Fred Schruers is the author of “Billy Joel: The Definitive Biography” (Crown Books). Fred has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly among many others. I”ve been friends with Fred for a long time., Recently I did a Google Hangout with him to talk about… View Original Article […]
The Rothschild is a Mensch View Original Article […]
Downtown LA’s Central Market is getting hipper by the minute. You can now have vertically responsible hamburgers (Bel Canto), gourmet coffee (G&G), small batch pastrami (Wexler’s), and heavenly ice cream (McConnell’s), and now, at  The Oyster Gourmet,my friend Christophe Happillon’s new pop-up (and I mean that literally, the kiosk pops… View Original Article […]
Read More… from Champagne & Oyster Architecture for the Holidays
Today Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century (if not “the” greatest). Auction prices for Warhol’s work, often silk-screened images, tinted or painted, sell for record prices at auctions: Warhol’s “Triple Elvis”(1963) sold at Christie’s for close to $82 Million… View Original Article […]
How do we understand the impact of climate change and natural disasters on people and architecture, and how does humanity learn from our mistakes and try to prepare for potential future cataclysms? That is ostensibly the agenda of “Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change,” an exhibition opening Dec. 13 at the Annenberg Space […]
The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles (NHM) is celebrated for its Dinosaur skeletons, dioramas, oar fish display, gem and bug collections. Some specimens in the collection date back 4.5 billion years. Â Â Â When I arrived at the NHM to see the traveling exhibit Grandes Maestros: Great Masters… View Original Article […]
Read More… from Living Masters of Latino Folk Art at LA’s NHM
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the J. Paul Getty Museum put on display “Spring” by Edouard Manet, a gorgeous Impressionist-style portrait of a highly fashionable young woman, the actress Jeanne Demarsy, that the museum recently acquired at auction for $65 Million. The painting is remarkable and note-worthy on several fronts, not… View Original Article […]
Read More… from The Kendall Jenner of The Belle Epoque Goes on View at The Getty
The mere release of “Popular Problems,” two days after Leonard Cohen’s 80th birthday last month, is remarkable in and of itself. (How many 80-year-old sex symbols and style icons are there?) But it also caps a decade in which Cohen conquered troubling neuroses and fears to mount worldwide tours that were invocations, convocations and spiritual […]
“Re:Mind,” a multimedia installation at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art, is the first solo show in the United States for Miri Chais, an Israeli-born artist who now lives in Los Angeles. For the show, Chais created and installed a room full of paintings and sculptures, as well as objects that have screens embedded in them, […]
Sanford Jay Frank, the Emmy Award-winning writer and producer, screenwriting guru and conservative ideologue whom everyone called Sandy, died at his home in Calabasas on April 18 of complications arising out of a glioblastoma, a cancerous brain tumor. He was 59. Frank grew up in Springfield, Mass., where his father worked at the post office. […]
The Shout! Factory release of “The Marx Brothers TV Collection,” an omnibus of the Brothers Marx’s post-film career TV appearances, is occasion enough to celebrate once more the irrepressible talents of Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx. I suppose there may be some readers who have never heard of the Marx Brothers, but I doubt it. […]
Stories of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1940s and ’50s are, by now, well known. Many books, articles and documentaries exist about the lives of actors, screenwriters and directors who the studios deemed unemployable because of their association — real or alleged — with the Communist Party. Also familiar are the stories of many who […]