The Actors’ Gang, now in residence at the historic Ivy Substation in Culver City, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The substation, constructed in 1907 by the Los Angeles Pacific Railroad, looks more like a Spanish mission than an electric power facility, strangely appropriate for The Actors’ Gang, which is both a theater troupe with a […]
Elvis is back in the building. On March 14 at the Cinerama Dome, Elvis will return, one more time, in a special 40th anniversary screening of the “Singer Presents Elvis†special from 1968, or “The Comeback Special†as it is more popularly known, as the kickoff event of the Paley Center for Media’s PaleyFest 2008. […]
Over the course of a year, I collect books I should read and books I want to read, but — should have/would have/could have — many I never get around to reading. Over the last few months, as last year came to a close and this new one began, and as a side benefit of […]
When it comes to Bob Dylan, I think it’s fair to say that I’m a fan of long standing — my wife still teases me about the time, shortly after we’d moved to Los Angeles, when in her car, radio on, she was surprised to hear me as a call-in contestant to KSCA’s “Lyrically Speaking” […]
In an underground office on the campus of Santa Monica College, Claude Brodesser-Akner is working with his producer, Matt Holzman, and associate producer, Darby Maloney, to describe the current status of the Oscar broadcast — and work in a pun. Finally, Brodesser-Akner says, with some satisfaction, “The Oscars are mired.” Welcome to the world of […]
In February, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will unveil the first phase of its renovation and expansion, including the opening of a new building devoted to contemporary art — the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (that’s Broad as in Eli and Edythe Broad, our local Medicis) or, as the acronymists at LACMA have dubbed […]
Let me state, for the record, that I know nothing about sports. I don’t watch them; I don’t follow them. My parents didn’t. I never did as a kid. I don’t now with my family. Occasionally in the finals of a season, a few names flutter into my consciousness and then, just as quickly, disappear. […]
Julius Shulman, the still much-in-demand architectural photographer, famous for his photos of Modernist homes, turned 97 a few weeks ago, and the partying has been pretty much nonstop — which is the way Shulman likes it. […]
On the occasion of the first annual “Celebration of Jewish Books” at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, the Jewish Journal asked me to engage Michael Chabon in a (brief) conversation about the Jewish flavor of his work. Herewith the results: Novelist Michael Chabon has an agent, Steven Barclay, who handles his speaking engagements […]
Read More… from Michael Chabon’s Amazing (Jewish) Adventures
Producer, songwriter and musician Larry Klein is having a good year. In a way, one could say his current success is the culmination of a process of recontextualizing his background, his experience, his talents and his interests. Two records he produced have just been released on Verve Records: “River: The Joni Letters” by jazz great […]
This fall, I am asking you to travel to Iran. Not the present-day, front-page, headline-grabbing, nuclear-developing, Holocaust-denying, Israel-hating Iran, but the Iran of just 20 or 30 years ago, as described in two newly published novels, Gina Nahai’s “Caspian Rain” (MacAdam Cage) and Dalia Sofer’s “The Septembers of Shiraz” (Ecco). Although Nahai’s novel takes place […]
In one of his most famous works, the French poet Francois Villon asked: “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan? (But where are the snows of yesteryear?).” I might ask the same about where this summer went. It seems like just last week my daughter was getting out of class, and now she’s about to start […]