Opinion
13 posts found
-
This Week Taught Me How Out of Touch I Am About Race
This has been a week that's felt overwhelming. Here, in Santa Monica, my wife and I and our 22 year old daughter Natasha, all stayed at home. Although there was no looting or vandalism in our immediate vicinity, the street where my office is in downtown Santa Monica was completely rampaged â with my local candy/soda shop, Japanese restaurant, and retail stores on the block, including REI and Patagonia and a family owned jewelry store, completely burned out and looted.It's… -
Documenting disaster in order to save the planet
Nov 24, 2014 ... Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he's an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times ...... View Original Article -
No, I haven"t read all of Proust. Fighting the coronavirus humble brag
David Hockney has painted 10 new iPad works. Barbra Streisand is working on her memoir. On Instragram people are baking bread and working out. Friends are calling to say that they"ve Marie-Kondo"d their homes.And all their getting-things-done is stressing me out.What this is is an epidemic of humble brags.People are knitting and quilting and reading children's stories aloud, and giving lessons on how to play the slide guitar and reading plays aloud and performing music together with other ... View… -
Reviewing 2020: My Top Ten Books Of 2020
In the beginning of the pandemic I was scattered and couldn"t really concentrate on any sustained reading. However, as the year went on and I reached saturation in my viewing capacity, I turned to books, aided by the discovery that I could easily borrow books online from the Public library, via Overdrive (Los Angeles Public Library) or Libby (Santa Monica Public Library). Since then, I"ve been reading up a storm. Here are my favorites from the year (not all were… -
A Heart Shaped LA Dream Drive
Saturday Night Live has regularly mocked Los Angelenos for their obsessive and unending conversations about their routes driving to and from any destination â and it is funny because it is true: Traffic and its avoidance is an inevitable fact of SoCal existence.In fact, one of the inside-LA jokes in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is Brad Pitt's ability to zoom around Los Angeles" freeways at top speed unimpeded by traffic. Those were the days!Nonetheless, I recently… -
My Prediction for 2014: Peace in the Middle East
This year, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry will secure a peace agreement in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians, leading to the establishment of a Palestinian State. I understand that no one believes this will happen. Not the Israeli officials who are dismissive of Kerry; not the Palestinian officials who bristle with each proclamation Netanyahu makes. Certainly not the news media pundits who traffic in naysaying. Yet if recent history has proven anything, it is… -
Ten years after
It's been 10 years since my mother Eva Teicholz died on Sept. 22 - nine since I stood by her graveside at the unveiling. Since then, I have visited her grave in New Jersey on many occasions and have diligently observed days of mourning and lit memorial candles. I loved her dearly. But have I missed her? The answer is, of course, yes. But death does strange things: it restores our loved ones to their best selves - as we… -
Lessons from the not-so-distant past: How photos of the civil rights movement can inspire us today
History often seems to take place on a stage distant from our own experience - yet the exhibition "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968," which opened at the Skirball on Nov. 19, reminds us that even our recent past can deliver a strong message for our times. "Road to Freedom" is a collection of more than 170 iconic images by more than 35 photographers - including Danny Lyon, Morton Broffman, Charles Moore, Bruce Davidson and Gordon… -
What Survives the Sixties
[caption id="attachment_233" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Illustration by Dan Kacvinski"][/caption] The summer of 1969 was host to a pair of historic events - the moon landing and the Woodstock festival - that seemed to define the '60s. As we revisit those events this summer, it is fair to ask: What did they mean, what did they accomplish and what parts of the '60s have meaning today? With the moon landing, there was a sense of America fulfilling the challenge made by President… -
The Dream is Over (Dreamworks)
According to reports in various newspapers last week, NBC-Universal is contemplating acquiring DreamWorks’ live-action feature-film division, or as it used to be called, their movie studio. Regardless of whether the acquisition is consummated, it reflects a sad truth: Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen’s dream of creating a modern major studio has failed. When Spielberg & Co. first announced the idea of creating a studio, more than a decade ago, before they had even chosen a company name, their… -
Sleep, Interrupted
I remember, as a child, trying in vain to stay up to see the ball fall on New Year’s Eve. In later years, high school brought concerts that went past midnight and college introduced all-nighters of the studying and partying kind. In the midnight hour came inspiration and revelation and dreams of new worlds to conquer. Back then, sleep was not an issue. Then sometime in my 20s, I suffered a bout of insomnia. For several weeks, I could not,… -
Polanski Hits a Sour Note in 'Pianist'
Truth to tell, I didn’t start to despise “The Pianist†— Roman’s Polanski’s Oscar-nominated film of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs of Warsaw during World War II — until the very end of the film: The war has ended and a friend has taken Szpilman to a farm in the Polish countryside. There used to be a Soviet POW camp there, where the Nazi officer who spared Szpilman was asking for him. Now there is no trace of that internment…