[contextly_auto_sidebar] A FEW weeks ago I got a historical novel, written for adults, called Little, based on the life of Madame Tussaud. I soon learned that my 12-year-old son had beaten me to this author's work: He'd already read Heap House, the first novel in the outlandish, fantasy-based The Iremonger Trilogy, aimed at precocious kids. I was lucky enough to speak to the writer, Edward … [Read more...]
Archives for 2018
The Art of Judy Dater
[contextly_auto_sidebar] RECENTLY I got to spend a little time with the Los Angeles-born, Bay Area-dwelling photographer Judy Dater, whose work goes back to the 1960s. Dater's been experiencing a bit of a career revival lately, with a recent show at San Francisco's de Young Museum, which has now come to Loyola Marymount University's art gallery, and a beautiful, career-spanning book of her … [Read more...]
The Music of Stanley Kubrick
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A FEW months ago I went to see a restored 70 mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and film I had not seen (I realized) in decades. A number of things struck me, among them how beautifully and in some ways unconventionally Kubrick used the music in the film. (Of course, the the slow, ruminative, color-soaked grandeur of the movie was also very hard to miss.) This is of … [Read more...]
Arts Funding: The US vs the World
[contextly_auto_sidebar] NOT long ago I wrote a story about the arts in LA since the Great Recession. I spoke to so many people, some at length, that most of my reporting ended up lost in my notebook. One of the more intriguing conversations I had was with David Sefton, the former head of UCLA Live, now running arts festivals in Australia. I asked Sefton -- whose early years involved booking … [Read more...]
The Arts in Los Angeles, 10 Years After
[contextly_auto_sidebar] SOME of you may know me as the author of a reasonably gloomy book on the arts, the recession, digital technology, and our fraught cultural future. When I was approached recently by the Los Angeles Times to take a look at how cultural institutions, large and small, and individual artists had experienced the 2008 crash, the belated recovery, the ensuing housing crisis, … [Read more...]
Alexander Calder in Los Angeles
[contextly_auto_sidebar] RAISED at a time when Europe was still the center of the art world, and coming of age as New York was beginning to replace it, the sculptor Alexander Calder can seem about as "East Coast" as a strand of ivy on a stone chimney. But he spent three crucial early years in Pasadena, CA, where his parents ran with the artists of the Arroyo scene and others in Los Angeles. … [Read more...]
Rachael Worby and MUSE/IQUE
[contextly_auto_sidebar] OVER the years I've attended several musical events put on by Rachael Worby, a human dynamo who has operated several series in and around Pasadena. Worby -- who was once, I think, the First Lady of West Virginia -- seems interested in something both populist and unorthodox, and the new season of her series MUSE/IQUE launches this weekend. What follows is our recent … [Read more...]
The Belated Emergence of Billy Strayhorn
[contextly_auto_sidebar] ONE of the great hidden figures in musical history is Billy Strayhorn, who seems to be a bit less invisible every year. When I was getting hard into jazz in the early '90s, haunting record stores and hoarding Coltrane and Mingus records right after college, Joe Henderson's Lush Life album came out and electrified the jazz world: One of the greatest saxophonists of the … [Read more...]
The Poetry of Leonard Cohen
[contextly_auto_sidebar] HE was born before Elvis, had his songs covered by everyone from Judy Collins to the Pixies, and managed five decades of brilliant work in a field that tends to see only bright flares. Leonard Cohen is known as a more-or-less rock musician to most of us, but he started out as a poet, publishing books for a decade before his debut LP. The other day I met Cohen's son, … [Read more...]
Ten Years After: Remembering The Recession
[contextly_auto_sidebar] A GREAT number of Americans have "moved on." Their lives are fine, and the Great Recession is just a bad, dimly recalled memory, like a really bad winter flu from years ago. But for a number of us, it was one of the defining events of our lives -- something whose consequences we deal with every day or every week. Over the last few days, the press has run a number of … [Read more...]