[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...]
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...]
The Return of Jeffrey Deitch
[contextly_auto_sidebar] AS recently as a few years back, it would have been hard to predict that controversial art dealer Jeffrey Deitch would have any reason to come back to Los Angeles for anything more complicated than a French Dip at Cole's. But now the man pushed out of the Museum of Contemporary Art -- and for a while, synonymous with faux-sensational, shallow Warholism -- is one his way … [Read more...]
Reading With Aimee Mann
[contextly_auto_sidebar] LAST week I took a wild guess and approached singer/songwriter Aimee Mann for my musicians-on-writing column, All the Poets. As a longtime fan I had a vague sense that she was literary -- whatever that means -- but could not recall a specific reference to a novel or poem in any of her songs. Nor had we talked about books of any kind across the several interviews we'd … [Read more...]
Guest Columnist: Empty Room at the Top
[contextly_auto_sidebar] Here is the latest piece by CultureCrash's regular guest columnist, Lawrence Christon. Christopher O'Riley, of course, is best known to some of us for his classical-piano interpretations of Radiohead, Nick Drake and Elliott Smith. EMPTY ROOM AT THE TOP By Lawrence Christon For years it’s been routine, whenever possible, for me to make … [Read more...]