All posts by Tom Teicholz

A Musical Portrait of LA

“Elvis Whispers Softly,” 1956, from “Who Shot Rock & Roll?”  Photograph © Alfred Wertheimer, The Wertheimer Collection

“Elvis Whispers Softly,” 1956, from “Who Shot Rock & Roll?” Photograph © Alfred Wertheimer, The Wertheimer Collection

The recent regional extravaganza known as Pacific Standard Time (PST), a six-month, far-ranging agglomeration of Southern California exhibitions, installations and performances, began with a series of shows that made a very convincing argument for the importance of art created in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980.

The role Los Angeles has played in shaping American culture (and, conversely, the role culture has played in shaping L.A.) was hardly limited to the visual arts, as has been made clear by two exhibitions here: “Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-1975,” which just closed at the Grammy Museum at L.A. LIVE, downtown; and “Who Shot Rock & Roll” at the Annenberg Center for Photography in Century City, which opens June 23 and runs through Oct. 7.

“Trouble in Paradise,” guest curated by USC professor (and Tommywood alum) Josh Kun was, like its subject of music in California, much more substantial than first appeared. Occupying a small corner of the fourth-floor installation at the Grammy Museum and consisting of a few vitrines of artifacts and a wall or two of information cards along with a timeline, it was a testament to the power of multimedia presentation that the show was able to cover so much territory in depth in such little space.

After World War II, Los Angeles’ population surged as a result of the postwar boom, as well as with increased Mexican-American immigration, African-American migration from the South and the many returning vets who decided to settle in California. However, as the city grew, two separate events enforced de facto racial segregation: a new freeway system, which isolated communities rather than uniting them, and the 1950 appointment of William H. Parker III as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), a man intent on keeping Los Angeles, to paraphrase the words of a song by Parliament, “a chocolate city with vanilla suburbs.”

Although “California music” generally conjures Beach Boys surf songs, Laurel Canyon-inspired hippie paeans and the Doors playing the Sunset Strip, each with lyrics bemoaning their respective white-people-problems, curator Kun reminded us of the richness and complexity of the region’s storied musical history of integration and cross-pollination, be it from the be-bop of Central Avenue, to Ritchie Valens (born Valenzuela) — the self-proclaimed “Little Richard of the Valley” — from “The Nat ‘King’ Cole Show” on NBC to Marilyn Monroe insisting that the Mocambo nightclub book Ella Fitzgerald, to the legendary T.A.M.I. Show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, directed by Steve Binder and featuring James Brown and the Rolling Stones.

“Tina Turner, Universal Amphitheater, Los Angeles, 1985,” from “Who Shot Rock & Roll?” Photo by Henry Diltz/Morrison Hotel Gallery © Henry Diltz

“Trouble in Paradise” did an excellent job of excavating such nearly forgotten musical heralds as Hadda Brooks, a singer and pianist who was the first African-American woman to host a TV music and interview program (move over, Oprah!), and Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, impresario and TV host, a Greek immigrant who adopted black Los Angeles. “As a kid,” Otis once said, he decided that “if our society said we had to be black or white, [then] I would be black.”

It is striking how much landmark music that we don’t necessarily associate with Los Angeles was recorded here, from Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna to Come” to James Brown’s “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

Finally, the exhibition also made a convincing display of how much the repressive reign of Chief Parker’s LAPD led to epic conflagrations in the African-American community during 1965’s Watts Riots (thousands arrested, millions of dollars in damage, 34 dead), in the Mexican-American community during the 1970 Chicano Moratorium rally in Laguna Park to protest the Vietnam War, and among the teenage fans of rock ’n’ roll during the 1966 riots on the Sunset Strip protesting curfew laws — all of which also produced memorable music — whether it was Wattstax, the all-day festival of African-American pride held at the Los Angeles Coliseum and immortalized on film, or the music of El Chicano or the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.”

Like the famous Magritte-inspired cover of Jackson’s Browne’s 1974 album “Late for the Sky,” California may look sunny from afar, but “Trouble in Paradise” documented an underlying darkness. Or, to quote, as Kun does, Browne’s lyrics from “Before the Deluge,” Los Angeles is filled with “the resignation that living brings.”

“Who Shot Rock & Roll,” at the Annenberg Space for Photography, is a group show originally curated for the Brooklyn Museum by author Gail Buckland. It features 166 images, many of them iconic photographs of music legends from the Beatles to Tupac, from Tina Turner to Amy Winehouse, by a wide range of photographers, among them Annie Leibovitz, Henry Diltz, Diane Arbus, Lynn Goldsmith, Bob Gruen, Amy Arbus, Linda McCartney, Albert Watson and many others. It also displays a selection of visually striking music videos, including ones of Elvis Presley, U2, Grace Jones and Sonic Youth, as well as a documentary, commissioned by the Annenberg, that highlights the photographers and their images, incorporating behind-the-scenes footage as well.

There is a vitality to these documents of the music world that seems very Los Angeles. And beyond that, the “Rock & Roll” images captivate on many levels: There’s the thrill of seeing an artist in an unguarded moment; of capturing the excitement and energy of performance — a stop-motion documentary of musical self-actualization; but there are also some elaborately staged portraits that, at their best, reveal a larger truth about artist or society at that moment in time. Each genre is very well represented.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Annenberg is partnering with KCRW (89.9 FM and KCRW.com) for a series of live concerts in July (admission is free, but reservations, at kcrw.com, are suggested). These will feature an acoustic and DJ set by Moby, a T. Rex tribute by Portugal. The Man, and Raphael Saadiq and others performing songs from “Chimes of Freedom,” the Amnesty International benefit collection of Bob Dylan covers.

“Trouble in Paradise” and “Who Shot Rock & Roll” serve to remind of us of how much music can shape the very landscape of our lives and our times, through journeys that both define and transcend the place where we live.

“Who Shot Rock & Roll,” June 23-Oct. 7, Annenberg Space for Photography, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles.

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Copyright 2012 Tommywood

Culture with a Side of Popcorn

James Corden and Suzie Toase in “One Man, Two Guvnors,” at the National Theatre in London, and onscreen at a theater near you.  Photo by Johan Persson

James Corden and Suzie Toase in “One Man, Two Guvnors,” at the National Theatre in London, and onscreen at a theater near you. Photo by Johan Persson

When the hit comedy “One Man, Two Guvnors” comes to Broadway this spring, I’ll be able to say I saw the London production. I also saw the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Don Giovanni” with the Polish tenor Mariusz Kwiecien. As for bragging rights, it’s hard to match having seen David Hallberg’s debut with the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow in “Sleeping Beauty.”All this, without ever leaving Los Angeles.

I’ve taken to attending theater, opera and ballet performances from around the world, recorded live in HD and shown in Los Angeles movie theaters, each for less than $20 a ticket, an exceptional value.

My adventures in high culture with a side of popcorn began much like Phileas Fogg’s journey, with a performance in London. No sooner had I read a review of Helen Mirren’s appearance in the National Theatre’s London production of “Phedre,” Racine’s great tragedy, than I discovered that it would soon be shown in HD at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood.

Although a screen can’t convey the intensity of a live performance, where you feel as if the outside world has stopped as you witness a greater truth revealed, watching “Phedre” it nevertheless felt a privilege to see a world-class performance. Moreover, there were some real benefits that went beyond the availability of concession snacks — no need to feel bad about slouching in your chair or not dressing up, no guilt for getting up midperformance for a bathroom break and no compunction about leaving early. Plus, the advances in HD cinematography are such that, regardless of where I sat, it was like having the best seat in the house.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve attended two National Theatre performances: the very enjoyable Victorian comedy “London Assurance,” which featured brilliant performances by Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw, and the aforementioned “One Man, Two Guvnors,” whose comic set pieces had the whole audience laughing as one. Upcoming in 2012 for the National Theatre, at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater, are the Oliver Goldsmith classic, “She Stoops to Conquer” on April 29, and the acclaimed Danny Boyle-directed production of “Frankenstein,” in June.

As for opera, I had always been told that it was a pleasure I would come to appreciate late in life. My parents were opera goers. I recall with great fondness how my mother would always remark on how, the minute the opera began, my father would fall asleep, only to snap awake when the curtain fell. When I asked him once why he was willing to spend so much on opera tickets if he was going to sleep through the performance, he answered: “Sleep like that I don’t get at home!”

I am here to report that after attending “The Met: Live in HD” performance of “Don Giovanni,” not only did I not fall asleep, but for the first time I “got” opera. I realized that Mozart’s genius was to take the beautiful sounds of sacred music, associated with the church and heavenly pursuits, and put them in the service of the profane — in “Don Giovanni” there is even an aria where a young woman pleads with her husband to beat her so that they can have makeup sex. “Don Giovanni” is the story of a rake meant as a wake-up call to the 1 percent of its day after the revolutions in America and those about to erupt in France. The closest analogy to contemporary music is the revolutionary way in which Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin took the sounds of gospel music and formed “soul music” to narrate the songs of unhallowed human experience and the way in which James Brown made it political.

Opera in HD is a global phenomenon: In addition to the Met’s performances, Emerging Pictures “Opera in Cinema” program offers HD performances from La Scala in Milan, the Royal Opera House in London, even from the Liceu in Lisbon.

Given the even greater price differential between live opera and HD, and the similarly large gap in informality, not to mention what I save on plane tickets, I’ve decided that I’m just as happy to attend the opera in HD in Santa Monica. It’s hard to imagine sitting in an opera house eating peanut M&Ms without incurring the daggers of dirty looks all around.

Finally, the Emerging Pictures folk also have a “Ballet in Cinema” program that delivers dance performances from the Bolshoi in Moscow and London’s Royal Court. Of the three experiences in HD — theater, opera, ballet — I would say ballet was the least successful.

Watching ballet is often about suspension of disbelief, watching how dancers achieve with ease the hard-to-believe perfection of line, grace of movement, physical prowess and stamina, displaying supra-normal abilities to stand en pointe, leap, lift and turn. On film, our eyes have been trained by the tricks of special effects to accept and even expect the superhuman (think of those flying martial arts scenes in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), and because of this, in ballet on film, the extraordinary seems more ordinary than it should.

My objections aside, it is still mind-boggling to see the Bolshoi dancers perform on their stage in Moscow. Bolshoi means “large” in Russian, but also “grand,”  and to see a Russian heirloom production such as “Sleeping Beauty,” with music by Tchaikovsky, based on the original choreography by Marius Petipa as passed down to Bolshoi ballet master Yuri Grigorovich, with its seemingly endless depth of dancers, incredible costumes and amazing sets in that storied theater — that is certainly grand — and good value.

Now, a caveat about the theaters – not all are created equal. For example, the sound and the screen at the AMC in Santa Monica, where “The Met: Live in HD” is screened, is not as good as that in Century City (but Century City often sells out). As for the audience at the performances I attended, the crowd was not so much hip as candidates for hip replacement.  But so what? There is an easy camaraderie at these performances, where people applaud at will and schmooze during the intermission, trading insider gossip. It’s fun (although the more precise technical term would be gemutlich).
One could do worse than to abide by these resolutions: Be lazy. Stay local. Be frugal — see theater, opera and ballet in HD. A world of high culture awaits — a chance to travel the world without ever leaving home, to see great performances in grand locations, at affordable prices with popcorn, candy and soda, as close as a nearby movie theater.

For exact dates, times and places of National Theatre showings, see http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ntlive. For Opera, there is the Met in HD (http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/liveinhd/LiveinHD.aspx); as well as Emerging Pictures’ Opera in Cinema (http://www.emergingpictures.com/opera-in-cinema/). Balletomanes, please check out http://www.balletincinema.com/.  All at your local theater, all for under $20 – at those prices, certainly worth a try.

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Copyright 2012 Tommywood

Jonathan Foer’s ‘New American Haggadah’: Extremely Similar and Incredibly the Same

The haggadah, the user’s manual to the Passover seder, might be the world’s oldest annually practiced ritual, and the story of the Jews’ freedom from slavery in Egypt is, Jonathan Safran Foer said recently, “the best-known greatest continuously read story” in book form. And yet, just like there isn’t a singer who doesn’t think he can cover a Bob Dylan song better than Dylan himself, the haggadah remains the book that everyone thinks they can improve on.

The “Maxwell House Haggadah” might be good enough for the White House, but at homes across the country there are any number of printed and self-stapled versions, including egalitarian, feminist and vegan versions with prayers writ special for women, children, Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and for the liberation of a wide variety of groups and causes, even those without benefit of 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable status. At our seders, the reading has been interrupted for comic plays, showings of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea, and after-dinner rounds of comic songs, including the much-maligned version of “Brisket,” sung to the tune of The Association’s “Windy.”

In other words, there is a good case to be made that we need a “New American Haggadah” (Little, Brown and Co.: $29.99). As luck would have it, one has just been published, edited and with an introduction by novelist and anthologist Jonathan Safran Foer, as well as translation from the Hebrew by Nathan Englander, novelist and, not incidentally, a graduate of the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County.

As Foer explained recently at a Writers Bloc event in Beverly Hills, every detail was considered in this haggadah’s nine-year gestation period. That the book lies flat – no accident. That it is of a certain size, to take importance on the table but not to crowd your neighbor – done on purpose. No representational art (despite a commissioned but never-used work by R.B. Kitaj) – a decision made because the visuals might detract from the text. More money spent on contributions made and killed than on those appearing in the book – true. As Foer explained, the process of allowing the “New American Haggadah” to take form took time, and the final result, much to Foer’s surprise, was more traditional than he would ever have imagined.

Similarly, Englander calls his translation “hyper-literal.” Englander adds a grace to the translation not usually evident, as well as moments of subtle poetry, as when he translates what is usually read as “Our Lord, God” instead as “Lord, God-of-Us.” The strength of Englander’s translation is, in some ways, its greatest weakness – it demands a more complete reading and a little more stamina and does not easily accommodate the fast-forward skipping and speed-reading of the haggadah that many have embraced as part of the tradition.

Alas, I truly wish I were more excited by this “New American Haggadah.” Foer is clearly a very thoughtful, intelligent person. His novels, such as “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” brim with inventiveness. There is something scholarly about him, and he harbors a genuine desire to create community, whether it be among a group of writers opining on the work of Joseph Cornell, non-meatarians or his fellow Hebrews. On the face of it, then, he seems a brilliant choice to commission and compile a “New American Haggadah.” However, the result is neither new nor particularly American – it is as if Foer wrestled with the haggadah, like Jacob wrestled with the angel, and the haggadah won, repeatedly. To cite but one example: When it came time to name the book, possibilities abounded (i.e. why not “The Brooklyn Haggadah” in honor of where Foer lives), but the final choice “New American Haggadah,” although literally correct, is strangely bland.

Or let me put it another way: Imagine you had an old house that had been in the family for many generations – that you thought could, in so many ways, be improved upon. So you consulted the best architects and designers and you took the house apart, tore it down and started over. At each crossroads, when faced with a choice between the suggestions and the original, you found yourself, much to your surprise, siding with the original. In the end, when the house was rebuilt, your friends expressed surprise, saying: “Where’s the new house? This is the old house.” Not much different and no more serviceable than the original (and in the case of this haggadah, perhaps less usable as it contains no transliteration for those for whom the mumbling of ancient words is incantatory).

I don’t want to give the impression that this “New American Haggadah” is not without its pleasures. The commentary is intelligent (Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on Spinoza’s seat at the table), tough (Jeffrey Goldberg on the Tenth Plague), learned (Nathaniel Deutsch on Exodus’ most theologically shocking moment) and at times subversive (Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, on the four types of parents). It runs at a 90-degree angle to the Hebrew – and offers not so much exegesis as discussion points for seder attendees. Although the commentary is at times engaging, entertaining and thought provoking, there is never as much of any of those as one might have expected or wanted. There is a timeline across the top of the book that is worth reading,  and the graphic design of the pages reflecting the Hebrew typography of each time period is beautiful in its own way; but, again, none of it matches the drama of the story being told. Which, according to Foer, is the point. The story, the text, comes first.

Without the haggadah, the seder is merely a Jewish Thanksgiving dinner whose emphasis is less on ritual than on family, more about side dishes than the main event, more about the heavy meal and the four glasses of wine than the time-bending empathetic command to feel as if we, ourselves, were slaves in Egypt.

Although the “New American Haggadah” may create a whole new gift category – the seder present, thereby selling many copies – my prediction is that few will use it instead of the family haggadah. More likely, this haggadah will be used as a supplement – a reading from Lemony Snicket here, a passage read aloud there – and will become yet another prop in the customization of the seder. Which is, in and of itself, part of the long tradition of haggadahs and Passover seders.

As for us, this year we’re ditching the comic play, opting instead for “Passover Jeopardy.” Our seder hosts will be overjoyed, no doubt, to receive their copy of the “New American Haggadah.” I may even read from it in between the Hebrew and the Maxwell House versions. More likely, I’ll be saying: “Pass the charoset, I’ll take Moses for $400.”

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Copyright 2012 Tommywood

Demjanjuk’s Just Epitaph

The recent death of John Demjanjuk, 91, in a nursing home in Germany, brings to a close one of the most extensive and most contested Nazi war crimes prosecution in history, a process that began in the United States in the mid 1970’s and was ongoing at the time of his death as Demjanjuk awaited the appeal of his conviction in Germany as an accessory to the more than 28,000 murders of Jewish men, women and children committed during the time he served as a camp guard at the Sobibor extermination camp.

In the immediate aftermath of his death there will be those, no doubt, who will argue that he was an innocent or at best served under duress, or was at worse a mere cog in the machine. There will be those who would repeat the canards expressed throughout his more than 30 years of prosecution in the United States, Israel and Germany, that the damning documents which prove his Nazi service were fakes and KGB forgeries, even though every court at every stage that has examined the documents have found them authentic and consistent with each other, proving that Demjanjuk was the bearer of a Nazi identification card #1393 issued at the Trawniki training camp that lists and correlates his Nazi service not only at Trawniki and Sobibor but also subsequently at the Flossenburg and Majdanek camps. There will be those who argue against the trying of old men, against the waste of resources, the time, the money, the prosecutorial effort.

There will be also many who, having no argument with Demjanjuk’s prosecution or conviction will still, in the face of Demjanjuk’s long life and the thought of him spending his final days in a nursing home in Germany, will ask: was Justice done?

As someone who spent many months in the Jerusalem courtroom attending the trial of Demjanjuk and followed closely every stage of his American and German proceedings, I would argue that, to borrow a biblical phrase, not only was Justice done, it was seen to be done.

The notion that Demjanjuk, awaiting the appeal of his German conviction, living in a nursing home was “free” is to ignore the reality of his existence confined in a foreign country cut off from family, friends, and community, left to die with the mark of Cain upon him. The fact that almost every article concerning his death contained the words “Convicted Nazi camp guard” is only one small measure of history’s judgment and of Justice being done. Although under German law, because Demjanjuk died before his appeal was argued, the court’s conviction is nullified, Margarete Noetzel, the court spokesperson, said his guilty conviction was “a historical fact.”

Demjanjuk’s prosecutions have added greatly to our knowledge of how the final solution, the unfathomable murder of millions was carried out by the unexceptional and not only by the Germans but by their willing collaborators and henchmen. The death camps were commanded by Germans and staffed by their auxiliary guards, such as Demjanjuk, with whom the murders could not have been accomplished.

Despite the fact that Demjanjuk denied any and all involvement in the crimes of the Holocaust, he was demonstrated to be an exceptionally bad liar whose own accounts of his whereabouts were riddled with inconsistencies, impossibilities, untruths, and evasions that bordered on admissions. The record by now is all too clear: Born in Soviet Ukraine, he was a Red Army soldier captured by the Germans who volunteered to serve the Nazis. Trained at Trawniki, and issued his Nazi I.D. there, he became an experienced camp guard serving at labor, concentration and extermination camps whose only function was the expeditious murder of innocent civilian Jewish men, women and children. He may have also served in the pro-Nazi Vaslov Army by his own admission, and by reason of a Nazi blood group tattoo that he tried to erase. All of which, even any of which, had Demjanjuk revealed when he applied to or entered the United States would have been sufficient cause to deny him admission, bar him from citizenship and which were cause for his denaturalization and deportation.

Those murdered at Sobibor and the other camps where Demjanjuk served can not cry out for Justice. There are no graves, other than the mass graves where they were killed, at which to mourn them. It is easy to imagine that those who committed the crimes thought that no one would ever know who the perpetrators were or, worse, that no one would care. Perhaps they imagined that they could, like Demjanjuk, deny everything. Who would prosecute them? What could they prove? It is to the everlasting credit of the United States, Israel and Germany that over the last three decades they continued to prosecute the guilty, not only the planners, or the officials, not just the commandants but the guards and policemen, not just the desktop murderers but also those with blood on their hands.

The generation that saw the Nazi horrors first-hand will soon pass from this world. Demjanjuk’s trial may well be the last major Nazi war crimes trial. If so, then Demjanjuk’s epitaph is just: not that he died a free man but that he died, in the eyes of the world and for all history that follows, a convicted Nazi war camp guard.


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Copyright 2012 Tommywood

Looking at Clouds from Both Sides Now

I listen to music all day, in my car, in my office, at the gym, while walking the dog or taking a hike. Most of what I listen to I don’t have to pay for; some of it I do. There are so many ways to discover new music or find old favorites that I thought it might be useful to create a guide to the various offerings – on the cloud, the Net or on the air – these days, based on my personal experience, thus far.

Terrestrial radio

Old-school radio, AM or FM, still works fine and is still free, and when my teenage daughter is in the car, we ping-pong among the hit-driven radio stations 97.1 KAMP-FM (Amp Radio), 102.7 KIIS-FM (Kiss FM) and 105.9 FM Los Angeles (POWER 106), until the ads take over all the stations – seemingly simultaneously. And while the music on 89.9 KCRW-FM is not interrupted by ads, the station does have pledge drives.

Nonetheless, most mornings I listen to KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” from 9 a.m. to noon. This show, where I discover most of my favorite new music, is best described as “adult alternative” and “world music,” and features mostly singer-songwriters and their bands, including some live performances and interviews. And on weekends, if allowed the pleasure, I try to listen to part of “Nothin’ but the Blues,” which airs on 88.1 FM KJAZZ from 2 to 7 p.m. on weekends.


Cloud-based music lockers

One of the reasons I don’t need to play my CDs anymore, or even my iPod, is because I’ve uploaded much of my music onto the Web. Google offers a music service that allows you to store a great deal of music for free. Apple, too, has just launched iCloud, which will copy music in the formats it recognizes to a (thus far) free locker. In addition, for $25 a year, its “music match” program will upload all your music to the cloud. With these services, you can access your music on multiple home, personal and mobile devices. Spotify (which I’ll discuss later in greater detail) also allows you to upload your music, but you can only access that music for free on your computer.


Internet radio and streaming music services (Pandora and Spotify)

If you sign onto iTunes and click on “radio,” you will be able to access a wide selection of radio stations from all over the country. However, not all stations travel well. I tried both WFMU, the Fordham University radio station in New York, where many of the DJs of my youth now toil, as well as WWOZ, New Orleans’ legendary music station, and I found that, much like Café Du Monde beignets, they are much better consumed right on site.

Pandora and Spotify are the two most popular music-streaming services (others include MOG, Yahoo music, Rdio and Last.fm), and the differences between them are as much generational as feature-driven.  If you grew up on FM radio and like to be surprised (pleasantly) by music you enjoy, Pandora will appeal to you. Pandora allows you to create “channels” or music streams by artist or song, and then brings you complementary music. Your musical choices can be mainstream or obscure (I have a Professor Longhair channel), and it allows you to mix any of the streams you establish. It works with the same kind of algorithms that Netflix uses, basing its offerings on your previous choices. So, for example, if you create a Rolling Stones or Bonnie Raitt channel, you might be delighted, as I was,  suddenly to hear an 18-minute version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

On the other hand, if you came of age in the mix-tape or playlist-driven era, Spotify might be your preference, as it allows you to upload your own music, create playlists and play any song that is in its capacious library. You can also share your playlists or songs with friends. Spotify is where I go when I know what I want to hear, say, the new Bangles record, “Sweetheart of the Sun.” Spotify recently teamed up with Rolling Stone magazine to allow subscribers of both to import all the celebrity playlists from their “playlist issue,” such as “Mike D’s Top Classic New York Hip-Hop” or “Jimmy Cliff’s Top Lost Reggae Classics.” Spotify also has just teamed up with Facebook to allow you to share music with friends and to be able to see what playlists your friends are listening to on Spotify (which may be the killer app).


Satellite radio

It is, as I prefer to think of it, crack for new car owners. These days most cars come with free-trial satellite radio. Once you’ve tried it, it’s hard to give up – conversion rates hover around 50 percent, according to a Sirius executive. There are now more than 21 million subscribers. The cost is anywhere from $9 to $17 a month, plus tax; although you can instead get an Internet subscription for $4 a month and play it on your smartphone through your car. Satellite is, for the most part, commercial free, and the menu of offerings is vast, with channels devoted to decades (’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s), genres and subgenres (country, bluegrass, blues, jazz, metal, rock, folk), performers and bands (Springsteen, Jimmy Buffett, Dave Matthews, Willie Nelson), custom compilations, with names like The Spectrum, The Blend, The Loft, Coffeehouse and, of course, The Joint (a reggae station). What stations you listen to could soon become a pickup line, akin to the 1970s-era catch all, “What’s your sign?”

There is one other reason that many people can’t resist satellite, and its name is “Howard.”  When Howard Stern departed terrestrial radio, those of us who didn’t follow him to paid radio may have thought that his moment of cultural relevance had ended. Yet satellite, its own parallel universe, reveals that Howard is still in his glory – some argue he’s better than ever. Listening to Howard, like playing golf or surfing, is all about waiting for that one unparalleled moment or experience. No one does interviews like Howard – the questions he asks and the answers he elicits are part of why he’s so addictive.

It may not all be all heavenly, but, to quote Joni Mitchell, “I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.” And, free or paid, that’s where I now go to stream her music.

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Copyright 2012 Tommywood

Art + Fashion = Life by Design for L.A. Couple

Artist Moshé Elimelech and his wife, fashion designer Shelli Segal, at their Burbank home and studio. Photos by John Hough

Artist Moshé Elimelech and his wife, fashion designer Shelli Segal, at their Burbank home and studio. Photos by John Hough

Cubes of color intersected by bands, which the viewer can manipulate into arrangements within a grid framing the work; watercolors of narrow striations, punctuated by colors and shapes, transform abstraction from cool cerebral to emotional landscapes. Clothing made in Los Angeles but destined for the world, an ongoing narrative about fabric and color draped over the human form. Such is the work and art of Moshé Elimelech and Shelli Segal, who live with their twin daughters in an ultra-contemporary home in Burbank. Elimelech’s work is currently on view in exhibitions at LA Artcore downtown and L2Kontemporary Gallery in Chinatown. Segal is a renowned fashion designer.

Elimelech was born in Rabat, Morocco. His Orthodox Jewish parents fled the country and settled in Israel when he was only 2. From an early age, Elimelech took to art, sketching landscapes before turning to oil paints. “It seemed in school that I was always the best in art,” said Elimelech.

Although admission to the Avni Institute of Art and Design was meant for those over 16, Elimelech lied about his age to get in. At the time, he was still observant, and art school opened his eyes in more ways than one. He recalls his very first class was life drawing, and he’s not sure who stared more: he at the nude model or she at his kippah.

Elimelech trained as a designer during his stint in the Israeli army, where he served for two and a half years as art director for the army publication house Maarachot, designing its magazine as well as covers for its books. Following his army service, he worked as the assistant art director for a fashion magazine for about nine months before saving up for a trip abroad.

His first “target,” as he put it, was London. He couldn’t speak a word of English. His money ran out in three months, after which he took a series of odd jobs, including working “in a supermarket, with cockneys in a factory, and in an Israeli restaurant.” When his English improved, he started taking his portfolio around and getting freelance design assignments. Then one day, the phone rang.

It was Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, and he wanted to know if Elimelech could come to Paris immediately to work in his studio. It turned out that one of Agam’s assistants, who was a friend of Elimelech’s, was leaving and recommended him. Within a few weeks, he was living in Paris and working in Agam’s studio. Agam is very particular about his color choices for his work, and in Elimelech he discovered a kindred spirit of sorts; someone whose use and choice of color he came to trust. Still, being a great artist’s assistant is its own travail, and once Elimelech had saved enough, he bought a one-way ticket to New York.

In New York, he moved in with an Israeli friend in Brooklyn and took the subway into Manhattan with his portfolio, looking for freelance design work. On New Year’s Eve of 1976, he and a friend went to New York’s Ocean Club. As the band was playing, he and his friend saw an attractive woman standing nearby. They flipped a coin to determine who would try talking to her. And that was how Elimelech met his wife, Shelli Segal. “You could say Moshé either won or lost the coin toss, depending on your point of view,” Segal joked.

Elimelech/Segal home interior.

Segal, who was born in Texas, grew up in New York and attended the High School of Music & Art. Although she enjoyed the school, she quickly discovered she wasn’t well suited to being on stage. “I wasn’t one of those people,” she said.

Segal recalled being “an awkward teenager” with one best friend, Charles Busch, who would go on to fame as the playwright/performer of “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife.” “He was my only friend,” she said.

Segal enrolled at Purchase College, State University of New York, but had to drop out – an assignment using a circular saw resulted in Segal cutting into her fingers (one of which had to be removed).

Instead, Segal enrolled in the Mayer School of Fashion Design, a nine-month New York trade school program in which she learned to make patterns and sew.  “After that, I was lucky enough to meet Ruth Manchester, who was a hot designer, and she gave me a job. I was 19, and I’ve been working ever since,” Segal said, adding, “I always knew I wanted to be a designer, not an artist.”

After meeting, they lived in New York – Elimelech a graphic designer, Segal a fashion designer. However, Segal’s brother, actor Robby Benson, was living in Los Angeles, and Segal’s parents, writer Jerry Segal and actress Ann Benson, followed. Suddenly, they felt alone in New York and, in 1981, they decided to move to Los Angeles. “All my New York friends thought I was a nut case,” Elimelech said.

Elimelech opened a graphic design studio and continued to work on his art on the side. He was selected as a contributing artist for the 1984 Olympic Games, designing a memorable poster that, in its use of color and striations, prefigures elements of his current work. After working for several L.A.-based designers, Segal in 1992 became head designer of Laundry, a popular fashion line. “Laundry by Shelli Segal” became a great success and was acquired by Liz Claiborne in 1999.

Artist Moshé Elimelech creating work for his current Los Angeles exhibitions.

By 2000, Elimelech decided to close his graphic design studio downtown to devote himself more to his family and his art, at his home studio.

His work is challenging – there is a coolness to the hard-edged graphics and brushed metal frames holding the cubes that resists interpretation. The possible mathematical combinations the work yields by virtue of the multisided cubes and the grid that holds them speak of a certain intellectual rigor, but are, at the same time, whimsical and playful. By contrast, the watercolors, perhaps because they betray more man-made evidence in the lines, grids and the way the colors seep in, are more emotive, suggesting skyscapes and the special light in Los Angeles. Like a beautiful circuit board, the series of lines and line breaks in the watercolors, interrupted by color and taking various forms, sometimes reveal patterns in the work that reorganize what we are looking at, as if to decode a secret message whose truth is more sensory than intellectual.

If all this seems like a contradiction, it perfectly suits Elimelech and Segal, a New York couple who are very much settled in Burbank; whose work could be done anywhere but speaks of Los Angeles; and who have excelled in creative pursuits while leading a very non-Hollywood life. Yet one could argue that they are both, by virtue of what they design, in the “show” business. Imagine that.

Moshé  Elimelech’s acrylic paintings and his watercolors at on view at L2kontemporary Art Gallery, 990 N. Hill St., Los Angeles, in the Chinatown District, through Feb. 11.

L2kontemporary
l2kontemporary.com

Moshe Elimelech
http://www.mosheart.com/

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Have a Fantastic Klezmatic Hanukkah!

Photo

From left: Frank London, Matt Darriau, Lisa Gutkin, Lorin Sklamberg, Paul Morrissett. Photo by Joshua Kessler

On Dec. 19, as part of their 25th anniversary tour, the Klezmatics will perform at Walt Disney Concert Hall for a Chanukah concert featuring both their well-known and new repertoire. On the program are songs by the legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie — or, as he’s known in klezmer circles, American-Yiddish poet Aliza Greenblatt’s son-in-law.

The band has just released a double CD, “Live at Town Hall”; Erik Greenberg Anjou’s documentary, “The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground,” featuring the band’s Town Hall concert, as well as performances in Poland and Hungary, is just out on DVD; and they are also working on a new album. There’s much to celebrate.

Klezmer — from which the band took its name — is the joyous, expressive music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe, a sound inspired by Bessarabian Romania, as well as the Roma (Gypsies), and is often played at weddings and other celebrations. Originally purely instrumental, Klezmer is a type of music long admired by people of all faiths and performed in Enlightenment-era European churches centuries before becoming the soundtrack to Yiddish life. Its appeal comes from its unique mix of the seemingly conflicting emotions — comic, plaintive, happy, sad, mournful — while also being transcendental and spiritual. It’s an infectious idiom that, like Yiddish itself, is forever being pronounced dead or dying, or dismissed as an artifact of a disappearing Jewish life that, nonetheless, persists in growing and reinventing itself.

The Klezmatics got their start in 1986, when Frank London, who had been playing jazz and rock ’n’ roll, placed an ad in the Village Voice looking to start a Klezmer band. Among the respondents was Lorin Sklamberg, a Los Angeles-born, classically trained musician who had a day job at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. As Sklamberg recounted recently, he worked on the same floor where the sound archives were located.

“The YIVO sound archives have touched virtually everybody who plays klezmer music,” he said, “because it was the first place that people knew of that housed historical recordings of Yiddish music, particularly instrumentals for klezmer music. It’s really one of the catalysts of the klezmer music revival. I don’t know if the klezmer revival would have been possible without it.” Sklamberg was allowed to pore through the recordings and make cassettes of whatever caught his fancy. That was, Sklamberg said, “the band’s music education and my own.”

Sklamberg still works at YIVO, but today he is “the caretaker of the collection.”

“That’s very lovely for me,” he continued, “because now I know enough to help other people who are looking for material the way we were looking in the early days of the band. So it’s a huge privilege and responsibility.”

Or as London put it regarding the Klezmatics: “We see ourselves as links in this glorious chain that never stops growing.”

“Live at Town Hall” is about as good an introduction/sampler/greatest hits collection as one can imagine. Tracks include Klezmatics original clarinetist Margot Leverett joining the band on Abraham Ellstein’s “Bobe Tanz” from their first record, high-energy romps from “Rhythm & Jews” featuring clarinetist David Krakauer, selections from their collaboration with Tony Kushner for “The Dybbuk,” “Di krenitse” from their collaboration with Chava Alberstein (who is often referred to as the Joan Baez of Israel) and songs from “Brother Moses Smote the Water,” including “Elijah Rock,” featuring Joshua Nelson — the Jewish-African-American exponent of Jewish gospel singing. All this, as well as songs from “Wonder Wheel,” the aforementioned Woody Guthrie collection, which won the 2006 Grammy for best contemporary world music — the only Grammy ever awarded to a klezmer or Jewish-music band, as well as its follow-up, “Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah.”

“It was so much fun to celebrate being together this long as a band, and to do it by getting everyone who has ever played with the band to be up on stage with us,” London said. “There was a lot of nachas — pride — out of the whole concert and CD. So much of what happens to the Klezmatics is more just about being out in the world and being available and open,” he said.

Some of this openness has led to collaborations with the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Woody Guthrie. “Who would have known?” London said, adding that he could never have foreseen that “Joshua Nelson has turned out to be one of the most enduring and fun collaborations.”

Certainly, no one could have predicted the hugely popular music festivals like the Jewish Music Festival in Krakow, Poland, where klezmer is played day and night, performed primarily by non-Jews to mostly non-Jewish audiences in a country that has few Jews.

Sklamberg is philosophical about this turn of events: “It’s part of where this music lives now. … One of the things you are reminded of when you perform in places like Krakow, is that this is where this music came from.” Sometimes these foreign audiences have an immediate and gut reaction to the music that is missing among American Jews who weren’t raised with the music or have no connection to Yiddish, he said. “It’s funny that the music is heard with different ears and is felt in different ways by different people.”

The Klezmatics’ documentary is not so much a concert film as it is an “Anvil! The Story of Anvil”-like tale of the band’s interpersonal, professional and financial travails, which came as a surprise to London. “If you had polled the band on what they thought the movie would be about, I don’t think any one of us would have said that.”

In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal declaimed: “While the new album marks 25 years, those who watch the documentary may wonder if the Klezmatics will make it to 26.”

I prefer the see the documentary not so much as the story of a fraying band, but of how, despite the challenges of this digital age, it persists.

It’s a matter of endurance, as well. Twenty-five years on, as both London and Sklamberg remarked to me, they still find inspiration in klezmer as their birthright and their heritage, but they also are still discovering ways to make it new. Their show at Disney Hall offers a chance to celebrate all that, and Chanukah, too.

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A Danielewski Halloween

Performance of "The Fifty Year Sword" photo by Ricardo Miranda

Photo by Ricardo Miranda

On Halloween this year, instead of being the best sugar pusher in the neighborhood, or following your inappropriately costumed progeny as they amass their candy fortunes, or abandoning your own hard-earned dignity for a night of brew-fueled revelry, let me steer the adults amongst you to REDCAT, the CalArts downtown theater at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where for one night only, Mark Z. Danielewski will conduct a staged reading with shadow puppets and musical accompaniment of his Halloween-set story, “The Fifty Year Sword.” The evening will also raise funds for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) in honor of the son of one of Danielewski’s close friends, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on Halloween.

“ ‘The Fifty Year Sword’ is a tale that is told to five orphans,” Danielewski, 45, explained recently, “and slowly, through the tale, you realize that the orphans are being threatened and that threat is severe enough to curtail their lives. Anyone who is cut by any of the swords will feel that cut in their 50th year… . It creates a very specific date, and, on a philosophical level, if you knew you were going to die at this time, it would shape your life. So the idea is, how do you protect those children, and who protects them?”

The performance will feature five actors providing the voices, the 40-foot shadows of shadow-caster Christine Marie, sound design by John Zalewski and music from several original Harry Partch instruments (which is appropriate, as Partch created his own instruments to play a tonal scale of his own invention, much as Danielewski does through his fiction).

Danielewski, author of the experimental novels “House of Leaves” and “Only Revolutions,” has lived in Los Angeles for more than two decades, and this performance at REDCAT is a continuation of his attempts to give meaning to contemporary life by pushing the conventions and traditions of storytelling.

Danielewski was born in New York City. His father, Tad Danielewski, was a Polish-born director and acting teacher who, as a young man, survived the Warsaw uprising only to be sent to a Nazi labor camp before being rescued by the American forces. In the United States, Tad was a director during the golden age of television, directing “Omnibus,” then went on to become a programming executive at NBC who, among his claims to fame, gave Woody Allen his first TV job.

However, when the younger Danielewski was growing up, his father was working on a series of films that had the family moving to far-flung locations, including traveling to Ghana for the Emmy Award-winning series “Africa” and working with Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck on “The Guide,” about India. Danielewski said his parents presented culture as something both accessible and not expensive. “You go to the Prado and look at these amazing paintings, and my Mom would say, ‘Draw this.’ We would go to the movies, and my father would say, ‘Let’s talk about how this is a political movie. How is it made?’ ”

In 1972, his father was making a movie in Spain, “España Puerta Abierta,” on which he had spent two years and his life savings of $2 million, when the film was confiscated by the Franco government. Danielewski’s father returned to New York with, literally, nothing to show. This setback led to the greatest dislocation in Danielewski’s young life, when his father accepted an offer to become a tenured professor and start a film department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. “That’s where I ended up going to high school,” Danielewski said. “It would have been a great experience if we were Mormons, but we weren’t.” he added.”

Danielewski says he made many good friends, some of whom he remains close with to this day, but they were not, in his words, “like-minded … . They did not have a sense of cultural value.”

The result? “I have this advice for parents who want their kids to go to great colleges,” he said. “Move them to a place that they deem as hellish. It will motivate them to get out of there. I knew that going to a good university would allow me to get back to a place where people like analyzing movies and reading texts.”

Danielewski found all that, and Harold Bloom, at Yale.

Although he never took a course from Bloom, he knew he was among those infected with Bloom’s love of literature. Danielewski, who graduated in 1988, majored in English at a time when Yale was swirling in the controversies surrounding deconstructionist literary theory, but Bloom inspired in Danielewski a love of Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens. Danielewski also was drawn to the romanticism of the French poets — Apollinaire and Mallarmé as well as Rimbaud and Verlaine, whom he first learned of through a song on Bob Dylan’s ““Blood on the Tracks.””

If I dwell on Danielewski’s formative intellectual roots, it is because they continue to inform his work. Danielewski said he knew from childhood that he would be a novelist. “House of Leaves,” which Danielewski began when he was 26 and published 11 years later, combines every form of literature that interests Danielewski, from the traditional coming-of-age story of a young hipster, to the Hollywood genre films, to academic citations, including footnotes replete with irony; it is a meta-work of the modern age. As Danielewski said by way of analogy: “In the old days, you were going to have one job that was going to last most of your life. Nowadays, kids have three or four jobs and … they’re assembling a life.” Similarly, Danielewski, who at various times has been a plumber, English teacher and served morning coffee, has assembled not only a life, but a lifework.

He said he sees the Halloween performance of “The Fifty Year Sword” as part of an ongoing effort “to get out of my comfort zone.” Dealing with a range of personalities, booking rehearsal studios and reacting to how performers change his words is not his usual form.

Which is why, if you are looking for a different sort of Halloween evening, REDCAT is for you. “The piece is not entirely accessible,” he admits. “It’s difficult. You have to think about it. There is a very definite meaning there, and it does emerge.

“These are complicated ideas: What is, exactly, forgiveness, what is fate, what holds things together, what cuts things apart?”

So consider it this way: “We’re raising money for the JDRF. It’s for those people who don’t want to have sugar. It’s … substantial. So maybe I’m offering apples instead of candy,” Danielewski, said, adding with a laugh, “and maybe those apples have razor blades in them.”

“Mark Z. Danielewski: The Fifty Year Sword,” Mon., Oct. 31, 8:30 p.m. $20 (general), $16 (students), $10 (CalArts students, faculty and staff). Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, 631 W. Second St., downtown. (213) 237-2800. redcat.org.

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Lost & Found: What Wasserstein Hid, New Bio Reveals

When the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein – beloved for her plays “The Heidi Chronicles,” “The Sisters Rosensweig” and “Isn’t it Romantic?” – died in 2006 at age 55, Broadway dimmed its lights in her honor. Five years later, Julie Salamon’s page-turning biography “Wendy and the Lost Boys” (The Penguin Press: $29.95) sheds light on the public and private selves of this author, whose own family dramas were no less gripping than those she wrote for the stage.

The title’s reference to “Peter Pan” is apt on many levels – Wasserstein was named for J.M. Barrie’s lost boys’ surrogate mother; she also became the chronicler for a generation that didn’t want to grow up; and, throughout her life, she surrounded herself with unattainable men, companions whom she could not commit to or who, being gay, were romantically out of reach. When she was 48, Wasserstein chose to become a single mother, and the identity of the father of her child, whose premature birth she chronicled in The New Yorker, remains a secret.

Wasserstein’s life illustrates the post-immigrant Jewish experience. Her parents’ origins were like folklore from a distant past, and their drive to make it in America was manifest in their move up from Brooklyn to Manhattan. For Wasserstein and her peers, assimilation was neither a goal nor a fear – it had already been accomplished. Even though she started her schooling at the Yeshiva of Flatbush, she soon moved to Manhattan’s private Calhoun School, then on to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and, later, City University of New York for graduate work, where she was taught and mentored by Joseph Heller, and finally, to Yale School of Drama, where she earned her M.F.A. degree

For Wasserstein, who came of age in the “me decade” 1970s, the issue was identity, not religion. No doors were closed because she was Jewish; on the contrary, Wasserstein and her characters suffer from too many options – wondering whether the things they so wished for (careers) were what they really wanted after all (instead of family). The constant refrain in her work is: What was the cost of the trade-offs?

Salamon, who will speak at the Skirball on Sept. 22, was given access to Wasserstein’s papers and conducted more than 300 interviews with the playwright’s friends, family and theater associates. She has done a masterful job of reporting and weaving a narrative portrait of a woman to whom her audience felt such a personal connection that they regularly stopped her on the street to engage her in conversation.

Wasserstein’s story is also that of a tight circle of playwrights, directors, producers and actors that included Christopher Durang, Terrence McNally, Andre Bishop, Daniel Sullivan, Meryl Streep and Swoosie Kurtz, and was largely played out at Playwrights Horizon and the Vivian Beaumont Theatre at Lincoln Center.

But there is also her relationship with her notable siblings: Sandra, one of the highest-ranking Fortune 500 executives, for whom there was no glass ceiling; Bruce, the much written-about takeover specialist and billionaire investment banker; and Georgette, who ran an inn in Vermont. All of which was previously known.

However, Salamon reveals what Wasserstein wouldn’t: that her two older siblings had a different father, George Wasserstein, who died of an infection following a ruptured appendix. Wasserstein’s mother, Lola, then married George’s younger brother, Morris, a fact not mentioned to Wasserstein until she was much older. Further, Wasserstein had an older brother, Abner, who had mental deficits and was put in a group home and rarely acknowledged, much less visited, by the family. Lola was the force of nature that Wendy had to deal with, and who provided anecdotal material for friends and in her writing – but it was Lola’s secrets that Wasserstein kept off-limits.

I met Wasserstein on a few occasions. She wrote the words for a comic strip that ran in New York Woman when my wife was that magazine’s publisher, and so we found ourselves at several of the magazine’s events. In my memory, she is a bit like Hagrid in “Harry Potter,” a lovable giant with a wild, thick mane of hair – that is, if Hagrid had appeared at black-tie champagne events.  When you talked to Wasserstein, you felt like there was extra oxygen in the air – smiling was inevitable.

After her death, New York Times theater critic and columnist Frank Rich wrote: “How could the most public artist in New York keep so much locked up?”

As Salamon makes clear, Wasserstein’s friends were her life, and their relationships often turned up transmuted in her work, causing friendships with Wasserstein to run hot and cold. Perhaps Wasserstein compartmentalized her friends and kept her secrets as a means of maintaining a fiction – that they lived in a Neverland of her own invention.

Peter Pan’s Wendy refuses the boy’s entreaties to stay young, instead maturing until, one day, her own daughter is visited by Peter. In “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” Salamon details the human cost of a life that will live on, on stage, but was cut far too short in real life.

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How LA Grew its Art

From left: Edward Kienholz, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps,” 1959; photo by Susan Einstein. Wallace Berman, “Untitled (Faceless Faces with Kabala),” 1963-70; photo by Ellen Labenski.  Larry Bell, “Untitled,” 1969.

From left: Edward Kienholz, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps,” 1959; photo by Susan Einstein. Wallace Berman, “Untitled (Faceless Faces with Kabala),” 1963-70; photo by Ellen Labenski. Larry Bell, “Untitled,” 1969.

For those of us who are not native to Los Angeles yet live here (some for more of our lives than anywhere else), there is a compulsion to define Los Angeles, to get control in some manner of this ever-changing city that is distinguished as much by its sprawl as its particulars, by its air and light as its buildings and institutions, by its self-made individualists as its patchwork of ethnic communities.

It is in this spirit of examining dichotomies that, beginning in October and for the six months that follow, Los Angeles and its surrounding communities will be home to “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,” an enormously ambitious attempt to make sense of the ephemeral and tangible through exhibitions at more than 60 museums, galleries and various other sites from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The project will also reach Pasadena and Pomona, as well as Palm Springs, with a 10-day arts festival slated for its mid-point in January.

This enormous undertaking, initiated and overseen by the Getty Research Institute (GRI), makes the case for the many ways in which Los Angeles has been a partner, catalyst and home to a unique, prolific and influential artistic vision. “Pacific Standard Time” is nothing more or less than a declaration of the importance of Los Angeles to the narrative of post-World War II American art. Its ambition is not only to reset how the art world views Los Angeles, but how we, who live here, view our own city — beyond Hollywood, Rodeo Drive, the freeways and the beaches.

The project’s genesis dates back about a decade, according to Andrew Perchuk, GRI deputy director. Perchuk and Rani Singh, a GRI senior research associate, as well as the GRI’s then-director Tom Crow, who left in 2007, all arrived at the Getty around 2000. Crow was a California native, and all three were interested in learning more about the art of Southern California. In what might be described as a “Big Yellow Taxi” moment, they realized “people were dying, and the history was fast disappearing,” Perchuk said.

“The Getty Research Institute [launched] a big oral-history research project to capture the first-person perspectives of the artists, curators, collectors, dealers and other people in the art scene. At the same time, Nancy Kienholz [widow and collaborator of Ed Kienholz] and [the now-deceased painter and museum director] Henry Hopkins approached the Getty Foundation to encourage them to preserve the paper record, the archival record.” The Getty subsequently commissioned a survey of archives related to Southern California. The institutions holding those archives were then able to make proposals and receive grants from the Getty to catalogue and make accessible their collections to scholars. The Getty also started collecting heavily in the archival area of the postwar years.

“We realized that we had uncovered so much interesting and new information … that we came up with the idea of a series of exhibitions,” Singh said. They brought that idea to a number of institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Hammer Museum.

It quickly became clear, Singh said, that “Everyone had very interesting ideas and a very deep wealth of information and exhibition material. … It very quickly snowballed into something [where] no one [exhibit] was overlapping in any way or stepping on anyone else’s toes. Everybody’s idea was unique and specific, and they had eked out their own corner of the story that is Los Angeles.”

The Getty gave grants in two phases, one for research and planning and then for the actual exhibitions and publications. The result is a citywide collaboration, the likes of which Los Angeles has not seen since the 1984 Olympics. Although it will be nearly impossible to attend every exhibit or event related to “Pacific Standard Time,” it will be hard not to be taken with the extent of creativity and artistry born in the region.

“Pacific Standard Time” will explore the hard-edged pop art (think Ed Ruscha) and assemblage works (Ed Kienholz) that made a name for Los Angeles in the 1960s, as well as the minimalist (such as Robert Irwin) and conceptual (Chris Burden) artists who followed them; the émigré architects (including Rudolf Schindler) who put their stamp on postwar L.A.; and the Chicano, feminist and African American artists who struggled to have their work acknowledged.

The Museum of Natural History, LACMA’s first home (then called The Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art) will show California artists from 1945 to 1963, while the Getty Museum’s own exhibit, “Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970” will feature an overview that, Perchuk said, “finds an interesting way to present some old favorites, some great paintings by David Hockney and Ed Ruscha, some rediscoveries like the amazing resin paintings of Ron Davis, and some [work] not particularly well recognized even in its own era, like some of the assemblage [by] artists like Ron Miyashiro.” The GRI will focus on how artists such as Wallace Berman, George Herms, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari disseminated their messages to the public. MOCA will present “Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981,” the most comprehensive survey of that period in Los Angeles art to date, bracketed by the resignation of Richard Nixon and the election of Ronald Reagan.

The Hammer will offer the work of African American artists in the postwar era, while The Autry National Center of the American West will exhibit the work of Mexican American artists such as Hernando Villa, Alberto Vades and Roberto Chavez; the Chinese American Museum will present the work of Chinese American architects in Los Angeles during the period; the Craft and Folk Art Museum will feature the work of living-legend enamellist June Schwarcz. And the Grammy Museum will focus on the music scene here from 1945 to 1970. The list goes on and on, literally, and can be examined in great detail at pacificstandardtime.org/participants.

There will be special regional weekends, shuttle buses, special T-shirted volunteers.

This thing is huge.

Yet as vast as “Pacific Standard Time” will be, it is also going to be personal. It is about artists and the prisms through which they view the world; it is about inspiration, cross-pollination and the personalities that have made Los Angeles a place where artists chose to work. What I learned in reading just the press materials for “Pacific Standard Time,” and through my conversations with Getty officials, is that in order for artists to make Los Angeles their own, they needed not just a sense of community, but also support — collectors who would become champions of their work, as well as art dealers and, ultimately, museums to show their work. By that measure, one of the least heralded but most important catalysts to the Los Angeles art scene was Stanley Grinstein, one of the founders of Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited); he and his wife, Elyse, have often been hailed as “the godparents of the L.A. art scene.”

Recently I met Grinstein in his art-filled Brentwood home, where he recounted for me his own involvement in the scene here.

Grinstein, born in 1927,  grew up in Seattle. “We always went to the Seattle Art Museum, but we didn’t take it too seriously,” he recalled. He had some relatives who were, in his words, “Bohemian” — and he got a sense that that was where the parties were. His whole family moved to Los Angeles when he was 16, and he went to USC.

“Even at USC,” he said, “we knew about the art scene.” He married Elyse, who painted and held art classes.

Grinstein went into the forklift business and became active in the Young Men’s Club at Cedars-Sinai. As he tells it, one day, someone came around and told them that many of the Jewish organizations in the city were looking for new leadership and offered to expose them to their choice of organization. Grinstein chose the Westside Jewish Community Center, in part because at the time he lived nearby, in Carthay Circle.

The JCC, Grinstein said, “turned out to be very interesting.” Every year they held a fundraiser, an art fair of sorts drawn from various artists and galleries. “We had a group that was very into art,” he said. For many, it was an introduction to contemporary art. Among the artists who participated were the conceptualists Allen Ruppersberg, Bruce Nauman and Michael Asher.

At the same time, curators were reaching out as well to develop new collectors. Grinstein and his wife took classes in contemporary art from Walter Hopps (co-founder of the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery and, later, director of the Pasadena Art Museum) and from Hopps’ wife, Shirley.

Collectors Fred and Marcia Weisman recommended the Grinsteins join the contemporary art council of LACMA, when the museum was still housed in Exposition Park. Jim Elliott, who later went on to UC Berkeley, exposed them to such experimental, multimedia artists as John Cage.

Elyse was on the new talent committee, and she and Eugenia Butler were going out to meet young artists in their studios.

The Grinsteins became more involved in collecting and purchased a major painting by Josef Albers.

Somewhere around 1965 they became friendly with the sculptor Larry Bell. For the gala opening of the new mid-Wilshire LACMA, the Grinsteins invited Bell as their guest. Doing so gave them the seal of approval among artists.

The Grinsteins tried having dinner parties with artists, but they were a failure; the artists were concerned the Grinsteins would just be using them to show off to their friends. So, instead, they decided to have parties for the artists to invite their friends. There was no set pattern, but they happened pretty much once a month, and there was always some excuse for them — an artist was having a show in town, or they would make up a reason. One of the more legendary parties was one in honor of a sumo competition in town, where the sumo wrestlers showed up.

Over the years, a fair amount of artists were known to overindulge a bit, but never to excess (although one did have to be tied up when he became enraged over his wife leaving the party with someone else). The only bad thing that happened was that a small work by Wallace Berman once disappeared during a get-together (and it has never resurfaced). The Grinsteins hesitated over telling Berman, with whom they’d become close. When they finally did, all he said was, “Boy, someone must have really wanted it!”

Sid Felsen was an accountant whom Grinstein had befriended in college — they were both members of the ZBT fraternity at USC, when Felsen was there as a returning veteran. Felsen took art classes from Grinstein’s wife and was part of their art group. He also did a lot of tax returns for artists. Felsen and Grinstein were approached about opening an art auction house, but they decided against it. Still, they wanted to be closer to the artists. “One day, we said to each other: ‘Maybe prints? Maybe we could do prints out here, ’ ” Grinstein recalled.

They had brought a lot of prints to the Westside Jewish Community Center. Grinstein had come to know Ken Tyler, who was a master printer at Tamarind Lithography Workshop. He invited him to a Christmas party and asked if he wanted to launch a print center that he would back, along with Felsen. Tyler agreed; now all they needed was the artists.

They began by approaching older artists, such as Edward Hopper, who offered a plate to restrike an existing work, which they refused (Grinstein says he regrets that now – he surmises he would have gotten Hopper to do something to the plate), as well as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who said yes, in principle, but they were busy and told them to wait (Rothko never did any prints for them). At that point, Grinstein turned to Tyler and suggested they try Albers, whom Tyler had worked with and whose work Grinstein collected. Albers said yes. But it would take a year before the print was done.

The delay gave them time to look elsewhere. The Surrealist Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) was staying with the Grinsteins, and although by this time he had become bitter, they got him to do some prints; they also got some from social-activist artist Ben Shahn. For a while they tried to entice some of the Mexican and Chicano artists, but without success.

When the Albers print finally came out, it sold well — at $100 a print. Still, they needed a $10,000 bank loan to keep things going. Felsen didn’t quit his accounting job for many years, and Grinstein never gave up the forklift company.

A turning point occurred when Robert Rauschenberg decided to visit Los Angeles in the spring of 1967. The artist had been taking a break from painting after showing at the Venice Biennale and had started a roller-skating dance troupe (Rauschenberg actually performed on roller skates with the Judson Dance Theater). Rauschenberg wanted to make wings out of steel, and Grinstein, being in the forklift business, was able to get the artist what he needed. Grinstein then asked if Rauschenberg would come to Los Angeles and make some prints here. He agreed.

“That was our breakthrough,” Grinstein recalled, “Once he came out, we had a direction, and all the other Castelli artists came out. That put Gemini G.E.L. on the map.” When Jasper Johns agreed to do a series at Gemini, Gemini became financially viable.

As Grinstein explained, “When you went to New York, you could go to Max’s Kansas City the first night and see half the art world there.” In Los Angeles, there was no equivalent outside of a group of artists who showed at the Ferus Gallery hanging out at Barney’s Beanery.

East Coast artists began to come to Los Angeles to work at Gemini, and they met local artists either at the print studio or at one of the Grinstein’s parties, and thus the scene grew. Early on, Gemini made works with Sam Francis, Ruscha, Robert Graham, Larry Bell and Wallace Berman, among others. Grinstein would often turn to artists such as Chuck Arnoldi and Laddie John Dill (who worked as an apprentice printer at Gemini) to start the word of mouth about a party.

Grinstein feels that from the beginning Los Angeles had a lot to offer the artists. “There’s the light — some people say that art is how you deal with light.” Grinstein also believes that the studio space available to artists impacted the very conception of their art here. Finally, he feels there was some benefit for artists who chose not to be in New York – they could create outside of the spotlight. Grinstein became close to many of them, including Wallace Berman, whom he found to be a spiritual soul, a pure hippie (Berman died young, the victim of a car crash). At the entrance to Grinstein’s home stands “Topanga Seed,” by Berman.

Grinstein also gave financial support to artists, opening up house accounts at art supply stores in the area to pay for their supplies. When Judy Chicago started to do environmental constructions, Grinstein gave her one of his forklifts to make the work. He also let several artists work out of his forklift company’s site, including Judy Chicago and Mark Di Suervo.

Equally important, Grinstein and Felsen stood by artists at all phases of their careers, and both Gemini G.E.L. editions and the Grinsteins’ own art collection reflect that. Grinstein essentially let the artists be part of his family. Man Ray, Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass would only come to Los Angeles if they could stay at the Grinsteins’ house. As Glass said, in a documentary being made about the Grinsteins, a clip of which can be found on YouTube: “They were not bystanders. … Their activities were aligned with development, preservation of art and the encouragement of artists to come and work here. They weren’t just hosts to the community; they were actively involved in it.”

Looking back, Grinstein now says: “I was proud of all the artists — we felt so lucky each time they made a work for us.”

For “Pacific Standard Time,” Gemini G.E.L. is offering a chronological exhibit of their output. Like the full collection of shows that will proliferate around the region for “Pacific Standard Time, they tell the story of how art made a home for itself in Los Angeles. Just as a great work of art forces us to engage with it, redefining our notions of art and art history, “Pacific Standard Time” has us rethink Los Angeles itself as a source inspiration and creativity, as home to postar American art.

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Copyright 2011 Tommywood