Paul Schimmel, the Museum of Contemporary Art”s (MOCA) chief curator, wants us to spend our summer looking back — 50 or so years to around the time of his birth, and to the city where he grew up, New York, to focus on the remarkable work of a young, poor and not-yet-famous Robert Rauschenberg, who was gathering junk and detritus from his life (clothes, family photos, fabric) and incorporating them into paintings that then became three-dimensional constructs, which Rauschenberg called “Combines.”

Although the Combines are well-known to art lovers, and certainly Rauschenberg’s “Monogram” (or “That work with the stuffed goat,” as most people know it) has achieved iconic status, no previous show has ever focused exclusively on the Combines.

Schimmel believes that the Combines are among the most important and influential works of the second half of the 20th century — that they operate not only as a bridge between the abstract expressionists and the pop artists, but also contain the seeds of many art movements that followed. He also argues that the Combines are even more culturally relevant today in the age of sampling and in a culture that cannibalizes itself at an unprecedented rate.

Schimmel believes that this exhibition of Rauschenberg’s work, “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines,” which he organized for MOCA and which had its first showing last winter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, will have a major influence on other artists’ work over the next 10 to 15 years. And this kind of thinking — the long-view historical perspective, the focus on artists, the pop cultural references and this sort of grandiose pronouncement (which could very well be dead on) — is all typical of Schimmel.

Schimmel is toastmaster and host at the hippest party in town, the L.A. contemporary art scene. He has been chief curator at MOCA since 1990, and during his tenure the contemporary art world and the L.A. art scene have exploded — never have so many collectors been so globally active in the acquisition of recently made art. Never have so many Los Angeles-based artists been so well regarded by the art establishment. MOCA has garnered serious consideration, in part, by virtue of Schimmel’s major exhibitions, which have tried to give both historical context to contemporary work as well as to focus on the output of many individual artists.

So how did Paul Schimmel get to be Paul Schimmel? Turns out, strange as it may seem, that he has always been Paul Schimmel.

“Even in high school,” Schimmel recalled recently, “I wanted to be a curator.”

He credits the influence of his Manhattan private school art teacher, Betty Tompkins, an artist he describes as a “photo-realist with a strong feminist bent” and whose work has recently been receiving renewed attention. He also points to his high school English teacher, Paul Schwager, who suggested that Schimmel do his 11th-grade project on Gertrude Stein. For that project, Schimmel began spending time at the library of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), where the librarian, impressed that a 15-year-old was so passionate about art, introduced him to some of the associate curators. They, in turn, learning that his project was on Stein, took him to see original works in the museum’s collection that, by coincidence, they just happened to be in the process of organizing for a landmark show on the Stein and Cone collections. “I felt this was the coolest,” Schimmel said
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As a teenager, Schimmel would walk friends through MOMA and the Met.
“I had these different tours that I would do,” he said. “I always felt museums were an extension of my house.”

He realized that he did not need to own the artworks to feel that they were his own: “By looking at something, spending time with it, talking about it, it became my work.”

Or, more to the point, Schimmel realized that looking and talking about artworks could become his life’s work.

“In some ways,” Schimmel now says, “nothing has changed since then. To this day, [this approach] continues to inform what I do as a curator.”

He attended Syracuse University, where he was allowed to take some of the graduate-level museum studies program courses, and did an internship at the Contemporary Arts Museum (CAM) in Houston. Upon graduation, he joined the curatorial staff of CAM, spending several years in Texas before returning to New York to the Institute of Fine Arts, an art history program at New York University, to work toward a master’s degree. After leaving NYU in 1981, he was offered a job as a curator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (which is now the Orange County Museum of Art).

Schimmel admitted that the first day he arrived in Orange County from New York “was a shock.” At first he felt “like I was in a satellite — removed.”

Yet he found that the expectations of what he could accomplish there were such that when he exhibited edgy and ground-breaking contemporary Los Angeles artists like Mike Kelly, Chris Burden or Charlie Ray, the reaction was: “How did you do that in Newport?”

>From the start, Schimmel realized that “you need to engage a younger audience.”

What he also learned is that if you do a show and get people to write about it, audiences will come, and you get a following. Equally important, you can have a big success with modest numbers. As long as the museum leaders feel the museum is making a contribution to its community, you have the support of the museum. In the just under a decade that he was at the Newport Harbor museum, Schimmel organized a series of major exhibitions including ones on emerging California artists; a reassessment of figurative art from the 1950s, an Edvard Munch show that was hugely successful and a local artists’ biennial
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Then, in 1990, Schimmel was offered the MOCA post.

“It was a surprise,” he said. “It’s not that likely for a major institution of international stature to look so locally.”

But Schimmel had the support of a few museum trustees, including the respected collector Marcia Weisman, who liked him for his commitment not only to the California and L.A. art scene, but for his wide-ranging historical approach to shows.

Schimmel has now been at MOCA for 16 years, an unusually stable career in a world where art institutions and curators regularly engage in musical chairs.

In many ways he has been at the right place at the right time. He presides over a significant collection of contemporary art at a moment when, as Schimmel put it, “the role of contemporary art has become more central, more visible, more financially significant than anyone can imagine.”

In the 1960s, contemporary art was a “very small, highly rarified world.” Although there was an explosion of artists and collectors in the 1980s, museums of modern art were uncomfortable with contemporary art. Today the scene is completely different.

“The growth of contemporary art museums in the post-war period in this country was a direct result of the larger more encyclopedic museums keeping two things out,” Schimmel said: “Contemporary art and Jews.”

“So if you look at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the number of contemporary art museums in Los Angeles, younger Jewish collections were at the root.” Schimmel defines these collectors as creating a counter culture — meaning a culture counter to the mainstream old master collections. On an international level, the most famous exemplar is Charles Saatchi, an Iraqi-born Jew who made his fortune in advertising and who, despite having advised Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party on its successful election campaign, is an outsider to the English establishment, and who has had an enormous impact on the contemporary art scene.

In Los Angeles, a similar phenomenon led to the formation of MOCA. Although for most of the 20th century the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), founded in 1910, was the pre-eminent repository for modern art in Los Angeles, the now-defunct Pasadena Art Museum was once thought to be the place for contemporary art (particularly under Walter Hopps). However, the Pasadena museum foundered financially, and in 1974 Norton Simon took it over and transformed it into his eponymous showcase of impressionist, old master, and Asian art.

In 1979, seeking a home in Los Angeles for contemporary art, Norton Simon’s sister, Marcia Weisman, along with her husband Frederick Weisman (they later divorced) and other major contemporary art collectors such as Phil and Beatrice Gersh, Lenore Greenberg, Max Palevsky and Eli Broad, broke away from LACMA, founding MOCA in 1983, after Mayor Tom Bradley suggested creating a museum of contemporary art as part of California Plaza, a downtown Los Angeles hotel and office development. While they awaited construction of the Arata Isozaki building (which opened in 1986), MOCA’s first home became a former police garage in Little Tokyo, renovated by Frank Gehry
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The Temporary Contemporary (TC) was always a place where expectations were different — it didn’t have the imprimatur of a “museum.” But it also afforded the opportunity to exhibit work that didn’t fit in the normal confines of traditional museum galleries. This freewheeling openness proved liberating for the curators, the artists, and for the audiences. At the TC you could expect to see avant-garde work, and you were free to hate it, ridicule it or even enjoy it.

The TC proved so popular that it turned out to defy its “temporary” name; it was expanded to include an additional exhibition space, and in 1996 David Geffen contributed $5 million to renovate the space — which resulted in it being renamed the Geffen Contemporary. The space housed the recent successful “Ecstacy: In and About Altered States” show, curated by Schimmel, which is now closed for renovation but will reopen in September.

Schimmel sees the Geffen space as keeping alive the connection between the “studio and the factory.” If the Arata Isozaki building is the heart of MOCA, Schimmel said, then the Geffen Contemporary remains “the soul of MOCA.”

Was necessity the mother of invention, or was MOCA prescient? In recent years, a number of major art institutions, most notably the Tate in London, have felt a need to renovate industrial space to showcase contemporary work. Could one be so bold as to say they owe a debt to MOCA?

Schimmel feels that one of the reasons that Los Angeles has become home to so many contemporary artists is CalArts — a school that is itself very much artist-led (a case he made persuasively with the exhibition “Public Offerings”). Similarly, Schimmel feels that what distinguishes MOCA as an institution is the involvement of artists, such as the late Sam Francis and the always innovative Robert Irwin as early trustees, as well as architect Frank Gehry, who was once a board member and is still an active supporter.

In some ways, Schimmel said, artists are the audience that matters most to the museum’s growth and future.

“Who is our audience?” Schimmel asks. “Tourists? Collectors? Our audience is the artists themselves.”

This is a variation on the lesson Schimmel learned in Newport. Put together shows that matter — shows that you are willing to stake your reputation on, shows that artists find interesting and people will write about — and the audience will follow.

“This is not the movie business,” Schimmel said, “we don’t need millions…. We had close to 100,000 visitors for the ‘Ecstasy’ show, and that’s huge by museum standards.”

Over the last 16 years at MOCA, Schimmel has curated numerous thought-provoking shows, including “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” (1992), “Hand-painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62” (1992), “Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979” (1998), “Public Offerings” (2001) and “Ecstasy,” as well as solo shows of artists including Sigmar Polke, Robert Gober and Charles Ray.

“I am always mixing historical and contemporary shows.” Schimmel said.

Postmodernism has often been critiqued for inserting us into a world without context, into a PC world in which art history is no longer relevant — into a world where the references are only inside jokes or appropriations from other work. Yet Schimmel stands at odds with this point of view.

“I still believe there is a history of art,” Schimmel said. “There’s a story to be told, and exhibitions that don’t attempt to define that history have lost a huge opportunity.”

To some extent, MOCA and Paul Schimmel’s success lie in seizing that opportunity. Many contemporary art museums have become institutions saddled with demands — large boards, large bureaucracies, the desire for huge shows and large attendance. As a result, increasingly we have witnessed more and more “mega shows” or career retrospectives but fewer historical, conceptual shows. Fewer shows that challenge us to see an artist or an era in a new light.

“MOCA is one of the few museums that consistently takes on large-scale thematic exhibitions.” Schimmel said.

He believes MOCA, in this way, is living up to the standard set by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York in his teenage years.

“MOCA has done more to embrace and further the legacy of complex theoretical thematic exhibitions than MOMA has done over the last 15 years,” Schimmel said
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Today, MOMA, in the wake of its successful renovation, is an encyclopedia of modern art come to life — the number of major recognizable masterworks in its collection is mind boggling. It is almost overwhelming. One can’t fault MOMA for the wealth of its collection. But one can still pine, as Schimmel does, for the clarity that the MOMA of Schimmel’s high-school years afforded.

Like Schimmel, I spent a great deal of time at New York’s Museum of Modern Art during my high school years (When Schimmel was looking in the basement at their collection, I was probably sitting in the garden staring at Rodin’s statue of Balzac and at Picasso’s goat). MOMA’s then-curator William Rubin had created a museum where one room followed the next, the artworks were all at eye level, accessible. You didn’t need an audio tour: the works in each room made the argument that this follows this — allowing the connections to be made in your head.

Rubin taught at NYU when Schimmel was a graduate student — but my guess is it is more the museum than the man that influenced him. When you visit the Combines at MOCA, you are seeing an exhibition that could have been shown at Rubin’s MOMA.

I was reminded of this when visiting Schimmel’s stunning installation of Rauschenberg’s work. The groupings are done in a way that states the importance of each work but allows the viewer space to interact with the art. There is a flow, an art historical progression that allows you to make the connections between abstract expressionism — the messiness, the found objects (while rejecting its emotional quality) — and the coolness of pop art to follow, with its similar interest in newspaper comics and the everyday. At the same time, there is bridge between the work Rauschenberg did before, the red paintings, and what would follow. Finally, the show allows us to consider the importance of the Combines unto themselves, as presaging the work of a wide variety of contemporary artists — from John Baldessari to Robert Gober, just to name a few — and as being uniquely relevant to today (some of the Combines look like they could have been made last week, not 50 years ago).

The Combines show would be reason enough to visit MOCA this summer, but as long as we are there, Schimmel has a few more tours he wants to take us on.

There is a 20-year survey of the work of Lorna Simpson, an artist whose photographs and video installations, combining images and text, challenge us to consider issues of narrative and gender; as well as a small show titled “After Cézanne,” which is an exquisite selection of works from MOCA’s collection that features artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Roy Lichtenstein, Diane Arbus and Arshile Gorky all in conversation with each other — pondering the 20th century by referencing Cézanne — just as the Combines nearby engage in a dialogue about art in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st.

So this summer, Paul Schimmel is sending us all back to the future. Summer school is in session at MOCA. Schimmel wants to inspire artists and make them see Rauschenberg’s work and their own in a new light. To the collectors and connoisseurs of contemporary art, he wants to reveal the context from which to regard the works that came before and those that will follow. Finally, for the general public he has a special offer: He want us to make these remarkable art works that most of us can never afford our own.

Very, very Paul Schimmel.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week in The Journal.

Scott Steindorff is a happy man. A successful movie and TV producer, his NBC series, “Las Vegas,” just got picked up for another season; he won a Golden Globe for the HBO miniseries, “Empire Falls,” starring Paul Newman, and produced the feature film of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain” with Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. Upcoming on Steindorff’s slate are adaptations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera,” TC Boyle’s “The Tortilla Curtain,” Michael Connolly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Penelope” starring Reese Witherspoon and remakes of the classic films “Ikiru” and “Rififi.” All this and he’s only been in the film business six years.

Very few people arrive in Hollywood already in their 40s and succeed in becoming producers. Even among those who do manage to get a film made (a miracle in itself), one-hit wonders abound and legions have given up after a just few seasons in the sun. To succeed in both TV and film is rare — rarer still for a relative newcomer.

So let’s pay attention to the story of Scott Steindorff.

Steindorff was born in a small town in Minnesota. When he was young, his family moved to Arizona, where his father was involved in real estate. As a young man, he was passionate about theater, skiing (he made the U.S. Olympic team) and books.
“I grew up reading books,” Steindorff told me recently. “We didn’t watch TV.”

Steindorff attended Arizona State, pursuing a dual major in theater and business. He wanted to go to Hollywood to act in movies, but his father wanted him to go into business.

Given what I know of Jewish fathers and sons, I sometimes wonder if what preceded Abraham taking his son to be sacrificed was Isaac telling him he wanted to be an artist rather than go into business. Many a child’s artistic career has been sacrificed on the mount by a parent’s plea.

So no surprise: Steindorff went into the family real estate business and spent the next two decades developing land and shopping centers.

Then came the 1990s real estate slump. Steindorff moved to California hoping to write or act in movies (he did manage to appear in some skiing movies). To keep himself financially afloat he did real estate consulting, which brought him to Las Vegas. Working as a consultant to the Forum Shops at Caesar’s Palace — which became an attraction unto themselves — led to his being hired by Caesar’s as an entertainment consultant.

When Tommy Tune took over the MGM Grand’s show “EFX,” Steindorff wrote the new version himself — which was a big hit. This taste of show business success led to Steindorff’s “now or never” moment.

Six years ago, at 40, he made the decision “to pursue the entertainment business full blast.” But unlike his earlier forays into Hollywood as a potential actor or writer, this time he took a different approach — as a producer.

Which is not as easy as it sounds.

Although every year brings, like the swallows to Capistrano, a flock of self-anointed movie producers to Los Angeles, Hollywood is actually a small club that doesn’t really like outsiders. The gatekeepers and decision makers are generally people who’ve been working in the industry their entire professional lives, for or with those corporate entities we call “the studios.”

Generally, to break in you have to have something the studios want — access to a star, or exclusive control of a best-selling or newsworthy book or story. Or money.
Hollywood has always been happy to greet new money. However, many wealthy people have had their wallets lightened by virtue of developing projects that didn’t get made; or, worse yet, ones that got made and were just as quickly forgotten. But as happy as Hollywood is to take new money, they are slower to award any respect to those they dismiss as merely “money people.” (And that, in my opinion, is what the whole Bob Yari/”Crash” suit is really all about.)

So how has Steindorff achieved his success? To get Hollywood’s attention he realized that, yes, he would need a bag of money. But more important would be how he chose to spend it.

Although many people deride Las Vegas as a cultural backwater, Steindorff had found himself surrounded by good friends who cared deeply about books and movies. He garnered a group of Las Vegas investors (including Danny Greenspun, son of the legendary Las Vegas publisher Hank Greenspun), and then with their backing he started to buy film rights to pedigreed popular literary books
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Steindorff’s gamble was that he would be judged not by his money (or not only by his money) but by his taste. And rather than just handing off the money to third parties, Steindorff and his company, Stone Village Entertainment, used their own money to acquire properties — much like a real estate deal — enabling Steindorff to maintain involvement in the projects and keep his position as a producer.

So, on the one hand, he is a businessman: “I’m an entrepreneur. But I take less of a risk when I go after the best.” (Think of blue-chip properties.) Hence his portfolio contains Nobel, Pulitzer and National Book Award winners. This business approach is the key to his art.

Today, although Steindorff admits that he spent many years resenting that he followed his father’s wishes, he feels his business background served him well.

Perhaps on that day long ago when Abraham stood poised above his son, Isaac, the Good Lord whispered in his ear, “Not to worry: I will create a business out of art for your son and his children and their children to pursue.” Perhaps Isaac wondered what such an enterprise could be — and God said “I’ll show you — I’ll call it Show Business.”

And it came to be that both father and son were pleased. Just ask Scott Steindorff.
Among the properties that Steindorff recently acquired is A.M. Homes’ “This Book Will Save Your Life.” Although it received a particularly unkind review from The New York Times, the novel had a particular resonance for Steindorff, a divorced father of three, a man who finally got to live his dream. Homes’ book is about a man who decides to change his life. Steindorff did that, and he can’t believe his good fortune.

“I love my life,” Steindorff says. Hanging out with Paul Newman; having dinner with Philip Roth; on the set with Reese Witherspoon. Sounds good.

Which reminds me of a quote from George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans), who said, “It is never too late to become what you might have been.”

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

How does an idea come to life? How is it that someone has an idea — an idea that he or she believes will help change the world — and it actually takes flight? I’m not sure anyone really knows how that process occurs, only that it does.

Just ask Zade.

Zade Dirani, 26, is a composer and musician who created the International Musicians Assembly, an internationally diverse group of musicians and future leaders from conflict-ridden countries who have recently embarked on their “Roads to You: Celebration of One World” tour.

The L.A. stopover kicks off at the Museum of Tolerance on May 31 (co-sponsored by The Jewish Journal). It’s followed by a members-only performance at Sinai Temple on June 2, as part of the synagogue’s 100th anniversary; and a concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall on June 6, where the International Children’s Peace Choir from Long Beach will join in.

The tour is the manifestation of Zade’s vision of musicians as world leaders making connections through music and culture.

Naive? Unrealistic? Zade doesn’t think so — and he has the life story to back that belief.

Zade was born and raised in Amman, Jordan. His architect father had ambitions for him to follow in his footsteps, but early on Zade showed musical promise (he started composing at 13) and was accepted at Jordan’s National Music Conservatory. At 18, he received a scholarship to study at the Berklee School of Music in Boston.

For the next few years, Zade traveled back and forth between the two. He appeared with the National Symphony of Jordan, where he first performed for Queen Noor, the American-born wife of the late King Hussein. In the United States, Zade organized a series of “house concerts” performing his piano compositions in peoples’ homes.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Zade was scheduled to give a concert in Maine at an American friend’s home. When news of the attacks spread, the concert was postponed.

“After 9/11,” Zade said, “I felt a tremendous responsibility.”

As a Muslim and an Arab, playing in the homes of American families, Zade wanted to bring a message that culture could unite people. At the same time, he also wanted to send a message to his fellow Muslims and Arabs that, “You can be proud of your culture.”

Zade threw himself into performing, grass-roots-style, in churches, synagogues and people’s homes all over the country, playing as many as 200 concerts in a year. He discovered that through music, he made a personal connection with an audience. Like a latter-day Bob Hope, this performer embraced the role of ambassador.

Zade’s performances had another unexpected side effect — he developed a wide-ranging fan base. Zade’s first recordings, self-released are now turning up on Billboard charts. His new album “Beautiful World” released on May 16 features compositions redolent of Middle Eastern rhythms as well as classical piano compositions. He has become one of Jordan’s best-known artists, performing not only for King Abdullah and Queen Reina, but for such dignitaries as Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. Like Madonna, Zade has ascended to one-name recognition.

However, Zade wanted to do more. Working alone, he was delivering, in essence, a monologue — about culture and heritage and the connections people can make between the two. What he wanted was a dialogue.

Zade sought out other musicians from conflict-ridden countries or regions — talented musicians who also had leadership qualities and were interested in developing conflict-resolution skills.

He also quickly found three sponsors. His alma mater, The Berklee College of Music, agreed to be an educational partner; the Barakat Foundation, which supports culture and cultural exchanges and operates under the sponsorship of Queen Noor, signed on as philanthropic partner; and Seeds of Peace, an organization that brings together young Israelis and Palestinians, helps with conflict-resolution programs and leadership training.

The Jordanian embassy contacted other embassies to suggest applicants; Berklee helped identify candidates as well. Over a period of many months, Zade assembled a troupe of 35 musicians, ages 18 to 30, from 18 countries, including Israel, Iran, Korea, China and Mexico.

Under the name The International Musicians Assembly, they perform Zade’s compositions. The musicians also appear as trios, quartets and septets, frequently performing their own compositions. Particularly popular is the Abrahamic Trio, a constellation that featured Ali Bekrahdi, a Muslim from Iran, on santur (Persian hammer dulcimer); Perla Martinez, a Christian from Mexico on violin; and Jake Hertzog, a Jew from Michigan, on electric guitar. On any given day, eight different ensembles hold musical workshops and speak at schools and before other audiences about themselves, their countries and their music.

Zade has a five-year strategy. He hopes this group spawns many others, so that on any given night, somewhere in the world, a group of musicians/leaders are performing and opening people’s hearts.

He already has inspired numerous others to get involved, including Dr. Nur Amersi, the honorary director of the International Musicians Assembly. The Santa Monica-based Amersi practiced veterinary medicine for a decade before committing herself to philanthropy, as the Western U.S. representative of the Aga Khan’s Institute of Ismali Studies.

“In these troubled times,” Amersi said, “musical initiatives become tools that promote human and cultural pluralism — thereby becoming an effective force of stability.”

Music is no certain path to peace (i.e. consider the East Coast-West Coast rap wars), but Zade sees culture as a powerful positive force. Zade’s mission calls to mind Isaac Bashevis Singer’s saying that “the good life is not passive existence where you live and let live. It is one of involvement where you live and help live.”

Zade, four years shy of age 30, already knows that.

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The Assembly is performing Wednesday, May 31 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Tolerance’s Outdoor Memorial Plaza, 9786 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles. Free. Reservations required at (310) 772-2528. Doors open at 6:30. For more information, visit www.museumoftolerance.com.

The Assembly is performing June 6 at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Royce Hall. $15-$135. For more information, call (213)-365-3500. For more information, visit www.ticketmaster.com.

Contact Dr. Nur Amersi for more information about scheduling house concerts or performances by Zade or the International Musicians Assembly in your home, school, concert hall or house of worship at k2amersi@aol.com or through www.roadstoyou.com.

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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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Here’s a strange coincidence: Both my doctor and my rabbi share the same leisure pursuit: They are passionate about attending rock concerts. U2, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen — If they perform, my good doctors of the body and the soul will attend. They both say it’s their way of relaxing from the stress of their respective jobs (and let’s face it, being in charge of my physical and spiritual well-being is some daunting task).

It’s not that I find this coincidence so strange … It’s just that doctors used to be into things like collecting kaleidoscopes, sailing, playing golf or squash and bad real estate investments and rabbis — well I’m not sure rabbis had hobbies other than the traditional staying up all night with the students, fleeing Cossacks or marching in civil rights rallies.

Although I associate the relentless pursuit of rock concerts as a student activity, it makes sense that this has become a leisure pursuit of the baby boomer professional class — a Four Seasons version of their student days — featuring the same bands as they saw (or wished they had seen) in their salad days, only now at exorbitant expense (i.e. ticket brokers, sky boxes, all to the tune of hundreds of dollars, and T-shirts that start at $40). Yes, everything old is new again, and like an iPod on shuffle, we are trapped in an endless looped cycle of our cultural references.

As I write this, I am listening to CD a friend gave me of a Grateful Dead concert we attended together in high school. I must confess that it sounds like I am hearing it for the first time — and God knows what it is I heard then.

And, coincidentally, by virtue of a new Web site, www.wolfgangsvault.com, I have been revisiting my wasted youth, much of which was spent at the Fillmore East in New York
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Wolfgang’s vault refers to the archives of Bill Graham, the concert promoter, born Wolfgang Grajonca, who ran the Fillmore West beginning in 1966 and the Fillmore East beginning in 1968 until it closed in 1971, and after that produced many, many concerts and tours until his untimely death in 1991 in a helicopter crash. Although musical omnivores Clear Channel purchased Graham’s business, they agreed several years ago to sell Graham’s archives to Bill Sagan, a Minneapolis businessman who has set up the Wolfgang’s vault Web site to stream performances, as well as sell rock memorabilia.

Graham, whom I interviewed in 1986 for Interview Magazine, was born in Berlin in 1931 to Russian Jewish parents. His father died two days after he was born. Graham was the youngest child and the only boy among five sisters. As the situation in Germany got worse for Jews, his mother sent him and the youngest sister, Tolla, on a kindertransport, which placed them in an orphanage in France.

His eldest sister, Rita, had gone to Shanghai; another sister, Evelyn, fled to Budapest, living on false papers. His mother remained in Berlin, only to be arrested by the SS; she died in a train car on the way to Auschwitz. His sister, Esther, was hidden in a convent in Vienna, but when it was no longer safe there she traveled to Budapest, only to be put on the first train to Auschwitz, from which she survived. Sonja, another sister, also escaped to Budapest, hid there, and ended up living in Vienna after the war.

As for Graham, when the orphanage was no longer safe, a Red Cross worker led him, his sister and the other Jewish children out of France on a journey that took them to Madrid. On the way, his sister fell sick, and Graham was persuaded to let her be taken to a hospital, where she died. He continued on to Lisbon and Casablanca before sailing to Dakar, Bermuda and Cuba, finally arriving in New York in late 1941. After being placed in a Jewish foster home in upstate New York and then settling with a family in the Bronx, Graham attended Dewitt Clinton High school. At 18, he formally changed his name to Bill Graham and attended City College before being drafted for service in the Korean War.

Graham liked to say he was reborn at 35. He had moved to San Francisco and was moonlighting as the business manager of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. When the troupe was busted for a performance that was deemed too “risqué,” Graham staged a benefit concert in a loft with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, the Jefferson Airplane and the Fugs. It was so successful and overcrowded that he staged two more, this time at the Fillmore Auditorium. Graham had found his calling. His first nonbenefit concerts were held at the Fillmore on Feb 4, 5, and 6, 1966, with Jefferson Airplane as the headliners.

Graham opened the Fillmore East on March 8, 1968, with Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin, in what had once been a movie palace called the Village Theatre, on Second Avenue and Sixth Street, a few doors down from Ratner’s dairy restaurant.

Graham was gruff and combative — he resented being labeled “the businessman.” As he told me, he saw himself as part of an alternative culture expressed by the performers he was closest to — Joplin, The Dead, Dylan and The Stones — who, voluntarily or involuntary, the public came to see as leaders. Graham gave birth to the modern rock concert phenomenon and saw himself as the enabler of the counterculture, creating communities through events that ranged from Woodstock to Live Aid.

As the promoter, Graham saw himself as having the last word in a democracy created in the service of the artists and the audience. As a member of that audience, I can honestly say, that I never felt Graham was taking advantage of me (as I do today at so many concerts). He gave good value at the Fillmore East.

Thanks to a wonderful book by Amalie Rothschild, “Live at the Fillmore East: A Photographic Memoir” (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, co-authored with Ruth Ellen Gruber), a chronicle more evocative than any dosed Madeleine, I was able to revisit the marquee, the ticket booth, the stage, the balcony, the view from the orchestra, the artists, the light show — all the details of a run-down wonderland locked faraway in the recesses of my mind, including the final image of the Fillmore East marquee with Graham’s parting words to his audience, “Thank you and farewell.”

Even more memory challenging, Rothschild included a list of every concert performed at the Fillmore East. Looking it over was pretty shocking. I remember sitting in the balcony the first time the Who performed “Tommy” in America — and the incredible light show the Fillmore had organized around it. I have an indelible memory of the Grateful Dead’s Pigpen playing stage right on the keyboards and sending flares up into the air as he was playing. Santana, Mountain — I know I saw them at the Fillmore — but others — such as Jeff Beck, Poco, Hot Tuna, Traffic, Johnny Winter — did I see them at the Fillmore or somewhere else? I’m no longer sure.

Here’s another thing I learned. As I looked at the dates of the shows that I know I attended — I realized that I went to several before I had turned 14. Talk about being in a den of iniquity. You might ask: what were my parents thinking?

But it now comes back to me. During the summer of my 13th year, my family went on a European vacation (our first). In Vienna, we visited with Sonja Szobel, who my father had helped escape from a prison in Budapest during the war. She told my father that her brother had just opened up a concert hall in New York, the Fillmore East. My father figured that if her brother was running it, I could go there on my own. It would be fine.

And it was.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

On April 7, 1944, Rudolf Vrba escaped from Auschwitz, one of very few to do so; he died recently at age 81, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Vancouver, British Columbia. Vrba once said that he spent 95 percent of his life on science and 5 percent on the Holocaust. It is worth considering the importance of that 5 percent and the controversy it engendered, which resonates to this day.

Vrba was born Walter Rosenberg in 1924 and grew up in Czechoslovakia. At 15, he was barred from attending school because he was Jewish. He became a laborer until he was arrested in 1942 and sent first to Majdanek and then to Auschwitz. He worked for many months in the arrivals area, watching the overfilled human cargo trains pull in and sorting the goods of the soon-to-be-dead. At a later date, he was transferred to Birkenau, where he worked in the quarantine area, registering those whose illnesses prevented them from immediately being murdered. There he could glimpse the gas chambers and came into contact with the sonderkommando, Jewish inmates whose job was to drag the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria.

In the quarantine section, Vrba met fellow inmate Alfred Wetzler (also spelled Weczler) who had worked in various areas of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and between them, they had a comprehensive understanding of the camps and their operation. They decided — against all reason, all information and even against the advice of some Jewish leaders in the camp — to escape. They were driven not only to save their own lives but to tell the world what they had seen. Vrba, in particular, was concerned because he had witnessed a new railroad spur being built and had overheard that this was meant for the Jews of Hungary who would soon be coming to Auschwitz to meet their fate.

Vrba and Wetzler escaped by hiding at the perimeter of the camp, where materials were kept for constructing an extension of the grounds. They hid for three days under planks in a woodpile and spread near them tobacco and some gasoline to hide their scent from the guard dogs. After three days, the Germans stopped searching for them. Only then did they emerge and actually make their escape.

Eventually, they crossed from Poland to Slovakia and made contact with leaders of the Jewish resistance, whom they told what they had witnessed. It was shocking — no one had escaped Auschwitz before — and no one had ever described the camp and its operation in such exacting detail.

The Jewish leaders knew that their friends and family members had been transported to the camps in the east — but even they could not grasp a systematic factory of death where plunder and murder were done in an assembly line process. They questioned Vrba and Wetzler each separately to make sure their stories matched and redacted their accounts in Hungarian and German into a 32 page account that became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report and as “The Auschwitz Protocols.”

Copies were prepared: One was given to Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel to send to Jewish representatives in Switzlerland, who in turn sent it the United States, where it was brought to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attention. Another was given to the representative of the pope in Slovakia, who forwarded it to the Vatican. Finally, Vrba insisted that a copy be sent to the Hungarian Jewish leadership to warn them of what the Nazis had planned for them.

The Nazis had invaded Hungary and occupied Budapest on March 19, 1944. Up until then, Budapest’s Jews lived in relative safety. However, with Adolf Eichmann now in command, the Nazis immediately began imposing restrictive laws and regulations.

The Hungarian Jewish Rescue and Relief Committee (also called the Waada) was headed by two men, Joel Brand and Rudolf (Rezo) Kastner. Kastner arrived in Bratislava on April 28, 1944, and was given a copy of the Wetzler-Vrba report. And herein the controversy begins.

Once the world knew of Auschwitz, what did it do? What did Roosevelt do? What actions did the pope take? And what of the Hungarian Jews themselves?

The gas chambers at Auschwitz continued to operate until late October 1944 — of 800,000 Hungarian Jews, only about 80,000 survived the war — Vrba felt that the world powers did not do enough, and that because the Hungarian Jewish leadership did not inform the entire Hungarian Jewish population of the Nazis’ plans, hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives were lost that might have been saved. Vrba titled his memoir, “I Cannot Forgive.”

Why didn’t Kastner distribute the Wetzler-Vrba report among the Jewish populace?

Many accounts suggest that the Waada didn’t want to “alarm” the population. But there is also another reason given: On April 25, 1944, Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, summoned Brand to his new offices in the Majestic Hotel in Budapest. After explaining that he was the one responsible for the “aktions” against Jews in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, Eichmann made a shocking declaration: “I am prepared to sell you 1 million Jews.”

Recently, I read Brand’s account of this meeting and what ensued in “Desperate Mission, Joel Brand’s Story,” by Alex Weissberg (Criterion, 1958). It is chilling and mind numbing to imagine being in the room with Eichmann and hearing such a proposal. It is even more heartbreaking to read what followed: Brand was dispatched to get the approval and funds from the Jewish Agency leadership in Constantinople (Istanbul). Although he was expected to return in two weeks, instead Brand was led on a wild goose chase that had him travel to Aleppo in Syria and to Cairo, where he was interrogated by British authorities. Along the way, he met with Jewish leaders Moshe Shertok, David Ben-Gurion and Teddy Kollek.

Months passed. No one helped. No one acted. Instead, the Jewish leaders parachuted “fighters” into Eastern Europe, who were immediately arrested, including Hannah Senesh who was put to death by the Nazis in a Budapest jail cell.

Back in Budapest, Kastner kept the negotiations alive with Eichmann and his surrogates, most notably an SS man named Kurt Becker. Eventually, they succeeded in having a train of some 1,600 Jews sent to Switzerland. Kastner believed, as Brand had, that the war was going to end imminently. They thought they just had to stall a little longer to save Jewish lives.

On July 19, 1944, Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Horthy stopped the deportations to the camps. However, the Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross Party, toppled Horthy and resumed a policy of murdering Jews, which continued unabated until the Russians liberated Budapest in January, 1945.

After the war, Kastner immigrated to Israel, where he worked in a government ministry. When a fellow Hungarian immigrant, Malchiel Greenwalt, attacked Kastner as a Nazi collaborator, Kastner sued for libel. The Kastner trial, as it came to be called, became a trial of Kastner’s behavior during the war — whether he deliberately did not inform Hungarian Jewry of the Nazis’ plan and let hundreds of thousands die in order to save the 1,600 members of the Kastner train, which included some of his friends and relatives.

He was faulted for having provided an affidavit for Becker at his war crimes trial, saying they had worked together to save Jews. The judge concluded that Kastner had “sold his soul to Satan” in dealing with Eichmann and Becker. Soon after, the Ben-Gurion government fell. American writer and Irgun supporter Ben Hecht wrote a play called “Perfidy,” critical of Kastner and those who would negotiate rather than resist.

However, on appeal, the Supreme Court of Israel reversed the verdict, saying Kastner had only done what any person in his situation would have done. But it was too late: Kastner had been assassinated on a Tel Aviv street a few months earlier. His murderer was never found.

Eichmann, for his part, fled to Argentina, where in 1961 he was apprehended by Israeli agents and brought to trial in Jerusalem. Brand and his wife, Hansi, testified against him. In his testimony, Eichmann implied that he used Kastner to keep order among the Jews during the deportations. Holocaust revisionists have used Eichmann’s comments and Vrba’s arguments as fodder for the contention that the Jews were complicit in their own murders.

So what are we to think? No one really knows what Eichmann intended. Were his negotiations with the Jewish community a way to distract the Jewish leaders and lull them into submission as he pursued his Final Solution? Would he really have saved 1 million lives if he had received the payment he demanded? Was all this a plan or a ploy by Eichmann — or even Himmler — to create an opening to the Allies after the U.S. invasion at Normandy and the approaching Soviet forces? Was this a way to say, as Becker did at his war crimes trial: “We wanted to save Jews”?

Did Brand and Kastner make tragic judgment calls? Or was Kastner guided purely by self-interest? How can we second guess him? If the Auschwitz protocols had been circulated among the Hungarian Jewish populace, would more have survived? Would people have even believed them as true?

Remember, that since 1939, more than 25,000 Jewish refugees had flooded Hungary, and many had reported on the fate of Polish Jewry, the ghettos and camps there and had established a resistance organization (which reported to Brand and Kastner). If Auschwitz’s purpose was not known, certainly the Nazi and Arrow Cross plans for Jewish annihilation were.

What we do know for sure is as follows: Vrba and Wetzler’s report did confirm the worst fears of the Jewish leadership. Roosevelt and the pope shortly thereafter did condemn the deportations and Horthy did act to halt the deportations. Kastner did save more than 1,600 Jewish lives. Some sources (and I’m not sure how they calculated this) estimate that as a result of the Vrba-Wetzler report, 100,000 lives were saved.

After the war, Vrba did doctoral and post-doctoral work in Prague. He became a medical researcher in Israel, Britain, the United States and Canada. Wetzler became a journalist and author, writing under the name Jozef Lanik. He died in 1988 in Slovakia.

The questions remain: How do we ponder the imponderable? How do we act? Given what we know of Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur (and these are just the places whose names have become totems to us), what can we do? What should we do?

Vrba knew he had to tell the world what he had witnessed. The world, for its part, found it hard to listen, but in the end, it could not ignore the facts. Vrba’s 5 percent still haunts us to this day.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

The recent publication of “A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army, 1941-1945” (Pantheon) brings attention to a writer who deserves to be better known and whose personal story illuminates the tragic dimension of Russian Jewry during the Communist era.

Grossman (1905-1964) was a journalist as well as the author of short stories and novels, most notably “Life and Fate,” which is to be reissued this spring by New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics. His reporting during World War II was the great crucible in which he forged himself as a person and as a writer, and it was what made him famous. What he witnessed during the war also fueled his great disappointment with Soviet society during the second half of his life.

Grossman was raised in Berdichev, once considered “the most Jewish city in Ukraine” — half its population of 60,000 were Jewish. Grossman, however, was fully assimilated and never practiced Judaism. He and his family embraced the Russian revolution enthusiastically, hoping that communism would mean an end to the pogroms and racial discrimination that had rained on Jews until then. And it did, at first.

Thanks to the Soviet regime, Grossman attended high school, was sent to Moscow University where he earned a degree in chemistry in 1929 and was able to find work as a scientist. For all this he was grateful, as it would have been almost impossible under the czarist regime. But more important to Grossman, he was able to become a writer — and he was appreciative of the opportunities the state provided.

His stories helped him gain admittance to the Soviet Writer’s Union. As a successful writer, the state treated him well: He was paid handsomely, had good housing (an apartment in the center of Moscow) and was invited (and allowed) to take his family on vacation to a dacha on the Black Sea.

When war broke out with Germany in 1941, Grossman, a patriot, volunteered for service. He was rejected as too old and not physically fit. Undeterred, Grossman went to the offices of Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), the official Red Army newspaper and asked to be sent to the front.

There is a long tradition of writers going to war. On the American side, certainly Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer come to mind. On the Soviet side, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” looms large (although Tolstoy himself did not experience the Napoleonic assault on Moscow); and before Grossman, there was Isaac Babel who rode with the Cossacks.

Grossman spent 1,000 days covering the war, more than any other Soviet reporter. He covered the original German advance though Ukraine, the battle in the South and he was there for the battle of Stalingrad.

He was respected by infantry and generals alike for his courage under fire. His accounts were read by the general public and the troops and were universally admired for delivering what Grossman called, “the ruthless truth of war.”

Through his reporting, one experiences how Russia, unprepared for war, endured enormous casualties to stop the German advance, in the process transforming itself into a victorious fighting machine that turned the tide of the combat against the Nazis on the Eastern Front.

“A Writer at War,” edited and translated by Antony Beevor (a historian of Stalingrad), and Luba Vinogradova is based on Grossman’s notebooks. However, while the authors do their best to give context to each comment integrated with excerpts from Grossman’s reportage — what is missing is more Grossman. Reading this book just made me want to read the actual accounts.

The battle of Stalingrad transformed Grossman. Just as it changed the course of the war, Grossman believed that moment would redefine the Soviet nation. The soldiers’ bravery and their unity were, for Grossman, the socialist dream realized. He believed that what he witnessed during the war, both the good and the bad, would help the Soviet nation become the just, egalitarian society he believed it could be. He was to be deeply disappointed.

Grossman followed the Soviet army as it reclaimed Ukraine, and he was there as it uncovered the crimes of the Nazi regime — the mass murders and the mass graves. He learned that in his hometown of Berdichev, over the course of two days after the Germans arrived, the entire Jewish population of 30,000 men, women and children were marched to a ditch outside town and shot.

“There are no Jews in Ukraine,” Grossman wrote. “All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered.”

In 1944, Grossman was among the first reporters at the Majdanek concentration camp, and then among the first to arrive at the great cemetery of Polish Jewry, Treblinka. Grossman’s reporting on the latter, “The Hell of Treblinka,” was read into evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Grossman was with the Soviet troops as they entered Berlin, and he visited Hitler’s compound in the Chancellery (and pocketed some stamps and souvenirs from the Fuhrer’s office that remained in his desk until the day he died).

The Soviet authorities encouraged Grossman to be part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an international organization founded by Albert Einstein, among others, to record the crimes and atrocities committed against Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators. Grossman and Ilya Ehrenberg collected accounts and reports of the murder of Soviet Jews. But once assembled, “The Black Book,” as it was called, was suppressed by the Soviet authorities, who now deemed singling out the death of the Jews as too “nationalistic” in accordance with Stalin’s decree: “Do not divide the dead” (which meant don’t mention that they are Jewish). “The Black Book” would not be published until 1968, after Grossman’s death; and only at first in the West, smuggled out of Russia, thanks to Andrei Sakharov and Vladimir Voinovich.

Grossman was bitterly disappointed by the Soviet turn against his account, but his novel of Stalingrad, “For a Just Cause,” nevertheless drew praise. He believed that the message of Stalingrad would help to create a more just society. But Grossman could not have been more wrong. This was the time when Stalin began his purges; his “doctors’ trial” signaled the return of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

Grossman found himself criticized in the pages of Pravda. Even after Stalin’s death, which Grossman hoped would signal a new openness, he suffered. The Soviet authorities refused to publish Grossman’s epic novel “Life and Fate” which he submitted for review in 1960. He appealed directly to Kruschev, but the authorities told him his novel would only give ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet Union. “Life and Fate” was not published in Grossman’s lifetime, either.

Here is the irony of the lives of Soviet Jews: Although many were accomplished and assimilated, nonpracticing and nonobservant with little knowledge or experience of things Jewish, their lives were nonetheless defined by being Jewish.

This was painfully true for members of my own family as well. When World War II broke out in 1939, Tarnopol came under Soviet control. My father’s cousin, Meyer Teichholz, lived there (today his name is Mike Sherwood). A teenager at the time, he joined the Komsomol (the youth wing of the Communist Party). When the Germans invaded in 1941 he went into hiding. Liberated by the Russians in 1944, he was sent to work in the Urals. There he was arrested on trumped-up political charges and sent to a gulag. Exonerated in 1947, he was repatriated to Poland and from there was able eventually to travel to Israel and then the United States. His older brother, Fedor, remained trapped in the Soviet Union. Although Fedor was a decorated Soviet War hero and a doctor — people in his town in the Urals, referred to him as “the Jew.” When it came time to say Kaddish for his parents, he would lock himself in the hall closet for fear the neighbors would hear him speaking Hebrew and denounce him to the authorities.

Grossman had a secret, too. He always regretted that when war broke out with Germany, he had not traveled back to Berdichev to rescue his mother. By the time, Grossman realized the speed of the German advance, it was too late.

That Grossman could not save his mother who was murdered for being a Jew; that the Soviet state he believed in, and had witnessed in all its glory in Stalingrad, would not let him speak out about the murder of the Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators; that Stalin would promote state-sponsored anti-Semitism; and that Kruschev who served at Stalingrad would not publish his novel “Life and Fate,” all this left Grossman feeling deeply betrayed. In the end, he realized whom he was and what he had to do.

Just before Vasily Grossman died of stomach cancer in 1964, he made a last request: that his coffin not be put on display in the Writer’s Union building. He also didn’t want to be buried in a Writer’s Union plot. Instead, Vasily Grossman asked to be buried in Moscow’s Jewish cemetery.
Today, he lies buried in a neglected Moscow cemetery next to his wife (because she wasn’t Jewish, they are not buried in a Jewish Cemetery). He lies there, waiting, like his great works, to be rediscovered.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

A few weeks ago, the Paris-based world music ensemble Les Yeux Noirs performed at Royce Hall as part of UCLA Live. Led by brothers Olivier and Eric Slabiak, violin virtuosos who are the Paris-born grandchildren of Polish Jewish immigrants, Les Yeux Noirs played improvisations on Russian, Yiddish, Romanian and Roma songs, as well as their own eclectic compositions (including one that puts Baudelaire’s poem “Invitation au Voyage” to music.). What a trip it was!

This concert just confirmed a feeling I’ve had for some time: Even if Los Angeles is not the center of the world — as I sometimes believe it is — the city has increasingly become a center for world music.

This spring you can attend amazing performances all over L.A.: Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares are performing at Disney Hall on March 8; Césaria Évora, the nightingale of Cape Verde, plays at Royce Hall on March 17; Pierre Bensusan, the French Algerian guitar maestro of Sephardic heritage plays at the Skirball on March 30. And that’s before summer programs kick in at the Hollywood Bowl’s world music series, as well as the sunset concerts on the Santa Monica Pier and Grand Performances, the series of free world music concerts held downtown.

There is no easy definition for what constitutes world music. Generally speaking, we are referring to music made in second- or third-world countries. Often we are talking about music made by non-Europeans in languages other than English — but even that is not always the case. Nor is world music a code word for the primitive rhythms of indigenous people — it can as easily refer to complex modulations of Latin or East Asian music. World music can be the music of longing, of exile, or the expression of joy, or the joyous expression of a spiritual rapture.

There are many portals to world music. Many listeners I know first encountered it through the reggae of Bob Marley, or the African beats of King Sunny Ade or Fela Kuti; others began their journey in Brazil with a girl from Ipanema, a samba or some smooth bossa nova. In Los Angeles, one can travel via radio to Tom Schnabel’s “Cafe LA” (www.kcrw.org) or to Yatrika Shah-Rais’ “Global Village” on KPFK Pacifica radio (www.kpfk.org). And for those still buying CDs, now that Rhino Westwood and Hatikvah Records have passed from the scene, all roads lead to the world music section of Amoeba Music in Hollywood, which has one of the most extensive offerings.

For myself, I can trace no specific moment of initiation; no Ur moment. Was it the Csardas or some Roma music that I heard in some Hungarian restaurant as a child? Or perhaps the cymbalom-driven theme to “The Third Man”? Was I made a devotee after Ravi Shankar’s appearance at the “Concert for Bangladesh”? Or was I entranced by a late-night show of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come”? Was it the summer I spent in Brazil after my high school graduation? Or maybe it was afternoons at my uncle Emil’s, when he would excitedly play a cassette of some obscure Eastern European cantor so I could hear some long-lost niggun (wordless melody) he’d uncovered.

My best guess is “Answer D: All of the above.”

For whatever the reason, all I know is that world music has a strange power over me — it takes me out of myself to places I want to go, while at the same time making me feel at home.

World music, as its name indicates, belongs to all people of the world. But it seems to attract people who can hear the universal in the particular.

So if the question is “Who is responsible for the explosion of world music in L.A.?” The answer is more people than you can imagine. David Sefton does a great job at UCLA Live, and Michael Alexander is to be commended for the Grand Performances at California Plaza. But for this article, I would like to highlight two people who deserve special mention: The aforementioned Tom Schnabel and Yatrika Shah-Rais. Schnabel has probably introduced more people in L.A. to world music over the years than anyone else; and then there’s Shah-Rais, who made the Skirball Cultural Center into a world music destination.

Schnabel seems, at first meeting, an unlikely avatar of world music. As he recounted recently over lunch, he is California born and bred; he grew up in Santa Monica Canyon, attended Pali High, was a surfer and worked summers as a lifeguard at Dockweiler Beach. You’d imagine his passion would be for Jan and Dean or Dick Dale. However, at 16 he heard John Coltrane’s “Impressions,” and it was, in his words, “a mystical experience.” He became a jazz aficionado, listening to 105.1 KBCA. Schnabel attended USC, where his passion for jazz led to an interest in classical music, Debussy in particular.

He then went to France, where he taught English. It was there that he first heard African and Arab music and began his lifelong passion for world music. However, after breaking up with his French girlfriend, he returned to Los Angeles. He tried to get a teaching job here, but couldn’t find any. In an attempt to create a new life, one more involved with music, he started to write liner notes and for Downbeat magazine, and he started doing a radio show on KCRW.

“Everything just coalesced,” he says.

On July 19, 1979, Schnabel became musical director of KCRW (a position he held until 1990): “I was in the right place at the right time.”

Reggae and African music were becoming popular. In the 1980s, Los Angeles was home to several clubs that supported African music.

‘It was fun,” he recalls.

I remember visiting Los Angeles during that period and being taken to a club that stood somewhere in the shadow of the 10 and 405 freeways, where a sweating King Sunny Ade invited the frenzied crowd to leap on stage, dance with him and stick dollar bills to his forehead.

Schnabel also hosted “Morning Becomes Eclectic” throughout the 1980s, until he ceded the show to Chris Douridas (the program is now hosted by Nic Harcourt). During Schnabel’s tenure, the list of world music artists he was the first to play would be too long to cite.

Says Schnabel: “World music is honest music. The lyrics mean something. There’s a lot of virtuosity.”

At one point, Schnabel became a “suit,” working for A&M, where he had his own label. Schnabel is responsible for one of my favorite albums “A Meeting by the River,” the collaboration between Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.

At this point in his illustrious career, Schnabel is a man of many business cards. He hosts “Cafe LA” on KCRW (Sundays noon-2 p.m.); he is program director of world music for the L.A. Phil, programming shows at Disney Hall, as well as the Hollywood Bowl; and he continues to do music consulting and supervision.

In the coming months he is hosting programs at the Disney Hall, such as Mônica Salmaso, Les Ballets Africans and Ravi Shankar. This summer, the Hollywood Bowl World Music series will feature a Sergio Mendes evening, a Bollywood evening and a reggae night, as well as other acts still to be announced.

Schnabel has great respect for his colleagues programming world music in L.A. He feels they are people who have great heart, citing the wonderful shows Grand Performances puts on for free and describing Shah-Rais, at the Skirball Center as “a beautiful person inside and out.”

Katrika Shah-Rais was born in Iran and educated in France. She has degrees in international relations and has worked for environmental and human rights organizations. Before coming to the Skirball, she worked at a management and booking agency and at the World Music Institute in New York.

Although she grew up a Beatles and rock music fan, in many ways it is her background in international relations that draws her to world music. Music, she told me recently, “is the best tool to bring people together.”

Shah-Rais came to the Skirball in 1998. With the Skirball’s support, she has made the center, whose nominal mission was to explore the connections between Jewish heritage and America into, in her words, “a gathering place where an exchange of ideas and culture takes place.”

By using its three venues (an auditorium, an outside plaza and the Ahmanson Hall) the Skirball can cater to audiences as small as a few hundred or as large as 800 (which is still small by concert standards). However, having this flexibility has allowed Shah-Rais and the Skirball to feature lesser-known artists and build an audience for them and their counterparts.

In recent months, the Skirball has featured jazz musician Ben Sidran and Czech Songwriter Maria Topferova. Coming up are guitarist Pierre Bensusan on March 30 and singer songwriter Keren Ann on May 11.

What struck me about my conversations with both Schnabel and Shah-Rais was that they both see music in general, and world music in particular, as a way to educate and bring people together.

“World music is a gateway,” Schnabel told me, “it expands you.”

Or, as Shah-Rais told me, “The common language is music.”

World music faces many challenges. Given the current geo-political situation, getting visas for foreign artists can be time consuming and difficult — for example, very few Cuban artists currently are being allowed to perform in the United States. At the same time, some foreign artists, resentful of the U.S. procedures are themselves less interested in performing here than in, say, Europe or Latin America.

Also the marketing of world music remains a challenge. Few of these acts appear on Jay Leno. To even come close to filling the Hollywood Bowl, which has a capacity of 18,000, is no easy feat. This requires a delicate balancing act between a known headliner — Sergio Mendes, for example — and a lesser-known opening act. This is the art Schnabel practices each summer for his series.

Sometimes I think about all the people who have immigrataed to the United States over the years, and about all their children who traveled to California to make their homes here. I think of Los Angeles, where we travel on the freeways and drive around in a constant stream of traffic — and the varieties of music that are the soundtrack to our lives.

In Hollywood, one of the memorable landmarks is The Crossroads of the World, on Sunset Boulevard. Thanks to Schnabel and Shah-Rais among others, Los Angeles is becoming the crossroads of world music.

* * *

Some World Music Artists With Jewish Flava:

Les Yeux Noirs (www.lesyeuxnoirs.net). French virtuoso violinists lead a band exploring klezmer, Roma, Russian, Yiddish, Romanian songs.

Yasmin Levy (www.yasminlevy.net). Jerusalem-born Ladino and flamenco singer.

Sophie Solomon (www.sophiesolomon.com). Classically trained British violinist, former member of “oi vai voi,” now recording to the beat of her inner fiddler on the roof.

Pierre Bensusan, (www.pierrebensusan.com) French-Algerian guitarist’s guitarist.

Eyal Sela, who has performed with the Darma ensemble, is an Israeli wind instrument performer, exploring a variety of traditional ethnic music.

Upcoming World Music Concerts

Walt Disney Concert Hall (www.laphil.com)
March 8: Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares and Mônica Salmaso
April 26: Sitar master Ravi Shankar’s “Festival of India II”

At UCLA Live (www.uclalive.org)
March 16: “Masters of Persian Music” featuring Mohammad Reza Shajarian, “the Pavarotti of Persian Music”
March 17: Césaria Évora, Cape Verde’s “barefoot diva”
May 4: Zakir Hussain, the tabla maestro with Ustad Sultan Khan and the dancing drummers of Manipur Jagoi Marup
June 22-23: Pink Martini, the 12-piece mini-orchestra that plays Latin jazz, pop and classical-inspired lounge music

At the Hollywood Bowl (www.hollywoodbowl.com)
June 25: “KCRW World Festival” features Sergio Mendes
July 12: “Latin Jazz Night”
July 16: A Bollywood night
Aug 13: Reggae night with Ziggy Marley

At the skirball (www.skirball.org) :
March 30: Jazz Guitar virtuoso, Pierre Benusan
April 21: Angolan icon Bonga Angolan
May 11: Singer songwriter Keren Ann
June 15: Rhiannon

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

“When is a dirty bathroom a broken window?”

This is the question that opens Michael Levine’s recently published business tome, “Broken Windows, Broken Business” (Warner Business Books).

Levine is a successful Hollywood publicist. I am indebted to him forever for one of my most memorable Tommywood moments — a séance with Hollywood’s evergreen legend, Robert Evans, at his home, and on his bed (see “The Kid Still Stays in the Picture,” March 2004).

Levine, like many a Hollywood success story, is self-made.

Born in New York City, Levine graduated from Fort Lee High in 1972, and attended Rutgers College for six months. At 18, with no job and, in his words, “a home life under an alcoholic mother,” he was determined to forge a life of his own invention.

Levine had a passion for the entertainment industry and began his show business career as an impresario, renting out the local movie theater in New Jersey on weekends after the last show and putting on midnight screenings of “Reefer Madness” and other cult movies
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In 1977, Levine arrived in Los Angeles looking for work in movie promotion. By 1983 he had opened his own firm.

“The most difficult thing is to get your first client,” Levine told me over tea at the Beverly Wilshire. He said it was “like trying to staple jelly to the ceiling.”

His first clients were Joan Rivers and David Brenner. Steve Reidman, Brenner’s then manager (now a beloved fourth-grade public school teacher in Toluca Lake) recalls that Levine’s devotion to his clients was 24/7
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“One advantage I had,” Levine recalled recently, “was that I was entering the business at a time of change… [the business then] was mostly old white guys. I was more intense.”

He still is.

Over the years he has represented a smorgasbord of talent, everyone from Demi Moore to David Bowie, as well as Prince, Kareem, Jon Voigt, Cameron Diaz, Jon Stewart, Dave Chappell, Ozzy Osbourne, Suzanne Somers and even the gloved one, Michael Jackson. He repped Barbra Streisand when she returned to Las Vegas and Nancy Kerrigan when she was attacked by Tonya Harding.

Recently, Levine relinquished the title of president to long-time associate Dawn Miller. He retains the title of chairman. However, giving up some day-to-day management affords Levine the opportunity to pursue other interests — and to express his theories.

“Broken Windows” applies to business the theories on controlling crime that were put forth by professors James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling and applied, most notably, in New York by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton, who is now L.A.’s police chief. Levine paints a convincing picture that businesses need to pay attention to those areas where they intersect with their consumers — first impressions matter, as do all the details that make up that first impression: the business representatives the consumer interfaces with, their attitude, the environment where that intersection takes place (store, Web site, phone conversation). All the small details contribute to whether the consumer will conclude a sale and continue to do business with one vendor over another. The book is about “how the smallest remedies reap the biggest rewards.”

Levine decries a business culture where the incompetent get reassigned rather than fired. “Businesses don’t understand that little things matter a lot,” he says.

Which brings us back to those broken windows. Repairing them makes a difference.
All very sensible and practical.

As for our conversation…. My mother had a saying: “Everyone in the world is crazy, except you and me. And sometimes I wonder about you.”

Clearly, Levine is successful; he is charming and he is wily. “Broken Windows” is his 17th book.

I wondered if Levine is, as Oudom, my Cambodian-born nephew might say, “a bissele meshugah.” (I taught him that!)

You decide. Here are some of the sayings of Chairman Levine:

1. “Most people are motivated by three things: 1) Cash; 2) Love and Sex; 3) Fame and Power — if you can deliver one, you’re doing OK, but if you can deliver more than one, you are going to get their attention.”

2. How do you get your first client? “Somehow.”

3. On motivation: “If you’ve got a gun in your mouth, you’ll do anything.”

4. “[There are] two pieces to our brain: the logical and the emotional. Eighty percent of the time, emotion wins out. [However] when the human is hungry, angry, lonely or tired — then emotion wins 100 percent of the time”

5. “The central question of life is: What do you most want, and what are you willing to give up to get it?”

Levine dismisses the notion of “balance.”

“No one achieves supersuccess in life,” he says, “without some part of their life suffering…. Something’s got to give.”

As for the culture of celebrity and the publicity-mad world Levine has toiled in, he remarks that in America we have a “more and more sophisticated culture, but a less reverent society.”

“Once upon a time, achievement preceded fame. Think of Jonas Salk,” Levine says.
But today fame precedes achievement Think Paris Hilton.

The reason: “Technology is the principal difference,” Levine says. “Technology is the enemy of reverence.”

Again I ask: who thinks like this? Michael Levine does.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: Some men (like me) see a broken window, and it is just a broken window, and others (like Levine) see a broken window and see a way to fix a business — and write a book.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

Before me sat a poet, flanked on each side by his muses. Was this Orpheus himself? His lyre was missing, and he looked off in the distance. Were the muses there to inspire him, or perhaps, to inspire me?

No, this was not just another late night of hanging out with Mary Kate and Ashley and one of their glazed-eyed rocker beaus — on this mid-morning my tastes were more classical: I was touring the newly restored Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, which opened to the public on Jan. 28.

To cut to the chase: The Getty Villa is magnificent, wonderful, in short, as my daughter said after jet skiing for the first time: “It was totally awesome.” First, a bit of history. J. Paul Getty was an oil scion, born in Minneapolis in 1892, who attended USC and Berkeley and graduated Oxford in 1914. He made his first million by 1916 and retired in 1917 to become a Hollywood playboy — but like so many careers in Hollywood, it was no way to live, so he returned to business. As founder of Getty Oil, he became one the world’s first billionaires. He wrote a book called, “How to Be Rich,” which, as the title indicates, is different from how to become rich.

In 1945, Getty purchased a 64-acre site in Pacific Palisades, and less than a decade later built the J. Paul Getty Museum to exhibit his expanding collection of Old Master paintings and sculptures, many of which were antiquities. In 1968, Getty got the idea of recreating a Roman country house as home for his collections, choosing as his inspiration the Villa dei Papiri, a first century Roman country house in Herculaneum that was buried, along with Pompeii, by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
Although the Roman villa was only ever partially excavated, and remains buried to this day, engineers had drawn a putative map of the property, and these became the basis for Getty’s villa.

The Getty museum opened in 1974. There was some controversy at the time over the whole notion of “recreating” a villa — an act of appropriation replete with a lack of authenticity one might deride as a rich man’s whim. Over time, the objections became more muted. Getty died in 1976, and the museum continued to be an important Southern California art destination until 1997, when it was closed for renovation — six months before the opening of the new Getty on the hills above Brentwood and the 405 Freeway.

In case you never visited the Palisades Getty in its prior incarnation, you used to enter via elevator right into the building. The rooms were dark and stuffy. There was no good way to get from the first to second floor, except by a narrow staircase. In order to protect some of the artworks from the light, there were few windows if any. What people remembered most about the Getty Center were its gardens, a peristyle around a pool, as well as the little cafe in the back where one could have tea. That, and the complicated reservation and parking arrangement.

What a difference a $275 million renovation makes.

One now arrives to a cobblestone street and an imposing portico. This allows you to look down the canyon and out to the sea. You also get a good view of the mansion below it, the Villa Leon, which is the classical building one sees from the Pacific Coast Highway that many mistake for the Getty but which is a private home that has been on the market for many years. From the portico or from the parking garage of the villa, you take a path along a walkway carved into the side of the canyon, leading to “the arrival balcony,” part of a calculated strategy by Boston-based architects Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti to deliver a “Wow!” moment.

Wow! Indeed. As you turn the corner, you are dazzled by a 180-degree panorama that looks over the roof of the villa itself, down the canyon and out to the sea. You can take in the breadth of the outdoor peristyle gardens, the new entrance of the Getty Villa in all its classical splendor, and then look up the hill to the new structures, the cafe (you order the food and they bring it out to you) with indoor and outdoor seating and a snack cart, as well as a new museum gift shop, the Getty ranch house and the new buildings devoted to staff, conferences, conservation and education.

In this way the architects have surrounded the restored Getty Villa with new buildings engaging in a dialogue between new and old, just as the villa itself engages in a dialogue between interior and exterior and a conversation between the classical form of a Roman home and the high-tech state-of-the-art installation of the holdings inside.

What Machado and Silvetti have done is to make of the villa itself an object of art to be contemplated and appreciated — something that never happened in the prior incarnation. This is also a nod to the Getty Center whose building and gardens have become the stars as much, if not more, than the collections inside. Also attached to the new Getty Villa is a 250-seat indoor theater, as well as several classrooms. All this and we haven’t even entered the villa yet.

Get ready for another “Wow” moment: You enter into an atrium which leads into the inner peristyle, and flows to a new grand staircase, framing a view of the colorful mosaic fountain in the east garden.

Now for the art: The Getty will feature some 1,200 items from its collection of approximately 44,000 objects spanning 6,500 B.C.E. to the 10th century C.E. I can’t tell you whether what remains in storage outshines what is presented; or if only exhibiting a small fraction of them is a disappointment. But I can say that what is showcased is done in a very aesthetically pleasing manner.

The 23 galleries, once organized chronologically, are now grouped by themes. The ground floor features rooms devoted to gods and goddesses, mythological monsters and heroes (including art devoted to stories from the Trojan War), a basilica and a room devoted to the Temple of Herakles, which features a gorgeous and intricately patterned mosaic floor. It is here you will find Orpheus, along with Zeus, Hera and Apollo, all looking better than ever (this is Los Angeles; assume they’ve had work done).

I regret to report that you will not be attending weddings in the basilica, or dancing the hora in the amphitheater. Due to the restrictive covenants under which the Getty operates, as well agreements made with the neighbors, the Getty Villa will not be available for private family and social functions.

However, families and children of all ages will certainly enjoy two rooms on the ground floor: “the family forum,” a kid-friendly art room, where children can shadow-play and decorate vases, thereby learning about the forms and variety of Greek vases, as well as “the Timescape room,” a clever interactive exhibit that places the Getty Villa and its holdings of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art in historical context.

One of the architectural challenges facing Machado and Silvetti was the flow from ground floor to the second level. To this end they designed a grand staircase — it is their artistic flourish, their own signature piece in the Getty Villa.

The first thing one appreciates on the second floor is the light. The upstairs now has 58 more windows and three new skylights (one of which, above the atrium, can be opened), as well as several accessible terraces.

The galleries focus on life in the ancient world, men, women, sports, coins and jewelry. My favorite was the amphora given to winners of athletic competitions, as well as the ceramics depicting the competitions themselves.

There are also five galleries for changing exhibitions. The first three exhibitions to be shown at the Getty are: “Antiquity and Photography,” featuring early photos of the Parthenon and the Sphinx, as well as some of the earliest Daguerrotypes; “The Getty Villa Reimagined,” which looks at the models and designs which led to the current renovation, and “Glassmaking in Antiquity,” which features highlights from the recently acquired Oppenlander glass collection which features beautiful exemplars of Jerusalem glass.

One of the most impressive aspects of the Getty Villa is the display. The rooms are painted in colors that suggest the classical world yet complement the holdings presented. No room feels overcrowded. The cases, many of which have built-in stabilizers for earthquake protection, are placed at a comfortable eye level.
Machado and Silvetti also designed the mosaic floors in the galleries and which are graceful and at the same time whimsical.

Even as I give credit where credit is due both to architects and to acting curator Carole Wright, I wonder: What is it about Greco-Roman and Etruscan antiquities that compels our attention?

Part of it is a worship of and curiosity about the great cultures that came before us. Part of it is a fascination with objects that carried great import to past societies. Or that reveal life in ancient times. The reach of the Greek and Roman empires extended throughout Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia, and as such can be seen as the cradle from which much of Western culture sprung.

But more than any of the above, there is a beauty we recognize in Greco-Roman antiquities that touches us even today. Much of modern art has been about, as Robert Hughes dubbed it, “the shock of new.”

And while much of modern art has focused on dissonance and cutting through the clutter, ancient art speaks of harmony.

Part of what is so pleasing about the Getty Villa is that the building itself and the gardens are, like the Greco-Roman art it displays, all about proportion. The interplay of interior and exterior, the sight lines and the vistas, the columns and the height of the rooms, even the space afforded in most galleries relative to the number of items exhibited, all contrive to give pleasure from harmonious proportions.

As I toured the Getty Villa, I also pondered the intersection of Hellenism and Judaism. As you are probably aware, when Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East, in the fourth century B.C.E., he allowed the Jewish people great freedoms and the right to practice their religion. As a result, many Jewish parents began naming their children Alexander, a tradition that continues today in all its international variants such as Xander, Sandor and Sasha.

For several centuries, Jews continued to thrive under Greek leaders. The Torah was translated into Greek (some claim the translation was for the Great Library in Alexandria and was from the Aramaic before there was even a Hebrew version). Some claim that 72 scholars were assembled to compile it. In any event, there is lore to the effect that Greek is a language especially pleasing to the Hebrew deity.

Although Babylonia may have been the first Jewish exile community, it was among the Greeks that assimilation first became an issue (so much so that in those days Jews called assimilation “Hellenism”).

The complaints may sound familiar: Jews were forgetting the ways of their forefathers. They could no longer read, write or speak Hebrew — having turned to Greek instead. They were not observing the commandments, and could no longer say the prayers. The Sabbath was not being observed: Worse yet, young men were engaging in athletics on the Sabbath, throwing the discus or participating in wrestling competitions (the rabbis were particularly offended that wrestling was in the nude; but my guess is that the Jewish mothers weren’t so crazy about all that fighting). There was even a reform movement led by rabbis, Jewish philosophers and Jews practicing new forms of Greek-leavened Judaism.

To many, it was a golden age. The Greeks were an intellectual society who venerated the old but appreciated youth; they were intellectual yet hedonistic. Jews began to flourish in society. But alas, assimilation, as manifested through its expression in a succession of societies to present time, has often charted a historical trajectory, much like that of Icarus, of exaltation and exhilaration followed by bad news and worse news.

As our young Chanukah scholars will tell you — Hellenism reached its nadir for Jews when Antiochus IV banned Judaism in the second century B.C.E., and insisted Jews worship the Greek Gods. A further blow followed when the Maccabees, Jewish zealots, successful in their revolt against the Greeks and Syrians, put to death those fellow Jews whom they found not sufficiently observant.

Which brings me back to the Getty Villa. Part of the terrible beauty we see in antiquities is the knowledge that the societies that created them are no more. Their gods and their beauty could not protect them from the inexorable march of fate.

Whether as per Robert Frost’s formulation, you side with ice or fire, or per the Greeks with the Hedonists or the Stoics, or in our times with the observant or the assimilated of all faiths, the Getty Villa has reopened in the Palisades to allow us to appreciate the beauty that Greco-Roman culture gave us, both fleeting and lasting. Not only that, now you can also grab a bite at the cafe, and buy a memento mori at the museum store.

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

“After 9/11, all I did was sit around and be scared,” Albert Brooks told me recently. “After a year and a half,” Brooks now says, “I just got tired of it.”

He wondered, “Why isn’t this being processed? Do we never mention it?” Looking at what Hollywood was releasing to the public, he concluded that “most of the [current] movies take place in the past — or are teenage sex comedies.”

Brooks decided to do something about it. His response, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” which opened in Los Angeles on Jan. 20, imagines that a U.S. government commission contacts Albert Brooks (not their first choice, but he’s available) to travel to India and Pakistan to better understand the Muslim mind.

They’ve tried bombing and spying, argues lawyer-actor, senator-actor Fred Dalton Thompson who’s leading the commission, why not explore comedy?

The movie opens with Brooks auditioning for Penny Marshall for the lead role in a remake of “Harvey.” The scene is played perfectly and succinctly illustrates the humiliation that attends working in Hollywood.

So when offered the chance to do “important” work — and possibly earn the Medal of Freedom — he signs on.

When Brooks goes to India, he is at first flummoxed by the challenge of how to find out what people think is funny there. Apparently, there are no comedy clubs in New Delhi, so he decides to stage a comedy concert.

Of course, as Brooks pointed out in our conversation, if the U.S. government actually wanted to find out about humor on the Indian subcontinent, it would never send a comic. And as I pointed out to Brooks, if a comic wanted to find out what Indians thought was funny, he might show them a whole range of classic comedy, say a smidgen of Chaplin, some Keaton, maybe a soupcon of Lucy and a smattering of the Three Stooges, some Richard Pryor, some Seinfeld, some Chris Rock — rather than performing a revue of some of his own greatest hits — which is exactly what Brooks does.

And that, folks, is part of the joke. Brooks has always mined comedy that operates at several levels, including deconstructing comedy itself.

Brooks, nee Einstein (yes, that’s a fact) is the son of actress-singer Thelma Leeds and Harry Einstein. Einstein was a comedian who performed as Parkyakarkus on the Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor radio shows. He died on stage, literally, after completing a performance at the Friar’s Club when Albert was 11 — an event that shaped Brooks’ worrying persona, and his comic one as well.

Brooks was famously funny even at Beverly Hills High. After graduating, he pursued acting but found success performing comedy.

Brooks appeared on the “Ed Sullivan Show” and the “Tonight Show” doing wild cerebral bits, ventriloquists who spoke more than their dummies, mimes who described their every gesture, animal tricks lacking the right animal. Brooks never tried out these bits — as legend has it and as he confirmed in our conversation — he just went on stage and performed them.

During the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” he made several short films that became comedy classics. A few years later, he began making his own feature films.
In the 1979 “Real Life,” he played “Albert Brooks,” who decides to make a documentary about an American family (like the Louds on PBS) and who is so bored by them he interferes to create a “better” show — presaging all that has followed in so-called reality TV.

In “Modern Romance” (1981), Brooks dissected a breakup; in “Lost in America” (1985), he took apart a couple who decide to ditch life in Los Angeles to discover America and themselves; in “Defending Your Life” (1991), he tackled the afterlife; in “Mother” (1996), his character decides that he can’t have a successful relationship until he resolves his relationship with his mother (played by Debbie Reynolds), and in “The Muse” (1999), he explored creativity and the writer’s life.

Now, with his latest film, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” Brooks has decided to deconstruct Albert Brooks himself. The conceit of the film is that Brooks’ ego as a comedian is such that he is seduced by the thought he might contribute to world peace; that even though he is most well known as someone who voiced a fish in an animated movie, when he puts on a show, it is of all his own material.

And when he bombs, he doesn’t accept it as a failure — just a matter of the show having been scheduled for too early a crowd. His vindication comes when he crosses into Pakistan and performs for a group of would-be stand-up comics who find his work hilarious, perhaps because it’s funny, perhaps because they’ve all been smoking hashish. In the end, there is no medal, and he has nearly caused an international incident, but he is hailed by his friends and family as “our hero.”

At the same time, we, as an audience, get to see Brooks do his ventriloquist routine and his improv routine — bits he has not performed in decades.

It is as if Brooks is saying: “This is who I am; this is what I do,” and that, despite the ways in which the world, and Hollywood in particular, belittles the sort of comedy Brooks is interested in, he has to go on doing it. It’s important.

It is also about Brook’s own existential search for meaning — to prove that after Sept. 11, what he does matters.

When I told Brooks this, he said: “Yes.”

I prodded him to elaborate.

“There’s no movie that’s going to change the world,” Brooks acknowledged.
However, Brooks maintains that “laughter is one of the best lubricants.” To Brooks, laughter is healing; laughter is survival.

“It’s not just car exhaust,” Brooks told me. “You’re adding things to the atmosphere. It goes somewhere.”

I told him that I thought “Looking for Comedy” was his personal “Sullivan’s Travels,” a classic Preston Sturges film about a director who discovers the value of comedy films.

“OK,” Brooks responded.

Frankly, I was hoping for a more expansive answer — something about the existential dilemma we all face that can be all the more acute when confronting life in Hollywood — and the importance of finding satisfaction in what we do. But, “OK” will do.

Or as Brooks put it more simply: “Comedy matters.”

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 Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward.