The following is excerpted from the introduction to “Being There:Journalism 1978–2000” By Tom Teicholz (Rare Bird Books, a Vireo Book).

Here’s how my journalism career began: I was in my first year at Columbia Law School and was working as a Democratic Party volunteer, election night November 1977. There was a special election and, for some reason that I can no longer remember, the final votes were being tabulated in a building on 15th Street off Union Square that was the infamous Tammany Hall of the Teapot Dome scandal. TO READ MORE CLICK HERE

“Hineni, hineni

I’m ready, my Lord”

With these words that Abraham, the biblical patriarch spoke when God called upon him, Cohen begins, “You want it darker,” the title tune of his final album, Released a few weeks before Cohen’s untimely death in Los Angeles on November 7, 2016 at age 82, Cohen’s nine new songs recorded in his home over the last year are a powerful farewell, elegant and poetic yet cleared-eyed in the face of imminent death. Very much like Cohen himself. TO READ MORE CLICK HERE

A casual visitor to TechStyle’s sleek modern offices, located in El Segundo right off Rosecrans Avenue on a block of gleaming commercial buildings, might think he’d arrived at a digital fashion media powerhouse or a tech start up rather than a successful apparel retailer. TO READ MORE CLICK HERE.

In my office, I have a Time magazine cover from 1968, that I framed for myself as a child (the marks where I pulled off my parents’ subscription info are still there). It’s a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy giving a speech, drawn as a comic book hero and secular saint in Pop Art style by Roy Lichtenstein. The cover appeared on May 24, 1968, during the Presidential primary season as Kennedy’s popularity was surging. A few weeks later, Kennedy was dead, murdered after his acceptance speech at The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California primary. I have kept that framed cover on my wall ever since, in my childhood room, dorm rooms, and in my offices, faded as it had become, to remind me of the promise of Bobby Kennedy and the dreams for America that his campaign ignited.
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Today, reality TV is a genre for which they award Emmys, from which careers are born, love is found, and fortunes are made. Reality TV represents a huge share of the television industry, and we accept that these shows are cast, produced, and edited to enhance their drama. Yet if we see humor in the self-seriousness of the participants and delight in the outrageousness of their antics, if we see the irony in the genre’s ability to produce stars (and even presidential candidates!) and acknowledge it as part of “show business” — then we’d do well to recall that these insights have already been abundantly elucidated in Albert Brooks’ prescient 1979 debut feature film, Real Life.
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Hauser Wirth & Schimmel (HW&S) an international gallery (locations in Zurich, London, Somerset, and New York) has landed in LA with a splash, in a new art space located at 901 East 3rd Street in Los Angeles’ downtown Arts district. HW&S have refurbished a large set of 19th and early 20th Century buildings, The Globe Mills (it once housed a Flour Mill), into 100,000 square feet of exhibition space broken up into several large indoor and outdoor areas. Their inaugural exhibition, “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016,” is also outsized, featuring nearly 100 works by some 34 artists covering a span of 70 years which remains on view through September 4, 2016. The exhibition is co-curated by Paul Schimmel,(the eponymous Schimmel of HW&S), the former MOCA curator and Jenni Sorkin, Assistant professor of Art History at the UC Santa Barbara (more on them later).TO READ MORE CLICK HERE….

“The Dionysus of Modern Architecture,” is how James Cuno, President and CEO of The J. Paul Getty Trust, described architect Frank Gehry when awarding him the third annual J. Paul Getty Award at a lively and elegant event at the Getty Center in Los Angeles on September 28, 2015.

Among a well-dressed crowd of some 350 attendees that included Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Executive Vice Mayor Rick Jacobs, LA Philharmonic Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, as well as artists Chuck Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Ed Moses, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Barbara Kruger among many other notables from the worlds of art, finance and LA civic life, Mayor Garcetti called Gehry “truly an angel in the city of Angels” for his civic engagement and for architectural gems such as Walt Disney Concert Hall which speak, the mayor said, of Los Angeles’ “unlimited freedom, innovation and creativity.” TO READ MORE CLICK HERE…

“London Calling: Bacon, Freud, Kossoff, Andrews, Auerbach and Kitaj” on view at the J. Paul Getty Center until November 13, 2016 is the first U.S. exhibition devoted to exploring what R. B. Kitaj called “The London School” — a group of post- World War Two painters in England who pursued figurative art at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the rage.

This is a wonderful exhibit, well-thought-out and well-curated, with a room devoted to each of these important painters, as well as a separate room of their drawings, with the majority of the works on loan from England’s Tate museum (and Tate Britain). The Getty’s own collection of paintings has, traditionally, ended in 1900. “This significant exhibition shows an important part of ‘what happened next,” said Timothy Potts, the director of the J. Paul Getty Museum and one of the exhibition’s curators, and “represents a new departure for us.” “Why this exhibit is at the Getty is another matter, which I’ll address later. To READ MORE CLICK HERE

PETER GURALNICK is the author of Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home, about the great artists at the heart of American Roots Music; the two-part biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love; as well as Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, and Searching for Robert Johnson. He has written the scripts for documentaries about Sam Phillips, Sam Cooke, and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. He was in Los Angeles recently to speak about his recently published biography, Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ’n’ Roll (Little Brown).

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TOM TEICHOLZ: You grew up in Massachusetts; spent summers at camp on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire; and your first love was writing fiction.

PETER GURALNICK: It was writing. I wanted to be a writer from the time I was six or seven and I wanted to be a baseball player too. Those were my only two ambitions in life.

One out of two isn’t bad.

I played baseball until I was 48. I carried it as far as I could.

How did this lead to an interest in writing about the blues?

When I was 15 or 16, I fell into the blues. A friend of mine, his brother went to the Newport Folk Festival and came back with [folk music by] Burl Ives and Buell Kazee but also some blues records. This friend of mine and I started listening and that just turned me on, eventually, to every other kind of music.

What were those first records you listened to?

I got my first Lightnin’ Hopkins record, Best of Muddy Waters, Howling in the Moonlight, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, Big Bill Broonzy. As a 15- or 16-year-old, this was the puzzle effect. It wasn’t on the radio. Those shows didn’t come to town. This was a music that was so thrilling to me for reasons I can’t explain. It just turned me around. It was something that I thought didn’t exist anymore. Then I went out, I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins performing at Adams House at Harvard. It was a thrill.

Then the soul shows started coming to town. WILD was the first black AM radio station in Boston and I started going to the soul shows and ushering right away. I was sitting in my room thinking that poring over these old records is the way to discover the blues, but once I started going out, I realized I was an idiot and that this music was happening all over. I said, “This is where it’s at.” It’s about the living experience.

The first show I went to was with Solomon Burke, Otis Redding, Joe Tex, Rufus Thomas, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Garnet Mimms.

The first half of your writing career was right there in front of you.

I think it was in 1964 that I started ushering the shows. I was the worst usher in the world. I’d just go backstage and see Jackie Wilson slumping over as he came offstage or Little Richard playing the piano.

But why did I start writing? Well, when Crawdaddy started [Crawdaddy was one of the first American music magazines started in 1966 by Paul Williams, who was a Swarthmore college student at the time], Paul Williams had been three or four years behind me in school, and I met him and Paul said, “How would you like to write for Crawdaddy?” It was mimeographed at the time and I said, “Sure, but I want to write about blues.” I wrote about Robert Pete Williams, about Buddy Guy in the middle of Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Psychedelic whatever. The same when the Boston Phoenix started in 1967: I knew a guy who’s a drama critic, he said, “Would you like to write about music?” and I said, “I’d like to write about the blues.” Everything that I wrote, the entire purpose of it, the only reason for it — was to tell people about this music I thought was so great.

The first story I wrote was about James Brown and it was a preview of his performance saying, “This is the greatest live theater you’ll ever see in your life.” At the time, happenings were a big thing, which invited audience participation. I said, “Forget it. This is the greatest happening you’ll ever see in your life.” This was his first time in Boston. I described it to induce people to come see him. I wrote about Muddy. I wrote about Wolf. I wrote about Bo Diddley. I wrote about Jerry Lee Lewis. All for that purpose. There was no pay. There was no thought of pay. I was writing my novels. I never thought that this would be any more than just my attempt to sell people on something they couldn’t read about in the mainstream press.

Writing the names on paper was so exciting. To write “Howlin’ Wolf,” to write “Big Joe Turner.” It was incredible because you never saw that in the mainstream press.

You wrote extensive features about these great artists …

Having the opportunity to write these [articles] was almost as thrilling as seeing their performances. I would give away my entire record collection to see Howlin’ Wolf live one more time. Who wouldn’t? For instance, right around that time, I saw the Staple Singers with The Mighty Clouds of Joy at the Boston Arena. These were not integrated events. They weren’t by definition not, but they weren’t. To watch Mavis [Staples] steal the show from Mighty Clouds of Joy and for Joe Ligon. It was unbelievable. To be there in that audience … It’s no less thrilling to me now than it was then.

Did you see yourself as a journalist, as a historian, as a storyteller?

I saw myself as a writer trying to capture what I saw with a non-specific vocabulary that didn’t reflect the times. For instance, when I was writing for Crawdaddy, most of the other stories, everything was “groovy.” I wanted to use language not that elevated the subject, but that was worthy of the subject and that could be read in 10 years or 20 years without being stamped as being of this particular moment. It was really about seeing Robert Johnson as being as significant as John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins. A lot of people think this is very pretentious but I honestly believe that the vernacular tradition [in the United States] — the voice of Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” — I think of this as significant as any other art.

I realized the best way to represent the music is to write about the people, about their aspirations, about how they saw themselves musically. Not being a musician, and not aspiring to be an ethno-musicologist in any way. I wanted to bring the world alive and bring the people alive. In many ways, there was no question that I was approaching it the same way I approached fiction. It was just the idea of bringing the character to life, treating him or her with dignity, with respect. As Sam Phillips said, “Tell the damn truth. Tell the damn truth.” That was what I tried to do.

Do you ever feel that you’re seeing a truth about them that they may not be able to see themselves?

To a degree. I think that everybody I’ve spoken to has their own story to tell. One of the things that’s given me the greatest satisfaction is when people I’ve written about have come to me and said, “You know, I really learned something.”

In choosing subjects, what was it you saw in Solomon Burke for example?

Probably the greatest performer I’ve ever seen on stage and the warmest and the funniest. I’ve never written about anybody that I don’t admire. […]

The first time I saw him he was singing, “Goodbye Baby (Baby Goodbye),” which was his big hit at the moment and he’s wearing this gold tuxedo jacket and cummerbund and he goes out on the stage and ends the show holding out the mic to these kids who leap across this kind of moat that exists there. The generosity of his performance and the warmth and the personality. When I first started writing Sweet Soul Music, I had been looking for him and looking for him and looking for him. Finally, I get this call. I was out in the driveway.

My wife Alexandra comes out and says, “Peter, there’s somebody who says he’s Solomon Burke, or represents Solomon Burke. I think you should come in and talk to him.” I get on the phone, and I’m talking to this person with this very chirpy little insurance salesman’s voice. Not at all the voice that I thought would come out of the singer. I’m talking about a white insurance salesman’s voice. I explained to him that I’m writing this book and that I want to get in touch with Solomon Burke and then this more familiar voice comes on and says, “Well, of course. How could you write this book without speaking to the king.” Which was indicative of, not his boastfulness, but his sense of humor.

I went to see him almost immediately. He was playing at Tramps in New York. We stayed out all night together. I mean, I would never have turned back. I wish I could spend the rest of my life with Solomon. If you want to know about regrets, I have two regrets in life that I can think of. One is not being able to play baseball, because I suffered a trifocal [eyesight] crisis and the other is not having written a book about Solomon. When I sent Solomon the Sam Cooke biography, the next time I saw him he said, “Pete, it’s great. It’s a great book, but when are we going to write The Book?” We talked about it off and on for many years and I tried to get him to start it. I felt like I needed some evidence of [his] commitment. […] It just never happened. […] It’s the only book I ever would have done in somebody else’s voice because he was so brilliant. He was so inventive. He was just an astonishing personality.

If you speak to Solomon’s producers, they say the same thing.

Yeah. I’m sure. I introduced Solomon and Sam, thinking that they would just absolutely fall in love with each other. This was at the publication party for Sweet Soul Music in Memphis, which is the greatest party I’ve ever been to. Didn’t have a single member of the public there. Didn’t sell a single book, but Solomon drove in from LA, Sam [Phillips] was there, [legendary session player and producer] Jim Dickinson was there, David Porter was there, Roosevelt Jamison [who wrote “That’s How Strong My Love Is”] was there …

I introduced Solomon to Sam and rather than falling all over each other, the two of them just locked gazes and it seemed to be a question of when it was going to break. I have no idea why. I’m a phenomenologist. I don’t need to know why and I’m not going to psychoanalyze this but it astonished me and to this day, I don’t know why. Neither one of them was like that. Both of them were very warm and polite. Whatever it was, that’s what happened.

In another interview you also said, “What I’m interested in is exploring a phenomenon.”

Without judgment or psychodrama. I don’t mean phenomenon in the sense of writing about a star, or superstar. I only mean that I’m not interested in either making judgments or having stories that just fit some theory neatly. I want to be the fly on the wall. In the Elvis or Sam Phillips books, I rigorously tried to avoid any first person. Everything was in the past.

It’s not that I don’t reveal myself. It’s not that any author could write anything without revealing him or herself. It’s just that I’m not interested in making judgments. I’m not interested in approving or disapproving what anyone does.

In bringing these stories to life, particularly a musician’s, have you had to create your own descriptive vocabulary to convey the sound of their music?

It’s finding the vocabulary to suit the subject and that evokes some of the excitement of the music, some of the excitement of, for example, Johnny Shines, his originality. Some of the excitement that Sam Cooke brought to the music and the degree to which he modified it for different audiences. Most of all, I want to find a language that reflects the subject appropriately. In a sense, it’s creating an artifice to indicate a reality that is deeper than the mosaic reality.

In the case of artists who either you didn’t know, or you didn’t know personally and not being a musician yourself, how does one describe how the music felt to them or how they thought about their own music? Like Robert Johnson, we don’t know him and we won’t know why he wrote those songs …

Everything I’ve written I’ve tried to write from the inside out. I’m not interested in the external persona. I mean, Bobby “Blue” Bland, there’s nobody whose music I could appreciate more than his, but the man behind the music was an all together different person and the person that he was was what gave the music its power.

You and I could be at the same place at the same time. We could have the same material, we could have the same interviews, we could know the same facts, but everything comes down to perspective and your account would be entirely different from mine. If I was to write the Elvis biography today, it would be very different from the book I wrote 20 years ago.

How?

I’m looking at it from a different vantage point. The reader might never notice that, but I would know it. Just as Sam did not believe in perfection and said, “I hate the word perfection. It should be banned from the English language.” I don’t recognize objectivity in any way. I think people are fooling themselves when they talk about objectivity. Basically, I think that everything is necessarily interpretive. I’m not interested in putting my interpretation out front but I can’t hide the respect that I’m writing from.

Which brings me to Sam Phillips — you’ve written a good deal about him before. You did a documentary about him in ’99. So why a book about him now?

Because to me, he’s as original and individually as creative an artist as anybody else I’ve ever written about. He had a vision of not just what music could do, but how it could sound, of how he could present it in a manner that truly reflected the beauty and the power of the music. Why now? There’s no “now” here. From the time I met him, I never wanted to let go of that subject … It took me six years to persuade him to do the documentary. Everything takes six years.

You have made a career writing books you’re passionate about that would not necessarily be considered commercial by the publishing houses.

The Elvis book [Last Train to Memphis] was the only commercial thing I’ve ever done, per se, although oddly enough, the Robert Johnson book came out just before the Robert Johnson box set was complete. Although the publisher never even knew about the connection, Tower Records started putting the book out front with the album, which went platinum. That was a big help.

Just to go back a second about what you were asking about Sam, while we were making the documentary, it became clear to me that Sam, while I didn’t think he’d ever write his own book, was essentially laying the groundwork for his own book, because I would ask him a question about Joe Hill Lewis and he would start talking about when his sixth grade teacher spanked him on the hand because he had a lot of the devil in him. That set him straight. He would tell me the sixth grade teacher’s name and none of this was anything we could use in the documentary.

I went to Seattle with him in 2002 and we did this thing where I was handing him an award and he invited Alexandra and me to have breakfast. In a very elaborate way, he presented this idea which he had researched involving digital recorders. [Phillips wanted them to work together using separate recorders and transferring tapes back and forth.] How it was going to work, I don’t know, but he revived the idea of us working together on his book. I said, “Yes.” I would not say no to him.

It turned out he was very sick at the time. The last time I saw him was August 14 or 16 of 2002. He just looked awful. He wouldn’t even give Alexandra a hug, because he didn’t want to give her whatever he had, but he had emphysema, basically. He went into the hospital a week later and never came out. That just fires me, so I don’t think there was any question I was going to do the book.

Sam Phillips saw himself as having the task of sort of finding a way to bring black music to a wider public.

To give voice to those who had no voice. To bring out a talent and inspiration that sometimes the artist himself didn’t realize that he possessed.

Happy birthday to the Israel Museum! The country’s national museum turns 50 this year — middle age for most of us, but quite young in museum years.

The museum is celebrating the occasion with a year of special exhibits, loans and gifts, adding to its encyclopedic collection covering Middle East archaeology, Jewish life, and modern and contemporary art.

The Israel Museum sits on a 20-acre campus in Jerusalem not far from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Givat Ram Campus, the Knesset and the Israel Supreme Court. Originally spearheaded by Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, the museum represents the consolidation of several earlier public and private collections, such as the Bezalel National Museum and important archaeological finds. It houses more than 500,000 objects, including the world-renowned Dead Sea Scrolls and a small-scale replica of Jerusalem during the time of the Second Temple, which have become a magnet for visitors.

When it opened in 1965, the museum was a campus of international-style pavilions designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad, complemented by the outdoor Billy Rose Art Garden, designed by Isamu Noguchi. A separate edifice, the Shrine of the Book (which resembles something of an acorn or a Hershey’s Kiss), was designed by Armand Bartos and Frederick Kiesler to house the Dead Sea Scrolls — ancient religious texts purchased by Hungarian émigré David Samuel Gottesman and donated to the State of Israel.

In 1997, James Snyder, formerly of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, was appointed director, and 13 years later, the museum completed a $100 million campaign to refurbish the campus. The buildings dedicated to archaeology, fine arts, and Jewish art and life were rebuilt and connected by a new entrance pavilion by James Carpenter and are now the spine of the museum.
Whereas a visit to the museum seemed previously a somewhat haphazard affair, with one’s interests being dragged in multiple directions, today it is a real pleasure — well-organized, -appointed and -curated. Never has the museum looked so good.

The new entrance pavilion, a series of broad, rising platforms, is currently home to an installation by Zadok Ben-David called “Evolution and Theory.” It runs the length of the pavilion on a bed of sand and consists of 250 hand-cut, razor-thin, life-size aluminum sculptures of the evolutionary stages of man and items inspired by scientific drawings in 19th-century encyclopedias, such as beakers, conical spheres and scales.

This leads to the central gallery and one of the museum’s signature anniversary exhibits, “A Brief History of Humankind,” which runs through Jan. 2, 2016, and is based in part on the best-selling book by renowned historian Yuval Harari. The museum has gathered 14 objects from its collection that highlight major advances in human civilization and surrounded them with contemporary artworks from around the world.

Just 14 objects, you say? But OMG, what objects!

Among them is the earliest evidence of man-made tools found in the land of Israel — stones that were used in the Jordan Valley some 1.5 million years ago to create fire or used as a tool for digging and cutting. Not impressed? How about the oldest hearth in Eurasia — from the north of Israel — a campfire of burned flint with traces that animals were cooked there some 780,000 years ago — the first evidence of cooking in Eurasia! There is also the oldest complete sickle in the world, the instrument that changed agriculture, which was found in a cave in northern Israel and dated at some 9,000 years old.

There are 60,000-year-old Neanderthal skulls and the skull of a Homo sapien some 85,000 years old. There are early examples of writing in which marks were made on clay tablets — cuneiform — and a fragment from the oldest extant copy of the Ten Commandments, dated to 30 B.C.E. and found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s more: a leaf from an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible — on loan from the National Library of Israel — and a handwritten page from Albert Einstein’s manuscript on the special theory of relativity.

These objects tell the story of the progress of humankind — the agrarian revolution, the cognitive revolution that brought about writing and communication, and the industrial revolution whose scientific discoveries ushered in the modern age.

The artworks that surround these objects range from Los Angeles artist Charles Ray’s unsettling set of nude mannequins, “Family Romance” (1993), to film clips from Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” (1936). The cumulative effect of the show is to feel the breadth of mankind’s progress and development. It is an exhibition that implicitly demonstrates the authority and the contemporary currency of the Israel Museum, as well as its value as a repository whose collection spans the sweep of civilization.

This golden anniversary is also occasion to revisit the Shrine of the Book, home to some of the greatest treasures of Jewish knowledge, tradition and culture. It is here you will find the Aleppo Codex, the very Torah that Maimonides, the Rambam himself, used in the 12th century. It is a profound experience to see a scroll that has such history and that connects all Jewish people throughout the centuries.. Likewise, how fascinating to be reminded of the various alternative gospels and texts that the Essenes produced, such as the battle of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, a phantasmagorical tale that speaks to a mystical, hallucinatory Jewish tradition that is far removed from today’s normative practice and observance.

An adjacent exhibition hall contains the Nano Bible, the smallest Bible in the world, etched onto a gold-coated silicon chip the size of a grain of sugar (which can be magnified to confirm its accuracy). Created at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the work’s 1.2 million letters were written using a focused ion beam. The exhibition runs through Dec. 31, 2016, and is a modern marvel that complements the ancient writings nearby.

The Israel Museum is also being celebrated with a number of anniversary gifts and loans, including a gorgeous Jeff Koons piece, “Sacred Heart.” The immaculate stainless steel sculpture looks like a giant chocolate heart wrapped in shiny red foil and tied with a gold ribbon. (It’s on loan from the collection of Steven and Alexandra Cohen of Greenwich, Conn.)

At 50, the Israel Museum is not showing its age, but rather its place as a world-class art and archaeology museum, whose anniversary deserves celebration — or at least a visit.