“Inside Llewyn Davis,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s new film, is the fictional story of one week in the life of a folksinger in Greenwich Village in 1961. The title character, played with total conviction by Oscar Isaac and supplied with credible material by the maven of American music, T-Bone Burnett, is acknowledged to have been […]

If you’ve been to Israel in the last 40 years or heard Israeli popular music, then you probably know Danny Sanderson, who will be performing with his band at the Gindi Auditorium at American Jewish University on Dec. 8. Sanderson was a founding member in 1973 of Kaveret (literally Beehive; also called Poogy), a band […]

A giant risk is being taken with The Wallis — as the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills is being called, and for which the 1934 Beverly Hills Post Office on Santa Monica Boulevard, between Canon and Crescent drives, has been rehabbed to pristine beauty. The former post office building holds […]

June 18, 2013 Jonathan Alter’s “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies” (Simon and Schuster), an account of the president’s reelection campaign and the challenges posed by the Republican’s obstructionist politics, has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for several weeks. We recently spoke to the columnist for Bloomberg View about the […]

The groundbreaking journalist taught me one of life’s most important lessons: You never have to be afraid to be yourself June 17, 2013 Recent months have seen a resurgence in all things George Plimpton (journalist and founding editor of The Paris Review), with the release of a documentary, “Plimpton!” as well as the paperback edition […]

Posted: 11/04/2013 4:32 pm Etgar Keret, with his collections The Nimrod Flip-Out and the recently published Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, reinvigorated the short story (and the short, short story). The author, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope and on This American Life, recently spent a day in Los Angles, at […]

Saturday, June 15, 2013 “Life is weird,” said Ringo Starr, who will turn 74 this July, at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles for the launch of “Ringo: Peace & Love” — the first major exhibit ever dedicated to a drummer and the first time Ringo has shared memorabilia from his private collection. Calling Ringo, […]

Wednesday, June 5, 2013 PURPLECLOVER.com Don Was, the multi-Grammy award-winning producer, a close collaborator of the Rolling Stones whose band Was/Not Was still plays the occasional gig; and who last year became president of legendary Jazz label Blue Note Records, is easy to spot in a crowd, or a police lineup for that matter, because […]

TOLDJA! UPDATE; DYLAN GUITAR SELLS FOR $965,000 MORE THAN PREVIOUS RECORD-HOLDER CLAPTON TO ANONYMOUS BUYER Bob Dylan playing the guitar. Image Courtesy of The Estate of David Gahr/Getty Images The guitar stood on a stand in a small conference room in corporate offices in Beverly Hills. A black Fender Stratocaster with a white body plate, […]

From left: Herb Alpert in the studio with Lou Adler in 1970. Photo courtesy of Herb Alpert Presents About a mile north of Duke’s in Malibu, a right turn takes you up to a bluff with its own driveway, which leads to a large parking lot. There, on the day I visited, a tour bus […]