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Ebikes: I Sing the Ride Electric
Let me make a prediction: You will buy an E-Bike, and like me, you will love having one. 2016-12-26-1482782513-3355061-WallerangM02Xpreview.png Wallerang Ebike Over the last six months, I’ve been testing a wide variety of E-bikes and have come to believe strongly that E-bikes are in the future for many of us, specifically those over 50, but in time, for everyone. I’ve tested bikes from brands you know such as Trek, Specialized and Raleigh, and ones you haven’t such as Swedish Ebike… -
Being There (and hanging out) 1978–2000
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… -
Leonard Cohen's Calling
“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… -
Kate Hudsons Fabletics: 21st Century Fashion Company Bets on Tech & Media
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. Everywhere you look, company employees (overwhelmingly women) are cradling laptops as they go from glassed-in conference room, to high-ceilinged white-walled showroom to glass door offices and open-plan cubicles. There’s an in-house cafeteria, two photo studios, five… -
Pop goes the Skirball with Lichtenstein's Prints
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… -
When reality was a joke: the making of Albert Brooks’ Real Life (1979)
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… -
The Full Schimmel: 'Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016'
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… -
Frank Gehry's Emotional Architecture
“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… -
This is London ("London Calling" at The Getty Center)
“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… -
Tell the Damn Truth! A Conversation with Peter Guralnick
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… -
The Israel Museum @ 50: Treasures & Exhibits
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… -
Heaven is a Library (The National Library of Israel)
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem this past June, I spent a few hours in heaven: touring the collections of the National Library of Israel and previewing plans for its new state-of-the-art building to be built on a beautiful site near the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the Israel Museum. Reimagining the library for the 21st Century and beyond -- the new building should be completed by 2019 and in full use by 2020 -- has been a herculean…