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MØ Waves, MØ Better Sound
Danish singer-songwriter MØ (Karen Marie Aagaard Ørsted Andersen ) was singing "I assure you I would dye my hair in crazy colors just to make you smile," from her song Nights With You, dancing and striking poses that were silhouetted on a giant scrim behind her as her band played and a sophisticated light show with visual effects enhanced her performance. In motions both sinuous and purposefully awkward, full of confidence and power, MØ stalked the stage of the Wiltern,… -
The Art to Being David Van Eyssen
Recently, I went to an art opening in Santa Monica, where a doorman stood guard, clipboard in hand like at some private party or club. A spiral staircase led to a basement gallery where new works by David Van Eyssen were on display that combined film and still images layered upon each other and interacting in various ways, projected on screens or shown on flat screen TVs.At times, there were video images that unfolded in a loop and appeared among… -
The Mariinsky: A Dream of a Ballet at the Segestrom
The Mariinsky Ballet performs La Bayadere View Original Article -
Carl Bernstein Delivers Inaugural Beck Lecture In Investigative Journalism
This past Sunday October, 27, 2019 Carl Bernstein delivered the inaugural Nick Beck Investigative Journalism Lecture at Los Angeles City College (LACC), telling a standing-room-only crowd that journalism is how we "arrive at the best obtainable version of the truth."Bernstein, celebrated for breaking the Watergate scandal with Bob Woodward as a young reporter at the Washington Post (and portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the movie "All The President's Men," have since served as Washington Bureau... View Original Article -
The Gateway Arch is a Tourist Must-do
There are some tourist experiences that need doing, such as walking the Sydney Harbour Bridge or going up the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. And when in St, Louis, you"ve got to go up in the Arch, America's tallest man-made monument, a catenary curve 630 feet up in the air, as wide as it is high.Truth to tell, I"d gone to the top of the Gateway arch almost thirty years ago. All I really recall is being seated… -
Pieces of R. B. Kitaj
It is hard to believe that twelve years have passed since the death of R. B. Kitaj, the at-times-controversial artist who coined the term "The London School" about his fellow contemporary artists in Britain (including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach) and who spent his last years living in Los Angeles. A new exhibition at LA Louver gallery in Venice, CA, "R.B. Kitaj: Collages and Prints, 1964-1975" reminds us of Kitaj's great talent and his restless, obsessive intelligence expressed in works… -
Netflix Debuts "The Devil Next Door"
Netflix's just-released documentary The Devil Next Door is a true crime mystery about John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker who was discovered to be a Nazi death camp guard and was tried over a 40-year period in the United States, Israel and Germany in a roller-coaster of convictions and appeals - as he denied any and all participation and guilt. Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home, in 2012, age 91, awaiting the appeal of his German conviction.As someone who covered… -
Love Rocks NYC 2020: A Pandemic Of Caring
This is an article about caring in the time of Coronavirus.This is an article about a benefit concert that was supposed to happen on March 12, 2020: the 4th Annual Love Rocks NYC benefit produced by Fashion Designer John Varvatos, multi-hyphenate Greg Williamson (Real Estate, Concert Production and God's Love We Deliver trustee), and Event Producer Nicole Rechter that was to be held at the Beacon Theater in New York to raise funds for God's Love We Deliver, an organization… -
Concerts At Home
Over the last five weeks I have had some great music experiences at home, music that has lifted my spirit and fed my soul, distracted me from the increasingly grim reality of the coronavirus death tolls, and been a companion during self-created "lunch hours" and late-night evening entertainment.Every day (or in my case, most nights) one has but to scroll through Instagram to see regular or occasional performances from home by James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, John Doe, Larkin… -
"I want to leave home less and less."
As the sixth week of the stay-at-home order in California begins, I realize that I"ve become deranged and must be suffering from a Coronavirus pandemic-induced Stockholm syndrome because I keep thinking: I don"t want the quarantine to end.Outside my home's bubble is tragedy: Thousands upon tens of thousands of lives lost to this insidious malady, and despite the most optimistic spin, no effective treatment or vaccine. Even where the disease has reached a plateau â it is a plateau where… -
No, I haven"t read all of Proust. Fighting the coronavirus humble brag
David Hockney has painted 10 new iPad works. Barbra Streisand is working on her memoir. On Instragram people are baking bread and working out. Friends are calling to say that they"ve Marie-Kondo"d their homes.And all their getting-things-done is stressing me out.What this is is an epidemic of humble brags.People are knitting and quilting and reading children's stories aloud, and giving lessons on how to play the slide guitar and reading plays aloud and performing music together with other ... View… -
Studio DRIFT's Freedom Franchise And Drone Art
Art has always had as its schema to make us see. At different times, in different ways, it has called on us to rethink every aspect of perception - what we see, how we see it, how it is seen and how it is rendered; as well as to reconsider the very materials with which art can be made, of paint and how it's applied; of the properties of and our relation to color, metal, marble, wood; of objects in…