Rose Eichenbaum	Dance photographer, author, lecturer
	Melissa Silverstein	Publisher, “Women & Hollywood” blog
	Shea New	Producer, “Dance Under the Stars” choreography festival
	Victoria Marks	Choreographer and Vice-Chair, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance
	Janice Steinberg	San Diego-based dance critic
	Nancy Reynolds	Director of Research, The George Balanchine Foundation

You like us, you like us, ladies. Thank you. Others may join the club here. Men welcome!

The tête-à-tête took place before an SRO audience at the Hammer’s Billy Wilder Theater. It was the closing day of “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,” one of the key exhibitions of the Getty Research Institute’s “Pacific Standard Time’ arts umbrella, and the community gathered to get a last look.

It was a father and daughter show. Inevitably, we all hung on the verbal droppings of père, whose inimitable phrasing and acerbic bon mots did not disappoint. 

Clearly proud of his daughter’s ambitious retrospective of L.A.’s serious post-War African American art scene, Baraka opened his musings by noting the relationship between the curator, Kellie, who is a Columbia University art history professor, and Lisa Jones, his second daughter, a respected filmmaker and writer. 

“[It’s interesting to see] what sisters give each other, [those] who have been raised around art, not as a commodity or something to decorate ugly stuff. But [sisters raised] to know people who dedicate their lives to creating art.

“I grew up with people like that; when I went to the Village we were steeped in abstract expressionism. You’d go in the Cedar Tavern, there was de Kooning, Pollack, Franz Kline. We despised pop art.

“I just went to Ireland. They have a museum of Andy Warhol. Which tells you what terrible things communications can do,” he said, leaving it to listeners to suss whether the slight was on Warhol or the Irish. I believe it was the latter. Oh hell, it was on both.

“I’m just skipping around — because I like to do that,” he said with a laugh.

“I like the irony of being in the Hammer. Being a dirty communist — to know Armand Hammer was the first to talk to Lenin [about accessing Russian oil.] Then he was smart enough to open a museum with my daughter’s show in it. How things relate!”

Switching gears, he returned to art criticism: “How do you make something that speaks to the world? That’s the burden on [art] abstraction. How do [artists] say what the world is?

“You can go to a museum and not see any evidence of the species that inhabits this planet.

“The question is: ‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’ That’s the bottom line of every work of art. If it doesn’t answer these questions, it’s hard for me to get close to it.

“You are always trying to extend the reach of art. The first time I heard bebop, the first time I heard Thelonious Monk, I didn’t know the world had that kind of thinking in it. Art is supposed to “unlock” the world to you.

“What do you mean? What are you saying? These are the important questions. A lot of people get through life without ever answering them. And they are making a lot of money doing it.”

The world is one-one-one-two today. That is 1/1/12!
Happy birthday world.

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• 0ne-one-one-one

It’s the ninth installment of Filmforum director Adam Hyman’s extensive and rigorous 24-program exhibition of experimental films made in L.A. between 1945 and 1980. This survey fits neatly into the time frame of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time examination of post-War California art. LA Filmforum is a participating organization in PST.

In the mid-1960s, the fascinating jazz-inspired collage artist, Wallace Berman, straight outta Boyle Heights, communed with a close-knit circle of actors and artists to screen underground films in their bohemian digs in Topanga Canyon. The films were influenced by Berman’s spiritualist and radically amateur concepts of art that nevertheless thrived in the intersection among art, Hollywood, and the institutions of the semi-commercial underground.

Included in Topanga’s magic circle were Dennis Hopper, Russ Tamblyn, Toni Basil, Dean Stockwell, George Herms, Bruce Conner, and Robert Alexander.

Co-curated by arts·meme friend, USC Professor David E. James, with Rani Singh of the Getty Research Institute, this screening runs in conjunction with the Pasadena Armory’s exhibition “Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976,” which will be open that evening before the screening. 

_{Photos:  Wallace Berman, Self Portrait Crater Lane, 1955, courtesy wikipedia
George Herms, Topanaga Canyon, 1965, Photograph by Wallace Berman}

“Wallace Berman’s Underground” | presented by Los Angeles Filmforum @ Armory Center for the Arts | Saturday Dec 3, repeats at Cinefamily Jan 7

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• LA Filmforum contributes “Alternative Projections” to Pacific Standard Time
  

It’s a tired idea that the likes of Jean Cocteau or other surrealists probably thought of and discarded circa 1931. In fact, based on photos at right and below, the artist behind the spectacle, Marina Abramovic, seems to have more than a passing familiarity with Cocteau’s work. 

I support the dancer/choreographer Sara Wookey in her call for professional wages for dancers. I reprint her essay below in hopes that it will further an important conversation.

Modern dance and film making legend, Yvonne Rainer, weighed in mightily on the subject here.

I decry the exploitation of artists anywhere, but it holds particular repugnance when it takes place at an art museum. I like that Ms. Wookey has “outed” the issue. Believe me there is desperation and exploitation going on with arts writers too. I support fair pay for artists, and that includes arts writers.

MOCA needs to address its responsibility in the controversy in a more thoughtful manner than, “For me this is the way the art world works, it’s all about dialogue,” which were the inadequate, self justifying words that MOCA Director, Jeffrey Deitch, tossed off a few weeks ago. As our society lurches sideways if not backward on so many fronts, it’s disturbing to see the lack of moral leadership from a vanguard institution like MOCA.

The bottom line seems to be, does MOCA respect and support the professionalism of artists, or does it exploit them as objects? You cannot have it both ways.

Writes Ms. Wookey on the gig she turned down:

I was expected to lie naked and speechless on a slowly rotating table, starting from before guests arrived and lasting until after they left (a total of nearly four hours). I was expected to ignore (by staying in what Abramovic refers to as “performance mode”) any potential physical or verbal harassment while performing. I was expected to commit to fifteen hours of rehearsal time, and sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement stating that if I spoke to anyone about what happened in the audition I was liable for being sued by Bounce Events, Marketing, Inc., the event’s producer, for a sum of $1 million dollars plus attorney fees.

I was to be paid $150. Read more…

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• Let’s do the calculation. Who got a better deal at the MOCA gala? The dancers … or the bartenders?

[[Show as slideshow]]

But none of it, not a one, could top the Ronni Chasen murder last November for its exquisite, undiluted brand of L.A. noir. It tinged and prefigured a creepy holiday season one year ago  — from the pert blonde publicist’s gritty death in a polished black sedan; through the suicide-offing of Harold Smith, drifter/grifter and alleged bicycle killer; to the bumbling Keystone Kops investigation… gripping, priceless, stranger than fiction.

No disrespect to the dead, but gawd! that was a good one.

Thank you arts·meme artist, Benoit Le Pennec.

Like this? Read more:

• Ronni Chasen murder suspect dies at former hotel to the stars
• Bloody Mamas: Violence Against Women in Art and in Life
• Ronni Chasen’s Restaurant Renaming
• Chasen Murder Redux
• More from Le Pennec:  Michael Govan gets out of Dodge

What’s the subject? “Serenade,” a ballet that in its making, and in the viewing of it, touches God.

C’est un ballet abstrait. C’est- á-dire, sans intention narrative … My mawkish English translation runs below the program, at bottom.

Thank you to former ballerina, Edith Brozak McMann, for posting New York City Ballet memorabilia on Facebook for the others to enjoy. Click on the backstage photo of the ballet, above left, and drink in “Serenade’s” extreme spirituality. It’s a connoisseur’s photo.

The ballet, made on the Serenade for Strings by Tchaikovsky, is the first work created by Balanchine in the United States (1934). It is an abstract ballet, that is to say, it lacks a narrative intention: The soloists and the evolution of the corps de ballet adapt themselves to the sections of Tchaikovsky in a manner of forming a moving counterpoint that is uninterrupted in the sense that it remains vague, which isn’t [any] less communicative inasmuch as the romantic abstractions that it evokes are clear: fate, love, yearning for a higher existence, and death.

_{notes:
Program is clickable
from NYCB Paris performances, possibly ’52 or ’55
They call Tchaikovsky “Pierre”!!
Thank you, Mr. Balanchine, for making Serenade.}

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• Lorenz Hart taught Balanchine English

_{Photo featured in Eiko & Koma: Time is not Even, Space is Not Empty
Photo credit: (c)Johan Elbers (1980)}

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• Eiko & Koma’s “Event Fission” at the landfill created for the World Trade Center, 1980

[... a humongous trove of cinema-memorabilia prodigiously overseen by archivist James d'Arc...]

The well regarded film historian, Scott Eyman (Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise), receives a classy accolade: the Richard Wall Memorial Award for his  Cecil B. DeMille biography published last year.

That’s Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille, by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster, 2010).

This honor certainly extends to Jim d’Arc. And what a thrill for Cecilia DeMille Presley, the director’s grand daughter, who supported Eyman in his efforts.

The Richard Wall Memorial Award, established in 1973, honors an English-language book of exceptional scholarship in the field of recorded performance published or distributed in the United States during the previous calendar year. Formerly known as the Theatre Library Association Award, the prize was renamed in 2010 to honor the memory of the late Richard Wall, longtime TLA member and Book Awards Chair.

Theater Library Association Awards Ceremony | Bruno Walter Auditorium, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts | Lincoln Center | November 4, 6 pm

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• Scott Eyman, Leonard Maltin, Cecilia DeMille Presley celebrate publishing of a new DeMille biography with screening of director’s film epic “Cleopatra”  
• Cleopatra reclaims the Egyptian Theatre
• Diaper changed, he’s ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.
• Bob Hope roasts C.B. DeMille
• The devilish Madam Satan