The din of art talk filled the Foundation’s sunlit third-floor loft. So did the industrious output of Herb Alpert creativity. No, not the trumpeter’s music nor his music producing, but rather his colorful paintings and outsized sculptures that decorate the space.

Chatting with choreographer Nora Chipaumire (on left in the photo) about her $75,000 Alpert Award stipend, the Zimbabwean expatriate (now Brooklyn-based) said with charming eloquence: “It’s a jump start on everything. It’s a rosy garden.”

Her flashing smile was equally rosy. The award is huge prestigious honor.

“It’s a promise, but it’s also scary … how to best move forward.”

Chipaumire, whose challenging solo dance-theater is charged with global and sexual politics, said: “I intend to wage relentless propaganda. And I’m not ashamed to use the cold war language.

“I come from the third world, so I’m willing to do more with less. But I’ve always been in want of a safety net. We work without a safety net — we’ve made an art of it.

“I’ve got no time to experiment — with what money? I say what I mean. I’m here to mess up peoples’ perceptions about African women.”

Winner slideshow here …

Herb Alpert speaking at his Foundation

2012 Alpert Award winner for dance Nora Chipaumire

2012 Alpert Award winner for music Myra Melford

2012 Alpert Award winner for theatre Eisa Davis

2012 Alpert Award winner for visual arts Michael Smith

2012 Alpert Award winner for film & video Kevin Everson

Chipaumire & Davis

arts·meme & the awardees

CalArts President Steven Lavine

Director, Alpert Award in the Arts, Irene Borger

Alpert Award honorees in dance constitute an interesting bunch. Over the years they have included

Like this? Read more:

• Herb Alpert, local hero
• Herb & Lani at Disney Hall [concert review]
• Back to school with Herb & Lani
• Rennie Harris discusses his Alpert Award in The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles

_{Photo credit: Scott Groller, CalArts, also Caroline Graham, C4 Global Communications}

The Herb Alpert Foundation and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) have awarded the 18th annual Alpert Award in the Arts to five exceptional mid–career artists. The award, a prize of $75,000, recognizes past performance and future promise to artists working in Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts. Herb Alpert, the legendary musician and artist who created the Herb Alpert Foundation with his wife Lani Hall and gave the first Alpert Award in the Arts in 1995, says, “All of this year’s winners represent the essence of the Alpert Award. They take aesthetic, intellectual and political risks, and challenge worn-out conventions. They’re unafraid of the unknown.”

The 2012 Alpert Awardees are: Kevin Everson, Film/Video; Nora Chipaumire, Dance; Myra Melford, Music; Eisa Davis, Theatre; Michael Smith, Visual Arts

A conversation with dance awardee Nora Chipaumire — straight outta Brooklyn — to follow!

Like this? Read more:

• Herb Alpert, local hero
• Herb & Lani at Disney Hall [concert review]
• Herb & Lani at Vibrato [performance review]
• Back to school with Herb & Lani

_{Photo credit: Scott Groller, CalArts}

Darryl Zanuck, the studio head of 20th Century Fox studio, did not engage Ms. Channing for the 1952 movie. The plum role went instead to you-know-who — a huge gamble for Zanuck. Jack Cole’s coaching of Monroe in her first beefy song-and-dance role brought it all home for the studio. [I wrote this story in the Los Angeles Times in 2009.]

On a television program in 1953 Channing struts her stuff in “A Little Girl from Little Rock” and “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

Next up, Marilyn and Jane Russell vamp in the film. You can find interesting borrowings by Jack Cole for the film version.  In Channing’s  “Diamonds” version, the men call out the jewelers’ names; in the film, this is transferred to Monroe. She delivers the words on a Jack Cole bump-and-grind. [Cole loved strippers.]

Thank you for pointing us to the historic Carol Channing video, Dancers Over 40!

I will co-host the broadcast with Robert Osborne which will air in September.

The films on the slate:

• Tonight & Every Night (1945)
  Full of dance; full of Rita Hayworth. Features the great Marc Platt and Cole himself dances. He jitterbugs!
• On the Riviera (1951)
  Wonderful dance numbers, Gwen Verdon sparkles, and “Happy Ending” is a masterpiece.
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1952)
  Jack Cole catapults Marilyn Monroe into the stratosphere with “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” — and Jane Russell’s no slouch either.
• Les Girls (1957)
  Cole contributes dance sequences of Cukor-esque sophistication — and he choreographs for Gene Kelly.

Cole is #1 with a bullet around arts·meme. We call him Balanchine Junior.

It will be a great joy to co-host with Robert Osborne. I interviewed Robert last December when I was a journalist bobbling in the Caribbean on TCM Cruise.

For four years I have researched and written about Jack Cole. He changed my life as a dance critic and now I get to honor him. I’m thrilled!

The taping will take place in Atlanta at the end of June. TCM’s Jack Cole evening will be broadcast in September.

Please stay tuned for further announcements  … and don’t touch that dial!

Like this? Read more

• arts·meme’s thread of Jack Cole coverage here
• Jack Cole & Marilyn Monroe in the Los Angeles Times
• Jack Cole at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in The Huffington Post

Impressive. It’s located on Vine Street south of the ArcLight Cinema. Click the photo to view the build-out.

The “Oscars Outdoors” open-air theater is part of the organization’s nearly 7.5 acre Hollywood campus, already the site of the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, home to the Academy Film Archive, the Science and Technology Council and the Linwood Dunn Theater.

Friday night’s “Oscars Outdoors” will screen classics and contemporary favorites for adults to cuddle under cover-of-quilt in the cool night air. Saturdays are devoted to family-friendly kid flicks — an incredibly good idea.   

Said Academy President Tom Sherak: “The events we are planning are an ideal way to share our love of movies with a wider audience.”

Indeed. The space now features an expansive lawn and an adjacent 10,000-square foot plaza, and will include a permanent 40×20 foot screen.

That’s wild. The Academy un-paved a parking lot and reinstalled paradise.

“These are not just screenings, but events,” noted Randy Haberkamp, Managing Director, Programming, Education, and Preservation. “We’re bringing a diverse range of programs and experiences to audiences as only the Academy can.”

*     *     *

“Oscars Outdoors” screening schedule:

Fri June 15: CASABLANCA
Sat June 16: SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS

Fri June 22: RAISING ARIZONA
Sat  June 23: FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF

Fri June 29: A STAR IS BORN (1937)
Sat June 30: THE GOONIES

Fri July 6: SHANE
Sat July 7: THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996)

Fri July 13: TO BE ANNOUNCED
Sat July 14: THE PRINCESS BRIDE

Fri  July 20: PILLOW TALK
Sat July 21: THE KARATE KID (1984)

Fri July 27: DREAMGIRLS
Sat July 28: THE DARK CRYSTAL

Fri Aug 3: NORTH BY NORTHWEST
Sat Aug 4: STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

Fri Aug 10: YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN
Sat Aug 11: BACK TO THE FUTURE

Fri Aug 17: Audience Choice (vote on www.oscars.org/outdoors)
Sat Aug 18: THE WIZARD OF OZ (Sing-Along)

_{Pictured: Judy Garland with, from left, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, and Frank Morgan during the production of THE WIZARD OF OZ, 1939.}

_{credit: Courtesy of AMPAS and Greg Harbaugh / ©A.M.P.A.S.}

Our story concerns the film director Preston Sturges, whose great legacy is his canon of laugh-out-loud, politically tinged screwball comedies: “Sullivan’s Travels,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Lady Eve,” among them.

The former private home where Sturges’ bar/restaurant, The Players, once operated still stands at 8225 Sunset Boulevard. In the 1940s it formed a Triangle of Amazingness with neighbors Chateau Marmont (next door) and the Garden of Allah complex (caddy-corner).

With its innocent-looking checkerboard balcony beckoning both trouble and fun, this building just screams vintage Los Angeles.

[Click photo for detail.]

Reprinted from The Hollywood Reporter (04.06.12) 

Harry Morton— son of Hard Rock founder Peter Morton — soon will open the second L.A. outpost of his Mexican restaurant chain Pink Taco at 8225 Sunset Blvd. During the renovation of the property, which has been Miyagi’s, the Roxbury and Imperial Gardens, Morton, 30, peeled back enough layers to discover traces of the site’s original hotspot: Preston Sturges’ Players Club.

Run from 1940 to 1953, the multilevel supper club, frequented by Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles and Howard Hughes, was a nexus of the Hollywood scene. Morton dug out the entrance to the Players’ legendary VIP tryst tunnel — which connected to the adjacent Chateau Marmont and has long since been sealed by the city — as well as a revolving circular band stage buried beneath the dance floor that he hopes to restore in a later phase of the project.

“When I first got into this place, it had years of shit piled on top,” says Morton. “But when I stripped it all down, incredible things came to light.

The new club going in? “The Pink Taco.”  Ya’d think that a legendary watering hole frequented by Humphrey Bogart might inspire different treatment. Chasen’s, the Brown Derby, the Cocoanut Grove, Ciro’s — all gone. Musso’s on Hollywood Boulevard, imperturbable or so it seems, still operates.

Writer Martin Turnbull tells the story of The Players on his website. 

Sturges died at The Algonquin Hotel. That’s classy.

Dear Miriam Rochlin, the lifelong dancer and Los Angeles dance instructor who died not two weeks ago, had a wonderful way of keeping fit. Thank you, Karen Goodman, for sharing the photo.

• Karen’s essay on Miriam’s life here.
• Obituary in the  Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

What I learned about reggae artist Bob Marley from “Marley,” an inspiring new documentary produced by his son:

• he was biracial (I did not know that)
• he was the soul of jamaica 
• he was gorgeous and nicely built
• he was all music, from childhood
• he was all artist, beatific in the final years of his life
• he was a prolific composer and spurred the very development of reggae
• his good career decisions led to his international popularity
• his last full concert was at pittsburgh’s stanley theater 
• he was 36 years old when he died. 

I did not know that. And it’s very very sad.

Highly recommended: “Marley” Really, just go. In Los Angeles @ Laemmle Pasadena 7 and at the Landmark.

• _{Sylvia Fein, “Lady with Her Baby,” 1947, egg tempera on masonite
  © Sylvia Fein, Photo courtesy of the Chazen Museum of Art, by Eric Tadsen}
• _{Leonora Carrington, “Green Tea (La dam ovale),” 1942, oil on canvas
  © 2011 Estate of Leonora Carrington/Artists}
• _{Frida Kahlo, “The Two Fridas,” 1939, oil on canva, © 2011 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Photo courtesy Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City}
• _{Francesca Woodman, “House #3″ Photographs by Francesca Woodman courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York}
• _{Dorothea Tanning, “Birthday,” 1942, oil on canvas © 2011 Dorothea Tanning Collection and Archive/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS) New York/ADAGP, Paris, Photo © The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY}
• _{Frida Kahlo, “Portrait of Lucha Maria, A Girl from Tehuacan,” 1942, oil on masonite, Photo courtesy of Colección Pérez Simón}
• _{Muriel Streeter, “The Chess Queens,” 1944, oil on canvas. Photo © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY}