Bliss revisited: Jacaranda’s summer garden party @ Villa Aurora

Music
It’s summer in southern California and that translates, for music lovers, to the annual afternoon garden party of Jacaranda — celebrating ten years of adventurous chamber music performance. The smart music series commissions works by top living composers, and mixes that repertoire with challenging bits of the historic classical canon. To apply the group’s own ...

Hollywood archeology: Digging DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”

Film · Visual arts
arts·meme friend Mary Mallory alerts us to a new exhibition featuring prime California archeology: the recovery and reconstruction of a huge prop piece from Cecil B. DeMille’s silent movie classic “The Ten Commandments” (1923). A humongous face of an Egyptian sphinx-statue was recovered from the Central California sand dunes where DeMille directed his first (silent ...

Beach ballet 1

Dance · Visual arts
The Hollywood Negro Ballet troupe formed by choreographer Joseph Rickard practice on Laguna Beach, California. In 1956, Flemyng invited the Los Angeles-based First Negro Classical Ballet (also known very briefly as the Hollywood Negro Ballet) and its director, Joseph Rickard, to join forces with the New York company. Rickard was of English German background and ...

welcome to arts•meme’s new look 3

Ideas & Opinion
by 
We hope our new design enhances your experience reading about arts and opinion at https://artsmeme.com. New features include: cleaner, cooler more contemporary look! “chiclet” navigator of top five featured stories. category menu allows direct access to the story scroll sorted by your favorite subject area, dance, film, music and the like full scroll displays the ...

arts•meme, stripped to skivvies, prepares for new look 2

Film · Ideas & Opinion
We don’t look bad, we just look a bit dated. We’re five years old, after all.That’s why we’ve stripped to skivvies and preparing for a new look-and-feel. Please stand by, your arts blog will soon emerge with colorful and more contemporary design! Coming soon!

Flamenco’s furor to blaze in Deborah Lawlor tribute @ Ford Theatre 1

Dance
One of L.A.’s most accomplished arts impresarios will float in flamenco heaven this Saturday night when her helming of the 20-year-running series “Forever Flamenco!” will be honored in an all-star performance at the Ford Theatre. Deborah Lawlor, southern California’s key importer of the gypsy art form, will take a rare turn as spectator, and not ...

Back-up singers to the fore in “Twenty Feet From Stardom” 1

Film · Music · Reviews
Providing a spectacular opening event of the second season of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science’s “Oscars Outdoors” series: “Twenty Feet from Stardom.” The badly titled but otherwise smashing new documentary concerns a great subject: the art of the pop music back-up singer. Directed by Morgan Neville, it’s a must-see movie about American ...

Jackie Chan fast, furious, funny at the Academy 1

Film
He kept popping out of his chair; at one point he perched on its arm. His energy was immense and direct. His water glass sat nearby, untouched. He was a Jackie Chan wind-up toy. Clutching a hand-held mike like a stand-up comic, he worked the room—the velvet-red Samuel Goldwyn Theater of the Academy of Motion ...

Jimmy Webb to perform “MacArthur Park” where torch song was inspired

Architecture & Design · Music
This just in from Liz Hirsch, the powerhouse behind the Levitt Pavilions, a national network of outdoor amphitheaters in urban park settings. The Pavilions’ marvelous ethnically diverse music offerings are all provided gratis for the pleasure of a picnicking (and often dancing) audience. Writes Liz: On Saturday, June 15 Levitt Pavilion Los Angeles at MacArthur ...

Party on, arts·meme people!

Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
It was an arts lovers Saturday night on LaBrea Avenue. A throng of party people clustered ’round a new exhibition, Francisco Zuniga: A Centenial Tribute, to appreciate the great Mexican artist and to celebrate five years of arts blogging on arts·meme. The party was hosted by Jack Rutberg Fine Arts. View the photos here. Like ...