Cold War rekindled with opening of Valley Performing Arts Center
Please dust off your bomb shelters. Store in there: red wine, brie, and lots of ballet videos. While adorable Bolshoi Ballet couple Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev are tromping the floorboards in “Reflections” at Orange County’s recently renamed Segerstrom Center for the Arts, not to be outdone, a top American pairing, Gillian Murphy and Ethan ...
OCPAC reborn as Segerstrom Center for the Arts
The erstwhile Orange County Performing Arts Center — Costa Mesa, California’s artistic mecca worthy of the 1.5- hour caravan southward from Los Angeles — entered a new era yesterday. In a burst of fireworks — $100,000 worth it is rumored — the center honored its founding patron Henry Segerstrom in a special way. Dropping its ...
Early Balanchine/de Chirico collaboration feted in Aussie costume exhibit 1
Ballets Russes expert Dr. Robert Bell, Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the National Gallery of Australia, shares these images of Giorgio de Chirico’s original costumes for “Le Bal,” an early Balanchine work based on a Boris Kochno libretto. The “Le Bal” costumes are part of an exhibit now on in Canberra of ...
Ronni Chasen’s restaurant renaming
Gaining her first p.r. experience by promoting her brother Larry’s blaxploitation movies, Ronni Chasen soon joined the renowned entertainment publicity firm, Rogers & Cowan. The powerful p.r. macher, Warren Cowan, became the young woman’s mentor, and by some accounts, her lover. Urban legend has it that early in their ten-year working relationship, Cowan took his ...
L.A. noir: Ronni Chasen suspect dies @ Harvey Apartments, formerly Harvey Hotel, El Cortez Hotel
Reprinted from L.A.Times: Ronni Chasen slaying: Suspect shoots himself as police serve search warrant; Suspect had been under police surveillance before he killed himself. December 1, 2010 | 8:34 pm Los Angeles Times A man described as a suspect in the slaying of veteran Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen fatally shot himself at a Hollywood apartment house ...
The ABCs of being Eli Broad
Los Angeles is blessed with a surfeit of alphabet-soup acronyms for its world-class museums, famously, LACMA and MOCA. Both derive from the mother of all art-museum acronyms, MOMMY, er … MOMA. In a Huffington Post blog item, bad-boy Coagula Art Journal editor Mat Gleason posits options for Uncle Eli’s swank new warehouse of contemporary art. ...
Madam Mayor, aka Heidi Duckler, occupies City Hall 1
I’m looking forward to seeing Heidi Duckler | Collage Dance Theatre‘s “Governing Bodies,” a wild event in which the choreographer takes over Sergeant Joe Friday’s favorite digs: Los Angeles City Hall. Joe’s proud LAPD badge (number 714) bore the emblem of City Hall, once L.A.’s proudest architectural beacon — it’s certainly still iconic — and for ...
Royal couple of California modernism to be honored
The extraordinary — and never open to the public — Case Study House #9 designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen for “Arts and Architecture” magazine publisher, John Entenza in the Pacific Palisades will be the venue for the Museum of California Design’s October 3rd Award Benefit and Auction honoring Charles and Ray Eames. Christopher ...
Happy 100th birthday, Julius Shulman 3
In keeping with arts·meme’s devotion to the dearly departed, we’d like to add Uncle Julius to the mix. The great Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-reared architectural photographer left our midst last year. By most measures, his was a life well lived (1910-2009). He left behind the visual splendor of his timeless photography, which captures and defines California ...
A real city ballet for a real city 1
Los Angeles — a patchwork of suburban satellites stitched into a megalopolis — felt urban Thursday night. A smart young contemporary ballet company, City Ballet of Los Angeles, performed downtown using our handsome cityscape as a backdrop. Robyn Gardenhire, the group’s go-get-’em artistic director, a veteran of Cleveland Ballet, Karole Armitage, American Ballet Theatre, and ...