Dance-trance at Lincoln Center 2
Everyone has the right to respond to our crazy age as best they can. And who am I to say that the eighth annual staging of “9/11 Table of Silence Project,” a “prayer for peace and healing” choreographed by Jacqulyn Buglisi for 100+ dancers, is not a valid expression of grief and anguish in still-traumatic ...
Fran at the Ace: fresh, frank … fraught!
Of her many accolades and achievements, what we find most cool and enviable about essayist/raconteur Fran Lebowitz is Vanity Fair having named her as one of the most stylish women of the year. She obviously presents well, so she’ll fit right into Los Angeles at her upcoming “Fran Lebowitz in Conversation” event presented by the Center ...
The valleys are alive with the sound of gibberish, courtesy of artist Paul McCarthy
Maria, pictured above and played by Julie Andrews in the syrupy Hollywood movie-musical, The Sound of Music (1965), delivers her iconic hilltop anthem, but in a bizarro version created by visual artist Paul McCarthy, her scale runs do ti la so fa mi re do. McCarthy created cisuM fo dnuoS ehT / The Sound of ...
Tarantino’s dream: the Pussycat meets the Bookshop 2
Women around the world are beside themselves with joy to see movie director Quentin Tarantino bring back the sleaze old days of the late sixties, when XXX-rated porn movies spooled at the bygone Pussycat Theatre. Admittedly, even I miss rolling by this colorful (ahem, it was the color purple) ediface of screaming architecture on the ...
‘arts·meme nation’ fetes the nation’s holiday 3
Jul
4
2018
A July 2 gathering of creative Angelenos was first and foremost a super-fun ‘blog party.’ But lurking at the periphery was uncertainty. In an unsettling situation for our country, truths assumed to be self evident are revealed to not be universally held. Those values have been shaken give the incursions — philosophical, commercial, even life-threatening — ...
A neighborly day in this beautywood with Fred Rogers
All that was missing was my blankie and a pacifier. Then I would hunker down all night with “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the latest documentary from Morgan Neville. Neville, whose Twenty Feet from Stardom shone a thrilling light on the unheralded talent of backup singers, in this new doc shifts focus to yet another ...
Hey, arts·meme people ~ we made it to ten! 7
May
23
2018
It’s our tenth birthday. On May 24, 2008 we were hanging around with nothing to do. We’d finished our homework, played with our Barbies, chewed some gum, kicked the can down the road. We were bored stiff! So we starting scribbling on a Word Press blog-template custom-created by Mark Levine. Topics: all kinds of arts ...
Wade in the Waters: the iconoclastic filmmaker to spiel at the Luckman
The dryest bon mots in town will cogitate in the twisted mind of John Waters and drop with abandon from the distinguished filmmaker/director/writer’s mouth June 2 at the Luckman Stage on the campus of Cal State Los Angeles. Waters’s short experimental films in the 1960s used his Baltimore-based pals as actors and gathered steam in ...
Respected film biographers converse @ TCM Fest
A Friday panel discussion—one of many such interesting events at “Club TCM,” a special gathering place for attendees of TCM Classic Film Festival—tapped the minds, memories and methodologies of three prominent film biographers: Donald Bogle, Scott Eyman, William J. Mann, with smart moderation by TCM’s Alicia Malone. Invited by Ms. Malone to consider their careers ...
Farber on Film: TCM Fest 2018 brings home the power of the press
This year’s TCM Classic Film Festival, which opens in Hollywood tomorrow night, is divided into several theme-related programs. One of the most intriguing—and certainly the timeliest—is called “Power of the Press” and celebrates movies about journalists. All the President’s Men was the Festival’s opening night film in 2016, so this year’s selections are not such ...