Mozart’s magic to mend regrettable U.S.-Cuban cultural rift
Jan
19
2017
A truly inspirational story on the cusp of Inauguration Day comes from Sony Classical music. It’s a new album release, April 21, by pianist Simone Dinnerstein playing Mozart concerti with the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. In June, the Orchestra will also make its American debut in a series of concerts, the first time an orchestra of ...
Los Angeles in freeze frame, courtesy of photographer Michael Grecco
Jan
18
2017
Michael Grecco, an award-winning purveyor of commercial photography, fashion spreads and film direction is exhibiting, as part of LA’s month of photography, a new body of fine-art photography at the Leica Store LA. Printed larger than life, the viewer feels as though they can step into the photographs, and thus, into another realm into Los ...
‘Hollywood a Go Go’ mystery dancer ‘backs’ Marvin Gaye 1
Boogieing with insouciance, without so much as a glance at the performing artist — that would be Marvin Gaye — is arts·meme friend Steve Vilarino. Steve has his moment in the Zelig world as a studio dancer on Hollywood A Go Go, the short-lived television teen dance program dating from the mid 1960s. Steve’s aged ...
Boss talk on Strip in ’60s by Priore
Culture historian Domenic Priore, author of Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood, promises a “boss” time at his upcoming talk on the “Sixties on the Sunset Strip” on February 8. The illustrated lecture, free to the public, targets a specific moment between 1965 and 1966 when West Hollywood absorbed, then advanced, ...
Fierce women of dance featured in UC Santa Barbara conference
We all heard Meryl Streep tell it like it is at the Golden Globes awards. Yes, we did. A courageous woman. We are similarly slated to hear from a group of courageous women of modern dance — they talk with both brain and body. In August 1960, Anna Halprin, at right, taught an experimental workshop ...
Get good weather in a painting @ Pasadena Museum of California Art 1
Jan
5
2017
It’s crappy and cold and rainy out and I don’t even recognize the weather in L.A. anymore: the whipsawing temperature, the nasty edge we rarely felt even in rainy season. That is your arts·meme weather report. Whiny. One solution might be In the Land of Sunshine: Imaging the California Coast Culture at Pasadena Museum of ...
The George & Barrie show at the Barn
We call it “The Barn.” Only in Los Angeles could a barn occupy dead center of a huge city! It’s the home of Hollywood Heritage, the esteemed group of film aficionados who gather in the historic structure where Cecil B. DeMille and his partner, Jesse Lasky, shot Hollywood’s first feature film, “The Squaw Man” circa ...
At Dances for a Variable Population, ‘Movement Speaks’ 6
Jan
4
2017
Remember “Bend and stretch … reach for the stars?” the guiding anthem of kindergarten class? Well guess what. You haven’t graduated kindergarten yet. Moving your body and staying physically active is a lifelong occupation, not just the task of six year-olds. As the population ages, and many of us pass our days glued to a ...
Dance & film co-mingle for a happy 2017
We’re ringing in a Happy New Year with a movie friend, Rudolf Nureyev, who stars in the Ken Russell biopic, “Valentino” (1977). Nureyev looks smart, doesn’t he, in his tuxedo pictured (above) alongside his festooned co-star, actress Carol Kane. But I also enjoy seeing Rudi sans tux — casbah-style — putting the iron grip on ...
