Good to be a Raelette — @ Hollywood Bowl Ray Charles tribute 1

Music
A stellar line-up heading our way at the Hollywood Bowl July 11. It’s the Ray Charles tribute concert co-produced by Phil Ramone and Gregg Field in association with the LA Philharmonic. At the core of a packed program (I hope it’s coherent; there so much talent crammed in) — four amazing “girl” singers replicating the ...

Amy Jean Boebel’s intriguing mesh-metal sculptures 1

Fashion · Visual arts
I am really liking artist Amy Jean Boebel’s beautiful wire and mesh screen sculptures. The Santa Monica sculptress and creator of wearable art also makes tutus! Boebel, who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Tulane University School of Architecture, will showcase not this work, but a new installation at Diverted Destruction 5 at The ...

A note from Ojai on the 2012 Music Festival…

Music
by 
The rural town of Ojai is a little more than an hour and a little more than a lifetime outside of Los Angeles. In my mind’s eye Ojai is dreamlike and fantastical, like the Hundred-Acre Wood of Winnie the Pooh (in reality Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, a little more than an hour outside of ...

The opera Pusherman

Music
Curtis Mayfield was a genius and “Pusherman” perhaps his greatest composition. Someone should develop it into an opera.

Jack Cole, the camera’s eye, and the space of the soundstage

Dance · Film
In the photo above from “The I Don’t Care Girl,” Cole inserts a staircase so that the dancer (Mitzi Gaynor, on steps) floats (as in space) at mid-frame. Cole layers men on the ground, populating the bottom edge of the frame. He regularly dispatched men, scrambling, across the frame bottom. He even extended the viewer’s ...

I *do* care that you get tickets for “The I Don’t Care Girl” screening August 4

Dance · Film
The Billy Wilder Theater, where UCLA Film & Television Archive will screen “The I Don’t Care Girl” on Saturday night, August 4, with Mitzi Gaynor attending, is located on the ground floor of the Hammer Museum. The Hammer Museum is the old Occidental Petroleum Building at the corner of Wilshire & Westwood Boulevard. It’s right ...

In a New York state of mind … with Henning Rubsam 1

Dance · Fashion
This New York/New York anecdote comes from our Facebook friend, Henning Rübsam, the artistic Director/Choreographer of SENSEDANCE: Back in NYC. Last night at the MET watching ABT … “Are you in fashion?,” the old lady sitting next to me started the conversation. “Always in fashion. But professionally I am a choreographer,” I answered. “My nephew ...

Chillin’ with a ballerina by a babbling brook

Dance
  Diaghilev hung around Venice’s Lido Beach with Lifar. Balanchine cooked Sunday dinners for his favorites. Ballet impresarios need down time. If they genuinely enjoy their artistic charges, they hang around with them on their day off. Here’s the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet artistic and executive director duo, Tom Mossbrucker and Jean-Philippe Malaty, on a ...

Jack Cole’s magic for Mitzi Gaynor on view in rare screening of “The I Don’t Care Girl” by UCLA Film & Television Archive August 4. Gaynor to appear in-person. 7

Dance · Film
I am very pleased to announce my participation in a truly wonderful celebration of dance on film at the Billy Wilder Theater In Westwood on Saturday August 4, 2012. It’s sponsored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. On that night, as a community, we will view the rare and out-of-circulation Twentieth Century Fox movie ...

Awake in a dream

Film · Music
I am very sorry this lovely video clip starts with a terrible commercial. I hope it is worth the wait for you.