Gwen Samuels’ skyscraper stitchery @ A & D Museum

Architecture & Design · Fashion · Visual arts
Looking forward to seeing artist Gwen Samuel’s amazing architectural clothing installed at the Architecture and Design Museum on Wilshire Boulevard across from LACMA.  Samuels considers that when we dress and go out into the world we turn ourselves into a moving canvas or a sculpture … or even a classic building. Whatever building I am, ...

Diverse dance makers selected for National Choreographers Initiative

Dance
The ninth annual National Choreographers Initiative takes place this summer from July 9-27, 2012. During the three weeks of intense creative effort at the dance studios of University of California, Irvine, teams of choreographers and professional dancers produce new dance works culminating in a public performance at the end of July. The invaluable program is ...

Fred & Barrie for the Fourth 2

Dance · Fashion
The meeting of two slenderellas …. in her red jumpsuit, Barrie Chase looks like a Fourth of July firecracker!

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 ...