High Brow

There are some pairings in film that conjure eye rolls and looks of confusion.  There are still others that are so perfectly crafted, they practically create a new era of film in and of themselves.  Cue Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That their first film together, Flying Down to Rio (1933), was a Hollywood-style happy accident was more fortuitous than producers and audiences could imagine.  From that film onwards, they delighted audiences with their charm, chemistry, and dancing style.

Astaire, 12 years her senior, offered Rogers a cigarette in The Gay Divorcee (1935) with his sly smile and a song in mind, “Night and Day.”  Dance numbers between the two range from vivacious, Vegas-style spectaculars to intimate, two-on-two turns on an impromptu dance floor.  Their costumes ranged from gowns and coattails to slacks and blazers just as their styles ran the gamut from sweet and silly dancing to dramatic sweeps across the floor.

In celebration of the romantic duo’s 75th Anniversary, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood will host a double feature of two of their most memorable turns on the silver screen – Top Hat (1935) and Roberta (1935).  The first is a comic look at what happens when, simply put, Astaire tries to impress Rogers with his good looks and dance moves during a show they’re both working on in London.  The latter sees them tapping their toes in Paris where Astaire, leader of a band in need of a gig, gets help from his old girlfriend, Rogers.

The rumor that mulls around American musical lovers is that Ginger Rogers really wasn’t a great dancer in her own right.  It’s that Astaire was such a professional, he made her look like queen of the dance floor.  (I mean, he has danced with a coat rack.)  No one really knows if that’s true, but if you think about it, it’s a sweet rumor – they were more together than they were alone.  Swoon.

The double feature of Top Hat and Roberta at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood is on view this Sunday, March 14 from 7:30pm.  For more information, please call (323) 466-3456 or click here.

What is Mindulful Awareness?  And how do you do it?

Right now my brain thinking of a way to describe this new-age, medical concept while sending signals to the muscles in my fingers in order to type out, letter by letter, the words and eventual sentences to communicate this notion to an imagined, future audience.  Oh, and I’m hungry.  That’s Mindful Awareness: the “moment-by-moment process of actively and openly observing one’s physical, mental and emotional experiences.”

To hear more specific information about the proven health benefits of such exercises, as well as how to do them, head to the Hammer Museum at 12:30 PM this Thursday for their free weekly “drop in” session.  Leading the discussion is the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Director of Mindfulness Education, Diana Winston, alongside Dr. Marvin Belzer, an expert practitioner of Mindful Awareness.

What is Gesamtkunstwerk?  And how do you sing it?

Well, Gesamtkunstwerk, pronounced ‘guess-amt-kunst-verk,’ is a term made famous by German composer, conductor, director, anti-Semite, and writer Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and it’s usually translated to mean “total artwork.”  Wagner, in all his “Ride of the Valkyries” gusto, had a vision of a kind of ‘future art,’  in which the end-result would be a synthesis for every art-form known to man (i.e. music, performance, drama, architecture, poetry, etc.).  It’s debatable whether or not Wagner actually achieved a true Gesamtkunstwerk in his work, but his deep influence and brilliance as a composer/writer of opera is hard to match, let alone perform.

At 7:00 PM on Thursday night at the Hammer Museum, Wagnerian singers Linda Watson and John Treleavan of the on-going Ring Festival LA (an enormous cultural compilation of lectures, exhibitions, shows, and conferences revolving around the first-ever Los Angeles performance of Wagner’s four-opera masterpiece, The Ring of the Nibelung) will discuss the intricacies of belting out complex tonal and chromatic changes, while still remaining a simple piece of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk.

What is the connection?  And why would you attend both lectures?

Besides the obvious similarity in setting, there does seem to be a thematic crossover between these two programs.  Both attempt to explain the whole in terms of its parts, and those parts in terms of their smaller parts, and so on.  This mode of thinking assumes there’s a greater organism at work, spinning wheels inside wheels, and what better way to get lost inside these rotations than to spend a day at the Hammer?  Either that, or write an opera.

“Mindful Awareness” starts at 12:30 PM on Thursday, March 11.  “Ring Festival: The Challenges of Singing Wagner” begins at 7:00 PM.  Both programs are free of admission, and take place at The Hammer Museum, located at 10899 Wilshire Blvd.  For more information, please call (310) 433-7000, or visit hammer.ucla.edu.

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens and LACMA are both about to come into a little bit of an inheritance.  The private collection of Sidney and Frances Lasker Brody, which is filled to the brim with enviable works, will go up for auction at Christie’s in May.  According to the LA Times’ Culture Monster, The Huntington is set to get a share of the upcoming sale, while LACMA will be the lucky recipient of a 12-by-11-foot mural that the Brody’s commissioned from Matisse.  Go back. Read that again.  They commissioned a mural, called “La Garde,” from Matisse.

The Brody’s served on both museum boards and their collection and their house are both points of pride for art and architecture lovers in Los Angeles.  Christie’s has estimated that the sale will garner $150 million especially considering that they’ll be auctioning off works by Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, and Degas.

Click here, or here, to read more about it.  Wonder if we can afford anything up for auction!

In an obvious turn of events, considering the children are the future, youth orchestras in Los Angeles have a chance to give the LA Philharmonic a run for their money own their own home court.  This Saturday at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, three youth orchestras have been invited to participate in the LA Phil’s Youth Orchestra Festival Day.  The Renaissance Arts Academy Orchestra, Korean American Youth Symphony, and the Santa Monica High School Orchestra will all take the stage to perform Mozart, Bizet, Tchaikosvky, Dvorak, and Bernstein in concerts set to last all day.

The Youth Orchestra Partners Program has six total participants that are presented with free concert tickets, master classes with LA Phil musicians, and this kind of opportunity to perform on stage at Disney Hall during their two year run in the program.  It is the Philharmonic’s way of making sure, six schools at a time, that classical music programs and youth orchestras are nurtured as they should be and are made to feel like valued parts of our local arts community.

Saturdays performances are set to provide us all with a marvelous perspective on what high school students are capable of when they have the right instruments in their hands.  From 1 – 1:45pm, the Renaissance Academy will delight with compositions by Holst, Bizet, Mozart, Adamis, and Orff.  Run off, have a snack at the café on the Music Center campus across the street.  Come back from 2:30pm – 3:15pm for the Korean American Youth Symphony’s take on works by Suppe, Saint-Saens, and Dvorak – a very enticing combination, if you think about it.

Run off again for a coffee, and jet back to your seats to finish off your day of discovering classical music with the Santa Monica High School Orchestra’s performance of works by Bernstein, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saens from 4 – 4:45pm.

You’ll discover that children are, indeed, the future and so is classical music.

The Youth Orchestra Festival Day performances will be held on Saturday, March 13 from 1pm – 4:45pm at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Click here or call (213) 972-3454 for more information.

A while ago, we posted an article asking what you, dear readers, thought about the distinction between art and vandalism.  Skating the line, with a very charged political message, is British street artist D*Face who has installed two enormous and menacing Oscar statues atop two iconic LA locations: Runyon Canyon and Mel’s Drive-In in Hollywood.  Both statues have skeleton-like figures with bits of flesh missing from their arms and legs exposing Oscar’s blood and bones.  The one that sat at Runyon had a placard that read “Beauty Is One Snip Away,” while the other at Mel’s Drive-In said “Beauty Is Skin Deep.” They’ve both been removed since they were spotted yesterday morning, but the whole incident begs a whole host of questions, not least of which is: really? Mel’s Drive-In? We get Runyon Canyon, but that’s a strange choice.

More importantly, what do you think of all this? The two most basic sides must be: applause to D*Face for exposing a vanity-obsessed culture at a time when it’s at its most self-congratulatory vs. how petulant of this artist to criticize a sector of popular culture that he need not participate in if he finds it so disheartening.

The last time the Dirty Projectors played in Los Angeles was on Halloween at the Jensen Recreation Center in Echo Park, where frontman David Longstreth wore a ten-gallon foam cowboy hat and his upside-down guitar with the confidence of a newly minted visionary. Fans of the Projectors’ odd, brilliant, shimmering music had been waiting for the band to play at Disney Hall since November, anticipating their breakout hit, 2009’s Bitte Orca, amplified by a lush string section.

But on Saturday night, Longstreth looked small and befuddled on the Disney Hall stage, fiddling with the tuning of his guitars for a half an hour during intermission. Longstreth is 28, with the refractory brain of a brilliant twelve-year-old with attention deficit disorder and the composing abilities of Mozart on mushrooms in Africa. After Saturday night, the audience learned his musical influences include Ligeti, Wagner, Ravel, and Don Henley.

Don Henley might seem like an odd choice. The program notes include an earnest letter Longstreth sent Henley in 2005, accompanying a free copy of The Getty Address, Longstreth’s 2005 opera about materialism, the homogenization of FM radio, and Sacagewea, or something like that. “I have included a copy of it here for you,” Longstreth wrote to Henley. “The album examines the question of what is wilderness in a world completely circumscribed by highways, once Manifest Destiny has no place to go- but in the end it is a love story.” Clearly, this makes sense to only one person: Longstreth himself.

The program was divided into three parts: the Philharmonic playing alone, the Projectors playing The Getty Address along with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, and the Projectors playing alone. The program began with selections Longstreth hand-picked for the Philharmonic. Highlights included Ligeti’s Etude No. 13, played by gray-haired John Orge, who lingered on the piano keys after the last high notes for a long, indulgent silence, and Ravel’s beautifully orchestrated Mother Goose Suite. After a long intermission, the Projectors emerged, wearing color-coordinated hooded jackets, to play The Getty Address in its entirety. And here is where the problems began.

Truthfully, the opera is an indulgent college project from a very, very talented student, with glimpses of the Projectors’ current, much more successful musical incarnation nestled in like raisins studded into a very wobbly gray oatmeal. In the first song (er, movement), “I Sit on the Ridge at Dusk,” the beat kicked in, and the Projectorettes (Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle, and Angel Deradoorian) wailed “got a world of trouble on my mind,” in an indistinct language, moving very slightly from side to side, like shy sirens. But momentum was lost on the second song, and the album is so complex, the time signatures so twisted, it seemed that no amount of practice could have nailed it down. It didn’t help that Alarm Will Sound had some spotty synchronicity and tuning moments. The long, drifting passages on “But in the Headlights” and “Gilt Gold Scabs” sounded misguided and naked, as though a player were missing. Some members played on wine bottles, and a base flute was involved, as well as lots of gratuitous hand-clapping, which sounded messy at times, perhaps on purpose. Many in the audience began to get restless, but the ensemble soldiered on to no avail.

After the opera finally ended, the Projectors (minus their drummer) took the stage for three songs: a very slow cover of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” as well as their own “Temecula Sunrise” and “Cannibal Resource” from Bitte Orca. They sounded good, and Longstreth’s singing sounded much more comfortable, but the band would have sounded much better with a whole orchestra backing them up. None of the women got to sing lead on any song, though Angel Deradoorian singing “Two Doves” would have sounded lovely in this acoustic setting.

All in all, the event demonstrated what the Projectors are capable of musically. It also showed that some misguided musical experiments are better laid to rest, no matter how brilliant their 23-year-old composer may be. As the Eagles said, “And I don’t want to hear any more/ No, no, baby/ I don’t want to hear any more.” Here’s hoping the Projectors stick to Bitte Orca from now on.

By Cassandra McGrath of CWG Magazine

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is located at 111 South Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles.  For more information on upcoming shows, please call (213) 972-7211, or visit www.laphil.com.

I recently found myself sitting on a couch in a dark room inside the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts at USC watching a play-test of a brand-new interactive video game.  I use the term ‘interactive,’ because it was less like your typical Nintendo or PlayStation proceeding, and more akin to one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ movies, only digitalized, intricately detailed, and not a little influenced by the likes of Spielberg or Christopher Nolan.  The game takes place in a slightly futuristic society, and at one point, the protagonist, a detective, is sitting in his beat-down, windowless office going over clues, when he puts on a pair of special sunglasses.  These sunglasses allow him, and by proxy, us, the audience, to perceive his spacial environment as a pristine mountain-top, or a Redwood forest.  The effect is novel, and provokes a round of ‘wouldn’t-that-be-cool’ comments from anybody who’s watching, yet it also brings up an interesting, modern phenomenon.  I call it the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome, and it works like this: you’re sitting in a beat-down, windowless office, but…it’s not to you.

Don’t get me wrong, this syndrome is hardly new or original, although it is intensifying in our digital age.  And one person who’s exploring this intensification is artist Jeffrey Wells with his newest exhibit Seeing While Seeing at the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Art.  Wells attempts to recreate the optical illusions of everyday life—the after-image of an exit sign, the undulating intersection of two vertical walls that meet at a right-angle—using video projections.  Thus the viewer is left questioning whether or not an illusion is physical or digital.  Both are percepts, separate from what some would call “objective reality,” but only one is an intentionally manipulated percept.

What Wells—along with the interactive video game, to a certain extent—may be attempting to illustrate is the danger of the ‘it’s not to you’ syndrome.  Because how do you really know what is?  Or who’s presenting what to you, for that matter?  And as the line between what is and what is to you gets smaller and smaller, what becomes of you?

Jeffrey Wells’s Seeing While Seeing is on view until April 17th at Project Room 1 in the Bergamont Station Arts Center, a part of the Santa Monica Museum of Arts.  Bergamont Station is located at 2525 Michigan Ave, Building G-1.  For more information, please call (310) 586-6488, or visit www.smmoa.org.

The Academy Awards are upon us.  Like St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland or Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Oscar weekend takes over the city of Los Angeles in a joyous display of self-congratulations.  Don’t get me wrong, being from Los Angeles makes it actually required (I believe it’s legally binding) that I watch and enjoy all that the Oscars have to offer each year.  Going into the final stretch before the big show, I feel an annual commitment to seeing all, or most, of the nominated films so that when yelling at the TV, I will be doing so with educated qualms.  The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood seems to have similar obligations, which must be why they are setting all of us up this week with a number of programs to get us good and ready for Sunday evening’s broadcast.

Before taking a look at this week’s programs, let’s just be clear – there are ten films up for Best Picture this year.  See whichever ones you feel drawn to; ten is a lot.  If, for example, you feel like you’ve seen District 9 once you finish the trailer, save your $10 or go see The Hurt Locker again.  Don’t be hard on yourself if you haven’t seen them all, I’d bet that there really are only 5 contenders anyway.

Over at the Egyptian Theatre, though, your pre-Oscar education can get underway with Fridat evenings show of Oscar-Nominated Short Films – Animated and Live Action.  You’ll get a chance to see shorts like “The Lady and the Reaper,” “A Matter of Loaf and Death,” “French Roast,” “Instead of Abracadabra,” and my personal favorite “The New Tenants.”

Head back into Hollywood on Saturday morning at 10am (no whining, this is Oscar weekend – we’ve got to get you in shape!) for their Invisible Art, Visible Artists panel with the Oscar-Nominated editors of Avatar, District 9, The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, and Precious.  Stop off for lunch somewhere nearby, but don’t stray too far.  The panel with Oscar-Nominated Art Directors begins at 2:30pm and will give you the chance to discuss your ideas for set design with those creative minds behind The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Avatar, Nine, Sherlock Holmes, and The Young Victoria.

You’re all set and squared away.  You should feel very capable of making some educated bets – not that we encourage gambling… much.  Here’s to the Oscars – LA’s version of a national holiday.  (Good luck making a reservation just about anywhere in town this week, too.)

Click here to check out the Egyptian Theatre’s full calendar of events.

When most people think of portraiture, images of aristocracy adorned in their finest medieval robes atop a crackling grand fireplace in some remote European castle probably come to mind.  When I mention that I focused on 18th-19th Century portraiture in college, people look as if they’re about to fall asleep before I can finish the sentence.  But this past Saturday, I attended a lecture at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum presented by John Klein, Associate Professor from Washington University in St. Louis, that reminded me of the magnetism and presence of portraits. In his lecture, “Matisse, Picasso and Beyond: How Portraiture Survived Modernism,” he examined the means by which the art of human representation prevailed through an era defined by its antipathy to historical convention.  Through the study of modernist masters like Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti, Klein arrives at a universal truth: human beings will always and forever be obsessed with themselves, others, and how others perceive them.

“Damn Portraits!” began Professor Klein, quoting Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres—an abrupt and honest exclamation that served as a perfect prelude to the difficult battle that portraiture was doomed to fight once the modern age descended on a timeless artistic tradition.  Ingres, like many artists of his time, despised portraiture.

He often complained that the overwhelming number of commissions from high society kept him from focusing on “more important” subject matter.  In the 19th Century, it seemed as if the only demographic that had an affinity for portraiture was the social elite.  When the 20th Century began, many creative figures decried the art form’s declining relevance.  Portraiture posed a series of difficult questions for the artist: How does one capture the complexity of human identity? How can an inner quality be expressed outwardly?  How can a still representation do justice to a personality trait that is defined by its movement? Modernism, says Klein, provided the platform that was so desperately needed: a movement that joined portraiture with the abstraction of the avant-garde.

Through an array of examples, Klein revealed how artists like Picasso and Matisse were uninterested with the centrality of the sitter, which historically would have been fundamental.  In works like Girl with Green Eyes (1908), Matisse blended his sitters into a decorative pattern where no single component of the painting could dominate.  Picasso’s Gertrude Stein (1906), on the other hand, showcases both the artist and the sitter, serving as a visual statement of the height and legitimacy of both Stein’s and Picasso’s careers. Klein taught the audience that through the execution of her face, as was common with many of Picasso’s portraits, the artist imposed a mask-like quality that hardly resembled Stein’s genuine appearance. The primitivization of her face is a symbolic and telling mark of the beginning of an important aesthetic shift.

After the First World War, artists became increasingly cynical of humanistic values, and rapid advances in photographic technology threatened representational portraiture.  Expressive abstraction began to take hold, providing the artist with infinite ways to communicate power, status and legitimacy—and the line between art and vulgarity became harder to define.  Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995) is an example of how modern portraiture could become a PR dream come true. Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley, a woman convicted of murdering multiple innocent child victims, is comprised of tiny flesh colored hands, hands meant to represent those of the children that she murdered.

Portraiture’s many levels of expression, as in Myra, have the potential for endless symbolism and emotion.  I could feel the tension in the lecture hall when Myra came on screen, and I could see that the man next to me was trying to conceal his goose bumps.

Professor Klein’s lecture was most certainly a personal highlight of my many years of studying and appreciating portraiture. Regardless of one’s knowledge of art, he was able to communicate his subject with admirable passion and vigor.  Professor Klein carried the double-barreled theme of portraiture and its modernist survival from the turn of the 20th Century through the fall of Saddam Hussein. It was quite frankly one of the most fun Saturdays I’ve had in a while, and I don’t think I was alone.  The jam-packed lecture hall’s enthusiastic applause was proof enough that nobody was falling asleep before Klein could finish his sentences.

-By Brittany Krasner

The Norton Simon’s calendar of educational lectures will certainly expand your art related intellectual repertoire.  For more information on upcoming lectures, please visit their website.

From George Washington on the Delaware, to Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Katrina on the Gulf, rivers make up an integral part of the geographical, historical, cultural, political, and artistic landscape of the America we know.  And Los Angeles is no exception.  Yes it’s true that for the good part of the year, the L.A. River remains hopelessly barren, and provides a better bike path to Long Beach than it does a waterway.  But if you’ve ever actually step foot into that mighty concrete divider of our city, then you’d know it’s every bit as organic and symbolic as any other great river.  Whether it’s the plastic bag trees, the graffiti-worn banks, or the garbage disposal current, one would be hard-pressed to not find the same beauty that Mark Twain once described in his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, as “…a wonderful book…which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice.”

On show until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the collective exhibition entitled The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River (UGLAR for short) also uses the metaphor of a book, only this one screams its secrets.  Consisting of a wide range of contemporary, LA-based artists, this unique assortment of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and illustrations all converge like tributaries into one central theme: the Los Angeles River.

One oil painting called “Confluence” by Tyson Dolan portrays the intersection of two concrete canals, meeting and opening into the space of the viewer.  The colors are muted, almost foggy, and with the installed background sounds of dripping water and distant train bells echoing throughout the room, one gets the distinct feeling of being alone and drifting through Dolan’s industrial river-basin.

Another piece, up-and-comer Rob Sato’s “Land Admiral Lefebvre’s Fleet Makes Sail”, takes a more surreal, maximalist route.  This multi-medium, ‘Where’s Waldo’ mash-up depicts an elaborate, farcical, eighteenth-century showdown between the Blue-Coats and the Reds on the battlefield of the Los Angeles River.  There’s of course no water for the huge wooden ships, so the implied Admiral Lefebvre sails upon his own ocean, with hundreds of tiny minions carrying the actual waves themselves.  Not to be ignored in this spectacle are Sato’s frequent dips into brash absurdity: slave-like giants, a monstrous fish-man-beast riding a whale like an Avatar pterodactyl, and if you look hard enough, a modern car wreck upon the bridge over the river.

The biggest work on show, however, is a mural completed by all the contributing artists.  It’s title is “The River Experiment,” and it speaks to the theme of the collection, which is one of evolution, or perhaps more accurately, mutation.  Because The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River – to complete Mark Twain’s quote – “[is] not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

The Ulysses Guide to the Los Angeles River runs until July 3^rd at the Pasadena Museum of California Art.  For more information, please visit pmcaonline.org, or call (626) 568-3665.