West LA

C’mon ladies, admit it—if you’re not a lesbian already, you’ve definitely given the idea some thought. I don’t want to make any assumptions about our readership here at FineArtsLA, but I know at least half of you have at least made out with a chick in so

me dimly lit back room—I mean, what are our 20s for? We all wonder what the other side of the lip gloss is like, right?

For those of you who haven’t yet adventured to the other side—and for those of you who have—this Friday affords a great opportunity for the voyeuresse in us all. In conjunction with Outfest, LA’s famous gay and lesbian film festival taking place in July, the UCLA Film and Television Archive will showcase the documentary montage film Triple X Selects: The Best of Lezsploitation. Director Michelle Johnson puts the “appropriate” back in appropriation, splicing spicy scenes from 60’s and 70’s lesberotica films—movies made by men, for men—into a romping 48 minutes of camp and cunts (don’t worry, nothing too explicit) that any woman is sure to enjoy. An open discussion with Johnson (aka Triple X) will immediately follow—so you can find out where to get the full versions of the films for later viewing.

Proceeding the discussion, you’ll have the chance to stick around and check out a classic lezsploitation flick, Just The Two of Us (1970), director Barbara Peters’ peek into the secret lives of housewives whose husbands are out of town.

So let that dirty little old man inside of you step out for a night, girls. And fellows—just, bring a date.

By Helen Kearns

The movie will screen at The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, 7:30pm, Friday April 20^th. Visit the UCLA Film & Television website for ticket information.

Wagnerite or not, the Ring Festival is upon us.  Let me explain.  If you haven’t heard, LA Opera spent $32 million on producing the ultimate Ring Festival that not only presents Richard Wagner’s infamous Ring Cycle, but also features an array of events, lectures, and concerts offering tons of things to do for German-loving Angelenos.  Starting this evening alone, one can find a visual exhibit on Maria Callas at the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood, a Ring Cycle discussion panel chatting on “From Nietzsche to Star Wars: The Wagnerian Power of The Ring,” and at Los Angeles Conservancy, see the German influence on Los Angeles’ mid-20th-century landscape.  Who knew Wagner made such an impact on so many aspects of our lives?

There’s one truth I’ve yet to unveil.  I’m not really a Wagner fan.  Yes, Wagnerites, Tristan und Isolde is undeniably gorgeous and the famous aria at the end, “Liebestod,” is truly glorious.  But his Ring Cycle, which features four full-length operas from Das Rheingold to Gotterdammerung, is simply not my cup of tea.  Putting personal preference aside, though, LA Operas tour de force Ring Festival is a triumph of peering into what makes such an infamous piece of classical music tick.  There will be, over the course of the next few months (now through June 2010), lectures detailing Wagner and his influences paired with art exhibits, free film screenings “for opera lovers,” and of course, full length masterful productions of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  In full.

The Cycle itself is four operas, each longer than the last.  There’s Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, which LA Opera produced during their 2008/2009 season and Siegfried and Gotterdammerung which both go up this season in June, finishing out the Cycle.  All four productions were designed by the controversial and avant-garde set director Achim Freyer and will be performed under the very accomplished tutelage of conductor James Conlon.

The Ring Festival is a huge accomplishment for the arts in Los Angeles.  Not only will it bring arts lovers of all shapes and sizes to our fair city, but it also derives its allure from many of LAs various attractions from food trucks (like Let’s Be Frank hotdogs) to the Hammer Museum and from LACMA to Griffith Park Observatory.  There’s rarely a better reason to cross the city in a German-and-opera-filled fury as there is now.

The show on at the Geffen Playhouse, Nightmare Alley, is also connected to the Ring Festival.  Running now through May 23, the show is based on the 1946 Gresham novel about the dark, wild world of “carnies, cons, and clairvoyants.”

The full schedule is about as long as a novel, proving again that LA Opera has gone above and beyond with this Festival.  Ticket prices range from free to $10 to $2000 (for really good front orchestra seats at the opera itself, calm thyself).

Regardless of my personal relationship with Mr. Wagner, when I say enjoy the show, I really do mean it. Really. Enjoy… Just make sure you bring your flask.

The Ring Festival has begun! Click here for more information on the Festival and click here for information on the Cycle itself. Click here to see the LA Times’ complete guide to the Ring Festival.

The kind people at UCLA Live have offered, exclusively to Fine Arts LA readers thank you very much, a discount on tickets to see that tortured, irresistible Englishman we wrote about last night at Royce Hall!  The man: Ian Bostridge.  The performance: Schubert’s Winterreise. The time: tomorrow evening, 8pm.

Click here to go to the event page and make sure once you’ve chosen your tickets that you enter in the following secret password: WINTERREISE.  That will get you 25% off — just cause you’re so in-the-know. Enjoy the show!  (The offer only lasts for a limited time and can’t be combined with any other offers.)

Discovering a new talent is always an exciting and enriching pursuit.  When contemporary classical musicians like Joshua Bell, Janine Jansen, and Nathan Gunn first hit the scene, goose bumps hit classical music fans in waves and they’ve yet to die down.  Among the latest string of virtuosic performers offering spine-tingling performances and inspiring such juicy nicknames as “barihunks,” are Juan Diego Florez (recently of LA Opera’s The Barber of Seville) and English tenor Ian Bostridge, performing this week for the first time at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Ian Bostridge is an Englishman through and through.  A born and bred Londoner with an Oxford education in philosophy and history, it wouldn’t shock any of us to learn he’s also in line for the throne.  (He’s not.) He’s won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Debut Award, Gramophone’s Solo Vocal Award, a Grammy, an Edison Award, and a Brit award among others.  As you may have imagined, he has performed on the world’s most prestigious stages in Paris, Lisbon, Brussels, and Stockholm and alongside the London Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera; in the late 1990s he sang at The Frick Collection in New York and at Lincoln Center.  So why is it that we haven’t heard much about him? Have we been too focused on our Latin heartthrobs to notice an English gentleman’s been looking over this way?

Well, he’s caught our attention and we can assume that his performance on Wednesday evening will only help to keep it.  He’s performing Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, which is a cycle of poems written by Wilhelm Muhler and set to music. It’s melodic, dramatic, and really showcases the singer’s technique.  It’s a notoriously difficult undertaking to sing the Winterreise, so pay attention – he’s pulling out all the stops.  We still get to keep Dudamel and ballet dancer extraordinaire Marcelo Gomes.  They’ll just have to make room for Ian Bostridge is all.

Ian Bostridge will perform Winterreise at Royce Hall on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 at 8pm.  For more information, please call (310) 825-2101 or click here.

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

Right now my brain is 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.

Ever wonder what happened to Ed Templeton?  That professional skateboarder turned internationally renowned artist, photographer, D.I.Y. innovator, entrepreneur, ‘Beautiful Loser,’ and book publisher?  Well if you haven’t, then Ed Templeton has.

His eclectic career as both a skater and an artist has always seemed to be about his own relationship to time and motion.  In his famous photography book, Teenage Smokers, for instance, each medium to close-up image of a young person with a cigarette has the feeling of personal impermanence, like a flash-memory of a kid you might have seen at the mall once when you were nine.

Templeton, especially in his most recent work, seems to be obsessed with these fragile, ephemeral moments, and what they might mean.  His 2008 book, Deformer, which took him 11 years to complete, examines his youth growing up in the ultra-conservative suburban “incubator” of Orange County, using childhood letters, notes, photographs, sketches, and paintings to tell his story with as much physical accuracy as possible—even if it’s all long gone.

His latest photography show, The Seconds Pass, at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City once again has Templeton on the move.  These thirty-some separate collages of pictures, mostly all taken from the vantage point of a moving vehicle, attempt to capture exactly where he’s been these last few years, so as not to miss a passing second.

Ed Templeton’s The Seconds Pass can be viewed at the Roberts and Tilton Gallery in Culver City until April 3.  Roberts and Tilton is located at 5801 Washinton Blvd.  For more information, please call (323) 549-0223, or visit www.robertsandtilton.com.

There is something about our daily commute these days that is visibly different.  Actually, now that we think of it, the streets of Los Angeles have changed, and we are thinking this change is for the better.

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House has decided to turn Los Angeles into a gallery space.  Instead of hanging paintings, they commissioned artists to create 21 billboard-sized artworks that will replace normal advertising spots.  So you can get a daily dose of public art without ever leaving the comfort of your car’s leather seats.

The exhibition How Many Billboards? Art In Stead — much like Clockshop’s Billboard Series, which also transformed Los Angeles’ landscape with artist designed billboards — is spread across the city, but is concentrated in West Hollywood and the Pico/Fairfax area.

We are hoping these artist billboards are a habit Los Angeles will keep.

The opening reception is this Saturday, February 27, 1-6pm at the Schindler House.  On Sunday, there will be panel discussions with participating artists from 1-5pm.  Also, make sure to check out their calendar for other programming accompanying the show.  Click here for more information.

Image: Artist Kerri Tribe’s billboard on La Brea Ave., north of Venice Blvd., on the east side of the street, facing north; photo: Gerard Smulevich

Women’s Rights have come a long way since 1920, the year that the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage was finally passed. Since then, women have thrust their way through the second and third waves of feminism, achieving greater economic, as well as social, equality. We’ve now reached a strange post-feminine stage, where the trend seems to waver back and forth between second- and third-wave values. Women are encouraged to be strong and independent, to choose a career, to foot the bill—but also to marry, to raise children, and to retain youth and beauty. While women have more power than ever to determine their own destinies, there still exists an overwhelming societal pressure to conform to that feminine ideal. Look at Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw —independent and successful, but also desperate for the one man who will make it all worthwhile.  It’s a lot to grapple with—and no wonder feminism has entered this confused stage today where women have hit the streets placarding for Botox and boob jobs.

Joanna Murray-Smith’s play The Female of the Species, on now at the Geffen Playhouse, promises to articulate just that frustration women are feeling with the state of feminism in 2010.  The play stars a ferocious Annette Benning as Margot Marron, a successful theorist of feminism who is held hostage in her country home by a former student.  Marron’s character is loosely based on Australian feminist Germaine Greer, author of the feminist classic The Female Eunuch, who was held hostage by an outraged dropout in her home in 2000. David Arquette, Mireille Enos, Julian Sands, and Josh Stamberg join the ensemble in this farce that is sure to underline everything outrageous, infuriating, and hilarious about modern feminist theory.

- By Helen Kearns

The Female of the Species is playing now at the Geffen Playhouse through March 14th. Visit the Geffen’s website for ticket information.

Finding the lobby of the brand new Pacific Stages theatre in El Segundo to see the debut production of their debut season, Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, is difficult.  The freshly-painted, modern alcove is tucked away in the ground floor of a corporate office complex, squished in between a giant Pacific Theatres multiplex, a P.F. Changs, and a golf accessories warehouse.  It would seem like the last place to see an intimate, contemporary drama in the Los Angeles area, let alone from the likes of Lonergan, one of the best living, American playwrights.  But then again, that’s what Lobby Hero, probably one of his best works, is all about: exceeding expectations.

Lights go up on Jeff—played by the young, pitch-perfect Edward Tournier—lounging with a newspaper during his shift as a lobby security guard at a middle-income apartment building in New York.  Jeff seems like the type to end up in such an overlooked position; he’s lazy, has a thicket of permanent, unshaven stubble around  his face, and is prone to making unnecessary wise-cracks about absolutely anything and everything that crosses his path.  He’s hardly unlikeable, but lacks the ambition to make him worthwhile.  Jeff’s supervisor, William, or ‘Captain’ as he likes to be called, doesn’t seem like the type.  William (Kareem Ferguson), walks with his head held high, his posture upright, always with a direct and just purpose.  He admonishes Jeff for not writing down the exact time when a policeman entered the building.  William’s harsh reality is that if it weren’t for his skin-color and his societal upbringing, he would most likely be a C.E.O. or a doctor, a high-priced lawyer or politician.  But instead he’s the captain of a security guard outfit, the same outfit he’s worked at since he was sixteen.

The two co-workers have a competitive, familial bond with one another that gets heightened when William looks to Jeff for advice about his troublesome brother who got arrested for murder and wants William to provide the alibi.   Enter the arrogant, womanizing Officer Bill (Nick Mennell, an uncanny Vince Vaughn doppelgänger), and his attractive, rookie partner, Dawn (Dana Lynn Bennett). Bill has not only involved himself in the sexual lives of both Dawn and a female tenant of the building, but also in the family troubles of William.  He wants to help out his brother, maybe corroborate William’s side of the story—if he does indeed have one.  But Dawn’s not so happy with her two-timing “partner” Bill, and she would gladly tell her superiors about his nightly, on-the-clock visits to the apartment building, if only she had actual proof of some wrong-doing.  After all, she’s simply a newbie female in the force, sexy though she may be.

This whole situation puts Jeff, the simple lobby security guard, in a suddenly powerful position.  In his hands he holds the fates of William, William’s brother, Dawn, and Bill.  The question is whether he should sacrifice morality in the name of loyalty and equality?  And this is the central question of the play, one each character must deal with on their own terms.  Essentially, Lonergan is asking if an equal morality can even exist in our unequal society.

It’s pretty deep subject matter for a first-year theatre company who’s own lobby could be mistaken for a boutique ad agency.  But just as Jeff is much more than his security uniform suggests, Pacific Stages‘ Lobby Hero goes above and beyond any set expectations.  Under the direction of Robert Bailey, the relatively young cast members each manage to glide past their respective stereotypes, and what appears at first a passive, jokey performance from Tournier or a Vince Vaughn impersonation from Mennell, for instance, becomes realistic and nuanced.  Even the simplistic set-design—a desk, a door, and a background painting—lit on each side by free-standing lights, in the end allows the actors and the drama to take precedence.   I walked away from Lobby Hero impressed and hopeful for the future of this new company.  Then I went and ate at P.F. Changs.

Lobby Hero runs until March 21nd at Pacific Stages located at Beach Cities Plaza/Continetal Park, 2401 Rosencrans Avenue in El Segundo.  For more information, visit pacificstages.org, or call (310) 868-2631.

Rachel Whiteread, Study for Village - 1st, 2004

It is fascinating to see a sculptor’s preliminary study of his or her work. Especially if the artwork has been created, it is a glimpse into the ever evolving nature of the creative process.  These type of drawings are like a secondary, kid sister manifestation of the artist’s idea.

Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993

Speaking of sculptors, Rachel Whiteread, one of the British Young Artists, is well-known for her encompassing sculptures that depict negative space. For an example, the work House is a concrete cast of a house’s inside.  It is as if someone had poured concrete through the chimney, filled up the interior space of the house, and then cracked the roof and walls away with a huge chisel.  But before the sculpture, there were the drawings.

The Hammer Museum presents the first museum retrospective of Whiteread’s drawings and other preliminary work. And the drawings are coupled with objects that Whiteread found and sought inspiration from for her artistic practice.

This show will make you want to dust of your black book to get drawing again.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings closes April 25th, 2010.  For more information, please click here.