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Saving Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in L.A. (VIDEO)
In spite of being one of the most unique works of art, the Watts Towers by Simon Rodia are on The Cultural Landscape Foundation's Landslide list of threatened and at-risk landscapes and landscape...
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London Art - A Sound Investment in Allen Jones RA
The Allen Jones retrospective at the Royal Academy's Burlington Gardens is like walking into a great party, full of like-minded souls dancing to the same music, where life and seduction, and feeling...
View ArticleStealing from the Best
The outpouring of responses I received for my piece about Gene and the upcoming stage production of An American in Paris prompted me to think about creativity and influences and the question -- from...
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We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: The Joan Didion Documentary's...
Avery Nejam Limited Edition Print. Image courtesy of Avery Nejam "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion writes to open one of her many seminal essays, "The White Album." "We look...
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How We Learn From Urban Immersion
How we experience purchases of coffee and baked goods may sound fairly trivial, and elitist. But, based on my current immersion in the south of France, I have come to think these simple interactions...
View ArticleThe Face of the Other
Who isn't yearning for a precious week in the summer at a cabin in the woods, off-line with a lake, a book and a Pendleton blanket? Heck, who doesn't have a shred of nostalgia for the simple pause of...
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AFI Fest Presents The Gambler: A Safe Bet
The Gambler combines some of todays most acclaimed and sought after actors, the hottest director, the finest screenwriter and the most interesting film composer to make a flaccid, laughable, lackluster...
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Boudoir for Same Sex Couples, No Different, Really
One of the most common questions asked of Ewan Phelan, of Last Forty Percent Boudoir, is, "what is it like as a straight man to shoot two men together?" in reference to their growing clientele of...
View ArticleFirst Nighter: Simon Stephens' Punk Rock Rocks Steady and Unsteady
Without an excessive amount of ballyhoo, Simon Stephens has become one of the most important contemporary English playwrights. Marianne Elliott's brilliant production of The Curious Incident of the Dog...
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A Musical Mix of Old and New: Judith Clurman's Cherished Moments: Songs of...
Essential Voices USA conductor Judith Clurman started work on her CD, Cherished Moments: Songs of the Jewish Spirit, several years ago, but the project really began when she was a little girl in...
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5 Powerful Lessons From 3 Incredible Women at the Chicago Humanities Festival
There's something important to be said about any event that manages to bring people together, put away their phones and pull our their notepads by the thousands these days. And that's exactly what was...
View ArticleKlinghoffer
This fall the Metropolitan Opera in New York City introduced an opera titled The Death of Klinghoffer by American composer John Adams. Though it was the Met's first mounting of the opera, the company...
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Southern California Has Best of Broadway Musicals Now
Photo Courtesy of Piippin Official Broadway Production Right now people in the Los Angeles/Orange County area are lucky because they can have two great nights of theater, at two very different plays...
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Straight to the Point: Young Jean Lee's Straight White Men
Gary Wilmes, Pete Simpson, James Stanley, and Austin Pendleton in Straight White Men, a co-production with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, written and directed by Young Jean Lee, running at The...
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Single Work Appreciation Day: '#textme,' Peregrine Honig
The Homunculus of Libido Down through art history, a special status has attached to the self-portrait. It is the artist's response to the Delphic injunction, "Know thyself." In the self-portrait, the...
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Harnessing the Power of Theater for Social Change
October was domestic violence awareness month--as April will be sexual assault awareness month. This has not always been so. The intimate violence that impacts as many as one quarter of all women is...
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To Be or Not to Be -- Will SOA's Jax Suffer Hamlet's Fate or Ride Off on His...
All things must pass, even for the oft-times bulletproof characters from the fictional California-based motorcycle crew on Sons of Anarchy, which airs its increasingly anticipated series finale on...
View ArticleAnd the Banned Play On
So far this season at the Met I have seen three sensational shows, The Marriage of Figaro, The Death of Klinghoffer and most recently Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Although one couldn't imagine three more...
View ArticleA Purveyor of Truth (Part 3)
Creativity is a quality we know but can rarely ever define. We know it when we see it. When it's apparent, we take joy in it. And when it's absent, we often cringe. Today, people in many fields of...
View ArticleCopycat Culture: Adapting to a World of Adaptations
When it comes to fiction - which today includes television, movies, video games, and other narrative media - copying someone else's ideas is nothing new. The Romans, after all, openly borrowed most of...
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