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Arts & Entertainment

LAPL ID: 
3

Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World

Monday, January 23, 2012
01:15:37
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
In his new biography, Lebrecht explores the life of the composer who straddled two musical worlds- born into the age of high romanticism and most prolific at a time of artistic revolution.

Presented in association with The Mahler Project, A Symphonic Cycle for the New World, a project of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Participant(s) Bio
Norman Lebrecht has written several best-selling works of nonfiction, including The Maestro Myth and Who Killed Classical Music? He is also the award-winning author of the novels The Song of Names and The Game of Opposites. He writes regularly for Bloomberg.com and The Wall Street Journal, and he presents The Lebrecht Interview series on BBC Radio 3 and The Record Doctor on WNYC. He lives in London.

Prior to becoming President and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2000, Deborah Borda was Executive Director at the New York Philharmonic and General Manager of the San Francisco Symphony. Under Borda's leadership, the orchestra is building new bridges to the community, among them the educational initiative YOLA. As Executive Producer, Borda implemented LA Phil LIVE concert transmissions to more than 500 movie theaters. Most recently, Borda launched Take A Stand, a bicoastal partnership with the Longy School of Music and Bard College which supports social change through music.

Dark Carols: A Christmas Cycle (World Premiere)

Tuesday, December 6, 2011
00:37:11
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
An original song cycle exploring the regrets, fears, and remembered losses that arise in this fell season. This year, the unsung and the unsaid, the long-buried and repressed, the saddened and the dead... are allowed a voice, and are made welcome at the table. Piano provided courtesy of Keyboard Concepts
Participant(s) Bio
Peter Golub is the composer of numerous film scores, as well as works for the theatre, ballet and concert hall. Recent film scores include: These Amazing Shadows, Countdown to Zero, Frozen River, The Great Debaters, Wordplay and The Laramie Project. He has had a longstanding theatrical collaboration with Moises Kaufman and for ten years was Composer-in-Residence at Charles Ludlam's legendary Ridiculous Theatrical Company in Greenwhich Village. His musical, Amphigorey, based on stories by Edward Gorey, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. Since 1998 he has been the Director of the Sundance Film Music Program.

Philip Littell has written a lot of words that have been set to music, collaborating with a veritable roll-call of classical composers: Previn, Susa, Kernis, Torke... the list goes on. Meanwhile he has been producing work for the less legitimate musical theater with collaborator Eliot Douglass ("No Miracle: A Consolation", "The Night Market", "The Wandering Whore"), and Libby Larsen ("Billy The Kid And What He Did"), has translated Moliere and Feydeau, and clowned in cabaret and sung in clubs, while continuing to work as an actor. He has two epic/historical travesty plays in hand and ready to go.

Photo by Philip Littell

It Chooses You

In conversation with Joshuah Bearman
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
01:10:49
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
In procrastination mode while finishing the screenplay for her second film, Miranda July obsessively read the Pennysaver. Who was the person selling Care Bears for two dollars each? She crisscrossed L.A. to meet a random selection of PennySaver sellers, grabbing hold of the invisible world in a book that blends narrative, interviews, photographs and deadpan humor.
Participant(s) Bio
Miranda July is the author of No One Belongs Here More Than You, winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Paris Review. July wrote, directed, and starred in the film Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Her second film, The Future, was released this summer.

Joshuah Bearman once wrote 8,000 words about the metaphysics of Ms. Pac Man, compiled an entire volume of writing on the Yeti, and has spent a lot of time with real life superheroes, international cat burglars, aspiring Fabios, and the lone survivor of the Heaven's Gate cult. He has written for Rolling Stone, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, McSweeney's, The Believer, and is a contributor to This American Life. He is working on a memoir, called St. Croix.

¡REVOLUCIÓN! An Internationalist Homage to the Mexican Revolution

Saturday, October 15, 2011
01:17:51
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

From the Russian steppes to Spanish and French anthems for love, liberty and freedom, ¡REVOLUCIÓN! looks at a pivotal historic event-- the Mexican Revolution--through an Internationalist gaze, showcasing a rare ensemble of Chicano musical, visual and performance talent.
In association with the exhibition, "A Nation Emerges: The Mexican Revolution Revealed"

Participant(s) Bio

María Elena Gaitán, (violoncello, narration) cellist and performance artist (under the rubric of "Chola con Cello,") has created a body of cross-cultural multi-disciplinary solo and collaborative works performed nationwide and in Europe. A student of Cesare Pascarella, Joseph Schuster Gabor Rejto, and Rachel Rosenthal, her works have been featured by Meet The Composer and Arts International as models for artistic collaboration. Gaitán has appeared with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under the baton of Esa Pekka Salonen, directed by Peter Sellars. She is one of the first performing artists to explore the African Diaspora in jarocho music for which she has won numerous awards and grants including Ford and Rockefeller Foundation funded projects.

Ixya Herrera (vocals) made her stage debut at age 12 at the Tucson International Mariachi Conference singing duos with her idol, Linda Ronstadt. She has perfomed on both sides of the U.S. / Mexico border. Her first CD, Primavera, was released to critical acclaim.

Will Herrón III (composer, guitar, vocals, visuals) is known as a prolific visual artist as well as lead singer for Los Illegals. A founding member of the art group known as ASCO, he has painted murals and created installations since 1972. His works have been featured in museums and collections throughout the world. After signing to a major label, Los Illegals first song entitled "El Lay" from their "Internal Exile" LP became an anthem & rallying cry of the plight the city's marginalized communities.

Otoño Lujan (accordion, vocals) has played button accordion since 1997, performing internationally with music and multi-disciplinary performance groups. He also teaches button accordion at the Eagle Rock Music Studio and at Plaza de la Raza in East L.A. Although he originally trained in Conjunto music, he has performed Conjunto and a variety of styles and genres and has been an important influence in raising the popularity of his instrument in Los Angeles.

Sid Medina (lead guitar, vocals) has been a fixture in the LA music scene since the 1980's as a founding member of The Brat, headlining, touring and in support of major international groups throughout the U.S. He currently arranges and co-produces material for various rock & theatre performances throughout Southern California.

Xiuy (Jess) Velo (bass guitar, vocals) has been bass guitarist with Los Illegals since 1979. Los Illegals have been documented and filmed by such luminaries as DA Pennebaker and Agnes Varda for broadcasts in the U.S. and abroad. Los Illegals partnered with progressive elements of the Catholic church to co-found the "Vex", alternative, music & art space in East L.A. kickstarting the "80's Eastside Renaissance", bringing Westside artists/poets & elements of agitprop to the Eastside in a show of unity that forced the industry to take notice.

Photo by Robert Runyon, Carranza's Troops in Matamoros (Las tropas de Carranza en Matamoros), ca. 1913-1916. Getty Research Institute (89.R.46)

Cannibal Island: An Artist Lecture with Short Films, Curious Images and Free Conundrums

In conversation with Howard N. Fox
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
01:01:03
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
McMillen--part sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, cultural anthropologist and L.A. native-- has been creating environmental installations with architectural references that deal with themes of time, change, and illusion since the 1970s, and his work is the subject of a current retrospective at the Oakland Museum of Art. Join us for a glimpse into McMillen's creative process and current obsessions.
Participant(s) Bio
Michael C. McMillen is the founding Director of Aero Pacific Research, an entity focusing on perceptual cognition and the practical application of the interflexed ambiguity principle. His research encompasses a wide domain of perceptual mediums such as visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory. Cannibal Island will reveal further aspects of his explorations. Currently on display at The Oakland Museum (April 16, 2011 - August 14, 2011), "Michael C. McMillen: Train of Thought" is an exhibition spanning the 40-year career of this internationally renowned Southern California mixed-media artist, and featuring the large-scale multisensory installations, assemblages, sculptures, paintings, drawings, and films that invite viewers into a made-up world, a skill for which McMillen is best known.

Howard N. Fox is an independent curator and art writer, having served as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1985 through 2008, where he produced many exhibitions and their catalogues - among them Robert Longo; A Primal Spirit: Ten Contemporary Japanese Sculptors; Lari Pittman; and Eleanor Antin. He was a co-organizer of Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity 1900 - 2000, Tim Hawkinson; Phantom Visions: Art after the Chicano Movement; and contributed a lead essay to the exhibition catalogue Los Angeles 1955 - 1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital, organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Most recently, in 2010, he curated Steve Rodin: In Between, a twenty-year survey of the Pasadena-based painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and sound artist, for the Armory Center for the Arts.

Huxley on Huxley: Panel Discussion and Film Excerpts

Tuesday, June 21, 2011
01:08:29
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
The Hollywood home of Laura and Aldous Huxley, psychedelic pioneer and author of Brave New World, was a hotspot for the West Coast artistic avant-garde like Igor Stravinsky and Christopher Isherwood. Join us for a discussion of the Huxleys' influence on American culture, plus excerpts from Mary Ann Braubach's 2009 documentary, Huxley on Huxley.
Participant(s) Bio
Los Angeles born artist Don Bachardy has had a long career of artistic success. His first one-man exhibition was held in 1961 at the Redfern Gallery in London and he has since had many one-man exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston and New York. His work resides in many permanent collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the M.H. de Young Museum of Art, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, the California State Capitol Building (official portrait of Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr.), the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, among others. Numerous books of his work have been published. In 2008 the documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story, a film about Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy directed by Guido Santi and Tina Mascara, was released in movie theatres in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.

Ann Louise Bardach is the author of Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Havana and Washington and Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana. She is also the editor of The Prison Letters of Fidel Castro as well as Cuba: A Travelers Literary Companion. She is a reporter for The Daily Beast/Newsweek and was a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair for ten years. Bardach won the PEN USA Award for Journalism in 1995 for her reporting in Vanity Fair on Mexican politics, and was a finalist in 1994 for her coverage of women in Islamic countries. Her book Cuba Confidential was named one of Ten Best Books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times. Bardach started the International Journalism class at University of California at Santa Barbara and is also a Resident Scholar with the Orfalea Center at UCSB

Director and Producer Mary Ann Braubach met Laura Huxley through her activist work and forged a friendship that evolved into the 2009 documentary, Huxley on Huxley. She is currently working on a variety of feature and documentary projects, including The Book of Jamaica, based on the Russell Banks novel and a film on the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop with Bruno Barreto, with whom she co-produced the Brazilian film, Four Days In September. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Braubach was a film and television executive for production companies at Warner Bros., Disney and Universal. She was the Head of Production for Tom Selleck's company, TWS, during which time she produced the Elmore Leonard western, Last Stand at Saber River. Before joining TWS, Ms. Braubach was Vice-President of Production at Spring Creek Productions and also served as the Director of Development for George Lucas' Lucasfilm. She was responsible for bringing together the talents for Mr. Lucas' upcoming production Red Tails.

John Densmore is an original and founding member of the musical group The Doors. John co-wrote and produced numerous gold and platinum albums and toured the United States, Europe, and Japan. His autobiography, Riders on the Storm, was on the New York Times bestseller list in 1991. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. His recent journalistic piece on corporations co-opting music to sell products, was published by The Nation Magazine, and subsequently syndicated in the Guardian and Rolling Stone. In film, he co-produced Road To Return, narrated by Tim Robbins. It won several prestigious national awards, and was screened for Congress, resulting in the writing of a bill. He also executive-produced Juvies, (narrated by Mark Walberg) which aired on HBO. He co-wrote and is producer of the screenplay Unknown Soldier with Eva Gardos,based on his novel, With God On Our Side.

Alina Simone: A Tragic-comic Journey Through the Indie Rock World

In conversation with Eric J. Lawrence
Thursday, June 16, 2011
01:11:33
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
In her wickedly bittersweet and hilarious novel You Must Go and Win, the Ukrainian-born, critically acclaimed singer traces her bizarre journey through the indie rock world, from disastrous Craigslist auditions with sketchy producers to catching fleas in a Williamsburg sublet. Simone performs songs from her newly released Make Your Own Danger album.
Participant(s) Bio
Alina Simone is a singer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in the Ukraine and came to the U.S. at a young age as the daughter of political refugees after her father refused recruitment by the KGB and was blacklisted for 'refusal to cooperate.' After the release of her first EP, Prettier in the Dark and her debut album, Placelessness, Simone became known for her sparse instrumentation and raw and powerful delivery, earning national airplay and critical acclaim. In 2008, Simone released Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, an homage to the music of Russian cult icon, Yanka Dyagileva, a Siberian punk-folk singer who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991. A second album, Make Your Own Danger is Simone's most lush and fully realized work to date, with a larger cast of musicians and exotic touches including flute, autoharp, horns, Brazilian drumming and vocal loops. You Must Go and Win is her first book.

Eric J. Lawrence has a musical mind unlike any other. As KCRW's Music Librarian, his encyclopedic knowledge of music ranges from the latest acts to classic TV themes and other criminally overlooked tunes, hidden gems, and guilty pleasures. Indiana-born and LA-raised EJL, as he is affectionately known, scours all genres, from psychedelic rock to glitchy electronica, in search of the most compelling tracks to share with the listeners on his weekly Sunday night show (12a to 3am).

We Are Here: We Could Be Everywhere

Moderated by Kenneth Rogers
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
01:26:27
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
Are the media arts a sensitizing force? What is media art's capacity to respond to political conditions? Cultural practitioners and scholars explore the role artists play as innovators of media technology and instigators in the public and media art realms. Co-presented with Freewaves
Participant(s) Bio
Anikó Imre is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Her main interests are global media and cultural studies. She has published several books, including Identity Games: Globalization and the Transformation of Media Cultures in the New Europe; East European Cinemas; and Transnational Feminism in Film and Media. She co-edits the Palgrave book series Global Cinemas.

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the "wow factor" of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy. Prior to joining USC, Jenkins spent nearly two decades at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. While there, he directed MIT's Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1999-2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism, and entertainment.

Reed Johnson is an arts and culture reporter for the Los Angeles Times. From 2004 to 2008 he was the paper's Latin America cultural correspondent, based in Mexico City.

Fabian Wagmister teaches audiovisual creativity and new forms of digital creation at University of California, Los Angeles. As a professor in the department of Theater, Film and Television, he was instrumental in the creation and growth of the Laboratory for New Media, the HyperMedia Studio, and the Program on Digital Cultures, a center converging regional studies (Latin America) and digital communications to support the development of empowered technological identities. A native of Argentina, Fabian maintains active collaboration with artists and theorists throughout Latin America. Currently Fabian is director of UCLA's Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance (REMAP), where faculty and students of engineering and of theater, film and television, develop theoretical fundaments, creative procedures, and technological toolsets for participative cultural systems.

Kenneth Rogers is Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. His research and publication is broadly concerned with the intersection of attention, labor, political economy, and social media. He is also engaged with the practical application of digital tools and social media in experimental pedagogy and direct action politics. Rogers has been a fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside. His current book project, The Attention Complex: Media Technology and Biopolitics, maps the complex of political and social forces that have, over the last two decades, dramatically reshaped how human attention is theoretically understood, technologically managed, and psychiatrically and biologically treated.

John Sayles, "Some Time in the Sun"

In conversation with Howard Rodman
Thursday, May 19, 2011
01:15:51
ALOUD
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Episode Summary

In his monumental new novel, Sayles-the great indy filmmaker-travels from the Yukon gold fields, to New York's bustling Newspaper Row, to Wilmington's deadly racial coup of 1898, to the bitter triumphs at El Caney and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and to war zones in the Philippines.

Participant(s) Bio

John Sayles's previous novels include Pride of the Bimbos, Los Gusanos, and the National Book Award-nominated Union Dues. He has directed seventeen feature films, including Matewan, Lone Star, and Eight Men Out, and received two Academy Award nominations. His latest film, Amigo, was completed in 2010.

Howard A. Rodman is a professor of screenwriting at USC's School of Cinematic Arts, serves on the Board of the Writers Guild of America, West, and has been Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriting Labs. He wrote Savage Grace, August, and Joe Gould's Secret. Rodman is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and of the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.

Catastrophe, Survival, Music and Renewal: New Orleans Culture Post-Katrina

In conversation with Josh Kun
Monday, June 6, 2011
01:25:48
ALOUD
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Episode Summary
HBO's Treme (from the creators of The Wire) is set in the aftermath of the greatest man-made disaster in American history. Join us for a discussion of New Orleans' music and its unique culture as reflected in one of episodic television's most powerful dramas.
Participant(s) Bio
Eric Overmyer, co-creator (with David Simon) of Treme, HBO's series about post-Katrina New Orleans, was recently awarded "Ambassador of New Orleans Music Award" at the 2011 Big Easy Music Awards. Overmyer lives part-time in New Orleans and used his experience in navigating the "ornate oral tradition" of the city's stories to create Treme. He is an award-winning playwright; his most produced play, On the Verge, has been performed extensively throughout the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia. Overmyer was the Literary Manager of Playwrights Horizons from 1982-84, an Associate Artist of Center Stage, Baltimore from 1984-91, Visiting Associate Professor of Playwriting, Yale School of Drama, 1991-2004, Associate Artist Yale Repertory Theatre, 1991-92, and Mentor, Mark Taper Forum Playwriting Workshop, 1992. He is the recipient of many grants and fellowships for his playwriting, including NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has written and produced extensively for film and television (St. Elsewhere, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, Homicide, Gideon's Crossing, Law & Order, Close To Home, The Wire, Treme) and is the author of a play for radio, Kafka's Radio, produced by WNYC

Josh Kun is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California where he also directs The Popular Music Project of The Norman Lear Center. His research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (winner of a 2006 American Book Award), co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past As Told By The Records We've Loved and Lost, and co-editor of the Duke University Press book series Refiguring American Music. In spring 2012, he will co-curate the exhibition Trouble in Paradise: Music and Los Angeles 1945-1975 at The Grammy Museum, as part of The Getty's Pacific Standard Time.

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