Review: Kay Larson's inspirational 'Where the Heart Beats'
At a low point in his life, composer John Cage turned to Zen Buddhism. In her book, Larson looks at Cage from the point of view of Buddhism and the visual arts rather than music.
Where the Heart Beats - John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists
Kay Larson - Penguin: 477 pp., $29.95
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, composer John Cage underwent related crises in his personal and musical lives. He was America's most progressive, most original, most brilliant, most charming and most media-genic young artist. But he had reached a dead end.
Shortly after moving to New York from the West Coast by way of Chicag
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Although his is not a household name, Charles R. Knight (1874-1953) created paintings of dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, woolly mammoths and other prehistoric fauna that captured the popular imagination. His murals in the American Museum of Natural History in N
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Odd Future and other Fairfax Avenue scenesters resent the area’s swelled popularity
BY REBECCA HAITHCOAT
It’s late afternoon on a recent breezy Friday, and Val Caruso is sitting outside Supreme, the streetwear and skate store he manages. Lanky guys rolling down Fairfax Avenue on skateboards lean down to slap his hand, and someone cruising by in an Audi hollers his name.
Meanwhile, a young customer tugs the shop’s door handle, but it’s locked. "Already closed,” Caruso tells him, even as a cluster of sweaty boys can be seen inside enjoying Supreme’s in-store skate bowl, which occupies a good half of the space. The subtext is obvious: Although it’s open to the public, Supreme is also something of an exclusive club.
The same can be said of Fairfax Avenue itself these days. Only, the hip-hop-influenced shops along the traditionally Jewish corridor that stretches roughly from Melrose Avenue to T
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It's not often in your life that you hear a heckler cry out "Hoo-ah!" or even "Attica!" But at Al Pacino's One Night Only event at Hard Rock Live last week, it happened way more than once.
You can call it a show — there's storytelling and laughter — or you can liken it to Inside the Actors Studio, but really, there's not much else out there exactly like One Night Only. My mother actually said it restored her faith in humanity. And that's something you can't say about James Lipton's Proustian questioning.
With tickets starting at $100, the room wasn't full, but every person in there was a crazed superfan. Pacino walked onstage, and the crowd sang and clapped "Happy Birthday." Pacino graciously repl
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It's a Tuesday night at the Clubhouse, a black-box theater on the second floor of a condo located down an alley from the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and El Centro Avenue. At the weekly improv show TNT, the group Call Waiting, comprised of Upright Citizens Brigade alums Mark Rennie, Ryan Rosenberg and Drew Tarver, are finally getting stage time after waiting four months, and they're starting off with the one-word audience suggestion "crown." As its name suggests, the group's angle is creating three-way phone conversations.
That Friday, not too far away, at the corner of Melrose and La Brea, an audience is packed up against the windows at the Neon Venus Art Theatre, reveling in the weekly improv show headlined by the tri
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The intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue becomes a new art district
"I can’t wait for it to be perfect,” says Shaun Caley Regen, who has just led the way down from the roof of her still-unfinished new building at 6750 Santa Monica Blvd.
For more than 20 years, Regen has run Regen Projects, a gallery that melds smarts and style in a way that feels definitively L.A. but has an international reputation, in West Hollywood’s modish design district. But she has never owned any of the Almont Street buildings she’s occupied. Rent was month-to-month on one building, and her staff barely fit into the offices it had. She had been looking for a building to renovate when, in 2010, she found this one, a spacious former production complex
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