Archive for February, 2010
Getty’s Foundation: Dirty Projectors Play Disney Hall
If music can be seen as a running conversation — as knowledge stacked up and passed down from one musician to the next — then that conversation can only improve with time. Survey today’s landscape and it seems that things have expanded exponentially: The information i…
Twin Soldiers: Corinne Bailey Rae and Sade
It wasn’t the vision of grief most were expecting. Sitting on a stool holding her guitar, accompanied only by a pianist on the British TV show Later with Jools Holland, Corinne Bailey Rae was, in a word, gorgeous. Gone was the pretty, slightly nerdy English Lit major who…
Understating the Obvious
Does it really need to be said? There’s a commonplace in our reality-TV talk-show Culture of Confession that dancing around an unspoken truth with repartee is really the art of evasion. What’s worse, it’s not manly, it’s cowardly — Noël Cowardly. It starts with the ide…
Theater Reviews: The Ballad of Emmett Till, Dual Citizens, The Subject Was Roses
THE BALLAD OF EMMETT TILL Shirley Jo Finney directs a vivacious five-person ensemble in Ifa Bayeza’s choreopoem based on the life and death of the 14-year-old black child from Chicago, brutally murdered during a 1955 working vacation in Mississippi, for the “crime” of whistling a…
Patti Smith: Dreams of Life and Death
Patti Smith steps onstage with a shy, joyous grin, as if still surprised by the applause. At the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater to perform a tribute to her friend, the late folk archivist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith, she rests her coffee cup on a stool and reads pass…
Unscrupulous Employers Skim $26.2 Million
Ruth Milkman is not in PR. But if she had been, she’d probably move the following statistic from the 53rd page of her month-old UCLA study to the front, where it might have had a fighting chance of being read, and then reported, by local media (it wasn’t): Every week, employers i…
The Longest Day: L.A. Street Food Fest
In my experience, you are either a festival guy or you are not; you enjoy floating into Coachella or SXSW, or you wait a few days to check out the band you want to hear at the Henry Fonda instead. Either approach can be wonderful — I have sworn never to visit Burning Man, b…
The Real McCoy: Hatfield’s Revisited
The main dining room at Citrus lay at the heart of California cooking in the mid-1980s, a clean, white space opening directly onto the restaurant’s vast open kitchen, where you imagined you could follow the progress of your appetizer from garde manger to hot line to the spot where Michel…
Best of the Oaxacans: A Mole Here, a Mole there …
Dear Mr. Gold:
I have friends coming from NYC and they’ve been asking about Oaxacan food. Oaxacan food? I’d like to find a great place, and what I mean by great is very good food and not a truck.
—Sherry, Manhattan Beach
Dear Sherry:
Los…
Sending Trutanich to His Corner
Carmen Trutanich, the bulky and bullheaded city attorney, has been in office for seven months, and has wasted little of that time making friends.
He has declared war on billboards, feuded with the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns Staples Center, and taken aim at the…