Penny-Ante Three Party | Jad Fair at Center for Arts, Eagle Rock

Saturday, August 1st
PENNY-ANTE THREE at Center for Arts, Eagle Rock

Performances by:

JAD FAIR & LUMBEROB / URINALS /
MANS ASSASSINATION MAN
+
Readings by:
MICK FARREN / LARRY FONDATION
&
EXPOSURE OF PROCESS Curated by Dawn Kasper
With performances by:
COREY FOGEL, DAWN KASPER, YASMINE KITTLES, JASON WALLACE-TRIEFENBACH

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@ BOOKSOUP Tomorrow - In-Store Event with Werner Herzog

Werner will discuss 'Conquest of the Useless' @ BookSoup
August- 1 @5p

One of the most revered filmmakers of our time, Werner Herzog wrote this diary during the making of Fitzcarraldo, the lavish 1982 film that tells the story of a would-be rubber baron who pulls a steamship over a hill in order to access a rich rubber territory. Later, Herzog spoke of his difficulties when making the film, including casting problems, reshoots, language barriers, epic clashes with the star, and the logistics of moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill without the use of special effects.

Hailed by critics around the globe, the film went on to win Herzog the 1982 Outstanding Director Prize at Cannes. Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog's diary on his fever dream in the Amazon jungle, is an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a genius during the making of one of his greatest achievements.

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Call for Submissions | Giant Robot Car Project

Asian car culture isn't limited to tuners, drifters, and SJs. There's also the gardener in his boxy Toyota pick-up, old lady in her cherry Datsun 510, and cheapskate in the Mazda GLC--they all love their rides, too. And there's got to be someone who is smitten by his or her Hyundai from the '80s just as much.

GIANT ROBOT is looking for all types of people who have bonded with their vintage Asian cars. The vehicles can be swapped, slammed, and tinted or have a Totoro Kleenex box in the back window; what really matters is that the driver cares for his or her unique ride like it's his or her baby. Send submissions to info@giantrobot.com.

In Xanadu Screening at COPA

In Xanadu (Film)
Friday, July 31 at 8pm
@ Center for Puppetry Arts

In Xanadu is an epic love story about Khubilai Khan attempting to bring his wife back from the underworld after her death. Performed with exquisite shadow puppets, the piece blends Tibetan, Chinese, and Indonesian theater techniques with lap dissolves, montages, Bergmanesque horizons, and a Kurosawa-style portrait of the controlled chaos of war. Directed by Larry Reed, one of the few Americans formally trained in wayang kulit (Balinese shadow puppetry).

Ticket includes admission to the Jim Henson exhibits prior to the show.

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Go See Nic Hess @ The HAMMER

Swiss artist Nic Hess is known for his inventive wall works composed almost entirely of masking tape. Like a master graffiti artist, he turns everyday imagery into bold graphics often borrowing logos from corporations such as Chrysler, AT&T, Nike and even Mary Long cigarettes. Mixing drawing, bright colors and icons from a variety of sources, Hess makes us reevaluate our understanding of familiar signs in consumer culture. In his elaborate compositions he draws new connections and weaves a loose narrative of worlds colliding and visions exploding. For the Hammer’s Lobby Wall, Hess will present a new work specially designed for the site.

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Thursday @ REDCAT - New Original Works Festival 2009 Program Two

@REDCAT

New Original Works Festival 2009
Program Two

Carole Kim w/ Oguri, Alex Cline and Dan Clucas: N¹
Carole Kim's hallucinatory mix of live-feed video and layered projections form an immersive installation that refracts the live performances of celebrated dancer-choreographer Oguri, percussionist-composer Alex Cline and multi-instumentalist Dan Clucas. The inventive media artist and her collaborators use time and technology to twist the myth of Narcissus, with a visual vocabulary that evokes a dreamlike state in which past and future mysteriously entwine.

Jennifer The Leopard: Leop Year (No Jamming)
The performance art inspired punk collective of Lauren Fisher, Stephanie Hutin, Lana Kim and Marissa Mayer portrays unpredictable artmaker-songwriters whose band, Jennifer The Leopard, aims to fuse feminism and cock-rock into a new genre of post-punk under the guise of an "all-girl band." The band, popularly known as J-Lep, stages a multimedia event featuring songs about celebrity sightings and knife fights while it pits an on-stage "audience" against the real one in a show that is part bitchin' rock concert and part post-studio pep rally.

Starts @ 8:30p

MERCE CUNNINGHAM - April 16, 1919 - July 26, 2009

Merce Cunningham, the American choreographer who was among a handful of 20th-century figures to make dance a major art and a major form of theater, died Sunday night. He was 90 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Cunningham ranks with Isadora Duncan, Serge Diaghilev, Martha Graham and George Balanchine in making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography, posing a series of “But” and “What if?” questions over a career of nearly seven decades.

He went on doing so almost to the last. Until 1989, when he reached the age of 70, he appeared in every single performance given by his company, Merce Cunningham Dance Company; in 1999, at 80, though frail and holding onto a barre, he danced a duet with Mikhail Baryshnikov at the New York State Theater. And in 2009, even after observing his 90th birthday with the world premiere of the 90-minute “Nearly Ninety,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music he went on choreographing for his dancers, telling people as they went to say farewell to him that he was still creating dances in his head.

In his final years he became almost routinely hailed as the world’s greatest choreographer. For many, he had simply been the greatest living artist since Samuel Beckett.

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ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE - Part VI - FEDERICO FELLINI'S 'La Strada'

La Strada can sometimes come across as similar to the Hollywood films made in the 1950s, but for the most part, is a unique and beautiful story. It concerns a young woman, Gelsomina, being given to traveling "artist" Zampano by her poor mother in exchange for money. Zampano makes his money by traveling around Italy, putting on a strong-man show for crowds. Gelsomina has dreams of becoming an artist as well, and therefore was more than happy to go with Zampano, but Gelsomina quickly realises that Zampano is nothing more than a drunkard and a brute, with eating, sleeping and sex being the only things he cares for.

The character of Gelsomina, played by Giulietta Masina, is the highlight of the film. With a face like no other, it exudes a certain beauty but is also very odd, with a definite quirkiness to it …"like an artichoke". Masina is excellent as expressing emotions with nothing more than a look, and it is because of this that the film stands strong. The story itself is simple, but with Gelsomina being such a romantic at heart, she is constantly searching for love and an understanding of a world she doesn't know, being such a sheltered loner when living with her mother and four younger sisters.

Zampano, the traveling strong-man, follows the basic of human instincts, irrespective of their bearing on others, namely Gelsomina. Anthony Quinn gives the character a great ignorance, Zampano being, for the most part, oblivious to the impact his actions have, only wanting to be able to earn money to eat and drink wine, and sleep with women. It is not until Zampano and Gelsomina (Gelsomina having become Zampano's sidekick in his traveling show) take on a position as part of a circus in town, and Gelsomina meets an acrobat clown, credited in the film as Il Matto – The Fool. She falls for his happy and carefree nature, exampled when he teases Zampano whilst he is trying to do his show. Zampano soon despises the Fool, and becomes jealous of the friendship forming between Gelsomina and the clown. This is where Zampano begins to show real emotion, and although he doesn't deal with the situation in the most appropriate way, it is the beginning of his life experience that changes him forever.

The film is gorgeous, with some memorable characters, namely Gelsomina. It doesn't end on a happy note, but you are still left satisfied with the story told, especially the lesson taught to Zampano, although it was all too late for him, and it is not certain that he learned from the experience. Masina is an absolute delight to watch, holding you captive with her face alone, beaming with love. The film is not for those looking for Hollywood drama and action, but for anyone who knows how it feels to be confused and in need of understanding about life's ways.

-IMDB

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Jacques Tati's PLAY TIME at the AERO in Santa Monica

Sunday, July 26 – 7:30 PM
PLAY TIME in 70mm!

In Play Time, Tati's character, M. Hulot, and a group of American tourists attempt to navigate a futuristic Paris constructed of straight lines, modernist glass and steel high-rise buildings, multi-lane roadways, and cold, artificial furnishings. In this environment, only the irrepressible nonconformity of human nature and an occasional appreciation for the good old days breathe life into an otherwise sterile urban lifestyle.

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at the HAMMER - ALSO I LIKE TO ROCK: Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros & Eskimo Hunter

The Magnetic Zeros

ALSO I LIKE TO ROCK
Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Eskimo Hunter
In the HAMMER Courtyard at 8p

Rock returns to the Hammer courtyard this July for a series of free concerts hand-picked by online radio powerhouse Indie. This Thursday catch psychadelic neo-folk collective The Magnetic Zeros (with frontman Edward Sharpe) sharing the bill with the summertime shoegazing harmonics of Eskimo Hunter. Galleries open until 9pm.

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Spoken Word @ the Eighth Veil Gallery

On Thursday night the Eighth Veil gallery is hosting an event with readings from two incredible contemporary Los Angeles writers plus amazing short video work. Benjamin Weissman (Dear Dead Person, Headless) (often hilarious) and Janet Sarbanes (Army of One) both create short works that resonate with characters and rhythm and are equally entertaining in live readings. Kelly Sears creates beautiful, moving, relevant films - slightly hypnotic narratives that create an effect that can be described as "serotonian". The combination of these artists in one night is a masterful stroke (of luck for you).

A night of fiction & video, curated by Kate Wolf
with Janet Sarbanes, Benjamin Weissman & Kelly Sears

July 23rd at 8pm

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SASSAS + MAK = sound. at the Schindler House

sound. at the Schindler House
Saturday, July 25
CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS + STEVE RODEN

Tickets and info here...

The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) pairs these long time fans of each other's work for a first time ever joint concert at the Schindler House in West Hollywood.

Climax Golden Twins

Seattle based artists Climax Golden Twins are exacting archivists whose work draws upon old wind-up Victrolas, broken down guitars, field recordings, drones and electro-acoustic manipulations to produce an abstract assemblage of sounds.

Steve Roden

Steve Roden works with acoustic objects, old instruments, small electronics and field recordings to create "possible landscapes" focused on the quiet activity of listening. Roden will also be working with scores generated by Schindler's architectural drawings of the House, along with "a heavy dose of improvisation."

Pneumatic forms by Steve Roden

Call for Participants | Earth ARchiTecture Residency in Ghana

ARchiTecture (art+architecture) Residency Project in Ghana:

FOTA Foundation, a registered NGO in Ghana is calling for expression of interest from curators, arts administrators, visual activists, international workshop/ course organizers to put together projects in earth architecture, earth art/ land art/ earthworks, and "green” engineering to enable their participants to design-and-build dwellings or non-dwellings out of earth and other materials on its 800-acre Artist Village in development at Maabang in the Ashanti Region of Ghana.

For application information email or click here.

2009 NOW Festival @ REDCAT Kicksoff July 23rd

The annual three-week NOW Festival launches eight new works by Los Angeles dance, theater, music and multimedia performance artists including Oguri, Meg Wolfe, Alex Cline, and Early Morning Opera.

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The Way Things are Looking | Suzannah Sinclair at New Image Art

THE WAY THINGS ARE LOOKING

SATURDAY, July 18th, 2009 | Opening Reception from 7 - 10 pm

Suzannah Sinclair returns to New Image for her second solo show, equipped with an arsenal of ethereal realist watercolors. Sinclair, who is known for her paintings of beautiful women in gently provocative poses, will show works of watercolor and pencil on various dimensions of birch panel.

More info here.

Call for Submissions | California Documentary Project

The California Documentary Project (CDP) is a competitive grant program of the California Council for the Humanities in partnership with the Skirball Foundation. CDP supports film, radio and new media projects that document the California experience and explore issues of significance to Californians.

For application information, click here.

IN FOCUS | Making a Scene at the Getty Center

Untitled (Michael and Christopher Meatyard), Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1966

Featuring works by Lewis Carroll, Joel-Peter Witkin, Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron, Eileen Cowin, Roger Fenton and many others from the permanent collection.

The photographs in this exhibition make no pretense about presenting the world as it exists; instead, they are the productions of directors and actors who rely on stagecraft and occasional darkroom trickery to tell stories. Spanning photography's history and expressing a range of sentiments, the images in this exhibition are inspired by art history, literature, religion, and mainstream media.

Seated Odalisque, Roger Fenton, 1858.

Photo-Transformation, Lucas Samaras, 1976.

A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there -- even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity.

-Robert Dosineau

For full exhibition info click here.

Book Soup Instore

Book Soup In-Store Event:
with Jerry Stahl, Erin O'Brien and Joseph Mattson for a night of John O'Brien
July 16th - 7:00 PM

Better delves deep into the psyche of its subjects through an intricate web of cultural icons, loyalty, covert communications, and sex. John O'Brien's characters loom in and out of a surreal world that seems to float high above the rest of us, but is in fact firmly tethered to the human condition.

John O'Brien was born in 1960 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved to Los Angeles in 1982 with his then-wife Lisa. During his lifetime, he was a busboy, file clerk, and coffee roaster, but writing was his true calling. He committed suicide in April 1994 at age thirty-three. His published fiction includes Leaving Las Vegas, The Assault on Tony's, and Stripper Lessons.

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Half Off Admission to LACMA's Pompeii

LACMA is offering one special day (July 14) of reduced ticket costs to its hottest exhibition, Pompeii and the Roman Villa.

Pompeii and the Roman Villa focuses on the breadth and richness of cultural and artistic life in this region. The exhibition includes works of art from the imperial villa at Oplontis and from aristocratic villas such as the Villa San Marco at Stabiae and the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, as well as works from the opulent houses of the urban elite in Pompeii, whose very name conjures up ancient Rome and other towns along the bay of Naples.

Reserve your tickets here.

ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE - Part IV

Jules and Jim

François Truffaut, 1962, -

Hailed as one of the finest films ever made, legendary director François Truffaut’s early masterpiece Jules and Jim charts the relationship between two friends and the object of their mutual obsession over the course of twenty-five years.

About Essential Art House : Laemmle Theatres and Emerging Cinema are presenting ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE, a summer weekend morning series of classic world cinema from the peerless Janus Films Library.

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Hungarian Rock @ Cinefamily Tonight!

B-MUSIC & DJ ANDY VOTEL PRESENT: Hungarian Rock Night
British DJ extraordinaire Andy Votel will be in person at the Cinefamily to spin tunes and to present what is both a remarkable achievement in Hungarian pop culture and Eastern European film, starring some of the leading lights of both Communist era New Wave cinema and the forward-thinking Hungarian rock scene. Szép lányok, ne sírjatok! (aka Don't Cry, Pretty Girls) stars Jaroslava Schallerova (fresh from her leading role in Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders) alongside Hungarian rock goddess Sarolta Zalatnay and a cast of freak-rock non-actors plucked from the disgruntled state-governed Qualiton and Pepita record label rosters, in this underhanded tribute to the "silenced" pop group Illes.

Directed by Marta Mészáros (wife of Hungarian New Wave luminary Miklós Jancsó) and featuring heavy footage of bands like Metro, Syrius and Omega (who can be heard on the recently released "Well Hung" compilation on Finders Keepers Records), this buried and previously untranslated film, in disguise as a working-class drama/rock festival liberation expose, holds serious appeal to fans of both Polish and Czech Cinema, Mod culture, Youth culture and obscure 70's rock music.

Don't Cry, Pretty Girls Dir. Marta Mészáros 1970, digital presentation, 90 min

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Bob Mitchell *1912-2009*

Bob Mitchell the organist at the Silent Movie Theater (Home of the Cinefamily), has passed on at the age of 96. I did not know Mr. Mitchell well, but I did have the pleasure of seeing him play many times over the past year and a half. Mr. Mitchell, who started playing at the Pasadena Playhouse at the age of only 12 years old, had actually played for silent films in the '20s. It was a pleasure and a privilege to witness someone who wasn't just a master at his craft, but was a human portal to another time. There will be wonderful silent musicians continuing the tradition of live, improvised accompaniment, but there was a certain unforgeable authenticity that comes from not simply recreating another time, but being of it.

Bob's entire musical background and earliest memories lent a texture to his performance that was quite unique; his musical quotations, his sense of humour, his reference points were all of the era. He knew and remembered the songs and themes that were contemporaneous with the films he accompanied, and would weave them into the scores at natural points. If you were watching William Hart's silent western Tumbleweeds -- sure enough, he would play the hit song "Tumbleweeds" as the credits rolled.

- Hadrian Belove

Saturday @ Vroman's Bookstore

Quinn Cummings, former child star, mother, and modern woman, just wants to be a good person. In this smart and delightful debut, Quinn tackles the domestic and the delightfully absurd, proving them often to be the same. From fighting off her prowling cat, to her failure at crafts, she provides insight into an often chaotic, seldom perfect universe.

Special musical guest: mynameisguy

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Tonight @ Skylight Books

Skylight Author Instore

STEVE ABEE
Great Balls of Flowers

Steve Abee is the author of the novel The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit (Phony Lid Books), and a collection of short stories and poems King Planet (Incommunicado). Beck Hansen has called Abee "The love powered bull horn blasting down from the altitudes," and Lydia Lunch has remarked that his "savage poetry demands the reader devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated."

Time: Wednesday, July 8, 2009 7:30p
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Tonight @ the SKIRBALL CULTURAL CENTER

Classic Films: Summer Road Trips

Road to Singapore

Today @ 1:30p

FREE!

In this first of the popular "Road to..." series of pictures, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope star as two American playboys in Singapore trying to get their minds off previous romances-that is, until they meet a gorgeous local, played memorably by Dorothy Lamour. Although scripted, much of the action is made even richer by material ad-libbed by Hope and Crosby. (1940, 83 min.)

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Tomorrow Night @ Cinefamily - Jerry Beck presents: Frank Tashlin Cartoons

"Some people say I'm crazy, some say that I'm insane, please pass the ketchup, I think it's going to rain..." Back in the 1980's I had a brain-melting night at the Nuart when Jerry Beck gave a talk and projected some of his favorite rare and unusual cartoons from the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies productions. I had always loved those cartoons and thought they were bursting with the wittiest wisecracks and the most suave sight gags I had ever seen and here was Jerry Beck showing me the historical context behind the mayhem. I bought his encyclopedic guide book The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons (now out of print) and thought he had the coolest job in the whole world.

This week he will be appearing at the Cinefamily to celebrate a master of cartoons: Frank Tashlin. Over his career Frank directed and wrote some of the craziest and most original cartoons ever created and also worked with people like Tex Avery, Walt Disney, the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Chuck Jones, Phyllis Diller, Bob Hope, and Jerry Lewis. Mr. Beck is just the expert to guide us through a screening of Tashlin's best and rarest work.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 8:00 P.M.
The Cinefamily
611 N.Fairfax Ave.
Los Angeles, CA
90036
(323) 655-2510
$13

What's going on this WEEKEND?

@ MOCA

ROBERT FRANK’S “THE AMERICANS”

Now through - October 19

In 1955, the Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation grant to photograph American people and places. For two years, Frank traveled by car throughout the United States, amassing over 20,000 negatives. The edited portfolio of 83 photographs was published in book form as Les Américains by Robert Delpire in France in 1958, and as The Americans in 1959 by Grove Press in New York. The American edition included an introduction by Jack Kerouac, the Beat writer most famous for his novel On the Road.

Describing the emotional scope of Frank’s portfolio, Kerouac wrote: “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” Frank’s photographs, which have become landmarks in the history of photography, were created with a hand-held Leica camera, often with a wide-angle lens, resulting in compositions that appear unplanned, spontaneous, and are ultimately revealing.

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@ LACMA

Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea

Now Through September 20, 2009

LACMA and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) will present the first major museum exhibition in the United States to focus on contemporary art from South Korea. The exhibition features work by a generation of artists who have emerged since the mid-1980s—some well-known and others on the brink of recognition—working on the cutting edge of international art trends and within a distinctly Korean context. Featuring site-specific installations as well as video, computer animation, and sculpture, the exhibition represents each artist through a large-scale installation piece or substantial body of work. Curators: Lynn Zelevansky, Contemporary Art, LACMA; Christine Starkman, Curator of Asian Art, MFAH; and Kim Sunjung, Director Samuso, Seoul, South Korea

ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE - High and Low

Laemmle Theatres and Emerging Cinema continue their ongoing summer series ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE, with Akira Kurosawa’s highly influential High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku).

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in Adapting Ed McBain’s detective novel King’s Ransom, Kurosawa moves effortlessly from compelling race-against-time thriller to exacting social commentary, creating a penetrating portrait of contemporary Japanese society.

ESSENTIAL ARTHOUSE, is a summer weekend morning series of classic world cinema from the peerless Janus Films Library.

Laemmle Theatres screens all the movies in this series via digital cinema projection at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., (310) 274-6869, the Playhouse 7 in Pasadena (673 E. Colorado Blvd., (626) 844-6500) and the Town Center in Encino (17200 Ventura Blvd., (818) 981-9811) simultaneously. All screenings begin at 11 a.m. except SEVEN SAMURAI, which starts at 10 a.m.

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Tonight! at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica - Stanley Kubricks 'Dr. Strangelove'

Tonight @ 7:30P

New 35mm Print! New Restoration!

DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, Berserk military honcho Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) sends off the code to Strategic Air Command bombers to start WWIII. Against a gallery of unforgettable comic grotesques, including Hayden’s fluoride-hating general and George C. Scott’s oversexed Commie killer, Peter Sellers stands out in arguably his greatest role(s) – as the befuddled U.S. president, the veddy British commander Mandrake and the maniacal Dr. Strangelove. (Interestingly, Sellers was supposed to play a fourth role – Slim Pickens’ B-52 pilot – before illness forced him to drop out!)

1964, Sony Repertory, 93 min. Dir. Stanley Kubrick.

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