Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick) opens November 30,@ REDCAT.

Written and directed by David J,

Co-founder of influential British bands Bauhuas and Love & Rockets

Featuring Darcy Fowers, James Duval & MC THIS
with live music by David J & the Silver for Gold Band

Part delirious theatrical event, part avant-garde rock concert replete with eerie video imagery, this production written and directed by David J—co-founder of the influential British bands Bauhaus and Love & Rocketsfinds new mythic dimensions in the rise and eventual drugs and alcohol-fueled crash of Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick. Performances will be held at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater Wednesday, November 30 – Sunday, December 4, 2011.

This mesmerizing performance considers the charismatic and misunderstood 1960s icon as a modern-day Persephone: Queen of the underworld to Warhol's Hades transforming her room in the Chelsea Hotel into a fog-enshrouded purgatory. Throughout her travails, a horse-headed wounded healer guides Edie to eventual transcendence. The ensemble includes Darcy Fowers (Edie Sedgwick), James Duval (Norihc, the wounded healer) and MC THIS a.k.a. Justin Hammond (Andy Warhol and video).

David J leads the four-piece Silver for Gold Band through a melancholy and droll song cycle that nods to the music of the Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan, while also commenting on episodes in the doomed star's life. The band includes David J (vocals / guitar), Michael Berg (guitar/backing vocals), Ysanne Spevack (violin/viola) and Dave Raven (percussion). To listen to hear some of the music click here

Seating is general admission and tickets are available for purchase in-person at REDCAT Box Office, online @ REDCAT.org

REDCAT | Roy and Edna Disney / CalArts Theater

631 West 2nd Street,LA- 90012

REDCAT is located at the corner of W. 2nd and Hope Streets, inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles.

ABOUT DAVID J

David J was a founding member of Bauhaus, one of the most influential British bands of the 1980s. Following its termination in 1983, David J produced and played for a brief stint with the group The Jazz Butcher. Next came Love and Rockets, another highly successful outfit, which won a gold record for its first release, Ball of Confusion. Bauhas reunited to play the Coachella music and arts festival in California in 2005, a performance that has attained legendary status and helped to launch a successful world tour.

David J has released several solo albums which have garnered much critical acclaim, prompting writer Matt Hoffman to describe him as "one of the great songwriters of recent times."

He has collaborated with numerous artists, including celebrated graphic novelist Alan Moore; renowned author Hubert Selby Jr.; producer and musician T Bone Burnett; MC5 found Wayne Kramer; producer Hal Wilner; poet, painter and broadcaster Rene Halkett; poet Jeremy Reed; and Mexico's innovative electronica pioneers Nortec Collective. He co-wrote the title track for Jane's Addiction's album Strays.

David J's creative involvement has always been broader than the purely musical, creating artwork for record covers, designing stage lighting and directing videos. As a visual artist, he has exhibited internationally. His first play, Anarchy In The Gold Street Wimpy, was staged by the award-winning Atlanta-based theater company Dad's Garage in 2004.

davidjonline.com

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Go See – Chuck Close @ BLUM & POE now on view thru 12. 22.11

Chuck Close is showing new work at the Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles, marking his first solo show at the gallery and first major exhibition in Los Angeles after almost two decades. The showcase debuts small-scale oil portraits of musician Paul Simon, art patron Agnes Gund, and artists Zhang Huan and Laurie Anderson.

Close’s emphasis on portraiture and introspection spans his 50-year career. On an art historical level, Close is both a departure from and an exploration of Post-Clement Greenberg abstract expressionism, drawing on photo-realism and representational portraiture as well as modes of aesthetic design to evolve his trademark introspection. Also exhibiting more experimental work in this exhibition, Close uses a variety of printmaking techniques, most recently that of Belgian Jacquard tapestries. His range of media includes Polaroids or Daguerreotypes, pen and pencil, conté crayon, pastel, watercolor, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper.

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@ The GETTY CENTER- How Los Angeles Invented the World.

From movies to pop music to surfing, Los Angeles has created many of the world's most iconic cultural symbols. The rest of the world has eagerly lapped up the fruits of L.A.'s labor, helping turn a group of high schoolers from Hawthorne into the Beach Boys, one of the most beloved rock bands of all time, and embracing movies that provide a gritty, yet romanticized glimpse into L.A. life. What social, political, economic, and historical forces made the city and its cultural scene flourish? How did L.A. culture come to stand in for America in music, books, film and art? The J. Paul Getty Museum and Zócalo Public Square present a half-day conference exploring how Los Angeles's unique culture was built and how it spread to the rest of the world.

The Getty Center
Date: Saturday, November 19, 2011
Time: 2–7p
Check-in begins at 12:30p Guests are encouraged to arrive no later than 1:30 to ensure they are seated.
Location: Getty Center, Harold M. Williams Auditorium
Admission: Free; reservations recommended. Call (310) 440-7300 or Make a Reservation Here

This event complements Pacific Standard Time at the Getty Center.

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EAMES: THE ARCHITECT AND THE PAINTER opens @ Laemmle's Music Hall Friday, 11.18

The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames are widely regarded as America’s most important designers. Perhaps best remembered for their mid-century plywood and fiberglass furniture, the Eames Office also created a mind-bending variety of other products, from splints for wounded military during World War II, to photography, interiors, multi-media exhibits, graphics, games, films and toys. But their personal lives and influence on significant events in American life – from the development of modernism, to the rise of the computer age – has been less widely understood. Narrated by James Franco, Eames: The Architect and the Painter is the first film dedicated to these creative geniuses and their work.

The “Eames Era” began in the optimistic flush of American victory during World War II, and the global impact of the Eames aesthetic continues to grow unabated today. With Eames: The Architect and the Painter, Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey have made a definitive and unprecedented cinematic foray into the private world of the Renaissance-style studio that Charles and Ray Eames conceived in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, CA. Eames: The Architect and the Painter, is the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths — and the only one that peers deeply inside the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured love for one another.

Despite their unrivaled impact on American design, the persona's of the steadfastly private Charles and Ray Eames have remained oblique beyond the giddy publicity photos they doled out to inquiring journalists while they were alive. Eames: The Architect and the Painter draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs and artifacts produced in mind-boggling volume by Charles and Ray with their talented staff during the hyper-creative forty-year epoch of the Eames Office.

Interviews with family members, including Charles’ insightful grandson Eames Demetrios, and design historians guide the viewer on an intimate tour of the Eames era, while junior designers who were swept into the 24-7 world of “The Eamery,” as they called it, flesh out a fascinatingly complex blueprint of this husband-and-wife powerhouse. Featuring interviews with Charles Eames’ daughter, Lucia, filmmaker Paul Schrader, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, noted architect Kevin Roche and a cast of former Eames Office designers, including Jeannine Oppewall, Deborah Sussman and Gordon Ashby, Eames: The Architect and the Painter provides a candid view of the emotional inner lives of two great American artists as they applied their genius to practical problems and innovation, not out of a sense of ego, but out of sheer creative necessity.


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Bonus Video - Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames

@ MOCA Grand - KENNETH ANGER Icons

MOCA presents Kenneth Anger: ICONS, a showcase of the films, archives, and vision of one of the most original filmmakers of American cinema, on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from November 13, 2011, through February 27, 2012. A defining presence of underground art and culture and a major influence on generations of filmmakers, musicians, and artists, Anger’s films evoke the power of spells or incantations, combining experimental technique with popular song, rich color, and subject matter drawn equally from personal obsession, myth, and the occult.

MOCA’s exhibition centers on Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle of films—Fireworks (1947), Puce Moment (1949), Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1979), Eaux d’artifice (1953), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954/66), Scorpio Rising (1963), Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1970-81)—presenting the work across multiple projections in a unique gallery installation of red vinyl, designed in close consultation with Anger.

“Kenneth Anger channels a world of magic, ritual, darkness, and desire—quintessential ingredients of Hollywood,” said MOCA Curator Bennett Simpson. “His films are legendary and yet always contemporary.”

Complementing the films is an archive of photographs, scrapbooks, and memorabilia from Anger’s personal collection that illustrates the filmmaker’s unique vision of Hollywood’s golden era. The inspiration and source material for the filmmaker’s infamous celebrity “gossip” books Hollywood Babylon, (1975) and Hollywood Babylon II (1984), the collection centers on stars such as Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo, as well as now lesser-known icons like silent-film actress Billie Dove. Anger grew up in Hollywood. His grandmother was a costume mistress, and he is claimed to have appeared as a child actor in the Warner Brothers production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). The world of the classic studios and the mystique of its major figures radiates throughout the photographs, press clippings, letters, and memorabilia on display, which Anger has gathered across many decades.

Kenneth Anger (b. 1927, Santa Monica, California; lives and works in Los Angeles) began making films as a teenager in the late 1930s, though his first work to be widely seen was Fireworks (1947), which would become a landmark of experimental cinema for its mixture of surrealism, open sexuality, and spectacular direction. Each of Anger’s classic films is distinct in subject and aesthetic, though they share an attraction to psychological intensity, occult themes and symbolism, and deeply artistic staging. Anger has been cited as a major influence on the aesthetic of music video, with its emphasis on dream sequence and elevated affect, and his own soundtracks have featured collaborations with Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, among other rock legends. From the 1940s onward, Anger has worked in a counterculture milieu of staggering diversity, a fellow traveler with Jean Cocteau, Alfred Kinsey, Stan Brakhage, Marjorie Cameron, Tennessee Williams, Anton LaVey, and Marianne Faithfull, among many others. Filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, John Waters, and Guy Maddin have all acknowledged Anger’s impact on their own work.

Technicolor Skull, a multimedia collaboration featuring Kenneth Anger on Theremin and Los Angeles artist Brian Butler on guitar and electronic instruments, will perform for the first time in Los Angeles at the exhibition opening on November 19. Technicolor Skull is a magick ritual of light and sound in the context of a live performance. The project premiered at Donaufestival in Austria, in April 2008, and has subsequently toured throughout Europe, performing at the National Museum of Art, Copenhagen, and the Serralves Museum, Portugal, and recently at the Hiro Ballroom, New York, for the Anthology Film Archives benefit.

Kenneth Anger: ICONS is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
This exhibition is made possible by generous support from Karyn Kohl.

MEMBER'S OPENING
Saturday, November 19, 7–10pm
MOCA Grand Avenue
Technicolor Skull will perform at 8pm.

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@ LACMA - Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel Thursday, November 10th.

Director Alex Stapleton’s fascinating and entertaining documentary on Roger Corman, one of the American cinema’s most compelling—and likable—figures, world-premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Corman’s World not only explores the producer-director’s vast body of work—over three hundred titles and counting—but also offers insight from both expected luminaries who flourished under Corman’s tutelage—including Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, and Pam Grier—to Corman graduates who seldom do interviews—Jack Nicholson, to name just one. This documentary offers a complete look at the complete filmmaker.

Film Independent at LACMA

2011/color & b&w/95 min.

Scr: Gregory Locklear, Alex Stapleton; dir: Alex Stapleton.

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DENNIS HOPPER & PETER FONDA - "THE TRIP" (1967) from Woody Braun on Vimeo.

Thursday 11.10 @ Atwater Crossing - SLAKE after Dark:

Slake: Los Angeles presents Slake after Dark, a reading and music series at Atwater Crossing. On the second Thursday of the month we’ll bring on stage the L.A. writers and artists who have grabbed our attention paired with live music programmed by Spaceland Productions.

For the debut event, Slake presents Hector Tobar, L.A. Times columnist and author of the recently released Barbarian Nurseries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Tobar will read from and discuss his novel, an intricate tale of contemporary Los Angeles that some critics are already placing in the Angeleno canon.

“Tobar … has crafted a novel that examines the smallest people—both literally and figuratively—who populate our shared landscape, while casting a wide view on the culture created behind the walls of gated communities, within the vast inland sea of interracial bedroom communities, and on the lost streets beneath the highways, where entire lives play out in the shadows of passing SUVs.”
—Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Review of Books

The evening will also include a live set by local torch ’n’ twangers RT ’N the 44s, presented by Liz Garo/Spaceland Productions.

Atwater Crossing Kitchen will be open to sell dinner and wine; Stories Books will install a pop-up book shop.

Atwater Crossing
3245 Casitas Ave.
Atwater Village, 90039

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Geoff McFetridge @ HEATH CERAMICS Saturday 11.12. -

A seven-week show where artist Geoff McFetridge's
hands meet clay, for the first time, with Heath Ceramics.

Saturday, November 12th, 2011
Opening Reception, 5-8 pm

Saturday, December 3, 2011
Studio talk with Geoff McFetridge & LA Studio Director Adam Silverman, 2p.

The show will feature one complete custom-painted dinnerware set with service accessories for six people, all featuring Geoff's iconic line drawings; hand-carved teapot and cup sets; custom hand-carved vases in both one-of-a-kind and limited edition multiples; Pottock Prints tablecloth, napkin designs and wallpaper; and a series of drawings, paintings and prints.

Click here for sneak peek images of the upcoming show.

The show runs through December 31st.

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