On November 7th, KUSC Associate Producer Katie McMurran and I visited the Wende Museum’s Wall Project, an anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall. Festivities were scheduled to begin at 8pm and were initially pretty small but would soon grow. My anticipation of food trucks/currywurst/music or even leftover Oktoberfest beer went unsubstantiated, although the crowd was authentically German. There was even a man prancing around in full GDR Stasi gear, riding boots and all.

Although the wall seemed solid from its better angle, it was actually a wooden construction, with only a small Styrofoam soft spot engineered to “fall” at midnight. During the hours leading up to the event, workers tirelessly added to the construction at little improvised workstations. It might have gone unnoticed, but the majority of the crowd obviously stood on the painted side - a peculiar reflection of the scene around the original wall twenty years ago.

The crowd started to grow as it got closer to midnight. Around eleven, Executive Director/Founder of the Wende Museum, Justinian Jampol gave an energetic speech augmented by a few words from LA City Councilmember, Tom LaBonge. Also a highlight was the prerecorded message from Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit.

Artists lined up for a little photo-op while Ute Lemper, the German chanteuse and actress, sang a jazzy overlay.

A lot of visitors seemed to be interested in watching the event through a screen. Probably to update blogs… the irony of this is not lost on me. In any event, the Germans kept to the back where arguably more interesting conversations were taking place, leaving the news crews to fight their way to the front.

A peal of thunder rang over the heads of the crowd and fires raged. Just kidding, the bricks were styrofoam; the smoke was likely some kind of particulate released into the air or from a smoke machine to deepen the effect.

KUSC associate producer, Katie McMurran, stands in front of the largest intact portion of the original Berlin Wall. The artwork, however, is significantly younger than twenty years. LA and Berlin artists collaborated to redecorate the piece.

~ Cameron Carlson

It’s not every day that I bring a blanket, Ugg boots, mittens, and stadium chairs to work with me, but yesterday I did, because I was one of the lucky recipients of a ticket to the Music Center Celebrates Dudamel—an outdoor simulcast of the The Inaugural Concert: Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic in front of the Dorothy Chandler.

As 5:00 came, I could see Brian Lauritzen and Gail Eichenthal in their offices, hunched over their computers, prepping for KUSC’s live broadcast of the LA Phil’s Opening night. With my supplies in tow, I headed toward Disney Hall. The closer I got, the fancier the dress of those around me became, until I was standing across the street from the venue. And what had previously been Grand Ave between 2nd and 1st Streets was now the technicolor patio of a Venezuelan nightclub, or so I assumed, having never been to Venezuela.

 

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I popped into the Disney Hall store, where a pair of older women were receiving counsel from an employee on Dudamel recordings. “That one is just a compilation,” said the employee, “THIS… this is the CD that you want.” The women reached for the CD to which the employee was pointing, faces consumed with wonder. The cashier told another set of customers that he heard there would be tightrope walkers at the post-party.

At the entrance to Disney Hall, I passed a hot pink carpet, across which gorgeous gowns and well tailored suits passed on their way into the event.

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Across the street and up the music center stairs, there was a gathering of a more casual, but no less excited nature. If there is one thing I have learned over my ten years in Los Angeles, it is that Angelenos know how to enjoy an outdoor event. Spread over the music center plaza were lovely collections of blankets, cushions and pillows, upon which my fellow ticket holders were chatting and enjoying picnics. I settled into an open spot and spread my blanket as the group next to me lit lanterns. It was as diverse a group as I have ever seen at a LA Phil event and when Dudamel strode onto the plaza’s big screen, he got a round of applause befitting Dudamania. Then he lifted his baton and I settled back into my chair, ready to hear the sound of my city from what felt like the very middle of it.

~Kelsey McConnell

On ArtsAlive this week (Saturday, August 1st), Kenneth Turan broke from his typical film review to discuss the recent controversy surrounding the LACMA decision to suspend its movie program and Turan’s subsequent article blasting said decision in Thursday July 30th’s LATimes.

We reprint the article here with permission from Turan:

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LACMA slaps film in the face

The museum’s decision to put its film program on ‘hiatus’ is an affront to the city.
By Kenneth Turan, Film Critic
July 30th, 2009

Museums in Southern California seem to be losing their collective minds.

First downtown’s Museum of Contemporary Art spent big chunks of its endowment on day-to-day expenses. Then the Orange County Museum of Art secretly sold some of its paintings to a private collector. And now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the museum of record in ground zero for the film industry, is killing its movie program. What are these people drinking?

I know, I know, the official word from LACMA Director Michael Govan is that the film program is not dead but on some half-baked hiatus while he puts his best minds to work “reconsidering the nature, scale and scope” of what the museum is doing.

You’ll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that “we had to burn the village to save it.” That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation’s pros and cons while things are up and running doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.

More than that, as Isaac Newton, no film buff, once observed, a body at rest tends to stay at rest, which means that once something is killed it’s harder to get it reanimated. Especially if that revival is tied, as it apparently is, to raising millions of dollars for an endowment. I can just see the crocodile tears flowing when the museum says it tried ever so hard but just couldn’t raise those needed funds.

If I am being a little tough on the museum, and I know I am, it’s because their reasons for doing what they’ve just done seem especially specious. LACMA’s thinking may seem just fine in the abstract but it doesn’t hold up under any kind of examination.

Take the question of the program’s million-dollar loss. That’s a nice round number, but it turns out to be a cumulative loss over a 10-year period. Broken down to $100,000 a year (and several museum sources tell me it has been more like $70,000 in recent years), it’s a drop in the bucket in an annual budget of more than $50 million. Especially in a city with the powerful connection to film Los Angeles has.

Even if you think that those losses are too big to ignore, consider the reasons for them. Successful programs require healthy budgets, and it has been an open secret for years that the money LACMA has put into its film program has redefined the concept of operating on a shoestring. Axing it because not enough people are coming is like starving someone half to death and then firing them because they’re too thin.

More than that, is anyone doing a comparable head count for the rest of the museum’s collections? Would LACMA shutter its collection of Etruscan art if not enough people came? Probably not. Would it consider packing up its European paintings because excellent reproductions are available in books and online the way DVDs are available in stores? No, that kind of art is considered too central to the museum’s mission to be dismissed in such a cavalier manner.

Which brings us to the question of that highly touted future rethinking of the film program. The truth here is that though things can always be improved, and audience numbers raised, the wheel that this kind of film exhibition represents can’t really be reinvented.

If you are not showing film classics or new work from other countries — which is the model the American Cinematheque, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and New York’s Museum of Modern Art follow — you are abandoning a core part of what institutional programming has to be about if it’s to have any lasting value. And if LACMA thinks attendance is bad now, just wait till its planned interim screenings of “artist-created films” begin to truly empty its seats.

It is all those empty seats that make the LACMA situation especially frustrating. The museum’s 600-seat Leo S. Bing Theater is one of the best movie-watching facilities in Los Angeles. It is also the city’s most centrally located major venue, no small virtue in this traffic nightmare town. To see it jammed, as it was last year when director Christopher Nolan did a Q&A about “Following,” his first film, is to experience moviegoing at its best.

Making all this even sadder is the fact that the economic realities of commercial exhibition mean that venues like the Bing are needed more than ever. In recent years UCLA, the Cinematheque and LACMA have all shown films that in a different, more prosperous era would have gone into first-run houses.

One such film, a new print of Jean-Pierre Melville’s little-seen “Leon Morin, Priest,” is in fact scheduled at the Bing on the weekend of Aug. 14. It’s possible that this kind of thing would continue under a new regime, if there is a new regime, but given the museum’s contempt for the current programming, that feels unlikely.

It is that contempt that is possibly the most distressing element in the entire LACMA equation. To shut this program down, in Los Angeles of all places, betrays both a disdain for the most vibrant of popular arts and a demeaning narrowness of vision about what Los Angeles wants and needs.

Make no mistake, the LACMA closure is an egregious slap in the face to those who believe in film as perhaps the most alive and vibrant of the arts. The fact that it’s coming from the very people whose job it is to protect and promote, makes the whole sad scenario sadder still.

We deserve better as a film culture and as a city, we really do.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

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Check out our podcast of the episode to hear Turan himself discuss it from the Aug. 1st ArtsAlive broadcast.

Why it’s important to support the arts now more than ever.

by Zev Yaroslavsky

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
– Bertolt Brecht, “Motto” (1938)

When KUSC first invited me last fall to write about the importance of the arts to the Los Angeles community, I was delighted. We’ve long enjoyed a warm and longstanding relationship between KUSC and County arts institutions like the L.A. Philharmonic, the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. Opera, and many others, and I was looking forward to a fresh opportunity to celebrate the “Golden Age of the Arts” that had been flourishing in our region. But today, like the rest of our economy, popular and financial support for the arts is in serious peril.

The Obama administration has welcomed comparisons with the early days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, when his New Dealers launched initiative after initiative to rescue the banks, stimulate the economy, hire the unemployed – and yes, make a substantial direct public investment in artists and the arts.

Between 1933 and 1943, the New Deal’s arts initiatives functioned as relief programs for unemployed artists, and as merit programs for public art commissions to the leading artists of the day.

Here in Southern California, numerous works were created for schools, post offices, and other public buildings. Among those which did not survive, ironically, were 10 Federal Art Project murals that adorned the Board of Supervisors Hearing Room in the County’s old Hall of Records, which was built in 1912, and proudly stood at 220 N. Broadway until its demolition in 1973. [Editor’s Note: The murals remain in storage at LACMA, but remain unrestored due to the prohibitive costs involved.]

For FDR’s public investment of some $5 million (roughly $70 million in today’s dollars), innumerable books, plays, paintings, murals, photography collections, and musical compositions were created. The programs nurtured a staggering array of budding artistic talent, including painters Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton; writers John Steinbeck and Studs Terkel; theatrical innovators Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, and Elia Kazan; and composers like Virgil Thomson participating in a Federal Music Project whose stated objectives included a mission “to educate
the public in the appreciation of musical opportunities.”

Today, Congress and the administration call it a day when the National Endowment for the Arts can eke out a $50 million allocation in a nearly $800 billion federal stimulus bill. But even that allocation will be little more than
backfill for future cutbacks, stimulating neither the economy nor the cultural scene with fresh money and new creativity.

Counting both the stimulus package and other allocations, the current NEA budget stands at $155 million – less than the production budget for Terminator Salvation.

It’s poignant to reflect on how important both public amenities and the art to beautify and promote them were considered back in the 1930s, despite a Great Depression that dwarfs today’s economic travails. It’s outrageous in light of the draconian cuts some of today’s political
leaders are proposing.

Los Angeles County provides more than $45 million a year to support its many cultural
facilities and programs, more than any other county in the United States. In addition to the ways in which these cultural activities enrich all of our lives and help knit our diverse communities together, there is considerable economic benefit to our region from the arts.

Moreover, these artists and the arts organizations that enable their work help attract the millions of cultural travelers who are so important to our region’s economic vitality.

But what about our nation as a whole? Surely the America of 2009 can do at least as much, if not more, than the America of 1933. Perhaps FDR himself put it best: “Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.”

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Zev Yaroslavsky is Los Angeles County Supervisor of the 3rd District.

My memory is a little foggy on some of the details. I was in high school, already a burgeoning trombonist, and already getting in amongst my mother’s collection of classical LPs. At some point, though, I decided to buy one of my own and that ended up being a recording of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, with Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. To the best of my recollection, chairman, that was my first classical record. At any rate, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Why Bruckner’s Fourth? I had never even heard of the composer, let alone his music, until about a week before. I was taking private lessons with a trombone teacher at Cal State Long Beach and he had gotten me started on what would come to be my daily bread for the next decade or so: orchestral excerpts. In those days they came in books (probably still do), just the trombone parts to famous and not so famous orchestral pieces that had significant contributions from the lower brass: the Overture to “William Tell,” “Ride of the Valkyries,” Schumann’s Symphony No. 3, “Bolero,” etc. Thumbing through one of the volumes during a lesson, we came across Bruckner’s Fourth and I remember my teacher playing the opening theme — two quarter notes, followed by quarter-note triplets, a characteristic Bruckner rhythm — and I thought it sounded pretty interesting and my teacher said it was a good piece, with good trombone parts. That was enough for me. I wanted to hear it.

How can I convey the impact that that record had on me? The sound of the Berlin Philharmonic, for one thing, was like nothing I had heard before, plush but gutsy, behemoth but placed by the sound engineers at a certain distance to add to the magisterial magic. Bruckner has a particular way of scoring for the trombones — the parts are often in octaves, and re-enforced by the double basses. This does something to the overtone series it seems, because the trombones sounded huge, monumental. The Berlin trombonists also had a way of adding an extra edge to their tone when playing fortissimo. It sounded like ripping cloth. As a young trombonist I related to it strongly; these Berlin trombonists were my heroes. I imagined myself in their place.

I’d listen over and over, very closely, to this record, on headphones. I remember the glow of the amplifier lamps, the glow of the Deutsche Gramophone vinyl, and the special whoosh it made with the needle in the grooves. (It didn’t sound like my mother’s RCA and Columbia records.) I also remember the liner notes in three languages, and the glossy cover with a picture of a frozen white wing, nestled in snow. All of it added up to a kind of teenage fetish. Needless to say, I still have the record, thirty years on.

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Special thanks to Tim Mangan, classical music critic for the Orange County Register.
You can also read much more from Tim by visiting his blog: Classical Life, click here to visit it.