Weekends are catnip for movie-lovers. So many new films opening, more than you have time to see, and the reviews are spread out all over the web and scattered throughout the pages of the Calendar/Arts & Leisure/Weekend section of your hometown paper (that is, if you’re sentimental like me, and still crave holding newsprint in your hands.) I don’t read the reviews, mind you!  I just like to know they are there. I almost always wait until I see the film before I read the review; I’m too impressionable. (One of my favorite LA Times columns by Jack Smith was the one in which he admitted having gone to hear Itzhak Perlman perform at the Hollywood Bowl one night, then  checking the review the next morning to see if he liked the concert.)

But this weekend I’ve got a downright spring in my step. Having been enchanted by a pair ...

The Herb Alpert Foundation and the California Institute of the Arts announced this year's recipients of the Alpert Award in the Arts at a luncheon last week, with Brooklyn-based composer Alex Mincek taking home the prize in the music category.

Anthony Davis, one of the three members of a distinguished panel that selected Mincek, said the panelists were looking for someone who was "breaking the mold, not just following in the footsteps of other people...someone trying to create music in their own voice."

Mincek fit the description. A saxophonist as well as composer, his music is known for combining many (seemingly) disparate elements. He uses repetition, not like it is used in Minimalism, but to create instability, unpredictability and surprise. Mincek says discovering free jazz led him to composition, and improvisation is a key component of his work: "Even if something's highly notated, and there's no actual improvisation happening," ...

The pioneering American composer Steve Reich has been hailed by the New York Times as “among the great composers of the century." Tonight he makes a rare LA appearance for a concert of his works as a part of LACMA's Art and Music Concert Series. KUSC Associate Producer Katie McMurran caught up with him after a recent rehearsal.

KM: Here we are at LACMA, and I understand you performed in art museums at the beginning of your career.

SR: As a matter a fact, I was at LACMA in 1972 or 1973, and we played Drumming in the atrium, and it was very difficult because the echo was enormous, but it was an occasion. When I started out in the late 1960's, basically what I was doing was quite different than the ruling Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez mentality, which everybody had to do or be laughed at as a fool. And ...

The number and quality of entries for the first Arts Alive Poetry Contest has been overwhelming. To everyone who submitted a poem: thank you! We hope you've enjoyed reading the ones we've posted this week on the Arts Alive blog. Here are a few more before the work week closes (and be sure to tune in tomorrow at 8AM to Arts Alive to hear Brian Lauritzen read one of his favorites).

City of Angels
by Eddie Glass

I am bordered by the mountains
And spread out to the sea
A potpourri of ethnic communities
Sprawling and congested
My environs are diverse
A focal point to many
Who fill this universe
I am a hub-bub of excitement
Depending on ones taste
Or a den of tranquility
Whatever be your pace
I am beauty, I am beast
Your choice, your belief
Yes, I'm far from perfect
And suffer frailties
Yet no place ...

Every day this week, we're posting entries from the first ever Arts Alive Poetry Contest and on Saturday, Brian Lauritzen will pick one to read on Arts Alive.

So far we've posted poems that capture the experience of listening to Los Angeles, going to the Hollywood Bowl and poems that travel the Southland. Today, a set of poems that deal with that most LA of phenomena: traffic.

Untitled
by Bejamin Toscher

Rolling wheels and rolling waves
Steel and glass sets SoCal haze

Bumper to bumper, stop to stop
Gridlock might make my head just pop

Then a tune rolls from the speaker
Like water to desert, truth to seeker

Washed over by the grace of tone
Cleansed by song on the way home

Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven
Masters mend what has been broken

Where traffic disrupts a flowing peace
There reconstructs KUSC

My Classical Southern California
by Lucy ...