February 2009 Archives
Layers
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
February 20, 2009
Mexican American sculptor Robert Graham, who died a couple of months ago, was the closest thing L.A. had to a modern day Auguste Rodin.
Think about it, from the fountain that slithers more than a hundred feet down steps to the foot of Downtown L.A.'s Public Library, to the nude bronze athletes in front of the Coliseum, to the bronze doors of the L.A. Cathedral - with its dozens of icons of the ethnicities that worship in the Catholic archdiocese. Graham put a lot of what he'd seen in L.A. on those doors. Toward the end of his life, Rodin put his whole life into the Gates of Hell, there's even (the best place to see it is at Rodin's Paris museum) a small version of The Thinker near the top.
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By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
February 12, 2009
A parking lot a block from MacArthur Park used to be the Vagabond Theater. As a teenager in the late 1960s painter John Valadez spent a lot of time there watching art house films.
The owner had painted scenes from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin on large canvases and draped them on the side walls. John says right on, when I tell him one his newest pastel works, Muertedores Baile would be a great scene in an early Luis Buñuel film. In the pastel three bullfighters in blue, pink and white carry out a cape move in a circle at a dusty cemetery. The capes and bull are absent. A green-suited bullfighter lies on a cloud above, limp like El Greco's Count Orgaz.
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By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
February 9, 2009
Last month, 123 U.S. Army reserve soldiers in the 137th Quartermaster combat-support unit finished their tour of duty in Iraq, walked off chartered buses and into an El Monte hotel ballroom where their families waited.
33 year-old Joe Leal greeted them at the hotel doors. Until a couple of years ago this was his unit and he still considers many of its soldiers best friends. The list of returning soldiers for the 137th included a couple of Garcias, a Dupree, a Nakamura and a Tran. These men and women put their lives on hold - some are municipal workers, cooks, and students - to fulfill their reserve commitment. Permalink Discuss (1 Comments)Conductor
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
February 3, 2009
The word PASIÓN rested on top of the word GUSTAVO. The Venezuela-born Gustavo Dudamel sat under the two banners recently with L.A. Phil CEO Deborah Borda and John Adams - this generation's most renown symphony composer - to announce Dudamel's inaugural season as music director.
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