Category: AJBlogs

Marko Remec’s 2018 piece Vertebrate Progression (Field Totem), commissioned for the grounds of a Long Island art museum, has already been damaged by visitors sitting on parts of it. One takeaway for custodians of outdoor sculpture in difficult-to-guard public settings may be that such works had better be less fragile. But that’s blaming the victim. – Lee Rosenbaum

Earlier this month I highlighted three factors fueling a growing international interest in community engagement and the arts: economics, demographics, and funders’ demands for much broader community impact than is typical with Eurocentric arts organizations. It seems like a little expansion on these existential threats to the status quo might be in order. – Doug Borwick

The jazz bands of the United States military services have long histories of impressive achievement. Let’s see and hear the veteran Los Angeles trombonist Andy Martin with the US Air Force’s Airmen Of Note in a 2012 concert in Washington, DC. – Doug Ramsey

And there’s not enough – hardly any – video of him performing, but here’s one. – Doug Ramsey

As Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 100, a tribute to the first decade and a half of the beloved bookstore he founded. – Jan Herman

Here’s a gathering of 1940s Los Angeles all-stars. – Doug Ramsey

Great Shakespeare plays take the color of their surroundings – if the production is doing its job – and Broadway’ new King Lear is accomplishing that. But how could any alert, modern Lear production avoid the current parallels with lines such as “‘Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind” and “Get thee glass eyes and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.” – David Patrick Stearns

A Rifftides reader recently confessed to never having heard Slim Gaillard’s “Poppity Pop,”a 1945 recording with Charlie Parker as a sideman. The record might be dismissed as a period piece, a novelty, if it did not also include a ineup of mid-1940s Los Angeles all-stars. – Doug Ramsey

One day, Edythe called me into the bedroom and said it was time for us to have a real meal, a roast beef. “You can do it, it’s easy.” That’s the first thing I cooked all by myself, a year or so before my bar mitzvah. And it’s what I cooked yesterday, for the second time in my life, 60 years later. – Jeff Weinstein

I recently had the opportunity to engage with Lyz Crane of ArtPlace America in a discussion about creative placemaking and community engagement. In the course of that discussion she shared some resources that ArtPlace has made available that can be of considerable benefit to anyone involved in community engagement. – Doug Borwick