Public Eye

Re the downpage photo on Monday's L.A. Times A1 from All Saints Church captioned "The Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr. embracing a parishioner" after the end of the IRS probe was announced Sunday ... well, the photographer failed to note, or failed to know, that the dude in mufti being hugged by the rector in priestly vestments is the church's former rector, George Regas, giver of the anti-war sermon that created the hoo-ha in the first place ... Photo in question is not up on the Times' Web page, though two others are.

Front page of today's N.Y. Times Arts section has a story about two new TV shows, "Cane," premiering tonight on CBS, and "Dirty Sexy Money," beginning tomorrow night on ABC. Alessandra Stanley's take: "'Cane' has sex, rum and salsa and still manages to be plodding. 'Dirty Sexy Money' ... is set in the suit-and-tie world of New York City and is a lot more fun."
The local angle is that both shows shoot at Villa del Sol d'Oro at Alverno High School in Sierra Madre, the mansion designed by Wallace Neff as a scaled-down version of Villa Corazzi in Florence, said to be Michelangelo's only architectural design.
Alverno head of school Ann Gillick said that out of concern about the title of the latter soap she is reviewing all scripts herself ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 9:18 AM | Permalink

Reading accounts of the historical
Migrations of artists
Whole schools
As if they all gathered each day at 8
At the sound of the bell
Moving on to junior high
Crushes on teachers
The kiss of the classmate effected
In these migrations
Everyone lives as in a book
And needn’t pay the gas man
Or tell the neighbors goodbye
Cancel the papers
Sell their cars and wrong-climate clothes
The children aren’t pulled
From their own schools
Really don’t bother
Locking doors
You are artists and places
Are waiting
Entire cafes empty without you
Bars ghostly, needing hard-drinking artists
It’s time for your Montevideo period
Get down to Uruguay
Perhaps it’s Paraguay, just go
Sao Paulo next
Caracas, Ciudad Bolivar
Then mostly it’s Paris
That’s where you’ll historically spend time
If you are much of a school at all
If I were these artists
I would eliminate
These middle periods
With their obscure works
And migrate to Paris en masse
Stand on these painted
Playground numbers
Soon as everyone is still, quiet
We’ll be gone
Don’t tell teacher

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So late Tuesday night I'm lying there under the halogen breaking my semi-vow to only read real books and not newspapers or magazines in bed by cracking The New Yorker that came in that day's mail. First Talk of the Town item by Hendrik Hertzberg opens with this: "On the evening of January 21, 1953, Bayard Rustin, a forty-year-old organizer for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a leading organization of religious pacifists, gave a talk, in Pasadena, California, about anti-colonial struggles in West Africa. Among the admirers who approached him after the speech were two young men. Late that night, he and the young men were arrested after being discovered in flagrante in a parked car. He pleaded guilty to a charge of 'lewd vagrancy' and was carted off to serve sixty days behind bars."
Actually, according to other sources, the man who went on to organize MILK's 1963 March on Washington had that charge pled down to "sex perversion," which believe it or not was a lesser crime. I've got to make the time to dig back in our files and see what church it was -- let's see, Neighborhood or Throop, or the Friends meeting hall; what's your guess? -- and how the Star-News of the day covered the story.
Hertzberg's piece goes on to brilliantly skewer the former political comrades of Sen. Larry Craig for their "cruelty and contempt" in throwing Craig to the Idaho wolves as soon as they realized he really is gay. Sample blather from Michelle Malkin: "He's a supremely arrogant, lying crap-weasel." A what?

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You've got the three Harbour board guys Sunday at Bolsa Chica just out of the water after a couple hours of waist- to shoulder-highs in the fog. Right to left, James from Mt. Washington, an artist and musician, with his classic red Banana; Rick from Pasadena, a teacher and screenwriter, with his impeccable brand-new Rapier; Public Eye from Pasadena, your blogger, with his dirty-waxed Sano. Water: 60 degrees. Sun: none. But you're sitting on top of the world. Photo credit: Tod the Boardhound.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

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Aren't those more like colored triangles? Yes. But I guess the 4,761 striped flags in French conceptual artist Daniel Buren's piece, on view through Nov. 11 in the sky above One Colorado in Old Pasadena, together form a square.

There are 69 lines of flags. Each line holds 69 flags. I know not of any sexy significance to these facts. Its other numbers are more pedestrian: 22.5 feet above the ground. (Don't you just love that we're not given some metrical nonsense?) Each flag is 13.5 inches long. The piece shades 70 feet by 70 feet of the courtyard.

Wednesday morning various chic French people from the consulate and the local Alliance Francaise, the women in wonderful shoes, joined One Colo, Armory Center for the Arts and Pasadena Convention and Visitors Bureau folks in feting the big sky thingie. Sadly, Pommery Champagne, another sponsor, was not there. We drank black coffee.

Buren is not all that well known here but is big everywhere else, with installations at the Palais Royal, New York's Guggenheim and Beijing's Forbidden City.

The proper question is indeed the one you are already asking -- what makes this different than those plastic flags you see fluttering every day above freeway-close used-car lots?

It is hard to say -- but not hard to know the answer to your question when you go see it. Not art hoax, but art. It just works: Something about the small sounds of the thousands of flags fluttering. About the trellis-like shade effect it provides in the courtyard. About the fastidious preciseness with which Buren designed and executed the site-specific piece. Yes, about its quiet commentary on the retail commerce all around it. And about its ephemerality.

Actually, we're the ones, sort of, who will force that latter issue -- force "Colored Square" to come down. Day after Thanksgiving is the annual Charles Cherniss Tournament of Toys charity Christmas tree lighting in the same courtyard, kickoff for the newspaper's charity toy drive with One Colo and Jaycees. Tree's so tall it would poke right through the art.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's all, you know, a terrifically big secret, and cast members are never supposed to spill the beans about the plot of, or the local celebrities in, the Pasadena Senior Center's annual fund-raising Pasadena Follies parody musical extravaganza. But Ann Erdman can't actually have us killed, can she? Powerful as she is in City Hall, we won't get tossed into the base isolators during a quake -- will we?
Well, you already know it's called "Pasablanca." Script is by Ann and Barry Gordon . Lyrics by Jerram "Ira Gershwin Ain't Got Nothin' on Me" Swartz, who returns to directing duties this year as well. Curtain goes up sometime after 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 21. Tickets still widely available.
And you know the mayor's in it, because the mayor's always in it. Mmm -- "Pasablanca." Wonder what part the mayor might play?

But someone slipped me a draft script and I see here that a certain local newspaper editor, in an incredibly self-referential bit of schtick calling back to a skit last year, has the following line: "Oh, the bovinity!" And that a certain city-side reporter for a competing rag -- OK, it's Andre Coleman -- replies, "Holy cow!"
Yes, it goes on like that, and yet you wouldn't miss it.
Others in greasepaint? I don't know, but I heard a rumor that there's a once and future mayoral candidate who managed to poll 26 percent fewer votes than the last guy who became an also-ran ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

Picking up a book at will call upstairs at Vroman's Sunday, I was scanning the store's monthly calendar when the young clerk -- a student at St. Andrews -- said that, while it hadn't made the printed edition, Bill Clinton would be signing his new book "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" at the store on Tuesday, Sept. 18 at 2 p.m.

If you're interested in getting at gander at the future Minister without Portfolio of these here United States, whatever you do, don't imagine you can pop in off Colorado Boulevard on the afternoon in question and do so.

For the incredibly complicated rules of the game, which have to do with vouchers that became available only at the store this morning at 9, click here to find out what you can and cannot do. You cannot, for instance, bring a cell phone into the store that day. Yikes! Could be a no-go for that reason alone for some. Check out as well the fascinating memo from Allison Hill -- formerly store manager but now carrying the fancy and well-deserved title of president/COO -- about the logistics of the day.

Vroman's is holding its event for former Mexican President Vicente Fox and his book "Revolution of Hope" Oct.16 at Beckman Auditorium. But the store itself is good enough for Bubba. Hey, if it could handle Howard Stern in his heyday, why not?

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)