CLASSICAL MUSIC at the HOLLYWOOD BOWL with friends 7.18.19

 

First and last volley of fireworks at the Hollywood Bowl, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in Tchaikovsky and film music on 7.18.19.  Taken with my phone, just a spontaneous appreciation of the moment.

Artists: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; celebrating his decade with the LA. Phil, Gustavo Dudamel conductor; Khatia Buniatishvili piano; members of the Los Angeles Youth orchestra sitting in for one number.

Program: TCHAIKOVSKY: Piano Concerto No. 1; KORNGOLD: Fanfare and “March of the Merry Men” from Robin Hood; STEINER: Suite from Casablanca; HERRMANN : Suite from Vertigo; WAXMAN: Suite from Sunset Boulevard; MANCINI: Theme from The Pink Panther; WILLIAMS: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Standouts in the program: Ms.Buniatishvili's hyper-dramatic flair, plus the queasy strings of Herrmann's disturbing themes from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. 

 Dinner al fresco at the Bowl with our generous friends Chris and Carolyn who treated Mr. Twister and me to the whole evening's extravaganza in celebration of Carolyn's birthday. Excellent cuisine to complement the excellent entertainment and company.

R.I.P. JOHNNY CLEGG

A variation of members of the erstwhile Tuesday Night Music Club performing together at the Troubadour, West Hollywood in June of 1993, L- R Johnny Clegg, David Baerwald, 

Lisa Germano, Freedy Johnston. 

Supermusician and anti-apartheid activist Johnny Clegg is reported dead today
of pancreatic cancer at age 66, gone way too soon.

DUNCAN HANNAH'S 20TH CENTURY BOY

Duncan Hannah's 20th Century Boy-- very enjoyable read. Nostalgia for those of you who came of age in NYC in the 1970s, nostalgia for me of my own art school daze, and great observations of the author's interactions with  the era's creative movers and shakers. 

As a good looking, trendy young fellow with actual talent, good reporting skills and snarkily realistic attitude to all that some of us grew up with and took for granted regarding sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, Hannah is just the character you want to follow around in his candid and Candide adventures. In contrast to his East Coast atmosphere, my photo is in today's warm California sun.

MY FAVORITE TV WESTERNS' HORSE!

Oddly, my favorite show for watching horses during the 1950s and 60s glut of TV westerns wasn't The Lone Ranger or Roy Rogers, it was The Cisco Kid. It used some amazing horseflesh, including Cisco's showy tovero pinto and his sidekick Pancho's Palomino Loco.  "Oh, Ceeeesco!!" was their clarion greeting.  

I wasn't a fan of western riding even at a really young age because it seemed unnecessarily harsh compared to English equitation, not knowing how abrupt stunt riding was in those days. Hollywood Hoofbeats original and updated books by Petrine Mitchum, an equestrian and child of old Hollywood, traces the history of oversight of animal welfare in films and tv.  Boy, was it needed... I now fathom the difference between the two styles when ridden correctly-- SUV or truck for ranch work, sports car for fun!

Trivia time: The Cisco Kid was the first TV show to be filmed entirely in color, and to have Hispanic actors in regularly starring roles. Its star Duncan Reynaldo was actually Romanian, but Leo Carillo who played the Kid's sidekick Pancho was a multifaceted native Los Angeleno of Spanish heritage (his great-great-great-grandfather arrived in San Diego in 1769 in the Portola expedition from Spain.) Carillo had been a professional cartoonist for the San Francisco Examiner, played his famous Pancho role when he was 70 (!) years old, was a Republican, and was such a generous preservationist and conservationist (he frequently permitted Boy Scout groups to camp on his 4,000 acre Carlsbad ranch) that Santa Monica's famous Leo Carillo Beach is named in his honor.

Duncan Reynaldo, Diablo, Leo Carillo and Loco

The Cisco Kid character was based upon the O. Henry short story "The Caballero's Way," and he wasn't a good guy at all, but joined Paladin (Have Gun Will Travel) and Hopalong Cassidy as tv's first black clad anti-heroes who nonetheless had a sense of fair play and were always doing good. End of today's nostalgia post...

R.I.P. GARY STEWART, MUSIC MAN

Another damn obit. But this one is so sad. I photographed Gary Stewart as a record-happy young'un for an early Rhino cover (seen upper left, my wrestling pic too.) Rest in peace, lifelong music appreciator who ended up at Apple iTunes. Thematically cogent, Gary and the whole Rhino staff grasped the subtle nuances of then unfashionable American professional wrestling in the early 1970s (that's Andre the Giant sitting on a hapless grappler.) 

Gary's persona for this release was "Little Stevie Weingold," and the portrait was staged to look as amateurish as possible. This was Rhino Records' second ever record album released. I photographed and designed Rhino's #s 3,4 and 5 releases as well...

2 SPOKEN WORD ALBUM COVERS ART DIRECTED BY ME IN the 1980s

 ↑ Art Direction by me for this Harvey Kubernik produced spoken word album, released in 1988 by New Alliance Records. I've always liked to mashup fonts for maximum effectiveness. The most thrilling part of this job for me? The chance to photograph Richard Berry, the actual songwriter of the immortal rock classic "Louie, Louie" flanked by the selfsame poets Wanda Coleman and Michelle T. Clinton, below ↓

↓ The first graphics job I did for Harbey Kubernik with his premiere spoken word compilation of L.A. poets album in 1982. Artists included Charles Bukowski, Wanda Coleman, Velvert Turner, Pleasant Gehman, Dave Alvin, Tequila Mockingbird, Richard Meltzer, Danny Sugarman, Chris D., Geza X, Joanna Spock Dean, Kari Krome, Danny Sugarman and about five dozen others. Harvey was the first  to discover, while pouring through contracts at MCA  Records, that just because a company has licensed the music of an artist, this didn't extend to spoken word performances. Whereupon he immediately started recording all sorts of actors and musicians for these compilations. Henry Rollins, Exene and others got the credit for slam poetry, but the progenitor was Harvey Kubernik.

↓ I was proud of this logo I designed for Harvey Kubernik's record company.

3 ALBUM COVERS ART DIRECTED BY ME IN THE 1980s

↑ Art Direction by me, LP cover for 1986 compilation for Warner Special Products based on a single black and white pic, photographer unknown. Do you think it's bright enough?

   

Having black over polychrome was a surf-redolent graphic technique a la art director extraordinaire John Van Hamersveld:  it never was used in mid-1960s psychedelia, hence my contrarian application to make sure it was seen as a newer compilation.

 ↑ Art Direction by me. Another deliberately over the top retro LP cover by me with a single black and white pic as basis, probably mid-1980s. It was released by one of the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band to look like a bootleg, but it wasn't. The imprecise printing registration of the flowers deliberately emulated a Warhol-ian "Pop Art" technique, one even used today by fine artist Niagara.

↑ Art Direction by me for 1982 LP cover, the first live Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris music sanctioned by the estate. Fittingly, more respectful tone. The pic, reputedly by a girlfriend of a Rolling Stone, was in bad shape but restored by the Charles Wild Studio, and I did the airbrushing for the font.

I was working with some of the same people involved when i art-directed Sid Griffin's biography Gram Parsons: A Music Biography. It was important to them to have quality images that were rare, that Gram's public wouldn't have seen before. That's why we had L.A.'s best retouchers restore this battered photo for the album cover, and why we had a screen capture from a rare Burritos video shot in 
Marina Del Rey for the book cover.↓

 Having a genuine wooden angel hovering over this sensitive but doomed singer/songwriter was the perfect image for the Fallen Angels band. We didn't have to do the oldskool pre-digital version of Photoshop of masking something in and airbrushing the join lines out, this is the way the photo was shot. It's just that the only extant print was beat up and too rectangular, hence the retouching.

R.I.P. KING OF THE SURF GUITAR DICK DALE

Rest in peace Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar, influencer of Eddie Van Halen, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jimi Hendrix (like Dale, also a southpaw with a Fender Stratocaster.) He also inspired Quentin Tarantino to include his "Misirlou" in the opening credits of Pulp Fiction, a great financial boon to Dale. 

My two photos of Dick Dale twenty years apart: The First Surf Revival, Hollywood Palladium, 1973 appearing with The Challengers, the Surf Punks and others. Yes, he leapt on top of the piano; secondly, staying with his beach roots, playing at the Santa Monica Pier, 1994.

My friend Donna Balancia, editor of "California Rocker," first broke the sad story of his passing in same, according to today's online "Rolling Stone," which then was confirmed by his bassist Sam Bolle. Dale, 81, had suffered from many serious ailments in his later years, despite his active touring. In his youth he was an accomplished surfer, a real one, not a gremmie...

REST IN PEACE EROICA

Eroica, the gorgeous Scottish Deerhound who was our playdate regular visitor owned by Paul and Mary Smith and who once body-slammed an actual deer in her native Canada, did not make it through her serious illness and passed away this morning. It was a fluke variant of a disease which destroyed organs before it even presented any other symptoms that could have been treated.

Just like there are exceptional people, Eroica was the quintessential exceptional Deerhound. In a breed known for kindness, playfulness, beauty and absolute devotion, she surpassed all expectations of these traits and immediately stood out to all as a one in a million individual. I feel like I've just lost a close friend and am crying while I write this. 

Offered above is a photo of my better half Mr. Twister and Eroica, and below, this song which recently was used in the tv series "Trust" to signify a much loved, playful, exceptional soulmate who also died too young, because I have no words...

EVERY ARTIST'S WORST NIGHTMARE BECAME ACCLAIMED, INFLUENTIAL CULT FILM 'CARNIVAL OF SOULS'

Screen captures from Carnival of Souls, a 1962 independent horror movie which cost $33,000 to make and ended up influencing George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, 1968. Above, the undead au carnival. Director Herk Harvey made industrial and educational films in Kansas, but had an advanced visual eye. This was his only feature film, which has become an acclaimed cult favorite, despite Harvey experiencing every single artist's worst nightmare happening during its production...

The image above was supposed to be the last shot of a long climactic sequence of the undead slowly and eerily rising from the waters of a half dried up lake next to an abandoned amusement park. But the development lab terminally wrecked that reel of film. The budget did not permit a re-shoot, even though the initial promo art for the film already featured an artist's concept of it.

Instead, the film is remembered for its myriad, arty visual touches, for being one of the few horror films of the era besides Hitchcock's Psycho for basing the plot on a credible female protagonist, and for being a successfully realized high concept of a commercial director who never again made another feature...