Bob Gruen - Chronicler of NYC Rock 'n' Roll

I always wondered who took that great photo of John Lennon wearing the New York City T-shirt.  Bob Gruen is the photographer extraordinaire behind many of the most iconic photographs that literally wrote the history of rock 'n' roll in New York and beyond. 

Bob Gruen has been in the business of photographing the New York City rock scene for decades. Rock 'n' Roll Exposed tells his story and is a great documentary that will inspire musicians, photographers and artists for generations to come. [more...]

The Frick Collection: The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec

I was lucky to be able to catch this exhibition at the Frick Mansion in NYC yesterday.  It took my breath away.  From the Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs, to the Gauguins to the incredible Degas drawings, I was in awe.

This exhibition presents a selection of nineteenth-century French drawings and prints from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Sheets by Millet, Courbet, Degas, Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other masters are on view. Ranging widely in subject matter and technique and spanning the entire second half of the nineteenth century, these works represent the diverse interests of Realist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist artists in a rapidly changing world. Graphite and charcoal drawings of classically idealized nudes exhibit the virtuoso finish and illusionism long championed by academic tradition while rapidly executed sketches present more candid and provocative renderings of the body. Luminous pastels and watercolors capture impressions of city and country, and lively etchings and vivid color lithographs convey the spectacle and atmosphere of modern life. Populating these images are peasants, performers, racehorses, and mythological goddesses. Settings vary from the French countryside and far-flung islands to Parisian cafés and dancehalls, shifting back and forth between labor and leisure, highlife and low. [more...]

Carol Burnett: Great American Humorist

Carol Burnett, who became famous for playing a variety of characters in sketch comedy routines on her namesake television show, was named the winner of the nation's top humor prize on Tuesday.

The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts said Burnett will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Oct. 20 in Washington. A gala performance featuring top names in comedy will be taped and broadcast nationally Oct. 30 on PBS.

The 80-year-old Burnett said she can't believe she is receiving the prize from the Kennedy Center. "It's almost impossible to be funnier than the people in Washington," she said in a statement. [more...]

Bourdain Continues to do Important Work in the World... His Own Way

They originally labeled him the 'bad boy chef,' but Anthony Bourdain, throughout his extraordinary exploration of the world and all its many cultures - not to mention his metamorphosis from chef to writer to world traveler, back to the realization that he himself made that he is truly a WRITER - has matured into a true ambassador of the Earth.  Many of his fans - me included - were suspicious of his new contract with CNN; however, we secretly understood that it was a natural evolution for him to continue his work in this world.  We didn't think he could be 'himself' bound by the limitations of prime time television.  We were wrong.

Tony is a fearless universal being - evidenced as he himself promised us all in his very first shows - from A Cook's Tour to No Reservations and The Layover - when he told us there was nothing he wouldn't try, that he'd go to the ends of the earth and that he had nothing to lose... from bungee jumping to skiing, swimming with sharks, almost dying of snail poisoning... visiting the ruins of Katrina and Haiti... his shows taught me more in one year - like a crash course in (to say the least) 'expanding one's horizons' while parked in front of a TV - than any class, book or college course I could ever have taken.  

His latest show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown for CNN is Bourdain Deluxe - fatty, succulent, delicious, with a full side of fries, perfect Chinese pickles, dumplings, and a pho included!  It's panoramic, splendificous, tasty... "GOOD," as Tony, himself, admitted was the only thing left to say about the most delicious food he could find on the planet to eat and enjoy and describe as he devoured life at its fullest, to be filled beyond repair.

In my opinion his programs should be taught in every college classroom in the world! And it all started with a little memoir he wrote called Kitchen Confidential.


[Go here for the latest program on CNN...]

RIP Roger!

Roger Ebert, the most famous and most popular film reviewer of his time who became the first journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for movie criticism and, on his long-running TV program, wielded the nation's most influential thumb, died Thursday. He was 70. [more...]

Ready My article from 2011 on Siskel & Ebert: 
http://sandyfrazier.blogspot.com/2011/03/phantom-ebert.html

Hendrix Recordings Resurrection

Jimi Hendrix, considered by many to be the greatest guitar player of all time, will have three new albums out this week. But sadly, this isn’t a story of resurrection.

Hendrix died 43 years ago of a drug overdose. Since then there have been more than three dozen albums released of his songs, the most recent coming out in 2011.

One of this week’s albums, however, will have 12 previously unreleased studio recordings that the album’s co-producer said is a Jimi many have yet to hear, “away from his record company’s expectations and his working band’s limitations.” [more...]

Hendrix at 70: New album offers different look
Hendrix sought inspiration in the studio - jamming.
http://jimihendrix.com

Celebrating Ceija Stojka

Roma artist, writer on Nazi atrocities, dies at 79

Ceija Stojka survived three Nazi death camps and then found her life's work: Raising awareness of the Nazis' persecution of Roma - also known as Gypsies - in her art and her writings. Stojka carried the horrors of those camps with her until she was in her 50s, speaking out in words and pictures only decades after she was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp at age 12. The Budapest-based European Roma Cultural Foundation described Stokja's concentration-camp themed paintings to The Associated Press on Wednesday as reflecting "entrenched sorrow in the bodies and spirit of the victims." [more...]

CEIJA STOJKA 1933 – 2013 : "If the world does not change now, if the world does not open its doors and windows, if it does not build peace - true peace - so that my great-grandchildren have a chance to live in this world, then I cannot explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Ravensbruck." Go here to watch Marika Schmiedt’s film Vermachtnis Legacy about Ceija Stojka

Stojka, who is self-taught, didn’t begin to make art until she was 56. She suddenly felt compelled to paint and draw and used the materials at hand - pieces of cardboard, glass jars, postcards and salt dough. “I work with everything that comes between my fingers,” she writes. The constant torment of the living hell in her mind takes haunting form in her crude style: Stojka uses her fingers and toothpicks instead of brushes to apply the paint and ink. This lends the work an eerie, childlike quality that makes even more horrific her depictions of the day-to-day anguish of living under constant threat of dying from starvation or the gas chambers.  [more...]

Paul Williams: Still Alive

Paul Williams has always been one of my favorite songwriters.  He wrote and starred in The Phantom of the Paradise, a cult film from the '70s that changed my life!  It was surprising to me that a lot of people thought he was dead! 

Quite the contrary!  Paul is very much alive and still performs and writes songs.  There is a documentary playing now on cable called "Still Alive" that tells the story of this talented singer and composer.

"A funny thing happened to Stephen Kessler on his way to completing Paul Williams Still Alive, his affectionate portrait of the diminutive dynamo who loomed improbably large as a pop-culture luminary during the 1970s. After serendipitously tracking down his childhood idol, and starting production on what he clearly intended - initially, at least - as a melancholy ode to a faded star, Kessler wound up forging an unlikely friendship and, in the process, making a richer, deeper and more idiosyncratic documentary." Go here to watch the official trailer.

I actually heard from Paul in November 2005 and he recommended his fans visit his official site.

Vincent is Back!

Van Gogh dazzles at Netherlands' Kroeller-Mueller

With the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam closed for renovations until April, the world's second-largest collection of the Dutch master's work is stepping into the limelight.

The Kroeller-Mueller museum in the eastern Netherlands is not as well-known but is still considered a jewel among connoisseurs. It has revamped the layout of its central rooms, giving more space and more focus to its very best works.

"Van Gogh really stands central now, both physically in the museum and in the collection as a whole," director Lisette Pelsers said in a telephone interview.

This week the museum announced "Vincent is Back," because after a time in which many of its 91 Vincent Van Gogh paintings, 180 drawings and other works have been on loan, they are set to return in style.

It has opened "Native Soil," the first of a two-part exhibition looking at the spectacular changes that Van Gogh underwent in his artistic career, which took place almost entirely in the decade from 1880 to 1890. The appropriately wintery exhibit focuses on Van Gogh's formative years in the Netherlands, with a dark palette and simple, somber subjects.

"Native Soil" culminates in what is widely regarded as Van Gogh's first great masterpiece, the 1885 "Potato Eaters." It also shows smaller works that presage the colorful brilliance to come, such as the 1885 "Head of a Woman Wearing a White Hat," which may have been part of Van Gogh's preparations for "Potato Eaters,;" and the emotive 1882 study "Sorrowful Old Man" in black chalk.

"You can really see him struggling to find his style as an artist," Pelsers said. [more...]

Maeterlinck Lives!

In Claus Guth's haunting new production of Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande," the characters move as if in a trance between two worlds — both of them unrelentingly bleak.

The French composer's only completed opera, starring baritone Christian Gerhaher and soprano Christiane Karg in the title roles, was seen Thursday night in the seventh of eight performances by the Frankfurt Opera this fall. The final one is Saturday night.

The story, adapted by Maurice Maeterlinck from his own symbolist play, sounds straightforward when reduced to its elements: Golaud, grandson of King Arkel, meets a mysterious, much younger woman, marries her and brings her home to his family's castle. She and his half-brother, Pelleas, fall in love, and Golaud's suspicions that they are having an affair (apparently unfounded) lead him to murder his rival. Melisande dies after giving birth to Golaud's child.

But in Maeterlinck's world nothing is quite what it seems, and as the characters wander through the story, their words, feelings and motivations are often impossible to pin down. Debussy captures this atmosphere of dreamy uncertainty and shifting reality with a score whose chromaticism continually eludes the musical resolution of traditional key structure. [more...]