Classical LA

ANGELENOS don’t need to be told that they live in one of the nation’s best cities for classical music, but it may still be news to much of the rest of the world.

On that count, I wrote a piece for the fall issue of Listen, the classical music magazine, that looks at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl, local chamber music series, and oddball programs like Classical Underground.

The whole story is not online, but I encourage everyone to pick up the new issue, which has pianist Maurizio Pollini (!!) on the cover. There’s also a very fine piece on how the city of Louisville reinvigorated itself during the torpor of the Great Depression – and after a major flood, no less -- with the creation of the Louisville Orchestra. (It’s timed to a new documentary, Music Makes a City, which could have easily served as the title of my article about L.A.)

Here are a few sentences that begin my article:

Los Angeles is the heavenly chime of the Byrds, the woodsy self-absorption of Laurel Canyon, the horn counterpoint of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, the boy-girl nihilist crunch of X, the rhythm-driven rage of gangsta rap.

These are some of the high points: The city, which is regularly and gleefully destroyed in disaster movies, has also long symbolized everything ephemeral and cheap in popular culture and pop music.

But other sounds have come from – and to – this place. John Cage grew up here. Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived here for years, as did thousands of German-speaking intellectuals fleeing fascist Europe, keeping alive a powerful literary tradition and sustaining an audience for chamber music.

And while neither the local orchestra nor the opera are as old as those in our sometimes-stuffy elder brother San Francisco, these operations have often been livelier and less predictable.

Crazy For The Big Lebowski

DO you spend your free time dressing up like figures of speech, drunkenly bowling for endless hours and memorizing non-sequitors from an obscure film? if so, you must be "an achiever," one of the group of  "big lebowski" zealots who gathers to celebrate the coens brothers movie at least once a year. the film, of course, was considered a disappointment upon opening but has become -- thanks to a few gen-x dreamers in louisville -- the biggest cult picture since "rocky horror."

today i have a piece in the LATimes, most of which is an interview with eddie chung, the director of a documentary on the phenomenon called "the achievers." some of the fans he tracks seems to NEED their "lebowski" friends so badly you kinda wonder how they avoided accumulating companions in other spheres... tho chung said most of them are pretty well adjusted. "they're not, as far as i know, criminals," he told me.

either way, more proof that in an atomized, media-obsessed post-industrial culture, anything is possible.