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With regulations changing by the week, the Bowl went from planning a modest reopening for sparse crowds to weighing vaccine requirements to planning to return at full capacity. More
Its cultural institutions, buffeted by the pandemic, will have to recover without the help of Eli Broad, the transformational benefactor who died last month.LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an open construction pit these days, surrounded by 12-foot-high wooden fences, with cranes rising across now open skies. Most of its midcentury modernist complex on Wilshire Boulevard was quietly demolished during the Covid shutdown to make way for a wavy $650 million light-filled building spanning the boulevard and designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.LACMA, as it is known, has long been a cultural anchor for Southern California, extraordinarily popular and as responsible as any institution for helping define the region’s cultural identity. “New Galleries. More Art. Opening 2024,” promises a sign in the courtyard. But the success of its next incarnation is hardly assured as the museum seeks to redefine its mission in a smaller building whose design, if adventurous, is not universally acclaimed.It is not only LACMA that finds itself in a moment of transition. Before the pandemic froze California in a wave of shutdowns and disease, Los Angeles had established itself as a cultural capital with its galaxy of museums, galleries and performing arts institutions, defying dated stereotypes of a superficial Hollywood with little interest in art. It now confronts uncertainty across its cultural landscape.Los Angeles institutions share many of the same challenges that their peers around the world face in trying to recover from the pandemic: bringing back wary audiences, confronting the expense and technical challenges of making their spaces safe, and raising money from philanthropists and government in the face of competing demands in a time of economic struggle. They are in precarious financial condition after a calamitous loss of revenue forced many to lay off staff members and abandon leases on theaters and galleries.But they face the added complications of recovering without the help of many of the old guard philanthropists who helped establish the civic and cultural scene here. That was underlined by the death last month of Eli Broad, 87, a billionaire philanthropist who played an outsized role in creating many of the region’s marquee cultural institutions, among them Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Broad, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and one of the buildings left standing at the LACMA complex.The next chapter for Los Angeles’s arts institutions will unfold without Eli Broad, a philanthropist who transformed the city’s cultural landscape who died last month. He is shown here in 2015 outside the Broad, a museum he financed himself to display his art collection. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesThere is cautious optimism that the region will return to its upward trajectory as the virus recedes.“Los Angeles, like New York, is a resilient city full of entrepreneurial creative people who will get back up on the horse,” said Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, which was also in the midst of an expansion project in Westwood when the pandemic hit.But in many ways the challenges here are more intense and complex, in no small part because the virus hit at a time when so many things were in flux. The next steps — by cultural institutions, wealthy philanthropists, government and audiences — could well determine whether Covid will have derailed, or merely delayed, the city’s ascendance as a cultural destination.For all its wealth, Los Angeles has always been a challenging fund-raising environment. Michael Govan, the director of LACMA, struggled to raise money to build the Zumthor building. The project turned the corner after David Geffen, 78, an entertainment magnate who has become a major arts benefactor, agreed to donate $150 million.A rendering of the new David Geffen Galleries at Lacma, a wavy, light-filled building being designed by Peter Zumthor.Atelier Peter Zumthor & Partner/The BoundaryThe death of Mr. Broad has rattled a Southern California arts world already worried about whether donors will come forward to help at a difficult time. Although he stepped down from public life in 2017, leaving the field to a new generation of benefactors, Mr. Broad had a history of being there at moments of need — getting the Walt Disney Concert Hall project back on track after it stalled in the 1990s, and offering a $30 million bailout for the Museum of Contemporary Art when it was on the verge of collapse in 2008.Mr. Broad was a singular figure in many ways — part billionaire philanthropist, part civic bulldozer — and it’s hardly clear who can (or even should) step in to fill in the gap he left. “It’s a little scary to imagine Los Angeles without Eli Broad,” said Donna Bojarsky, the founder of Future of Cities: Los Angeles, a nonprofit civic group.The pandemic was economically ruinous for many cultural organizations. The Los Angeles Philharmonic slashed its annual budget from $152 million to $77 million. Museums lost millions in revenues. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills had to lay off 30 people.“It will probably take us 12 months to three years to get back to the same level of operation,” said Rachel Fine, the executive director of the Wallis.In addition to the challenge of philanthropy, the sheer difficulty of getting around this city — one sure sign that the recovery is at hand is that traffic has returned to roads and freeways — has long made it harder for theaters, music halls and galleries looking to draw crowds. The transit system is in the midst of a dramatic expansion, funded by a $120 billion mass transit plan. But it will be many years before it is completed.“It’s a wonderful place to live and it’s a wonderful place to work,” said Deborah Borda, who was the president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 17 years before becoming president of the New York Philharmonic. “And it’s truly a receptive place for the arts. But if you want be there for a 7:30 concert, you really have to leave at 6. I knew people who used to come but stopped: That would be a reason that they would give.”Los Angeles has long been a cultural magnet, and not just for the creative classes who flocked to Hollywood. It has drawn composers like Stravinsky and Schoenberg, writers like Thomas Mann and Joan Didion, architects like Frank Gehry and artists like David Hockney. It took longer for the city to establish institutions: Mr. Broad, who played a key role in establishing the Museum of Contemporary Art, recalled in a 2019 essay that while Los Angeles had long been home to brilliant artists, great art schools and leading galleries, it had lacked a modern or contemporary art museum when he got there.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano, is scheduled to open this year.Alex Welsh for The New York TimesAnd pandemic or not, the next three years promise to be transformative, with a series of openings of major projects that Los Angeles officials believe will dramatically expand the cultural offerings here.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a $482 million complex designed by Renzo Piano next door to LACMA, is scheduled to open by the end of the year. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a sprawling futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is scheduled to open in Exposition Park in 2023.“We are slowly climbing back,” Mr. Govan said. “I think the big institutions will survive. It’s been hard. But I can’t be anything other than optimistic.”Chad Smith, the chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, said that as recently as three weeks ago he was resigned to staging a handful of concerts this season at the Hollywood Bowl, expecting to be able to seat only 4,000 people in the 18,000-seat amphitheater. Now, the Bowl is planning 50 events and is hoping to fill 65 percent of capacity, reflecting the dramatic decline of the virus and the lifting of regulations.This is critical because the Bowl, with its diverse mixture of outdoor programming — from Beethoven to Car Seat Headrest — is a major source of revenue for the Philharmonic.“At this point, we see ourselves coming out of this, with these 40 or 50 concerts at the Bowl,” Mr. Smith said. “Our financial situation will improve. It has to improve. We have been relying entirely on contributions.”The arts scene is animated here not only by big institutions but by an estimated 500 small nonprofit arts organizations. Many were forced to abandon leases on performance or exhibition spaces over the past 14 months, and some are now in danger of fading away.The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, a futuristic $1 billion building being financed by George Lucas, is under construction in Exposition Park.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“We see a lot of the arts, especially the performing arts, as being the last to recover,” said Kristin Sakoda, the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture. “We know there is a long road to recovery.”In response, a group of philanthropists has created the L.A. Arts Recovery Fund to help theaters, music halls, museums and galleries survive the transition. “For Los Angeles to regain its prowess as a leader in the arts we need to come together,” William Ahmanson, the president of the Ahmanson Foundation, said in a letter seeking contributions.The Recovery Fund set a goal of $50 million, and has already raised $38.7 million. But even before Covid hit, cultural institutions were struggling to compete for philanthropic dollars, and there is concern that this trend will only continue.“The demand for social services and social justice funding is just ramped up so significantly, somewhat at the expense of performing arts,” said David Bohnett, a philanthropist and member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. “That was already happening. But we are coming out of this learning the value of the performing arts to social service and social justice initiatives.”Still, arts executives are hopeful that a soaring stock market has created a new class of donors. “There is enough to support both social services and the cultural sector, and we just need more people to step forward in civic-mindedness,” Ms. Philbin said.Mr. Geffen, an art collector, said he was hopeful younger people who were getting wealthy and buying art would eventually become donors, though arts professionals said that transition has been slow to happen in Los Angeles. “I would think that young people who are making incredible amounts of money in tech,” he said, “will be generous in the future.”Still, he acknowledged the difficulties LACMA had faced before he wrote his $150 million check. “L.A. deserves a world class museum,” he said. “And it didn’t seem like anyone else was stepping up to the plate.” More
Known for scene-stealing side characters, the comedian and actress is pushing past her limits with her starring role in “Together Together.”Patti Harrison, the actress and comedian, has taken one acting class in her life, an introductory course at Ohio University. “It was taught by a grad student and was very loose,” she said. “We mostly just did yoga.”One assignment was to perform an interpretive dance based on a poem. Harrison searched online for “dumb emo poems” and found one called “A Darkness Inside Me.” “Looking back on it now, I think it was about someone who’s an active shooter,” she said. “I did it as a joke, but no one took it as one.”Not many of Harrison’s jokes have fallen flat since. “Scene stealing” is one of the adjectives most applied to Harrison, who has appeared in alt-comedies like “Shrill,” “Search Party” and “Made for Love.” The downside of stealing scenes, of course, is that you generally don’t steal them on your own show. “I haven’t been in a million things,” she said. “And most of them have been really small, or guest parts.”This week, Harrison, 30, moves from one-offs and recurring parts to her first starring role in a feature film, in “Together Together,” one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The dramedy stars Harrison as a 26-year-old barista named Anna who is hired as a gestational surrogate by Matt, a single 40-something app designer (Ed Helms) who really, really wants a baby — as well as some sort of connection with the woman who’s having it.Ed Helms and Patti Harrison in “Together Together.”Tiffany Roohani/Bleecker StreetHarrison has already earned rave reviews, with critics describing her performance as “groundbreaking” and “revelatory”; The New York Times called the movie “sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful,” praising Harrison’s portrayal of Anna and her rapport with co-star Helms.“Patti was the actress for the part,” said the director Nikole Beckwith. “And to get her in her first leading role, I just feel like the luckiest person on Earth.”In a recent video interview, Harrison was in her home in Los Angeles talking about her childhood interests (there were many), the questionable roles she’s been offered as a transgender actress — “the first thing producers see in me is like, I’m trans” — and how “Together Together” came to be.The stories come fast and looping. Ask Harrison what she was into as a kid, and you get the full menu, in chronological order, from age 4 through high school: sharks; dinosaurs; insects/arachnids; Pokémon (“I was super, super into Pokémon”); video games; karate (“I was like, if I ever have to beat up 20 people at one time for absolutely no reason at all, I want to be able to do that”); guns; cars.“Together Together” came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison, whose mother is Vietnamese, grew up the youngest of seven siblings in a rural, conservative town in Ohio called, of all things, Orient. “I looked at the census when I was in high school, and it said there were zero Asian people in Orient,” she said.In college, Harrison joined an improv group at the prompting of a friend. She felt an immediate connection — the tightrope feel of it, the magic moments springing seemingly out of nowhere. “It still triggers a lot of anxiety in me,” she said. “But when it goes well, it’s amazing. You can make up stuff, and things can seem brilliant on accident. People will imbue intention into everything that you do.”In 2015, Harrison moved to New York and began doing standup comedy. There, she found fellow funny people like Julio Torres (“Los Espookys”), Jo Firestone (“Shrill”), and Ziwe Fumudoh, who recently filmed the music video “Stop Being Poor” with Harrison for her self-titled Showtime variety series. “Patti’s comedy comes from such a pure creative place, where she never does exactly the same thing twice,” Fumudoh said. “She’s phenomenally creative and original.”In 2017, Harrison was recording a commercial when she got a call from “The Tonight Show” to do a bit for the show that night about her reaction to Trump’s just-announced ban on transgender people in the military. (“I was shocked,” she said in the bit, “because I assumed he already did that.”) After the appearance, things exploded for Harrison. “My agent was like, there’s all these people who want to meet with you now,” she said.“But at the same time,” she continued, “there were a lot of people I felt that had pigeonholed me into this idea of what they thought I was. They were calling me an activist without any prior knowledge of me other than this piece, because I’m a transgender person who had spoken on something.”So while the appearance got her noticed, it was a very specific sort of notice, at least at first. In those early meetings with production companies, Harrison was brimming with pitches like, say, the one for a show about a dog and its dysfunctional, codependent relationship with the little bird that lives in his rectum. (“I gave them my gold ideas,” she said.) But all they were interested in were “stories about trans girls coming out and getting rejected by their families,” she said, or having her come on shows to talk about the difference between being gay and trans.All of which made “Together Together” that much more special. Here was a story about a clearly cisgender woman — the plot revolves around her character’s pregnancy, after all — in which the relationship between the younger woman and the older man is much more nuanced than one sees in a lot of rom-coms. Not as much will-they-or-won’t-they, and more: Where does all this lead, if anywhere?“It really takes a lot of humility to engage in a story like this, and Patti is very humble, and always authentic,” Helms said. “But then she’s also one of the funniest human beings on Earth.”The film came at a time when Harrison was at a crossroads in her life. “I didn’t know if I was going to go into acting more, or kind of lean into TV writing or comedy,” she said. “And I was processing a lot of feelings about my self-esteem, and body dysmorphia. But then I got the script, and it was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Beckwith, the director, had spotted Harrison performing on a late night show and realized she had found her Anna. Harrison had an “amazing, salty, a little spiky, humor and way about her,” Beckwith said, that went hand in hand with her vision of Anna as “warm, like Patti, but not a totally open book.”“Together Together” was shot in just 19 days in the fall of 2019, with limited chances for retakes. “The scene where her water breaks — that was our version of a stunt,” said Beckwith. “And we only had two pairs of pants, so we could only do it twice.”Playing the lead “was very scary,” Harrison admitted. “But if I had known how much work it was going to be, I would have been way more scared. I think I was shielded a bit by being stupid about it.”The script for “Together Together,” Harrison said, “was very delicate and positive and sincere, which is the opposite of what I normally do in my comedy stuff.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesHarrison is getting fewer pitches for trans-centric roles nowadays, and she is busier than ever. In addition to “Together Together,” she is appearing in the final season of “Shrill” and singing, dancing and acting in “Ziwe,” and recently she joined the cast of the feature film “The Lost City of D,” alongside Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum.Still, that doesn’t mean her days of being typecast are over. “Now I’m seeing a trend where people want me to read for stuff where I play a social media-obsessed millennial, this vapid turd person. So I’m moving away from offers where, ‘you’re a de-transitioning sex worker who finds that he likes his old lifestyle a little better than she thought,’ to ‘you’re one of the stupidest people on Earth. You only like social media and likes.’”The confidence Harrison gained from going “so far out of my comfort zone” has only fed her desire to move even farther out of it. What she’d really love to do is some sort of science fiction movie, the more action the better, she said, where she might indulge her childhood love of karate and get to say stuff like “zorbon crystals.” “I think there will always be a part of me that kind of fanboys out about action sci-fi,” she said, “just to see if I could do it.” More
A Times journalist gives a sneak preview of the Academy Awards on Sunday and offers insights on a changing film industry. More
It was over lunch in 2013 that the literary agent Eric Simonoff asked Jonathan Ames, “So what do you want to do with your writing career?”Ames replied, “Have you read Richard Stark?”Simonoff confessed that he had not. Moreover, he had no idea who Richard Stark was.“Well,” Ames explained to his old friend and new agent, “I’d like to be like Richard Stark.”Richard Stark is one of the pseudonyms for the prolific writer Donald Westlake who, under that name, published over 20 novels centered on a character named Parker. The Parker series, with titles like “The Hunter,” “Butcher’s Moon” and “Nobody Runs Forever,” features a classic antihero: a no-nonsense criminal who speaks tersely and acts decisively, most often with his fists.Ames, in his 20-year writing career, had written perhaps most frequently about a character named “Jonathan Ames.” Before he departed New York for a television job in Los Angeles in 2014, he was well known in his hometown as an essayist, novelist, performer and bon vivant. “Jonathan Ames” turned up as the lead in his comedic confessional essays, collected in books like “What’s Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer,” and in the short story “Bored to Death,” which in 2009 became an HBO comedy series starring Jason Schwartzman. On that show, Schwartzman is a neurotic Brooklyn writer who dreams of writing pulp novels and who, inspired by his love of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, decides to advertise his services as an amateur private detective.“We were shooting the first season and we were coming up with the graphics for the opening, which showed a pulp novel called ‘Bored to Death’ opening up and showing the actual words of my story,” Ames, 57, said this month over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I said, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool. I wish I was writing books with covers like that.’ And one of the writers said to me, ‘Jonathan, you have a TV show now.’”The implication, of course, being that whatever rung on the literary ladder that involves writing pulp fiction, Ames, a newly minted HBO showrunner, had long since climbed past it. “But he picked up on something,” said Ames. “The fact that, even then, my Holy Grail was to be writing crime novels.”This month, Ames has captured his personal Holy Grail, in the form of a detective novel titled “A Man Named Doll.” Published by Mulholland Books, it is the first in a proposed series (there’s already a Netflix film in the works) about a Los Angeles-based ex-cop and private detective named Happy Doll. (No spoilers, but suffice to say that the circumstances leading to his unusual first name are not, themselves, happy.)“A Man Named Doll” comes out on April 20.Crime readers may notice some superficial similarities between Doll and the kind of fabled gumshoes that Ames has long been enamored with — figures like Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, or quick-fisted pulp avatars like Parker or Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. But it quickly becomes clear that Happy owes more to the rumpled Marlowe played by Elliott Gould in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” than to any hard-boiled toughs inhabited by Humphrey Bogart.Doll, for example, may be the first private detective in Los Angeles who’s in Freudian analysis five days a week. He is certainly the first one to describe his relationship with his beloved dog as “disturbed,” saying, “We’re like two old-fashioned closeted bachelors who cohabitate and don’t think the rest of the world knows we’re lovers.” Doll is less Jack Reacher than, well, Jonathan Ames.“He’s a neurotic Reacher with the soul of a poet,” said Joshua Kendall, the editorial director of Mulholland. When he received “A Man Named Doll,” he said, he recognized it as perfect for Mulholland, an imprint that specializes in both contemporary and classic genre fiction. But he also realized that “one of the great pleasures of the book is seeing the Ames pop out.”Of Ames’s detour toward crime writing, Simonoff, his literary agent, said, “He was clearly called in this direction. But the novel also exhibits the charm and quirkiness of classic Jonathan Ames. There’s a sweetness to it that isn’t there in the typical Parker novel.” (Since their lunch, Simonoff has happily brushed up on his Westlake.)Ames has spent most of his decades-long literary career bed-hopping promiscuously between forms and mediums: He’s been genre-fluid but pulp-curious.“Bored to Death” was a warmly satirical take on hard-boiled themes, set against a hipster Brooklyn backdrop. And on assignment from the online publication Byliner, Ames wrote a novella-length story, “You Were Never Really Here,” which was adapted into a dark and violent film directed by Lynne Ramsay and starring Joaquin Phoenix that premiered at Cannes in 2017. With that story, Ames said, “I did have this goal of not being funny at all. I just wanted to write something really lean and dark.” He loved the challenge of creating “an express train of a plot, where you can’t put it down.”There is a well-worn piece of writing advice, often traced to Aristotle, that contends that the perfect ending of any story should be surprising yet inevitable, and the fact that Ames has written a detective novel seems exactly that: surprising yet inevitable.“At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” Ames said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”Adam Amengual for The New York TimesOther authors have veered unexpectedly into crime writing, either as a commercial diversion or out of love for the form. Graham Greene famously classified certain of his novels as “entertainments.” (Ames said, “I often liked the entertainments best of all.”) Denis Johnson wrote the pulp homage “Nobody Move,” and the Booker Prize winner John Banville wrote crime fiction as Benjamin Black.Yet for Ames, “A Man Named Doll” is not a dalliance with detective fiction so much as the consummation of a decades-long courtship. “At a certain point in my life, starting back in the ’80s, I began to read almost entirely crime fiction,” he said. “You’re studying the form — you’re kind of doing an apprenticeship.”“A Man Named Doll” feels both like the culmination of that apprenticeship and the logical successor to his comedic autobiographical writing, in which, after all, he cast himself as a lone figure roaming in the naked city, a broken romantic embroiled in adventures that often veered toward the illicit.Ames’s former teacher, Joyce Carol Oates, once gave a quote to The Paris Review that has stuck with him. Oates, he recalled, had said that, in “Ulysses,” James Joyce had used the structure of the “Odyssey” as “his bridge to get his soldiers across.”For him, pulp has become that bridge, he said.“The soldiers being my wish as a writer to observe, to describe, to form sentences, to entertain and to share my fears, my hopes, my, you know, despair — and maybe some of my courage. It’s important,” Ames added, “to try and pass on courage to the reader.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More
As a founding member of the band Poco, he helped define a genre and establish the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in West Coast rock.Rusty Young, a founding member of the popular country-rock group Poco and a key figure in establishing the pedal steel guitar as an integral voice in the West Coast rock of the late 1960s and ’70s, died on Wednesday at his home in Davisville, Mo. He was 75.His publicist, Mike Farley, said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Young played steel guitar with Poco for more than a half-century. Along with other Los Angeles-based rock bands like the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco was among the architects of the country-rock movement of the late ’60s, which incorporated traditional country instrumentation into predominantly rock arrangements. The Eagles and scores of other bands would follow in their wake.Formed in 1968, Poco originally included the singer-guitarists Jim Messina and Richie Furay — both formerly of Buffalo Springfield, another pioneering country-rock band from Los Angeles — along with Mr. Young, the drummer George Grantham and the bassist Randy Meisner, a future member of the Eagles. (Timothy B. Schmit, another future Eagle, replaced Mr. Meisner after he left the band in 1969.)Poco initially came together for a high-profile show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, not long after Mr. Furay had invited Mr. Young to play pedal steel guitar on his composition “Kind Woman,” the closing track on Buffalo Springfield’s farewell album, “Last Time Around.” The music that Poco made generally employed twangier production and was more populist in orientation than that of Buffalo Springfield, a band that had at times gravitated toward experimentalism and obfuscation.Mr. Furay’s song “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” the title track of Poco’s debut album in 1969, served as a statement of purpose:Well there’s just a little bit of magicIn the country music we’re singin’So let’s begin.We’re bringin’ you back down home where the folks are happySittin’ pickin’ and a-grinnin’Casually, you and meWe’ll pick up the pieces, uh-huh.Poco in 1973, clockwise from left: Paul Cotton, Mr. Young, Richie Furay, Timothy B. Schmit and George Grantham.Gijsbert Hanekroot/RedfernsAt once keening and lyrical, Mr. Young’s pedal steel work imbued the group’s music with its rustic signature sound and helped create a prominent place for the steel guitar among roots-conscious California rock bands.“I added color to Richie’s country-rock songs, and that was the whole idea, to use country-sounding instruments,” Mr. Young explained in a 2014 interview with Goldmine magazine, referring to Mr. Furay’s compositions.But Mr. Young, who also played banjo, Dobro and mandolin, was not averse to musical experimentation. “I pushed the envelope on steel guitar, playing it with a fuzz tone, because nobody was doing that,” he told Goldmine. He also played the pedal steel through a Leslie speaker, much as a Hammond B3 organist would, causing some listeners to assume he was indeed playing an organ.Mr. Young was not among Poco’s original singers or songwriters. But he emerged as one of the group’s frontmen, along with the newcomer Paul Cotton, after the departure of Mr. Messina in 1971 and Mr. Furay in 1973. Mr. Young would go on to write and sing the lead vocal on “Crazy Love,” the band’s biggest hit, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart (and No. 17 on the pop chart) in 1979.He also wrote and sang lead on “Rose of Cimarron,” another of Poco’s more enduring recordings from the ’70s, and orchestrated the 1989 reunion of the group’s original members for the album “Legacy,” which, like the 1978 platinum-selling “Legend,” yielded a pair of Top 40 singles.Norman Russell Young was born on Feb. 23, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., one of three children of Norman John and Ruth (Stephenson) Young. His father, an electrician, and his mother, a typist, took him to country music bars, where he was captivated by the steel guitar players as a child.He grew up in Denver, where he began playing the lap steel guitar at age 6. As a teenager, he worked with local psychedelic and country bands.After moving to Los Angeles, but before joining Poco, he turned down an invitation to become a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, which at the time featured Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, formerly of the Byrds.Mr. Young performing at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles in 2018.Timothy Norris/WireImageAfter Mr. Cotton’s departure from Poco in 2010 over a financial dispute, Mr. Young became the group’s sole frontman. The band made its final album, “All Fired Up,” in 2013, the same year Mr. Young was inducted into the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame in St. Louis. He released his first solo album, “Waitin’ for the Sun,” in 2017, and performed sporadically with the most recent version of Poco until the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.Mr. Young is survived by his wife of 17 years, Mary Brennan Young; a daughter, Sara; a son, Will; a sister, Corine; and three grandsons. His brother, Ron, died in 2002.Mr. Young’s emergence as a singer and songwriter in Poco in the late ’70s, after almost a decade as a supporting instrumentalist, was as opportune as it was fortuitous.“The band didn’t need another singer-songwriter when Richie and Jim were in the band,” he explained, referring to Mr. Furay and Mr. Messina, in his 2014 Goldmine interview. “My job was to play steel guitar and make the music part of it. So when my job changed, it opened up a whole lot of opportunity for me. So I liked the way things went.” More
For the director Gina Prince-Bythewood, seeing her movie premiere there or just a poster for it on display was a sign that her work mattered. News of the closure hit hard.As the rest of the film industry begins its tentative return to prepandemic normalcy, the announcement that Los Angeles’s ArcLight Cinemas, a chain that includes the Cinerama Dome, would close came as a shock to loyal moviegoers and filmmakers alike. Here, the director Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Old Guard,” “Love & Basketball”) explains why the news was so devastating. These are edited excerpts.The ArcLight is a place for people who love movies. If you’re a filmmaker, if you love movies, you just appreciated everything that [the ArcLight] put into making it a curated moviegoing experience. They always had the films that we wanted to see, but they also had special screenings of movies that hadn’t been out for years, and a balance between big blockbusters and independent films. They made it an event. We never had to go anywhere else but the ArcLight — because you knew it was an experience every time, and you just didn’t want to cheat on your theater. There was no reason to go anywhere else.Ours was ArcLight Sherman Oaks, which was beautiful. The second you walk in, it’s about film. To the left was this very cool gift shop, which had film memorabilia and books, and then there would be the bar with mixed drinks but also great hot chocolate and coffee. There was a whole costume display from whichever film they were focused on, whether it be “Star Wars” or a period piece. [The concessions stand] was always packed because the food was really good — but there were tons of people working, so the lines moved fast.They had this entire wall of movie posters, and as a filmmaker, you’re always hoping that your poster would show up there. “Love & Basketball” premiered at the Cinerama Dome, and that was incredible to have my first film be at this iconic theater, with the red carpet and the excitement of it, and to see my film up on the marquee. My husband’s film, when he wrote “Get on the Bus,” also played there. To take a picture of the marquee, to have your movie poster be on rotation, it was exciting. And it made you feel like you’re working on something.Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps in “Love & Basketball,” which had its premiere at the Cinerama Dome.New Line CinemaMy husband and I, when we were dating, would go to the movies once a week. Nobody else at the time had assigned seating. You know when you used to go to the theater, and you’d have to get there super early, searching for two spots, and you knew where you’d like to sit and those seats are never available because someone’s there already, and you’re — you know, “Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me”? Here, you picked your favorite seat, you walked in and you sat down. Once we had kids, all of us would go to the exact same seats every time: F25, 24, 23, 22. They allowed us to be near the end, but also to put our feet up on a metal bar right below us. And as you wait, they always have great trivia going up on the screen and movie music playing, and then the usher would come and the experience will begin.All the ushers and everybody who worked there clearly love movies: You could ask them which film they would recommend, and they would go into detail why they loved it. Right before the movie would start, an usher would come to the front of the theater and announce what movie you’re about to see, the running time, the rating and some little tidbit of information about the film. And it was always fun because there would be ushers who were completely shy, and it was probably horrifying for them that they have to do this; others would give these long explanations and you could tell that this was just their moment in the sun.When “Black Panther” came out, we got our seats that we loved two weeks in advance. We knew that it was going to be packed. And the audiences there, there’s just a love of film. So you just knew that you were going to have fun with the crowd as well, because people clap at the end of movies they love and cheer during trailers they’re hyped about. I loved seeing other families going for that same experience, and then being able to talk about it afterward in the lobby. You knew the people were there to see the movie and they respected the filmmaking.To hear that the ArcLight, of all theaters, was shutting down was a shock. It was kind of a blow to that fantasy that we were going to get back to where we were. Streaming has been great during this time, and it was incredible for “The Old Guard” to reach the global audience that it did. But I still love theaters. I love the collective experience of watching a film with people I don’t know who are all feeling the same things.I’m just staying optimistic that someone is going to step up and purchase the theaters. It’s too important to the industry; it’s too important to the audiences; the meaning of it is just too important for it to just go away. I have this fantasy that Netflix or Apple or George Clooney is just going to step up and save it, because it needs to be here. Oprah! We need Oprah. More
An archival release marks the technical debut of a band that helped build a scene, 44 years later.K.K. Barrett hadn’t spoken to Tommy Gear in two decades when he reached out about releasing a secret stash of their old music. There were no hard feelings — the two had simply grown apart over the years — but it was tricky business, regardless. Their band, Screamers, was something of a phantom in the history of Los Angeles punk rock.Despite being one of the most popular acts of the scene’s budding years in the late ’70s, routinely packing shows alongside peers like X and Germs, there had never been an official Screamers release. No LPs, no EPs — not even one measly single. To a certain subset of punk fans, Barrett may as well have been suggesting that he and Gear release the true contents of Area 51. But a five-song, 15-minute 12-inch called “Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977” will be out on Friday.“It wasn’t meant to have an afterlife,” said Barrett, 68, who’s best known as a production designer (“Being John Malkovich,” “Her”), on a video call. “It was just something we did. You document things.”The set was recorded at the band’s then-headquarters, a charming Craftsman in Hollywood dubbed “the Wilton Hilton,” solely as a means to get gigs early on. But after the music was recovered from Barrett’s archives 40-plus years later, and dusted off by the label Superior Viaduct, Gear relented.“Honestly, it wasn’t as if we were adverse to a record per se,” said Gear, the group’s main architect and songwriter, along with the vocalist Tomata du Plenty, in a phone interview. “We actually had conversations with managers and record company people at the time, because they clearly thought we were drawing people to clubs and getting press. But frankly, they didn’t know what to do with us. We didn’t fit their paradigm. And, of course, they were making offers that were useless, anyway.”Gear was speaking on the record about his former band for the first time in at least 30 years, by his estimation. Any lack of promotion on his part aside, though, the shadow of Screamers has been growing substantially since the rise of internet-aided bootlegs and YouTube. These “Hollywood 1977” demos are among the hissy, unauthorized recordings already out there, but hearing a cleaned-up version, transferred from the original reel-to-reel tape, is like stepping into the Wilton Hilton after years of being stuck outside, listening from the street.“It’s not always easy/To get what you deserve,” du Plenty howls on “Punish or Be Damned,” over dueling distorted keyboards, one played by Gear, the other by David Brown, who left the group in late 1977. (He went on to co-found the seminal underground label Dangerhouse; du Plenty died of cancer in 2001, at 52, his illness having been complicated by a long battle with H.I.V.) Barrett anchors the group on drums, playing in tandem with a drum machine. There were no guitars, then or ever, in the band. “We’re talking about a period before ‘punk’ became a bin at a record store,” said Gear.Gear, right, with Barrett in 1978, said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: They’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Ruby Ray/Getty ImagesThe Screamers story takes place in Southern California, but Gear and du Plenty met in Seattle, as part of the queer performance-art troupe Ze Whiz Kidz, and soon formed a heavy glam band, the Tupperwares, ultimately deciding to try their luck in Hollywood. Barrett was an aspiring visual artist from Oklahoma, and left for Los Angeles with $100 in his pocket. The quartet adopted the Screamers name and were immediate icons among the sea of misfits flocking to the city. (The artist Gary Panter designed their logo of a hair-spiked punk, roaring full tilt.)“Was there something in the water?” said John Doe, the singer and bassist for the band X, who also felt a calling to move West on a whim in 1976. “Yeah, it was cheap rent. And people could own cars — and a sense of freedom.”A clique of “50 people, 60 tops,” according to Barrett, constituted the entirety of the initial Los Angeles punk scene. Concerts were just as much a social event as a musical one, and the nascent Slash magazine served as a “newsletter” for those who were hanging out. At that point, the crowd was notably diverse and free thinking, particularly in terms of sexuality.“I thought it was very inclusive,” said Joan Jett, who was one of those 50 or 60 people, and whose group the Runaways was a source of inspiration to many soon-to-be punks. She also produced the only Germs album, “(GI)” from 1979. “It was wonderful, actually. Some of the best times of my life I remember — or don’t remember — are from that time period.”It would prove to be a fleeting moment. By 1980, the scene’s music was transforming into something else entirely: faster, angrier. Eventually, conceptual acts like Screamers faded away. (A contentious, drawn-out film project known as “Population: 1,” made by the filmmaker Rene Daalder, drove the group apart as well.)Gear said the band was an experiment. “You know how chemistry experiments are: they’re going to be a panacea or they’re going to blow up in your face.” Since moving on, he has lived a private life — he cited his age as “ageless” — working mostly in the “personal computer world,” he said.The arrival of the first-ever Screamers release, almost a half-century late, seems to tie a bow on the band’s saga — but it may reopen it more than anything else. As to whether there’s any danger in ripping away the mystique that was so central until now, Barrett isn’t worried.“Whenever you try to dig out something from artistic scenes, you end up with crumbs that get you a flavor of what it might’ve been,” he said. “Those documents add up to tell a new truth, because the real truth is missing a lot of parts. So I feel like we’ve left some bread crumbs. And this is a pretty good one.” More
