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F4
SUNDAY, AUGUST 12, 2007
LOS ANGELES TIMES
CALENDAR

ARTS&MUSICCONTENTS

CLASSICAL MUSIC
It's still tough to rock opera's world
Artists keep trying to meld the musical forms; now one comes close. By Mark Swed. Page 1

POP MUSIC
Putting a forward spin on the past
Hey, you have heard that song before as originality gets a signature twist. By Ann Powers. Page 1

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KEN HIVELY Los Angeles Times
Hershey Felder

The housewife who became a star
Lori McKenna's tunes of everyday drama have struck a chord with music fans. By Holly Gleason. Page 10

THEATER
His key to success: the singalong
Hershey Felder finds happiness is sharing the stage with a crowd. By Diane Haithman. Page 6

BOOKS & IDEAS
Blog-borne insights into a too-brief stay
Theresa Duncan's posts reveal the touchstones of her life. By Steffie Nelson. Page 11

ART
Exploring Portugal's open-doors policy
A Smithsonian exhibit looks at the world trader's lasting effect. By Stanley Meisler. Page 12

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British National Maritime Museum
"Portuguese Squadron Off a Rocky Coast," ca. 1521, poss. Joachim Patinir.

Also...
Fast Tracks 10

THE GUIDE
Theater, music, dance, museums and more. Page 14

PLUS...
Ask Amy, Astrology, Chess, Poker, Puzzler, Sudoku. Page 16

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Photographs by WALLACE BERMAN The Rose Gallery
LIFE AND TIMES: Wallace Berman photographed artists, writers and actors. He also chronicled himself. Here, he's in Larkspur, Calif., in 1961.

ON THE SHELF
An ode to a lost time
IT was a moment that seems as brief as the blink of a camera's shutter: a California much more bucolic, spacious and slow. This was, at heart, artist Wallace Berman's midcentury bohemian California – an instant quickly eclipsed by the vividly hued social revolution to follow.
A just-released collection of black-and-white images, "Wallace Berman Photographs," assembled by writer Kristine McKenna and designer Lorraine Wild, reveals another dimension of an artist who was best known for his intricate assemblage and collage work and a handmade, self-published magazine, Semina.
In nine issues that appeared between 1955 and 1964, Semina showcased the work of friends – writers and visual artists in inventively constructed formats. Although he quite often used photographs in his collage work, he didn't incorporate images of his own. In fact, the remarkable number of images he left behind – mostly negatives – brought up a lot of questions.
"I was stunned at how good the work was. And the breadth of the people he knew," says McKenna, who got her first glimpse of the photographs nearly 10 years ago when she approached Berman's son, Tosh, and his widow, Shirley, about working on a biography (Berman was killed in a car crash in 1976).
The images reflect both a now-vanished simplicity and a dedicated artistic spirit that feels at once loose yet deeply engaged. Sprinkled amid the famous (youthful) faces – actors Dean Stockwell and Teri Garr, Beat poet Stuart Perkoff and artist George Herms – are glimpses of L.A.'s shaggy bohemia – Topanga, Venice Beach, and Beverly Glen, where Berman kept a studio.
"It's people living not quite off the grid, but somehow the big hand of consumer culture is not as evident," says Wild. "We wanted it to be a very intimate portrait of what life and work was like then. How children were integrated. How comfortable people were with themselves and the surroundings."
It was a big canvas, the city, full of possibility: "In those days they could get into their huge car and sail everywhere from Highland Park to Topanga all in one day," says McKenna. "I guess it is a love letter to a lost city – a lost time and lost place."
– LYNELL GEORGE

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THE VIBE:
Berman captures poet Stuart Perkoff midstride, above, in Venice in 1965. At left, he turns the camera on himself, and his wife, Shirley, in Topanga Canyon in 1967.

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KIRK MCKOY Los Angeles Times
GREETER: Visitors to his theater hear the voice of Ricardo Montalbán.

HOT TIP
The Guy sounds simply mahhvelous
Theatergoers attending "Zorro in Hell" at the Ricardo Montalbán Theatre are treated to a special "guest" at each performance of the zany, politically tinged comedy from Culture Clash.
Though he isn't officially part of the play, which runs through next Sunday, the theater's namesake makes an "appearance" at every show-in the form of a voice-over welcome.
So as you "relax in your seat made of fine Corinthian leather," listen up: That voice you're hearing really is Montalbán's. And before you get too caught up reminicing about "Fantasy Island," don't forget to turn off your cellphone.

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Associated Press
The Boys of Summer deliver a sun-soaked geography lesson.

THE SoCAL SONGBOOK
GEOFF BOUCHER
'California Girls'
The Beach Boys|1965

It was late at night and Brian Wilson, who had just taken LSD for the first time, was in the bedroom of his Hollywood apartment with a pillow over his head. He was stricken. He had images of his mother and his father in his mind and, most of all, fear. Then he managed to push all those thoughts aside. He walked downstairs to the piano.
"I was thinking about the music from cowboy movies. And I sat down and started playing it, bum-buhdeeda, bum-buhdeeda. I did that for about an hour. I got these chords going. Then I got this melody, it came pretty fast after that. And the rest was history, right?"
Yes, the rest was history. Wilson, then 22, kept working the keyboard and, turning his thoughts to fashion magazines, he came up with one of the most famous opening lines in pop music, "Well, East Coast girls are hip, I really dig those styles they wear..."
The next day, Mike Love came by the apartment on Gardner Street and the pair-one a troubled auteur, the other the commercial-minded driving force behind the Beach Boys-took turns building a hit that would define the sun-tanned promise of L.A. as the center of American glamour and youth. "Every other line was his or mine," Wilson said.
Wilson recounted all this a few weeks ago over a cellphone on his way to Laguna Beach. He and his wife and their three children have encamped at a tony resort for the summer, and most days you can find him there sitting stiffly at poolside behind sunglasses and a smile. "We're going down to sit by the water," he explained. "The weather's great out."
Wilson is a beloved and tragic figure in pop, and at the core of his life story is the painful paradox that some of the sunniest music ever recorded came out of man who, mentally and emotionally, spent years of his life squirming in a dark and lonely corner. "California Girls" is part of that paradox. It's a carefree teenage ode to girls; it was also written the night that Wilson first heard another voice in his head, one that was threatening and stayed with him for years.
Wilson is enjoying a well-documented career renaissance. He's feeling more confident too. When asked about the accepted lore that it was Love who had written almost all the lyrics to "California Girls," he said that was a fallacy he had let go unchallenged for too long. "I wrote a lot of those lyrics too; it was line for line, back and forth between us. That's what happened."
The basic notion for the lyrics, Wilson said, was his belief that some truths are self-evident. "Everybody loves girls, right? Everybody loves California and the sun. That's what I wanted from the song. And to mention all the parts of the country, that's fun, people will like that."
In the studio, Wilson recalled, he channeled a bit of the sonic feel of "On Broadway," a hit for the Drifters two years earlier.
The music of "Girls," like so many of Wilson's compositions, was equal parts symphony hall and amusement park, 2 1/2 minutes of nuanced musical complexity and beach-blanket simplicity.
The West Coast has the sunshine
And the girls all get so tanned
I dig a French bikini on Hawaii island dolls
By a palm tree in the sand
"Good Vibrations," recorded a year later, may be Wilson's otherworldly masterpiece, but he knew he had a crowd-pleaser the moment the harmonies were finished on "Girls."
"It was special, I knew that would become the theme song of the Beach Boys. It's an anthem. That song went to No. 3 in the country. I think if anything, that song speaks louder than ever. Everyone knows about California girls, and that song is the reason."