Collaboration

Mark Morris Dance Group in collaboration with LA Opera Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday Price: $30 to $120 Contact: (213) 972-0711 or http://www.musiccenter.org/events/dance.html

For 18 years, Dora Sanchez Hernandez has fiercely protected her son. From the time Erik Esequizel was born prematurely at just 24 weeks, she has been there for him. Through 50 surgeries and two near-death episodes. Through the daily demands of feeding, bathing and dressing. Through abandonment by his father and advice from doctors to pull the plug. Now - in what L.A. County Superior Court Judge Michael I. Levanas called a "celebration of family" - Hernandez and 14 other families have been granted limited conservatorships over their disabled children.

Image and Word, the Interaction of 20th-Century Photography and Text by Jefferson Hunter (Harvard University Press: $25; 233 pages, illustrated) Photography has never been fully accepted as an art. People who wait in line to see a celebrated show of paintings, a dance concert or a visiting orchestra will more likely show you their slides of Europe than spend time in front of carefully printed and framed photographs.

He had already been proclaimed "the Picasso of children's books" by Time magazine when Maurice Sendak, then in his 30s, wrote and illustrated "Where the Wild Things Are," a dark fantasy that became one of the 10 bestselling children's books of all time. Published in 1963, the book was a startling departure from the sweetness and innocence that then ruled children's literature. "Wild Things" tapped into the fears of childhood and sent its main character — an unruly boy in a wolf costume — into a menacing forest to tame the wild beasts of his imagination.

Scott Z. Burns was nervous. He had sent Steven Soderbergh an e-mail and gotten back a surprising reply: "Please don't ever contact me again. If you do, you can expect to hear from my lawyer." It shouldn't have been like that: Maybe Burns and Soderbergh weren't old buddies, but they had collaborated on two pictures -- in 2004, Burns was one of several writers on "Ocean's Twelve," which Soderbergh directed, and Burns wrote the screenplay for the 2006 HBO feature "The Half Life of Timofey Berezin" (a.k.

If you were a teenager in the 1980s, you probably wore a Swatch or two or five. And since this decade's designers have been rehashing '80s fashion trends (shoulder-padded blazers, baggy "boyfriend" jeans and wide belts), the timing is right for the Swiss watchmaker to make its resurgence. Swatch, which made the late graffiti artist Keith Haring a household name, again looks to the street for its latest artistic collaboration this summer.

John Spiak made his name as a curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, in Tempe, where he spent 17 years helping to develop an innovative program dedicated in large part to a socially engaged mode of art-making known as "social practice. " He was born and raised in Orange County, however, not far from downtown Santa Ana, which makes his move last fall - to take over as director and chief curator of the Grand Central Art Center - something of a homecoming. "I grew up running around this neighborhood," he says, and he speaks of it today with a booster's enthusiasm.

As the lone artistic voice behind Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor regularly had the pleasure of answering to no one during NIN's approximately 20-year run of emotionally damaged hard rock. Now in his mid-40s and into his second career as a film composer, Reznor not only is having to learn a new discipline, but adjust to ceding control and holding back his reflex of saying 'no.' Take, for instance, the music that opens David Fincher's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which marks the second film score for Reznor and his latter-days NIN producer Atticus Ross.

Missoni is having a moment. Last month, the Italian luxury label's Missoni for Target collaboration was so hotly sought after that it caused the retailer's website to crash. EBay was flooded with resales of the stuff — some 21,000 items at one point — at inflated prices, including a pair of boots a Tulsa, Okla., woman posted for $31,000, in hopes, she wrote in the auction listing, of funding her daughter's college tuition. Orders for the Missoni spring 2012 ready-to-wear line got a post-frenzy boost, and the company is pondering a mid-priced line.

"It's a completely new experience," said Matthew Zuber, a 21-year-old bassoonist studying at the Colburn School. "I've never done an opera before. " He was referring to his participation -- along with 21 other young musicians at the downtown conservatory -- in a new collaboration between Colburn and Los Angeles Opera's Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. That union gets its first showcase this weekend, when the combined forces present two one-act operas: Ernst Krenek's "The Secret Kingdom" and Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis.

"Zen and the Art of Punk Rock"? If anyone were utterly qualified to write such a book, it would be John Doe and his longtime musical partner and ex-wife, Exene Cervenka. On the heels of the recent release of their first duet album, "John Doe and Exene Cervenka Singing and Playing," the two express such a matter-of-fact, "accept life as it is" view that the founding members of X and its rootsy offshoot the Knitters often seem to have reached some level of enlightenment.

The burgeoning cloud storage space business got more crowded Tuesday as Google launched its much-rumored and highly anticipated remote storage service, Drive. Cloud-based storage gives users a place to park their documents, photos, presentations and other files so they can easily and immediately access and share them with various digital devices wherever they have an Internet connection. But Google said its Drive service also gives users the ability to collaboratively edit documents in real time.

A new $12.3-million building is set to rise next to the Eli and Edythe Broad Stage in Santa Monica, allowing the organization to expand its cultural offerings and host more events. On Wednesday officials with the Broad will announce the new wing, with construction on the two-story structure expected to begin next year and be completed in 2014 at the earliest. The new complex, which will be situated on the east side of the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, comes at a time when the Broad is looking to expand its programming.

Scientists have published a new map of gene variations that influence the risk for various brain diseases and conditions, including Alzheimer's. More than 200 researchers involved in Project ENIGMA (for Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) pored over thousands of MRI images and DNA screens from 21,151 healthy people. They looked for specific, heritable gene variations that appeared to cause disease. They sought out gene variants associated with reduced brain size, which is a marker for Alzheimer's disease and dementia, as well as mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Late last year, Joachim Cooder began feeling that life as a sideman wasn't enough. Cooder is the son of one of the most lauded names in L.A. rock - singer-guitarist Ry Cooder. For years he played drums for his father, Mavis Staples,Dr. John and the Cuban collective Buena Vista Social Club while composing for indie films like "Lars and the Real Girl. " His life was the archetype of a successful behind-the-scenes musical mercenary . But late last year during a hobbyist's stint as an apprentice chef at the downtown L.A. pop-up restaurant Le Comptoir, he began to suspect that new challenges might be good for him musically as well.

John Spiak made his name as a curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, in Tempe, where he spent 17 years helping to develop an innovative program dedicated in large part to a socially engaged mode of art-making known as "social practice. " He was born and raised in Orange County, however, not far from downtown Santa Ana, which makes his move last fall - to take over as director and chief curator of the Grand Central Art Center - something of a homecoming. "I grew up running around this neighborhood," he says, and he speaks of it today with a booster's enthusiasm.

"A moving picture," said William Faulkner, "is by its nature a collaboration, and any collaboration is compromise, because that is what the word means — to give and take. " True enough for Faulkner, whose moonlight job in Hollywood, though he worked on some Howard Hawks classics, required his craftsmanship but not his genius. And there is truth enough in the observation to apply it more generally to novelists in the movies. In that tumultuous history, the long and faithful collaboration between director Bela Tarr and novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai stands apart.

This report, one in a series of occasional articles about oversight of nurses, was prepared in collaboration with ProPublica, an independent investigative newsroom in New York.

Tonino Guerra, an internationally renowned Italian screenwriter who collaborated with Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and other greats of Italian and world cinema on films such as Fellini's "Amarcord" and Antonioni's "L'Avventura" and "Blow-Up," has died. He was 92. Guerra died Wednesday at his home in Santarcangelo di Romagna, in northern Italy, according to an announcement on the Tonino Guerra Cultural Assn. website. A poet, novelist and former schoolteacher, Guerra began his screenwriting career in Rome in the mid-1950s.

You can probably work out what you will think of the new book, "Standing on the Sun: How the Explosion of Capitalism Abroad Will Change Business Everywhere" by gauging your reaction to this passage on the future of capitalism: "Firms that want to be part of fruitful collaboration will start behaving generously. And as a result, they'll attract generous partners. " Naive idealism or visionary insight? If you think it sounds like the former, prepare to be enraged; if the latter, to be enchanted.