Music

In an odd yet understandable marketing strategy, the folks behind E!'s new reality show "Mrs. Eastwood & Company" have spent a lot of pre-premiere publicity time explaining what the show isn't. Which is to say, Clint Eastwood. The legendary actor and director will appear in but a few episodes and then only briefly. He will not, for instance, be slamming doors or engaging in filmed therapy sessions with his wife, Dina, around whom the show revolves (see title.) That doesn't mean the show is not about Clint Eastwood; it is. If the principal characters -- Dina, her 15-year-old daughter Morgan and 19-year old stepdaughter Francesca -- were not related to him, there would be Absolutely No Reason to watch this, which, by reality show standards, promises to be tame to the point of sedation.

A bleary-eyed Chui Hom tripped down her apartment stairs at 8 a.m. sharp and started her car. She didn't get far. The vehicle inched across Riverside Terrace, a narrow one-way lane in Echo Park, and stopped on the other side. Hom is part of Los Angeles' Great Street-Sweeping Do-Si-Do. Twice a week, residents of Koreatown, Pico-Union and other neighborhoods with more apartments than parking spaces race to their cars, hoping to move them before parking enforcement officers arrive and ticket them for blocking street sweepers.

Two 17-year-old girls have been sentenced for torturing and butchering an elderly woman, less than three weeks after a pair of 10-year-olds were charged with murdering a toddler. Again, a troubled nation is asking, how could this happen? Edna Phillips, 70, was throttled with her dog's leash and stabbed or slashed 86 times. The mental images of the crime have shocked the nation just as the video pictures of little James Bulger being led to his death did last month.

There are things that Slash just doesn't want to talk about. And the timing was definitely not right a few weeks ago as the guitarist was preparing for a trip to Cleveland for his induction with Guns N' Roses into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. "I don't even want to talk about that. I don't want to touch it," Slash said in April, his usual friendly demeanor turning cool at the mere mention of GNR. It was during a week of drama and uncertainty about the ceremony, which had peaked days earlier with the arrival of a confrontational open letter to the Hall of Fame from singer Axl Rose.

When Pink Floyd first took its concept album "The Wall" to the concert stage more than three decades ago, even lead singer and chief songwriter Roger Waters couldn't imagine a day when rock music might get any bigger. But 32 years later, his magnum opus about the battle between individual freedoms and authoritarian oppression has magnified beyond Waters' own expectations of yore. Now the man who once excoriated the voluminous expansion of the rock concert experience has helped institutionalize it. "I famously hated playing to large numbers of people and playing in stadiums," Waters, 68, said from a tour stop in Austin, Texas, earlier this month.

 Neil Diamond and Katie McNeil were married Saturday, the "Sweet Caroline" singer announced Sunday on Twitter, the same place he told the world of their engagement back in September. "Katie and I got married last night, we wish you all could've been there," the singer-songwriter told his more than 300,000 followers. "It was magical! Love, Neil. " The couple - he's 71, she's 42 - tied the knot in L.A. in front of friends and family, his rep told People. It's McNeil's first wedding, and the third for Diamond, who was previously married to high school sweetheart Jayne Posner, then to Marcia Murphey.

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

Bob Moog was a geek. And proud of it. His music-meets-electronics inventions made him a legend in the music world but not exactly a household name. Today, a Google Doodle seeks to change that, honoring him with an ultra-cool interactive doodle -- call it a Goog -- that shows the world just how "instrumental" the late Moog was.

Southwest Chamber Music's L.A. International New Music Festival is more a Los Angeles interstitial new music festival. Skirting touristy Europe, these Southwesterners are not interested in inclusiveness but in filling gaps that very much need filling. Monday's installment, the third of the festival's four concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall, did feature two admired L.A. composers who do not lack local institutional attention. Anne LeBaron, on the faculty at CalArts, happens to be the local composer of the moment with her breathtaking opera "Crescent City" currently in production and a piece on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's opening Hollywood Bowl concert in July.

The financial well-being of nonprofit arts organizations typically depends on ticket-buying fans and check-writing philanthropists, but the Music Center is trying to bring complete strangers into the mix — including some who might never set foot on Bunker Hill, or for that matter, the West Coast. Its first-ever online auction is going on right now, with 36 items up for bid. They range from what you might expect — living it up at the Los Angeles Opera’s opening night gala on Sept.

Never, perhaps, was there a more fitting program for Jacaranda's motto “music at the edge” than the one served up Sunday evening: two rare works by two iconoclastic Pacific Rim composers, performed almost literally on the Rim itself at Santa Monica's First Presbyterian Church during a solar eclipse. Terry Riley's ground-breaking exercise in repetition “In C” is world-famous, but hardly anyone has ever heard its followup, “Olson III” -  which, incredibly, was receiving its large-scale U.S. premiere.

  The artistic sagacity of Stephen Sondheim met the personal veracity of Elaine Stritch on Saturday, when "Elaine Stritch Singin' Sondheim … One Song at a Time" strode into Walt Disney Concert Hall, leaving venue and audience ineffably transformed. In her Disney Hall debut, Stritch and this acclaimed 2010 Café Carlyle salute to the master of American musical theater didn't so much seize the house as subsume its regard and send it back tenfold. Visibly charged by the capacity crowd's ovation, Stritch opened with "I Feel Pretty," weaving her sandpaper Sprechstimme around Sondheim's lyrics to wryly irresistible, post-Noel Coward effect.

Warning: Music may be hazardous to your health. It's not just your hearing that's at risk, according to a study out Monday in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. Teens and young adults who listen to digital music players with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot, the study says. And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender. These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students at two vocational schools in the Netherlands.

There's so much to praise in the blissful Broadway revival of "Follies," which opened Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre on the heels of its numerous Tony nominations, but let's pay homage first to the sheer sophistication of the show itself. After experiencing "Follies" again - an adult entertainment if ever there was one - I flat-out refuse to accept any more jukebox substitutes. One doesn't often talk about architecture when writing about musicals, but the most impressive thing about "Follies," beyond Stephen Sondheim's bejeweled score, is the ingenious way it is constructed.

Elvis Costello and Elton John are joining forces for a talk-and-tunes series to air on Sundance Channel. "Spectacle: Elvis Costello With . . ." will be a 13-week series on which Costello plays host to artists and other personalities for an hour of discussion and performance. "This is a wonderful opportunity to talk in complete thoughts about music, movies, art or even vaudeville, then frame it with unique and illustrative performances," Costello said in a statement. John, who also will appear, will be an executive producer of the series, which is scheduled to premiere in December.

MIAMI - The Carnival Destiny cruise ship hasn't even left port, and half the ship's guests are already wasted. Passengers pack the lobby bar, balancing luggage with buckets of ice-soaked beer bottles, and flashing room keys that double as charge cards to keep the drinks flowing. When it's time for a mandatory safety drill, the life-saving instructions playing over the vessel's intercom can barely be heard over sounds of drunken guests stumbling over one another, spewing obscenities, cheering, slapping high-fives and yelling chants like "Ain't no party like a … Kid Rock party.

Though Carl Davis has composed scores for such films as 1981's "The French Lieutenant's Woman," over the past three decades, he's become one of silent cinema's greatest champions, composing and conducting scores for countless silent films as well as orchestrating existing scores for such silents as Charlie Chaplin's 1931 masterwork"City Lights. " In March, the U.S.-born, London-based composer earned kudos for conducting the 46-piece Oakland East Bay Symphony in his score for the restored 5 1/2-hour version of Abel Gance's 1927 epic "Napoleon.