The Hollywood Beat

In 2019, that halcyon year before we found ourselves seeking shelter from the storm known as covid, musicians of every stripe were putting the finishing touches on albums and looking forward to hitting the road to promote them.  Such was the case for a female singer-songwriting duo that met at a music festival and found that they shared a similar quirky outlook when it comes to songwriting. Louisa...

Singer-songwriter Leo Sawikin, like many other emerging recording artists, is busy making up for lost time. He wrote the material for his first album, Row Me Away, in 2019. The album was released two years later in 2021 — one year into the covid pandemic. Promoting that album in front of a live audience wasn’t possible. But that was then.  Sawakin has been back in the studio recording tracks for a...

In 2021 alone, more than 60 thousand of the 80 thousand overdose deaths in the United States were due to opiods. One of those who died was 30-year-old  Robert “Luke” Paschal, whose mother, Susan Bartz Herrick, has penned the mother-son memoir, Slow Dancing with the Devil: A Son’s Substance Use Disorder, A Mother’s Anguish. In it, Herrick chronicles a catastrophic car crash that very nearly killed...

Brian K. Pagels is one half (along with partner Stephen Russ) of the musical duo, Brian K. & The Parkway. He and Russ formed the band in 2021. Pagels describes the duo’s music as “coastal heartland rock.” Their first album, Killing the Bear,” was preceded by two singles — Wind the Clock and Straight Through. On the latter, Pagels is joined by singer-songwriter Cat Popper, known for – among oth...

John Ondrasik, known by his stage name Five for Fighting, rose to fame with the 2002 Grammy-nominated single Superman (It’s Not Easy). The song charted at number 14 on the Hot 100 and reached number 1 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40. Music aficionados considered it an anthem following the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11.   On his third album, The Battle for Everything, the single 100 Years r...

Covid-19 infections exploded across the globe in 2020. By the end of the year, statistics were staggering. In the United States alone, estimates put the number of infections at 20 million. Of those, some 340 thousand people died. Worldwide, nearly 84 million people had been infected resulting in more than 1.8 million fatalities. The World Health Organization (WHO) designated the virus a pandemic o...

Jess Phoenix wears many hats. The history undergrad major took a geology class on a lark and found herself instantly hooked. Soon enough, she earned a master’s degree in geology at California State University, Los Angeles. Her thesis is a mouthful: Lava Flow Morphologies and Structural Features Along the Axis of the South Rift Zone of Loihi Seamount, Hawaii. Jess’s expertise in volcanology and sei...

In the Republic, the philosopher Plato notably penned that “Our need will be the real creator.” A rephrasing of those words survives to this day: Necessity is the mother of invention. And so it is. Just ask filmmaker Vishavjit Singh, a cartoonist, performance artist, and public speaker. Singh is a member of the religious sect Sikhism, a worldwide spiritual movement that has its roots in India. Sin...

Aba Arthur is an actor, playwright, filmmaker, and author. This multi-hyphenate woman knew what she wanted her future to look like from day one. A cast member of Wakanda Forever, the sequel to Black Panther, she now can be seen in the new musical motion picture, The Color Purple, a revisiting of the 1985 film adapted from Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by the same name. There's more o...

Tandy Culpepper talks with Australian filmmaker Keer Shelter, the man behind the live action short film, Perspectives. The film has qualified for consideration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the folks that bring you the Oscars every year. Perspectives' storyline involves a female Israeli soldier who finds herself on a bus with a Palestinian man she suspects may be a suicide b...

You may know him as John Ondrasik. You may know him by his stage name Five for Fighting. No matter. By any name, this acclaimed singer- songwriter is recognized throughout the music industry as one of America’s greatest balladeers. Think Superman and 100 Years. Last year, Ondrasik set out on an arduous and perilous journey. After Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, John sat down at his piano and...

I’d been trying to schedule an interview with veteran broadcast journalist Don Dahler (most recently of CBS News) for weeks. We finally found a good date in October, and looking back, I realize had we conducted the interview in September, I would have missed out on his valuable observations regarding the Israel-Hamas war. Earlier in his career — as a war correspondent with ABC News — Dahler was em...

For several months, I had been trying to pin down journalist Francine Kiefer for an interview regarding her award-winning work as West Coast bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. My efforts were complicated by unforeseen circumstances not of our making. Kiefer had been asked to assume the role of interim national news editor pending results of a search to fill the position long term. I c...

Recently I had the opportunity to interview the D.C. based singer-songwriter Lauren Calve. By her own wry admission, she’s something of a late bloomer. In fact, one of the tracks on her debut long-form album, Shift, bears that very title. The ten track collection was released the first week of September. Calve recorded the LP in Nashville – and, boy, howdy, did she have heavyweight musicians in th...

Judy Lev (the pen name for Judy Labensohn) is an American-Israeli writer whose new memoir -- Our Names Do Not Appear -- breaks new ground for the genre. One book critic referred to it as a "hybrid memoir." After reading it, I must opine that hybrid is an accurate description for the book. Judy mixes creative nonfiction with elements of fiction, and she does so with a deft hand. The story mines mem...

Dr. Nancy Irwin is a Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist. A longtime mutual friend thought I’d enjoy interviewing Dr. Irwin, and our friend was right. She came to this profession by way of an interesting journey . Can you imagine a stand up comic who morphs into a shrink? Well, Dr, Irwin traveled that road. I talk to Dr. Irwin about why people — including Hollywood celebriti...

Pamela Skjolsvik and I met in 2008 at Goucher College where we both were enrolled in the Creative Nonfiction MFA program. We’ve kept in touch over the years. When Pamela decided to try her hand at fiction, she settled on a topic guaranteed to raise eyebrows. The novel is Forever 51, a dark comedy about a menopausal vampire named Veronica. Pamela’s protagonist is forever condemned to a life of irri...

I caught up recently with a woman who, like me, graduated from Goucher College's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. She and I have been Facebook friends, but we spoke by phone for the first time only in the last month. I came across one of her posts in which she shared that she had just come out with a poetry collection titled The House Inside My Head . In this episode of THB, she tells us about...

Dr. James Michael Stevens is a professor of music and chair of the music department at Welch College in Gallatin, Tennessee. Stevens is also a composer and a prolific one at that. By his estimation, he has some 8,000 compositions to his credit, mainly for piano but also for organ and choral groups. The chorale composition Without Love We Have Nothing – written with Joseph M. Martin – has been perf...

Tandy Culpepper talks with author, lecturer, and broadcast journalist Reba Merrill. This is a woman one Hollywood wag dubbed "The Queen of the Hollywood Press Junket." Merrill came to Los Angeles and sought to build a brand in entertainment journalism at the unheard of age of 47 -- unheard of because, for a woan at that time, 47 was over the hill. So after assorted trials and tribulations, she bea...