I finally had the mini-Hollywood experience of getting to check out a premiere for a film at Grauman’s Chinese Theater last night. My friend, Randy Lee who owns Limbeat Studio in NYC, where I recorded my most recent album, scored the film, “Cayman Went” and invited me to it’s debut.  Congrats Randy! Nice work!

I had taken friends sightseeing along that famous strip before – it’s like the West Coast Time’s Square only instead of Broadway Shows they have the Academy Awards at the Kodak Theater – only I’d never actually been past the George Clooney hand/footprints and gone into the actual Chinese theater.

All I can say is – WOW. Loews can take back their stadium seating with state-of-the-art cup-holders and space-ship-like aisle lighting. You enter the Chinese Theater and get to the top of the stairs and you see this enormously elaborate embroidered curtain covering the front of the theater – flanked on either side by ornate pseudo-balconies and Chinese lanterns. It makes you remember that movies are more than just a low-key evening activity.

They are art.

We have sleeker screens now through technological advances. At concerts we have huge stages and auditoriums built to pack in as many people as possible…but there’s a magic that’s missing. A magic that I felt sitting in that old theater, built in a time where attending movies was an event. I felt inspired as a spectator – and engaged before the curtains even opened to show the screen and then the movie.

It reminded me that I needed to reach out and touch more art.

I’ve been working so hard lately on behind the scenes music stuff that I haven’t been going to galleries – or watching movies. I haven’t been going to shows. I’ve been recording and writing – but not just playing to play anymore.

Colors – textures – guitar strings and piano keys under my fingertips – a new pen and a blank sheet of paper – movie music pumped through high-end speakers in a theater – the sand under my feet as I kick a soccer ball around on the beach and take in the natural beauty of the coastline. Reaching out for the sensation of it all.

Hollywood dresses up many things. People. Movies. Dreams. And I feel like unlike in NYC where I see art everywhere – it gets buried here in Los Angeles a bit under flashing lights, money and the desire for fame. Art becomes secondary to those things, even though Art is the foundation for it all in entertainment.

But even if it’s harder to see – it’s still here.