This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Arts & Entertainment

Worlds Collide In Eagle Rock for Lummis Day Fundraiser

Support local musicians by attending the Lummis Day 2011 benefit featuring a film by Emmy Award-winning journalist and author Ruben Martinez.

In addition to walking cross-country and founding the Southwest Museum, Charles Fletcher Lummis was the Los Angeles Time’s first city editor, one of the young city’s first librarians, an advocate for Native Americans and the preservation of the California missions and a fervent booster for the City of Angels.

Evidently, he was also an early multitasker who didn’t need much sleep.

Lummis was famous as well for the frequent soirees he threw for local and visiting writers, artists and musicians in El Alisal, the Highland Park house he built from Los Angeles river rock with the help of a Gabrielino teenager.

Find out what's happening in Highland Park-Mount Washingtonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

And if you’ve been to the annual Lummis Day celebration, now in its sixth year, you know that the Grand Old Man of the Arroyo Seco still knows how to throw a damn good party.

At the turn of the (19th) century, Lummis could probably wow a crowd with only some vino, a kettle of campfire chili and a splashy California sunset.  These days, it takes a whole lot more moolah to put on the shindig of music, poetry, art and dance that honors Lummis’s memory and accomplishments.

Find out what's happening in Highland Park-Mount Washingtonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

According to Eliot Sekuler, Lummis Day mover and shaker and board member of the non-profit Lummis Day Foundation, the annual operating budget is $25,000, which pays for items such as insurance and rental of the three stages where local talent like Ann Likes Red, Mariachi Divas, and the Chapin Sisters perform.  Most importantly, the Foundation makes sure that every artist who performs at Lummis Day gets paid.

Sekuler is quick to add that the Foundation can’t afford the usual fee of past performers such as musician, activist, and local-boy-made-good Jackson Browne who famously ran into Sekuler one day and wondered why the latter had never called him to perform at Lummis Day.  Sekuler promptly extended an invitation for the 2008 event and Browne subsequently delighted 6,000 Lummis Day fans in Sycamore Park.

But while Browne might not need the money, Sekuler says it allows many performers to play for the people in their own neighborhood.

Luckily, like the man they honor, the collective members of the Foundation are ingenious, creative, and know everyone who’s anyone.  In addition to donations from Neighborhood Councils, the City of Los Angeles, and private individuals, their twice yearly fundraisers are interesting, erudite, and worth the price of admission even if they weren’t for such a worthy cause.

Case in point: the February 12th benefit for the June 5th Lummis Day 2011, which features a screening of When Worlds Collide, the Untold Story of the Americas After Columbus.  The film was co-produced by KCET and Red Hill Productions and co-written by director Carl Byker and host, author, Emmy award-winning journalist (for his T.V. series Life and Times) and musician Ruben Martinez, who performed at Lummis Day 5.

Much like Lummis’s salons, When Worlds Collide anchors an evening of film, music, discussion, and community.  As a companion piece to Martinez’s exploration of the clash between the New World and the Old, there will be a screening of excerpts from Que Viva Mexico, the never-finished, 1931 silent film from pioneering Soviet Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin has astonished many a young film student.  Pianist and noted sound editor/sound designer Michael Feldman will provide the film’s “soundtrack."

Martinez made a critically acclaimed film.  Lummis built a museum and saved missions and Native Americans.  Eisenstein traveled from Russia to Mexico to record a culture.

All you have to do to make a difference is buy a $15 ticket and have an interesting evening.

Go, world builder, go.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE is being held at and co-presented by Center for the Arts Eagle Rock (2225 Colorado Boulevard, Los Angeles 90041) on February 12 at 7:00 p.m.  Tickets are $15 and are available at the door, online via Paypal at http://www.lummisday.org/2011/2011-FundRaiser.htm, and locally at Café de Leche (5000 York Boulevard), Antigua Coffee House (3400 North Figueroa Street), and Galco’s Old World Grocery (5702 York Boulevard).

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Highland Park-Mount Washington