Terri Hiete, daughter of Mary and Kurt Hiete of Pacific Palisades, married Geoff S. Linville, son of Janice and George Linville, on September 21. The rose garden ceremony and dinner-dance reception took place at The Ritz Carlton Hotel in Marina del Rey. Tracey Hiete, the bride’s sister, was the maid of honor. The bridesmaids included Tiffany Hiete, the bride’s sister, and friends Jack Songaila, Marissa Irvin, Katie Rhames, Shannon Linville, the bridegroom’s sister, and Lauren Hiete and Jenn Hiete, the bride’s sisters-in-law. The best man was Matthew Pohlson, friend of the bridegroom. Groomsmen were David and Robert Linville, the bridegroom’s brothers, Brady Hiete and Ryan Hiete, the bride’s brothers, and friends Ryan Cummins and Patrick MacManus. The ringbearer was nephew Bradley Hiete. The newlyweds honeymooned in Costa Rica. They are at home in Encino.

Jason David Perez, son of long-time Palisadians Judge David D. and Penny J. Perez, married Michelle Biermann on Saturday, September 29 at the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite Valley. The celebrant was the bridegroom’s father, a retired Superior Court judge. The reception dinner was held in the Mural Room of the hotel. Friends of the bridegroom from Corpus Christi school and former Palisadians Jin Takemura and Drew Phillips, attended the weekend festivities, as did the bridegroom’s sister, Heather Austin and her husband, Travis, and their daughters, Brooke and Grace. Also in attendance were Jason’s grandparents, Annette and Harold Faust of Woodland Hills. The bride’s sister, Carrie Lantermann and her husband, Steve, joined the celebration along with the bride’s brother, Bryan Biermann, and his wife Cathy and their son Gavin. The bridegroom attended Corpus Christi School and Loyola High School. He received his B.A. in sociology with a minor in sports management from UC Santa Barbara. Jason earned his master’s degree in sports management at the University of San Francisco. The bride, daughter of Mrs. Melinda Barry, attended Simi Valley High School and earned her B.A. in history at Cal State Northridge. The newlyweds work in the insurance industry and reside in West Los Angeles.

When watching a movie, the soundtrack might be something that generally goes unnoticed. Not because it is unimportant, but because if done correctly, it flows seamlessly with the film and viewers, enthralled with the movie’s action, might be unaware of any music at all. When done poorly however, it’s a different story. Songs become like nails on a chalkboard, distracting viewers from the advancement of the story, forcing them to dwell on the poor musical selections. Such is not the case for ‘The Great Debaters’ soundtrack, whose songs enhance the film, taking the viewer back to the Depression era South. The film, which opened on Christmas Day stars Academy Award winners Denzel Washington (who also directed the film) and Forest Whitaker. The film revolves around the efforts of a debate coach (Washington’s character), who struggles to get debate team at the historically black Wiley College on equal footing with whites, despite the prevalence of lynch mobs and Jim Crow laws. Soon, his team is debating with the Harvard debate team, in the first American interracial college debate. The soundtrack was produced by Palisadian G. Marq Roswell and features remakes of authentic pre-1935 blues and gospel songs that Roswell, his team and Washington hand selected (out of thousands of potentials). The songs were re-recorded by modern artists Alvin Youngblood Heart, Sharon Jones, Teenie Hodges, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Billy Rivers &The Angelic Voices of Faith, David Berger & The Sultans of Swing, Art Tatum and Marian Anderson and were recorded in the soul capital of the world, Memphis, Tennessee at Arden Studios. ‘With more music intensive movies, it all starts with the script and the scenes in the movie inform what the soundtrack will be,’ Roswell said. ‘Denzel wanted, as the absolutely authentic pre-1935 music.’ Apart from recording in Memphis, one of the biggest highlights for Roswell in producing the soundtrack for ‘The Great Debaters’ was researching a early 20th century music catalog of blues, soul, pre-swing and gospel music, much of which was new to him. ‘One thing that made this such an incredible experience was the research that my partner [Jeff Powell] and I did. It was just unbelievable, to explore this one era of music, that connected the Harlem Renaissance to the most stripped down, raw, traditional music, all in the same tapestry of the African American music world at the same time,’ Roswell said. ‘We were like kids in a candy store.’ Roswell had soon chosen between 20 to 30 songs for each scene, including scenes at school dances and at juke joints that would feature musicians in the actual movie scenes. ‘Before we blinked, we had a good album’s worth,’ Roswell said. He also mentioned that Washington was crucial in making final selections for songs. ‘His ears were extraordinary in what he would pick out of a lot of songs,’ he said. ‘He would just astound us the way he would do that.’ Once modern artists were chosen, Roswell and Washington began production on the soundtrack. ‘The songs that we worked on were traditional and we came up with our own arrangements for the movie’creating something from a traditional song that would work with the movie and match the style of the scene.’ Then it was on to Memphis. ‘Those sessions at Arden Studios were magical in the way that they came together,’ he said. ‘To be able to work with such amazing artists, I didn’t have to do much.’ Roswell has lived in Pacific Palisades since 1984. ‘It’s one of the most extraordinary places to live in the world,’ he said. He lives in the Alphabet Streets with his wife Karen and their son Cal, 3. He is a sixth-generation Californian whose family settled on the Rancho Camulos, a 40-acre plot with a rancho house, small chapel and schoolhouse (right off 126 Hwy., 10 miles north of Magic Mountain) that still stands today, as a national historic site.

Transcending Partisan Politics in 18th Street Art Center’s ‘Patriot Acts’

As you enter the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, you are greeted by a colorful, cartoon-y, ostensibly cheerful wallpaper that might superficially evoke pop artist of the moment Takashi Murakami. But upon closer inspection, this work comments on our national obsessions and consumptions”war and food”in the form of hot dogs, pie slices, cookies, donuts’and tanks! Hillary Mushkin’s ‘Untitled (Junk Food Camo)’ is one of a dozen works comprising the art exhibit ‘Patriot Acts,’ which runs through March 28. Palisades resident Clayton Campbell, the Center’s artistic director since 1994, devised four topics under the over-arching theme, ‘The Future of Nations,’ for the artists to frame their art: ‘The Constitution,’ ‘Demographics,’ ‘Urban Environments’ and ‘War as a Way of Life.’ He enlisted various curators and artists to create new works around these sub-themes. Part one of four of a year-long, multi-pronged exhibit, ‘Patriot Acts,’ curated by Linda Pollack, represents the work of 13 artists spanning a gamut of styles and media, including installations, wall hangings, books, paintings, and a series of postcards. ‘These themes are based around election-year issues and civic engagement”which 18th Street thinks is very critical”without being partisan,’ Campbell says. ‘This is not political art where it’s agitprop. There’s not a piece in here where it’s ‘I hate Bush’ or ‘I love the Republicans.’ It’s more about the broader issues of citizenship and what freedom really means. These artists are really stretching it beyond the election, going deeper into these issues.’ Rebecca Ripple’s ‘Absolutely if you will,’ executed in paint and graphite, literally presents shifting shades of meaning and gray area. The work consists solely of text: ‘Absolutely’ scrawled across a wall; ‘if you will’ across the counter opposite it. The phrases fade in and out. According to Pollack, the former comments on an overused vacant blanket term, while the latter can be interpreted as a somewhat passive-aggressive command. The visual highlight of the show might well be Zeal Harris’ folk/na’ve art mixed-media mural ‘Devil’s Rejects,’ a colorful, surreal landscape inspired by an Iraq War vet’s stories and peopled with characters in a circus-like atmosphere. Harris also has a piece titled ‘Jody and Fee La Beau Haunting.’ Pam Strugar and Shirley Tse’s ‘AWOL AWOL’ (some word play at work, as this installation utilizes a pair of false walls) is a mixed media, two-artist, two-parter that includes skiing champion John ‘Madcow’ Hembel’s quote, ‘Freedom to me is skiing at 150 mph,’ across one of its panels. Nearby, a monitor features various people interviewed about the meanings of ‘freedom.’ Another multi-media work, Vincent Johnson’s ‘The Ballot of History,’ casts a voting booth as its centerpiece and illustrates various voting technologies both on a wall and in book form to make its point. Projects such as Meena Nanji and Tommy Gear’s ‘Transmission from ‘Alphahville’ (a twin-monitor installation referencing Godard’s 1965 futureshock caveat which depicted a society controlled by an ominous master computer), are interactive (says Pollack, it comments on ‘two different pulses that shape our intellectual landscape’), but none are as interactive as the ‘Habeas Lounge,’ created by Pollack herself ” a red-and-white, all-purpose room with Valentine’s Day-ready d’cor wherein various visiting guest speakers lecture on voting issues. Performance art by Adam Overton, Susan Silton’s offset lithography ‘The Five W’s,’ and Sara Hendren’s video ‘Tools for Historical Imagination’ round out the show. ‘It’s good art,’ Campbell surmises. ‘It creates a conversation instead of shoving a political view in people’s face.’ ‘Patriot Acts’ runs through March 28. The next Habeas Lounge will begin at 1 p.m. on Sunday, February 3, featuring a round-table discussion with the topic: “How to Improve the World: Artist-Citizens on Hope, Apathy, Healing, and Piece of Mind [During Wartime].’ The discussion, presented by Art Spa, will be followed by a group participatory performance of ‘What Do We Do Now?’ The 18th Street Arts Center is located near the intersection of Olympic Boulevard at 1639 18th Street. Contact: (310) 453-3711 or visit www.18thstreet.org.

What is it with girls and horses? Horses are certainly beautiful, graceful, elegant creatures. And if you nurture them, train them, praise and, yes, discipline them as you would a child, the horse and the girl form a close relationship. Numerous stories have become children’s classics, like the ‘Black Stallion’ series and Margaret Wise Brown’s many books, often based on real girls and their horses. A modern-day girl-horse story has been unfolding in of all places on Maui, where 10-year-old Kalee Farberow’s love for horses grew into a 16-acre retirement home for old and infirm horses. The granddaughter of Palisadian Bobbie and the late Mort Farberow (Mort’s Deli), Kalee started riding at age 7 at the Ironwood Ranch in the out country of the small Hawaiian Island, a trail riding facility, whose boarders include strange bedfellows, from Shetlands to Clydesdales, Kalee says. ‘My dad started taking me up there after school, and I loved helping out with the horses and getting them ready to go on the trails,’ says Kalee, who recently spent the holidays in the Palisades visiting her grandmother (‘Tutu’). Her dad Stuart is a policeman in Lahaina and a ‘cowboy’ the rest of the time. Kalee is a friendly, trendy little girl, attached to her cell phone and decorated T-shirts, but with an unselfconscious confidence. Her knowledge of horses is sure. She describes them with accuracy, observes their habits and afflictions and possesses a strong horse sense. Over the course of her visits to Ironwood, Kalee fell in love with a retired Appaloosa named Harrison Ford. ‘I would go up to the ranch every day and brush him out and he would put his head and neck on my shoulder,’ she says. Harrison was sick: Kalee knew that he had cancer and that the owners were going to have to retire him–or put him down. ‘The ranch owner said that if my dad could get some land, they would give me the horse. My dad started working on getting the land to keep him on. ‘One day, I went to the ranch to see Harrison and he was not there. He had been in a lot of pain, so they put him down. I was really sad and cried. I was the only one at the ranch that cried but when they all saw me cry, then they started to cry.’ Kalee told her dad that she wanted to start a retirement stable. ‘If they do pass away they could do this in open air,’ she says. ‘Harrison died in his stall because there wasn’t enough pasture.’ Stuart’s friend Dave Minami at West Maui Land Company took Kalee’s idea to his bosses, who ‘took all of two minutes to say yes.’ They provided the 16 acres of fenced-in agricultural land to use as pasture for the horses, and provided water. After Stuart completed the barn, made of old telephone poles, Kalee’s Retirement Stable began operation in March 2007, with its first two residents’Chuck Norris and Ted Danson. It didn’t take long for neighbors to notice that something very special was going on. People began stopping by and asking how they could help the horses. ‘I was overwhelmed with what Kalee and Stuart were doing and decided to get involved,’ Lahaina Inn owner Toni Johnson said. ‘I thought a Web site would be a great way to spread the word, and kaleehorses.com was created.’ For Kalee, now a fifth-grader in the Maui public school, the story is all about her friends–the five horses who now reside at the ranch. In her own words, she has written a book that introduces us to the horses with glowing descriptions of their beauty, history and their quirks. ‘Chuck Norris is a painted horse and Appaloosa mix with a little bit of thoroughbred in him,’ she says. ‘He has two different colored eyes. He is 17 hands, 32 years old and grumpy. He was at Ironwood ranch for 22 years and is a retired trail horse. He has a little arthritis and trouble shedding.’ Prior to Ironwood Ranch, Chuck was a barrel racer on the Big Island of Hawaii. Kalee, who has also participated in the sport, says the rodeo event consists of a horse and rider maneuvering as fast as they can in a cloverleaf pattern around three barrels. A keen observer and nobody’s fool, Kalee knows all about Chuck, whom she describes as a ‘very stubborn horse. He does not want help and he does things when he wants to and on his own terms. He loves to be ridden and roll in the dirt, but he does not like baths.’ Not all the horses are bridle-able, Kalee says. For example, Faith Hill, the only filly on the ranch, who her own white name plate with pink lettering, had her back broken when she was two, so she’s not domesticated. ‘She was a rescue, her owner couldn’t keep her,’ Kalee reports. ‘She’s also a camera hog and loves attention. She’s a normal 4 ‘-year-old kid–she throws tantrums, gets mad and stomps off.’ Because the retirement stable is just a short distance from her home, in Lahaina, Kalee goes with her dad to feed the horses in the morning before school. They repeat the exercise in the afternoons. Weekends are reserved for riding, if the ground isn’t too wet. The horses are well cared for. They’re bathed twice a month with Mane and Tail, although Kalee says she uses her L’Oreal apple and pear detangler on their manes and tails. Dan ‘the hoof man’ regularly checks their shoeless hooves, and because of the horses’ ages, the Maui equine veterinarian visits every six months. The realities of maintaining five retired horses are hard work and food and supply costs run approximately $300 a month. Kalee’s Retirement Stable is currently awaiting nonprofit status, which will open the way for more fundraising and donations. Knowing full well that she cannot save all the horses she’d like because of space limitations, Kalee has future dreams that expand in all directions. ‘One day I saw this little girl riding her bike near the pasture and she had a basket on the front of her bike with a little pouch of carrots. She wasn’t afraid. Another little girl, with Spinabifida, came by to ride one of our horses. I sat behind her on Ted, and she loved it. She held the reins and I taught her about horses and the animals. When the ride was over, she would not take the helmet off’she wanted to ride again! ‘I would like it if kids with special needs knew they could come and do stuff with the horses,’ Kalee says. ‘If they see the older horses with problems and that they’re okay, it makes them feel better. ‘We would love to have kids come and feed and brush the horses. If people come by and see our truck, they can stop and talk. ‘It makes me happy to know that if my dad and I didn’t take these horses, they wouldn’t be here anymore’that we’re saving them.’ For more information, visit kaleesretirementstables.com