Blogs

After much tense and longwinded day and night negotiations, the state legislature comes out with a new water policy for the coming decades, including over $10 billion in new bonds and new restrictions on water use and new political councils to help manage the state's water.

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The view from my hotel room in Seoul is filled with palaces and office buildings. If you minus the palaces, I could be anywhere in Asia. Taxis make a blur on the roadways, people criss cross across the streets, the smell of charcoal and noodles fill the air, I feel at home and I miss home.

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A grand dame of the Los Angeles performance art and avant theater scene is scheduled to be feted Saturday night, November 7, at "Rachel Rosenthal's Birthday Bash 83."

The fundraising happening will take place at Track 16 Gallery, in Bergamot Station. Ticket information is here.

The ever-conceptual Rosenthal famously retired from the stage a dozen or so years back, but continues to mentor emerging talent. Saturday's 'Bash' is to serve as the coming out for her new troupe, the TOHUBOHU! Extreme Theater Ensemble. (It's pronounced just like it's spelled, we figure.)

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This week Huell gets "pink", that is he gets one of Pink's famous chili-cheese dogs, visits the oldest hydroelectric plants in America outside Fresno, and heads over to the Sons of Norway Lodge in Van Nuys for a little something called Lutefisk. (For more information on these and other episodes - as well as a chance to purchase them - you can always visit Huell at www.calgold.com).

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Planning on going to Little Tokyo or Sawtelle or your neighborhood convenience store tonight?

Thinking of ordering Unagi?

Or Hamachi?

Consider, then, the "Ocean Friendly Sushi" guide produced by the Blue Ocean Institute, an advocacy org founded by MacArthur winner Carl Safina and author Mercedes Lee.

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Mix the detritus of a Robert Rauschenberg collage with the excess and veiled social commentary of a Douglas Sirk melodrama and you might come close to a film by Los Angeles filmmaker Lewis Klahr, who makes his collage animations from images snipped out of books and magazines; these pictures are moved inch by inch beneath a camera to create movement, resulting in powerful visual artworks and deeply engrossing, if enigmatic, stories. Klahr, who teaches at CalArts, will present his work twice this week, starting with the seven-film series Engram Sepals at USC on Thursday night. The word "engram" refers to the place in the brain where fragments of memory are engraved, leaving traces that can never be completely retrieved, while "sepals" names the part of a flower stem that holds the petals in place. The phrase nicely describes the series of animated shorts in which Klahr chronicles the post-World War II decades almost as if to uncover the past and hold it in place. One of my favorites from the series is Altair, which is set in the late 1940s and follows a woman's descent into alcoholism. The melancholy deep blue backdrops, the elongated lines drawing the female form, and the rain of objects that envelopes the character point to the sense of restriction and longing that the film beautifully embodies. In Downs Are Feminine, Klahr romps through '70s sexuality with pictures torn from an illustrated porn novel, while Pony Glass imagines the tortured, secret life of Jimmy Olsen, comic book sidekick to Superman. On Saturday (November 7), Klahr will screen and talk about several of his films from the 1980s, including the masterful The Pharoah's Belt, with film scholar Tom Gunning. Klahr's work is remarkable, and he speaks about it with clarity and a reflectiveness that is entirely engaging.

Deputy Chief Charlie Beck moves into the top spot at LAPD, unsurprisingly--but the decision to name him wasn't as simple as some expected.

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No one officially wants to be the Democratic governor for California next year--leaving "exploratory" former Governor and current attorney general Jerry Brown heir apparent to his old throne.

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The Ferrari California convertible test driven by Jerry Garrett of the New York Times was red – Corsa red, the red of a bad girl’s lipstick or a bankrupt’s bottom line. Based priced at less than $200,000, this Ferrari is the least expensive model from a very expensive maker. Even with extras – including handstiched leather rear seating and a computer-controlled suspension – the California is almost an economy car.

That makes the California a dilemma for Ferrari, the same dilemma every luxury brand faces: either democratize to improve profitability and dilute the brand’s exclusivity or ratchet up the mystique of the brand and achieve near unobtainability. Either can turn out to be a trap. Open any edition of Vogue and you can see luxury brands lurching to one pole or the other and without any guarantee of making the right choice in today’s woozy economy.

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The exhibition, "Otto Neurath. Gypsy Urbanism," opens this Tuesday, November 3, at the MAK Center in West Hollywood. The show runs through the end of January, 2010.

From the particularly interesting press release:

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The 1966 animation It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown had everything a Peanuts cartoon should have: cheery music, kid's humor, philosophy, the angst of Linus, the exploits of Snoopy and the officiousness of Lucy. According to LA-based animator Justin Hilden and his essay "Color Design in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, however, it also made terrific use of color. In the images here, for example, we move from day to night, from cheerful pumpkin-picking to the moody hues of evening. "While we have been busy watching Linus wrestle his pumpkin homeward," Hilden writes, "the very air around the characters has changed and we can feel the coolness of night and a hint of the excitement that darkness will bring to Halloween." Hilden's essay gives readers a new way to enjoy the film and understand how it achieved its particular kind of emotional power. Thanks to Motionographer for the tip, and happy Halloween!

The city is growing ever more sentient, snapping photos of our misbehavior at intersections and tracking our movement past banks and federal buildings. Our phones let us connect with that sensing data, pointing us to the nearest Thai restaurant and illuminating the freeways in rivers of red, yellow, or, on occasion, green. As we grow accustomed to the data-driven, real-time city, though, what do we lose? That question forms the foundation for LA-based designer and research Julian Bleecker and researcher Nicolas Nova's intriguing essay, "A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing," a Situated Technologies Pamphlet recently published by the Architectural League of New York. The essay asserts a provocation, namely to rethink the fetishization of the real-time data-enabled city in order to "stretch out the space of possibility and the space of possible imaginings." What does this mean? In short, the pair is less interested in how data delivered immediately and orchestrated bureaucratically in a top-down approach may "help" city-dwellers, and instead ponder the potential for more speculative and poetic layers of information, and for a notion of the city that's not static and fixed but rather in process. In the later part of the conversation, Bleecker describes a series of objects that were designed to provoke different ways of interacting with the city, moving beyond the expected and the screen-based. "We're in the realm of epistemological monkey-wrenching broadly conceived," he explains. "Creating objects that shift meanings and provide new, unexpected points of view. Or, they may just show you the obvious, but do so in a more legible way..." Check out the essay to read about these objects, and to get a glimpse of alternative ways of considering the sentient, asynchronous city.

All this week, Ophelia Chong will be touring China, all the while recording her observations, thoughts, and insights right here for you. To view more of her online diary entries, click here.

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Note: I received a surprising response to this post. I've had calls and emails and never knew there are so many Dark Shadows fans in public media. I posted a great story from producer TJ Lubinsky at the end of this post. Read on! - Bohdan

Everywhere I turn I'm surrounded by the sign of the times. There are Halloween decorations throughout my neighborhood, in the grocery stores and here at work. Some of my KCET colleagues have gotten very creative with their notions of spooky and funny.

In these last weeks of October, I start thinking of pumpkins, goblins, and the television series that left an indelible mark on me as a child. Dark Shadows.

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