Recently in Arts & Culture
Where We Are:
The new permanent exhibition "Becoming Los Angeles" opens on Sunday at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park. I had a small part in the press preview on Wednesday and got to say a few words about what "becoming" might mean to Angeleños.
Where We Are:
Looking at the "found photographs" in the Huntington's archive of Southern California Edison photographs and finding why the darkness is such chilling fun.
Where We Are:
Many of the images were taken by by G. Haven Bishop whose work, almost entirely unknown today, has the subtlety and richness of Julius Shulman's photographs.
Where We Are:
The "undecorated shed" that was the mass-produced tract house changed the American landscape, with consequences that are still to be fully appreciated.
Where We Are:
Bugs, bones, birds, and millions upon million more things fill the museum's collections, second only to the Smithsonian's. But there's nothing dusty about this 100-year-old archive of what was and what is Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
The Getty's "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 - 1990" and the Huntington's "Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream" consider how Los Angeles sought to be forever modern.
Arts & Culture:
The Bureau of Land Management has offered a reward for information leading to the apprehension of those responsible for a bout of archaeological vandalism near Bishop that has angered fans of rock art worldwide.
Where We Are:
From San Diego to Santa Barbara, as much as $280 million in spending flowed through Pacific Standard Time's museums and galleries. But there are other values, too.
Movie Miento:
I went into the attic and dug out a banker's box sized container of Día de los Muertos paraphernalia.
LA as Subject:
According to at least one authority, Robinson Jeffers is the greatest poet to emerge from Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
Sheriff John is dead. So is Engineer Bill. What lasts is the imaginative life cultivated by afterschool TV.
Commentary:
The county's library system is a hundred years old this month. When I was a boy, 50 years ago, my county library branch was refuge, instigator, and generous companion.
Where We Are:
From the late 1930s through the 1990s, country western music and the hybrid culture from which it came defined much of white working class Los Angeles.
Commentary:
Palm Springs has a conflicted relationship with good taste. The town is a somewhat self-conscious shrine to the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic, with houses, bank buildings and diners reflecting that artistic movement.
Where We Are:
150,000 visitors, 400 authors, and dread occupy the 17th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Arts & Culture:
Abigail Child brings her brilliant experimental films and video to REDCAT, showing how words and images merge to create a new poetics.
Arts & Culture:
The future still looks to the past for inspiration - this week Abigail Child recalls early cinematic techniques for contemporary visual exploration and the Academy recalls the early days of projection...
Arts & Culture:
The best of cinema history is on view this week, with the work of avant-garde icon Maya Deren, the remarkable eight-hour documentary Shoah, and the 24-hour collage film "The Clock" by Christian Marclay.
Arts & Culture:
REDCAT will screen Daniel Eisenberg's extraordinary visual essay exploring objects, how they're made and what they mean as the nexus between the maker and the consumer.
Arts & Culture:
Radical, experimental and avidly political filmmakers are featured on the screens of L.A. theaters this week, from Jon Jost to Rose Lowder, Dziga Vertov to Kurt Kren.
SoCal Focus is a blog about the people, places, and issues in and around Southern California.
I Am Los Angeles: Strings of Success
Sasha is content just to be living his life on his own terms, doing something he thoroughly enjoys: building and playing guitars.
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