UCLA Broad Art Center opens! "LA is one of the great art capitals of the world"

[dragonsky]

Think you know coffee? Find out at this new coffee training center in Silver Lake

North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee, which began 21 years ago and helped pioneer the direct-trade movement, has opened a training center in Silver Lake. Essentially a schoolhouse for coffee for its wholesale partners, with weekly coffee tastings and other events for the public.

http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydis...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

LACMA's $600-Million Makeover Revealed

After years of planning, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has launched an official website for its proposed $600-million makeover, which would extend the campus over and across Wilshire Boulevard.

The project, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, is dubbed the LACMA Building for the Permanent Collection. According to its website, the approximately 368,000-square-foot structure would be comprised by eight semi-transparent pavilions supporting a main exhibition level. The main exhibition level would extend over Wilshire Boulevard to a separate museum-owned property on the south side of the street.

http://urbanize.la/post/lacmas-600-m...nsion-revealed
http://la.curbed.com/2016/8/4/123823...mthor-redesign
http://buildinglacma.org/

[dragonsky]

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Angel's Wings - This magical art installation covers Downtown LA in silver streamers

[dragonsky]

“Forever Marilyn” could be back in Palm Springs by the end of September, as officials work through the details of possibly locating a temporary site for the 26-foot-tall head-turner.

“The tribe has expressed interest to have it temporarily installed right across from the new entrance at the Spa Resort Casino, which is on the corner of (Calle) Encilia and Andreas (Road) for a period of a couple of years, and they will foot the bill for that,” Aftab Dada, chair of the organization PS Resorts, told the Palm Springs City Council on Wednesday night.

http://www.desertsun.com/story/money...soon/88073978/

[dragonsky]

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Another Aerial Trip Through the USC Village

[dragonsky]

Stagecoach, the biggest country music gathering in the world, is going on tour

Ten years after launching the Stagecoach Country Music Festival as the country counterpart to the annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in the California desert city of Indio, Goldenvoice is launching a touring version that will spotlight up-and-coming country acts. Many have been or will be featured at what has become the biggest country music gathering in the world.

First, the tour is expected to further extend the Stagecoach name beyond Southern California, and it also aims to deepen the promoter’s relationships with many of the acts it books year in and year out.

“What happens,” Vee told The Times, “is that these artists come in for Stagecoach, and we work very closely with them for several months, really get to know them and then when the festival ends, we have to say ‘Bye guys, we’ll see you again maybe in four or five years.’ We are just looking for a way to stay in business with them and keep working with artists longer than Stagecoach weekend.”

In 2015, the most recent year for which figures are available, Stagecoach was the third-highest-grossing festival in the world, grossing $21.9 million over three days, according to Pollstar, the concert industry-tracking publication. That was behind Coachella, by far the biggest festival of all, which grossed $84.3 million over six days, and Outside Lands in San Francisco, which pulled in $24.3 million, also over three days.

Total attendance last year was about 216,000 counting daily attendance of 72,000, according to Goldenvoice. Still, Goldenvoice officials aim to push those figures even higher in years ahead.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

More details on LACMA's redesign to be shown at Wednesday 'scoping' meeting

An upcoming "scoping" meeting for the big redesign of Los Angeles County Museum of Art by architect Peter Zumthor is the place to be to get the most detailed look thus far at what the new building will look like. KCRW reports, "plans, sections, renderings and a model will be on display" at the meeting, which is geared toward helping the Miracle Mile museum prepare for an environmental impact report.

Earlier this month, the museum released a few renderings of the the giant, blobby structure that will span Wilshire Boulevard. The meeting is not a place to get answers to questions about the project; in fact, it’s designed for people to ask questions that they’d like to see answered in the resulting report, says KCRW.

http://la.curbed.com/2016/8/23/12617...coping-meeting

[dragonsky]

SpaceX erects historic 16-story-tall rocket booster outside its Hawthorne headquarters

The rocket booster that sealed SpaceX’s place in history as the company that pioneered reusable spacecraft now stands in testament to the achievement outside its Hawthorne headquarters.

The thin, white, 162-foot tall aluminum-lithium alloy booster was erected over the weekend outside Space Exploration Technologies Corp., welcoming employees and visitors Monday to 1 Rocket Road.

The Falcon 9 is the first booster rocket ever to return to Earth intact for reuse.

“We’re really proud of everything SpaceX has accomplished,” Hawthorne Mayor Alex Vargas said. “The Falcon 9 is a symbol of pride for our city. SpaceX is a hometown success story and we can’t wait to see what they achieve next.”

The rocket maker’s Hawthorne headquarters sit next to the city’s airport, at the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and 120th Street near the 105 Freeway. At night, locals and travelers flying to the Hawthorne Municipal and Los Angeles International airports will be able to see a red flashing light atop the rocket as required by the Federal Aviation Administration for airspace safety.

Its successful return to Earth on Dec. 21, 2015, followed its predecessor’s ugly demise six months before. On June 28, 2015, a faulty strut snapped during a Falcon 9 launch and released high-pressure helium. The rocket disintegrated, leading engineers to a major overhaul that resulted in the new upgraded rocket now on display.

This upgraded Falcon 9 has 33 percent more efficiency than its predecessor, and can carry colder, denser propellant, SpaceX says. Its successful landing occurred after delivering 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit for Orbcomm, a commercial satellite network that facilitates machine-to-machine communication enabling remote tracking and monitoring of trucking routes, agricultural production, and industrial, oil, government and maritime industries. The 11 satellites ensure continuous communication with the orbital receiver.

On the trip, the rocket’s first stage kissed outer space before separating with the second stage at more than 60 miles above ground and returning to Earth in good condition, gently touching down on Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. At its fastest, it sped more than a mile a second. At its highest, it traveled the distance from Los Angeles to Bakersfield.

Nine engines — referenced in the rocket’s name — arranged in a circle at its tail carry the thrust power of five 747 jets. While the monument’s engines all still work, SpaceX decided to display it because of its historic significance.

http://www.sgvtribune.com/science/20...ce=most_viewed

[dragonsky]

Huntington Library sets out to decode thousands of Civil War telegrams hidden for a century: 'It's mind-boggling'

They ticked out news of typhoid, scurvy and fear. They spoke of long marches and vast battles. They hummed with frailty and humor, fretting over drunken soldiers and praising the unwavering president of a fraying republic. They clacked in broken rhythms that rang with the ominous: “We will not remain undisturbed tonight. Even the Rail Road men have been ordered to leave.”

The 15,971 telegrams — hidden in a wooden foot locker for more than a century — scrolled like a Twitter feed through the Civil War. The messages from the Union side, many tapped out in code to elude Confederate forces, carried the urgings and reflections of Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and other prominent players. But most echo with the thoughts and schemes of colonels, infantrymen and lesser-knowns that offer a peek into the bureaucracy and machinery of war.

“It’s mind-boggling and unpredictable,” said Olga Tsapina, curator of the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens’ trove of 35 leather-bound ledgers and documents relating to telegrams sent between 1862 and 1867. “We don’t really know what is in here. Every single telegram has a story behind it, from the president to the greatest generals and to the privates and telegraph operators. It’s like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle.”

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

More details emerge on the massive Port of Los Angeles redevelopment

Gensler’s Los Angeles office has revealed plans for a $150 million expansion to the Port of Los Angeles by marine science and business innovation group AltaSea. Revealed plans detail a 280,000-square-foot facility encompassing a new waterfront promenade, aquaculture research center, and science hub that combines the existing dockside warehouses with a new visitor’s center and signal-house.

Three formerly industrial warehouse shells with exposed composite steel beams and original overhead trusses will house dedicated research and business development facilities for aquaculture and underwater robotics endeavors. The project’s development will be divided into phases beginning with the redevelopment of Warehouses 58 through 60, which will add 180,000 square feet of combined research and business hubs to the site. This phase also incorporates an education pavilion and wharf plaza. The second and third phases entail renovating Warehouse 57—which will contain 60,000 square feet of laboratory and classroom space—and the construction of the site’s two new structures.

http://archpaper.com/2016/08/port-of...ment-unveiled/
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpo...8&postcount=11

[dragonsky]

The boho-drain: bohemians say goodbye San Francisco, hello LA

“San Francisco turned into this billionaire playground. Everything I identified with was being pushed out. The community that I loved was crumbling and disappearing,” said Andrew Schoultz, a painter. “I just didn’t want to be in that city anymore. So I moved to LA.”

Schoultz, 41, who does installations and public murals, moved in 2014 and was among a group of bay area migrants featured in the new site 7x7. “It’s been very amazing. It was a good decision. A lot of art curators, galleries, museums don’t do San Francisco anymore.”

A community of San Francisco transplants – musicians, writers, designers, comedians – appears to be burgeoning, injecting fresh talent into a city which thrums with new museums, galleries, events and artistic experimentation, giving it plausible claim as the US’s cultural capital.

“I never thought LA would feel like home but it does. It was really easy to move here knowing I had more artist friends here than there,” said Jason Quever, founder of the indie pop band Papercuts, who relocated last spring.

“The Papercuts were a San Francisco institution for years. When Jason moved to LA that’s when I really knew San Francisco was over,” said Van Pierszalowski, 31, lead singer of the group Waters. He moved two years ago. “I’ve not looked back a single time. As soon as I moved here my music career greatly benefited. I felt the effects of being close to the epicentre of the industry.”

So I moved to LA: a phrase repeated by so many bay area migrants it sounds like an epitaph for bohemian San Francisco. The descendants of Jack London, Armistead Maupin, the Grateful Dead and Maya Angelou are fleeing a city they say has become unaffordable, imperilling its artistic identity.

“I love San Francisco but couldn’t find a studio space. It was stressful and exhausting always looking. I moved south because this is where the art world is happening,” said Melissa Fleis, 36, a fashion designer. “San Francisco is changing. It’s not the San Francisco I knew.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...P=share_btn_fb

[dragonsky]

Checking in on the new Academy Movie Museum taking shape next to LACMA

Construction is chugging along on the new Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Museum next to LACMA on the Miracle Mile.

Right now, the foundation is being poured for a giant orbed-shaped theater that will be attached to the rear of the old May Company building. Built in 1939, the Streamline Modern building with its gold tower is being restored to house the museum's exhibits

http://la.curbed.com/2016/9/27/13081...a-miracle-mile

[Chuq]

Originally Posted by dragonsky

http://www.sgvtribune.com/science/20...ce=most_viewed

Question - would this rocket now be classified as a "monument" and be suitable for addition to the SSP diagram section?

[dragonsky]

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USC celebrates the opening of a $46-million building for dance

Several hundred USC dance faculty and students, university trustees, professional dancers and choreographers gathered Wednesday afternoon to celebrate the opening of the $46-million Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center, the university’s first on-campus building dedicated to dance study.

Kaufman made her gift, the amount of which the university declined to reveal, in 2012. Groundbreaking took place in 2014. The dance school welcomed its first class in fall 2015, with 33 students collaborating with dance professionals while studying styles including ballet, ballroom and hip-hop. Classes were held in a temporary facility on campus, then moved into the new 54,000-square-foot building in August.

The two-story center, with its arched windows and thin red brick exterior, was designed by Pfeiffer Partners Architects. It includes dance studios and a performance space along with a “dance wellness center,” a training and fitness space, dressing rooms, classrooms and faculty offices.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

At Desert Trip, Rocking Beyond the Hits With a Vengeance

Desert Trip promoter Goldenvoice sold the bulk of the 75,000 passes for both weekends within five hours of putting them on sale in May. The promoter stands to gross about $160 million, making it the most lucrative music festival ever. Billboard estimates the cost of producing the show at upward of $100 million.

But don’t look at the event, organized by Goldenvoice, the promoters behind Coachella and its country cousin Stagecoach on the same site, simply as a celebration for rock fans navigating their golden years. Such a view, attendees argued, discounts the cross-generational and multicultural appeal each act has developed over careers collectively tallying more than 300 years.

Festival organizers dramatically revamped the grounds at the Empire Polo Field for Desert Trip, erecting three-story high grandstands on either side of the field immediately in front of a massive stage the size of a football field.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/ar...tney.html?_r=0
https://seatgeek.com/

In Bob Dylan, Desert Trip now has a Nobel laureate on its bill

Among all the other groundbreaking aspects of this week’s Desert Trip festival, the concert can now add a Nobel Prize-winning headliner to its pedigree.

The news of Dylan earning literature’s highest honor came as a surprise to many.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

Live Nation plans new, temporary Orange County outdoor venue

Live Nation and developer FivePoint have announced that they are seeking permits to build a 12,000-seat venue adjacent to Orange County’s Great Park.

The firms plan on a summer 2017 opening date.

“Orange County has become a major concert stop for touring musical acts and Live Nation is committed to keeping the long tradition of live summer concerts alive and growing in this region,” said Bret Gallagher, president of Southern California Live Nation, in a statement.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...nap-story.html

[dragonsky]

Even Peter Zumthor wasn’t impressed by renderings of LACMA's redesign

In an exclusive interview during a recent trip to London, Zumthor explained his vision for the project.

“The museum is not organised in timelines, periods or geographical regions,” he said. “It's organised like a forest with clearings inside, where we have free choice to go to this clearing, or to the next. I would like to allow an experience of art where people can go and look at the art without didactics, without premature explanations, and make their own experience.”

“The museum is open to the outside; this is very important,” Zumthor told CLAD. “You’ll have this almost sacred, sublime kind of experience, but I would also like to accommodate the profane, the dirty, the normal, the everyday.

“You start off down on the ground – this is normal city life – then as you go up you are received in a beautiful big palace for the people. From there you can go to the clearings, and that’s where you have the most intimate and maybe more private experiences of art."

“They were conventional renderings, which I personally don't like so much," he explained, adding that his studio is currently working on photos taken from models which are prepared especially for the purpose. “The models allow us to take pictures with natural daylight, the light of the sun, which makes a lot of difference,” he said. “These will explain the building better.”

http://www.cladglobal.com/CLADnews/a...tecture/327628
http://la.curbed.com/2016/10/18/1332...ign-renderings

[dragonsky]

George Lucas' museum designs for L.A. and S.F.: a first look at competing plans

George Lucas is hoping the third time will be the charm for his Museum of Narrative Art, plans for which have already foundered in the face of strong community opposition in San Francisco and Chicago.

Actually that’s not quite right: Lucas is hoping that either the third or fourth time will be the charm. He’s decided to bundle those efforts together, unveiling two different designs for the museum, for different locations, simultaneously this week.

One is for a site on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay. The other is in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, near the Natural History Museum and just west of the Coliseum. Both are fluid, forward-looking designs from the office of 40-year-old Chinese architect Ma Yansong, a rising star who also worked with Lucas on the ill-fated proposal for the Chicago lakefront.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...htmlstory.html

[dragonsky]

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Drone video reveals tremendous progress on USC Village
The $700 million residential and retail complex will change the way Trojans live and learn when it opens in fall 2017

https://news.usc.edu/109466/drone-vi...n-usc-village/

[dragonsky]

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LA’s starring role in ‘La La Land’

The New York Times just published an interview with director Damien Chazelle about the look and feel of his new movie La La Land, a swoon-worthy song and dance ode to old Hollywood, modern Los Angeles, and its native dreamers.

Chazelle, who directed Oscar-winning Whiplash, set the movie in Los Angeles, shooting scenes on the Colorado Street Bridge and at the Griffith Observatory and Grand Central Market, at least from what we can tell from previews. There’s even a bombastic dance number with more than 100 dancers that was, according to Deadline, filmed over two very hot days on the 105/110 interchange. Chazelle got the freeway shut down, but he got Angels Flight—a funicular that used to ferry riders to the top of Bunker Hill and which has been closed for a few years now—up and running for another scene.

“L.A., even more so than any other American city, obscures, sometimes neglects, its own history,” Chazelle told the Times. “But that can also be its own magical thing, because it’s a city that reveals itself bit by bit, like an onion, if you take the time to explore it.”

http://la.curbed.com/2016/11/4/13529...ot-los-angeles
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...027-story.html