New Architecture found
But now I am on the cusp of some new projects that will require my undivided attention. Over the next few months Johnny and I will be building out our new studio in Culver City, and simultaneously launching the new video design firm, Be Johnny. In addition to the studio there will be a new website, shows and maybe even a gallery in the future. Whatever we do, you are invited to join us. -Bree
Globe Trekker
Today Luc and I went to The Getty to check out
the
California Video
exhibition and decided that we would need to go back
when we had more time. AH...the curse of time-based
exhibitions. Here is one of our photos from today's
trip up Mt.Getty.
Tonight I turned on TV to watch one of those travel
shows that I adore and was surprised that Megan, the
host from
Globe Trekker
was not in Istanbul or Hong Kong because she was
right here with me in Los Angeles. She even went up
to
Signal Hill,
for a little So.Cal oil history. Nice job!
As I type this post, a film crew is shooting a cop
chase scene outside of my house and there is a
spotlight erected in my neighbors' yard. Los Angeles
folds in upon itself in amazing ways and it is always
beautifully lit.
This Friday
This Friday at noon in Los Angeles, Lex Bhagat will
be at
FarmLab
to discuss
"An
Atlas of Radical Cartography"
Here is a recent review from the blog
We Make Money Not Art.
Beginning Friday and running all weekend in Houston
is the annual
Media Archeology Festival
put on by the
Aurora Picture Show.
This year's theme is Live & Televised and
features multimedia artists who incorporate
audio/visual technology with live performance. I have
said it before & will say it again, Media
Archeology is the coolest thing that happens in
Houston!
Musical Tour
Seems I have been a little focused on buildings
lately and have neglected to tell you about all the
amazing music we have been seeing around Los Angeles.
A few weeks ago our friend Steve escorted us
to
NOSAJ THING
at The Eco or maybe it was The Echoplex? His
Electronica/ Hip Hop has been described as "laser
bass" because it sounds alot like those laser sounds
from Sci Fi or Star Wars. This kid is gonna blow up-
check him out! Another great show was the US premier
of Sweden's
LITTLE DRAGON
presented by KCRW at The Roxy in Hollywood. Beautiful
and talented singer Yukimi Nagano was great and it
was amazing to see with such clarity the
impact
KCRW
has on the music scene of Los Angeles. Machine
Project wrapped up its
TablaCentric
residency with Robin Sukhadia & I am glad that I
caught the free Monday concert with
Srinivas Reedy
on Sitar and
Sameer Gupta
on Tabla. Fast forward into the future. We will be
doing video for the rockin DJ from UK and now fellow
Angelino,
ADAM FREELAND
& we are really excited to work with him. Come
check out the show Friday at
Coachella.
At the end of April we are heading back out with
the
BAND
for the final month of this year-long world tour. I
cannot believe it has already been a year. We have
been so many places, clocking thousands of miles and
frequent flier points. I will miss it when the tour
is done, but it will be great to concentrate on the
LA studio. If we are coming through your city, drop
me a note. We would love to see you.
Building and their documentation
It was an architecturally infused weekend.
Friday night was the
Storefront for Art & Architecture
Pop-Up
gallery opening. The temporary gallery is located in
one of the busiest sections of Hollywood and
illuminated by the flashing red lights of a Go-Go
Girl club next door. The design of this show is
fantastic and Frederic Chaubin's Cosmic Communist
Constructions photographs are totally curious and
beautiful. I cannot wait to go back to the show when
it is not so packed & wish there was a book based
on this exhibition.
Saturday night we headed to the other side of Los
Angeles to attend the screening of Schindler's
Houses, by German filmmaker Heinz Emigholz hosted by
the UCLA Film and Television Archives. Rudolph M.
Schindler was a Viennese architect, who worked in Los
Angeles from the 1920- 1950s and had a significant
impact on this city, primarily with his single-family
home designs. While he is not my favorite architect,
I love the way his houses feel natural and
light-filled. His designs fuse the outside with the
interior space, resulting in houses that feel like
they are floating or built into the trees and
hillsides.
The impact R.M. Schindler made on southern California
modernism is significant and deep. Schindler came to
the United States in 1914 and began working with
Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin in 1918. In 1922 he
& his wife began the construction of their Kings
Road home (now the
MAK Center).
The construction of his Kings Road home used his
"Slab-Tilt" system of prefabricated slabs of natural
colored concrete. The architect Richard Neutra and
his family were among the Los Angeles vanguard who
lived in the guest quarters on this property during
the 1920s
The Saturday night screening was part of the
city-wide retrospective of Emigholz's films. I
enjoyed the opportunity it provided us to peek inside
Schindler's houses and we were engaged by some of the
sound editing techniques Emigholz employed, but
generally speaking it was a slow moving 90-minute
film that perhaps had too rigid a structure, for my
taste. A few moments of comic relief were provided by
three cats unexpectedly caught perching or posing, or
when the bright yellow SUV came roaring past, loudly
slicing open the neutral calm of Emigholz's still
shots.
The Billy WIlder Theater at the Hammer Museum is
quite nice, but I was annoyed by the attitude of the
organizers and that the screening was disorganized,
starting almost 45 minutes late. Being an organizer
myself, I am empathetic to the potential difficulties
that can arise with public programs: no one comes,
too many people come, it rains, it is too hot, the
machine breaks, the artist freaks... But in this
case, ticket sales were in advance & they knew it
would be sold out.
I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
Johnny Video
The tour of South America has come to an end. This time out we logged 11 flights in and out of 5 countries to do 8 shows. And as I add up the ticket sales (or venue capacity) for this tour, it is mind blowing to realize that we created a live video show for 73,932 people.
The past 48 hours have been the most extreme of this two weeks on the road. On Thursday we left Bogota, Columbia at 10AM and arrived at the airport in Caracas, Venezuela at 6PM. We then boarded a bus that took us over the mountains and arrived in Valencia, Venezuela at 10PM. On Friday morning we boarded a van at 10AM that took us to the venue and that night had a 9PM show for an amped up audience of 6,000.
Immediately following the show we broke the stage down and loaded the trucks. By 12:30AM we were boarding the bus that would take us back over the mountain to Caracas. We checked into a hotel at 3:30AM, showered and then checked out at 4:15AM to catch the last van ride of the tour to the airport for our 7AM flight home.
Not much deep reflection about the tour is available at this time. Now I am looking forward to unwinding at home while writing an article about Houston for the upcoming "Urban" issue of ArtLies magazine. Later this week we will be doing video for two club shows in LA. Wednesday night's show is with DJs Steve Nalepa (LA) and MattB (Tokyo) who will be rocking the house with their Bass Science collaboration and on Thursday night we will be at Spaceland in Silverlake with the Bay Area band Film School .
Cable Untangling Championships in LA
Xeni from Boing Boing TV visits the first-ever "Cable Untangling Championships" at Machine Project in Los Angeles, where knottiness abounds and speedy-fingered sysadmins own the world. "Cabling" is a new sport founded by Steven Schkolne in which competitors must race to detangle bundles of CAT-5 ethernet cables. (NOTE: This event took place in early February)
Week 1 Los Angeles
I am slowly morphing from tourist into a Los Angeles resident, as I set out on my daily driving missions armed with print-outs from Google Maps and a GPS backup. I have established some ground rules for these solo missions. The first of which is that I can only travel on surface roads, avoiding all highways. This is generally my rule with city driving, except when I am passing through, which is all I have been doing this year.
However, I already see some geo-relationship problems looming on the horizon. Yesterday I called Johnny while stopped at a red light and asked; “If I am at the intersection of Pico Blvd & Crenshaw, then what neighborhood am I in?" A few Los Angeles friends have offered to loan me their Thomas’ Guide maps, but I have declined with a “No thanks, I have a GPS”. But I am coming to realize that the GPS is best for getting from point A to Point B but the technology encourages a lack of interest in the spaces between the start and end points and provides no clues to how neighborhoods fit together to create the larger city of Los Angeles.
Yesterday, I followed my GPS over to Venice Blvd in Culver City to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the new-ish exhibition BIRDFOOT: Where America’s River Dissolves into the Sea at The Center for Land Use Interpretation. I had heard about CLUI's birdfoot project while working with Matthew Coolidge in Houston, and while Matt’s first-hand stories are more colorful, the CLUI slideshow provides a muti-directional overview of this seriously downstream delta region. The delta terminology birdfoot or bird’s foot originates from the bifurcated nature of this unique watery terrain. These narrow lobes of Louisiana land are located between branches of the Mississippi River, as it nears the Gulf of Mexico. This is remote and delicate land that has been hard hit by the recent hurricanes.The CLUI presentation in Culver City reveled a landscape that is dangerously over engineered to accommodate the demands of the petroleum industry.
photo is from the CLUI exhibition BIRDFOOT & links to their website