March 2009 Archives

This Tuesday—for the second time in history—LA's always-inspiring Silent Movie Theater will host author Erik Davis and a series of his guests for Occult LA, a "night of talks and films devoted to Southern California's alternative spiritual culture." The time this happened went down topics included local witches, satanists, JPL scientists and their influence on 1950-60s California assemblage and performance art (which is more profound than a lot of us would like to believe, I think). So Tuesday should be very, very promising.

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There's no doubt that these are trying times around here. As mentioned before, my hometown is recovering from it's first (and hopefully last) political scandal in years, Long Beach's economy is in upheaval, with city council candidates not just entertaining the idea of city employee furloughs but picking it up, taking the idea of furloughs out to dinner and chatting endlessly with it from sundown to sunrise. So it's encouraging to see that the local powers that be have the time, resources and money to make things like the orange abstraction you see on my left. Actually, it's not an orange abstraction. It's an Orange Twist by Kathleen Caricof; capitalized and italicized because - as you might guess - it's the title of Long Beach's newest addition to a long line of expensive, bad public art. This particular piece sits idly at the intersecion of Atlantic and 45th and ran the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency $104,000. And yes, it's almost all bad. Don't take my word for it, visit the Long Beach Art Council's map of local public art (don't click on districts 8 and 9 though, as they're apparently no-mans land and you'll get a 404!).

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