LA's hottest new museum is is in a building downtown and only open a half hour a month, Tony Danza write letters to Tupac, bunnies glow downtown
Here's why you're seeing giant glowing rabbits in downtown Los Angeles
In the neatly manicured office parks of downtown Los Angeles this week, there are six enormous inflatable rabbits — all glowing an eerie white at night. What are they? How did they get there?
Like almost all unexplained city phenomena, the answer is simple: art.
It’s a project by Australian artist Amanda Parer called "Intrude." It came to L.A. through the real estate company Brookfield. The exhibit's been shown in San Francisco, New York, Houston, Paris and beyond.
Standing in front of the Bank of America building on a cool Wednesday night was Karen Kitchen, who works for Arts Brookfield — the real estate company's art division, who commissioned the works. Around Kitchen, dozens of Angelenos gathered in a part of downtown L.A. that normally slows to a crawl after the 9 to 5 crowd leaves.
"I mean, this is 7:30, 8 at night and we have probably 200 people who don't work in this neighborhood who have come to see these rabbits," said Kitchen. "This is incredible!"
"The artist's attention is clearly about scale. It is about giving us the impression that these rabbits have invaded this space," said Kitchen.
Kitchen says the enormous inflatable rabbits tap into a challenging history in Australia, the artist's home country, where rabbits have done millions of dollars in damage to crops.
"It's a very simple construction," said Kitchen. "They are very sweet, and then in another way they really do talk about the idea that humans can impact their environment."
But nuanced environmental critique only has so much cachet in the world of public art — most of the people there were content to gaze at the rabbits in awe, talk with friends and pose for the occasional selfie. Johny Ta and Jaime Le drove up from El Monte and Westminster, respectively. "It's pretty cool, though," said Ta. "It's like not something you see every day — like a giant bunny in the middle of the city."
"Intrude" is on display daily now through Saturday, June 11. You can see the exhibit at the Bank of America building, the Wells Fargo building and in the Fig at 7th retail complex.
Hollywood Fringe: Tony Danza's prison pen-pal was Tupac Shakur
Leather and lace.
Pepper and strawberries.
Two surprising pairings.
But possibly the most surprising pairing you'll ever come across is effervescent actor Tony Danza and gangster rapper Tupac Shakur. And just like - as Stevie Kicks showed us - leather and lace do go together, and a little pepper on your strawberries is delicious, Tony Danza actually made a pen pal of Tupac Shakur ... while Tupac was serving time.
Standup comedian, voiceover actor, and writer Steven Benaquist tells the story - with not a little comic embellishment - in "Tony Danza's Letterz 2 2Pac: an Evening with Tony Danza," as part of Hollywood Fringe. In the show, Benaquist plays both Danza and Danza playing Shakur.
He told Off-Ramp he went to a book signing at Skylight Books to see Danza, who offhandedly mentioned writing to Tupac in jail. "Danza should do that as a one-man show," Benaquist thought. When he didn't, Benaquist did, and gained new respect and insight into both men. He invents a lot in the show, but says some of the most far-out things turn out to be true - like that Tupac was in the Nutcracker when he was young.
It's at the Shepard Studio Theater at Complex Theatres at 6472 Santa Monica Blvd, Saturday, June 11; Sunday, June 12; Friday, June 17; and Saturday, June 18. Showtimes vary. Tickets are just $12.
Listen to the audio for samples from the show, and more stories from the most unlikely friendship since Nixon and Elvis.
By the way, Benequist voices Honeybear in Fishstick and Honeybear on the Dreamworks YouTube channel.
There's a hidden museum of streetlights in downtown Los Angeles
On Broadway and 12th street in downtown Los Angeles, on the 2nd floor of the Department of Public Works building, there’s a museum I’ll bet $5 you haven’t heard of.
The Historic Streetlight Museum is home to what must be the most comprehensive collection of Los Angeles streetlights since Chris Burden’s "Urban Light" was shut down for maintenance at LACMA.
It’s not the easiest museum to get to: it opens just once a month... for just a half hour. But if you step inside and take a look around, you’ll find the story of Los Angeles told in fluorescents, cast iron and LEDs.
"It's a small room, here, but it's got a lot of history," says Bureau of Street Lighting director Ed Ebrahimian. "The fixtures that you see here are so precious that they don't exist anywhere else in the whole world."
In a room only a little bigger than a LACMA bathroom, you can see the entire museum: fixtures ranging from the first ever street light attached to a power line to state of the art LED poles with bulbs specially calibrated to imitate moonlight.
Yes, the sample size is small — maybe it's best to call it "curated." If you walk the streets of Los Angeles today, you'll find over 400 varieties of lights above you — 215,000 street lights altogether. The museum houses a couple dozen.
The museum came about only in the last couple years — most of the artifacts on display were just housed in storage before. Ebrahimian says the Bureau wanted to start a museum because nearly every light tells a story.
"Los Angeles is a large city. Each neighborhood in the city has its own characteristics," he says. "Some of these fixtures kind of identify those neighborhoods throughout the year. We owe it to the citizens of the city of Los Angeles who lived here to preserve what was here many years ago."
The oldest light on display at the museum dates back t0 1905 — a Five Globe Llewellyn — which back in the day dotted the streets of Downtown Los Angeles.
But for Ebrahimian, fast forward a couple decades and you enter the renaissance of street lighting — giant ornate fixtures with beautifully patterned artisanal glasswork housed in cast iron decorated with mermaids, pine cones and leaves.
"Frankly, we don't make them this way anymore," Ebrahimian says. "It doesn't pay for itself nowadays — to be able to spend that much time to create fixtures similar to this."
Ebrahimian says the museum keeps the odd hours for now because the Bureau simply doesn't have the resources to keep it open longer — after all, they're in the street lighting business, not the museum business.
So if you want to take a look, it's best to ask for time off now — the museum's next opening day is Friday, June 17 between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Email the museum through its website for a reservation.
Directing a comic book blockbuster is Hollywood's dream gig — unless you've made one already
The most sought-after directing gig in today's Hollywood is the Marvel comic book movie, and it's easy to see why. The sleeper hit of the year is "Deadpool." The biggest summer blockbuster: "Captain America: Civil War." Even a poorly received Marvel movie like "X-Men: Apocalypse" is an all-but-guaranteed hit.
So everybody wants one. Everybody, that is, except directors who've already had one. Many of them describe making a Marvel as a kind of Faustian deal with the Devil, with creative control bartered away for some obvious perks: increased bankability and an increased bank account.
Take Shane Black. He co-wrote and directed "Iron Man 3" — a 2013 smash. But while promoting his new film "The Nice Guys," Black has thrown shade at Marvel, saying they forced changes on him to increase tie-in toy sales.
Then there's Joss Whedon, the cult fantasist behind "Firefly," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the oh-so-meta "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog." On the Dr. Horrible DVD — and on a live "This American Life" stage show — Whedon himself sang a number about how franchise filmmaking is the enemy of creativity.
Whedon's had exactly two hits as a director: Marvel's "The Avengers" and "The Avengers: Age of Ultron." But he's a veteran. When Whedon dissed "Ultron" with surprising bitterness on its opening weekend, he was renouncing his citizenship in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Almost a decade on, Sam Raimi has never stopped complaining about the rushed production of "Spider-Man 3" and how it ravaged his career.
And no list of Marvel casualties would be complete without Josh Trank, the hot young director who committed professional suicide by Twitter feed last summer. Crushed by negative reviews, Trank posted about how his early cut of the disastrous "Fantastic Four" reboot was far better than the studio version.
Even Jon Favreau, who arguably created the Marvel Cinematic Universe with the first "Iron Man" movie, has shown mixed emotions. After directing "Iron Man 2," Favreau returned to his indie roots to make "Chef," a thinly veiled parable about going small to regain lost creative integrity.
It's a Hollywood cliche that the creative types war against the "suits." But kvetching after the fact about how the insanely expensive franchise blockbuster you were hired to supervise didn't fulfill your directorial vision isn't artistic pushback — it's passive aggression.
The Marvel films move toys, set box-office records and spawn sequels by being familiar. A part of the business model is to hire gifted directors to enliven the formula just enough to differentiate one movie from the next. It's a director's stylistic signature — not his or her vision — that Marvel traffics in.
Small wonder if for some directors, a Marvel film feels less like a universe and more like a plantation. But in the Faust story, if you tell it right, the Devil isn't the one you blame.
Groundbreaking artist Claire Falkenstein's infinite appeal seen in 2 new shows
The artwork of Claire Falkenstein (1908-1997) is featured in two Los Angeles exhibits that run until early September: a retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art called "Beyond Sculpture," and as part of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's "Revolution in the Making."
Nearly 50 years ago, after he had a good look at the madly assorted jungles of stained glass that artist Claire Falkenstein proposed to put in the walls of St. Basil’s Catholic Church, ultraconservative Los Angeles Cardinal James Francis McIntyre asked her, “Are you religious?” Falkenstein said she assured the Cardinal, “’Oh yes. I'm very religious.’ But he didn't ask me what religion. If he had, I would have said nature.”
By nature, she meant something eternal and infinite. McIntyre accepted her assurance, and her radical plans for his new Mid-Wilshire church, designed by AC Martin, went forth. At the time, The New York Times called St. Basil’s — now heavily used by Anglo, Korean, Hispanic and Filipino Catholic congregations — Falkenstein’s “most important commission in the United States.” Though other Falkensteins are strewn throughout the Southland, St Basil’s is also her most visible work.
Of the thousands who pass St. Basil’s daily, many probably marvel at the 3-D towers of joined colored-glass triangles and trapezoids that soar up its eight stories toward heaven in their glassed-in wall slots; the huge, abstract south window; and the front doors latticed to suggest the bare skeletons of joined autumn leaves. Very few realize that they are experiencing a masterpiece of one of the most remarkable and protean artists ever to have labored in Los Angeles.
Now there are, amazingly enough, two generous shows of Falkenstein’s work going on in Los Angeles County, about 10 miles from each other.
A portion of the vast Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel Arts District gallery’s “Revolution in the Making” show is devoted to Falkenstein’s sculpture. And there is a show at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, called “Claire Falkenstein: Beyond Sculpture.”
The show at Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel mostly deals with the sculpture that made Falkenstein famous — archetypal works showing her utter mastery of fine welding and intricate metal-forming techniques with steel wire and copper tubing. Here we see several of her noted “Suns,” dense cages trapping darkly colored glass shapes, suggesting some form of Ordovician sea fauna, staring balefully, over a half billion years, into the present.
The Pasadena show, her first comprehensive L.A.-area show since before her death in 1997, offers us a retrospective that includes her earliest drawing, ceramics, paintings, and even her jewelry, which, at least according to the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow, is now quite valuable.
Falkenstein’s various media were all adjacent, in her view; they somehow harmonize here. She called certain of her wire sculptures “drawings in space.” She riffs on scientific concepts, and refers to the “Einsteinian” aspects of her work in her bids to evoke interconnected infinity and eternity. Another sculpture represents DNA's double-helix structure. Indeed, she likes to call her sculptures — and even her paintings and drawings — “structures”; and her work called “Glass Painting” is exactly that — a flattened 8-inch-thick quadrilateral of dark copper tubing and indigo glass. Her later paintings, drawings and gouaches suggest a retracing of her earliest path as an artist, combining abstract and figurative forms of the 1920s.
Early in her career, Falkenstein's instructor Michel Tapie told her: “Look within.” This simple admonition authorized her creative path. In a 1995 Smithsonian interview, she said: “I build a vocabulary for myself, and it's not a matter of copying a style, but rather having words, not words, but forms and shapes and ideas that can relate to feeling and expression rather than copying objects or using objects…’’
Sometimes the shapes stymie logic itself, venturing into the geometrical paradox called topology, in which the exterior surface becomes the interior. But perhaps her deepest love is the lattice, “where you have visibility at all time” and the form can extend to infinity.
In 1963, after decades in Europe, Falkenstein abandoned Venice, Italy, for Venice, California. Her public work is now all around us — at South Coast Plaza, Cal-State Fullerton, USC, Cal-State Long Beach, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.
But to really get the measure of her accomplishments, you should see them assembled together. So come see all you can, at both of these two fine shows or at St Basil’s on Wilshire, where you can best appreciate the infinity of her creations.
Song of the week: "2 Young" by T.O.L.D.
This week’s Off-Ramp song of the week is “2 Young” by the Los Angeles artist T.O.L.D. - that stands for "The Order of Life and Death."
https://soundcloud.com/t-o-l-d/2young
T.O.L.D is fronted by Daniel James Smith, a British born producer and singer who calls Los Angeles his home these days. "2 Young" is off his new album “It's Not About the Witches” which comes out June 17. You can see him live on Saturday, June 18 at Union Station.