Central-Cali cloister to catapult country-creatives

Architecture & Design · Music
Bring dancing boots. Beer mugs provided — with beer inside. Top young-gen country music stars to perform. That is the gist of the invitation to attend the touring country-music show Boots & Brews Country Music Festival as it nestles at the Madonna Inn, a cloister of high-kitsch in California’s Central Coast town of San Luis ...

One man’s LACMA: a farewell 1

Architecture & Design · Visual arts
Ed. note: It is a sad time as LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by dribs and drabs, closes down galleries — beloved spaces like the one that housed the museum’s fabled German Expressionist collection and also that for Pop Art. The art goes into storage and the walls and ceilings will meet ...

Mehraban windows connect classic & contemporary design talent

Architecture & Design
A happy highlight of this year’s La Cienega Design Quarter (LCDQ) three-day design festival showed its face to the public on a busy, design-rich Los Angeles boulevard. Two chic and fascinating windows, designed by Gary Hutton and Chad Dorsey, lent special life at Mehraban, a three-generation purveyor of contemporary and artisinal rugs. Mehraban hosted the ...

Silent Movie Theatre before/after #metoo accusation

Architecture & Design · Film
The disbanding of The Cinefamily at the end of December 2017 began with accusations of sexual predator behavior. It led to the unraveling of The Cinefamily’s clearly vulnerable organization which, despite miscreant behavior, managed to project movies onto the screen of the former Silent Movie Theater. The frothy group of followers, both guys and gals, ...

Jerry’s beach house … 1

Architecture & Design · Dance
This lovely Bridgehampton cottage, a creative, restorative retreat for its former owner, Jerome Robbins, can now be yours. It is for sale by the Jerome Robbins Foundation. According to Forbes.com, His two-bed, 2 ½ bath wooden-shingle cottage on an acre along the Hamptons oceanfront was the perfect spot, with a wraparound deck and views of ...

Flowers from John Lautner

Architecture & Design
Samuel’s Florist, 2017 photo: Adriene Biondo In October 2017 our friend the architectural historian Alan Hess, author of The Architecture of John Lautner, felt a frisson comparable to how ladies feel when receiving a big unexpected flower bouquet. The Architecture of John Lautner, author Alan Hess Ding dong, Alan’s architectural preservationist sidekick/friend, Adriene Biondo, was ...

She imagined, she designed and she built: Julia Morgan 2

Architecture & Design
Cali’s renowned female architect and her mansion by the sea for Marion Davies All she did was to conceptualize, design and build Hearst Castle in San Simeon, as the West Coast corollary of Versailles. It wasn’t much. It took no time at all — 28 years. There on a high cliff overlooking the Pacific, in ...

Laurie Sefton’s tasty dance offerings for Clairobscur

Architecture & Design · Dance
“Concert Walls” (2018) choreography by Laurie Sefton This evocative dance photo speaks to me, for, like many fellow Americans, I have walls on my mind. How I wish I didn’t. The image is of Concert Walls, a work from the attractive, diverse repertory of Clairobscur Dance Company, whose resident choreographer Laurie Sefton states with certitude, ...

Air-con comes to Great White Way

Architecture & Design · Theater
It’s precious. Variety “slanguage” used the expression legit to reference legitimate (live) theater. Not movies, not vaudeville, not burlesque, not off-off, but bigly stuff, like Shakespeare or O’Neill. An example, “Choreographer Michael Kidd distinguished himself in legit before working in pictures.” You’ve heard of Michael Kidd the “terpser”? right? He’s the guy who directs the ...

All hail the Cinerama Dome at 55

Architecture & Design · Film
Again we travel to 1963, the year when the groovy Robert Frost Auditorium found footing in Culver City, California. Across Los Angeles, those 55 years ago, a geodesic structure boasting a movie screen of 32 x 86 feet with a 146 degree curve opened on Sunset Boulevard. It’s very exciting to wish The Cinerama Dome, ...