Photographs by Rush Varela are featured in the Art Walk Lounge during today’s Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES
Home sweet home — the United Artists Theater right around its first birthday. Opening later this year as an Ace.
“Phyllis Galembo’s interest in the masquerade traditions of Africa and its diaspora began twenty five years ago, with her first visit to Nigeria. Since then, she has travelled widely in west and central Africa, and regularly to Haiti, making portraits that document and describe the transformative power of the mask. Her subjects are participants in masquerade events, both traditional African ceremonies and contemporary fancy dress and carnival, all of whom use costume, body paint and masks to create mythic characters – sometimes entertaining and humorous, often dark and frightening, and always powerful and thrilling. Titled after the Haitian Kreyòl word for mask, Maske is the first comprehensive collection of these portraits.”
One of our favorite books to carry: MASKE by PHYLLIS GALEMBO
We may not share a street corner with Mohawk General Store, or even a neighborhood, but knowing that we share as much as distantly linked power wires and cellular data molecules in the stilted summer air of Los Angeles makes us happy. Go in, get this book and say hi to our friends.
If you’re on the other coast, you can pick up prints by Phyllis Galembo at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York.
via mohawkgeneralstore
Chris Stroffolino banging out Hanging Downtown by The Replacements in the Piano Van this February in Los Angeles behind Griffith Park’s old carousel.
Los Angeles’ Various Small Fires is currently host to Home Office, a solo exhibition by Anna Sew Hoy. Anna taught a workshop and lectured at Snow in the Desert, our gathering for women in the arts at Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs last summer. The show is up through the 18th of May. See David Pagel’s review in the LA Times and see more about Anna’s vision.
…there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless
Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
Excerpted from Bertolt Brecht’s Contemplating Hell, featured on Literary LA.
Through July, Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. celebrates the vast Autopias and Plains of Id of Los Angeles with programs and exhibits like Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 at the J. Paul Getty Museum. We’ll be around, soaking it all in, meeting some of our new neighbors, and sharing what we see and learn right here.
William Bensussen aka The Gaslamp Killer, a hyperactive, hypersonic, LA-based channeler for all the right musical vibes, plays April 19 at Desert Gold with Warp Records in the Amigo Room at Ace Hotel & Swim Club in Palm Springs — here, he represents for all the deep musical woo we love and believe in, as part of the Serato Icon Artist Series.
LOS ANGELES : WOMBLETON RECORDS
Jali Musa Jawra is from the Kankan region of Guinea in West Africa. The Jali (or “Djeli”) prefix on his name means “musician by birth”; both of his parents were jalis as well, you see. Traditionally speaking, Djelis were more or less wandering minstrels in this part of Africa. He is best known for playing the Kora, a 21-string bridge-harp, though he also mastered the balafon, basically a wooden xylophone from the idiophone family of tuned percussion instruments. He plays guitar and sings, too — but doesn’t everyone. Am I right Hollywood?
Moving to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast to play in Mory Kante’s band in the late 1970s put Jawara in a more progressive state of mind. When he split from Kante in ’83 he developed his own, hypnotic and exciting style of modern African Mandinka music. The album this tune was taken from, “Soubindoor”, was recorded in London in 1988 and was released on Island’s Mango imprint.
The song is about how suspicion and mistrust can ruin otherwise loving relationships. So to put it in your frame of reference, Wombleteens, this song is like West Africa’s answer to “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. I’d like to hear what Jawara could do with “Shadowplay” or “Disorder”, wouldn’t you!
- From the selectors at Wombleton Records in Highland Park — all vinyl all the time for all the people.
Fractal Projections is a play on the idea of the cube broken in space to create an interlocking grid system that follows a linear deformation, allowing them to break from the normal grid behavior into a family of fractal surfaces.
Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles hangs its shingle later this year, and we couldn’t be happier to share a neighborhood with one of our almae matres, SCI-Arc. This Thursday, we’re looking forward to circling like sharks around Evelina Sausina and Eugene Kosgoron’s installation — the winner of SCI-Arc’s 40/40 competition — at the Farmer’s and Merchant’s Bank building for the Downtown LA Artwalk. 40/40 pays homage to architecture and how SCI-Arc alumni have transformed the school over the preceding four decades. Hats off, neighbors.
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