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!

AUDIO OF SOUBINDOOR (1988)

- 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.

The last four letters lasted 26 years, but weren’t included after the sign was refurbished in ‘49.

This is California Hospital in Downtown Los Angeles, at its latest incarnation in 1898. The hospital was founded with the help of John and Dora Haynes — you may recognize the ring of “The Haynes Foundation” from many a public broadcasting sponsor shout-out — an enterprising pair of social activists who uprooted from Pennsylvania to settle where the sunshine shone. Mister was a philosopher, civic entrepreneur, medical practitioner and teacher; Missus was a tireless suffragette and ally. California Hospital — now in its 126th year — is one of the many organizations that still benefit from this childless, eccentric and driven couple’s foundation, legacy and goodwill nearly 75 years after their deaths — not to mention the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, Los Angeles City Historical Society, Los Angeles Public Library, USC, UCLA, public radio stations KCRW and KPCC and any deserving, eloquent and well-referenced applicant who applies for a grant.

The hospital has transformed considerably over the last century and a quarter — you can learn more on their site.

Mixed messages at Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. What’ll show up there next? Your guess is as good as ours.

Untitled #1, from the Freeway Series by Catherine Opie

“Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy I. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”

— Excerpted from Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

Thank you, R. Buckminster Fuller. For experimenting with geodesic domes decades before the term “hippie” even existed. Like the Cinerama Dome in our soon-to-be newly adopted city of Los Angeles. Thank you for having such a wonderfully stuffy sounding name and for being an unstuffy elder spirit guide to a generation of tuners in and droppers out at places like Drop City. For inventing the endlessly enchanting concept of a ‘Spaceship Earth.’ For making weird watercrafts and something like a prototype of what would become the VW mini-bus. For making outlandishly futurist objects straight out of science fiction into living realities — dreaming out loud, geometrically and in Technicolor. In the minds of our hearts we march through this life with belly band tattoos of the word ‘Buckminster’ in Old English because you, sir, are still an inspiration.