Author: Lyra
-
Sun Belt Cities from the Sky
Michael Light often snaps his photos from a two-seater plane — at a bumpy 70 mph — that he pilots himself at the same time, but you’d never know it from his well-composed aerial shots. From swimming-pooled suburbs in Phoenix to razed hills awaiting their luxury homes in Nevada, Light has been documenting the western…
-
Playa Vista Bandshell by Michael Maltzan
By day it’s a brilliant white turban, or a scoop of ice cream hollowed out; by night it glows like a Japanese lantern, afloat in a dark sea of grass. Michael Maltzan’s bandshell is an astonishingly light affair, a sheet of canvas stretched over a dramatic curve of scaffolding that Maltzan likens to “bones set…
-
Weegee’s Naked Hollywood
“Hollywood is Newark, New Jersey, with Palm Trees,” quipped Arthur Fellig, the prolific and fearless photographer of America’s underbelly who was known as Weegee—like the ouija board—for his uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time. After selling the film rights to Naked City, his best-selling book of gritty crime scenes…
-
Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography, 1944-1984
Joe Deal, reflecting on his landscape photographs of the early 1970s, wrote: “Why contribute, I reasoned, to the growing pile of photographs of an idealized American landscape while it was being chewed up before our eyes by advancing suburban development, interstate highways and shopping malls?” Deal’s sentiments were shared by a new school of Southern California-based…
-
Llano del Rio
“Squaring the Circle” was a celebration of the centennial of the socialist colony Llano del Rio in the Antelope Valley, founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. Harriman ran for mayor of Los Angeles on the Socialist ticket, but an ill-timed bombing by labor activists destroyed his chances. Fed up with local politics, he decided to create…
-
Dune Forum
A magazine on art, literature, and politics (with the occasional treatise on nudity) Dune Forum was published in the early 1930s in the artists’ colony of Moy Mell, on the central California coast. Its founding editor, Gavin Arthur, aimed to provide a view point that would “express the creative thought of America looking not toward Europe but toward the…
-
Hot Tub Books from the 70s
“Some say bathing alone is a sin.” Do you have more examples? If so, email me. The Odd Book Club of Los Angeles is always on the lookout.
-
On Carlos Zanni//Oil Data//CIA//Three Days of the Condor
“It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.” —Don de Lillo, White Noise Every minute, numbers track the actions of nations and individuals worldwide, adding to an already dense storm of data. Digits scroll up and down incessantly, mapping the number of cold days in Bogota today as compared…
-
Cell Phone Trees
Perhaps you’ve noticed them in your neighborhood – tall, oddly stiff trees that appear seemingly overnight, with a ring of mysterious metal rectangles visible through the branches. Depending on the surrounding landscape, they might resemble pines, oaks, palms, elms, cypresses or cacti. Their bark can be textured or mottled, and their leaves are appropriately spiky,…
-
L.A.’s Modernist Ruins
When I was a docent at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock house, I became fascinated with the ruins of the Little Dipper school on the side of the hill. Co-designed by the dream team of Wright, R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, it was meant to offer a holistic, European-style elementary education including music, art, theater, and…
Lyra Kilston 