Tag: 11.23.19

Artist’s Light Installation Lets People On Either Side Of The US/Mexico Border Talk To One Another

On either side of the border, there are three stations, each with a microphone, speaker and tuning wheels that control a searchlight, that can be seen from a 50-kilometre radius. When your light beam intersects with someone else’s in the sky, a two-way audio connection opens up and you can talk to the other person through the microphone. – CBC

The Talented And Busy Street Artists Of Dakar

Their canvases are houses, specifically the canvases of one working-class neighborhood called the Médina. “The neighborhood has welcomed street artists from all over the world to practice their craft in what the founder of the project calls the open sky museum. Dozens of wall paintings dot the neighborhood, bringing color to usually drab cement walls, and adding to the flourishing international art scene in Dakar.” – The New York Times

The Astonishing Breadth Of Turn-Of-The-Century French Director Alice Guy-Blache’s Career

Guy-Blaché is well-known among film scholars, but the film world and the world at large? Not so much. Quick summary: “Starting out as a secretary at Gaumont Studios in Paris, she began directing her own films in 1896 before taking on oversight of the company’s motion-picture production. She emigrated to the United States with her husband in 1907 to promote Gaumont’s Chronophone technology and, several years later, established and headed up her own studio, Solax, in Fort Lee, New Jersey.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Raymond Kappe, Who Profoundly Influenced Southern California Architecture, Has Died At 92

Kappe founded the Cal Poly Pomona architecture program and was fired for being, as he called it, “free-swinging.” But, unlike many a faculty member could or would do now, he picked up his bags, recruited his own faculty, and started another architecture school: “The New School, soon to become the influential Southern California Institute of Architecture, or SCI-Arc, opened in 1972 with 75 students at its original Santa Monica campus.” – Los Angeles Times

A Bookstore Whose Nooks And Crannies Are Practically The Key To Narnia

Well, no, no wardrobe or fur coats, but “9,000 square feet of nooks, alcoves, labyrinths, and warrens.” Its customers really love it, including the way thousands of books crammed together smell. And “the store is orderly if not antiseptic. Signs are hand-lettered; there are plenty of chairs for contemplation and ladders for climbing; and, whether by accident or puckish design, the crime section stops short at a fittingly dead end.” – The New York Times

Documenting ‘Old L.A.’ As Developers Destroy More And More Craftsmen Houses For Apartment Buildings

It’s not that preservationists don’t understand the need for housing – that’s obvious in L.A., as in most cities and towns on the West Coast. “It seems to me that we should fight the argument that any talk of preservation is anti-housing. Because it doesn’t have to be. We can be for affordable housing but against the kind of utter freedom to tear down and put up just about anything at all anywhere in the name of it that on the block just east of mine has produced the kind of development that makes neighborhood people cry.” – Los Angeles Times

Longtime King’s College Choir Director Stephen Cleobury Has Died At 70

Sir Stephen Cleobury conducted the King’s College Choir for nearly 40 years and instituted the annual commissioning of a new Christmas carol. He retired two months ago. “He was influential in the musical world beyond the choir, conducting a number of ensembles including the Academy of Ancient Music and the BBC Singers, and through his association with the Cambridge University Musical Society.” – BBC