Los Angeles: The Cultural Capital of the 21st Century

[VZN]

Los Angeles is the future

It is difficult to pinpoint the precise moment when Los Angeles stopped giving a damn what you or we or anyone else had to say — it was a slow but important finding of self, taking place quietly over the past decade. A decade that saw the city grow in all sorts of exciting and impressive ways. A decade of building real transit. (For the first time in generations, you will soon be able to travel by rail between Downtown and the Santa Monica; soon after, expect a subway stop on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.) Of creating truly walkable neighborhoods. The melting pot actually began melting, bubbling over messily and rather beautifully all over every aspect of city life. (Not coincidentally, suddenly here in the land of salad and iced tea, people truly learned how to eat. And to love eating.) Oh, and just for fun? A few more people squeezed into the city, now overall the most densely packed in the country. Los Angeles, quite simply, is ready to challenge anyone. New York, watch your back. Here are four LA places to get up to speed.

DOWNTOWN

To see what we mean, you have to start Downtown. It’s a generic umbrella term for a wildly diverse group of neighborhoods that comprise the city’s core; in these pedestrian-friendly streets with their incredible Art Deco architecture and ample transit and tons of people-watching, you can spend a week experiencing a Los Angeles that many outsiders assumed didn’t even exist. Many locals didn’t either, until about 10 years ago, so don’t feel bad.

These days, the core is in overdrive trying to find its rightful place as the city center of a metropolitan region of nearly 18 million people. (That’s right – just four million fewer than in the Tri-State Area.) That’s how you end up having a thing like the glittering LA Live complex with the Staples Center (where the Lakers play), luxury hotels (JW Marriott, Ritz-Carlton), destination restaurants (including a Kerry Simon eatery, of course), daily celebrity sightings, a Times Square-like entertainment district and more just a few blocks down from the Mercado Olympic, an unofficial Sunday street festival of the city’s dominant culture (Mexican, in case you forgot) in the wonderfully named Piñata District (named because of all the people who sell piñatas there, of course), where vendors who speak no English sell food that’s more Mexican than places we’ve been in Mexico. Squash blossom quesadillas, pleasantly chewy Guadalajara-style churros, Mexico City-style fried fish and other intensely good and inexpensive finds.

Then there is the Warehouse District, that vast swath of low-rise industrial complexes, where once barren streets are now punctuated by artist lofts and good restaurants and people biking to places like Handsome Coffee, a local roaster and café that has a pop-up farmers market and occasional taco nights. It’s one of many cafés across the Los Angeles Basin that is becoming a true community center in a city everyone said wasn’t interested in community.

Nearby is the Arts District, next to Little Tokyo — the two share a gleaming light-rail station on the Gold Line, which takes little old ladies from Pasadena into the bustling Union Station intermodal transit hub, or beyond into East Los Angeles for tacos, if they feel like it.

The heart of old Downtown, too, is booming — the Old Bank District with its cocktail bars and yoga studios and the incredible monthly Art Walk, a street party/night market that revolves loosely around the area’s galleries.

Over on Broadway, with its sea of intact theaters and their garish, old-school marquees that lend the whole faded strip a Times Square in the 1970s feel, there’s room for luxury lofts, for the giant Umamicatessen, a sort of hipster Eataly meatery affair from the Umami Burger folk.

And then, down on Seventh Street, which sews all of this together, from the bland glossiness of Figueroa Street on down to the appalling, otherworldly depths of Skid Row, you have one of Downtown’s most promising streets, the perfect spot to stroll on a sunny afternoon.

Hungry? Some of the city’s best restaurants are Downtown these days — anyone will tell you that. Here’s Ricardo Zarate repping Peru at his newly relocated Mo-Chica in the Seventh Street corridor, making diners flip out with his stellar lomo saltado and pan con tuna, serving up ceviches and tiradito that are all ocean and acid and heat and happiness. (What started as one tiny Mo-Chica stall in Southeast LA has turned into a growing Zarate empire that also includes West LA’s Picca, where Peru meets Japan for family-style madness.)

Here’s Bryant Ng at the Spice Table, repping Southeast Asia at his Little Tokyo joint, blanketing tables with satays, Hainanese chicken over rice, laksa and other first-class renditions of hawker-stand staples.

Here’s Josef Centeno at Baco Mercat in the Old Bank section, repping his baco “sandwich/taco/pizza hybrid,” a creation so multi-cultural and over-the-top that you should just describe it as American. And although Centeno might be best known for specialties like his oxtail-hash baco, you shouldn’t overlook his mastery of vegetables (Caesar brussel sprouts!) and fruit (sautéed peaches with goat cheese and honey!).

t all might be rough around the edges, and sometimes you have to dig to get to the greatness — that’s LA in a nutshell — but if you want to see and taste the diverse and unique world-class city that Los Angeles is becoming, Downtown is where you start.

VENICE

If you’re one of those people who show up from New York complaining that all you want to really do is go to the beach, congratulations, you win. Outside of Downtown, LA’s most fascinating area these days is Venice, which has gone from being a funky and fun dead end to being front and center in the city’s complete revamp. (Sorry, anyone who was thinking of buying a ridiculously cheap place in its ever declining catalog of seedy side streets — those days are essentially over.) What Venice has become is, quite simply, one of the most inspiring urban settings in North America, a major leap from a few short years ago.

Beach? Check. Crazy people-watching? That’ll never change. Seedy boardwalk action? Oh yeah. Creepy muscle dudes, people trying to get you in for your free medical consult to get your pot card, street performers, sleaze, stroller moms, skaters — your head could explode.

But the real revolution is in the neighborhood’s back streets, which, like the iconic Canals section, can all be explored on foot or by bike. Start at formerly moribund Abbot Kinney Boulevard — with its boutique, farm-to-table pizza places, non-divey “dive bars,” indie-rock jukeboxes, food trucks and surf shops — which was recently knighted by one glossy magazine as the “coolest block in America” and we’re really not going to argue (pop in for coffee at Intelligentsia one morning, or any time, and see what it’s all about). Locals seem to be all about Rose Avenue these days; walk it from the beach on up to the Whole Foods (one of the most architecturally impressive in the country, and certainly one of the busiest) and you’ll see why; along the way, pop into the patio at Superba Snack Bar for charred figs, black kale salad, a dab of pheasant rillettes, perhaps, or maybe just the fried chicken.

But the best place to eat in the neighborhood, if you’re asking us, is Sunny Spot, over on Venice Boulevard. What is it? Oh, no big deal, just some really great Caribbean food from an Angeleno of the Korean persuasion, Roy Choi, who became famous for making some of the city’s raddest tacos and serving them from his Kogi food truck. How Los Angeles is that?

MID-CITY WEST

People who say that the Los Angeles sprawl cannot be tamed have obviously never been to London. Or maybe they have, and refuse to see the parallels between the two cities, both essentially a chain of villages that grew enough to bump into one another. All you have to do is knit the villages together with a proper transit system, and voila, everyone shuts up about sprawl.

t will take Los Angeles, oh, like, forever, to get all the way there, but in places like Mid-City West, a low-rise, vaguely suburban in-between spot, you can see it all coming together in what has become, rather by accident, one of the most vibrant parts of town.

Of course, it helped to have the historic farmers market at the corner of Third and Fairfax, next to the CBS Television City studio (“Price Is Right” taping anyone?); over time, everything seems to have evolved around it — the revived Fairfax District to the north, the gigantic Grove shopping center, the booming Third Street corridor, Beverly running parallel. This nabe is where you’ll find some of the country’s best sneaker/street-wear shopping (holla, Undefeated, Flight Club, Sportie LA) and, at the southern end of things, behind the imposing Park La Brea residential development, is the cultural magnet and gathering place that is LACMA; the Purple Line subway extension, which will link Downtown, Koreatown, Mid-City West and Beverly Hills with Century City, Brentwood, Westwood and, hopefully someday, the beach in Santa Monica, will have a station right at the museum entrance, at Wilshire and Fairfax.

You don’t have to wait until then to come here — Ray’s and the adjacent Stark Bar, facing the museum’s often busy plaza, are two of the most pleasant places to while away a warm Los Angeles evening. Not that you aren’t spoiled for choice around here. Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo’s Animal and Son of a Gun restaurants are located within walking distance of the farmers market, for example.

Then there’s Karen and Quinn Hatfield, the married chef duo behind the rightfully praised Hatfield’s in Hollywood. The Hatfields know their way around a seasonal menu and understand what it means to create a civilized, white-tablecloth dining environment. But with Sycamore Kitchen, their new order-at-the-counter bakery and cafe on stubbornly unlovely La Brea Avenue, they have a much more casual-cool but equally important goal: creating a ridiculously good salted caramel pecan babka roll. That gooey magic – part of a salted-caramel movement that’s sweeping sweets shops all over the country – is just one of dozens of different baked items (including wonderful chocolate-chip rye cookies and brown butter/date mini bundt cakes) at the new hot spot, but there are more than sweets to accompany your Stumptown coffee at Sycamore Kitchen. The lunch menu has refreshing salads and a crispy and braised pork belly double BLT, for starters. And if you can’t decide between savory and sweet, split the difference and order the toast with house-made ricotta, stewed citrus, fennel and hazelnut.

On Third Street, you’ll find Fonuts, a donut and ice-cream shop from Waylynn Lucas. She’s the former pastry chef at the Bazaar by Jose Andres and Patina, four-star restaurants both. Now she’s baking — yes, baking — donuts with standout flavors including maple bacon, blueberry earl grey and strawberry buttermilk. Lucas is also churning out great ice cream. And yes, the salted caramel soft-serve is habit-forming. Kind of like this part of town.

HOLLYWOOD

For the visiting New Yorker, Hollywood has long been low on the list of Los Angeles musts, unless you wanted a West Coast version of New York’s old-school 42nd Street filth. Slowly, awkwardly, a new kind of Hollywood is taking shape, where chic hotels and grand nightclubs (alongside horrible nightlife, admittedly) sit side by side next to beautiful historic theaters and new residential buildings. In the mix are great new restaurants and awesome old dive bars, a hugely popular farmers market and two very busy subway stations. Best of all? This is only the beginning. To the chagrin of homeowners in the hills, a recent rezoning looks to be upping the height restrictions on development in the area — expect Hollywood the neighborhood to be a major force in Los Angeles life over the next century.

But what of today? Check out Hollywood and Vine, with its hotels like the Redbury. The Redbury’s all about old-world, boho-chic cool mixed with modern-day glam. With its bordello-red rooms, purposefully faded carpet and sexy Library bar, and a location near many of Hollywood’s overflowing nightclubs, it’s a spot for discerning VIPs and a surprisingly pleasant and restful boutique hotel in spite of the partying crowds in and around the property.

It’s also just a couple blocks from the bountiful Sunday farmers’ market, one of the city’s best spots for an impromptu lunch. Yes, you can make a picnic with the finest meats, cheeses, bread and vegetables, but you’re on vacation, so let the locals cook for you: Salvadoran pupusas, Thai sticky-rice desserts, artisanal breakfast sausages served over mounds of French fries. The variety is worthy of Portland food-cart pods.

And Hollywood has mass transit that takes you right to, say, the W Hotel with its Drai’s nightclub up top. Further down the boulevard, there are local, down-and-dirty dining mainstays like Aziz Ansari and Jonathan Gold favorite Jitlada, which some argue is the best Thai restaurant in the country. There’s the Sayers Club, a fab nightspot for rock and hip-hop fans, accessed via a Papaya King. Yeah, Hollywood, the secret’s out. We like you.

[saiholmes]

[pesto]

A nice fun rundown that is more optimistic than most; it's attitude is to pick out the positive, while ignoring the "still dumpy" criticsms. It hits the key points: that the demand is there and the people and retail are moving in. These are rapidly turning into desirable urban areas, although with more openness than is found in European and East Coast cities.

I notice they even respected LA's borders and left places like SaMo and WeHo and Culver City out.

[VZN]

This Weekend: Art Platform LA attracts global attention

Art Platform LA opened September 27 with a constellation of artists and galleries from around the world. They joined many local art leaders who have made Los Angeles an important center of the art world. The extensive exhibition in two pavilions radiated creativity and built anticipation for even greater things to come. And several well prepared collectors seized the opportunity to secure their purchases before more visitors follow this weekend. The show has become an appealing destination for both arts fans who seeks to learn more about art and serious collectors actively looking to acquire more art.

Dianne Tanzer of Melbourne, Australia is a first time exhibitor and explained why Los Angeles has become important for so many international art trendsetters. “Everyone goes to Art Basel and nothing stands out. Los Angeles is a place where you can see where the future is going. And the Art Platofrm director Adam Gross is so helpful. He made it an easy decision.” Tanzer also plans to show at other major art centers in the Pacific region in Hong Kong and Singapore. Her first show in Los Angeles features six paintings by Neil Haddon of Tasmania, a large island between mainland Australia and Antarctica. The high gloss, stylized images of real life events reinforce the popular trend of art that tells a story.

The Patrick Painter Gallery is featuring works by Rhinus Van de Velde of Belgium. The ART1307 studio is introducing two dozen Italian artists as part of its program of fostering cultural exchange between Los Angeles and Italy. Three works are part of a series featured as part of the “Last Days of Pompeii” exhibition at the Getty Villa, showing how Pompeii legends and landscapes have inspired artists throughout the centuries. Exhibitors from Turkey and Israel add to the sunny Mediterranean aura of the show.

The results of a rare special exhibition of art from the Japanese Gutai School commanded attention. A dozen rare works by avant-garde trendsetters in mid-Century Japan were exhibited by the Whitestone Gallery of Tokyo, Japan. Nine works by iconic Gutai school artist Chiyu Uemae sold during the first hours the fair was open, all at high-five figure prices. More works by Gutai school artists will be exhibited in New York this November at a special program of the Guggenheim Museum.

The results of Los Angeles Modern Auctions pointed to a robust market for art in the Los Angeles area. Annual sales have grown from $ 6 million in 2007 to $10 million in 2011 and continue to climb this year. This success story reflects both healthy increases in prices for quality art of historic importance and growth in the number of Southern Californians who are actively collecting art.

Art Platform LA also displays a public art exhibition by local Santa Monica artist Clayton Campbell. Art fair executive director Adam Gross explained how Clayton took the initiative to contact the fair early enough with a distinctive proposal that would help expand the audience and appeal of the program and cited Campbell as a role model for other area artists who want to try to do something new.

Art Platform LA also has many tours and educational programs scheduled throughout the weekend. In addition to category specific programs about photography and Middle Eastern Art, local experts will update fair visitors about important trends in art in Los Angeles.

Love how L.A. has become a go to destination in the art world.

[saiholmes]

Originally Posted by THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Tech Titans Hit the Beach
As Silicon Valley moguls go on a home-buying spree in Los Angeles, they're reshaping the real-estate landscape
By LAUREN SCHUKER BLUM
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The tech industry is going south.

In growing numbers, Silicon Valley executives—long based in tech strongholds like Santa Clara and Palo Alto—are buying homes in Los Angeles, as the lines between the technology and entertainment businesses grow blurrier.

Venture capitalist and hedge-fund manager Peter Thiel—PayPal's co-founder and Facebook's earliest investor—paid $11.5 million in January for a 6,000-square-foot house on a promontory above the Sunset Strip. Andrew Frame, a 30-something entrepreneur who founded Internet-telephone company Ooma, bought a contemporary four bedroom in Bel Air for $5.5 million last summer from singer/reality star Nick Lachey, who in turn had acquired the home from model Heidi Klum and singer Seal. In March of last year, Matt Jacobson, head of market development at Facebook, paid $10.9 million for a modern house on the ocean in Manhattan Beach, according to public records. He uses his former home, a just-under 900-square-foot beach bungalow two blocks away, to house Facebook employees visiting from up north.

"It's the Facebook flop house," Mr. Jacobson jokes. "We have a surf in the morning before going into the office."

The southern migration is taking place as companies like Google and Facebook beef up their presence and more Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs establish footholds in the entertainment industry. Prices are soaring in the beachfront communities tech types favor, and rents in these areas are growing at a faster rate than in other parts of the city.

"There is a feeling that techies are the new celebrities," says Eric Kuhn, an agent who heads the social-media department at United Talent Agency. "When I arrived in Hollywood, everybody had written a screenplay," he says. "Now, everyone has an app."

Kurt Rappaport, a Los Angeles broker specializing in luxury real estate, says the number of his house-hunting clients from Silicon Valley has doubled over the past couple of years. Earlier this year, Mr. Rappaport sold a beach cottage in Malibu to a Facebook executive for $6.8 million. Another client, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, just closed on a deal to buy ex-Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's compound in Malibu for $37 million—Mr. Ellison's 27th Malibu property purchase, says Mr. Rappaport. Mr. Ellison did not respond to requests for comment.

It isn't just Silicon Valley-based techies who are buying. Last summer, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss—twins best known for suing Mark Zuckerberg over the origins of Facebook, and who recently formed a venture-capital firm—bought an 8,000-square-foot bachelor pad in the Hollywood Hills for $18 million. Ted Waitt, co-founder of computer company Gateway, also bought in Bel-Air, paying $14 million this past June for a six-bedroom Mediterranean.

Another client of Mr. Rappaport's, Mich Mathews, formerly the head of marketing for Microsoft and a longtime Seattle resident, paid $11.5 million for a 12,000-square-foot home in Holmby Hills in March. From her new perch in Los Angeles, she's helping to launch a company that she says lies "at the intersection of marketing and digital entertainment, philanthropy and lifetime experiences." Ms. Mathews is currently remodeling the seven-bedroom home, adding a wine cellar and a cabana for the pool.

More than 600 tech start-ups have sprung up in L.A. over the last few years, according to Represent.LA, an open-source project that tracks the growth of start-up communities, bringing with them engineers and executives looking for housing. The narrow, 3-mile strip of land that runs from Santa Monica through Venice, and is now stretching down to Playa Vista, has been dubbed "Silicon Beach" due to the heavy concentration of Internet companies and executives there.

Prices have gone up dramatically on this beachfront strip. Previously known for an edgy vibe, the area has grown increasingly upscale with the arrival of gourmet restaurants and mainstream stores. In Santa Monica, the median price of homes jumped 16% in the first eight months of 2012 compared with 2011, after a 9% decline over the same period the year before, according to Multiple Listing Service data compiled by Paul Habibi, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Venice's median home price in the first eight months of 2012 broke the $1 million barrier, rising to $1,012,000 from $899,000 in the first eight months of 2011.

In Los Angeles County, median home prices went up by just under 1% during the first eight months of 2012, compared with the same period in 2011, according to Mr. Habibi's MLS data. Nationwide, the median home price rose 3.3% during that time period to $186,000, according to DataQuick, and in California the median price rose 4.8% for that same time period.

A substantial portion of Venice's real-estate boom is attributable to Google. Last November, the Web-search giant opened a flashy new office in Venice to focus on engineering, sales and advertising; the company will lease close to a quarter-million square feet in the neighborhood by 2014. To create a campuslike setting for its more than 500 employees in L.A., the company took over a funky Frank Gehry complex resembling a pair of binoculars. Like Google's other locations, it offers amenities like a climbing wall and an outdoor movie theater, as well as bicycles and surfboards that can be rented during the workday.

"Want 300 days of sun a year?" Google says on its website. "Forget the Valley—pack your bags for Google L.A."

In February, Google's YouTube signed a lease for about 40,000 square feet of production space in Playa Vista. It will open later this year. And in August 2011, Facebook began leasing about 13,000 square feet in Playa Vista.

The arrival of techies has also had a profound effect on the rental market, brokers and real-estate developers say. Kevin Miller, president of Westside Rentals, which bills itself as Southern California's largest home-finding service, says he has seen rents in Santa Monica and Venice increase by about 10% over the last 18 months—compared with other desirable areas such as Beverly Hills and Culver City, where he says rents increased by about 4% to 5%. Rents have increased by just 2% across Los Angeles over the same time period, he says.

"Entrepreneurs love being around other entrepreneurs, and that's driving demand toward the beach," says Mr. Miller. "Plus, people like to live near where they work, and the tech companies are there."

Silicon Valley buyers shop differently from other wealthy L.A. clients, brokers say. While entertainment moguls often rely on the taste, advice and social connections of the city's top brokers, tech executives frequently do their own research online before they arrive in town, and know what they want before they look.

Broker Mauricio Umansky recalls a moment earlier this year when he was showing several homes in the Hollywood Hills to an entrepreneur visiting from Northern California. "I was telling him that houses in the neighborhood sell for $1,000 per [square] foot. He interrupted me and said, 'No, they sell for $936 per foot.' He was testing me. It totally caught me off guard. And by the way, he was right." Mr. Umansky, who is the CEO of real-estate firm the Agency, adds that many buyers from up north often shy away from relying on the taste of others, preferring instead to rely on themselves. "They will challenge your knowledge of the market," he says. "And only if you pass will they trust you." In the end, he sold an $8 million home in the Hollywood Hills to the entrepreneur.

The business interests of Hollywood and Silicon Valley continue to converge. Tech companies are becoming distributors of studio content; YouTube, iTunes and Netflix have all licensed content from major entertainment players. Talent agencies CAA and WME are incubating start-ups.

"There's so much more traffic between these two worlds of tech and entertainment that we're seeing the social worlds blend together, and that's luring the Northern California community to buy homes down here," says Ben Silverman, former co-chairman of NBC Entertainment. "These days, there are more Internet guys at the Vanity Fair Oscar party than traditional media players."

South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who co-founded PayPal and Tesla Motors, has also dabbled in the film business, serving as an executive producer on films like "Thank You for Smoking." He commutes back and forth on his Dassault Falcon between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. According to people close to the situation, Mr. Musk is in contract to buy the roughly the $20 million Bel-Air house he has been renting—a 20,000-square-foot estate on a private knoll with a home theater, library, lighted tennis court, gym, pool and 1,000-bottle wine cellar. Representatives for Mr. Musk declined to comment.

More venture capitalists also are putting down roots. "For years, I would watch people launch their start-up in L.A., raise capital and move up north as soon as they got successful. Now, they get successful and they stay," says Paul Bricault, a venture capitalist who founded one of Los Angeles's largest accelerators and lives in Venice. After years of traveling to Los Angeles once every few months, Timothy Draper, founder and a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says he now flies down to L.A. about twice a month—often enough that he bought a house in west Los Angeles this year.

"I thought, 'Why leave all the activity here to compete with everyone else in NorCal?' " says Mark Suster, a venture capitalist who started leasing in Pacific Palisades two years ago.

Another factor: Even as prices have begun to creep up in neighborhoods like Venice, L.A.'s real-estate prices still tend to be substantially lower than those in desirable parts of Silicon Valley. In Palo Alto, the median price paid for single-family homes was $1.7 million in the first eight months of 2012, a 20.4% increase over the same period in 2011, according to DataQuick.

"We had a great time looking for a house in L.A., especially after living up north," says Sonya Merrill, an ex-Google executive who moved to L.A. with her husband, Douglas, a former Google chief information officer, in late 2008. "Silicon Valley is all 1960s and '70s tract houses or small bungalows—it's a sea of blah. Expensive blah—I once looked at a teardown in Palo Alto that smelled like urine and was made of cinder block. It was on the market for $1.5 million and there was a bidding war for it." The couple spent $2.8 million on a Hollywood Hills four-bedroom home where actor Bela Lugosi long resided. They spent another year redoing it.

Some tech moguls, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, venture capitalist Ray Lane and Mr. Ellison, have owned property in Los Angeles for years. David Sacks, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, owns a Beverly Hills house where Quentin Tarantino filmed "Pulp Fiction."

But the newest wave of Silicon Valley arrivals is heavily favoring the Silicon Beach area. Viddy, a mobile-video-sharing company, has its office a block from Google in Venice. About a fifth of new employees have relocated from Silicon Valley, says Brett O'Brien, Viddy's CEO and co-founder. One of Viddy's other co-founders, Chris Ovitz, in January paid $1.6 million for a loft on Venice's main thoroughfare.

Developers are scrambling to cater to the influx. Jim Andersen, president of prolific Westside developer NMS Properties, says the firm is opening five more buildings not far from the offices of Google and Yahoo, among other tech firms. He added that NMS has begun building smaller apartments to better serve young renters who are part of the tech scene.

Jim Jacobsen, a commercial-real-estate broker, says he first built one of his projects—a warehouse in Venice converted into 30 lofts for both working and living—with entertainment-industry folks in mind. But with just a month or so until the units, which run between $500,000 and $2 million, hit the market, he is advertising them to people in the technology industry.

Mr. Umansky, who sold two homes in Los Angeles this year to Facebook executives, has another explanation for why Silicon Valley executives are heading south.

"A lot of these guys are young, they have cashed out, they are bachelors, they like to party," he says. "And let's be honest, the partying in Hollywood is way better than in Silicon Valley."

Read More: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...307933850.html

Related Link:

Silicon Beach emerges as a tech hotbed
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/...ach/56241864/1

[VZN]

Giant Steps for Dance in Los Angeles

A FEW weeks ago inside a sunny rehearsal hall here, six sweaty dancers and one star choreographer — Benjamin Millepied — set out to charm a group of donors. As the sextet performed some intricately interwoven partnering, he leaned against a wall and chewed on his bottom lip. “Beautiful! It’s insane! It’s just great!” he interjected.

In truth, parts needed a little work. “We will fix a few things, maybe how it ends,” he told his dancers. He turned to the 18 donors, sitting in a line against one wall, and smiled as only a Frenchman can. “This is impossibly hard to do,” he explained.

Mr. Millepied was speaking about his choreography, but the comment also applies to his upstart L.A. Dance Project. Having retired last October from New York City Ballet, Mr. Millepied, 35, moved to Los Angeles — where his new wife, Natalie Portman, resides — and started his own company. Sorry: “curatorial collective.” He says he will create new dances, revive seminal works and generally kick up dust by collaborating in unusual ways with various arts organizations here.

The first program from L.A. Dance Project, which made its debut in September in Los Angeles and opens at Montclair State University in New Jersey on Thursday, is an enormously ambitious one consisting of that new dance Mr. Millepied was rehearsing; Merce Cunningham’s sonically arduous masterwork “Winterbranch,” not fully seen since the 1970s; and William Forsythe’s “Quintett,” a haunting piece from 1993 that Mr. Forsythe has described as “a love letter” to his young wife, who was dying of cancer.

Mr. Millepied’s arrival in Los Angeles comes as its fine arts organizations are tackling adventurous and far-reaching projects in a way that makes New York look a little humdrum.

“There is more innovation happening here than in New York — it’s not even close — and certainly more excitement,” said the Los Angeles arts philanthropist Maria Arena Bell. “Art is colliding everywhere but particularly here, and it’s exciting and also a little controversial.”

Ms. Bell is biased, but she also has a point. This fall New Yorkers are being served traditional museum fare like “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” and “Picasso Black and White.” Angelenos, meanwhile, have “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void,” an examination of postwar artists’ shredding, ripping and burning of canvasses, and a major retrospective of Ken Price, the contemporary sculptor who died in February — on the heels of last year’s Pacific Standard Time, a regionwide collaboration of more than 60 cultural institutions.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, meanwhile, continues to sizzle under its 31-year-old Venezuelan conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. Experiments there include last spring’s “Don Giovanni,” with costumes by Rodarte and crumpled-paper sets by Frank Gehry. Also firmly ambitious is Netia Jones’s version of the opera “Where the Wilds Things Are,” performed here in recent days and involving video projections of the book’s illustrations, which Ms. Jones then animated in real time.

Now comes Mr. Millepied, with his promise for jump-starting dance. His goal, put simply, is to make Los Angeles “embrace dance more than it has so far,” said Charles Fabius, who serves as L.A. Dance Project’s producer and business mind and whose career has stretched from the Paris Grand Opera to the Watermill Center on Long Island.

“How is it possible that here is this huge city, and it doesn’t have a big ballet company?” Mr. Millepied said. “There has to be a way, but it has to be done differently.”

Los Angeles has successful niche dance organizations, including Diavolo, known for acrobatic performances, and the University of California, Los Angeles, has a serious dance program. But Mr. Millepied is right. For a city of its size, and given the scope of the local movie and television industries (not to mention San Francisco’s devotion to dance), Los Angeles has historically exhibited little cohesive support for the art form.

The Joffrey Ballet’s bicoastal run in the 1980s was considered a debacle, ending with red ink and epic bickering. The modest Los Angeles Ballet has been performing for only six years. Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center, a subscription series that brings the likes of American Ballet Theater to town, is 10 years old and gained solid footing in 2009 with a $20 million gift from Ms. Kaufman, the widow of the KB Homes co-founder Donald Bruce Kaufman. But its annual subscriptions contribute only about 20 percent of its total audience.

“This city is rich with intellect and culture, but you can’t present dance like you would in New York or Paris,” Mr. Millepied said. “Let’s bring dance to people who might not come to a formal setting. Let’s touch on different aspects of culture and pull people in.”

L.A. Dance Project is small. There are those six dancers, plus Mr. Millepied, and a couple of junior administrators. There are three creative advisers in addition to Mr. Fabius, although their involvement is more limited: the French choreographer Dimitri Chamblas; a contemporary photography expert, Matthieu Humery; and the composer Nico Muhly. Mr. Fabius said the company’s operating budget is about $1 million a year. Glorya Kaufman Presents underwrote the initial months of operation; presenting partners include Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Maison de la Danse in Lyon and Sadler’s Wells Theater in London.

Like any other arts nonprofit, L.A. Dance Project will look to corporate sponsors and private donors. (The ones observing in the rehearsal hall are tied to the Music Center here.) The company is planning work that will span at least three seasons.

“We want to start small and keep as much artistic flexibility as possible,” Mr. Millepied said. “Over time, we will build the company and hire more dancers.”

The split between pure dance and multigenre performance will vary depending on what ideas come to fruition and when. “Right now we’re working on a contemporary opera project to be performed at a spectacular site in L.A.,” Mr. Fabius said.

Mr. Millepied (pronounced MEEL-pee-yeh, and, yes, it roughly translates as “thousand footed” in French) wanted to challenge his Los Angeles audience from the start and he certainly achieved his goal. “Winterbranch,” originally from 1964, features abrasive music by La Monte Young — the sound of ashtrays scraped against a mirror; pieces of wood rubbed against a Chinese gong — and is partly performed in the dark. At the first performance last month at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a few patrons covered their ears and some walked out; Los Angeles Weekly reported “some booing, polite clapping and nervous eye-rolling.”

Still, the first performance was almost sold out and won some high praise from cultural tastemakers.

Lewis Segal, a dance critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote in his review that L.A. Dance Project was “a unique cultural resource with an inaugural performance dominated by the kind of daring, world-class contemporary revivals that our homegrown companies lack the will or budget to attempt.” (Mr. Segal did have a few barbs for Mr. Millepied personally, however, complaining about the “very, very ordinary choreography” in his commissioned piece, “Moving Parts.”)

Jeffrey Deitch, the New York gallerist turned controversial director of the Museum of Contemporary Art here, was sitting in the front row. “To look up and see a full house for vanguard dance is extraordinary for any city,” he said. “In addition to being one of the great dancers and choreographers, he is a great impresario.”

Renae Williams Niles, director of programming for the Music Center, said she was impressed at what Mr. Millepied had pulled off before the program even began. “I was hugely surprised that Bill gave the work,” referring to Mr. Forsythe, who will personally work with the dancers in Montclair in the coming days.)

Some star choreographers are perhaps taken more seriously by critics, but Mr. Millepied has become one of the rare danseurs to cross over to pop culture. A protégé of Jerome Robbins, he spent 16 years at New York City Ballet, the last nine as a principal dancer, and is a prolific dancemaker.

Ad campaigns for Club Monaco, the Gap, Yves Saint Laurent and Uniqlo attest to his fame. He met Ms. Portman, with whom he has a son, while choreographing and acting in the Oscar-nominated “Black Swan.” TV fans know him from “So You Think You Can Dance.” Recently he handled musical staging duties for La Jolla Playhouse’s premiere of “Hands on a Hard Body,” although he will not be involved with that show’s coming Broadway run.

Despite his celebrity — or perhaps because of it — the dance world is full of catty chatter about his relocation west. “All of this, ‘Oh, he went to L.A. because there is too much competition in New York is absolute nonsense,” Mr. Fabius said.

The Los Angeles dance establishment has also been a little chilly. Mr. Segal, the newspaper critic, has referred to Mr. Millepied as a “carpetbagger.” Others worry that Mr. Millepied, with his big spotlight, will siphon off sponsorship money.

Asked to what degree Mr. Millepied’s arrival makes it more difficult for local companies to raise money, Thordal Christensen, co-artistic director for the Los Angeles Ballet, said: “I think there’s space for everybody. It doesn’t make it any easier, but I’m not the new kid on the block anymore, either.”

Another criticism is that L.A. Dance Project does not seem to have a whole lot of Los Angeles in its DNA. His dancers moved here after being hired, but all were formerly based on the East Coast. The contemporary ballet that Mr. Millepied created for the Disney Concert Hall involves giant paintings by the New York artist Christopher Wool. (The art, mounted on rollers, is moved around the floor by the dancers as they perform.)

Mr. Millepied acknowledges a New York current running through his first program, but said “there shouldn’t be suspicion about my commitment to Los Angeles.” He added: “There should be support. It’s very difficult to do this.”

Mr. Millepied said detractors were also overlooking other work he has done since arriving in Los Angeles. In July and August he performed a 30-minute duet with one of his dancers, Amanda Wells, inside the Museum of Contemporary Art to a narrated soundtrack by the California artist Mark Bradford. Called “Framework,” the performance took place throughout various galleries.

Mr. Millepied has also spent time working with middle school students here and made a video in downtown Los Angeles featuring the jookin’ dancer Lil Buck. Other recent collaborators include Rodarte and Alex Israel, a contemporary California painter and video artist.

“Los Angeles is endlessly interesting to me for a lot of reasons,” Mr. Millepied said. “It’s a cliché, but I love the light. I find the architecture impossibly rich.” Even the minimalls are fascinating, he added with a grin.

Confidence is part of what sets Mr. Millepied apart in this city, which at its core is a deeply insecure place. (It’s a reason that Hollywood people hug each other so much: You still like me, right? Right?) Mr. Millepied, with all of his Frenchness, can come across as suspicious and reserved.

Still, when he turns on the charm, it’s blinding. In that rehearsal hall last month, the assembled donors, looking more Lord & Taylor than Saks Fifth Avenue, were clearly not a New York bunch. But he quickly had them in his corner.

One woman wanted to know how often Mr. Millepied would perform with L.A. Dance Project. “I’ve had neck issues,” he said, but he definitely plans to perform at some point. Perhaps picking up a whiff of disappointment, he added, “But I can still do this.” He abruptly executed a dizzying pirouette.

Coos and clapping.

[saiholmes]

Originally Posted by CURBED LOS ANGELES

Any Way You Slice It, Los Angeles is the Music Capital of the US
Monday, November 19, 2012, by Adrian Glick Kudler

Read More: http://la.curbed.com/archives/2012/1..._of_the_us.php

[SelectYourLifestyle]

Suprised how big the creative industry is in LA

[milquetoast]

Why surprised? It's

[soup or man]

Originally Posted by SelectYourLifestyle

Suprised how big the creative industry is in LA

I'm also surprised at how hot it is in the desert.

[saiholmes]

Originally Posted by Los Angeles Times

V Squared Labs visualizes dance music
The Los Angeles company's digitally savvy lighting and images for EDM performers and events like Electric Daisy and Coachella help define the artists and enrich the music's story.
By August Brown, Los Angeles Times
12:00 PM PST, December 29, 2012

When Brazilian electronic musician Amon Tobin took the stage at the Greek Theatre for his headlining set in October, fans couldn't see much of him. That's because he was concealed behind panes of opaque, electrically charged specialty glass, part of an enormous Cubist lighting contraption that filled the stage.

From a booth in the crowd, technicians projection-mapped images onto the milky blocks, turning the stage into a color montage cued to the music, punctuated with images of space travel (fitting, as Tobin was wearing a full-body astronaut suit).

The project, ISAM 2.0, is part of Tobin's ongoing experiment in disappearing into a live setup and using visuals to enrich the music's story rather than just performing songs.

He's not alone in that vision for how electronic music can command a stage.

L.A. company V Squared Labs collaborated with Tobin on the show, designing the physical and digital architecture of the visuals and integrating it with his live mixing. Beyond Tobin, the company just retrofitted the new EDM-heavy Hollywood club Sound and has done similar setups for electronica acts and events such as Skrillex, the Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Hard events and the dance-heavy Sahara Tent at the annual Coachella festival in Indio. In essence, V Squared — a small outfit with a staff of nine — is creating the future of live shows in an era where music is made and played on software.

"He didn't want to be standing in the front of the stage," V Squared founder and designer Vello Virkhaus said of Tobin and his set. "He wanted to be a part of it. He became the stage."

Virkhaus founded the firm in 2000, just after electronic acts such as the Prodigy and Moby began to make inroads in American pop culture. At that time, major rock bands such as U2 had long enjoyed elaborate lighting and pyrotechnics for their sets. But in America at least, DJ culture was mostly confined to indoor nightclubs or festival stages where a projection screen and some lasers would set the mood for an artist. The focus was generally on watching your dance partner — not the stage.

That began to change in the mid- to late 2000s, when dance sounds began colonizing radio and DJ-centric festivals such as Electric Daisy and Hard, along with Coachella, drawing tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands of fans. Daft Punk's lauded 2006 performance at Coachella, which featured a monolithic light pyramid, raised the stakes for live electronica visuals seemingly overnight. Now, even DJs had to plan for stage setups like an arena-rock band.

Today, other companies such as StarLight Visual and SJ Lighting are also designing sets to make EDM shows more lively. "Competition is a way to evolve," Virkhaus said. "EDM expanding into more immersive territory was necessary. It's becoming more like Cirque du Soleil than a rock show today."

At the same time, the software used to make electronic music and visuals began converging toward a price point and technical capability that gave electronica artists greater access and possibilities. Virkhaus, a lifelong dance music fan, was one of the first to capitalize on the possibilities of what a digitally savvy stage designer could do in an EDM setting. With the musical "performance" generally confined to an artist manipulating software, almost anything could be happening around them.

ISAM "is a deliberate statement about my role as a music producer as opposed to a performer onstage," Tobin said. "There's often a wide gap between making something aesthetically consistent with what you actually do and playing the role of a rock star. I'm happy to play that role, but the challenge with this show was to build a compelling live format for music that has really nothing to do with performance."

Although V Squared Labs has built more traditional setups for rock acts such as Red Hot Chili Peppers and Coldplay and the "American Idol" sets, the dance space is where the company shines. It often creates projects, such as Tobin's, by designing a "virtual object" in software and crafting visuals around it. Then the company builds a scaled live installation to match it and projects the results (cued to certain musical patterns) in ways that make it look as if the stage is alive.

The results vary as widely as the artists V Squared Labs works with. Its Electric Daisy and Coachella installations are seas of lights interacting with artists' mixes. The challenge at such festivals is in visually entertaining tens of thousands of fans while also giving an identity to a rotating cast of artists.

"If you're at EDC without a video screen, the average punter couldn't tell the difference between half the artists up there," Virkhaus said. "The lights, the video and the sound are an inseparable part of the enjoyment. But I think the overall essence can eclipse that of a guitarist doing a solo."

As dance music and EDM festivals increasingly become a permanent part of American musical life, their integration with high-end visuals is opening entirely new avenues for artists to express a vision — and for venues to create immersive spaces for that vision. You're not watching a performer, you're watching a visual embodiment of the music — and that might be one way to make sure an artist in a fast-moving scene doesn't disappear so quickly.

"I think the real achievement of the show was that it successfully presented music that is quite specialized and unusual to a wide range of people," Tobin said. "We found a way to sell out venues all over the world without selling out what's at the heart of the performance."

Read More: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,7197205.story

[pesto]

http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/stanley-kubrick

LACMA is packing a triple punch right now. Two new Japanese painted screens, which the director calls the best to ever leave Japan. All set to be "must see" attractions for LA visitors.

There's also the largest collectin of Caravaggio's ever in one place, although only 2 real masterpieces. The story of his influence on the Spanish (Velazquez, Murillo, etc.) and the French is interesting for art history buffs.

The biggest is the Kubrick exhibit, which features the pictorial aspects of his works but covers other themes as well. It is well worth seeing how Kubrick's background as a photographer evolved into a cinematography that heavily influenced everyone from Spielberg and Scorsese to del Toro, Von Trier and the rest of the new directors that emphasize the cinematographic side of film making (film as light and dark, colors and framing; with time, character and plot ultimately at the service of visual style).

[saiholmes]

[AnaSEP]

I'm tired of talking, I wanna post pictures. I'll let you do the talkin'

[saiholmes]