In the Architect’s Newspaper – the bicoastal publication and blog – California Editor Sam Lubell has profiled a sustainable redevelopment of a charter school in Los Angeles. The Watt’s Learning Center serves about 240 elementary students in the heart of Watts. Its design, by Cuningham Group Architecture (CGA), offers low-tech, high-achieving green components: north-south orientation, a white roof to minimize heat gain, operable windows for cross-ventilation, low-emitting materials, and a solar water-heating system. Perhaps just as importantly, the school serves as “beacon of hope” for the surrounding community by elevating scholastic values and offering a place for early-morning to late-afternoon learning. The school’s literal “beacon” is a two-story elevator tower with large LED lights “that can be programmed to project any color. For instance, said Cuningham Group principal John Quiter, if the Lakers win, they can turn on the team’s purple and gold, or they can project a rainbow…. The tower has been planted with ivy for a touch of more traditional academic gravitas.”
In a Huffington Post op-ed today, California’s former Governor, present Attorney General, and possibly future Governor again, rails against Wall Street crimes. And against the laissez-faire philosophy that he says prods it. Regulators and federal officials “were lulled to sleep by a pervasive ideology that private vice on Wall Street would always be transmogrified into public virtue. America is paying the price for this noxious doctrine in unprecedented job losses and an avalanche of foreclosures.” Brown uses as exhibit A Beverly Hills financial adviser Stanley Chais, who allegedly funneled funds to financial crook Bernie Maddoff. The California AG has charged Chais with securities fraud, unfair business practices and making misleading statements and seeks at least $25 million in penalties for alleged victims.
The Age of Stupid, the fictionalized documentary, is debuting as the largest multi-screen premiere ever. In it, after much of today’s coastline has sunk under melted polar ice, actor Pete Postlethwait plays “the Archivist,” the condemning voice of the future (2055). New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden is down-the-middle verging on sympathetic. Conservative blogs, such as Human Events, attack it for being “dishonest,” because (among other gripes) “director Franny Armstrong has embarked on a global aviation orgy,” to promote the movie. These kind of gripes, when you consider the serious message of the film, are seriously beside the point. Meanwhile, on their website, the filmmakers are offering anyone a platform to review the film. Well almost anyone. Right at the top, they say: “Any comments from climate deniers/sceptics will be deleted. The debate about whether climate change is partly man-made is over. One of the key reasons we are now so desperately short of time in which to act to avert runaway climate change is that decades were lost to the deniers’ pointless, ill-informed, obfuscating arguments.”
The mega G-20 summit comes to Pittsburgh next week for the first since the world plunged into economic chaos because of the financial meltdown. The Nation reports French President Sarkozy will “walk out of the summit of presidents and prime ministers from the world’s most developed countries if the leaders fail to endorse a plan to curb bonuses for bankers.” Perhaps even more significantly, Sarkozy will attempt to redefine economic progress beyond wealth accumulation (you know, Gross Domestic Product) to include as “the politics of civilization.” These include environmental sustainability, the quality of public services and the amount of time citizens of a country have to meet family responsibilities.
Sarkozy was elected as a conservative, but the global meltdown has brought out a radical streak.
Kenny Scharf has made a career out of perverting cartoon imagery and he’s not going to stop now. Born in Hollywood and first gaining fame in the 1980s Manhattan art scene of Fun gallery and beyond, the pop artist particularly fixates upon warped visions of the Flintstones and Jetsons. Scharf’s new show at Honor Fraser gallery in Los Angeles is no exception. The exhibition is called Barberadise, presumably in reference to cartoon producers Hanna Barbera. The art, according to the gallery, “implies a utopian world that is at once nostalgically comic and vibrantly cosmic. However, even in this utopia everything is still tinged with the subversive undertone of the disarray that was left behind.”
Expect to see Fred and Wilma join 2-D donuts floating in space, happily menacing amoebas, and hyper-colorful jungles.
Artist Sandow Birk is at it again. He has established his career by placing classic art and literature in contemporary – often humorous – settings. Birk’s mock-heroic epic, “In Smog and Thunder” portrays Los Angeles and San Francisco at war, in paintings suggestive of 18th century battle portraits. He also recently re-illustrated the entire Divine Comedy by Dante into contemporary American English. Birk’s latest combination of the archetypal with the typical is American Qur’an: exhaustive, hand-illustrations of The Koran, rendered in graffiti-writing style, set against images of contemporary urban America. An exhibition continues at Culver City’s Koplin del Rio gallery through October 30.
Once upon a time, The Beatles surfed the zeitgeist. For their few years in the sun, they ushered or least feasted upon dozens of culturally defining music trends, from the English invasion to folk rock to psychedelia. They recaptured a bit of that on September 9, 2009, with the release of re-mastered albums: Everyone seems to be talking – or writing – about them. As Los Angeles Times Ann Powers recaps, “A team of top engineers, led by longtime Beatles associate Allan Rouse, labored for four years to return the feel that was lost in the flimsy-sounding 1987 compact disc reissues.” Powers has been leading up to this moment with several blog posts, but in this article notes how The Beatles have been re-interpreted over the years. To take just “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as an example, two inspiring renditions are to be had from soul singer Al Green and T.V. Carpio (from the Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe… particularly moving).
Of course, it all just makes you remember how explosive “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was to begin with. Over at the New York Times, Dave Itzkof gathers many of the reviews of the re-mastered reissues. This includes Pitchfork, the alternative music site, which gives long, historically re-assessing raves to nearly all the re-releases.
In the Architect’s Newspaper – the bicoastal publication and blog – California Editor Sam Lubell has profiled a sustainable redevelopment of a charter school in Los Angeles. The Watt’s Learning Center serves about 240 elementary students in the heart of Watts. Its design, by Cuningham Group Architecture (CGA), offers low-tech, high-achieving green components: north-south orientation, a white roof to minimize heat gain, operable windows for cross-ventilation, low-emitting materials, and a solar water-heating system. Perhaps just as importantly, the school serves as “beacon of hope” for the surrounding community by elevating scholastic values and offering a place for early-morning to late-afternoon learning. The school’s literal “beacon” is a two-story elevator tower with large LED lights “that can be programmed to project any color. For instance, said Cuningham Group principal John Quiter, if the Lakers win, they can turn on the team’s purple and gold, or they can project a rainbow…. The tower has been planted with ivy for a touch of more traditional academic gravitas.”
In a Huffington Post 
The Age of Stupid
The mega G-20 summit comes to Pittsburgh next week for the first since the world plunged into economic chaos because of the financial meltdown. The Nation 
Kenny Scharf has made a career out of perverting cartoon imagery and he’s not going to stop now. Born in Hollywood and first gaining fame in the 1980s Manhattan art scene of Fun gallery and beyond, the pop artist particularly fixates upon warped visions of the Flintstones and Jetsons. Scharf’s new show at 
Artist Sandow Birk is at it again. He has established his career by placing classic art and literature in contemporary – often humorous – settings. Birk’s mock-heroic epic, “In Smog and Thunder” portrays Los Angeles and San Francisco at war, in paintings suggestive of 18th century battle portraits. He also recently re-illustrated the entire Divine Comedy by Dante into contemporary American English. Birk’s latest combination of the archetypal with the typical is American Qur’an: exhaustive, hand-illustrations of The Koran, rendered in graffiti-writing style, set against images of contemporary urban America. An exhibition continues at Culver City’s 
Once upon a time, The Beatles surfed the zeitgeist. For their few years in the sun, they ushered or least feasted upon dozens of culturally defining music trends, from the English invasion to folk rock to psychedelia. They recaptured a bit of that on September 9, 2009, with the release of re-mastered albums: Everyone seems to be talking – or writing – about them. As Los Angeles Times Ann Powers