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insane 1959 folkways street gang kids do improv raps NM - Urban field recordings of the Junior Mint gang. Freestyling, rhyming and letting it all out over kiddie bongo drills. Listen to clips of Gang Fight and I Want Some Food.
The first pair of customers came 26 minutes early, and their arrival Monday morning drew smiles of relief from the staff at Encounter, the iconic LAX restaurant that had been closed for repairs for eight months.
"Before we could open up our doors, we were getting customers," said operations manager Kenneth Merritt. "It's good to be back in business."
That was the sentiment of Steven O'Bryant of Azusa and his 16-year-old son Kyle, the first two in the door. O'Bryant had planned to drive to San Diego for the day, but when he heard an early morning radio report that the intergalactic-styled restaurant would reopen for lunch at 11 a.m., he and Kyle headed for Los Angeles International Airport. O'Bryant, 47, had last eaten there when he was 10.
"I didn't recognize it until I came in here," he said, pointing out the blobby, multicolored decor that might have been inspired by a lava lamp. "These might even be the same tables."
Encounter is housed in the Theme Building, which was completed in 1961 and designated a historic-cultural monument by the Los Angeles City Council and the Cultural Heritage Commission in 1992. The restaurant is operated by Delaware North Cos. Travel Hospitality Services. The observation deck has been closed since 9/11 for security reasons, but is expected to reopen once the exterior renovation is complete, said Nancy Castles, a spokeswoman for the airport agency.
Featured in many movies and tourist snapshots, the kitschy landmark was closed in March after a 1,000-pound piece of stucco fell from one of its spider-like arches. No one was injured, but inspectors assessed the damage, and officials decided it was safer to close the building while crews retrofitted the structure.
In 2002, when the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York began to plan for a new building on the Bowery, east of its previous location, in SoHo, it decided to limit the search to younger architects who had not built anything in New York. “We thought we should be consistent with our mission of supporting new art,” Lisa Phillips, the director, told me. The search led the museum to SANAA, a twelve-year-old firm in Tokyo, whose principals, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, are known for buildings of almost diaphanous lightness. When the museum hired them, Sejima and Nishizawa had just one American commission, the Glass Pavilion, at the Toledo Museum of Art, an eye-catching structure of curving glass walls, which opened last year. Their best-known work includes a low-slung circular art gallery with no clear front or back, in Kanazawa, Japan, and a design school in Essen, Germany, that is a concrete cube a hundred feet high, punctuated, seemingly at random, with windows of assorted sizes.
SANAA’s refined style might seem odd on the Bowery, one of the grittiest streets in New York. The site, a former parking lot at the intersection with Prince Street, was framed by blocks of restaurant-supply stores, whose owners seemed to be the only property holders on the Lower East Side who showed no interest in selling out to condominium developers. But after two decades in SoHo the New Museum had seen both the upside and the downside of gentrification. Marcia Tucker established the museum in 1977—the day after she was fired from the Whitney for curating shows that it found too controversial—in order to focus on cutting-edge art. Yet as the museum grew larger it drifted from its radical beginnings, just as the Museum of Modern Art had done two generations before. The decision to move to the Bowery was perhaps a clever way of assuring its supporters that its agenda remains radical.
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Indeed, there are only two major differences in Bloomberg’s and Thor’s plans for the amusement district. First, Bloomberg wouldn’t permit hotel construction in the heart of the district or along the Boardwalk. And second, the city wants to rezone the amusement district as public parkland.
To do so, Bloomberg will still need to buy out Sitt — who paid more than $100 million for his land — and some smaller-time landowners, rezone the land, and then hand-pick a new developer.
Horace Bullard, a developer who owns land in the amusement district and who once harbored similarly grand visions for the area, said he didn’t think the administration would run into much opposition from local property owners.
“No one in his right mind will be fighting the city on this issue if he’s justly compensated for it,” said Bullard, one of the landowners who would, indeed, need to be compensated.
But not everyone shares Bullard’s rosy optimism.
Dennis Vourderis, whose family has operated the Wonder Wheel for 87 years and owned the Wheel, its popular kiddie park and the land under it for 24 years, doesn’t particularly want to cede his land.
“We hope that the city doesn’t force us to lose our land at an unfair price and against our wishes,” said Vourderis, frustrated that the city prefers an integrated theme park to a hodgepodge of honky-tonk, family-owned businesses.
FILMS BY TONY CONRAD THE FLICKER 1966, 30 minutes, 16mm. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. Mathematical and rhythmical orchestration of white and black frames. STRAIGHT AND NARROW 1970, 10 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. STRAIGHT AND NARROW is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black-and-white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. FILM FEEDBACK 1974, 15 minutes, 16mm, b&w, sound. Preserved by Anthology Film Archives with funding provided by The National Film Preservation Foundation. “Made with a film-feedback team which I directed at Antioch College. Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen by the team. What are the qualities of film that may be made visible through feedback?” –T.C. Total running time: ca. 60 minutes.
Upcoming Showings: Sunday Nov 18 6:00 PM
The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City
Which is more important to New York City's economy, the gleaming corporate office--or the grungy rock club that launches the best new bands? If you said "office," think again. In The Warhol Economy, Elizabeth Currid argues that creative industries like fashion, art, and music drive the economy of New York as much as--if not more than--finance, real estate, and law. And these creative industries are fueled by the social life that whirls around the clubs, galleries, music venues, and fashion shows where creative people meet, network, exchange ideas, pass judgments, and set the trends that shape popular culture.
The implications of Currid's argument are far-reaching, and not just for New York. Urban policymakers, she suggests, have not only seriously underestimated the importance of the cultural economy, but they have failed to recognize that it depends on a vibrant creative social scene. They haven't understood, in other words, the social, cultural, and economic mix that Currid calls the Warhol economy.