Exploring the people, places & culture of greater LA
This weekend Foodprint Project returns to Los Angeles with its much-anticipated event, Foodprint LA. According to Nicola Twilley, co-founder of Foodprint Project, the event will “…explore the forces that have shaped the Angeleno foodscape and speculate on how to feed LA in the future.”
Water has long been the most prized resource in Los Angeles. Indeed, the city’s history and growth is inextricably linked to the development of infrastructure required to import water from the Eastern Sierra and other regions.
While the Los Angeles River was the main water source for El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles when it was founded in 1781, population growth outstripped the river’s ability to meet the city’s increasing thirst. Enter William Mulholland, the first superintendent of the new municipal Water Department. Under his leadership, the city constructed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a five-year project completed in 1913 that brought water from the lush Owens Valley to semi-arid Los Angeles.
This weekend the Los Angeles Maritime Museum opens a new exhibition titled “STRANDED: The Twilight of the Ocean Liner.” The show is comprised of 25 large-scale, black and white, photographs by Martin Cox and documents classic ocean liners nearing or at the end of their service life due to changing economics or technology. Cox, a native of Southampton, England who now lives in Los Angeles, shot all the photographs for this solo-exhibition in the US, Bahamas, India and the Philippines.
Before the advent of cinema as we know it today, audiences around the world experienced other types of entertainment that involved optical magic, such as the diorama, cosmorama, magic lantern, panorama and scientific spectacles. Mexico is one country where these forms of visual culture flourished and then set the stage for later generations of moving image entertainment, including the Kinetoscope and the Cinematograph.
With the recent opening of Metro’s Expo Line, greater Los Angeles’ rail transportation network moved another step closer to linking the dense Westside with communities across the southland and providing a viable alternative to the automobile, at least for certain routes. This milestone is noteworthy in that it represents yet another opportunity for a Metro transit line to remake the city’s built form, as well as its civic and cultural life. It also harks back to a time when the region had the largest electric railway system in the world, comprised of what were commonly called Red Cars.
In May of 2011, I met Lawrence Culver while participating in a tour of the LA River. As we chatted while exploring Marsh Park, located adjacent to the River in the Elysian Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, I learned that he is an Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University and had recently written a book titled The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America, published by Oxford University Press.
During mild, dry winters such as the one we’re experiencing this year, it’s easy to forget that the Los Angeles basin has seen its share of extreme flooding. In fact, intense rainfall, flash floods and their associated debris flows are part of the region’s normal climatic cycle.
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