STRANDED: The Twilight of the Ocean Liner | Photographs by Martin Cox

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.

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The Art of Illusions: Pre-cinematic Entertainment in Mexico

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.

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The Jet Propulsion Lab’s 2012 Open House Is Here

Once again the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) welcomes the public to its annual Open House. This highly anticipated event is your chance to get an inside look at one of the world’s premier research facilities focused on exploration - both of Earth and the universe beyond.

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Exploring the Subway Terminal Building with de LaB

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.

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Ray Bradbury Dies at age 91 in Los Angeles

While news of author Ray Bradbury’s death yesterday at age 91 is already receiving widespread attention by national and international media outlets, I want to add my voice to the many tributes that have been written about a master of the science fiction / fantasy genre. Bradbury was long one of my favorite local writers. I was always very proud that he called Los Angeles home and would have loved to interview him for this site. While that never happened, I did meet him at a LA area event many years ago and recall how excited I was just to shake his hand.

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Made in L.A. – 60 Los Angeles-based Artists Strut Their Stuff

The Los Angeles arts scene is one of the most vibrant in the world. Long known for its embrace of experimentation and innovation, the city’s community of artists is as diverse as its population. To recognize and support this rich talent pool, the Hammer Museum has organized Made in L.A. 2012 in collaboration with LA>

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Lummis Day 7 – The Festival of Northeast Los Angeles

This weekend Northeast LA is celebrating its history and diverse culture with music, dance, and poetry at the 7th Annual Lummis Day Festival. Named after Charles Fletcher Lummis (1859–1928), who was the Los Angeles Times’ first city editor, founder of the Southwest Museum, prolific author and historic preservation activist, among other distinctions, the festival is a tribute to its namesake’s embrace of multicultural inclusiveness, appreciation of history and the arts.

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Cruelly, Madly, Deeply: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

To mark the 30th anniversary of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s (1945 - 1982) untimely death at age 37, the American Cinematheque has put together a 16-film retrospective of the German film director’s work. The program will include such films as Love is Colder Than Death (1969), The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), Lola (1981), and Veronika Voss (1981), among others.

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