California's diverse vernacular and designed landscapes have roots in the late 1700s Spanish colonization of what was then called Alta California. The state also has a unique endemic flora and rich botanical history from both the Indigenous people's "protoagriculture" and plant introductions that continue to this day. For many people, however, the concept of landscape is associated with gardens, especially estate gardens. Yet landscape design reaches far beyond the elite circles of private estates; California Eden: Heritage Landscapes of the Golden State showcases a wide range of landscapes from the professional to the vernacular through exceptional essays by distinguished landscape historians. Entries highlight famous and beloved estate gardens but also more frequently overlooked landscapes such as shopping malls, streetscapes, sports venues, and vernacular sites. From a military installation on the California-Mexico border to the campus of Stanford University and the Japanese American gardens of San Diego, the essays speak to design as well as the challenges of historic preservation of these-often ephemeral places. As elegant as it is informative, California Eden is an essential book for anyone who is passionate about plants.
KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell tells the story of filmmaker, educator and community activist Ben Caldwell and KAOS Network, the media-arts center he founded in Los Angeles's Leimert Park neighborhood. Through vivid illustrations, archival media, and engaging storytelling, KAOS Theory shows how Ben crafted a life centered around the power of fellowship, community, and the use of art and media as a social force. The text takes a journey through history and time, beginning with Ben's ancestors in the American southwest, up through Ben's childhood in New Mexico, his experiences in Vietnam, his work as a filmmaker and pioneer of the L.A. Rebellion Film Movement, and as founder of KAOS Network. But KAOS Theory is more than just the story of one man's life. It is a work of art, remembrance, and tribute. Encompassing music, film, art, and performance, KAOS Theory honors the vibrant and influential communities that continue to shape the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, the African Diaspora, and beyond.
Take in the glitz, glamour, and graphics of vintage Hollywood with Hollywood Signs: Glittering Graphics and Glowing Neon in Mid-Century Tinseltown. The glittering lights of the big city have never been brighter than in this delightful book from author/designer Kathy Kikkert. Featuring signage from Hollywood's hottest bars, nightclubs, restaurants and movie theaters, Hollywood Signs is a glowing love letter to Tinsletown type. And who can forget the sign that started it all, the original and iconic "Hollywood Sign" perched on its hill for all to admire. Perfect for locals and tourists, mid-century mavens and design aficionados, Hollywood Signs is a love-letter to La-La Land in all its illuminated glory.
Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California explores California through twenty-five essays that look beyond the clichés of the "California Dream," portraying a state that is deviant and recalcitrant, proud and humble, joyful and communal. It is a California that reclaims the beauty of the unwanted, the quotidian, and the out-of-place. Constantly in search of "the spirit of a place" Writing the Golden State pries into the themes of familial genealogy, migration, land and housing, and national belonging and identity.?Collectively, the essays demonstrate how individuals and towns have weathered some of the social, political, and economic changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
L.A. Painter: The City I Know / The City I See is a full-color exploration of Karla Klarin's abstract and modern landscapes of Los Angeles, where she was born, raised, and became one of the city's most influential female painters. This first full monograph of her work is accompanied by ten essays that define her hometown--a city of moving parts and people that exist within a geometry of impressive expanse and beauty.
For decades, the Los Angeles lifestyle has been equated with the suburban single-family home with a big backyard, yet L.A. has also been a laboratory for exceptional experiments in multifamily housing, from the courtyard to the rooftop garden, all centered on shared open space. In Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, author Frances Anderton explores that fascinating history, from the bungalow courts and apartment-hotels of the 1910s, to the development of garden apartments, to contemporary mid-rise "urban villages," and experiments in co-living.
Bar Keeps: A Collection of California's Best Cocktail Napkins is a fun and fabulous tour through the cocktail napkins of the golden state. Hundreds of images of vintage cocktail napkins will surprise and delight anyone who is a fan of cocktail culture, roadside diners, hidden dives, tiki bars, and more. Collector Patrick Quinn highlights some of the most unique and interesting napkins he's brought together over years of enthusiastic searching. Bar Keeps: A Collection of California's Best Cocktail Napkins is the perfect book for any coffee table or bar top in town!
After fleeing Nazi Germany, writer and Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann found refuge for himself and his family in the Pacific Palisades, a quiet residential neighborhood in Los Angeles between Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Mann was one of many European intellectuals who fled to Los Angeles, forming a community known as the "Weimar on the Pacific." Thomas Mann's Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940-1952 explores Mann's connections to the city and the network of intellectuals he found there, including writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley and musicians such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Short texts accompanied by maps, a rich selection of historic images, contemporary photographs and vivid anecdotes guide the reader through this fascinating community. Stories from both scholars well-known writers such as the New Yorker's Alex Ross and Lawrence Weschler produce a captivating read for fans of literature, history, and Los Angeles.
RIO-LA: Tales from the Los Angeles River 20th Anniversary Edition traces the history and lore of the Los Angeles River. When the book was first published in 2001, few people even regarded the river, but because of Morrison's devotion to the topic, LA River has been rediscovered. The river has become the center of the county's 2021 MasterPlan to reestablish it as the heart of the city, its lifeline to all things positive: an antidote to homelessness; a source of increased affordable housing; new jobs, good health; serenity. Morrison traces this rediscovery in her extensive new Afterword, following pages of river history, dating back to before the founding of the pueblo called Los Angeles. Together Morrison and Lamonica explore the river and the culture that evolves around this virtual oasis in a land of super highways and celluloid dreams.
In Googie Modern: Architectural Drawings of Armet Davis Newlove, author Michael Murphy takes readers inside the private archives of the forward-thinking trio dubbed the "fathers of Googie." Inspiring not just artists and filmmakers but the public at large, their futuristic coffee shops and restaurants made dining out a space-age experience, just as man was ready to walk on the moon. Armet Davis Newlove's architecture captured the optimistic and forward-thinking mood in post-war America and set the bar for what would become Mid-Century Modern style. The firm's high-concept designs shaped Southern California and then took off across the American landscape, giving the US innovative, practical, and gorgeous monuments of everyday life. Each remarkable rendering demonstrates the passion and precision that went into every Armet Davis Newlove creation. Googie Modern is itself a monument to the excitement and optimism that once lined the streets of mid-century America.
CITIZEN KANE: A Filmmaker's Journey is an updated and expanded softcover of Lebo's 2016 hardcover that traces the creation of Orson's Welles's classic film. This filmland history is itself a sinister tale of conspiracy, blackmail, and Coummunist witch hunts, while detailing the extraordinary rise of Welles, the legend who, at 23 years old, defied the studio system and became a Hollywood icon simply by making the greatest film of all time.
Since 1963, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater has enchanted families in Los Angeles and beyond with their delightful marionette performances. It isn't fall in Los Angeles without a showing of the Hallowe'en Spooktacular, and no Christmas season is complete without a puppet performance of The Nutcracker. Now, for the first time ever, the visual history of the theater has been captured in the pages of a book, from Bob Baker's earliest days to the theater's transformation into a thriving non-profit. The text describes a theater at the height of its powers, hosting performances for school children and collaborating with Disney on live-action films. The images bring some of the Bob Baker's most beloved shows to life, featuring new and vintage photographs of performances, introducing iconic characters like "The Black Cat" and "Bobo the Clown". This book is perfect for a devotee of the performing arts or anyone who is a child at heart!
A Country Called California traces the development of the Golden State from the nineteenth century on, through to its emergence as the fifth largest economy in the world--all as seen through the eyes of photographers whose names are synonymous with fine art photography: Carleton E. Watkins, Dorothea Lange, Eadward Muybridge, Will Connell, Edward Weston, Max Yavno, A.C. Vroman, Mabel Watson, and many more. Author Stephen White, a longtime photography gallerist and collector, has curated the book to perfection, capturing the California that is its own country, the light that has captivated every photographer's eye.
Kathy Fiscus tells the story of the first live, breaking-news TV spectacle in American history. At dusk on a spring evening in 1949, a three-year old girl fell down an abandoned well shaft in the backyard of her family's home in Southern California. Across more than two full days of a fevered rescue attempt, the fate of Kathy Fiscus remained unknown. Thousands of concerned Southern Californians rushed to the scene. Jockeys hurried over from the nearby racetracks, offering to be sent down the well after Kathy. 20th Century Fox sent over the studio's klieg lights to illuminate the scene. Rescue workers-ditch diggers, miners, cesspool laborers, World War II veterans-dug and bored holes deep into the aquifer below, hoping to tunnel across to the old well shaft that the little girl had somehow tumbled down. The region, the nation, and the world watched and listened to every moment of the rescue attempt by way of radio, newsreel footage, and wire service reporting. They also watched live television. Because of the well's proximity to the radio towers on nearby Mount Wilson, the rescue attempt because the first breaking-news event to be broadcast live on television. The Kathy Fiscus event invented reality television and proved that real-time television news broadcasting could work and could transfix the public.
As compelling as the story of the destruction of Bunker Hill is""with all the good intentions and bad results endemic to city politics""it was its people who made the Hill at once desirable and undesirable. Marsak commemorates the poets and writers, artists and activists, little guys and big guys, and of course, the many architects who built and rebuilt the community on the Hill""time after historic time. Any fan of American architecture will treasure Marsak's analysis of buildings that have crowned the Hill: the exuberance of Victorian shingle and spindlework, from Mission to Modern, from Queen Anne to Frank Gehry, Bunker Hill has been home to it all, the ever-changing built environment. With more than 250 photographs""many in color""as well as maps and vintage ephemera to tell his dramatic visual story, Marsak lures us into BUNKER HILL Los Angeles and shares its lost world, then guides us to its new one.
Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. Waldie's particular concern is commonplace Los Angeles, whose rhythms of daily life are set against the gaudy backdrop of historical myth and Hollywood illusion. It's through sacred ordinariness that Waldie experiences the city's seasons. In his exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He measures the place of nature in the city and the different ways that nature has been defined. He maps on the contours of Los Angeles what embracing--or rejecting--an Angeleno identity has come to mean.
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