Los Angeles & Southern California - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [75]
A busy events schedule features celebrities, Hollywood moguls and fine thinkers in panel discussions, lectures, readings and performances. Big crowds also turn out for the free outdoor world music summer concert series. Zeidler’s Café (mains $6 to $10) serves tasty, kosher California fare.
Culver City
If you haven’t been to Culver City lately (if ever), go! You won’t recognize this once bleak, boring and run-down neighborhood that you could safely ignore as a local and definitely skip as a tourist. It’s no-man’s-land no more. Seemingly overnight Culver City has become a stylish yet unpretentious destination for fans of art, culture and food. Sony Pictures execs talk deals over Hefeweizen at Ford’s Filling Station, coiffed couples nibble a quick salad at Tender Greens before hurrying to a show at the Kirk Douglas Theatre and hipsters check out the latest homewares at HD Buttercup. Even the venerable Culver Hotel, where the Munchkins once slept, has been spruced up. It’s been a miraculously speedy metamorphosis and, best of all, it’s happened organically, not imagineered by some hot-shot developer or urban planning board. And the momentum will likely keep growing once the Expo light-rail line to Downtown LA starts running in 2010.
The buzz isn’t limited to the downtown area where Washington and Culver Blvds meet. Continue east on Washington and you’ll hit upon the fabulous Helms Bakery Complex (www.helmsfurniture.com; cnr Washington Blvd & Helms Ave), a giant former bakery turned furniture and design district. One of LA’s best jazz venues, the Jazz Bakery has also found a home here, as have fabulous restaurants such as Beacon.
The Helms complex also marks the beginning of Culver City’s vital new arts district, which runs east along Washington to La Cienega and up one block to Venice Blvd. In 2003 art-world movers and shakers Blum & Poe relocated their gallery here from Santa Monica, drawn by cheap rents and airy, malleable spaces in old warehouses. Since then, more than three dozen galleries have piggybacked on their success, turning Culver City into LA’s latest hub for contemporary and conceptual art. Also here is the Museum of Design Art and Architecture (Map; 310-558-0902; www.moodagallery.com; 8609 Washington Blvd; admission free; noon-6pm Mon-Fri), a starkly postmodern cube that also contains live-work lofts and an architecture firm. Architecture fans also gravitate to the Hayden Tract (Map; 3500 block of Hayden Ave), where Eric Owen Moss has turned a worn-out industrial compound into eyepoppingly deconstructivist office buildings.
Last but not least, Culver City has the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT; Map; 310-836-6131; www.mjt.org; 9341 Venice Blvd; adult/student & senior/child under 12 $5/3/free; 2-8pm Thu, noon-6pm Fri-Sun), LA’s most intriguing exhibition space. Nope, it has nothing to do with dinosaurs and even less with technology. Instead, you’ll find madness nibbling at your mind as you try to read meaning into displays about Cameroonian stink ants, a tribute to trailer parks and a sculpture of the Pope squished into the eye of a needle. It may all be a mind-bending spoof, an elaborate hoax or a complete exercise in ironic near-hysteria by founder David Wilson. Maybe. But one thing’s certain: the MJT will challenge the way you look at museums. For an entertaining read about the place, pick up Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by ex–New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler.
Exposition