Art Future

Art Crawl is an event where artists, radicals, hipsters, and anyone else can mozy through 20 open-door galleries in the Silver Lake neighborhood just northwest of downtown. It was a comfortable, Madisonesque scene with lots of cyclists, free Tecate beer, and outdoor garage bands in the various exhibits. The neighborhood claims to be home to the future of art in L.A., and I would have no way of rebutting that claim. The event was the first time I have done anything in the city with other people up to this point, and it was nice to have companions to talk and joke with. Pictured above are USC Geography Ph.D student Dan Warsowsky and L.A. Times staff writer Alana Semuels. We met at La Luz de Jesus gallery, then walked to 4 or 5 others, including my favorite called Thinkspace. Besides my second favorite art, La Luz de Jesus had an incredibly interactive bookstore, that is books made for browsing. The topic of their most catching book for sale was "your worst fears," but instead of words it was a 3D pop-out format. Open the book to a dentist moving a drill toward you, or a gang of spiders sneaking on a web, or you at school with no clothes on. On our way back from the art we ran across Love Craft, my potential future car dealership who specializes in refurbishing "Reagan years" diesel Mercedes so that they run on biofuels like vegetable oil and/or biodiesel.

The strong suit of Dan's department at USC is urban geography, and specifically Los Angeles. Perhpas not surprisingly it is one of the leaders in the development of the L.A. School of urban geography, which is essentially grounded in the idea that the future design, development, and evolution of large cities around the world affected by global capitalism (all of them) will come out something more similar to L.A. than to something like New York. The city center core is dead, say they, and the annihilation of space is more relevant than place and distance. This is of course hotly debated among geographers, and there are several examples of cities around the globe that both reinforce and contradict this central idea. With all the rock star L.A. urban geographers at USC, their historically and socially informed visual virtual tour of Los Angeles is worth checking out.