The bulldozers are set to move in shortly and tear down the entire structure that once housed the Culver Plaza Theater complex on Washington Boulevard and Hughes Avenue.
As Culver City residents bid farewell to the landmark theater and its array of surrounding restaurants including Choppe Choppe, Mezza Grill and Mrs Garcia’s to make way for NMS Properties mixed-use development, the city will also lose the vibrant, colorful artwork that stood proudly above the buildings.
Ed Massey’s ‘Syncopation’ mural, however, will be spared the bulldozers. Instead, the painting - which stands at 241 feet long and 35 feet high - will be removed in sections to Del Rey’s Westside Neighborhood School and installed piecemeal on the campus over the next few weeks.
Massey created the bright, bold shapes specifically for the Culver Theater Plaza complex in 2004, using mops as giant paint brushes on all-weather material, according to a press release. The completed painting was then installed onto the building's curved exterior walls in 11 separate sections.
Massey said he was pleased with the choice of the mural’s new home.
“I hope that once the painting is installed at its new location that it will invigorate viewers and encourage a spirit in young and older students, campus visitors and passersby to think and act boldly, innovatively and creatively in everything they do,” he said.
The annual Cultural Affairs Commission Town Hall is a chance for all the arts groups in the city to come and discuss the work they have done throughout the year and their plans moving forward.
Among those in attendance was actor Tim Robbins, who is also the artistic director of the Culver City-base theatre company The Actors’ Gang. He was welcomed as a special guest and given the opportunity to speak first.
“I’m delighted to be here,” Robbins said. “The most significant change in our organization has to do with our relationship with Culver City and its willingness to provide opportunities to expand our educational outreach.”
Robbins said the theatre has taken the energy, commitment and vision of Culver City and “we feel like you guys have provided us with a wonderful opportunity.”
The Actors’ Gang is the recipient of a 2012 grant from the commission and Robbins spoke about the company’s plans to expand its educational outreach in the coming year by providing after school theatrical training for students. He also touched on the company’s current programs including a teenage poetry program called Get Lit that teaches classical poetry to inner city youth; the company’s outreach programs in the prison system; and upcoming shows including a mid-February production of George Orwell’s 1984.
“We’re here to serve this community, we’re excited to serve this community,” Robbins said.
Briefly addressing the problems that the city will now face with the abolition of the Redevelopment Agency (which funded many Culver City arts projects), Robbins said, “[The Actors’ Gang] had a meeting two and a half years ago when the economy started to sour and we talked about how to get through this. We realize there are budget cuts in California but we believe the only way to survive a crisis is to expand and grow. I’m here to say that what you have done in the past 10 years here has reinvigorated the community, and that’s a rare thing. Thank you for including us in that vision.”
Robbins did stay for a part of the meeting but apologized in advance for his early departure, stating that he had to get to 1984 rehearsals.
Be sure to like Culver City Patch on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
The memory that sticks with me, in fact, is that I was temporarily dumbstruck by the sheer feel of the device. I was testing it while sitting with a couple of Apple executives as well as an Apple PR handler. The idea was that I could try out the device while also asking them questions. As I used the iPhone, I found it very difficult to speak questions or even listen to the answers. The iPhone was so unlike anything I’d ever handled.
The iPhone: Five years later… | Macworld.
I had to link to my pal Jason Snell’s reminiscence about his first hands-on experience with the iPhone. It was so very familiar. I probably had my own briefing on the same day. I was a room with a VP, a senior executive, and a PR person. I had about a half an hour or maybe 45 minutes, tops, to ask as many questions as I could about a device that I knew nothing about until that morning. So what was the first thing I said after they handed me the iPhone?
Well, I said “Go help yourself to a cookie,” nodding towards the catering table. “I wanna play with this for a while.”
Yes. I don’t regret it, either. I had been blown away by Steve Jobs’ demo. I didn’t want to be led or coached. I wanted to see if I could make it do absolutely everything I wanted it to just by poking around with it.
It lived up to every expectation. Nothing — nothing — about the iPhone or the way it worked was in any way similar to anything else I’d ever used. Every tap and swipe and pinch and zoom was accompanied by the exhilaration of discovery and of new experiences. And the only time I couldn’t get something to work was when I launched the Notes app. None of its buttons responded. I finally asked for help…and was told that what I had been trying to use was just an image file taking the place of an app that wasn’t on the device yet.
I’ll never, ever get bored with my job. Every now and again, a device like the iPhone comes along. Great, groundbreaking technology provokes a physiological response: a tingling at the base of my neck. When a thing sets off my Spidey-Sense like that it means This is effing brilliant. I’ve never seen anything like it, but I’m certain that this marks a real moment of history.
Devices like the iPhone come along rarely. In between, I look at hundreds of phones and laptops and social networks and generic apps and gadgets which are each about 80% interchangeable with anything else in their product category. I have to check all of these things out. It’s part of the job. I keep right on looking and it’s for the same reason why movie critics keep coming to the screening room day after day even they know damned well that the first film of the day is going to be the second sequel to a movie based on an 80′s TV show: we love what we do and when we find something special, we feel like that love’s being returned.
Oh, and Jason was 100% right on another point. Man, oh, man…as someone who had actually had substantial hands-on time with a working iPhone, there were a few months in 2007 when paying for your own meals and drinks was purely optional. Everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to ask questions and hear more.
It was just like that scene from “Bull Durham,” only more so.
“Yeah, I used an iPhone once. It was the best 37 minutes of my life…”
At approximately 6:40 pm this evening, a “twenty something male black” fired an unknown amount of shots in the Whole Foods parking lot near the Thoma’s Burger exit.
The suspect took off running across Rose but was apprehended “within minutes” near 7th and Sunset. As of 8:15 pm the LAPD is still looking for the gun using a K-9 unit in the area between Rose to Sunset and Lincoln to 7th.
An LAPD officer said that there was “no known victim” and that they were not sure the shooter was actually shooting at someone else. Freshly broken glass at the scene indicated that the shot may have been fired at a car, but LAPD said they could not confirm that.
As always, the crime is under investigation so the LAPD is tight with details.
Having learned all there is to know about the "water world," Heal the Bay's Mark Gold, who has worked for the water quality watchdog for more than two decades, announced on Tuesday he will step down from his current role as president of the organization.
Gold will remain on the nonprofit's Board of Directors as he enters into a new fulltime post as the associate director of UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. He will begin the new job Jan. 30.
"I've just been in the water world my entire life, obviously there's a lot more to environmental law and policy than that," Gold said. "I needed a new set of challenges, and that's what's exciting to me about UCLA."
Gold has worked part-time at UCLA as an adjunct professor for a number of years. He has earned all of his degrees there, from his bachelor's to his doctorate in environmental science and engineering.
The Heal the Bay Board of Directors was expected to meet soon to finalize the new management structure of the organization. Longtime Executive Director Karin Hall and Associate Director Alix Hobbs, who have been with Heal the Bay for more than 10 years, will provide day-to-day management and organizational supervision, spokesman Matthew King told Patch.
"So for Heal the Bay, it really is business as usual," King wrote in an email.
He further wrote that because Gold will remain on the nonprofit's board, "we can continue to tap into his expertise."
Gold came to Heal the Bay as a staff scientist in 1988. He became the executive director in 1994 and was named president in 2006.
His proudest accomplishments, he said, were too many to name. "I almost feel like giving you a David Letterman answer," he said in phone interview.
The achievements include creating beach report cards that analyze water quality at more than 500 beaches along the West Coast, grading them from A to F. Gold said local beaches are cleaner now, especially during the summer months. "Dead zones"—areas devoid of marine life—have been restored.
"It's been an incredible, rewarding experience," he said. "It's hard to leave."
Correction/Clarification: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated when Heal the Bay's Board of Directors would meet to discuss the organization's new management structure.
The giant cowboy hat-shaped sign at 1340 Lincoln Blvd. will live even though the "delicious" roast beef sandwiches it's advertising will not.
The Arby's will be shuttered and turned into a Wendy's while the sign is relocated to its new home at the American Sign Museum in Ohio.
The only step left before Santa Monica bids farewell to the retro sign is for the property owners to secure final permits from the city for the restaurant changeover.
According to Mike Dampf, the regional construction engineer for Wendy's, the company is in the process of drawing up the documents needed to apply for those permits.
Wendy's agreed to donate the sign, first to a museum of neon in Glendale, but it turned down the sign because of the sign's size—20 feet wide by 35 feet high, according to Ken Kutcher, attorney for the property owners John and David Bohn.
As first reported by the Santa Monica Daily Press, the sign was then offered to the sign museum in Cincinnati. Museum co-owner Tod Swormstedt said that he was excited to get the sign, but that he was not sure when it would come to the museum. Wendy's has agreed to pay for dismantling and moving the sign, in addition to donating it.
Neither Dampf nor Kutcher could offer any specifics on when the sign would actually be relocated beyond that it wouldn't happen until the restaurant changeover actually begins, and that depends on when the project finally winds it way through the rest of the city planning approval process.
Far from being a tussle, the story of what to do with the neon sign for the sandwich fast food restaurant is one of cooperation between several entities, including the city's Landmarks Commission, Wendy's and Arby's corporate offices, the property owners and the sign museum.
"We wanted to see if there was a solution that was not provocative, that was cooperative," said Kutcher.
The story starts when the Wendy's Company bought a significant interest in the Arby's Restaurant Group last July, and then decided it wanted to change the Arby's restaurant on Lincoln Boulevard to a Wendy's.
Under normal circumstances, such a change would not have drawn much interest, except that the sign for the restaurant had been designated a "meritorious" sign, which means that it does not have to conform to current city rules for signage.
Still, the city's Architectural Review Board recommended th...
