We spend this week’s show at a one-time musical happening in a motel on Colorado Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound converts a block of rooms into experimental music stages and installation spaces for an afternoon.  Arts editor Jesse Lerner went to the January 29th Welcome Inn Time Machine; a 6 hour sound fest; and condenses it for our half-hour show. (Image: Los Angeles Free Music Society Pyramid Headphones.)

The performance features David Ornette Cherry live and Kamou Daaood, co-founder of Leimert Park’s World Stage. This collection of L.A.-based works in sound performance and installation and riffs on John Cage’s Variations IV, a 1963 six-hour-long performance at UCLA that incorporated actual sound and invited the audience to add to the layers of ambient sound by doing other activities while the performance was in session. You can read the L.A. Times coverage of the performance here: http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/10/entertainment/et-guidefeature10

On this episode of Hear in the City, we take an eclectic tour of Los Angeles-based music. We go to the Nethercutt collection– a private showcase of intricate, hand-crafted music boxes featuring pianos with tiny hammers shaped like bees and one of the largest pipe- organs in the world, we also preview the punk-rock films feature in Los Angeles Filmforum‘s Alternative Projections series, and at the end of the show, we go to Venice Beach with a Mariachi odd-couple Aurelio Reyes, El Gallo de Chiapas and Sally Hawkridge, La Guera, from Boyle Heights as they try to expand their territory.

Our interview on the Nethercutt Collection was reported and recorded by independent producer and audiophile Erin Scott. Her blog is: http://audiochic.blogspot.com/.

Independent curator/filmmaker Jesse Lerner interviewed Adam Hyman of L.A. Film Forum. His website is: www.americangypt.net.

It’s our first show of the new year! We go to the Rose Parade to hear the first Occupy Los Angeles march of the year… and we’ll go up above Hollywood Boulevard to the Barnsdall Art Park for an exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery that deals with the ambivalent relationship between city government and the arts.

On this week’s episode, we hang out with founders and fans of independent film gem, the Echo Park Film Center on the occasion of their 10th anniversary, and we review some lesser known and more campy work of Arthur Felig, AKA Weegee in the Naked Hollywood show at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Plus, a coda from our series on oil extraction in the Baldwin Hills.

Happy holidays to all!

On our last episode, we heard from residents about the history of oil fields and parkland in the Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, Windsor Hills, and Culver City Crest in South Los Angeles. On this week’s show, we hear about two competing visions for living alongside oil extraction in the Baldwin Hills, and we help L.A. local-global nomadic micro cinema, The Echo Park Film Center, celebrate it’s 10th anniversary.

In honor of our one-year anniversary on Hear in the City, we bring you a show about protest, performance, and prayer in the public space. We visit the Asco arts exhibition “The Elite of the Obscure” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, we check in with Occupy L.A. as more people gather to protest economic and social inequality on the lawn of City Hall, and we hear a prayer to the sea from the World Festival of Sacred Music and the Kinnara Taiko drum ensemble.

Host Sara Harris interviews Albert Chacon who is Hear in the City’s technical producer and a participant in the Occupy L.A. movement. Arts editor Jesse Lerner talks to co-curators of “The Elite of the Obscure”, Rita Gonzalez and Ondine Chavoya, at LACMA. Johnny Mori of the Kinnara Taiko drumming group performs at a blessing of the sea for the World Festival of Sacred Music.

Hear in the City is back on the airwaves and the web-space celebrating our one-year anniversary! We are thrilled to return with a series of audio maps of what may well be the biggest arts exhibit in the world, in our very own city of Los Angeles: Pacific Standard Time.

On Sunday, October 2nd, we’ll be at the Trespass/Parade all along Broadway in Downtown L.A. We’ll be back on KPFK on Tuesday, October 4th at 3:30PM. Click here for a map of the parade route: 

Listen to Hear in the City host Sara Harris talk with West of Rome director and Trespass/Parade organizer Emi Fontana, and 1980′s New York underground music luminary and Brazilian carnival mover and shaker Arto Lindsay to talk about what the parade will bring to Broadway.

“To call it Trespass is a provocation: what is really the fine line between what is permitted and what is not permitted in the public realm?” –Emi Fontana, curator, director, organizer, West of Rome.

Hear in the City is back in action! We took some time off to raise cash and to produce our Air Check series on oil extraction in Los Angeles.

On this week’s episode, we offer a mixed bag of art and culture happening around Los Angeles. Luis Sierra Campos visits a community garden in Highland Park that serves as a model for urban sustainability and food security in a depressed real estate market, Jesse Lerner reviews the Cuban photography show at the Getty, and as part of our ongoing series, Two Wheels and a Mic, we sit in on a rehearsal and planning session for the upcoming performance of the Bicycle Bell Ensemble who will use their bicycles as improvisational instrument sin the upcoming Tour da Arts festival with director, Patrick Miller.

The Los Angeles Community Garden Council is part of a national movement to turn abandoned urban lots into public garden space. The garden council recognizes that by managing land that would otherwise be an expense and a liability, they are helping out the city and saving some money. Hear in the City Senior Producer, Luis Sierra Campos, takes us on a tour with Community Garden Council organizer Edgar Flores of the Milagro Allegro garden –one of 70 community gardens that serve close to 4000 families in Los Angeles. Here’s a slide show of photos Luis brought back: 

Click here to view the embedded video.