from the South Bay
Wayfarers Chapel – Rancho Palos Verdes
First Movement from Mahler’s First Symphony. Reinhold Behringer and the Virtual Philharmonic Orchestra (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Mr. Behringer’s has been doing MIDI adaptations of classical scores for nearly 25 years. Visit About the Virtual Philharmonic for details. The MIDI world has come a long way from bloopity origins. The synthesized orchestral instrument samples are eerily impressive.
Months in the making. Enjoy this 40 minute collection of LAX comings and goings from the man with access like no other.
Visit SpeedbirdHD for even more.
It is 30 years to the day since a supernova went off in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Mismangled pronunication of ‘Chandra’ aside, this video offers a good synopsis featuring images from the eponymous Great Observatory built by TRW in Redondo Beach.
Addendum:
We’re overdue for one in the Milky Way.
The ‘R’ behind the Thompson-Ramo-Woolridge (later TRW) corporation passed away a few months ago at age 103. Simon Ramo saw the future and made a lot of it happen in a bygone era when technical people ran corporations. Here, he explains what we currently call Cloud Computing over a lovely guitar score by Nell Hultgren of whom little, unfortunately, can be found.
Via Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc. channel at the Internet Archive>
Photo: D. Ramey Logan – Wikimedia Commons
As a teenager, I was privileged to see him fly his Shrike Aero Commander at a Northern California airshow. As an adult, I got to see him at an event in his honor at Torrance Airport. Robert Hoover, the pilot’s pilot and long-time South Bay resident, passed away today in Torrance at age 94. Rest in Peace, Sir.
The International Printing Museum in Carson showed (and, hopefully, still does show) visitors a working Linotype machine. Inspiring engineering that lasted a century, now surpassed by digital methods that are replaced at much greater frequency.
(via aeon.co)
Youtube Channel: Darkskynet
(Link updated 3/22/19 after the deletion of Jeff Quitney’s Youtube Channel)
Planespotter and filmmaker Ryan Bomar, that’s who. Watch his recent video on Youtube and check the description for how to apply to get on one.
Big tankers tie up offshore and disgorge their contents into brightly lit and mostly inscrutable refineries. This sixty year old film by Shell Oil neatly explains the chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics of distillation that takes gives us our gasoline, diesel, oils, and waxes. In a different setting, it also gives us many different kinds of beverages.
Who knew that The Western Museum of Flight has a speaker series and that the Peninsula Seniors have made many of these talks available for all to see? I routinely search for things like this and last night stumbled across these by accident. Aircraft buffs owe both organizations a big vote of thanks. And, there are plenty more gems where these came from.
Image courtesy El Segundo Museum of Art
Not all collaborations are created equal. Some time ago, the jewel-box art museum in El Segundo teamed with the Getty and noted graffiti artists to compare and contrast ostensibly street art with medieval illuminated manuscripts. ‘Scratch’ was an audacious reach across centuries, comprehensive in its choices, and convincing thanks to its subtle yet driving focus on context.
‘Studio,’ ESMoA’s just-opened collaboration with LACMA suffers greatly in comparison. It’s a retrospective of the late Norbert Tadeusz (1940-2011) with twenty-seven paintings from moderate to large adorning the walls and leaving a lot of whitespace for all that. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the art but nothing especially right about it, either. All fall short of the promised monumental scale. Tadeusz seemed to like bold colors, moderate perspective, gymnastics, and cats. The works on offer are all about his studio, hence the title. A couple almost pull you in. Almost.
The website says he was important(tm) and that he studied and associated with other important(tm) people. It might even be true but the evidence and context woven so well together in ‘Scratch’ is startlingly absent here. Captions are limited to a webpage per piece with a thumbnail, size and material data, and ‘Q&ART’ a question designed to solicit comments. The viewer can see these on two iPads or on his or her smartphone at http://esmoa.org/gallery/studio/ Even a linked Wikipedia article on the artist is in German. Asking audiences to engage with the art is fine but it doesn’t relieve the gallery of its obligations in the matter.
The catalog has an unconvincing introduction from LACMA’s unremarkable Michael Govan and mostly shows photographs of the artworks with a few other images and an interview with Tadeusz’s wife. Whitespace again rules the day. It’s as if ESMoA had to meet its opening date and did what it could with time and money available. The artist deserves better.
Experience 17: STUDIO – June 7 until September 27, 2015
208 Main Street
El Segundo, CA 90245
Phone: 424 277 1020
http://www.esmoa.org
HOURS
Fri – 10am-5pm
Sat – 10am-5pm
Sun – 10am-5pm
Mon – Thur – appt. only
ADMISSION
Free