A Culture of Change | Memorial Day Weekend May 24 – 25, 2009 

Los Angeles, CA – As Memorial Day Weekend approaches, anticipation and excitement is rapidly mounting for The 23rd Annual Jazz Reggae Festival at UCLA presented by SCION. The student run festival, which has attracted an average of 30,000 attendees annually over the past 6 years, features the most prominent and critically acclaimed artists from around the world, along with an international food, arts, and crafts fair. As we enter a new era, this year’s festival has been carefully programmed as “A Culture of Change” with all artists, vendors, sponsors and messages cohesive in support of social and environmental change. With this in mind, the festival’s production team is proud to present this year’s line-up for both days: click here.

In addition to booking this elite line up and maintaining the art production value with a huge LED screen, the production team has continued efforts to make the festival environmentally progressive. Our specified Sustainability Team is working alongside many non-profit organizations to ensure that all aspects of the show are eco-friendly through means such as waste-separation and direct recycling, along with strong encouragement to our vendors to use biodegradable materials. A sustainability tent will provide attendees with information on fair-trade products, energy and water conservation, and the benefits of using locally grown products. There will also be a tent for children that will provide educational activities that emphasize environmental issues.

Tickets Available Now: 

Advanced Tickets $25, Day of Event Tickets $35, Two-day passes $45, Deluxe Two-day passes $115. Ticketmaster and the UCLA Central Ticket Office. Online presale tickets available until May 24, 2009. (click here for Ticketmaster)

A strong collaborative effort and fine piece of art from a few of my LA comrades.

Rap Duo Bleu Collar (Basik + Reese1) and Director Amanjah (met this young man back in my “Pimpin Ken” days at FAMU on my visits to ATL). Impressive stuff indeed, see commentary and thought behind the project: 

Seminal clothing brand Black Scale Presents L.A. hip hop duo Bleu Collar matched up against the sinister drums of Portishead’s “Machine Gun” (click here for more)

Otherwise, enjoy the video below, pardon some of the choice language: it’s art.

Photo: Artis Lane holds a small version of the Capitol bust. (Francine Orr / LA Times)

First lady Michelle Obama helped unveil Los Angeles artist Artis Lane’s new sculpture in Washington, D.C. today. Lane’s latest work is a bronze bust of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and women’s rights activist that is the first sculpture of a black woman in the U.S. Capitol.

For more on Lane and her work, see: “L.A. Artist’s ‘Truth’ to Be Unveiled.”

pictured above: Students learn in a cheerful room, part of a campus that sits in an area of seafood and produce wholesalers, social service agencies, single-room-occupancy hotels and auto-parts shops.

A downtown arts center signals constancy and community.

By Christopher Hawthorne / Architecture Critic (LA Times)

“In this neighborhood the most radical thing you could do was make a white building,” architect Michael Maltzan told me on a recent afternoon as we toured the campus of Inner-City Arts, where his firm completed an $8.5-million expansion earlier this fall.

The ICA complex — which indeed has the surprising brightness of a soap-opera actor’s teeth seen up close, or the pages deep inside a newspaper that has yellowed on top — offers classes in the arts to students bused in from a number of public-school campuses. Its 1-acre site, at 7th and Kohler streets near the edge of downtown’s skid row, is surrounded by seafood and produce wholesalers, social service agencies, single-room-occupancy hotels and auto-parts shops. Bunker Hill’s gleaming, mirrored-glass towers loom quite visibly to the northwest, but at ground level these blocks are dominated by roll-down security doors and loops of razor wire.

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More than 20 years after making his first splash with “She’s Gotta Have It,” Spike Lee is finally going to make it to Sundance. His belated debut — in the 25th year of the Sundance Film Festival – comes as director and co-producer of the film version of “Passing Strange,” the stage musical by L.A. indy-rockers Stew (Mark Stewart) and Heidi Rodewald that took an unlikely passage from New York’s nonprofit Public Theater to Broadway in February. It ran for 165 performances at the Belasco Theatre, with Stew nabbing a Tony Award for best book of a musical before it closed July 20.

Among those captivated was Lee, who said Friday that he saw the show several times at the Public, then came back for repeat viewings at the Belasco — even before producers approached him about capturing it on film before it closed. The film will premiere in the Jan. 15-25 festival’s noncompetitive Spectrum Documentary Spotlight program, where Lee is hoping it will attract a distributor. The filmmaker said he’s been invited to the Sundance festival before, but wasn’t able to make it. Stew and Rodewald, who is co-composer of the songs, are well-connected at Sundance, having developed “Passing Strange” at its annual Sundance Theatre Lab in 2004 and 2005.

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In my short-lived life, I’ve been blessed with many great friends and family…people from all walks of life and individuals talented in so many regards.

As it relates to the arts, I was first introduced to the theater element at my very own Taylor Tot’s Playhouse (a blog post forthcoming on the significance and legacy). Fast fwd to high school, I was introduced to a young man in my [St. Bernard's High School] graduating class of  ’98 by the name of Aaron White.

Aaron always took the arts very seriously…even impressed me enough to seek out his knowledge and experience in helping CLIMB develop a CLIMB Youth Performing Arts Academy. Nowadays, you can find Mr. Aaron White spearheading a movement of consciousness, with very enlightening one-man performances highlighting the journey and struggle of “our people.”

Upon hearing of the new production, I made a surprise visit in Winter of 2005, and to my knowledge, this same performance has received rave reviews and national recognition. With that said, I’d encourage you to not only embrace the arts, but also lend yourself the experience of opening your mind to other outings and happenings (especially here in LA)…in the meantime, I give you Aaron White’s The Blood They Shed.

contact info: thebloodtheyshed@gmail.com

this was very impressive. enjoy: