Doo-Doo Doo-Doo

Errant kid-carrying balloons, planes that overshoot the runway by 150 miles — these days, preternatural occurrences are the stuff of cable news. But 50 years ago, viewers tuned in to “The Twilight Zone” to get their weekly eeriness fix. Before the “The Twilight Saga,” and before “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF” became the creepiest [...]

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No Particular Place to Go

“No Particular Place to Go” as Chuck Berry sang in 1964 is as good a metaphor as any to describe the current plight of the U.S. auto industry. It was just announced that the once mighty Pontiac is no more, and at least two of the Big Three are in serious danger of being relegated [...]

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Leaving Los Angeles

My time in Los Angeles is coming to an end. I will miss the phantasmagorically perfect weather, the hiking trails (with coyotes!) 5 minutes from my house, the focused and talented students (and faculty) of Art Center, and all the interesting strangers who tend to be, I think, more [...]

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Kurt in the LA Times

The LA Times just did a nice feature about Kurt and his spring semester post as “Visionary in Residence” at the Art Center College of Design.  Now if only they could get his name spelled right! They fixed it!

-Leital Molad

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iPod, Meet Your Maker

We recently spent some time with one of the most interesting people in Los Angeles. He’s a leading light in the so-called Makers’ Movement – people who believe that making things yourself, or fixing the things you have, is lots better than mindlessly buying new stuff.

His name is Peter but he goes professionally by [...]

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The Piano Doctor

Kurt’s brother David Andersen is one of the top piano technicians in Southern California — he’s also an accomplished rock n’ roller (and a total ringer for The Dude from “The Big Lebowski” ). Kurt visited him at home in Malibu and at work on the pianos of some leading lights in jazz and film [...]

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A day in the country

I am not on the payroll of the California Travel & Tourism Commission, I swear. But as if the weather in general were not splendidly un-wintery enough, here’s some of what I encountered a couple of hours west and north of Los Angeles, by aiming for Santa Barbara and then more or less aimlessly wandering. [...]

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New BLK JKS song! “Banna Ba Modimo”

When Studio 360 recently caught up with the up-and-coming BLK JKS in Los Angeles we stumbled onto a bit of a musical scoop. Hanging out “back-stage” with the South African band before their show at the LA Natural History Museum, we were fortunate enough to hear a brand new unreleased song from their forthcoming [...]

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City of angels

When I visited Johannesberg a few years ago, I was startled by how much, townships aside, it reminded me of southern California — the topography, the sunniness, the freeways, the shiny Americanism in general. So the other day when I interviewed the delightful founders of the cool South African rock band BLK JKS, Mpumi [...]

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Desert Planes and Automobiles

I’ve just spent a fascinating day in the desert an hour and a half north of Los Angeles.
It was an Art Center College of Design field trip. First stop was a hangar-cum-workshop at the Mojave airport – officially, and very grandly, the Mojave Air and Space Port — where I met Jon Sharp, a charming, [...]

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