LongBeachCulture.org CenterStage Blog

Miss Polonia California(R)
and
Queen of Polonia International(TM)

Polish Beauty Pageants in Los Angeles
www.MissPoloniaCalifornia.com

November 4th, 2006
Scottish Rite Theatre, 855 Elm Ave., Long Beach. 5:30 PM.

TICKETS

On sale now!
$30.00 per person.
All under 18 years of age: $15.00!
FOOD AND DRINKS ARE NOT INCLUDED IN THE TICKET PRICE

To purchase call daily 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM:
562.435-5232 Marek.
or respond to this e-mail

TICKETS ARE NUMBERED. FIST COME FIRST SERVE BASIS RESERVATIONS

Photo by Jacek Nowaczynski

Left: Miss Polonia California 2005 Matylda Smolen
Right: Queen of Polonia Int. 2005, Kasia David

__________________

PROGRAM for November 4th:

5:30 to 7:30 P.M.
* Pageant Finals … where you can participate as a judge!
Great entertainment between contestant’s appearances!

8:00P.M. to 12:30 A.M.
* The World Famous Polish Party!
Polish cold beer and hot food!

__________________

How to participate as a contestant?
check our website www.MissPoloniaCalifornia.com

________________

Sponsors are welcome to participate.
Promotion of your enterprise will be included on a big screen projection,
in our programs and all printed materials.
For details call Marek Dzida at 562.435-5232.

__________________

Media Soponsor: White Eagle / Bialy Orzel. The new voice of Polonia
www.whiteeaglenews.com

Polish Beauty Pageants 2006 are sponsored by:

Polam Federal Credit Union
www.polam.org

Visage Laser and Skin Care
www.visageskin.com

Polmar Travel San Diego
travel@polmartravel.com

Lubczuk Dentistry
andrewlubczuk@yahoo.com

Jola Mohan / Century 21 / Amber Realty
jolamohan@hotmail.com

Fredricks and Von Der Horst Attorneys at Law
www.fredrickslaw.com

Jacek W. Lentz Attorney at Law
www.lentzdefense.com

Polish Center in Los Angeles
www.polishcenter.org

Polish Film Festival Los Angeles
www.polishfilmla.org

American Services LAX
www.americanserviceslax.com

J & T European Gourmet Santa Monica
310.394-7227, 1128 Wilshire Blvd

Modern Travel
mtravel@earthlink.net

Hellada Photography Studio
www.hellada.us

__________________

If you want to teach a class at the Arts Park, there’s an application process. You can find information about existing classes, and the Instructor Application, here. We need to utilize the Arts Park so it can stay open. If you’ve not visited, it is located on East side of Elm Street, just South of Broadway.

Lots of folks teamed up to change the status of the Art Park on Elm, just South of Broadway, from being in a constant state of lock-down to now having regular hours. In order for this to continue, however, we need to encourage its regular use.

A great way to encourage residential use of the park is to place Parks and Rec classes in it. The parks and rec department can place classes in that park, if anyone is interested in teaching out of it. So that means it’s our responsibility to encourage artists and others to start a class in the Arts Park. If you know anyone who would like to make a few bucks by teaching a class out of the park – tai chi, meditation, drawing or watercolor classes come to mind, for example.

An interested person can submit an application to Michelle Gringas in the Parks and Rec department, along with details about the proposed class. It takes about 2 months after an application is received before the class can begin. If anyone has any questions about teaching classes, or wants a copy of the application, they should call Michelle directly at 562-570-3117, or contact her via email at michelle_gingras@longbeach.gov

By Greggory Moore

A simple concept: sound artists gather to create a live score for short expressionistic films. And that’s all that happened. This will be a short review.

This was my first experience of them, but apparently the Brothers Quay are well-known for their stop-action animation work (which has been featured on MTV, among other outlets). Think a team-up of David Lynch and Tim Burton aspiring to sets fit for Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. The Quay films shown on this night ranged from one minute to something under a half-hour and seemed to eschew any (important) plot. These films were projected on a pull-down screen in {open}’s back room, but their “proper” soundtrack was muted; instead, nine artistically intrepid souls provided the music and atmosphere. The results were completely satisfying.

To give some idea of the sound, here is the roster of artists and the tools with which they plied their collective trade:

Shea M Gauer—piano, baby piano, clock chimes, bowed metal, kalimba, fx
Scott A Peterson—signal generators, field recordings, vibrator
Joe Negro—laptop
Glenn Bach—laptop, analog synth, fx, dulcimer, abacus
Marco Schindelmann—laptop, keyboard
Michael Raco-Rands—laptops, fx, bass
Jorge Martin—laptop, a whole variety of fx pedals and signal generators
Jeremy Drake—guitar, resonating devices
Jessica Catron—cello, resonating devices

The number and variety of sound-makers meant that the audio came from everywhere, enveloping the viewer/listener, which helped immerse us in the filmic world before us. The menacing calm of the tones and groans, gentle screeches and breathiness, soft clanks and rumbles was the kind of thing that could both lull you into somnolence and waken you to a lucid dreamworld.

And thus endeth the review, because this event was a paragon of the limits of symbolic language to communicate the raw and immediate realm of the purely sensory. {open} is a place to experience this for yourself—so why don’t you? www.accessopen.com will help you on your way.

[Editor's Note: Here are links to two large pictures taken at the performance - P1 - P2]

The Press Telegram covered the meeting between Phil Hester, Director of the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department, and the community served by the Homeland Cultural Center. Orlando Greenhill, who teaches an improvised music class at the center, speaks passionately about the impact Zoot Velasco has had on every person at the center.

I’m not sure, but the blurry bald head in the foreground may be mine.

If you are as outraged as many in the community over the dismissal of Zoot Velasco, Cultural Program Supervisor at Homeland Cultural Center and Macarthur Park, then this is a CALL TO ACTION. You, The Friends of Homeland and the community want to know what this means for the future of the Art and Cultural programs of the Center; programs that are not only unique in this city but vital to the social fabric of the community around it.

Anyone who has visited Homeland during the past 16 months would have witnessed a scene unlike any other in a city often fractured by racial and ethnic tensions; young people of all cultures and races dancing together, hanging together, cooperating together, and co-existing. Homeland is not your typical Recreation Center. How can it be when it’s in the middle of a multicultural neighborhood with its share of gang violence, unemployment, and poverty? It is a refuge, a safe zone, a neighborhood treasure.

Is the person who is replacing Zoot so much more superior in experience with young people and cultural programs and working in a multicultural environment that they will blow anything that Zoot has done out of the water? Will they continue the rich programs for Hip Hop, the Ballet Folklorico, the Hmong Association?

And finally, what does this say about sensitivity to the needs of a multicultural community? Did the City of Long Beach go out of its way to assess the needs of the community that it serves and make a personnel decision based on the best interest of that community? Or did they just not care because they assumed that no one would say anything?

Here are some specific actions that you can take:

1. Call or email your Councilmember. If you don’t know who they are, insert the following into your internet browser and you can find out

http://www.ci.long-beach.ca.us/council/default.asp

1. Call or email Phil T. Hester, Director, Long Beach Parks, Recreation and Marine at (562) 570-3170 or phil_hester@longbeach.gov
2. Call or email City Manager Gerald R. “Jerry” Miller, main City Hall number (562) 570-6555 or citymanager@longbeach.gov
3. Call or email Christine Marshall, Manager, Community Recreation Programs Bureau, 570-3150. She made the final decision.
4. Call or email Harry Saltzgaver, Vice President, Parks And Recreation Commission and Associate Publisher and Executive Editor of the Gazette Newspapers, 562-433-2000 or hsalt@gazettes.com
5. Attend a special Thank You celebration for Zoot and the Homeland Cultural Center on Monday, October 16, 2006 at 7PM at the Center, 1321 E. Anaheim St., 570-1655, 2 blocks east of Orange at McArthur Park.
6. Attend the City Council meeting on Tuesday, October 17, 5PM in Council Chambers where Youth from the Center will be speaking during the Open Comment section at the top of the meeting
7. Attend the Parks, Recreation and Marine Commission meeting next Thursday, October 19, 9AM, at El Dorado Park West Community Center
   Senior Center Library, 2800 Studebaker Rd.
8. Write a letter to the Editor of the Press Telegram:

http://www.presstelegram.com/writealetter

1. Send us any suggestions or ideas to: creativitynetlb@aol.com

CONTACT:
The Creativity Network
and
Friends of Homeland
562-430-8637
creativitynetlb@aol.com

By Greggory Moore

In 2006, in addition to the walking tour of sound installations throughout the East Village Arts District, SoundWalk has been expanded to include three nights of performances. The first, on October 6, took place in the Dome Room of the Lafayette (528 E. Broadway).

Noah Thomas used a laptop and a mixing board to take us on an acoustic journey with an aural, narrativeless plot. A long opening portion instantly brought to mind the submarine, pings and sequences of sound slowly and gently echoing off into the deep, behind which Thomas kept up steady, rhythmic low ends, making it easy to drift along with him. Eventually one human voice dropped in, then another, operatic vocals sounding as if they came from a concrete stairwell far below (the kind of thing you hear on a This Mortal Coil album). Soon there were different voices, speaking, lecturing or reading essays. The content seemed to touch upon certain artistic concepts, but the function was more suggestive than didactic. The voices were slowed, treated electronically—prompts that helped take you away from the meanings of the words and left you to your own inner travels (to which all of this was a soundtrack). Courtly music made its way in, faded, made way for carnival music, which eventually slowed and got pared down to isolated tones. It was a delightful trip, even if I’m not sure where I went. Thomas was in complete command of his audio, and he made exceptional use of the Dome Room’s specific acoustics. The only Website I have for him is www.csulb.edu/~gbach/socalsonicthomas.html, which is just a short bio.

Metal Rouge is a duo playing what I believe to be dulcimers with metal strings. Contact mics are placed on them, and digital delay and other effects are used to treat the pair’s hammer strikes, bowings, and the like. They seemed to confine themselves to a limited scale, focusing on manipulating an industrial tone that bespoke of the musical notes inherent in all sound (if only we pay attention). Too loud and this sort of thing can register as a distorted mess, but they regulated things well enough. See helgafassonaki.net for more info.

The bulk of Alessandro Bosetti’s music was pre-recorded. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only live element was a vocal he put on top of the vocal and music emanating from a laptop, manipulating that live vocal with a small mixing/effects board. Of course, if what’s of interest is the sound, it’s not all that important how it’s produced, just what you hear. Bosetti performed five pieces, which gave a nice variety to his set. His sound is mostly sort of a jazzy, meandering scat line of words on top of stripped-down jazz orchestration. At times the result is exceedingly charming. For example, his third piece was a short narrative about a visit to a cousin who “is a comedian in Ivory Coast” and Bosetti’s (or the narrator’s) being inspired upon his return home to become a singer—something that he thinks is “a very hard job.” This same little story is repeated maybe a half-dozen time in varying keys, but always with exactly the same grammatical solecisms (Bosetti is German), and it took me a while to grasp the playfulness of the piece, its self-referential humor. Bosetti explained that his last song, “Idiot”, is recordings of the oscillations of human voice you hear on short-wave radios when they’re in between frequencies. He transcribed a phonetic version of what he heard and sang that transcription over the recording, occasionally finding certain “real” words (e.g., “idiot”). The last section was radio-wave whistles over top of piano and stand-up bass, during which Bosetti walked amongst the audience. At first it was hard to know what to make of his peregrinations; soon, though it became clear: he was whistling. This was the vocal he layered on top of the recording. There is something very creative in this simplicity, and the result goes beyond its elements. Generally speaking, his final products makes use of randomness but end up pretty far from random. Check him out at www.melgun.net.

There was a fourth act, Arcanum—a duo on bass sax, effects, and laptop—but I could not stay for them. For info, visit www.myspace.com/arcanumartensemble.

If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you and you’re sorry you missed it, don’t fret!, there are two post-SoundWalk performances at {open}, 144 Linden: Monday (Oct. 9) and Wednesday (Oct. 11) at 8:30 p.m. Go to accessopen.com for further info or call (562) 499-OPEN.

Aleks Figuroa has an admirable goal: To bring an ancient art form to the East Village Arts District. Once viewed as low-brow and unsavory, tattoo art has become part of the zeitgeist, part of popular culture, and has developed a decidedly upscale clientele.

Like many Cities, Long Beach has rather strict laws that restrict tattoo businesses to a very narrow geographical corridor. With other restrictions, the result is that these businesses can only exist in depressed and crime-ridden areas. Upscale clients will not visit these areas and, instead, take their business out of the City.

Aleks has provided us with some information about his proposal, and his background. Please take a moment to review it, and post your thoughts about the idea of allowing tattoo art studios into the East Village Arts District.

Aleks writes:

History

The hard image of tattoo art patrons in Long Beach has changed over the last dozen years from being associated with sailors, bikers, gangs, The Pike, and strip bars. The mainstream has embraced tattoo art to unprecedented heights; however, tattoo art business within the East Village Arts District is prohibited by way of zoning/ordinance restrictions.

(more…)

The Creativity Network of Long Beach and LongBeachCulture.org sponsored two community forums to engage in a meaningful dialogue toward building a Cultural Master Plan for the creative community of Long Beach. The August 2nd meeting at Koos Art Center solicited a lengthy list of issues. On September 6, the second forum was held at Second City Council Art Gallery and Performance Space to prioritize the issues important to Creative Community.

The link below will take you to a PDF version of the final report. (You can copy and paste the link on your browser for ease or you can go to LongBeachCulture.org and The Press Room to find the document)

http://blog.longbeachculture.org/docs/Creativity_Network_Forums_Final_Report.pdf

Now What?

The Arts Council for Long Beach is the process of updating its Strategic Plan. That plan holds the key to setting priorities for itself and is an opportunity for the Council to assume a more visible and proactive leadership. That, in turn, could set the stage for updating of the City’s Cultural Master Plan. However, this goal can only be accomplished with Community involvement. Forum attendees were encouraged to reach out to community organizations to talk about the importance of the arts. The Creativity Network, in cooperation with the Creative Community, will continue to network and dialogue with artists, small and large arts organizations, reach out to the Media as an advocacy mechanism and to establish a dialog with the Arts Council for Long Beach, the City Council and Community Leaders. Over the next six months, we hope to sponsor and organize workshops around the three major priorities that would include representatives of the City, the Arts Community and experts in various fields of Live/Work Space for Artists, Arts Education and Advocacy and Government. Most importantly, we will continue to advocate for an updating of the Long Beach Master Cultural Plan.

For more information, please contact:

Antonio Pedro Ruiz

The Creativity Network

562-430-8637