You See LA: February 2024
Things to see and do in L.A., handpicked by Professor and Department Chair Eddo Stern
The arts are an essential part of UCLA. They inspire dialogue, encourage creativity, and drive real lasting change, across disciplines, borders, and backgrounds. They also create opportunities for increased engagement with our surrounding communities.
Eddo Stern, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and director of the UCLA Game Lab, has curated a diverse selection of things to see and do in Los Angeles.
Eddo is an artist and game designer. At the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts, where he is currently chair, he teaches courses on game design and culture; computer game development; and physical computing in an art context. His work explores the uneasy and otherwise unconscious connections between physical existence and electronic simulation, surrounding the subject matters of violence, memory, and identification. He works with various media including computer software and hardware, game design, live performance, digital video, and kinetic sculpture. He is a strong advocate for independent game development and the inherent potential of game design as a medium for artistic expression and cultural impact.
I appreciate L.A. for the endlessly explorable vastland that it is; I’ve long given up on trying to articulate its grand unifying theory. These days I look for fleeting moments, green play spaces, grounding routines in the sprawl. Here are a few:
Night Driving
The Westin Bonaventure Hotel
Anyone who remembers watching the iconic Miami Vice “In the Air Tonight” driving scene, or at least has had the ultimate joy of riding along the promenade at night to Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City should relate. Driving around listening to music is one of the great things to do in L.A. One of my favorite drives is heading back at night from the eastside on the 110S onto the 10W while listening to a playlist inspired by the beloved Jonathan Gold, who once shared some of his favorite songs in a KCRW interview. My mix starts with his first three:
1. John Dowland - "Flow, My Tears"
2. Louis Armstrong - "Tight Like This"
3. Funkadelic - "Maggot Brain"
and goes somewhere from there:
4. Matisyahu - "King Without a Crown"
5. Conjure One, Sinéad O'Connor - "Tears from the Moon"
6. Ozzy Osborne - "I Just Want You"
7. Erkin Koray - "Cemalim"
…
I play a little game whenever I’m on that drive. The trick is to match the precise moment the electric guitar kicks in at the 1:15 minute mark of "Maggot Brain" with the moment you pass the The Westin Bonaventure Hotel on the left. The Bonaventure is a manyfold L.A. cinematic landmark, and I hear you can go inside and even take the elevator to the roof, but I like it just fine at a glance, through the car window, at midnight, on the side of the road, with just the perfect soundtrack. If you ever want to try it yourself, here’s a link to my playlist.
Softcore Surf
Carpinteria Beach
I moved to L.A. in 1998 to go to CalArts. For the first few months I camped on the Pyramid Lake beach; this was before the toxic algae bloom, and you could swim there. After that I lived in Lake Piru in a vegetable packing warehouse. Later I spent ten years living at Quail Lake, 80 miles north of L.A. in the high desert. I heard that when you move to L.A. you should live by the water; I didn't imagine there would be so many lakes.
I tried to surf once. It was fun but sure does come with lots of baggage. These days I prefer the boogie boarding experience — it’s low-stakes surfing, minus the glory and minus the anxiety. Being an adult with a big foamcore boogie board is kind of a funny thing, but it really works for me. Any kind of ego investment that may be involved is just not happening and nobody’s a local and everyone’s a kook. (Well, unless you're a pro bodysurfing in Teahupo'o…) With an XXL boogie board you can take on some pretty big waves! And though you may take a rough tumble in the sand you’re less likely to harm yourself or anyone else. On a weekday evening I go to the closest beach in Santa Monica, just south of the pier, and afterwards I sometimes get some ceviche tostadas or a shrimp burrito at La Isla Bonita, a very good Mexican seafood truck. In the summer, when there’s more time, I’ll drive out for choice boogie boarding to Carpinteria State Beach up the coast — it has really long mellow swells and you can grill at the wooden picnic tables under the small pines and watch the sun set. You can go tidepooling and also camp there. It’s kind of far, and maybe Carpinteria doesn't count as Los Angeles for everyone…but the city defines its own boundaries and serves us well to expand and contract when we need it to.
The Mycoloscene
A bolete on the forest floor
So there seems to be a mushroom craze going on — all those Chaga Chagas, something about new nutrients? T’was an alien species all along!? Brain enhancements? Or is it about the Anthropocene? I’m not really sure, to be honest. But I will say that nothing beats a good old fashioned mushroom hunt — roll the dice and you never know what you may find. I used to live somewhere else back in the day where it rained more, and the forest was nearby, and mushrooms were there to be hunted. But L.A.? It turns out that Los Angeles has its own mushroom fan club. I first joined the Los Angeles Mycological Society (LAMS) about seven years ago, and while I haven't been the most constant attendee — the drives are too long, the season too short, and the eatin’ may not be always great, but their newsletter is really interesting, they do public lectures, and the forays have always brought adventure. (I remember a two-hour drive out east to the Angeles Forest where I hauled back fifteen pounds of King Boletes that turned out not to be King Boletes, but Viscid Boletes which, when cooked turned into a kind of a yellow, acid, soup slime. We still ate most of it and I gave the rest away as a gift...and I’m sure no one got sick.)
Arc_ery
Pasadena Roving Archers in Arroyo Seco Park
A few years ago I learned about “Instinctive Archery.” I was on sabbatical in Berlin and a friend took me out to shoot arrows in the woods. The concepts of instinctive archery are oppositional to olympic archery — there are no aiming sites, scopes, counterbalances, compound bows, or technical competitions. The approach was explained to me simply as “shoot a bow like you were throwing a rock” — i.e., no need to aim...do it enough and you will get better at it. It works! Alongside the philosophical differences in the approach to better hit a target, instinctive archery parallels artisanal bow making, a return to wooden traditional recurve and longbows, and in Germany, at least, a romantic back-to-nature archery experience. In Berlin I bought a handmade longbow and was ready to play this new game in Los Angeles.
When I got back I checked around for archery ranges and was excited to hear that Rancho Park Archers in Cheviot Hills was wrapping up its long-awaited remodel of its range. I had seen photos of folks slinging arrows at hay bales outside in the park. This was perfect and so close to UCLA! When the range finally opened up it wasn’t really what I was hoping for — the new range is half indoors, a modernist designed gray metal hanger with a low hanging roof and limited range to shoot. The beauty of archery is in the curvature — the “arc” part…the recurve of the bow, the bend and flex of the draw, and the flightpath of the arrow as it rises and then descends in symmetrical arcs: tighter bends at medium range and big sweeping rainbows at long range. Straight, frozen-rope shots with a bow I don’t really enjoy — not poetic, more mechanical, efficient...instrumentalized? The Rancho range is designed for this optimized archery and it’s claustrophobic. I even hit the ceiling a few times trying to force some more arc in there.
But this L.A. Archery story has a happy ending. Doing more research and expanding my search I found Pasadena Roving Archers (PRA), a non-profit archery club founded in 1935, set in the pastoral Arroyo Seco Park. PRA is the site of the oldest continuously operated “Field Archery” range in the world. “Field Archery” is a type of archery involving shooting in organic, natural, and unpredictable real-world settings and seems like some kind of cousin to “Instinctive Archery.” I really love PRA and going out there to shoot makes for an unculinary excuse to head out to the east side. I usually get poisoned by oak while searching for wayward arrows, but it’s still well worth it.
Killscreen Engage!
India-based game design studio Studio Oleomingus exhibition at Killscreen (5511 West Pico Blvd. Los Angeles)
Killscreen is a wonderful L.A. art space focused on play and game culture through an interdisciplinary lens. They host exhibitions, screening playtests, workshops, talks, and conferences. Killscreen has been around for about 15 years, founded by Jamin Warren as the unique game culture print magazine Kill Screen, after which it went online as a new media art and games journal, and has now been incarnated as an L.A. storefront multispace just west of Midcity. I particularly appreciate the open-armed interdisciplinary focus on games and play, and how these connect to other creative media. This ethos mirrors our approach at the UCLA Game Lab, where games and the culture around them are intermixed with everything, where games are the hub and anything can be another spoke. Killscreen has been doing some really exciting stuff recently and is picking up the pace of cool events. You can sign up for their mailing list to keep track of what’s coming up.
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