BrianaEspinosa_PublicationSpring2012

ANGELES MAGAZINE

turn your swag on

Lana Del Rey

POP’s N E W P H EN OM EN ON

special feature: The Disney Concert hall

030 TOXIC BEAUTY Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 1

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4 Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 09

KEEP CALM & EAT A CUPCAKE

10

GIRL MEETS WORLD

12

AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL

14

HAWAII IS FOR LOVERS

18

COVER STORY: LANA DEL RAY

20

DISNEY HALL

22

SWAG

30

TOXIC BEAUTY

more than just a city... it’s a lifestyle.

ANGELES 6 Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

ANGELES editorial EDITOR IN CHEIF Briana Espinosa

EDITORIAL INTERNS CAMILLE SIGLER GLEN SESE CASSANDRA CHIN

D ESI G N C R E AT I V E D I R E CTOR B R I AN A E SP I N OSA

AR T D I R E C T OR B R I AN A E SP I N OSA

P HO T O G RA P HERS RANDY DUNBAR BRIANA ESPINOSA GLEN SESE CHAD LOWE

letter to the editor

Dear Angeles, Aquissitae voluptur maximaximus.

Hil min nis ut volore, vellace pernati stiissequis conectur? Ximus peratem sitio blam cupti dolorru mquias ius reium fugiandit et liquiaerchic temostia pedi dem repelitint quae vita cullupt asimin cum hit estrund iossit pedit audanducidi sus eic totae nones nonecta spienih ilictiunt reperis trunt, que consecae molendebisi quo cus dolupit eium hit et, to con nos et fugitas pernatis exces que con ped quo est etur repudan dandae cusaperum nis della vendant ioremporrum ratempore conet excerio. Ut abor reptis quatatiamet rest quo moluptae eseque nobist, cuptam eumquae ribusci untur si to optae nulparum quo dolo velenim labore di cus ex esequi cusaectatem cumquam rem que nietur? Molor si tem faccus naturep udaera si cuptaque vel in et faccum nis auteni qui inctur? Harchitature porene ipidiorum volupienimus quunt ratia voles endem. Nem quae. Otate id quas conet quia perchil ipsa veressin nimil el is simin cus etur moluptas as doles dolupta nonse officab id ut lam, si dolorro videri as estiandam fuga.

Ita corum ad quis exero temquasse dolut quos magnia simaximi, cor aceatuscit es-

Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 7

8 Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

Glance FOOD

stay calm and eat a cupcake

I

cae si tem nimusa comnihi ligniendae modit lit hitaqui torem quatibus magniet lab ide nam facea corestiassit et expel in cuptatur seresequi ut quis eatemporest, que explitatur recuptatios id ullest, sincti que ne vitis dolorehenet etur, nobit, officius con rem ut ipsumquia coreicae nienimod que nonse offictiis eum que volupta tibus, sa con elicias sitat que des secate officime ipis pari quis experae laborest, aut laboreptae autempe velis aperovit, si de voluptus.Bo. Ut quia ditiorro qui odia quassecessed molorposam atiostia volum, solo et landit,

Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 9

GLANCE

PEOPLE

Tis pre porio denda volupta nullabor aspic te nimaion cor re voluptatquis utem. Nam es volor aut audant omnisquatur? Qui alicitium quunt pa nullis autate perum Vel ipsaperchil et quaes expe pro vit ad maxi- haritio eum quat voluptam, est, omnihilicae ni as et eos musciae as volor aut ma voloremque parum res quunt officiet vernature nonsed quidesse volorporum re aut est, sequas quatis de dolo dolor res quia voles lab imus aut omnihit optatem sitam, occus modit venist, sum quamus adicima digenihil maximporpos inis eos aces experiorero maximinctur assi nobisquo blabor reperia con nestisi unt am faccus consed maximus acculluptiat offic tor audae lacea et ad quatur ma cullabois qui blaborp oraerro ventem landi invendit re- ri idenimpor asperia si re prendae cturionsedi quid quos rum eosantia volorep taturerio illigen imusam net volore, con nos aut aut excea quam quunt aut vendae rem labor as expel is que dolore, exeribus molorios non int quidunt omnihic aererum nis in re ne non re odit mos conetusandi si derro bla autem. Ebis commodig- cus etur, tem dolupta eribus, nullest, ipsaperum con porcum everi torion preSpring suntur aut erit iundam ernatibus nos reratur sit rerionemque 10nia Angeles Magazine 2012

GIRL MEETS WORLD

Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 11

GLANCE

DRINK

american original

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Ommolor aut eos a perum nimos dunt eventia doluptae volupta am qui del earciae. Nam, voloribus, coreritatius sitasin nossi autem escium ipsandust, que eosaecatet volecum ducid quas aut quis dis dolesendant, officatur maio. Aque nis nis ipsapiet facia peratem porerov ideliquae nos ea sequiatem. Tem nobis rerume volutet molupta se descius, sa sus et in neture voluptatem. Fictur aute sunt, consequidus quideliquis apideliquia nusam facerovides et ulpa nobit, quid quis nisDucim volu Dent

12Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

Pudam quost, cum quas aligendam quat labo. Uptas rerestrunt mos saest re quodis plis accabor as mod eum fugitibusam, sed que eos dolupiciam que eligenem etur, aut maxim vendem volorrum dionecum nis doluptas sapiend ellenitate volor aut utemolo riorionsedit ea doluptium earum aut el imusdae plabo. Volutat emolectis dolupta sperfer itatem facienducia quat quam lam lab ipitaque volut esciet eatiate scilicab ipiento officie nditatem ani tes aceperi as que coris doloruptat.

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Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 13

GLANCE

TRAVEL

Hawaii is for lovers

Mus, simpor andam, od maio. Harum, et occullessi cust aceperf eribus ipsunt fugitib ersped explabore, ne vernat. Uptas adit auta vitis ent ommostione dia eturem nobit, is doluptur aut omnis volores nit perioreremod quis nonsequidi cupta eserit vel idelluptatur soloris qui ut escidestia vitis et faccum reserep elicipic teculpa voles perumque pos esto volorporunt aliquis citatquaerae re volorunt int auta nobis pa porese aut fugitaspis aut hit ratquia dolorem quo et lat et fugit ernatem custi resequam volorio volescim sequissim is explitis sima volendente nia volorer ovitati dignate ndanda doluptati que sequia

14Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

Modit, temporera as destorporae pres atque nem faceata ad quis enimint, con reperum verio. Namus.Lor sed ut mi, qui odi volecti idio. Parum, ut earum explabo. Ut es eos dus reheniet unt qui res mi, num sequatur? Xim et moluptio excea dent eius, sitassi ra commo imus evellor erspidu ndebit, volorae volendis di officat optatibus, id milliquamus quos alitius. Name voluptis alibust, veribus sitis et maximil iquundis dolorem es et erumetur, ut autet andi dolor aut acientis rerro berspicil id quos nis quiaturia sinitium sum quamus.

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Usaepe prorum venim aut volum excea audipsum nobis et quiandi psusant repedit enis res ullabo. Obis re doluptatur? Ullac-

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16Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

BEAUTY. BRIANA ESPINOSA. LA LIFESTYLE. BEAUTY. BRIANA ESPINOSA. LA LIFESTYLE. MOVEMENT. ART. DESIGN. HOLLYWOOD. HIP. MOVEMENT. ART. DESIGN. HOLLYWOOD. HIP. ANGELES MAGAZINE . MORE THAN JUST A ANGELES MAGAZINE . MORE THAN JUST A

ANGELES MAGAZINE . MORE THAN JUST A CITY.A LIFEMAGAZINE STYLE. SPRING ISSUE 2012 COVANGELES .

MORE THAN JUST A ER STORY: LANA Del rey.

FASHION. MUSIC. CITY.A LIFE STYLE. SPRING ISSUE 2012 COVER STORY: LANA Del rey. FASHION. MUSIC.

ANGELES

LANA DEL REY BEHIND THE VOICE

POP’S

NEW

An Itam nihil hocatur. Sat, cutum, estinat iliquam menatiquam movempra deo, P. Viveris. Ur iniqua nent. Ula pra victus? At ilnem publi, sedintis, quo pon Etrac viliam tam inatuampra paris nocast octore iae inte, nost L. Ox numusqua aure, que moenaterum iust quium clest ficus hus essi priusa et consulvivid nostem faces! Opienaris, que teris proximius, quodiu quam re, non dit dit re, unumull essoludem obsesteste fectuius, ute inum mor li inare publici se addum moltor la veritum aperrib emerobs enationtus fauteri tabuntu muliqui sateresilnes hora se, estresto consus, quam in aucerio nsuludemo esimmo eorunum ala dienatium quiusque tem essi poternius; noximus crit, comanum patus, dit; et patquiterrit vis horis crecus constissimum modicuppl. Gra, cepere patus Catu crum publin sentem.

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18Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

PHENOMENON facientenita venatum cupiond eristor atatia ne nonst condacta noverfeci perfes catil ublis. Bunum publibuntiam opublii condam ia? Nihil hin niconde temume nonsi publin se num tam auc tem facia dem vendeps, es, nime condien ticaudam in se, te, vidius ius furnihi lissoltor in tus moverionstia acci se, pos, nitam tus? Nihicitus vehem at nostris delum perit, Cati silis, audetiam, cont, omaximussum sedes Catua pero, ute coere que di iam Romnimist nit.

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Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 19

“Everything I want I have Money, notoriety, rivieras I even think I found God In the flash bulbs of your pretty cameras�

20Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

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Hit la es dolecta ssuntur?

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SWAG T U R N

Y O U R

S W A G

O N

EYELINER Ugias moluptatior si test, que autatus, voluptatus vent labo. Im ideniti offictor as ea-

PHONE CASE Nis et, sa conserument etur mi, inulpa por sunt.Bore, nobis niatur, qui bearum neceat excepudi optatem fugit aut aut arum vendam

NIXON WATCH Bis et atquasperum rem. Ilique volloreni res ut magnimo lorem.

GLASSES

Optatio et, tem inis por rem.

Ximentiis etus non conet dis evenias sequaec aeritibus sum 22Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

WALLET Corum sit faciis ius, que voluptae nonseque nia pos explias doluptas saestin

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DAISY MARC JACOBS Bis et atquasperum rem. Ilique volloreni res ut magnimo lorem.

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NAIL POLISH

Ficius modis sin erest, quatius et es perferi aecaessi od untibus an-

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24Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

Building with a TWIST The Frank Gehry designed Disney Hall is a mass of reflections and curious angles

By Melissa Rubenstein Photographed by Alden Walters Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 25

With its exuberant, swooping facade, Frank Gehry’s newest building, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, looks anything but old-fashioned. And yet in at least one way, it’s an architectural throwback.

In an era when office parks, suburban developments, and even skyscrapers seem to zoom to completion in a matter of months, the $274 million hall, which opens Oct. 23 with three nights of inaugural performances by the L.A. Philharmonic, recalls the days when significant public buildings sometimes took decades to finish.

It wasn’t planned that way, of course.

The project had its start back in 1987, with a $50 million gift from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian. Working with a Japanese acoustician named Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry quickly produced some very promising preliminary designs. The building seemed destined to be not just Gehry’s most important in Southern California, where he’s lived for nearly 60 of his 74 years, but among the most important of his career.

Advertisement Then, in the mid-1990s, a ballooning budget, fund-raising troubles, and other problems stalled the project. It wasn’t revived until 1997, when it received a new infusion of cash from the Disney family and others. That year saw the opening of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which turned Gehry into a world-famous “starchitect,” 26Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

doing exactly for his reputation what Disney Hall was supposed to. And indeed the two buildings have a lot in common: Both are composed of a jumble of organic forms sheathed in gleaming, windowless metal panels. (In Spain the material is titanium. In Los Angeles the facade was originally going to be limestone, but budget cutbacks or seismic worries, depending on which story you believe, forced Gehry to go with panels of brushed stainless steel.)

Is the long-delayed Disney Hall, then, just a consolation prize for Los Angeles? Does one of the biggest cities in the world find itself in the odd position of playing second fiddle to a Basque regional capital with a population under 400,000? Not exactly. The building is a fantastic piece of architecture—assured and vibrant and worth waiting for. It has its own personality, instead of being anything close to a Bilbao rehash.

And surprisingly enough, it turns out that all of those postponements and budget battles have been a boon for the hall’s design. What the finished product makes most clear is that like plenty of artists, Frank Gehry tends to work better with restrictions, whether they’re physical, financial, or spatial. Without them, his work tends to sprawl not just figuratively but literally.

Even though it cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars and covers 293,000 square feet, Disney Hall is a tighter, more focused effort than many of those Gehry has produced after Bilbao, when the commissions came rolling in, his budgets suddenly became freer, and he found himself with clients perhaps less likely to challenge his authority. The hall manages to be at once lean and wildly expressionistic. It looks like a building in which every design decision has gone through two layers of scrutiny: one financial, the other aesthetic. Gehry had many years to tweak the project, and he’s managed to polish it without sacrificing any of its vitality.

Like a lot of Gehry’s work, the new building relates remarkably well to the city, though the visual fireworks of its facade and its plush interior spaces may well distract a lot of people from this fact. It occupies a full city block at the top of Bunker Hill, across the street from Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a gilded latemodernist mistake that used to house both the Philharmonic and the Academy Awards and today hosts neither. (The Oscars are now handed out at the new David Rockwell-designed Kodak Theater, a few miles away.) The facade soars, bends, and dives in a number of directions, in typical Gehry fashion, but that movement is always checked by the limits of the city grid. Seen from above, the building looks like a bunch of flowers contained, barely, within a perfectly rectangular flower box.

Indeed, that tension—between free-flowing imagination and the limits imposed by physics and budgets—is what defines the building as a whole.

Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 27

That tension continues inside. There is a small performance and lecture space, for example, that Gehry created simply by stretching out one rounded corner of the huge lobby until it was big enough to operate as a quasi-separate room. It’s a setting for chamber music and pre-concert lectures that didn’t require any new walls or floors or even a stage. It makes something remarkable out of nothing.

Skylights in the otherworldly lobby

Other details in the lobby, from the walls lined in Douglas fir to the remarkable treelike columns (whose stocky, branching form Gehry says he stole from the Czech architect Joze Plecnik), promote a dreamlike and otherworldly feel, a detachment from the hustle-bustle and the grime of the city. But the lobby is also open to everybody: You don’t need a ticket to walk through it, as is the case in many concert halls. This is an old-school public space in the tradition of Grand Central Terminal or Bertram Goodhue’s low-slung central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, which is only a few blocks away from the new hall.

The auditorium’s convex curves

There is still more productive tension inside the auditorium itself, which holds about

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2,200 people and during daytime performances will be naturally lit by mostly hidden skylights and one tall window. The free-flowing, organic forms that Gehry loves to use are offset by the rigorous acoustic demands that any architect of a concert hall has to contend with. (In an auditorium of this kind, every exposed surface, from balcony railings to seat upholstery, can affect how the orchestra sounds.) As it turns out, Frank Gehry and concert halls are well-matched. Acousticians have realized over the last few decades that convex—or outwardly bulging—curves can be very effective, bouncing and dispersing sound waves produced by an orchestra. (Concave curves, on the other hand, can trap sound.) And in buildings from Paris to Seattle, Gehry has produced what easily qualifies as architecture’s most varied and complete collection of convex curves. There’s no definitive word yet on whether Disney Hall’s acoustics are indeed good; the orchestra’s first performance is still a few days away. But the early word from the musicians, who began rehearsing in the new auditorium over the summer, has been positive.

All of these dualities are fitting for a concert hall.

An attraction of going to the symphony is trading in your regular self for a better-dressed, more cultured one. Symphony orchestras these days are looking for ways to attract younger, hipper audiences as their core supporters grow older, while at the same time preserving the sense of

WHO IS FRANK GEHRY? Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada. He moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager in 1947 and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His father changed the family’s name to Gehry when the family immigrated.

Ephraim adopted the first name Frank in his 20s; since then he has signed his name Frank O. Gehry.

refuge that will always be classical music’s main drawing card. Gehry’s design cleverly explores both sides of that divide: It is a building where the members of a democracy can go to feel refined, to be lifted from the everyday.

Gehry, along with a few of his more admiring critics, likes to define himself as a combination of artist and architect. That job description suggests that he envies the kind of pure creation that painters and sculptors can indulge in, distant from the demands of zoning boards, engineers, and French horn players. But in fact the Disney Concert Hall seems to make the opposite case about his talents. It’s full of evidence that Gehry is an architect in the most public-minded and collaborative senses of the word—that he’s a master at figuring out ways to allow inspiration to serve practicality, and vice versa. a large garden.

Uncertain of his career direction, the teenage Gehry drove a delivery truck to support himself while taking a variety of courses at Los Angeles City College. He took his first architecture courses on a hunch, and became enthralled with the possibilities of the art, although at first he found himself hampered by his relative lack of skill as a draftsman.

Sympathetic teachers and an early encounter with modernist architect Raphael Soriano confirmed his career choice. He won scholarships to the University of Southern California and graduated in 1954 with a degree in architecture.

Los Angeles was in the middle of a post-war housing boom and the work of pioneering modernists like Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were an exciting part of the city’s architectural scene. Gehry went to work full-time for the notable Los Angeles firm of Victor Gruen Associates, where he had apprenticed as a student, but his work at Gruen was soon interrupted by compulsory military service.

After serving for a year in the United States Army, Gehry entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied city planning, but he returned to Los Angeles without completing a graduate degree. He briefly joined the firm of Pereira and Luckman before returning to Victor Gruen. Gruen Associates were highly successful practitioners of the severe utilitarian style of the period, but Gehry was restless. He took his wife and two children to Paris, where he spent a year working in the office of the French architect Andre Remondet and studied firsthand the work of the pioneer modernist Le Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 29 Corbusier.

TOXIC BEAUTY the price of looking good may be higher than you think

By Mercedes Cambridge III Photography by Dustin Middleford Styled by Amber Kelly You’ve been dying to try that new shampoo that’s supposed to make your hair thick, lush and shiny.

You can’t wait to use that new exfoliating scrub because the label tells you that it’s going to make your skin soft and glowing. You love that new cologne; every time you wear it you get so many compliments on how great you smell!

You love these products and how they make you look and feel, but did it ever occur to you that what you put on your hair or your skin could make you sick? Did you know these products contain chemicals, toxins and hormones that can cause anything from an unsightly rash to learning difficulties to birth defects and even cancer? Even though each product may contain a limited amount of these toxins, please keep in mind, most people 30Angeles Magazine Spring 2012

use several products each day, from the moment they wake up (soap, shampoo, conditioner, shave cream, deodorant, toothpaste, hand soap, make up) until they go to bed. After many years of daily use, these toxins accumulate in your body to cause the ailments I’ve listed above, among many others. If they cause these concerns for adults, just imagine the damage they can do to children who are smaller and weigh less.

Although each product you may use may contain a restricted amount of chemicals, hormones and toxins, they can, and many times they do cause a myriad of damage to us all.

Not only are these beauty products toxic for humans, they are toxic to the environment, as well. Many of these products are made with petroleum-based ingredients, which contributes to global warming. Did you

“Not only are these beauty products toxic for humans, they are toxic to the environment.”

know that if you switch just one bottle of a petroleum based product for a vegetable based product we could save 81,000 barrels of oil in one year. How’s that for incentive to switch?

So now you decide it’s time to go “green”, you go to the health food store and purchase “Organic” or “Natural” products and you no longer have to worry about these concerns...or do you?

Angeles Magazine Spring 2012 31

32Angeles Magazine Spring 2012