Alissa Walker

Our spiny, spiky, Gaudí-by-way-of-L.A. landmark, the Watts Towers, represent an extreme, experimental way of working, rising and falling in the hands of Simon Rodia as he tested out radical ideas in rebar and concrete. “The best story comes from Charlie Mingus,” says artist Edgar Arceneaux, 37. “He said that one......

“I went surfing this morning in Malibu, and there were six people in the water,” Ben Goldhirsh gushes after he bounds down the stairs into the lobby of GOOD magazine’s Sunset Strip headquarters. “It was awesome, it was awesome.” Then, just to reinforce the complete and utter awesomeness of the......

In 1994, Jonathan Wells famously launched the film festival RESFest at a Christmas party in his San Francisco basement, when he showed a few friends some skate videos by a not-yet-mainstream director named Spike Jonze. RESFest quickly escalated into a global phenomenon — a decade later it had spawned the......

Like a ride at Disneyland, each room at Motion Theory Studios is a vignette revealing a different stage of the production process: directors chewing on storyboards at a pre-pro meeting, costume designers hidden in racks of multicolored vintage dresses, animators toiling over type treatments, dark caves of postproduction filled with......