Slanted Magazine #35 – Los Angeles

From the perspective of a European, Los Angeles is the opposite of our old metropolises. The sprawling multi-dimensionality is alien, and for many, gets on our nerves: the tangled network of highways and the constant driving around (damn you, General Motors streetcar scandal!), the emphasized nonchalance and never ending optimism of everyone, the sunny weather, the ingenious modernist architecture, the film industry, the tourists and the shitty art museums ... perhaps, just perhaps everything about this city gets on our nerves. Despite, or maybe because of all of this, L.A. is a fucking awesome city, both in the Biblical sense and the slang sense. This staggering awesomeness is fucking undeniable.

We wanted to meet Ed Ruscha to talk about his mysteriously seductive and motionless-looking reductive paintings. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, but his piece “Hollywood is a verb” inspired the three different titles/cover variations of this issue. We would also have liked to see David Hockney, who fled the austerity and grey oppression of England (an early Brexit) to Los Angeles to discover a sunny and hedonistic city. No dice there, either. But hey!, in a town like L.A. and on a production like Slanted’s, not everything has to work out. Often, the best things happen when they’re not planned, just as they did here.

We hung out with the wonderful actor Udo Kier and learned a lot about Hollywood and his life. We spent a superb evening with Sarah Lorenzen and her husband, photographer David Hartwell, who meticulously restored the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, the home of architect Richard Neutra (see our video interviews), and a number of other luminaries.

Our partner-in-crime Ian Lynam introduced us to tons of great designers, artists and teachers, who all—really, all—when asked where their allegiance lies: with N.Y. or L.A., yelled “L.A.!!!” without batting an eyelid. You can find their brilliant works in the new issue.

Illustrations, interviews, essays, and a huge appendix with many useful tips and the best Californian typefaces complement the issue thematically.

Slanted Publishers is an internationally active publishing and media house founded by Lars Harmsen and Julia Kahl. They publish the award-winning print magazine Slanted, covering international developments in design and culture twice a year as well as other design-related projects and publications in the field of typography, contemporary art, and design.