Remember when a laser lightshow was going to save Long Beach?

IMAGE COURTESY ARTS COUNCIL LONG BEACH
Richard Florida was prowling the stage in a Hyatt ballroom, his every thoughtful chin stroke, reflective pause, and rim-shot wisecrack narrowcast over two state-of-the-art flat-screens at stages left and right for an audience of business types gathered to hear a [...]

If the Majic Wand does return to Long Beach after a long absence, it will be a case of art imitating life. Because when Rockne Krebs arrived in LB to install his laser art project in 1992, it wasn’t his first time here.

The Majic Wand was going to “forever change the downtown night”, according the Press-Telegram’s optimistic assessment when the laser light art installation debuted in 1992. Actually, it was only going to forever change the downtown night Wednesday through Sunday from about an hour after sunset to 11 pm, and on holidays and during special events. [...]

For such a prominent– or at least, once prominent– work of public art, the Majic Wand (scroll down to previous entry) has had surprisingly little written about it. That’s odd, because it qualifies as notable both in terms of how the media measures the worthiness of such work, and how the art world does. [...]

You may not have noticed it, but last Saturday night was “Lights Out Long Beach”, an eco-friendly night when everyone was supposed to turn off all nonessential lights for one hour, and replace one incandescent light bulb with a compact fluorescent bulb. So it was only to expected that the Majic Wand wouldn’t be [...]