LAX Airport

Kobe Bryant superhero cape big seller at LAX airport

Sports memorabilia is a big seller at many airports and, as you might imagine, anything relating to the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team is very popular at Los Angeles International Airport.

LAX Sports shirts

And, even though knee injuries and a torn Achilles tendon seem to have taken Kobe Bryant out of the game – for now and possibly forever – I learned last week that in many LAX gift shops these #24 super hero capes are among the bestselling items.

“For children AND adults,” the salesperson eager to model the cape in this photo told me.

LAX KOBE

LAX KOBE HeRO CAPE

Stuck at LAX Airport

LAX GATE 134

Earlier this week I took a quick tour of some of the new amenities, shops and restaurants at Los Angeles International Airport. Here are few tasty tidbits from my tour.

In the shiny new Tom Bradley International Terminal, I was pleased to see that many of the seats are powered and that some have a place to rest weary legs:

LAX SEATS for resting

In Terminal 4, the Homeboy Cafe and Bakery was doing great business and raising both funds and awareness for a local gang intervention program.

Cafe front

In Terminal 5, I found travelers positively giddy at finding reasonably-priced healthy food and such a wide variety of lemonade flavors at the airport branch of Lemonade restaurant.

LAX LEMONADE

 

LAX lemonade drinks

And, over in Terminal 2, in the Air New Zealand Koru Lounge, they were serving these colorful candies.

More photos next week after my swing back through LAX.

 

ANZ Koru Candy

Art made of coffee filters at LAX Airport

Drink up! A new art installation at Los Angeles International Airport is made out of used coffee filters and will be on view in the art display case in the Customs Hall of Tom Bradley International Terminal through March 2013.

Detail from Passage by Sophia Allison and Leanne Lee. Photo by Kelly Barrie, Panic Studio LA

The work is titled Passage and is by Los Angeles-based artists Sophia Allison and Leanne Lee, who have sewn together dried, used coffee filters and mixed with them delicate drawings made on rice paper.

Installation view of Passage. Photo by Kelly Barrie, Panic Studio LA

Here’s the explanation of the work:

Passage references a ritualistic domestic action: making coffee. Water passes through ground coffee and filters, staining the ghost image of the process into the paper. Allison and Lee dried and ironed flat the used filters, then stitched them into clusters reminiscent of floral and vegetative landscapes. Adding to the juxtaposition of organic and inorganic, of ritual and daily activity, the artists incorporated cityscape drawings on rice paper which were stained with watercolor and coffee.  Informed by traditional Korean symbols and motifs, these drawings were reconfigured by cutting, tearing, and sewing the images into the clusters of coffee filters.  As actual geographies, locations and landscapes shift and fluctuate – physically, mentally, and metaphorically –the materials that comprise this work are non-permanent and fragile. As a modular construct, Passage can be repositioned infinitely, becoming site-specific and speaking to the temporal nature of life.