Just weeks after the influential painter’s passing, Karl Benjamin’s image can be found painted on a wall in the downtown Pomona Arts Colony. Renowned for his colorful abstract painting, Benjamin taught at Pomona College from 1979 to 1994, and his work is found in collections from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The new mural by David Flores was planned well before Benjamin’s death in July at age 86, and Flores completed it earlier this month. This news comes from an IE Weekly cover story written by Pomona’s very own Chris Michno (of the Financial Aid Office), who calls Benjamin an “artist’s artist.” Writes Michno:

Ironically, Karl Benjamin wasn’t concerned with celebrity; he was simply and resolutely committed to painting. He was engaged in a continuous structural arrangement of shape, color, pattern, space and rotation; he cared more for exploration than notoriety. Yet, his likeness appears on a wall in the Arts Colony. Pedestrians traversing the distance between venues will have ample time to consider the image before them as they pass through the west-end fringe of the Pomona Arts Walk along the row of businesses, studios and galleries. Perhaps some will stop to read the inscription painted on the corner of the mural. Those who know of Karl Benjamin will understand that his final admonishment would be for each one to sit quietly and start coloring.

More about Benjamin today in The Nation, and last month in The Huffington Post.

With this year marking the centenary of composer John Cage’s birth, the New York Times runs a piece about “Cage moments” that “occur when happenstance kicks in, and surprising musical experiences take form, seemingly out of nowhere. They can happen anywhere at any time.” Writer Allan Kozinn found his during a New York City subway ride that evoked the composer’s 4’33”:

Typically, most of the noise you hear comes from the subway itself: its din drowns out conversations, and people tend to stare at their feet, or at whatever they are reading, and listen to their portable music players. But this Tuesday evening just about all the people were talking, and working hard to drown out both the subway and the chats taking place around them …

I would normally have tuned all this out, but instead I sat back, closed my eyes and did what Cage so often recommended: I listened. I made no effort to separate the strands of conversation or to focus on what people were saying. I was simply grabbed by the sheer mass of sound, human and mechanical. It sounded intensely musical to me, noisy as it was, and once I began hearing it that way, I couldn’t stop.

This fall, Pomona College is celebrating Cage, who attended the College from 1928 to 1930, in a slightly less ethereal fashion. The Music Department has organized a series of events that include a 100th birthday party, organ, keyboard, percussion and orchestra performances, and a special Cage-O-Rama performance. The Pomona College Museum of Art, meanwhile, will be showing some of Cage’s watercolors.

The Boston Globe recently featured Eastern Standard, the Kenmore Square restaurant owned by Garrett Harker ’89, for his unusual educational program that has staff members take field trips, hold discussions and sometimes even write reports to learn more about topics ranging from Revolutionary War history to neuroeconomics to Major League Baseball. The purpose is to allow for a more interesting rapport with diners:

Writes Globe culture writer James H. Burnett III:

Training for employees of Eastern Standard is not just about how to pronouce “moules Provençales” and the right way to pour wine. It includes a unique repertoire that seeks to make employees fully versed in the culture and politics of our times. How? Think book reports about historical figures and their neighborhood, as well as field trips to other cities to study culture and ambience, and group discussions about the meanings of life. … The idea is for restaurant staffers to be able to be as urbane and well-informed as the customers they serve. …

Read more.

At laobserved, Claremont native Joel Bellman waxes nostalgic about his long-ago summer dream job working behind the counter at the legendary Rhino Records in the Claremont Village just a few blocks from the Pomona College campus. Writes Bellman:

One Saturday morning, I’d just opened and the store was still empty when a kid wandered in with an old Beatle album he wanted to trade in: “Yesterday and Today” – the first pressing, with the notorious pasted over “butcher cover” I’d only heard about but never before seen. Another Saturday morning, the singer Iggy Pop unexpectedly walked through the door, joined by one of his former bandmates in the Stooges who’d become a friend of one of my co-workers.

Read more.

More Rhino Records news from The Student Life.

The work of light and space artist James Turrell, Pomona College Class of 1965, is under a very bright spotlight at the moment. Turrell, whose on-campus Skyspace draws visitors from a wide area, was featured in this past school year’s “It Happened at Pomona” exhibitions. Now his latest Skyspace, the pyramid-like “Twilight Epiphany,” has just opened at Rice University in Houston. Also in Houston, his “Six Holograms” exhibition opens in July at the Hiram Butler Gallery. Plus Turrell has an ongoing exhibition, “The Light Inside,” near Stockholm, Sweden.

And, in a new Q&A with Los Angeles County Museum of Art Director Michael Govan in Interview Magazine, we learn that Turrell (pictured here on the left at the 2007 dedication of Pomona’s Skyspace) will be the subject of a retrospective exhibition to be shown next year at LACMA, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Govan interviewed Turrell at an Arizona Route 66 truck stop near the artist’s famous Roden Crater project.

In an interesting new piece for Slate, Adam Conner-Simons ’08, a frequent contributor to PCM,  looks at attempts to patent edible innovations ranging from new cuts of beef to no-crust sandwiches.

Digital rules these days in commercial radio, but the turntables are still turning at KSPC (88.7 FM). Last Friday, the campus radio station held a “Vinyl 101” workshop to “encourage students who didn’t grow up with records to get to know” the medium, says station director Erica Tyron. “There are a lot of things that we have that were never re-issued digitally.”

While visitors hung out and played old records from the station’s still-extensive collection, Tyron noted that some students find working with LPs a tad intimidating because of the direct contact with the surface of the record:  “People just get nervous that you’re going to break something.”

Not so for jazz deejay Nathan Schauer ’12, who likes records, in part, because they make it easy to play a particular part of a song. When Schauer was growing up, his dad sometimes played LPs, but “I never really knew how vinyl worked until I started here.” He is one of the roughly 30 percent of KSPC deejays who still make use of the vinyl collection. And with the medium’s recent comeback, the station is even seeing more new releases arrive in LP form these days.

Still, for student deejays the thrill is often found in thumbing through the well-worn album sleeves of yore. “It’s a lot of fun to just find something,” says Ella Schwalb ’14, who has an underground music show. “You don’t really know what to expect.”

The night after Saving Face won the Academy Award for best short documentary, the film's co-director Daniel Junge (center in photo) and reconstructive surgeon Dr. Mohammed Ali Jawad (right), who performed the work featured in the film, visited Pomona College to screen the 40-minute film and take questions from the audience in the packed Rose Hills Theatre. According to the Pomona press release, Saving Face is the story of two survivors of acid attacks in Pakistan, "their battle for justice and their journey of healing. Saving Face follows their personal stories and that of the nation of Pakistan, which is attempting to tackle this vexing social problem." Co-directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, the movie marks the first Academy Award win for Pakistan, notes the International Herald-Tribune. But on Monday night, that golden Oscar statue was held aloft here at Pomona.

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A new musical movement may be in its, well, infancy. Pomona College Art Professor Mark Allen, who runs The Machine Project in Echo Park, on Saturday (Feb. 18) will put on an unusual experiment using the movement of babies to make music with help from a computer, reports Pasadena-based KPCC (89.3 FM) in a web article.

Collaborator Scott Cazan has written software that uses a camera and a computer to track the movement of babies aged 6 months to 18 months, and convert that information into different sounds. Of course, the symphony will also include the natural sound of babies babbling, giggling and crying.

Allen and Cazan will premiere the results between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. this Saturday. Mark Allen says he makes no guarantees about the quality of the performance.

“We haven’t done this before,’ he says. ‘It could sound terrible, not work, be boring, embarrass everyone and end in tears — like most everything at Machine Project.”

We went in-depth about The Machine Project and Mark Allen, “The Curator of Cool,” in the fall 2009 issue of PCM.

Sharon Paul ’78 may never have launched her career in choral conducting if the late William F. Russell, Pomona’s music director from 1951-82, hadn’t been tardy to choir practice. Paul serendipitously took the baton in his stead, unaware of her professor’s arrival. “I think he watched from the back and thought, ‘Oh! That’s what Sharon should do with her life,’” Paul says. “He saw my abilities, felt I had strengths and nurtured them. I don’t think I would have found conducting if I went to any other school.” Since then, Paul has carved out an illustrious career in choral conducting and, in February, will return to the Pomona campus as clinician of the 2012 Pacific Southwest Intercollegiate Choral Association (PSICA) Festival. Pomona, a founding member of the association in 1922, is hosting the festival for the first time in the College’s recorded history

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