1. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  2. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  3. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  4. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  5. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  6. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  7. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  8. Performance by Scott Benzel, Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Performance by Scott Benzel - Desert Center (Composition I10 Mvmt IV: Dusk) for string quartet, experimental percussion, AM radio, and electronics

    April 4th, 2015, Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  9. Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance

    Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  10. Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance

    Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
  11. Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

    Desert Center Palm Circle, backdrop for performance

    Desert Center, CA


    ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025

LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center

A performance of Desert Center (Composition I-10, Mvmt IV: Dusk), composed by Scott Benzel, will be presented as part of Zoe Crosher’s LA-LIKE: Expanded Shangri-LA’d exhibition at The Palm Springs Museum in Palm Desert, April-May 2015. This exhibition is presented in conjunction with LA-LIKE: Shangri’LA’d, Crosher’s chapter of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project in Palm Springs, organized by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division).

Desert Center is part of a twenty-four hour musical cycle whose notes and number of participants are dictated partially by the traffic patterns, sounds and harmonics of the I-10 freeway. This piece will be performed at dusk on Saturday, April 4th inside an abandoned circle of palm trees in a small ghost town between Blythe and Palm Springs known as Desert Center. It will also performed Friday, April 3rd at the Palm Springs Museum at Palm Desert.

This composition is inspired by such legendary desert-based site-specific works as Iannis Xenakis’ Polytope de Persepolis performed at Persepolis, Iran in 1971 and Stockhausen’s Stimmung performed at Jeita, Lebanon in 1969. Here in Desert Center, a former roadside attraction, now a quasi-mystical site fallen into disrepair, the desert site embodies both entropy and a site of regeneration. Like the ruins of the Temple of Darius in Persepolis, the palm trees stand as vertical sentries and reminders of a more glorious past; a decrepit California Stonehenge.

Projects
  • The New LA-LIKE
    1. LA-LIKE: Sunlight As Spotlight
    2. LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds
    3. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics
    4. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific
    5. LA-LIKE: LA Imaginary As Unlit Lightboxes
    6. LA-LIKE: Fools Gold Dust (Mimic) Paintings
    7. LA-LIKE: Day For Night (or Sunlight As Spotlight)
    8. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, in conjunction with LAND
    9. LA-LIKE: Mirage
    10. Shangri-LA'd & Expanded Shangri-LA'd
    11. LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center
    12. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Perfume
    13. LA Disappearing Frond-Like
    14. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Dessert Concepts & Recipes
    15. For An Evening with Eve Babitz, at the Chateau Marmont
    16. Tear Sheet Posters
    17. LA-LIKE (LOST)
    18. LA-LIKE: LAXART Billboard
    19. The Pools I Shot
    20. LA-LIKE
  • The Michelle duBois Project
    1. The Uniqued Series
    2. The Additive Dust Series
    3. Mae Wested
    4. The Disbanding of Michelle duBois
    5. The Vanishing of Michelle duBois
    6. The Disappearing of Michelle duBois
    7. The Other Disappeared Nurse
    8. Silhouetted
    9. All Her Shadows
    10. Blackened Last Four Days & Nights in Tokyo
    11. Almost the Same
    12. The Unveiling of Michelle duBois
    13. The Unraveling of Michelle duBois
    14. Posed Postcards
    15. Polaroided
    16. The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois
    17. Obfuscated
  • The Santa Cruz Kids
  • Out The Window (LAX)
  • The Fainting Club
    1. The Fainting Club (London)
    2. The Fainting Club (New York)
    3. The Fainting Club (Los Angeles)
    4. The Fainting Club (More Cities)
    5. The Fainting Club (About)
  • –
  • Publications
    1. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics / The Bronzed Blossoms of Madame, published by X Artists' Books
    2. The Good & The Glamorous, A Memoir of Misremembering & The Cold War
    3. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Published by Hesse Presse, Los Angeles, CA - Spring 2016 (Sold Out)
    4. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles (May 2015) Published by Metropolis Books
    5. Forthcoming: The Re-duBois Book
    6. Returning to Berlin / Publication curated by Kim Schoen - Motto, Berlin (August 2013)
    7. Why Art Photography? by Lucy Soutter (2013) Published by Routelage
    8. Volume 4: The Disappearance of Michelle duBois, aka *Mitchi* (Fall 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    9. Volume 3: The Unveiling of Michelle duBois, aka *Cricket* (Spring 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    10. Volume 2: The Unraveling of Michelle duBois, aka *Alice Johnson* (Fall 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    11. Volume 1: The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, aka *Kathy* (Spring 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    12. Out the Window (LAX) with essays by Norman Klein, Pico Iyer, & Julian Meyers (2007)
    13. NTNTNT (2004)
    14. L.A. Now: Volume One, Published by Art Center College of Design, August 2002