Lifestyle
Murals Have Moved Indoors
When Megan Debin purchased her Long Beach, Calif., house in 2020, she found her backyard dreary with its cinder-block walls. Dr. Debin, an art history professor and content creator, was smitten with a light blue crab motif she had come across on Instagram. She asked its artist, Tracy Allen, a muralist in Long Beach, to paint the crab on one of her yard’s walls.
One mural turned into five — all different designs, predominantly blue — and now Dr. Debin, 45, sees her yard differently. “It’s so bright and playful, and it lifts your mood,” she said, adding that the murals inspired her to create an outdoor space where she could entertain among the yard’s orange trees.
Home murals were once relegated to children’s bedrooms, where they often tied into a theme. Today, they’ve grown up and taken over walls, indoors and out.
Technically speaking, a mural is a large work of art executed right on a wall. And while modern murals are typically associated with streetscapes and Insta-worthy backdrops, they’re one of the most primitive forms of artistic storytelling. In Dordogne, France, for example, the Lascaux cave paintings of about 15,000 to 17,000 years ago depicted horses, bison and other animals. And in Patagonia, Argentina, the “Cueva de las Manos” (“Cave of Hands”) is a composite of stenciled human hands that dates back at least 9,000 years.
“I think as humans we have this built-in tendency to share things with other people and do that in a visual way,” said Hailey Widrig, an art historian and founder of Art Partners Advisory in Paris, which advises collectors and appraises art works. “Murals really evolved out of that.”
The sprawling wall paintings have ebbed and flowed out of popularity through the centuries, from religious works in the Renaissance (like the “Last Supper”) to political statements by Diego Rivera in the 1930s and Banksy’s start in the 1990s. In the 2010s, destinations like Richmond, Va., which has hosted the RVA Street Art Festival since 2012, and Wynwood Walls in Miami began welcoming murals to add vibrancy and become attractions.
The rise of murals on social media has inspired homeowners to bring them indoors. “Platforms like Instagram have reframed murals as contemporary visual statements by transforming them from niche to aspirational through sheer exposure,” said Elena DeStefano, an interior designer in Philadelphia. “In response, designers began integrating them as immersive, site-specific works that introduce a unique narrative and spatial complexity into the home.”
That individualized touch is what makes Ms. DeStefano so inclined to incorporate murals in homes. “I think they work in literally any room with walls,” she said. “They are a true representation of the person that lives in that home because there’s no mural that is ever going to be the same.”
Ms. DeStefano is also a proponent of digital mural wall coverings by companies like Phillip Jeffries. She recently worked with a couple who wanted birds in their mural, and the company blended their designs and tweaked the scale of the birds to make a customized mural.
There are considerations to take into account before painting a mural. Diana Hathaway, an interior designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, suggested pulling in colors from the surrounding design to make the space cohesive. “It doesn’t have to be too literal, but it should echo something you already have going on,” Ms. Hathaway said.
Many see hand-painted murals as an alternative to wallpaper, which can be fussy to install — and not as unique. Some muralists paint designs reminiscent of wallpaper, like Kate White who lives in Garrison, N.Y. She specializes in retro hues and geometric patterns, such as a terrazzo-inspired bathroom mural or pink and yellow blocks in an entry hallway.
Even an often-overlooked area, like a stairwell, is not immune to a muralist’s palette. Kreh Mellick, an artist in Asheville, N.C., recently painted one in a family member’s home in Virginia. Ms. Mellick took the stairwell from plain to whimsical, adorned with stars and a dress-clad sun ascending over flowers and a blueberry patch.
In some cases, homeowners empower muralists to think beyond just painting the walls. Christina Kwan, a muralist in Atlanta, installed an oceanic mural-painting hybrid in a client’s dining room. “When I work on canvases, they’re so contained,” she said. “Then when I work on murals, they’re so expansive, but I want them to have the intimacy that a canvas does.” Additionally, if the homeowners ever move, they can bring the canvas with them, too.
Even in the modern era, murals tell stories. Rachel Kerns, a muralist in Sacramento with a flair for boho-chic florals, painted a dining room ceiling in Pasadena, Calif., last year. Among leaves and golden flowers set against a red backdrop, Ms. Kerns painted silhouettes of the homeowner’s children on the edge of the mural.
“We incorporated the silhouettes in a way that was kind of abstract and not too on the nose or cheesy,” Ms. Kerns said. “I just thought it was so special that it was above the table that they’re going to dine at for years.”
Lifestyle
Glen Powell is ‘The Running Man’ in the latest Stephen King adaptation : Pop Culture Happy Hour
Glen Powell in The Running Man.
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The Running Man is a new dystopian thriller starring Glen Powell as a man so desperate for money to care for his family that he volunteers to run for his life. As a contestant on a TV game show, he must survive for 30 days while being hunted by a group of highly skilled assassins and by his fellow citizens. Based on a Stephen King novel, director Edgar Wright brings in an all-star cast including Lee Pace, Colman Domingo, William H. Macy and Michael Cera.
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Next time you’re driving the Grapevine and nearing the forest of oil rigs on the outskirts of Bakersfield, look for a six-story guitar.
That would be the Hard Rock Casino Tejon, whose opening on Thursday brings industrial-strength Indian gaming — and some Hollywood pizzazz — to a territory better known for cowboy hats, farmland and petroleum extraction.
The Tejon casino stands in the rural community of Mettler, near the convergence of Interstate 5 and State Route 99 — “a stone’s throw away” from Los Angeles, suggested Hard Rock Casino Tejon President Chris Kelley.
In effect, the casino is a $600-million bet by leaders of Hard Rock International and the Tejon Indian Tribe that they can grab a central role among the many Indian casinos in Southern California.
The property is the first full-scale gaming and entertainment destination in Kern County.
(Makenzie Beeney Photography for Hard Rock International)
A wind sculpture at the entrance of the casino.
(Cristian Costea for Hard Rock International)
The draw? Most notably, 150,000 square feet of gaming space — including 58 table games and more than 2,000 slot machines — putting it among the largest casinos in Southern California, on par with many along the Strip in Las Vegas.
And, of course, because this is a Hard Rock venture, there are pop music artifacts on display. Among them: the blue hooded velvet mini dress Sabrina Carpenter wore in her “Please Please Please” music video, signed guitars from Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt, Beck’s tambourine and Natalie Cole’s orange high heels.
The casino also includes four restaurants serving Asian street food, tacos, pizza and American comfort food (especially Nashville hot chicken) — and a bonus feature. At select hours, Kelley said, staff will put up a divider to create Deep Cut, a fancier “speakeasy restaurant” that will emphasize steak and seafood.
“This is something no other Hard Rock Cafe has … a restaurant within a restaurant,” said Kelley, leading a tour in the days before opening.
Live-action table games include blackjack, craps, roulette and baccarat.
(Makenzie Beeney Photography for Hard Rock International)
Plans for the second phase of the project will include a 400-room hotel and spa on-site, along with a 2,800-seat Hard Rock Live venue designed to host concerts, sporting events and ultimately make Kern County a premier destination for travelers and fans. Officials declined to share a timeline for this next installment.
Though its global empire began with a London cafe in 1971, Hard Rock International has been owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida since 2007. The company’s native ownership was “a major influence” on the Tejon tribe’s decision to team up, said Tejon Tribal Chairman Octavio Escobedo III. Hard Rock Casino Tejon is owned by the Tejon Indian Tribe and is managed by Hard Rock International.
For the Tejon tribe and its 1,523 enrolled members, the casino amounts to a new chapter in a saga full of challenges. In the 1850s, the Tejon were included in the creation of California’s first Indian reservation — which was then closed by federal officials in the 1860s. More than a century later, in 1979, the tribe was omitted from a U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs list of formally recognized tribes — an apparent mistake that took decades to correct.
When the Tejon did win federal recognition in late 2011, gaming plans materialized quickly. By late 2016, the tribe had set in motion the acquisition of the casino site.
The restaurant Deep Cut is billed as an “elevated steakhouse experience.”
(Makenzie Beeney Photography for Hard Rock International)
For the tribe, Escobedo said, the long-term picture likely includes developing a residential community — which the Tejon haven’t had for more than a century — as the tribe aims for “financial sovereignty.” Though he declined to specify the amount of money that would require, he did say “it’s going to take a tremendous amount of financial discipline to achieve that.”
So far, things feel promising. Escobedo said 52 tribal members have signed on to work at casino jobs and “I’d love to see that number double over the next year or so.”
Long before the Seminoles bought control of Hard Rock International, the tribe pioneered Indian gaming in the U.S., beginning with a bingo hall in Hollywood, Fla., in 1979. Through further investment and legal victories rooted in tribal sovereignty, tribes in 29 states across the U.S. have built hundreds of gaming operations, which together gross more than $40 billion yearly.
Beyond its possibilities for the Tejon tribe, the arrival of the casino means about 1,100 new jobs for greater Bakersfield, which lost a beloved entertainment venue in August when Buck Owens’ Crystal Palace closed after 29 years.
Owens, who died in 2006, was a longtime resident of Bakersfield and proponent of the gritty “Bakersfield sound” in country music. Besides artifacts from pop music, rock ’n’ roll and Tejon cultural history, Kelley said, “We are going to have some Buck Owens memorabilia. It just wouldn’t be right not to.”
Lifestyle
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A note from Wild Card host Rachel Martin: You know how famous actors or musicians will sometimes talk about how hard it is to lose their anonymity? They talk about how every detail of their lives is dissected and interpreted to fit someone else’s narrative. It’s the trade off for getting to do that kind of work, and they understand that devil’s bargain. But Malala Yousafzai never agreed to this deal.
Fame and notoriety was forced on Yousafzai after the Taliban shot her for talking publicly about why girls should be allowed at school. After the attack, she was put on a pedestal in front of the entire world.
Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel peace prize when she was just 17. She wasn’t just a survivor, she was a hero on the global stage. But when does a hero just get to be a human? Malala Yousafzai spoke with me about how she’s figuring that out. Her new memoir is called “Finding My Way.”
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