Kaleidoscope

Melanie Wood, president of the Color Marketing Group: Green has peaked in all its shades. It's still a great environment color. It won't go out, but it will settle down and become a neutral. Blue is back. Red will come on stronger. White's rising and no more plain black. Look for black purple, black red, black iris. Fashion: Stay in midtone palette, nothing too strong. If you have to buy neon, buy it in something expendable like a scarf. And relax. You can't buy the wrong color because it won't be in the stores.

As construction starts on a 200,000-square-foot entertainment mall, the City Council will meet today to settle parking and access issues connected with the so-called Kaleidoscope project. The city became partners last year with the developer, Pacific Development Partners Inc., investing $2 million to build the mall, which is to include specialty shops and entertainment such as a theater complex and a community concert venue.

You don't have to know the mythology and context of a particular ceremony to enjoy it, but sometimes it helps. Joseph Campbell probably never said this, but it was implied when he started explaining myths and rituals to the general public on PBS. And it always comes to mind when dances with ethnic roots are featured, as they were in the last Dance Kaleidoscope '96 program, at the Ford Amphitheatre on Saturday night.

Modern dance was the first movement form to exalt individual expression--indeed to insist on it. But when a dance fails to offer viewers a way inside, it becomes a coded message: meaningful to insiders, a riddle to everyone else. Dance Kaleidoscope '96 has been full of such dances, with an 11-part program at Loyola Marymount University on Sunday adding its share.

It's always tempting to look at the annual Dance Kaleidoscope series as an index of Southern California creative trends when it more accurately reflects the priorities of that year's selection panel. At worst, academic rectitude reigns.

Kaleidoscope, an entertainment mall proposed three years ago, may finally be moving off the drawing board. The City Council agreed Monday to invest $2 million in the project, which would include restaurants, specialty retail shops and several movie screens. Acting as the Community Development Agency, the council also voted to give developer Pacific Development Partners Inc. of Beverly Hills about $125,000 annually in redevelopment funds for the 200,000-square-foot mall.

Kaleidoscopes, those groovy, psychedelic eye trips, have become even groovier. On Sundays, crowds gather along the Ventura Promenade to try the latest innovation in kaleidoscopes: attached to the front of the standard mirrored chamber is a slender vertical tube containing multicolored specks suspended in glycerin oil; when the specks slowly float downward, they add the element of motion to the experience.

Call it Dance Kaleidoscope West: the first visit by the annual showcase series to the intimate Strub Theatre at Loyola Marymount University. Besides four previously reviewed offerings, the Sunday performance included one duet and four solos showcasing first-rate dancing and choreography that didn't always clearly express the themes described in the program booklet.

I write these words from a fast up-and-coming European country called Ireland and from a house haunted by the ghost of James Joyce, who once visited here. And haunted too, by other literary gentlemen who roamed along these verdant byways of Westmeath, namely Evelyn Waugh, who actually thought of buying my home and who is the present subject of this quite marvelous biography by Selina Hastings. On the jacket cover, Waugh stares at you with no-nonsense eyes.