Falling Embers

This was a powerful representation of the civil rights era:  A sculpture made from the charred remains of a torched church from, I believe, Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s.  The pieces of wood dangled in a precise arrangement from the ceiling. 

Update:  Thanks to a commenter I can now credit the artist: Cornelia Parker.

Portals of Andromeda

Jon Kuhn’s kaleidoscopic, prismatic sculpture at the DeYoung.

Does the title refer to the mythical Greek character punished for her mother’s pride in her beauty?  Or to the constellation?  Or to the galaxy nearest to ours, containing a trillion stars?

Nature Nook at DeYoung

From the outside, it isn’t easy to see how the museum’s designers have created these little open-air nooks that have mossy landscaping…

I like the picture enough to show it to you, even though there’s a reflection from the window.   Also note the bumpy surface of the museum’s exterior walls, like someone stamped the wall tens of thousands of times with a spoon.

Hanging Sculpture and its Shadows

Floating and falling are unconscious themes in a lot of the art we saw at the DeYoung…

I’m in this picture somewhere…

Detail from a sculpture at the DeYoung…

Enough Politics, Time For Pictures

From the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, specifically the tower, which is like a new hill from which to see San Francisco:

More to come after Mother’s Day festivities…

Migraine Art

Recovering from the debacle of TimesSelect, the New York Times is developing a superb repository of off-the-wall blogs.  I just discovered this one, devoted to migraines. 

The most recent post is a long essay by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (not one of my favorite bands, sorry to say).  His descriptions of the mysterious condition are compelling, especially to someone like me who’s never had one but has lived with people who have.  Tweedy now claims to have his migraines under control, but only after years of suffering, and a painkiller addiction that was a result of misguided care:

I had had a psychiatrist that was prescribing drugs to me without any conscience. I actually had a psychiatrist prescribe Vicodin to me as a way to alleviate anxiety. And I also had a therapist tell me that I needed the painkillers because I had migraines and that I didn’t need the antidepressants because they were just capping my creative energy. This guy was just a quack, an idiot. But when you’re in such a vulnerable and desperate state as I was, you want somebody to help you. I really wish I had been in a condition where I could have known and listened and understood that these people were out of their minds, but I wasn’t. I was vulnerable and I needed someone to help me. But I got really, really bad help.  

Also on this blog, a slide show of paintings by migraine sufferers.  Here’s an example:

Bruce? Couldn’t You Make Bail? *Updated w/Link to New Single

This is the cover of the new Bruce Springsteen album, due out in early October. 

What is he trying to say?

Is he very sad? 

Did we wake him?  

Actually, excerpt for the styled hair, it looks like a mug shot.  Like he’s channeling James Brown:

 or Glen Campbell:

And don’t his eyes look a little…unfocused? Like one is looking over here and the other is looking over there?

This is supposed to be a rockin’ fun album with a lot of the E Street Band.  The cover does not convey that.

*Update:  Here’s a link to his new single, “Radio Nowhere.”  It’s…ok.  Melodically a little monotonous.  He’s mining the same territory as Tom Petty’s “The Last DJ,” complaining about the complete loss of any personality in radio. 

I was tryin’ to find my way home
But all I heard was a drone
Bouncing off a satellite
Crushin’ the last lone American night
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
This is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

I was spinnin’ ’round a dead dial
Just another lost number in a file

Except Tom Petty wrote about this problem five years ago. 

It should go without saying that the worm has turned a little.  After all, Bruce, you released the single on the Internet.  Where there is a ton of great music, infinitely more than even during the great years of classic rock radio.   I can make my own 1,300-song playlist now, include as much old and new music as my mp3 player will hold, put it on random play, and it’s like the best, most eclectic underground radio station ever. 

Bruce could probably afford an even bigger mp3 device. He is The Boss, after all.

I try to do as little old-guy complaining about changes in the world as I can.  I’ve been rebuked for doing it by a good friend on this site!  Even Tony Soprano said, “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.”  So while I think Bruce is going to get attention for this Major Statement, it’s pretty empty if you ask me.

The reality is, the radio industry’s changes reflect the Paradise Lost of our popular culture.   In the glory days after the Beatles’ arrival on Ed Sullivan until the mid-70s, the culture united around an inclusive idea of pop music, when radio stations would play the Rolling Stones followed by Aretha Franklin followed by Frank Sinatra followed by “The Ballad of the Green Berets” or a song by a French nun.   

By the time Bruce Springsteen came onto the scene, those days were about gone, which is why he got so little airplay until he was able to figure out how to use TV in the mid-80s.  I was a huge fan back then, and I felt like a disciple, telling people about this great rock hero many of them had never heard of.  

I don’t see anyone bringing those days back.  Pop’s biggest star right now is Justin Timberlake.  I cannot hum a single one of his tunes.  And one of the reasons why is I never listen to top-40 radio anymore.  I am now in charge of what I want to hear.  About half of my personal Top 10 are technically dead, but they live on in the music I carry around with me.  And, Bruce, old as we are, I think that’s a good thing.

Sorry, Theresa

The story of Theresa Duncan has begun to take shape.

It’s the story of what happens to you after you die. What happens to your reputation when reporters think your corpse is sexy.

Theresa Duncan wrote a blog almost every day of the last two years of her life, a blog in which she left almost no clues to her pending suicide. But it’s being picked over anyway. The big assumption is that her death had something to do with her alleged delusions about being stalked. Apparently, she and her boyfriend, the notable artist Jeremy Blake, shunned some ex-friends who didn’t buy into their fears. According to a follow-up story by the LA Times’ Chris Lee:

Bradford Schlei, head of production for Muse Productions, optioned the rights to George Pelicanos’ “Nick’s Trip” that was to have been Blake’s feature film directing debut. The project stalled just before a deal with Paramount Vantage was being negotiated, however, when Blake accused Schlei’s then girlfriend and the project’s screenwriter of being Scientologists. (Schlei says neither he nor the other two are affiliated with the church.)

“It was complete and utter craziness,” Schlei said. “Theresa sent around e-mails, delusional things. They’d say, ‘You’re a Scientologist, your girlfriend’s a Scientologist, we don’t want to be involved with you.’

“The thing that ended our relationship was when Jeremy said [my girlfriend] was trying to ruin Theresa’s reputation. None of this ever had to do with Jeremy. It was always about Theresa and her film career.” Several other sources confirmed Schlei’s account, recalling that Duncan’s e-mails grew wilder toward the end of her life.

“There was a paranoia thing going on there,” he continued. “If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell.”

(Ms. Gaskell is a former girlfriend of Blake’s who Duncan, and perhaps Blake, saw as a participant in their persecution.)

Kate Coe, in LA Weekly, goes much deeper in her search of Duncan’s seemingly endless foibles. I’ve left all her links in this excerpt:

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

Duncan’s paranoia began to hurt her professionally. Renee Tab, her agent, tells the Weekly that Duncan was advised to tone down the paranoid talk but called back later to say she had not given that advice to Duncan, but hoped or wished someone had. And two of Duncan’s acquaintances, who refused to be named, say they were so unsettled by Duncan’s campaigns by e-mail, where she accused them of trying to hurt her or Blake’s careers, that they contacted lawyers. Nichols says of Duncan and Blake, “They didn’t just burn their bridges, they exploded them.”

THE ILL-FATED COUPLE LEFT — some might argue fled — Los Angeles last fall. In New York, Blake took a full-time job at Rockstar Games and prepared for a big fall show at the Corcoran Gallery, where he was to be artist in residence. The stylish couple found the perfect apartment in a converted rectory at St. Mark’s in the Bowery.

By uncanny coincidence, activist Father Frank Morales, a controversial figure who probes conspiracy theories, was the pastor. Morales told the Weekly that “Theresa . . . manifested a penchant for looking at things in a dark way,” adding, “She came to [New York] with some hard feelings, some hurt, but she was a bright light.”

She and Jeremy Blake were photographed at New York social events, and she eagerly joined the St. Mark’s fund-raising community. In March, her short story “Topographers” was published in Bald Ego, the au courant magazine edited by Glenn O’Brien. But Duncan never shook off her fear and suspicion. On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse. She accused me of being an undercover CIA officer, of eavesdropping on her, of having her FBI file. The conversation she blogged about — about her FBI file — never came up; the whole conversation was completely fictional.

“She was losing her grip on reality, and Jeremy was so devoted to her that he would go along with it . . . It became impossible to ignore, and so my [girlfriend] and I began to extricate ourselves.”

This last paragraph is the developing conventional wisdom: Theresa went crazy and dragged Jeremy down with her. Jeremy had the “real” art career, but was hobbled by his strange symbiotic relationship with a crazy person. His suicide was, in effect, crazy Theresa’s final grasp at him from the grave.

David Segal of the Washington Post — he’s their music critic and in that role he’s good — takes a step back from this horror-movie cliche, and tries a more psychological approach:

Duncan and Blake didn’t just fall for each other; they grew so close they all but intertwined. “When you called, they were always both on the phone,” said Jason Meadows, an artist and friend. “When you e-mailed, they’d take turns writing back. At some point, I realized it doesn’t matter which of them I’m communicating with. They were that tight.”

One of their shared passions, friends said, was a distressingly paranoid view of the world. The two would describe plots by the government, plots by Scientologists, people tailing them, breaking into their home. All of it sounded so far-fetched that it was easy to think occasionally that they were kidding. They weren’t.

“It was like a Tom Clancy novel,” said Meadows, “except that was very real to them. And if you said, ‘This can’t be true,’ there’d be a lot of anger and you’d be exiled. That happened to me several times and I had to work to regain their friendship.”

Gradually they seemed to slip into some sort of shared psychosis, and they had each other to reinforce delusions that friends were powerless to talk them out of. Many of those friends bailed out, frustrated and bewildered. But for all the tumult, the pair remained focused and Blake, at least, was applying himself to work, said Binstock. Duncan could be prickly and acerbic and sometimes one would say something loopy, friends said, but the couple generally kept it together.

“Obviously there was much more going on than any of us realized, but he never said anything that suggested there was a problem,” said Anne Schwartz Delibert, Blake’s mother, who lives in Takoma Park. “He was devoted to her. He was a loyal caretaker.”

The last comment from Blake’s mother refutes everything that came before it, though, doesn’t it?  His own mother never detected a problem?  How does that fit into a diagnosis of “shared psychosis…a distressingly paranoid view of the world…?”

See, that’s my problem with virtually all of the journalism published since the pair’s death.  There was too much going on in both of their lives for anyone to say, or even suggest, what caused these deaths.  The reporters know this.  So they dig up stuff about both of them — Duncan especially — and put it out there.  It’s salacious. It’s embarrassing.  It’s suggestive, but suggestive of what they won’t say, because they don’t know.   But because it’s a mystery, there is no end to the investigation and revelation of every stupid, unkind, ill-considered or even “paranoid” thing they might have done or said in their combined 75 years on Earth.

Is there anyone whom you couldn’t portray in a extremely negative light by choosing, say, five anecdotes from two lifetimes — three of them reported anonymously?

And neither of them can respond. “There are two sides to every story,” is a truism from kindergarten, but the way events have unfolded, we’re only getting one side of each tale, and the tales are accumulating and solidifying into a reputation, a kind of pseudo-truth that will mestatisize in the vacuum of the real truth.   Which is none of our business anyway.

You can think about this:

At some point, you will die.  Maybe you’ll die before your time, in a sensational fashion.  At whatever point, your life will become a story, but it won’t be your story, it’ll be the story that your survivors will try to piece together.  If you happen to be prominent, or if your death is determined to be sexy, the media will assist with this process, whether they have a right to or not.

Everything you ever said or did that anyone remembers or can document will float to the surface, like old bobbins released from under a rock.  They will all appear to have the same weight — the good, the bad, the funny, the weird, the selfish, the selfless; something you did for ten minutes, something you did for ten years.  All of it floating on the surface, waiting for others to find patterns in it, patterns more revelatory of their own minds than of yours.

Ron Rosenbaum, a good writer with an interesting blog is obviously fascinated by Duncan/Blake, and has begun some kind of investigative study.  Compared with Lee, Coe and Segal, however, Rosenbaum is relatively modest in his claims to understand anything based on these fragments — yet.

Unlike Coe and Lee, Rosenbaum lets his readers comment.  I think this commenter, Mike Payne, is reacting to all the news coverage of his friends, but takes it out on Rosenbaum because he provides an outlet:

Theresa’s blog was read around the world,in her wake she is praised for her dynamic personality and intelligence-one webblog event submits that this is all ARG, a game-Theresa would be flattered,certainly capable of masterminding such a concept.The fact is her real life is as hyperdynamic as it reads.
The people who discount Theresa and Jeremy’s claims-who needs the CIA and CoS (Church of Scientology) with friends like them.You tell people the real shit going down in your life and they degrade you,how many times do I get to read GLenn O’Brien’s disregard of Theresa’s concerns as improbable-he never said this to her face-otherwise his word would for sure not be the last post on Staircase.I bet the emails you ‘ve read would confirm this in terms of how T & J react to feeling betrayed.
I don’t believe she killed herself-I’m sure I’ve lost you all now-I fucking knew her-I was even able to give her the benefit of the doubt,from her note reading she was at peace-it’s not gloom and doom it’s just exactly what she writes-she is at peace so let her rest,her personal reasons are her own damn business to quote her film THE HISTORY OF GLAMOUR-the people who made this most excellent bit of film,were not done living,even if they did make it years ago.

I  add this not to validate the alleged “conspiracy” — I’m in no position to do that — but to illustrate that some people apparently believed them, some people didn’t find them irrational, or if they did, never said anything until their deaths gave them the opportunity.

I’ll close with two comments from another Washington Post writer, an in-house blogger named Joel Achenbach:

Forensic psychoanalysis on the dead is never wise.

An entirely praiseworthy position, which he undercuts with his next word: “But…”

I forgive him, however, because he closes with this even more praiseworthy comment:

I hope no movie studio decides it’s a great romantic story, Shakespearean and ripe for the screen.

It’s just sad.

Amen.

“…the Apparent Double Suicide…” *UPDATED

A rank odor rises from the LA Times’ belated coverage of blogger/filmmaker Theresa Duncan’s death and the subsequent disappearance of her boyfriend, the artist Jeremy Blake. After rehashing what everyone else said days ago — the deaths were “confounding,” the art world is in shock — writer Chris Lee gropes in the dark for explanations that are clearly beyond the facts in his notebook, and in doing so, inflicts needless damage to their reputations.

If someone knows why two talented, popular people with the world on a string would kill themselves, they can choose to tell that story. When it comes to prominent people — and there’s no question Duncan and Blake courted attention — the trade-off between violating the privacy of the deceased and offering a coherent narrative to explain a senseless act tends to favor telling the story. But only if you have a story to tell. Lee doesn’t. He has a hodge-podge of disquieting details that add up to a big, contradictory blob of nothing that perhaps tells us more about Lee than his subjects.

I Never Knew Theresa Duncan

I never knew Theresa Duncan, author of the blog The Wit of the Staircase among many other creative accomplishments. But I happened to get a note from an admirer of hers last week, asking if I could confirm her death.

Our connection was LA Observed. Kevin Roderick loved Duncan’s blog, and he says nice things about this one, too. Somehow, the e-mailer thought we might know each other, and hoped I might be able to dispel what was then just a rumor.

This thread led me on a search through the Internet to find out what had happened. The facts are unbelievably sad and frankly bewildering. Not only is Duncan gone, but so is her boyfriend of 12 years, the well-known artist Jeremy Blake, who apparently drowned himself a few days after finding Duncan’s body in their New York apartment.

The New York papers have all now weighed in. The most straightforward account appeared in Saturday’s New York Daily News:

Belated New Year’s Gift

If you have a blog that takes comments, you find out a lot about the inner workings of spam.  WordPress equips you with a spam filter, but it doesn’t catch all the spam.  Some spammers are better at disguising their links in seemingly benign comments like “Nice site,” or “I was looking for information on this subject, this was helpful,” and those comments sometimes slip onto your site.  

One giveaway is when you click on the website or name link and it takes you to a site selling…whatever.  Insurance is the most common.  Another giveaway is when the comment is made to an old post that no one has commented on before. The game for these spammers is to trick the Google algorhythm into ranking them higher, so they will get more hits and, they hope, more sales. 

So, when I saw this comment — “Lovely Blog!” — on a boring year-old post about urban sprawl, it had all the earmarks of spam.   But then I looked at the website associated with the post: http://sureshg.wordpress.com/.    Hmm, a WordPress blog.  I hadn’t been aware of any spam being hosted by WordPress.  So I clicked.  And here is a screenshot of what I saw:

This is an absolutely gorgeous site! How its owner could find mine “lovely” by comparison is astonishing.   Every photo on the site — by Suresh Gundappa — is as penetratingly beautiful as this one.  Each one is accompanied by a “meditation,” a beautiful, Zen-like prose poem about applying the wisdom of nature to our strange human anxieties.  Today’s top post starts off like this:

It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense.

But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life. You are living in competition — that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison — that will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present which is the only reality — that will create tension.

IT IS A QUESTION of simple understanding; there is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good.
Accept yourself.

This is the way existence wants you to be. Some trees are taller; some trees are smaller. But the smaller trees are not tense — neither are the taller trees full of ego. Existence needs variety. Somebody is stronger than you; somebody is more intelligent than you — but in something, you also must be more talented than anybody else.

Just find your own talent. Nature never sends any single individual without some unique gift. Just a little search… perhaps you can play on the flute better than the president of the country can be a president — you are a better flautist than he is a president.

There is no question of any comparison. Comparison leads people astray. Competition keeps them continuously tense, and because their life is empty, they never live in the moment. All they do is to think of the past, which is no more, or project in the future, which is not yet.

Reading this, and looking at the incredible mountain landscape… it relaxed me!  I’ve got a lot going on, as you might know.  This has the potential to be a very restless weekend.  But somehow, reading this put me at ease.  

Mr. Gundappa is, from what I can tell, an investment banker and photographer in India.  On a Blogger page he lists his age as 250.  What, if any, religious tradition these thoughts come from is not identified, at least from what I can find.  It was an unlikely path that brought me to his wisdom, but, ya know, that’s how life works sometimes.

Another Candidate to Buy the LA Times?

With all the recent talk of David Geffen selling off a Jackson Pollock painting to raise cash for a possible purchase of the Los Angeles Times, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that this story would run in today’s New York Times:

After retiring from truck driving in 1987, Teri Horton devoted much of her time to bargain hunting around the Los Angeles area. Sometimes the bargains were discovered on Salvation Army shelves and sometimes, she willingly admits, at the bottom of Dumpsters.

Even the most stubborn deal scrounger probably would have been satisfied with the rate of return recently offered to her for a curiosity she snagged for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. A buyer, said to be from Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay $9 million for it, just under an 180 million percent increase on her original investment. Ms. Horton, a sandpaper-voiced woman with a hard-shell perm who lives in a mobile home in Costa Mesa and depends on her Social Security checks, turned him down without a second thought.

Ms. Horton’s find is not exactly the kind that gets pulled from a steamer trunk on the “Antiques Roadshow.” It is a dinner-table-size painting, crosshatched in the unmistakable drippy, streaky, swirly style that made Jackson Pollock one of the most famous artists of the last century. Ms. Horton had never heard of Pollock before buying the painting, but when an art teacher saw it and told her that it might be his work (and that it could fetch untold millions if it were), she launched herself on a single-minded post-retirement career — enlisting, along the way, a forensic expert and a once-powerful art dealer — to have her painting acknowledged as authentic by scholars and the art market.

Horton is demanding at least $50 million to sell the painting. Her efforts to get the hyper-elite art world to validate her find is the subject of a new documentary, “Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?”

If Horton doesn’t get the money she thinks she deserves, she told the New York Times:

“Before I let them take advantage of me,” she said, smiling broadly, “I’ll burn that son of a bitch.”

Maybe Geffen needs a partner?

Punching Picasso

Robin Williams once said that cocaine was God’s way of saying you were making too much money. That was during the 80s. Now, 20 years later, God is finding more dramatic ways of making this point:

A US casino mogul has pulled out of a deal to sell his Picasso painting for a record $139m (£74m) after accidentally elbowing a hole in the middle.

Las Vegas magnate Steve Wynn was showing Le Reve (The Dream) to guests at his office in Las Vegas last month.

Mr Wynn, who has retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease affecting peripheral vision, tore a coin-sized hole.

He will now keep the painting, which he bought in 1997 for $48.4m, and repair it, his spokeswoman said.

Mr Wynn had finalised the sale of the 1932 painting to art collector Steven Cohen.

The $139m price tag would have been $4m higher than the previous private-sale record – for Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, in July this year.

Picasso’s Boy With a Pipe, which fetched $104.1m in 2004, holds the record for art sold at auction.

Mr Wynn, known for gesturing with hands while speaking, was showing the painting at his office at Wynn Las Vegas when he struck it with his right elbow, spokeswoman Denise Randazzo said.

Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron was at the incident and wrote about it on a blog site.

She said Mr Wynn raised his hand then “at that moment, his elbow crashed backward right through the canvas. There was a terrible noise”.

“Smack in the middle… was a black hole the size of a silver dollar. ‘Look what I’ve done’ he said. ‘Thank goodness it was me.’”

Mr Wynn, a high-profile art collector, developed The Mirage and Bellagio resorts in Las Vegas in the 1990s.

Nothing Better than Griffith Observatory

Is there any public space in Los Angeles more wonderful than Griffith Observatory?

It is an architectural gem set against a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of Los Angeles. It is a celebration of a branch of science, astronomy, to which Southern California can stake a proud claim. In a few weeks, it will reopen after a five-year renovation project, but because our friends Todd & Robin Mason have gained the affection of both the scientific and science-history communities in this area, they were invited to a preview opening Sunday morning — and let my wife and me tag along.

The Masons are finalizing a documentary, “Journey to Palomar,” the story of George Ellery Hale’s creation of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Telescopes that profoundly expanded humankind’s understanding of the universe, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s first observations of  the universe’s expansion, which led to the development of the Big Bang theory that is now almost universally accepted. The Mason’s documentary will be one of the films you can see at the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, a new theater that the “Star Trek” actor and his wife made possible.

As will the public after November 3, we met a shuttle bus on the Orange Street side of Hollywood and Highland and presented our tickets there. The Observatory will accept visitors via a registration system, but as before the renovation, admission will be free. Waiting for the bus gave us a minute to check out the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater:

We arrived to hear a talk from a volunteer who was clearly excited and proud of what had been done to bring the observatory back — and asked us not to take pictures of the few still-uncompleted details. Rather than going into the front door, which is what past visitors are familiar with, we were guided down a flight of stairs on the observatory’s west side, which leads to a new exhibit area — the Gunther Depths of Space, which covers a lot of information — our solar system and what we know about each of the planets; the stars, galaxies and nebulae; and “The Big Picture,” a 152 x 20 foot image of the “cosmic wilderness” — the Virgo cluster of stars and galaxies.

Here is what the Gunther room looks like:

And here is a detail from “The Big Picture,” which in its entirety shows you a million stars. Each lighted object on this image represents not a star, but an entire galaxy:

Upstairs, you’ll find some of the exhibits you recall, such as Foucault’s Pendulum, and the arresting murals in the rotunda, all nicely restored and probably augmented. But for me, when I got to this floor, I was less focused on the scientific information, and more on the sheer artistry of the building, indoors and out:

You probably remember this monument that depicts Gallileo and Copernicus and other early explorers of the heavens:

…and the walkways around the domes, up on the roof, opening up fantastic views of the city…

…as well as beautiful little architectural details like this:

I am really grateful we got to see this. It felt like a pilgrimage to the L.A. of old, the city and region with a spirit of adventure and discovery–a better place and a better time than L.A. now. But Griffith Observatory is here now, so the present-day is ennobled by it.

(Photo credits: From the top, #1 and #9 are by Todd Mason; #2-8 and #10 are by yours truly. And I hope the volunteers at Griffith Observatory will note that everything shown here is ready for public consumption!)

“The Yuppies and the Junkies Can Have It.”

While watching the Mets beat the Dodgers’ brains in, I checked out a few of the blogs on my blogroll that I hadn’t read in awhile. On the San Pedro-based group blog “Life on the Edge,” the most recent entry is a terribly sad tale that suggests the latest efforts to revive the beautiful but unsettled village overlooking LA Harbor are falling short.

The author is an artist named Marshall Astor, whose nom du blog is “Calamari.” Astor announces that he won’t be posting much on the site for awhile, in part because “I don’t really feel like writing about Pedro at the moment.” The post explains why. To sum it up, Astor ran the Walled City Gallery in downtown San Pedro until closing it in August. (He also has a position at Angels Gate Cultural Center.) Astor had a good rent on the space, so he decided to retool it as studio space for himself and two other artists.

At about the same time we began to transition the space from a gallery to a working studio, I got some new neighbors in my building. The illegal live work, sublet that was a bit of an irritation became at first a hassle and then later, a crisis. I had been speaking with my landlord for half a year about the issue with the sublet next door, and for half a year, he claimed that he was going to evict the tenants. No eviction took place, and in August, more people started living next door, most notably a couple that engaged in on and off, 24 hour a day domestic violence. It was soon obvious that everybody next door was using methamphetamine, and by the beginning of September it had become obvious from the amount of in and out traffic at both the front door and the alley entrance that the place had become a major drug den.

By the beginning of September, it had become impossible to use the backyard, as there was either constantly a semi/non-operational vehicle parked in my half of the yard, or just piles of new and mysterious junk had been dumped on my side. The lock on the back gate was changed. Lumber and paint started disappearing when I would leave it outside. So many people were now living/crashing/hanging out/getting loaded/buying drugs at the space that I didn’t even know who to blame or talk to. When I did manage to bring it up to anyone, it was a non-productive conversation with a doped up, out of it, loser.

The landlord promised to evict the tenants, but never started the process. In the meantime, the building was sold. The new landlord told Astor he would evict the tenants and wanted him to stay — at a significant rent increase. Astor stresses that the rent hike was fair and in keeping with the market, but he wasn’t interested in paying that much. He decided to stay until December 15, and began slowly to move his belongings out. However, he didn’t move quickly enough:

Edith (one of his studio-mates) had arrived at the studio, found the back door wide open. I immediately directed her to the dusty silhouette where my laptop had been before some tweaked out, low life had made off with it. Every box, container or package in the building had been opened and searched, for what, I do not know. My talles was strewn across my desk, defiled and manhandled, and during the high holy days, no less. The remanents of my father’s coin collection was gone, one of my backpacks was gone, presumably to carry off my belongings in. Edith’s stuff was searched, but nothing taken. Someone had spent a lot of time in my place, making a mess, rifling through my personal business, and otherwise subjecting me and my mates to a disturbing and frustrating violation.

They posted a guard until they could return to the studio to move everything out, and turned in their key.

So I’m out of downtown, and due to the level of gentrification, combined with the general decline in the quality of life downtown (I’ve spoken with a lot of police in the past week, they all have heard or experienced that San Pedro has become a mecca for drug activity and more of a “dumping ground” than usual), I’m not likely to have either a studio, or a gallery there in the future. The yuppies and the junkies can have it.

I’ve lived in LA, and mostly in the South Bay/Harbor area, since the late 60s. All that time, San Pedro has been a town on the verge. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think it’s one of the most beautiful spots in the Los Angeles. Some blame the Port of LA, but I should think having such a vital economic force as a neighbor could only help. Besides, container cranes are kind of interesting to look at. They don’t blight the landscape — they’re just more colors and shapes for the morning and evening sun to illuminate.

Why can’t all the powers-that-be line up to keep this gem safe from becoming a “mecca for drug activity?” What a waste if they let San Pedro’s downtown slide into the kind of chaos from which decent, community-spirited people like Astor have to flee.

(photo credits: “Warner Grand, San Pedro,” by My Life as a Haint, “Downtown San Pedro” by Lyan Zurke)

“End Times”: Imagine a World With No Lollipops

It’s hot, I’m slow, I only got to this story this morning, but I was not exactly charmed by it:

STEAL a toddler’s lollipop and he’s bound to start bawling, was photographer Jill Greenberg’s thinking. So that’s just what Greenberg did to elicit tears from the 27 or so 2- and 3-year-olds featured in her latest exhibition, “End Times,” recently at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles. The children’s cherubic faces, illuminated against a blue-white studio backdrop, suggest abject betrayal far beyond the loss of a Tootsie Pop; sometimes tears spill onto naked shoulders and bellies.

The work depicts how children would feel if they knew the state of the world they’re set to inherit, explained Greenberg, whose own daughter is featured in the show. “Our government is so corrupt, with all the cronyism and corporate lobbyists,” she said. “I just feel that our world is being ruined. And the environment — when I was pregnant, I kept thinking that I’d love to have a tuna fish sandwich, but I couldn’t because we’ve ruined our oceans.”

What nonsense! Jill Greenberg is living in the lap of the lap of luxury, and she thinks it’s “end times.” What a gassy title for her exhibit — claiming for herself the final word before the curtain comes down.

Oh, how I wish there was a time machine, so I could take Greenberg back to, say, New York in the so-called Gilded Age, or London in the 1830s, or really almost anytime in history prior to her own cozy lifespan. Mozart had six siblings; he was one of two to survive infancy, and that was a common ratio, even among relatively comfortable families like his, until only about 100 years ago. If a stolen lollipop is Greenberg’s metaphor for the cruelties that our society will visit upon the next generation of children, she is completely ignorant of history.

The future’s so bright for our society’s kids, on the whole, they won’t even notice the lollipop is missing. There is plenty to worry about, of course, and any parent worries for their child’s fate. 9/11 will happen again. Wars won’t stop, and the weapons of mass destruction loom as a threat. And then, as Kurt Vonnegut put it, there’s “plain old death,” dogging all our steps. But as a society, we are heading into a period of unimaginable prosperity, when many festering problems will find sustainable solutions.

Before you get the vapors, be assured: I’m no denier of global warming. We have a lot of environmental problems, serious ones. And fortunately, we have serious people investing their lives in addressing them. On this blog, I honor the scientists who are working to understand, characterize and hopefully reverse global warming. But I have less respect for people like Jill Greenberg, who prefer to wallow in the apocalypse.

In terms of human impact, the environmental conditions that Jill Greenberg or her toddler are likely to encounter anytime in their lives will be enviable compared with what most people in the history of the world have faced. The bleakest environments are in the poorest countries, there is no scenario in which her child will face those conditions unless she volunteers to do so. There is such hubris in her saying “we’ve ruined our oceans.” Sure, the oceans are polluted. But be grateful that your child is growing up at a time when scientists are able to monitor environmental conditions, and people can organize globally for change. Greenberg acts like she’s just discovered this problem — epiphanies of a tunafish sandwich — and nothing’s being done. Which is partly true. She, herself, is doing nothing. She’s taking pictures and trying to depress people. What good does that do?

Likewise the incantations of “corrupt…cronyism…corporate lobbyists..,” like that’s something new and unique to our era. Is she serious? Is she saying this in a national publication like the LA Times? Let me throw a few names at her: Boss Tweed. Mark Hanna. J.P. Morgan. Albert Fall. Billy Sol Estes. Bobby Baker. Richard Nixon. Spiro Agnew. Thomas Keating. All of these names and many more are in Wikipedia if she wants to look them up.

Just to pick a juicy one: Is she familiar with Sam Giancana? One president, Eisenhower, used the murderous Mafia chieftain in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro. Another future president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, got Giancana to help him wrangle labor votes for John Kennedy’s successful 1960 election. When Giancana was found years later with a bullet in his head, the CIA chief actually had to deny having anything to do with it. If there is a political scandal today that rivals two presidents trucking with a Mafia capo, I want to know about it.

Anywhere in the vicinity of money or power, Ms. Greenberg, you will find corruption, and that’s been true for 3,000 years. And yet, somehow, we keep making babies, and most of them grow up to enjoy the blessings of this rare and unusual planet.

Okay, but the story’s absurdity doesn’t stop there. It seems like the Internet has gotten ahold of Greenberg long before I did. The complaint? That she’s hopelessly naive? That she’s spoiled by prosperity? That’s she a doom-porn addict? No. They’re mad at her because she took the lollipops away from the kids before she photographed them in order to make them cry.

Bloggers such as Andrew Peterson called Greenberg’s lollipop technique abusive and exploitative, while Greenberg, her husband, Robert Green, and gallery owner Paul Kopeikin defended the work, the process and one another. The conversation, cycling between rational and hyperbolic, says as much about Net communication as about the art in question.

“Jill Greenberg is a Sick Woman Who Should Be Arrested and Charged With Child Abuse,” Peterson wrote under his pseudonym Thomas Hawk at ThomasHawk.com, a blog that focuses on new media and technology. For Peterson, Greenberg’s technique was “evil.”

At this point, I change sides, and become Jill Greenberg’s defender. Child abuse? Is this man insane? When you pollute the English language by relating something as benign as a photographer’s trick to the hideous violence and cruelty visited upon children all over the world by abusive parents and other authority figures, you dishonor the real victims.

But the vortex of stupidity didn’t stop there. Greenberg’s husband, Robert Green was so offended by the comments on ThomasHawk.com that he searched until he found the real identity of the previously anonymous blogger, and outed him. As if the idiocy of his comments wasn’t enough to hang him! He had to be cyber-stalked?

We’re in a bad stretch in the politicized culture of America. It might not be the “end times,” but I still wish I had my lollipop.

Random Signs

Garrison Frost of the South Bay’s art-focused “The Aesthetic,” has a funny-but-true post up today asking why certain cultural attractions get signs, but others don’t. He makes CalTrans’ sign policy sound almost as random as the contents of a blog (or at least my blog).

One could also wonder why the tiny Lomita Railroad Museum gets a sign at all. Have you seen it? Sure, it’s a neat little thing, but let’s get serious, if you see that sign on the freeway, you’re likely to picture something a lot more significant. Even though it is Lomita’s big claim to fame, it is not nearly as big a deal as the Torrance Airport or the Redondo Beach Performing Arts Center.

One could also wonder why drivers going north get specific directions to Manhattan Beach while drivers going south do not get a sign at all.

You might now be curious about the Lomita Railroad Museum. What about it struck CalTrans’ signmakers as so noteworthy? It does have a website, which reveals that the museum has been around since 1966.

Dedicated to the proud era of the steam engine, complete authenticity is the hallmark of the Museum. On display is a Southern Pacific Railroad Steam Locomotive(1902-1960) and Tender. Nearby stand a 1910 Union Pacific Caboose and a modern all-steel Santa Fe caboose. On display at the annex are a 1923 Union Oil tank car and a 1913 Southern Pacific outside-braced wood box car. Also check out our Water Tower.

And of course who can forget the 72 x 25 ft. Railroad Mural at the corner of Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) and Narbonne Ave that once guided visitors to the museum. Postcards if (sic) the mural are available at the museum.

One clue could be the museum’s vintage. In 1966, CalTrans and most other state government agencies thought they had a lot of taxpayers’ money to throw around. That was the last year of the great Pat Brown era, when anything could happen, if it was made of steel or concrete.

Hail the Post-Modernist Prophets!

When I was in college, certain very alienating movements in art and literature were just getting momentum: Deconstructionist literary theory, and indeterminate (a.k.a. “chance”) music. Both of these theories attacked the notion of authorship.

According to deconstructionists, a literary work should be read strictly as a product of the assumptions that the author brought to it. The appropriate way to understand any literary work was to “interrogate” it. In the left-wing hothouses that college campuses became by the late 1980s, the result of such interrogation was to dethrone the classics because they and the society they inevitably represented, were ridden with racism, sexism, homophobism, elitism, cultural imperialism, beautyism, comprehensiblism and so forth.

Texts by great writers from Shakespeare to Saul Bellow should not be “privileged” over, say, a newspaper article, a rap song, or even a grocery list, according to deconstructionist theory. And certainly, the primacy of Dead White European Males as subjects for literary study needed to be overturned in favor of a more representative canon of authors.

Advocates of indeterminate music propounded similar ideas. Composer John Cage’s most famous work is 4′33” which is comprised of three silent movements. When it is performed, the audience experiences its own breathing, coughing, foot-shuffling and butt-shifting, as well as air circulation and any outdoor noises, as music. This was, obviously, contrary to the kind of music theory I was taught in school. Music is organized sound, by definition. It could be improvised, as in jazz, but not unplanned.

I considered myself opposed to deconstructionism, and was also more conservative in my music tastes (although the one John Cage concert I did attend was an enjoyable novelty). I tended to dismiss these schools as aberrations, newness for newness’ sake, a dead end artistically.

Well — I think I might have been wrong.

This occured to me tonight as I sat in an auditorium for a presentation to parents of high school sophomores. A couple hundred people were in the room, and most of them forgot to turn off their cell phones. So, throughout the presentation, I heard a random assortment of ringtones. They don’t sound like telephones anymore. They’re very individual: Funny sound effects, pieces of songs, bird chirps, human voices.

After a while, I started to like it. It was an odd, peaceful sort of music that was composed by the random decisions of people far away from this auditorium deciding to call someone inside. It was the kind of music John Cage would have loved, and I have to admit, he probably anticipated.

As for literary deconstructionism: I think the Internet is rapidly changing reading habits. What are hyperlinks but answers to anticipated questions? Authors don’t just write on the Web — they aggregate. The appropriate word for anything that appears on a Web site — whether it’s text, video, sound or graphic — is “content,” a very deconstructionist-sounding word.

Not only are most Web authors content-aggregators; they subject content to very skeptical interrogation. Andrew Sullivan’s word for it is “fisking,” after a British writer named Robert Fisk (whose work Sullivan objected to, and would rebut line-by-line. It is not a technique Fisk invented; if anything, he is its unwilling victim.) All content is taken apart for analysis, and it’s done just as aggressively by the right as by the left. Whether you read Patterico, or DailyKos, you are reading a writer who takes a piece of text — a speech, a news article — and deconstructs it. Conservatives’ search for “liberal bias” is not much different from the original deconstructionist obsessions with racism and elitism.

You don’t just find deconstructionism on political topics. Many websites are devoted to deconstructing advertisements, television shows, gossip and other products of pop culture. These sites — Defamer, Adrants, Television Without Pity, FARK, MetaFilter, Gawker, to name just a few — are often said to be “snarky,” another Web-culture word that combines irony, skepticism and a sort of insider/outsider viewpoint that says “I’m immersed and yet distant. I despise, and yet I celebrate.” Nothing is sacred in Snarkytown, but anything can be worshipped.

Perhaps the most iconic post-modern site on the Web is “Post Secret,” which is the third most popular blog right now according to Technorati. Post Secret is nothing less than the deconstruction of the human soul. People send in 4″ by 6″ postcards, on which a shameful secret, hope or fantasy is confessed, anonymously. It is random from the standpoint of the reader in that no one postcard has any relationship to any other.

Each postcard is, in a sense, a work of art, but artistic technique is not “privileged.” If all you know how to do is take a photo of your hand holding a piece of paper with your secret, it is posted right next to an accomplished graphic. The secret is the point. But it also the point that so many Web-surfers want to read these secrets. Here are the most recent postcards’ messages:

• I feel guilty being served by black people.
• I am a nobody. I want to be somebody.
• If you ate, in one sitting, enough food to make your stomach look like this… (photo of bloated stomach)…you would have to throw up too.
• When my parent treats me well, I feel guilt…like I don’t deserve it.
• If he dies in Iraq…I will be lost.
• I used to be an anarchist. Now I read the Wall Street Journal every day.
• I am not the sum total of all my failures.
• I couldn’t orgasm because you looked too much like Jesus.

To me, the brief confessions of these anonymous authors, especially when aggregated in the huge numbers Post Secret collects, is high art. So there you have it. I embrace deconstructionism and randomness, and the demotion of the author. Never would’ve believed it.

The Golden Rhinoceros Stampede

For Christmas, my mother gave my wife “Southern Californialand: Mid-Century Culture in Kodachrome,” Charles Phoenix’s coffee-table collection of amateur 35mm slides snapped by locals during the 40s thru the 70s. In this book, people show off their new cars and swimming pools, marvel at the mountains above the desert dusted with snow, and capture for posterity landmarks like Pan Pacific Auditorium, the Brown Derby, Disneyland and the globe at Leisure World. 

The photos burst with the giddy optimism that California used to embody. The skies are blue, the clothes pastel. Even the oil derricks are presented with love. In one shot, a man sits poolside, a tam o’shanter on top of his head. On the little table next to him, two bottles of booze and a pack of Camels. His little grin says, “this is paradise.”

What is the greater Los Angeles area now? For some people, it is still paradise, but few say so out loud.  It’s home. It’s a place to work. It’s a place that used to be great, but now just seems necessary.  It’s not a place Americans abandon New Jersey or Oklahoma for anymore.  It’s just like those places, except with much better weather–once an overwhelming advantage, but now just a factor, and for businesses, a not very persuasive factor anymore.

Since the post-Cold War military cutbacks, Los Angeles’ economy has been pretty stagnant. That’s a period of 15 years.  The Bay Area has undergone tech-driven boom-and-bust cycles during that period, while Southern California has seen mostly bust, followed by slow recovery, then bust–never a real across-the-board, everybody’s-happy boom. 

LA catches the nation’s colds, but when all the kids are playing outside again, we’re still wearing our bathrobes.

Defense/aerospace, and filmed entertainment used to be signatures of the Southern California economy, but the growth in those industries is largely going elsewhere. But the one area where growth has been steady and significant is international trade, which was worth $264 billion in 2004. When Tom Bradley and others boasted about LA’s position on the Pacific Rim, they were right on. LAX and the two big ports are how Pacific Rim countries get their products to North American markets. The boxes of stuff get picked up by trucks, some of it winds up on trains, and away they go, to destinations north and east, loaded onto vehicles with big wheels and big diesel engines.

I’ve started to wonder: How much does the LA area really benefit from all this?  Of course–there are jobs associated with international trade, some 400,000 of them with the addition of 42,600 last year.

But what kind of positive ripples do these kinds of jobs generate? Are we educating youth in California to join the global trade industry? Is there such a thing? If my son wants to take part in the growing global trade industry in LA, what courses should he take? Truck driving? Warehouse management? He could be an entrepreneur, selling imports to the U.S. market. But he doesn’t have to be in Southern California to do that. The trucks and trains that roll through Wilmington and Long Beach will bring everything to him, wherever he decides to locate his business.  

The Inland Empire is trying to grow a job base to match with its booming population, but many of the big new commercial projects are warehouses and distribution centers. They’re important, and of course people work there, but do they stimulate the creation of other businesses? When I’ve been out in those areas, the only service businesses I see are truck stops where you can fill your tank, microwave a burrito, buy a bag of sunflower seeds and hit the head.

Is trade facilitating the kind of sturdy, sustainable economic engine that aerospace/defense once was? Will trade bring back the glory days that those kodachrome slides depicted?

The world increasingly looks at Los Angeles as an immense depot, a place where hundreds of thousands of boxes carrying the world’s manufactured goods and raw materials change from one mode of transportation to another–ships to trains, jets to trucks, trucks to rail–and then roll on to their final destinations.

What we get out of all this are a lot of highways broken down by the weight of the truckloads – footprints from a golden rhinoceros stampede. And, we get bad air. Not just the ubiquitous bad air created by Southern California’s inversion layer, sunlight and civilization, but highly toxic diesel exhaust that hangs around around these trade centers and transportation corridors. 

According to the South Coast Air Quality Management District:

• Diesel exhaust is responsible for about 70 percent of the total cancer risk from air pollution;
• Emissions from mobile sources — including cars and trucks as well as ships, trains and planes — account for about 90 percent of the cancer risk.  Emissions from businesses and industry are responsible for the remaining 10 percent; and
• The highest cancer risk occurs in south Los Angeles County — including the port area– and along major freeways.

Those numbers from the district’s MATES-II study of air toxins in 1999.  MATES-III comes out in March 2006, and it will provide significantly more detail, along with fresher information.  

Environmental groups like the Coalition for Clean Air and the Natural Resources Defense Council have advocated policies to abolish “dirty diesel” for years. My guess is, MATES-III will spotlight the problem, but also show that years of high-profile activism have had a marginal effect at best.  Nonetheless, an ever-brewing revolt in communities near the ports and airports, combined with the environmental community’s success in monkey-wrenching lawsuits has the stewards of the Southern California economy worried:

“There has been a major shift in the image of the international trade industry in Southern California,” observed (Jack) Kyser (of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation). “It has gone from the fair-haired child to wearing the proverbial black hat. It is blamed for pollution and congestion, and a growing number of the region’s residents would like to either see growth at the ports capped, or worse yet see the ports go away, despite the growth of jobs with good wages.”

The tone of Kyser’s quote is: “How could we be so crazy?”  The frustration for the LA area is this: Most sources of diesel exhaust aren’t regulated locally–and virtually none of the sources associated with international trade. The container ships that sail into LA and Long Beach harbors are regulated by the international body that enforces the MARPOL treaty. Trucks, airlines and trains are regulated federally, and the lobbies for those carriers have far more pull with the ruling class in Washington D.C. than do California’s state or local governments. Remember: Most other states benefit economically from the international trade that rolls through Southern California. As do big companies like Wal-Mart, Sears/K-Mart, and Home Depot.

Local authorities have the bully pulpit, or they can try to cut deals, but they do so knowing that other ports, other cities, even other countries, would pounce if we made things too expensive for the trade industry here.  In Barstow the other night, we saw an example of what local authorities can do to rein in the pollution from railroads — and what they can’t. From the Desert Dispatch:

Although turnout was low for community members, the information presented by BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) representatives clarified some of the major changes that the company will be making in communities like Barstow in order to help lower the toxic emissions from diesel engines.

BNSF Environmental Program Development Manager Michael Stanfill outlined some of the major goals of the memorandum, including the following:

* A state-wide idling reduction program: The program uses anti-idling devices and employee training to ensure that locomotives do not stay on longer than necessary.

“We’re starting the blitz of the idle-reduction side next week,” Stanfill said. The training will teach employees how long to leave the locomotives on before it is necessary to turn them off.

BNSF is also asking for help with this goal. Community members that see a locomotive idling for long periods of time should call 800-832-5452 with the four-digit identification number to report it.

* Use of low-sulfur diesel fuel: The MOU states that the railroads achieve maximum use of low-sulfur diesel six years earlier than required by federal regulations.

* Reduce visible emissions: Locomotives that are emitting visible smoke will not be returned to use until they are complying with regulations.

BNSF is asking for community help with this goal as well. If people see locomotives emitting continuous smoke, citizens should call 800-832-5452 with the locomotive’s four-digit identification number to report it. Stanfill also said BNSF is guaranteeing that all of its locomotives will be tested annually for visible emissions.

The MOU referenced is between the two major rail freight haulers, BNSF and Union Pacific, and the state Air Resources Board. It’s probably the best the regulators could get. It looks to me like it primarily relies on the good faith of BNSF to follow through. The citizen enforcement elements are a nice PR touch, but not much of a threat.

The railroads with their fixed rails running through dozens of cities always need something from local and state government, so this is a trade-off they’re willing to make.  Public leverage over airlines is a sometime thing; most of the power the airlines respect resides in the FAA.  The City of LA’s two airports give them something to negotiate with, but that tool has never been very effective.  The two seaports can talk to the big international shippers, but won’t try to dictate to them. Shippers don’t need to establish a good image in the U.S.  Americans don’t buy anything directly from Maersk, or P & O Nedloyd, so they don’t worry about what we think of them.  

In an attempt to manage the coming trade v. the environment clash, the LA Economic Development Corporation helped form the  Southern California Leadership Council, with former governors Wilson, Davis, Brown and Deukmejian serving as joint figureheads.  Clearly, the powers-that-be are worried that too much unruly local and environmental activism might chase international trade away, so they’ve promised to tackle trade’s biggest vulnerability:

The first policy issue selected by the Leadership Council is a “Green Freight Initiative.”

“The objective is to support the development and implementation of a near-term plan to rally business and public sector leaders around the ideas of reducing diesel pollution, modernizing our goods movement and trade infrastructure, and increasing the management, security, safety and velocity of our freight corridor system. There are a million new good paying jobs related to the initiative,” (Robert) Wolf, former chairman of the California Transportation Commission, said. The tax revenue generated by these new jobs over the next 25-30 years will help us pay for the community and environmental improvements we need now and fund critical health, public safety and education services in the future.

“There are smart ways to reduce truck traffic impact on our highways, freeing up more room for cars and reducing air emission impacts while building community friendly infrastructure,” added (Ray) Holdsworth, former Chair of the California Chamber. 

My advice to the four ex-governors would be to look at the communities that will be cited in the upcoming MATES-III study as carrying a disproportionate share of the pollutant load.  You’ll find, I suspect, that these communities do not see much direct benefit from international trade, and they’re all about to get reminded of the cost. Their strategy should be to decrease the rhinoceros tracks in those areas; and find a way to leave behind more rhinoceros steaks.

Dialogue in green paint

The Cezanne & Pissarro show at the LA County Museum of Art is unlike any art exhibit I’ve ever seen.  It points the way to the kind of art show we might see more of in the future–one that explores the process of making art, and the progress of an artist’s eye. 

You enter the exhibit and see two paintings side by side: One by Pissarro and one by Cezanne.  They are both of the same subject: A country road with trees on the left side and, in the distance, a village on the right. Two figures on the road, one of them a child. Some clouds. Both paintings are called Louveciennes. Pissarro painted his in 1871. Cezanne borrowed it, and painted his own version the following year.

It’s a copy–and yet it’s not.

Pissarro’s original, though beautiful, does not prettify the landscape; it analyzes it. His amazing array of techniques are harnessed to serve the creation of a detailed depiction of nature, light and shadows. His brush strokes are thick here, delicate there, and in some places the paint is troweled onto the canvas. All in service of capturing the ineffable play of light at a moment in time.

It’s important to note that, in his time, Pissarro was a revolutionary artist, and is now generally regarded as the father of the impressionist style.  But in his copy of Louveciennes, and throughout the exhibit, you see how Cezanne starts where Pissarro leaves off. He too wants to see nature as it is, but takes it a step further, into pure form.  Not for Cezanne are the delicately rendered details. To him, the trees, the rooftops, the clouds are all shapes, delineated by color, and organized into a geometric pattern. 

It’s the exact same composition as Pissarro used, but Cezanne finds something else in it, and emphasizes what he sees. His colors are not divorced from nature (as Pissarro renders it), but because they serve a different purpose, they are rendered with greater intensity and clarity.  

Cezanne starts where Pissarro leaves off; and then Cezanne takes us all the way to the doorway of abstract painting, where color, form and composition become pure expressions of an artist’s vision.

Throughout the exhibit (which closes January 16), paintings by each artist are paired.  There are no more “copies,” but many paintings of the same vista, or the same still life subject.  The contrast allows you to see not only the uniqueness of both artists’ visions but also the hinge of European art history, where it swung in a just a few short decades from the formal techniques favored by the Paris Salon  against which Pissarro rebelled, to the departure from representation that Cezanne approached.

I might be a bit out of my depth writing about art, but the show was enlightening and thrilling. More like this, please, curators.