Olds would establish ‘social responsibility’ in place of the profit motive. That is conclusive proof that he does not believe in our form of government. Hugh Roy Cullen, in a letter to then-Senator Lyndon Johnson, trying to get Johnson to not reconfirm Leland Olds as head of the Rural Electrification Administration.
I’ve just started listening to All the Wrong Moves by Anthony Scaramucci. If the name sounds familiar but you can’t place it, he was the White House Communications Director for ten days, from July 21, 2017, to July 31, 2017. At the time, he was painted by most of the press as a sort of duffus. Maybe that’s why he got fired, but from his podcast with Katty Kay, Special US correspondent for the BBC, he doesn’t seem like a good fit with Trump; he seems a little too goody-two-shoes to be an insider in the Trump crowd.
Although, as an aside, before that official role, he did work on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, joining the Trump Finance Committee and later serving on the Presidential Transition Team Executive Committee after the 2016 election. End aside.
In All the Wrong Moves– subtitled How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Shitshow Politics Lead To Trump. And How We Find A Way Out – Scaramucci puts forth the case that the United States was founded on making money and that this is our national religion. So far, about twenty percent into the book, he makes an excellent case. Of course, he wasn’t the first observer of American values to say that. Alexis de Tocqueville pretty much said the same thing in 1830 when he wrote, I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men… And, from the quote at the top of this post, I would say that Hugh Roy Cullen agrees, too. Still, I’ve never looked at our history that way, and it is sort of shocking and a little disturbing.
Generally, if draining is worth doing at all, it is worth overdoing...civil engineer George E. Waring Jr., speaking for the drainage design of New York’s Central Park, in 1867.
Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. My favorite homily, although Lazarus Long in Robert A. Heinlein’s Enough Time For Love (1973) apparently also said it.
Last week, we drove to Olympic Valley – formerly known as Squaw Valley – to spend some time with Rick Paine and Lynnaea Lumbard, who were passing by on their way to a family meeting. In a way, we were passing by, too, on our way to find some fall color in Bishop Creek Canyon, west of Bishop, California. We were in our electric Kona, which, while not exactly a problem, does take some planning to drive around rural California (exactly is the operative word here).
Our first stop was a Tesla charger near Roseville that’s almost next door to a Japanese restaurant. I thought about Elon Musk for the first time. Well, NOT the first time ever, but the first time on this trip. We had a Japanese meal while we topped up on electrons just before we started the uphill grind to Donner Pass at 7,056 feet. It worked perfectly.
We had a delightful but all-too-short 24 hours with Rick and Lynneae, and then they were on their way. We had charged the Kona overnight, so soon after, we drove around Lake Tahoe, on the west side, past Emerald Bay, through the border city strangely named South Lake Tahoe, over Kingsberry Grade, and finally dropped 3,000 feet into a different world on Highway 395 in Nevada.
We drove down the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada –Snowy Mountain Range in Spanish – crossing the border back into California at Topaz Lake as the shadows cast by the Sierras turned into twilight.
I want to make an aside here. The above photo was made by Michele, as was the photo above it and the photo above that. On the driving-to-get-somewhere part of the trip, at least, the great majority of the photos were taken by Michele while I drove. End aside.
While we had a very late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Delli, we topped up the Kona at a Rivian charging station, and I thought about Elon Musk again. Not that I like Elon Musk; he seems very juvenile and insensitive at best. And I want to add, I really don’t know much about Musk except for the chainsaw stunt or whatever it was – political speech? demonstration? childish asshole stunt? or just plain whatever? – in the White House with President Trump. Oh, and that he has a lot of kids, 14, I think – by four different birth mothers. He seems more childish and wacky than interesting, but he is worth a trillion dollars. A TRILLION DOLLARS, so he must be doing something right (assuming he does want to make lots of money).
A trillion dollars is an unfathomable amount of money, though, in the middle of the 19th century, the entire Rothschild family – in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Naples – were probably richer in total. Still, Musk is richer than any single person: ever. Sure, Elon Musk is exceedingly smart – he taught himself computer programming at an early age and sold the code for a basic video game, Blastar, when he was just twelve years old – and has often been at the right place at the right time, but I think his not-so-secret ingredient for financial success is that he is fully committed to whatever he is involved in.
Musk is a “put all your eggs in one basket” kind of guy; I’d even say, an “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guy. His 14 kids are an excellent example, so is Tesla. Every automaker makes electric cars, but most do it sort of begrudgingly. Tesla not only makes electric cars, but Tesla also makes high-speed chargers to make electric cars more convenient, and now they are starting to build diners nearby so people can eat or grab a cup of coffee while their car charges. They are committed. I’m pretty sure we could not drive across the country without using Tesla chargers.
We had a late lunch at the Whoe Nelli Deli, owned by the same kind of “anything worth doing is worth overdoing” kind of guys. The Whoe Nelli Deli is located in a Mobil gas station on Tioga Pass Road just off Highway 395 and just outside the small town of Lee Vining. To quote the New York Times, our editors were relieved to find the Whoa Nellie Deli, a shockingly gourmet oasis located at the local Tioga Gas Mart, and The Los Angeles Times described chef Matt Toomey as a manic figure in a white chef’s jacket and a baseball cap whose charisma and sense of humor are reflected in his cooking….To have one of the better meals of your life in a gas station is bizarre. It leaves you staring at your plate for a moment or two in disbelief. I know that feeling; I just had it at our lunch. I ordered the steak salad – again, because it’s so good – and just stared at the plate, thinking this is the most perfectly cooked steak I’ve ever had except, maybe, two or three restaurants in Japan and one in Paris.
After lunch, we drove to Bishop in the dark, had a late dinner, went to sleep early, and woke up to a view of a small portion of the Sierra Nevada’s eastern wall.
After an early cup of coffee and egg-thingy at Starbucks, we drove up Bishop Creek Canyon to see the fall color. Bishop Creek Canyon starts west of Bishop at about 4,150 feet and climbs up an additional 5,000 feet. Near the top are three lakes, North, South, and Sabrina, all with lots of Aspens in color. We hope.
The last time I was here was in October of 2018, and I was the only person at North Lake except for a Chinese women’s photography class. This year, eight years later, North Lake we had to follow a honey wagon on its way to servicing the new portable outhouses.
Years ago, probably about 15 years ago, I remember meeting Michele and Karen Amy for lunch in Nashua, New Hampshire. We walked around, stunned by the fall colors, especially in the lovely – can I use that word? – old cemetery where the bright yellow leaves were almost ankle-deep. The Eastern Sierras are not like that. The Eastern Sierras are less color and more mountains. (So, be forewarned, Karen.)
I think North Lake is the most photogenic lake in the entire Sierra Nevada that anybody can drive to in a regular car. In this case, there were too many regular cars already parked along the narrow dirt road for us to find a place to park close to the lake. The lake was packed, but from what we could see, as beautiful as it was in 2018.
I blame the internet for the crowds; I blame YouTube specifically; and I have very mixed emotions about it. Michele and I have pitched the Eastern Sierras for years with very few converts. I think YouTube, with dozens of people, often with kids, pitching the magic of the Eastern Sierras in fall, probably has a low conversion rate as well, but they have an almost infinite audience. More than 15 million people within easy driving range. It is the democratization of information in a way we have never experienced before.
Out of all these people, some, probably not very many, maybe a lot, I have no idea, will have their soul touched like I did in 1956. They will look at North Lake, even in a crowd, and their life will change. That’s great, but last week, they were just blocking the road. I have very mixed emotions.
North Lake in 2018.
After crowded North Lake, Lake Sabrina, South Lake, and the surrounding area seemed pretty empty, the kind of empty where you stop and chat when you meet someone. Most of the people we chatted with were locals, and most of them were interesting and charming, and most of them probably voted for Trump. But we didn’t talk politics; we talked about how stunning the whole area is, and even more so in fall colors.
Artists rarely do the same thing over and over again. Art is about the new, doing things in a new way. Eli Broad, who, along with Donald Kaufman, perfected the art of building repetative Tract Housing.
I met a guy who plays the same game I played. Yoko Ono, after John Lennon offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer an imaginary nail in her painting, Painting To Hammer A Nail.
Life is beautiful’ isn’t such an opulent assumption when seen through Ono’s keen and kind lens, Darren Bader who the New York Times Style Magazine describes As playful as he is provocative, interrogates the meaning of art itself.
The second day we were in LA, we went to The Broad to see Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind. I’m not sure what to make of the show; the LA Times says it is more mind than music. Which I completely agree with, but then they go on to say, She opens your mind; you make the music. which wasn’t my experience. Although I think it was Michele’s.
From the street, The Broad looks much more radical than LACMA, but inside it is a conventional museum, a very nice conventional museum, built around the private collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum was designed by a team led by Elizabeth Diller of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, based in New York City. DS + R, as the architectural firm is called, has two of its most famous projects in its hometown of New York City, and both are conceptually innovative: the design of The High Line Park* and the recent transformation of MOMA. BTW, Elizabeth Diller is an architectural superstar: she was on TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list and the first MacArthur Foundation fellow awarded in architecture. End Aside.
Yoko Ono is a conceptual artist, which makes it hard to show much. Visibly shown, that is. Her typed or written ideas can be shown, but they are ideas, not images. As an aside, I was listening to an interview – I don’t remember with whom or the interviewer – with a Trump expert. One thing she, the Trump expert, said – in a derogatory way – was that Trump is very visual and, like a child, is best persuaded by pictures; charts showing information do not persuade him. I thought, Shit! That sounds just like me, how embarrassing. End aside.
Still, embarrassing as it may be, there was not much “art” that I resonated with at the show; a lot of ideas, several walls to mark up, and a handful of interesting vintage pictures.
Outside the Yoko Ono show, The Broad continued on its mission of collecting and showing – for free – contemporary art. Good contemporary art; Important Contemporary Art.
Red Block (2010), constructed from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire. By El Anatsui2009 Hustle’n’Punch By Kaikai And Kiki (2009). Acrylic and platinum leaf on canvas. By Takashi MurakamiMichael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) by Jeff Koons.Balloon Dog (Blue)) by Jeff Koons and the legs of future art patrons.
Looking at the large Jeff Koons sculpture, Balloon Dog, one of which sold for $58.4 million, got me thinking about Steven Soderbergh’s movie, The Christophers. It is about a family hiring a reformed art forger to finish some of their father’s unfinished paintings. He is a famous artist whose work sells for obscene amounts, and the family will get more money if the unfinished art is finished. At the time, the movie got me thinking – obsessing, may be more accurate – about art and what makes one artist important, famous, and expensive, and another artist an also-ran.
My mother used to say, “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, usually when she disagreed with somebody’s choice, but I don’t think she really believed it. And I’m not sure I do either. But what I do believe is that, to a great extent, the sales price of a piece of art is a result of secondary market forces like luck, timing, and dealer hype. And, as time goes on, how famous an artist is becomes the most important factor of all. People like name brands they recognize.
I went through that reconizing known brands, or the smug joy of knowing a artist’s name when we we saw the second huge El Anatsui sculpture – blanket? – made from found aluminum liquor bottle caps and copper wire in two days. This blanket was just like the one we had seen at LACMA the day before (no, no, not just like, but easily close enough so I could reconize the artist). In both cases the tapastries are huge and I think that is a big factor in what makes art. Size and complexity can make something a work of art even when it wouldn’t be if it were smaller.
I think that’s what makes Nolan’s Odasy a serious art picture; it’s size and complexity. We saw it in 70MM one night when we were in LA and, although it wasn’t a super huge screen, it was immersive in its detal. It was totally different from seeing a movie on TV.
*The High Line is a 1.45-mile public park and walkway built on an elevated, disused section of the former New York Central Railroad line along the West Side of Manhattan. It is regarded as a great example of transforming an abandoned industrial relic into a model of urban adaptive reuse.
The plant above is a Mammillaria candida, but the tag on it says Mammillovdia candida. A while back, I wrote that Carl Linnaeus named the Mammillaria candida, and used it to support my theory that Linnaeus was inordinately obsessed with nipples and named these cacti Mammillaria because they have nipples that the spines grow out of. It turns out I jumped to a wrong conclusion: one of Linnaeus’s students, Belgian botanist Michaël Scheidweiler named these cacti Mammillaria in 1838.
In 1951, Austrian botanist Franz Buxbaum renamed the plant Mammilloydia candida because the seed covering is slightly different from other Mammillarias. But most people, most botanists – who care – most people in the cactus world, have said something like Awww, come on, this plant is a Mammillaria; you’re just splitting hairs.
When I was in the San Jose Cactus and Succulent Society, I learned there are Lumpers and Splitters, and I am a Lumper, and the plant above is a Mammillaria despite what the tag says.
We drove down to Greater Los Angeles last weekend. The nominal reason was to see the new Geffen wing of LACMA (I’m not sure “wing” is the right word; it is really a whole new museum, and, by the way, LACMA is short for Los Angeles COUNTY Museum of Art ). But, I suspect, the real reason for both of us was just to go to one of our very favorite cities and get away from our daily routine. We took the Coast Route to get there, and it was hotter than we expected; Paso Robles was 104 degrees, although it got cooler as we dropped down to San Luis Obispo and we got closer to the coast.
The drive down took longer than we planned because there was heavy traffic most of the way, so we ended up having lunch in San Luis Obispo later than we had planned. San Luis Obispo is an interesting town – partially because it is a college town – for lack of a better descriptor – and partially because almost all the towns and cities along 101 between Paso Robles and Ventura are interesting.
As an aside, we took our electric Kona, and working around charging it took more mental space than we expected. It wasn’t the only thing we talked about while driving; still, we talked about it a lot. We quickly realized there were more Tesla chargers than any other brand, which led us to think about Elon Musk and his successes. He didn’t start Tesla, but when he went in, he went all in. He realized that electric cars wouldn’t sell without convenient charging, so he built chargers. Lots of them. The chargers became another way of making money rather than a problem. Because charging takes time, Tesla is now building Tesla Cafes to go with their charging stations. No other car company has done that; most companies are treating their electric cars as something they have to do. End aside.
Once in LA, well Beverly Hills actually, we checked into our hotel, grabbed a bite to eat that was fine, if not very memorable. The next morning, we went to see the new LACMA. Our LACMA experience started by driving down into the biggest, nicest, emptiest garage I’ve ever been in. Along one wall was a long line of free chargers, which were the slowest we’ve ever plugged into except at home before we upgraded the line (but, hey, they are free although the garage wasn’t).
The architect of the new LACMA wing is Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in collaboration with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Before going to Google, I didn’t know anything about Zumthor except that he fit the need for the apparently required out-of-town architect, but I do know Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and I am a big fan of their work, especially their early work during the 50s and 60s . SOM, as they are affectionately called, designed the first International Style building in San Francisco in 1959, the Crown Zellerbach Building, which is one of my favorite buildings anywhere.
Peter Zumthor has become well-known in the architectural world for designs that prioritize the atmosphere – the light and texture, primarily – of how a space feels inside rather than looking great on the outside. Zumthor hasn’t designed many major buildings, but each has become famous (maybe not to you and me, but to other architects, and readers of architectural magazines, anyway). I think the new LACMA is his largest building and it fits his MO perfectly. From the outside, it is not very impressive, but inside, the experience is powerful.
We start by taking an elevator from the garage up to a large concrete open space where a building used to be, and if I remember correctly, a casual outdoor restaurant. The main decoration is composed of a series of bronze Chinese zodiac figures by Ai Weiwei. I think they are great, but they’re leftovers from the previous museum.
I was unimpressed by the new museum when we first saw it, but as we stopped and really paid attention, the building grew on me. It is one floor, about 220,000 square feet, sitting on seven massive concrete support pavilions/pylons/rooms? 30 feet off the ground. You can’t see it in the picture above, but as the building gracefully bends to the right, it goes over Wilshire Boulevard and ends in what was once an employee parking lot (presumably they were given parking rights in the patron’s garage).
The 30-foot space to the gallery floor, along with the 8 – foot thickness of the edge of that visual – first? second? only? – floor warps the building’s scale. The new museum looks smallish, but it is huge. At 220,000 square feet, it is twice as large as the average single-building data center everybody is currently complaining about being so big. The gallery area alone is roughly the size of two football fields, and yet it looks and feels much smaller. That is, until you realize that the windows on the ground floor, in the support structure, are 30 feet high.
Tlali by Mexican contemporary artist Pedro Reyes.
To get to the gallery on what I guess is really the second floor, we have to either climb a long outside stair or take an elevator; we took the elevator, and it was a little weird. There is no lobby, just an elevator door in the side of one of the support pylons. A ticket checker stood next to the elevator door, which is on an outside wall ( although protected – sort of – from the elements by the cantilevered floor above). When the elevator door opens, we are in the gallery with no warm-up.
Reclining sphinx by South Los Angeles artist Lauren Halsey.
The entire gallery area of LACMA is on this second floor, and this is the major philosophical difference between Peter Zumthor’s new LACMA and traditional museums. This museum ignores the spatial and cultural hierarchies that almost every museum uses to organize art with European traditions in prime real estate and non-European art in distinct, secondary sections, often treating non-European art as cultural artifacts rather than True Art. Here, all the art is treated equally, although inner sanctums are spread around the gallery space for art that is more light-sensitive.
The shots above and below illustrate how the galleries mix up the art. The sphinx is a modern piece and isn’t kept separate in a contemporary wing; it is positioned in the light-filled Mediterranean gallery alongside ancient Egyptian, Nubian, Greek, and Roman antiquities. Without any additional commentary, here are a couple more photos.
Romano-Egyptian funerary plaster mummy portraits and masks: and MicheleFading Scroll (2007) by El Anatsui For LACMA byJohn Baldessari Stone urns displayed silhouetted against the window overlooking Wilshire Boulevard by unknown Greek and Roman stone carvers.Pond Lily Table Lamp (Model No. 344) by Louis Tiffany (and partial Mother About to Wash Her Sleepy Child by Mary Cassatt)(On the left) Our Lady of Guadalupe by Sebastián López de Arteaga (1610–1652) and (on the right) The Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos by an anonymous 18th-century Mexican Colonial painter.Split-Rocker by Jeff Koons (37 feet high and weighing over 150 tons, the hollow steel framework holds an internal irrigation system supporting roughly 45,000 living flowering plants and greenery).Dangerous Liaisons(1935) and Stimulation Objective No. 3 (1939) by René Magritte.
We ended the LACMA part of our trip to meet one of Michele’s step-cousins for dinner in Manhattan Beach. It is only a 19-mile drive, but in commuter traffic, it took more than an hour. We had tickets to the museum for 11 AM and left around 4:30 with about an hour and a half for lunch and a walk around the LeBrea Tar Pits. That was not enough time. BTW, the museum was almost empty at 11 and packed after lunch. To be continued…
