Our Short Weekend Trip To LaLa Land

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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 turns to the left, 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 Michele
Fading 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…

A Couple Of Political Thoughts On 2025 and 2026 So Far

Americana, Politics

The whole thing with Trump is so insane that people are waking up. Michele Stern

We are entering a new era of radical authenticity. Elysia Berman in an Instagram Thread about Rama Duwaji wearing Goth boots at her husband’s swearing-in ceremony.

We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Zohran Kwame Mamdani in his mayoral acceptance speech.

Whether you love him or loathe him, it is easy to look back on the last year and get fixated on Donald Trump. At the beginning of 2025, like most people I know, I thought Trump’s being elected was a terrible thing. Even before he took office, he went into hyperdrive, seeming to jam change into the American psyche at a record pace. I thought it was the first step away from the ideals we were taught in school; the professed ideals that make America – or make the United States of America, if you prefer – the self-identified greatest nation on Earth. Today, a year later, I feel very different. Today, I think Trump’s reelection is not the primary problem; it’s a reaction to and an exposure of a problem that has been slowly growing.

The problem is that we, the American people, are not who we say we are; we are not what we teach our children; we are not President Reagan’s “shining city on a hill… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” and we never have been. Still, for most of our history, and for almost all of my life, I thought we were moving closer together and closer to those ideals. But that has changed, and Trump’s election and reelection exposed that we have been moving away from those ideals for some time.

I like to think that the high point of that arc was just before Trump was elected, but that is not true. We first betrayed what we said we stood for with the Selective Service Act of 1948, which allowed full-time college students to defer their military obligation. That was our first overt step away from treating all our citizens equally (minorities, especially Indigenous and Black People, and, of course, Women, have never really been treated equally, but that’s baked into the Constitution). Twenty years later, when the Official Minimum Wage was decoupled from the actual cost of living, that inequality became even more obvious. Still, most of us either ignored or missed it – I probably did both- just as we ignored the growing unrest.

Either way, by then, the country was essentially ruled by a rich elite class because they had the money to control what we are still told is a government for all the people. We were no longer true to the supposedly self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Carpenters and factory workers and waitpeople and anybody doing manual labor were no longer as valuable – valuable as human beings – as people with lots of money. We were told that the less valuable should be sent into the meat grinder of war first. Soon, the less valuable didn’t even deserve a living wage or a home of their own.

Of course, this was never said out loud; we were told that riches were there for the picking if they just worked hard enough. Being rich became an outwardly visible sign of an inner worth that we all, pretty much, bought into, if not by our beliefs, by our acquiescence and actions.

Then came the Great Recession of 2008, brought on by the collapse of the housing bubble and the massive expansion of high-risk subprime mortgages that had sustained it. Nearly 10 million families lost their homes, and millions more lost their jobs. We, most of us, anyway, agreed that the poor, the homeless, were there only because they lacked that inner worth, and they should be kept out of sight so we, the valuable, wouldn’t be offended.

The country voted for Barack Obama and his promise of change. But we didn’t get that change. Nobody went to jail for the damage caused by the Great Recession; companies were bailed out, and rich people got their bonuses, but nobody got their homes back. Our costly wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which Obama ran against, continued. President Obama wanted to improve our health care system and, in a way, he did. Under ObamaCare, health insurance companies grew larger, expanded to include more people, and some of the added expense was covered by the government, but the rising cost of premiums and deductibles still left most families with significant out-of-pocket expenses.

When they voted for Trump in 2016, we said that his voters were stupid, but they weren’t stupid; they were pissed. Well, some are probably stupid, and some are racist, and some are getting rich as they make Trump rich, but, most I believe, are pissed that the establishment – both Democraatic and Republican – for lack of a better word, wasn’t treating them as promised, pissed that we – and, if you are reading this, you, like me, are probably part of the establishment – didn’t even acknowledge they had a right to be pissed. I think most people voted for Trump out of that anger and desperation.

I want to stress that I don’t think a President Trump is the answer; to me, he clearly isn’t. Donald Trump is a selfish, nasty human being with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old and almost no intellectual understanding of the problems we really face. For me, he is impossible to like or admire. After that, I also want to point out that Trump brings a couple of qualities to the table that we need more of: he is authentic, and he looks for ways to make things happen rather than reasons they can’t.

That leaves us with President Trump doing a staggering amount of damage to the climate, to the economy, to the American people, while getting breathtakingly rich. And he is psychologically incapable of not bragging about it. But I want to be clear that I think Trump’s public display of arrogance is good; it is waking people up, and many of them are starting to vote for Democratic Socialists, something inconceivable when Trump was first elected.

The most famous Democratic Socialists are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani, but there are others. This year, the Democratic Socialists ran 150 candidates in the primaries, most of them in solid Democratic districts, of whom 35 either won their primaries or advanced to the general election without opposition. I expect that rather than three Democratic Socialists in Congress – Bernie, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib – there will be closer to 30, and that should make a big difference.

It won’t be easy, partially because the Democratic Socialists’ Platform calls for a complete end to all U.S. military and economic aid, as well as all weapon sales, to Israel. That means their opponents will be heavily financed by AIPAC. Although our relationship to Israel is changing too: according to polls, 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with the Palestinians in the Middle East versis 36% who sympathize more with the Israelis. That is a huge change from only three years ago, when it was 54% to 31% in favor of the Israelis.

Still, a bigger point of friction on a smooth path to thirty members of Congress being Democratic Socialists is what I’ll call the Democratic Establishment. The politicians and monied interests who consider themselves “moderates” and have a vested interest in the status quo. Keeping out what everybody, from Chuck Schumer to The New York Times, calls the “far-left” or “ultra-left” as if they were very unrealistic and, even, slightly wacky. But Zohran Mamdani, New York’s new mayor, is showing the world that his will to make needed change is making the “moderate” view look self-defeating. His post-election popularity has not only remained strong but has actually grown, defying the historical trend of post-election “honeymoon” periods.

That is why, as we navigate the rest of 2026, the old label of a “Chinese curse” feels so fitting. We are living in an interesting time; a time of immense friction, change, and chaos. Much of it is hard to watch: the ongoing political battles over our public lands, the constant threat of foreign conflict, and the massive global shift away from fossil fuels. But if this “interesting” era has taught us anything, it’s that the status quo is no longer an option. Change is coming, whether the establishment is ready for it or not, and for the first time in a long time, the public is wide awake.

ICE and Combat Uniforms

Americana

I need to say something that’s been bothering me for a while, and I’m saying it as a Marine Corps veteran who leans center-right. We’ve slow-faded into accepting militarized police as normal, and nobody seems to notice or care. I’ve worn the gear. The helmet, the tactical vest, the whole kit. And I can tell you from experience, it changes you. There’s a psychological shift that happens when you strap that stuff on. You feel different. You carry yourself different. James Tate, a Marine Corps veteran and self-described center-right commentator.

I want to preface this by saying that I started writing it last February and somehow didn’t post it. I’m posting it now because I just argued with a friend that Trump is too much of a buffoon to be a danger to our country, and, re-reading the post below, I realize how wrong I was.

The first time I remember seeing a cop in tactical gear was on February 28, 1993. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) was raiding the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the aforementioned cop was directing traffic away from a turnoff on Highway 84 about half a mile away. A lone cop who seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere, directing traffic, dressed like he was getting ready to go into Iraq during the Gulf War. He was even wearing a helmet. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous, pointless, and annoying, and up until very recently, I still felt that way.

I want to add that I wasn’t at Waco; I only saw it on television. I wasn’t in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, 2026, either, when Renee Good was publicly executed by ICE Agent Jonathan Ross; I only saw it on my computer screen. This time, I didn’t see the wearing of a military combat uniform as ridiculous or pointless; I saw it as scary. Now, I realize that scaring people is the point. When Trump’s ICE thugs executed Alex Pretti, a nurse who worked in the ICU at a Minneapolis VA hospital, on January 24, 2026, I think terrifying people is a better descriptor than just scaring people.

This isn’t primarily about immigration; Obama deported a lot more people, about 1.59 million formal deportations in his first term, 600,000 more people than the first Trump administration. Wearing combat uniforms is about showing who is in control and, more importantly. sowing fear. The fact that the ICE thug called Renee Good a “fucking bitch” after he shot her three times is a red flag for all of us. ICE agents dressed in combat fatigues are not here to protect us; they are here to scare us.

Looking At A Basket Show & A Quilt Show And Thinking About Curating

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A couple of weeks or so ago, we saw a basket show by Jeremy Freyan. It was terrific! Both as Art and in its presentation. Freyan is an Indigenous American, and the baskets are in the Passamaquoddy tradition. It takes at least several months to make a basket, starting with searching for and then cutting down just the right Brown Ash tree; this alone can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks of wandering through the forest.

Next, he uses a heavy tool to beat the shit out of the log, causing the wood to separate, naturally along its growth rings. Then he separates these thin layers into small strips of wood, dyeing some and leaving some natural. Only then does Freyan weave the basket from the strips of wood, keeping them wet to keep them pliable. The results are stunning.

But I want to add that they are stunning because we take our time looking at them. We did this for two reasons. Before we walked into the show, we watched a movie detailing the construction of a basket, from felling a tree to making strips of wood and then weaving them into a basket. (Weaving is not very accurate, but it’s the best I can do.)

As an aside, the basket is burned at the end of the film. First, we see a wisp of smoke rising from inside; it could almost be our imagination. Then more smoke, then flames, until the basket is consumed by fire. All that remains of that basket is the image on the film. End aside.

The second reason we took our time and looked at each basket is because of the way they were displayed. They are art, and they are displayed like art. In every other basket show I have seen, or ceramic bowl show, for that matter, the art is displayed as a collection of artifacts, not as a piece of art. The difference was refreshing.

About a month before we saw the Jeremy Freyan show at Stanford, we went to the Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild Show. It was not at a museum but at a local Elementary School in Los Altos. I was shocked at how good many of the quilts were. I was also dismayed that they were not displayed very well – in my humble opinion -making it easier to just mindlessly stroll through, which would have been a mistake because there were quite a few quilts that I thought were superb.

I have been a fan of quilts – especially Amish quilts – ever since I saw a show at the Whitney Museum in the early 1970s, and this show had some of the most interesting quilts I can remember seeing. Seeing the basket show and the quilt show side by side drove home the importance of curation. Still, both shows were worth seeing.