All posts by Steve Stern

Frank Gehry and the out of town architect

October 29, 2015Americana, Art, CaliforniaSteve Stern

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you’re the only expert. Frank Gehry

Before I went, I thought that the whole purpose of my going to Los Angeles was to see the Frank Gehry show at LACMA – the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – but, on the way home, I realized that the highlight of the trip was just being in Los Angeles for a day. Like many people – actually, most is probably more accurate – raised in Northern California, I was raised to look down on Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular. We were taught that L.A. was crass, even vulgar, completely lacking the refinement of us Northern Californians.

As an aside, one of my favorite Northern v. Southern California stories is from Herb Caen, “Mr. San Francisco”, who quoted a well known bon vivant from Santa Barbara (which really is in Southern California even though we Northerners sometimes try to claim it). The Santa Barbaian, let’s call him Bon, told of a time he was in San Francisco visiting a schoolmate who was now a lawyer on Montgomery Street; it was summer and Bon was wearing a tan linen suit with white shoes, feeling very spiffy. As Bon was walking down Montgomery Street, he spotted two guys wearing sandwich boards that advertised a health food store. They were walking towards him, the one on the right was wearing a tomato costume under his sandwich board and the guy on the left was dressed as a carrot. He giggled to himself, thinking Only in San Francisco. As they passed him, the carrot leaned over to the tomato and said in a stage whisper, “I can’t believe that idiot is wearing white shoes on Montgomery Street.” End side.

I wouldn’t say that Los Angeles is totally unlike San Francisco, but they are atleast a third of a culture apart; the climate is very different, even the light is different, the standards are looser – and, if that sounds pejorative, it is because that’s how I learned it, maybe a better way to say it is that the culture is more open to innovation and change – and the chaos is amped way up.

The Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry (picture from Wikipedia)

This difference shows itself the most in L.A.’s streetscape and architecture. The chaotic grid covers hundreds of square miles and there are times when the out-of-towner has no idea where the particular disorganized spot where he/she/or it is standing is in relation to some famous landmark, identifiable place, or where they want to be. Every part of Los Angeles seems to be screaming for attention. It is this landscape and this light that educated the architects who matured in it. Yet, when Los Angeles wanted a Museum Of Contemporary Art, they chose an outsider, Arata Isozaki. He is from Japan and about as far away as they could get.

I don’t want to say that Isozaki is not a good, or even great, architect but when Michele and I went to MOCA about twenty years ago, we were very disappointed, it seemed too formal, too contained. Then we walked down the street to The Temporary Contemporary – now relabeled as The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA – which was a warehouse lightly redone by Frank Gehry and were delighted.

Temporary Contemporary. (not my picture) — Temporary Contemporary (not my picture).

Somehow, as simple as it was, this museum was more L A and everybody liked it. Even the New York Times’ art critic, William Wilson, liked it, saying it was a prince among spaces that was all set to embrace whatever princess came round the corner. The space prompted, the Guggenheim to talk to Gehry about a remodel in a factory space at Bilbao for their new museum. That lead to the totally new Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

(1 of 1) — Gehry Bilbao (not my picture, duh)

As an aside, Gehry must have as much of a distortion field as Steve Jobs once he gets close. Many, maybe most, of his jobs started out small or as remodels and became bigger and more expensive. End aside.

With Gehry living and practicing in Los Angeles , the Museum still felt it had to go out of town to get a prestigious architect. And that is the rub, it seems finding or showing or using out of town architects is considered better – better as in more prestigious, in a we are a world-class-town way, I think – than using local guys. And that is not just in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hired a guy from Switzerland who designed a building that not only doesn’t fit in but doesn’t work very well. Sadly, it is not just in signature museums that the out of town syndrome reigns, it is also the art in them. I have been going to museums all my life – dragged would have been a better term for the first dozen years – and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was the first museum that really spun my beanie. It was on the top three floors of the The War Memorial Veterans Building – designed by Arthur Brown Jr, a local guy who also designed the City Hall – and it was full of art I had never seen before. Some of it was the permanent collection but much of it was small shows of local, emerging, artists.

That is not the case now (with some exceptions). The shows have gotten bigger and the artists have become more famous and often that means the artists are from somewhere else. I think the purpose of travel is to see a different place and the homogenization of art in museums, like the standardization of stores and restaurants, makes places seem less different.

As an aside, the only museum that I know about that fights this trend is the Oakland Museum. It only has local – by that, they mean California, so not local, local – art so the visitor is treated to a great Robert Arneson or a Michael McMillen,

rather than a mediocre Jasper Johns. And that is good, because you aren’t going to see any McMillion in New York, only great Jasper Johns. End aside.

Racism and Anna Deavere Smith

October 27, 2015Americana, Art, Local eventsSteve Stern

An examination of traffic stops and arrests in Greensboro, N.C., uncovered wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct. Sharon LaFraniere, Andrew W. Lehren, and Susan Beachy in The New York Times 10/25/2015

Last Wednesday, we saw Anna Deavere Smith at the Stanford Chapel. I would probably only know her as the National Security Advisor on West Wing, if it hadn’t been for a fortuitous blind ticket buy about twenty years ago. We were in L A for my former partner’s widow’s 85th birthday and we decided to see if we could see a play – L A being a hotbed for great, small, local, theater companies – and we ended up in small theater watching Anna Deavere Smith put on a performance about the Rodney King Riots, called Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, in which she played all the parts.

To back up, what Anna Deavere Smith did was to interview various people that were involved in the riots, from young black men who broke windows and stole TVs, to a Korean shop owner who was robbed, to LAPD chief Daryl Gates and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She then tells each part of the story, using the interviewees’ own words and attitude. We were blown away.

Now Smith is an Artist in Residence at Stanford and, last Wednesday, she put on a show that was billed as Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Of course, the center of the show was her reading of Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail but what I found most moving was the first reading, Glass All Over My Clothes, which came from an interview with Charlayne Hunter Gault who was one of the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia. Gault told about how carefully she had packed, wanting her clothes to be just perfect – she had gone to Wayne State, in Detroit, for a year and a half and she thought her clothes looked very look cool and hip – and how a riot of white kids threw bricks through her dorm window, the only window with a light on because every other girl in the dorm had quietly been told to turn their lights off. Anna Deavere Smith embodied the nineteen year old Charlayne Hunter Gault’s feelings of isolation and fear just perfectly.

That feeling of isolation and fear, of not being an equal American – projected large by Anna Deavere Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates in his writings and the drumbeat of cops killing young black men- are the reality of how we treat our fellow citizens. I might have never thrown a rock through a young girl’s dorm window, but in a Letter from Birmingham City Jail, Martin Luther King reminds me that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice. I have never thrown a rock through a young girl’s dorm window nor did I even know it was happening in 1957 but, I didn’t know and didn’t care only because I was looking the other way.

As an aside: a couple of days ago, I read a book review of KL: A History of The Nazi Concentration Camps by Nikolaus Wachsmann. The KL are not the Nazi Death Camps that we know through the holocaust, but slave labor camps and Wachsmann writes that even though they were not death camps, the mortality rate was about 50% annually. He goes on to say that the only comparable mortality rate was in prisons in the Southern United States after the Civil War in which about 50% of the black prisoners died annually (after about 1880, the death rate dropped to only about 15% annually). I did not know that appalling fact. The only place that compares with Nazi slave labor camps is the United States, sixty years earlier. End aside.

As much as I want to exonerate the US or only blame people south of the Mason-Dixon Line for the way we have treated black people and, of course, by extension, exonerate myself, with Social Media that exoneration is now impossible. It’s not just slavery or Jim Crow in the South but redlining in the north, it’s California with a 6.6% black population having a black prison population of 29%. In reality, we have been disenfranchising, disempowering, marginalizing, and demonizing, black people since our country was formed. Formed on that grand principle that that all men are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, by men who put the three fifths clause in the Constitution, by men who were more devoted to order than to justice.

The subtitle of the Letter from Birmingham City Jail is The Negro Is Your Brother and the last performance of Anna Deavere Smith was a story told by John Lewis. Lewis was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, on Bloody Sunday and he was beaten by a what? civilian volunteer beater? bully? idiot? asshole? take your pick. Lewis goes on to say that the guy approached him about ten years ago, hat in hand. He apologized and asked for forgiveness and, of course, John Lewis forgave him. Lewis went on to say that they have met four times since and now they call each other Brother.

In Twilight: Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith quotes Cornel West on Optimism versus Hope, Optimism Is when you look out the window and think things are going well and Hope is when you look out the window and you go, “It doesn’t look good at all, but I’m going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.” Looking at how we treat people of color, especially Americans of African heritage, Hope is as good as it is going to get.

A couple of thoughts while watching the Democratic Debate

October 18, 2015Americana, PoliticsSteve Stern

I’ve been thinking about the Democratic Debate all week because one of these guys is who I will probably vote for for president, and my first impression is still how subdued it was. There just didn’t seem to be any crazies. Nobody touted a non-existent film and everybody believed in global climate change.

Starting stage right, I liked Lincoln Chafee and when he said “I didn’t leave the Republican Party, it left me” – probably not quoted very accurately – I thought, What a great guy for the Democrats to run for president, they can pick up the Reagan Democrats who are disillusioned with the Republican crazy. But Chafee completely blew the question of why he voted for the reduction of Glass Steagall – and that is a question he should have known was coming and be prepared for – and his “Solid as a block of granite” comment, at least twice, just seemed too contrived. But, when he pitched that his biggest plus was that he had no scandals, I knew he is not going to get this nomination – he couldn’t even get reelected as Senator from Rhode Island – and the fact that he seems clueless to that just reinforces how delusional it is to live in the political bubble.

On the other end of the spectrum, Jim Webb gave a great impression of what a sane Republican would look like. His credentials are solid working white blue-collar, if that makes sense, with a mother from Arkansas who worked in fields picking cotton. When he said he would have no problem with letting undocumented immigrants get on ObamaCare, I was a little surprised, but then he talked about his immigrant – from Vietnam – wife going from not speaking English to graduating from Princeton, I was completely convinced that he meant it. When Webb was asked about his position of being against Affirmative Action – he is against it because it has been expanded to almost everybody but poor white people – I thought This is too nuanced, but I almost completely agreed with his answer and when he talked about African Americans being special because of slavery and then, surprisingly, included Jim Crow, I thought This guy really does understand the problem. But when he was asked “What enemy defines him?” – or something like that – his answer of the Vietnamese soldier who tried to kill him was almost embarrassing. In the end, much of the time, Webb just seemed to come off as pissed.

After Bernie Sanders said something along the lines of being a Democratic Socialist, Anderson Cooper asked if anyone on stage besides Bernie Sanders wasn’t a Capitalist, nobody raised their hand but only Clinton spoke. The question was about Bernie, so he couldn’t speak but that nobody but Hillary seemed to want to speak, was telling. If nothing else, Hillary came across as really, really, wanting the Presidency and she is willing to bust her ass to get it. I thought her answers – like “I can find common ground and know when to stand my ground” or “I want to save Capitalism from itself” or “I’m a progressive who gets things done” (which is, technically not true) – were too canned but I think Clinton did a fine job in doing what she needs to do. Her main tasks were to keep her backers on board and to keep Joe Biden out and she probably did both (maybe, in the end, she won’t be able to keep Biden out, but she did make it harder). I’m still not a Clinton convert, I’ll vote for her if she get’s the nomination, then I won’t have a choice, but there is something about both Clintons that is a little bit above the law and she is too much of a hawk for my taste.

Martin O’Malley was a complete unknown to me so the fact that he is much better known nationally is a big win. I keep thinking that he is running for Vice-president which may not be fair.

I turned on the debate wanting Bernie to win and, in the end, I still wanted him to win and I am still going to vote for him as long as I can. At one point he was asked – what could be called a gotcha question – on not voting for the Brady Bill and he started to explain a couple of details that he didn’t like but, unlike Chafee, his answer seemed to say Why are you asking me such a stupid question, ask me about the important stuff and I don’t think it hurt him. When Hillary was asked a gotcha question about her emails, Bernie had a similar reaction saying something like “Nobody cares about the stupid emails, let’s get to the important stuff like inequality.” His answer helped Hillary but I don’t think that he cared, I don’t think that was the purpose of his answer, I think that he just wanted to get back to his agenda.

At one point, everybody was asked “What is the biggest single threat to the United States?” and the various answers were interesting. Somebody, several, actually, said versions of Terrorism, Webb surprisingly enough said China, Hillary listed three or four things – that above the rule thing again – and Bernie, with a tone of voice that seemed to say duh!, said “Climate Change”.

Of course it’s Climate Change. The long drought in the middle east – is middle east still OK to say? or is it like Oriental? – has been a major fact in the violence, especially in Syria where farmers have been forced to give up their farms and have fled to the cities. In North Africa, the nomads are being driven south to what was traditionally farming country rapeing and killing as they go. The seas are rising which should make living in Seattle and New York interesting (not to mention our dear Bay Area). Bernie saying “Climate Change” and the way in which he said “Climate Change made me very happy.

But I don’t feel about Bernie the way I felt about Obama even though his positions and his priorities line up almost perfectly with my beliefs. I am for Bernie and I have sent him money – not much – but I am concerned that I’m only for him because I don’t think he will win. If he wins, I worry that he won’t be effective, he isn’t known for Playing well others after all. And I worry that I’m not the only one who feels that way. When I heard him on the Bill Mahre show, I started thinking that maybe Bernie feels that way too. I think he wants to energize the country, to push it in the direction it must go to survive, more than he want to be President.

A pitch for the feel good science movie of the year

October 11, 2015FilmSteve Stern

“I loved it, I really loved it.” Michele Stern while walking out of the theater
“I’m goin’ to have to science the shit out of this.” Astronaut Mark Watney

Michele and I saw The Martian, by director Ridley Scott, last Friday night and we both loved it. I loved it because it is a visual delight – like most of Scott’s movies – and I loved it because I want to love Scott’s movies. This is the first Science Fiction movie that I can think of that really has science at its core. By that I mean all the science in it is real. The movie is also bright, cheery, and often funny; a feel good science movie that takes place in a near future in which science and NASA are well funded (that is the fiction part).

Even without this movie, Ridley Scott is one of my favorite movie directors. He can build a densely layered photographic picture better than anybody (and it is a moving picture, after all). Scott started his career in TV advertising where the budget per minute is usually much higher than a movie and that density of detail, that voluptuousness of the image, is one of his hallmarks. He packs the frame with such care that even his bad movies are visually interesting. The overall cheer of The Martian surprised me a little because I think of Scott’s movies as usually brooding and atmosphericly dark and, even, somewhat nihilistic like Blade Runner or Alien or one of my very favorite movies, The Duelists.

But what makes me want to like Scott is his strong feminist credentials. He is the producer of The Good Wife, he directed G.I. Jane and Thelma and Louise, and Ripley is one of moviedom’s most memorable heroes. In The Martian, Matt Damon is the center of the story, but the mission commander is Jessica Chastain. There are more women and actors of color, in noticeable roles, than in any movie I can think of and they all have actual personalities and make major, plot changing, contributions (and I’m not sure action movie is an accurate descriptor and – again – actors of color sounds pretty stilted, sorry).

I think that we will go back and see it again, it was really that enjoyable a movie.

The Carrizo Plain on the way to Fresno to pick up the V dub

October 8, 2015Around home, California, PhotographySteve Stern

When we left Fresno last Thursday, the Volkswagen still wasn’t repaired. Or, more accurately, they repaired the water pump only to find out that the radiator had started to leak and they would need until Monday to fix it. Since we had an Enterprise rental car – with unlimited mileage – for a week and Los Angeles was only about 425 miles out of the way, I decided to run down to Los Angeles to see the Frank Gehry show at the L A County Museum. To keep costs down, I was going to camp at the Carrizo Plain north of Los Angeles and go into town in the morning. Courtney Gonzalez volunteered to come along for company if we could take the time to visit her niece.

Driving south on 101 and the 58, California looked dry and the Golden Hills were a parched dun. As we got close to where we were going to camp – camp is way too grandiose, all we really planned on doing was throwing our bags down on a flat spot with a view – we saw a tarantula crossing the road, then another one, then several more, then lots more. It was a tarantula migration! and we were in the middle of it. Courtney said, We don’t have a tent and I don’t want to sleep out with tarantulas crawling over me in the dark. I didn’t either but I was still in denial, thinking we would soon enter a tarantula free zone in which we could sleep without worries. We didn’t. As an aside, I haven’t seen a tarantula, in the wild, since the fall of 1981 when I was moving into my Portola Valley home. That fall, I saw three; two near my home and one on a back road to Mt. Hamilton. In the thirty four tarantula-free years since, I would sometimes wonder at the oddness of that year of seeing tarantulas crossing the road and how it must have been a once in a lifetime event. Now Courtney and I were seeing hundreds and it turns out that this is an annual event. It is not a migration but late September to early October – in dry grassland areas – the males go hunting for girlfriends. Tarantulas live from six to twelve years, mate once near the end of their life and – presumably – die happy (sometimes, but not usually, the girlfriend will kill the male after mating). End aside.

Discretion being the better part of valor, we opted out of spending the night on the Carrizo Plain. Instead we wandered around for a while and then drove back to Civilization in the fading light. Fortunately, the late afternoon light was golden and I did get lots of pictures.