Category Archives: California

Frank Gehry and the out of town architect

Gerhry (1 of 1)-3Your 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)
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.

MOCA, picture from Wikipedia.
MOCA, picture from Wikipedia.

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.Gehry (1 of 1)

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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 Robert Arneson (1 of 1)or a  Michael McMillen,  McMillion (1 of 1)

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.

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

Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-2When 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. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)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. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-3As 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. Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-6 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-7 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-8 Gerhry Trip (1 of 1)-9Gerhry Trip B (1 of 1)Gerhry Trip B (1 of 1)-2

Looking for the elusive Pagani in a world of excess

Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-6Last Wednesday and Thursday, Michele and I were stuck in – what seemed like – an endless traffic jam. It was great.

To back up, a couple of weeks ago, Michele suggested we go down to the Monterey Peninsula to see a small car show – small as in only 45 cars, not small as in tiny cars; that would be The Little Car Show +, an entirely different show  – The Mission Classic, in the middle of the week. Not just any week, The Monterey Car Extravaganza Week, the annual get together of cars and car people which has become the biggest car week in the automotive universe. The Week is intense and getting more so every year. There are art shows, tours, nine different car shows, nineteen different car auctions, four days of vintage car racing, and an entire week of lustful car watching much of it while sitting in a traffic jam with other car nuts. It is the only time I don’t mind being stuck in traffic because there is sure to be a couple of interesting cars stuck nearby.

Michele’s suggestion was prompted by her reading that a Pagani Huayra would be at the Mission Classic and, knowing that the Pagani Huayra has become my Holy Grail, she proposed we spend a couple of days on the Monterey Peninsula, looking for it. I have not spent a night during The Week, in years. I used to during the seventies and eighties, but now I will run down for one day, usually with Malcolm and usually at the races . Michele has gone down a couple of times for the races but she has never spent the night, so it was a shock to both of us just how immersed one gets just driving around.

The bigger shock, although not entirely unexpected, was just how much money is involved. When I asked Michele what her first impression was, she said How many rich people there are in one place. Sure, car people come in all wealth brackets – a kid driving a $8,000 1964 Corvair lives in a different world than the old man driving a $1, 500,000 Ferrari LaFerrari, but the Ferrari people – and even more so, the Lamborghini people – take up more psychic space.Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-3 We drive around, seeing cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, just casually parked, with the people walking by on car overload, not even noticing. Monterey 15 (1 of 1) Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-2To increase their exposure Ferrari has even taken over a historic gas station/gift shop at Carmel Highlands, to make it a Ferrari dealership/gift shop/owner oasis. retreat. Inside Ferrari Owners could relax with great wines and food – including the best prosciutto I have ever had and an excellent cappuccino – safely gated off from the hoi polli.Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-5Monterey 15 (1 of 1)-4Outside the Owner Oasis, people – prequalified and almost all men type people – were lined up to take a test drive in one of several Ferrari models. It was hard not to think of the one percent and not in an entirely positive way. Them that’s got shall get, the great Billie Holiday sang, So the Bible said and it still is news. I get the feeling that it was not news here. Here, at the ad hoc Ferrari place, everybody gets the free lunch.

To be contin

 

 

 

 

 

After four years, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei is free to leave China

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-2Until I saw Ai Weiwei’s Alcatraz show, I knew him more as a dissenter than as an artist. I am not normally a fan of message art – for lack of a better term – but this show was a surprise.

To back up, last April, we went to Alcatraz – for the first time, Alcatraz being one of the many, many, Bay Area attractions that we would see if we were tourists here, but have never gotten around to seeing because we live here – to see an Ai Weiwei installation. I’ve struggled whether to call it a show, protest, art installation, art show, or what, because it is really all of that.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and activist who was jailed and released but then confined to China for his art, well, actually for his activism. His show at Alcatraz was put on, in absentia, by the For-Site Foundation, a nonprofit that commissions artwork in public places, and the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy which run  Alcatraz now that it has been decommissioned.

It was a beautiful spring day in San Francisco and on the Bay when we went to the show and it was easy to feel superior about an art installation – to settle on one descriptor – that is being put on in the United States by a guy who is deprived of his freedom in China. But the show, itself, put a lie to that. After all, the installation was at Alcatraz, one of the most notorious prisons in the world, and the thick walls and ever present bars constantly reminded us that the United States is the World Champion of putting people in prison.     Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-4Walking around the island with its view of San Francisco, tantalizing close, seemed so pleasant. However, once inside the cellblock, the view shrunk to an unobtainable dream. We are free and can leave on the next ferry and the inside-out fortress still felt oppressive. Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-5 Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)-6For me, the most powerful part of the installation was…well, here is the description from Weiwei’s website:

This sound installation occupies a series of twelve cells in A Block. Inside each cell, visitors are invited to sit and listen to spoken words, poetry, and music by people who have been detained for the creative expression of their beliefs, as well as works made under conditions of incarceration. 

Ai Weiwei (1 of 1)I listened to part of Study for String Orchestra which was written in Auschwitz by Pavel Haas Terezín, an unknown to me, Jewish composer. The music is disturbingly and beautifully upbeat  and, sitting in the empty cell, I wondered how anybody could keep themselves together in those conditions. A couple of cells over, I listened to Pussy Riot’s Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away, and then Martin Luther King, Jr’s plaintive call for an end to the war in Vietnam, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.  

Outside the cell, people were talking, some even laughing, and it was frustratingly hard to hear King’s speech. Sitting in that oppressive cell, with the paint peeling off of thick concrete walls and hard steel bars, prison felt real, less abstract. It is not just being locked up, prison is about having our humanity taken away. Prison is about having control of our own life taken away, it is about living without privacy or power or influence; even over ourselves. That is the point.

Michele and I both left the prison subdued. The size of the infrastructure required to sustain that kind of brutality is horrifying. I suspect that a visit to Alcatraz would always be disturbing but Ai Weiwei’s installation has given the passive ruins a new life.

 

A winter walk on the edge of the continent

Kehoe Beach-2639I have been looking at the picture above – taken from Tracy and Richard’s backyard – for a couple of days, trying to put together an interesting post. To un-stall myself, I’m just going to list what I want to say, post a couple of pictures and go on from there (or let it go and get on with my life).

  • First I want to say Here, on the coast of California, the long nightmare of winter is over.
  • We went for a walk on the western edge of the North American continent but we also went for a walk on the eastern edge of the Pacific plate.
  • Saturday was Michele’s birthday and Sunday was Super Bowl Day. Saturday was clear, warm, and calm (when I took the top picture). Sunday started foggy and warm – when I took the picture below -then cloudy and warmer, and it seemed like a perfect day to walk on a beach.

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Now, I’ll try to do some ‘splaining. When I say that the long nightmare is over, I’m just bragging. I love the weather here, I love that it is so micro-climatish, that it can be cold and windy at Candelstick and hot where we live. I grew up here, it just seems natural. Although it may not look like it in these pictures, this doesn’t mean we don’t have four seasons, just milder and different seasons. Winters are the rainy season and the summers are the dry season. Spring is spring and the fall is summer; it’s simple. I should say used to be rather than are because, rather than just being a drought, the rainy season has slid to Late Spring. This means that the rains are warmer and we get less snow in the mountains. Because we used to store our water in the mountains as snow, that change is not for the better.

Kehoe Beach-2648Meanwhile, back in the Winter Walk department, on Superbowl Sunday, after celebrating Michele’s Birthday on Saturday at Tracy and Richard’s weekend home, the people who stayed over went for a walk at Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Our guides choose Kehoe because Michele’s sister, Claudia, was with us and had brought her dog,Emma, and Kehoe is a Dog Beach. It is also at the western edge of the North American continent.

I don’t know how old I was when I learned that there are seven continents, but I do know that I was much older when I figured out that the whole continent thing is Eurocentric phony baloney-ness. Continents are supposed to be large land masses with an inference that they are separate areas. But Europe isn’t a separate landmass – any more than, say, India is – it is a part of Asia and is about the same size as China which doesn’t get awarded Continental status.

Point Reyes National Seashore, where we went for a walk, is on the western edge of the North America continent but we are really walking on the Eastern edge of the Pacific Plate. Almost all of  the so called North American continent is on the North American Plate. Unlike continents, plates are real things. The hard outermost shell of Earth – the part where we live – floats on a viscous interior. This hard crust is broken into rigid plates like the sections of a soccer ball. Where the plates bump or rub against each other are most of the world’s geologically active areas. One of these boundaries is our very own San Andreas Fault which separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate.

The North American plate is some what misnamed because it not only consists of most of the continental North America, it is also Greenland, Western Russia, and part of Japan. What isn’t on the North American Plate is Point Reyes, that is on the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate is probably better named because it is mostly the Pacific Ocean along with Point Reyes, part of southern California, part of southern Japan, and part of South Island in New Zealand.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates

Point Reyes, the peninsula, seems to have been very loosely attached to the rest of California, but that is only partly true. It is attached, but it is just passing by as its homeland plate slides serenely north (of course, that is only serenely on a geological, deep-time as John McPhee calls it). North of us, the San Andreas fault runs along the coast of California, as it goes south, it comes inland and, almost to Los Angeles, it bends more easterly and runs along north of the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way, the fault cut off a little of the granite batholith basement of our Sierra Nevadas. As the Pacific Plate moved north during the last 80 plus million years, it has dragged this southern section of the Sierra base-rock with it. Just north of where we went walking is an area of exposed granite that used to be 300 miles south, near Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield.

Back at the trail to Kehoe Beach, we follow a small stream down to the beach where the seagulls are standing around, feeding on what ever is washed down the stream. I guess it is the animal equivalent to a desk job.
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We walk along the beach in the cool air with a soft, warm, sun. We walk in groups of, mostly, two; stop and cluster; then walk in a different pattern.

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As we walk back to the car, I think  about the drought, that it is real and as unstoppable as the incoming tide. Walking, in the soft air, I fall in love with Life again. In love with California, with the lovely people I am walking with, with their shadows and reflections that join them at their feet.