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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 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 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…

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.

It’s The Inequality, Stupid.

Americana, Current Affairs, No category

We live in a system that’s stealing from us. Graham Platner Tou Tube ad.

AOC is in the house now. So AOC, you don’t even need a name anymore. You can go anywhere in the world, you say AOC and they know who you are. David Axelrod, while introducing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a public interview in front of a packed house at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

They assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate and House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at that interview.

I heard that someone was flying a plane with a banner that said This is Trump country… It sure don’t look like it today. I don’t think this is Trump country. This is our country. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez just before her speech in Folsom, California.

We Liberals seem to have an all-purpose answer for why so many people voted for Donald Trump. “They’re stupid,” or “They only watch FOX News”, which sort of means the same thing. I don’t buy that generalization. Sure, some people are stupid, and some are not interested in politics or current events – as we used to call it. – enough to be informed, but most people know that most people are being screwed by the few the system is serving.

A large number of people voted for Trump because they were desperate. They hoped Trump might stop the economic screwing they were getting from powerful economic interests. They were so desperate that they had even voted for a black man with a Muslim name, Barrak Husain Obama. Obama was a Washington outsider, and, while the change he brought was real, it was minimal rather than substantial. When Trump ran in 2016, he said he was already rich and didn’t need any more money, so he could bring real change. Of course, that was a lie. The funny thing about money, not funny Ha Ha, but funny unexpected, is the more a person has, the more they want. Very few people get very rich and say, “I don’t need any more money”. Trump said it, but – obviously – Trump didn’t really mean it.

I thought that the voting public was still so desperate that they would be willing to try a woman, even a Latina woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think that the country is more sexist and, probably, more racist than I thought a couple of months ago, but that is not the main reason I’ve changed my mind. The main reason is that AOC – a handle I’ll use for the rest of this – is a fiscal populist, and the Democratic Party leadership, while socially liberal, is fiscally conservative. Even more importantly, the Liberal Media establishment, like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Times, and CBS, and NBC, and ad infinitum, are fiscally conservative. They are aligned with what they call the Centrists (as if that were a virtue). Politicians who think we should have a one-payer health system, or a fair Minimum Wage, are called Extremists by the so-called Liberal Media.

Since I started to write this post – way longer ago than I’m ready to admit – several things have happened that are starting to make me change my mind. A new poll by the highly regarded AtlasIntel has AOC leading a crowded, hypothetical 2028 Democratic primary field. In that poll, AOC narrowly edged out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for the top spot. Twenty-twenty-eight will be a good year to be a Democrat running for president, for what I think are obvious reasons, but getting the Democratic nomination for a woman, a Latina, and most importantly, a fiscal Liberal, will be hard.

I’m convinced, for two reasons, however, that AOC will try. First, when she was sworn into Congress in January 2019, she wore large hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. She said she was inspired by Jusyice Sotamayer and said: “Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.” It was a badge of honor she was not going to change, but she toned down both her lipstick color and the size of her earrings.

Still, the biggest reason I think AOC will run for President is that she is campaigning outside of her district and, even, outside New York, although AOC is not calling it campaigning. Last year, AOC and Bernie Sanders went on the “Fighting Oligarchy” National Tour, during which they campaigned in 21 states (Los Angeles, Folsom, and Bakersfield in California; Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania; Iowa City and Davenport in Iowa). This year, she has campaigned for Sam Forstag in Montana, Chriss Rab in Pennsylvania, and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey.

Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists’ money. No one’s ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one’s ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Precious Mae

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Bringing a pet into a home is a long-term commitment that often spans a decade or more, depending on the species. It requires a consistent investment of time, finances, and emotional energy. A sidenote by Gemini, who – which? – identifies itself as a family of multimodal large language models developed by Google DeepMind, and ended its self-identification with the following creepy question: I noticed you’re currently working on a post for your blog about Precious Mae. I am truly sorry for your loss; sixteen years is a remarkable journey to share with a companion. Would you like some help refining that tribute or perhaps selecting some photos of her to include?

Precious Mae, our beloved cat, died yesterday, leaving a big hole in our family. She first came into our lives on September 10, 2010, and left us on May 10, 2026. Her quiet presence filled our home, which now seems empty without her.

After she had lived with us for a year, I wrote: She is never nasty, often sweet, usually interesting, and always marches to her own drum. Almost any time of the day or night, if we are inside and walk towards a door, she will streak over to get out. And then, bam! she is gone. Often for the rest of the day or night. As she got older, Precous Mae became more of an indoor cat, but she never became nasty, staying sweet and interesting. Still, she always marched to her own drum.

We miss her terribly.