She cared about shit. Michele Stern

Michele’s second cousin, my second cousin-in-law and friend, Marion Kaplan, passed away a week or so ago. I don’t think she would have said, “Passed away,” actually. She was not a “passed away” kind of person. She was a “tell it like it is” kind of person. She was a hitchhike, at nineteen, from South Africa to Kenya-type person. However you want to put it, Marion is gone, and the world is less interesting.

When I first met Marion Kaplan, sometime in the oughts, we were in Arkansas, and she was planning on going to Chicago to take a picture of “the young senator who gave the keynote speech at the Kerry Democratic Convention.” I was surprised at how confident she was that she would be able to meet him and get his portrait — that is until she said she had some friends at Life magazine who could help. Now I know that was so typically Marion.

I bonded with Marion over photography and our mutual curiosity about almost everything. I differed from Marion in the guile required to satisfy that curiosity firsthand. What is it like to sail on a dhow? Marion knew; in the early 1970s, she sailed on a dhow from Dubai, which was still a small fishing village in the Persian Gulf, to Mombasa, Africa.

I had the pleasure of accompanying Marion into the great American Outback. One memory that sticks with me is stopping at a pass overlooking the Smoke Creek Desert. I thought it would be a good place to take a photograph. By the time I got out of the car, collected my photo gear, and switched to a wide-angle lens, Marion had, somehow, levitated two hundred yards down the road, camera in hand, stalking the best view.

Another memory from an addendum to that trip is when Marion and I were driving south on Highway 395, just north of Minden, Nevada. Marion said, “Stop!” “pull over!” I’d driven this section of 395 maybe thirty times without stopping or even seeing it, but Marion knew a good picture when she saw it.

I’ll miss Marion. She was an extraordinary woman and a remarkable person. I’ll miss her emails remarking on some world event or something she disagreed with on my blog. Marion Kaplan has enriched my life.

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The other day was a beautiful warm day, not warm for summer at 65°F, but warm for mid-February, the daffodils were blooming, the fruit trees were in flower, and even one of our Aeoniums was putting on a show; the world felt delicious. I was on my way to Pulmonary Rehab and, when I got in the car, I turned the radio on. They were talking about Israel raiding a Refugee Camp in Gaza. One young father, who had his entire family wiped out was talking about trying to find the remains of his two daughters. He found one and knew it was her when he saw part of an ear with his daughter’s earring on it. I just couldn’t listen. I turned the radio off, seething.

By the time I had finished exercising, I had calmed down. I got back into the car and again turned on the radio. This time. they were interviewing a Ukrainian returned POW and he was talking about how he was tortured while he was a POW. Again, I just couldn’t listen and turned the radio off to drive home in silence, thinking about what I had just written – indirectly – about the value of facing the horrible truth and how hard it is to do so in real life.

A couple of nights ago I was reading about the House not passing the Ukraine/Israel/ Border bill because Trump didn’t want them to. I was especially surprised at Lindsey Graham, a lifetime hawk, voting against supporting Ukraine. He said he voted that way because Trump told them to vote against the bill. Along the same theme, Candidate Trump has said he wants his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to be the RNC Chair. It was late and I was tired and I asked myself – for at least the hundredth time – how did Trump come to so dominate the Republican Party? For the first time, I could sort of feel the answer. For the first time, I could understand how Caligula was able to put his favorite horse, Incitātus, in the Roman Senate.

I think the beautiful thing about California is the diversity of our state. We are, you know, the largest community of X, fill in the blank, outside of Y, fill in the blank. That is true for the largest community of Palestinians outside of Palestine. The largest community of Armenians outside of Armenia. The largest community of Chinese outside of China. The largest community of Jewish people outside of Israel. And the beauty of living in and experiencing that beauty and that diversity. California Senator Laphonza Butler.

A couple of weekends ago, Michele and I drove down to L.A. to get away from the clouds and overcast of Northern California. The plan was to visit LACMA – the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – The Broad, the home of Edythe and Eli Broad’s art collection, have a couple of Mexican dinners, and drive home.

A couple of days after we got home, I read an article about a teacher in South Carolina who was reprimanded for teaching Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It turns out that South Carolina has a law that prohibits teaching students anything that makes them feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his [sic} race or sex. Two students complained saying that Between the World and Me made them ashamed to be White which resulted in a formal complaint and the teacher being reprimanded.

I can understand the shame. Between the World and Me is beautifully written but it does not soft peddle slavery, saying: Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in a particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels in dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribed this love in its sacred texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, hold her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved…For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. 

I don’t know why this law is on the books but, it seems to me, that looking at our ugly past should not be discouraged. Indeed, looking at and acknowledging our ugly past is the only way we can move forward. As difficult as it is to look at crimes committed by our ancestors, as much shame that it brings up, looking at the truth of our past should be encouraged. Looking at the ugly past seems to be happening in the two LA museums we visited, where California’s diversity is on full display.

Michele had never been to LACMA so that was the goal of our first day. To the surprise of both of us, LACMA was undergoing a major rebuild, and most of it was closed. There were, however, two exhibitions that I want to highlight to prove my point. The first is a gallery remembering the mostly Mexican community that was destroyed to build Dodger Stadium. It features paintings by Vincent Valdez and was organized by, improbably, Ry Cooder. Titled El Chavez Ravine, the exhibition features an ice cream truck painted by Valdez, that, according to LACMA, is a monument to a disturbing chapter in L.A. history and symbolizes struggles across the country about affordable housing, eminent domain, gentrification, and discrimination. 

The second exhibition features murals for the LA River.

As an aside, the LA River is 51 miles long and falls 830 feet from its official headwater where two creeks come together (that is more than the Mississippi River falls over 2,000 miles). Like most desert rivers it is usually dry or a small trickle, but, rarely, in 1815, 1825, 1862 1914, 1938, and, now, 2024, being notable, it was a raging torrent. The 1938 flood resulted in the river having been made over as a concrete flood channel for much of its length. The flood channel is an eye sore and divides the City and LA is planning on spending up to a billion dollars to gentrify the river and better tie it into the surrounding City. End aside.

As another aside to the main theme here, LACMA still has lots of fun art on display, two of my faves were a David Hockney painting entitled something like “My Road to Work” showing the LA hills and the flat, flat valley floor and, of course, everybody’s fave, “City Lights”. End aside.

As the last aside, the new museum, according to LACMA, will: While replacing nearly all of the existing galleries in the four aging buildings, the new building totals 347,500 square feet, replacing approximately 393,000 square feet of existing buildings. In the new building, the entire 347,500 square feet will be on one floor about thirty feet off the ground, and all the separate traditions, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Japanese, French, Indian, blah, blah, blah will be treated equally in that they are all on the same level and partially intermixed. End aside.

The next day, we went to The Broad. The money to build The Broad and fill it with art came from Eli Broad, primarily, who made his money building tracts of homes for largely first-time buyers. The Company, Kaufman and Broad – now KB – started in Chicago, then Arizona, and finally moved to Southern California in the early sixties where they became hyper-successful (the company is worth about 4.6 billion now).

With some of that money, Edythe and Eli Broad have assembled the best private collection I have ever seen. I know that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the same can be said for art and I am predisposed to like this art. The collection is contemporary art from the 50s until today and that is right in the middle of my sweet spot. Still, all my prejudges aside, this is an amazing collection, ranging from the usual suspects like Jean‐Michel Basquiat and Chuck Close to Jeff Koons to Andy Warhol. It also contained dozens of artists I hadn’t heard of but thought were terrific like Mark Innerst, Shio Kusaka, and Mickalene Thomas.

But the most surprising piece of art was West by Doug Aitken which showed the damage builders like KB do to the enviroment.

All in all, I enjoyed the Broad more, which was unexpected, but both museums were worth seeing. Even more worth seeing is art as a window to reality even when it causes discomfort.