Art As Truth and Remembrance

Japan

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.

Harriet Tubman, William Dickey, and John Brown

Japan

On this site, on August 14th, 1881, nothing happened. A brass plaque on my neighbor’s stone fireplace.

[Southern California] is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.

Michele and I went to L.A. to go museum shopping last weekend; it was our first trip since we went back East last fall. While we were on our trip back East – as everyone called the East Coast while I was growing up – we drove through and around the Delmarva Peninsula, stayed with Tom and Linda Melton in Dickeyville (Baltimore), and visited Harper’s Ferry. Three places where the past is still alive.

That presence of the past is, to my mind, other than the topography and weather – which, OK, are big deals – is the biggest difference between the East Coast and the West Coast. Harriet Tubman performed her first act of resistance at the Bucktown General Store in 1835. A slave tried to escape, and the overseer yelled at Tubman to stop him, which she didn’t. The Bucktown General Store is still there.

We stayed with Tom and Linda in Dickeyville, and it was almost like being on a movie set. Some of the buildings date back to the late 1700s, although most are originally from the 1800s. I say originally because many of them were rebuilt in the early 20th Century.

On our drive from Washington DC to Pittsburgh, we passed by farms that were there when John Brown was still alive, farms he must have passed on the way to Harper’s Ferry, where he played his part in ending slavery. Everything feels the same. The past is still alive.

L. A., where the oldest building – downtown, at least, the Bradbury Building, is known for being the location of the ending of Blade Runner – is not like that.

Coretta King & Martin Luther King Jr.

Americana, Japan, Politics
Julia Roberts lors du Festival de Cannes le 19 mai 2022. (Photo by Laurent Koffel/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

George Washington gave us our independence. Abraham Lincoln cemented our unity. Equally significant, Dr. Martin Luther King glorified America’s spirit! As our greatest spiritual leader, Dr. Martin Luther King more than deserves a national day of permanent recognition! Edwin Cooney  

Part of me doesn’t think that Martin Luther King Day is a real holiday. It has always seemed like sort of a consultation prize given to African Americans in lieu of treating them as well as White People are treated.

The Reverand King was a powerful and consistent advocate for African American rights but was not celebrated in the White community for that. He was beaten and jailed for it. To quote Representative Ayanna Pressley, “Dr. King wasn’t murdered because he was a preacher, pacifist with a dream, that is revisionist history…He didn’t become an American hero until after he was dead and no longer a threat to White supremacy.”

The animosity against King wasn’t just in the South, it was also at the Federal Leval; the FBI wiretapped King and harassed him. This was not J. Eager Hoover going rogue; the wiretapping was done with the knowledge and permission of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The FBI bugged King’s hotel rooms, hoping to record King’s extramarital activities. They wanted to discredit him. The FBI spread misinformation throughout the government as well as to journalists and church leaders, saying that King was a communist and a moral degenerate.

Reading all the accolades for King over the last couple of days, all this seems shocking. Still, the most shocking thing I’ve recently read about Martin Luther King Jr. is that he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, paid the hospital bills for Julia Robert’s birth. The backstory is charming and worth Googling.

What I like about the story is that it flatters everybody involved. That King was a nice guy as well as a powerful leader is worth remembering.

Israel, Hamas, Palestinians, Terror, and Power

Current Affairs, Japan, War

Surely, the most chilling part of the film is an audio-only clip: a terrorist calling home to tell his parents that he is in Israel and killing Jews — 10, he boasts, including a woman whose phone he is using. “Their blood is on my hands,” he cries, joyously. “Your son’s a hero.” Charles Lane, a Washington Post column writer, describes a collection of film clips made by Hamas agents and shown by the Israeli Embassy.

The Hamas killers who attacked Israeli unarmed men, women, children, and babies are cowards. Yes, they are also unbelievably nasty homicidal maniacs driven by hate and fear, but at their core, they are cowards. Their hate and anger are so strong, so pervasive, that it has oozed out and corroded them as human beings. Israel has released a series of clips made by the Hamas killers themselves, and it is ugly. They are ugly people who, somehow, think they are heroes because they killed helpless people. There must be a better word than disgusting when describing such inhumane behavior, but none comes to mind.

I like to think that I am a practical guy, not necessarily in my real life but in my giving advice to countries-that-didn’t-ask life; even though I am a liberal, I think that my solutions – answers? opinions? – for most of those, and our country’s problems are based on practicability rather than how liberal they are. In that vain, I think what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is wrong. Wrong because it will not solve the problem. When I say solve the problem, I am assuming that most – with most being the operative word here – Israelis want to live in peace, and I don’t think stealing land from the Palestinians for Jewish settlements in the West Bank and bombing the shit out Palestinians in Gaza will result in long-term peace.

I keep reading about the Israeli-Hamas War as if it were a real war. But it is not a war any more than the October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh synagogue slaughter was a shoot-out. On the first day, Hamas’ cowardly attack killed about 1,200 people and injured 6,900 others. Israel killed that many Palestinians in the first half an hour of their retaliation. According to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, as of December 30, 2023, the death toll in Gaza is 27,681 civilians, including bout 9,077 children.

When this is over, the majority of the survivors will be beaten into submission, but not all and not forever. A sizable number of survivors will join Hamas, or the next Hamas-like resistance movement, willing to kill and die for what they consider a just cause. The numbers that I see don’t paint a promising picture for Israel: there are about 6.8 million Jewish people living in Israel and 2.5 million Arabs – whatever that means – and 5.35 million self-identified Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank of what, for all practical purposes, is now greater Israel.

As I sit here staring at my computer screen, I realize that I have been here before, and I’ve written about this over and over again. (The Tragedy of Israel. Israel in the West Bank.) The difference, I guess, if there is any difference, is how the world is reacting. Increasingly, the world is acknowledging the deaths of Palestinians. Today’s Washington Post’s front page had an article that started, Settlers killed a Palestinian teen. Israeli forces didn’t stop it. A review of the deadliest settler attack in the West Bank since the war began shows how increasingly violent tactics have gone unpunished. Today’s Los Angeles Times front page says – asks? – Is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians a form of apartheid?… Video appears to show Israeli army shooting 3 Palestinians, killing 1, without provocation. Right now, the Israelis seem to be reacting to that by killing pro-Palestinian journalists who are acting as witnesses, still the world does seem to be changing.

That this can not be the way Israelis want to be seen by the world gives me some hope.