Another Postcard from the Southland

We went down to LA last weekend to see our friend Jessica’s play reading at the Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood. One of the great things about LA is the 99-seat house. Equity actors are allowed to perform in non-union theaters if they are less than 100 seats. There must be hundreds of these theaters in LA. You can see great plays and great actors in an intimate setting at very little cost. Jessica’s play is about a place very familiar to Paul and me. Thankfully, only one of the characters is really close to reality, and she is no longer living. One of the actors was O-lan Jones, who would be familiar to Magic Theatre audiences. She was a real standout. We were relieved not to see ourselves in any of the characters!

The playwright outside the theater

We stayed downtown at Checkers, which was once a posh hotel. I think it was like a sister to Campton Place in SF. It has been kept on life support by big chains and is now a Hilton. But the beds are good, and I love sitting in the rooftop hot tub and looking at the highrise towers above me. 

View from the jacuzzi

One of the weird LA mashups was driving out to Monterey Park and going to a Chinese restaurant in a mall where all the businesses are Chinese. There are few English signs, and they are usually misspelled. The best part was that the architecture was High Taco Bell. Really the most hideous fake Mission Revival (which is kind of fake even when it’s good) highlighted by neon. This topped off (or bottomed off?) by a surface parking lot and two-level subterranean parking garage that brought to mind that splendid kids’ puzzle Rush Hour. Once we got upstairs, there was a band on the other side of the screen playing for a wedding. A wedding attended by maybe a dozen people. That said, the duck was quite good.

We got to chat with Charlie Schroeder, whose new book, Man of War, sounds hilarious.

The screenwriter blows out his candles

We were in China celebrating our buddy Ian’s birthday. While we are name-dropping, we have to mention that Ian’s movie The Oranges, starring Hugh Laurie, comes out October 5. Welcome to New Jersey.

Our good buddy Johnny took us to the farmers market on Ivar in Hollywood on Sunday. It’s huge! A real town square. One of our favorite bookstores of all time, Hennessey & Ingalls, has a branch in a little retail center that was repurposed from some kind of warehouse. And of course we got to see the rear end of Crossroads of the World, another great LA mashup! Funky fantastic.

The Ivar Theater along the farmers market

The market

The rear end of crossroads of the world

Back downtown, we wandered around a bit and were pleased to see so many people living in converted office buildings. There is still a paucity of good restaurants and food emporiums, but there is no lack of dog walkers—always a sure sign of gentrification. Certain pockets are still just empty, and other pockets are still scary. Pershing Square is really bad. Legorreta’s bold colors don’t do much for the homeless.

Pershing Square

Union Station

We took the subway to Union Station, which was packed. It is the first time I ever saw it full of people, just as it is supposed to be. The ticket area was closed off, and Paul and I thought it would make a great setting for “The Ghost Train.” The old Harvey House restaurant is still empty, just like it was when my buddy Kristina first showed it to me in the late 1970s. Apparently, it is leased out for special events and photo shoots. The tile floor is divine. Here is a blog post about the space. http://laplaces.blogspot.com/2010/02/union-station-harvey-house.html

CA Union Station - the old Harvey House Restaurant

Across the street from Union Station is Olvera Street, the perfect alley of cheap crap. Despite the hideous trinkets, I love the scale. This time, we wandered into the Avila Adobe, which gives a sense of how LA’s earliest Spanish settlers lived. I especially enjoyed the scale of the courtyard.

Avila Adobe

Although Frank Gehry has been overexposed, his Disney Concert Hall is still beautiful, at least on two sides. The Chandler and the Mark Taper Forum brought people back downtown in the 1960s, and the Disney Concert Hall extended that possibility into the new century. Just down the street, Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art never quite achieved the same level of significance. After the expensive, postmodern, mostly subterranean showpiece was completed, most folk said they preferred the Temporary Contemporary, a former police car warehouse reshaped by Frank Gehry. That was where most of the fun took place.

Disney Concert Hall

Temporary Contemporary

My favorite show in the Temporary (now known as the Geffen Contemporary, although most members still call it the Temporary) was the one in 1989 about the Case Study Houses called “Blueprints for Modern Living,” curated by Elizabeth Smith. As I have written before, I think this show was the catalyst for reexamining midcentury modernism. It sure brought Julius Shulman out of his Soriano lair in the Hollywood Hills. The staff used the space beautifully, rebuilding two Case Study Houses and the living room of the Eames House (not quite the re-creation we saw recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but cool nonetheless). At MOCA up the hill, I count a wonderful Ad Reinhardt show and a Robert Irwin retrospective in the 1990s as two of my favorites. MOCA started life as the museum that artists supported. Back then, LACMA was kind of fuddy duddy.

Blueprints for Modern Living:
History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses
by Elizabeth A. T. Smith

So it’s sad to see MOCA in such trouble. There was an enormous show called “The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol,” and while I really liked the Mark Bradford and Tauba Auerbach canvases, I really can’t be bothered with the Andy Warhols. He is one artist who really suffers from overexposure. Rather like Salvador Dali. Director Jeffrey Deitch appears to be favoring a kind of safe avant garde. And some folks feel that he has made a Faustian bargain with tract house mogul Eli Broad. The prediction is that Broad will eventually take over MOCA and fold it into his own Broad Museum (with a new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro under construction now).

The Broad

Over at the County Museum, director Michael Govan was willing to disagree with the mighty mogul, and after his namesake building was finished, Broad picked up his marbles and moved downtown. Strangely enough, this seems to have served the County Museum well. They are much freer to pursue all kinds of different avenues and have now become the preferred museum for artists. Although it was the Temporary that put on the Michael Heizer show in its early days, it is the County Museum that got the rock.

Levitated mass by Michael Heizer

In the last year, the County Museum exhibit “Living in a Modern Way” bookended the Case Study House show from 20 plus years ago. And their reconstruction of Ed Kienholz’s “Five Car Stud” was one of the most disturbing and wonderful pieces to be seen in recent LA history.

Although I didn’t care for the “Abstraction after Warhol” show, I was relieved to see the Rothkos from the Panza collection front and center in their show of masterworks from the collection. I remember when these were shown at the Temporary and how they were barely lit. They just hummed. Count Giuseppe Panza’s gift must have been one of hope. Hope that this new museum would forge a brave new way in art. Maybe it will again one day.

Postcard from New York

The 9/11 Memorial

The 9/11 Memorial is incomplete. And that may be a good thing. No required video to watch, no precisely scripted experience. There is a long line even with a reserved ticket. In that way, it feels like a Disney park or a major historic tourist attraction. Security there is like a fast-paced version of a U.S. airport anywhere.

But once you’re inside the memorial, it is surprisingly barren on a winter day. The forlorn oaks still have a few dead brown leaves, and the surviving lawns are barely green. The memorial is a huge island-like plaza surrounded by buildings in various stages of completion. The construction noises are loud and at times hard to distinguish from the high level of city hum.

As you approach the two water-filled voids, the jackhammers, horns, bells, and sirens recede, and there is just the great sound of water falling. The voids occupy the spaces where the two World Trade Center Towers stood. Depending on the angle of the sun, the water dazzles or fades into a monochromatic sheet. As with Michael Heizer’s sculpture at Dia:Beacon, “North, East, South, West,” it is hard to see the bottom of the void. There is no end to sadness, to memory, to evil, to kindness. The metaphors can multiply and become intensely personal because of the abstraction the designers created.

Surrounding the voids are enormous bronze plaques with the names of the victims carved into each panel. Underneath the incisions lies darkness, although apparently, the names glow slightly at night. I was surprised by how large the letters are. I was worried that thousands and thousands of people would be lost in a litany of names. Where you look down, you can see an individual and think about his or her name and story. The names are organized according to the circumstances of their death, including Flights 11, 175, 77, 93; the first World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993; First Responders; World Trade Center North; World Trade Center South; and the Pentagon. Rather than arrange the names alphabetically, the victims’ families wanted them to be in proximity to friends or coworkers.

I was struck by the names of women followed by “and her unborn child.” In the corner of the north pool is the name of Berry Berenson Perkins, the wife of actor Anthony Perkins and sister of Marisa Berenson. Almost everybody takes photos, and some point to a name of someone they presumably knew. Couples hold up their iPhones at arm’s length to photograph themselves. The typical response is to smile, but then people stop themselves: is it OK to smile here?

As far as I’m aware, nobody I knew directly perished in any of these disasters. But I felt a need to recognize one person among the thousands. There are several helpful guides who can locate a name, and at computer stands, you can print out a map locating a name you have requested.

I entered my own name, Kenneth Caldwell. Kenneth (Marcus) Caldwell can be found on panel N-65. He was born in Philadelphia on February 8, 1971, lived in Brooklyn, and worked for a company called the Alliance Consulting Group. His survivors asked that his name be placed near that of Larry John Senko. I said a prayer for him.

The 9/11 Memorial is one place in the United States where design and faith come together without a predetermined narrative. The place lets each person contemplate an event that can never be understood. Right now it is about the water, the void, the names of those who died, and then all of us who are fortunate enough to be standing there looking for meaning, looking at each other.

For more information:
http://www.911memorial.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/met_MISSING_0925_caldwell.html