Hockney Pool Painting - One Of My Favorites - Sells For $90 Million

When I took a computer art class with Prof. Mariano Gonzales at the University of Alaska Anchorage years ago, I realized on the first day, that everyone else in the class was a real artist.  Mariano tried to reassure me.  He said that all the others began with a different medium - water colors, oils, etc. - and had to adapt it to the computer.  I was coming to this fresh, with the computer as my first medium.

At the end of the class, we had to copy a masterpiece.  Simply duplicate it completely digitally.  I started to panic.  First I thought of doing a Mondrian.  For example.  At first that seemed like a copout, but when I looked at some of his paintings closely, I understood that they were much more subtle than I first realized - lots of subtle shades blended.

So I picked out one of my very favorite pictures - David Hockney's “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures).”   It has the feel of the chaparral hills that I knew so well growing up in Los Angeles.  It has a sparkling swimming pool.  And a man in a salmon colored jacket by the side of the pool and another man swimming.  Except for the people and the vegetation on the hillside in the background, it's pretty angular.  Or so I thought.  

Image from larger LA Times photo

 I had to recreate it from scratch.  I think in that class we were using Corel Draw.  It's amazing how much of a picture you don't see until you really, really look at it.  

But I managed to get a reasonable copy of the picture - at least for someone who didn't know the picture well.  

It was good enough that Mariano has told me that he showed students in later classes - an example of what someone who is not an artist did.  I'd show you my version, but my copy is on an old disk that doesn't fit any current computer I have.  And I'd show the copy I have hanging in the garage.  Except we're with family for Thanksgiving out of state.  And our house sitter isn't technologically savvy enough to take a picture of it and send it.  

But here's a picture from the LA Times article from the auction the other day where it went for $90 million.  I don't think that's a particularly good thing - monetizing art like that.  But that is several more blog posts.  For now, it's important because this is a picture I love and know fairly well. There are some arrangements where the artist gets a percentage of future appreciation of their work.  But I don't think this one is likely to be covered.  It was sold long ago.  

Here's a link to the whole LA Times story.

LA Loses Gold - Their Venerable Food Critic Who Knew Good Food And How To Write About It

Jonathan Gold was my guide to eating out in LA.  As a food critic, he wasn't snobby.  As Sunday's LA Times article tells us:

"Food criticism before him — and even during his time — focused on the austere, the high-end, the Michelin stars. Gold redefined the genre, drawn more to hole-in-the-wall joints, street food, mom-and-pop shops and ethnic restaurants than he was to haute cuisine. Although he appreciated and wrote beautifully about fine dining, he revered the taco truck more than the tasting menu. . ."

“Jonathan understood that food could be a power for bringing a community together, for understanding other people,” said Ruth Reichl, who edited Gold at The Times and at Gourmet. “In the early ’80s, no one else was there. He was a trailblazer and he really did change the way that we all write about food.”

"Gold was mission-driven as a critic, hoping his food adventures through the city’s many immigrant enclaves would help break down barriers among Angelenos wary of venturing outside their comfort zones. In the process, he made L.A.’s enormousness and diversity feel accessible and became one of the city’s most insightful cultural commentators.
“I am trying to democratize food and trying to get people to live in the entire city of Los Angeles,” he said in a 2015 interview with Vice. “I’m trying to get people to be less afraid of their neighbors.”
In 2007, when he was writing for L.A. Weekly, Gold became the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. "

His death at 57 is a great loss not only to LA, but to the art of writing about food.  So it is with sadness, I post about him today.

And I've had a draft post up for nearly a year now because I was so taken by one of his reviews last year.  It was over-the-top, but then the restaurant itself was beyond that even.  Was the chef a true artist who sculpted not only the food, but the whole dining experience and, with Gold's help, found people to pay for his art? (Dinner for two was $1000.) Or was he spoofing restaurants who gave people a square plate with couple of artfully placed asparagus and dribbles of colorful sauce for $40?

I never posted about that review, but it seems appropriate now.   Especially because today's article tells us:

"Gold was protective of Los Angeles and how it was portrayed. For years, when the Los Angeles food scene was overlooked by critics who preferred dining in New York and San Francisco, Gold was quick to defend and champion it.
After New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells disparaged the Oakland location of Locol, a fast-food chain that originated in Watts, Gold penned an impassioned essay in response.
“Locol is less a replacement for a fast-food restaurant than a better version of it,” he wrote. “Someday, if he’ll allow me, I’d like to take Mr. Wells to Watts.”
Perhaps to make a point, when it came time to pick his first Restaurant of the Year recipient three months later, Gold chose Locol."

Verspertine is about as far from the the Southern India spot in the Culver City strip mall or the food truck anywhere.  His review begins:

If you were looking for the oddest dish being served in an American restaurant right now, you should probably start with the fish course at Jordan Kahn's new Vespertine, a dish that nudges the idea of culinary abstraction dangerously close to the singularity. It doesn't look like fish, for one thing — it looks rather like an empty bowl, coarse and pebbly inside and out, of a blackness deep enough to suck up all light, your dreams and your soul.
If this were Coi or Alinea, to name two modernist temples, your server would instruct you on how to eat the dish, or at least on where you might direct your spoon. At Vespertine, the server, wearing a severe frock like something out of "The Handmaid's Tale," does not. If you prompt her, she may whisper the word hirame, which in a sushi bar can mean either flounder or halibut. She will leave before you discover that the flounder has been pounded thin, crusted with charred-onion powder, and pressed into the bowl over a kind of porridge studded with minced shallot, perfumy bits of pickled Japanese plum, and bright, crunchy bursts of acid that could either be finger-lime vesicles or chopped stems of the wildflower oxalis. You are not sure exactly what you are eating. You are not meant to know. You have traveled from darkness into light, and that is enough.

The link here is worth it just for the pictures, but also for his words.  Gold knows that few of his readers will ever go to Vespertine:

I would say that a meal at Vespertine is mandatory for a certain kind of diner, but mandatory in the way that the James Turrell show at LACMA a couple of years ago was mandatory, or Berg's "Wozzeck," or the current season of "Twin Peaks." It's not dinner; it's Gesamtkunstwerk.

But for most of us, reading Gold's description (it's way beyond a review) of the Vespertine experience makes me, at least, feel like I was there with him.  Vespertine was his Restaurant of the Year for 2017.  I imagine he saw it not as a spoof, but the work of great artist, and like a Lamborghini, something to admire, but something only a few would experience.

May Anchorage's food critics read Jonathan Gold's old reviews and set their sights much higher.

Where Are The Steepest Ten Streets In The USA?

An LA Times columnist, Steve Lopez, answers this question in a story on the problems on Baxter Street in LA's Echo Park.  It seems that driving short cut apps like Waze are routing people onto this street and lots of people have trouble navigating it, especially when it rains.

The problem is that Baxter, with its Himalayan double dip between Allessandro Street and Echo Park Avenue, is not a normal street, and it was never meant to be a thoroughfare.
It was designed for goats, not people or cars.
Whoever built it, more than 100 years ago, must have gone on to design roller coasters. A video of a daredevil skateboarder blasting down Baxter has had nearly 1.2 million views on YouTube.
The Times has reported that Baxter ranks as the third-steepest street in Los Angeles with a 32% grade, behind 28th Street in San Pedro (33.3%) and Eldred Street in Mount Washington (33%).
Still, it’s on the list of the 10 steepest streets in the United States, seven of which are in California, and four of which are in Los Angeles, with Fargo Street in Silver Lake joining the others. Only two of the top 10 streets are in San Francisco, which is often thought of as a city of hills, and the famous Lombard Street (27% grade) doesn’t crack the list. The steepest streets in the U.S. are in Honokaa, Hawaii, (45%) and Pittsburgh, Pa. (37%).

OK, I'm embedding the skateboard video just so you can see this street.  The soundtrack is a bit raunchy so if you're showing it to little kids you probably should turn off the audio.  

Dear Sir, Couldn't You Have Held Off The Rain Another Couple of Hours?

The last few days have been mildly frantic - I try to remember to breathe slowly, remind myself that none of this is very important, get in a bike ride, etc. - as we tried to get the house ready for rental.  A company called TurnKey is handling it and so far their reps have been terrific.  It's sort of a cross between AirBnB and a Vacation Rental company.  But they're good for folks like us who live far away from the property.

I only wish my mom could see what her house looks like now.  The stuff inside, couldn't have been done while she was still living here.  The commotion would have just been too much.  But the deck outside would have been great.  But she wanted bricks - "Mom, how are you going to go down the stairs and then negotiate bricks in your wheel chair?" - and I countered with a wood deck at the same level of the living room - "No, the opossums and raccoons will get underneath".  It was a stand off.
But she would say regularly, "When I'm dead, you can do what you want."  So now there's a beautiful wooden deck that I know she would have loved.


Anyway, here's some light relief from a book I found in the house, published in 1942, called Dear Sir.  These are supposed to be letters that government agencies received from citizens.  I picked a few quickly.  Trying to get short ones, so you get an idea.

"Navy Relif Fund
Los Angeles
Gentlemen:
Enclosed find my check for $2.00.  You'll pardon me for not signing it, but I want to remain anonymous.
A FRIEND

Col. Arther Mc.Dermott;
Selective Service
535 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
After four months of Army life and much sober reflection I have decided that I cannot support my wife the manner to which she has become accustomed on my army pay of $50 amonth.  Please consider this my resignation from the armed services.
Private Leonard K----------

OPA*
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Gentlemen,
Please tell me if I must give my right aeon my application for a food ration book.  I am really 43, but my husband things I'm 36.If I tell him the truth he will probably divorce me.  Please answer my question by writing me by writing to the newspaper in the personal column addressed to "Belle of the South", and please say it is ok to falsify your age.Thank you very much.  I hope you will be able to keep me from getting a divorce and still keep me eating.
Worriedly yours,
Mrs. ....

You get the idea.

They predicted heavy rains to start last night - periods with .5 inches per hour.  The ground was wet when we woke up this morning, but the rain was barely a mist.  I was able to keep cleaning up, throwing out trash, etc.

But it just started raining heavily.  Time to abandon our usual bus ride to the airport in favor of calling a Lyft.  You can't really see the rain coming down, but we'd be pretty wet before we got to the bus stop, let alone waited for the bus.  It had snowed and the temps were in the 30s when we left Seattle last week, so I left my raincoat for my warmer coat.  San Francisco is supposed to be rainy too, but there are two grandkids there to warm us up.

*OPA was the Office of Price Administration

Slack Line Juggler Santa Monica Beach

This post is dedicated to my friend JK.

Another day with workers putting in moulding, doing electrical work, and various odds and ends at the house.  Phone calls to arrange further stuff, moving furniture, figuring where to hang pictures, and other work preparing my mom's house for rental for most of the year when we're at home in Anchorage.

I couldn't wait to get on the bike and ride down to the beach and then north along the beach bike trail.   I try to go earlier, because it gets more crowded as it gets closer to the sunset.  Today I had to stop and take some pictures. First, they had a much longer slack line than I've seen there before - it's the first one you see in the video.  Then on another wire was a juggler.  I also pan on the trail so you can see the traffic I have to navigate in this section of the trail, just south of the Santa Monica Pier (which you can see in the background.  Watch for the roller coaster.)



That spot on my camera is getting annoying. Sorry.

Once I get past the pier, the traffic thins out.  There is one short row of houses, separated from the beach by the public bike trail.

And there was a film crew camped out in one of the parking lots.

And I was getting back to the point where I leave the beach and head home, the almost full moon was rising to the east.

And to the west the sun was slipping down toward the ocean.

Here's why I did the video - you can see that a still shot just do this juggler justice.  You need to see the balls moving while the juggler goes up and down on the slack line.

Snow In Seattle, Cold And Clear In LA (And Simon Winchester's Pacific On The Way)

It snowed yesterday on Bainbridge and my granddaughter couldn't get enough playtime.  Throwing snow at me, eating snow, making little snow people, rolling in the snow, and just reveling in the bright, bright sunshine.  Slides go really fast when you're wearing a slippery snow suit.  Lots of laughing and running and reveling in nature's white gift.



By today there was a thin layer of cloud, threatening to snow again.  But we were able to walk to the ferry and then to the train to the airport without rain or snow.

The security line was snaked all around, we saw police officers, a dog sniffing people lined up.  Fortunately we were in pre-check so the wait was short.  I booked the flight via Alaska Airlines, but our flight was on Virgin.  The plane coming in was late and we left 25 minutes late, but we eventually got to LA a little early.  I'd been wondering why nearly all our flights in last couple of years have been on time or early.  I finally surmised that Alaska simply projects the flight to take longer than they need to.  That way, they score high for 'on-time' flights.  Even if they leave late, they get where they're going on time or even early.  But I hadn't had the time to try to check the details - like see how long other airlines say a flight from city A to city B should take.  And then I heard a piece on NPR the other day that confirmed my suspicions.  It's probably not a bad thing.  As they said on the show, people are happier when they get somewhere early than if they get there late.  I just found a 2015 article on this phenomenon.

Anyway, the Alaska-Virgin merger is moving along.  I watched Alaska Airlines baggage vehicles loading our Virgin flight.

I got to do some reading on the flight.  I'm reading Pacific for our next book club meeting (well, the next one I can attend.)  The first section has been a page turner, except it was so depressing that I didn't want to read it.  Simon Winchester picks 12 events from 1952 that took place somewhere in or around the Pacific.  The first one is about nuclear bomb testing in the South Pacific, and he highlights the US cavalier approach to the people living where they wanted to do their testing - Bikini Islands.  Arrogance, racism, relocation of people to much less suitable islands, and using people as human Guinea pigs.  There are plenty of bad guys to go around in these 45 pages or so, but I'll just mention Alvin Cushman Graves.  Winchester gives him little slack for his handling of Pacific nuclear tests, particularly the last one that was significant more powerful than he expected and devastated, once the people of Bikini and sent radioactive material over a large area of the Pacific.  Neither the Atomic Heritage Society (not unexpectedly), nor Wikipedia give any details of the Castle Bravo test.  From Winchester:

"The solid compound in the new bomb was lithium deuterium, an amalgam of lithium and isotopic hydrogen.  And no one knew exactly how much hydrogen it would release, or how big the detonation would be.
The testers would soon find out.  And because of the other uncertainty - over the weather, and more specifically, the direction of the winds on detonation ay - a great many others would find out as well."  

The normal winds had been blowing toward the west, the normal condition, and the US had put out a vague warning for ships to stay out of a 57,000 square mile 'danger area.'  Though they didn't explain the danger.  However, the night before the test, the winds switched to the east.  And at sunrise there was a powerful gale in upper altitudes.

"Graves was told of the wind direction and knew that radiation would spread downwind and contaminate, at the very least, Rongelap Atoll.  But he had his orders, which were to proceed with the test without delay.  Moroever, whatever the wind direction might be, no one had any idea how much radiation would be produced.  Not that this was strictly relevant, of course, since Graves still cleaved robustly to his views about the malingerers who had concocted all this fuss about radiation being so terribly dangerous." [pp 70-71]

He gave the order to detonate the bomb.  I'd note that Graves was a physicist who had been in charge of nuclear testing and himself had almost been killed in an accident that killed the man next to him.  Doctors thought he would die, but he did recover.  Though many suspect his fatal heart attack 20 years later was related.

"At 6:45 am on that clear, windy, blue-sky Pacific morning, it was as if the world had suddenly stopped, blinded by a vast white light of an intensity never before experienced.  The iron gates guarding some terrible inferno seemed to clang wide open and unleash a ball of fire and shock waves and roarings of unimaginable speed, violence, and loudness.  A white fireball four miles across was created in less than one second  A minute later a cloud of debris ten miles tall and seven across rocketed into the sky.  Ten minutes on, it was twenty-five miles tall and sixty miles across."

It uncashed huge amounts of radiation and quickly arrive at Rongerap Atoll, 120 miles to the east where the islanders had no idea what was happening.  As they became ill with radiation poisoning.  They were evacuated after being hosed down several times.

"We were like animals,"  said an islander named Rokko Langinbelik, who was twelve at the time.  "It was no different from herding pigs into a gate."

While Japanese fisherman who also were in the path of the radiation got treated quickly by Japanese doctors, the islanders were not.

I really hadn't intended to get into all this but it's eating away at me.  The treatment of the Marshall Islanders and the callous denials that the US had done anything wrong, even blaming the Islanders for their own tragedy.

You can read more on their fate, which continues to this day, at this site on Bikini Islanders. 

While the book transported me far out into the Pacific, the map on the screen in the seat back in front of me, had airplane located off the coast of Africa.

Only 8000 miles from Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, soon we were in the LA basin which was clear, cool (for here - in the high fifties (F)), and windy.

Downtown and the mountains beyond were crystal clear.  We were at my mom's house in just about an hour from landing, via public buses.  The house is in good shape now after the work we had done last time and while we were gone.  But we have a busy week ahead of us before seeing the other grandkids in SF, then a little more time in Seattle.  And finally home.

Travel Day - LA To Seattle, Karenka Gets Her Name Tag

Airport Shuttle

Growing up and until just about a year ago, my mom's house was about a mile from the nearest bus in any direction.  But when they opened the last link - Santa Monica to Culver City - of the Metro line to downtown LA, they added a bus line to  just a few minutes walk from my mom's house.  In one direction it goes to the Metro station.  In the other direction it catches the bus to the airport.   So getting to the airport by bus is even easier than it was.  From the airport bus station, there's a shuttle the rest of the way to the airport.






When we were checking in, another agent gave our agent her name tags.  She said she'd been working for Alaska Airlines for a month - so I insisted she put one on, and we toasted her with imaginary glasses.

Kalenka Gets Her Name Badge

Then from SEATAC by train to downtown, a quick walk to the ferry and over to Bainbridge Island.  Here's sunny, and relatively warm (56˚F) downtown Seattle from the ferry.

(It's a little distorted since I put to photos together here.)  The best part was picking up our granddaughter from day care as we walked from the ferry.  She ran up and gave me a really big hug.  Then she helped pull the suitcase the rest of the way.

The Fog Rolled In, I Got A Flat, And We Get Picked Up By A Good Samaritan

The workers were here at 9am and finished up the ceiling.

I got a call from my friend B - he wanted to bike to Palos Verdes, starting around Redondo Beach.  It was sunny and beautiful and getting out of the house so the workers could do their thing without me around seemed like a great idea.


As we cruised around the beach cities looking for a parking spot, we entered the fog.  Low, grey clouds.
Here's a shot of it.

And it was chilly.  A very damp, low 60s. (I know, chilly is relative.) After a bit we needed to get off the beach bike path and head up hills through Torrance.   I stopped partway up the hill to watch the fog roll up from the ocean.


As we got further up, the sun was visible, sort of.







And then as we rode higher, we got above the fog.   There's Palos Verdes above us, visible.





And this, I'm pretty sure, is Malaga Bay.  You can see the wall of fog sitting there waiting over the ocean.   There were 20-30 surfers out in the waves below.

But soon we were in the fog again.  B kept checking the map on his phone to see how much further it was.  I didn't actually know what 'it' was, except "Palos Verdes."  As far as I was concerned, we were already in PV.  Should we go the rest of the way?, B asked me.  I told him I didn't know where we were going or why it would be worth the extra three miles uphill.  I was also thinking about the two foot wide bike path on the other side of the street and the cars whizzing by.  Our side had about ten feet of parking area that was also a bike lane.  Finally B said it was Terra something resort.  Then I remembered I'd just read about them hiring foreign interns and using them to replace their minimum wage workers.  Human trafficking was in the headline.  I didn't need to go there.  B suggested I might interview some of the workers for the blog.  I was thinking about when it gets dark in LA (early - about 5:30pm in late December).  We went a little further and turned around.

We'd gone about nine miles.  After about a mile my bike was getting very sluggish and making a strange noise.  When I looked down I could see my back tire was flat.  We found the nail.  B's repair kit wasn't working - no patches and his hand pump didn't work on my valve stem.   I told B to ride ahead to the car and I'd walk as far as I could and he could pick me up.  We were about eight miles from the car.  He wanted me to turn my bike upside down so people could see we were in trouble, and he'd hitch a ride in a pick up truck.  I'm not sure why I didn't want to.  I guess I was embarrassed that I didn't have stuff with me to fix the flat.

Five minutes, that's all B wanted, then we could go with my plan.

After four minutes I was ready to start walking, then a pick up stopped.  B ran and talked to the driver and soon the bikes were in the bed and we were in front with Steve Lavine who had been out for a walk.  He used to run and bike and hike, but he had various health issues now and it was even a struggle to walk.  We met a new friend who took us all the way back to the car.  He said he was headed our way anyway and it wasn't too far extra.  B was pleased to have been right and I wasn't upset I was wrong.

Oh, and Steve has a second cousin Norm LaVine who lives in Anchorage. Hasn't seen him in 25 years.   If anyone from Anchorage knows him, tell him we are trying to convince Steve to come visit him in Anchorage.

Thanks, Steve, for ending our bike ride with a spectacular show of good will.  Getting a ride back was great, but getting to know a total stranger  who'd stop and pick up two guys with bikes was even better.



I'm not that surprised, but we do get jaded by our media that tends to focus on the tiny number of people who do harm each day rather than on the 350 million other US inhabitants who are like Steve Lavine.

While Trump Cites Eastern Cold To Dispute Climate Change, I Submit California Warmth

Aside from getting stuff cleaned out in my mom's house so that we can have some repair work done, we did make it to the beach Thursday afternoon.  So did a lot of other folks.  I went by bike and the bike trail along the beach was like bike freeway traffic.  There's room - between Venice and Santa Monica for two bikes in each direction.  But there were clots of bikes, motorized scooters, skateboarders (with and without motors), Segways, and other sorts of wheeled transportation that made it necessary to pass.  There's separate pedestrian walkways for part of the distance.  At other points, there's just room for single file pedestrians on the edge of the bike trail, though tourists tend not to realize this or that they are standing in the middle of an active bike trail.

But this post is about the warmth.  It wasn't hot yesterday (in the 70s), but it was just comfortable to lie in the sun and Z and I spent a lot of time playing in the surf.  I had on trunks, and she had on a bathing suit, but for the most part I kept my trunks dry, but I had to pick her up out of the incoming surf a few times to keep her from getting drenched above her thighs.  That's not us, but you get the idea.

And considering it was a Thursday, there were a fair number of folks enjoying the rays.

AND OF COURSE, the cold in the Midwest and the East  and the warmth in LA prove nothing about climate change.  The anecdotal temperatures are weather, not climate.

From NASA (you know those elites who send missions to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, etc. based on so called science):

"The difference between weather and climate is a measure of time. Weather is what conditions of the atmosphere are over a short period of time, and climate is how the atmosphere "behaves" over relatively long periods of time."

There's a lot more at the NASA link.

As Stephen Colbert pointed out -

"Global warming isn't real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate."

Santa Monica Sunset

We spent a couple of hours at the play equipment near Santa Monica pier as Z walked the balance bars, crossed the monkey bars, climbed ropes, swang swings, and generally stretched her muscles and worked her balance.  But she didn't know she was exercising, she was just having fun.  We left as the sun was lowering over the Pacific.  (I started thinking about how to say that differently.  We know the sun doesn't lower itself, that it's the earth's rotation, not movement of the sun that causes us to move to dark in the evening.  Yet we still say rise and set.  I wonder how many people really think it's the sun moving.) (Well I googled it.  From Time:

"Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth? 

When asked that question, 1 in 4 Americans surveyed answered incorrectly. Yes, 1 in 4. In other words, a quarter of Americans do not understand one of the most fundamental principles of basic science. So that’s where we are as a society right now.
The survey, conducted by the National Science Foundation, included more than 2,200 participants in the U.S., AFP reports. It featured a nine-question quiz about physical and biological science and the average score was a 6.5."

And a bit later, from Venice.

And let me slip in this picture I took as we walked back to the car.  It's one of the murals we saw at the Skirball Saturday in the Ken Gonzales-Day exhibit.  This mural is Dogtown and having seen one of the Dogtown movies explains a bit more of the mural.  

Though having grown up in this area in the late 50's and early 60's when skateboarding was invented and we simply nailed the front and back ends of roller skates to 2X4s and zoomed down the hills (our street was perfect), I'm a little skeptical of getting background from a Chicago based movie critic.

Surface Tension LA and Noah's Ark

The Skirball Museum was chosen as a kid friendly meeting place for my daughter and an old friend.  There were two dynamite exhibits - one temporary and one permanent.  If you're ever in LA with young kids, be sure to check out the permanent one.



First The Temp Exhibit - Surface Tension LA


The most striking thing when you walk into the room is the map of LA on the floor.  It has every street. But no names.  It goes from the beach on the west to way off in the east, well past East LA.  I confess, it's part of LA I don't know at much about and there were no red circles with numbers out there so I didn't look too carefully.  North/south is more constrained - from the near valley north to not even LAX to the south.  There's a bit of South LA that goes out the doorway into the hall.

Z immediately began running the freeways.

And you can also see the red circles that have numbers.

The numbers show the locations of murals which are pictured on the wall.  The picture below just shows a few of them.

Just checking out the city and trying to figure out where places were without the street names.  It made curved streets make more sense in this huge map format.  And then there were all the murals.  Some of which I knew - including the "Pope of LA" that we saw in downtown the other day.

And the security guard was really into the project, asking us what we thought it meant.  He went on to say something about no one mural tells the story, but the combination of all the murals makes a statement.

Ken Gonzales-Day who conceived of this project and took thousands of pictures of murals, wrote on a description of the exhibit in the room:

"I believe these images reveal more about Los Angeles and its communities, its struggles and its losses, than one can find in any book.  I witnessed memorials to those lost and to those who inspire, as well as the rage and political frustration of city residents, and even resistance to displacement.  In a city of contested spaces, these are traces of its people:  material celebrations and negotiations of the politics of place, often painted side by side."

Gonzales-Day is an art professor at Scripps College in Claremont.  His personal website has more on his art, including a larger picture of this exhibit with many more of the murals.  It's the third dot at the top of the page.


Second, The Permanent Exhibit - Noah's Ark

I have to say upfront that this is the best interactive kid space I can recall ever having been to, and I've been to a lot.  It's aesthetically beautiful, it's resourceful, imaginative, and full of interesting things for kids - and adults - to do.  They also limit how many people can be in the space - you get tickets that are good for a specific 90 minute block.  We had 2pm-3:30 on the Saturday before Christmas.  There was lots of room for the kids to explore.

If you live in LA and have young kids (3-9 is probably ideal) or your visiting from out of town, this is a great spot to go.  It's not photogenic - big pictures don't show the detail, which is what's so amazing, and pictures of the details miss out on how it all fits together.  Maybe it would be fairer to say I wasn't up to the task of digitally capturing this place.  Plus I only had my small camera with me and my kids have a ban on family pictures on the blog.

But here are a few attempts.

There's just so much going on in the room, so many nooks and crannies, so many animals, things to push or pull or crank or climb up, under, into.  This is one room that is 'inside the ark.'

We first got a kid friendly intro to what we were going to see.  Part one was the storm, with rain and wind and lightning.  Part two is the ark.  Part three is the rainbow, a room where everyone can work with paper and colored pencils and stencils.  World Immigration Day was earlier in the week, so there was a place to write notes to immigrants and hang them up.

Most everything in this exhibit is made of recycled objects.  As you can see, the elephant's trunk is partly made of bamboo steamer baskets. It was all very clever.  Like this alligator, made out of a violin case, violin and the teeth are little plastic tubes.

In the storm room, there were lots of cranks to turn.  This one made lightning in the glass tube.  Another blew air into a tube  showing wind as the leaves inside flew all over.  And there were drums and other ways to recreate thunder.

There were neat ways to climb up.  A pulley to send messages or whatever up to folks on a different level.














And interesting ways to get back down.

There wasn't any real biblical indoctrination - just the most basic telling of the story of Noah's ark and the animals.  They even had fake animal poop in the section of the ark that held the animals.  And brooms and dustbins to clean it up with.

A truly wonderful place for young kids to explore and climb and have great adventures.

Here's where you can learn a lot more about Noah's Ark.

DTLA With My Granddaughter and Wife Part 2: Who Killed Liberty, Maiolino, And Roses

[Part 1 is here.]

We left off in the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.  As we moved along we came across this image of the statue of liberty by Daniel Joseph Martinez.  When I found the title - Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It's the Sound of Inevitability, The Sound of Your Death - it made sense.  But I wondered about more politically conservative people.  How might they react to this?  Even though they rail against government, how their religious rights are violated by things like gay marriage, how they are economically less well off, etc., would they appreciate this symbol of all those things?  Or would they see it as a desecration of a traditional monument to freedom?  Or have they soured on the Statue of Liberty because it represents a pro-immigration stance?

click on image to enlarge and focus

Then we walked a little further and saw this work extended into the next room.    This  second picture was taken by Z, my four year old partner in crime.  She has had no trouble picking up how to turn on the camera, how to press part way to focus, take the picture, then  open the window and press the view button, then move from picture to picture.  And her composition isn't bad either, though she did cut off the base of the statue.  The base is a mirror and she got in trouble with the guard for touching it.  My wife was closer to Z at the time, so she got written up, though the guard was apologetic and said there was clearly no damage and nothing would come of it.  

The main exhibit was by an artist I'd never heard of - Anna Maria Maiolino - but who had a large body of work in many different media.   There was a large room of pieces with torn paper, some of which was sewn up, or thread played a key role in the image.  Here are a couple of examples of the torn paper without thread.  (My camera had difficulty knowing what to do - I take that as a tribute to the artist who was tricking the camera's auto settings and chiding my slow progress in mastering the manual commands.  The first two attempts came out almost white.)

Here's a close up of another one with torn paper.  I think the original was much whiter, but I don't have it in front of me, so I'm not going to try to fiddle with the photo to replicate something I'm not sure of.

Here's something on the artist.

This one was called By A Thread and shows the artist in the center attached by threads to her mother and daughter.






And this one is The Hero.

But let's look at different media.






I was enjoying the shapes and positioning and textures and the imagination that created these pieces, I really wasn't of thinking about what it all meant, so I didn't take pictures of the descriptions, so I can't give these names.

Don't know what these are, but I do remember looking to see what they are made of - cement.

And finally, still Maiolino,

You can see a lot more images of her work at the MOCA website.


One of the downtown places I'd never been to, but had heard about and wanted to see was the Last Book Store.  But first, this mural we passed as we walked to the bookstore.  An exhibit on murals in LA we saw today at the Skirball says this is Eloy Torrez' "Pope of Broadway."  The sun was brightly reflecting off the wall fading out the colors, and with a four year old in tow, it's harder to run back up the block to from where the colors were better.

Then finally to The Last Bookstore.

I'm afraid I was expecting the most incredible bookstore ever.  It isn't.  Powell's in Portland is much better.  I like Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle better.  This one is quirkier than those two.









This building was a bank before it became a bookstore (a transformation I highly approve of.)  You can even go into the old safe to peruse books.  Maybe I just needed more time to get the feel of this place, but I as I walked through aisles and aisles of books, books weren't calling out to me to stop and pick them up.  And there are lots of signs saying, "No public restrooms."   This was more a bookstore in a gritty downtown block that seemed to be trying to figure out how to discourage the homeless.

It wasn't warm and inviting.  There were some places to sit and read, but not enough.

Z found a book she liked in the kids' section and her grandmother, of course, made sure it came home with us.  We wandered down to the Metro station - Z never stopped looking around, never complained about anything, and when I asked if she wanted to stop at the rose garden on the way home enthusiastically said yes.  So we got off at the Exposition Park station for a quick fragrance check on as many roses as we could before the next train came by.

This is a rose garden that I visited as a young child myself.  The Natural History Museum is nearby as well as the coliseum,

Wikipedia says the garden is seven acres.

"In 1986, plans to dig up the garden to build an underground parking garage led to protests in the media.^[15][17] The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial opposing the plan: "There are times when the leaders of Los Angeles seem perversely intent on living up to the image that many outsiders have of them—insensitive and uncouth rabbits who would, say, dig up a garden to put in a parking lot."^[18] The garden had also been threatened by an earlier proposal by the Los Angeles Raiders football team to convert the garden into a practice field for the team.^[16] In order to protect the garden from such threats, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991."

I also read that the garden is closed from January 1 to March 1 for pruning, so this was likely the last chance to see these flowers this year for us.

And as I look at this last picture, I can't help but see similarities between this rose and the Disney Concert Hall that began Part 1 of these DTLA posts.