DTLA With My Granddaughter And Wife Part 1- Gehry, Rothko, and Ray

We took the Metro downtown Thursday, checked out the Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry - one of my favorite buildings anywhere.  It's a photographer's dream.

Looking Up

A passage way

Gehry isn't my focus here and these pictures are probably mystifying to someone who doesn't know this building.  You can see other images I've taken of the Disney Concert Hall here.

The Disney Concert Hall is across from the Broad Museum.  The Broad is only a little over a year old can get tickets online, but when I've tried early the first day of the month, it was always already sold out.  You can wait in line and get tickets made available that day.  So we thought we'd try that.  But two hours waiting in line didn't seem like a good use of our time.  Especially with a  four year old.  (Almost five she'd tell you.)
and it's free.  The image to the right is from the Disney garden looking down at the line for the Broad - this is the part that is around the block from the entrance.  Those are people to the left of the cars at the bottom of the picture.

So we walked down the block and went to MOCA - the Museum of Contemporary Art.  This isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I love art work that pushes against restraints.  They had a room full of Mark Rothko's.  Again, I know that the literal minded just don't get this stuff.  That's not a put-down, but an observation on how our brains work differently - partly by genetics and partly by training.  Fortunately, I had a father who took me to all sorts of art exhibits as I was growing up.


Here are two Rothko's and a gallery visitor.













And here is the one on the right close up.  You can tell I haven't captured the colors quite right.  The one below is, I believe, more accurate.  I can get lost in these paintings, particularly when I'm looking at part of one up-close like this.  Read the explanation below if you're not convinced.

I know some people are scratching their heads about this. "His four year old could do this."  So I'm adding the description to it.

For visually impaired readers, I'll send you a text version of this if you email me. (Right hand column above Blog Archive.)




















My granddaughter did find these two photographs of interest.  They're by Charles Ray and are called the plank pieces.   I asked if we should try that when we got home and she emphatically said "No!"

The Tate Gallery has a lengthy explanation of these two paintings.  Part of me says that one should just look and think about what one sees.  But often we just don't know enough about what the artist was thinking or the context of the times, so reading about a work helps us appreciate it.  Here are some excerpts from the Tate article.

"Ray created the work using his own body, experimenting with the ways in which he could balance himself against the wall using a single plank of wood. The critic Michael Fried has noted that ‘both arrangements, it seems clear, could have been achieved only with the help of at least one other person, who, however, does not appear in the photographs.’ (Fried 2011, p.72.) Indeed Ray deliberately presents the arrangements of body and plank as completed structures, offering no evidence of how the artist arrived in these poses. The works were created while Ray was still a student at the University of Iowa (1971–5) where he studied under Roland Brenner, a former student of the sculptor Anthony Caro. Studying Caro’s work and sculptural techniques (such as welding and bolting metal) was a formative experience for Ray, as the artist recorded in an interview: ‘Caro’s work was like a template; I saw it as almost platonic.’ (Charles Ray and Michael Fried, ‘Early One Morning’, Tate Etc., no.3, Spring 2005, p.51.) 

While a student, however, Ray also became interested in the work of minimalist sculptors such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd and Richard Serra. In works such as Shovel Plate Prop 1969 (Tate T01728) Serra had used balance alone to support a heavy sculptural structure. This carefully judged equilibrium is seemingly precarious, pressing the sculpture into a charged and potentially dangerous relationship with the viewer. In response to such works, Ray began to experiment with balance and tension in his own sculpture, dispensing with the bolts and welding he had adopted through studying the work of Caro. In doing so Ray erased distinctions between sculpture and body. As he has said of Plank Piece: ‘My body is a sculptural element pinned to the wall by a wood plank.’ (Quoted in Nittive and Ferguson 1994, p.30.)"

It's getting late, so I'll stop here.  I'll add more in part 2.

LA Poster Edged - Comics, Costco Liquor, Burmese Halal, and Skateboards

It seemed like the comic store would like better after a Photoshop poster edge filter was applied.  And then it seemed the whole day would look better that way.  I'd note they had 20-40% off on all the graphic novels.  I'm enjoying The Last Man credited to Brian K. Vaughan, writer; Pia Guerra, penciller; José Marzán, Jr., inker on the cover, and inside Pamela Rambo, colorist, and Clem Roberts, letterer.  I'm sure it will get its own post.




The filter did enhance it the store, but the poster edge filter not obvious in this photo.







Again, it's not obvious to the average person in this shot of a couple of graphic novels.  But look close at the wood and the background.

But you should be able to notice the effect on our lunch at a Burmese/Indian Halal restaurant, called Jasmine, on Sepulveda near Washington.

The Costco liquor department had some eye-popping prices.  Maybe I'm not looking carefully in Anchorage where the liquor department is separate from the rest of the store and I don't usually go in.  In this Costco it's right in the middle of everything else.



















And this Saturday afternoon's shot at the Venice Beach Skateboard Park also seemed to be begging to be poster edged.


[As you can tell, I'm avoiding more current event posts for a bit.  Not because I don't think they're important and not because I don't feel strongly about the issues.  But it takes time to say something that everyone else isn't saying and that is also useful.  Like how to at least make Lisa Murkowski feel a tinge of guilt as she votes for the 500 plus page so called tax reform bill that she and others really won't read first that surely includes all sorts of hidden gifts and thefts will only learn about later.  Though reporters say things like "most people will get a tax cut until the middle income tax cuts expire in five years,"  what they don't say is that other costs - health care, child care, insurance, and countless other necessities - will go up and people will pay more on those things than they will gain in their tax cuts.]

Fires Very Visible From The Air As We Fly Into LA [Updated]

It got up to 50˚F (10˚C) in Anchorage yesterday and about 60% of our yard was snow free.  Unusual for mid December in Anchorage.

Our red-eye to LA was pretty uneventful - which is a good thing - but as we flew over what was about where Santa Barbara should be, I could see the fires in the mountains.  There was one big raging conflagration and then many little ones scattered all over.  These pictures demonstrate why I need to get serious about learning how to take control of my camera.  It works pretty well under normal circumstances, but not in unusual ones, like taking night pictures of forest fires from an airplane.  The first shot was the biggest fire.

Mind you, that's way off in the distance, and we were 30 minutes out of LA, so maybe a pilot can figure out what our elevation probably was - well over 10,000 feet I would guess.

These next two pictures are more 'artistic.'  The lens was open a long time so there's some jiggle and lots of reflection in the window.  This is with a wider angle view.  It gives a better sense of there being fire in a lot of different places, not just one ridge.

And this last one shows totally different hot spots.

As we got closer to LA we headed out over the ocean, so if there were any fires closer to LA I couldn't see them from the right side of the plane.


 My computer tells me it was 48˚F at 7 am in LA.  

UPDATE 4:30pm:  We got the bus to my mom's house, slept until 2pm, then I biked to the beach and up along the coast.  Felt great.  The only sign of the fires was smoke along the mountains to the north.
You can see that as you get closer, things clear up a bit.

From Santa Monica pier looking north.

A couple miles closer and you can see where the mountains meet the ocean.

Another mile closer and you can distinguish three different points meeting the ocean.

We Made It To Seattle

We made it by bus to the airport without it raining on us.

I want to say thanks to Theresa at Alaska Airlines for changing our ticket because she was sure we wouldn't make our connection in Seattle.  (We'd changed our flight that was supposed to stop in Portland to one stopping in Seattle because of the weather.  Alaska lets you change flights when there are big weather issues without having to pay the flight change or change in cost of the ticket.)  We learned another big advantage of being MVP on Alaska.  You get a leg up on the waiting list.  I have issues about this airline class system, but if it exists, I'm glad we were on the right side and I apologize to anyone who might have not gotten on because of us.

We got our ticket and you can see the view through the window above as we waited to take off.

The landscape around Portland was pretty white as we flew by Mt. Hood.



But as we got further north, things were looking better and we landed in the sun in Seattle.

Our gate has been changed from C11 to D1 and my wife is waiting for me to finish this so I will. Be back in Anchorage soon if all goes well.

In LAX Travel Chaos Hoping to Get On This Flight -Updated

Our original flight to Seattle was delayed and the checkin person didn't think we'd make our connection to Anchorage, so she put us on the earlier 11:45 am flight which is overbooked, but she thought we might be able to get on when they upgrade people to First Class.

This one is also delayed.  Passengers are just getting off the plane now.  It's 12 noon.

We've been lucky to avoid this sort of mess most of the time.  I do have an appointment in Anchorage at 1pm tomorrow.  Fingers crossed.


UPDATE  12:12 pm -  we now have boarding passes with seats.   On to Seattle with plenty of time to connect to the Anchorage flight.

UPDATE:  4:40pm the follow up to this post is here.  We made it to Seattle.

Bits And Pieces January 9, 2017

It rained hard before it got light Monday morning.  We had a walking tour through Silverlake planned with friends.  J and my old neighborhood.  Back in the 1970s.  J was working downtown and I was going to school at USC so it seemed like a reasonable location.

It wasn't cool back then.  Just a funky neighborhood.

As I was preparing breakfast, I noticed a car out front of my mom's house.  I went out to take in the garbage can and saw that it wasn't a car.  It was traffic.  This quiet, out of the way street has become a way to beat traffic.  It's insane.  But it's only for a short time in the morning.  Maybe 20 minutes.  But it's sick that there is so much traffic that cars are backed up the block on this out of the way residential street.

There was a fair amount of nostalgia as we walked up and down the hills of streets roamed in our 20s, newly married, and discovering interesting people and places every time we went out.

In a lot of ways, the neighborhood looks remarkably the same.  While in my mom's neighborhood contractors buy old little houses, tear them down, then build lot squeezing villas, there was very little of that on the streets we wandered.  Places had new paint, maybe even a new facade, but most looked like the original buildings we'd wandered past over 40 years ago.

And this neighborhood is as likely to have lost parrot posters as lost dog posters.

The biggest difference I noticed was security.  Rambling hillside apartment buildings that had interesting steps used to be open to the world.  Now, many of them have security gates and locks.  Our building's old inviting opening onto a courtyard with a view, now had a glassed in wall with a door.  Fortunately a tenant came in and let us in so we could look around.  But here's an examples of what I'm talking about.

So many places now have iron gates.


But the neighborhood's funkiness is alive and well.  Here's a fence with little arm chairs and signs on it.  Since this is a nostalgia trip, I've taken the liberty to play around with a few of the photos below in photoshop.  In this case it was to get some closer views of the chairs along with the larger picture of the fence.  But then I played with the color of the sky and the saturation.

And we walked down the Micheltorena stairs.

We stopped at Night Market Song - a Thai place that left my mouth with a satisfying, if low watt,  glow - and wandered on Sunset past this motorcycle shop where our friend fell in love with an old used Vespa.

Much to my amazement, the Free Clinic was still there.  As part of a graduate class, I volunteered as an intake worker there several nights a week for a semester.

It looked a bit tired, so I took some liberties again in photoshop to perk it up a bit.






After a couple of hours of exploring the old stomping grounds, we got back to the car and made one last stop at Barnsdale Park where I took this view of Hollywood from outside the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Hollyhock House.

I've got lots more thoughts, but no more time.  It was good to just go out and have fun for the day after lots of paper shredding, sorting of boxes, and looking through old documents and memorabilia that give a little back story of my family that I never quite understood.  If I have time . . .

Jane Wyman's 100th Birthday, Rain, Clouds, And Fences

Jane Wyman was an Oscar winning actress and she married a B movie actor in 1940 named Ronald Reagan until they split in 1949.   Here's the New York Times obituary.  She'd be 100 today.  Here is the first birthday from my list of people born in 1917.

It's been mostly cloudy, with breaks of sun and breaks of rain.  Southern California can use every drop of rain it can get, so I'm not complaining. When we came home after seeing Fences Thursday evening, it was raining, which I tried to catch, not too successfully, in the lights at this soccer field.  But the fence is a good lead into talking about the film.

Fences was powerful.  The language was magnificent, but then it was written by August Wilson, a playwright who has written some of the best American plays of the 20th Century.  I couldn't help thinking about Death of a Salesman - another play about a father who was doing all he could to cope in his role as the family provider.  But while we can see that Willie Loman is a victim of the social expectations of his times, he's essentially a weak man who could have made different choices in his life.

But in Fences the father, Troy, - played by Denzel Washington in the film - was a much stronger and competent man, restricted by much harsher limits.  But flawed as well.  His anger at the injustices he experienced and perhaps some he just perceived prevents him from enjoying the comparatively decent life he has built.   He was a great baseball player, he hit home runs against Satchel Paige he claims, but it was before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball.  Now he's fighting the system to break out of the restrictions of the Pittsburgh sanitation department.  He's tired of throwing the garbage into the truck.  He wants a promotion to the job reserved for white men - driver.

As the play progresses, we learn why he's such a hard ass father, and why he can't tell his son, Corey (Courtney B. Vance  in the 1987 version and Chris Chalk in the 2010 version)  he likes him, let alone loves him.   Here's that scene I found online from the play - first the 1987 version with James Earl Jones as Troy and then in the 2010 version with Denzel Washington in the role he plays in the movie.  (Washington also directs the film.)




Troy's father had abandoned him and we can see throughout the play* how stretched he is trying to provide for his family - which includes his mentally unhinged brother, a son from an earlier wife, and a son from his present wife of 18 years or so, played by Viola Davis. And you can see the pressure he feels to raise his son to be responsible and tough in a world that shortchanges black men.

And Davis is fantastic. Here's a later scene, after Washington had told Davis he's going to be a father again, and how he just needed a place where he could let go of all those pressures, where he didn't have responsibilities to pay the rent and feed the family, where he could escape and laugh and be himself. She doesn't take kindly to that at all.



No one should be saying that while men have it easy in today's world. Few people have it easy.  The system isn't kind to human beings.  But all things considered, there have been fewer barriers to success for white men than for black men. (I'm avoiding women because that's a whole other issue.) 

But I wonder how many white men who hate the slogan 'black lives matter' can watch this film and get its humanity. The issues are universal, but will the racist wing of the Trump team  be able to see past the skin color and the language? One would hope so, but how many will ever see it? And if they do, and if they felt Troy's pain, could they tell their friends?  I don't know, I'm just asking.

* I say play deliberately as I'm vaguely aware of some critics finding the movie not cinematic enough.  As I was looking for cast names I saw a link to a New Yorker article on that topic, but haven't looked because I wanted to finish this first.  I'll look now.

Before I found it, I found an article by Kareem Abdul Jabbar and I can't think of a smarter or more suited man to talk about this film.  The link also includes a video interview he had with the two lead characters of the film.  Jabbar writes as part of the intro:

"The Maxson family's unhappiness results from a toxic mixture of the patriarch's unapologetic hubris and the pressures of being raised black in a white society that marginalizes, degrades and oppresses anyone not in the mainstream. Troy Maxson (Washington) isn't aware that while he battles for equality from the white society, he's imposing the same tyrannical restrictions he's struggling against on his own family. He has become the very enemy he's fighting."

Most of it is the transcript of the video and the video itself.  They are exactly the same.  There are a few things in the written interview that aren't in the video and vice versa.  Also, in the video Davis correctly says 'baseball league,' not the 'football league' that's written.

Thursday was a break from the rain.  When I did a quick bike ride down to the beach just to move my legs a bit, the clouds were out over the ocean, but it wasn't the solid gray we'd had.

We had dinner with a friend of my mom's, a woman who came by weekly and always brought some food for my mom.  They'd been good friends for a long time.  She told us stories about after WWII when she met her husband in London.  They were both young refugees in England during the war.  They'd both gotten out of Germany before the war started.  His sister had lived through the war in Berlin with fake papers.  They had both applied for jobs as translators for the American military in Europe.  Her father took her down to the station and started talking to a young man while she was away a moment.  So, it turned out he introduced her to her future husband.  She was 20 and they first were sent to Paris for a week of training and then to Germany where their fluency in German and English were helpful.  Despite the hardships of those immediate postwar days in Germany, love and adventure are what she remembered most.

For those of you who are wondering about the New Yorker article, I did find it after I finished this.  I think the reviewer got so hung up on the idea that this should have been done more cinematically that he missed the fundamental power of the story.  He's focused on technique, even when he has praise, which he has.

More Beach And Clouds

It was sunny. The sky was blue.  The air was balmy when J and M pushed the stroller to the beach and I biked down to meet them.  

And there were a lot more people there than on other days since we've been here.

There were clouds out on the horizon, yet Catalina was sharp and clear out across the water.  There was a special golden light.

But clouds were moving in.  And as I haven't gotten past the chapter on Cumulus clouds in the Cloudspotter's Guide, I may run into trouble here.  The ones below surely are cumulus.

And maybe these here, moving in from the south.  I'm not sure what the ones in the background are.  But it's a good incentive to read my Guide more.

Soon the sky was like this.  Skipping a few chapters ahead, I found a picture that looks similar and are called Altocumulus stratiformis translucidus.  The last term means they let the sun shine through, which is what was happening, though my camera fought that.

Looking at another picture in the Guide, I'm guessing these (above) are altocumulus stratiformis (with out the translucidus.)  The altocumulus are mid-level clouds - about 20,000 feet up.

Closer to earth, this electronic beachcomber was scanning the sand, presumably looking for metal objects.  These guys have been around since I was a kid, going across the sand with the hopes of finding something metal and valuable someone lost in the sand.

It seems as good a hobby as any.  You spend your time at the beach, you get exercise walking, and maybe you find something of value.  Kind of like a fisherman, but with more exercise and you don't need a license.  

From Treasure Enterprise:

HOW ARE ITEMS LOST?
Let’s take a typical example of what happens at the beach.
Firstly, we find that many people just lie on their beach towel to sun bake - or whatever! – generally with their valuables. When they leave, the first thing they do is to give their towel a good shake, and everything from sand particles to jewellery, rings and coins generally fly off into outer space. The object hits the sand, buries itself quickly and can’t be found again in a hurry. When they realize that something is missing, they panic! … moving the sand around the place doesn’t help and of course the situation is worse than before.
Try this … throw a coin backwards into loose sand (don’t look) and see if you can find it again … I bet you don’t … and don’t even think of using a metal detector either – that’s cheating!
For those who like to swim and love to wear rings and jewellery at the same time is a recipe for disaster. Most people generally wear rings a little loose and the chances are that they will lose it. A simple scientific principle of expansion and contraction applies here – in this instance, cold water contracts the finger – the water and the surf acts as a lubricant – the ring falls off and settles down through the sand with its flat side acting as a cutting blade, going deeper and then it’s lost – simple as that! This can also apply to other jewellery items too and it happens every day.

This Australian writer goes on to talk about how to use metal detectors to find treasures.

As the clouds covered a larger area, the air temperature dropped and we decided it was time to go home.  But there was still a beautiful light over the sand and water.

Gramping Beats Blogging

I've got a couple more days left with my granddaughter.  Her parents are more than happy to leave her with her grandparents and so we go on various adventures.  Back to the beach again yesterday - different kinds of waves, lots of fun in very shallow water.  Cooler, but still ok to get your feet wet.

Today we visited the cemetery to put plants on the grave plaques.  My mother used to do that all the time and now I'm the one left to do it.  And since we aren't here that much, it's trickier.  In October we left jade plants since they can survive a long time without water.  They were still alive, though struggling.   In one I had added soil, and that one was doing much better.  Added water to the dirt and brought new ones for the other plaques.  We'll check them out before we leave and then they'll just have to survive as best as they can.

And then we walked along Ballona Creek in the afternoon sun.

They've prettified part of the trail and added signs and walkway that is separate from the bike trail - but only for a short distance from Centinela.

I've been pretty supportive of graffiti artists on this blog, but here's an example that I don't think has any redeemable qualities.  Just juvenile destruction of other people's stuff - not even important people's stuff.  Just ordinary people who walk or run or bike along the creek.

Gives potheads a bad name.  

From Pier To Pier - Surfers, Canal, Who Says People Don't Walk In LA?

It's great to do things with a 3 year old in tow.  Took advantage of the sunny, though for LA, cool day to be by the ocean.   The view of the surfers from the Venice Pier was great as they caught long rides on frequent, good sized swells.

Here's that same picture in context.

They made it look so easy, but you can see the power of the water in this picture.  

This was on the other (north) side of the pier.

As you can see, there were great sets constantly coming in.

More gentle water a short walk away in the canals of Venice (California).

My preference would have been to do this all by bike, but there were others.  We drove back towards the Santa Monica pier (about 3 miles north of the Venice Pier) and walked along the boardwalk.  Here one of the many Santa hatted folks watches a slack wire walker.  

And for those who think no one walks in LA, the Santa Monica pier was jammed with walkers.  There just needs to be more pedestrian friendly spaces and better public transportation to get to them. But I'd also guess that at least half these people were from out of town sightseeing.

[UPDATE Dec. 26, 2016:  The LA Times has an opinion piece on LA walkability today.]

A good day and the youngster went to sleep really fast this evening.