The Idea Of The Getty - Homage to Man's Power To Conquer Nature

Early man lived at the mercy of nature. At best, societies found a way to live with nature by learning its cycles and secrets - which plants nourished, which plants healed, how to keep warm, when the fish came and how to catch them without drowning. They appealed to spirits to help them survive. Occasionally, societies would break some barrier - learn to grow crops, tend beasts - and rise up a notch in their level of survival, making a noticeable impact on their local environment.

It was only when humans found the god Science and began to systematically unlock  the secrets of the universe that man moved from living with nature to the idea of conquering nature. Philosophers call this the 'modern' era.

In the 20th Century change was most rapid as humans strove to 'conquer' disease, hunger, and  nature itself by unlocking sources of energy which enabled giant machinery that could cut down forests in days rather than centuries, that could conquer time with airplanes and trains and cars, and could power weapons to conquer the most dangerous creature on earth - other humans. The collective environmental impact is now global. 

Many humans, beginning a post-modern era, are now aware that the systems that support life are far more complicated than we first believed and that we are destroying the earth that nurtures us.  Yet our habits - driving for example - are hard to break so we strive to find ways to keep our habits, but in ways that do less damage.

All this intro is to give background to my reaction to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

My first impressions, years ago when it was being built, were of dismay that they'd taken a natural outpost in the city - a sometimes green sometimes grey-brown piece of relatively natural mountain top - chopped it off and put up a stone monument to man's ability to destroy nature. (In the picture you can see to the other side of the canyon what this hilltop used to look like.)

After wondering at the masses of concrete and lack of natural plants in the new Vancouver waterfront areas this summer and at the massive plazas and monumental architecture of Simon Fraser University, I come back to the Getty with new eyes. (I thought I'd posted about the 'green building' with grass on the roof at the waterfront, but on the ground all the green was replaced by concrete.  And of the massiveness of the SFU architecture, but it seems I only posted glimpses and didn't make the point.)

The Getty too, with its massive flat plazas and monumental buildings, is an example of the modern ethos of conquering nature. All the 'natural' greenery is controlled carefully.




Each tree has a cage around the base and the earth it grows in is hidden from view as though it were a growing statue and not a natural tree.  

 




The grass is caged as well with metal walls and then carefully manicured demonstrating man's control of nature. 


















 They even created metal trees that more graphically cage in the bougainvillea inside.

There's no question that there is a certain beauty in all this.  Humans use natural materials to create images of beauty every day.  But not this massively and controllingly.  Underlying this form of beauty is the notion of power.  This is a beauty that glorifies man's fantasy of conquest over nature.  I would say this is like the beauty some men see when they have a beautiful woman chained to a bed.  This is nature chained to a bed. 

The water at the Getty flows down man-made channels into man-made pools, with 'nature' twisted into unnatural patterns. (OK, these patterns do appear in nature, but no plants grow naturally into neat mazes like this.)









This conquering of nature concept is also matched by the Getty's original goal to become a great international museum out of virtually nothing.  And their methods of getting there were less than honorable.  From the LA Times:

"Under growing international scrutiny for buying potentially looted antiquities, the J. Paul Getty Museum has dramatically tightened its acquisition standards.

The move, announced Thursday, is designed to screen out any item whose history since 1970 is murky. In doing so, two experts said, the Getty is essentially taking responsibility for making sure an item's recent history is clean, instead of challenging critics to prove it's dirty.

The move is not retroactive -- if it were, the museum would have to relinquish scores of ancient items from its galleries and storerooms -- but some authorities see it as a potential turning point in a global confrontation between curators and archeologists over the way museums do business. . ." [emphasis added]

The history of the world is made up of people striving for control.  Some people are content with merely gaining enough control of themselves and their immediate environment to live a decent life.

Others have a need to be dominant over nature and over other human beings.

And we have countless examples of people covering up a dishonorable past of stealing and looting by applying a facade of public monuments such as the Getty museum.  If one tallies up all the good and bad that Getty Oil did to amass the fortune that built and now sustains this museum, I don't know whether humanity would be shown to be better or worse off.



















Since it is here - and admission is free (though parking is $15, but you can also take a bus) - people should go to the Getty and take in its offerings - its beauty, its research facilities, its lessons about humanity, its views of Los Angeles.






But not being so caught up that one forgets the Getty's assault on this hill top perch, from where it shouts to LA and the world - Look at Me!  I Am The Greatest!

Eating Vegan at Leaf Organics with Rod Rotondi

It was time to try Leaf Organics. We'd passed it a few times when it wasn't open. We try to eat mostly vegetarian, and we're always looking for new options. And this one turned out to be way more than we expected.

We had my mom with us - she's game to try new things still in her late 80s - and the place was bright and colorful with people coming and going.

You order at a counter and it took a little time to sort through the menu.  Most of the items were marked R (raw).







I got one of the few C (cooked) items, Vegan Chile which had great tastes hidden in it.













We also got a Vegan Burger, Gazpacho, and Rawsagna. 

But the highlight had to be the chocolate cake, which came as one serving on two plates with raspberry sauce. 

I couldn't help thinking, "We need a place like this in Anchorage."  I'd already had thoughts about how we needed more vegetarian options in Anchorage, but this experience pushed me to talk to the chef.  (As I write this I'm thinking how I'm not saying anything about the Organic Oasis, which we should be going to, but just feels uninviting.  OK, we'll give it another try when we get back and I'll try to figure out why I feel this way.)



Anyway, Rod Rotondi said he does do classes and travels to different places for that.  Now I want to plan a weekend for him to come up, do a class, and prepare a meal.  That was the general picture and I'll have to talk to him again about more details.  But I'd love to do this.  So if there are any of you out there who want to help me figure this out, leave comments and/or email me.

Here's his book, which we bought - when I realized the chef was the author - and we're going to use it to convert some of our friends, maybe.

When vegetarian food is presented as a non-meat version of a carnivore favorite, the eaters will always be disappointed because it doesn't taste the same as the original.  So it's really important to come up with totally different dishes designed to take advantage of the the non-meat possibilities.  India does this magnificently.  There, meat dishes are "non-veg".

The menu here does include choices like the rawsagna and vegie burger, which to new folks may be less daunting.  Perhaps if they had pictures of the dishes it would help.  We saw things being carried out to other tables and thought, we should have ordered that. 



Like with most people, there is far more to Rod than one first sees.  He did mention that he'd spent time in the middle east (he's not fond of cold weather, so we have to bring him up in the summer), but there was a lot more to it.  From the Leafcuisine website:

After graduating with a Masters of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School, Rod’s life took a dramatic turn. Volunteer work in Morocco and Tunisia as a manager of grass roots development projects was followed by a 6 years in Jerusalem as a Program Management Officer for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) trying to develop the private sector of the Occupied Terretories. Six years and many harrowing stories later, Rod moved to Dahab, Egypt, a Bedouin village along the Sinai Peninsula. . . 

For LA folks,  Leaf Organics is at 11938 W. Washington Blvd a few blocks east of Centinela.

Getting Your Blackberry Repaired

I don't use too many videos from other sources, but while I sort through my photos for the last couple of days, let me post this bit of chuckle a friend sent me:

Does Free Ever Mean Free Any More?

Here's the email subject line I got:

Make 2011 a Smarter Year and Get a Free Wireless Device at Alaska Communications!

But when you open the email it says:

Buy a Smart Phone and get any wireless device FREE*.

Oh, yes, you have to buy a smart phone, first AND there's an asterisk.  That leads to:

Purchase of a Smartphone and a new 2-year contract required to receive free device. Free device must be accompanied by a new 2-year contract. Discount taken on least expensive device if both devices are Smartphones.

TRANSLATION:  Nothing is free here.  The cost of the extra wireless device is built into the smart phone and two year subscription cost.   We're charging so much for the two year subscription that we're still making a fat profit if we don't charge you more for the second device.  You're paying for the extra device, just somewhere else.  And I think it says that you have to buy another 2-year contract for the free device. 


Here's another example:

TRANSLATION:  It's free if you spend $85 or more.  Our markup is high enough that we can absorb the shipping price and still make a good profit.   There may be a discount from what they normally charge, but it's not "free."

Even Skype's offer of 30 minutes of free calls to land line phones (normally a few cents a minute) isn't 'free.'  They were off the internet for hours and so Skype users (especially those who pay) already paid through their inconvenience.  But you don't have to buy anything to get this free 30 minutes, maybe worth $.60 - $.90 for most people who take them up on this. 

Language changes over time.  New words are created, old words are used in new ways.  But the erosion of the word 'free' has been pretty deliberate.  It's a way that public relations people trick the lazy into buying something - by getting them to believe they are getting something free. 

There are still things you get free.  Most of Skype's regular service is free. (Except perhaps for the information they collect about you.) When you get a food sample at a market, it's free for you. (Though it's part of the marketing budget and those costs are factored into the cost of the product.)

It used to be that swindlers had to hide the deception, but it seems Americans are so lazy, that marketers can put all the details out there  in black and white and still get people to go along.  And as long as people buy products that have 'free' offer gimmicks attached, marketers will plaster free all over everything. 

Girls Play Here and Other Bike Ride Shots

As you can see, the sky's blue again and the sun's back.  And it was T-shirt and shorts weather on the bike.  When I pass this sign I think of my friend Thomás in Spain.

I stopped at the Venice skate plaza briefly to watch the skaters.  Yes, it's one at a time now, and just one loop.

Here's the Gehry house in sunshine.  The placement of the light pole is unfortunate.

I wandered down to the breakwater again and through the Ballona Lagoon area.

And when I was almost home, I saw this poster at Penmar - a playground built when I was a kid here.

It's nice the poster is here, it's sad that it needs to be.









UPDATE:  Anon asked what this "Girls Play Here" sign meant.  My response was too long for the comment so I'll put it here:


Anon, reasonable question. I'm guessing it has to do with social and other barriers to girls participating in sports.

I found a sociology article about an LA program called Girls Play Los Angeles, that resulted from a discrimination lawsuit. Here's a bit from “GIRLS JUST AREN’T INTERESTED”: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INTEREST IN GIRLS’ SPORT by CHERYL COOKY, Purdue University

BACA V. CITY OF LOS ANGELES: CAN GIRLS PLAY IN L.A.?

In 1998, five years prior to the start of my fieldwork, the California Women’s Law Center worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to represent the West Valley Girls’ Softball League in a case against the City of Los Angeles, Baca v. City of Los Angeles. The plaintiffs sued the City of Los Angeles contending the city did not comply with California’s Equal Protection Clause and had violated the civil rights of girls by denying the team equal access to the city-owned ball fields, which were dominated by male teams. Baca v. City of Los Angeles was set- tled out of court in 1999. As part of this settlement, the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks was required to implement a girls-only sports league. This league was called “Girls Play Los Angeles” (GPLA), a year-round, gender- specific sports league program for “at-risk” girls, ages thirteen to fifteen. Accord- ing to the Director of Gender Equity for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks (a position also required as part of the settlement), the department defined “at-risk” girls as those from low-income families who live in particular

“Girls Just aren’t Interested”: The Social Construction of Interest in Girls’ Sport 265
residential communities in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Although it was never explicitly stated what girls were “at-risk” for, based on conversations with staff, coaches, and participants, girls were understood to be “at-risk” for teen sex, pregnancy, and gang involvement. Another factor girls were “at-risk” for was early drop-out from sport. While boys’ and girls’ sport and physical activity par- ticipation decreases once they reach adolescence (Dwyer et al. 2006), the drop-out rate for girls is almost six times that of boys (Garrett 2004). Girls in this age group (thirteen to fifteen), particularly Latina girls (Denner and Dunbar 2004; Jamieson 2005), struggle with the pressure to conform to dominant notions of femininity that often conflict with sport participation (Malcolm 2003). The GPLA program addressed these risk factors by targeting the program to girls transitioning into adolescence.

Sport and physical activity have been, and continue to be, viewed as a pana- cea for girls’ physical and psychosocial problems. Research has found positive correlations between (some) girls’ sport participation and academic performance (Miller et al. 2005; Videon 2002), self-esteem (Tracy and Erkut 2002), and body image (Crissey and Honea 2006). Research has also found a negative correlation between sport participation and the risk of teen pregnancy (Miller et al. 1999). This body of research provided empirical support for women’s sport advocates, who vociferously fought for Title IX and for continued support of girls’ sport programs. During the 1990s, many school and recreation sport programs were developed to increase opportunities for girls to play sport, given the correlation between sport participation and pro-social outcomes.

From a 2004 women's sports foundation web article:

A bill prohibiting gender discrimination in youth athletics programs run by cities and counties passed the state legislature in late August, and Schwarzenegger has until September 30 to sign it. He has not taken a position on the bill, his spokesperson said.

Advocates for youth sports and fitness programs say that most local parks departments don't provide girls nearly as many activities as boys, and that boys are more likely to get better equipment and playing fields. .  .

I'm sure that's more than you wanted to know.

Who Owns Auto Black Box Data and Related Questions

Sunday's LA Times had an interesting article about a topic I didn't even know existed:  black boxes in cars.  That is, the auto equivalent of airplane black boxes that store data that can be used to figure out why an accident occurred.

It seems that

• Some car manufacturers do put black boxes in cars
• They don't record a lot of data
• The car companies claim they own the data and don't need to make it public

The article is about two men - Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and Tom Kowalick, a college professor whose dad died in a car accident - who had both learned about these boxes in the early 1990's, met each other, and teamed up to develop a protocol (as co-chairs of an IEEE committee) for mandatory black boxes.

Hall and Kowalick did succeed in publishing a 171-page standard under IEEE sponsorship in 2005 that described how automakers should design an EDR. An update was approved in 2010.

Under their standard, automakers would record 86 different streams of data — including whether a motorist was using a turn signal before a crash, and the acceleration forces in every direction that affect a vehicle in a rollover. (LA Times online article p. 2)

As mentioned above, some companies do put black boxes in their cars, but they have very little information which they don't share.

Toyota was among the most aggressive automakers in claiming control of the encrypted EDR data in its vehicles, and refused to provide downloads to its customers. After catching national attention last year for sudden acceleration problems, the company agreed to provide 10 EDR readers to federal officials. But the tools are not yet available to accident investigators across the country.

The obstacles are listed in the article:

But their quest has led into a thicket of legal, constitutional and economic issues. They encountered arguments about

• who would own the data, 

• its impact on defect lawsuits, 

• whether computers would incriminate drivers, 

• the cost effect on manufacturers and 

• patent rights over the design of the systems.

[I've reformatted this into bullets so it's easier to read]

It seems that everyone agrees that black boxes in airplanes have yielded valuable information for making safety changes which have saved countless lives plus the costs of lost airplanes and all the collateral costs.

But what interested me most was the issue of ownership of the data.  You buy a car.  It has a little computer in it that records information about the vehicle which could be useful after a crash (for you individually and for all car drivers collectively).

But the automakers claim the information on the computer they sold with the car, belongs to them. 

That's problematic to me.  Clearly this is related to what you can do with with the content of movies and music you buy.  And your rights to your own medical data. 

I think the real answer is that people know about these things and have an opportunity to choose between vehicles that have black boxes with

•  just a little info, or
•  the Hall and Kowalick standards

And whether the data is

•  corporate owned, or
• purchaser owned

The auto companies have developed an alternative system, but it isn't mandatory.

In response to Hall and Kowalick, automakers developed their own standard under the authority of the Society of Automotive Engineers. It aimed mainly at standardizing existing practices.

"Everybody in the industry buys into how valuable more information about crashes can be," said Brian Everest, a General Motors manager who chairs the engineers society's committee for EDRs. But, he added, "They really haven't been around that long."

In 2006, the NHTSA issued its own regulation for EDRs that would take effect in 2012. It did not require automakers to install the devices; if an automaker voluntarily puts one in a vehicle, it would have to record only 15 data elements, not the 86 envisioned by Hall and Kowalick.

These devices are estimated at 50 cents per vehicle.  So cost isn't the issue. 

The whole article is here.

White Suit, Clouds, More Gehry at Venice Beach, Myrna Loy, Mark Twain, Fallen Tree

The Southern California Chamber of Commerce must have a deal with the Weather Service. For the Rose Bowl parade and game, the nationwide audience saw blue sky and sunshine. But the next day it was gray and threatening rain. So I biked before it rained.

This was the coolest dressed man I've seen here, so I asked if I could take a picture. I had to take it quick because the green walk sign had just come on. 

This section of Venice Beach is 'under construction.'  I couldn't find anything explaining what was being constructed, but it's fenced off in orange fencing and these seven life guard stations are sitting together.  

But while I was looking for info on the beach construction I found out that this house I shot was designed by Frank Gehry - the same architect who designed the Disney Concert Hall I posted yesterday.  There are more pictures at the link and information about the house - it was built in 1986.

This house was a few houses south of the Gehry house.

The bike trail gets funny south of Washington.  The other day I had to go out to the street because the trail along the beach ended before I got to the breakwater at the Marina.  But there's a bike rental place at the beach and Washington and he told me to take Washington to Mildred where the bike trail picked up.  I did that and got into the middle of the marina and then turned back to return home. 

Back on Washington I passed Yo San University.

Then by my alma mater Venice High school, where they have a newly made statue of Myrna Loy.  As it says in the plaque, the original statue was unveiled in 1922.  It doesn't mention the gossip when I went to school here - that Myrna was expelled for posing nude for the statue.  Here's more information on the statue and on Myrna Loy.

Then copying the route I used to walk home, I passed my junior high school, Mark Twain, now a "middle school."  This was my homeroom.

And further down I found that a tree had toppled over at my old elementary school - Walgrove Avenue. 














The real rain didn't begin until after I got home about an hour later.  

Year End LA Tour With The Future Machatunim

(Note:  Today is 1/1/11)

We met our future Machatunim* Thursday night for dinner. They're here from Detroit. Friday we took them on a quick tour of LA. OK, not everyone knows machatunim. From googlebooks, Secret of a Jewish Mother:

*MACHATUNIM (noun) The parents of your child's spouse.

Let me just say, we're getting along fine.  We started off at the observation deck of the Santa Monica airport.  M had already spotted a vintage airplane, so I decided to stop to see what else he might see.  Then off to downtown where we checked out the old Library from outside and I waited at the curb while they all went into the Biltmore Hotel.  Then we parked and wandered around the Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry.

The Gehry building is irresistible to someone with a camera.  It offers so many shapes and shadows.  I've posted pictures of it before.

It seemed that it all goes up like this.  

From behind.

 From across the street.

 

Then past the Dorothy Chandler to the  Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels down the block and to the right.

From the Cathedral website:

What historically took centuries to construct was accomplished in three years in the building of the 11-story Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. This first Roman Catholic Cathedral to be erected in the western United States in 30 years began construction on May 1999 and was completed by the spring of 2002.

Spanish architect, Professor José Rafael Moneo has designed a dynamic, contemporary Cathedral with virtually no right angles. This geometry contributes to the Cathedral's feeling of mystery and its aura of majesty.

Tomás, see?  A Spanish architect, just like you.

A quick looksee at Union Station.

Then a late lunch at Philippe.  

We drove up to see Dodger Stadium from outside the locked parking lot gates. (M is a big baseball fan.)  It was too far away to get a good picture.  And then off to the Griffith Park Observatory.  It was fenced off and people were parked on the side of the road. 

And then down still schlocky Hollywood Blvd. to the Sunset Strip and then home.

All in all a very good end of the year.  Happy New Year to you all.