Easy Day in Palm Springs

Posted on March 10, 2020 by admin

My recent visit to Southern California involved a lot of motion, by car and light rail and on foot. By the time I got to Palm Springs, I was ready for an easier time. Steve and Jack’s hospitality made that possible for me from late afternoon on February 24, when I arrived, to the morning of the 26th, when I left.

If you have the means, Palm Springs is a good town for taking it easy, especially in the winter, which is like a pleasant springtime in a lot of other places. The full day I was in town involved getting up late — a necessary part of any easy day — looking around Palm Spring’s main shopping street and some of its neighborhoods, including visits to a few shops, then lunch and a drive out to the town of Indio to see its main tourist attraction.

If I’d been in full-tourist mode, I might have taken a closer look at some of the town’s modernist houses, or visited its art museum, or taken a hike in the hills, or ridden the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. If I were another person all together, I would have played golf. I hear a lot of people do that in wintertime Palm Springs, and maybe that’s why Gerald Ford spent a lot of time there.

I took in a few sights. Such as the view across the street from Steve and Jack’s.
We took a stroll down Palm Canyon Dr., which includes restaurants, tony shops, tourist shops, design showcases — modernism is the thing, an aesthetic fully occupying a number of shops — and more.
More, as in stars in the sidewalk, featuring celebrities who lived in Palm Springs at least part of the time. Such as good old Adam West.
Sonny Bono rates a bronze on the street, maybe for his efforts in Congress to ensure that his distant descendants retain the copyright to his songs.
Lucy has a bronze, too. Here’s Steve with Lucy.
Lunch, at Steve’s suggestion, was at the Haus of Poké just off Palm Canyon. The small chain’s web site tells us that “poké/poukei is a raw fish salad served as an appetizer in Hawaiian cuisine, and sometimes as an entree. Poké is the Hawaiian verb for ‘section’ or ‘to slice or cut.’ Typical forms are aku (an oily tuna) and he’e (octopus).”

Haus of Poké is on the Chipotle model — seems like a long time ago that that was novel — in which you pick a series of ingredients for your meal from a limited selection. Step 1, size. Step 2, base: brown rice, white rice, chips or salad. Step 3, protein: octopus, tofu, ahi tuna, salmon, yellowtail or shrimp. Step 4, mix-ins: edamame, cucumber, red onion, green onion or mango. Step 5, a selection of sauces.

I can’t remember exactly what I had now, though it involved white rice and salmon and other things, and it was delicious combo. I can see why Steve’s a regular.

Also not far off Palm Canyon: The Church of St. Paul in the Desert, Episcopal. Unfortunately closed.
That afternoon, we went to Shields, a date farm that’s also a tourist attraction in Indio, California. The sign has been a fixture of the road since the 1950s.
We stayed for a short film — Romance & Sex Life of the Date — which was something like a film you (I) might have seen in elementary school, and at times a little hard to stay awake for. But I can’t say I didn’t learn anything about date agriculture. I didn’t know, for instance, that about 90% of U.S. date cultivation is in the Coachella Valley (Wiki says more than 95%, but I’m citing the movie.)

Steve said that Shields used to offer a selection of date samples on a table, as many as you cared to eat, but we didn’t see that. Turns out you have to ask for a sample now, which includes two dates. Is a new private equity owner clamping down on the freebies?

We bought two date shakes, which were good, and looked around a bit. You can’t wander around the date-growing grounds any more, either, Steve said. Used to be able to. The best view of the Shields date trees turned out to be from the edge of the parking lot.
After Shields, we returned to Steve’s house to loaf around (now there’s a verb we shouldn’t let die). I wasn’t completely idle, however, since I spent time writing postcards. In the evening, we had a pleasant dinner and then sat around and talked and watched TV. The Food Network, I have to say, is a whole other world I knew little about.

The Getty Villa

Posted on March 9, 2020 by admin

I’m connected on Facebook with a man named Rolf Achilles. I took a noncredit class he taught on Chicago history at the Newberry Library in the late 1980s. I think he also attended the Harvest Dinner Party at my apartment on October 22, 1988, but I’m not sure — a lot of people were there. Not sure I’ve seen him since then, or whether he’d remember me if he saw me.

Rolf’s an art historian, and often publishes images of fine art on Facebook. Not long ago, he posted pictures of items on display at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, California. I also happened to be planning my trip to California at the time. Almost at once I knew I wanted to see the place, along with the Getty Center. Thanks, Rolf.

When the time came, on the afternoon of February 23, I only had time for one of them. I decided on the Getty Villa. Of course I did. It offers a collection of ancient art.
Oil billionaire and notorious tightwad J. Paul Getty had the property developed in the 1970s to house his large collection of ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan art. Tight-fisted Getty might have been in many things, but not when it came to the sumptuous villa. The structure, on the hills overlooking the Pacific, is a re-creation of a specific villa in Herculaneum, the Villa of the Papyri, which wasn’t just any Roman country villa, but among the poshest known.

Apparently the old man died before the villa was completed, or at least he never went to see it. Too bad for him. The villa was opened to the public as a museum for a short time, but soon closed and wasn’t re-opened until 2006, after some additions to the grounds.

Langdon Wilson Architects did the original design. “Architects looked closely at the partial excavation of the Villa dei Papiri and at other ancient Roman houses in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae to influence the design,” the Getty web site says. “The scale, appearance, and some of the materials of the Getty Villa are taken from the Villa dei Papiri, as is the floor plan, though it is a mirror of the original.”

In 2006, Machado Silvetti renovated the villa and added a nearby complex of buildings, such as a cafe, museum store and auditorium. These buildings set the pattern for your approach to the Getty Villa. After parking at some distance, you walk to a bank of elevators or flight of stairs that take you to a elevated path to the villa. Then you have to go back down (part of the way) to enter the villa — via a 500-seat outdoor amphitheater, which was also part of the addition.

In this shot, the amphitheater is to the left, the entrance to the right.
The entrance. I decided to go in and look at the building and grounds first, and then the works of art on display.
The entrance leads to the Atrium, a splendid introduction to the structure that has rooms off each side, exhibiting art. Then the structure opens up into an open-air Inner Peristyle.

“This type of space was common in the second century B.C., when the main structure of the ancient villa was built,” signage in the peristyle says. “The Getty Villa’s garden is lushly planted with a variety of annuals and perennials bordered with hedges. The colonnade is paved the terrazzo, a mosaic flooring… A long, narrow pool emphasizes the east-west axis of the Getty Villa. Statues of young women, reproductions of ancient bronze sculptures found at the Villa dei Papiri, are set around the pool.”

Exit the Inner Peristyle and you’re on a small balcony overlooking to Outer Peristyle. I stood there for a while, just gawking. It’s a gawk-worthy place.
The top level of awe at the property, as far as I was concerned. The Atrium had been bronze and the Inner Peristyle had been silver. Now I was at the gold level.

Walk out into the Outer Peristyle and all the way to the far end, and you get a view of the Inner Peristyle that you came from.I quote at length a press release from the time the Getty Villa reopened in the mid-2000s that’s remarkably informative: “Designed by Denis L. Kurutz Associates, and implemented by kornrandolph, inc., the Getty Villa landscape takes into account the lush topography of the Malibu canyon.

“In addition to the historically accurate species found in the four gardens and in areas closest to the J. Paul Getty Museum building, the landscape design also features a mix of Mediterranean and native California varieties, local plants of the Santa Monica mountains, and plants from other parts of the world that grow in climates similar to that of Southern California.

“[The Outer Peristyle] is the Villa’s main garden, the largest and grandest of the four. Bronze sculpture and replicas of statues discovered at the remains of the first-century Villa dei Papiri have been placed in their ancient findspots…

“Just like its smaller neighbor, the Outer Peristyle is dominated by a large pool running down the center. Trimmed ivy topiaries frame the edges of the pool, which is crowned at its north end with two sculptural pomegranate trees and enclosed by 24 Grecian laurels on either side, mirroring the structural columns of the building.

“Four benches are available — two located in arbors draped in grape vines, and two nestled in pockets surrounded by hand-crafted wood trellises. Clusters of rose gardens are filled with ancient gallica, damask, and musk roses, while much of the ground is covered with a layer of sweet violet. Flowering perennials such as chamomile, daisy, rosemary, and sage are planted in abundance for variety and color, along with tulips, iris, Madonna lily, cyclamen, and narcissus.”

I understand that the Getty Villa isn’t an exact replica of the original in Herculaneum. For one thing, the Villa dei Papiri hasn’t been fully excavated. Also, buildings in our time need to be up to modern fire codes and so on. Still, as a re-creation of ancient Rome, this is likely to be the best I’ll ever see.

It’s also an excellent setting for the art collection. I’ve read that the once upon a time, Getty had some issues with stolen artwork. Or at least disputed provenance. Back around the time the villa re-opened, a number of objects were sent back to Italy and Greece. Hope that’s all behind the museum. What remains is amazing enough.

Might as well start with the museum’s star piece of art. Its Mona Lisa, you might say: the Lansdowne Hercules, Roman, ca. AD 125. (As the museum styles it — not CE.)
Found near Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli, so maybe the emperor himself saw it. In our time, the statue has its own room in the Getty Villa.

Other Roman statues include Leda and the Swan, AD 1st century.
Venus, Roman, AD 2nd century.
Crouching Venus, Roman, AD 100-150
Jupiter, Roman, 1st century BC
Plus busts. A number of emperors. Such as Augustus.
Tiberius.
Caligula.
All very good, but I’ll never shake the feeling that those emperors looked like Brian Blessed, George Baker and John Hurt, respectively.

The Greek galleries excelled in pottery. All the pictured objects are Athenian, 6th or 5th century BC. Such as Storage Jar with Diomedes Slaying Rhesos.
Mixing Vessel with Adonis and Goddesses.
Prize Vessel with a Chariot Race
All in all, the ancient art collection is in the same league as those at the British Museum and the Pergamon Museum, in my amateur opinion, though I’ve barely scratched the surface of the many collections around the world.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Posted on March 8, 2020 by admin

With a name like Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I suspected — in spite of what I’d read — that the place had gotten the Hollywood treatment instead of a proper renovation. That is, superficial and unsatisfying.

Fortunately, I was wrong. Just off a dowdy selection of Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood Forever is a resplendent cemetery, on par with any of the lush rural-cemetery-movement grounds I’ve seen in other parts of the country.

With examples of funerary art.
A number of private mausoleums.
Including one picturesquely set on a small island, the tomb of William A. Clark Jr. (1877-1934), son of copper baron Sen. William A. Clark Sr.

Plenty of trees.
If you find just the right spot, you can see the Hollywood sign off in the distance.
There are a few unexpected features, such as a section devoted to Southeast Asian memorials.
I’ve also read that in our time, Russian immigrants are fond of the cemetery. There’s plenty of visible evidence of that.

Along with a sprinkling of earlier Russian émigrés.
Hollywood Forever also sports a number of unconventional memorials. Something you might expect in California, except that I’ve seen them elsewhere.
Or maybe not unconventional, but just a little unusual.

Plenty of regular folks, too. Most of the permanent population would be, I believe. John Taylor was laid to rest just as the movie business started getting off the ground in Hollywood.

The cemetery dates back to 1899 and has had three names: Hollywood Cemetery, Hollywood Memorial Park, and since 1998, Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Its history is as strange as Hollywood itself.

A long-time owner in the 20th century essentially used the place as a piggy bank, and let it go to pot by the 1990s. The current owner invested millions in the property’s renovation — or oversaw the investment, and I’ll say it again, did a splendid job — with the funds at least partly generated by a pre-need funeral company Ponzi scheme his father and brother went to prison for, though the owner himself wasn’t charged. Sounds like a subplot in the entertaining and California-esque Six Feet Under, except the con was perpetrated in Missouri.

The whole story is more than I care to unpack, but for further reading there’s “The Strange History of Hollywood Forever Cemetery,” an article about the Ponzi scheme, and this entertaining article in LA Weekly.

Not only has the current owner made the cemetery look good, he’s raised public awareness of it through various events, such as outdoor movie screenings and other events not usually associated with graveyards. Also — and perhaps most astute of all, from a business perspective — he seems to have opened up space to be interred, especially in mausoleums near famous people (example to follow).

That brings me to the fact that I’ve buried the lead (har, har). All the features I’ve mentioned above are nice, but not really why I spent a couple of hours at Hollywood Forever on a pleasantly warm Sunday morning.

I’d come to find the graves of movie stars. Normally, celebrity earns a shrug from me. But I was in Hollywood. Movie stars are part of its sense of place. It’s a movie industry town, after all. Besides, a highly detailed map of the cemetery is available at the front office for a reasonable $5, and it guides you to the graves of about 200 notables.

“We sell more of these maps than we do flowers,” the lady behind the counter told me.

So I was on a treasure hunt to find some stars that I’d heard of, especially from the Hollywood of before I was born, more or less. It was fun.

Grand names are part of the deal at Hollywood Forever. Parts of the cemetery include the Garden of Eternal Love, Chandler Gardens, Garden of Memory, and a Jewish section featuring the Plains of Abraham, Garden of Jerusalem and Garden of Moses. This is the the entrance is the Abbey of Psalms Mausoleum.
I entered in search of the Crying Indian, Iron Eyes Cody. I found him in a modest niche. His wife, who died about 20 years before he did, rests there as well. She’s called “Mrs. Iron Eyes Cody” on the plaque; you have to look her up to learn she had a name besides her Italian-American husband’s made-up Native American name. She was Bertha Parker Pallan and, unlike him, was actually an Indian.

Iron Eyes is small potatoes compared to the real star of the Abbey of Psalms: Judy Garland. She has her own chapel-like room, re-interred there only in 2017. That must have been quite a coup for Hollywood Forever.

Want to have your ashes near Judy? It can be arranged. A lot of new-looking, glass-door niches are in the chapel walls, most still empty, though I did note that John Cassese, the “Dance Doctor,” recently occupied an eye-level niche across from Judy. His niche includes an urn, but also a bobblehead-like figure of him, a printed obituary, an award he won in 2013, a small disco ball, some seashells and other objects.

From there I headed to the open air, looking for Mel Blanc.
I left a penny. Here was a man who had entertained me and millions of others.

Most of the graves I wanted to see were in the Garden of Legends, an open area, and the Cathedral Mausoleum, so I soon headed that way. Douglas Fairbanks and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. have their own lawn and reflecting pool, with a major memorial next to the Cathedral Mausoleum.

The cemetery shop only had a few postcards for sale, but they included ones featuring Douglas Fairbanks, probably dressed for The Black Pirate and looking very much like the actor who invented swash and buckle. I sent one of them to a friend of mine and wrote, “You or I might be cool, but we’ll never be Douglas Fairbanks cool.”

Heading into the Garden of Legends, I soon happened across Johnny Ramone. I didn’t even know he was dead.
Nearby is a cenotaph for Hattie McDaniel, who was denied burial here in 1952 because of segregation. Her memorial was erected in 1999.

Next I spent a while looking for Fay Wray, and found her, and then Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The composer is buried under a tree.
I sent the picture to my old friend Kevin, a movie music enthusiast. But for Kevin I might not know about Korngold, or have ever listened to such treasures as the music from The Adventures of Robin Hood or The Sea Hawk.

Rounding the pond that forms the centerpiece of Garden of Legends, I came across Cecil B. DeMille.
One I hadn’t been looking for: Virginia Rappe.
I puzzled for a moment. Who was that? Then I remembered.

Tyrone Power is hard to miss.
Next to him is Marion Davies’ mausoleum, which you might miss if you don’t know that her actual name was Douras, which is above the entrance. She paid for the building herself, I’ve read.
At the Cathedral Mausoleum, an even larger complex than the Abbey of Psalms Mausoleum, I found Peter Lorre in a niche. I was looking for him. I also found Mickey Rooney. I wasn’t looking for him, but he does illustrate that stars are once again considering the cemetery, now that the period of neglect is over.

Rooney’s inscription says: “One of the greatest entertainers the world has ever known. Hollywood will always be his home.”

Well, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, Mickey, though I want to mock that inscription. Then I began noticing some other recent arrivals from the movie business, most of whom I’d never heard of. Some of the memorials were like ads in Variety, touting their careers.

Last stop: Valentino. I couldn’t very well miss him.
I’d read that lipstick is often there, and so it was. He’s got amazing staying power for a silent film star.

Curious, I took note of the grave next to Valentino: June Mathis Balboni (d. 1927). Just an accident that this person is next to the Great Lover?

No. She knew him. In fact, she discovered Valentino and wrote some of his movies, most notably The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Remarkable the tales that cemeteries tell.

SoCal Driving

Posted on March 5, 2020 by admin

Remarkable how quickly last week’s political mail becomes obsolete.

Then again, if he follows through with his promises, we’ll continue to get mail from his organization until election day. The message will just be a little different. Namely, Kick the SOB Out, or words to that effect.

Before I visited Southern California last month, I was slightly apprehensive about driving there, which was in no way rational. I’ve driven in most major U.S. metro areas, including Los Angeles, without major incident. I’ve been jammed up in traffic and had near accidents and gotten lost, but those things can happen anywhere.

Driving around SoCal wasn’t bad at all. As mentioned before, I opted out of GPS. Don’t need a box telling me where to go, especially when its advice tends to be: find the nearest freeway. I used maps — electronic maps, in this case. That’s about the best thing my phone does for me, as I discovered walking around in New York a couple of years ago.

(One strange thing that first happened during that trip was people asking me for directions, with a phone in their hands. They pointed to the Google Maps display and asked, how can I get to x from here? Dunno, man, read the map, maybe.)

You can’t — at least certainly shouldn’t — call up Google Maps while driving, and I didn’t do that, but usually it was easy enough to find a place to stop to consult a map. Also, here’s a tip for getting a light to change: start fiddling with your phone to look up a map, and it is sure to change.

Often enough I didn’t need to consult a map. Los Angeles street theory isn’t perfectly grid-like, but it has strong elements of a grid. Up one major street for miles, over another for more miles.

Not that I wanted to drive everywhere. The first morning in town, a Saturday, I drove only as far as a station on the relatively new Expo Line, which goes from Santa Monica to downtown LA, or vice verse.

I rode it downtown from the Expo/La Cienega station, through miles of the city I’d never seen before, including the edge of the University of Southern California. Good old USC — how persistent that school was in sending me mail in the late ’70s and early ’80s, inviting me to apply, even after I was attending VU.

On my second day in town, a Sunday, I got up early, strategy in mind. I was staying fairly near I-405, the 405 as it’s called locally, so I took that freeway north to I-10, the 10, and headed east from there to Western Ave. I’d read that the 405 was one of LA’s worst freeways in terms of congestion, and maybe it is.

But just before 8 on Sunday morning, I encountered smooth driving on the 405, as well as the 10, where traffic was also light. Getting off the highway, I headed north and soon found myself in Koreatown. Easy to know you’re there, because of the Hangul signs. Soon I began to wonder, just how large is Los Angeles’ Koreatown? I passed block after block after block after block of Hangul-marked buildings. How big? Really big.

Eventually, I turned west on Santa Monica Blvd. to reach the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, but also to begin the longest drive of the day, west from there to Santa Monica itself, through (among other places) West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

A virtual stage, it seemed to me — a carnival of sights to see, a spectacle of wealth and poverty, even at driving speed. Urban texture that you experience in any North American city, and yet with its own flavor. You see only glimpses, but even so you pass distinct cars and trucks, but not as many trucks as some places (because LA tends to have alleys for delivery), more pedestrians than you’d think but fewer bicyclists, chain shops and independents in strip centers, apartments, houses, office buildings, churches, schools, bars, restaurants, vacant lots, buildings under construction, parking lots, car washes — a lot of them — tall palms and short bushes, cannabis dispensaries, gas stations, graffiti’d walls, mural’d walls, billboards, parking meters, neon signs, showrooms, construction zones (but not as many as I expected), lamp posts and telephone poles, self-storage and payday loan offices, parks, playgrounds and even a cactus patch.

The Cactus Garden in Beverly Gardens Park, recently renovated. I stopped for a look at the cacti and the churches next to the park.

Santa Monica’s traffic is pretty thick, so driving was less pleasant there. To get to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, you head north on the Pacific Coast Highway. That too was crowded. The road is probably more scenic and less crowded further north, but Pacific Palisades isn’t that far, so I didn’t see much of the highway (we saw part of it up that way in 2001, driving to Santa Barbara, though mostly we took U.S. 101).

On Monday, the plan was to reach Palm Springs by way of freeways and then San Gabriel Canyon Road (California 39) through San Gabriel Mountains National Monument to California 2 and 138. Looked good on the map.

First, though, I had to get out of Los Angeles via freeway. I knew I didn’t want to drive anywhere near downtown, because February 24 was the day of Kobe Bryant’s memorial service at the Staples Center. So I went around downtown, and avoided the 405 too.

First, Sepulveda Blvd. south, which passes through a tunnel under LAX. I didn’t know that till I looked at the map. Then I drove it. I don’t think I’ve ever driven under an airport. I’m not sure any other airport has a tunnel under it.

From south of the airport, I took the 105 east to the 605 north to the 210, the Foothill Freeway. There were some minor snarls along the way, but nothing too bad.

Radio coverage of the memorial followed me all the way along the route. Reminded me of when Princess Diana died. It was a horrible accident, but still. Radio jocks can be counted on for maudlin twaddle at times like that.

When I got to the entrance of the monument, near Azusa, a sign said that California 2 was closed in x and y places. What did that mean? I stopped to look them up. That meant that I’d have to double back if I went as far as where 2 and 39 met, way up in the mountains. Still blocked by snow, I figured.

So I drove about 10 miles into the mountains and then drove back. Scenic territory, and not much traffic in February.
Evidence of an unfortunate accident.
No name or date, though. No maudlin twaddle on the airwaves, either. The world is quiet when most people die.

I spent the next hour or so driving east through the Foothill communities, including Rancho Cucamonga, along the former US 66. Of course I wanted to drive through Rancho Cucamonga.

The Foothills are naturally more suburban in character than Santa Monica Blvd. Except for the mountains looming off to the left, in fact, and the palm trees, not so different than my usual suburban haunts. I even stopped for gas at a Costco before getting back on the freeway to Palm Springs.

Didn’t drive in Palm Springs on Tuesday; Steve took me around. On Wednesday, I left town and drove to Joshua Tree National Park, whose roads are either small and paved, or small and unpaved. I drove on both kinds. On the unpaved version, through a Joshua tree forest, traffic was extremely light. I was it. Just like driving in a car commercial. Happens occasionally.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels &c

Posted on March 4, 2020 by admin

Another place that still under construction the last time I visited Los Angeles, in 2001: the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake so badly damaged the previous seat, the 1870s Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, that the archdiocese wanted to tear it down and build another cathedral on the site. Preservationists, led by the Los Angeles Conservancy, fought against that, and so eventually a deal was struck allowing the city to take possession of the former cathedral, and the archdiocese to build a new building on downtown land given to it by the city.

These days the former cathedral is an event center — which I didn’t see — and the new cathedral, completed in 2002, looks like this.Not everyone loves the design by Rafael Moneo, which I’ve seen called deconstructivist or postmodern, but which looks pretty brutal to me. I wasn’t all that fond of it myself, though it is interesting.

Does it say sacred space to me? Not particularly. You could argue that most of us have been conditioned by traditional forms to feel that way. Or you could argue that of course sacred space should be beautiful, not brutal. Take your pick. My goal when I’m somewhere is to see what’s there.

Besides, the interior is less brutal somehow.
The light fixtures and the natural light help soften the space, I think. Also note that people use the space. While I lurked around the back of the cathedral, a couple named George and Florence were getting married up front. People probably get married there every Saturday except during lent.

At the back is the Ezcaray Reredos, an intricate work of carved black walnut.
It dates from 17th-century Spain. More information about how it came to be in modern California is here, though I will say it left Spain during an impoverished period in the 20th century. The sign in front of the reredos is incorrect, however, when it says that the chapel attached to Saint Philip Neri at Ezcaray, original home of the work, “was dismantled in 1925 after being damaged in the Spanish Civil War…”

On the cathedral’s lower level is a mausoleum.
Most of the spaces are yet to be occupied. I later read that Gregory Peck is interred there, but I didn’t see him. I did spot California Chief Justice Malcom Millar Lucas (d. 2016), who had the distinction earlier in his judicial career of presiding over the trial of Charles Manson.

The relics of Saint Vibiana are in the mausoleum as well. She was a 3rd-century martyr.
Atlas Obscura: “Her time in the public eye began in 1853 when her tomb was excavated from the catacombs of San Sisto in Rome. Unlike many of the so-called ‘catacomb saints’ who didn’t even have names, the inscription on Vibiana’s tomb gave her name, the day of her death (August 31), the symbolic laurel wreath of martyrdom, and indicated she was ‘innocent and pure.’

“The following year Bl. Pope Pius IX gave her relics — blood, tomb inscription, and body — to Thaddeus Amat, the newly appointed Bishop of Monterrey, California….”

After a time in Santa Barbara, and then many years at the former cathedral in Los Angeles, Vibiana eventually came to where she is now. Interesting that a saint migrated to California like everyone else.

The cathedral isn’t the only church I managed to visit in Los Angeles. Not far away is Our Lady Queen of Angels Catholic Church, an historic parish church.
I rested a while inside. The name really should be rendered as La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, since all of its masses are in Spanish. The historic marker outside, in English and Spanish, says (in English) that the church “was dedicated on December 8, 1822 during California’s Mexican era. Originally known as La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles, the church was the only Catholic church for the pueblo. Today it primarily serves the Hispanic population of Los Angeles.”

On Sunday morning, as I headed through Koreatown, I spotted St. James’ Episcopal Church, or St. James’ in-the-City, on Wilshire Blvd.
I attended part of the service that was going on at the time. The church dates from the 1920s, done in a more traditional Gothic Revival by a San Francisco architect, Benjamin McDougall. Most notable about the design: a lot of fine stained glass.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church isn’t far away on Wilshire Blvd.
Unlike St. James’, it wasn’t open when I came by. Still, I got a good look from the across the street.

The Walt Disney Concert Hall and The Broad

Posted on March 3, 2020 by admin

The last time I was in Los Angeles, the Walt Disney Concert Hall looked like this — still more than two years from its completion in 2003. I paid no attention to it then.

On February 22, 2020, the 2,265-seat hall looked like this from across Hope St.
Whatever else you can say about Frank Gehry, his designs aren’t like their surroundings. They’re going to stand out. Also, they’re interesting to stand under.
I’d read that self-guided tours of the venue were free, and that’s true. You get an MP3 player at a table just inside the Hope St. entrance, and off you go. The audio snippets about the development of the building, along with various design elements, are narrated by John Lithgow, with some additional commentary by those who worked on the project, including Gehry.

I was keen to see the auditorium. It was not to be. Musical careers were hanging in the balance in there.

Still, the rest of the interior was worth a look.

Though it’s invisible from the street, the hall has some outside space at mid-level, including greenery. A pleasant interlude among the twists of metal and vaulting ceilings.

At one point, the outdoor space practically becomes a box canyon made of metal.

Later that day, I visited The Broad, which is next door to Disney, though much newer, completed less than five years ago.
Interesting texture for a 120,000-square-foot box. It looks good, but how long will it be until its gleaming exterior begins to turn gray and streaky? Eventually, but I won’t worry about it. That will be on designer Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who did The Broad in collaboration with Gensler.

Even at 6 p.m. — the museum is open till 8 on Saturdays — the standby line was fairly long. But not as long as the more popular rides at Disneyland. It took about 20 minutes to get in.

Once in, you see works by the likes of Christopher Wool, Jean‐Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Kerry James Marshall, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns and others. Always something interesting to see, even if not everything on the walls is that compelling.

Somehow I managed to miss the Infinity Mirrored Room by Yoyoi Kusama, which I chalk up to being pretty tired after taking more than 20,000 steps that day. So it goes.

One more thing about The Broad, something other museums with sizable endowments could take their cue from: admission is free. Among others, that means you, Met.

Downtown LA Walkabout, Including a Light Brush with Insane Clown Posse

Posted on March 2, 2020 by admin

Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles looks like a pleasant public space, but on the morning of February 22, I only got the barest glimpse. Entry to the park had been blocked all the way around by temporary barricades. This was a concern, since according to the receipt for the walking tour of downtown LA that I’d booked for that morning, the group was supposed to meet at Pershing Square.

Soon I found that we were meeting at the corner of W. 6th St. and S. Olive St., at the edge of the park, with the tour proceeding from there. I wasn’t the only one who asked the guide what was going on at Pershing Square. Turns out the city had rented it for the weekend for a couple of Insane Clown Posse concerts, the second of which would be that evening. Sounded like a must-miss to me.

The tour took us on foot past, and sometimes through, 12 different historic structures in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. This is the central wing of the building.
Originally the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel when completed in 1923, the property has 683 rooms, down from about 1,500 at its opening. People didn’t mind smaller rooms in those days.

The south wing.
Design by Schultze & Weaver, a New York firm best known for the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, though that would come later.

The north wing. Why fly the Singapore flag, I don’t know. Owner Millennium & Copthorne Hotels plc is based in London.

Not far away is the CalEdison Building, one of LA’s grand art deco exercises, designed by Allison & Allison and finished in 1931.
The allegory above the entrance holds a torch. Not a torch of fire, but capped with a light bulb, though the electric utility that used to anchor the building left nearly 50 years ago.
The exterior is grand, but the main lobby is the real wow.
More CalEdison pictures are here.

Speaking of wow, the Los Angeles Central Library came a little further on the tour. Along with the U.S. and California flags flying there is the flag of the city of Los Angeles. The library is capped with an ornate pyramid. Originally it was supposed to be a dome, but 1920s Egyptmania had its influence on the building.

Completed in 1926 with a design by Bertram Goodhue and Carlton Winslow, what nearly happened to the library about 50 years later? Demolition. The Los Angeles Conservancy was organized at that time in response, and the building was saved.

Only to nearly burn down in April 1986. The cause remains a mystery. Our guide asked those of us old enough — which was most of the group — whether we remembered the fire. I drew a blank. Even living in Nashville at the time, I must have heard about it, but I couldn’t remember.

“It happened three days after the Chernobyl disaster, so it didn’t get as much coverage as it might have otherwise,” she said. Such is the news cycle.

The citizens of LA insisted that the library be rebuilt, and it was. Such places as the splendid central rotunda were thus saved again.

Looking up in the rotunda.
On the rotunda walls are fine California history murals, finished in 1933 by artist Dean Cornwell.

Across the street from the library are the Bunker Hill Steps, designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and completed in 1990.
If I knew downtown Los Angeles had a topographical feature called Bunker Hill, I’d forgotten it. The place has quite a history: a posh neighborhood in the late 19th century, a run-down one by the mid-20th century, and then the victim of urban renewal. These days, office towers and other commercial buildings developed during or after the 1980s occupy most of Bunker Hill.

Once you go up a hill, you have to go back down again, or at least we did to reach the next destinations on the tour. So we took Angels Flight Railway down the side of Bunker Hill. This is the terminal at the top.

The original funicular, which opened in 1901, closed in 1969, lost temporarily to urban renewal. The line was revived in 1996 a block south of the original location, though it has spent much of the last quarter-century closed because of safety problems. With any luck, those are resolved now.

Looking up the track, which is nearly 300 feet long.

The terminal at the bottom.
The last place on the tour: The Bradbury Building. I knew it by reputation. A lot of people know it that way. If it were in, say, Des Moines, that wouldn’t be true. But it’s in Los Angeles.
The exterior is nice, but it’s the striking interior that makes it a favorite of location scouts and tourists. An almost exact contemporary of the 1890s Monadnock Building in Chicago, the Bradbury’s superb ironwork reminded me of that building.
One George Wyman, a draftsman without formal architectural training, designed the building, at least according to most sources. He was inspired by the description of a building in Looking Backwards by Edward Bellamy, again according to most sources. I like to believe the stories are true, since they argue against credentialism.

Back to Insane Clown Posse. I didn’t actually have a brush with them or any Juggalos closer than a few blocks away. That evening, as I headed for the Metro station to leave downtown, I heard the concert off in the distance. It was probably one of the opening acts, but no matter. I could hear that it was loud.

Cal-Tex ’20

Posted on March 1, 2020 by admin

The clerk at the rental car desk asked, as they always do, whether I wanted GPS for my car. For a small fee.

“Where’s the adventure in that?” I said.

So my whole time in a mostly unfamiliar part of the country last week, I didn’t have GPS. I had a better trip for it.

Before visiting Texas recently – I got home today – I went slightly out of the way to spend a few days in Southern California, flying from the chill of metro Chicago to the mild warmth of Los Angeles on February 21, though basking in better weather wasn’t the main consideration. I wanted a new sampling of Los Angeles, which I hadn’t visited since 2001, and to take a trip out to Palm Springs, where I’d never been.

Like any vast urban area, Los Angeles is visually rich. Plenty to see at eye level, but also above your head.

Also beneath your feet.

Arriving late that Friday afternoon, and after leaving LAX behind in my rental car, I went Ladera Heights, a little-known but well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles where I’d rented a room through a peer-to-peer hospitality platform, as they say in the real estate biz. The room was part of an exceptionally pleasant condo unit: clean, well appointed, quiet at night, and not particularly expensive for short-term renters. Everything you need in an arrangement like that. Also, there was free parking on a side street that actually had available parking even late in the evening.

On Saturday, I drove to a Los Angeles Metro station on the Blue Line, parked – at a reasonable $3 for the day; you start paying close attention to parking right away in LA – rode downtown and took a walking tour offered by the Los Angeles Conservancy. That included a look at many fine downtown structures, but especially the Bradbury Building and the Angel Flight.

After lunch at Grand Central Market, I did a self-guided tour of Walt Disney Concert Hall, and then wandered down to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels for a look. A wedding was in progress during my visit, but the place is so large non-guests could easily sit way back. I needed the rest anyway. Downtown LA isn’t that large, but on foot the distance adds up. Still, I had enough energy to visit Union Station after the cathedral, take a walk through Olvera Street, and then return (via subway) to The Broad, LA’s most recent major museum, opening only in 2015.

Sunday was a driving day. By mid-morning, I’d made it to the lush, picturesque Hollywood Forever Cemetery in, of course, Hollywood, spending longer than I’d planned there. Then I drove all the way down Santa Monica Boulevard, famed in song and maybe story, to Santa Monica itself, then up the Pacific Coast Highway a short distance to the Getty Villa, an astonishing place the likes of which I’d never seen before, except in Pompeii — where, as Getty pointed out, everything is old. I returned to Santa Monica in the evening for dinner near the Third Street Promenade.

The next day, February 24, I drove into San Gabriel National Monument a few miles, but the roads were blocked further in – lingering piles of snow at higher elevations, I guess. So I made my way via the Foothill towns to Palm Springs, where I stayed with old friends Steve and Jack for two nights. I spent the first day in town, including a stop at Shields Date Garden. I played no golf.

After leaving Palm Springs on February 26, I drove through and walked around the high and dry Joshua Tree National Park, where you see two kinds of desert for a single entry fee. Which, at $30, I object to. Especially since you pay only $25 to get into Big Bend NP. Sure, the JTNP landscape is remarkable, but that fee just means that Congress is underfunding the National Park Service. Ah, well. If I ever want to see Joshua tree forests again, the Mojave National Preserve is also a good place for it, I’ve read, less crowded and with no admission fee.

The next day I flew to San Antonio, where I had a pleasant visit with family and friends, and even met a few new people, the cherry on the sundae of the trip.

The House of Prime Rib, 1973

Posted on August 11, 2019 by admin

I went with my family to the House of Prime Rib on Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco in August 1973, picking up a souvenir postcard at the same time.
I remember the place seemed dark. Low-light restaurants weren’t something I knew except maybe from TV. More exotically, servers carved the meat at a cart near our table. There was a dessert cart as well. Every now and then around the dim room, flambé erupted. Quite a place for a 12-year-old with ordinary tastes.

The House of Prime Rib, which is still open, wasn’t the sort of restaurant we usually patronized. The only place we visited remotely like it (that I can think of) was Old San Francisco — which was in San Antonio, and still is. We went there two or three times.

Except for the fact that Old San Francisco served upmarket beef like the House of Prime Rib, there wasn’t much similarity. Old San Francisco wanted to evoke those giddy Barbary Coast days before 1906; the House of Prime Rib had a Old England vibe. It was a midcentury fancy restaurant.

We were on vacation, hence the indulgence. My mother and brothers and I flew to Los Angeles that August, spent a few days there, drove up the coast on California 1 in a rental car, and spent a few days in San Francisco, flying back to San Antonio from there.

I remember it well: Disneyland in the days of A-E tickets, the Huntington Library, a side trip down to see Mission San Juan Capistrano, perhaps because my mother remembered one version or another of the song, the smoggy LA air, the winding coastline, our disappointment in not getting to see the Hearst Castle, Big Sur, climbing the hills of San Francisco, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, Chinatown, the Cannery, the cable cars, my brother Jay ordering octopus at a Fisherman’s Wharf restaurant, a boat trip around the Bay (Alcatraz was still closed at the time). A nothing out-of-the-ordinary tourist week in California. What a good time.

Wine Label Art

Posted on March 7, 2019 by admin

As I’ve mentioned before, I like the idea of wine better than wine itself, which pretty much goes for any intoxicant. One reason to like wine is wine bottles, and one reason to like wine bottles is the label.

Here’s a collection of labels used by Château Mouton Rothschild for more than 70 years. The winery has been hiring an artist a year to create its labels, with some interesting results.

But you don’t have to go all the way to the Médoc to see interesting wine labels. I can do that at a grocery store a few miles away.

This one caught my eye recently.
I don’t think Franklin counts as a Federalist. Sure, he supported the ratification of the Constitution, but in terms of participation in politics, Franklin found himself at a major disadvantage by the time the Federalists became a force in U.S. politics. Namely, he was dead.

There are plenty of actual Federalists who could be on a wine label. Famously, Alexander Hamilton or John Adams. Less famously, but more interestingly, DeWitt Clinton, Rufus King or Charles Pinckney. Well, maybe not Pinckney, since he owned a lot of slaves, but King was an abolitionist before it was cool.

Turns out, the winery did put Hamilton on a different bottle. Along with Washington (he of no faction!) and, incongruously, Lincoln. People might get the wrong idea if you called your product Republican Wine, but there’s always Whig Wine. Lincoln was originally one, after all, and it opens up the possibility of Daniel Webster or Horace Greeley on a bottle.

I saw this and thought: Botero.
I couldn’t find any evidence that Botero himself did the Bastardo label, though as Château Mouton Rothschild shows, artists are hired for such work. Shucks, you don’t even have to be a painter to shill for inexpensive wine.

Another artist-created label.
By one Victo Ngai, whom I’d never heard of. Raised in Hong Kong and current resident of California. She’s done a number of labels for Prophecy; probably a good gig. Just another one of the things you can learn poking around grocery stores.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: US: California