March 2009 Archives

A wooden corpse. Flanking the gilded reredo at the Plaza Church on Main Street are two shallow bays. In the bay on the left is a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Pinned to a bulletin board are wounded snapshots, each picture pleading for solace or some grace to endure. Lying in a glass case in the right bay is a near life-size sculpture of the crucified body of a very Castilian Jesus, its wood and plaster painted a naïve white over which the greenish pallor of death has begun applied.

Sublime stairs. The cast iron stairs filigree the light falling through the core of the Bradbury Building.

Anonymous grace. The streetlights of Los Angeles remember every decade of the past hundred years in cast, spun, and poured iron, in steel, and in the speckled mica and gray concrete of the ubiquitous Marbelite Corporation of America streetlights (that were invented here in 1912). Street lights are the city’s “Louvre of the streets” with classical, Baroque, Beaux Arts, and Moderne designs watched over by the curators of the Bureau of Street Lighting.

More

The Board of Supervisors may have to refight the battle of the county seal. They had decided in 2007, probably for the best, to erase the cross that former Supervisor Kenneth Hahn put on the county seal fifty years ago.

A divided board voted then to edit out the disturbing imagery, and now they may have to face another debate about the symbols we place on our public perception of ourselves.

I didn’t think the decision in 2007 went far enough. In our Los Angeles, a place notable for its edited memories, an official seal that tried to represent the kind of people we are would have to picture the unimaginable – how can you draw a universal symbol for forgetfulness?

Corporate America learned long ago that product names and logos can be active sites of memory and, therefore, can be contentious. Your misinterpretation of their symbols isn’t good for business, as Proctor and Gamble discovered when some Christian zealots imagined satanic references in that company’s corporate seal.

More

The first in an occasional series about places in L.A. This place is Laurel Canyon.

Strings

Predictably, it involves sex. And betrayal, murder, and glory. It begins with a girl – pretty, well-connected, high strung (today, perhaps only that she had gender issues). The story ends with a musician and a laurel tree. But the story doesn’t end exactly or, rather, it has neither beginning nor end, only another rendition – sometimes melancholy, bluesy; sometimes raucous and urgent; sometimes elegant, lingering – making the story even more dreamlike, harder to place. The story comes from an album of changes, of variations on a theme of longing. Predictably, longing for undying beauty and youth.

The girl is Daphne, a nymph (already the same old story) uninterested in men (this is unexplained). Prince Leucippus falls in love her. She is young, desirable, and unobtainable; maybe it wasn’t love but his urgency to possess. He cross-dresses in a virgin’s shift and hair ribbon and lingers with Daphne and her girl friends – Leucippus being as friendly with Daphne as he can in drag. Unbelievable, but still, the point is erotic complication not low comedy. They all go swimming one day; “she” being he can’t strip; they want to know why; he backs off; they get the picture; he’s exposed; they kill him.

More

Using the vast network of public transit provided by L.A. taxpayers isn’t easy. There is, in fact, a very big transit map, but only for the Metro portion of public transit. And that map was only a snapshot in time. The Metro map was out-of-date the moment it was printed, which helps to explain why it wasn’t easily available, even at the Metro transit center downtown at Union Station.

Metro doesn’t publish a booklet of all its routes and schedules. The OCTA does. So does Long Beach Transit. But these are relatively small systems compared to Metro, with over 500 lines of bus and rail transit. Metro would have to print something resembling a phone book to cover all its lines.

Maps and schedules of individual lines only hint at the connecting lines that intersect it. But don’t expect the bus you’re riding to have schedules for connecting lines. Be grateful that it has the foldout brochure for the line you’re on. More often than not, the only route guide on board is for some other line, answering to some other need but not yours.

More

Bernard Cooper excerpts a few hundred words from his forthcoming memoir in the New York Times Magazine. A moment - counted in mechanically delivered drops of medicine - of waiting as the man he loves dies. The waiting has been long, and it goes on. The partner's death comes after, not in Cooper's words but in an editor's footnote.

One of the stranger and more terrible things about a memoir - and a memory - is that it doesn't end. You can return to the exact page, and a moment is counted out again in increments that may be elastic but remain inevitable. It's the lesson that we asked to be repeated in our bedtime stories and then forget and then endure in the latter part of our lives. Memoir is the fairytale that waited until we grew up. Grew up enough to shoulder its burden.

More

From Lakewood to the summit of Laurel Canyon takes about three hours by public transit. Several buses, light rail, and the subway. The last bus – a cranky van on the verge of breaking down – jolted up the canyon to the stop where Mulholland and Laurel Canyon boulevards cross. Across the intersection is the western end of Woodrow Wilson Drive. A few hundred feet down that narrow street – it snakes away east to Cahuenga – is the Fitzpatrick-Leland house.

The bus had come up from late afternoon shadows at the mouth of the canyon. Now there was a second sundown and twilight. The house, on a steep embankment overlooking Laurel Canyon Boulevard, regards the west exclusively. It’s a house made for sunsets.

The Fitzpatrick-Leland house was designed by Rudolph Schindler and built in 1936 to boost the opening of a real estate development. The house is now one of three Schindler residences in the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. The MAK Center in Los Angeles – partially funded by the Austrian government – is a satellite of MAK/Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art and under the leadership of MAK CEO and Artistic Director Peter Noever.

More

The polymath Scott Young – co-founder of the City of Angles Film Festival, minister, film historian, and cinéaste – presented The Exiles on Friday at the opening night of this year’s program at the Directors Guild.

The City of Angles Film Festival creates an informed audience for movies that reflect on themes of moral conflict, redemption, and the making of communities of faith. Scott’s special contribution is to focus on movies that pick up these themes and add the dimension of Los Angeles as subject.

I came along to offer some comments to filmmakers and film students about the erased city that The Exiles recalls with such terrible beauty. The panel discussion justly focused, however, on the comments of Erik Daarstad and John Morrill, two of the film’s three cinematographers. Their extraordinary camera work made the streets around now vanished Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine into a voluptuous city of the night.

More