More thanks

It’s kinda predictable that I’d be getting some high-profile visitors at the time I’m least able to put up new material—it’s the busy season at the journal I edit. (That’ll change after the holiday weekend, after I throw everything into the copyeditor’s lap.)

In the meantime, a big shout-out to the good folks at Coudal for linking to my throwaway igloo piece, the esteemed Abu Aardvark for linking to the piece on Middle Eastern pop culture, and new friends who’ve contacted me over the past few weeks. There’s a rambling meditation on LA and the land (one of the pictures didn’t work, will fix) to chew on until next week, when I'll be back from Nashville and typing merrily.

Happy Independence Day to all!

Woes

Swamped at work, just got internet service back at home (out since Wednesday), and off to NYC until tomorrow eve. But back soon! ::cws

Heat index

The picture at the right, below,

Igloo City, Cantwell, Alaska.
Courtesy of flickr;
originally uploaded by Mr. Lunatic Fringe.

an arty snap of an igloo-hotel-in progress near Cantwell, Alaska, made the rounds the other day (I first saw it on Coudal’s website).

Here, ff is providing a full-on collection of igloo links—not a lame one among them—to celebrate the onset of summer weather on the eastern seaboard.

• Arctic explorer Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson—the father of the low-carbohydrate diet—stands beside an igloo in a snowfield at Camp Hale, Colorado in 1947, where he is teaching classes in snow-craft (photo and annotation courtesy of the excellent collection in western history at the Denver Public Library, accessible through the Library of Congress’ American Memory).
• A hand-tinted photo of a man at the turn of the last century, dressed in his best clothes with a shovel in his hand, standing in front of a North Dakota snow-block-covered sod house, with a stovepipe showing.
  
• The Swedish Icehotel, a Lapp Brigadoon built from thousands of tons of snow and ice, has an inviting website with lots of pretty pictures. Maybe all of that vodka distracts one from the fact one is sleeping on ice.
• The “igloo church,” in Inuvik, NWT; the Our Lady of Victory Roman Catholic church is “One of thee [sic] most popular tourist attractions in Inuvik!”
• An collection of arctic exploration images from the 1850s through the 1920s, including stereoview cards, glass magic lantern slides, trading cards, and engravings from old newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Here’s a stereoscopic image of an Inuit igloo of driftwood and sod.
• Cheesy but pretty igloo photos from Japanese tours in Yellowknife, home of the 2008 Arctic Winter Games.
• An interesting account of a beautiful building, Seattle’s Igloo restaurant
  
  [inset, left], during WWII. An excerpt:

The neon eskimo hovering over the two metal domes of the drive-in invited passengers from a distance. Irene’s uniform, which included a short red skirt, red panties, white short-heeled boots, and white jacket, probably attracted more customers.

• A website and blog on the making of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, a new film by the makers of Atanarjuat, the fast runner, about a Danish explorer and scientist who visits the isolated camp of Aua, a great Iglulik shaman, in 1922.
• Arte Povera artist Mario Merz, fashioner of igloos.

Correction: I had originally cited BB as my initial sighting; changed it to Coudal, where I really saw it (sorry, Phil!). [cws::28 Jun]

On metal

Printed from Ameoba’s Music We Like: The Best of 2004!, courtesy of Stacy, “East Bay Mistress of Metal”:

1. Demigod, Behemoth: Unrelenting Polish Extreme Metal! Check out their Crush Fukk Create DVD. It’s the next best thing to witnessing the intensity of their amazing live show.
2. Sardonic Wrath, Darkthrone: Old school Norwegian Black Metal back with a vengeance!
3. Blackdoor Miracle, Ragnarok: Brutal Norwegian Black Metal!
4. Glory and Petroleum, Sear Bliss: Agressive Hungarian Black Metal!
5. Sworn Allegiance, Unleashed: Old school Swedish Death Metal kings are back!

From this, we can glean the stylebook for black/death metal copy:

1. Always capitalize “Black Metal” and “Death Metal.”
2. Always include the nationality of the band members when describing the black/death metal subgenre.
3. Always use an exclamation point.

Art into life, continued

(Photo courtesy of the BBC.)

From a 23 May BBC dispatch:

A 60ft high picture of a murdered prostitute has been projected onto a derelict block of flats in Glasgow.

Detectives hope it will help to turn up clues about the death of Emma Caldwell, whose body was found in woods in South Lanarkshire on 8 May.

The image was displayed for four hours on the multi-storey flats in Cumberland Street, Hutchesontown on Monday night.

See also: SlideShow at the BMA.

There's text in them thar hills

There’s no real iconic building in Los Angeles. The city’s symbol, if one exists, is the “Hollywood” sign, built atop Mount Cahuenga in the 1920s to flog a real estate development. I first visited LA in the late 1970s, touring by city bus, always amazed when the sign would reveal itself to me. It still holds a sense of wonder, many years later: a graphical sign looming above the city.

During interleague play (over the weekend of the 20-22 May), Goff and I saw the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim take on the Dodgers in Dodger Stadium,

my first visit to the storied ballpark. The cheap seats were a lot more entertaining than attending an Orioles game at Camden Yards, especially for the surprisingly contentious rivalry: the largely Latino crowd (with entire families dressed in Dodger Blue or Angel Red—did the Angels’ brain trust know what they were doing when they tacked Bloods to the Dodgers’ Crips?) was vocal and good-natured, jeering the opposition throughout the tautly-played game.

When Eric Gagné—recently returned from the DL—entered the game in the ninth, the entire stadium blasted off. In the shadow of the left-field “THINK BLUE” sign, though, the Dodger offense would not prevail.

If you spend any time driving about the American west, one will come across monograms,

spelled-out in white stone, on mountains and hillsides above town. These signs largely date from 1905-1915, and were constructed by students from high schools and colleges to trumpet school and/or class spirit (the original is apparently Cal’s “Big ‘C’” on the Berkeley hills, as documented in 1988 by James Parsons in Landscape, v. 30, no. 1, and reprinted here).

For those who yearn for the east coast to get into the act, check out the Murrysville tree sign, a Pennsylvania herald fashioned by planting fir trees spelling out the town name in a clearing, a sign that's still visible.

Smart LA: boobs and books

On May 25th, the UCLA Hammer Museum hosted a conversation between artist Lisa Yuskavage and Lisa Cholodenko, director of High Art and Laurel Canyon, as part of the

Museum’s “Hammer Conversations” series. Yuskavage’s erotically-charged paintings pose a critical challenge to the public, since her frank, fantastic centerfolds leave the observer nowhere to hide: one cannot admire the technical artistry without confronting one’s relationship with the pornographic image. Cholodenko, whose films are filled with characterizations of strong, self-possessed female sexuality, would seem an ideal and illuminating foil (a light-saber?) to the provocative MFA from Yale.

Big Blonde with Beaded Jacket (1997),
courtesy of postmedia.net.

The conversation was illuminating, but not entirely successful as a give-and-take. The headstrong Yuskavage was, more often than not, in control of the evening, and forceful in articulating the woman behind the art. Equally at ease in the blue-collar world of her youth—her father was a truck driver who delivered frozen pies—and the rarefied New York art scene, she confidently acknowledged that her work was not without irony, not without cognition, but also convincingly argued that her overriding aim was to create volume, to animate the space, often using a literate rhetoric of the great Renaissance painters. There was little doubt that she was a far more formidable and ambitious woman than expected.

I was surprised—but, perhaps, shouldn't have been—at the content of the audience Q&A following the talk. For all of Yuskavage’s dominance of the first part of the evening, the audience, hungry for film lore, turned to Cholodenko for advice and insight into how to break into the film and television business (she has directed episodes of HBO’s “Six Feet Under” and Showtime’s “The ‘L’ Word”). Her deft handling of the audience, especially of a funny and tedious actor who lightly interpreted the inner life of Kate Beckinsale’s character from Laurel Canyon, was impressive and amusing to this outsider, a portrait of an anxious population, a group perpetually on the make.

On the Friday before, I took in the opening night of “Sin Uncensored: Hollywood Before the Code,”

a new film series sponsored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, highlighting Depression-era movies made prior to the censorship crackdown of 1934. During the pre-code period, “Hollywood produced some of the most compelling and daring films of the studio era, when profit-hungry companies were all too eager to offer salacious stories of promiscuity, prostitution and perversity.” Alfred Green's Baby Face (1933), starring an eye-popping and provocative young Barbara Stanwyck, is a portrait of young Lily Powers, a waitress who works in her father’s speakeasy who, after a conversation with the Erie’s curmudgeonly cobbler (!), embraces his Nietzschean philosophy and embarks upon a campaign to sleep her way to the top. (When a watchman in the trainyard prepares to throw her off a boxcar bound for the Big City, she, er, “succumbs” with a sly smile. Barbara Stanwyck!)

The film was introduced to a wonky crowd that filled the James Bridges Theater in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall by a short talk from Associate Programmer Mimi Brody, who explained that the print—discovered late last year at the Library of Congress—restores five minutes that had been replaced in advance of the new regime by Warner Brothers. (After the screening, the Film and Television Archive kindly screened the moralistic five minutes for comparison; in it, the cobbler comically disavows Nietzsche with a worried voice.) Afterwards, it was a short hop down Westwood Boulevard to Café Dahab, an Egyptian shisha joint that serves up a mean and minty cabbage salad, piping in Danadana TV all the while.

Five outstanding bookstores in the greater Los Angeles area, and some selections from each:

1. Hennessey and Ingalls, in Santa Monica—H&I carries a staggering assortment of art and architecture books that easily competes with similar venues in New York and San Francisco; it's only a stone's throw away from the Pacific Ocean to boot. Comfortable and a fine place to browse.
   
   Noteworthy:
• Edson and Savage-Smith’s Medieval Views of the Cosmos (University of Chicago Press, 2005), a beautifully-designed volume that examines the shift of knowledge between the Muslim and Christian worlds;
• A well-stocked section of fashion books with British imprints, including Doyle’s An Illustrated History of Hairstyles 1830–1930 (Schiffer, 2003); and
• A new volume in the excellent Pepin Press clip art series: Occult Images (2005).




2. The UCLA Hammer Museum bookstore, in Westwood—a surprisingly nice selection with a great wealth of crit books, over two floor-to-ceiling, six-foot shelves. Eerily, I opened up a catalog from a show on François Curlet, and I almost immediately happened on a piece that featured photos from our fair city.
   
   Noteworthy:
• Two [themed] issues of The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, a publication of the Wolfsonian-Florida International University: #25 on the American hotel (MIT Press, 2005) and #23 on Florida (MIT Press, 2000);
• Ricky Jay’s new Extraordinary Exhibitions: The Wonderful Remains of an Enormous Head, the Whimsiphusicon & Death to the Savage Unitarians (Quantuck Lane Press, 2005);
• Linda Frost’s Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850-1877 (University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and
• Barry Shank’s A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004).




3. Wacko, in Los Feliz—adjacent to the street La Luz de Jesus gallery, home to Shag, Ocampo, Coop, and tattoo artists across the Southland, this eighties refugee from Melrose Avenue flogs tsotchkes of all stripes, but has a healthy-sized selection of fringe literature, visual sourcebooks, and postcards for one’s corkboard.
   
   Noteworthy:
• Polk’s Botánica Los Angeles: Latino Popular Religious Art In The City Of Angels (UCLA-Fowler, 2005);
• Salvo’s Home Altars of Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 1997); and
• Hammer and Bosker’s Freak Show: Sideshow Banner Art (Chronicle, 1996).




4. Taschen America, in Beverly Hills—perhaps the only sexy tenant in an otherwise forgettable stretch of chain retailers on Beverly Drive, there are several free parking lots here, provided that you can do your business in less than two hours. Cool and sleek (what appear to be framed film stills in the rear, above the quilted bancs, are really slo-mo video monitors), the table in the rear offers previews of upcoming titles. (The Museum of Television and Radio is across the street, on the corner of Beverly and Santa Monica.)
   
   Noteworthy:
• Aesthetic Surgery, edited by Angelika Taschen (upcoming in 2005): a spectacular examination of the history and phenomenon of cosmetic surgery;
• Fashion, a two-volume visual sourcebook of female fashion from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, taken from the encyclopedic collection of the Kyoto Fashion Institute, by Fukai (chief curator of the KFI), et alia, (2005); and
• Walter Schurian’s Fantastic Art (upcoming in 2005).




5. The bookstore at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in Culver City—a tiny but remarkable selection, devoted almost entirely to the literature of wonder. (I had to stop myself from walking away with more.)
   
   Purchased:
• The Banff International Curatorial Institute’s Obsession, Compulsion, Collection: On Objects, Display Culture, and Interpretation, edited by Anthony Kiendl (Banff Centre Press, 2004), includes a written version of an address from David Wilson on micro-sculpture and the ethos of the MJT;
• Willian Henry Matthews’s Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development (Dover, 1985); and
• A generous sample of Shire “colour albums,” a series of short books by the on “under-published subjects,” including Kevin McSwiggan’s Silhouettes (Shire, 1999), Hazelle Jackson’s Shell Houses and Grottoes (Shire, 2001), Brian Kemp’s Church Monuments, (Shire, 2001) and Ann Luthi’s Sentimental Jewellry (Shire, 2002).

City of angels

I first set foot in LA some twenty-seven years ago, arriving at LAX with my bicycle; I unpacked and set out up Lincoln Boulevard to the PCH, en route to Santa Barbara, where I was set to begin graduate school. To this day, the sight of palm trees is a happy occasion, a homecoming.

(“A Beautiful Palm Drive, California,” an image of LA courtesy of the Northern California chapter of the Palm Society.)

Now, my favorite way to arrive is through Ladera Heights/Baldwin Hills, via La Tijera to La Cienega. (The Heights are barren and populated with nodding donkeys, a motorized pump for the small oil wells that mark the hills above central LA’s broad valley.) Late at night on May 18th, I crested over Ladera’s sodium-lit oil pumps to see the city of angels revealed to Neil Young’s “Vampire Blues” (from On the Beach), the windows of the rented white LeSabre rolled down, drinking in the damp, cool air,

(Photo courtesy of the
Los Angeles architectural photo gallery.)

I’m a vampire, babe, suckin’ blood from the earth.
I’m a vampire, baby, suckin’ blood from the earth.
Well, I’m a vampire, babe, sell you twenty barrels worth.

I’m a black bat, babe, bangin’ on your window pane.
I’m a black bat, baby, bangin’ on your window pane.
Well, I’m a black bat, babe, I need my high octane.

Good times are comin’, I hear it everywhere I go.
Good times are comin’, I hear it everywhere I go.
Good times are comin’, but they sure comin’ slow.

Welcome back, y’all: I turned up the volume and pressed “repeat.”

Postscript: I had forgotten to mention that the climactic scene in Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential—the shootout at the Victory Motel—is filmed on a set constructed in Baldwin Hills: the nodding donkeys are visible as the protagonists approach and leave the complex. [cws::07 June]

Back

OK. Where to begin?

I don’t stay wired during vacations, so I was reliant on the Los Angeles Times during the showdown over the filibuster. (In fact, the only time I read the physical newspaper anymore is when I’m on vacation.) Upon my return, I’m turning more to politics, and, after sorting through all of the analyses, I would’ve been fine reading a single site: Mark Schmidt’s Decembrist. Although there’s not much more to add at this point, I do want to highlight this post from last week on immediate speculation that the compromise deal would unravel.

In it, Schmidt, a former senior staffer for Senator Bill Bradley, observes that the camaraderie forged by the “Gang of Fourteen” won't be easily upset, for most senators are senators for a reason: they enjoy being, well, senators: the raison d’être for senators is deal-making. Majority leader Frist, who clearly does not share their predilection, has quashed the impulse in enforcing one-party rule, and the deal-makers want out.

As a radical centrist, I welcome Josh Marshall’s TPMCafé, which opened shop only this week and features some of my favorite commentators: Marshall and Schmidt, Steve Clemons of the Washington Note, Marshall Wittman of Bull Moose, and Ed Kilgore at NewDonkey. (TPMCafé has absorbed Matt Yglesias’s blog as well.) The, er, café’s flat structure makes it a little hard to maneuver, but the first guest-blogger is none other than every centrist’s favorite 2004 Dem, John Edwards. Go see how he’s fixing for his 2008 run (and burnishing his foreign policy credentials) by dropping in.