Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
Weary of the inhuman torture of life in the box, day after day, shut up with no air conditioner and a single window I dastn’t open because of the smoky particulates in the breeze; and with the inescapable racket of hectoring voices from the TV, uneducated cable pundits braying into the cheap microphones of their home computers from the echoey boxes of their soulless living rooms, amplified by the TV studio, then amplified again by the local affiliate to please the sponsors, then turned up again to max on the home TV for the deaf of Siberia to enjoy from 7 am until past dark; I finally got up the energy to maybe try to go for a little drive to Van Nuys, maybe get a slice of pizza, maybe find a shady tree, and a shop that sells better earplugs.
So, only a few blocks out of Valley Village, I start to hear sirens, sirens, sirens. A couple of times in a few blocks, we all pulled over, then drove on. Then more sirens, black-and-whites coming from the other way. We all pulled over, drove on. Then the cops in both directions burn U-turns and go back the other way; now in all four directions, square dancing in the intersection with sirens blazing and cherries spinning. I recognize it as a tactic, but don’t know what it means; until, in the course of things, I realize I am stuck in the ice-jam of the intersection, in the middle, in the front, next to go, when the cops before me threw open their doors and assumed the position, with long black rifles cocked at their shoulders, aimed at a mini-market on the corner, which I thought might be a good place to look for earplugs. I don’t know how I got these pictures, or got out of the intersection, or got home to catch my breath in this foul airless unlivable box, where I intend to sit in my underwear and drink and smoke weed till sunset or Doom, whichever comes first. Sorry folks, life fucking sucks and society is a poor bet and men are pigs and crime sucks and cops suck and we should all have stayed in the damn trees. Remember trees?
LACMA is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a public institution since 1961, when the art collection was moved out of the stairwells of the Science Museum in Expo Park. Like the Science Museum, and like baseball and soccer fields, libraries, parks, nature paths, water fountains, public emergency rooms, safe beaches, and family-friendly picnic tables, the County’s mission for the art collection as it grew was to keep it available free or pull-ticket-cheap to anybody, any day of the week. My God does that sound bloody noble today.
Q: How do you turn a dusty public art collection into a prohibitively expensive elite commodity only the rich get to enjoy? A: Build an expensive new museum, and lock it up inside!
The latest breathless projection into the Orwellian future of a plan that was already out of date and controversial before Coronavirus. The push to replace LACMA has had a bloated design process, going through many, many starchitects in the past few years, with costs getting ever more gigantic. Plus the HUGE carbon footprint attached. At least the design, at last, is pretty. But why build it at all?
LACMA has been under constant construction ever since I arrived in LA, and access to the collection has been woefully limited, mostly because “these old galleries are too small for the collection.” So they’d build a new building with much closure and re-opening fanfare. Each new pavilion or plaza, while individually okay, was seemingly selected to be totally at war with what came before it. Then two years later you’d start reading again about a major re-fit. Now, they aren’t even bothering to keep the art accessible at all, the collection has been crated up in storage for a few years now. It’s being held essentially for ransom; we’ll have to see that the new building gets its financing and permits, because they’ve already torn down the old ones. [Peremptory tear-downs being the old Trump Management trick, by the way.]
See, it sprawls across Wilshire Blvd., both sides of the street! What an important expensive building.
They released some new sketches to get us all excited. But after Coronavirus, this seems like a parody ad from the fifties of a gleaming future where art is important because it’s expensive, and it’s expensive because it’s important. It’s being built at tremendous cost even though right now, it’s unclear anybody may ever willingly visit a dead-air public space again. And even if there’s a vaccine, with the economic disaster, Americans, will find it tough for years to afford hundred-dollar admission prices. So it seems they’re building this sexy new building specifically to have a reason to justify luring tourists in numbers large enough to justify charging them a hundred bucks to visit this really sexy building. It might as well be the concourse of an airport, to process timed trips to Venus, to see the 2.4 trillion-dollar Van Gogh that’s already on your coffee mug.
The trend of huge echoey ware-house spaces for everything is not good for art. The idea being sold is, the curators will be constantly shifting art around the deliberately amorphous galleries, to make fabulous ever-changing moments in the fabulous ever-changing space they’re building. So who knows what we’ll get to see? The public — returning visitors — local citizens — us — have lost forever the chance to view, and get to know, our art collection, over long years, even generations, during many delightful visits. That is one of the best services any art museum can perform. Otherwise, the public is removed from feelings of connection and ownership. Individuals, particularly the poor, lose interest and inspiration. We lose the casual habit of art, of having day-to-day relationship with certain works, which is indispensable for civilization. We lose the tickle of coming back to get lost in a loved painting or artist, just because you had a free afternoon. Now the managing curatorial experts own the art, and will dangle bits of it temporarily before you, then snatch it away somewhere. If you assume your passive position in a long queue hours before the showtime, you’ll eventually get in and get a whole three-minute pass; if during that pass you are jostled from behind by a stroller, or don’t look up from your cell-phone, you’ll miss it forever, whatever it was. Next.
Hmmm…looks like the Getty…and everything else. Where’d they put all the art again?
The way to save the future of Nature and our connection to it, and art and our connection to it, is to NOT build museums as “tourist events” — de-natured, multi-purpose, ever-changing, where-has-that-painting-gone, but-look-there’s-a-yoghurt stand, white-Star-Wars-plastic, airport-anomic crowd-processors. Can’t you just hear the squeals of children racing around? The piercing squeak! of sneakers on marble floors, the coughs and sneezes, the grunts and protestations of a thousand cell-phone conversations twittering all around you in a Babel of languages? You will. Not a breath of fresh air that doesn’t come already stale from the ducts. Not a window that could ever be opened. In LA.
Paintings, recall, are best seen indoors, in controlled light, well spaced but in curatorial communication with each other, and kept shaded and at constant temperature, where silence or hush is preserved, so that an individual or a class of students can find their own (collective) privacy to contemplate individual art objects. Exactly like the 1960s ’70’s and ’80’s galleries they’ve torn down. Indeed, Zumthor’s big design concept is: We wanted glass windows facing south so the sun bakes the canyon-sized concourse, requiring constant air conditioning….so the art goes in the usual small, boring, dark galleries at the back. What a design innovation!
Injury: this isn’t being financed cost-free through the public bank. Nope, it’s Wall Street. Kids of kids yet unborn will be floating this debt, a large multiple of the $750 million. For a County art collection donated in 1910.
Insult to injury: In the article above, read how the spokesperson coyly admits when this fantasy crowd-processor is built, it will be mostly empty because its capacity dwarfs the current art collection. Chuckle, “I guess we’ll have to go on a big art-buying spree to fill the barn!”
Woo hoo, though, this one hits home for they’re stripping the name off David Hume Tower, the same very awful and ghastly building in which I did, I think, two out of my three mind-shattering full-year classes: Early American Social, and British Empire History.
It would be fair to say that I started getting real woke in that wonderful, very awful and ghastly rain-smeared building, studying the erection of the apparatus American slavery, and the partition of Africa, among students of all races and from all countries of the globe and all political persuasions: Marxists and Anti-Colonialists and Punks and Anarchists and go-go capitalists, World Government types, Nigerians, Indians, a Lord or two, and plenty of slick and smug Thatcherite Tories. Nobody shy about any of it, either, though (usually) polite and eager to share what they know.
Flash forward, and today another group of nobody adolescents, with a brief from no one, acting in anonymity and under the impetus of momentary emotional promptings of anguish and pain in a band-wagon teen-idol flashmob, “feelings” which anybody just has to take it for granted are even appropriate or genuine — “click I Like This, and post to all your friends”– has gotten for itself a meaningless blip of publicity for the “pain” history causes them, though hardly relief from it, by canceling from Edinburgh memory, and striking from every pillar and pylon in the home town he helped put on the world intellectual map, this man, a man whose work they will never read:
Generally regarded as one of the most important philosophers to write in English, David Hume (1711–1776) was also well known in his own time as an historian and essayist. A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works—A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)—remain widely and deeply influential. Although Hume’s more conservative contemporaries denounced his writings as works of scepticism and atheism, his influence is evident in the moral philosophy and economic writings of his close friend Adam Smith. Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his “dogmatic slumbers” and Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume “caused the scales to fall” from his eyes. Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution. The diverse directions in which these writers took what they gleaned from reading him reflect both the richness of their sources and the wide range of his empiricism. Today, philosophers recognize Hume as a thoroughgoing exponent of philosophical naturalism, as a precursor of contemporary cognitive science, and as the inspiration for several of the most significant types of ethical theory developed in contemporary moral philosophy.
— plato.stanford.edu The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Fuck ’em, and I mean the administrators. It was their dishonor to put a shining name on such a grotty, windswept brutalism in the first place: the ugliest building by far in the George Square neighborhood, or indeed the whole University.
David Hume was only lightly touched on in my studies; and God, did I have plenty to read already. But as a break from the hardcore, and inspired by the building’s name, and knowing what he meant to the University and the town and Scotland and the world, I specifically took out his books from the library that year and read them, rattle-rattle, on the trains as I explored the country. I am not the poorer for it. From today forward, Edinburgh history students can be assumed to be dumber than I; and here I thought we were going the other way. Is that what they’re at college for? Feh.
April, 1976: Monty Python came to appear Live at City Center, in New York. May, 1976: Everybody bought the rush-released album. I did, at age 12. Or Chris did. Kenny maybe saw the show –? Anyway one of the big laughs on Broadway that season was Michael Palin snidely referring to “the Abraham Beame School of Advanced Finance.” Everybody in the crowd, even the suburban kids, thought we got the joke – Beame was New York’s mayor, and New York was bankrupt, bust. The Big Apple had been told to Drop Dead; so, we laughed. But that corruption bred corruption, which we missed.
May, 1991: Angels In America, and Tony Kushner told us all about Roy Cohn, and we thought we felt the pain — Cohn, the McCarthyite witch-burner, had AIDS and yet denied it. Tragic. But that corruption bred corruption, which we missed.
Below, Frank Rich writes of how all that corruption was hatched out; and it sums up why playwrights have fulminated against tyrants: they are irresistibly corrupt, right the way down, to the ghastly little lessons learned at the knee. But they get rich, thus, the crowd applauds:
Frank Rich, writing for New York Magazine.
The crowd is not the chorus. Laughing and crying is beneath the chorus. In hindsight: maybe we need to be the chorus: to foresee, to lament, to gasp, to protest, and if needs be gnash our teeth.
The Valley Village View 