Train Graffiti

I walk in the mornings for about a mile down Crescent Park, which parallels the train trains downriver from the French Quarter in New Orleans. The cars are colorful with graffiti of all kinds. But sometimes there's one I like. Like this one.

Reminders everywhere

Walking through the Bywater, warm summer afternoon. Faced again with a reminder to BE.

Vegetables or art?

Yesterday I went down to the French Market to catch the Crescent City Farmers' Market, which takes place there on Wednesdays. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the time. I got there two hours too early.

So instead I wandered around the shops on Decatur Street; at the downtown end of the French Quarter there are still some funky antique and junk shops, some dive bars and voodoo shops. In one junk shop, I saw a painting on the wall.  It's acrylic on canvas, painting in 1985. For junk-shop prices!

It was too early to buy vegetables, so I bought art.

Get your nourishment where you can.

Magnificent ruin

I was driving out to see friends yesterday when ahead at the corner of Broad and Orleans I could see the blue flashing lights of police motorcycles, and a crowd of people in black and gold spilling out into the street.

In any other city you might think there was an accident or some kind of emergency, but this is New Orleans - it had to be a funeral second line. It was also right where the Zulu Club's headquarters is on Broad Street, so it was obviously the rites for someone prominent in the community.

To avoid traffic, I cut across the neutral ground and headed uptown a couple blocks. Suddenly, I came upon a most fantastical sight - the crumbling Art Deco ruin of the General Laundry and Dyers building on St. Peter Street.

This building was built in 1930, registered as a National Landmark in 1974 by preservationists,

Its brilliantly colored red, green, blue and yellow terra cotta tilework makes it unique among Art Deco buildings, most of which are more subdued in color.

It is owned by the Southern Recycling Company, which for several years has been seeking permits to demolish it.

Open the door

This is the entrance to one of the quirkiest "museums" in the South. It's the ICM Museum in Abita Springs, Louisiana; a collection of oddball stuff thrown together. Or, as one of the signs says, "a hobby that got out of hand."

There are ancient pinball machines, re-engineered bicycles. There are funny, doll-house-like dioramas featuring juke joints, general stores, trailer parks and oil refineries.

One room is wallpapered with paint-by-number paintings.

There's a tank with big old algae-encrusted snapping turtles. There are fake stuffed alligators everywhere, including a giant one, a dog-gator, a duck-gator and a pony-gator riding a bicycle.

It costs $3 to tour the place, and you can buy a souvenir t-shirt on the way out. It's well worth it.

Fruits of wisdom

I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art today with a friend. On Wednesdays, admission is free to Louisiana residents.

Looking at art with a friend is always a good thing. Some works stir my brain, other works stir my friend's brain. We can point out interesting details to one another. We can go to a cafe after, and talk about things that well up in our minds after seeing the pure and vivid expression of feeling that others - some long, long past - have left in the world.

I am thinking of a Greek double-handled vase from 400 BC, emblazoned with an image of a swan flapping its wings.

Or the stairway of the Paris Opera House in 1880, viewed by an impressionist painter.

Or a medieval altarpiece portrait of a saint - who happens to look exactly like a bartender friend of mine.

Being able to share these experiences with friends is a treasure. I'm so lucky.

Stop me before I buy art again!

It was $40 in a resale shop. Acrylic on canvas, it's signed and dated by the artist, and I have no idea who he is.

I thought it looked pretty. It does look pretty. It will look really pretty in my new place.

Should I be concerned about my addiction to buying art?

No roadblocks to creativity

Mermaid with a tall boy

 New Orleans streets are a challenge, especially in the Bywater, where the city has been undergoing a repair project that seems mostly to result in gaping holes left open for weeks.

But New Orleanians are a creative bunch, making do with whatever city life brings us. So here at the intersection of Piety and Dauphine, someone has used the opportunity of the street repair project to create an urban vignette.

You can't roadblock creativity.

Today's gator

The only way I could photograph it without glare

The house we're renting is furnished; it reflects our landlady's taste in furnishings and artwork. She contacted us to say a piece of artwork she had on back-order has come in, and if she arranges for delivery and for her handyman to come by, were we willing to help with hanging it?

So now, with the help of Little Shannon and Eddie, our little dining room, which has become my messy work-space, is graced with another 'gator. a fabric applique framed piece by Chris Roberts-Antieau called "Alligator Wrestler."

I think pretty soon, we're going to be up to our asses in alligators - in a good way!

Keeping the lights on

Photo from LACMA

Artist Chris Burden passed away Sunday, at his home in Topanga Canyon.

He was a noted, often controversial artist, a pioneer in the "performance art" genre. His most notorious piece was "Shoot,"  a work where he arranged to have himself shot in the arm. He also received attention for locking himself in a school locker for five days, and for impaling himself on a Volkswagen Beetle.

But that kind of shock stuff wasn't all he did. Chris Burden was fascinated with machinery and technology, and he created moving, functional sculptures that buzzed with kinetic energy, and that awed viewers with the outsized, gigantic scale of his vision.

One of Los Angeles's best loved work of public art is Burden's "Urban Light" at the LA County Museum of Art. In this piece, 202 cast iron street lights, beautifully restored, are assembled in rows that entice visitors to explore.

I was lucky enough to have met Chris Burden and his wife, artist Nancy Rubens. In 2005, we were invited to dinner at their home up on the Mesa, where Chris's studio and workshop were located. During that visit, he showed us the collection of antique street lights, and when he turned them on, up there under the evening sky, it was magical.

Also during that visit, he showed us the prototype of what would become another well-loved piece, "Metropolis II."  We were shown one of Nancy's works in progress, a sculpture made of wrecked airplane parts exquisitely balanced in a gravity-defying formation. I also discovered Afghan War Rugs, which Nancy collected, where images of war, weapons and destruction are woven into what first seem to be traditional textiles.

Chris Burden's most recent work, a flying dirigible titled "An Ode to Santos Dumont," will be unveiled at LACMA on May 18.

Blue

Click to "embiggen"

Wall on Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA.

Night on St. Claude

It's Friday night, and we're out on St.Claude in the Marigny, right across the neutral ground from the Hi Ho Lounge. The kid stops us as we're putting up posters on a plywood construction wall.  I'm taking photos of the posters already there, a series protesting violence to women, and the kid asks if those are ours.

He's tall and skinny, with dreadlocks arraying around his head like a black sun. He's wearing a blue shirt with a bright green marijuana leaf blazened over his heart.

"No," we say, "we're just putting these up," and my friend Louie begins to tell him about his music.

"I thought maybe you were photographers," says the kid. "I'm a photographer."

We get to talking and someone says, "There's a lot to shoot here in this town," and the kid says dismissively, "Naw, it's getting boring here. I'm going other places. I'm going out to LA," he says. "I want to find other things to take."

Naomi steps forward. "You ought to go to Birmingham, Alabama. I know it sounds weird, but there's this historic furnace there." I'm looking at her from outside myself and think this young black kid is going to turn away from this older white lady, grey hair on top of her head and glasses with beaded strings swagged from the temples to around her neck, but no. This is New Orleans, and you can be anybody. The kid gives her his rapt attention as she tells him about the shapes and colors and textures of the Sloss Furnace and how she took photos there until her memory card filled up.

And then he tells us about what he's doing, a project of 56 days' worth of photos, shot everyday in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, other places. "And then I'm picking the best and putting them up, 56 Dayz, it's called, dayz with a z."

And I know, watching them, that if it had been just me there, we would have said our polite and good-natured hellos and moved on. But it was Naomi, and she can reach out and totally engage another artist, leading him to open up and share his art, enthusiasm, and hopes with strangers.

Before we part and go on to the club, we've typed our email addresses into his phone.

TJ, or Ti Young 'un, he's called, and he's a young photographer. In 56 days he'll have something for the world to see.

My friend Naomi made these reproduction street tiles here on St. Claude Avenue.

Night out

Last night after work, I braved Los Angeles traffic for two hours and ended up at Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown.

I had a ticket for a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert - I actually had two tickets, but at the last minute [The Man I Love] was unable to attend, so I went alone. It may seem odd to do that, but I've decided not to let inconvenience keep me from doing things I want to do.

Chalk it up

When we arrived at home in Topanga, we were greeted with this beautiful mural our neighbors' kids chalked on the fence adjoining our driveway.

Click to "embiggen."

Here's the Santa Monica Pier. There are jellyfish in the surf!

Here's our wonderful Topanga mountains, with hawks and birds and bobcats.

What a lovely welcome home!

Winston Street Streetscape

Stenciled art on the sidewalk on Winston Street at Werdin Place

If you walk down Winston Street between Main and Los Angeles, you'll get a feel for how neighborhoods change. Los Angeles Street is in the heart of Skid Row, a stretch of small wholesale businesses and immigrant-owned shops valiantly trying to survive, amid the misery of the street - homelessness, substance abuse, prostitution. Yet there are signs of change - industrial buildings transformed into trendy residential lofts, new condominium complexes, and trendy restaurants like The Must, where we had dinner yesterday.

Downtown gala

Sculpture at the Gala

We attended a gala for a local arts organization this weekend.

It presents innovative, often experimental performing arts and music in a beautifully designed black-box performance space located in the amazing Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Frank Gehry. This building is quite rightly one of the crown jewels of Los Angeles' cultural scene.

Along with the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, the Mark Taper Forum, and MOCA, the museum of contemporary art, and other cultural facilities clustered together in downtown Los Angeles, the Concert Hall is part of the Grand Avenue Project. A massive development conceived by LA's movers and shakers, the project aims to transform this part of downtown into a vital, pedestrian-friendly site, with parks, housing and activities.

Walt Disney Concert Hall from upper Grand Avenue

To see the hall on the street is something, its curved and silvery shapes break through the rectangular urban landscape and proclaim - "something interesting is going on in here!"

But when you attend an event here, you don't see that at all. When you drive to Disney Hall - as most event guests do - you exit the freeway at 4th Street and glide through curving ramps of concrete and the foundations of skyscrapers, watching anxiously for the directional sign leading to a turn-off lane. This lane puts you in the bowels of Grand Street beneath the Music Center. It's a dark tunnel, punctuated by garage-like openings, dotted here and there with orange and white A-frame barricades and traffic cones.

Lower Grand Avenue beneath the Music Center

To get to Disney Hall, you follow a small sign that beckons you into what looks like a dark dead end; then you turn into a parking garage.

You park and look for the way out. On an evening with a Philharmonic performance, you might see scores of suited gentlemen and dressed-up ladies, high heels click-clacking on the concrete ramps, walking through the rows of parked cars to a central escalator. Concert-goers rise up into the main hall lobby; guests to the small venue follow signs back into the parking garage, and enter the theatre from there.

At the end of whatever transformative experience one has in these beautiful temples of art and music, one leaves the same way, through the echoing parking garage and the dark tunnel. Last night, I never saw the exterior of Mr. Gehry's celebrated building, though I was standing inside it. This architectural marvel, for all I saw of it, could have been a concrete bunker.

Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

In Mexico City, the Palacio de Bellas Artes welcomes visitors into its echoing hall from a plaza that serves as a gathering place for everything from protests to street performers. A park nearby is busy with families, strolling and playing even late at night.

How wretched and shameful is it that in Los Angeles, the pathway for our city's arts patron is so ugly and disconnected from life? How can the arts ever hope to connect with people if they have to sneak in through the loading dock for access?

Whether you are an affluent season ticket holder from the Westside and Beverly Hills, a student purchasing discount tickets, or a new audience member responding to outreach efforts, if you drive in, this shabby tunnel will be your welcome to the place.

Disney Hall on upper Grand Avenue

Streetside, it isn't much better. The broad empty avenues and outscaled concrete plazas render the cultural palaces nearly unapproachable by foot.

Last night as our car emerged onto 4th Street from the tunnel, our headlights flashed across the huddled figures of homeless people, sleeping beneath the concrete overhang. Here's one way, I guess, that the arts complex serves this population - providing shelter from the cold night.

What planner, what traffic engineer conceived such monstrosity? Did they really intend to create such a glaring symbol of the void between the city's creative establishment and its citizens? To confront guests with the city's harsh reality, after their interlude in fantasy?

The desserts were wonderful, though!

Farewell, Leonard Knight

Leonard Knight, creator of Salvation Mountain, in the California desert southeast of the Salton Sea, passed away yesterday at the age of 82.  The mountain was inspired by Leonard's faith, and became an attraction for a diverse group of fans. Rest easily, Leonard.

Thematic Photographic - Made of Steel

Carmi at the blog "Written, Inc." hosts a photographic get-together, based on a weekly theme. This week, the theme is "Made of Steel."

 

Click to "embiggen"

This is Richard Serra's 2006 sculpture Band, a huge ribbon of steel that undulates and swirls in a room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Two hundred tons, twelve feet high and seventy feet long - it's hard to believe such graceful fluidity is made of steel.

Cat women

This Sunday, we attended the Cat Art Show LA, in Hollywood. Benefitting the Stray Cat Alliance, the show features cat-themed art by a host of accomplished artists, including heavy hitters like Shepard Fairey and Buff Monster. You can read more about the show and its curator HERE.

Shepard Fairey cat print

Joining us was my good internet friend, Heidi of Smalltown Me, the proprietor of the Online Gallery of American Vernacular Cat Art, and her husband.  Before the show, we met for brunch at the Hollywood branch of The Hungry Cat restaurant, and supped upon delicious seafood, as properly fits discerning felines.

[The Man I Love] took a photo of us two Cat Women. I think I must have been talking when he clicked the shutter. I look silly, Heidi looks great!!

Rowr!

Live bait

There's no doubt it caught our eyes. The small, low building on Fletcher Road where the I-75 on-ramps curved was bright blue and festooned all over with fishing floats painted in candy colors. To one side, a tall tower of piled and braided floats rose, like a tree made of corks.

"What the heck is that?" we said, as we passed it by. "A bait and tackle shop? Art?"