Quilts, Kettlekorn, Fire Codes, and Steve Buffalo's Grandkids

AVC starts this week --- and so does the AV Fair

That time of year again: the Perseid meteor shower, long lines in the bookstore, weeks on end of 100+ degree days --- and with parades and Ferris wheels, the AV Fair has came back again too.

This past Saturday on Lancaster Blvd we had the traditional small-town, good-time, come-one-come-all parade.  Here's a sampling of life in America, 2012.

It used to be that as an evening instructor, I had a lot of requests come Fair time --- my students were showing animals in 4H events or had appearances as Miss Rodeo Buckle or some such, and needed permission to miss class. Now that I have shifted to be more on the online teaching side of the equation, I don't get to know who raises sheep or whose sister needs a ride after the concert. I still feel connected though: the fair is a good place to see old students, meet Vietnam Vet beekeepers, or take pictures of a Board member's grandkids playing with the giant chess pieces.

Again, moving on from parade to the full Fair itself, let's take another visual tour. The ride's sign says "Alien Abduction," though in some respects, you don't need to pay to take that ride to end up on another planet.  And so here we go....

 

 

 

The sign said "henna tattoos," and having seen real henna tattooing in India, this product seemed to me more like a different kind of India, as in, India ink, not henna.  Lovely design though, I will say that, even if there was a bit of false advertising at work.  That's okay.  Who comes to a Fair expecting drab reality?  The whole point is to escape back into Never Never Land.  We eat luridly colored food, we fling our bodies into dangerous and vomit-inducing poses, and we try to win immensely overstuffed prizes.  (Man, did my wife beat the pants off of me at Skee-Bowl this year!)  The AV Fair is a chance to wear cowboy boots and a denim mini-skirt (if a gal), or (if you're a kid) to ride a pony or play with chess pawns nearly as big as you are.  I'm just sorry that it only comes once a year, since it is a good way to take one's mind off of grim reality . . . such as how long the wait lists are for English 101 and Math 60.  Speaking of which, I had better go clear out my voice mail and my email's in-box.  "No, sorry, I know the computer shows an opening, but that's an error.  The class really is full --- trust me, I am the instructor, and I was there.  In that room we are right up against the edge of the fire code as is, so no, sorry, I can't take even one more person."

Hmm, this will be a long day.  Maybe I should run get just one more order of funnel cake, to see me through . . . .

Waiting for a Plane, Waiting for a Class

Patience and Expectation and looking Out the Window at LAX

It seems to be a waiting time, an anxious time, for many of us.  I don't have the enrollment numbers but as a broad guess, would assume that as of now, a week before the start of fall term, about 3,000 students must be on wait lists for classes at AVC.  That means they are not IN a particular class, just on a priority list to be notified if somebody drops out.  It is a grim place to inhabit, and yet they are the (somewhat) lucky ones --- they at least got a place in line.  A few thousand more have tried to sign up for this or that class only to find that not only has the class itself been full for a month, but the wait list has been closed for weeks too.

Teachers too are waiting; speaking for myself, my final fall schedule remains potentially in flux.  I am waiting to hear from admin if it will be changed.  And I suspect that all the folks over in Building and Maintenance are waiting to see if the new Health and Science Buildings will be finished on time, and the bookstore is waiting to hear if our schedules change what that will do to pending book orders, and so it goes, up and down the launch sequence.

And then separate from campus, so much of life means waiting for a bus, for pay day, for the elections finally to be over, waiting for the lady ahead of you in line at Wal-Mart to get it together and actually manage to figure out how to use a debit card.

We think of art as being about classical themes and elevated beauty, but artists have to stand in line too.  The Velvet Underground, that Andy Warhol-era New York rock band, has a song titled "Waiting for the Man," about trying to hook up with drug dealers. The speaker needs a fix and the man, his connection, just ain't there. (Apparently drug dealers are not very reliable. I wouldn't know, personally.)

And not all waiting is bad, of course: we can be waiting for something good, as I was tonight at the airport, waiting for my wife to come home after a few weeks away, or we can merely be learning a slow, important lesson about patience, such as waiting for the soup to cool rather than rushing ahead and burning one's mouth.

Before going to the airport, I had done what I could on my side for this next juncture --- I had cleaned house and fed the pets and watered the tomatoes and had bought (and arranged) flowers.  Just waiting now for that darn airplane!

At LAX, watching the others wait too, I was thinking about the body language of waiting, one thing that artists really need to get right in order to make a convincing portrait.

Here is Salvador Dali, a painting I first saw in Madrid. He painted it in 1925.

The original is in the Sofia Reina Museum but there was a poster of it in my small hotel.  Somebody had scratched out her bottom and called her bad words (in Spanish) --- is this really that provocative? Surely the Surrealists have done much more sexualized works than this?  Her full figure apparently bothered somebody.

Another waiting picture, less well known, is in the Portland (Maine not Oregon) Museum of Art. It's a very subtle and successful oil by Winslow Homer.

Again, he captures the wistfulness -- or is it pure boredom? --- of this somber woman.  Life is outside, green and bursting, but something keeps her inside, in the dark shadows. That arrangement reminds me of something in a similar tonal range but a bit earlier, Caspar David Friedrich's wife at a window of their home by a canal, watching a passing boat.

Brighter in tonal range than either of these (and painted in Nice, in the South of France), Matisse offers a painting that also has a waiting woman in it.

She seemingly has turned to look at us as we enter the room.  Have we kept her waiting long? Matisse isn't afraid to let the carpet be as red as blood, nor to hesitate with her house dress, which seemingly is some type of architectural element in itself. You can almost smell the beach air coming in the propped-open, slated window covers. Matisse painted this in 1921; according to one reference that I checked, Matisse had discovered his model, Henriette Darricarrere, working in Nice as a film extra. She was a dancer, a violinist, and a pianist, so her time here, posing, may have been dull indeed. She is certainly waiting --- waiting for him to hurry up and finish his painting, so she can go out and do something on the esplanade.

It seems from this visual survey that only women have to wait. Where are the men? Off doing their drug buys with Velvet Underground's John Cale perhaps, or getting drunk in bars and forgetting their car keys. Of course it's not all fighting dragons and jumping motorcycles over the Snake River if you're a man. We have to wait as much as everybody else, and I doubt that there's a single person, male or female, who doesn't know that war is not about glory and gunfire, but instead, mostly about waiting. Where are the men in these pictures? They've been drafted, and they are in the army, waiting.

This painting by Rodrigo Moynihan was done in 1943, during World War II.  The Medical Officer shuffles papers, treating the men themselves with no more attention than he gives the forms themselves. Notice the jaundice yellow light that he has chosen to portray the scene under: no Matisse here and no lady dancers who can play the piano, just the grim monotony of having your life and your soul reduced down to being a number on a list.

If I was inhabited a mixture of boredom and anxiety while waiting at the airport, of course so too were all of the human sardines flying coach class back from Pittsburgh with my wife. I had checked the radar map of their flight map (thanks, United!), to see what delays they might be having. The drought in the Midwest at least made for smoother flying, and I imagined the small towns of the American prairie east of Denver as my wife passed overhead, the clusters of towns and truck stops and crop duster airfields that roll past outside the window.  These are towns without names, just junctions of lights intersecting in the blackness of the American night outside the droning monotony of a trans-continental flight.

It is hard to write about this kind of experience, though some people have tried and done quite well. The French aviator Antoine de St Exupery (the one who wrote The Little Prince) has a book titled Night Flight that is very much worth knowing. A sad footnote to the above medical painting is that the author of the Little Prince died in World War II, when his P-38 Lightning crashed into the sea. The wreck has recently been recovered; Wikipedia summarizes the events and the (probably false) claims of those who have said they shot him down. The true circumstances remain unknown.

I end my forthcoming book on Antarctic aviation with a somewhat mystical and surreal description of my exit flight from Antarctica back to New Zealand, the details of which will be covered in another post.  Until then, the poem "Flying at Night" by Ted Kooser is one of my favorite night-flight poems.  I will close by quoting it in its entirety:

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn

back into the little system of his care.

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like

his.

Levitated Mass or Levitated Miss?

LACMA's Very Big Rock --- Or is it a Very Big Nuthun?

When something was over-hyped in relation to its actual presence, my grandmother used to ask rhetorically, "You know what that was?" There would be a pause and she would answer her own question: "I'll tell you what that was. It was a big nothing!"

Would she say that now? 

Famously inched through the streets of LA to LACMA from its quarry in Riverside, Michael Heizer's art installation Levitated Mass now is on view on the north side of the "new" part of the LA County Museum of Art.  Nobody needs yet another picture of it but here one is anyway, mainly because that is a convention of blogging.  (And then two more, since I can't edit my own work very well, so I am not sure which one I like best. Photos were taken Saturday, Bastille Day.)

So it is basically this:

a large rock balanced over a long tunnel.

Okay then.

The current head of LACMA, the articulate and astute Michael Govan, told the LACMA blog how he interprets this piece:

The artist here has created a thoroughly modern artwork, abstract, and challenging the traditional notions of sculpture. I can read it as a series of visual and visceral oppositions: weight and lightness, mass and emptiness, up and down, solid and line, organic and human-made, nature and culture. You will read it your own way. It makes the impossible possible. As the artist said to me: “When do you ever get to see the bottom of sculpture?” For me, it’s better than those ancient monuments because it is not an expression of the power of gods and kings, but rather of people—of the museum visitor that descends into an empty abstract space defined by linear concrete walls to see the monolith from below, virtually levitating in our beautiful California sky.

Sure, I can go for that.  And yet....  And yet....

It seems a lot of fuss about a rock given that rocks, in California, are pretty easy to come by. Yet some of my dear friends and colleagues have never even been to Joshua Tree Park, let alone Tahquitz or Yosemite, so this installation will seem like a great achievement --- wow, yes, a rock. Fabulous . . . unless, of course, one has ever hiked (say) among the glacial erratics along the Tioga Pass Road.

Just as one sounds defensive when making a racial observation and then saying, "Oh, but some of my best friends are black," now I have to rush and affirm, but oh, don't get me wrong: I like rock, I really do.  Only I really DO. I love the feeling of granite especially, in all of its many forms. I even have some rocks in my backyard (brought in on purpose, I mean); not granite, but they will do. We call this "Hoodhenge," and the center column is over eight feet tall and weighs almost a thousand pounds.

My apprenticeship with learning how to read stone started as a teenager, when I began to learn how to rock climb. (Indeed, one of the first things I noticed about the LACMA stone is that it has some good bouldering routes on it.)  In the next picture, here I am as a dropout from Glendale College, wearing wool knickers ---- this was a very long time ago --- and practicing some unroped moves in Wales at Llanberis Pass. A kind Welshman I met while hitchhiking took this picture for me.

So I "get" the value of free-standing stone, and if I were a ja-zillion-aire, would gladly have the LACMA rock in my backyard. It is indeed a lovely piece of very hard dirt.

But my point is that as rocks go, it's not that big, that rare, or that special. One can go to Yosemite and find a few thousand not so unlike it. Some even come with their own snow banks, which can make its own temporal statement as it freezes and thaws.

Add spring's snow melt to rock and it gets even better.

The "levitated mass" feels less hovering than merely clever placed, and from the underside, one can see the necessary bolts running up into the stone from the placement brackets. (I heard an otherwise sane and rational national news anchor, in covering the opening, say that she would never want to be under that rock. What a load of horse pucky. OF COURSE it's going to be seismically placed. LA County is not going to let a museum just toss down an immense boulder and not think about the consequences of what happens if it shifts and squishes some cute little toddler or a basket of kittens or something. In fact, in an earthquake, that might be an excellent place to be --- much better than inside the adjacent May Company building.)

The effect is less massive and more clever, at least to me: the very theatricality of the setting (smart and funny as the under-trough as) lessens the stone-ness of the stone. I had this feeling reinforced by a small display inside the main building, in the entrance hallway to the Photography Department's office. A fellow named Robert Cumming did a lot of large format work of back lot sets during the 1970s, and one of his pictures is of a rock seemingly the size of Levitated Mass, except this rock is a movie prop:

The caption titles this shot Composite Boulder with Lifting Port.

So far as I can tell, one can't yet buy a postcard of the Levitate Mass site in the gift shop at LACMA, but in the ancillary shop that focuses on exhibit catalogues and artist monographs, they had a striking poster --- striking if not very literal.

I guess this poster just goes to show that the Technicolor treatment is not limited to Hollywood spectaculars. (Where is the 3D version?) Nice poster, though it does not seem to have much to do with the piece as it was finally installed.

This art piece is fun and successful and is bringing in new visitors to the museum, so let's take our cowboy hats off and whoop and ride in a circle.

For me, though, I keep thinking of a truly levitated mass --- the immense yet seemingly floating monolith of El Capitan, which at 3000 vertical feet is twice as tall as the tallest building on earth.  (In the photo below, at that scale, LACMA's stone would not even show up on this web page, it would be so small in relation to the rest.) I have never climbed El Cap, though I have done lesser routes along the lower portions, and I like to bring visitors up the climbers' trails to the base of the Nose Route, where one can rest flat against the stone and look straight up at all 3000 feet.  (As a reminder, that's over half a mile of pure, vertical, unbroken granite.  If we could magically excavate the soil from around the base and keep going down to its own foundations, we could double that height.)

I am not saying it's better to go to Yosemite than to LACMA --- I go to both many times a year, and urge the AVC community to do the same --- but I am saying that in reading and listening to the hyperventilating commentary around Levitated Mass, I think some of our cultural critics need to leave Starbucks and go to Stony Point or Vasquez Rocks or Devil's Punchbowl or even just the interior side of Devil's Gate Dam downstream from JPL, which is to say, to get out of the house, out of the normal, and go see just how grand and glorious all the other stones --- the ones NOT brought to Hancock Park --- still are, still can be, still will be in a thousand or even ten thousand years.

Born on the 4th of July

from Gay Pride to Pimp My Ride:
the 4th of July weekend, Antelope Valley

We'll let the fingers do the walking and the pictures do the talking: shots from around the AV on or just before the 4th of July.