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.

Rich Folks, They Crazy

Proud to Be Normal

My wife and I get an odd mix of magazines --- most it seems we never signed up for --- and as a consequence see ads very much intended for non-Antelope Valley audiences.

Reading Elle Decor, for example, can be quite a tour.  Not to sound like somebody planning to write a sequel to "You Know You're a Redneck If...", but some of the featured properties and furnishings make me think, "Lordy, you would have to PAY me to live in a place like that!"  Are all rich folks crazy, or don't they ever sit in the same living rooms being photographed?

Look at some examples.

Here's an ad from the Art Institute of Chicago's members' magazine.  Nice sofa, but what's with tagging your own penthouse white walls?  And I don't even understand the message itself.

Some things are just strange.

I get the allusion to the uber-collectable Jeff Koons, but really, is this chair for real?  (This comes from the high-end magazine, Architectural Digest.)

Maybe you would want to sit in while you watch a friend or private chef make your lunch.  This too comes from AD.

This is an ad for skylights, by the way, but it implies what one's kitchen should look like.  In comparison, my life is pretty drab!  My main question at Trader Joe's is who I will run into that I know, since apparently ALL of the AVC faculty (and half the students) shop there.  Maybe when I am there I need to get a different brand of wine.  Here's a white wine ad, though you might think it's for a stronger kind of potion.

This is an ad from Elle Decor for Kim Crawford wine.  The copy reads, "A bright, refreshing take on Sauvingnon Blanc.  Because there are those who find comfort in the ordinary, then there are those who thirst for so much more."  (The headline is, "Undo Ordinary.") 

Note the hands, far right, pushing the lady in the swing; this is such a fun party that even the painting, Harry Potter-style, is getting into the mood.  Yet our Elvis Costello look-alike in the white chair on the left looks a bit zoned out ---- a long day at work, or is this just "chaos like normal" for him?  I went online and priced this wine and since it's under $20 (I think?), it seems reasonable.  It's a New Zealand wine, and in fact, I think I had some a year ago, coming back from Antarctica.  According to their website, they have gotten good reviews.  They link to an article from which this quotation comes:

"You say you need more enticement to part with your hard earned cash? How about descriptors such as elegant, complex, rich, outstanding, mouth-watering, brimming with flavour, exceptional wine and amazing value? These are the adjectives the world wine press used to describe Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc 2009."

Yes, but does it go with food that a magician has set on fire?  How about white swing sets?  Rich folks, they crazy.  Of course, for me, to take the wine out of the paper bag before serving it counts as "presentation."  Is this a wine to drink in an all-metal chair that looks like a sex aid from Woody Allen's Sleeper?  If I drink it, will I start spray painting my apartment?

This is all too much for me.  Pass the two-buck Chuck from Trader Joe's.

The Longest Day of the Year

Long Days, Long Nights, Summer Days, Summer Nights

In honor of the soon-to-arrive summer solstice, my wife and I were at Gladstone's, the famous "EAT FISH" place between Malibu and Santa Monica, trying to decide how long the longest day really is, and, inversely, in winter, is the longest night the same duration as the longest day?

I said one thing, she said another.  As usual, she was right.

She also ordered a prettier cocktail than mine, as shown here in this gold-bordered Polaroid.

Why gold?  Just a whim.  This film is now manufactured in Holland by the "Impossible Project," and they release "editions" of film in colored formats.  I prefer black borders but this one happens to be gold.  Love the retro look of the colors, though, on the print itself.  Sorry about the seasick horizon line.  My fancy dancy Nikon has a built-in artificial horizon (like airplanes have) so you can level everything just-so on the tripod.  My Polaroid camera by contrast has a dim, off-axis viewfinder and a plastic lens.  It is what it is.

Anyway, the days are long now and so the question is, how long?

Here is what the good men and women of the US Naval Observatory have to say:

"The longest day is longer than the longest night, and the shortest day is longer than the shortest night, for the reason that sunrise occurs when the upper edge of the disk of the Sun appears on the horizon, and sunset is at the moment when the upper edge disappears below the horizon. These are the instants of first and last direct sunlight; but at these times the center of the Sun's disk is still 50 minutes of arc vertically below the horizon, because the semidiameter of the sun is 16 minutes of arc, and in addition the Sun is seen 34 minutes of arc above its actual geometric position on account of atmospheric refraction. Consequently, the length of every day exceeds the time that the center of the Sun is geometrically above the horizon by the intervals of time required for the Sun to move through these extra amounts of 50 minutes of arc in altitude at both rising and setting, or 100 minutes of arc altogether; this shortens the night by the same amount.

On any two dates when the center of the Sun is at equal distances north and south of the equator, as it is at the summer and winter solstices, the center is geometrically below the horizon on one date for the same length of time as it is above the horizon on the other date; but on both dates the upper edge of the disk is visible longer than the center is geometrically above the horizon by the time required for 100 minutes of arc of motion in altitude, and therefore the day that is the longer exceeds the night on the other date by twice this amount, i.e., by the time equivalent of 200 minutes of arc in altitude. This excess is greater the higher the latitude because the path of the Sun at rising and setting is at a smaller angle with the horizon, and more time is required in this slanting motion to cover a given vertical distance."

There you go: you read it here first.

Short version?  My wife was right, Malibu is a nice place to have lunch, and if you're driving (as I was), make sure you just have just one cocktail only.

The link to the rest of the "longest day" discussion is here, along with moonrise data, leap year tables, and the answer to the question, "when did asteroids become minor planets"?

http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/astronomical-applications/astronomical-information-center

If you have seen Men in Black III, you know that not leaving a tip can put the Earth at risk for being wiped out by a rogue comet, so at Gladstone's I made sure to do my part towards preserving the planet for another few days --- and to make sure my server went home that night with a living wage.

Jerusalem, City of Faith, City of Cell Phones

The Many Faces of the City of Three Faiths

In the Islamic and Hebraic traditions, Jesus is a prophet --- just not "the" Prophet, the way that He is in Christianity.  All three religions overlap in Jerusalem, which among other things was the site from which Mohamed ascended into Heaven.  (Like the body of Jesus, His body is no longer present on this earth.)  What is Jerusalem today?  A site of warfare, a site of pilgrimage, a place of commerce, a place with quiet gardens and posh restaurants and ancient temples and underground parking lots.  it is, above all, a place of humanity --- our common shared bond, as human beings.  Below is a tour of some of the faces of Jerusalem today.  This will include a self-portrait of myself in a falafel shop mirror and will end with candles inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built over the site of Christ's execution.  (This place, holy as it is, does not necessarily bring out the best in visitors --- as I told my pastor, my private name for it in my journal is "the church of push and trample."

Here is the face of the city --- or I should say, the many faces.

This is a complex city, with 5000 years of history and violence, hope and destruction and rebirth.  Yet during my visit, there was very little visible animosity, other than maybe over a parking place or two.  Right now Israel controls Jerusalem; by some political views, this is wrong: they are occupying land that rightly belongs to Palestine.  There probably is no easy, single, just solution.  For now, it is an uneasy truce, but one that is, at least for the moment, working.  Perhaps if we can just endure like this --- moment by moment, day by day --- that very "waitingness" and lack of resolution will become a workable reality. Until then, we will pray and light our candles, we will face Mecca, we will raise our children as patiently and justly as we know how.  Peace be with us all.