Capturing Captives

We’ve told you again and again (HERE for instance,or HERE) how you should always have a little sketchbook in your pocket when you go to an art museum. Memory enhancement; sharpening of perception; happy fun. Good stuff like that.

Well, the zoo is also a good place to sketch — for all the reasons noted above and more. For one thing, children are vastly amused (and adults perplexed). For another thing, animals make pretty good models unless they’re agouti (giant rats with deer legs) who never cease dashing around (though Mlle NiceWork managed a nice rapid sketch of one of the frantic beasts). Most importantly perhaps, drawing them flatters the proud animals and sometimes they will grant you wishes.

Today the captives of that way-bigger-than-it-looks-at-first zoo meandering the northeast slopes of L.A.’s Griffith Park served as our subjects. Me, I bagged a tapir, a submerged hippo and a Tadjik markhor. Mlle NiceWork captured those as well, and went on to catch some meerkats, a horned yak-like creature from Tibet whose name I forget, and ducks-a-plenty.

Instead of my usual black, I came armed with four different colors of woodless pencils. Two dark shades of brown, a yellowish sort of thing and deep blue. One of the dark browns was commandeered by Sketcher Two, but the three remaining tones gallantly stepped into the breach with the results displayed before you in this post.

The drawing below is by Mlle NiceWork. Ink on map.

Beach Blanket Massacre

We don’t miss much about the Old Country (i.e. Chicago and environs), but it must be admitted, our little city of Elmhurst had (and has) a terrific library. Bright and spacious, chock full o’ books. And to top it all: an espresso bar! With pastries! Located right by the displays of new books. An irresistible combination on many a Saturday morning.

Nothing quite like that here, but I freely admit the library in next-door Calabasas is okay. Though espressoless it is bright and spacious. If not so chock full o’ books as the one we left behind, such books as it has will serve our simple needs. We signed up straightway, and then to inaugurate our shiny new library cards we each snagged a volume at near-random. Me, I brought home The Beach by Alex Garland. Had never heard of it, though it turns out to have been a bestseller back in the late 20th century, and provided the basis for a Danny Boyle movie of the same name.

Mr. Garland, born in 1970, tells a tall story about back-packing drugged-out 20 year-olds in the mid-nineties. A can’t-miss subject, but he doesn’t leave it at that. You might have thought a flat-out narrative of staying ahead of the tourists (and Lonely Planet writers) in the Far East would be enthralling enough, but Garland ratchets up the adventure. Our semi-psycho dopehead protagonist, youth-hostelling his way through Thailand, receives a map from a completely psycho dopehead who promptly suicides. The map leads our semi-psycho and some pals, a likewise footloose if less mentally disturbed French couple, to a secret paradisial island lagoon where other dopeheaded young travellers have set up what we are meant to see (I think) as the perfect vacation spot for Frisbee-tossing, Nintendo-obsessive, one-step-ahead-of-the-crowd post-college time-wasters, but which seemed to me more like a really, really unpleasant summer camp.

The Beach starts out funny, glib and intriguing. Lots of young-person smart talk from the Clinton era. The wisecracking and tomfoolery drops away as the story progresses, though. Turns out young people don’t get along all that well; jealousy and so on. And if mankind’s fallen condition weren’t enough to spoil the party, the secret island comes infested with a contingent of Thai dope growers. Their dragon tattoos and AK-47s bode ill. Bode accurately, too, as it turns out.

The novel devolves into Lagoon Mayhem. The pages become fairly sopping with many bodily fluids the least disgusting of which is arterial blood. There was no question of not reading right through to the end — you just have to know what happens even pretty much knowing already — but about halfway through I started getting the awful feeling that author was actually trying to make a point. About human nature or something. Maybe he did.

Me, I read it for the humor (at the start) and the suspense (in the middle) and all the gory action (climax). All that stuff I got in spades, so I was well entertained. If The Beach has any larger meaning, it’s this: Just say “No” in at least twenty languages.

The Beach
By Alex Garland
(Riverhead Books,1997, Paperback, 436pp.)

All I Gotta Do Is Act Naturally

Look what I found attached to my mail box moments ago: A “Notice of Filming.” This quiet little portion of the street where we live is going to serve as the location for a film shoot next week.

Movies were shot all around our little Chicago pad back in the days – the producers of The Color of Money, for instance, needing a really nasty, dangerous, nitty-gritty sordid urban backdrop for their nitty-gritty sordid film, thought our neighborhood looked about right — but this is the first time we’ve ever been given advance warning. Must be an L.A. thing.

I do appreciate the heads up. Wouldn’t want to wake up to the hoarse cries of gaffers, the piping voices of the best boys, the roar of generators and later, blinded by the movie lights, to stumble over miles of cable snaking and sparking all over Mulholland Drive. Foreknowledge allows mental adjustment to the impending invasion. So thanks, film people. It’s just that I’m beginning to worry about what I should wear.

Among the promised diversions listed on the back of the notice were “camera on sticks” and “scissor lifts.”

Cameras on sticks? I can hardly wait!

If You Want to Be an Easter Egg…

Peter Cheyney was a highly successful British author of hard-boiled crime novels ‘way back in the forties. Forgotten now. Good luck finding his stories except as channelled through the fevered imaginations of the spy novelists Ian Fleming and Len Deighton who I guess were big fans. (Come to think of it, good luck finding any Len Deighton thrillers.)

We purchased this battered and yellowed copy of Dark Street Murders at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, L.A.

Anyways, Cheyney was hot stuff for a while there. Like today’s Michael Connelly, he started out as a crime reporter, toiling long years for little pay, but during those days of poverty he kept detailed clippings files on all the cases he covered. Converting those files into lurid bestsellers made him wealthy.

He wrote his novels by dictating to a secretary — as you can see for yourself in this weird little film made by British Pathé: PETER CHEYNEY DICTATES A MURDER.

Film buffs will recognize the name of one of his popular detective tuff guys: Lemmy Caution. Jean-Luc Godard used the character in his film Alphaville, une Étrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution.

On the last page of the Avon (“Look for the Shakespeare Head Imprint!”) paperback scanned above, an advertisement for Rex Stout’s Mystery Magazine boasts that it “presents such masters of MYSTERY and detection as: Rex Stout, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Carter Dickson, Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc. etc.”

Well done, Mr. Stout! Every single one of those writers (including your illustrious self) are still in print after sixty-three years.

Remember: If you want to be an Easter Egg…

How to See

I’ve said it before in this scrolling chronicle, I’ll say it again: Do not go up unto the house of art without a little pad and little pencil. To look at a painting is only to look at it, but to sketch it is to see it. Stays in the brain better too, as though you’ve saved it to hard drive. So come equipped: bring your drawing tools.

You can take your time with the rendering, as I did today at The Getty Museum with this one of Gerard ter Borch’s A Maid Milking a Cow, an oil painting from 1652. (See a photo of the painting HERE.)

Or you can quickly scribble out a lightning-fast sketch. Frameable art is not the goal. All you’re going for is something to affix the image in your mind, like this barely-a-drawing of Gerard ter Borch’s The Horse Stable. (Photo of the 1654 oil painting HERE.)

Either way, when you look at your notes weeks or months in the future you won’t wonder (as I did only moments ago puzzling over a non-illustrated memo) who in the world is Charles Christian Nahl, and what does he have to do with “The Dead Miner?” I fervently pray it refers to a painting and not some foul crime to which I was witness, but how can I be sure? No sketch, no memory.

The little note pads in the photo above were purchased in museum gift shops for mere pennies. They tuck discreetly into the breast pocket ever ready to augment treacherous synapses. My preferred scribbling device happens to be a lacquered woodless graphite stick, but I think I know enough of art to know that for depiction pens are also smart and will suffice.

PS: Other examples of gallery sketching HERE and HERE.

Frodo Live!

A rapid transvalley auto trip came to an abrupt halt in the parking lot of the Falcon Theater, er, I mean Theatre. Having no further need of the automobile, we locked it and left it in the lot while we gathered our pre-purchased tickets for the night’s show, Fellowship!, and explored the bright, tchotchke-filled lobby.

Falcon Theater Theatre presents its four outer walls to the city-state of Burbank. By day the sun of California beats upon its roof. Within those walls various small theater troupes, primarily comic, cavort. Even while awaiting their cavorting, though, the gathering audience-to-be finds much — itself not least — that rewards gazing upon. Showbiz memorabilia — lots of it from theater-owner Garry Marshall’s own TV and stage career — line the walls and fill the display cases of the lobby, arresting the attention of the swelling crowd whose latent potential as an audience will soon find conversion to kinetic energy in the form of laughter and applause on the other side of the auditorium doors. Before the ushers throw wide those doors, the photos, trophies, programs, posters and mementos of past shows hold each theater-goer immobile just long enough to provide opportunity for top-notch people-watching.

Nor did we allow that opportunity to pass ungrasped. If Los Angeles affords the best people-watching in the country, Los Angeles theater affords the best people-watching in Los Angeles.

The other half of the night’s entertainment took place in as swell a small theater as I’ve ever experienced. Honest-to-golly plush theater seats, generously spaced, rose on tiers that, unlike most let’s-put-on-a-show venues I’ve visited, did not boom hollowly under foot. The carpenters, themselves dedicated theater-people no doubt, had installed joists. Joists!

But of the magical experience beyond the auditorium doors I can say no more. Photography was strictly prohibited and I am punctilious enough to interpret that injunction to apply also to word pictures. My lips are sealed. I shall not breathe one syllable more about the theater nor about the funny musical show, Fellowship!, at which we so laughed and laughed and laughed.

Some information, of course, is public and can be revealed. The name of the comedy, as you see displayed in outdoor signage in the photo above, is Fellowship! It is a musical parody of the movie (not the book) Fellowship of the Rings. It would help to have seen the movie, but you don’t absolutely need to put yourself through Peter Jackson’s desecration to enjoy the spoof. The basic story — a diverse band of elves, dwarves, wizards and hobbits frustrates some kind of evil eyeball — gets neatly told in outline, and then, since so lofty an epic as Tolkien’s sweeping mythopoeic tale simply screams out for demolition, gets demolished.

What a cast! I would break the code of silence imposed by the Falcon Theater, er, I mean Theatre, to tell you about them, but respect for the house rules stills my tongue beyond saying each actor is a circus of one. I wish I could go back nine or ten times to give all my attention to each individual actor per performance — they’re all so antic you hardly know where to look — but even at Falcon Theater’s (Theatre’s!) low, low ticket prices, personal budgetary constraints enforce a strict limit of one viewing.

I do the rest of the cast an injustice to single out for kudos Steve Purnick playing both a George Burns inspired Bilbo and an exasperated Boromir, but I willingly bear that additional weight to my already staggering burden of guilt.

All this is to say: trust me, go. Will you laugh? Oh, reader, I am confident you will laugh. Will you tap your toes during the many comic songs? Of this I am less certain. After the show will you still be so mirth-filled you don’t mind much being unable to find the entrance ramp to the 101 west? Yeah, sure. Just go.

A Night at the Opera

We went to see an opera last night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown LA. Cameras were not allowed inside the pavillion so I took a picture of the huge banners outside. The human figure — the stylized one, not Placido Domingo — is inserted for scale.

During one of the intermissions my darkest fear was confirmed: The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was haunted by the Opera Ghost. In its frenzied rush to buy cookies out in the lobby the audience took no notice, but luckily the secret photographer from whom I purchased the photo above did notice and captured the image of a numinous glowing figure appearing stage left. The Opera Ghost.

Well, after that little apparition you’d better believe I was unable to concentrate on the travails of poor Violetta, the heroine of Verdi’s heart-rending opera; not even as sung so prettily by soprano Elizabeth Futral.

Yeah, I got that Violetta was a fast lady back in the days of voluminous dresses and barons in tuxedos. Also that she fell in love with Alfredo and repented her fast life. Also that she didn’t get to enjoy true love for very long. First Alfredo’s dad persuades her to pretend she hates Alfredo so Alfredo will come back home and his little sister can marry some big shot. Next she dies of consumption. Yeah, I got all that.

But I couldn’t take my mind off those huge chandeliers hanging all over the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I kept thinking how, even as we sat there singing along with Elizabeth Futral, the Opera Ghost could well be sawing away at the chains by which those enormous chandeliers suspended.

The Gangs of Old York

Sure, you’ve meant to read Shakespeare’s history plays — especially those eight plays having to do with the War of the Roses — but the same thing always stops you: You can never remember which of the roses, the York or the Lancaster, was red and which white. Allow me to pry up that stumbling block and roll it to the side of the road. As a public service NiceWork offers this handy mnemonic device which will forever affix the rose colors of those feuding Dukedoms forever in your mind:

Burt LANCASTER drove a RED Ferrari.
There are many WHITE Bichon Frises in New YORK City.

If that doesn’t help, you might want to pick up this classic production of Shakepeare’s king cycle: An Age of KIngs, an epic TV mini-series made by the BBC way back in 1960. It ran to great acclaim over in Great Britain back in those pre-Beatle days, and was televised once in the US shortly thereafter, but the video tapes have languished since in the Secret BBC Memory Vault deep below the streets of London. In March 2009 the doors of the Vault parted and out stepped, blinking in the sun, pretty much an entire generation of British actors, wondering what had happened in the nearly half century that had passed while they were suspended in time.

Some became famous. Look! There’s one now on the back of the DVD case: A young Sean Connery playing Harry “Hotspur” Percy. And look again: in the starbar along the bottom you can see a young Judi Dench (M) wearing a lofty veiled hat and chatting up, um, Blackadder, I think.

Fans of the Brit TV series All Creatures Great and Small may be flabbergasted — aye, dumbstruck — to see a youthful, svelte Robert Hardy playing Henry (”We happy few, we band of brothers”) the Fifth — not what you’d expect if you’d grown used to him as the portly, blustering vetrinarian Siegfried. But there you go; that’s him (not Blackadder after all) on the front of the DVD case.

In his eight plays Shakespeare condensed to about twenty hours (give or take an alarum and excursion) all the action-packed years of English history from 1398 — when Richard II unwisely exiles the young Duke of Hereford, who returns, much honked off, with an army all his own and introducing himself as Henry IV — to the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, during which evil Richard III offers his “kingdom for a horse” but, far from getting a horse, instead gets stabbed by Elizabeth I’s grandfather.

The producers of An Age of Kings further condense the condensation to fifteen hours of TV. Those fifteen hours have been skillfully compressed onto five discs; those five discs slipped into one box.

De Gustibus

The cobalt Crips and crimson Bloods
Were long ago the best of buds,
But one day wounding words were said
About the colors blue and red
Distinguishing each other’s duds.

Fooled by those Foxes at LACMA!

In a previous NiceWork posting (LACMA Christmas Treat, December 5, 2008) we expressed certainty that the surprise sculpture under wraps was a Rodin. Specifically, we thought the figure showing hazily through its thick protective sheath of polyvinyl was a Rodin job called Hercules, the Archer.

Well, it was Hercules, the Archer, all right, but it wasn’t the one by Auguste Rodin. The Hercules by Rodin looks like this: CLIK HYAH. This other Hercules, now plonked down into a little outdoor sculpture garden on the south side of LACMA, is by the French sculptor Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. He was a student of Rodin. He made the sculpture way back in 1909. Then, twenty years later, he died!

Bourdelle signed his sculpture of Hercules the Archer with a curious symbol made up of his initials slyly  combined. Two triangles are superimposed, but the invert triangle has a bent tip; it makes the Bourdelle “B” if you look at with your head atilt. I copied the the signature into my wee notebook and scanned the drawing for you to see.