The final resting place of 19th century Chicago real estate mogul, Potter Palmer, and his wife, Bertha née Honoré, must be well insulated now under its crisp new blanket of snow. Six inches according to the weather reports. Just enough to make you wish it were half again as much so everything would shut down.
California is causing our once highly developed snow shovel muscles to atrophy. Temps were in the 80s here on Mulholland Drive today, though the evening cool calls for light sweaters.
Before we left the Chicago area we gave away our snowblower. So far that seems to have been the smart move. If we ever need to dig anything it will be the rubble following a 7.1 on the Richter Scale, and for that we’ll need a John Deere excavator.
And then won’t Mr. and Mrs. Palmer have a good laugh!
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art called to us over the mountains — partly because it is the museum through which Steve Martin roller skates in his movie L.A. Story, but also because it is stuffed to the bursting point with, oh, all kinds of stuff. For example, there on the bridge connecting two of LACMA’s seven or eight buildings are banners directing you to two of the many current art exhibitions you can choose among: The left banner touts photos from Vanity Fair; the right banner points towards a roomful of the objets d’art we’re meant to imagine sealed up in those crates in the last scene of Citizen Kane (i.e. the Hearst Collection).
There’s more to see and linger over than we could possibly take in during one visit, so we’ll be returning as often as the Fates allow. More stuff, too, worthy of posting about in this web log than your patience would endure, so we’ll point out only two or three Neat Things per entry.
The most remarkable LACMA experience so far has been the [insert extreme approbative here] Pavilion for Japanese Art. You go to the top via elevator as at the Guggenheim in New York, and (also as at the Guggenheim) you wind your way down a gentle ramp. Unlike at the Guggenheim, the ramp is not spiral, but convoluted. It branches past wide “tokonoma,” or display shelves. The natural lighting comes through translucent walls designed to resemble shoji doors. This main section of the exhibit was a display of Edo period painted screens. Words fail to describe them, but photography is prohibited at this current show, The Age of Imagination – private collection — so for illustrative purposes we’ll have to make do with this fierce tiger banner. Also on display — in more ordinary, non-ramped galleries — were contemporary Japanese ceramics, groovy ancient armor, hanging scrolls, netsuke, cloissoné and, well, just about everything Japanese but Sony PlayStation 2™.
The American art collection included some old pals like Robert Henri and Abbott Thayer, but here’s the only snapshot we took in that building: a monumental acrylic painting by David Hockney, which we like mostly because of its title: Mulholland Drive, the Road to the Studio.
Look! There’s our house!
This glaring thing is but one of many pictures we took of the inviting outdoor sculpture — or “installation” — by, of all people, performance artist Chris Burden. The work, Urban Light, is made up of 202 refurbished antique streetlamps. They’re set in tight ranks and files like soldiers or trees in an orchard. At night they light up.
The overall effect is uplifting. You take away a feeling of cheerfulness. Knowing the artist — past stunts include having himself crucified on the roof of a car — we doubt whether this was his intention. He probably meant Urban Lights to be a searing indictment of… oh, fill in the blank. If so, he failed. It’s jolly.
When we first saw it last week, a couple of classroomfuls of third or fourth grade kids on a field trip were dashing around the forest of poles laughing and screaming. They had exactly the right spirit.
On this day, 100 years ago, Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency (“We Never Sleep”), had been under this tombstone for over 24 years. Before that, he had kept busy protecting presidents, solving crimes, and writing detective fiction, making him twice-over the forerunner of Pinkerton detective and crime novelist Dashiell Hammett.
One of his many detective novels was the 1880 page-turner, Bucholz and the Detectives, which you can download free from the Gutenberg Project if you want to, but you do not want to.
Look, here is an original illustration from that book. SPOILER ALERT! We witness a moment of triumph as a trio of PInkertons unearth the evidence which will doom the murderer and thief, Bucholz.
Then, with a joyful cry, he withdrew a large wallet, and held it up exultingly before his excited companions.
Our Thanksgiving hike took us along the Yearling Trail and the Deer Leg Trail, both on the old ranch operated by Ronald Reagan in his Death Valley days. We chose it because the LA Times hiking trails guide book, Days Hikes Around Los Angeles, described it as “level,” but the guide book either fibbed, or used the special California defininition of the word “level,” i.e. “not level.” See how the ground slants up out of the right side of the picture? Well, the Deer Leg Trail veers up that grade and grows steeper as it climbs up a 400 foot hill. At some points it was steep enough for some pitying soul to have built stone steps into the trail. Still, it was shady and if the enclosing riparian growth blocked most views it was cool (literally) and it smelled spicy like pepper and sage.
The rest of the trail wasn’t so great. The Yearling Trail was more of a runoff than a trail. Untended, deeply rutted and rock strewn it required nimble stepping to avoid twisted ankles. What rankled most was the promise in the LA Times guidebook of a “duck pond.” The map even showed a cute little silhouette of a duck enjoying the pond. Our eager hearts braved the tennis ball sized rocks in the path just to see the duck in the pond. But those hearts sank upon seeing the stark truth: No pond and no duck; only a weed-choked declivity and mocking crows.
The LA Times guidebook was nearer the mark with its description of the first part of the trail, the “unpaved Yearling Road, lined with stately eucalyptus trees.” In fact, the road is paved, but the eucalyptus trees are there and stately as advertised. They’re the best feature of the otherwise bleak trail with their shedding outer bark, gleaming white inner bark, and aromatic slender leaves.
These trees, I assert confidently, are the “gum trees” that merry, merry Kookaburra sits in laughing according to the Australian song, unless I am very much mistaken, in which case they are not.
Well, we got our exercise, I suppose, and certainly our sinuses were cleared by the airborne oils of the stately eucalyptuses, but no return trip is on the agenda. Compared to the mind-blowing hikes elsewhere in these hills and vales the Yearling and Deer Leg trails are kind of shabby. Also duckless.
What are we thankful for this Thanksgiving Day? George Pullman, that’s what… who.
George Pullman, who, during the alien invasion of 1890, with flaming rhetoric roused the nation from cowering awe to ferocious resistance, thereby freeing first the nation and then the entire planet from domination by methane breathing intelligent nematodes.
A grateful tip of the Hatlo Hat to you, sir, to whom we owe our seat of prestige in the Federation of Rational Entities, and may you at least somewhat slake your eternal, unappeasable hunger in the afterlife with numinous white meat and eerie can-shaped cranberry sauce.
ERRATUM: We have just learned that the Thanksgiving post confuses George Pullman, the 19th century designer and manufacturer of luxury train cars, with Bill Pullman, the actor who played the U.S. president in the film Independence Day (1996). The rescue of Earth from alien invasion is the work of Bill Pullman — or more precisely, his character, President Thomas J. Whitmore — and not the great railcar tycoon. Nice Work regrets the error.
Come nearer, my gentle readers. Closer… Closer… Stop! That’s close enough. In fact, back off a bit. There. Perfect.
It’s time you told me something of yourself. No more sitting in the back of the room hoping you won’t be noticed. I see you. Now I want to know you. Answer the following question:
We went to see Danny Boyle’s new movie the day before yesterday, but the show was sold out (except for a couple of single seats), so we skipped it, vowing to try again on Monday. This time we made it in to see Slumdog Millionaire and we’re sorry.
Not that it was all bad. If you really must see Slumdog, skip the first two hundred minutes and watch only the final ten. During the credits, the entire cast does a peppy little Indian musical sort of dance. You can enjoy that happy number without having to endure the preceeding scenes of torture (Jamal, our hero, is zapped with electricity while hung from the ceiling), or people set on fire. You can even miss the scene where young Jamal dives through an outhouse floor into an over-his-head pit of excrement. He runs around entirely covered in human waste –a condition that becomes useful to him when he needs to force his way to the front of a crowd to obtain a film star’s autograph. Comedy.
Jamal, a Mombai slum kid, is being tortured because he is so close to winning the jackpot on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. That’s how TV producers in India manage contestants. During his rough police interrogation, we learn about each of the awful, dreadful events in his dreadful, awful life that just happen to have supplied him with the answers he needs for the quiz show. For example, he guesses the answer to the question “Who invented the revolver?” because once his brother, Salim, said, “This revolver is a Colt,” just before blowing a guy’s brains out.
We’re going to have to rescind three of the probationary stars we assigned to Slumdog on Saturday. Now all it gets is this one, lousy little star: ★ The dance is cute.
If we can believe the blurbist on the cover, this newish (1993), John E. Woods translation of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooksis close “in style, vocabulary, idiom and tone to the original.” I’ll have to take his word, whether in German or English, for it. The only German I know is, “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond!” But if Mr. Blurb is right, then I have boundless compassion for the hapless novel-readers of 1900 Germany. Thomas Mann, had just given them a glimpse of how depressing novels were going to be in the upcoming disaster of a century.
The wunderkind Mann — he was 25 when Buddenbrooks whumped heavily down on the public — thought the previous century had been pretty much a disaster. He had his reasons. The Manns had a tough time in 19th century Lübeck and Thomas visited those woes on their fictional counterparts, the Buddenbrooks. He guides us from one calamity to the next as we follow four generations of the titular merchant family from 1835 — we meet them at a lavish dinner party in their mansion where guests reminisce about the recent Napoleonic invasion — to late 1870s when a unified Germany is feeling like hot stuff after the Franco-Prussian War, but by which time the proud Buddenbrooks have dwindled to three impoverished women in rented rooms, one brother locked away in an insane asylum, and the family name surviving only in the person of a fey, feckless teenage boy incapable of anything except performing eccentric improvisations on his harmonium and lying in bed hugging his pillow “with lavish tenderness.”
Mann takes particular care in describing the deaths of the heads of the family. Here goes Großmutter:
Elisabeth Buddenbrook lay on her back, propped up on several pillows, and both her quivering hands — those beautiful hands with pale blue veins, which were so thin, so emaciated now — were in constant motion, hastily, impulsively stroking the quilt. Under a white nightcap, her head never stopped shifting from side to side, with the dreadful rhythm of a metronome. Her lips appeared to have collapsed inward, and her mouth kept opening and closing as she gasped for each tormented breath; her sunken eyes strayed about in search of help, resting now and then on one of those around her with an appalling look of envy — they were up and dressed, they could breathe, life was theirs, and yet all they could do was offer one last sacrifice of love: to fix their eyes on her and watch.
That’s one of the gentler departures. Her son dies after a botched tooth extraction, collapsing in the street “splattered with muck and slush.” His son (the harmonium virtuoso), in turn, gets an entire chapter all to himself — a chapter which begins with the foreboding words, “Typhoid runs the following course:…” We, the readers, suspect we are about to get the works from young Herr Mann, and we do.
Even if you are not made of the stern stuff — or the ironic stuff, or the heartless stuff — needed to make it through this epic “decline of a family,” you may want to at least read the opening. The action of the 730 page novel takes place over some forty-two years — but, remarkably, “Part One” — more than a tenth of the novel’s length — describes only a single evening, the dinner party mentioned above. It’s a tour de force, and well worth your attention as a stand-alone novella. No one dies.
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Tonight we tried to go see Danny Boyle’s new film, Slumdog Millionaire, but even though we arrived more than an hour early for the 8:15 showing at the nearest cineplex — the nasty, noisy ArcLight Cinemas in the nasty, noisy Sherman Oaks Galleria — we were still too late to get tickets. Well, there were four seats left, but no two were adjoining, and what’s the fun in sitting separate? Suppose a facetious comment occurs to you during the show; will you giggle and whisper it to a stranger? Rarely.
We weren’t about to wait around in that zoo until 11:05 for the next screening. Back west we drove down Ventura Boulevard to home where we enoyed pizza and two episodes of Frasier. So we missed the film. But, never daunted, Nice Work will review it for you anyhow sight unseen. No matter how good, bad or indifferent a movie Slumdog Millionaire may be one thing is for sure: it’s better than Twilight. We give it four probationary stars. ★★★★
Six inches according to the weather reports. Just enough to make you wish it were half again as much so everything would shut down.
