IN FOCUS Redux

We revisited the IN FOCUS display of portrait photography at The Getty, our numbers augmented by one. Because Liz & I had enjoyed it so much we dragged her mom along to see what we were raving about.

Despite our reinforcement we decided not to overpower the guard in order to flout the stern prohibition against photography and video. We were compliant.

But no draconian code forbade the sketching of exhibit items. So we fell back on our tried and true method of recording faves: drawing them. We had brought along our graphite stick (Really. It’s a stick of graphite.) and one of our tiny fits-in-your-breatpocket notebooks.

So there we stood, scribbling away zestily while the guards clenched and unclenched their meaty fists, helpless — from a strictly legal standpoint — to stop us.

It’s entertaining, sketching is;  it makes a nice record of your visit, it arouses the curiousity of the passing herd, it warms the blood, and, above all, it leads you to look harder at the subject than you might otherwise. It slows you down.

We have recommended the practice of museum sketching in the past, we recommend it now, yes, this very moment, and, if Providence vouchsafes to us more days on earth, we will recommend it in the future. Never go art-gawking without a little sketchpad. Every gift shop stocks them.

Oh, here’s the info about the photo for those of you who simply need to know this stuff:

The photographer was a French guy who called himself “Nadar” even though his name was really Gaspard Félix Tournachon. He came into this world in 1820, but left again in 1910. The photo is a “salted paper print.” It’s about 9.5 inches tall and 7 inches wide. The subject, who sat for the picture in 1860, is “The Journalist August Vitu.” His mustache is unnamed.

Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Fifty-five years may have passed, but this little Irish girl is still boring holes through the photographer with her eyes. If you dare subject yourself to her knowing scrutiny you may do so at The Getty’s exhibit of portrait photography entitled In Focus, but you will have to make your way to that lofty Los Angeles art museum before June 14, 2009.

Show up so much as one second beyond that strict cutoff date and the great Getty doors will be slammed shut against you and there you will stand in outer darkness, whimpering in despair like the five foolish virgins who ran out of oil. On the other hand. Arrive promptly, as did my daughter and I today, and you will see Dorothea Lange’s 1954 photograph “Young Girl in Ennis, Ireland” in all it’s gelatin silverprint glory, its perfect gradations sullied by neither screening for print nor digitizing for flatscreen display. And it won’t be murderously cropped top and bottom as it appears here atop this post.

You may also view a rare daguerreotype of Edgar Allen Poe, and Cecil Beaton’s ice-cold portrait of Marlene Deitrich, and a Matthew Brady mumblesomethingotype print of President Lincoln fidgeting next to his anxious body guard, Allen Pinkerton, and many other portraits by photographers both famous like Avedon or anonymous like someone other than Avedon.

The oldest picture — frazzled Mr. Poe — dates from the gold-strike year of 1849, the most recent from 1986. But they are not arranged in anything like chronological order. It’s not history. The focus is on the people — subject, photographer, viewer — who make a picture a portrait.

Here is a photo portrait that wasn’t in the gallery. It didn’t even exist until we took the elevator down to the parking garage on our way out of the Getty:

Improve Your Circulation

The minute I stepped into L.A. I knew I was home; I was always meant to be here; I’ve been living here all my life in every way but physically. My lifelong geographical displacement is now corrected. That said, I’m still surprised at the near total absence of nostalgia for the Old Country: the Chicago area. You’d think there’d be at a tiny twinge for auld lange syne. Yet even when I make a conscious effort to whump up a little homesickness for that distant scene of my childhood, youth and manhood, all I can manage is

“The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was.”

But I do miss two or three things. I’ve written here oodles of times about the wonderful Milwaukee Art Museum. (HERE, for example. Or HERE, or HERE.) I never wrote about the mighty Mike’s Meat Market (a butcher’s shop, not a singles bar) in wan Villa Park, but I should have. For a decade it well served our carnivore needs.

I especially miss the very excellent public library that the enlightened citizens of tiny Elmhurst IL paid great sums of money to re-house in a wonderful airy comfy new building three or four years ago. A wise expenditure of public funds — and one on which we voted approval.

I was reminded of the place yesterday when, while cleaning the Augean Stables (my computer area), I found my Elmhurst Library card. There it is, above, propped against my external hard drive. A nice picture of the eastern elevation. I’m kicking myself, though, for failing during this summer’s confusion of house-selling, home-moving and cat-hauling to get a nice photo to show you the light-filled interior — in particular the spacious lobby area by check-out with cafe tables and comfy chairs, thirty-foot high (I’m guessing) west-facing windows, and an ESPRESSO BAR operated by nuns from a nearby convent, I kid you not. This coffee area is also where the bright new acquisitions are displayed on five or six four-sided shelves, and so it quickly became a Saturday morning routine to hoof the mile from home to library, snag a latte & pastry, choose from amongst the shiny new books, and pass an hour or two feeding body & soul. People, this is Truth, Beauty and Gluttony are tied up with a pretty ribbon: a high order of Contentment. Here’s a photo of the place (not my own) from Flikr:

Los Angeles is a groovelous place — I could, and will, go on for years about its many wonders — but, alas, it falls short in its library system. Our humble part of the aggregate, Woodland Hills, has no more than a mere branch of the LA Public Library. It’s a nice little branch, but branch is all it is. And little. And getting littler as the budget is cut back. Libraries are not given priority here…

This is not to moan, but to warn you in my capacity as the Jeremiah of Idle Reading: if you are fortunate enough to live in community with a fine local library like the one in Elmhurst, burn some incense to Athena; but even if you are less fortunate and depend instead upon a mere branch of a larger system, do not take your library for granted: Library funding CORRELATES TO CIRCULATION. The money they get is based in part on the books you check out. Use it or lose it, people.

ADDENDUM: The photo of the lobby is part of this great Flikr Photostream from “tnachtrab.”

Athertonpix

I’ll admit it: I’ve been remiss. The whole point of starting a web log was to publicize my drawings and generate more freelance work (or so I once claimed). As it turned out, it has been so much fun playing Junior Editor and putting out this pretend publication that I have let the Illustration side of the operation languish in Limbo.

Well, no more. While continuing to blather here on this site — just as if it mattered so much as the entire mass of Bean Hill — I solemnly pledge to keep the Athertonpix website updated at least three times weekly, or maybe twice weekly. Well, more frequently than twice-yearly.

Today, I posted the entire drawing of which you see but a portion in NiceWork’s lovely header. You can see it by going here: http://athertonpix.wordpress.com/. Or, if you prefer the tingly magical feeling of hypertext clickpoints, by all means click on the word Athertonpix wherever it appears (example: Athertonpix) or click on the thumbnail of the drawing embedded in this copy.

You’ve Got Me Under Your Skin, Redux

Here’s a re-post of a, well, post I did back in May of last year in a fey mood — a giggle fit, if you will — never expecting anyone to see it besides the handful of people I like to keep amused because it calms their rages. Far less did I expect some hapless souls to actually seek the site while gleaning information regarding tattoos, but it so befell. Mea culpa, hapless souls, you will find nothing here but chuckles, grins and merriment; no body art save for the idiot muskrat on my trapezius.

Today Nice Work inaugurates a spanking new business venture:

Atherton Tattoos!

The entire Nice Work body of work oeuvre is now available for your prison, gang, armed forces or piratical identity needs! We’ve been practicing off and on for, oh, a month with a sharpened knitting needle and Pelikan™ Blue Fountain Pen ink and we’re pretty sure that we can provide you with some accurate reproductions of Kevin Atherton’s fine illustration on any sufficiently broad, hairless and numbed expanse of your skin.

How Do You Get an Atherton Tattoo?

It’s easy! All you need to do is flip through the ATHERTONPIX CATALOGUE of Kevin’s many droll drawings and, with trembling finger, point mutely at which of his creations you’d like to take with you to your grave.

Who Will Touch You?

Nice Work’s stable of tattoo artists have has been culled with ruthless severity from the thousands of applicants who answered our ad in Soldier of Fortune. Under the expert supervision of Vician Placement Services, they’ve been carefully rehabilitated, detoxified, trained in rudimentary social skills, washed, shaven, dressed and unchained to give you the finest tats available this side of three inch plexiglass.

Can a Tattoo Ever Be Deleted?

Some of you, the timid minority, balk at the permanence of body art. We at Nice Work are more than happy to address your concerns. “Are we stuck with our tattoo forever?” you ask. “Suppose we change our minds. Can the image be removed?” you further ask. You tug at our sleeves. You follow us around. You blubber and babble incoherently. We turn abruptly and bark, “Be rid of your tattoo, sir? Change your skin, madam? Why, become a Hindu, if you are not one already, you importunate wretch! Then in your next life you can come back as unmarked as a hen’s egg, for all I care. Now good day to you!”

Our rates are competitive. Our back room is dim and hosed down weekly.

Call Atherton Tattoos today!

Bosch Sites VII — Angels Flight

It’s almost too easy to get photos for the Michael Connelly police novel Angel’s Flight, featuring the dour detective Harry Bosch. The Angel’s Flight funicular railway is an oft-photographed bit of L.A. oddity just east of the downtown skyscrapers. Built in 1901, refurbished every so often — it’s closed even now for yet another refurbishment — the two cable cars have been peacefully hoisting passengers up and lowering passengers down for over a century. It took the evil mind of a mystery writer to turn it into a crime scene — and a double homicide at that!

Still, I thought it might be worth the while of Bosch readers to get some new angles on the locus and I think this handful of humble snaps are successful in doing that.

First, here’s Harry on the scene:

“Bosch had ridden the inclined railroad as a kid and had studied how it worked. He still remembered. The two matching cars were counterbalanced. When one went up the side-by-side tracks the other went down, and vice versa. They passed each other at the midpoint. He remembered riding on Angels Flight long before Bunker Hill had been reborn as a slick business center of glass and marble towers, classy condominiums and apartments, museums, and fountains referred to as water gardens. Back then the hill had been a place of once-grand Victorian homes turned into tired-looking rooming houses.” [Angel's Flight, 1999]

At top of the post, we have a photo taken by your intrepid reporter from the very steep slope of a park to the south of the tracks. There are the two cars stopped midpoint, awaiting whatever repairs the operation is undergoing. A guy who works there assured me it would be open again soon.

Here, to the left, is a view of the whole shebang looking west from across Hill Street. There is the lower terminus — now sealed — the tracks (see how they separate at the midpoint to accomodate two vehicles?), the two cable cars themselves, gabbing, and, finally, way up there at the top of Bunker Hill (yes, really) is the housing for the cables and wheels and gears.

There’s a huge fountain-filled plaza up there serving the museums and office buildings that surround it. While the train awaits repair you must climb those many stairs on the left to enjoy a caffeine treat at one of the many little tables that dot the plaza.

Strengthened by hikes into the upper reaches of the Santa Monicas, I was able to make it to the summit of Bunker Hill. There, halfway to the stars at the upper gate, I tried to take photos through the window of the shiny machinery that made the magic happen but window glare fought me. Happily, an Angels Flight caretaker was on hand. He was kind enough to let me into the cable house to obtain the photo you see to the right. The guy told me he hadn’t read Angel’s Flight yet because his wife had told him he must read the Bosch series in order and he was still on the earlier ones. He’d met Connelly, though, and we both mused a while on how such a nice guy could come up with such wicked thoughts as murder in this cheerful spot.

Of course, a spooky spot might put timorous folks on their guard making it that much harder to slay them according to the requirements of the drama, so a cheerful locale might be just the ticket for your professional murder novel culprit. In this case, he would have chosen well indeed.

I mean, look! See how peaceful and sunny it is. Why, there’s even a woman happily exercising, not a care in the… but, wait! Could she be the multiple murderer? For that matter, what about the guy who unlocked the cable house? He had the means and opportunity… what could the motive be? And why do I think that a mere weblog photographer has some special protection from the maniacs that lurk in this Halloween-colored nexus of horror?

Fortunately for me, returning to the relative safety of Hill Street and my semi-legally parked RAVmobile is as easy as skipping with some haste down this many-angled set of stairs, footsteps echoing behind me.

Those are the sinister ties of the inclined railway you see to the left, above the hand rail. And there, there, at the bottom is the lower terminus and freedom — but it never seems to be nearer no matter how fast I run.

I’m scribbling these notes on the back of an informational flyer about Grand Central Market (another scenic spot across Hill Street). In the event of my disappearance and the retrieval of the flyer and my little EasyShare Kodak, please post to my weblog. I can face death at the hands of a raving lunatic, but the thought of my dear readers going unserved is too bitter to contemplate.

Angels Flight, a Harry Bosch police thriller by Michael Connelly, Warner Brother paperback, 480 angst-ridden pages.

John Updike, RIP

In Extremis

I saw my toes the other day.
I hadn’t looked at them for months.
Indeed, they might have passed away,
And yet they were my best friends once.
When I was small, I knew them well.
I counted on them up to ten
And put them in my mouth to tell
The larger from the lesser. Then
I loved them better than my ears,
My elbows, adenoids, and heart.
But with the swelling of the years
We drifted, toes and I, apart.
Now, gnarled and pale, each said, j’accuse!–
I hid them quickly in my shoes.

–– John Updike

UPDATE: More Updike light verse HERE

Beware of Slumdog

NiceWork cares for our readers and would hate to think of any of you — even the vilest — stuck in a cinema with Danny Boyle’s scatalogical romp Slumdog Millionaire. We fear, though, the Academy Award nomination may tempt some of you to turn over two hours of your precious lives to this (almost literal) stinker. It’s too late for us, but not too late for you, we hope.

And so we present you with this capsule review:

Slumdog Millionaire is the sort of movie professional film critics are obligated to praise.

There. Get it? You have been warned.

NiceWork Goes to the Talkies: DEFIANCE!

Foo. This is my day for frustration: First, inclement weather and unsuitable clothing conspire to keep me from fulfilling my dream of planting my feet on the rocky peak of Rocky Peak.

Okay. Fine. So I decide to go to a local movie house instead, but when the serpentine line finally deposits me before the glass-encased teen selling tickets he has only bad news to give: the 4:30 showing of Defiance is SOLD OUT. No Daniel Craig fighting Nazis for me this fine day.

To top it off, when I get back home I hurry to the fridge to pull out the long-anticipated Stouffer’s Southwest Style Chicken Panini that will assuage my grief… but, someone (I suspect Daughtergirl) has already snagged it.

But that won’t stop NiceWork from providing a timely and entertaining movie review. Yes: sight unseen. After all, how many films do you suppose professional critics actually see before penning their opinions; or if they see the fim to be reviewed, how much of it do think they really sit through? Most of it? Half? As long as their Lemonheads last? I

Hypaethral Hike

Yeah, I know Milton McCauley, Master Hiker of the Monicas, said that “every day was a good day for hiking, no matter what kind of weather,” but I’ll bet he owned a poncho.

Me, I don’t. Nor a rain hat. Nor a water-repellant jacket. No laughing at the elements for me.

I had hoped to bring you a report on the Rocky Peak Trail up into the cloud-hidden heights of the Santa Susana Mountains — so well described by Casey Shreiner on his Modern Hiker weblog — but the angry Sky Gods drove me back. The very clouds that hid the heights soaked me to the skin before I’d gone half a mile. But even that half mile was enough to see such beauties as glisten in the fog-blurred photo above; and enough to make me swear unto the Sky Gods and Mountain Gods, “I’ll be back.”

During my return to home base — where I sit now typing and shivering with what I hope is a passing chill — I stopped to pick up rain wear at a sporting goods store which I will not name because it was so ratty I feared the Plague. They had some nice small arms which I considered for those weekends I go drug-running, but what they offered for foul-weather was more suitable to sitting in a duck blind than blithe excelsioring up a slope. I passed.

Next I stopped at the Westfield Promenade, a classy Valley mall at which I never shop, having no use for Talbots et. al., but which I like to visit because of its hypaethral central dome:

I like this hypaethral dome in part because it is as close as I’m likely to get to the famous hypaethral dome of the Pantheon in Rome, one of the great architectural hypaethral splendors of the ancient world. Also because I am proud to know a classy word like “hypaethral” but never ever get the chance to use it. Hypaethral ceilings, whether domed or undomed, never seem to come up in conversation. Or in writing, for that matter. This may well be this is my final opportunity to use the word hypaethral.

Hypaethral. Hypaethral. Hypaethral.

Anyhow, there’s a Chick’s Sporting Goods in that mall — my second reason for the mall visit — but they’re more geared to surfing and skiing than to trailblazing, and so I left empty-handed, pausing on my way out to observe the fickleness of the Sky Gods through hypaethral dome.