Who Was That Lady?

Say good-bye to this ancient Roman goddess before she leaves her present home in The Getty Villa in Los Angeles. She will return this Sunday to her birthplace, Sicily, where, we hope, she will be better treated than before when she was left buried like an old tin can for several millennia. Having seen how nice she looks when cleaned up, the Sicilians suddenly want her back, so back she goes.

Her name is Aphrodite or Hera or Demeter or Athena, depending on the now-missing identifying objects she once held, and on the now-missing headpiece she once wore. Maybe the Sicilians can kick around in the dirt and find something to I.D. the lady.

You can see that Jane Doe — Giovanna Cervus in Latin — is a doughty hunk of woman. Eight feet at least, without shoes. The picture above includes a field trip kid for scale.

Mostly she’s made of limestone, but her head, arms and feet are marble. Marble, intones the informational card on her pedestal, was an expensive Greek import and so was saved for the nicer bits.

We’re also told that close inspection reveals faint traces of pink and blue pigment in the crevices. No such close inspection was vouchsafed this member of the public. The alert museum guards forbade pedestal clambering. Peer as we might from the allowed distance, nothing pink or blue was revealed to our sight. But we take the coloration as a matter of faith from the Getty curators who have never lied to us.

The statue was carved sometime around 400 B.C. Or 400 “B.C.E” to you godless heathens out there. It’s well preserved — not too badly weathered, that is — so we guess the Sicilians valued Ms Unknown Goddess and took good care of her for a while, until they forgot where they’d put her.

I Left My Heart in a Bowl of Rice-A-Roni™

The onrushing cable car above hints at where we’ve been.

We spent a couple of carefree days strolling up and down (way up and down) the City by the Bay. Hadn’t climbed those  quadricep-challenging hills in years. We feared we might have to relearn that Awful Truth “What youth deemed crystal, age finds out was dew,” but San Francisco is one of the few places in this disappointing world that is exactly as nice as you remember it.

Even nicer in some ways. This giant hand, one of six, wasn’t there last time we passed through:

Nor, for that matter, was the present home of the Asian Art Museum where we spent about five times the amount of time we’d budgeted. After all, you can’t just rush by items like this seated Buddha from the 4th century:

It happens to be the “most published” item in their entire collection. Every book on Buddhist sculpture includes it, says the helpful placard nearby.

Then there’s this stern soldier — a “haniwa,” or Japanese funerary figure in terra cotta, made in the 3rd millenium BC  — who won’t let you pass until you pay your respects:

And what would a sojourn in the Bolshiest city on the Bolshy left coast be without an hour browsing for lewd and seditious literature in City Lights Bookstore? This is the indy bookshop from which, in 1957, extruded Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl. Signs in the upper story windows exhort passersby to “keep an open mind” and also to “turn left.” But can a passerby do both at once?

We patriotically held out the palm and sneered “nyet!” to all the Bolshy blandishments, but before we could launch into our chant of “Sarah Barracuda” the Red Youth Brigade (now rather aged) spotted our red, white and blue hearts and ejected us into Kerouac Alley…

… into which poor drunken Mr Kerouac had been tossed more than half a century ago from Vesuvio, a bar in which he had been demonstrating once again that the Beat Culture was more acceptable on paper than in the flesh.

But if you have to become so inebriated that crawling along the sidewalk becomes a reasonable mode of transportation, and street signs loom too far in the distance above your lolling head to help guide you to your SRO in the Tenderloin, don’t worry. San Francisco helpfully molds the street names into the concrete at every intersection:

Next Post: A visit to San Francisco’s De Young Museum of All Kinds of Art.

—L’autre direction! dit l’abeille.

We went a-hunting for a Los Angeles bookstore selling books in French. A store with more titles than the measly selection in the big box bookstores. The magic mind of the Web told us to go to Skylight Bookstore on North Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz.

Well we found it eventually, but not before we got lost in a section of the city called “Wilshire Center” because it would be impolite to call it Shabbytown. Our mapless wandering up and down miserable streets was, happpily, of short duration. A friendly statue of a gesticulating bee [see above] seemed to tell us the direction in which to go. We obeyed. The bee did not lie: Reader, we found Skylight Bookstore.

The number of books in French that were on sale there filled four or five short shelves; indeed more than you’ll find in Barnes & Borders, but not nearly enough to justify the grueling car trip over the mountains. The rest of the books throughout the store, humbly standing on plywood planks, spoke of the “poisonous doctrines of Milton Friedman” and offered tips on planning your gay wedding. A shrine dedicated to Bukowski’s prose and poetry rose Mayanlike in tiers. The giant bee who had been so helpful back when we were driving in circles proved to be a homosexual Marxist alcoholic.

Old Mission Santa Barbara, an Old Mission in Santa Barbara

Today we left L.A. behind and drove 71 miles up Highway 101 with a single purpose: to see a famous old mission founded by the Franciscans back in 1786. Old Mission Santa Barbara is still a going concern. Monks study there, retreatants are put up, Mass is said in the church, and the grounds are maintained and art restored for tourists like us.

Our first stop on the self-guided tour of the monastery was the famous STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN. We ached to climb those timeworn stairs, but we hung back, daunted by the legend according to which those with stained souls would only find cactuses on every step. Somewhat shamefacedly we gave the Stairway the go-by and headed for the centuries old GRAVEYARD.

There, too, we met resistance. The SKULL-HAID DOOR challenges all comers with three riddles, one from each skull-haid. Answer correctly and you may pass safely through the portal. Answer wrong and you may still pass, but the skull-haids smirk and make you feel uncomfortable.

On the way out, as we wrapped up our self-guided tour and a visit to the (excellent) Gift Shop, we met BROTHER CAT who blessed us and let us rub his belly.

Who’s That Nibelung at My House?

We were free this July 5th and so we all piled into the RAV and crossed the mountain to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Within those walls we spent most of our time looking at… at what? That spooky lady up atop this post is a costume for the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. It’s a Valkyrie riding a horse. Fans in the body of the Valkyrie’s horse (actually just an outline of horse made of pipes) blow scarlet-lit flags up and backward to suggest forward momemtum. The name of the assemblage is Walkurenritt, which is German-talk for Ride of the Valkyries.

Other nightmarish costumes by the production’s designer, Achim Freyer, hang behind Ms Valkyrie as part of an exhibit of artwork inspired by the stories of Siegfried and the Nibelungen (also by the Bros Grimm). Among the artists whose work appears are David Hockney (with six fairy tale etchings from 1969), Henri Fantin-Latour, Aubrey Beardsley and George Grosz (the German artist whose sketches of Weimar German nightlife inspired the set design for Caberet). An alcove contains a monitor continually playing scenes from Fritz Lang’s 1924 silent epic Die Nebelungen and from a real creeper called Der Golem (1920).

If you have any questions, please feel free to sit alone forever at the Information Table conveniently located just outside the gallery.

Wiener Whistles March Forward

Today an adventure-filled trip to Van Nuys ended happily with an up-close encounter with one of the fleet of world-famous Wienermobiles. This one, with the license plate “RELSHME” sat festooned with pennants in the parking lot of a Lucky (née Alberton’s) grocery market. It’s drivers, the Wiener Women, handed out Oscar Mayer wiener whistles and took photographs of civilians in front of the sleek, sausage-shaped vehicle.

When I was child — as the Pink Floyds sing so mournfully — I had one of the original Oscar Mayer wiener whistles. It was the shape of a hot dog — no wheels, no bun, no anything; just the dog. The temptation to swallow it was too great for many unfortunate youngsters, and so the toy was withdrawn for safety’s sake. My own minimalist whistle was swept away with the years that took my innocence, and I was left with only the later version, a whistle with a wide, less ingestible base, to console my old age.

The child-safe wiener whistle has never fully satisfied. It looks funny, wrong, not wienery at all. To make matters worse, it’s music is harsh and unpleasant. Those faults have been set right in the latest version handed to me by a Wiener Woman in Van Nuys. In the photo above, you can compare the wide-based, child-proofed whistle on the left, with the 2010 model on the right. Note the improved coloration of the new one, as well as the more realistic rendering of the automobile body. The whistle’s tone, as everyone around me these past few hours can attest, is sweet and loud.

Five Smooth Stones, Five Sore Coyotes

They agitate our kitties from the valley next door. They gibber like scary girl-ghosts at night. They dare prowl the streets by day.

They are the coyotes of California. And their days are numbered.

Well, their haunches are numbered anyhow. Behold my new stealth missile launcher:

I call it the Varminator. The varmints will soon call it “The Invisible God That Spanks My Butt at Night.” They want to howl? I’ll give the devils reason to howl.

Morgan the Penguin and Bjorn the Gnome already know the power of the Varminator. Soon the world will know.

From 3 Kingdoms to 2 Koreas: Korean Art Galleries at LACMA

What have we here? A painting from the 1920s by Paul Klee? A Jazz LP cover from the 50s? A Louis Vuitton scarf from the 00s?

Nope. Wrong wrong wrong. This colorful, seemingly contemporary assemblage is in truth a silk craftwork made in the 19th century in Korea. You’re looking at a “wrapping cloth” or to give it its Korean name it’s a… ah… just a minute. It’s a…

Oh, here we go. Fortunately my memory was augmented by my past self with this photo of the information placard near the bojagi in the new Korean Art Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The stitched-together fabric artwork is called a bojagi or pojagi, depending on which transliterator looks more trustworthy to you. Korean women have been making them for centuries, but they all look as new and stylish as if they were made yesterday. You need not take my word for it: Read the placard yourself and grow wise.

So much to see in the Korean rooms at LACMA. I guess it’s the largest collection of Korean art on display outside the nice half of Korea. The time-frame represented by the statues, figurines, ceramics, paintings, woodwork, and loads else is vast: From the Three Kingdoms Period (way back when), through the Goryeo Dynasty (from then up til 1392), through the Joseon Dynasty (1392 to 1910), right up to a sample of that great contemporary Korean work such as was seen so recently in LACMA‘s eye-popping “Your Bright Future” show. Here’s a figurine from the somethingth century (forget to make notes) holding a turtle. The rooms hold many turtles. There are turtle stamps and turtle clasps on turtle boxes. You will enjoy the wealth of turtles. I know I did.

To help you picture the size of the bojagi, here is the first photo repeated, with the head of an Abenaki Indian for scale.

For a more intelligent and informative essay on the newly installed Korean Art Galleries at LACMA, see Dorothy Guest Tours the West.

Bosatsu

I was thinking about you as I lay a-bed just before daybreak. “What would my kind and gentle NiceWork readers like to see today?” I wondered.

Then it hit me like a ton of harmless Nerf™ bricks: My readers craved a little dose of “Kuan-shih yin” the bodhisattva whose name means “Hearing the World’s Cries”, but whom we know better under her Japanese title: Kannon Bosatsu, (“Bosatsu” means “bodhisattva”) or the Goddess of Mercy.

So here you go: A larger-than-life size figure of Kannon, carved way back when. If she doesn’t give you a good feeling, seek professional help.

You can view the photo larger, and larger still, by going to my Flickr page. Here’s the magic link to click on for that very purpose: WILLIAM CONRAD.

Come Up and See My Etchings

We journeyed south some 60 miles to visit the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. Through this portal we crossed into a wonderful collection of Things Made Long Ago by People All Over the Place (aka “Culture”).

You may know Santa Ana primarily as the source of the famous fire-causing “Santa Ana” winds that emit seasonally from the deep vortex in the center of the city. It’s a nuisance, that vortex, but since nothing can be done about it — the effort to plug it with concrete only resulted in the terrible “big hunk of concrete on downtown Pasadena” incident — we may as well enjoy it as a “natural wonder.” But it was the “unnatural wonders” strewn about the Bowers Museum that spurred our trip.

I don’t really know you all that well, but I’ll bet when I whisper “Bowers Museum” in your ear, the first picture that comes to your mind is of its famous collection of terra cotta laughing horses that were found some time ago in the tomb of one of the more amicable Yuan emperors.

We lucked out. The recording of whinnies intermixed with giggles was blessedly not functioning the day of our visit. We supplied our own laughtrack in plenty.

The famous clay figurine of “Dancing Lil” dating back to the Zing Dynasty may also be the thing that shows up in your dreams when your subliminal speakers mention the Bowers Museum during your refreshing slumbers. But how would I know what bizarre ideas  you might freely associate with the words “Bowers Museum?” Your mind is a shut book to me, thank God.

Though we did pause briefly at each of these attractions — to show our respects and beg favors — our trip was motivated primarily by the ongoing exhibition of rare etchings by Rembrandt, a magnificent once-in-a-lifer show and worth travelling many more than 60 miles through shrieking super-heated Santa Ana gales.

On the other side of this glass door, however, no photography was countenanced. Nor would it have availed, etchings being notoriously resistant to graphic reproduction (other than by the original copper plates, I mean). But I would not leave my wide-eyed, trusting NiceWork readers without some eyeballable example of Mr. van Rijn’s work. Below is a sketch, drawn from memory, of the 1630 etching, Begger Holding Panicked Chicken.