Online since April, the relatively new LA Eastside.com group blog is one of my favorite blog stops.
This week, the site posted two items on the rapid disappearance of many Eastside murals. On Saturday, Ed Fuentes posted his recap of the “Against the Wall: The Ruin and Renewal of L.A.’s Murals” panel hosted by Morono Kiang Gallery on June 14th. Judith Baca, Artistic Director of SPARC and Professor of Art at UCLA, Man One, owner of Crewest, Yreina Cervantez, muralist and Associate Professor, Department of Chicano/a Studies CSUN City of LA Department, Pat Gomez of Cultural Affairs, and USC Adjunct Professor Michael Woo spoke about the fading of L.A’s mural culture, urging attendees to support plans to restore the famous image of Anthony Quinn dancing in front of the Victor Clothing Company. Fellow Eastside LA blogger, Victoria Delgadillo followed up on Sunday with an editorial on the role of East Los Angeles politicians in the eradication of the area's murals.
Why all the fuss?
LA murals are not just important to L.A.'s identity as a multi-ethnic area and important markers for our every evolving streetscape, but also served to inspire state and federal laws protecting public art.
Also check out Al Guerrero's wonderful photo tour of Whittier Boulevard movie theaters.
So I’m driving along Interstate 5, minding my own business, when a car one lane over and ahead of me runs over some debris and it flies up.
It’s coming at me. I duck and the next thing I hear is an explosion at 55 mph and my first thought is, dang, I ran over it. My second thought is that suddenly there’s this evil-looking metal cudgel in the passenger wheel well and holy merde, my windshield has erupted, shattering glass everywhere, and there’s a huge effing hole about six inches from where I sit, gripping tight to the steering wheel and trying not to run off the highway.
At that point, my limbs pretty much turn to jelly and I start pulling over. It’s like they say about death-defying moments. It seems to happen in slow-mo, and you go on autopilot and a Higher Force takes over. The next thing I remember is groping my head and face, expecting to feel wet warm viscous fluids, but nope, the stereo’s still playing Tori Amos, the engine is fine, the A/C is blasting and it’s just me and a million pieces of glass and a 15-pound cast-iron trailer hitch, cruising along.
Here it is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, and all I want to do is stay inside to read books. There's plenty of book events happening this weekend so I can have fun in the sun and satisfy my book cravings.
Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave, Los Angeles, 90027
Get discounts up to 50-75% at both L.A. stores:
TASCHEN Store Beverly Hills
354 North Beverly Drive Beverly Hills, CA 90210, United States
June 20 - 22, 2008
Friday, Saturday 10:00 am to 7:00 pm
Sunday 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm
TASCHEN Store Hollywood
Farmer's Market
June 20 - 22, 2008
Friday 9:00 am to 9:00 pm
Saturday 9:00 am to 8:00 pm
Sunday 10:00 am to 7:00 pm
'Hollywood Bread' advertisement, Oakland Tribune, 1941
You don't have to be a Los Angeleno to greet all diet claims with immediate suspicion, if not full-on Fran-Drescheresque laughter, but given this Hollywood Bread advertisement was published in the Oakland Tribune nearly 70 years ago, it not only amused me, but deepened my understanding of human gullibility and the pitfalls of misfiling long-term lessons in the short-term memory bin of our brains.
As Pres. George W. Bush once said (on camera): "fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again."
An excerpt from the ad, circa 1941:
Until recently many a screen star was a "poor little rich girl," who had to go hungry — for the sake of a dainty figure. Today all that is changed. Screenland's population eagerly buys Hollywood Bread, the delicious filling new loaf that knocks Old Man Hunger for a loop, yet contains so few calories that it is a cinch to make room in a rigid diet for a couple of slices at every meal.[snip...]
One of the reasons why Hollywood Bread is so good, and so good for you is that it contains the essence of eight different vegetables including celery, lettuce, spinach, carrots, pumpkin, cabbage, parsley and kelp. These give the most marvelous flavor to toast and to sandwiches of all sorts. Toasts evenly, too.
I'm acquainted with "Old Man Hunger," but I've never been to "Screenland."
Click to e-mail TJ Sullivan.
My father, Elmer Price, left frustratingly few personal papers behind--no letters, no records from his community work, no documentation of his awards as a lawyer--but had rather saved just a very few things. He'd saved birthday cards from my mother: we found those in his safe deposit box at the bank, where most people keep jewels and stock options. He'd kept copies of letters he'd sent in May 1961 to his political representatives to ask why they were on the sponsor list for the Greater St. Louis School of Anti-Communism, and whether they supported the School's ties to the John Birch Society. And he'd kept two sets of notes for talks he'd presented in the early 1960s: one on 1st Amendment rights; and one that refuted the assertions of a propaganda film about the House Un-American Activities Committee.
In the 1950s, when he defended people for the ACLU against charges of communism, the prosecution once presented its evidence in the form of a sealed envelope, whose contents the judge and defense were not allowed to see--and my father still won. In the 1960s, he was voted onto the School Board by a huge margin, and then he was voted off it by a huge margin in the next election after he proposed a desegregation plan--a plan not unlike the one the school district would adopt twenty years later.
He was by all accounts a witty, fearsome litigator in the courtroom--legendary, I'm told, actually--which I find quite easy to believe, having grown up in a heady political era around the dinner table with the gentler version, my three brothers, my mother, two labradors (whom my father lovingly dubbed Smartass and Bonehead), and noise levels that took freedom of speech to grand new heights. I didn't truly win an argument with him until I was around 25--the perfect 1st Amendment rights in our family notwithstanding. Sometimes I was right.
He believed that the practice of law should be a profession, not a business (and he felt the same way about baseball.) He believed that to believe in the spirit of the law was to believe in the letter of the law. He didn't cheat on his taxes, and he observed the speed limit: I know no one else who does both. He believed that honesty was essential especially in the most inconvenient situations.
Above all, he believed in his children.
He did not believe at all in Father's Day, however--nor has my mother believed in Mother's Day. We barely celebrated them, even when my brothers and I were kids. My parents rejected these days as crass, commercial, entirely pointless, and hardly any measure of their children's love, which they did not demand and felt no need to measure.
But Dad, on this one Father's Day--and this one only, I promise--let me say two things:
In these past two months, as the Supreme Court finally affirmed our constitutional principles on the detainees issue, and Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination, still these momentous events, without you to share them, have felt a bit like we're sending triumphs of integrity and civil rights into the wind.
And in these last few weeks, as I've encountered the word "father" everywhere--plastered, crassly and commercially and pointlessly, in newspapers, on websites, on buses, and in store windows...Well, I have to admit that on this one Father's Day--the first one without you--this relentless onslaught has conjured meaningfulness and immeasurable love as never before.
It's 11 am on Saturday afternoon and I'm on a big bus traveling backward up a curvy street in the Hollywood Hills. I have no fear as we round a turn at an alarmingly awkward angle. I have faith for I am one of about 30 seekers who have joined author Erik Davis and Esotouric Tours on a five hour pilgrimage to local occult landmarks cited in Davis's 2006 book, The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape.
The Krotona Inn, off Franklin Avenue near the 101, is our first stop. Named for an ancient Pythagorean community, the Krotona Inn housed visitors and guests of an important Theosophical community established by Albert Powell Warrington in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1910s. The retreat space is now a collection of private apartments arranged around a patio courtyard with a lotus pond. Erik pointed out the complex's east wing where colony members once meditated under the remaining Moorish dome. Erik led us up a pathway to inspect a gorgeous stained glass window, the only remaining remnant of the Grand Temple of the Rosy Cross, another Moorish-style structure now subdivided into apartments. Then it was back on the bus. My fellow passengers and I, stuffed with information about Rosicrucian and metaphysical art history, waved at a line of Jehovah Witness proselytizers puffing up the hill on foot. I chuckled over the idea of them proselytizing in a neighborhood that may be even more spiritually susceptible than they can even guess.
Photograph of Erik Davis by Richard Schave
Continue...There’s a place known in paleontology circles as “The Barnyard.” The Barnyard has tracks, not bones - tracks of camels and elephants and birds, but mostly horse tracks, thousands of them, coming from the past and going towards the future, preserved forever in a mountain range that wasn’t there when they were, magic ciphers embedded in a permanent and ever-open ancient scroll.
These horse tracks are on a wall in a secret location inside Death Valley National Park. They are accessible only by way of ranger-led hikes. I visited them two years ago, after reading about them in an obscure park service newsletter and making a reservation months in advance. To get there, I took an interstate to a highway to a desert two-lane deep inside the park, and then parked my car and joined a small group of pilgrims. We followed the ranger up an alluvial fan, through giant washes where tender once-a-century flowers were blooming after the recent rains. After two or three miles, the desert street began to shrink and we were on a narrow path that wound through slot canyons lined with sandstone and except for the crunching of hiking boots all was silent.
As time passed, the path got thinner still, winding along a ribbon of sand that was lined by sheer granite walls. We traversed upwards across rough desert gravel at an incline of about 15 degrees. As the sun rose to the high noon mark, we stopped for a rest, then trekked on as a stir of air came down off the higher elevations. The path emptied into a sprawling white bajada criss-crossed by fault lines and ringed by mineral-veined mountains. After awhile, we reached the far side of the bajada where the path resumed. We walked another hundred yards or so until we reached the seven-mile mark, the outside bend of a steep and craggy gypsum slope.
“Okay, everybody,” the ranger said, pointing to a wash. “This is it. The Barnyard. Put down your backpacks and go in single file. Take your time.” I was talking with a companion and my voice fell to a whisper, lest I somehow derange the invisible horses and the tracks vanish. I gingerly clambered over giant boulders and chunks of gravel as the sun – rising higher - illumined the ancient hoofprints. They were scattered across the wall of rock, equine signals that appeared to be heading in every direction, this way, that-a-way, away away home. Some of the prints faced upwards to the sky, some down, some east, others west and northwest. It was a Miocene movie, an antediluvian Western, with hundreds of hoofprints left in the dust, but no vestiges of the animals they came from – just tracks, running across a wall.
Like all deserts, Death Valley was once comprised of many lakes. In the lakes were vast islands of grass where mammals gathered to feed during seasonal monsoons – horses on the lush flora, saber-tooth tigers on the flesh of horses. As they fed, they made tracks in the mud and when the waters receded and they moved on, the tracks were preserved. This process would repeat itself over thousands of years, with animals leaving tracks in different layers of mud. As the terrain evolved and sheets of rock were thrust upwards through the earth’s crust, the tracks emerged – on slabs, creating an equine Rosetta stone. I placed my hand inside a hoofprint, the timeless cipher which would later become a talisman for warriors and barbarians of nations old and new. It was as big as my outstretched palm and many others appeared to be the same size.
The Shoshone Indians of this region may have known about this site for a long time, our guide explained, but it was officially discovered in 1932 by Donald R. Currey, the first ranger of what was then called Death Valley National Monument. So many anthropologists and paleo devotees began to visit the site that officials scheduled visits for certain days at certain times of the year, like the one I was on. With the sun rising higher in the sky, it was soon time to go.
We began to make our way out of The Barnyard, stopping for lunch – appropriately – at Carnivore Ridge, another sprawling track site. Then we packed up our gear and retraced our steps, our tracks, down the rocky paths and through the slot canyons and across the alluvial fan that led to our cars. As I later found out, due to budget constraints, we were the last citizens outside of academia or the strange and flourishing world of anthro crooks to have taken the hike - an obscure event on a park service calendar that just happened to link today to always, an expedition to an accidental stone mural upon which horse tracks, the very beginnings of the American story, are forever preserved.
Excerpt from the author's new book, Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (Houghton Mifflin).
Librarians and other book professionals attending the American Library Association conference in Anaheim at the end of the month can expect lots of fun and games this year. The California Myth Authority, as the organizers call themselves, have just announced an information scavenger hunt for conference attendees. Players or teams can sign up to play the "California Dreaming" game designed to highlight Californian pop culture history. Participants must find clues spread out across the entire convention campus, popping up in conference materials, exhibits and session areas. Winners can obtain prizes in a new Games Pavilion in the exhibition hall.
Great idea. Perhaps Disney's California Adventure can use the same concept.
