Westward Ho!

Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

OK, well, we didn't end up going to the Pacific Design Center, but Geeta and I (and a couple of friends of hers from UCLA and Caltech, respectively) were elsewhere within the MOCA system yesterday -- at the main location downtown, for Rauschenberg's Combines exhibit.

I had seen it just after I moved to Los Angeles in late May, and since it closes in a few days (on September 4), I was glad to have one final look. It's a beautiful, beautiful collection, created from 1954-1964 and getting more poignant with each passing year as the objects of Rauschenberg's media continue to yellow, fade, distance themselves through dated typography and design and persistent disuse. Yesterday I compared it to the water-damaged detritus stuck to the floorboards of an old person's attic -- things that were never meant to last 50 years, but which stamped themselves into the house like a printing press would, to tell the real story. Here's how I recommended it to someone in May (forgive the lowercase; I often type this way informally):

i was in awe and more than a bit emotional. the general feeling is of walking through rural salvage yards and church-owned thrift stores circa 1960. very impressionistic -- rather than being presented as one tritely iconic image (like warhol's soup cans), these muddy fabric swatches and scrap metal shards and cartoon clippings and bird feathers are basically momentary blips in the radio static of the painted canvases. it was one of the only art exhibits i've been to where i wished there was more, lots more, several rooms more.

Tupperware is a homemaker's dream, you save time and money because your food keeps Longer.

Geeta is in LA (and San Diego) this weekend, and she expressed interest in going to the Bill Owens: Suburbia exhibit at the Pacific Design Center. This blog entry is both a post-it note to myself and a suggestion for the rest of you -- I'm not intimately familiar with Owens' work, although I have a moderately good working knowledge of '60s-'70s Americana photography (Stephen Shore, et al). Some photos from Owens' 1973 Suburbia book are in the Portfolios section of his official website. For more background, the Art a GoGo site has an in-depth, candid interview with Owens:

Art a GoGo:  What was your inspiration for “Suburbia”?

Bill Owens:    When I came out of the Peace Corps in 1966, I knew that I wanted to be a photographer. I went back to San Francisco State and took a visual anthropology class from a guy named John Collier who had written a book on the subject. In 1968, I got my first job as a news photographer for the Livermore Independent, in Livermore, California. Everyone was moving to the suburbs, you could buy a house for $2,000, with only $99 down. A two car garage, a swimming pool, and a Kenmore washer and dryer….all of the things that come with the good life.

AAGG: Did you begin taking photographs for “Suburbia” as part of your work for the Livermore Independent?

Owens: Working for a newspaper gave me great access to the community. Doing         six to ten assignments a day for the paper, I was in contact with the Chamber of Commerce, the Chief of Police, community groups, and schools. You begin to see the community from the inside out, where most people go to work all day, go home, and    don’t see much of their own community.

Initially, I went to the city of Livermore and asked them for a couple of thousand   dollars to take photographs of the community for the city’s archives. I did that project, but in the back of mind I really wanted to do a bigger project. Really take on the idea of Levitt Town [sic], and study the sociology of who we are.

AAGG: Why photographs of the suburbs?

Owens: Most people look at the suburbs as “ticky tacky” little houses and say that there’s no culture, and then they go back to the city. I’m not interested in the city, I’m interested in the middle class…I was interested in making the suburbs a better place to live. It’s like Pogo says, “I have met the enemy and he is us!”

AAGG: So how did you go about shooting the photographs for “Suburbia”?

Owens: The photographs for “Suburbia” weren’t done by accident. I put together a shooting script of events that I wanted to photograph…Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Birthday’s, etc. I got a small grant, and began taking photographs every Saturday for a year, so basically “Suburbia” was shot in 52 days. After I finished        the photographs, I realized that I had a book, but I never set out with the intention of doing a book.

In related news, Chris Barrus ponders the dark side of suburban bliss (part 93435452131311.0532): San Clemente in 1994 and 2006.

The Central Office

A quick bookmark for you: thecentraloffice.com, "A Tribute to Telephone Central Offices and the AT&T Long Lines Microwave Network of California and the Nation." Whew, that's a mouthful. The site is "dedicated to ... the visual preservation and documentation of telephone central offices (COs) in the U.S. and select countries, [and] to visually preserve and document various stations of the retired AT&T Long Lines nationwide microwave network. Where applicable this second task is extended to local telco sites used to interconnect into the aforementioned AT&T Long Lines network."

Some California/Southwest CO pages to get you started:

California page
Arizona page
Colorado page
Nevada page
New Mexico page
 

 

Back to School

Rodney Dangerfield's Thornton Melon and I have something in common -- we've both returned to school after a long stretch doing time in the real world. My stretch is nowhere near as long as Thornton's -- I got my B.A. in 1998 and have taken various test-prep and professional skills-building classes in the interim -- but at 29-going-on-30 I still feel like the old lady of my first-year cohort. And although I'm sure the professors will reserve the same level of scorn for me they do for all the other clueless first-years (maybe more, considering how yakking about urban planning is all I'm capable of lately), I really admire their expertise and can't wait to exploit it for personal gain.

Today I had my first two classes: Intro to Planning Theory, and the Legal Environment of Planning. Both are going to be tremendous fun, in different ways. One is as academic and abstract as social/political philosophy can be, but with the necessary wiggle room for lightheartedness that appeals to audiences who aren't yet immersed in the rhetoric. The latter is very much a law-school class -- terminology, cases, and intricacies of policy are rattled off rapid-fire, diagrams and pie charts are drawn and quickly erased for lack of blackboard space. Key subjects are introduced, disappear down a rabbit hole of facts and figures and more facts, and reappear in passing 15 minutes later. And I was able to keep up with about 95-97 percent of that first session, even while my cell phone was ringing with a couple of urgent calls (I didn't answer, but I knew they were important). Lord knows those numbers will drop, but it appears that my few years as a hobbyist dilettante have served me well, and I've (gasp) never even played Sim City.

Tomorrow morning I've got Prof. Banerjee's class on public space -- it's a new course that was listed at the last minute, and the second I got the e-mail about it I dropped one of my requirements so I could fit this into my schedule. The assigned reading looks good: this and this, among other things (inc. this).

The Ho Inches Ever-So-Slightly Westward

If I've been a little quiet over the last couple days, it's because I'm getting ready to move -- in fact, I start dragging my shit over to the new place tonight, and will be shuttling back and forth over the next few days until I get settled. Goodbye Silver Lake, hello "North University Park."

Oh well... I always felt a little embarrassed telling people I was staying in Silver Lake, because it's kinda unimaginative and kinda over and and and. When I was looking at potential sublets, there was a place I really wanted on the Glendale/Eagle Rock border that was right on the 81, but the woman renting it changed her mind and raised the rent another $100/mo. I inquired about a few more listings and was getting impatient with the process when this deal fell into my lap -- a studio in a well-kept building with fine upstanding neighbors, reasonable rent for the area, near shopping, on a bus line, close to downtown -- and yes, in the dreaded Silver Lake, but in the groovy Neutra part of SL, not the Sunset-scumbag part.

And it's been good, mostly. My lowest points here were the three times I was divebombed from behind by the same crow for walking too close to his baby's nest (sorry dude, the sidewalk is narrow), and getting a little paranoid when I found out my downstairs neighbor's apartment got robbed (some other dwellings in the area were hit too; the thieves were mainly interested in electronics and computers). Also not thrilled about the homeless person who rummages around the dumpster for recyclables at the same time every night (2:30 AM; I know because I'm usually awake), but this happened at my place in Brooklyn too and I bet it happens in most street-accessible urban buildings, so I shrug it off as a part of city life.

I was down by my new digs this morning, picking up my keys, and the first thing I saw when I got over to the keymaster (er... the Customer Service Center on Portland St.) was a GIANT RAT darting out from the bushes and running across the street towards the intersection where my future home stands. CAN'T. FUCKING. WAIT.

You Bet Your Life

Direct from NBC Studio D in Hollywood, California, Groucho Marx discusses gas prices and private enterprise with one of his You Bet Your Life guests, a self-made San Fernando Valley petroleum distributor and part-time USC "salesmanship" instructor named Kent Moore.

The woman standing next to Moore, as we learn in an earlier segment, is a mother of six and "waitress at the Red Barn in Panorama City." The Valley Observed's "Gone but not forgotten" page tells us the following about the erstwhile Red Barn, which doesn't sound very different from a modern-day TGIF-style suburban feeding trough (or, to be fair, one of those comfort-food neo-luncheonettes that city kids love):

Located at the corner where Parthenia Street begins in Panorama City, the restaurant that was at 8701 Van Nuys Boulevard is remembered by its longtime fans for the cheese sauce, kitschy decor and generous helpings of American food.

Maps (They Don't Love You Like I Love You, Etc.)

Quote of the day, at LA Observed's Chicken Corner: An Echo Park Blog (link courtesy of Atwater Village Newbie):

RJ Smith (my husband) on maps: “We all make private maps of Los Angeles, because the public maps we share so clearly fail us. None of them ultimately satisfies, because none of them ultimately lets us understand Los Angeles.”

(If you are a cartography trainspotter, however, boy does the Library of Congress have a treat for you.)

 

Future Homes of Stucco Monstrosity

In the Oaks... (Sherman Oaks) sighs girlishly over the "pizzazz" of the signage and typography on his favorite '50s and '60s stucco apartment buildings. And I agree! The "s" word has become a dirty one in architectural circles, with campaigns all across the country for people to "de-stucco" their homes, but something about this style of down 'n' dirty dingbat production lent itself very well to innovative, stylish designs that were in lockstep with the mid-century modern city. Urban designer John Chase dedicates much of his excellent book to just this, saying that the "honesty of the stucco box was inadvertent, born of the ease with which a speculative developer could disguise economic necessity as modernistic chic," and noting the tabula rasa style of these pre-ornamented boxes, writes about the often lush and outrageous courtyard-and-garden landscaping (all tiki and tropicalia), bizarre gargoyles adorning facades, terrace railings that bulged out like Chinese-food take-out boxes, and street-level carport slots that proudly held the upper landings up on stilts like a father showing off a newborn baby. Chase calls it "communication with the street," and admits that this was mostly out of necessity because of small lot sizes, but suggests that the eye-catching designs made the passer-by feel welcome. It appealed to the "ephemeral" sensibility of the times too, the celebration of the artificial and temporary, the idea of "the future" being a finite thing that was already there (and was AWESOME), with no concern or duty towards more realistic timelines. It's interesting that much of the style from this period is called "atomic," because it comes from such a defeatist Cold War mindset, of party-like-it's-1999 resignation towards the there-and-then -- which was allowed to be fake-futurist because wtf is a "real" future when you're doing air-raid drills and reading civil-defense bomb-scare propaganda every day?

The building I live in now comes from this era, and so does the building I'm moving into soon (which I like a lot less except for its cool typography and how its orientation reminds me of a tall person laying on his stomach with his face looking out on the main street while the length of his side hugs the side street). It's not ideal for everyone, but for me it's loads of fun.
 

Feasting On Asphalt

In a previous post I gave a shout-out to the then-upcoming Food Network miniseries Feasting On Asphalt (starring Alton Brown and his production crew riding tricked-out motorcycles across the USA). Westward Ho is a blog about California and the West (as I see them through my NYC-tinted lens), and a little more than half of Feasting takes place west of St. Louis, so I feel it's appropriate to give a rundown on what I've seen so far (although the first two episodes focus on the Southeast and Mid-South and Midwest, the second installment does leave us a bit west of the start of the Mother Road, Route 66, the gateway drug to Manifest Destiny). The show eventually ends up in Los Angeles, which I'll definitely cover.

Two episodes in, Feasting is the best travel special (or series) the Food Network has done (and they do a lot). It's got Alton's trademark historical bent and pursuit of deep knowledge, but the editing and camerawork is less frenetic and kidlike than Good Eats.

It's very charming -- the premise is that he wants to travel the "old" roads of the United States, the pre-interstate ones, and look for the last vestiges of that kind of road food -- and he goes from the typical soul-food places and lovingly restored railroad-car diners (getting that out of the way in the first episode) to scenes where he's munching on just-picked kudzu and zooming the camera into bee-infested honey trees. He samples the vending machine coffee at an Indiana Greyhound station (it's awful, he says) and talks about vended food and Automats, and eats canned cling peaches and cottage cheese with bluehairs at a YWCA tea room (it's great, he says) to track the development of dining options for ladies traveling alone. There's a whole segment on how Duncan Hines, well before he started the cake-mix juggernaut, was the inventor and lone food-service critic of the AAA-style hospitality guide -- any restaurant listed in Hines' guide bore his personal stamp of quality assurance. Alton holds up a tattered book called Adventures In Good Eating, and doesn't bother to point out an obvious connection. But there's a sense of pure joy that he's got this link to America's forgotten past right there in his hands. He's like Huell Howser that way. (The obsessive-compulsive Marc Summers would just flash a fake smile and go wash his hands at the end of the take.)

Alton's honest, too: If he doesn't like something he tries, he'll tell us, even if it's not in the presence of the person who prepared it. I loved his theory on why foods like fried brain sandwiches have survived in tiny ethnic enclaves of the USA while never managing to imperialize the rest of the country -- it may be an acquired taste to broader American audiences, but it's a beloved staple of that culture's culture (in this case, Germany), and they're probably proud to hold on to a tradition that n00bz don't wanna get with.

I admit that I cheered when Alton went to Ted Drewes (the custard stand in St. Louis, along the eastern edge of the former Route 66); I insisted on stopping there when a friend and I road-tripped cross-country last year, and the custard was indeed pretty revelatory. Alton says that when he announced his plans for Feasting on Asphalt on the Food Network's website, he got hundreds of letters beseeching him to check the shop out. But Ted Drewes ALWAYS gets talked about on these Food Network things, and if AB had known that, maybe he would have kept going, in search of something more blue-highway and obscurantist. Seriously though, that's great custard, and you sorta have to bring up Rte. 66 on shows like these.

Downsides: As on Good Eats and the play-by-play of Iron Chef America, Alton has a nasty habit of saying "culinary" and "very very" too many times in one episode. (Some TV-forum dwellers have criticized him for all the "uh"s that pepper his sentences, but I LOVE that; it gives the narration an off-the-cuff, professorial feel, like he's mulling over his words rather than merely reading cue cards.)

Another negative, which I think was more of a problem in the first episode than the second, is his somewhat rockist insistence that this early 20C road cuisine is "real" American food -- e.g., denigrating one of his stops for now serving tuna niçoise and Starbucks coffee instead of sticking to its roots as a homespun, owner-operated, shining beacon of cheap, reliable sustenance. But he has a point when he says that if your restaurant is exceptionally good at one thing, it shouldn't stray too far from that basic concept -- it's just good business sense, and virtually all of our most beloved fast-food establishments became famous for adhering to this rule.

Renu Nakorn

A tipster on the Chowhound L.A. Board announces that Norwalk's Renu Nakorn will be closing at the end of August for six months, while the strip mall that houses it undergoes a remodel. People I trust on the matter (see links above) have said it's the best Issan-style Thai food in Southern California, and perhaps the best Thai food full-stop, although this may or may not have changed since the restaurant changed ownership. Amazingly, I haven't been yet, although on a 2003 trip to Las Vegas I got to visit the original Renu Nakorn owners' latest restaurant, Lotus of Siam, and it was a religious experience. Great spice (without fratboy levels of Scoville heat), great concentration of flavors, great variety of dishes under one regional rubric, beautiful-yet-unpretentious presentation, all for very level-headed prices (like Renu Nakorn, Lotus of Siam is in a shitty strip mall).

It's unlikely I'll get back to Vegas any time these next few months, but I think I could accept a slightly jumped-the-shark version of Southern California's best Thai. And sometimes celebrity impersonators can be just as satisfying as the real thing.