Joe DiMaggio's last car up for sale in Woodland Hills, and we drive in it ... seeing the Larry King murder through a clinical psychologist's eyes ... DubLab's "weird" and calming presence in Union Station ... Yacht Rock returns to LA ... Hauser Wirth + Schimmel preview ...
New Hilbert Museum's ambitious goal: Represent all California art in last 100 years
In an unpretentious but attractive part of the City of Orange’s Old Town, right across Atchison Street from the local Metro Link Station, there is a brand new art museum. It’s called, after its donors and patrons Mark and Janet Hilbert, the Hilbert Museum of California Art.
The Hilbert is associated with Chapman University, and proposes to represent all of California art over the past century. Right now, it is largely devoted to the style called California Scene Painting.
What makes a California scene painting? The museum says the genre is based on the work of earlier California water colorists, “highly creative and imaginative in their individual approaches, but always produced works based on subject matter that is easy to recognize.”
To me, the missing word here is “evocative.” This scene painting puts you in someplace enjoyable where you have been or would like to be. Much of what’s being shown at the Hilbert, skillful as it is, is fundamentally pleasing and reassuring, even uplifting; pictures to relax into over an icy glass of good Scotch after a hard working day. Nothing disturbing like, say, a grinding, tragic coastal shipwreck by these artists’ Monterey contemporary Armin Hansen, with its implications of the transitory.
But many do more than that. Whether it is William Jekel’s delightfully Hopperish “Night” street scene of World War 2 San Pedro or Phil Dike’s contrastingly upper-class 1934 “Regatta,” the sense of place is powerful, as it is with the works of other well-known artists like Dong Kingman, Lee Blair, and particularly Millard Sheets.
The featured piece of the show is Sheets’ twilight view of the original San Dimas Red Car station, the complexity of whose lighting is worthy of a Rene Magritte street scene. Sheets completed the study shortly before the station burned down in the 1930s. What seemed most emotive to me were the paintings, like this one, that benchmark our loss of a more human urban environment. Two more: With its shattered green hillsides, Ralph Hulett’s landscape of Bunker Hill in the earliest stages of its 1960s demolition feels like a lost urban pastoral. So does Russian-born Mischa Askenazy’s immaculate rendering of the peaceable and doomed Chavez Ravine.
French-born Emil Kosa Jr.'s delicate depiction of the Hollywood Freeway downtown interchange’s eradication of a huge swath of humble urban landscape has an emotional power no number of old black and white photographs can muster.
It’s interesting that many of the artists on display had day jobs at the big studios. Hulett, who also created a line of stylish greeting cards, started out in California as an animator working on Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Kosa’s decades as another kind of scene painter—a studio illustrator--eventually won him the industry’s highest prize: a 1963 Oscar for his special effects on the blockbuster Burton-Taylor film “Cleopatra.”
But if you want to see what was in their hearts and souls, that’s what’s on display now at the Hilbert, and it's an hour's train ride from Downtown LA.
The Hilbert Museum of California Art: 167 N. Atchison St, Orange CA 92866; Open Tuesday thru Saturday, 11am – 5pm; closed Sunday and Monday.
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, literally the biggest art gallery opening in years
"Huge" gets tossed around a lot today. But the word fits on several levels for the new hybrid gallery Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, which opens to the public this weekend.
First, the building in the downtown LA arts district, an old flour mill, is literally huge., with 23,700 square feet of gallery space. Second, it's a huge event in the art world, the arrival of a global art gallery in Los Angeles long in coming. Third, the management has really huge plans to change the way we think of a gallery.
Paul Schimmel, the former MOCA chief curator who left during the museum's Deitch debacle, says, "We're doing some things that are rather revolutionary in the gallery world. Exhibitions will be up two to three times longer than normal. Instead of five weeks, it'll be 15 weeks. We have a very high percentage of loans from museums and collectors. We brought in an outstanding team of scholars, and we're hoping to change the relationship of the public to the work of art."
A big part of the plan seems to be to "activate" the space — encouraging people to come in and hang out, have a coffee, sit in the garden, use the WiFi, eat at the restaurant (when it opens this summer). It's an idea keeps people who aren't rich from being put off by the high prices of the blue-chip artists Hauser Wirth & Schimmel handles. Listen to the audio for much more of my interview with Schimmel, including his thoughts on the Deitch years and MOCA's present and future.
Jori Finkel was at the press opening, and I talked with her about her recent article in The Art Newspaper called "The unspoken reason why galleries are flocking to Los Angeles." As always, follow the money.
Many galleries are fiercely, if discreetly, vying for market control over artists, with high-end galleries such as Hauser Wirth & Schimmel and Sprüth Magers competing directly for the startling number of major Los Angeles-based artists who lack gallery representation there. Just two years ago, the list was extraordinary: Mark Bradford, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Houseago, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Liza Lou, Robert Irwin and Paul McCarthy didn’t have galleries here. -- Jori Finkel, The Art Newspaper
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's inaugural show fills the space with a somewhat revolutionary show that features exclusively works by women sculptors. Curator Jenni Sorkin says (not shockingly) the people in charge of art schools thought women couldn't handle the physicality of sculpting. Turns out (not shockingly), they were idiots. Check the photos for examples, and listen to The Frame Friday for an interview with Sorkin.
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016," is at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel this Sunday through Sept. 4. The gallery is at 901 E. 3d St., Los Angeles, near Wurstkuche and the old Al's Bar. Admission is free.
Cruising in Joe DiMaggio's last car, for sale on Craigslist
As a baseball fan and a Mercedes owner, it was a natural, so to speak. When I saw Joe DiMaggio's last car listed on Craigslist, I knew I had to see it, and drive it, even if I could never own it.
John Evans, a Yankees fan and collector, bought the car after seeing it while he and his wife were getting a sno-cone. He saw it from the corner of his eye, and then couldn't believe it when he discovered it was owned by the Yankee great.
The Yankees gave DiMaggio this car in 1991 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his 56-game hitting streak. Odd, Evans points out, that they picked a Mercedes 420 SEL instead of a 560 SEL, but maybe Joe preferred the better MPG. DiMaggio took it back to Miami and drove it there.
Sportswriter John Schulian (winner of the PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing and author of the novel A Better Goodbye) joined us as color commentator. He says "Mercedes would have appealed to his sense of elegance. He was a very elegant man; he was an elegant baseball player, famous for his grace, his loping stride. And in his personal life, he was always well-turned out. And I'm sure he was pleased to drive this little beauty."
Schulian says the comparatively low pay he got as a Yankee (about $600,000 per year in 1941 in today's money) rankled DiMaggio. "He was desperately underpaid. The Yankees may have been giving away Mercedes in 1991, but most of the time they were throwing away nickels like manhole covers."
Joe took great care of the car, and it was a pleasure to drive. Make sure to listen to the audio so you can drive along with us in the last car of Joe DiMaggio. And if you've got $12,500, the car is yours.
'Music For Train Stations' takes over LA's Union Station Fridays in March
If you haven't been to Los Angeles' Union Station, it's a beautiful but hectic place: Each day over 100,000 people pass through its art deco halls to board buses, trains and taxis. And there's probably no busier time than a late Friday afternoon.
What better time could there be to put on some music?
Los Angeles's Metro Transit Authority has partnered with the music collective Dublab to install speakers in every corner of the station's waiting room. It's called "Music for Train Stations," a series of music installations blending live and recorded ambient music with the aim to give L.A.'s commuters a rare moment of tranquility in the rush.
It's happening every Friday this month, starting with a public listening to the album that inspired the series: "Ambient 1, Music for Airports," Brian Eno's classic, pioneering ambient record, which was first installed at LaGuardia Airport in 1979.
Alejandro Cohen, the director of the music collective and online radio station Dublab, said the aim is to shoehorn some joy into Angelenos' daily commute.
"The idea is to offer that glimpse of inspiration during peoples' busy schedules," he says. "Traveling, meeting deadlines, getting to places on time can be, obviously, stressful for everyone."
When he composed "Music for Airports," Eno said in the liner notes that the music "must be as ignorable as it is interesting." In that tradition, Dublab and Cohen's sound installation surrounds the hall with speakers but doesn't command passengers' attention. To wit: during live performances, Cohen and Dublab set musicians off to the side and out of the way.
"The idea wasn't to blast music from one source and just point from one corner towards the rest of the building but have everything at a lower level, but a much more involved experience. And really it make it at the same time invisible," said Cohen. "If you want, you can just walk around, not really be sure where this is coming from."
Passengers responded in kind: some sat with earbuds on, gladly ignoring it, some talked with friends. Sean Constant, on his way to Camarillo, sat near a window and listened.
"I was just texting a friend of mine about it," he said. "I think a couple weeks ago we saw some cops tackle somebody in here. Peoples' blood pressure was high, and everybody was yelling and stuff. This is the calmest I've actually felt at Union Station, I think, ever."
Tyrone Cain lives in the San Fernando Valley and commutes through Union Station five days a week. Sitting in the ticketing hall, he compared the music to the work of Yanni.
"The music adds a different atmosphere to it, a plus," he says. "It helps relax you. In fact, I have to be conscious of not going to sleep!"
Music for Train Stations takes place every Friday afternoon in March from 3pm to 6pm at Union Station. March 11's event will feature a DJ set by Richard Cartier and a live performance by Los Angeles duo Electric Sound Bath.
Black Mountain: The tiny arts school that spawned giants
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews "Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957," at the Hammer Museum through May 15.
“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” ― John Dewey
For nearly a quarter century, it was the vortex of the Lively American Arts — music, poetry, painting, sculpture, weaving, theater, and, overwhelmingly, dance. And a new show at the Hammer takes you there. It was called Black Mountain College. BMC wasn’t in the heart of a great city like New York, but straddled some Blue Ridge hillsides in faraway Buncombe County, North Carolina.
BMC gave few diplomas, and was never even accredited, but it nurtured American avant-garde culture like no other institution in its time. Great artistic innovators of the past century — John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Ruth Asawa, both of the De Koonings, Buckminster Fuller, Catherine Litz, and Cy Twombly — established themselves at BMC. Other great ones — like Einstein and Aldous Huxley — offered their benedictions as they passed through.
Born in 1933, during one of the darkest moments of the Great Depression, Black Mountain withered away, paradoxically, in 1957, a peak year of America’s Eisenhower Era affluence. Strange that it survived the Depression, to be brought down by America prosperity.
But now we can all encounter what it was all about, thanks to the gregarious and plentiful show at the Hammer Museum. Warning: It’s sure to make you wish you had been there.
"Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957" is curated by Helen Molesworth for The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston before she moved to MOCA. It's a singular show that combines the history, accomplishments and even what you might call the anthropology of Black Mountain. Molesworth was also lead editor on the magnificent catalog, also called “Leap Before You Look,” which could have been BMC’s mission statement. It formed out of two separate exiles — that of progressive educator John Rice, who was booted out of Florida’s conservative Rollins College, and Josef and Anni Albers, whom Hitler drove out of Germany. For about half of the BMC’s history, Rice and the Albers formed an uneasy partnership in running the school and setting its goals.
The variety of BMC innovations on display is just staggering: There’s Buckminster Fuller’s first successful geodesic dome, for instance. There are vivid primary works by Robert Rauschenberg (who was still calling himself Milton then), Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and Ben Shahn. There are mysterious music scores by John Cage and rare film clips of Merce Cunningham performing, creating both his style and the troupe that was to dance it. At times his troupe included the faun-like Rauschenberg, Bucky Fuller, and grizzly-sized poet Charles Olson. There is Anni Albers’ monster loom, and examples of the extraordinary textiles she and her weaving students produced.
Oddly, what sank most deeply into my memory was the extraordinary art jewelry Ms. Albers and her students accomplished — all out of homely ingredients like bottle corks, hairpins, colanders, and plumbers’ washers. She was fulfilling one of her husband’s mandates: to create art out of whatever comes to hand.
There were plenty of other philosophies at Black Mountain, one of them being the distinction between education and instruction. It appears there was plenty of both: there are abounding photographs of buff young men and women in shorts and shirts, wielding picks and shovels as they dig ditches and foundations for their expanded campus, among others of them playing fiddles, practicing drawing, learning to throw pots and studying on the campus’s grassy hillsides. And dancing, dancing — in addition to Cunningham’s inclusive troupe, BMC hosted up to three social dances a week.
But it couldn’t last.
There were severe, growing divisions even in the tiny BMC population. And on some serious issues, too, like whether black students should be allowed to live on campus. In 1945, the students overruled the faculty and made BMC the first integrated college in the South.
Also, BMC was becoming less necessary. Prosperous postwar America was accepting its avant-garde — Jackson Pollack was featured in LIFE magazine. Albers took a post at Yale; even the way-out John Cage got a job at Wesleyan. By 1956, BMC enrollment had shrunk to a handful. Acting rector Charles Olsen, who had once written “What does not change is the will to change,” found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to close the place down. He greeted each departing student with an offer of a drink for the road. And the goodbye message: “Now, Arise.”
By 1957, most of Black Mountain’s artist pioneers had fled North (largely to New York) and West (often to San Francisco). But 60 years later, the nearby North Carolina city of Asheville still sees the ripple effect of the college, which now has a museum of its own downtown. Right now, the museum is hosting a show of the works of abstract colorist Ray Spillenger, who studied at Black Mountain with Willem de Kooning and Josef Albers and then moved to New York to become what some called “America’s greatest unknown painter” and who was the last of the old-line abstractionists when he died in 2013. Admission is free. It’s on 56 Broadway in Asheville.
So what's happening now where Black Mountain College was?
Across the street is the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design, which maintains and extends many Black Mountain creative traditions. The whole surrounding Asheville River Arts District, with its architecture dating back to the 19th Century, is a lively conglomeration of artists, restaurants and bars.
Just as there was at Black Mountain, locals say there are bounties of creativity in Asheville’s theatre, spoken word, music and visual art. 25 minutes away, Madison County still has its strong traditional music heartbeat. But it’s developing its own artistic traditions.
Digging into why transgender teen Larry King was murdered
It was a story that made headlines here for months. In 2008 at a school in Oxnard, a 14-year-old named Brandon McInerney shot and killed a 15-year-old boy named Larry King who'd started identifying as a girl and calling himself "Leticia."
The prosecution called it premeditated, first degree murder; the defense said a lesser charge was deserved because King had essentially sexually harassed McInerney. After the declaration of a mistrial, McInerney pleaded guilty to lesser charges and got 21 years in prison without parole.
Ken Corbett attended the trial and writes about the case in his new book "A Murder Over a Girl." He's a clinical psychologist and has also written "Boyhoods," about masculinity.
Here's a taste, in which one of the boys' classmates takes the stand:
Moving quickly, as we would learn was her style, Ms. Fox turned to the day of the murder, February 12, 2008, and the classroom at E. O. Green Junior High School, where the murder took place. Using an aerial diagram of the school, Ms. Fox asked Mariah to identify the classroom and to confirm where she had been sitting on the morning in question.
Mariah hesitated, and Ms. Fox repeated the question. As Mariah pointed at the diagram, she began to cry. Sheriff Anton offered tissues and water. Mariah took the tissues, leaving the water bottle unopened on the edge of the witness stand.
Calmed, she went ahead to describe how twenty-eight students had started off the school day together in their homeroom, where they stayed for about fifteen minutes before walking together to the computer lab to work on research papers. Mariah's paper was about Anne Frank.
Twenty minutes after the class had settled into the computer lab, Mariah turned away from her computer to ask a friend a question.
"What did you see? What happened?" Ms. Fox asked.
What happened was that one boy shot another in front of a group of people who are now scarred forever. Why it happened is still unclear. Corbett is extremely sympathetic to both boys' highly troubled backgrounds, and critical of the U.S. practice of trying adults as teenagers, but says the scales are tipped toward the Brandons of the world... and that violence is seemingly more acceptable than expressing a non-standard gender identity.
Listen to the audio for John's in-depth conversation with Corbett, then go to Skylight books Friday to hear him talk about it in person.
Event: March 11, 2016 @ 7:30 p.m., Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Song of the week: "Omnia" by Young Lovers
From the heart of the San Fernando Valley comes Young Lovers, a band of high school friends playing mostly instrumental rock music. "Omnia” comes from the band's debut album and is this week’s Off-Ramp song of the week. Check out the video:
Young Lovers are performing live on Sunday, March 20 at Pehrspace in Echo Park, but you’ll have to get there pretty early: the bands set starts at 4:15 that morning. It’s one small part of the beloved venue’s 12 hour long 10th anniversary celebration.
LA band Harbor Party pays tribute to Yacht Rock
UPDATE: Harbor Party is playing The Satellite in Silver Lake on Tuesday, March 15. Doors at 8:30, music at 9:00, and it's free.
Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Landon Beard, lead singer for Harbor Party, which plays yacht rock every Tuesday night at Rockwell in Los Feliz.
Yacht Rock: Another name for the adult-contemporary musical movement in the late 1970's and the early 1980's. It was defined mostly by its smooth sound. Popular Yacht Rockers include: Kenny Loggins, the Doobie Brothers, and Steely Dan. — Urban Dictionary definition
Talk about your guilty pleasures. Some people watch old McMillan & Wife episodes; others read Jackie Collins novels. Me? I like Yacht Rock — music that comes from a simpler and possibly better time. If that floats your boat, too, slip on your Topsiders and join Harbor Party late Tuesday nights at the music club Rockwell.
Tickets for Harbor Party are just five bucks - cheap!
I caught what turned out to be Harbor Party's first performance. After the show, I talked with lead singer and
, former backup singer for Frankie Valli, who hails from the port of San Diego. "We figured out it's specifically a genre of music that was written between 1978 and 1984. Tends to be your Hall & Oates, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross, Michael MacDonald, who were brilliant songwriters."
Christopher Cross singing "Sailing" in 1980
Beard says he got hooked to yacht rock listening to his dad's music when he was only 6-years-old, and he admits that yacht rock might seem "fluffy" at first. But Harbor Party — most of whom are elite USC music grads — find the tunes "super, super tough."
A lot of music now, he says, is about solo singers and a brand more than an act. There's something to be said for when that musicianship was still so strong. "I mean, when we're really picking out things, there are 4, 5, 6 parts on certain songs. It's a blend, it's harmony still."
VIDEO: Watch a casual home movie of "Harbor Party" doing an Eagles tune
Why is it called yacht rock? "I actually don't know who coined the term but I think it's so apropos. It's sad to say, but it's like white people in boat shoes."
Spoiler alert: Beard does not own a yacht, and he can't even sail a boat. But the music of Harbor Party is smooth sailing.
RELATED: Watch Hollywood Steve Huey's hilarious series on the history of yacht rock
Harbor Party is playing the late set (10 p.m.) at Rockwell every Tuesday night. The band also includes Alex "Huntington Newport" Ellis, backing vocals; John Schroeder, guitar; Jack Kovacs, bass; Dan Reckard, keyboard & sax; and Ben Rose and Sam Brawner, drums.