Kevin Ferguson talks about the hot new app game Survive! Mola Mola with Molly Peterson and Milton Love; John talks with Assemblyman Gatto about avoiding the horrors of probate.
Taschen's adults-only exhibit 'Bizarre Life' obsesses over 2 pioneers of fetish art
Warning: This content contains adult themes and may be considered NSFW (not safe for work).
At the intersection of Beverly and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles, there's a billboard of a topless woman adjusting her stockings , her toes curled over her car's dashboard. The image is the perfect emblem for Taschen Gallery's new fetish art show, "Bizarre Life - The Art of Elmer Batters and Eric Stanton" (link NSFW).
(Caption: A billboard advertises Taschen's latest show at the corner of Beverly and Crescent Heights boulevards. Photo: Chris Greenspon)
"A fetish is a substitute for 'natural,' procreative sex," says Taschen Publishing's Sexy Book Editor, Dian Hanson. "Something that symbolizes sex that becomes the center of your sex life."
Photographer Elmer Batters was obsessed with women's feet. Illustrator Eric Stanton's thing was "big, strong women who would wrestle him down to the ground," Hanson says.
Both men were World War II veterans. Batters apparently realized he had a foot fetish on board a submarine, discovering he was the only sailor who liked feet more than the other parts of a woman's body, Hanson says.
(Caption: In the mid-60s, Eric Stanton illustrated hundreds of sexploitation book covers. Photo: Chris Greenspon)
Batters self-published his photos, by necessity. "The Sneaker World of Elmer Batters," "Leg Language," "Thigh High" and "Skirts that Flirt" were magazines sold through mail order in the 50s and 60s. Batters' models were not merely Playboy bunnies trying on shoes; he often photographed them performing lesbian sex acts.
Stanton's illustrations were sold under the counter in Times Square. After making a name for himself as a fantasy-artist-for-hire in pulp magazine ads, he was commissioned by booksellers Stanley Malkin and Eddie Mishkin to illustrate sexploitation novels. Four cover paintings a month paid Stanton's rent at a flat in Manhattan in the mid-60s. The bookstores that carried these novels were protected by organized crime, according to Hanson.
One of Stanton's creations made it onto drug store racks, though. Richard Perez, Stanton's biographer, says Spiderman creator Steve Ditko shared a studio with Stanton in the 1950s, and credited Stanton with Spidey's full-face mask. "There was no such thing before that. There was only a half-mask. You'd see the nose and the mouth. The full-face mask was a fetish inspiration."
The market for fetish art was deflated by the first explicit porn film to get wide distribution in the U.S.: 1970's "Mona the Virgin Nymph," according to Perez. The movie made moot the simulated or suggested sex of Batters' erotica and Stanton's sexploitation, and led to a decline in their careers.
Cartoonist Jack Enyart isn't sure whether Batters and Stanton's work qualifies as pornography.
"The borderline keeps changing," he says. "If someone makes an issue, then that's pornography, or that's awful, and that's something we can't do, but you don't know where it is these days. It's a matter of what special interest group decides 'this is pornographic' or not."
Adult film actress and director April Flores is grateful for their work. She calls Batters' models brave and Stanton's sexual imagination "progressive."
(Caption: Eric Stanton's cover art for "A Lesson In Eros," 1964. The female figure was inspired by '60s screen goddess Ursula Andress. Image courtesy of TASCHEN)
Foot fetishists, submissives, and transvestites were shown that "they're not alone" by Batters and Stanton's work. More importantly, because women were shown participating in their fantasies, it showed young men that "the women liked it and wanted it," Hanson says.
Taschen's "Bizarre Life" runs to May 24 at The Taschen Gallery at 8070 Beverly Blvd, LA CA 90048.
'Survive! Mola mola!' is an addicting game about fish, but how accurate is it?
In "Survive! Mola mola!" — a video game available on iOS and Android — the challenge is in the title: You play a fish whose mission is to eat and survive. Here's the game's trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDvU-9tOztk
The game's protagonist is a Mola mola, or ocean sunfish. The game's object is to reach as much food as your fish can, growing bigger with every plankton, sardine and scallop it eats. But the Mola mola's road to becoming the biggest fish in the sea is fraught with danger. At any moment, the fish could choke on a sardine bone or mistake a plastic bag for a jellyfish:
Or it could go on an adventure to gain even more weight and get caught by humans along the way:
It's kind of a dark game. The motto is "300 million of my own kind, all dead."
But why use a Mola mola? KPCC's Environment Correspondent Molly Peterson asked the game's developers, Select Button, and got this reply from CEO Nakahata Koya:
Mola mola is my hero. Mola mola is the biggest fish but they are very much sensitive. There is a big contradiction in that they die so easily, even [though] they have got a big appearance. That really attracted me.
I thought that the feature and nurturing game are very compatible. So I made the mola a nurturing game.
There are so many ways the Mola mola can die in the game, it prompts the question: How's the science in it? Can an ocean sunfish really die by just jumping out of the water?
"Well, it probably doesn't happen very often," said Milton Love, a UC Santa Barbara marine biologist. "Some of the aspects of it, I was going, like, 'Wow! This actually looks like a baby planktonic Mola!'"
Love says the game gets a lot of parts correct: Mola mola do indeed eat a lot of plankton. And, as they do in the game, Mola mola can grow to gargantuan sizes — they usually end up weighing around 5,000 pounds.
"There was one in the Monterey Bay Aquarium that was a small one that was fed on, admittedly, an usually high protein diet of shrimp, and it gained a couple hundred pounds within a year," Love said.
Love added that while there's obviously unrealistic parts to the game, he's excited about its message.
"Anything that can teach people about the natural world and what really goes on in my mind [is a good thing]," he said. "And I was teasing about the game, but I think it's really a good idea."
MOCA doubles your art pleasure with Sturtevant and Joseph exhibits
The Museum of Contemporary Art on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles has opened two new shows designed to make you think twice.
"Double Conscience" is MOCA's presentation of the double-screen video "m.A.A.d." by Kahlil Joseph. The piece juxtaposes images of L.A. — mostly Compton — from today and 1992. The 1992 scenes are mostly Straight Outta Compton, but the new ones are largely commonplace scenes of everyday life: kids at a community pool, the Apaches High School marching band.
Life is generally better in Compton now, compared to 20 years ago. But watching the new scenes knowing the history, you keep waiting for something bad to happen to the kids at the pool. And then you ask yourself why you expect that. It's a powerful experience.
"Sturtevant: Double Trouble," according to MOCA the first comprehensive American survey of her work, is more intellectual. According to Chief Curator Helen Molesworth, starting in the 1960s, Sturtevant did works based on the works of her contemporaries — people like Warhol and Jasper Johns — but Sturtevant refused to use the word "copy."
But if Johns and Warhol made legitimate art by appropriating other images (like the American flag and Marilyn Monroe), then isn't it also legit to appropriate their art? Molesworth says Sturtevant's point, though, is for the viewer to put themselves in the artist's position. What was it like to be Johns or Warhol doing this art?
Make sure to listen to our entire interview, in which Molesworth also talks about MOCA's fresh start after its recent financial and personnel turmoil.
Kahlil Joseph: Double Trouble is at MOCA through August 16; "Sturtevant: Double Trouble" is up through July 27. They're both at the Grand Avenue location. At MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, be sure to catch William Pope.L's powerful and controversial "Trinket," up through June 28.
Dr. George Fischbeck talks about his life 'In Weather'
Update: We were crushed to hear that Dr. George Fischbeck died on Wednesday, March 25. He was 92 years old. Here's Patt's 2013 interview with Dr. George:
Not only was George Fischbeck, also known as Dr. George, one of the most beloved characters on local television, he also an award-winning journalist and educator. Fischbeck spent the better part of 25 years on TV in Los Angeles.
The man with the bow tie and glasses is 90 years old now, but is still a character, a performer and a teacher. He has never pretended to be a meteorologist, but he does know how to get peoples' attention. And how to get them to learn and remember. Patt Morrison spoke to him about his new book, "My Life In Weather."
On being a weatherman and a teacher:
"Well, I couldn't do anything else. I come from a family of teachers, and I'll tell you one thing about teaching, if you can get a kid's attention you can teach them anything. You've got to do whatever you can to make sure they're listening to you and not doing anything else. And then you can teach them."
On doing the weather in the early news days:
"I knew everybody in the viewing audience. They were all my friends to begin with, and when I opened up and said 'my friends' they knew who I was talking to. And I've got their attention, and that's the whole secret."
On how doing the weather changed over the years:
"I started in the early days I was a weather forecaster with the National Weather Service. I put in my time down at the weather station three times a day. I had my maps and I'd take my maps, make Xerox copies and I'd put the maps on the air so people could see what I was doing. And now everyone does it."
New bill from Assemblyman Gatto aims at expense and delay of probate
Say your folks own a nice house like this one. If they put it into a trust, that speeds its transfer to the heirs (you) but costs thousands of dollars to set up. If it goes to probate, that's tens of thousands in costs and months, maybe years, of delay.
There are some advantages to probate: you get formal proceedings overseen by the court, and a cutoff to claims that creditors can make. But Glendale Assemblyman Mike Gatto's AB 139, which has passed the Assembly Judiciary Committee and now heads to Appropriations, would let homeowners treat a home like most any other asset, and avoid the torturous, expensive probate process.
AB 139 would create a “Revocable Transfer on Death (TOD) Deed” in California to let the homeowner specify to whom their house should be deeded to when they die.
“It is illogical and unfair to allow someone to pass a $250,000 retirement account and a $50,000 classic car easily, but then to force our constituents into probate if that same individual owns a $150,000 house." -- Assemblyman Mike Gatto
Gatto says 25 other states have this system, without a single instance of abuse.
'Ask a Moritician's' Caitlin Doughty's own version of Fear of Flying
Caitlin Doughty is a licensed funeral director, host of YouTube's Ask a Mortician series, and author of the book Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: and other Lessons from the Crematory. She's also a contributor to Off-Ramp and shares this story:
It's a normal day, after a normal flight, and our plane is coming in for a landing. Looking out the window I can spot the airport, the runway, the other planes on the ground. Moments before we touch down, the engine roars, the nose of the plane pulls vertical, and we shoot back into the air at a very steep angle.
As we bump back into the sky, the plane is eerily silent. We passengers are flicking our eyes back and forth and white knuckling the armrests.
I grip my partner's hand. "It's not terrorism, is it?" he whispers. "Hijacking?"
"No, I'm pretty sure the wheels fell off," I reply, with no sarcasm. At this point I'm fairly sure the wheels have, indeed, fallen off. You can't land if the wheels have fallen off, right?
The plane circles around, and 15 minutes later we touch down. In those 15 minutes, not a word of explanation or comfort comes from the cockpit.
Some frantic safe-on-the-ground Googling tells me what we experienced what’s known as a go-around. A go-around is when, for some reason, the pilot decides the landing were going to make won’t work out. Maybe it’s a bad angle or the wrong speed; maybe there’s another plane on the runway.
I'm all for this. If there's any question of a landing being unsafe, by all means, try again. But the silence in those 15 minutes was downright scary. I was all set to post this experience on Facebook the following morning, sympathy trolling, when word came in that an Air Asia flight disappeared over the Java Sea.
The loss of the plane put my middling complaints into perspective, but it did nothing to help my mounting fear of flying. A lot of people are afraid to fly, but I'm a mortician, and an advocate of death acceptance. I've worked for years to become comfortable with my own death, that it can happen anytime, anywhere. So why am I suddenly so afraid to fly?
There’s quite a bit of evidence that this kind of fear pops up in our late 20s. Maybe that’s the age when we stop thinking we're bulletproof and finally realize that we have no control over our lives, and hurtling through the air in a metal tube thousands of miles above the ground is just a particularly visceral metaphor for that fact.
The only thing that seems to work to combat the loss of control, other than pills and white wine, is knowledge. How the plane works, how landing gear functions, how much turbulence they’re designed to endure. Answer: a ridiculous amount of turbulence, far more than you’d ever run into on a passenger flight.
It doesn’t help to hear general statements like “flying is safer that driving!” But it does help to hear specifics: My chance of dying in a car crash is about 1 in 5,000. Chance of being killed by a shark? 1 in 3.7 million.
Dying in a plane crash? 1 in 11 million.
Then I stumbled on a post deep in the bowels of a message board from a woman who said her best tip was to fly United and listen to “Channel 9” on the headphone selector, the conversation between the cockpit and air traffic control. The post explained, “You feel some turbulence, and start to freak out, and then the pilot casually asks the co-pilot ‘what do you think, 37 thousand better than 35 thousand feet? Let’s ask air traffic control.’”
Yes! That’s it. Right there, that’s what I want, access to completely mundane pilot chatter. Just like it helps to know what the dentist is planning before he sticks the drill in your mouth. Just like it helps so many of my clients to hear exactly where their mom’s body is going when my funeral home picks her up. It’s better to know.
My go-around would have been significantly less terrifying if the pilot had said something. Anything. The absolute worst thing is to leave a scared passenger his or her own imagination.
But as great as that all sounds: United has spent the past year pulling all their inflight entertainment, and with it, access to Channel 9. Pills and white wine it is.
LAST CHANCE: MOCA's huge American flag exhibit will blow you away
UPDATE: This is the last week to see trinket; the exhibit's last day is Sunday, June 28. Saturday and Sunday hours: 11-6.
Take a 55 x 16-foot American flag, add a few spotlights and four huge movie wind fans, and you have an unexpectedly overwhelming and moving art exhibit.
"Trinket," by William Pope.L (pronounced poh-PELL) is the centerpiece of a show of the same name at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in downtown L.A.'s Little Tokyo. It's wonderful in its simplicity, and bewildering in its complexity. It's just a flag in the wind, but it's so much more.
WATCH Off-Ramp's special slo-mo video of William Pope.L's "Trinket" at MOCA
The noise and the wind from the fans, plus the ever-changing shape of the flag in the lights, create an immersive experience even before you start thinking about what "Trinket" means to you — especially in the context of the Tunis museum attack, the baby cradled in a flag, Rudy Giuliani's claim that President Obama doesn't love America, U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
"People need to see it," said MOCA chief curator Bennett Simpson as we stood downwind, like CNN anchors covering a hurricane. "But, more than that, they need to feel it. The artist Pope.L says people should physically feel their democracy, and not just understand it as an abstract symbol, and with this work, yeah, you are physically enveloped in the work."
William Pope.L's Trinket is at the Geffen Contemporary through June 28.
Del Casher invented the wah-wah pedal and changed rock and roll history
Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, George Harrison — none of them would sound quite like they do without Del Casher. In the mid-'60s, Casher helped develop a device he envisioned as the new voice of the guitar. He called it the wah-wah pedal.
The wah made it possible to take the electric guitar from a harsh sound to a softer one with a simple rock of the foot. Here's a demonstration of a wah-wah pedal in action:
Dunlop GCB95F Crybaby Classic Wah Pedal Demo - Sweetwater Sound
Now in his 70s, the pedal's inventor runs a studio in Burbank and still writes and performs. But before Casher came to California, he was an Indiana kid fascinated with musicians like Django Reinhardt and Les Paul.
Casher's dad bought him a Sears Roebuck guitar for $9.95 Casher got to work modifying his electric guitars just like Les Paul. It was also Casher's father who suggested he go to Los Angeles to pursue music further — but like so many who come to Southern California to pursue a dream, Casher wasn't thinking realistically.
His big plan was to ask Lawrence Welk (of "The Lawrence Welk Show") if he had a job for him during an autograph signing.
"As I approached him I said, 'Mr. Welk I'm not here for an autograph, I'd like to play guitar in your orchestra, because I'm from Hammond, Indiana and I play really great guitar," Casher said. "And he looked at me and he said 'Absolutely not!'"
After Welk turned him down, Casher landed a job playing with the Three Suns at L.A.'s hottest night club: The Coconut Grove. Before long, it was Welk who was calling Casher to solo with his orchestra.
Del Casher "Dark Eyes" - The Lawrence Welk Show
Casher says he always tinkered with his sound, looked for ways to make his guitar do new things. His biggest idea came while he was playing guitar with a traveling group of musicians' Vox amplifiers put together in order to show off their products.
"I turned a knob. And I turned the wrong knob because that knob went 'wow.' And I said, 'That's the sound I've been looking for!' So I went to Stan Cutler, who was head of engineering, and I said 'Stan, you know that little knob over there on that amplifier, could you put that in a pedal?'"
The wah-wah pedal was born. Now Casher keeps the original in a bright red case
But to Casher's surprise, the people at Vox didn't get it. Casher got Joe Banaran, the chairman of Vox, to take a listen. But, according to Casher, Banaran saw the wah-wah pedal for trumpets and trombones — not guitars.
Casher knew he had to sell people on the wah-wah for guitar, so he got creative. He made a Vox Wah-Wah demo record in his own garage studio. Casher even tried showing the pedal off for James Brown, but Brown wasn't interested either.
It wasn't looking good for the wah.
"I got nobody on my side," Casher said. "I'm thinking I'll call up my friend Frank Zappa. I told Frank, 'The wah-wah pedal is really something you should consider, because I can't get anyone else to go for it.'"
Zappa found plenty of uses for the wah — and Casher says that's how Jimi Hendrix got turned on to it.
"The biggest fame that Jimi had got with the wah pedal was playing Woodstock, which was 1969," Casher said. "Everybody said, 'how's he getting that magical sound?' Well, just call me up, I'll tell you how to do it, I already been doing it for two years."
Once you start listening for the wah, you'll hear it everywhere. From Funkadelic solos, to Led Zeppelin licks, to Isaac Hayes' Academy Award-winning theme for "Shaft."
George Harrison even wrote a song called "Wah-Wah" and in it gave the pedal plenty of playing time.
"The wah-wah pedal was a device that was allowing him to express a particular feeling," said Casher. "That was exactly my vision for the pedal. Everybody has whatever they want it to be and the wah-wah enables them to do that."
Bakersfield Confidential: The city's unique natural history museum documents the San Joaquin Valley
It doesn’t look like any natural history museum you ever saw before. First, it doesn’t stand in the middle of a big park-like lawn. And it’s not a fantastic piece of Victorian architecture. Instead, it’s a pastel-painted former JC Penney store in the middle of a tired downtown block in good old Bakersfield, California.
The Buena Vista Museum of Natural History is the only museum anywhere that documents the geology, zoology and paleontology of California’s great San Joaquin Valley, which extends from the Tehachapis to Sacramento. At the Buena Vista, there's everything from dinosaurs, large and small, down to an amazing collection of dinosaur eggs and even dinosaur fetuses.
The Valley as it is now began to form about the time those dinosaurs became extinct, leaving behind the sprawling petroleum resources that gave Kern County some of the nation’s richest oil fields, and also leaving a rich fossil record.
Then came the flood, as museum board member Tim Elam explains. "Kern County," he says, "is where Northern California geology meets Southern California geology, so we've got a variety of rocks, and we are an area that was once covered by the Pacific Ocean, and that is why we tend to find marine fossils."
A primal sea lion skeleton does broad-pawed breaststrokes over the museum's display cases. The Buena Vista also has an astounding hoard of shark remains, ranging from huge, menacing maws to a flourish of shark teeth excavated at the nearby Sharktooth Hill. The museum staff takes members on regular tooth digs on the hill.
Two million years ago, the ocean was replaced by a freshwater lake, which had shrunk to three separate lakes by the time the first Native Americans showed up. The Yokuts were just one of the local tribes the lakes nourished. Once Anglo settlers began farming the Valley in the 19th century, the big lakes disappeared into their irrigation ditches.
Then all that oil was found at the dawn of the 20th century, and the story of modern Kern County began.
In its wall charts and specimen cases, the museum tells this story to around 14,000 people a year, many or most of them children. But I suspect that what excites the kids even more than the geology and the dino remnants is the thoroughly non-PC but incredible collection of taxidermied animals. These come from a benefactor who traveled and hunted in Africa, Asia and Australia.
There used to be other museums like this in Central California, but the Buena Vista is the last one left. It’s mostly volunteer run, and functions without government funding apart from some local grants. Elam says they’re nearly halfway into a $300,000 campaign to buy the old JC Penney building that houses them.
The Buena Vista Museum of Natural History is at 2018 Chester Avenue in Bakersfield. It's open Thursday through Saturday, 10 to 4, and Sunday noon to 4.
Make sure to check out the rest of Marc Haefele's writing on Bakersfield, which he says is worth more than a day trip.
Bakersfield Confidential: A few gems in a town with a bad rap
A 100-mile plus mile drive from Los Angeles will take you to Santa Barbara. It will also take you to Encinitas, or Big Bear Lake. Or it can take you to Bakersfield. And why should it do that, you ask? Even for 24 hours?
Because under the rugged surface, it contains enough attractions and surprises to easily fill 24 hours. Despite its having 364,000 people, Bako, as it is locally known, is one of the Golden State’s most avoided places. Its commonplace superlatives are dubious: the most obese, the most conservative, the least college-educated population. The air quality is below L.A.'s.
(Buck Owens in the early years. Image: BuckOwens.com)
On the other hand, it’s got its own worldwide country sound, courtesy of the likes of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, who left us his landmark Crystal Palace, the only combination museum, dance hall and restaurant I can think of anywhere. There is the county museum, which features acres of real life-displays of the area's agricultural and oil-drilling history. It has a sizable community college and a CSU campus, which provide some cultural underpinnings. It has several famous Basque restaurants — like the James Beard-awarded Noriega Hotel — that feed you fiercely.
But even if you skip these, you can get right to the heart of the city via bus from downtown L.A., which at this time of year passes through the Grapevine at its green spring finest. (Trust me, the trip is much more enjoyable when you aren’t driving.) And have an enjoyable, fulfilling day’s stay on foot.
You can also check into the nicest hotel in town a block or two away from the bus station. This is the Padre, an eight-story 1928 hostelry, recently restored in slightly odd deco-steampunk style within walking distance from some art galleries, antique shops, restaurants and two singular museums you've never heard of.
Plus a great music store, a formidable-looking steampunk department store and several tattoo parlors. What is called the downtown arts district seems to be growing, but it still has a ways to go. But there are a number of expansive restos around the Padre, along with a serious-looking club scene that seemed to switch on around our bedtime, so we didn’t sample it.
We picked Mama Roomba (1814 Eye Street) for late lunch purely because of its colorful exterior. Inside, it’s like an old Caribbean café with a South American menu. Peruvian ceviche and Chilean ground beef empanadas were perfect and our salad was the most beautiful thing we'd seen in the city. An impressive variety of wine was on hand. Service was indulgent, prompt and friendly. “Take your time,” our server told us. “We don’t close until 9:45 p.m.”
Uricchio’s Trattoria (1400 17th Street) is big and generally crowded, but, even minus a reservation, we didn't have to wait at 7 p.m. Thursday. No spa cuisine here. There were tables of as many as 20 people, chowing down on lasagna, spaghetti Alfredo, cannelloni, manicotti — recalling that local obesity statistic. Despite the crowd, our server was pleasant and fast. West L.A. prices, but the portions were larger.
The wine list, on the other hand, had some premium selections at bottom-level prices. I had the manicotti marinara, my wife the chicken piccata. The portions were so big we were sure that we’d take something home, but were so excellent that we finished every little bit. The house sourdough bread was good too. We skipped dessert and resolved to take it easy on breakfast.
The Padre Hotel has a handful of eating and drinking places, including a bar that was hosting “PaintNite,” a hard-drinking watercolor class that convened the evening of our arrival. Dozens of aspiring painters clutched wine glasses and brushes as they copied a Van Gogh starscape off a vast flat-screen monitor. Other Padre offerings include the relatively costly Belvedere Room restaurant, fancy enough for Beverly Hills.
But we breakfasted at the Brimstone Bar, whose only satanic detail was a red-felt pool table. I had a somewhat bland rendition of huevos rancheros with an excellent side order of roasted potatoes, my wife a big bowl of oatmeal with a few strawberries and, by request, a lot of walnuts and soy milk. With good coffee, the whole thing came to about $20 with tip. Then we were off in time for the opening of the Buena Vista Natural History Museum, then the Bakersfield Museum of Art, a last stroll in the park and then over the greening mountains towards home.
Check out the rest of Marc's "Bakersfield Confidential" and plan your own trip to Kern County.
Bakersfield Confidential: How antiques saved one Woolworth's
It's Tiki Tuesday at one of my local haunts, and while I'm there, wearing a vintage Hawaiian shirt I picked up for $20, I'll be thinking of Woolworth's and Bakersfield.
My friend Chris and I drove up to Bakersfield yesterday to take photos to illustrate Marc Haefele's "Bakersfield Confidential," a series of broadcast and online pieces on the gems of what Marc calls one of California's "most-avoided places."
Yes, we saw the meth-heads, the vacant lots, and the vacant storefronts. But we also stumbled across the Five & Dime Antique Mall, which inhabits the old Woolworth's store in downtown Bakersfield, across from the old Kress department store.
We met Evelyn Merriman as we walked in. The Bakersfield native says she retired as manager of the place a few years ago, and is just working a few days a week now. She told us the story: Woolworth's closed in 1994, and within a few months, the antique mall moved in. And they didn't wreck anything. The exterior is absolutely pristine, from the plastic sign above the door to the entrance terrazzo that spells out "Woolworth's." Inside, the same story, down to the luncheonette, which is still serving food.
As a kid who grew up in small town America - Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan - and spent a good deal of time and money in our Woolworth's, it was a relief and a pleasure to see a reminder of my childhood so lovingly cared for.
(Woolworth's in downtown Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.)
And you have to wonder: if Bakersfield hadn't been economically depressed, wouldn't someone have snapped up the Woolworth's and ruined it? It's a small silver lining, but I'll take it.
Meantime, we're having a conversation about Bakersfield on the KPCC Off-Ramp page:
"Did you know that in the late sixties and early seventies there were at least 3 active theatre groups in Bakersfield along with the Kern Philharmonic? We had upscale clothing boutiques that rivaled anything down in LA. In fact, Brock's Tea Room on the Mezzanine was every bit as swanky in it's day as Bullock's Tea Room on Wilshire Blvd in the Miracle Mile of Los Angeles. And all this artsy-snooty sophisticated culture existed side-by-side with Country Music greats who topped the charts. It was a wonderful crazy mix that gave Bakersfield its own unique personality." -- Bakersfield native Cindra Lee Henry
Share your stories and thoughts, too.
Song of the week: 'Circles' by Dunes
Off-Ramp's song of the week is "Circles" by the LA band Dunes.
https://soundcloud.com/dunesband/circles
Dunes is made up of former members of Mika Miko and Abe Vigoda. "Circles" is off Dunes' upcoming, yet-to-be titled album. You can see them live at the Purple Room in Palm Springs on March 28 and at Pixels in Downtown Riverside on March 29. Here's a video from Dunes' 2011 song "Tied Together:"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaYjWwYvXs4
Bakersfield Confidential: The Bakersfield Museum of Art
The handsome, 20-year-old Bakersfield Museum of Art is perfectly situated in the town’s Central Park, which includes a walkway along a fast-flowing stream, full of ducks and geese, called Mill Creek. On its far shore stands the United States Courthouse, with some paintings of its own. This de facto campus, a long walk from downtown, may be the most attractive green space in the city proper. It is well worth a stroll in itself.
("2011 Bakersfield Museum of Art Sign" Skyman9999/Wikipedia Commons)
So what kind of art museum does Bako possess? A very decent one, but not one that suggests a long local artistic tradition; no donated heirloom Utrillos or Picassos here. Unlike Monterey and Laguna, Bakersfield has apparently attracted few artists in the past.
Most of the permanent collection consists of solid works by modern California painters, mostly from the last 20 years or so. They include crowd pleasers like Dennis Zieminski’s “Giant Orange,” a glowing, glaring portrait of a pre-World War II California juice stand, as well as some surprises — like a gorgeous egg tempera landscape called “Abandoned Olive Trees” by nonagenarian late-blooming Martinez surrealist Sylvia Fine, and a 1950 expressionist satire of the capitalist marketplace: “Buyers and Sellers” by maverick Daily Worker illustrator William Gropper. Most of the rest of the permanent collection seems to me to be on the conservative side.
But there’s also a very interesting and unusual show going on there right now by San Bernardino County painter Dennis Hare: his first retrospective. His work falls into two categories — what he calls “figurative assemblages” and “abstract assemblages.” The two overlap — basically, Hare does subdued-colored abstract compilations of found objects like tires, toys, fabrics and many other objects.
He also creates what might pass for conventional, figurative paintings in bright intense colors that include interacting groups of people, whether children at play, men in hats waiting in a union hall or folks just waltzing on the shore. The found-object canvases demand some intellectualization from us — like his "Route 5," with discarded objects from along that interstate stuck to the canvas. The figurative work, however, seems more to jump out at the viewer — and bring them in.
(Dennis Hare, from the artist's official website)
Hare brings an unusual resume to his work: for decades, he was a serious beach volleyball player, a top-rated pioneer in that activity. Then he had his first serious look at a Van Gogh painting. Although he’s assiduously self-taught as a painter, it’s said that his involvement in the sport brought him to great familiarity with the human figure, as his earliest work — fast sketches of volleyball matches — shows.
He uses the palette knife virtuoso-style, piling on the bright colors in thick layers. Oddly, his conventional work seems to me more original somehow than his abstractions. He’s worth a trip to Bako to see, along with two other smaller shows: Kusan Ogg’s “Rev Zero” and an absorbing three-artist display of drawings by Scott Hassell, Anne Marie Rousseau and Pamela Diaz Martinez.
And then there is the park with its river rambles, its geese and its wild ducks. Even the nearby new low-income housing is attractive, more like something you’d find in a New England town than you might expect from a small-city California community redevelopment agency.
The well-designed museum building also contains expansive classrooms for art students from age 3 and up. If Bakersfield doesn’t yet have its own school of painting, it’s certainly taking the right steps toward creating one.
Be sure to check out the rest of Marc's "Bakersfield Confidential."