A seeker and a famous son build a city in the High Desert: Ding Le Mei and Lloyd Wright's Institute of Mentalphysics ... John rides in the last B-24 ... Jean-Michel Jarre is in town this weekend: go see him. WARNING: This episode has NO Twin Peaks spoilers (David Lynch, 2016, by John Rabe).
Elton John's new 'Tiny Dancer' video is a Los Angeles love letter
46 years ago, Elton John released Madman Across the Water whose opening track, "Tiny Dancer" would go on to enrich karaoke bars, Kate Hudson movies, and everyone's parents.
Monday, Rocketman fans new and old finally received an official video for "Tiny Dancer" by Max Weiland featuring Off-Ramp's benevolent muse: the city of Los Angeles. This video is one of three creative reimaginings of Elton's three greatest hits, which premiered at Cannes last week. Videos for both "Bennie and the Jets" and "Rocketman" are also available.
But filming "Tiny Dancer" throughout LA makes a lot of sense when you think about the inspiration for the song's lyrics. Elton's long-time lyricist Bernie Taupin originally wrote the song for his then-girlfriend, turned- first wife Maxine Feibelman the actual "seamstress for the band" after a trip to California with her in 1970.
I guess I was trying to capture the spirit of that time, encapsulated by the women we met, especially at the clothes stores and restaurants and bars all up and down the Sunset Strip. They were these free spirits, sexy, all hip-huggers and lacy blouses, very ethereal the way they moved.
The video follows 12 different people in Los Angeles from behind the wheels of their cars or skateboards. We see a young woman riding along Palm Tree-lined streets, while a girl in a Volvo drives past with an urn strapped into the passenger seat, she passes a gas station with a dancing Marilyn Monroe impersonator, then flashes to a man buying alcohol at the Circus Liquor, as a woman clutches a 10-year sobriety token outside, then we see young girls in colorful quinceañera gowns riding in a limo by Mariachi Plaza.
Each of these vignettes helps weave together a story about the people of Los Angeles, both happy and sad, dancing or struggling, that the melody and lyrics of "Tiny Dancer" lend themselves to. It is a journey song and this video complements the narrative perfectly, even 46 years later.
Oh and Marilyn Manson kisses a snake in it. So there's that too.
Watch the video, and let us know what you think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYcyacLRPNs&t=297s
REVIEW: Dean Byington's ferocious, unruly impulses in a new show at Kohn Gallery
Off-Ramp arts correspondent Marc Haefele reviews Dean Byington's “Theory of Machines." See it at the Kohn Gallery through June 30.
“I have my impulses,” says the bearded, sturdy painter Dean Byington, gesturing at his nine immense black and white canvases in “Theory of Machines’’ at the Kohn Gallery. Looking at the pictures, you think, “These impulses are deeply sublimated.”
That’s because his work is so profoundly meticulous, on such a grandiose scale, that you’ll want to put on your reading glasses to see it. Its land and townscapes depict dozens of square miles of intricate visions of compressed, distressed and fragmentary realities, juxtaposed and superimposed into the irreal by Byington’s ferocious, unruly imagination. And those impulses.
The commonality is their feeling of faltering failure. Baroque facades poke up at 45 degree angles, like sagging tombstones. Domed and steepled building shapes are skeletal, flayed structures of iron framework. At the base of each canvas there is usually at least one great concentric hole, often representing an open pit mine. One of these is labeled “Omphalos,” or “navel.”
This refers, says Byington, to the damage we do to our earth.
Overhanging many of his tableaux are stage-scenery flats. These objects had a key role in Byington’s early artistic development. As a child, he had the run of the film lots of Culver City—Particularly Desilu Studios, known now as Culver Studios. In his catalog, Byington said: “The sense of abandonment in there is something I always carry: the feeling of loss and decay in those lots and sets was very palpable and hard to shake.”
“So much of Hollywood is a façade,” said David O. Selznik. And although Byington now lives in the Bay Area, his works invoke that filmic reality. The permanent sense of the temporary, the idea that once something is photographed, it is discarded. Modern machines often sprawl in ruin among his landscape’s ancient artifices—like the seven derelict turbofan aircraft engines at the bottom of “Theory of Machines (Grand Saturn). “Grand Saturn” is said to riff on 19th Century painter Edwin Church’s “The Heart of the Andes,’’ but Church’s virgin South American mountainscape is here sullied by layers of debris and the detritus of countless derelict civilizations, while centered by a bosky stage flat from some Arcadian drama. In Byington’s earlier work, nature is vivid, even occasionally striped with color, But in his recent pictures, nature is often represented by flat fakery.
The painter’s key influence include the printmakers of the 18th to 19th century, but his technique is rooted in earlier German engraving, particularly that of Durer. Yet the collage-like process by which he builds his work is also reminiscent of the early '60s pre-psychedelic creations of artist/writers such as Akbar del Piombo. Byington cuts and clips and applies and builds his surfaces, then finishes his paintings with silk screens and computer scanning. The results include antique surfaces that closely impersonate the lines of fine engraving.
But the eldritch execution is belied by Byington’s transgressive impulses—like the vast 18th century warship that is perfectly inverted, standing on the tips of its masts in “The New City.” Or the waterless “Waterfall” that does include a procession of happy-looking folk lining up to vault into a giant, hand-cranked meat grinder. Another of his imagined cities even includes a Chinatown—with the signs inverted. What does this immense, immaculate swath of thwarted representation actually represent?
Trying to answer that question bears heavily on the viewer’s mind. And that’s a worthwhile experience.
The Institute of Mentalphysics : A seeker and a famous son build a city in the High Desert
"With their oblique angles, rubble stone masonry and long low lines, these structures settle into the desert like shards of heavy quartz exposed by recent floods." -- Architectural historian Eric Davis
On 420 acres on the outskirts of the unincorporated town of Joshua Tree, a vast complex of odd, angular buildings bleaches in the High Desert sun. It’s the Institute of Mentalphysics, also known as the Joshua Tree Retreat Center.
The Institute broke ground August 23, 1946, and is equal parts a mystery and a dream.
The dream began with Edwin J. Dingle, a British expat, naturalized American, wayfaring adventurer, and spiritual seeker. Dingle was an eyewitness to China's Boxer Rebellion and to the revolution that overthrew China's emperor a decade later. He wrote the first book on the founding of the Chinese Republic, and in 1910, travelled to Tibet and stayed for nine months. Expensive maps and almanacs based on his travels became the standard reference books on China for decades.
Dingle relocated to California. He withdrew from public life for six years, and then re-emerged as "Ding Le Mei," architect of a new philosophical movement: a non-denominational hybrid of Christian and Tibetan mysticism called "The Science of Mentalphysics."
Dingle wasn't the only one who saw California as a place for new beginnings. In Los Angeles, another man for whom the Institute of Mentalphysics was also searching. He was Frank Lloyd Wright, Jr. and struggled for years to make a name for himself in architecture, to step out of his father’s shadow. He eventually dropped the “Frank” to try to differentiate himself from his overbearing, visionary father.
His father was a globetrotter with signature works in LA, Tokyo, Manhattan, Chicago, Scottsdale. But California wasn't just Lloyd's home, it was his canvas: his major creations were all built within a 75 mile radius, with Riverside California at its center.
The largest concentration of Lloyd Wright’s work is at the Institute of Mental Physics, and the story of how they came to be - and whether Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. had a hand in designing the buildings there - is the subject of this new audio work from Off-Ramp contributor R.H. Greene, “Elevations: Frank Lloyd Wright Sr. and Jr. in California’s New Age.”
Even in unfinished form, the Institute of Mentalphysics remains one of Lloyd Wright's signature achievements. They suit the Mojave plateau they were built to inhabit as though they were born there.
Review: The Getty Center's 'immensely enlarged snapshots' of 300 years ago
Off-Ramp culture correspondent Marc Haefele reviews Eyewitness Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe, at the Getty Center through July 30.
Jaded souls in the last century used the term “pseudo event” as a criticism of any event that was staged, rather than occurring naturally. According to the Getty’s lavish new show, “Eyewitness Views,” this was not a valid distinction in 1700s Europe. Particularly in Rome and Venice, but even in cities as far flung as London, Madrid and Warsaw, the more contrived and staged the public event was, the more worthy it seemed of an immense artistic commemoration in the form of a mighty and intricate painting, usually by one of a group of specialists known as View Painters.
Some of these — Guardi and Canaletto, for instance -- are best known today for masterly renderings of canals, palaces, squares and classical ruins for rich tourists. But they, like the lesser known Panini, Calavarijs and Belloto, were also memorializing the spectacles of the Age of Enlightenment, usually in honor of occasions like royal births, weddings, the elevation of a ruler, the arrival or departure of a prince or a pope or even a mere ambassador. Any of which was likely to foment mighty, if temporary, architectural monuments, immense costume parades, regattas, or monster musical theatrical productions with performers by the hundred. Many of these they recorded for posterity, in more detail that you might suppose to be humanly possible.
![Öl auf Leinwand <br>Bernardo Michiel Bellotto (Canaletto) [1720 - 1780]<BR>Bernardo Bellotto, gen. Canaletto Venedig 1721 - 1780 Warschau . 1765<BR>Inventar-Nr.: Gal. Nr. 638](https://scpr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4061d05/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1024x743+0+0/resize/1920x1394!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fa.scpr.org%2F160733_7af2a80b7b2e8b13043b962d6a18c796_original.jpg)
A fine collection of these great oil-painted transcriptions, curated by Peter Bjorn Kerber, is what we have at the Getty: it is amazing to think that nobody ever before thought to do an exhibit of what amount to some of the most spectacular pictures of an entire century, granting us immensely enlarged snapshots from up to 300 years in the past.
Kerber notes that there is a certain aspect of mass-production to some of these mighty canvases. Rather than render all of hundreds of people over and over again for different paintings, an artist might keep a stockpile of sketches, so that a man in blue in one painting might show up wearing brown in another. He also noted that what appears to be a literal view of a massive occurrence could be built on illusions, just to make it possible to include all the participants. In one painting, he pointed out, “a wall had been removed and the painter’s point of view is from 10 feet off the floor.’’
Despite or because of these liberties, the sense of reality is immense. Panini’s "Musical Performance in the Teatro Argentina in Honor of the Marriage of the Dauphin of France" appears to give us all the hundred or so performers arranged in cloudy tiers across the stage, as well as an audience of over a thousand on the main floor and in five tiers of boxes and balconies. It's as though Panini was desperately afraid of leaving anyone out. So strong is the sense of being present that the average viewer can’t help feeling direly underdressed for this glitteringly costumed presentation.
MEANTIME: Check out a modern California artist whose work is just as detailed
Just as stunning are the exterior functions shown here, particularly Canaletto’s regatta festivals, whose flag-draped, gilded, red-trimmed longboats make our Rose Bowl floats look drab. Kerber stresses that it wasn’t all fun and festivities for the eye-witness masters of the 18th century. On occasion, they had to capture genuine events, genuine disasters. They acquitted themselves magnificently. Parisian Hubert Robert strikingly rendered the burning Palais-Royal opera house in 1781. Pierre Jacques-Volaire did several views of the 1771 explosion of Mt. Vesuvius. 18 years later, Hubert Robert recorded for us a destructive event that was to trigger an even greater explosion, one that would end forever that era’s aristocratic, pompous and glistering rituals so loved by the view painters. It was the destruction of the Bastille.
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Nearby, in another Getty Gallery, there’s a simple drawing of a structure that in sheer extravagance and implausibility puts anything by Panini and his colleagues to shame. It’s by the great architectural fantasist Giovanni Piranesi, and it’s called “View of an Ancient Port.” A vaulting vision of waterfront arches, columns, pediments and pilasters rising to a barely suggested sky, it could never have existed in reality but will stay forever in your imagination.
It’s one of the highlights of the exhibit called “The Lure of Italy: Artists’ Views.” It consists largely of drawings and water colors, work on the run, so to speak, of the same general period as "Eyewitness Views." It is a beguiling display of enormous talents, limning many elegant, for the most part under-portrayed, sights in Italy, from the heart of Rome to the waterfalls of Terni. The danger of it is that it might actually inspire you to toss some drawing pads in your back pack and immediately book a cheap ticket to Rome.
Louis Zamperini's son flies in an 'Unbroken' B-24 bomber
On May 27, 1943, Louis Zamperini - the Olympian and hero of the movie "Unbroken" - was flying in a B-24 bomber on a mission over the Pacific. The plane had mechanical difficulties and went down about 800 miles south of Oahu. Zamperini was adrift for almost 50 days before he made it to land, where he was captured by the Japanese and held and tortured until the end of the war.
About 19,000 B-24s were built, but only one -- owned by the Collings Foundation -- is still flying, and it's in Southern California as part of the foundation's Wings of Freedom tour. It flew from Santa Barbara to the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance yesterday, with Louie's son Luke Zamperini - and Off-Ramp - aboard.
It was Luke Zamperini's second trip. "I only saw one once before," about 3 years ago, he said. "I took my dad for a visit and he crawled inside the plane and got in the bombardier's seat, and then I followed him through the plane as he starting reliving the battle above Nauru. By the time we got to the back of the airplane, he was exhausted, and he said to me, 'I tell you. In my memory, the plane was larger.'"
(B-24 above Nauru, April 1943. Office of Chief of Military History)
The plane is built for war, not comfort. Equipment is packed into every available space. The windows are tiny, and the gun ports are huge. Oxygen comes from big yellow tanks. The plane's skinny ribs and thin shell are clear to see. "You get in there," Zamperini says." It starts to taxi and you get the idea that you're kind of in this flying jalopy. You just have this wind blowing through the plane, and I suddenly realized what kind of men that generation was to get inside something like this and fly eight or ten hours over the ocean. There's nothing in between you and a bullet except a little tiny bit of aluminum."
The Collings Foundation spent years renovating the plane, now flown by Jim "Pappy" Goolsby, a retired airline pilot who was looking for something to do to keep him busy after he retired. He knows he has a plum job. There aren't many openings to fly B-24s. Of course not; he flies the only one left.
The plane is also the one used by the sound geniuses who worked on "Unbroken" for their Oscar-nominated sound effects. We talked with them on Off-Ramp at Oscar time.
The B-24, as well as a B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-25, and a P-51 Mustang, are all at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance until Wednesday at noon for tours and rides. The rides are expensive - from $400-$450 per person - but you'll never forget it. "What a gas it was," said Zamperini when we arrived at Zamperini Field in Torrance, named for his dad. "I coulda stayed another couple hours in that thing."