1968 (1967) (1969) (1960-1970) (1970-1980) Table of Contents
Elizabeth Broun Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 6, 1968. Oil, 233.7 x 182.9 cm (92 x 72 in.). Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith, National Museum of American Art, 2000, 1993, 1968. 1967 See Text nmaa-ryder.si.edu/journal/v13n2/broun.html
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1968, 1947, 1935 Upton Sinclair [1878-1968],
Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt* Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1968 See Text
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1968 See Text
Pacific Ocean Park: The Wax Max Episode, Get Smart See Text
Ruth St. Denis [1878-1968], 1920s, 1910s, 1894 See Link
Edward Sanders 1968: A History in Verse, Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa, CA, 2000 (1997). 1968 See Text
Jeffrey Stanton* Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987, 176 pp., 1968, 1967, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1960s, 1959, 1958, 1956 See Text
Who's Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, British Film Institute (1996 content) and individual contributors, Ruth St. Denis See Text
Document
Elizabeth Broun Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park No. 6, 1968. Oil, 233.7 x 182.9 cm (92 x 72 in.). Gift of Arthur J. Levin in memory of his beloved wife Edith, National Museum of American Art, 2000, 1993, 1968. 1967
nmaa-ryder.si.edu/journal/v13n2/broun.html -11K
"It's a painting with a lot of what we used to call presence and authority, which I now take to mean that it sweeps away the cobwebs of art history and creates its own present. It's almost eight feet tall and exactly six feet wide-about the reach of a grown man. The canvas is vertical, with uneven parallel strips of color that flex roughly at midpoint, the way a figure bends at the waist and legs. Lines vertically divide two of the color strips, until they are interrupted at the middle of the canvas. . . .
". . . Diebenkorn's turn to abstraction began in 1967, the year after his move from Berkeley to a neighborhood of Venice called Ocean Park. This painting, created in 1968, was early in the series that would run for almost two decades, . . .
" . . .
"The idea that representation and abstraction are about different things has been a constant topic in the literature about the artist, though writers like John Elderfield have proposed a convergence. Diebenkorn's studio notes refer to the"limited range of possibilities" of abstract painting on the one hand, but also to "another set of things" that abstract painting can bring out-something beyond landscape, still life, and the figure. He said, "I wanted it both ways-a figure with a credible face-but also painting wherein the shapes, including the face shape, worked with the allover power I'd come to feel was a requisite of a total work." Wanting it both ways, he felt, was "an inherent trap." One part of his deep involvement with Matisse was that the older artist had managed to avoid that trap. For instance, he occasionally simply omitted facial features from his figure paintings, a device Diebenkorn also used.
"Over decades, Diebenkorn found other solutions. He once said, "Temperamentally I have always been a landscape painter," so it's reasonable to look to the landscapes first for clues. They tend to arrange bands of color parallel to the picture plane and then introduce at least one plunging diagonal-a freeway, aquaduct, coastline, or railing-with a directional thrust that creates a deep space in the flatness of the painted surface. Diebenkorn can summarize in a single diagonal centuries of knowledge about the way single-point perspective creates spatial illusion. Although his landscapes often are seen from a height or a window, the receding color bands never completely flatten or tilt up to press against the picture plane.
"In Diebenkorn's interiors, converging walls and floor create the same spatial effect, prying open the tight seal of the picture plane to make a room. Usually that room is inhabited. Diebenkorn painted more women than men, and mostly they sit in chairs or read or drink coffee. Their arms and legs are often crossed in gestures echoing the diagonals that create the room space. Sometimes there's no figure but just a chair or table with arms and legs at angles, their contours conforming to the space within the frame. The empty chair seems to "remember" the figure, as if holding a place for someone who stepped away momentarily, or who perhaps left behind an even more profound absence. Diebenkorn discovered so many ways of making up and peopling space that we come to recognize it as familiar and intimate, distinctly his space. Whether a landscape, interior, figure, or abstraction, his world feels experienced and lived, and all of a piece. And so the sloping curves in Ocean Park No. 6 trigger thoughts of bent backs, while the more straightly drawn oblique angles in the same painting evoke the corner of a room.
"Part of the satisfaction of Diebenkorn's work is the way elements that are widely separated in space meet on the canvas surface. He may place a figure so that it just touches-in two dimensions-the corner of a distant window. He aligns figures' heads with the horizon, embedding them visually in the distance even though they occupy a foreground nearer to us. This allows him to open up the plane and occupy the space within, while he's still standing outside the frame and watching from a single vantage point. In Ocean Park No. 6, curves and diagonals sometimes interrupt adjacent straight edges and sometimes are bound by them, an interpenetration of form and space that conveys abstractly the same double meaning. It's as if he were reminding us of life's paradox-that we are at once actors on the stage and observers with our individual points of view.
"Since I first saw Ocean Park No. 6, Richard Diebenkorn has died in 1993, leaving a legacy that is more and more recognized as significant. . . . "
Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp., 1968, 1947, 1935
Chapter XXVI Our Literati
"[p. 351] Among [Rupert Hughes'] discoveries was Jim Tully [1891-1947], the hobo who turned author. Jim was fortunate in having the guidance also of Upton Sinclair [1878-1968], who taught him how to write in short, stinging sentences. He lives in San Fernando Valley
" . . .
"Sinclair lives in Pasadena in a house that he patched together from three dilapidted bungalows. He has what is probably the largest daily mail of any living author and all the money that comes to him in royalties goes back to the "Cause." Of all the resident literary stars, Upton is the most adored social lion.
" . . .
Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolt* Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers and Their Influence on Southern California, G.P. Putnam's Sons: NY, 1977. 603 pp., 1968
Chapter 24 Politics in Flux
2. The Resurrection: Richard Nixon
" . . . in the turbulent days of 1968. Vietnam, the campuses, the riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy . . . appeared to be on the brink of a massive social confrontation.
"Just ten weeks after Bobby Kennedy's death, the Democrats gathered in Chicago to select their Presidential candidate. . . . Antiwar demonstrators had arrived by the thousands. They, and the antiwar convention delegates inside the amphitheater, felt under siege in Daley's Chicago and Lyndon Johnson's Democratic party.
"As the convention got under way, the Chicago police broke up the protest activities. Demonstrators were gassed and clubbed, and several journalists were among the injured. . . . "police-state terror.""
"A Paul Conrad* cartoon depicted a policeman, labeled "Chicago Police," writing on a pad marked "Body Count," while another policeman waded into a crowd of sprawled bodied, some identified as "Press." The caption read, " Law and Order." p. 403
Chapter 26
The Odyssey of Ruben Salazar
"When his one year tour of duty in Vietnam was completed, Salazar was assigned to head the Mexico City bureau, covering Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean. When the Castro government extended invitations to several U.S. news organizations to cover two international gatherings in Havana, Salazar jumped at the chance. 'Castro," Salazar confided in his journalist friends, "was the manifestation of the Latin American resistance to American domination."
"Despite his attitudes about Castro and American policy in Vietnam, Salazar still kept aloof from politics. But more and more, Ruben Salazar was forced to face political issues. In the tumultuous period in Mexico before the 1968 Olympics, Salazar covered the student demonstrations. He was in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, when police opened fire, killing several hundred Mexican students protesting the government's policy of spending money on the Games amid conditions of economic scarcity." pp. 423-424
Alan Hess Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1985, 1968
McDonald's
" . . . In 1968 McDonald's . . . introduced a new prototype, its low-profile mansard roof and brick-and-shingle textures . . . p. 107
While attempting to show off for 99 at an amusement park's shooting gallery, Max complains that his poor shooting is caused by a defective gun. He then quotes Genghis Khan as saying, "a warped barrel is a fool's frustration," not knowing that this is a KAOS code phrase. Thinking Max to be a KAOS agent, the carny worker gives Max a kewpie doll, despite him wanting a lace pillow that says "mother." Max and 99 then enter the Tunnel of Love, though Max insists on separate boats because they're "just friends." They leave the tunnel to find the park empty of patrons and filled with KAOS assassins. KAOS is desperate to get the kewpie doll back because it contains the weekly plutonium drop. Max and 99 get captured in the Chamber of Horrors, where Waxman attempts to behead them and turn them into wax dummies.
Who's Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, British Film Institute (1996 content) and individual contributors
Ruth St Denis (Ruth Dennis)[1878-1968]
"American dancer
A major figure in the development of modern dance and one of the earliest performers for Edison's Kinetoscope. Ruth Dennis was born in Newark, New Jersey, studying dancing as a child and making her professional debut at the age of sixteen. It was at this early stage of her career that she was filmed by Edison, billed in the December 1894 Kinetograph Company Bulletin as the 'Champion High Kicker of the World'. Less known is the fact that around the same time she was also filmed for Charles Chinnock's imitation Kinetoscope. She continued to make a haphazard living as a dancer in vaudeville and in musical comedies until 1905 when she choreographed and produced her first ballet, Radha. Although, according to Agnes de Mille, she 'dressed up as an Egyptian cigarette ad . . . and gave Oriental mysticism a new lease of life by undulating in a roof garden restaurant', she was intensely interested in Eastern culture and dance forms. With her husband Ted Shawn she founded the Denishawn School of Dancing in 1915, developing such leading modern dancers as Martha Graham and Charles Weidman. Ruth St Denis and the Denishawn Dancers appeared in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916)."
-Barry Anthony
Article references:
Edward Sanders 1968: A History in Verse, Black Sparrow Press: Santa Rosa CA, 2000 (1997).
" . . .
" March 6
" . . .
"Throughout the month there were Saturday afternoon meetings at the Free University at 20 East 14th Street near University Place"I'd taught a course there once called Revolutionary Egyptology which had piqued the attention of the secret police
" . . . " p. 39
"April 11 The Fugs . . .
" . . .
"then we flew the next day to San Francisco to play the main Avalon April 12, 13, 14 "Jim Morrison was backstage one night in his snake skin pants swigging from a Jim Beam bottle a bit too wasted to ask him to sing in Chicago p. 89" . . .
"April 17
"The Fugs flew to Los Angeles and stayed once again at Sandy Koufax' Tropicana at 8585 Santa Monica Boulevard just a few blocks from the Troubadour Bar"During our two weeks in L.A. the jukeboxes in barland were singing the seething/soothing of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne."
"We performed on the 19th and 20th at the Cheetah, a place built on piers on the beach in Venice It was like playing Coney Island There seemed to be a glut of bikers backstage Some of the Straight Satans for instance, who lived nearby" p.91
Columbia
" . . .
"And so, on April 23,
" . . .
"During the next three days . . . "One day Mathematics Hall with its flow of numbers the next day it was packed with SDS and leftists and renamed "Liberated Zone 5"with the red flag of Rev and the black of Anarchia starkly elegant, freshly defiant. Leftists also grabbed Low Tom Hayden (non Columbia student) chaired Mathematics - he'd come over from Newark where he'd been a housing organizer Abbie Hoffman stayed there too.
" . . . " p. 104
"Wednesday August 28
" . . .
"Rennie Davis was beaten bloody The blood soaked rag with which his wound was stanched was later run up the Grant Park pole. "Tom Hayden spoke to the crowd suggesting that people break up into small groups and go out into the streets" . . . p.196 "October 12 saw the glorious moment of the raised fist glyph when Tommy Smith won the 200 meters in a world record 19.8 seconds raising his arms in jubilance & John Carlos winning the bronze.A few minutes later on the platform of triumph Carlos and Smith both lifted their arms during the national anthem with fists enmeshed in black gloves a glorious glyph that told the world such tales the War Caste forbade.
Both were dismissed
. . .
and sent home p. 223
Government
"In the years just before World War I there were 70 socialist mayors in 24 states 1,200 socialist office holders in 340 cities And the socialist Meyer London was in the House of Representatives . . .
" . . .
"Eugene Debs in '12 got 6% of the vote for prez My mentor Allen Ginsberg had once sought to become a labor lawyer and there were even a few good overtly socialist poets, including Carl Sandburg . . . p. 229
Jeffrey Stanton* Venice of America: 'Coney Island of the Pacific,' Donahue Publishing: Los Angeles, CA, 1987, 176 pp., 1968, 1967, 1965, 1964, 1963, 1960s, 1959, 1958, 1956
"A.J. Bumb became Trustee of the [POP] park, and on April 25, 1968 federal bankruptcy referee Norman Neukom gave permission to dispose of the park. When he was asked if P.O.P. might be saved, he replied, 'No Chance! Santa Monica doesn't want it there.'
"The auction began on June 28, 1968 and ran through the 30th. The proceeds from the sale of 36 rides and sixteen games were used to pay off creditors. The park's dilapidated buildings and pier structure remained until several fires and the final demolition in the winter 1973-1974 removed it from all but people's fond memories. The long era of Venice/Ocean Park amusement parks was finally over." p. 170