2004b (2003) (2004) (2004a)(2005)(2000-2010) Table of Contents
Excerpts from the liner notes to Three Generations Avshalomov Daniel plays Viola Music by David, Jacob & Aaron Troy 216 Albany Records 1996 (2004b), 2003, 1999, 1997
Amit Chaudhuri In the Waiting-Room of History a review of Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, London Review of Books 24 June 2004, p.3, 2004b, Introduction See Text
Pat Hartman Ghost Town: A Venice California Life Xlibris: 2004, 542 pp.
J.B. Nethercutt, 91; Owner of Merle Norman Cosmetics Los Angeles Times, 9 December 2004 p. B15, 2004b 1931 See Text
J.B. Nethercutt,* 91, Cosmetics. Car Expert, Los Angeles Times, 11 December 2004, 2004b, 1931 See Text
Ed and Judy Pelletier Chamber Jazz Sextet and Kenneth Patchen Email 7/12/04, 2004b, 1957 See Text
Judith K. Rose* Tree Poem 2004b See Image See Text
Rebecca Solnit Check out the parking lot, Dante's Inferno, illustrated by Sandow Birk, text adapted by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, Chronicle, 218pp. London Review of Books, 26, 13, 8 July 2004, p.32. 2004b See Text
Phil Wayne Historic Mural Comes Home The Lookout News, 21/12/04, 2004b, See Text
Documents
Excerpts from the liner notes to Three Generations Avshalomov Daniel plays Viola Music by David, Jacob & Aaron Troy 216 Albany Records 1996 (2004b), 2003, 1999, 1997
"David [Avshalomov's] first major choral opus is Principles, a secular oratorio on texts by Thomas Jefferson, hammering issues of social justice and religious tolerance. His recent compositions include a choral setting of the Kedushah for the High Holy Days, a solo voice setting of the Hashkiveinu, a Cello Sonata with piano, an unaccompanied violin suite about the suffering of Russia (The Last Poet's Farewell), a virtuoso toccata for band (Prime Time), a solo Harp Sonata, a Sonata for Flute with piano, commissioned works for wind quintet (Around the year) and oboe with piano (Sonata Breve), and a series of songs, including Songs of Life Songs of Death on poems of Emily Dickinson. In 2003 he completed newly commissioned works for women's choir (Where You Go, I Will Go (Ruth and Naomi)] and string orchestra (Pangs of Love, for the San Jose Chamber Orchestra). He recently completed a large cycle setting Blake's complete Songs of Innocence and Experience for a cappella choir, and orchestrated his Dickinson songs in order to sing them with New York's Musica Bella Orchestra as part of a 3-concert festival of his compositions there in October of 2004.
Amit Chaudhuri In the Waiting-Room of History a review of Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, London Review of Books 24 June 2004, p.3
" . . .
" . . . Walter Benjamin thought photographs changed our perception of human movement:
"Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious; just as we discover the instinctual subconscious through psychoanalysis." {The last analogy seems tacked on to me, and of little use.}
" . . . Benjamin goes on to say in a late essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, "The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time."
" . . . he [suggested] an alternative version of modernity and space in his description of the flâneur, the Parisian arcades and 19th-century street life. . . . The flâneur, indeed, retards and parodies the idea of 'progress'. But [the flâneur] did not prevail; Taylor, who popularised the watchword "Down with dawdling!", carried the day. The flâneur views history subversively; he-and it is usually he-deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies. As far back as 1929, Benjamin had explained why the flâneur had to be situated in Paris:
""The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved. and isn't the city too full of temples, enclosed squares and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by, along with every shop sign, every flight of steps and every gateway? The great reminiscences, the historical frissons-these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artist' quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile-that which any old dog carries away."
" . . . Benjamin doesn't romanticise the primitive . . . instead, he comes up with a particularly modern form of aleatoriness and decay in the 'weathered threshold' of a Parisian street.
"Of course, the flâneur was not to be found in Paris alone. There was much wayward loitering in at least two colonial cities, Dublin and Calcutta. . . . Calcutta would have probably been difficult for Benjamin to imagine. Benjamin's figure for the flâneur was Baudelaire, and for Baudelaire-and, by extension, for the flâneur-the East was, as it was for Henri Rousseau, part dreamscape, part botanical garden, part menagerie, part paradise. Could the flâneur exist in that dreamscape? Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of Provincialising Europe, [writes] an elegy for, and a subtle critique of, his own intellectual formation and inheritance as a Bengali. The kind of Bengali who was synonymous with modernity and who believed that modernity might be a universal condition-irrespective of whether you're English, Indian, Arab or African-has now passed into extinction. Chakrabarty's book is in part a discreet inquiry into why that potent Bengali dream didn't quite work-why 'modernity' remains so resolutely European.
" . . .
" . . . Europe is at once a means of intellectual dominance, an obfuscatory trope and a constituent of self-knowledge, in different ways for different people and histories.
"Said's great study [Orientalism] takes its cue from the many-sided and endlessly absorbing Foucault, in its inexhaustible conviction and its curiosity about how a body of knowledge . . . can involve the exercise of power. [This approach seems somewhat used up. Chakrabarty seems post-structuralist and Derridean, and it rehearses a key moment in Derrida: the idea that it is necessary to dismantle or take on the language of 'Western metaphysics, . . . but there is no alternative language available with which to dismantle it-so that the language must be turned on itself.
" . . .
" . . .'Historicism-and even the modern, European idea of history-one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th c. as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else.' . . . John Stuart Mill . . . proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giviing Indian or Africans self-rule since they were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. . . thus consigning [them] and other rude nations to the waiting room of history."
" . . . Gandhi . . .when asked what he thought of Western Civilization thought it would be a good idea. . . . Tharoor writes, "India is not an underdeveloped country. It is a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay." . . .
" . . .
[The literature of colonialism, J.S, Mill, Naipaul, Conrad, Forster is about 'waiting,' 'not now,' 'not yet,' 'an echo,' 'not real.']
" . . .
" . . . The translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the "Shakespeare of the East." To do this, Jones had to reverse history -Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful (a supremely approbatory) comparison as telling us inadvertently that it's impossible to escape 'homogeneous, empty time:' that as far as Kalidasa is concerned Shakespeare has already happened. . . .
"The 'first in English, then elsewhere' paradigm . . . made the processs of modernisation seem . . . like mimicry. "We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World," Naipaul [writes]. . . . the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha in Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse . . . tries to rescue the idea of mimicry to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the colonisers' gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection . . .
" . . . to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it . . . but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.
" . . . [the narrator of The Mimic Men]. . . writing something like his memoirs, is . . . haunted, even entrapped by the language called 'Europe.' It's not a life story he wishes to compose. My first instinct was towards the writing of history . . . I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. . . . Even memory, the site of renewal for the Romantics and Modernists, is deceptive. . . . memory is 'discursively constituted,' and has its own truth. . . .
" . . .
" . . . in the chapter Adda: A History of Sociality . . . (pronounced 'uddah') is translated as "a place for careless talk for boon companions" or "the chats of intimate friends."
""By many standards of judgment in modernity, adda is a flawed social practice: it is predominately male in its modern form in public life; it is oblivious of the materiality of labour in capitalism; and midde-class addas are usually forgetful of the working classes. Some Bengalis even see it as as practice that promotes sheer laziness . . .""
" . . . Both adda and flânerie are activities whose worth is ambivalent in a capitalist society: they rupture the 'march of progress.' Flânerie is 'dawdling', and adda a waste of time . . . Neither flânerie nor adda is a purely physical or mental activity; both are reconfigurings of urban space. The flâneur . . . walked about the Parisian arcades of the 19th c, . . . as if they were extensions of his living room: he blurred the line dividing inside from outside. . . adda took place in drawing rooms, in such a way as to disrupt domesticity and turn the interior into a sort of public space; or on the rawak or porches of houses in cramped lanes . . .
"Benjamin's relationship to the flâneur and his subterranean affirmation of daydreaming in his meditations on flânerie lend his work an odd poignancy and ambivalence; given that Benjamin was a Marxist, the flâneur could never be wholly legitimate either outside or inside his work. . . . Chakrabarty's concerns . . . modernity, adda, and the shadow of Benjamin's flâneur . . . occupy a similarly ambivalent position in relationship to his provenance . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakrabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that give his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility."
J.B. Nethercutt*, 91; Owner of Merle Norman* Cosmetics Los Angeles Times, 9 December 2004 p. B15
J. B. Nethercutt *(1913-2004)
Obituaries/Funeral Announcements, Los Angeles Times, 9 December 2004, B15.
"J.B. Nethecutt*, owner of one of the nation's leading cosmetic houses, died on December 6, 2004 in Santa Monica. He was 91.
"Born in South Bend, Indiana, on October 11, 1913, J.B. moved to Santa Monica in 1923 to live with his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman*, after his mother Florence G. Titus, passed away unexpectedly and his father, Carl Corwin Nethercutt, was relocated for business.
"In 1931, Merle-with husband Andrew Norman* and nephew J.B. as partners-founded her namesake cosmetic company. On September 3, 1933, J.B. married high school sweetheart Dorothy Sykes*, who was the company's second full-time employee. Together, the Normans* and the Nethercutts* built Merle Norman Cosmetics into a top manufacturer and distributor of skin care and cosmetic products, with franchises throughout the U.S. and Canada.
"With a natural talent for cosmetic chemistry, J.B. became a nationally recognized authority in the field, specifically in the chemistry of cosmetics. The California Cosmetics Association named him president of the organization, and later appointed him director of the Toilet Goods Association (now called the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association). J.B. was responsible for creating many popular products including the renowned Merle Norman* Blush Rouge, Decollete Eau de Toilette Spray and Parfum, and a wide variety of Merle Norman* lipsticks.
"Along with his role as a pioneer in the cosmetic industry, J.B. was equally renowned for his world-class vintage automobile collection.
"J.B.'s very first serious show car was a 1930 du Pont Model G Merrimac Town Car, purchased in 1956 at a corner filling station for $500. Despite the missing bumpers and torn interior fabric, J.B. was captivated and convinced the vehicle could be fully restored in three weeks. In his pursuit of perfection, the restoration took well over a year and cost $65,000. By 1958, his meticulously rebuilt project claimed its first prize-the coveted "Best of Show" award at the prestigious Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance.
"As J.B.'s collection grew, he was determined to freely share his masterpieces with the public. In 1971, he and his wife Dorothy opened a groundbreaking museum in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and named it "San Sylmar," which today consists of more than 250 vintage cars and the many rare collectibles he regarded as "functional fine art."
"By the summer of 1992, J.B.'s cars had won the top award at Pebble Beach an unprecedented six years. He has received the most "Best of Shows" in the event's 54-year history. To recognize his achievements, the Concours d'Elegance gives out a yearly trophy in his name.
"In the summer of 2000, the Nethercutts* opened a 120,000-square-foot museum that today showcases his restored vehicles and houses the Nethercutt* Automotive Research Library and Archives.
"In 2001, a committee of 22 prominent automotive journalists named J.B. "Meguiar's Collector Car Hobby's Person of the Year" for his contribution to the preservation of classic cars. J.B. was also a 32nd Degree Past Master Mason.
"Prior to his wife Dorothy's death in 2004, the Nethercutts* also dedicated thier time and resources to supporting many charitable organizations. They were key contributors to the Kayne-ERAS Center, Santa Monica Hospital and Kenora Hospital in Canada.
"J.B. is survived by two sons and daughters-in-law, Jack and Helen Nethercutt II (Las Vegas, Nevada), and Robert and Roberta Nethercutt (Pacific Palisades); and two grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
"The viewing will be held Thursday, December 9, from 4-8 p.m. at Gates, Kingsley & Gates, Moeller Murphy Mortuary, 1925 Arizona Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Funeral services will be Friday, December 10, at 10 a.m. at First United Methodist Church, 1008 11th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90403.
"In lieu of flowers, contributions in J.B. Nethercutt*'s memory may be made to Kayne-ERAS Center, 5350 Machado Road, Culver City, CA 90230, to benefit the Nethercutt* Post Seconday Program.
J.B. Nethercutt,* 91, Cosmetics. Car Expert, Los Angeles Times, 11 December 2004
"Los Angeles-J.B. Nethercutt, 91*, who made a fortune in beauty products for women as the co-founder of Merle Norman* Cosmetics and used much of that wealth to assemble one of the world's finest automobile collections, has died.
"Nethercutt* died Monday at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, according to his son, Jack Nethercutt. The elder Nethercutt had been in failing health for some time.
"Respected in the beauty industry as an expert on cosmetic chemistry, Nethercutt *created a number of his firm's most popular products, including blush rouge, perfume and lipsticks.
"But Nethercutt* is perhaps better known to the general public for his private car collection, housed in two buildings in Sylmar and open for viewing.
"The Nethercutt* Collection and Museum contains nearly 250 automobiles, as well as a nationally known automobile library and a state-of-the-art restoration shop. It has become a mecca for car enthusiasts and collectors since it opened in the 1970s.
" . . .
"Jack Boison Nethercutt was born in South Bend, Ind., on Oct. 11, 1913. He moved to Southern California when he was 9, after his mother's death, to live with his aunt, Merle Nethercutt Norman*. After graduating from Santa Monica High School, he studied chemistry at California Institute of Technology.
"Working out of a house in Santa Monica, Nethercutt's aunt had started a small business producing cosmetics for sale locally in 1931. Nethercutt dropped out of college and joined the venture, establishing Merle Norman* Cosmetics.
"Nethercutt* subsequently bought out his aunt, her husband and the other shareholders in the company and eventually created a firm with $100 million in sales. There are now about 2,000 Merle Norman* franchises across the United States.
"Nethercutt* loved the cosmetics business, his son said, and was active in the firm's management until his health began to decline in August.
Ed and Judy Pelletier Chamber Jazz Sextet and Kenneth Patchen Email 7/12/04, 2004b
". . . I. . .pulled out my old Chamber Jazz Sextet albums, and was so excited to see a reference to a Cadence album they had done with Kenneth Patchen (CLP-3004). . . . (The Patchen connection, by the way, was merely a coincidence, since, while we had previously spoken briefly of POP and the Chamber Jazz Sextet, the conversation had never taken us into "Patchen land".)
"The CJS personnel you mentioned included the original trumpet player Robert Wilson. My friend was his replacement, Dent Hand, who is heard on a later CJS recording Pal Joey as the Chamber Jazz Sextet Sees Him (CLP-3015). Dent has several solos, but I always felt the the real star of the group was Mo Briseno on the baritone sax. He was only a teenager at the time (circa 1960), and I never heard of him again. Dent Hand was a law graduate . . . working for the Milk Advisory Board promoting the benefits of milk . . ., and I have lost track of him too. Allyn Ferguson became quite prominent in movie and television music composition/arranging, and may have been, if I recall correctly, connected as the musical director/arranger for Dinah Shore or Carol Burnett,. . ."
"I recall seeing the Sextet live with Patchen on stage at the old Ivar Theatre (I believe) on Ivar in Hollywood. I well remember Patchen's thunderous opening line to one of his readings..."Lonesome is a long, long time". Another was his lament "Egg into eggplant", . . . "
"The definitive CJS album is Cadence CLP-1020 (again pre-Dent Hand). The group was struggling, most of them living at Allyn Ferguson's house, circa 1960, and were willing to take almost any gig offered. Thus it came to pass that they were employed as a strolling Dixieland band for the grand opening of Pacific Ocean Park (straw hats, red and white striped blazers, white pants, etc.). I was amazed at how well they could play in this genre, given their background and preoccupation with the classical and jazz idioms. When we would go to the bullfights in Tijuana on Sundays, Dent would even sit in with the Mariachis and seemed just as comfortable there too. Hence my total awe of trained and talented musicians, and that extra gift that they have to hear and create music."
Tree Poem
-2004
Rebecca Solnit Check out the parking lot, Dante's Inferno, illustrated by Sandow Birk, text adapted by Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders, Chronicle, 218pp. London Review of Books, 26, 13, 8 July 2004, p.32. 2004b
"Many years ago, I was supposed to move to Los Angeles, but every time I went there, something about the light and space made me think that life was basically meaningless and you might as well surrender hope right away. I was still an art critic in those days, and I would drive from north-east Los Angeles . . . over to the downtown museums, look at some art, and drive back. But when I got home I would find that the hours I spent negotiating freeway merge lanes and entrances and exits and parking garages was, in some mysterious way, more memorable than the museums. I was supposed to have a head full of paintings or installations, but instead, I was preoccupied with the anonymously ugly spaces that are not on the official register of what any place is supposed to be.
"Every city has them. Thinking about Paris . . . the long cement passages of the Metro lit by bad flourescence and smelling of piss, or the dank passageways descending from cafés into Turkish toilets. Even national parks steer their visitors into an asphalted world of public toilets, parking lots, and thou-shalt-not signage, stuff that almost everyone is good at fast-forwarding past . . . I wonder how it is that visitors can be so sure they saw what they were supposed to and so oblivious of what they were not.
" . . . Not that I'm against din or cities or such, but I do wonder about those leftover spaces. . . . And they get grimmer and grimmer. Perhaps what's terriftying about these new urban landscapes is that they imply the possibility of life lived {in anonymously ugly spaces.}
"The world seems to be made more and more of stuff we're not supposed to look at, a banal infrastructure that supports the illusion of automotive independence, the largely unseen places from which our materials come-strip mines, industrial agriculture, automated assembly lines, abattoirs -and where they end up: the dumps. Los Angeles consists mostly of these drably utilitarian spaces, in part because cars demand them, and it is a city built to accommodate cars. These spaces tend to be grey, the grey of unpainted cement, asphalt, steel and accumulated grime, and they tend to be either abandoned or frequented by people who are also discards, a kind of subterranean realm hauled to the surface. Or not.
'When the new Getty Museum opened off the stretch of the 405 freeway that connects Los Angeles proper to the even more suburban San Fernando Valley, much was written about Richard Meier's architecture and Robert Irwin*'s gardens. Remarkably little was written about the parking garage, although it's the first structure you encounter on arriving at the Getty. . . . ( . . . public transportation is largely an underclass phenomenon.) . . .
" . . .You come out of the smog-filtered Los Angeles light (which gives me the impression that a thrifty God has replaced our incandescent sun with diffused fluorescent light . . . spirally into the seismically unstable bowels of the Los Angeles earth . . .
" . . . Altitude correlates neatly with economic clout in urban and suburban California . . .people first . . . first parked, then they looked at the mighty fortress of the Getty . . . you went through a redemptive exercise of experiencing art . . .
" . . . the gardens [from which] from . . . a real-estate point of view -[you see] what the San Francisco Bay artist Richard Misrach calls " the politics of the view," the vista . . . Irwin* is thought to have chosen out of contrariness to make a garden in which this splendid view disappears. . . . the bright erratic plantings. They were chosen by Irwin*, who is no gardener. . . .
"California has often been imagined . . . And probably the whole place is Purgatory, since nearly all of us are so, so to speak, hell-bent on self-improvement. Something about my dear weird Golden State obliges it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen . . . (Schwarzenegger's election as governor has deeply gratified the rest of the nation, which can now reflect even more confidently that, though we have better weather and really are inventing their future, we're totally feckless freaks.)
"One of the reasons often given to explain why the American film industry settled in Hollywood is Southern California's ability to simulate almost any part of the world: it has lush agricultural areas, deserts, mountains, forests, oceans and open space in which to build Babylon or Atlanta, all drenched in ceaseless light. That is to say, to be in California is to be everywhere else (in the posher parts of LA every house seems to be dreaming of elsewhere: this half-timbered job is in the Black Forest and that one next door in the Alhambra. And as the Los Angeles writer Jenny Price recently remarked, to say "I ate a doughnut in Los Angeles" is a different thing altogether from saying "I ate a doughnut." The invocation of LA throws that doughnut on a stage where it casts a long shadow of depravity or opportunity (which here might be the same thing.) She added that just as Lévi-Strauss once remarked that animals are how we think, so Los Angeles, and by extension, California, are also how we think- about society, about urbanism, about the future, about morality and its opposite. It's as though, in the golden light, everything is thrown into dramatic relief, everything is on stage acting out some drama or other.
"Sandow Birk, who early in his career restaged great watery history paintings - The Raft of Medusa, Washington Crossing the Delaware - as surfing scenes, has long been picking California's allegorical crops. A Southern California surfer himself, he once painted a brillian series-In Smog and Thunder: Historical Works from the Great War of the Californias -in which the cultural clashes between San Francisco and LA were depicted as a multi-ethnic battle complete with fast-food sponsors and gang colors carried by the armed factions. Another series, Incarcerated: Visions of California in the 21st Century, an inspection of California as Heaven and Hell, represented all 33 state prisons in this incarceration-crazy state. . . .
"And now comes Birk's California Divine Comedy. . . . Hell, naturally, is Los Angeles . . . its line drawings depict the back-alley Los Angeles of anonymous dead-ends. . . . Canto I sets the stage nicely with a tipped-over shopping cart on what appears to be a vacant lot. The words 'Canto I' seems to be spray-painted on one of those oblong cement wheel-stops that mark the front end of a parking space.
" . . . Birk, . . . took on the project [translating the text] with . . . surf journalist Marcus Sanders. . . . I'm not sure [they're] always up to the challenge. . . .
""About halfway through the course of my pathetic life I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place . . . I can't really describe what that place was like. It was dark and strange, and just thinking abut it now gives me the chills.""
" . . .
" . . . Birk's book is better looked at than read. His pictures are a critique of urbanism in the vein of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, rather than a contribution to Dante studies or theology. LA has little to give Dante, but Dante via Birk has much to give LA. The city's invisible territories and Dante's phantasmagoria go together beautifully; in Canto XXI, the winged devils of the fifth ditch fly toward Dante and Virgil as they overlook the freeway from a clifftop. There is a cyclone fence behind them, a one-way sign in the lower right, another shopping cart, this time full of the posessions of a homeless demon, and the flying demons carry . . . carry signs: "Will work for food," "Homeless veteran." . . . .
" . . . In Hell, something happens; in the genre scenes, all is quiet, and a sense of inertia, inevitability of pure doom is there, the doom that disaster alleviates. . . .
"The cover of Birk's book is also its masterpiece. It remodels Frederick Church's gargantuan 1862 luminist painting Cotopaxi, Ecuador into a vision of all California as Hell. The same belching volcano is there on the horizon filling the sky with sun-reddened smoke, the same vast gorge in the central foreground. But Birk has turned the gorge's sublime waterfalls into a sort of terraced lava-bottomed mining pit around which emblems of all California gather. There are palm trees and oil derricks and power lines in the foreground, along with signs for chain stores and, rather in the mode of Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, a skull sitting on a plinth inscribed "Inferno." In the middle distance a shattered Golden Gate Bridge reaches toward the gorge then breaks off, and birds, black against the backlight, fly through the ruddy scene and perch on the power lines. Freeways snake throughout this vision of Hell, the red taillights of departing traffic balanced with the yellow-white of approaching headlights in what looks like California's most frequent invocation of Hell: the rush-hour traffic.
"Sandow Birk's ongoing project has been to revamp the language of history painting so that it fits California. This means bringing a Californian sensibility (surfer jokes, burger-joint references) to reiterations of history paintings while attempting to come to terms with a place where the idea of history itself is problematic. The mythology would have it that California went from pristine wilderness to suburban paradise in a single bound, thus erasing the genocide of the Native Californians and the marginalization of the Californios, who lived here when California was still part of Mexico; to say nothing of the environmental disaster and drive-by shooting that was the gold rush and the epic corruption of the railroad corporation that ran California into the 20th century. . . .
"Birk's surfer series mocked histories that had unfolded elsewhere . . . and his prison paintings were situated in the absolute present. History is what gives a place meaning, and Birk has wrestled with the conundrum of California, a place full of amnesiac erasures of history and impositions of histories that never happened, a place where roots are, in some strange way, in the future. Rome was the eternal city; California, as Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, is the eternal present tense."
Phil Wayne Historic Mural Comes Home The Lookout News, 21/12/04
"December 21-An historic mural-its 38 panels long separated on opposite coasts-will soon come together on the walls of the new Santa Monica Main Library where it will receive its first public viewing in four decades.
"The optimism of City officials, who made room for the return of the Depression-era mural in the library's design even before funding was secured, was rewarded last week when the State provided $113,000 in matching funds, roughly half of what will be needed to ship, restore and install the mural.
"Entitled Technical and Imaginative Pursuits of Early Man, the mural by Santa Monica resident Stanton Macdonald-Wright depicts what the artist considered to be the two most important areas of human development-technology and creativity.
[Stanton Macdonald-Wright at the unveiling of the murals in the reading room of the Santa Monica Library. Circa 1930s (Photos courtesy of City of Santa Monica)]
"The mural, specifically designed for the old Santa Monica library torn down in the 1960s, has been under the control of the Smithsonian Institution, which has kept most of the panels in storage.
"Since the works were created as part of the federally funded Public Works of Art Project, ownership reverted back to the government's Federal Arts Program when Santa Monica chose to demolish the original library.
"Murals are made specifically for a community or a site," said Dr. Ilene Fort, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an expert in the work of Macdonald-Wright, who died in 1973 and is considered by some to be one of Southern California's premier modernist painters.
"The mural panels-which contain scenes from the area, including Santa Monica Bay, and references to the film industry, which fascinated the artist-are finally "going back to the community they were designated for," Fort said.
[Motion Picture Industry with Santa Monica Bay in background]
"Efforts to return the important work to its rightful home have been underway for years, according to local historian Roger Genser*, a member of the City's Landmarks Commission who pushed for the mural's return.
"The architects were directed to design the new library with the murals in mind," said Genser, who formerly chaired the Arts Commission.
"The mural panels-which were painted on plywood -are slated to be installed on the second floor of the new $66 million library in a section designated for periodicals, history and reference.
"They feature colors that are "phenomenal," said Karen Ginsberg, assistant director of The City's Department of Community and Cultural Services.
[Dr. deForest]
"The mural's homecoming comes three years after the City Council directed staff to work with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) to have the panels "returned, conserved and installed" in the new library.
"According to a recent staff report, "The City received correspondence [in June 2004] from the SAAM indicating its willingness to enter into an agreement with the City for the long-term loan of the mural series with the stipulation that funds for the transport, conservation and installation be provided by the City."
"City staff estimated the mural program would cost roughly $230,000. Half of that funding will be provided by the State grant, issued by the California Cultural and Historical Endowment (CCHE) using funding from Proposition 40, passed in 2002.
"The endowment administers a grant program providing funds for public agencies and non-profit organizations to share "the many stories and narrative events that embrace California's culture and history."
"The other half of the funding will come from the City, which has the monies available in a Library capital improvement project.
"The art work, Fort said, is significant because it represents the "first major Southern California mural" created under the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project program, which predated the Federal Art Project of the WPA, Fort said.
"In addition, Macdonald-Wright was "one of the most renowned Southern California modernists" of the time, Ginsberg said.
"Other local works by McDonald-Wright include a terrazzo mural in the Santa Monica City Hall foyer, as well as "Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla," which serves as the fire curtain at Santa Monica High School's Barnum Hall.
"Macdonald-Wright, created a style of art known as "Synchromism" with fellow artist Morgan Russell. The style emphasizes the use of color as a means of expression.
[Solar system]
"The work of art boasts "brilliant use" of color and "children will find it quite interesting," predicts Fort.
"One of the largest panels is currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the Ahmanson Building.
"The mural panels-totaling over 2,000 square feet and featuring more than 160 figures-have been in storage in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles ever since the first Santa Monica library was demolished.
"Because the mural is under the control of the Smithsonian, the restoration and installation program must be conducted according to strict guidelines set forth by the institution, including such considerations as humidity and sunlight levels.
[Images in the reading room at the old library, torn down in the 1960s]
"While the selection of a company to perform the restoration has yet to be finalized, Ginsberg indicated that the current intent is for the work to be executed by the same team that was retained to examine the condition of mural panels currently in storage.
"Ginsberg is hopeful that restoration will be completed in time for the opening of the new library, perhaps towards the end of 2005."