American Sabbatical 052: 11/14/96

11/12-11/14 .. Los Angeles.

Our first day in the City of Angels was a teaser. Mild, sunny, only a hint of smutch. You could sea the blue Pacific beyond Santa Monica from the modern pueblos on the mountains. We even ventured into Nina and Bill’s unheated pool.. for a gasping moment. The ravens were courting in love spirals over the canyons, and the big raptors hovered above as we lolled in the warm sun. Tuesday morning LAX was socked in with a cold fog off the sea and the air was clingy on the upslopes. Wednesday was even jacket weather. And the days are starting to bleed together here as we grope about in the humidity.

I’m totally disoriented. Even after three days of driving back and forth and around and about, I have only the crudest map of this metropolis in my head, and as soon as I’m out in traffic I’m lost. Matters aren’t helped by the intense hustle of traffic. The pace is hard and fast in New York, but it’s like football on a gridiron. Once you know the rules, it’s almost fun to play in traffic. Here the intertwined maze of arteries and the hardcharging abandon of Angeleno drivers gives you whiplash without collisions. I actually woke up Tuesday with a sprained neck, and had to drive like a turtle. The Owl is squeaking with uncertainty, but you wouldn’t know by the outside audio that you were in megalopolis. Nobody honks, and only the rare siren assails the airwaves. Only the hurtling streams of gleaming horsepower braiding around you tell the tangled tale: this is the big time, stranger. Keep up or get cut out. So you sprint to the lights and try to guess the next turn.

But what really pleases the dogs are the trees. This sprawling metroburb has the most glorious trees. Streets and Boulevards, Drives and Lanes are lined with single species, so you will crackle through an overarching maple autumn (yes, LA is finally getting around to “fall”), turn into a processional way of fat-bolled feather-palms fanning overhead, round a corner and wind along a sculptured linden promenade, get lost and find yourself hunkering along under lines of 150-foot coconut palms. Sycamores, coral trees, pines, eucalyptus, and parades of unfamiliar glossy greens and fuzzy needles. And lurid vegetation bursts at you from every cranny, fragrant with flowers. A city that blooms in November might even cure you of the grumbles.

Peggy went to court, though. She spent a day with Aaron at Juvie, while I went down to Venice to get an eyeful of the wild side. On a foggy noontime in midweek it looked like the AM side of any local bar district. Redeyed, unshaven, plainspoken, and smelling of old suds. I didn’t stop in for a waker-upper. I just rolled on in the fog, and got turned around among boat basins. Billions of dollarsworth of fiberglass and aluminum bobbing in slots in the heart of Cinema City. Yachts are like house pets in two-worker households. They spend most of their time waiting for some attention, are eager to get out, and sometimes make an expensive mess. The hired crews were enjoying morning cappuccino in their topsiders and deepwater tans, while massa was off toting his bale. Maybe there is some justice.

Waiting for Peggy, I walked around in Beverley Hills for a bit, but quickly realized I was an object of curiosity. Nobody walks in LA. Jog. Skate. Exercise the dogs. Yes. But just amble along looking with interest? What’s wrong with this picture? The only other pedestrians were anxious elderly women and latinos in uniforms waiting at the bus stops. When the private security cruiser came around slowly the third time I headed back to the Owlshade. The private cop cars have a full light array on their sleek black horsepower, with ads for “Instant Armed Response,” and 800 numbers on the side. Makes you feel a lot safer, don’t it?

The ultimate question of security slips just below the surface all along this coast: what about THE BIG ONE? We were repeatedly told that the last major quake, “Really scared me.” David in Santa Barbara paid to have boulders removed from the public lands above his house, and wants to move to a less vertical locale. Maureen boasts that lining their pool with tiny blue tiles makes it easier to repair after the earth moves. Nina gets hyper-anxious when she sees water gushing out the hillside near home. Maybe aggitatus angelenus is a perpetual state of pre-quake jitters. Living in Edge City may feel like being at the center of the universe, where it all happens first, but that may just be the psychic upwash of epicentrality. Woah, what’s that shaking? Whew, it’s just the dryer.

Our time in Tinsel Town was spent mostly with family and old family friends, so the days were a mix of personal intimacy and public alienation. Warm welcomes and get out of my way asshole. Street dress may be I-am-casual, but keep out from underfoot. The only public places where strangers aren’t likely to get trampled are the tourist venues, if you can find parking. We had toured the big sights in a previous incarnation: Disneyland, Universal Studios, the Hollywood stuff, so we avoided the cattlecar experiences and park-by-the acre. At the Getty in Malibu you have to call days in advance to book a parking space. Up in Pasadena at the Norton Simon the lot was empty at 11AM, and SRO by noon. One thing about LA, don’t expect it to be open before 11, and don’t expect convenient parking after. Angelenos spent most of THEIR days hunting a place to park.

But I’m torn by the museum experience. Getty recreated a Roman villa, which had been buried by Vesuvius, on the quaking slopes of Malibu by the sea, and it's a splendid refuge from the automoted tremors of LA. Aircraft on final for LAX and the rising roar from the Pacific Highway somewhat dilute the antique Mediterranean ambiance, but you can close your ears and bask in the refined elegance of those ancient times. Pillared atria, reflecting pools, formal gardens of sculpted shrubs and trees, geometric wonders of inlaid marble, noble but human proportions to buildings and courtyards, lifelike mosaics, bronze and marble statuary everywhere. You realize how much Italianate styling has informed the California look, down to the least bungalow. And how much “Spanish” architecture derives from Rome. Sneer as I may, the chance to stroll for half a day through a semblance of antiquity does ease your spirit and give some perspective. The Greek statuary, in particular, reminds me that the beauty of human form isn’t about crotch-hugging bodysuits, exercise machines, and all that tumescent perspiration at the beach. No one has shaped lasting expressions of the human spirit better than the Greeks. Thank you, Mr. Prissyface.

Vase Details

The Getty also has rooms full of decorative embellishments, baroque and beyond, which are startlingly out of place. But this will be cured when the collection moves, next year, uphill to the lamasary on high now rising on canyon walls above the Santa Monica Freeway. The villa will reopen in the year 2000 with strictly Greco-Roman antiquities on display. I’m glad this place will still be accessible for those who need respite. It has all the magic of the Cloisters in NYC, or the Isabel Stewart Gardiner in Boston. I now understand why Paul Monette came here so often in his last days.

After sampling the gilt jangle and the requisite Impressionists upstairs, Peggy and I became immersed in sketching details from Greek pottery. Mythic personifications, and comical cats and dogs; heroic figures, and owls at hoot. I felt my eyes opening again amid these old messages, where the sensory bombardment of Los Angeles had shut me down like a periwinkle in a storm. And the sun was breaking out again.

Today we spent the day in a Roman (actually a Pompeiian) villa with a parking garage underneath and climate control within on the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. The villa was the creation of J.P. Getty a billionaire oilman who died in 1976. Getty was a brilliant businessman and art connoisseur who amassed an incredible collection of artifacts (statues, paintings, manuscripts). He built a replica of the Villa dei Papiri (found at Pompeii) on 65 acres in the oceanside community of Malibu on the border of Los Angeles to house and display his art collection. He felt Malibu resembled the Mediterranean and landscaped the museum with plants thought to be from the Mediterranean region of two thousand years ago. There is very limited parking so that you need to make a reservation, but there is no entry fee.

You enter from a terrace with ocean view that faces the main peristyle garden with the villa beyond. This first long garden (a hundred yards perhaps) has a long rectangular pool with fountains and statues in it and columned cloisters around it. There are beautiful small gardens on the sides set with copies of bronze statues . Beyond the outer wall on the north is an equally long herb garden with formal beds (we were encouraged to nibble to our heart’s content). Wide stairs and a massive door lead to the villa proper with many small rooms surrounding its own inner peristyle garden.

The upper floor has the more recent collections, paintings and illuminated manuscripts and rooms in a variety of decorative styles (the Baroque room and the Rococo Room etcetera). It was a jolt to leave the classical floor and suddenly encounter ornate bureaus and lush oil paintings.

One room showed sketches by masters accompanied by photographs of the completed works (usually large oil paintings or altar pieces) that followed. The texts described the drawing materials used and the history of the final product. It was fascinating to see how master artists worked. Changes often appeared on the sketches, two different leg positions or varied placements of a figure. It was interesting to compare sketch and final work. A small Michelangelo sketch (“The Holy Family with the Infant St. John”) was done in black and red chalk with pen and brown ink over stylus etching. It was superb and showed his brilliance even in the quick strokes of a first effort. Then on to the oil paintings.

The Malibu villa will be closed next summer. Most of the museum’s work will be moved to the huge modern Getty Center being constructed in the Santa Monica mountains. You can see it from the freeway, a cluster of white curvilinear buildings high above the city, their shapes breaking the empty mountain skyline.They will be reached by a five-minute ride on a specially constructed monorail. Its track can be seen snaking up the mountain. This new center which is closer to downtown Los Angeles will draw huge crowds. The Malibu Roman villa that we visited will reopen in the year 2000 as a center devoted solely to Greek and Roman art. I can’t wait.

11/15-16.. LA continued.

So I want my cake, and criticize it, too. How else could I get up close to the power of these expressions, if there wasn’t all this effete apparatus, these institutions of self-importance-by-association. The whole heroic artist and priceless object syndrome makes me nauseous, and the thought of creative expressions of our humanity being horded away, or having the public paraded before them like pieces of the true cross, gives me vertigo. Let artists grovel for their bread but spend millions to protect ART? Well, the Norton Simon had a modest entrance fee, but the Getty was free! If you reserved parking.

On another night we creep through Hollywood at midnight, and it’s full of police with lights going, beating in sync with the dazzling displays. A jostling parade of leather-and-exposure couture is marching back and forth between nightclubs, some of them so hot they had no names out front, only mobs of wouldbes begging admittance. And the crawling cars are full of rubbernecking gazers. Us too. Nope, we don’t see Elvis.

I had a back trail to cross in this burg, too, and managed to find the chance one foggy morning. I visited a college classmate of my father’s, with whom I’ve corresponded for some time. Larry has lived the life of a bachelor poet all these years, and ekes in a one-room apartment in Santa Monica, surrounded by manuscripts. A gentle spirit, Larry has kept alive his enthusiasm for crafted language among the jangle of tongues, while working as a watchman, draftsman, and elsewise honest laborer. We hadn’t been face-to-face since I was a babe in arms, and finding my way to his door was something of a pilgrimage to someone who has kept faith with his true nature, despite the winds howl round. I still remember the strange and wonderful letters Larry would write my father in the 50s, full of terrible puns and loony cartoons, and his apartment walls were covered with the samestyle lyrics and images, stuck up with pushpins. It was like being inside a comipoetic chapbook.

Larry is much too shy to push his theory into the public eye. I attempted to interest Nina in this historical mystery out of left field, but sensed that her academic hackles went up at such amateur meddling. Ironically, her current research is directed at the evolution of iconic portraiture featuring a woman of the French Revolution. I thought the resonances would make her ears perk up. Then, I always was academically tonedeaf. Will Larry’s lyric go unheard?

We were lucky in our final visit. Eva is Nina and Bill’s 20-year-old daughter, living in a studio apartment with her boyfriend, and now enrolled in art school at Otis, after a couple of years “dropped out.” Her digs are a cozy nest in a tripledecker around a courtyard and pool, and she has made a home that tells volumes about her maturity and esthetic sensibility. She had asked that we come and see her work, and bring mine to share. Her paintings are full of representational images, but she says that her instructors sneer at any sort of realism. And her work is about people, which we gathered was another nono. Ah the canons of culture. And her eyes are sharp. She immediately grasped the technical problems of my materials, and appraised my solutions, saw what each piece was about and asked penetrating questions. There are Nina and Bill up on the hill worried about this wayward daughter, while down here on the flats she is finding her way into an artist’s life with keen perception and gentle grace. She let us play with her lizards, which was a bit strong for Peggy, though well meant. And asked us to please write her, because we were so akin, which we will, of course.

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