---------
Thanks. I'll put it on the list.
I've often thought about going back to LA for a visit, but haven't been there since the early 90s. The one non-business stop we made in the early 90s was to the new LA County Museum. I didn't recognize it since they had built several buildings in front of the old New main building. Typical. But even so it was wonderful.
I went to the first public opening when the museum re-opened back in 1965(?). The original LACMA was housed in what is now the Exposition Park Natural History Museum. Well, the new one on Wilshire had a Franz Klein retrospective and one of the largest exhibits of Pierre Bonnard ever assembled. Both were spectacular.
This last time, we spent a lot of time in the Baroque section. I had forgotten the Georges de la Tour, Magdalene. My friend (a woman civil rights activitist from Chicago, then later Berkeley) was maybe appalled at how I went off on this painting, spending I don't know maybe ten minutes on it delivering one of my art history lectures. People stopped their own tours and started gathering behind her. I think they thought I was a docent. It was funny. Even the guard was bending his ear over my way. I loved it. For once in my life I got to teach art. The pure liquid quality of the La Tour's space is stunning when you see it live and it is something that doesn't quite reveal itself in reproductions. Also the plastic quality of the flesh illuminated from the candle, like a living wax----beautiful, fragil, the stuff of life itself. The angle of the highlight in Magdalene's eyes as she stares at the candle, the mirror of her soul at night, the infinite question of the existence of God, of the vulnerablity of flesh to endure even for the moments before the candle whose smoke rises in the stillness the absolute immobility in the universal chasm of night---all of it completely antithetical to Christian or rather Catholic religious belief... It's worth ten thousand Shakespeare's for the shear gravity of its metaphysical questions---the patina of the polished skull, all of it:
http://www.abcgallery.com/L/latour/latour42.html
This one doesn't have the mirror, it's another one. La Tour was contemporary (very old) to Descartes, and there is imho nothing like la Tour for the subversion of faith, by reminding us of the momentary quality of life flickering before its profoundly dark alternative---which isn't really death, but the infinitude of space, the space that would become Descartes mathematical space and Spinoza's substance, but these are hardly the match for la Tour's metaphysics.
Then to go outside, blinking in the brillant LA afternoon, the noise and the traffic on Wilshire... La Tour evaporates.
I was out in Daly City today doing deliveries and got lost talking to a guy who used to build hot rods up here in the late 50s. All I could think of was James Dean looking out over the city from the Griffth Park observatory with its fake neoclassical facade, and its stunning similarity to Etienne-Louis Boullw's Memorial to Issac Newton or Henry Moore's Nuclear Energy:
http://physics.uchicago.edu/moore_sculpture.html
I went to this tourist site for an LA city school field trip and never forgot it. They had a special giant room with a light show in the planetarium of the night sky and some sort of ascent of man--darwin exhibit. The combo was stunning. The cosmos moves along its track and the slime of earth creates man---just wild stuff for a kid, spinning off into sci-fi realms on his own.
How LA could inspire such metaphysics is beyond me, but it certainly did. LA in the large seems absolutely opposed to any of this sort of speculation and yet it inspires it---what the fuck is that about?
I don't know. But think about an external, non-chuck example. Miles Davis for example. After his bebob days, he moves to LA and does All Blues, Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, (try the Bizzard Song), then Bitches Brew... like Dante off into the empyrean.
I can't stop talkng. George Kennan in Sketches of a life has been dismissed from the State Department and he is in LA, Pasadena visiting high tone friends. He goes out to the veranda, and looks across the vast wilderness of the city in 1953 and wonders what is to become of all these people, do they know what kind of world they are living? I was just a little kid, trudgng my way up Beverely to Union Avenue, and slogging along the busy street ....yes I did eventually know. You were looking out on a sea of humanity, and you absolutely must trust it. That is my answer to George Kennan's question.
CG
ps. forget this bullet train jive. It ain't going to happen until the waters of Sacramento sprout through lawn sprinklers in Victorville... Well, they already do, so nevermind. Say when Lake Meade dries up and Las Vegas dies... or something.... O kay, well when the Sea of Cortez turns to chrome... nevermind. Juat pick something else for the postive cord...