Opening at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

 Opening Night at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

Driving into downtown Los Angeles is nobody’s idea of fun. There was once a time when doing it on a weekend was a fairly easy cruise. That time has long passed.

We crawled off the 10 freeway at the exit for San Pedro Street, but the off-ramp actually puts you out on 16^th.. The official Arts District is quite a few blocks away, and rubs elbows with Skid Row. Our destination, The Bendix Building, is in the Garment District.

 Downtown is heartbreaking. 16^th street is lined with derelict mobile homes, sloppy makeshift huts, and lots of tents. Grafitti covers everything. Every square inch of building wall and concrete is vandalized by taggers. It's like seeing an old woman  covered with tattoos. The homeless wander aimlessly in and alongside the filthy street. Bladerunner without the cool futuristic special effects. Parking down there at night is just plain scary.

The Bendix Building was once a hallmark of  Los Angeles’ architecture. Looking up the Bendix Building on Google, one learns:

“A signature visual in the gothic facade of the Bendix building are what are presumed to be Renaissance scholars – accompanied by architectural art forms such as painting and writing, including words like “Progress, Education, and Invention”, written in bold yet austere lettering above each image. Remarkable sculptural ornamentations such as these speak to the designer’s passion for the creative arts and their place within urban architecture. Large windows were also an intentional design element, offering sweeping views of the surrounding downtown skyline.

From 1929 to 1960 it was home to Bendix Aviation Corporation, established by its namesake, Vincent Bendix. In the latter part of the 20th century, the signature occupants of the building included the offices of the Federal Housing Administration, the regional offices of the Boy Scouts of America, and the Wilshire Oil Company.”

The Bendix is now home to numerous art galleries, including Tiger Strikes Asteroid. Tonight was the opening reception for the show, “Pete Hampton’s Lost Era,” hosted by your humble narrator.

 Pete Hampton was a childhood friend, despite being twelve years my senior. He was born in 1940, and spent a lonely, and isolated early childhood in a small house deep in the hills above La Habra. He was  a wildly eccentric guy, the original mad artist. He was also the very definition of a tragic genius. I have always believed that Pete was one of the Greats. The comparisons with Van Gogh are inescapable.

The subject matter of Pete’s work was the Puente Hills in La Habra Heights, and Whittier, California. Long before environmental issues were a popular concern, he launched a passionate one-man crusade to save the hills from development. Pete’s entire life was centered on this Mission.

His artwork was the vehicle. He created thousands of paintings of the pastoral world that once existed in Southern California. He created what would now be called multi-media shows of his work, combining slides of his paintings with narrative, sound effects, and his odd home-made music. He even built a smell machine to recreate the experience of being up in the hills. He put those shows on at various small venues in and around eastern Los Angeles, and  north Orange counties.

Pete died in 2018, and I took on the project of bringing his work to the world. The story of my ongoing project to preserve and promote Pete’s work is just too long, and too involved to go into in this essay. The web of coincidence, and synchronicity is so vastly unlikely that I can conclude only that somehow there has been some Greater Hand that initiated this project in the summer of 1970, and brought me to this opening reception Saturday, March 22, 2018.

That story is posted here

This evening would be the first time his work was ever seen in a gallery setting. Some of the paintings on display had never been seen by anyone other than Pete, myself, and some few of his close friends back in the early 1960's. The photographs of the display are deceptive. It looks like just a bunch of pictures on a stark white wall. But hanging an art show is an art in itself, and Carl Baratta, the curator at TSA, is a pro. Going left to right, the display carries the viewer’s eye from pastoral scenes of the Heights eighty years ago into the dark, and terrifying realm of Pete’s inner world.

above photo credit Gemma Lopez

 My wife and I arrived at the gallery just after 7:00. I had expected that the program here would unfold like the shows at Whittier, or La Habra Art Associations. That is, we would wait until the crowd had gathered, and maybe a half hour or so after the start time, I’d be introduced to the crowd, and be given a few minutes to welcome everyone to the show, and speak briefly about the display. I wrote down notes, and rehearsed the heck of the short introduction.

But it didn’t work that way. By 7:30 the other galleries in the building were closing up shop, and the people began wandering in. By 8:00 we had a big crowd. Carl sort of retreated into the background, and left me on the floor to play host to the guests.

 **(footnote)

Me in black tryin' to look all cool.

The guests at a downtown gallery opening were exactly what you  would expect. Diversity may, or may not be our strength, but it has always been a fact of life in Los Angeles. People of all shapes, sizes, colors, and genders came in. Every stripe in the rainbow flag had its representatives. The show on the walls was not at all what they expected.

 For me, the best part of the evening was watching these folks come in, probably expecting the sort of contemporary art that we all too often see: incomprehensible, ugly, and lacking anything that resembles even a rudimentary level of craftsmanship. Suddenly they were confronted with beauty, power, and an other-worldly, and intimate relationship between the creator, and the subject matter of his creation.

I’ve been to my share of art shows as a creator, and I’ve spent a lot of time watching the people attending the displays. Mostly they’ll walk slowly along, scanning the various works, only occasionally stopping for a few seconds at something that catches their interest. This was different. People hit that wall of paintings and it was like seeing someone grab hold of a powerline. Pete's stuff is so intense, and so compelling that they could not look away. They simply were not used to seeing that combination of transcendent beauty, insanely detailed execution, and sheer power that comes through in the work.

I talked to people almost non-stop, pointing out that the work on the walls was completed fifty or more years ago, and briefly telling them both Pete’s story and mine. Of course, not everyone was interested in the stories. I’ve done this kind of thing before, and I’ve learned how to read a crowd pretty well. Surprisingly, only a very few gave me that cool vibe, of uninterest. Carl had set up a monitor, and had The Lost Era Film (link to Vimeo) running on loop with two sets of headphones available for people to listen in. Every time I looked over there someone was watching and listening. Of course no one stood there for the entire forty minute production, but no one just walked off either. 

For me  the take-away lesson from the evening was this: Regardless of what may be trendy, regardless of where people are coming from, they are hungry for beauty. Silly ideas may impress critics, but every band in the human spectrum is inspired by the light.

I enjoy doing this, but it is high energy work. The adrenaline runs low quickly, and after two hours I needed a break. My wife was chatting with a few of our friends who came out to the show, so I went with our friend Holly to check out the other openings. We headed up to the 8^th floor to  get a peek at the Gallery of Degenerate Art to see Degenerate Art in the Age of DOGE

(*Advisory*)

Do you really want to hear this? Of course you do.

Some vaguely obscene looking blob of soft sculpture with an erection. 

A little wooden rack of little bottles full of pills, each labelled with the title of a banned book:Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Captain Underpants (seriously?) 

(Did you know that Moustache Guy banned books?!)

 A huge photograph of some naked dude lying on his back and urinating into his own open mouth. 

Another giant photo of a quadriplegic in one of those elaborate mobility devices performing fellatio on a guy standing at his side. 

Some video of dumpy women writhing around in revealing clothing, and eating food and being gross.

It was all sort of sad. They were trying so very, very hard to upset the squares. Apparently no one told them that the squares they were trying to upset have been extinct for a generation. Even Boomers like Holly and me got bored with that kind of stuff before most these guys were born. We both kind of rolled our eyes. "This the best you got?” *yawn*

We returned to the fifth floor and The Lost Era show.

The crowd had thinned out. At last there were only a couple guys left, and we were all just talked out and ready to close it all up. The show was a hit, and I could not have been happier. We  left the Bendix building, hurried down the dark and dirty streets to our cars, found our way to the Westbound 10 freeway onramp, and punched it. 

 You know what’s worse than crawling through LA traffic? Going seventy miles an hour, bumper to bumper in the middle of the night. Life in So Cal. 

We made it home OK.

** footnote**

I did not mean to imply that Carl abandoned me to the crowd, or something. Hosting an opening takes a lot of running about, and making sure everything is in order. Carl was busy as all getout and I was more than a little hyper at being in a real downtown venue for the first time. My apologies to our host.

 Autumn

I know. It isn't quite fall yet. Autumn is a little over three weeks away, but I can feel it coming nonetheless. The seasons are subtle things in So Cal. Fall doesn't announce itself with flaming red and yellow trees, and frost in the early morning. It leans in with the yellowing angle of the sun, and hints of a certain heaviness in the afternoon breeze. A whisper, a sigh, and a slow turning awareness that summer is old, and getting weary. So it has been these last few days. 

It conjurs up memories, of course. The school year starting meant getting off the day shift after the hard work of summer cleaning, and going back to pushing broom on swing shift, so I could get up early and surf in the morning. September swells at Huntington Beach, and that 7' 5" diamond tail Dyno. It was such a sweet and easy board to ride. Weed harvest in Mexico, and soon enough you could get a fat lid for ten bucks. Or some years later, going back in as teacher, getting lesson plans together for the Cholos in East LA. Looking back through the haze, it was all pretty damn sweet. Best of all, I knew it. I have always been acutely aware of the good in good times.

I don't write about politics, current events, or even social trends here on the blog. It's not because I don't pay attention, or care about this kind of stuff. Indeed, I pay altogether too damn much attention to it, much to the detriment of my happiness, and even my mental health. Overall, it looks like the nation, and even the greater West, civilization as we have come to know it, is unravelling. I see kids in their twenties who by rights should be  in the wild and unruly phase of life, masked up, wearing safety helmets as they ride e-scooters, and constantly hypnotized by the cellphone. I find this horrifying. I don't have a television, but if I go into J's Grill to get a taco I see the TV on, and it seems like something from a bad dystopian satire. I could go on here, but I won't. You get the idea. 

I'm an old man, seventy two by the last birthday some days back.  I remain acutely aware of the good, in good times. I can count my blessings, and I do so regularly. God has been far better to me than I deserve. I have a lovely wife, a beautiful and comfortable home.  The greatest cat in the world (so he tells me) sits under the window, atop the bookcase near the desk. We have food on the table. We have good friends. We don't owe any money to anyone. These are all incredible blessings in this age and time.

I have the stonework, and the Lost Canyon Project to keep me very busy, and lend some meaning to these late days. It is good to have a task to accomplish, and the energy and desire to accomplish it. Daylight arrives in a few minutes, and I'll get busy with the tasks of the hour. So it is, this cloudy early morning late in August. 

So, anyway, let's have a look at the orange stone. Unlike most of my projects, this is a simple, uncomplicated form. There won't be any fancy though-cuts, or figure-within a figure stuff.

 One arm will twist forward, and the other will bend behind it, but other than that, it's a fairly simple shape. I've been working toward pushing the leaning faces back so they'll turn around the forward face on the other side. It's pretty basic stuff, but slow going. Notice that the bottom two pics represent a day's progress from the ones nearer to the top of the page.

 Here is where using power tools would greatly speed up the process. These cuts have taken three days to get to this point, advancing with a line scored with an ancient bone saw, some delicate application of the small point chisels, and a lot of  careful excavation with the rasp. This would all take less than half an hour with the angle grinder, but the faster the cut, the more likely to make an error, and once the stone is ground or cut away it can't be undone. So I prefer slow, and safe to fast and final. I can be patient if patience is called for.

 The Orange Stone

I know. It looks like a giant pot roast, but this thing is forty eight pounds of translucent orange alabaster. It came from The Compleat Sculptor, which is in, of all places, New York City. The stone itself came from either Colorado, or most likely, Utah. I haven't seen this stuff on the market since the late 1990's, and as soon as I saw it on-line, I jumped at the chance to get some. It wasn't cheap. This chunk of rock cost me a little over four hundred bucks. When they find the orange translucent it is most often in narrow layers along with other stone. This piece is a healthy four inches thick, so there's a lot of potential. It had to wait while I finished up the last piece that broke in two. Hope I don't have bad luck again.

The first part of the job is deciding how the stone is going to sit, and then finding a point of balance. It didn't take long at all.  The next step is to make a nice flat foot for the stone to sit on. That part went quickly as well. The stone already had even flat faces, so it took only two days find the right attitude, create the foot, and sand the faces smooth so I could draw on the rock with a pencil.

 It often takes many days of staring at the stone before an idea comes to me. But this piece had only two planes, rather than 360 degrees of differing faces. The outline of the basic shape of the rock, plus the intense vibrant color suggested flames, so the plan practically drew itself.

Wait a minute.

Flames?

Isn't that kind of cornball?

Maybe so. But the drawing looked cool, and I liked it. So here we are:

 This is the result of two days of work on the basic outline:

The long upper tearddrop will be opened up. The smaller one near the base will be a window to let the light shine through. The rest of the stuff? We'll see.

But I'm not going to leave this thing to stand on such a small foot, however well balanced. A lot of sculptors mount their carvings on tiny feet, the stone on tiptoe, and held vertical with steel pins drilled into the base. I can't say it doesn't look cool as hell. But I have my own aesthetic with my stone. Stone wants to sit, firmly anchored to the earth. It doesn't like to dance of fly. I have a very cool plan for a base, but that'll happen in the future. There are many days of hard work ahead before I get there.

 Negligence, and the Remnant

I suppose I should at least complete the tale of the May Stone project. 

I've been negligent about the blog, here. It's a self perpetuating thing, you know? Very few people stop by here, so I don't have a lot of incentive to post, which means nobody has a reason to stop by. I see the stats on The Lost Era, and Lost Canyon Project blogs, and most of the visitors are from overseas, mainly China or Singapore. Nobody from either place could possibly have any interest in that stuff unless it's to steal images, or harvest them for AI. If I could, I'd treat them to same uncivil  responses I give to phone scammers. But you can't say Go Fuck Yourself to a machine, or some anonymous trolling bot.

Oh well.

So, anyway, let's have a look at where we were with this tall slender stone, and how it finally turned out.

I alawys joke about having the Pee Wee Herman option at hand when creating an abstract figure. No matter how bad you mess up, or if the stone just breaks, you can always take on that snotty voice, and say, I meant to do that, so there. But in all the projects I've done over the years I never had to actually employ the Pee Wee option. 

Until this one.

Here is where we left off in early July:

(I didn't get any pictures through the next couple of phases.)

That center section was going to pass into the globe from the top, and form a sort of tongue protruding into a bowl. The 'wings' on either side were going to curl around it. But when I went to open the globe at the bottom, I overdrilled and spoiled what would have been the center section. Embarrassing. So I had to change course. I went ahead and drilled all the way through the globe. Then, I went to drill again to separate those 'wings,' and once again missed with the drill. Humiliating.

So I fell back on the Pee Wee option. The center section became a sort of swan's neck with the big teardrop at the top. Success! This was actually a better design than I had originally planned, It would have been a prize winner. But:

I was finishing, wet sanding at 400 grit, which is getting quite close to the polishing stage, and the stone literally came apart in my hands. I didn't drop it, or bump it, or chisel on it. It just quietly came apart.

Bummer. So. 

Sometimes you just do the best with what you have, and what I had was two separate chunks of rock. No, it couldn't be drilled and pegged, or glued back together. And here's what came of the remnant:

All things considered, it's not too bad. Certainly not what I had planned, but, you know- What're ya gona' do?

Anyway, tomorrow is Monday, and tomorrow I'm going to begin on this:

48 pounds of translucent orange alabaster. I haven't seen this stuff since the early 1990's. It'll be quite a while before I put a tool to this gem. The most important part of the job is to stare at the stone until it speaks to you. I'm going to listen very, very closely.

 Slow Progress Beats No Progress

One whole week was entirely taken up with preparations for the Solstice party we threw on Saturday, the 22nd. Cleaning the house, and grounds used to be a one day affair, two if stuff was unusually messy. We're slowing down. Mary will say, "Well, we're getting old..." 

There ain't no more gettin' about it. We're there.

But the gather was a great success. (I like to noun-ify the verb, the way Anne McCaffery did in her Pern novels.) We had our gang of friends as always, but this time we extended the invitation to the members of Whittier Art Association, and La Habra Arts as well. We had a good sized crowd, everyone loved the BBQ, and the day went off with only one small hitch. I had been cooking on the grill for a couple hours, and my glasses were all foggy from the greasy smoke. I was taking a bowl of potato salad out to the yard, and walked through the patio screen door, fell down the step, and ended up on all fours on the patio. Somehow I pulled this stunt off without spilling the potato salad, or sustaining any serious injury, but I'm still sore, and a little emabarrassed. My pal John Hill is coming over later this afternoon to help me re-screen the sliding door. 

Luz Spanks, the new president at La Habra, has been a great ally in promoting The Lost Era film. She arranged a showing at the Fullerton Museum Center on July 14. Somehow, I have a feeling that this show will be important. We'll see.

 So here is where the new stone stands. I'm working the middle section into a globe. I'll rough out the base section next, and count on some sort of inspiration to show up, and tell me where the long top section is going to go.

The process always goes like this: work a little, plan the next step. Get stuck. Stare... I've tried to begin with a sketch, and a plan. After all, that's how yer s'possed to do it: draw a picture, create a maquette, then do the real one with the maquette as a guide. I can't do much of anything with pencil and paper. The boulder has no flat surfaces; no two faces are the same. No symmetry at all. I can definitely see the advantages of working with a perfect cube of stone. But a perfect cube doesn't speak to me. A boulder has its own unique shape. I can always see some form in the irregular faces  and use that as a start. Like the last piece I did. I couldn't come up with anything until I started. Once I start I can see some thing that I like, work toward that thing, and before long I can see a way forward. So it is here.

7/2/24

Well, inconsistency is better than incontinence, but it's not a good way to create and keep a following for the blog, here. Every time I start a project I promise myself to do weekly updates, and then...

I don't. 

I see guys on instagram posting these sped up videos of doing projects, and I'll have to admit they usually hold my interest long enough to see how the stuff is going to turn out. But, too, those are all cell phone videos, and I still do not have a cell phone. I notice that it becomes increasingly inconvenient to do without one. All that does is kick in my crusty old man stubborn streak. Screw you guys, I ain't gonna get one. I am increasingly horrified by the sight of everyone and their dog running around with faces stuffed into that nasty little screen. It reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

 So anyway, let's have a look at how the May Stone Project is coming along.

 We left off here:

This is another plan-as-I-go endeavor. I had a notion of what to do with the lower half of the stone, but the upper part had to wait for an idea to show up. Well, as per always, I reach a point where I'm not sure how to proceed. The solution comes during the process of taking care of what I know I'll have to do, anyway.

Here's the next step:

And the next:

Which brings us here:

I had planned on leaving some of the "natural" shape and texture in the stuff atop the globe, but  I changed my mind on that. I retained much of the raw form on the last project, but that won't work here. This is where working from a boulder is a challenge. The sides are uneven; the front and back don't match, and it's hard to take measurements. The key I've found is to scribe north/south, and east/west lines on the bottom of the base, turn those into vertical centerlines on the stone, and measure everything out from the center. Bit by bit I nudge the natural form toward symmetry.

So I'll close today's post with a preview. Check this baby:

That is not a Texas sized steak. It's 48 pounds of translucent orange alabaster. ('spensive stuff!) I'll get around to posting again, when I've made more progress on the May stone. It's going to be hard not to jam through it so I can get my hands on Big Orange. Patience...