Return to the Fall part two

I've been overhauling my den here at the Suburban Hermitage, and in doing so I've been  going through my altogether too large collection of books, and irresistably cool shelf items. 

 It isn't easy. Every time I lay hands on something I ask, "Do I really need this thing?" The answer is always, "No, BUT..." That's from Art Class in 1969. I got this thing back in the 70's. I made that one when I was a kid. Here's a souvenier from a vacation back in 1960...

Worse is the stuff that belonged to my mother or father. Worse yet is the stuff from my grandparents...

It has been a week of hard work, and there is still no end to it.

I woke up in the middle of the night, last night and rather than lie in bed staring at the ceiling, I got up, and went into the living room. Buddy the Cat hopped off the bed, and followed me out there. Looking out the sliding screen door I could see a soft overcast blanketing the sky, and feel the cool, quiet air flowing into the room. I sat in the big green chair. Ol' Buddy jumped up, made himself comfortable, and went to sleep in my lap. Good ol' Kitty! Odd how things come to light in the dark hours of the morning. I saw very clearly that there are many things I need to let go.

 I didn't intend for rearranging the den to be anything more than moving furniture and opening up wall space for artwork. But somehow, sitting there in the dark, I realized that it's more than getting rid of stuff I don't really need. It's time to put some things to rest and move on. I recently sold my 1950 Schwinn B6 to a very nice young guy whom I met on the local bike path.

I didn't ride it any more, and it was a shame to just let the old cruiser collect dust in the garage. As I sat there in the dark living room I decided to gift him the 1956 girl's bike as well. The bikes are a matched pair, and I don't want to engage in the hassle of trying to sell it. Maybe he can use it to get some young woman on a riding date.

We really don't own things like these, anyway. We are stewards of them, preserving the old machines against Time.


Neither Mary nor I have children. I have a niece and a nephew, but neither of them has much in the way of a connection to the family. My mother's and father's families are all from Michigan and Ohio. That lineage and history means nothing to the niece and nephew, and to be fair, there isn't much reason that it should. After all, those are people they never knew, and places they've never been. They have only a vague memory of my maternal grandmother, and not much connection to my mother either. Mary and I see them maybe once or twice a year at the most.
Going through the accumulated treasures in my collection, I find that so very many of them are touchstones to people, and places I knew and loved. 
I can't hand that down. Memory creates the touchstone, and the heart alone can appraise the value. It is not transferrable. Things are only things after all. What to keep? What to toss? These are melancholy considerations. But the considerations extend to more than souveniers of the past.

As I mentioned in the last couple of posts, I'm about to put The Lost Canyon Project to rest.
This project has been center stage in my life for eight years, now. I still have the feeling that it was a mission that chose me. The number, and frequency of wildly improbable coincidences that led to this work is too great to ignore. If I hadn't engaged this effort there would be nothing of Pete's legacy but a disorganized pile of very old paintings moldering away in a storage bin. I have some few gestures yet to complete, and those tasks will be discharged in the next couple of months.

Right now, I'm waiting for results on a submission to the Doc LA Film Festival. Results were to be posted on September 24th, but they postponed it until Friday, the 26th. This November I have a Lost Era Film presentation at the Whittier Museum, and another at the Whittier Art Association gallery. Pete's sister-in-law will be coming out here for other stuff, and she'll be attending the museum show, and probably taking some paintings with her when she goes back to So. Carolina.

I'm having a new copy Of The Lost Era Transcripts book printed, but I'm still waiting for the printer to get his machines fixed, and complete the order. I'm having it printed up for my one last attempt to get recognition for Pete Hampton's The Lost Era.

George Lucas is building his Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park in Los Angeles, and The Lost Era is nothing if not the quintessential California narrative. I sent them an email, and got no response. I don't think anyone answers emails anymore. So I'm planning on sending the new copy of the Lost Era Transcripts book to the address posted on their web site and hoping for the best.  It's kind of like putting a message in a bottle. Hope is a Virtue, after all. 

Some very slim chance of real success does remain. Maybe the film festival. Maybe the museum show, or the art gallery show. Maybe the message in a bottle  will wash up on the right shoreline. 

But what would real success look like? I ask myself frequently. It is surprisingly hard to envision what shape success might take. 

 I have worked very hard. Indeed, I worked myself to exhaustion creating the catalog, the blogs, the book, and now the film. I've invested huge amounts of time, and spent no small amout of money. I've been ignored by Laguna Beach, Fullerton, La Habra (of all places), La Mirada, and Claremont. I've given over a dozen film presentations. For all that, I have reached a few people, but only a few. I just don't have the energy to continue.
Failing isn't easy. These are the last gestures I intend to make. I really want closure. I need to get this whole thing off of center stage, and move on.

 It's hard to express all this without sounding angry or bitter. But I'm neither bitter, nor angry. I'm tired.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, it's time to put some things to rest. There is always a melancholy turn of heart in the first days of autumn, and that is compounded when your autobiography is in its last few chapters. As I've said before, If my life were a book then the thick part would now be in my left hand. But the last chapter hasn't yet been written. So there is that.

JWM

Return to the Fall 

It has been quite a while since I sat down here to write a post. I did a note on the Lost Era show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid gallery, but that was way back in March. I never did follow up writing about the orange stone even though I finished it over a year ago. Anyway, here it is:

Fire on Ice

It has not been a productive year for the stone work. Other stuff kept coming up. I put a rock on the carving table but it sat there for months like an unpaid bill while my creative energies were diverted into the Lost Canyon Project stuff.  I finally got to work on it, and finished it up a little over a week ago. Here it is:

It isn't one of my better pieces, to be sure. But nobody bats 1000 at anything. 

The other day I was checking the statistics for the WFB on Blogger, and noticed a spike in page views, but I can't imagine why.

What could possibly be the reason for a lot of traffic from Duke, Princeton or Oxford universities? And the jump in views is here at the World Famous Blog, and also on the Lost Era blog, and The Lost Canyon blog as well. Maybe I'm a better writer than I thought. Maybe some clever undergrad is plagiarising some of my musings for a quick "C" in English class. Many of the views here were for stuff that I had written in 2009 which didn't feel like a long time ago, but that was sixteen years in the past. 

 I guess sixteen years is a long time, but as I just said, it doesn't feel like it was all that long ago. It's a feature of being old. When you're in high school, sixteen years takes you back to infancy. When you're seventy three, it's just a short while back.

So very much has changed since 2009. Here's one of them:

Today we braved the rain for Time Out Burger. The place was a mediocre dump until a Korean couple took it over a few years back. Now, Time Out defines hamburger, and you can get a great grilled chicken dinner with a full plate of salad, and a big drink for under six bucks.

Time Out is long gone, and a chicken dinner like that, anywhere these days, will kill a twenty dollar bill, and seriously wound a fiver who goes along. So few of the features of daily life around here remain unspoiled. With every passing year, life here in So Cal is measurably worse than it was the year before. More crowding. More traffic. More high density housing.

More foreigners. Perhaps it isn't politically judicious to not be pleased with folks deciding to prefer Southern California to  wherever it was they came from. But I see headscarves on women and masjids springing up like the noxious weeds they are. There is nothing whatsoever to be gained by importing moslems. There is nothing worthy of admiration, or emulation in the muslim faith, or the repressive cultures that it spawns. They are not immigrants, but invaders, colonizing  bits of our nation to spread their vile religion.

Except for the moslem incusion, Pete Hampton predicted this future back in 1961, and launched his quixotic, and failed crusade against rampant development.  And, more and more it's looking like my own quixotic crusade to preserve Pete's legacy is coming to a similarly unsuccessful conclusion. But more on that in another post.

Summer is gone. The days are getting shorter. Time is getting out from under us, and change rolls on at an ever increasing pace. There is no brake on Time, and no breaks in change.

JWM

 

 Samples of Pete

I've written before about my work to preserve my late friend Pete Hampton's legacy as an artist and storyteller. Without going into great detail, there has been some, but only some success. It looks like the project has gone as far as it is going to go. It isn't over, yet, and there is still some hope. I haven't lost faith in my belief that Pete deserves to stand with, at the very least, California's finest regional artists. Here is a small sample of my favorites among Pete's work.

See the links to The Lost Era Transcripts blog, and The Lost Canyon Project Blog on the sidebar for more about Pete, and my work to preserve his legacy.

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This stuff is all quite old. All of the above paintings have come unglued from their backings. It'll take some work to get them in any shape to hang.

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 These two, however are a couple of Pete's favorites. They are nicely framed, and ready to hang.

So, we'll just have to see where this thing goes from here. There will be two final Lost Era shows this November. One will be November 8th at the Whittier Historic Museum, and the other at Whittier Art Association Gallery on November 22nd. There are two other remote possibilities. If either of them comes to fruition I'll post about it

JWM

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.