Captain Underpants

Man, oh, man, oh, man. I love the new Rodarte collection at Target, but it’s nice that a retailer who sells women’s clothing created by amazing designers  sees fit to also also serve up some exceedingly well-defined (note the piping) kitsch for the menfolk. Or the tall-boy-folk like the young man lurking behind the rack and trying to talk his mom (out of frame) into buying him a pair.  

Dust to Dust

The stunningly beautiful actress Jennifer Jones died yesterday at her Malibu home at age 90. In 1944 she won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Saint Bernadette, but she also took on memorable roles in which she played outrageous sinners and/or quasi-ethnic types in roles that probably wouldn't fly in today's cinema. 

These include the vixenish mestiza Pearl Chavez who’s in love with two brothers in Duel in the Sun (aka Lust in the Dust); the ex-patriot bourgeoise Mary Forbes in Indiscretion of an American Wife; and Dr. Han Suyin, a widowed Eurasian doctor whose family disapproves of her romance with an American journalist played by William Holden in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing (a movie for which my sister has a vaguely embarrassed yet nostalgic fondness). 


Jones married three times. The first was to actor Robert Walker, perhaps best known as the sublimely sociopathic killer Bruno Anthony in Strangers on a Train. Her second marriage was to producer David O. Selznick, whose bad advice was thought to have wrecked her career. Her third marriage was to magnate Norton Simon, and after his death she served as chair of the Board of Directors of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

Read more at USA Today or the Seattle Times.
Update: a Los Angeles Times appreciation of Jennifer Jones and her work on behalf of the Norton Simon Museum.

Another Big National Cover-Up

national chocolate-covered anything day : : dark chocolate-dipped macaroons * milk chocolate-dipped strawberries * chocolate-covered double-stuff oreos * chocolate-covered kimchi * chocolate-dipped fortune cookies * dark chocolate-dipped cherry ice cream cones * chocolate-covered kettle corn * chocolate-covered bacon * chocolate-dipped mini-cheesecakes with chocolate-covered spoons * chocolate-covered espresso beans * chocolate-covered frogs for young wizards * chocolate-coated marshmallows * chocolate-dipped pretzel rods * chocolate-covered bananas * chocolate-covered peanut butter balls * chocolate-covered matzo * chocolate-covered cheerios * chocolate-dipped potato chips * chocolate-covered carmel macadamia nuts * chocolate-covered peeps...

And Then There’s Mod

H.D. Buttercup, 4:52 pm: never underestimate the power of a black hole-style chair to bring out the nap in you.

Changing How We See Art

Thomas Hoving, who served as director of  the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art during the 1960s-1970s and was the innovator of the blockbuster exhibit -- starting with Tutankhamen -- died on Thursday of lung cancer. Hoving was 78.

A 1992 Publisher's Weekly Review of his book, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, described his tone as being “preening and amusingly self-deprecating at once.”

He seems to have been a man who courted controversy, and at 6'3", he was a larger-than-life character who described his collecting style as “pure piracy.” One of the acquisitions made during his 10-year tenure at MoMA was a 2,500-year-old Greek vase that had been whisked away from an Etruscan tomb; when he made the purchase, he chose to overlook the questionable methods used to obtain the work. (Years after his departure as director, in 1996, the vase was returned to Italy.)

This isn’t to say that the self-described shark didn’t expect fair play from others, however. During his 1980s sojourn as editor of Connoisseur magazine, he revealed shenanigans perpetuated at the Getty, including a tax fraud scheme and another about a fake Greek kouros that the museum had acquired.

Although I’m interested in reading Mummies to learn more, I’ve already concluded that the way he re-envisioned the museum experience 35 to 40 years ago continues to benefit art enthusiasts everywhere. Aside from developing the blockbuster-style show, he brought about other changes that are now central components. One example -- he brought live artists into the MoMA collection. (Until that time, MoMA trustees only allowed works by dead artists to be shown.)

“We are still working out of the model he set,” said Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in the Los Angeles Times. “Beyond blockbusters, it’s the fundamental assumption that our museums have to be open and accessible to the public. That’s his legacy, and it’s a very important one.”

To read up on Hoving, check out the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times. 

Also, to hear a 1993 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, occasioned by his memoir, Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, visit NPR.

Animal Farm

My coworker, TerriTwitter, and I took a lunch break yesterday and walked over to a petting zoo at Central and California in Glendale. Zoo is an overstatement -- it was more like a tent and a chain-link fenced-in pen on a Christmas tree lot. She paid 75¢ to enter the pen since that’s all she had with her, but I paid the full $2. Both prices of admission included a bowl of feed, and when we showed up with it, the lambs and goat rushed us like we were rock stars. One of the bunnies, the one with his rear to the camera in the last photo, had a mustache like Groucho Marx. Funny, we didn’t see a pony-ride. I was still picking straw off of my tights two hours later.

Brownie Mania

Hooray -- it’s National Chocolate Brownie Day! 

Here’s Martha Stewart's Caramel Pecan Brownie recipe.

While they’re in the oven, here’s some brownie history from Nibble.com.  (The first brownie was actually a molasses treat.)

Perhaps Brownie cameras are more your speed.

Click here to read up on the history of the Brownie camera.

Or click here to see some brownie photography.

Photo above: Brownie Troop 592, Norwalk, CA, 1962

Keeping Up With The Joneses

Ditto on that ditto.

The First Rock Star

Before Madonna made 
a career of entertaining 
in her underwear, 
before Bjork dressed in outlandish costumes, before Cindy Lauper had fun, before recorded music became the norm rather than a passing fancy, there was vaudeville’s 
Eva Tanguay.
Jody Rosen, Slate’s culture guru, says that “for roughly two decades, from 1904 until the early 1920s, Eva Tanguay was the biggest rock star in the United States.” 
Tanguay was born in Quebec and she died in Los Angeles; Rosen’s article is a fascinating look into the years in between, the rise and fall of a forgotten artist.

Home Schools

Dozens of family homes on residential streets throughout Koreatown have been converted into businesses, and a high number of these are focused on caring for the young -- pre-schools, schools, schules, academies, kindergartens, child care centers... 
I’m often curious about these home-based businesses:
01. Do the owners live in the house?
02. Does having a commercial business increase or decrease the value of the nearby family residences?

03. Do the owners know that there’s a 90% chance that their signage could be improved by 90%? 

I could go on about this all night, but let’s look at the photos instead. 
(Click to enlarge.)

Wilshire Smiling Tree, Child Green School / Wiz island, Sunshine Pre-School;

Morning Star Education Center, Preschool After School, Kinder Schule;

San Marino Academy Children Center, Shin and Kim Family Child Care, (unknown);

Serrano Lily Academy, Christian Kindergarten, Key’s Wonderland School;

JC Education, Academy Children Center, Dreamland Children's School.

Judge a Book By Its Cover

Recommended: The Book Cover Archive

William Burroughs: Thanksgiving Prayer

If you’re feeling a little dispirited this Thanksgiving, this video won’t help. Directed by Gus Van Sant back in 1991, it features a sad-eyed William Burroughs reciting his poem, Thanksgiving Prayer, amidst an montage of American icons. Happy holiday, anyway.

Drive-By Shootings: The Kitchen

One of my favorite paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Angel’s Flight by California artist Millard Sheets. 
I like the painting’s sense of isolation, with the two women positioned high in the frame, regarding the goings-on below, absorbed in their own thoughts. Geometry dominates the painting, and the women seem to be all angles and elbows, with their A-line and trumpet-flare skirts softly echoing the diagonal roof lines, stairs and fire escapes. Stairway to heaven, this isn’t. Perhaps they prefigure Damiel and Cassiel, watching angels who long to be corporeal, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire.

A mural covers an outside wall of The Kitchen at Fountain, a stone’s throw from Sunset. Its elements are the antithesis of Angel’s Flight -- the colors, less vibrant; the view from below, rather than above; a crowd, rather than isolation. Yet there seems to be a sense of contemplation and longing reminiscent of Sheets’s two women, although, with the absent-minded S-curves dual silhouettes, appear to be more harmonious with each other than the members of the mural’s shoulder-to-shoulder populace.

Loneliness takes many forms. Isolation and solitude are not synonymous concepts.

Angel’s Flight, Millard Sheets, 1931

Three images from “The Kitchen,” Silverlake.

The Fountainhead

 

A water main on Pico near Fairfax broke late last night, creating a geyser that shot higher than the sign for the $5.99 Hi-Fashion store.

Within moments, the fire department showed up to put out the water.

By the time I drove around the block and then turned back for another look, cars and neighbors had gathered at all corners of the intersection.

I love the $5.99 Hi-Fashion store, although everything I've ever purchased there has been $12.99.

My friend Dawn prefers Fallas Paredes, which is  by our gym.

Neither of us knows the correct translation of Fallas Paredes. 

Fashion Parade? Fashion Paradise? Fa-la-la?

Fa-La-La is a much bigger operation than $5.99 Hi-Fashion. It has its own website, and it’s part of a nationwide chain.

On the other hand, the exterior of $5.99 Hi-Fashon is hot pink, which makes it cheerier and more inviting than Fa-La-La. Plus the store has an endearing set of rules: no trying-on before buying; no credit card transactions below $15. Which means you’re encouraged to pay cash if you’re only going to buy a pair of lime green razor-slash ho leggings to wear with your scuffed white stilletos and ripped Fame sweatshirt without leaving a trail that leads straight to Citibank. Plus, who can resist a dazzling water feature?

Pop Takes a Holiday

If you’re a fan of Andy Warhol, and if you like Christmas, too, click here 
to see a Corbis Fine Art slideshow his of early commercial illustrations. 
Above: Merry Christmas Shoe, 
Andy Warhol

Kahn Artist

Louis I. Kahn, Architect. Drawings for City/2 Exhibition: The Street 
is a Room, 1971. 
Charcoal. 34" x 34"

Drive-By Shootings: The Living Room Re-Do

These days I commute so much that I often forget which road I’m on. Wilshire, Beverly, Normandie, Vermont, Heliotrope, Fountain, Hyperion -- they blur into one.
Sometimes I navigate by way of food joints: one block from Mandarette, by Jollibee, or across the street from Porto’s. A ridiculous, yet reliable method.
But now more ephemeral points have started sinking sharp pins into my mental map -- murals, drawings, graffiti -- work easily destroyed by a clean-up crew, a wrecking ball, rain, wind, or sun. Or covered up by another artist or vandal, recycling a wall as though it were a canvas.
Back in the 1970s, architect Louis I. Kahn observed, “The street is a room by agreement / A community room the walls of which belong to the donors / The ceiling is the sky”.
Which leads to my minor theory: Los Angeles is a living room and everyone keeps redecorating it.

Words To Live By

“There’s nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich.” — You’re in Love, Charlie Brown

It’s National Peanut Butter Month, and here’s what I’ve noticed: if you love peanut butter, it won’t love you back, but it will stay by your side (especially your backside) forever.

Drive-By Shootings: Ladies First

Sometimes Los Angeles seems like an outdoor art gallery of the best kind, with mostly blue skies and wealth of nice days, which can make just about any building or sculpture appear significant. Same thing with the murals, paintings and graffiti scattered around the city -- turn a corner at a side street off Hollywood Boulevard, and there’s a wonder to behold, or get stuck at a stoplight on Wilshire or mid-town Beverly and there's something interesting to see on a brick wall fifteen feet away. 

Dog Collar as Statement Jewelry

Another dog handbag from my Workingman Press page-a-day calendar. (Thanks yet again, Christopher!)

Dream Factory

Today is National Chocolate Day!

If you visit thenibble.com, there are all sorts of fascinating articles about what makes a truffle a truffle, the dynamics of couverture, the mysteries of ganache...

“E” for Effort

Hostess With the Mostess

In case you had planned on dressing up for National Cupcake Day.

This delicious little trifle is available on etsy.com 
Click here to see another Hostess Cupcake costume (complete with a dreamy little hat).
Or wake up your jaded palette with passing fancy -- the bacon peanut butter chocolate cupcake. Bon appetit!

Penn Was Mighty

With the advent of rain, it’s officially sweater weather, and for a couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the recent death of Irving Penn, the stark beauty of his subjects -- the angles of whippet-thin fashion models; the illuminated beauty of harshly voluptuous nudes; the exoticism of other lives -- Peruvian children, Hell’s Angels, New Guinea mud men; and an affinity for the inherent beauty of objects, from cigarette butts in pools of ash to tweeds with turtlenecks.

The New York Times obituary

The Wall Street Journal obituary

The Jezebel slide show

The New Yorker slide show

Raiders of the Lost Archive

Between 2004 and 2007, a couple who own an antique store in Mexico allegedly acquired more than 1,200 objects thought to have belonged to Frida Kahlo, which are the subject of a new Princeton Architectural Press book, Finding Frida Khalo: Diaries, Letters, Recipes, Notes, Sketches, Stuffed Birds, and Other Newly Discovered Keepsakes.


Some Kahlo scholars believe that these objects are fake. As New York-based Latin American art dealer Mary-Anne Martin suggests, she believes that the publishers “have been the victims of a gigantic hoax.” 
On the other hand, Christopher Knight, art critic at the Los Angeles Times, seems to think the objects may be valid, although perhaps not overly valuable. His term: ephemera. He has said he has seen the items first-hand in Mexico on three occasions; Martin and other detractors have only seen facsimiles in news story photos and the book. And the Finding Frida Kahlo authors, Barbara Levine and Stephen Jaycox make no claims to be Kahlo experts.
Last week both Knight and Martin were guests of KCRW’s Ruth Seymour on The Politics of Culture. If you like Punch-and-Judy shows, this may be the podcast for you.
Above: Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird.

Truth or Dare

Nineteenth-century Parisians such as Marcel Proust and his contemporaries played a question-and-answer game that they believed would offer insight into an individual’s nature. This game inspired Vanity Fair’s long-running back-page Q-and-A, the Proust Questionnaire. VF editor Graydon Carter has collected the most noteworthy responses for  Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire: 101 Luminaries Ponder Love, Death, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life. Included: Bette Midler, Salmon Rushdie, Donna Karan, Gore Vidal, Sandra Bernhard, Keith Richards, Emma Thompson... 

My results were frighteningly similar to Joan Rivers.

Name Your Poison

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently acquired a painting by a nearly-forgotten 17th-century French painter and Aubusson tapestry designer, Isaac Moillon, with funds gained from recently deaccessioned artwork sold at auction.
The 1653 painting, Sophonisbe Drinking Poison, is a narrative depiction of a queen who drinks poison rather than allow herself to being paraded through the streets by Roman conquerers. According to the LACMA site, Moillon descended from a family of painters, of whom his sister, Louise, was the most well-known. (Two of Louise Moillon’s still lifes -- Still Life with Bowl of Curacao Oranges, 1634 and Still Life with Cherries, Strawberries and Gooseberries, 1630 -- are part of the Norton Simon Museum collection.)
Sophonisbe Drinking Poison has a number of distinctions. Its beauty lives up to the epic heroism of its tale, conveying Sophonisbe in the extreme foreground, off-center, as a tragic, alabaster figure with disproportionately-long arms and a delicate hand, holding a cup into which her handmaid is pouring the poison; the queen’s face is turned aside, an aria of tragic I-will-bear-this sacrifice. The work was created in Mannerist style when the rest of the art world had gone Baroque. It’s also a rarity -- LACMA is the only American museum to have any of Isaac Moillon’s work.
For more info on Isaac Moillon, visit LACMA’s site here.
Sophonisbe Drinking Poison, 1653; Isaac Moillon (France, Paris, 1614-1673); oil on canvas: 56" x 56 3/4". Purchased with funds provided by the European Paintings Deaccession Fund.

Sometimes You Feel Like A Fluff

It’s National Fluffernutter Day.

[Bread + Fluff + Skippy* = Fluffernutter]
The debate in Massachusetts: Fluffernutter for official state sandwich? 
*Skippy just seems like the happier choice; Jif just sounds like it’s in a hurry.

Pretty in Pink

In the Season Two premiere of  The Rachel Zoe Project, which aired on Bravo at the end of August, much of the episode’s drama revolved around a hot pink taffeta Chanel gown that Rachel Zoe had asked Karl Lagerfeld to alter on behalf of client Cameron Diaz. After much sturm und drang, the dress arrived, it looked fantastic, and Diaz wore it to the Golden Globes.
Above: left, the original gown on the Chanel runway; center, Cameron Diaz on the red carpet at the Golden Globe Awards; right, a similarly-inspired dress by Max and Cleo, available at MyShape.com.
Right photo by Lindsay at MyShape.com.

I Dream of Genie Slippers

The latest advance in multi-tasking:

Who Likes Short Shorts?

Back story: For the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, Gilles Jacob, the festival’s president, invited 35 directors to each create a three-minute short film inspired by the motion picture theatre experience.
The resulting anthology, To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun son cinéma), is available on DVD, and it features 33 films by luminaries including Jane Campion, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Gus Van Sant, Wong Kar-Wai, and the ever-scandalous Roman Polanski. 
Three films were delivered too late for the DVD release: a second short by Walter Salles, Absurda by David Lynch and World Cinema by Joel and Ethan Coen. 
Fast forward and thank heaven for YouTube, where you can see World Cinema. It stars Josh Brolin as a guy puzzling over which film to see at a theatre. Ceylan’s Climates by Nuri Bilge? The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir? 
There's a funny line regarding a rabbit, which works if you’ve seen The Rules of the Game. I won’t tell you which movie Josh chose. To find out, click here.