The Story of Joseph

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In One Image, Several Scenes of the Story of Joseph

Yesterday at the Getty Center, I spent most of my time in the Medieval and Renaissance galleries, reacquainting myself with old friends. One painting that fascinated me was “The Story of Joseph” (circa 1485), attributed to the Florentine Biagio d’Antonio, which in foreground and background gives several early episodes of the tale of Joseph from the Old Testament. By focusing on different parts of the image, one saw different scenes from the story.

The following is the description of the painting from the Getty Center website:

Drawn from the Old Testament, a series of continuous narratives depicts episodes from the life of Joseph, the favorite son of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob. To make the story easier to follow, Biagio d’Antonio included inscriptions identifying the principal characters.

In the left-hand loggia, Jacob, seated on a throne, sends Joseph to his half-brothers tending sheep in the field. In the far left corner, the brothers, jealous of their father’s love for Joseph, strip him of his jacket and throw him into a pit. Passing merchants purchase the young boy from his brothers for twenty pieces of silver. In the background to the right, the merchants board the ship that will take them and their cargo to Egypt. In the right-hand loggia, the brothers show a blood-smeared coat to their father as evidence that Joseph is dead. With his head in his hand, Jacob mourns his son, whom he believes to be dead.

It’s almost as if this were a precursor to the cinema by telling a detailed story in a single still image. One of the things I love most about Medieval and Renaissance painting are the picturesque landscape backgrounds, which lend an aura of fantasy.

Many people (Martine among them) don’t care for the repetitive Biblical themes of the art of the period. What interests me is the almost endless variety within a familiar, given subject matter.

25 Years of the Getty

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This year the Getty Center in Los Angeles is celebrating its silver anniversary. I took the MTA 761 bus to the museum (neatly avoiding the $20 parking fee) and spent several hours looking at the new exhibits and reacquainting myself with the Medieval, Renaissance, and 19th century artworks in the permanent collection.

The Cy Twombly (1928-2011) special exhibit left me speechless. Who slipped up? The man’s work left me shaking my head: Nothing in the gallery spoke to me except to say, “Just pass on through, Bud—the quicker the better.” There was another exhibit on “Conserving de Kooning,” but as I didn’t give a hang for Willem de Kooning’s work, I passed up on it.

Curiously, for the first time, I began to have my doubts about French Impressionism. There was a huge crowd around a Van Gogh still life which was nice, but not spectacular. I disliked some of the Claude Monets: There were some haystacks and a study of the Cathedral of Rouen, but I thought they were merely experiments in the quality of sunlight at different times of the day.

Claude Monet’s “Sunrise”

The Monet that grabbed my attention was a painting titled “Sunrise.” According to the Getty:

In the muted palette of the emerging dawn, Claude Monet portrayed the industrial port of Le Havre on the northern coast of France. The brilliant orange of the rising sun glimmers amid the damp air and dances on the gentle rippling water, lighting up its iridescent blues and greens. Barely discernible through a cool haze, pack boats on the left billow smoke from their stacks. Painted during the spring of 1873 as the country struggled to rebuild following the Franco-Prussian war, this Sunrise might also metaphorically suggest a new day dawning in France.

What struck me about the painting was its hovering on the edge of abstractness while still being clearly representational. I love the sun trying to break through the early morning fog and clouds.

In the days to come, I will discuss some other paintings and photographs that favorably impressed me. My visits to the Getty Center and the Getty Villa always energize me. I have long since given up regularly visiting the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as it is expensive ($16 for Seniors) and they are perennially suffering attacks of constructionitis. They are replacing their perfectly adequate main building with a more jazzy building with less exhibition space.

No Stylist He!

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Poet Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Okay, so he’s no great stylist. You won’t quote his poems at length the way you might quote Keats or Shakespeare. But I guarantee you will get what he has to say because it is written to communicate simply and directly. You can read a book of Bukowski poems the way you read a pulp novel, from end to end, with total comprehension. In my book, that counts.

mugged

finished,
can’t find the handle,
mugged in the backalleys of nowhere,
too many dark days and nights,
too many unkind noons, plus a
steady fixation for
the ladies of death.

I am 
finished, roll me
up, package
me,
toss me 
to the birds of Normandy or the
gulls of Santa Monica, I
no longer
read
I
no longer
breed,
I
talk to old men over quiet
fences.

is this where my suicide complex
un-
complexes?: as
I am asked over the telephone:
did you ever know Kerouac?

I now allow cars to pass me on the freeway.
I haven't been in a fist fight for 15 years.
I have to get up and piss 3 times a night.

and when I see a sexpot on the street I
only see
trouble.

I am
finished, back to square one,
drinking alone and listening to classical
music.

much about dying is getting ready.
the tiger walks through my dreams.

the cigarette in my mouth just exploded.

curious things still do
occur.

no, I never knew Kerouac.

so you see:
my life wasn’t 
useless
after
all.

Little Landers

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Bolton Hall, Clubhouse of Los Terrenitos (“Little Landers”)

Bolton Hall was named after a man called Bolton Hall. It was built in 1913 in Tujunga as the clubhouse of a utopian community called Los Terrenitos, or Little Landers. It was one of two communities inspired by the teachings of William E. Smythe. (The other was at San Ysidro, just across the fence from Tijuana, Mexico.)

According to a prospectus issued by Smythe in 1913:

The Little Lander is his own boss. His notion is not an acre nor half an acre, but “so much land as one individual or family can use to the highest advantage without hiring help.” No landlords or tenants, no employers or hired hands! Men work lovingly for themselves, while the best of them work but grudgingly for others. In moments of exaltation the Little Lander loves to think of himself as the Spiritual Man of the Soil—the man who works in conscious partnership with God in finishing the world. His own man on his own place, he works more in the spirit of the artist than of the farmer.

Bolton Hall Clubhouse As It Was in the Beginning

Any agricultural surplus from the small plots was donated to a cooperative: “The wagon calls to collect his vegetables, fruit, flowers, eggs, poultry—whatever he has to sell—and ship it to town, where it is received by the market manager and disposed of direct to consumers…..”

In many ways, the Little Landers were kin to the Distributists in England who followed the writings of G.K. Chesterton and the Catholics influenced by Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Unfortunately, like almost all utopian communities, the Little Landers of Los Angeles lasted only for a few years. In 1917, Little Landers Incorporated was disestablished for failure to pay taxes. By 1925, almost all of the original settlers had left.

Unfortunately, the soil of the Tujunga area was not conducive to farming, so the dreams of small-plot farming did not come to pass, not here anyway.

Today all that remains is the Bolton Hall Clubhouse, which is a fascinating museum of local life. Martine and I spent an afternoon chatting with the docents inside the stone building, which was surprisingly cool considering the external temperature (90º Fahrenheit or 32º Celsius).

If you have any feeling for the area in which you live, I recommend supporting small local museums, which usually have fascinating stories to tell of the people who first settled an area and how their descendants fared.

North (and Central) American Nebula

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Looks Like the Map of North America from Yucatán to Panama

Every once in a while, I check out NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day which frequently has images which make me think. The above picture is technically called the Cygnus Wall of Star Formation. According to the website:

The North America nebula on the sky can do what the North America continent on Earth cannot — form stars. Specifically, in analogy to the Earth-confined continent, the bright part that appears as Central America and Mexico is actually a hot bed of gas, dust, and newly formed stars known as the Cygnus Wall. The featured image shows the star forming wall lit and eroded by bright young stars, and partly hidden by the dark dust they have created. The part of the North America nebula (NGC 7000) shown spans about 15 light years and lies about 1,500 light years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Makes me yearn to visit Yucatán—yet again.

Hoke Moseley

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Damn! He Looks a Lot Like Me

I have just finished reading all of Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley novels about a Miami police sergeant investigating homicides. Unfortunately, there are only four novels in the series:

  • Miami Blues (1984)
  • New Hope for the Dead (1985)
  • Sideswipe (1987)
  • The Way We Die Now (1988)

Hoke Moseley is a decidedly soft-edged detective. He soaks his false teeth in a glass, has no ambitions regarding promotion, is helping to take care of his two teenage daughters as well as his pregnant Cuban police partner (he was not the father), and is actually an all-around nice guy. He drinks beer, plays Monopoly, and is, in many ways, quite average. Very refreshing for a change!

If you like the Florida crazies in the novels of John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen, you will love Willeford’s Hokester. It’s too bad that he wrote his best novels at the end of his career (he died in 1988) instead of earlier. That way, he could have written more of the Moseley saga.

I urge you to start with Miami Blues and continue with the other three titles. In fact, I couldn’t think of a better series for summer reading.

Boardwalk

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There’s No Place Quite Like It

Today I took a walk along the Venice Boardwalk. I could swear that I actually heard a couple of people speaking English. There was French, German, and something that sounded vaguely Slavic. And that was in addition to the frequently heard Spanish.

My destination was Small World Books, near the corner of Pacific and Windward (under the Venice sign above). If you’ve ever seen Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil (1958), you will remember the colonnades meant to be a sleazy Mexican border town. Except now it’s all tattoo parlors, T-shirts, surfboard and bicycle rentals, food take-out places., and Hippie paraphernalia.

When I first visited the Boardwalk, I was put off by all the Hippie associations and suggestions of violence. After all, the Manson Family was in residence there in the 1960s. (But them, so was Jim Morrison of The Doors.) That’s still part of the Venice scene, but I’ve come to terms with it. If anyone tries to sell me a rap music CD recorded by a local garage band, I’ll just answer pleasantly in Hungarian and continue on my way.

Venice was the creature of a developer named Abbot Kinney who founded the community in 1905, complete with canals, gondoliers, and bath houses. And there was also an amusement park jutting out on a large pier (Pacific Ocean Park), Some of the canals still exist and are another pleasant walk,

At Small World Books, I bought books by Roberto Bolaño and Salman Rushdie.

Not Buk’s Cup of Tea at All

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I encountered the following paragraph in Jean-François Duval’s Bukowski and the Beats: A Commentary on the Bet Generation:

It was Jack’[Kerouac’s] matinee idol looks that irritated Hank [Bukowski]. “He was even better looking than Marlon Brando,” Joyce Johnson, one of his girlfriends, said of him. As a good-looking rodeo rider and actor, Jack was too handsome to be “real,” authentic in the Bukowskian perspective (which was ever tinged with humor). Jack was lacking in ugliness that, according to Bukowski, allows a truer contact with the reality of the world more than beauty; ugliness is a safe conduct for hell and, as such, is infinitely closer to the truth. In fact, beauty is not even real to Buk’s eyes, beauty doesn’t make sense at all. As he said to [his friend] Sean Penn, “There is no such thing as beauty … it’s kind of a mirage of generalizations.” In Buk’s opinion, Kerouac seemed like a cheap Roy Rogers whose work gets lost in a swirl of glitter and illusions where the word “wonderful” crops up every three sentences. Jack went wrong in trying to go with “heart’s songs” and the illusions attached: hope of salvation on the road, faith in an idealized America, poetically fantasized, escape into an uncertain mysticism, oscillating between Buddhism and Catholicism. This was not Buk’s cup of tea at all.

Don’t Try.

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Poet Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Whoever ordered the tombstone for poet and counterpuncher Charles Bukowski knew what he (or she) was about. There is a two-word epitaph: “Don’t Try.” Below it is a silhouette drawing of a boxer with his gloves raised.

The poet’s grave is at Green Hills Memorial Park in San Pedro which I have passed scores of times 0on visits to my friend Peter who lives a couple miles further south. Maybe next town, I’ll stop by and pay my last respects.

On Bukowski.Net, there is an explanation by Bukowski’s wife Linda which sheds some light on he meant:

See those big volumes of books? [Points to bookshelf] They’re called Who’s Who In America. It’s everybody, artists, scientists, whatever. So he was in there and they asked him to do a little thing about the books he’s written and duh, duh, duh. At the very end they say, ‘Is there anything you want to say?’, you know, ‘What is your philosophy of life?’, and some people would write a huge long thing. A dissertation, and some people would just go on and on. And Hank just put, “Don’t try.”

I am reminded of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, who sees life as a roadside inn where we all have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up:

Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I’m given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don’t read it, or are not entertained, that’s fine too.

In the days to come, I plan several more posts about Bukowski and what he means to me.

Mozart on the 405

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The San Diego Freeway (I-405) at Night

My two best friends each live 25 miles away: Bill K, in Altadena; and Peter J, in San Pedro. This afternoon I drove to San Pedro and discussed a film idea with Peter, whom I think is the ideal person to do a film about the whole hippie scene in Southern California in the late 1960s.

On the way back, I was listening to KUSC-FM. They were playing Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D, K. 626. Although I feel most partial to the 19th century romantic composers, Mozart strikes me as almost Godlike in the perfection of his music. The Requiem was composed in the last year of the composer’s life (1791) and eerily foresees his own upcoming death in abject poverty. There is a solemn magnificence to the Mass.

I felt quite strange driving in the L.A. traffic on the 405 at dusk, seeing the cars in front of, beside, and behind me almost as if they were notes in the symphony.

Frequently, I am powerfully moved by classical music. Pop music? Not at all. As I ascended the stairs to my apartment, my neighbor was playing some Mexican pop music that went BOOM BOOM BOOM with assorted moans and cries. No, there is no doubt where my preference lies.