“Bastille Day” by Marion Eisenmann
It’s Bastille Day, so I thought I would repost a sketch Marion Eisenmann did a year ago during a gathering in Elysian Park.
July 16, 2010: Marion Eisenmann called Sunday and suggested we visit a Bastille Day celebration in Elysian Park. I practiced my rusty high school French on the way there with Marion quizzing me “How would you say ‘I’m hungry?’ ” (My teacher, Madame Royce, would be so pleased that I remembered).
This gallery contains 3 photos.
Here’s a better look at the courthouse at Temple and Broadway, where Wednesday’s photo of Broadway was probably taken. In what I call “seismic Darwinism,” the courthouse was demolished after being damaged in the Long Beach quake. The Hall of … Continue reading
Photo: Los Angeles Public Library. Credit: LAPL
FEATURED
A celebration will be held at the downtown library on Monday at 9:30 a.m. as the L.A. library system restores Monday service at all branches. Sunday closures are continuing, however.
Saturday will be John Lautner Day at LACMA with more events to follow, celebrating the architect’s centennial.
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James Cuno gives an exit Q&A to the Chicago Tribune’s Lauren Viera before leaving the Art Institute of Chicago to become president and chief executive officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman muses on the current state of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and writes a thoughtful, provocative essay: And so the picture I found filthy but florid during the gritty days of late Fellini and the Red Brigade had been reborn into the fastidious age of soy milk and nanotechnology. In lieu of lone pilgrims and natural light, package tourists making online bookings joined artificial lights that flattened the image. Modernized in its new climate- and crowd-control environment, one of the most familiar pictures in the history of art suddenly seemed alien, like vacuum-packed heirloom tomatoes and no-smoking parks. Even the time limit, a courtesy of the modern hospitality industry, only discouraged visitors from getting to the bottom of the bottomless.
June Q. Wu of the Washington Post profiles Fenella France, a preservation scientist at the Library of Congress,
“There’s quite a lot of detective work in this,” said France, who joined the Library of Congress staff in 2007. “I can find something, like the smudge, and say here’s what we’ve got, here’s some extra text, and we’ll collaborate with historians to see if it’s relevant.”
My L.A. Times colleague Elaine Woo, who makes an art form of the obituary, has one on Theodore Roszak, who coined the term “counterculture.”
Woo writes: Roszak was an author and longtime professor at Cal State East Bay whose best-known work defined an era: He wrote “The Making of a Counter Culture” (1969), a nonfiction bestseller that popularized the word “counterculture.”
Drawing on the works of influential thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman and Alan Watts, the book examined the intellectual underpinnings of the social tumult that began in the mid-1960s and extended into the 1970s — the campus protests, love-ins, rock music and psychedelic drug fests that infected masses of young people and bewildered their elders. The youths comprised “a culture so radically disaffiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society,” Roszak wrote, “that it scarcely looks to many as a culture at all but takes on the alarming appearance of a barbaric intrusion.”
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OK, as long as we’re satirizing Carmageddon with a Hitler rant, here’s my favorite humorous video set on the 405. It’s by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt.
I got this postcard on EBay because the details are sharp and it shows The Times Building before it was blown up in 1910. The picture was most likely taken from the beautiful old courthouse farther north on Broadway that was demolished.
So I thought it would be fun to compare it with the way it looks on Google Earth.
The gray “ghost” building on the right represents the Cold War monstrosity that was demolished after being damaged in the Northridge earthquake. At the moment, it’s a big hole in the ground that collects rainwater and is growing weeds.
Photo: Pierre Loti’s house. Credit: Discover Poitou Charentes
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Elaine Sciolino’s new travel column Lumiere in the New York Times takes a look at the house museum of Pierre Loti.
Sciolino says: “On an unremarkable street in the unremarkable town, the Loti house museum — two attached bourgeois houses, really — is an alternate world where wildly divergent cultures and epochs are thrown together. Loti was an eccentric of his era, and would be considered eccentric even today.”
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The Los Angeles Public Library will present a program on getting started in genealogical research. The free presentation will be from 11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 16, 2011.
Folks should gather at the reference desk in the History & Genealogy Department on Lower Level 4. No reservations are necessary for groups of six or less. Larger groups should schedule an appointment at (213) 228-7400.
As we say at the Daily Mirror: Any day we can do research is a good day.
Here’s our mystery tennis player! Thanks to Steven Bibb for sharing this photo.
[Update: This is Lida Baarova. Please congratulate Jenny M, Don Danard and Rick for identifying her and her mystery companion Joseph Goebbels.]
There’s a new photo on the jump!
I picked up the 1961 edition of “Just One More!” by the Los Angeles Press Photographers Assn. and I’ve been enjoying it more than I expected. It’s a time capsule of press photography as it was 50 years ago, so there are the posed shots, humorous animal pictures and gory traffic wrecks, all examples of things that we don’t see in newspapers anymore. Some of it is kitsch, but there are powerful images as well. These photogs did great work.
Sept. 19, 1890: Edison’s talking doll in the Sydney Journal.
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Ron Cowen in the Washington Post has a great story about scientists using optical scanning to recover a primitive recording made by Thomas Edison about 1889 for a talking doll. This recording is a recitation of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” There were apparently a variety of recordings. One model said: “I love you, mamma; I love you dearly, mamma, but I am tired and sleepy now. Please put me in my little bed.” Another sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and a fourth sang a German song, according to the Sydney Mail, June 15, 1889, quoting the Chicago Tribune.
Adam Clymer and Don Van Natta Jr. in the New York Times: As archivists prepare to make public 63 boxes ofRobert F. Kennedy’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, his family members are having second thoughts about where they should be housed and are considering moving them elsewhere because they believe that the presidential library has not done enough to honor the younger brother’s legacy.
Carolyn Kellogg in L.A. Times Jacket Copy: The first 12 pages of Jane Austen’s “The Watsons” are at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. The rest of the unfinished manuscript will be auctioned by Sotheby’s Thursday. It is the last Austen manuscript to be held by a private collection.
[Update: The manuscript sold for $1.6 million.]
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Here’s our mystery desperado!
[Update: This is John Anderson (d. 1992), who played used car dealer California Charlie in “Psycho,” in addition to many other roles in film and on stage. Please congratulate Michael Ryerson, David Franklin, Dewey Webb, Herb Nicholas, Sarah, Bill, Steven Moshlak, Floyd Thursby, Jenny M, Carmen, Lee Ann Thom and Megan, Rick, Julie Merholz, Mike Hawks, Benito, Robert Nelson, Roget-L.A. and LC for identifying him! ]
Nov. 26, 1936: Ambrose Schindler in The Times as USC and UCLA prepare to play for the first time in six years.
My colleague Jerry Crowe at The Timeshas a nice profile of Ambrose Schindler, former USC quarterback, stuntman on “The Wizard of Oz” and Coach at El Camino College.
Crowe writes: He no longer surfs or bicycles, favorite pastimes of the longtime beach resident, but on good days he’s still pretty sharp.
“His short-term memory is terrible,” says his 61-year-old son, Charlie, “but when he’s clear he can tell you the plays he called in the huddle at the Rose Bowl. …
“He’ll remember every play, every call. It’s just amazing.”
MERION, PA.
The Barnes Foundation closed in June and is being relocated to Philadelphia, but the New York Times has created an interactive tour of the museum’s former home. Sometimes described as quirky or eccentric, the museum reflects the particular vision of its creator, Albert C. Barnes, whose will stipulated that everything had to remain just as he left it.
The Museum of Arts & Design’s “THE FUN” has awarded four fellowships in the “artistic practice of nightlife,” according to Lizzie Simon in the Wall Street Journal.
Simon writes: As it turns out, these parties are neither the thumping, clubbing sort, nor the tightly choreographed gala sort, but “environments of cultural production,” said Jake Yuzna, the fellowship’s 28-year-old founder and the museum’s manager of public programs.
From the MAD Museum’s website: In recognition of New York nightlife’s vital contribution to the city’s creative community and its artistic pursuits, the Museum of Arts and Design introduces THE FUN fellowship. THE FUN annually provides four artists or artist collaboratives with financial and logistical support to strengthen and advance their endeavors in this undervalued social practice. The first recipients of this fellowship are Judy (Gabriel Babriel, Brian Belukha, Benjamin Haber, and Icky Mikki), Earl Dax, Gag! (Cameron Cooper and Zach Cole), as well as Lauren Devine and Patrik Sandberg.
Queen of the Dead—dateline July 11, 2011
• Archduke Otto of Austria, pretender to the throne of the late Austria-Hungary, died on the Fourth of July, at 98. I must admit to a schoolgirl crush on his . . . great-great-uncle, I think? The dreamy Crown Prince Rudolf, who killed himself in 1889 at Mayerling. (OK, he killed his mistress, too; I didn’t say it was a healthy schoolgirl crush).
While the folks who think big thoughts are busy debating the future of newspapers, I thought I would experiment with something called paper.li. Paper.li, in case you have never heard of it (I hadn’t) allows a user to create a newspaper based on a stream of Twitter feeds. The cyber-elves automatically configure the feed into a paper and then the “publisher” can rearrange items in a rudimentary way, selecting a lead story and deleting articles that are inappropriate.
Is this the wave of the future? Well it certainly allows anyone with a computer and a Twitter account to become a news aggregator. The quality depends on the content. In the meantime, check out our paper.li feed, which is updated every 24 hours.
Portions of fabric clipped from the U.S. flag before it was planted on the moon by Neil Armstrong in the Apollo 11 mission are being offered Sunday by Ira and Larry Goldberg auctioneers, 11400 W. Olympic Blvd, Suite 800. Lot 1209 has an estimated sale price of $100,000-$150,000. NYT
A pendant presented to Chicago Cubs executive Charles Williams honoring the teams 1908 world championship is being offered by Hunt Auctions. Estimated sale price is $20,000 to $30,000. Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune has the story.
Meanwhile, Christian Lopez ends up with the ball from Derek Jeter’s No. 3,000, but turned it over to Jeter. In return, he received season tickets for the remaining home games, and three bats, three balls and two jerseys, all signed by Jeter. A nice feature by Sam Borden in the NYT
The Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, Wis., is displaying one of its custom motorcycles created for the film “Captain America.” The bikes are Cross Bones modified to look like a 1942 WLA Army motorcycles. The museum says the company made about 70,000 WLA motorcycles during the war.
[Update 2: Margaret Campbell and Gertrude Olmstead in “Monte Carlo,” 1926. ]
[Update: Please congratulate Mike Hawks for identifying the mystery gal on the left right!]
Here’s another mystery photo, courtesy of Steven Bibb. Thanks!
June 29, 1939: Campbell’s son, Campbell McDonald, admitted killing his mother in her sleep and was committed to Mendocino State Hospital.]
There’s another photo on the jump….
Is Michael Jackson’s art collection with $900 million? Well, maybe not.
Dylan Howard of Star magazine writes: Michael Jackson secretly left behind an almost billion-dollar secret art fortune that is now at the center of an international tug of war, Star has exclusively learned.
But not so fast:
Ashton Cooper of ArtInfo.com writes: When the news broke recently that Michael Jackson had a $900 million art collection, most people probably had the same reaction: Michael Jackson had a $900 million art collection?! Furthermore, all but the most fanatical of Jackson fans were probably unaware that the late singer was himself a visual artist.
Photo: Michael Jackson: “Leave Me Alone.”
Steve Alexander is giving his “living history” portrayal of Gen. George Armstrong Custer on Saturday at the Michigan Historical Center in Lansing as part of its “Plowshares into Swords” exhibit marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The museum is also displaying the “Custer flag” before it returns to a private collection.
Ted Gregory and Isolde Raftery of the Chicago Tribune, reporting from Seattle, have a jailhouse interview with Jack Daniel McCullough, suspected in the 1957 killing of Maria Ridulph.
“You gotta have evidence. They have nothing,” McCullough tells Trib.
My L.A. Times colleague Elaine Woo has a first-rate obituary on Catherine Mulholland, author of “William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles.”
One reason Mulholland took on the biography was to provide what she viewed as a more balanced portrayal of her grandfather. I haven’t read the book (I bought it the other day at the Last Bookstore) so I’ll refrain from commenting.
But it is worthwhile to note that the story of the Valley conspiracy, as told in Morrow Mayo’s “Los Angeles,” is so embedded in Southern California’s world view that it is indestructible.
Not that scholars haven’t tried. While researching the 1910 Times bombing last year, I stumbled across a wonderful article by one of my favorite historians, W.W. Robinson, on “Myth-Making in the Los Angeles Area,” published in the March 1963 issue of Southern California Quarterly.
