Monday, March 25, 2024

Seen in the Neighborhood

What a time to be alive! It was reported recently that for the first time since the late 1970s vinyl records will outsell CDs. How cool, I remember thinking. But I don't own a record player, and while I listened to CDs in my old car, my new car isn't equipped, and if not for a Christmas present for Cass (a boombox, baby!) we wouldn't have a CD player around either.

In our building there used to be a comic shop. Pour some out for Atomic Basement. After Mike shut it down in moved The Cypher on Elm, a clothing and skaters-sundry store. They moved out and in moved the instigation for this piece: Foot Work Records.

I made up a little diagram to illustrate this phenomenon:


Checking the legend makes this point clear. We live at the star, and in our building is Foot Work Records:


They weren't open today, or at least in the early afternoon. Now, if we walk up Elm we find the next closest little circle, the yellow record from the legend, a tiny spot called the Record Box (sorry, link's Instagram only):


Walking up Elm to 4th and turning right, we get to the largest spot in the quartet, Long Beach icon Fingerprints:


The furthest record spot on the map, Bagatelle's, is just across Atlantic from us, and is about 1000 feet away:


It's an institution in the downtown community and was old when we moved here 13 years ago.

How cool is it that within a rectangle that makes up just over 3% of a square mile (sounds weird, but I calculated it) there are four different independent record sellers? Pretty cool...I'm sure, even if records aren't one of my compulsions...

(My assistant on my photo recon mission gets herself in a few of the pictures above...)

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Happy St. Paddy's 2024

I got off work early on Friday and so was able to take Cass to his swim lessons. Afterwards, instead of zooming straight away to get Camille, we stopped by Dave and Busters, the location that Corrie has been taking him to on Fridays. Instead of video games, we talked sports. It was pretty cool:


But the beer drinking is part of my, er, discussion about St. Paddy's (or, as Corrie lovingly refers to it around here, St. Daddy's Day).

I had a beer as we watched college basketball and ladies beach volleyball. Is it always booze for the 'Irish' is us? Maybe...

Today, as Sundays are usually labeled, is a work day for me.  Laundry, grocery shopping, farm-box ordering and menu-listing bookend the work I do at home for the J-O-B.

So, oddly enough, Camille came with me to do laundry today:


I'm usually on my own for the washing and drying. It takes barely an hour, and once I get home, Corrie and I fold it all in a half-hour. So much better than taking over the laundry room in our building for the entire day.

Anyway, Happy St. Patrick's Day! In the past I've typed about the background of the day and the legends that surround the people claimed as the patron saint of Ireland. Today, though, is about chores, playing games with kids (Cass is setting up Catan right now!), cooking corned beef (it'll be ready in a few hours!), watching the Beer Baron episode of the Simpsons, and possibly getting in a few drinks in between.

Be safe out there!

Friday, March 8, 2024

Learning Something Everyday

I pride myself in my ability to be open to learn new things, to have my world rocked whenever necessary. Like the other day a few weeks back when I learned about Norval Morrisseau and his works. This moment is in that same vein: an artists came known to me today: Wadsworth Jarrell.

A Black American from Georgia, born in 1929, had his arts education in Chicago in the '50s, co-founded AfriCOBRA in 1969 (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) and painted works like this, called "Revolutionary:"


The kaleidoscopic colors! The words! Angela Davis! If you can see close-up, you can make out quotes by Angela Davis herself, Malcolm X, and other quotes from the Black Panthers in general among the rest.

I'm sure there are plenty of cool stuff by people I've to hear about. But inspiration should be shared. This also looks somewhat lije an arruffato work, as here we can see how it may have come together:


As always, I'm enjoying expanding my horizon...

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

So...I Watched David Lynch's "Dune"

As a kid I always remember seeing the VHS cassette for Dune at the video store each Friday when we'd go looking for rentals. Pizza and a movie night, a tradition we're kinda/sorta maintaining with our kids. 

Anyway, I remember thinking it looked so cool, or weird, or serious, as the dude from Twin Peaks was young and had some thingy in his nose. Plus his eyes were blue...like the cornea was blue. I remember hearing that a drug turned eyes blue...or something.

My understanding was suspect, but, as it turns out, not so bad for a kid.

But the movie remained a mystery to me until a few days ago. I watched a Ted Talk episode of "Why You Should Read..." about Frank Herbert's "Dune", and it touches on the many books Herbert wrote about the world he created and built up. It shed more light on it than I understood beforehand. To wit:

One thing I remember about thinking was weird about Star Wars was: Hey, this guy (Han Solo) is from a planet called Corelia, and Princess leia is from Alderaan, and Luke Skywalker has been living in Tatooine. But they all look like they could be from Indianapolis. Or Malibu.

I asked my dad about it and he laughed said something like, "Right?" He went on to explain that at least Star Trek had an episode that spoke to why the dominant types of beings were bi-pedal, nitrogen/oxygen breathing, 1.5 to 2 meter tall beings. Star Wars was more of a mythology class set against a space western.

Which brings us to Dune, or Frank Herbert's main conceit: The reason the beings all look human is because THEY ARE HUMAN. It takes place about eight-thousand years in the future, in year 10,191 (or something). I heard somewhere---NOT in the 1984 movie---that humans and AI had a war, that ultimately lead to humans moving on from computers in general.

A few thousand more years in the future, and humans have colonized three separate planets. One where the emperor lives, one that produces their very important societal commodity, and another where one of the two Houses lives.

Maybe it was a good waiting until I was this-old to watch this movie for the first time, and especially before we watched the new version in both parts.

But...is it surprising that it's basically about money and power? There's the greasy gingers (House Harkonnen), the nominal good guys (House Atreides), and the emperor who's a puppet of two different groups: some magical lady group, and the vagina-mouthed floating slug beings.

The important societal commodity is a dusty spice that's mined on the mostly inhospitable sand planet called Arrakis (AKA Dune). The spice can get you high, but it also powers the space-ships and allows faster-than-light travel. Pretty nifty. While using it will stain corneas blue, just being on the planet long enough will have the same effect, as the saturation level is reached in a few months due to microscopic particles in the air.

Those details were all new to me. Watching it felt like, though, while it was a neat sci-fi conceit, it was basically House Musk vs House Bezos vs Planet-Wide Union Organizer.

SPOILER ALERT: at least the organizers won.

I'm curious to see how the new movies deal with the real/fake messiah storyline, and how they handle the worm-riding, but at least I have a handle now on the characters and plot threads. Also, being as old as I am now meant that I could handle the more incoherent parts...like:

Ehhh...WTF?

Friday, March 1, 2024

The Art World's Wild North

My favorite app on my phone is the DailyArt app. The Polish-run app delivers a single work each day to your phone, along with a story about the piece, the artist, the era, or most often, some combination of the three. It has kept the fires of my art-lust going for a few years now.

It was through the app that I found a painting that has since become one of my favorites (a work I even mentioned before), Afterglow, by Norwegian-born American artist Jonas Lie, a painting of New York from the harbor (or one of the rivers):


But the connection of the north got me feeling the connection between that painting and the works of Norval Morrisseau, an artist I just learned about. Not that they're stylistically similar, because they are decidedly not. Mainly because I can't stop looking at them or thinking about them.

Or about the bizarre story of fame, fakes, fraud, first-nations people, and gangsters that inhabit the world of Norval Morrisseau.

"Artist and Shaman Between Two Worlds" 1980
Morrisseau was born on March 14th, 1932 on the Sand Point Ojibwe reserve in Ontario. He, like so many natives of the era in both Canada and America, was taked from his reserves and placed in boarding schools, forced to learn English/French, assimilate religions, and ignore his heritage.

Working later in life
Instead of forgetting everything, he merged his Anishinaabe beliefs with the western artistic vocabulary he was forced into at a young age and synthesized something new, something powerful.


If that was the end of this story, it would be compelling enough for me. I enjoy getting lost in amazing works of art. But it gets crazy.

Today, Morrisseau is widely recognized as the grandfather of indigenous art in Canada, and has been called the "Picasso of the north" when his works were exhibited in France and Italy. His rise to fame in the 1960s led to the trappings you may expect: parties, drugs, excess, et al.

Times were fun, followed by times that were hard, and sometimes decisions were made that could benefit people close to Norval. Maybe it was the occasional signing of a painting that wasn't his to help a cash strapped loved one; maybe it was helping out a crew of gangsters out of Thunder Bay on Lake Superior with some forgeries or fakes.

Eventually things got out of hand. The whole story is available in documentary form, and in book form, and I saw it all in an article in the Smithsonian but: in the end there were THREE separate rings of fake Morrisseau production companies---three separate entities producing high-level fakes of Morrisseau works, none of which he knew about or sanctioned.

It looks like, before they were all broken up, these groups possible produced over $100 million for themselves (of which Norval got exactly zero dollars), and over 200 paintings were sold and shipped worldwide. This whole enterprise turned into the biggest art fraud ring(s) in history, which is saying something. Disputed Morrisseau works have been found everywhere from private collections (natch) to the Smithsonian itself and the Canadian Parliament building in Ottawa.

In another bizarre twist of this story, Kevin Hearn, keyboardist for the Barenaked Ladies (composers of the theme song for The Big Bang Theory, among other things), upon learning that his Morrisseau painting was a fake, set about an odyssey with his lawyers to investigate and bring down the rings that were profiting off of these forgeries.

That's not a misprint: the keyboardist from the Barenaked Ladies and his lawyers performed the work of a police procedural---doing the legwork---that brought down three separate, unaffiliated, international forgery rings.

This seems ripe for a dramatization, or true crime miniseries on HBO, doesn't it?

In any case, I can't stop looking at these paintings, and this whole saga has set up shop in my brain. It reminds me a little of what the opening chapter of Gould's Book of Fish emphasizes: the story is more important than the artifact. That may be true with junky trinkets being sold as fake objects, but with these paintings, the story is just as compelling, which isn't always the case with amazing art.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Leap Day 2024!

We made it to another arbitrary calendar phenomenon: the Leap Day. February 29th is the day added every four years--but not for years ending in 00, unless preceded by a divisor of 4--too much math!

We had a dog that was born on February 29th, but back in 1984. Sadly, and obviously (right?), she's no longer with us.

Here are some other posts about this topic I've done over the years:

Sheesh, been doing this a while.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

"Ben Hur" for Corrie's Birthday

Ben Hur! Yes! Ben Hur, but not the Charlton Heston movie, not any of the movies over the years, or even some other type of performance based on Lew Wallace's 400+ page book. (I hadn't known that Ben Hur (the book), written by former Civil War general Lew Wallace, became a best-seller, and by 'best seller' we mean the top selling book ever in America from the time of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to "Gone with the Wind,"  a span of forty years of title-holding for Big Ben.)

No, for us, Ben Hur was the Long Beach Playhouse show, an ensemble of six actors (two understudies and four speaking roles), itself a play-within-a-play. See, the idea that "all 9000 speaking roles from the sweeping epic book" (as quoted during a fourth-wall break in the opening few seconds) would be performed by only four actors is kind of the whole joke. The main conceit of this performance is that "Daniel Veil" has adapted, directed, choreographed, and stars in the epic "Ben Hur," and his troupe, the Daniel Veil Theater Collective, fills out the other characters. There's "Crystal Singer" playing the Girl, but really she's playing all lady characters (except Judah and Messala's mom), and she's the love interest for Daniel Veil himself, only the feelings aren't reciprocated.

"Omar Lord" is the name of the young man playing Messala, Jesus, and a whole bunch of other characters. Rounding out the quartet is "Edgar Chesterfield," an older actor playing, well, any old character they need, including the Hur (and Messala's adoptive) matriarch...despite the goatee.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek silliness, the story is pretty coherent. The lack of actors and abundance of roles is played to great effect, mostly for humor. The venue is quite small and the stage is a peninsula, jutting out from "backstage", with seats on all sides. Check out my picture below:


The seats I got were essentially front row center, with our feet chilling on the stage if we stretched our legs. Visible above is the screen that had different things projected upon it, depending on the setting of the scene. Never a group to miss an opportunity for a joke, the stills projected often had the Shutterstock watermarks left on them (or other likewise watermarking) or, like when they were back in Jerusalem, it was the establishing shot of Agribah from Disney's Aladdin.

A few of the crazy scenes from the story they retained for us were (1) the sea battle; and (2) the chariot race. The sea battle was very interactive. Before they performed the scene, the team came out to explain "Care must be taken henceforth because lives are at stake." The crowds on both the left and right sides of the stage were instructed to pantomime the rowing motion. From our seat, this looked very cool: dozens of enthusiastic people rowing. Our group wasn't set to the rowing task. Our section was itself broken into three sections, with each group shouting--in unison--a "researched and approved-upon Roman-aristocracy slur/command." For me and Corrie it was "Row! Row, you Phillistine scum!" They even had cards to be read by the rowers, some of which were "Arrgghh!!" while others were more plaintive whines.

Once it all started going, both sides rowing, our section shouting a barrage of slurs I can't remember beyond our own, the cries coming from the rowers, and the "battle" happening in the center of the stage--actors wrestling with dressed blow-up dolls--the effect was complete, and awesome. It was loud and malevolent chaos.

The chariot scene was wonderful in its inventiveness, and because it's the climax of the Judah Ben-Hur and Messala storyline, was really just them. The screen behind them played on a loop scenes from the silent 1925 version of the movie, along with a black and white car race. In the scene, the guys were riding cheapo office chairs each wrapped in an Ikea box. It was wonderful and hilarious. Kinda like Jesus ascending. Kinda like the play within the play, where Daniel catches Omar and Crystal kissing, and alost ruins the whole play.

Our play turns into the same thing Ben Hur turned into: a story about vengeance becoming a story about forgiveness.

The show was a success; funny and well-thought, while also whimsical and heartfelt. It was also Opening Night and had a champagne gala afterwards. This was a birthday present for Corrie, which made it a datenight, one of our two-a-years. It was a great evening.

Also, as it was opening night for the (super-small) Long Beach Playhouse organization, as Corrie and I enjoyed our sparkling wine and hors d'oeuvre, showing off our awesome hair, we absorbed many quizzical and funny looks. Who were these two in the front row? Who were these two chilling with us afterwards? I'm fairly sure that Corrie and I were the ONLY people at this performance unaffiliated with one the actors or with the Friends of the LB Playhouse, the financial backers of the theater. We were seen, as it were.

The actors themselves were fun and game. Grant Thackray played Daniel Veil, Devin Ricklef played Omar Lord, Amara Phelps played Crystal Singer, and lawyer-by-day Eric Schiffer played Edgar. The two "understudies" were equally funny, even with no lines. they were played by Jackie Shearn and Charlie Rodriguez. Should you recognize any of those names? I'd be shocked if you did. I put them here because there were so few and they worked so hard. 

It has inspired me to make more of an effort to see the Charlton Heston version. And to also, er, be seen again...maybe...at a tiny local theater environment? Such a vibrant thing, live theater in Southern California...