Evan Holloway, Hanging Christmas Tree. Jason Meadows, Scrap Lamp.

Extended to next Saturday, December 24

Images Here

“Death Shrine I” from “Happy’s Curios”

The Harwood Museum Taos

By JENNA WORTHAM
NY Times Published: December 13, 2011

Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.

“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”

As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.

But the company is running into a roadblock in this country. Some people, even on the younger end of the age spectrum, just refuse to participate, including people who have given it a try.

One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated.

“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”

To be sure, the Facebook-free life has its disadvantages in an era when people announce all kinds of major life milestones on the Web. Ms. Elser has missed engagements and pictures of newborn babies. But none of that hurt as much as the gap she said her Facebook account had created between her and her closest friends. So she shut it down.

Many of the holdouts mention concerns about privacy. Those who study social networking say this issue boils down to trust. Amanda Lenhart, who directs research on teenagers, children and families at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that people who use Facebook tend to have “a general sense of trust in others and trust in institutions.” She added: “Some people make the decision not to use it because they are afraid of what might happen.”

Ms. Lenhart noted that about 16 percent of Americans don’t have cellphones. “There will always be holdouts,” she said.

Facebook executives say they don’t expect everyone in the country to sign up. Instead they are working on ways to keep current users on the site longer, which gives the company more chances to show them ads. And the company’s biggest growth is now in places like Asia and Latin America, where there might actually be people who have not yet heard of Facebook.

“Our goal is to offer people a meaningful, fun and free way to connect with their friends, and we hope that’s appealing to a broad audience,” said Jonathan Thaw, a Facebook spokesman.

But the figures on growth in this country are stark. The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said this slowdown was not a make-or-break issue ahead of the company’s public offering, which could come in the spring. What does matter, he said, is Facebook’s ability to keep its millions of current users entertained and coming back.

“They’re likely more worried about the novelty factor wearing off,” Mr. Valdes said. “That’s a continual problem that they’re solving, and there are no permanent solutions.”

Erika Gable, 29, who lives in Brooklyn and does public relations for restaurants, never understood the appeal of Facebook in the first place. She says the daily chatter that flows through the site — updates about bad hair days and pictures from dinner — is virtual clutter she doesn’t need in her life.

“If I want to see my fifth cousin’s second baby, I’ll call them,” she said with a laugh.

Ms. Gable is not a Luddite. She has an iPhone and sometimes uses Twitter. But when it comes to creating a profile on the world’s biggest social network, her tolerance reaches its limits.

“I remember having MySpace for a bit and always feeling so weird about seeing other people’s stuff all the time,” she said. “I’m not into it.”

Will Brennan, a 26-year-old Brooklyn resident, said he had “heard too many horror stories” about the privacy pitfalls of Facebook. But he said friends are not always sympathetic to his anti-social-media stance.

“I get asked to sign up at least twice a month,” Mr. Brennan said. “I get harangued for ruining their plans by not being on Facebook.”

And whether there is haranguing involved or not, the rebels say their no-Facebook status tends to be a hot topic of conversation — much as a decision not to own a television might have been in an earlier media era.

“People always raise an eyebrow,” said Chris Munns, 29, who works as a systems administrator in New York. “But my life has gone on just fine without it. I’m not a shut-in. I have friends and quite an enjoyable life in Manhattan, so I can’t say it makes me feel like I’m missing out on life at all.”

But the peer pressure is only going to increase. Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, said society was adopting new behaviors and expectations in response to the near-ubiquity of Facebook and other social networks.

“People may start to ask the question that, if you aren’t on social channels, why not? Are you hiding something?” she said. “The norms are shifting.”

This kind of thinking cuts both ways for the Facebook holdouts. Mr. Munns said his dating life had benefited from his lack of an online dossier: “They haven’t had a chance to dig up your entire life on Facebook before you meet.”

But Ms. Gable said such background checks were the one thing she needed Facebook for.

“If I have a crush on a guy, I’ll make my friends look him up for me,” Ms. Gable said. “But that’s as far as it goes.”

Untitled Crystalline Dome Set, 1968
porcelain and Plexiglas
6.25 x 21 x 7.5 in

Through January 7

Frank Lloyd

Glen Lukens, Untitled Ceramic

By Scarlet Cheng
The Los Angeles Times
December 11, 2011

The shift in ceramics from craft to art form was a quiet revolution in postwar Southern California. “Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945-1975″ at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona explores that big topic through the influence of one man, Millard Sheets, a painter who taught and was an administrator at Chouinard Art Institute, Otis Art Institute and Scripps College.

It was Sheets who brought the legendary avant-gardist Peter Voulkos to California to run the ceramics department at Otis. For years, Sheets also organized the art exhibition at the L.A. County Fair and included a section for ceramics.

With more than 300 objects by 53 artists, “Common Ground” is the largest survey of SoCal ceramics in recent years. Why was there such a boom? In addition to the influx of talent — some from out of state and some, such as Austrians Gertrud and Otto Natzler, from abroad — there was demand generated by an explosion in home building.

Christy Johnson, AMOCA’s director and exhibition curator, points out that ceramics offered an affordable way to decorate the home: “People had some disposable income — not enough for painting or sculpture, but maybe enough for ceramics.” Ceramists sold from their own studios, some showed at high-end department stores and some even had jobs designing tiles and lamps for mass production.

“Common Ground” is a who’s who of the postwar ceramics world. It opens with work by teachers at the three local colleges that established ceramics departments in the 1930s — Glen Lukens at USC, William Manker at Scripps and Laura Andreson at UCLA. Later, other colleges added ceramics to their curriculum too.

Harrison McIntosh was part of the boom. “After the war, I could use the GI Bill to study more about ceramics, so I went to Claremont Graduate School,” he says. “I realized that you could create very sculptural forms in clay. That’s what I was mostly interested in, though most of my forms are container shapes.”

Much of the work in the show takes vessel form (plates, bowls, vases), but these come in a range of shapes, sizes, decoration and glazes. There are also figurative works, such as Dora De Larios’ lively figures made of wheel-thrown clay — people on horseback, posing as if in a circus act; a seated woman, arms and legs propped wide like a warrior queen.

De Larios studied at USC, first with Vivika and Otto Heino, then with Susan Peterson (all in the show). After graduating, she set up her own studio and then, with Peterson’s recommendation, got a job designing architectural tiles at Interpace, in Glendale. “We were given free rein,” she recalls. As long as they kept to the standard square sizes, “everything we wanted to do was great.”

This is AMOCA’s inaugural show at its new, greatly expanded space in Pomona. Appropriately enough, it’s in a former bank decorated with a 77-foot wide mural, “Panorama of the Pomona Valley,” by Sheets. The bank is gone, but the mural remains.

AMOCA

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
NY Times Published: December 10, 2011

A MAN’S home is his castle — except when it becomes someone else’s marijuana plantation, crack den, movie set, homeless shelter, farm or public park.

Such opportunities for conversion present themselves in the United States, which now has about 1.2 million more vacant homes than there would be in normal economic times. In fact, the depressed housing market has become a case study in how an economy adapts — if only in an early transitional phase — when one of its pillars suddenly collapses.

Foreclosures, home abandonments and devalued houses have helped to inspire creative thinkers, political protesters, opportunists and civic leaders who envision new uses for homes besides nesting.

Detroit, where nearly one in four homes is vacant, has been at the vanguard of all manner of manorial makeovers for some time now. Artists and political campaigners have adopted abandoned properties as their own nontraditional canvases, painting some empty houses bright orange or quite literally freezing them by dousing them from the roof down with hydrant water, to draw attention to the housing crisis. The Motor City’s epic housing wreckage has also inspired a couple of breathtaking photography projects.

Much of the rest of the country is following suit in adapting to the housing bust with ingenuity and audaciousness.

An Atlanta filmmaker dreamed up a post-apocalyptic indie drama set in deserted and dilapidated dwellings in and around the city. In Las Vegas, where 1 in every 171 homes has been served with a foreclosure notice, the authorities found a stretch of empty homes that had been turned into marijuana greenhouses. Some empty houses have become de facto dormitories in places like Merced, Calif., as college students opt to rent chandeliered chateaus instead of living in cramped rooms on campus.

Of course, political protesters were bound to find potent symbols in the forsaken dwellings of the downturn. And so the Occupy movement last week began an action called Occupy Our Homes in cities like Chicago and Atlanta to fight evictions and protest what the movement leaders say are unfair lending practices by banks. In Oakland, Calif., protesters seized foreclosed property and turned it into a headquarters.

Not all of the repurposing is serious. In Fresno, Calif., empty McMansion swimming pools have been covertly converted into makeshift skateboarding parks, turning someone’s dashed dreams into good, clean teenage fun.

Sometimes the unapproved abode adoptions are less wholesome, attracting criminal elements and feral animals, thereby unsettling neighbors and inspiring boomlets in security services and pest control. Wary of blight risks, many state and local governments are paying to fix up, tear down or rent out empty housing stock.

The governments of James City County, Va., and Perris, Calif., for example, are retrofitting foreclosed homes to make them more energy efficient, in the hope that weatherization will make the houses more attractive to buyers when the market does come back.

Across Ohio, Michigan and many other states, governments are simply bulldozing empty homes and replacing them with urban farms, public parks or other infrastructure. It’s little wonder houses sit unsold and empty when tighter credit requirements have most likely discouraged some 13 million households from buying homes, according to Capital Economics. As a result, rents are at record highs, prompting some homeowners to voluntarily vacate so they can rent out their homes at a tidy profit — the so-called leveraged move-out.

The Obama administration has expressed interest in increasing this shift from failed ownership to renting, and already federal programs are backing the process. Spacious homes in wealthier areas of Newport News, Va., and Antioch, Calif., have been converted to Section 8 housing, a program that subsidizes rent for low-income families by directly paying private landlords.

This is hardly the first time that overbuilding of luxury homes has meant hand-me-downs for low-income Americans, of course. Harlem was originally built up as a luxury community in the late 19th century, in anticipation of a new mass transit station’s coming to the neighborhood. Then overbuilding and subway construction delays (sound familiar?) led housing values to plummet. By the early 1900s, poor immigrants and blacks instead absorbed the excess housing and redefined the neighborhood.

Finding brand-new homeowners may also be today’s best hope for healing the depressed housing market. And as in Harlem in the early 20th century, some of those new homeowners could be immigrants. Two senators, Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, have proposed a bill that would offer three-year visas to foreigners who spent at least $500,000 to buy homes in the United States. But the idea has many opponents who fear expanding the nation’s oversupply of workers (a worry not shared by a fair number of economists). Still, the supply of homegrown homeowners may expand soon anyway.

Household formation has slowed dramatically since the recession, as cash-strapped families double up and unemployed recent college graduates are unable to leave behind their parents’ couches. To judge just from demographic statistics, more than a million households that should have been formed in the last few years weren’t, according to Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics.

The tally of missing households is approximately equal to the country’s current surplus of vacant homes. The implication is that once people start getting jobs again, doubled-up families will peel off and quickly sop up a lot of that excess housing inventory.

Think of such houses as castles once again, though hardly out of a fairy tale.

Untitled (Down), 2011
C-print
40 x 30 cm

Through Today December 10

Galerie Neu Berlin

via

Thanks to Andy, Lance, Rodney, and Taka

Dorothy Hall

Diane Keaton

By SHEILA WELLER
NY Times Published: December 2, 2011

Diane Keaton is admired for her ease in performing the difficult and for making the sensible glamorous. She minted a wildly original style of dressing while moviegoers were just learning her name. For three and a half decades, she’s starred in films spanning from younger woman’s nightmare (“Looking for Mr. Goodbar”) to older woman’s fantasy (“Something’s Gotta Give”), while somehow not being punished for the fact that no role ever quite equaled the luster of her Best Actress-winning turn in “Annie Hall.” She sashayed into arty endeavor — working on books about architecture and photography, directing a documentary on concepts of heaven — without waxing aloof. She rode out the “age thing” (she’s 65) that all female stars face, with minimum humiliation. And she’s been self-sufficient. She forthrightly says, “I never found a home in the arms of a man.” Yet she’s furnished an awfully big home in these pages.

Fifteen years ago, Keaton adopted her first of two children, just as her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall, with whom she’d been exceptionally close, was struggling to put together sentences, fading from Alzheimer’s. “After a lifetime of avoiding intimacy,” she writes, “suddenly I got intimate in a big way.” Dorothy Hall had been a prolific diary keeper: on the outside, she was a married homemaking mother of four, but within her private journals she revealed herself as a woman with an intense internal life who ached through hidden periods of depression. When Dorothy died in 2008, Diane started using her mother’s diaries as a springboard to her own autobiographical journey. And so we have this book, rich and ruminative, provocatively honest, jumbled and jittery and textured. It speaks in two voices: Keaton is bitingly wry, ironic and tough about herself, but pleadingly earnest and passionate when writing of her mother, to whom she feels she owes her success, her self-esteem — just about everything. It’s as if she’s bargaining with her readers: she’ll open her life to view and dish the dirt she knows we want, as long as we love her mother as she did. It’s worth taking her up on it.

Both of Keaton’s parents made the mythic trudge to California from the Midwest in the 1920s. (On her mother’s side there’s a crazy grandpa from Oklahoma; on her father’s, “Grammy” Hall, a gruff, self-made loan shark.) Her father, Jack Hall, was a civil engineer; home was a Santa Ana tract house with frugal casserole dinners. We see young Diane aping the Vogue model Penelope Tree (the very long bangs, the very short minis), getting C-minuses in English and rummaging in Goodwill bins for castoff fabric, which her mother sewed into nifty outfits. Dorothy talked the local big-deal musical-theater coach into giving Diane better parts, which led to a breakout role for Diane in high school. And soon she found herself, at 19, at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. She pinched pennies at a theatrical women’s boardinghouse (the Rockettes were always hogging the phone), fretted that she was, at best, “affable looking,” and, as we discover in the book’s first big Reveal, developed a five-year case of bulimia.

Keaton met Woody Allen via her role in his “Play It Again, Sam,” which opened on Broadway in 1969. They argued about women’s status in the arts (her idea) on their first date; he wrote her a letter, calling her “Beet Head” (she called him her “White Thing”), and soon — “He couldn’t help himself; he loved neurotic girls” — they were spending time in his penthouse, she was in psychoanalysis, and they were “quite a couple, one more hidden than the other,” wearing their constant hats and happily “torturing each other with our failures.” Her loyalty to Allen remains intense to this day. (“He would cringe if he knew how much I care about him.”) Yet in these pages Keaton does share a trove of the very private director’s letters (one, signed “the fabulous Mister A, a man with healing humour”), tossed in amid the (touchingly equally valued) diary entries of her mother.

After Allen came the tenacious if impermanent grip of Warren Beatty. Keaton learned, in 1978, that “once Warren chose to shine his light on you, there was no going back.” Beatty, she writes, was “always searching for what lay hidden behind the facade.” He once barked, in response to one of her art projects: “You’re a movie star. . . . Now deal with it. What is all this art stuff going to get you anyway?” But he was also magnanimous, both materially (buying her “a sauna for one bathroom and a steam room for the other”) and emotionally (exhorting her to exploit what he gushed was her “unfair allotment of gifts”). She could be difficult — it took her “something like 65 excruciating close-ups” before she stopped hating her “Reds” character, Louise Bryant, enough to let Beatty get a printable take. Still, her ascent “to the top of the hill” as his girlfriend was uncomfortable. “I didn’t have the fortitude to prolong my moment in the sun. I preferred retreating.”

The love of her life seems to have been Al Pacino. She lays it right out there: “For me the ‘Godfathers,’ all three of them, were about one thing — Al. It was as simple as that.” She was taken by his “killer Roman nose” (“It was long like a cucumber”) and his “kinetic” energy. She taught the Bronx boy how to drive a car and was terrified when he refused to stop pumping the gas pedal. That was the first stage of their romance. Later, after both had done much living, they got back together. Their days at his home on the Hudson River were sweet ones, she wistfully recounts. She issued marriage ultimatums. “Poor Al, he never wanted it. Poor me, I never stopped insisting.” The end of their affair as she depicts it here, just as her father is succumbing to brain cancer, is infinitely sadder than the others.

Keaton’s career had dark patches that echo Dorothy’s emotional downward spiral. Before “Baby Boom” (the stellar 1987 comedy written by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer) broke the spell, she believed that “without a great man writing and directing for me,” she was “mediocre.” When she adopted her children, she became acutely aware that she had created for herself a large, lush domestic life long after her mother’s parenting years, which had defined and occupied her for so long, had shrunk to empty-nest-hood. I won’t pretend there are pages you won’t skip over — I, for one, didn’t care about Kea­ton’s siblings; I thought all the passages about her family (yes, including Mom) could have been reduced by a third. Sometimes I wanted to yell at this book: It’s you, Diane, not them I want to read about! I enjoyed the parts about her overripe present, conveyed in antic spurts: driving her daughter to her 4:45 a.m. swim practice (Starbucks doesn’t open till 5!), restoring a Lloyd Wright house, filming “Morning Glory,” singing a Katy Perry song in the car with her son, feeling vulnerable as she ponders the deaths of Elizabeth Edwards and Natasha Richardson. The actress who’s always been best when underestimated has built herself a soulful, unselfish maturity. A tip of the chapeau to her.

When, 30-some years ago, Keaton first plunged into Warren Beatty’s world, the rush of sophisticates she was meeting — “Katharine Graham, Jackie Kennedy, . . . Diana Vreeland, Gay and Nan Talese” — felt like an “endurance test,” and she longed “to go back to the open arms of my family.” In insisting her mother’s life be part of this book, Keaton has heartfully, and cleverly, kept open those arms — and it’s a not-bad time in life to have done so. No wonder Dorothy Hall once mused to her diary: “Diane . . . is a mystery. . . . At times she’s so basic, at others so wise it frightens me.”

Diane Keaton
THEN AGAIN
By Diane Keaton
Illustrated. 265 pp. Random House. $26.

Blowing Hats, 2011

The Los Angeles Times
Published: December 8, 2011
By Leah Ollman

Each of the little alchemical wonders in Ricky Swallow’s show at Marc Foxx started as a cardboard tube. The Australian-born, L.A.-based Swallow cut, folded and otherwise altered the humble, functional tubes of various diameters, turning them into jaunty tabletop sculptures cast in bronze. Three “Penguin Pots” in soot black stand in ascending sequence, angular handles aimed in one direction, extended beak-like spouts in the other. Two bone-white mugs, both split in half, nest into each other like double parentheses. A cigarette sends up a waft of blue smoke in the shape of a French curve.

The transposition of an everyday object into something else, materially and psychologically, brings to mind Therrien and Gober, as well as the ceci-n’est-pas sly humor of Magritte. Four small, gray top hats, stilled at different points in a windblown tumble, make “Blowing Hats” a stop-motion animated sculpture, one with the bittersweet charm of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton antics. Figures are implied throughout, gracefully distilled into a pair of half-pipe legs or a row of coat buttons.

Swallow dips into an Art Deco idiom when he renders letters and numbers out of snippets of tubing, and elsewhere adopts a sort of Cubist approach to a single subject’s multiple planes. Art historical echoes resound among these works, yet they have distinctive character of their own, a highly appealing mix of modesty, tenderness, elegance and wit.

Marc Foxx, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5571, through Dec. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday. Marc Foxx

Fragments from the West Coast:
A Peculiar Surf Vernacular thru December 31, 2011

LEFT COAST BOOKS
5877 Hollister Avenue Goleta, CA 93117 805.845.1212

Thanks to Jed Lind

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Published: December 4, 2011

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory — because Herman Cain was not an accident.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year — and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or totally clueless.

Mitt Romney embodies the first option. He’s not a stupid man; he knows perfectly well, to take a not incidental example, that the Obama health reform is identical in all important respects to the reform he himself introduced in Massachusetts — but that doesn’t stop him from denouncing the Obama plan as a vast government takeover that is nothing like what he did. He presumably knows how to read a budget, which means that he must know that defense spending has continued to rise under the current administration, but this doesn’t stop him from pledging to reverse Mr. Obama’s “massive defense cuts.”

Mr. Romney’s strategy, in short, is to pretend that he shares the ignorance and misconceptions of the Republican base. He isn’t a stupid man — but he seems to play one on TV.

Unfortunately from his point of view, however, his acting skills leave something to be desired, and his insincerity shines through. So the base still hungers for someone who really, truly believes what every candidate for the party’s nomination must pretend to believe. Yet as I said, the only way to actually believe the modern G.O.P. catechism is to be completely clueless.

And that’s why the Republican primary has taken the form it has, in which a candidate nobody likes and nobody trusts has faced a series of clueless challengers, each of whom has briefly soared before imploding under the pressure of his or her own cluelessness. Think in particular of Rick Perry, a conservative true believer who seemingly had everything it took to clinch the nomination — until he opened his mouth.

So will Newt Gingrich suffer the same fate? Not necessarily.

Many observers seem surprised that Mr. Gingrich’s, well, colorful personal history isn’t causing him more problems, but they shouldn’t be. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, conservatives often seem inclined to accept that tribute, voting for candidates who publicly espouse conservative moral principles whatever their personal behavior. Did I mention that David Vitter is still in the Senate?

And Mr. Gingrich has some advantages none of the previous challengers had. He is by no means the deep thinker he imagines himself to be, but he’s a glib speaker, even when he has no idea what he’s talking about. And my sense is that he’s also very good at doublethink — that even when he knows what he’s saying isn’t true, he manages to believe it while he’s saying it. So he may not implode like his predecessors.

The larger point, however, is that whoever finally gets the Republican nomination will be a deeply flawed candidate. And these flaws won’t be an accident, the result of bad luck regarding who chose to make a run this time around; the fact that the party is committed to demonstrably false beliefs means that only fakers or the befuddled can get through the selection process.

Of course, given the terrible economic picture and the tendency of voters to blame whoever holds the White House for bad times, even a deeply flawed G.O.P. nominee might very well win the presidency. But then what?

The Washington Post quotes an unnamed Republican adviser who compared what happened to Mr. Cain, when he suddenly found himself leading in the polls, to the proverbial tale of the dog who had better not catch that car he’s chasing. “Something great and awful happened, the dog caught the car. And of course, dogs don’t know how to drive cars. So he had no idea what to do with it.”

The same metaphor, it seems to me, might apply to the G.O.P. pursuit of the White House next year. If the dog actually catches the car — the actual job of running the U.S. government — it will have no idea what to do, because the realities of government in the 21st century bear no resemblance to the mythology all ambitious Republican politicians must pretend to believe. And what will happen then?

Vandalism Series: 75V02, 1975, archivally processed black and white photograph

December 10, 2011-January 21, 2012
Opening Reception: December 10, 2011, 7-9pm

LAXART as part of Pacific Standard Time

( Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times )
Elmer Long at his Bottle Tree Ranch, which draws visitors from around the world. The ranch, located on an old stretch of Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, is a folk art forest — two-plus acres crowded with hundreds of metal sculptures adorned with colored bottles and topped with just about anything one could imagine.

By Mike Anton, Los Angeles Times
Published December 4, 2011

To see the forest for the trees, drive north from Victorville on old Route 66 into the desert, past the cement factory where Elmer Long toiled for decades, to a grove of metal and glass that is more than the sum of its parts.

Long’s Bottle Tree Ranch is a folk art forest — two-plus acres crowded with hundreds of metal sculptures adorned with colored bottles and topped with just about anything one could imagine.

A saxophone, caribou antlers and windmills. Half a surfboard, a rusted tricycle and furniture. A traffic signal, a carousel horse and various ancient rifles. A muffler, toys and a police cruiser siren from the 1930s.

“You know, the old type that goes wooo, wooo,” says Long, 65, who has the wild white beard of a castaway and skin as dry as a sun-baked car shammy. “There’s all kinds of junk out here.”

How this came to be is a father-and-son story.

Long grew up in Manhattan Beach. His dad — also named Elmer, as was his grandfather — was an aviation engineer who loved the desert and the secrets it kept.

“We’d camp out here all the time. I loved it. We’d have campfires at night, cook hot dogs and marshmallows. Shoot guns. Can’t do that at the beach,” Long says. “He got into collecting bottles and sort of went crazy. He had thousands of them.”

The elder Long would spend hours at the library researching the Mojave Desert’s ghost towns and mining camps. He would spend days in the field with a metal detector unearthing hand-blown antiques and modern machine-made trash.

“You find one, clean it up, make it pretty and go on to find the next one,” Long says. “I took it one step further.”

After a stint in the Marine Corps, Long moved to the desert in 1968. He lived in his Volkswagen van for two years. He landed a job at the cement plant. He met his wife of 39 years, Linda, and they raised three sons and put them through college.

Their home is a ramshackle structure with a leaky roof, plywood floors, a wood stove and a web of extension cords.

Long’s memory is encyclopedic. He can tell you that the two scorched napkin holders atop one bottle tree came from a burned-out restaurant. That a box of Fred Flintstone-size buffalo bones came from a swap meet in Arizona. That the Lionel trains atop another bottle tree were his Christmas present when he was 3 years old.

Long says he gets thousands of visitors a year. Tourists looking for nostalgia along what’s left of Route 66. Motorcycle clubs on a weekend rides. Lots of foreigners.

“This man is a natural genius,” says David Wing, a retired photography instructor from Sherman Oaks who stopped by recently to take pictures. “It’s wonderful Americana from an artist who isn’t afraid to use everything he gets his hands on.”

Once, Long got a call from a Englishman who was on business in New York who saw a YouTube video about his bottle trees. He flew out the next day and spent the afternoon wandering through Long’s idiosyncratic vision. Then he flew back to New York.

“People come here and ask me to build them one. I won’t do it,” Long says. “I’ve got no interest in money. I tell them, ‘Build your own — there’s my welding machine, you can use it.’ How could it possibly mean anything to you if you don’t make it yourself?”

There is no charge to wander the Bottle Tree Ranch, only a tip box. Some people leave items for Long to use in future sculptures. Others steal stuff.

“You can’t stop it,” Long says. “What are you going to do, put up a 10-foot-tall fence? Why worry about it?”

By his own account, Long was once judgmental of people, easy to anger, a man who settled scores. But a decade of building bottle trees and topping them with other people’s discards has changed him, he says.

“I’ve got a lot of time to think, to plan. And I use that time wisely,” he says. “I’m free of any kind of worry. I’m free of any feelings of confrontation.”

From somewhere in the forest a voice calls out: “This is awesome.”

A man named Bull, his wife, sister and a stranger they met on the road step out of the trees.

They are walking home to Las Vegas, Bull says, pushing a baby stroller piled high with clothes, water, food, blankets and a tarp. Their van, Bull says, was stolen in Venice Beach, and they’re flat broke.

He is 38, shirtless with a nipple ring. He picks up a buffalo bone the size of a yule log and inquires about it.

“I’d love to have one,” he says. “I’d wear it as a necklace.”

“You need some money?” Long says. “I’ll give you some.”

“We weren’t looking for money,” Bull says. “Just stopped for the art.”

Long hands him some cash and they head east on Route 66, pushing the stroller, the Joads in reverse.

“I’m not a people person,” Long says, turning his attention to his latest project, a bottle tree that will be topped with a Navy ship’s telephone that he found in a junk shop.

“But if you get a thousand people coming by to say howdy and shake your hand …. it changes you. It changed me. I’m a much better person than I was.”

Peter Shire’s Annual EXP Pottery Sale

December 4, 6-10
December 5, 12-6
December 6, 12-5

Echo Park Pottery
1850 Echo Park Avenue,
Los Angeles, CA 90026,

EXP Pottery

Teal Legs, 2011
Acrylic on steel
34″ x 14″ x 48″

Through December 31, 2011

Shane Cambell

BEFORE THE PH.D. Steven Pinker in 1971 with fellow Wagar High School students on a Canadian television quiz show.

By CARL ZIMMER
NY Times Published: November 28, 2011

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection.

He has also become a withering critic of those who would deny the deep marks of evolution on our minds — social engineers who believe they can remake children as they wish, modernist architects who believe they can rebuild cities as utopias. Even in the 21st century, Dr. Pinker argues, we ignore our evolved brains at our own peril.

Given this track record, Dr. Pinker’s newest book, published in October, struck some critics as a jackknife turn. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (Viking), he investigates one of the most primal aspects of life: violence.

Over the course of 802 pages, he argues that violence has fallen drastically over thousands of years — whether one considers homicide rates, war casualties as a percentage of national populations, or other measures.

This may seem at odds with evolutionary psychology, which is often seen as an argument for hard-wired Stone Age behavior, but Dr. Pinker sees that view as a misunderstanding of the science. Our evolved brains, he argues, are capable of a wide range of responses to their environment. Under the right conditions, they can allow us to live in greater and greater peace.

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” is full of the flourishes that Dr. Pinker’s readers have come to expect. He offers gruesomely delightful details about cutting off noses and torturing heretics. Like his other popular books, starting with “The Language Instinct” (1994), it is a far cry from his first published works in the late 1970s — esoteric reports from his graduate work at Harvard, with titles like “The Representation and Manipulation of Three-Dimensional Space in Mental Images.”

From Irregular Verbs, a Career

He came to Harvard after graduating from McGill University in 1976. At the time, he was convinced that a life in psychology would allow him to ask the big questions about the mind and answer them with scientific rigor. “It was the sweet spot for me in trying to understand human nature,” he said.

But he quickly realized that such explorations would have to wait. “You can’t do a Ph.D. thesis on human nature,” he said. “So I studied much smaller problems — academic bread-and-butter problems.”

He began by studying how we picture things in our heads, looking for the strategies people use to make sense of the visual information continually flooding the brain. As he worked on his dissertation, however, he recognized that many other scientists were also tackling the same problems of visual cognition.

“There were a lot of people studying them who were doing a better job than I could,” he said. So he looked for another problem.

The field he settled on was language, and it proved to be consuming. For Dr. Pinker, it was “a window into human nature.” Linguists have long debated whether language is a skill we develop with all-purpose minds, or whether we have innate systems dedicated to it.

Dr. Pinker has focused much of his research on language on a seemingly innocuous fluke: irregular verbs. While we can generate most verb tenses according to a few rules, we also hold onto a few arbitrary ones. Instead of simply turning “speak” into “speaked,” for example, we say “spoke.”

As a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he pored over transcripts of children’s speech, looking for telling patterns in the mistakes they made as they mastered verbs. Out of this research, he proposed that our brains contain two separate systems that contribute to language. One combines elements of language to build up meaning; the other is like a mental dictionary we keep in our memory.

This research helped to convince Dr. Pinker that language has deep biological roots. Some linguists argued that language simply emerged as a byproduct of an increasingly sophisticated brain, but he rejected that idea. “Language is so woven into what makes humans human,” he said, “that it struck me as inconceivable that it was just an accident.”

Instead, he concluded that language was an adaptation produced by natural selection. Language evolved like the eye or the hand, thanks to the way it improved reproductive success. In 1990 he published a paper called “Natural Language and Natural Selection,” with his student Paul Bloom, now at Yale. The paper was hugely influential.

It also became the seed of his breakthrough book, “The Language Instinct,” which quickly became a best seller and later won a place on a list in the journal American Scientist of the top 100 science books of the 20th century.

Dr. Pinker used the success of the book to expand the scope of his work. “It gave me the freedom to return to these much larger questions, informed by what I could learn about real humans,” he said.

For the past 17 years, he has alternated between wide-ranging books on human nature, like “How the Mind Works” (1997) and “The Blank Slate” (2002), and books focused on his research, like “Words and Rules” (1999), about irregular verbs. He writes at the apartment he shares with his wife, the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, and at a house on Cape Cod.

Cause for Optimism

As a public intellectual, Dr. Pinker has engaged in a series of high-profile debates about evolutionary psychology. In 1997, the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould accused him and other evolutionary psychologists of seeing fine-tuned adaptations in every facet of human existence.

Evolutionary psychology, Dr. Gould wrote, “could be quite useful if proponents would trade their propensity for cultism and ultra-Darwinian fealty for a healthy dose of modesty.”

Dr. Pinker gave as good as he got. He declared that Dr. Gould was “scrambling things so that his opponents have horns and he has a halo.” (Dr. Gould died in 2002.)

Then there is the question of male and female minds. In 2005, Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, caused an uproar by speculating that one reason for the underrepresentation of women in tenured science and engineering positions was “issues of intrinsic aptitude.”

Dr. Pinker (who had moved from M.I.T. to Harvard in 2003) came to Dr. Summers’s defense, and ended up in a high-profile debate with a fellow Harvard psychologist, Elizabeth Spelke.

Dr. Pinker argued that there were small but important biological differences in how male and female brains worked. Dr. Spelke argued that these differences were minor, and that evolutionary psychology had no part to play in the debate.

“The kinds of careers people pursue now, the kinds of choices they make, are radically different from anything that anybody faced back in the Pleistocene,” Dr. Spelke said at the close of the debate. “It is anything but clear how motives that evolved then translate into a modern context.”

In a way, “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” is a response to this kind of critique. He says the idea for the book took root in his mind around the time of his debate with Dr. Spelke, when he stumbled across graphs of historical rates of violence. In England, for example, homicide rates are about a hundredth of what they were in 1400.

In 2006 Dr. Pinker was invited to write an essay on the theme “What Are You Optimistic About?” His answer: “The decline of violence.”

The reaction to the essay was swift and surprising. “I started hearing from scholars from fields that I was barely aware of, saying, ‘There’s much more evidence on this trend than you were aware of,’ ” he said.

Researchers sent him evidence that violence had declined in many other places, and in many different forms, from the death rate in wars to rates of child abuse. “I thought, ‘This is getting to be a conspiracy.’ It was beyond my wildest dreams. I realized there was a book to be written.”

Dr. Pinker set out to synthesize all these patterns and find an explanation for them. And in the process, he wanted to rebut stereotypes of evolutionary psychology.

“There’s a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it’s fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife,” he said. “Why even try to work toward peace if we’re just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?”

Instead, Dr. Pinker argues that evolutionary psychology offers the best explanation for why things have gotten better, and how to make them even better.

Civilization’s Effect

“Better Angels” has impressed many experts on historical trends of violence.

“Steven Pinker’s great achievement is to weave these trends into a much larger pattern of reduced violence, greater empathy and, indeed, a comprehensive civilizing process,” said Nils Petter Gleditsch, a research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway.

Human violence started dropping thousands of years ago with the formation of the first states, Dr. Pinker argues. For evidence, he points to archaeological studies and observations of stateless societies today. With the birth of the first states, rates of violence began to fall, and they have dropped in fits and starts ever since.

Dr. Pinker grants that these results may be hard to believe, but he thinks that is more a matter of psychology than of data. The emotional power in stories of violence — whether on the nightly news or on “Law and Order” — can distract us from the long-term decline.

He acknowledges, of course, that the past century produced two horrific world wars. But he says they do not refute his argument. Statistical studies of war reveal a lot of randomness built into their timing and size. The 20th century, he argues, suffered some particularly bad luck.

Dr. Pinker finds an explanation for the overall decline of violence in the interplay of history with our evolved minds. Our ancestors had a capacity for violence, but this was just one capacity among many. “Human nature is complex,” he said. “Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.”

Which inclinations come to the fore depends on our social surroundings. In early society, the lack of a state spurred violence. A thirst for justice could be satisfied only with revenge. Psychological studies show that people overestimate their own grievances and underestimate those of others; this cognitive quirk fueled spiraling cycles of bloodshed.

But as the rise of civilization gradually changed the ground rules of society, violence began to ebb. The earliest states were brutal and despotic, but they did manage to take away opportunities for runaway vendettas.

More recently, the invention of movable type radically changed our social environment. When people used their powers of language to generate new ideas, those ideas could spread. “If you give people literacy, bad ideas can be attacked and experiments tried, and lessons will accumulate,” Dr. Pinker said. “That pulls you away from what human nature would consign you on its own.”

And these ideas helped drive down violence even further. Ideas about equality led to women gaining power across much of the world, and “women are statistically more dovish than men,” Dr. Pinker said.

Reviews for the new book have been largely enthusiastic, though not unmixed. In The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert called it “confounding,” “exasperating” and “fishy.”

“Hate and madness and cruelty haven’t disappeared,” she concluded, “and they aren’t going to.”

Dr. Pinker’s response was equally scornful. “No honest reviewer would imply that this is the message of the book,” he wrote on his Web site.

Though violence has indisputably declined, he says, it could rise again. But by understanding the causes of the decline, humanity can work to promote peace. He endorses the new book “Winning the War on War” (Dutton/Penguin), by the political scientist Joshua S. Goldstein, which argues that the slogan “If you want peace, fight for justice” is precisely the wrong advice.

If you want peace, Dr. Goldstein argues, work for peace. Dr. Pinker agrees.

“It’s psychologically astute, given the massive amount of self-serving biases,” he said. “In any dispute, each side thinks it’s in the right and the other side is demons.”

The moral of his own book might be, If you want peace, understand psychology.

The Vails’ former ranch, now part of Channel Islands National Park, is no longer a home for cattle, cowboys or adventurous children. And now the family’s last link to the place is being severed.

By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2011

Reporting from Santa Rosa Island, Calif.—
For the family that once owned Santa Rosa Island, it was part Zane Grey, part “Robinson Crusoe.”

Generations of Vail cousins would arrive from the mainland and take refuge for months at a time. They would explore places with pirate-map names: Skull Gulch, Abalone Rocks, China Camp. They were city kids, but they rode with the island’s cowboys and knew the island lore — stories about ghosts, about shipwrecks, about a mythical temptress named Rita who supposedly awaited new cowboys.

For a senior project in high school, Nita Vail talked her teachers into letting her saddle up for a full season on Santa Rosa, spending weeks on end with the cowboys.

It was hard, but worthwhile.

“You’re in a sitting trot at dark-thirty in the morning and you’re riding 20, 30 miles,” Nita Vail recalled. The “gathers,” as they were called, weren’t over until all the cattle were herded onto custom-made ferries — the Vaqueros I and II — for the rough trip across the Santa Barbara Channel.

These days, when members of the venerable ranching family fly out to Santa Rosa Island, it isn’t to round up cattle. It’s to say goodbye.

The island became part of Channel Islands National Park in 1986, and the storied Vail & Vickers ranch — a spread that spanned the island’s 84 square miles of rolling grasslands and rugged coastline — shut down 12 years later. But the family continued to run a big-game operation, guiding hunters to the trophy deer and elk transplanted to the island nearly a century ago.

Under an agreement with the National Park Service and an environmental group, the sport hunting ended last month. Now, professional marksmen are tracking the remaining dozens of deer and elk from canyon to canyon, sometimes targeting them from helicopters.

The Vail & Vickers Co., a partnership formed by Arizona ranchers in 1889, will dissolve Dec. 31. Without land or cattle — or deer or elk — there’s nothing left to manage.

Once home to thriving Chumash villages, the island is all but unpopulated — a natural gem that only hints at its rich human history. In its day, the Vail & Vickers ranch was part of a California shaped by outsized personalities and powerful families, a state where palaces built by the likes of Hearst and Huntington have long since become public treasures.

But that doesn’t make the story’s ending any easier for the Vails.

“This is a sad time for us,” said Nita Vail, a great-granddaughter of the rancher who bought the island 26 miles off Santa Barbara in 1901. “We tried everything we could to keep the herds, but it didn’t work.”

A cowboy’s tale

Like all great westerns, the Vail saga started with a larger-than-life cowboy.

Walter L. Vail turned a $100 grubstake into a million-acre ranching empire based in Arizona. When the Southern Pacific railroad tried to gouge him, he orchestrated the West’s last great cattle drive. He left for California in the 1890s, eventually establishing an 87,000-acre ranch in Riverside County. He survived a near-fatal Gila monster bite and other Old West calamities, but was killed by a Los Angeles streetcar in 1906.

The Santa Rosa spread was an overgrazed sheep ranch when he and J.V. Vickers bought it. The Vickers family participated in big decisions about the property, but the Vails ran it day to day, at some points living on the island for long stretches of time.

Ed Vail, one of Walter’s seven children, was “a slave-driver,” his nephew Russ Vail once told an interviewer. “He was a hell of a cattleman and a hell of a horseman and a hard drinker.”

He also was an old-fashioned gentleman, Russ Vail said: “He rode in a coat, a tie and a vest all his life. Even if he was drunk, he was courteous as hell.”

In the 1920s, the family began importing Roosevelt elk and Kaibab mule deer to the island. “There was an ethic of ranchers wanting to see wildlife on their property,” said Vail cousin Will Woolley.

Those animals were also the game hunted by the family and their guests.

From time to time, Ed Vail hosted his friend Will Rogers. The two were so close that Vail was a witness when the famous humorist signed his will on Aug.5, 1935. Twelve days later, Rogers died in a plane crash at Point Barrow, Alaska.

Earl Warren, the former California governor, was hunting on Santa Rosa on Sept. 25, 1953, when a Navy PT boat showed up to ferry him back to the mainland. A guest of the Vails, he was being summoned to become chief justice of the United States.

In 1978 — partly to manage herds that had grown to 1,100 animals and partly to help the ranch through lean years — the island was opened to commercial hunting. Hunters would pay as much as $10,000 for a four-day outing, ranging the hills with guides and bedding down in the family’s 1855 ranch house, the oldest wood-frame home in Santa Barbara County.

But history soon took a turn that would spell the end for the deer and elk. Fearing condemnation, Vail & Vickers sold Santa Rosa Island to the government for $30 million in 1986. At the time, the Vails knew they couldn’t go on for long raising 2 million pounds of beef a year in a spot widely likened to the Galapagos, but they understood that they could keep ranching for 25 years, until 2011.

It didn’t work out that way. Family members say government restrictions after the sale forced them to quit 13 years earlier than they’d planned.

A 1997 lawsuit by the National Park and Conservation Assn. hastened the end of both ranching and hunting. The group alleged that the game animals — as well as the cattle — were degrading the environment. Under a settlement, they were to be removed over a four-year period ending this Dec. 31.

Failed attempts

There were attempts to keep the deer and elk in place.

Duncan L. Hunter, a former San Diego congressman, wanted to make the island a hunting resort for wounded veterans.

In 2007, Tim Vail, a cousin of Nita’s, urged a congressional committee to “engage in an open conversation that acknowledges that these magnificent herds will be slaughtered if this National Park … has its way.”

The plea didn’t succeed.

White Buffalo, a Connecticut-based company run by a wildlife ecologist, is conducting the final hunt. In the hunt’s first few weeks, the family gave more than 4,000 pounds of elk and venison to Ventura County charities.

In a recent statement, the conservation association said removing the deer and elk will “finally end their cycle of death on the island while allowing the opportunity for the full natural diversity of plants and wildlife to flourish.”

Native plants have already started a resurgence that park spokeswoman Yvonne Menard called dramatic.

The island’s future is still being mapped out.

There might be expanded camping opportunities, as well as lodging on the site of the cowboys’ bunkhouse. Without a hunting season, there won’t be a need to restrict travel. As visitors learn about discoveries like the 13,000-year-old bones that are thought to be North America’s oldest human remains, park officials hope, they will be astonished by the sweep of island history.

“It’s a great interpretive opportunity,” Menard said.

Russell Galipeau, the park’s superintendent, said displays in the old ranch buildings will help preserve the Vails’ cowboy heritage, of which there is plenty.

One recent afternoon, Woolley and Nita Vail — wearing a necklace with the ranch’s old VR brand — led visitors past a tiny schoolhouse, through weathered, long-empty corrals and into a hayloft where one Henry Lopez wrote his name in large letters and inscribed the date: Oct. 31, 1896.

In a barn, dust-covered saddles sat on a beam. There were huge clumps of horsehair, a wooden rack used to stretch hides, shelves crammed with bolts and pipes transformed by time into museum pieces. In a corner, Woolley pointed out a spot once occupied by a still rigged up from an old milk jug and some tubing.

A ranch foreman made “godawful stuff he called brandy,” Woolley said, and traded it to passing fishermen.

In its heyday, the ranch bustled with 10 to 15 cowboys, 150 horses and as many as 7,000 head of cattle.

Family members still hold ranching close. Tim Vail is an equine veterinarian. Woolley raises grass-fed beef in San Luis Obispo County. Nita Vail runs the California Rangeland Trust, a group that helps property owners preserve working ranches.

All that, Galipeau said, makes this “a very hard transition for the family.”

At a recent gathering of ranchers, Woolley concurred.

“It’s hard to see four generations of work, sweat, tears and dreams be relegated to the pages of a book,” he said, “when we knew it as a breathing, living entity.”