An installation view of the exhibition, which includes a varied collection of American Indian materials.

By ROBERTA SMITH
NY Times Published: December 22, 2011

“Kindred Spirits: Native American Influences on 20th Century Art” at the Peter Blum Gallery in SoHo closes out the New York gallery year with a great group show. This superb yet fraught exhibition creates a vortex of history, visual culture, language and ideas that is both heartbreaking and exhilarating. It seems almost impossible to straighten out, but that may be what makes it so valuable.
ArtsBeat

At the heart of the show is a shatteringly beautiful array of American Indian material, most of it from the Southwest, in which organic and geometric forms mingle effortlessly and with great variety. There are chalky white Mimbres burial bowls, one with an image of a bird catching a fish as it stands on its own elongated beak, and Navajo chief’s blankets, whose combinations of bold and fine bands and patterns in red, black and white seem to capture the very electricity of life.

There are Panamint, Western Apache and Yavapai baskets punctuated with the alert silhouettes of horned animals and stepped, radiating lines suggestive of lightning; Arapaho ledger drawings and a Lakota Sioux box made of hide and decorated with a vivid accordionlike arrangement of reds, yellows, blues and greens. There are Zia, Zuni and Acoma earthenware pots whose decorations — variously geometric, zoomorphic, floral and calligraphic — simply dazzle, and a Navajo drawing for a sand painting and a weaving based on one, dominated by swastikas achieved by adding semi-abstract, postlike figures to the four arms of large plus signs.

Dispersed around these extraordinary works is a varied mass of material — books, prints and photographs and the work of modern and contemporary artists — that attests to several generations of contact between indigenous peoples and government forces, sympathetic observers, trained scholars and aesthetic “kindred spirits.” Hand-colored aquatint engravings by the German artist Karl Bodmer from around 1840 depict Indians hunting bison. Edward Curtis’s turn-of-the-20th-century photographs of weary, wise-looking Indian chiefs give a hint of lost lands, lives and traditions (as do their words, quoted in the show’s excellent catalog). Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is captured in a photograph by Adam Clark Vroman in 1900 and in another by Ansel Adams from around 1947.

As for 20th-century art, Georgia O’Keeffe is represented by a small abstraction, in which a field of blue is divided by a jagged span of black that suggests a horizon line, a flock of birds and a Navajo weaving. Two marvelous drawings from the 1940s by Jackson Pollock suggest his awareness of Indian sand painting and rock petroglyphs. “Arizona Rouge,” a small painting on wood from 1955 by Max Ernst, captures something of the essential abstractness of the Southwestern landscape, as do works by Agnes Martin. The Swiss artist Helmut Federle pays tribute to Navajo weavings with small works in gouache and oil.

More originally, Josef Albers layers together planes of color into reverberating distillations of adobe architecture that also suggest ghostly, distended masks. There is also a video by Bruce Nauman, “Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor),” which shows him, working alone, setting three fence posts. In this context his actions suggest an austere and arduous ritual, and the posts evoke abbreviated totems.

One of the most affecting works is one of the tiniest: Paul Strand’s “Ranchos de Taos, Church, New Mexico,” an exquisite vintage photograph from 1931 in which the adobe architecture, a small symphony of graduated grays, has the delicate solidity of flesh. It looks great next to the Ernst, and some of its organic earthiness is bodied forth in a miniature sculpture of a pueblo by Charles Simonds that nestles in a nearby corner upside down, as if protected from gravity by the gods.

The modern and contemporary art in the show struggles to hold its own against the Indian objects. It seems hopelessly romantic to say that it lacks their spiritual connection to nature, although that may be an issue. More urgently, the 20th-century works seem plagued by a kind of physical deficiency, a failure to integrate motif and material into a seamless whole. In the Native American works this integration is always in force, although it is understandably most intense in the woven blankets and baskets, where there is no distinction between image and process, or art and craft, or front and back. The weaving forms a completely efficient, irreducible whole: figure and ground are one and visible to the same degree from both sides. In a seemingly monochromatic Hopi weaving from around 1875, the power of the work comes not just from subtle shifts among tones of black, brown and deep blue, but also from weaving techniques that set off diamond-pattern borders against a field of diagonal twill.

While much of the work by non-Indian artists lacks this kind of physical integrity, Nicholas Galanin, the Alaskan Tlinglit artist who works in various Conceptual Art modes, does muster some of it by wittily appropriating the rock-art technique especially favored by the Native Americans of the Southwest. Into the sidewalk in front of the gallery he has incised the silhouette of a small horned animal like those found on several objects inside, as well as the word “Indians” rendered in the distinctive script used by the Cleveland baseball team, but without the Indian caricature of the logo. Redolent of tattoos and graffiti, these works bring the fuel-efficient unity posed by the Native American works in this show squarely into the present.

“Kindred Spirits: Native
American Influences on 20th
Century Art” continues through Jan. 28

Peter Blum

From the brochure collection of Steve Hayes

THREE LITTLE PIGS Detroit’s homegrown subcompacts included the 1973 A.M.C. Gremlin, above, along with the Ford Pinto and Chevrolet Vega

By JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN
NY Times Published: December 16, 2011

ADDRESSING a group of 450 civic leaders at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan on Oct. 3, 1968, the chairman of General Motors, James M. Roche, did something almost sacrilegious for an auto executive: he talked about a future product.

Roche boldly announced that in the fall of 1970, G.M. would begin producing a small car designed for the American market and priced from $1,900 to $2,300. Developed under the code name XP-887, the subcompact would be about a foot shorter than G.M.’s smallest offering at the time, the Chevrolet Corvair.

And it would, no doubt, be better than that star-crossed and litigation-plagued import fighter from a decade earlier.

Roche’s plan was largely a reaction to the commercial threat presented by import brands, which were increasingly attracting young buyers. In 1968, the domestic automakers sold nine out of 10 new cars in America. But import sales were expected to top a million in 1969 — a number even Detroit couldn’t ignore.

But in answering that challenge, American automakers were by the end of 1970 producing three of the most notoriously awful cars ever built — the American Motors Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto — and opening the door for the Japanese onslaught of the 1970s and 1980s.

The new models were so terrible that even 40 years later, some shoppers still won’t consider Detroit’s brands. Their flaws made for cars that comedians would savage, liability lawyers would chase and crestfallen owners would try to pawn off on unsuspecting victims.

“Led by General Motors, the giant domestic auto industry was going to flex its muscle and swat the pesky fly of imported cars off its shoulder,” John Z. DeLorean, the former Chevrolet general manager, said in J. Patrick Wright’s 1979 book, “On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors.”

The Gremlin, Vega and Pinto were small enough to compare directly with the import standard bearer of the time, the Volkswagen Beetle. All three of the domestic entries were conventional designs — shrunken versions of the era’s gargantuan sedans — with their engines in front driving the rear wheels.

G.M.’s ambitions for the XP-887, which would become the Vega, were huge. Instead of being developed by the engineering staff of a single brand, the Vega was designed by the corporate engineering staff under the direction of Edward N. Cole, an executive vice president. It was then handed to Chevrolet’s managers to sell.

The Vega would be an all-new car unrelated to any other in G.M.’s portfolio, using an all-new engine, and it would be built at the company’s newest, most automated plant, in Lordstown, Ohio. “The Vega came just as the bean counters were rising at G.M.,” said John Heitmann, a professor of history at the University of Dayton, about G.M.’s changing corporate culture.

“From the first day I stepped into the Chevrolet division, in 1969, it was obvious that the Vega was in real trouble,” DeLorean said. “General Motors was pinning its image and prestige on this car, and there was practically no interest in it in the division.”

Chevrolet had proposed its own small-car design and was turned down; as production approached, the Chevy staff’s disdain for the corporate model — heavy for its size and more costly to produce — grew.

Worst of all, its 4-cylinder engine was an unfortunate mix of innovation and archaic design. The cylinder head was made of cast iron, a conventional practice for the time, but a special aluminum alloy was chosen for the engine block.

“What resulted,” DeLorean said, “was a relatively large, noisy, top-heavy combination of aluminum and iron, which cost far too much to build, looked like it had been taken off a 1920 farm tractor and weighed more than the cast-iron engine Chevy had proposed, or the foreign-built 4-cylinder engine the Ford Pinto was to use.”

The engine wasn’t particularly powerful; breathing through a one-barrel carburetor, it produced a piddling 90 horsepower; with a two-barrel carburetor, that rose to 110. When the ratings were revised in 1972 to net power output — from the gross horsepower rating used previously — those figures dropped to 80 and 90 horsepower.

“To pass a vehicle going 50 miles an hour,” wrote John S. Radosta of The New York Times in a test of a 1971 model, “a Vega with the 90-horsepower engine and automatic or 3-speed manual transmission needs at least one-third of a mile and 20 seconds. That’s a long time to be sitting in the left lane of a two-lane road.”

Ford, meanwhile, rushed to ready the Pinto in light of Roche’s announcement and was further pressured by the ascension of a small-car advocate, Lee A. Iacocca, to the company’s presidency.

“The Pinto was the first real ‘world car,’ ” Mr. Heitmann said, noting Ford’s production strategy. “It was innovative in the sense that Ford set up a global assembly line with the engines and transmissions made in Europe and the car itself assembled in the United States.”

Like the Vega, the 1971 Pinto was engineered to a tough $2,000 price point with an equally tough 2,000-pound weight goal. The base engine was a 1.6-liter 4-cylinder rated at 75 horsepower; a 100 horsepower 2-liter 4 was optional.

“The Pinto is rolling proof of an economic fact of life,” a 1971 car test in The Times observed. “In building an American car for the $2,000 market something has to give. Pinto disappoints in acceleration, braking, ride quality and rear-seat comfort.”

American Motors, though much smaller than Ford and G.M., decided that despite its scant resources it needed a small car to retain the budget-minded buyers who had been loyal Rambler owners. It was forced to punt.

Instead of engineering a new car, the company’s design chief, Dick Teague, took the existing Hornet compact car, knocked 12 inches out of its wheelbase (down to 96 inches) and eliminated virtually all of the sheet metal beyond the rear wheels. The awkwardly proportioned result was named the Gremlin.

The biggest advantage for American Motors of this simplified product development scheme was that the Gremlin reached the market in April 1970, about five months before the Vega and Pinto. Lacking the resources to develop a 4-cylinder engine, A.M.C. resorted to installing either 3.3- or 3.8-liter versions of the Rambler in-line 6 in the Gremlin.

Weirdly unbalanced, the nose-heavy Gremlin was primitive even in the context of the early 1970s. It was noisy and handled poorly — and like every A.M.C. product suffered from haphazard quality control. But it was never the disaster the Pinto and Vega would prove to be.

The Vega went on sale on Sept. 10, 1970, as a 1971 model, but labor strife at the Lordstown plant initially kept the car in short supply. Even before the model year was through, reliability complaints emerged.

Its major problem was an inadequate engine cooling system and the fragile marriage of an iron cylinder head with an aluminum block. The metals expanded at different rates as they heated up and the head gasket couldn’t keep things sealed. Much of the time, the engines were ruined. Beyond that, by 1972 the Vega was also subject to three major safety recalls, and owners were noticing the appearance of rust in cars just a few months old.

While more reliable, the Pinto, which went on sale the day after the Vega, would earn a terrifying reputation. In 1977, while the car was still in production, a scathing article by Mark Dowie in Mother Jones magazine asserted that Ford had knowingly and cynically produced a car prone to bursting into flames in rear-end collisions — even at low speeds.

Citing an internal Ford memo he said was in his possession, Mr. Dowie claimed that Ford had put a value on each life lost in such an accident at $200,000. For that reason, he wrote, the company decided that modifications to better protect the fuel tank from rupturing — and possibly prevent as many as 180 deaths a year — was, at $11 a car, uneconomical.

The problem wasn’t that the Vega, Pinto and Gremlin didn’t sell. Kept alive by their makers through the ’70s fuel crises, they sold by the millions over long production lives that covered much of the ’70s. The disaster was that they let down so many Americans.

In 1968 Toyota, Datsun and VW were more of a nuisance than a threat, and Honda was still a year away from selling its first car in the United States. But by 1980, partly because of the door left open to them by the failed Detroit subcompacts, those imports were firmly established as value leaders.

“The Pinto, Gremlin and Vega represented everything that Toyota was not,” Mr. Heitmann, the historian, said.

Four decades later, Detroit is still fighting the perception that it doesn’t take small cars seriously. But with tougher fuel economy rules coming, getting past the stigma of the small ’70s cars is more important than ever.

Vincent Fecteau, Untitled, 2006

Vincent Fecteau, Untitled, 2006

Through February 12

Hauser Kunst

TATE CAFÉ 7
2011
Acrylic on Linen
200 x 300 cm, 78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in.

Through December 21, 2011

Simon Lee

via

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.”