Saturday, April 30, 2011

A light on the hill (the Reagan Library)

We went out to the Reagan Library on Monday, 25th.

http://www.reaganfoundation.org/

It was actually a knockout, very impressive sitting way up there on its hill overlooking the vast sweep of the Simi Valley. And inspiring, I've got to say. Just to give a sense of the scale of the building, a Boeing (Reagan's own Air Force One) is on display, standing on columns, in a space the size of a hangar (of course), looking out a glass wall over the Valley. And the library is inspiring because it dramatises just how large the Reagan story was - and Southern Californian. There are all the signal events - the assassination attempt, the meetings with Gorbachev, the signing of a treaty banning medium-range missiles, the demand to pull down the Berlin Wall. Reagan sensed, rightly I suggest, that a president should concentrate on two or three key achievements and that this created memorability.

I've actually always been intrigued by the fact that Reagan campaigned for Harry Truman and endorsed Hubert Humphrey (with whom he remained friends). This is what I would explore if I were to dramatise his life.What happened? What, if any, anxiety did the switch (or was it a shift) cause him? He and his father loved FDR and the New Deal - 'loved'! - so was there an emotional cost? Of course the ultimate prize was the presidency. But in the library there is a statement from one of his 1976 radio speeches:

"Our problem is a permanent structure of govt. insulated from the thinking & wishes of the people; A structure which for all practical purposes is more powerful than our elected representatives..."

So that's the beef? A permanent structure of government? Bureaucracy?

There is one important difference I sense in the Reagan philosophy and that of his heirs in the Tea Party. Reagan had a sunny personality. He was personally engaging. His politics comes from a positive belief in the inherent goodness of people, following from a long-held principle of American society. The founding fathers saw Native Americans all around them who seemed to have no government; they seemed to have no regulation. Franklin talked about this in his Concerning the Savages of North America and so did Jefferson in a chapter of Notes on the State of Virginia. And the theory is that people left free to fully explore their own capabilities will generate goodness to all. But does it happen? I remember seeing a letter from Jefferson to a Shawnee explaining that "with us a majority suffices". The Iroquois Confederacy, however, looked for unanimity and, in the old days, used to naturally, reflexively, consider the impact of their decisions down to the seventh generation. They were self-regulating. And, even though a subsistence society, came from a feeling of plenty. I fear that the 'Tea Party' comes out of resentment and a 'poverty mentality': "Leave us alone", "there isn't enough to go round", "why should we?"; "why should we 'subsidize the losers' mortgages'?" (to quote from the radio spiel that some say started it all, and leaving aside that the pain was felt also by winners who didn't have mortgages).

One of the guides at the library told us that many people give talks out at the library (people such as Condoleezza Rice, 'not Democrats'). She said that 'Sarah' has spoken at the ranch. I asked the guide if Democrats really never spoke at the library. She said she couldn't recall any. But then she said, "they'd be welcome. This is America." And there was my ray of light.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center)


It was so clear from the Getty Center last night that you could see downtown Los Angeles and the sea quite clearly. In fact the view was rivetting.



I wonder even if the Center expresses a Southern Californian attitude to European art. It's meant to be a shrine to it of course, and there are great pictures like Monet's Rouen Cathedral and Van Gogh's Irises. I particularly liked the Caspar David Friedrich

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=1046

But we kept going outside to look at the building and the view. Is it possible that in the act of paying homage to European art, the shrine outshines it? At the least it dramatises the difference between an indoor and outdoor culture.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

When you take a closer look

Los Angeles, it seems to me, is a city in the process of clawing its way back to live-ability. We've just been downtown from the Valley via the rapid transit and subway. And it all worked beautifully. It was well-staffed by cheerful attendants who anticipate your needs (I merely looked like I wanted to ask a question and the station-master said, "Can I help you sir?"). It was also well-patronised. This whole system has all gone in since Kate lived here. What we're witnessing is a city that is putting back public transit and overcoming the car and the loss of community that comes with individual mobility.What's more there is downtown living. The 1913 Metropolitan building has been converted to 88 lofts (a restoration made possible by the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance). All this could be considered in line with what Mayor Villaraigosa said, in praising the deputy mayor Austin Beutner's job creation achievements: "...we no longer let the palm trees do our marketing".

You can see that the downtown was once quite grand, and in places that's being restored.


And here the pavements are populated with just about the right proportion of people. We walked past the Hilton Checkers Hotel and Kate asked the bell captain if it used to be the Mayflower. Yes, he said, it did, and he took us for a tour of the ground floor ("You're very welcome"). Kate said that when she was a kid they'd dress up to come downtown from the Valley. It may take a while, if ever, to return to that. Still, much of the historic downtown is sad and nostalgic.

And you get the sense you wouldn't want to walk around down here at night. We walked past two guys wearing identical clothes, identical brocaded black Mexican handkerchiefs hanging out their back pockets, and grooming distinctive hairstyles. Gang members? I immediately felt a sense of 'keep your distance'. 'Excuse me' mightn't suffice for an excuse if you bumped into them.
 
But the other thing Los Angeles has going for it is a fascinating history. At Universal City station, there were beautiful Mexican mosaics on the platform columns telling the story of California. I just had time to read about Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor, before the train doors shut and we sped off. But then, an hour later we were walking past a building (the first three-storey building in the old pueblo) that Pico had built from the proceeds of a land sale in the San Fernando Valley.


And walking past the old Los Angeles Times building we saw a plaque that identified this as the site of the first school in the Los Angeles area (school house No.1, 1854), the site of the US quartermaster's headquarters 1861, and a camel corral for Fort Tejon.

This city has layers upon layers. (Interestingly, the oldest house in the city, the Avila Adobe of 1818, is not as old as Elizabeth Farm, 1799, in Sydney). But it is a history that is engrossing in itself, without looking to the rest of the United States. And then of course there is the Native American thread.

I must look into this. In fact, from now on, I'm going to find out about the Native American language of each area of go to. I should've looked deeper in San Diego last week, but I did discover that the locals once called San Diego 'Cosoy'.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Return to principles

A typical scene from the San Diego area. I love the topography, but I understand that the coyotes are finding it harder to scrounge for food. We wake up here to a bell-like bird sound just before dawn. And the other day we went to the San Elijo Lagoon where I saw a hummingbird for the first time in my life. I imagine its colours are beautiful (blue, red, yellow), but I could barely tell as it was a whir.
Today we caught the train back to Los Angeles and talked to a Nigerian cardiologist and Korean journalism student. The cardiologist was most impressed by San Diego. He thought it was very clean and didn't 'know how they do it'. And yet, US cities are cutting services. The mayor of San Diego (Sanders) announced his budget measures the other day, and they include reducing library hours to two days a week. Can you imagine if you went to London or Paris and the libraries were only open two days a week?
Funny how easily we talk to people. I helped a woman take her suitcase downstairs and onto the platform at Union Station. In the two minutes it took to help her down, she told me how she'd had a life-threatening illness and her husband had been told to prepare himself. I hugged her on the platform and got back on the train to go to Van Nuys. But it is amazing how often here we have hugged people we have just met.
Now we're back in the San Fernando Valley. We walked to the Sepulveda Basin Dog Off-the-Leash Park in the early evening - hundreds of dogs and their owners enjoying the dedicated area by the side of the concrete river, in the distance the magnificent serrations of the surrounding mountains. Then we went to Lake Balboa where families were fishing. I realise Los Angeles is restoring infrastructure and community and wish them well. I remember being impressed by the bicycle path I saw a couple of weeks ago. And this a city built for cars!

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Lyrical lessons from Der Rosenkavalier

Sometimes I despair of the endless recitativo of modern opera, this fallacious idea that the music should underscore the words. These passages remind me of Kenneth Hince's phrase: 'acres and acres of interminable mudflat', which he applied unfairly to Brahms, but which describes much contemporary opera better. I think this 'unending recitative' (which is not what Wagner asked for; he asked for 'unending melody') comes from a mistaken belief that words are the primary element in drama. They're not. It's the pyschological beat.
I believe that librettists can play their part to remedy this by creating events and situations that cannot fail but inspire melody, and instruct the composer not to follow the words, but to follow the metre, motivation and action.
I was intrigued by Der Rosenkavalier the other night because a lot of the vocal part is recitativo. Certainly Baron Ochs's part is mostly parlando. And yet the impression is not that dreary sub-lyrical sensation of contemporary opera. Why not? Because there is the constant lilt of waltz-time underneath, a frequent rising to peaks of melody. Opera situations have to rise to melody, or why bother?

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Noblesse obliges and spreads

We went downtown (San Diego) to the opera last night. I find myself mostly these days appreciating turns of the plot and trying to remember how turns are affected. (I haven't SEEN Der Rosenkavalier since Opera Australia's production in 1973.) How do they get Ochs to the tavern at the beginning of Act III if we're near the end of Act II and he is left onstage alone remembering his favourite song? Why would he go? How is it explained? Is there a jump? No, Annina, the intriguer, comes back in having been hired by Octavian offstage to arrange an assignation. 'Offstage' is so useful. And these days I also enjoy the way the music weaves in further details - the morning music that had accompanied Octavian and the Marschallin in bed now accompanies Octavian and Sophie's getting together.

On the way back to the venue, however, after a coffee at Starbucks, we noticed that there was a banner on the grand old 1910 Hotel US Grant which said, 'Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation'.  I wondered why this was there. Then, before the performance, the 'please turn off your cell phones' message was sponsored by the Sycuan Casino.  I looked this up on Google and yes, it's a casino owned by the Sycuan (pronounced: suh-KWAHN) Indians, who now also own the downtown hotel named after President Grant, who granted them (no pun intended) land north of here in 1875, and seem to be benefitting ultimately, as many Native American bands now do, from the assertion of Indian sovereignty in Chief Justice Marshall's decision in Worcester vs Georgia. The Sycuan seem to be quite a success story. According to the Sycuan's website, there are only about 120 Sycuan, but who support - it must be - around 400 organisations, including 911 for Kids Foundation, Adopt a Block, American Indian Film Festival, American Parkinson Disease Association, Amputees in Motion, Back Country Square Dance Association, Bonita Vista School District, the Braille Institute, the Burn Institute, the California Association of Hostage Negotiators, North Coast Repertory Theater, Patrick Henry High School, Pauma Indian Reservation, Parkway Bowl's 200 Club... and that's not even really scrolling down! I find it interesting to consider how this sovereignty works within states and how it doesn't conflict, but I dare say it's a bit like having the ACT in the middle of NSW.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Connections familiar or otherwise

I took this photo in Balboa Park in downtown San Diego yesterday.



The trunk to the right, by my reckoning, belongs to a sideroxylon, that species of red-flowering eucalypt that is endemic to Goulburn, NSW. It was flowering red yesterday.
I muse over this. Throughout California, you find native Australian plants. It took decades to get Australians to plant Australian natives. And are Californians planting Californian natives? This planting of exotics seems to express a constant longing for somewhere else.
I'm more heartened when the natural networks are all still in place. One of the other features of San Juan Capistrano that I forgot to mention the other day is that each year, on or around the 19 March, cliff swallows still arrive on their annual migration from Argentina. It is good to see some links not broken.

Monday, April 4, 2011

From sea to shining sea



I was interested to read on the plaque below these bells at San Juan Capistrano that they were rung by the president of the United States, 'Mr Richard M. Nixon' and his wife, "Mrs Richard M. Nixon' in 1969. What struck me was the use of the 'mr' and 'mrs' prefixes. They are certainly less grandiose than what I was expecting, and I wonder if that has something to do with the times in which this plaque was struck. Apart from the glaring contradiction of Vietnam, were those times at least in some sense less imperial?
I enjoy being in this most southwestern corner of America. There is a prevalence of Spanish, as we seem to be wearing through to the deep-set footmarks of Portola, Fr Serra and others. As we booked accommodation in New York next month and were talking about things going on in faraway rocky Maine, I wondered how imperial and united this country really is these days. I remember thinking, when I watched some mayors debating on TV a couple of weeks ago (from memory there were the mayors of Atlanta, Washington, Cleveland, New York...), that each city may find its own solutions to the country's infrastructure shortfalls, and that maybe the country will devolve into city states. I am aware that in places Lakota may be as prevalent as Spanish, or Chinese or Vietnamese (though are there still Acaghchemem speakers - pronounced A-harcha-mum - around here?). There is far more variety and mass packed into this continental space (a factor certainly in squeezing up excellence.)
Outside the walls of the former mission was a plaque explaining that the mission was returned to the Catholic Church from the Forster family by proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln on 18 March 1865. Another thing struck me about this. Lincoln never made it this far west. But in the dying days of the Civil War, back east so, so far from here, such was the extent of his continental reach.

Two footnotes:
1. I found on Wiki-pedia that the Acagchemem language was recorded by Anastacia Majel and John P. Harrington in 1933 and that the tapes resurfaced in 1995. The language is being re-learnt by a number of members of the tribe whose number of enrolments now stands at 2,800.
2. During his presidency, Nixon maintained a 'White House' not far from here, at San Clemente. It's out on a headland which was pointed out to me the other day.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Friday, April 1, 2011

A daily reminder

LA gets such a bad press. A shop assistant in Van Nuys even said, 'You came from Australia to Van Nuys!!?' And yes, parts are obviously barren - concrete and trashy shops.
But there are beautiful pockets. There is still an orange grove on the university campus at Northridge. We went walking up in the Santa Monica mountains at the end of Reseda Boulevard. You can reach the sea from here. It felt familiar to me as desert, hot, dry and scrubby, and yet, look closely at this picture and you'll see snow-capped mountains in the distance. This is a real buzz for me.


I know people love to knock LA, but out in the suburbs in the San Fernando Valley where we stayed, I would sum it up as 'birdsong, grapefruit and sunshine'. Don't forget that that when someone once couldn't understand how the arch-European intellectual Arnold Schoenberg could live in LA after Vienna, he said, 'I get to play tennis every day.'