[sic]

This is kind of convoluted and roundabout, but on my Flickr stream I posted a blurry snap I took last Sunday of a section of the famed L.A. muralist Kent Twitchell’s L.A. Marathon mural, which was originally painted on the 405 Freeway near Century Boulevard but late last year was relocated to the 5 Freeway near Stadium Way.

Later on I was surprised to find a fellow Flickr’er named Vidalia had posted a comment to the posted image calling the mural “ugly and dated.” Now if you know me you know I’m one of those naive types who strive to seek beauty in everthing and thus I see magnificence in things like hissing cockroaches and potato bugs and some republicans and old nails and vast tracts of unspoiled desert. On top of that I have a marked aversion against what I feel is the erroneous go-to use of the word “ugly.”

Not that there isn’t any ugly out there. There’s plenty. The devastation in Beirut, the genocide in Darfur, 9/11, the horror of Iraq, the phonecam video footage of Saddam Hussein’s execution, pretty much any decision Duhbya makes or any pompous tabloid TV program such as “Access Hollywood” and “The Insider.”

So to beat the dead horse, I’m not gonna gag if you don’t like what I like. I’m just gonna do so if your default descriptive is to call something ugly. Ugly is territorial gang tags. Ugly is skinheads. Ugly is rotting meat. Ugly is unchecked greenhouse gas emissions. Ugly is a shotgun blast to the head.

Twitchell’s marathon mural certainly is not my most favorite of his vast number of murals around town… and perhaps even dated. But not ugly. And thus I commented back telling Vidalia I didn’t think so. I also said that I had a long-term appreciation of Twitchell’s works and that I was happy to see this one salvaged in the wake of so many that had been unceremoniously destroyed.

And then she came back with “how she doesn’t want to argue with me” and posts an example of a mural she considers beautiful — and it certainly was — but it was a stylized romanticized illustration that I wrote back saying comparing the two was an apples-and-oranges thing

A n y w a y. . . the point of writing about this exchange was that it got me thinking about Twitchell’s long-lost Freeway Lady who I grew up with, and his most recently lost downtown mural of the artist Ed Ruscha, and the one I discovered gone last fall, his Steve McQueen Monument painted on a structure at Union near 12th.

I first wrote about finding it painted over back in September. Afterward I contacted the L.A. Murals organiztion in an attempt to get some info as to when and why it was destroyed but got no reply.

So today after this exchange with Vidalia I googled Kent Twitchell and found his wiki page, in which I modified the now-outdated information about the location of the L.A. Marathon mural and the still-existing status of the Steve McQueen portrait. Then I found KentTwitchell.com and his email link so I decided to go straight to the source:

Dear Mr. Twitchell,

The first and only time I saw your wonderful Steve McQueen mural was in 1995 while participating in the inaugural L.A. Marathon Bike Tour whose course that year took us down Union Street where it was near 12th Street.

I’d long since mentally misplaced it as to being on Hoover, but finally in the fall of last year I went searching for it and found the location only to be dismayed that it had been painted over. I searched the internet as well as local L.A. mural resources for information as to when it might have been destroyed but could find none (in fact most maintain it still stands). So hopefully I’m not bothering you too much or bearing any previously unknown bad news in asking if you might know when and why it was obliterated and/or if it might have been protected beforehand.

Regards,
Will Campbell

Much to my surprise came his rapid response:

Will,

Thank you for your kind words. Yes, I also was partial
to The Steve McQueen Monument. It was my first LA
mural, in 1971. I went back during 1980 and fixed it
up, retouching it with acrylic artists paints (it had
been originally painted with cheap enamel oil based)
and it would have lasted for many years. The original
people in the house sold it to some people from Korea.
They did not know they were supposed to contact me
before painting it out. Someone would have been able
to explain the situation to them had we known. I think
it was during the mid ’90s. It did not have the
protective coatings over it that I use now. I painted
gloss medium & varnish all my murals until recently.
It does allow removal of overpaint but it would
possibly be easier to repaint than to remove the
overpaint on that one since it was not nearly as
detailed as my subsequent murals.

There was a great character actor with your name
during the 50s. I actually still have a photo of him.
He was in Elvis’ first movie and a LOT of other
movies. One of the best.

Anyway, thanks for your interest. I wish I had better
news.

Kent

Get home from a long day to my baby who welcomed me with open arms and dogs that were happy to see me and there was a package in the mail that Susan couldn’t wait for me to open. Inside was a very pleasant surprise:

A bird of our very own — from the “Bird Man” artist I interviewed last week for Blogging.la. At the end of the phone call, the guy asked me if I’d like one and I said hell yeah and reeled off my address pretty much figuring I’d believe it when I held it in my hands and gazed upon it with my eyes. After all this was a young whippersnapper in the midst of packing for a New York excursion, and one of them artist types to boot. He had a million better more hipper things to do than stand in line at the Venice P.O.

Well shame on me for being doubtful.

I’m tempted to honor the gift by displaying it from somewhere on high in the manner it’s meant to be displayed: dangling from a string outside. But I may just keep it inside where it’s safer and warmer.

Oh yeah: and our Christmas cards arrived, too. From Shutterfly.com, made with a holiday-ized image from one of the places we visited on our roadtrip this summer:

[click image for larger version]

Word got back via Andrew at Liquid Premium, who emailed me with the news that the L.A. Times shined a light on my interview on Blogging.la this past week with the unknown artist responsible for the growing number of wooden birds hanging from wires over intersections throughout the city (and beyond in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and, as of this week, New York). The Times not only posted it on their website, but found room for it on the second page of the Arts & Music section of this Sunday’s Calendar… which I’d missed this morning and had to go digging through the recyclables bin to retrieve it for posterity a a digicam snap:

[click image for large version]

Interestingly enough both online and in print the Times ran the photo I’d taken of one of the birds back in September, but without any type of photo credit. Is that greedy of me to want that credit? I don’t think so. Greedy would be me wanting some level of compensation for my work being used for free by the Times to fill its news hole.

Instead I’ll take whatever measure of exposure the mention provides as payment enough.

I’ve had it up to my aperture with the Photo Synthesis feature by Colin Westerbeck that appears each week in the West magazine that’s inserted into my Sunday L.A. Times. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a full-page column anchored by a piece of shutterbuggery that’s representative of some current gallery exhibit in town.

My main beef? There’s two actually. First the photography is almost always decidedly unengaging — as if the selections are actually selected based on an ability to disinterest the reader. Second, said “art” is almost always decidedly dolled up with a hearty dollop of intellectual esoteric artus-fartus coolwhip dressing, which only serves to further disconnect me.

If there’s anything intriguing about this staple it’s the ironic translation loss from print to internet: the online version of a magazine feature on photo exhibitry doesn’t include the photo it features. You can find an incomplete stable of Westerbeck’s previous Photo Synthesis pieces online on the L.A. Times website… but they’re missing the photos he prattles on about. Such as this one from September. I remember that picture because of its lack of reference. In one side of the image some branches of an evergreen crawl into the frame; in the middle is this blank space of blue sky and across it was a hint of a mountainous ridgeline. Westerbeck somehow lauds it as an iconic image of the “big sky” west, but it could’ve been taken somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains and frankly comes across as little more than a disposable snapshot, something that could have been a result of the camera slipping from the photographer’s grasp at the moment he tried to make a different image altogether.

This week Westerbeck is up to his usual stuff, making something out of a nothing image (at right) by John Baldessari rather inefficiently and obviously titled “Face (with Red Nose): Plus Four Alternate Noses” that’s in the “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” exhibition designed by Baldessari and currently on display at the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Late preface time: Until this Magritte show got some press last week with a feature in the Times on Baldessari and how he’d envisioned the thing, I’d never heard of the dude and perhaps that speaks volumes to my ignorance of the art world, which I’m only too proud to admit. Indeed, I do not know much in the realm of art be it classic or contemporary, conceptual or expressionistic or abstract or any of the other of its myriad schools, disciplines or whatever the hell you want to call them. I just know what I like and what I don’t. And I rarely like anything Westerbeck gives me, and certainly I have a healthy disdain for the puffery he blows about it.

From Westerbeck this week:

Baldessari in the 1980s painted circles over faces in the news photographs or old movie stills in his work. The noses here are a variation on that idea, with different colors so the viewer can imagine the subject in different moods (red for dangerous, blue for hopeful, etc.).

He’s kidding, right? And I love the “etc.” As if it’s a given that his readers know what the remaining three colored noses represent. I guess green is for envious and yellow is for cowardice and orange is for… uh, scurvy? Got it. How’s this for a pallette: color it all bullshit. But it gets better. Westerbeck admits the thing’s a piece of crap, but that just makes it all the more relevant:

It’s all pretty crude, and intentionally so. The photo reproduction is grainy, the painting amateurish; even the moods are color-coded clichés.

Crude + Grainy + Amateurish + Cliché = BRILLIANT!

And just in case after all that I still had left even the slightest sliver of interest in going to see the LACMA exhibit, Westerbeck has to go and give me Baldessari’s own words about what art should be:

He likes pictures that are “dumb,” [Baldessari] says. Art should be “mute and stupid and not about parading… virtuosity.”

You go Baldy… and take Westerbeck’s praise of your dumb art with you.

A good day today. Last week I did my occasional check of the Getty website to find some not-easy-to-get tickets were available for today. So I got em and mom and I enjoyed a Columbus Day outing to the freshly redone oceanside landmark, which afterward included a stop at the nearby stretch beach she used to take me to when I was a kid followed by lunch at another of our old haunts: El Coyote.

Pix from the museum are here.

My friend and biking bud Steve today sent me a pic he snapped of me hoisting a thirsty-two ouncer of Kirin at Joy Mart in Little Tokyo after our regular Thursday night bike ride:

And dang was it good to the last drop.

By way of catching up, here are links to photo sets and videoclips of some of my exploits this weekend:

• Thursday: IAAL•MAF Bike Ride
• Friday: RIDE-Arc Bike Ride | Video Clip
• Saturday: U.S. Bank Tower Stair Climb To The Top | Video Clip
• Sunday: New Street Art-In-Progress By Cache
  

I also had time to watch the excellent Thank You For Smoking with my baby and introduce her to Scoops, my favorite ice cream place. And we had a really romantic outing this afternoon to the supermarket where we rented a carpet cleaning machine and came home and de-dogged the livingroom area rug.

Yesterday was the weekly Thursday evening bike ride of the mighty mighty IAAL•MAF and as I’ve done as an enthusiastic and dedicated member in the past I put a fair amount of effort into routing the journey to areas otherwise previously untouched by mine or my biking buds’ tires. Here’s an example.

This time I started with a kernel of an idea to trace part of the last few marathon bike tours, mainly across Exposition Park to Arlington down across Martin Luther King Boulevard intoto Leimert Park and then back up through the Crenshaw District. I swear to you that when it dawned on me we’d be near to the location of where Elizabeth Short’s remains were discovered north of 39th on Norton Avenue on January 15, 1947, it was strictly because I’d been there once previously when Susan accompanied me on a crime bus tour back in January organized by the folks at 1947 Project. It was only after I’d charted us past the scene of that horrible crime that I realized — duh! — Brian De Palma’s “Black Dahlia” film is opening this weekend.

Honestly, I almost killed the idea right there because I didn’t want it to seem as if I was caught up in the overhype for a movie about a 59-year-old murder that I hadn’t heard much good about and certainly wasn’t eager to see (at least not in the theater; Netflix maybe). But then I what-the-helled and just stayed the course, which included a pass-by of the house made famous by the HBO series “Six Feet Under” and lastly a mural of Steve McQueen that I’d seen once before several years ago and couldn’t remember where it was since — until I Googled “Steve McQueen mural” and there was info on it like magic. It was on Union Avenue at 12th, and looks a little something like this:

Painted in 1971 by noted muralist Kent Twitchell and later restored in 1982 it was his first public art creation in Los Angeles. Though I’d seen pictures of it and known about it for as long as I can remember, I only physically saw it once, during one of the early L.A. Marathon bike tours… maybe 1998. After that I somehow got the idea it was on nearby Hoover or Virgil avenues and as I’ve journeyed down those streets relatively regularly and never seen it since I figured it got destroyed.

Learning I was mistaken and that it was on Union gave me hope it had survived. Sadly though, it hadn’t. Riding by last night after the stops on Norton  and the “Six Feet Under” property, the house is still there, but the compelling image of Steve McQueen isn’t. I don’t know when it was painted over, but it was and Steve’s gone. Dammit. Another piece of L.A. vanished.
Anyway, if you’re interested, you can check out who and where we rolled. Here’s the 16-mile route itself, and a buncha pix taken along the way are in a photoset here.

It’s rare that I don’t post at least once a day, and even rarer that I don’t feel the pang to do so, but yesterday, by the time Susan and I got home from spending eight hours in the Angeles National Forest above Altadena (not to mention scarfing some serious El Pollo Chicken as a reward), I was too tee to the eye to the r-e-d to do anything but watch The Sopranos and hit the hay.

Susan, on the otherhand, had a little reserve of energy and managed a picture post about the hike before heading to bed.

But this morning, I’m refreshed and ready — and not nearly as sore as I expected I’d be from traipsing around for a third of a day across almost 12 miles over hill and trail up and down some 2,600 feet in elevation. Thusly energized, over on Flickr you can find newly minted photo sets of yesterday’s post-Earth Day nature walk up the Mt. Lowe Railway Trail to Inspiration Point and back, as well as a smaller set from Saturday’s Downtown Art Ride.

In reciprocation to my biking/blogging pals Eric Richardson and Dave Bullock for their noble participation in the L.A. Treasure Hunt April 2, when they asked if I could help out with today’s Downtown Art Ride I opted to shoot them a yes first and then ask questions later.

The one thing I have going for me is a passing familiarity with the downtown area. The marks against me are more: I have no knowledge of the civic center’s art scene; have never been to any of the 19 galleries on the ride’s route; and don’t do well pretending to know things that I don’t know anything about — especially art and artists.

Dave’s told me that’s no sweat. I don’t need to know diddly about the places or people. Essentially I’ve just gotta get people from the start to the finish and do my best along the way to limit the amount of time spent at each gallery to 10 minutes or so. Wish me luck with that.

The other wrinkle is that I gotta be back home to get cleaned up and out to Granada Hills High School for my daughter who’s singing in a talent show at 7 p.m.

Off I go!

This morning Susan and I are headed to the Ashes and Snow exhibit next to the Santa Monica Pier for Phase III of her birthday gifts. But before leaving and seeing as it’s Sunday and all I stepped on the scale and found another two pounds has evaporated, bringing me to 226 with 34 pounds total lost to date. Which rhymes with great!