Tag: Home Ground
Home Ground: What God hath intended: jellies, jams
Pectin makes it all possible. Pectin is one of God’s best ideas, purveyed in fruity packages. No question: God intended us to have jellies and jams and marmalade. This is why I take my marmalade straight, by the spoonful. To that end, my friend and I, in Los Angeles, set out to make marmalade, inspired […]
Slow-plucked chicken and M.F.K. Fisher’s anti-war essay
There was a train, not a particularly good one, that stopped at Vevey about 10 in the morning on the way to Italy. Chexbres and I used to take it to Milano.” Thus begins the essay “The Flaw” by M.F.K. Fisher, one of the most subtle anti-war and anti-Fascist pieces of writing in English. “The […]
What’s changed in Southern California since the last century? Everything.
Look deeply into this landscape image. You might well think it is a dreamscape of Eden, or, perhaps, a fantasia of Devon. The original was painted by an English watercolor landscape painter and illustrator, Sutton Palmer (1854-1933). The painting is Palmer’s painting of the verdant, gentle landscape of Glendale, California, around 1913. It is one […]
Home Ground: ‘Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps’ and the making of L.A.’s contemporary art scene
Three point six miles separate Larchmont Boulevard and 736 La Cienega Blvd. My computer computes that this trip along Melrose Ave. would take, I suppose in some alternate universe, 15 minutes. In 1957, when the artist Ed Kienholz found “a big barnlike artist’s studio with high ceilings and whitewashed walls, in the back half of […]
The missing house of America’s ‘most dangerous architect’
He was a proven and inveterate liar before he was elected to high office; Roy Cohn was his trusted advisor; and his fellow Republicans were loath to denounce him before he wreaked havoc on the country. Joseph McCarthy’s early 1950s reign of terror in the U.S. Senate zoomed straight to Los Angeles and swallowed Hollywood […]
God’s work: Frank Lloyd Wright, quintessential American modernist
The first time I became aware of the stunning power of architecture, I was 17 and walked into the terra-cotta cocoon of Grady Gammage Auditorium in Tempe, AZ. The building sparked a life-long interest in architecture, “the great mother art,” as Frank Lloyd Wright called it. Wright used 57 shades of terra-cotta in the auditorium. He […]
