Friday, September 17, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Utopia by the Sea
In the early mornings, when the ocean is enveloped in fog and the scent of wild iris hangs in the air, the possibility for solitude can be found on a wind-tossed path. Deer eyes stare from slender meadow grasses, and a curve in the trail along the headlands can unexpectedly yield a squadron of pelicans zooming skyward on ocean thermals.
At Sea Ranch — even the name has an aura — it is possible at once to lose and to find yourself on a path, following it past tumbledown picket fences to a driftwood throne on a secluded beach. When the architects Charles W. Moore, Joseph Esherick, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, and Richard Whitaker and the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conceived this place along a mystical 10-mile stretch of California coast in the early 1960s, they courted the wind. They measured it, observed the way its salty gusts sculptured the cypress trees.
Eventually, they would tame the wind in architecture, its force poetically echoed in the angled plank roofs and slanted towers of the original building, Condominium One, an austere Shaker-like ode to nature’s power and the first of many groundbreaking structures at Sea Ranch.
The wind still holds sway at this once-idealistic second-home community, where man and nature are engaged in an intricate dance. Sea Ranch has achieved a sort of a cult status among architecture mavens, who house-gawk rather than bird-watch, bearing a glossy tome by Mr. Lyndon, a spiritual dean of Sea Ranch, as a guide. They come to see a style forged by A-list architects (shed roofs to deflect the wind, windows punched through redwood boards) but perhaps more than that, to pay tribute to a big idea: the then-radical notion, influenced by Mr. Halprin’s experience on a kibbutz, of open land held in common and houses designed in deference to nature.
Since moving to the Bay Area nine years ago, my family and I have rented numerous houses at Sea Ranch, a place that for me has become the psychic equivalent of a tubercular Victorian’s healing in a sanitarium. Over the years, I have gotten to know Mr. Halprin’s landscape intimately, savoring the way the trails lead to salty cliffs alive with nesting cormorants and into dark, enchanted forests straight out of the Brothers Grimm.
Like many, I fantasized about what it might be like to experience some of Sea Ranch’s most iconic houses, the ones designed by the guys who dreamed up the place before the sad arrival of what might be called Sea Ranch sprawl. This past summer, I finally got my wish, indulging in architectural promiscuity by renting Mr. Moore’s fabled Unit 9 in Condominium One, a complex now on the National Register of Historic Places; an Obie Bowman-designed Walk-in Cabin; a Binker Barn designed by Mr. Turnbull; and, as the drum-rolling crescendo, or so I thought, one of the original Esherick houses tucked into a now-fetishized cypress hedgerow.The timing was fortuitous: the Sea Ranch Lodge, the community’s dated, killer-view hotel, is about to be Post Ranch-ified, as Passport Resorts, whose principals created the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur and other high-end lodges, proceeds with an expansion. The company envisions a luxurious watering hole with 15 or so house-size cottages serviced by motorized carts spilling down 52 acres of now-pristine meadow.
They will by necessity be marketing seclusion. Just getting to Sea Ranch, about two and a half hours from San Francisco, requires negotiating a stomach-churning, acrophobia-inducing sliver of Highway 1. The payoff is a relatively undiscovered, unspoiled swath of California coast — bordering Sonoma and Mendocino Counties and nicknamed Mendonoma — that mercifully has yet to be mythologized à la Mendocino village or Big Sur.
Charles Mooore called Sea Ranch his “Mother Earth.” All I could think of when I stepped into Unit 9 was that the little rat had kept the best place for himself.
I had this revelation while sipping coffee from a vintage Vignelli-designed mug in Mr. Moore’s kitchen — a riot of painted checkerboards overseen by a textile of frisky Indian goddesses. A misty cauldron of waves was churning madly against the cliffs that Condominium One, widely considered to be one of the most influential buildings of the 1960s, seems precariously perched upon. My teenage son, Gabe, and his two pals were still asleep, white iPod wires in their ears, visions of a winged cow, a wooden dinosaur, a shadow puppet, toy blocks spelling out M-O-O-R-E and a fragment of a Corinthian column dancing on wooden beams over their heads.
A restless global wanderer and voluminous author who collected university appointments the way he did Oaxacan clay pigs (Yale, U.C.L.A., Berkeley, etc.), Mr. Moore, who died in 1993, possessed an infinite capacity for joy that was expressed in his architecture. “I think that fairy tales have a great deal to teach us architects,” he once wrote. The way that most magical adventures, he observed, “end in time for tea seems to me worth careful looking into.”His twinkly view of the universe lives on in Unit 9, which has been delightfully frozen in amber by his family, who still own it, down to the papier-mâché ponies and abalone shells inserted into the 14th-century tile ceiling fragment on the wall. It thus has become a shrine for architects, whose rhapsodies fill the guest register.
Hovering gluttonously over the ocean, the condo was Mr. Moore’s salon-by-the-sea, filled with students and a blizzard of manuscripts. Today, it is a powerful argument for the afterlife, an indoor fairy tale with a four-poster bedroom loft held up by logs, creating a cozy shelter underneath. For Gabe and his friends, Pete and Gabe D., a cadre of teenage Coppolas equipped with a digital movie camera who had resoundingly rejected Mr. Moore’s leftover jigsaw puzzles of Queen Elizabeth in Parliament and the Tokyo subway system, it was the perfect place to plot a literal cliffhanger.
My most vivid memory of Mr. Moore, whom I interviewed six years before his death, involved the spectacle of the architect as human periscope, swimming in the pool around midnight at his compound in Austin, Tex., and clutching a flashlight aimed at the water so that he’d be able to spot wayward tarantulas.Puttering around the kitchen the morning of my visit, admiring Mr. Moore’s global tchotchkes, I realized things were getting weird. “Where does Charles keep the vacuum cleaner?” I muttered to myself. “I wonder if Charles has a steamer.”
I knew Mr. Moore had worked his magic when I found Gabe sprawled on the turquoise cushions of the saddlebag — a trademark Moore feature in which windows project out of the main space — gazing at the horizon. “Hey, Mom,” he wondered. “If you went straight across the ocean, where would you be?”Daydreaming is the emotional agenda at Sea Ranch. It’s a place to watch a hummingbird with your coffee or to observe a deer grazing improbably on a sloping grass-covered green roof.
It is a place to drink too much wine while being transfixed by harbor seals with your college roommate and then being unable to find your way home in the foggy dark. The possibility for both discovery and community undergirds Sea Ranch, an early example of ecological planning that, for better and worse, spawned suburban wannabes across the country. The founding ideal, shaped by Mr. Halprin and his all-star cast, was that 10 stupendous miles of California coast were something to be shared rather than subdivided.
The early architecture was communal and modest, with houses clustered perpendicular to the ocean so that everyone would have a view, leaving the meadows open and held in common. Houses were sited to settle into the landscape, like quail nesting. “This wasn’t a place to show off your architecture,” said Mr. Whitaker, now a 79-year-old renegade. “Buildings were meant to be like geodes, ordinary rocks on the outside with the inside going gangbusters.”
Too much of that philosophy has bitten the proverbial dust, a long, bloody tale of politics, real estate, public access to the coast and the sad disconnect between taste and money. Today there are essentially two Sea Ranches: The southern portion, planned by Mr. Halprin et al.; and the later more suburbanized north, with cul-de-sacs and palazzos along the bluffs.
But plenty of the genuine item survives, including the Moonraker Athletic Center, one of three recreation centers with pool, tennis court and family sauna (this is California after all). Along with miles of hiking, biking and horse trails and a Scottish-style golf course, the centers are major perks for renters, who must dangle passes from their rearview mirrors. Moonraker is a stark, weathered cathedral of chlorine, all but buried in an earthen berm.At the Obie Bowman Walk-in Cabin I rented, the first challenge was finding the door. Spatial organization has never been my forte. Anxiety mounting, I finally spied a padlock attached to a sliding barn wall. Eventually, I realized it was the door. Architects! I cursed.
The conceit of the Walk-in Cabins, a remote gathering of 15 troll-like dwellings in a kingdom of redwoods in the hills above Highway 1, is that no cars are allowed. They are left about a quarter-mile down a dirt road, which sounds romantic until you realize that your garbage has to walk out the same way.Make no mistake. Sea Ranch is not pussyfooter terrain. I was reminded of this fact when, traveling solo this time and relieved at having found the front door, I perused the welcoming material: a form to fill out should I spot a mountain lion, with blank spaces for size, color, tail and attitude.
Mr. Bowman, who still works in Healdsburg, was a shopping center designer in Los Angeles when he took a trip up the coast and discovered Sea Ranch. After the Walk-ins were completed in 1972, he remarked that the spartan cabins, recipients of umpteen design awards, were about the size of the restrooms in his shopping centers.
In contrast to the Moore condo, with its drama-queen ocean views, the Walk-ins are about quietude, the light feathering through the redwoods. With its compact loft bed, wood stove and twee kitchen, it all felt a bit like inhabiting a lifestyle magazine edited by the redwood-dwelling activist Julia Butterfly Hill.One of the pleasures of a rental, of course, is imagining the real owners (the tip-off here may have been the stuffed gnome in a basket). Exhausted, I hiked down to the ocean, where the harbor seals were sunning on the rocks like old couples by the pool in Miami Beach. They seemed to have the right idea. So I hiked back up to the cabin and promptly collapsed on the deck into savasana, the yoga corpse pose. I let the breeze, sun and scent of pines lull me before soaking in the hot tub (life is tough at Sea Ranch).
The only sign of fellow humans in the dense thicket were scattered lights at dusk — the home fires burning in our little warren of Prius-driving hobbits.Every visit to Sea Ranch has a mood. I have watched migrating gray whales breach the surface from Walk-On Beach, experienced a near-tsunami with pelting rain followed by brilliant sun at Christmas. During abalone season, when divers routinely lose their lives (three so far at Sea Ranch this year), bulbous wet-suited figures with inner tubes around their waists scramble down rocks to plunge into the churning kelp-ridden abyss.
Like the weather, houses set a tone. And it was an exhilarating one in Barn Dance, one of 17 Binker Barns designed by William Turnbull, who died in 1997 and designed the houses to be replicated around Sea Ranch. As soon as my husband, Roger, and I opened the wooden door — artfully carved in quilt-like patterns — we knew we’d hit pay dirt.
The house is poetry in wood, a beautifully fashioned breakfront in architecture. Built like a barn, with plank walls and crisscrossing beams with exposed bolts, it felt like a totally chic abstraction of Nebraska, with an airy central space soaring to the roof and a staircase winding up to an interior bridge leading to the bedrooms. The dining area and kitchen had me convinced I could cook like Thomas Keller. They were enfolded in lustrous Douglas fir, with light streaming ethereally through clerestory windows.Roger promptly deposited himself on a lounge chair beside the fireplace, becoming positively ecstatic when he discovered the owner’s voluminous CD collection, including the obscure “Veedon Fleece”*/ by Van Morrison, with whom he is obsessed. Shortly thereafter he proclaimed, “I want to live in a Turnbull house!”.
Warmed by radiant-heat floors, I cracked open the guest register, in which the owners had charmingly chronicled their own escapades, including a week of nonstop rain in which they hunted for mushrooms and watched bygone episodes of “The West Wing.”
Gualala, a village nearby, offers escape valves for the stir-crazy: a couple of excellent restaurants; a fine-foods store, a bookstore, a first-rate crafts gallery and even an au courant design store, Placewares (Mendocino and the Anderson Valley wineries are a curvy hour-and-a-half drive away).
The most popular hangout at Sea Ranch is the Twofish Baking Company, which has morphed into an ad hoc community center for the growing number of full-timers, many of them aerobic grandparents.
But there remains a psychic divide between people who are drawn to Sea Ranch for its history and those who regard it as a generic seaside resort. The impending transformation of the lodge is causing some fear and loathing. “A highly processed destination resort, with all sorts of pleasure amenities, will bring people with different expectations and a less deep commitment to the place,” said Kenneth Wachter, a demography professor at Berkeley who was walking his poodle not far from the house he and his wife bought on their honeymoon 26 years ago.
Arguably, Sea Ranch’s most hallowed ground are the Hedgerow Houses, a group of genteel rustic shacks that Joseph Esherick tucked inconspicuously into a row of wind-blown cypress trees not far from Black Point Beach. Along with Condominium One, they define the Sea Ranch style. Mr. Esherick, a master craftsman of space who died in 1998, used to say that “the ideal kind of building is one you don’t see.”
For renters, the prime Hedgerow House is the one that Mr. Esherick designed for himself, a sophisticated cottage with ship-like woodwork that seems to all but disappear into the meadow grasses.
A mere 875 square feet, the house is made from inexpensive materials though its spatial arrangements are quite complex. Ironically perhaps, the current owner, Jim Friedman, builds $10 million to $20 million 20,000-square-foot houses for a living. “The Esherick house has taught me that really great architecture doesn’t require gilding a lily,” he said.
Sadly, the house was already spoken for, so the rental agency, Sea Ranch Escape, suggested an alternative Hedgerow House also designed by Mr. Esherick.
So it was a crushing blow to open the door and find pickled woodwork, wall-to-wall carpeting and Venetian blinds — a Motel Esherick. Trying to cheer me up, Roger gamely kept chanting “location, location, location.”
Nevertheless, I began to suspect that our abode wasn’t even an Esherick because the conventional arrangement of spaces was so un-Esherick-like. Several days later, a Deep Throat with access to the historic files confirmed that the house was designed in the manner of Esherick by Van Norten Logan, a little-known architect turned land investor.
It was then that I felt the palpable presence of the ghost of Joe Esherick returning to my beloved Sea Ranch.
“Never trust a real estate agent,” he whispered.
IF YOU GO
In the Zen sense, it’s hard to go wrong with any house at Sea Ranch (just don’t forget to bring your own sheets and towels). The nicest agency to deal with is Ocean View Properties (707-884-3538; http://www.oceanviewprop.com/; $200 to $250 a night for William Turnbull’s Barn Dance). Rams Head Realty rents a number of homes at Sea Ranch, including the Redwood Cottage Walk-in Cabin (800-785-3455; http://www.ramshead.com/; $342 for two nights). Sea Ranch Escape (707-785-2426; http://www.searanchescape.com/) has the largest collection of prime rentals by classic architects, including Unit 9 ($468 to $525 for two nights ) and the real Esherick house ($761 for two nights).
Sea Ranch 101: “The Sea Ranch” by Donlyn Lyndon and Jim Alinder (Princeton Architectural, 2004); “The Sea Ranch ... Diary of an Idea” by Lawrence Halprin (Spacemaker, 2002); “The Place of Houses” by Charles Moore, Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon (University of California, 1974); “William Turnbull: Buildings in the Landscape” (William Stout, 2000); “Appropriate: The Houses of Joseph Esherick” by Marc Treib (William Stout, 2008). The Sea Ranch Association Web site (http://www.tsra.org/) is also an excellent resource.
PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
NYTIMES
2008
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Buckminister Fuller Institute
The Buckminster Fuller Institute is dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of solutions which radically advance human well being and the health of our planet's ecosystems. We aim to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.
Our programs combine unique insight into global trends and local needs with a comprehensive approach to design. We encourage participants to conceive and apply transformative strategies based on a crucial synthesis of whole systems thinking, Nature's fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview.
By facilitating convergence across the disciplines of art, science, design and technology, our work extends the profoundly relevant legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. In this way, we strive to catalyze the collective intelligence required to fully address the unprecedented challenges before us.
Friday, July 9, 2010
El Padrino and Manila
El Padrino and his lovely wife will be moving to Manila in the Philippines!
Any tips, facts, and stories welcome.
We arrive in January 2011.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Allandale House: A Cabin of Curiosities
The house links three horizontal extrusions of “leaning,” or asymmetrical A-frames. The skinny A-frame on the western side contains the library, wine cellar and garage. The wide A-frame in the center of the house is dedicated to two floors of bedrooms and bathrooms. The medium A-frame on the eastern side consists of living, kitchen and dining areas. The house aims to undermine the seeming limitations of a triangular section by augmenting and revealing the extreme proportion in the vertical direction, and utilizing the acutely angled corners meeting the floor as moments for thickened walls, telescopic apertures and built-in storage.
The relationship between the need for exposed storage and the interior liner of the house is a reciprocal one. Ostensibly problematic head-height limitations posed by the angled.
William O’Brien Jr. is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and is principal of an independent design practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92
Lena Horne, who broke new ground for black performers when she signed a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. She lived in Manhattan. In a message of condolence, President Obama said Ms. Horne had "worked tirelessly to further the cause of justice and equality."
Ms. Horne first achieved fame in the 1940s, became a nightclub and recording star in the 1950s and made a triumphant return to the spotlight with a one-woman Broadway show in 1981. She might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early: she languished at MGM for years because of her race, although she was so light-skinned that when she was a child other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” film musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that, she later recalled, could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.
“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.
But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, whose singing voice was dubbed. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage, in 1947, took place in France and was kept secret for three years.
Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing, and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”
Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”
She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)
In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank S. Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”
“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”
Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”
Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.
This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work.
Although absent from the screen, Ms. Horne found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.
In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests. In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”
She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.
She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.
Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.
“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”
Strayhorn was also “the only man I ever loved,” she said, but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.” Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.
By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.
When she was 16, her mother pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934. At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.
In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale. She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”
Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”
Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc. (The war had scaled down Mr. Young’s ambitions to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor.) He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM. She was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio — MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 — but she was the first to make an impact.
Though she was not the first black performer under contract to a major studio - MGM had signed the actress Nina Mae McKinney for five years in 1929 - Ms. Horne was the first to make an impact.
The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated her contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.”
Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter; Gail Lumet Buckley; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Her son died of kidney failure in 1970; her husband died the following year.
Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”
New York Times
By ALJEAN HARMETZ
Published: May 9, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
One for the Road? Bar Cars May Face a Last Call
The cocktails started early, before the train left Manhattan, and by 6 p.m. most of the passengers were already on the second round. Tiny vodka bottles and punched ticket stubs littered the floor. A game of dice by the bar was getting rowdy as a couple canoodled in the corner, beers in hand.
The bar car is a mainstay of the commuting life, a lurching lounge on wheels inseparable from the suburbia of Cheever and “Mad Men.” “The commute is so bad as it is,” explained Paul Hornung, a financial worker, as he sipped a Stella Artois. “This is the one thing you can look forward to.”
But perhaps not for long.
Having survived numerous attempts at prohibition and outlasted its brethren in the suburbs of Chicago and New Jersey, the bar car out of Grand Central Terminal is now facing its gravest threat: the great recession.
A new fleet of cars will soon replace the 1970s-era models now used by commuters on the Metro-North Railroad line heading to Connecticut. But with money tight, railroad officials said they could not yet commit themselves to a fresh set of bar cars, citing higher costs for the cars’ custom design.
“They’re being contemplated,” said Joseph F. Marie, Connecticut’s commissioner of transportation. “But we have not made any final decisions.”
Defenders of the boozy commute say it helps raise revenue: After expenses, bar cars and platform vendors made $1.5 million last year, up from $1.3 million in 2008. (Officials would not say if a bar car makes more money than a car with the normal number of seats.) So far, 300 new train cars have been purchased, featuring airline-style headrests and graceful luggage racks. But officials say the bar cars remain a low priority, and may not be ordered.
“A decision was made early on that more seats on the trains was our top priority and that bar cars — as popular as they are — could wait,” said Judd Everhart, a spokesman for Connecticut’s department of transportation, which operates New Haven Line trains in conjunction with Metro-North. “It was about that simple.” The existing bar cars, much beloved for their homey wood paneling, cannot be operated with the new fleet, which is expected to be phased in starting at the end of this year.
That prospect did not go down well with the regulars on a recent weekday ride to Bridgeport.
“It raises my anxiety level,” said Tom Skinner, a marketing executive from Westport and proprietor of BarCar.com, a Web site devoted to the steel-wheeled saloon. “There’s always people trying to scuttle the bar cars. It’s just a fact of life.” Smoking was banned on the cars in the 1980s, much to riders’ chagrin, but the diehards fought back against any attempt to end liquor service. The most recent threat, in 2007, would have banned alcohol from being sold on the trains and on platforms at Grand Central and Pennsylvania Station, but an outcry prompted officials to reject the proposal.
Full-fledged bar cars — complete with lounge-style leather seating, cupholders and stools — have been phased out on the Long Island Rail Road (although bartending carts are occasionally wheeled onto trains during the evening rush), and Metro-North trains to much of Westchester County and other points upstate no longer offer the amenity. (Even Ossining, home to Don Draper, is out of luck.)
Which makes Connecticut riders (and a few who get off before the border) all the more territorial about their rare perk.
“This is a civility of days gone past,” said Michael Mahan, a commuter since 1984, as Stamford sped by and he took another sip of white wine. “I would miss them very much.”
Among the anxious is Cesar Vergara, a Ridgefield, Conn., resident and a veteran train designer who created the interior of Metro-North’s new commuter cars, known as M-8s. As part of his contract, Mr. Vergara designed several concepts for a modern-day bar car, including more space for group seating and a smaller, more streamlined bar to replace the current cramped setup. But he acknowledged that his vision may never become a reality.
“The M-8 bar car, right now, is in a very political realm,” Mr. Vergara said.
Indeed, Connecticut rail officials would not provide images of the prototype designs, which have been reviewed by focus groups, although Mr. Marie, the commissioner, mused a bit on what might work. “It would be nice to create a row-bench type of environment,” he said. “Kind of like in a pub.”
Modeled after the private club cars of the early 20th century, the Grand Central bar car sought to bring a perk of high society to the everyday commuting class. Still, the car’s current incarnation is more bar-around-the-corner than Tavern on the Green.
The cars tend to break down, air-conditioning is creaky, and commuters have been known to sneak duct tape aboard for impromptu repairs.
“I wouldn’t care if they went,” Pat Charla, an environmental consultant on the Bridgeport-bound train, said of the bar cars. “It’s one of those holdovers from the past.”
But some would not have it any other way. Jeffrey Maron, a rider from Stamford, said that the new designs floated by officials reminded him of a “snack shop” and that his only request for a new design would be “more cupholders.”
No satellite TVs?
“Nah,” Mr. Maron said. “Half the crowd are Yankees fans and half the crowd are Red Sox fans. You’d have a war in there figuring out what to watch.”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Inspiration Information - Mulatu
Broadcast this year on national TV channel, France 2, the awards were first created with the support of the late Martinique poet and political commentator Aimé Césaire, in 2006. One of the founders of the concept of ‘Negritude’ during the ‘30s, reacting against the ‘cultural alienation’ which took place during French colonisation of the Caribbean, Césaire was an ardent supporter and promoter of Afro-Caribbean culture during his lifetime.
The award for Astatke and The Heliocentrics caps a great year for the band following strong critical reaction to their album and a hectic touring schedule: “everyone from the band has worked very hard and I thank The Heliocentrics, !K7 / Strut, Karen P and Red Bull Music Academy very much,” explains Mulatu. “This award was entirely unexpected and is great for Ethiopia and for Ethio jazz.”Other winners at this year’s awards included Ivory Coast’s Magic System (Best Group), Guadeloupe singer Erik (Best Newcomer) and Reunion vocalist Davy Sicard (Best Artist).
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
For High Line Visitors, Park Is a Railway Out of Manhattan
It has its own mobile skyline in the steady stream of heads (or, in the rain, umbrellas) bobbing above the trestle. It has its own economy, including the $15 High Line Picnic Baskets for sale at Friedman’s Lunch at the Chelsea Market (sandwich, cole slaw, pickle, chips, cookie, beverage). It has its own art scene, drawing students from Parsons sketching panoramas, and photographers armed with devices from cellphones to Leicas. It has its own neighborhoods and hot spots, shifting in feel throughout the day.
It even inspires crusty New Yorkers to behave as if they were strolling down Main Street in a small town rather than striding the walkway of a hyper-urban park — routinely smiling and nodding, even striking up conversations with strangers.
“Here people tend to be more friendly,” Kathy Roberson, who is retired but does volunteer work with the poor, said on Saturday. “Those same people, you might see them someplace else and, you know,” she broke off, raising her eyebrows, “they’re kind of stressed.”
A little more than a month since its first stretch opened, the High Line is a hit, and not just with tourists but with New Yorkers who are openly relishing a place where they can reflect and relax enough to get a new perspective on Manhattan.
Despite the complaints about noise, gentrification and tour buses spewing forth their cargo, many locals have fallen so hard and fast for the park that they are acting as impromptu tour guides, eager to show off their new love interest.
“It just gives you a whole new appreciation of Chelsea,” Amy Goodman, co-host of the radio and television news program “Democracy Now!,” was saying with an enthusiastic sweep of her arm to her companions early on a Friday. “It’s such an incredible celebration of urban architecture.”Later, the evening found one of her group, Brenda Murad, leading a tour of her own for a friend from Mexico City.
Since its southernmost section — from 20th Street near 10th Avenue to the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Streets — opened to the public on June 9, the park has attracted more than 300,000 visitors, said Patrick Cullina, vice president of horticulture and park operations for the High Line. Plans call for the park to reach as far north as 34th Street.
Weekdays it draws from 3,000 to 15,000 through its entrances at 20th, 18th, 16th, 14th and Gansevoort Streets. Weekends are busier, with roughly 18,000 to 20,000 visitors a day; but the park’s legal capacity is 1,700, so officials have often resorted to “special entry” for an hour or two, limiting entry to Gansevoort Street and, for those needing an elevator, 16th Street.
On Saturday around noon, the park was lively, but there was still plenty of room. Ms. Roberson had brought her mother, Josephine, and her neighbor Louis Smart, a retired opera singer and teacher, from their apartments on West 43rd Street, wanting to show them something a little different.
They were sitting on the topmost row at the Sunken Overlook, the centerpiece of 10th Avenue Square, which hovers over 16th and 17th Streets. In daylight the space functions like a central plaza, with trees scattered around benches, open areas and rows of amphitheater-style seating that offer a windowed view of cars and trucks rushing below on 10th Avenue.
Mealtimes tend to be most crowded, when people picnic, chat or just stare blankly at the traffic underfoot, often with children running serpentines through the seats. At night, the overlook turns into a Warholian conceptual installation, with its art-house vibe and screenlike windows.
But on Saturday, it was a stop on Amy Chin’s “urban birthday safari,” a daylong tour of attractions far above the ground, she said, inspired by the High Line. Ms. Chin, a consultant to nonprofit arts groups, was celebrating her 47th birthday with friends and family over lunch and a cake frosted in thick chocolate butter cream and poppy-red and saffron-orange flowers (“Van Gogh colors,” as her sister, Lily, put it).
Back at the top of the overlook, Mr. Smart was transfixed by the cake. “Now, I’ve got to see that,” he said. “You’ve seen a cake before,” Kathy Roberson said. “Not like that!” Mr. Smart countered, descending. After his return a few minutes later, Amy Chin approached, offering to share the confection. Josephine Roberson accepted. The High Line had not yet seemed to impress her much, but the cake did. “She’s smiling now,” Kathy Roberson said, laughing.
There are other gathering places, like the passage beneath the Standard Hotel near Little West 12th Street, where the arching structure has created a breezeway with perpetual shade and cooling winds. The Standard is itself a draw, attracting people hoping for a glimpse of the racy displays in the huge plate-glass room windows of the hotel, which seeks out exhibitionist guests by promoting itself as a sleek sex palace. (“And now, the floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the High Line at the Standard New York offer direct views to your most intimate moments,” read a notice on its blog).
There is plenty to see below the hotel, especially near 13th Street. On Friday around 7 p.m., a shifting cluster was leaning over the railing there, snapping pictures of the creative types sipping champagne at an open-air lounge, and of Marni Halasa, a figure skating instructor and “parade junkie” who was posing, arms held high — for a National Enquirer photo shoot, she said.
She was wearing what she called her mermaid outfit: long, form-fitting aquamarine sequined skirt slit nearly to the waist, halter top, shimmering cape held like angel wings, Rollerblades.
But there is no spot more coveted than the sundeck facing the Hudson River between 14th and 15th Streets, where the row of dark brown ipe wood lounge chairs brings bikini-clad sunbathers, picnicking families and affectionate couples throughout the day and evening. If it were the late 1980s, this would be Nell’s, albeit without the cocaine and cocktails: roving park security officers are vigilant about drinking, which is prohibited.
The visibility of the staff — maintenance workers, gardeners, volunteers wearing “Ask Me About The High Line” buttons — is important, Mr. Cullina said, in promoting the sense that the park is well maintained.
So on Sunday night, before the park’s 10 p.m. shutdown and 7 a.m. reopening, a maintenance worker was wheeling a garbage can along the sundeck.
“I’m looking for trash donation,” he called out, as if hawking hot dogs at a ball field. “Can I get a trash donation, y’all?”
A few along the way obliged. Meng Li, a bond analyst with a fondness for magic tricks, playfully fanned out a deck of cards. The pinks in the sky deepened toward purple, the red neon W of the hotel across the Hudson grew brighter, and the strains of Hector del Curto’s Eternal Tango Orchestra on Pier 54 drifted overhead.
One of Mr. Li’s companions, Nikoleta Kasa, took it all in, saying, “I’m lucky to live here.”
Article by Diane Cardwell New York Times 21 July
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Swiss Bunkers - Part 1
For over four years, I have developed a photographic documentary work on Swiss fortified constructions – bunkers. Each element of these photographs has a relation with Switzerland and particularly the mountain landscape that is an inherent part of our identity. The bunkers are a integral part of a finely developed popular defense military system in Switzerland, a military with historically strong links to the landscape.
After the cold war ended many of the bunkers became obsolete. The tendency is to forget them or even to renounce them, my approach on the contrary, aims to expose them from a new angle. This approach has led me to discover a great number of bunkers, some in remote areas, sometimes difficultly accessible, covering the whole of the Swiss territory. The relations between these basic shaped bunkers and the often-sumptuous landscape surrounds them became an essential part of the study. I looked for the most spectacular bunkers, notable for their camouflage devices, true theatre scenery made with the utmost care. A quality indeed fully Swiss.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Malcolm X Jazz Festival - East Oakland
The last Oakland posting for the evening. Nostalgia has consumed the nine variables. The Malcolm X Jazz Festival is an annual treat held in San Antonio Park in East Oakland. The Festival is endorsed by the nine variables who attended in 2003.
Bad Granddad
Johnny Talbot strides into Berkeley's Funky Riddms Records like a man on a soul mission. He's casually stylish, dressed in a khaki shirt with metal tips on the collars, black pants, a black jacket, and blue-tinted sunglasses. What really completes the look, however, is his short, processed coiffure, almost identical to that of James Brown's on the Live at the Apollo Vol. II record the shop sells for $20 (used). He still looks good, he says, "because the music keeps me young."
Talbot is like your funky uncle, or perhaps the cool dad you wished you had. This grandpa of groove can claim to be an originator of the Oakland funk sound, although his soft-spoken modesty won't allow him to brag that much about it. To hear Talbot talk is to be taken on a trip down memory lane, when Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye routinely used to recruit East Bay bands for their touring outfits, when Sly Stone was a radio disc jockey, when Bill Graham owned and booked the Fillmore Auditorium. Talbot can even recall playing concerts there before Graham's tenure.
Talbot's roots are in Texas, but he is East Bay-bred. He was raised in Oakland, and attended Berkeley High School, where he was involved in the doo-wop scene, the flavor of the day back then. Because of his Lone Star State heritage, it was natural for him to pick up the guitar -- just as a person from New Orleans might gravitate toward the piano. He played in local blues and R&B bands, worked the West Coast circuit from Los Angeles to Seattle, and gigged frequently in the Bay's then-thriving bar scene. Eventually, Talbot became the front man for a band called Da Things, who inspired numerous other musicians -- among them Tower of Power -- to learn the nuances of Oakland-style funk, an urban variant of the Texas blues guitar sound, based around a gritty, syncopated rhythm section.
"Oakland funk is sort of a mixture of the blues and R&B," Talbot attempts to explain. "It originated on the streets of Oakland. It's hard to just describe it without hearing it. When I say 'sound,' I mean, musicians from a certain place have a certain sound." The band's name came about, Talbot recalls, when they were sitting around trying to come up with a moniker and one member said, "I can't think of a thing." The name stuck, and for a while, Da Things were the hottest thing happening in the local scene. Although the band cut only one album, for the Kent label, its legacy lives on through the innumerable Bay Area funk, R&B, and soul bands of the '70s and '80s, all the way up to Too $hort, Oakland's first rap star. Talbot speaks glowingly of $hort (who has maintained the attitude of Oakland funk more than any other rapper, according to Talbot), just as he speaks disparagingly of Los Angeles bands, who in his mind weren't as funky as Da Things and their peers.
Talbot got introduced to a younger generation of listeners through the recent Bay Area Funk compilation, which included his song "Pickin' Cotton," a killer jam that contains all the hallmarks of heavy funk. He also played live at the record release party at the Shattuck Down Low (284 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, 510-548-1159), a show that went over so well, he's reprising it Friday night at the same venue. The local legend is careful to distinguish his brand of original Oakland funk from the later permutations, which commercialized and even applied a jazz paradigm to the sound. "To be a funk band, you have to have people in the band who are funky," he reasons. The statement speaks for itself.
Article courtesy of East Bay Express - Eric Arnold - 17 March 2004
The ninevariables attended Johnny's record release party many moons (and whiskys) ago. it was indeed a funky affair.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Diddy Wah and the Underdog
1. Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels - Devil With A Blue Dress On
2. The Monks - Oh, How To Do Now
3. Ray Charles - Hit The Road Jack
4. Link Wray - Switchblade
5. Brian Auger - Tiger
6. Sweet Charity Orchestra - The Pompeii Club (Rich Man's Frug)
7. Gong - Pot Head Pixies
8. Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - Obeah Man
9. The Byrds - Artificial Energy
10. Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band - Apache
11. Spanky Wilson - Sunshine Of Your Love
12. Esther Marrow - Chains Of Love
13. Sly & The Family Stone - Underdog
14. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas - Easily Persuaded
15. Isaac Hayes - Run Fay Run
16. Otis Redding - Papas Got A Brand New Bag
17. Maceo & The Macks - Cross The Tracks
18. Idris Muhammad - Super Bad
19. Tom Jones - Venus
20. Candido - 1000 Finger Man
19. The Lebron Brothers - Summertime Blues
20. Trinidad Oil Company - Feelin' Alright
Visit the Diddy Wah website to download tunes:
http://diddywah.blogspot.com/search/label/mixtape/
Shacking Up In The Mississippi Delta
The Shack Up Inn says it all – if this ain’t your kind of place, don’t bother stopping because there are plenty of others who see the charm in spending the night in a shotgun shack. More people than you’d think.
At a time when most hotels are struggling to find ways to attract new guests, the Shack Up Inn, which rents out renovated share cropper shacks on a former cotton plantation, has seen its business grow amid the recession.“We’ll turn down 50 to 70 people every weekend,” said Guy Malvezzi, one of the owners.
“We’re a cheap thrill,” Malvezzi said, adding that as he saw the unemployment rate rise, he thought reservations might drop off, but “I just sat and watched our business start climbing.” Most recent guests seem to come from within a 400-mile radius, indicating that more people may be choosing to stick closer to home for more affordable vacations.
Michael and I discovered the place--it calls itself a "B&B," but that's bed and beer, not breakfast, thank you) as we drove through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, but the inn doesn't make itself easy to find. Business is so good that that the Shack Up Inn might be one of the only places nowadays that spends less energy trying to lure new guests than discouraging a certain type from stopping there. The owners chase away tour buses, refuse to rent rooms to adults younger than 25 (“drunken frat boys stay away,” as the inn's web site puts it) and warn potential guests, “The Ritz, we ain’t.”
“We don’t have the place listed in the phone book," Malvezzi said. "We don’t have a sign or billboard anywhere. You talk with any tourism person and they’ll tell you how we’re [messing] up. But we do it for a reason. We’re not desperate for anybody’s money.”
Instead, they cater to guests who can appreciate stains on a table and hand-scrawled graffiti on a door. The barely-rehabbed shacks, named after the people who once lived in them or the places where they were originally located, are weathered wood outside and modern appliances inside. They have air conditioning units, electric coffee makers and television sets. But the comforts stop well short of luxury, with much of the furniture looking like it's seen better days. To complete the rustic look, tree branches hold up curtains, bathroom walls are made of corrugated tin and room decorations depend on roadside finds and estate sale buys.
“Blue Mike” Spence showed me the floor of the staircase he constructed inside the inn. The wood changes at each level, transitioning from oak to distressed maple to two kinds of bamboo. All came from scraps; their irregularity fits right in. The inn is a place where every object and nook seems to have a story: A nightstand made from a coffee-bean holder, a strand of ivy turned into art, a ceiling constructed from distressed tin (purchased from a man who considered it trash).
“Nowadays when something’s broken, you just throw it away,” Spence said. “There are some things I refuse to throw away.”
Spence moved here from Ft. Lauderdale, taking on the task of “making the old stuff look new and the new stuff look old”--a job he came to crave after his first visit, as a guest in the Robert Clay shack. Spence wrote in the guest book then that he felt he was “stepping back in time.”
"You can feel the blues," he said. He has scraped the dirt and grime from the walls of these shacks, where black sharecroppers lived and raised families. “The difference is that you want to come and stay in it. But they had to live in them."
The shacks are less an exploitation of the region's history than an attempt to preserve what would have inevitably been torn down with time, Malvezzi said. One by one, he and the other owners have had the shacks moved from the surrounding area to the Hopson Plantation, which is famous for developing the first mechanized cotton picker. The Inn opened in 1998 and, now, for a starting price of $60 a night, you can rent one of 19 shacks, an old tractor shed converted into a three-bedroom house or one of the 10 rooms carved into the top level of a cotton gin.
Malvezzi said there are also plans to build “shackominiums," or shacks for sale, in the 18-acre lot across the way from the Inn, creating an eventual “Shackville.”
“I knew when we got into this, it would be a good business,” Malvezzi said. “But I didn’t think it’d create such a demand.”
He couldn’t have guessed he would be turning away people or putting up signs like “Juke Joint Chapel” that either draw you in or scare you off.
On its website, the inn does what it can to “keep people away”--the wrong people, anyway. The inn's desired clientele would be the history and music buffs who drive through the Delta in search of the spirits of Sam Cooke, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and the other great blues pioneers.
“Discounts – try Motel 6 or 8,” the Inn's site warns. “Roof leaks – only if it rains. Room service – call the Peabody in Memphis. Wake up call – yea right, automatic one minute after check-out time, it consist of a foot on your door at 11:01 AM.”
The ninevariables endorses the Shack Up Inn. Having sold our soul to the devil at the crossroads (and eaten some fine Bar-B-Q at Abe's), a memorable evening was had on 2 January 2008. Amen.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Soviet Album Covers
