Angelus Rosedale Cemetery Tour

Like cemetery tours?  C'mon, admit it!  We all like cemetery tours!

The West Adams Heritage Association presents "Entertaining Lives" on Saturday, September 29th, at the Angeles Rosedale Cemetery.

The Living History Tours will begin every 25 minutes, between 9 am and noon.

For this popular event, advance reservations are REQUIRED. Call 323-732-4223, or send an email to  tours@westadamsheritage.org.

Living History Tours cost $25, if ordered by Sept. 24. If you wait till the 25th--if there's space, the tour will cost $35.

The tours are three hours long, and the noon cutoff is just to start the tour. So you could be there through 3pm.

Who will you see? I'm copying this right from the tour flyer:

• Mildred Washington, the charming lady at right, a vaudeville dancer and choreographer who headlined at Sebastian's Cotton Club in Los Angeles;

• Harry Cooke, Magician and Civil War Union Army “scout” who was America’s first Escape Artist;

• Byron Houck, pictured at left, baseball pitcher for the 1913 World Series Philadelphia A’s, who later became Buster Keaton’s cameraman on "The General." Houck was the Vernon Tigers’ ace pitcher when the team was owned by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle;

• Della Hogan Monroe, Marilyn Monroe’s colorful grandmother; a religious devotee, Mrs. Monroe had baby Norma Jean baptized at the Hawthorne Foursquare Church in 1926;

• Victor Dol, L.A.’s first chef trained in Paris, who opened an elegant French restaurant in 1876 that soon earned the nickname “Delmonico’s of the West”;

• Rita Carewe, a Jazz Age starlet and “Baby WAMPAS” (Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers) winner who appeared in films with Delores del Rio, Edward Everett Horton, and Mary Pickford;

• Sadie Cole, a Fisk Jubilee singer and a civil rights activist who helped desegregate L.A.’s cafes and beaches;

• Honorable Wu (Harry Gee Haw), pictured at right. Wu was an actor, singer, dancer, and vaudeville impresario known as “The Broadway Mandarin.”

All these fascinating people who lived such interesting lives were buried at Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, and you can meet them (kinda) and learn about them on Saturday 9/29/12, while supporting a historical association that has truly become a vibrant part of the West Adams community.

Wear walking shoes!

Sheets Week and Temecula

Two stories for Mosaic Monday.

Actually, the first is so multifaceted it's way more than one part.

LA Curbed just ran a cycle of stories for Millard Sheets Week that includes:

• Adam Arenson's map of Sheets' work throughout the area,

• A photograph-intense post of the artist's former design studio in Claremont,

• A tour of five big Sheets artworks in Los Angeles County--Chase banks in Beverly Hills (my own photo of that below), Studio City, and Rancho Palos Verdes, as well as the City Hall mural and the New Balance store in Santa Monica,



• A special essay on the Hollywood Chase Bank (formerly Home S&L, of course, as are most Chase Banks mentioned),

• The Claremont-Pomona tour, with incredible pictures of the Garrison Theatre (how did they do that? that place is impossible to photograph well!), the Chase Bank in Pomona and the Mall there, the US Bank on Foothill, and the mural in the American Museum of Ceramic Art,

• Another photo-heavy presentation of the Scottish Rite Temple on Wilshire, which I've never featured on my blog because I could never figure out how to get into the place. Curbed LA managed to get dozens of stunning pictures.

• Sheets did not work alone, and Curbed wrote up his collaborators, like Susan Hertel and Denis O'Connor, Arthur and Jean Ames, and other sculptors and architects.

• An article on how Sheets raised funds and built up two academic art institutions: the complex at Scripps College, Otis Art Institute--and was briefly involved with a third, CalArts in Valencia.

So have at it--that will keep you busy through lunch time, at least. Curbed drew a lot from the oral history that Sheets did with UCLA--hours of talking, from the 1970s. It's transcribed online here.

Now for Part II:

Temecula is not in Los Angeles County, but we all go out there occasionally for a bit of history and to tour the wineries, right?

At the beginning of 2011, the city of Temecula unveiled a new mosaic by artist Carole Choucair Ouejian titled "The Emigrant Trail" at their big new City Hall.

The artist used blocks of rough, local granite to enhance and contrast with the the tile and Byzantine glass pictures of men and women with their covered wagon, at right.

The entire work--7 by 10 feet--includes a frame worked with gold smalti--appropriate, because gold is what drew most of those emigrants across the plains and desert to California. In the frame, there is a stagecoach--Temecula was once a stop on the Butterfield Stage Line--and other images that tell the story of the area.

A large, in-depth article with pictures of the artist's other mosaic work, is at Mosaic Art Now. You can see how the entire work was constructed, laid out, and assembled, as well as some of the exquisite details of the gold work. Below is one of many pictures there--I like it because it shows the tactile, sculptured aspects of the mosaic. The pictures of the finished work are beautiful too, of ocurse.

For Richard Feynman, Pasadena

Today's mosaic is hidden on the back of a Ross Dress for Less in Pasadena. The store's on Lake; the mosaic/mural is on Shopper's Lane, just off San Pasqual.

The artist is ceramicist Gifford Myers, and the work is titled "The Motion of the Planet/for Richard Feynman." It was installed in 1997, and I'm guessing that a grant by the City Arts Commission may have funded it.

Compared to some of his other works ("Sad Boy/Ragazzon Malinconico" at right), the Feynman mural is downright conventional.

Although this work is mainly ceramic, Myers the artist works in many mediums, including aluminum and found objects. He also teaches at UC Irvine; here's his page there.

According to Dante Stefani of Italy, "Myers transforms the reality that surrounds him through wit, a free spirit, and a strong capacity for observation."

As to the subject, Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who hung out at topless bars when he wasn't teaching at CalTech, who worked on the Manhattan Project and sat on the panel convened to investigate the Challenger disaster, and who once answered a reporter's request to describe the reason he won the Nobel Prize in a few words by telling him, "If I could describe it in a few words it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize,"--well, start with Feynman's own biographies to learn more about him. And I'm paraphrasing--the quote may not be exact.

My thanks to old friend Joseph Schwartz for this picture. I never would have known of this otherwise.

Rams Band, 1953

This is for everyone who remembers the Los Angeles Rams, our previous football team. Their games were played at the Coliseum.

The Rams were not LA's first football team--we had the Hollywood Bears and the LA Bulldogs before them. The Rams were here from 1946 to 1980, when they moved to Anaheim--close enough, though not LA. In 1994, they rode away from the sunset, east to St.Louis.

They had an official band while in LA (long before the Embraceable Ewes) and thanks to Joe Hill, I have a picture of the band at a concert given in 1953, at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Culver City (the place with the giant film strip in the fountain).

 Johnny Boudreau was the Band Director, and they worked all home games from 1946 to 1980. They played before the game and at half time.

Joe is in the top row, far left. No idea who the little majorette and cohort are at bottom right, nor do I know if there's a story behind these piebald uniforms. Maybe Joe will comment--what colors were they, and why the two-tone design?

Family by Joseph Young

The elegant and sparkling family at right are facing the same problem that so many of our neighbors have gone through--they lost their home and are looking for another.

That's actually true; I am not being sarcastic.

This lovely mosaic, surrounded by many smaller images, was created by Joseph L. Young in 1964 for the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Sherman Oaks.

That Center (and several others, like the Silverlake JCC) closed after a long fight to stay open, in 2009.  Everything in it was auctioned off.

The artist--who created many other works, including the mosaics on the Math Building at UCLA, and the Trifonium downtown, died in 2007.

If you'd like to see more of his work, here is his Facebook page, maintained by his daughters. That's where these pictures came from, as well as the pictures from an earlier post I did on the mosaics at the Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills.

Some photos are in black and white, with members of his family, and others show installations over past decades.

Young's family was able to reacquire the mosaics from the JCC and they're now looking for an appropriate venue. This main mosaic of the nuclear family stands 7 feet high and 3 feet wide.

In the picture below--part of the Los Angeles Public Library collection--the artist is on the left, identified as Dr. Joseph L. Young.

The man second from the right is actor Herschel Bernardi.

The photographer was Bob Martin and the picture ran in the Valley Times, I think. The event was the dedication of the mosaic in the community center lobby on January 23, 1964.  Right above Joseph Young's head you can just see one of the smaller mosaics, Music, that surround the main picture. Others represent different facets of life. But the Music piece is at right.

The other folks are Mrs. Kenneth Shore, Bert Gold, Mrs. Arthur Becker, and to the right of Bernardi, Milton Malkin.

Boys and girls, once upon a time, ladies didn't have names of their own. They were known as appendages of their husbands, except among very good friends.

That's one silly custom I was glad to see the end of!

Old Silent Movie Locations

I used to have a sweatshirt that read "So many books, so little time."  That's how I'm beginning to feel about all sorts of things lately: so many delights to fill up my days, so little time to squeeze them all in.

So just in case you wanted to squeeze one more historical LA event in between the visit to Santa Monica's Inkwell and the movie screening (last post), here's something else going on in mid-September:

Do you like/love the films of Harold Lloyd and Charlie Chaplin? and Buster Keaton? On Saturday, Sept. 15, at 2 pm at the Los Angeles Main Library, John Bengtson will talk about the downtown Los Angeles locations that these comedians used in their silent movies. His talk is free and open to everyone, and he'll also sign & sell copies of his own book, Silent Visions, about Harold Lloyd's films (maybe he'll have his other books there as well).

Inkwell History in Santa Monica

Following up on the Ocean theme, here are some free historically-themed activities coming up:

From 9 am to noon on Saturday, September 15, you can learn about the Inkwell in Santa Monica. Docents from the Santa Monica Conservancy will be at Bay Street and Oceanfront Walk—the site of the Inkwell, which for years was the only beach open to African Americans. The event is in conjunction with Coastal Cleanup Day so don’t be surprised if the docents hand you a trash bag and put you to work, too.

The next day--Sunday, September 16, the Santa Monica Main Library at 601 Santa Monica Blvd, you can learn even more about the Inkwell at a special screening of White Wash, a film about African American surfing. Archival footage and interviews will talk about the Inkwell in particular. After the film, director Ted Woods, along with historian Alison Rose Jefferson and Rick Blocker of Blacksurfing.com will lead a discussion. Again, free, but seating is first come, first serve at the library's MLK Auditorium.

A Temporary Mosaic

Starting August 29, artist Motoi Yamamoto of Japan will make a mosaic of salt at the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester. The process and the resulting mosaic is called Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto.

The artist has created these artworks all over the world, each one unique, each one standing for only a few weeks or months. The picture below is of an installation in Marseilles and comes from the artist's blog.

This picture is from an installation in Seoul.

I think this qualifies as mosaic--I learned about it in Mosaic Art Now. And while salt granules are smaller than tiles or bits of glass, making a picture of them is just such an interesting concept that I hope we can blur the line.

Yamamoto came to this unusual art form as a way of memorializing his younger sister, who died of brain cancer. Salt is a symbol of purification and mourning in Japan, and as the Gallery puts it, the art "radiates an intense beauty and tranquility, but also conveys something ineffable, painful, and endless."

For three days, from 10 am to 4 pm on Wednesday through Friday, you can come watch the artist work. Ditto the next week, on Tuesday 9/4 through Thursday 9/6--all free.

On Saturday, September 8, a reception will be held from 4 to 6 pm, then the artwork will be on display through the first week of December. When the exhibit is finished, the salt is bagged and returned to the sea. The following video shows an installation from earlier this year:

California Forever on PBS--Our State Parks

California Forever is a 2-part documentary about our state parks that does not involve Ken Burns, as far as I can tell. The series producers (David Vassar and Sally Kaplan) were inspired in this project by the recent battle over the OC Toll Road, which would have paved over a part of San Onofre State Beach.

Budget cuts and temporary closures are one thing, Vassar says, but "the scenic lands and historic sites that state parks protect must never be forgotten."

The first show starts with the discovery of the giant sequoias in 1852, which led to our first state park, Yosemite.

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant? I didn't.

While the first show focuses on history, the second takes up the problems parks face today, like, balancing the recreational uses with protection of sites and species. One example of that will be Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and off-roading at Ocotillo Wells Recreation Area. This second episode will also feature the Los Angeles River and the way its being changed. (The picture at left is from The River Project website.)

KOCE plans to run these shows back to back on September 4th, then one at a time on the 9th and 16th. PBS OC will show them on September 8th.  KLCS will run both on 9/11, then repeat them much later in the month. Meanwhile, here is a minute-and-a-half trailer:

Anti Piracy Mosaics

Recognize Jim Morrison? How about MJ, below?

These mosaic pictures--made of cds--come from Flavorwire, along with the story. They're not on display in Los Angeles, but since they deal with singers who lived in our area, I figured this would be an interesting post.

Mirco Pagano and Moreno De Turco are the artists who created these images, using the artist's own cds as the medium. The one at left is titled "This is the end."
Appropriate.

The article by Heba Hasan states that,

"the project is more than just a tribute to the stars. It’s part of Piracy, a campaign against illegal file sharing by the advertising agency TBWA based on the idea that these deceased musicians were cheated out of their success and ultimately brought down by music piracy."

Heavy stuff.  The picture at right is titled "The way you make me feel."
The Piracy site features a video which uses stop-action to manipulate the cds of another image of Michael Jackson screaming and being buried in cds.