Redirected: Culture

Idol Folly

By Steve Erickson — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:07:00 GMT

Illustration by André Carrilho

The 1988 biopic of bebop immortal Charlie Parker, Bird, was the film that opened my eyes to Clint Eastwood’s potential as a filmmaker. Flawed and filled with strained flourishes—a drummer’s cymbals constantly whirl through the air like flying saucers from an Ed Wood picture—Bird nonetheless was the clearest sign that Eastwood was moving beyond his comfort zone. Ensuing years produced Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and Letters from Iwo Jima. Always bringing in his movies on time and under budget, Eastwood has embodied more perfectly than anyone in Hollywood that “to live outside the law you must be honest,” a line written by Bob Dylan.

The first time I heard that line was the afternoon when, as a teenager, I listened to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde back to back, a life-changing moment that left me rethinking art and my own possibilities. Those albums were the peak of a career that apotheosized the 1960s, followed by inspired stretches in the ’70s, flashes of genius during an erratic ’80s, and a triumphant revival in the ’90s and early 21st century.

Stories of Eastwood’s politics and personal life haven’t changed my opinion that he’s one of the half dozen best American directors of the last quarter century. Narcissism and rumors of plagiarism haven’t changed my opinion that Dylan is the greatest of American songwriters, with the usual allowances for Duke Ellington. This past August, within seconds of Eastwood’s appearing on television at a national convention to insult an invisible president in a chair that millions of viewers took to be empty, I reached for my remote—almost frantically—to hit the mute button because, as an admirer, I was embarrassed for him. A few days later the star remarked that the current occupant of the White House is the “biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” which smacked of the familiar slander that the president is an illegitimate American. That was the point at which I wondered whether I would like Eastwood quite as much again. In the meantime, with the September release of a new album called Tempest, Dylan gave his most startling interview ever to longtime Rolling Stone contributing editor Mikal Gilmore. Dylan always has been a prickly interview, known for talking circles around journalists; in earlier years his evasions were a modus operandi, justified by reporters’ questions that were insipid or stupid.

Gilmore’s questions were neither insipid nor stupid. Dylan couldn’t have had an interviewer more insightful or supportive, but Gilmore also was willing to press the point when the author of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “Blind Willie McTell” refused to answer straightforward queries (“I don’t know…I don’t have any opinion…You can’t pay any attention to that…”) about what role racism plays in American politics. “Do you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word?” finally replied an irritated Dylan, who may now believe that visionaries—of whom he certainly is one—shouldn’t be bothered with such earthly concerns. Dylan finished with an outburst about a notorious incident at a concert when someone called him “Judas,” a subject Gilmore hadn’t raised. “Judas, the most hated name in human history!...for playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified.” You could hear the snarl in what came next: “All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.” The concert in question—when Dylan alienated much of his folk audience by playing rock and roll—was 47 years ago, a long while for a persecution complex to simmer unabated when you’ve been vindicated by wealth, awards, presidential honors, and the guarantee in your own lifetime of immortality. Once you hear a regard for humanity this angry, you can’t help noticing that Tempest, Dylan’s most ambitious work in a decade and a half, also is the most violent he’s recorded, shot through with more hallucinatory brilliance than generosity of spirit.

/ / / /

Hopefully it doesn’t come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren’t always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes. Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison—each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts some of them are not nice people at all. Our reaction to such artists is divided because the artists themselves are divided. Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create. It’s a propulsion fueled by insecurity and self-absorption, by the need to justify one’s existence while at the same time believing the creation is a gift that the world needs and that therefore justifies the artist’s ruthlessness. The audience winds up confronting paradoxes and calibrating distinctions having to do with whether the art that we love offsets whatever it is about the artist we don’t like, or whether what we don’t like about the artist actually informs what we love about the art. What humanity do Dylan and Eastwood draw on that renders their art great or enduring? How much of their personal darkness becomes compelling or attractive once it’s artistically mediated? When is it appropriate to set aside Eastwood’s opinions and when isn’t it? What, other than mere skill and technique, makes Dylan’s music speak to so many people if the man evinces so little empathy for anyone but himself?

Eastwood didn’t direct his latest movie, the predictable Trouble with the Curve, which came out within weeks of Dylan’s record. With assistance from the typically infallible Amy Adams, however, he gives one of his most affecting performances, and for two hours in the theater I forgave everything else. Eastwood has more humor about himself than Dylan, or at least he has the sense to fake it as only a good actor can, as he did with Ellen DeGeneres when the business about the empty chair inevitably came up. “The Democrats who were watching thought I was going senile,” he cracked, “and the Republicans knew I was.” Neither Eastwood’s performance nor Dylan’s album refute, or bother trying to, whatever misgivings we’ve formed. Rather, they own up to our perceptions and then broaden them. Because Eastwood’s aging, misanthropic baseball scout in Trouble with the Curve bears resemblance to the man who seethes at the president’s legitimacy, his emotional frailty in the film seems all the more authentic and therefore touching. Infused with the fury that seems petty in an interview, the doomy Tempest—which leaves more corpses in its wake than a serial killer (“I pay in blood,” goes one lyric, “but not my own”)—imparts to Dylan’s wrath an epic scope, and the heightened imagery and insights of which only Dylan is capable express a worldview that explodes into the cosmic.

Eastwood and Dylan have been famous and successful and lionized for so long that they don’t feel accountable to themselves or anyone else in the way the rest of us do. Self-examination carries for them the potential for sabotage more than revelation, and to assume that either man is at a loss for answers presumes he’s not too far inside the bubble of his public persona to have perspective on the questions or a recognition that the questions even exist. Our pact with artists whom we embrace personally includes the kind of familial forgiveness that we extend to a beloved uncle who says something disagreeable at the dinner table. Our expectations are greater because figures like Eastwood and Dylan come to represent something bigger than themselves as well as what they can’t risk betraying: an irascible independence in Eastwood’s case, a moral voice in Dylan’s. Fortunately for both men, Unforgiven and Blonde on Blonde, if not Trouble with the Curve or Tempest, will outlast everything repellent that made both possible.

Nonstop Gigs

By Steve Appleford — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Photograph by John Gilhooley

Backstage at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on a December night, Gary Tovar is looking at a temporary gallery of old pictures, show posters, all-access passes, and vintage flyers. They’re the framed remnants from the hundreds of concerts he staged as a young man—shows by the likes of Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys. Wearing baggy jeans and a crisp white shirt, his black hair slicked back, Tovar is here for GV30, a three-night celebration of Goldenvoice Productions, the concert promotion company he founded 30 years ago. These days, at 59, he’s a consultant to the company and out most nights seeing new bands and posting pictures to his blog, as insatiable as he was in the ’80s.

“Gary was the only promoter who would take my calls,” says Andy Somers, the longtime talent agent for the punk bands X and Social Distortion, at GV30. Nearby, in a plaid shirt and black Angels baseball cap, stands Paul Tollett, 46, the soft-spoken president of Goldenvoice. In his front pocket is a cell phone containing top-secret information that is already the subject of intense online speculation: the 2012 lineup for the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the annual gathering in Indio that Goldenvoice set in motion 13 years ago. Only a handful of people have seen the list, Tovar among them.

When the names of the bands and DJs are released several weeks later, the headliners include Radiohead and Swedish House Mafia, the Black Keys, and the hip-hop duo Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Farther down the list are dozens of forward-leaning rock, hip-hop, and dance artists, from Wild Flag and Justice to Feist and Le Butcherettes, each an essential part of the three-day gathering at the Empire Polo Club. “Paul has a great ear for that undercard,” says Kevin Lyman, a Goldenvoice alum who is creator of the Vans Warped Tour. “It’s how you build the undercard that gives strength to the package.”

Everything that Coachella has become is rooted in the original Los Angeles punk rock scene and the collisions of noise and euphoria Goldenvoice has hosted since 1981. They’re where Tovar, Tollett, and his business partner, Rick Van Santen, learned how to create shows—in clubs along the Sunset Strip, in forgotten restaurants and union halls across the state, and in bunkers like the Olympic Auditorium.

The company, whose offices overlook the La Brea Tar Pits, puts on nearly 1,000 shows a year, bringing both the insurgent and the mainstream to wildly disparate audiences. But Coachella is the main event, drawing 80,000 visitors last year. Regarded as an important showcase by connoisseurs of new music (people fly in from all over), the festival has become so popular, two of them will unfold this year: Tollett has scheduled the identical lineup for consecutive weekends this month.

At GV30, X is midway through a set of punk-noir tunes about decadence and woe. Tovar stops to look at an old black-and-white photograph of the Ramones, the Queens, New York, act once viewed by the concert industry as a mostly underground oddity. “Ohhh, people loved the Ramones,” Tovar says in a warm rasp, remembering nights in Hollywood, Anaheim, Santa Barbara—anywhere there was a stage. “I talked to the Ramones and I said, ‘I’ll put you everywhere.’ The other promoters treated them like they were nothing.” Having said that, Tovar heads out the door and wades into the moshing crowd.

ovar got his first taste of punk rock early. In 1978, he picked up a pair of hitchhikers in his hometown, Huntington Beach, and drove them all the way to San Francisco, where he joined them for the final Sex Pistols concert at Winterland. Tovar was intrigued. The sound and culture were already earning alarming headlines, with pictures in Time magazine of young Brits in safety pins and raw meat (decades ahead of Lady Gaga). Riots were not uncommon. Traditional rock venues were scared off.

While still in his twenties, Tovar was making vast sums as a pot smuggler. He owned homes in Santa Barbara and Huntington Beach and had plenty of cash left over to support his nascent punk rock habit. He put on his first show on December 4, 1981, a typically chaotic concert by T.S.O.L. at a tiny community center in Santa Barbara. By the time he threw his second gig, Tovar had named his new business Golden Voice (two words originally), after a powerful strain of cannabis. Music was his new obsession, and he lost millions that first decade, flying bands in from England, covering damages from concert riots, even paying for early-morning cab rides home for stranded punks.

Operating out of a small office in Huntington Beach, the company tapped into a vibrant music scene ignored by mainstream promoters. Tovar says that changed after a pair of sold-out nights with Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Civic got everyone’s attention in 1984. “They were undaunted by pressure from the LAPD to stop dealing with controversial bands,” says Chuck Dukowski, bassist for Black Flag and creator of the Goldenvoice logo, which is designed using “Chinese” lettering. “The world would be a different place if we’d had to wait for the mainstream promoters to wake up and pay attention.”

Tovar had become the ringmaster of choice for a generation of the young and the reckless. His shows were inspired. A ska night headlined by Bad Manners at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach began with a crosstown rally of scooters rolling up to the venue in style. Paul Tollett was a young show promoter and a committed Mod in suit and tie when Tovar handed him flyers for a show. “His energy was just incredible. He wanted to talk concerts all the time, and so did I,” Tollett says. “I started working for him immediately.” That was 1986.

On the morning of March 9, 1991, federal drug agents raided Tovar’s home in Huntington Beach, kicking down his door. He was arrested on conspiracy charges. After battling the charges for two years from L.A. County Jail, he pleaded guilty to four counts related to marijuana trafficking, was sentenced to seven years, and signed over ownership of the company to Tollett and Van Santen. No money was exchanged.

By then Goldenvoice had built a reputation for paying bands fairly and even bailing musicians out of jail. But it was also hemorrhaging $100,000 a year. While the ’90s alt-rock explosion and copromotion of local stops of the Lollapalooza Festival helped them to a couple of profitable years, a cloud of debt hovered. Tollett often spoke of producing their own festival, learning the science of Porta-Potties and crowd control. A success could pull them from debt. Van Santen finally called him on it, insisting that they had to make it happen.

They commandeered Empire Polo Field, a 78-acre site in the Coachella Valley. It would be a two-day festival in October 1999 featuring live music on a pair of main stages, with smaller ones inside several large tents and huge kinetic sculptures scattered across the lawn. (In later years a giant Tesla coil would crackle with purple blasts of electricity into the night air.)

Headlined by Beck, the Chemical Brothers, Tool, and Rage Against the Machine, that first year of Coachella delivered an astonishing collection of modern rock and electronic artists. But coming so soon after the spectacular meltdown of Woodstock 1999 and its frenzy of fire and rape, the desert fest attracted just 38,000 people. Goldenvoice lost nearly $1 million. Tollett and Van Santen sold the company to the Anschutz Entertainment Group, which had just built Staples Center and needed to fill it with concerts, but they remained in charge.

Things were finally on track, with Radiohead booked to headline opening night at Coachella 2004, when Van Santen died of a heroin overdose. Tollett, in Brazil looking for drum-and-bass acts, was relaxing on the beach when his phone kept ringing. The messages were puzzling: “Call me, Paul, call me.” “Oh, I heard about Rick.” “My condolences about Rick.” The last one got his attention. He hopped a plane to L.A. “I cried all the way back in that middle seat in coach,” Tollett recalls.

/ / / /

Months ahead of Coachella, Tollett is in a Pomona warehouse. Stacked on one side are the steel tubes used as fencing at the festival. There are boxes of ancient LPs and 45s of rock, pop, and soul that are destined for the shelves of the local record store Tollett owns with his older brother, Perry. With their partners they’ve also renovated the Fox Theater Pomona and opened the Glass House concert venue and an adjacent bar amid the boarded-up stores and neighborhood warehouses. Tollett stocks the record store himself with used vinyl. “I can’t wait until Coachella is over,” he jokes as he looks at boxes of discs. “It gets in the way of my record sifting.”

In the morning he will drive out to the polo field for more planning and adjusting. The festival has lost money for at least three years since its beginning, but it is now almost a given that it will sell out. Repeat customers make plans to return before the lineup is even announced. In June the 2011 edition had been over for barely three months when tickets for this year’s two weekends went on sale; 68,000 were sold in seven days. When the remainder became available in January, tickets for both weekends were gone in less than three hours. Demand for Coachella keeps growing.

“Last year it sold out so fast that we estimated there were maybe 80,000 people who wanted to go who couldn’t, which is crazy,” says Tollett; he calls the additional weekend “an experiment.”

Broadening the event’s repertoire from its early focus on alt rock is one reason for the bigger draw. Prince was a late addition in 2008, the same year Roger Waters performed Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. In 2009, Paul McCartney delivered an emotional two-and-a-half-hour performance with dedications to his late wife, Linda, as well as to John Lennon and George Harrison. Jay-Z erupted on the main stage with hard funk in 2010 (and a cameo by wife Beyoncé), and last year Kanye West brought epic psychodrama (with sideman Justin Vernon of Bon Iver) to the venue.

Of course, for some of the hard-core fans Tovar has spent a lifetime slam dancing with, having broad appeal is the same as having no appeal. At GV30 there are punks who sneer at the very idea of the gathering. The music is not loud enough or angry enough. Out in the lobby Rachel Barnes, a 23-year-old from Long Beach, is fresh from the mosh pit, scuffed white Creepers on her feet. She will not attend Coachella. “It’s too artsy-fartsy and fuckin’ hipsters everywhere,” she says, her lip curled and pierced. “I don’t like it.”

Tovar understands. Not that he is about to miss the festivities himself. Leaving his home in Venice Beach, he expects to spend the entire weekend on the polo grounds—crashing in a trailer on the concert site—and then return the following weekend. “Music, beautiful scenery, happy people, and beautiful girls. What more do you want?” he says dreamily. “When I die, I want to go to Coachella.”

ALSO: See a slide show of Steve Appelford's photos from Coachella 2012.

The Next Stage

By RJ Smith — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 17:56:00 GMT

Photograph by Sabine Scheckel

They were a really big rubber ducky floating in a Highland Park backyard blowup pool. The band the Negro Problem had pull among indie rockers and smarty-pants popsters. They had worked their way up from KXLU to KCRW; they could totally hold down a monthlong residency at Spaceland. Singer Stew, in his faux-leopard-print hat and robe, and bassist Heidi Rodewald, in her thrift store dress and boots, turned heads when they entered a restaurant. And that, it seemed, was as good as it was going to get.

The Negro Problem had been around for nine years, and many fans undoubtedly liked them because they weren’t stars. They just kept reliably cranking out well-crafted tunes in which L.A. loomed so large as a reference and inspiration, it was practically a character. They had a following under lock and key, and then they left it all behind. After Stew moved to Berlin in 2006 (he’d lived there before, in the 1980s), he and Rodewald landed in New York City—where they achieved a kind of stardom. They got a residency at Joe’s Pub, a bar far pricier than the Silverlake Lounge. Then their Passing Strange, a theatrical piece written by Stew, with their music at its center, made them the toast of the Great White Way. In it actors perform chapters taken from Stew’s life as the singer watches and comments musically. The intelligentsia loved the distance he put between himself and Los Angeles, throwing Obies and then Tonys at him. The Public Theater paid their rent; The New Yorker compared Stew to Sondheim.

Their success in exile has given fans on both coasts something to feel good about. Angelenos can laugh at the New York culturati who think they’ve discovered some exotic new genius, thus launching a familiar cycle of Big Apple overkill. New Yorkers can once again feel superior to Southern Californians.

Stew is not unaware of the ironies. New Yorkers, he says, “get to compliment themselves that ‘we are smart enough to get you when they didn’t in Los Angeles.’ Much like the French must have felt about the old jazz guys playing on the Left Bank.”

And the musicians? They have a lot of fresh ironies to mull over, a good setting for music they’ll unveil when they have their big-stage homecoming March 9 at UCLA’s Royce Hall. They’ll play a new cycle of songs written about the city they left behind. It’s a return to a place they might understandably feel sold them short. Will they bring the love? Will fans find them as charming since they’ve left? It’s a complicated moment, the sort that always seems to have Stew reaching for his rhyming dictionary.

/ / / /

Mark “Stew” stewart was born middle class in Mid City and formed the Negro Problem in 1995. From the start the band’s sound was parti-colored pop that drew on Love and lounge sounds—along the way someone even dubbed Stew Burt Blackarach. Their debut, Post Minstrel Syndrome, was lightly psychedelic and wonderfully decorous. An album later Rodewald came aboard (a shifting cast of musicians orbits around Stew and Rodewald), and the band gradually moved in a more cabaret direction. “The live shows that they did at the time, and the way Stew owns the stage as a black man fronting a rock band doing that kind of material—that was pretty unique,” says former KCRW music director Nic Harcourt, host of Connections on KCSN. Rodewald is a white chick with a punk rock pedigree. She’s a steadying force as a musician and a ball of energy as an onstage foil, flailing long hair that contrasts with the front man’s bulwark presence.

Stew is a bunch of interesting people. There’s Stew the Enraged, firing off responses and blog posts at imagined detractors, throwing the kitchen sink at writers he thinks have done him wrong. There’s the exile who couldn’t wait to leave L.A.—“the most fearful place I’ve ever lived in,” he told Studio 360 host Kurt Andersen—a town he was born in and that he said he’s hated since he was nine years old. There’s of course the sly, unreliable narrator, a tart, droll, self-absorbed boulevardier. In performance Stew is the domed rotunda of retorts, a round black man who may not be drunk on words but whose vocabulary might not walk a straight line. And then there’s the provocateur. It starts with the name: the Negro Problem. In L.A. it was first and last a punk rock nom de guerre. Stew was telling you to put up your dukes and lay down your preconceptions. The name has brought the band threats from folks who thought they were a skinhead crew, while the music sounds like a chart topper on the Stuff White People Like Web site. When the black singer showed up for the gig, Stew would hear a lot of “you guys must be the funk band.” Such ironies keep their motor running.

After they moved to New York around 2006, that name gained added dimensions. Stew was already working on a set of songs that would tell the story of a black man pushed and pulled by both whites and blacks who think they know him before they meet him. The joys of putting a thumb in someone’s eye took a backseat to artfully examining the complexities of race. That Passing Strange came to Broadway just as Obama was winning primaries made Stew’s critique feel all the more timely.

The author Touré interviewed Stew for his recent book on the age of “postblackness.” Touré uses the term to describe a moment—the present—in which African American identity is more fluid and ambiguous than ever. Stew illustrates the point on “Black Men Ski,” from the band’s new Making It CD. He sings, “Some kids I’ll describe as friends say I am race-obsessed / The luxury of that opinion shows that you are blessed / I have poems about sunsets flowers and the rain / I’ve read them to policemen, but it was all in vain.” Preconceptions may be dangerous but also very, very funny.

What he’s obsessed with, ultimately, is defining himself, which is perhaps why he left Los Angeles. Here he’d become known as a chronicler of a little boho enclave, and it was time to shake up everyone’s expectations, including his own. In L.A., says Stew, a good turnout was assured whenever a critic wrote, “Catch them before they get signed to a major label.” The band’s following was invested in knowing them before the world did. That was problematic enough, insofar as it suggested your fans might not want you to progress. It was even worse when no major label did sign them, considering them a cult band. To cross over to a wider audience, L.A. was their subject, and it was their tormentor, too.

“L.A. is horribly personal to me,” says Rodewald. It also approximately remains home—albeit one the musicians felt they had to leave. “I like that I can stand at a red light and feel the sun on me,” Stew explains. “I can have a Zen meditative experience at a red light, which is not possible in New York. Also, no matter how New Yorkers delude themselves, they still haven’t figured out Mexican food.”

Another thing L.A. has over New York, according to Stew: the culture of the garage. He sat for months upon months in garages, passing around libations, talking out song ideas and what they’d do if they ever hit it big. He has photographs from a typical rehearsal where the crib for Stew’s baby daughter is parked beside equipment. The garage was their shelter and their cradle.

“I go back to those long afternoons in L.A. garages where you take two hours basically talking shit and warming up and, in the case of some of us, taking certain things, drinking certain things. These long afternoons you don’t have in New York. There you rehearse for two hours. Talking Heads, the Ramones—those bands wouldn’t have come out of L.A., and the Beach Boys would never have come from New York.

“What I love about the place is its sense of time—those long afternoons and those forgiving parents who will let you play in those garages,” he says. “When I was growing up, you couldn’t walk down any block without hearing a band. It was a social gathering where you just happened to have guitars."

/ / / /

Here are some things success has brought the Negro Problem: In 2009, Spike Lee filmed Passing Strange, taking the band way beyond Broadway and Spaceland—to any cable system carrying the Sundance Channel. Academia has proved supportive of Stew’s ironies, too. He held a fall residency at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he and Rodewald gave a talk at UCLA in November. The pair discussed their relationship to L.A., sharing assorted sense memories to the accompaniment of slides of John Wooden, Tiny Naylor’s, and the Whisky. They also parlayed Sonny & Cher’s “I’ve Got You Babe.” Which indirectly points to another thing success has brought Stew and Rodewald: prurient interest in the rise and fall of their romantic relationship. In L.A. they were a couple who wrote songs together. They broke up in 2006, continuing on as two friends in a band.

Making It, their first CD since Passing Strange, is largely a look into their breakup—purportedly from both points of view, though Stew seems to have written both sides of the story (spoiler alert: he’s the victim). Rodewald says the words are Stew’s and that hearing him dissect their relationship onstage has brought out her inner Cher—she’ll cut him off to set the record straight or say it didn’t happen the way he just claimed it did. “Imagine you’re on the stage with this other person, and all the time they are lying,” she says with a small chuckle.

“He’s Mr. Singer-Songwriter, so whatever he says, people think he’s being honest in his lyrics. And I have to be on the sidelines saying, ‘Uh, that’s actually not the truth...’ He does the whiny-guy thing, and then I jump on him.” Not that it does a whole lot of good. “The audience all loves Stew,” she says, only a touch of resignation in her voice.

They have changed, and so has the place that launched them. It’s the little things that stop Stew cold, the things you only thought you could take for granted. Now when he comes back, he’s shocked at how cool taco trucks have become. “When I lived here, they were not being frequented by as many white people as they are now. They were five-foot-two norteño-music Mexican guys in cowboy hats and cowboy boots. They were short, but you didn’t fuck with them—just order your taco and shut up about it.” A town where the loncheras are postracial: You could write a song about it.

The People’s Band

By Steve Erickson — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 01:12:00 GMT

The Doors formed on the beaches of Los Angeles, in what you might imagine is the tradition of local rock bands since the Beach Boys. In contrast to a lot of 1960s L.A. groups who were transplanted easterners, half of the Doors (the guitarist and the drummer) were born and raised in L.A., while the keyboard player was from Chicago and—so befitting a psychological profile as to be trite—the legendarily incorrigible singer was a navy brat from the Florida coast by way of San Diego. The group’s start in the summer of ’65 couldn’t have been less auspicious. Playing dives like the London Fog, they were regarded with contempt by other musicians of a scene that wasn’t merely explosive but was the pop-cultural equivalent of a white dwarf star. Then they were dropped by their dream label, Columbia, before they recorded a note, and fired from their gig as house band at the Sunset Strip’s Whisky a Go Go for the singer’s declamations about having carnal relations with his mother. Two years later the Doors were the biggest band in America. They so dominated their moment that radio stations polling kids about their favorite group would stipulate two ground rules: You couldn’t vote for the Beatles, and you couldn’t vote for the Doors.

Radio was more prescient than it knew or cared. Not long ago, driving back and forth across the Bay Bridge from his home in Berkeley to his ailing father in San Francisco, Greil Marcus noticed—as he recounts in his fine new book, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years—that the Doors were the one classic group besides the Beatles he could count on hearing daily. As this past summer drew to a close and I chauffeured my kid to the Santa Monica Pier one more time, the twentysomething Latino parking attendant taking my money approvingly cried, “The Doors!” when he heard my CD player, and I couldn’t help musing how it is that four surrealists who last recorded together four decades ago and were more influenced by Blake, Rimbaud, and Céline than by Elvis, Chuck Berry, and James Brown somehow have endured as the people’s band. L.A.’s dark response to the Beach Boys, the Doors looked to drive off a high cliff into the sea and wipe out a surfer or two on the way to a watery and ecstatic oblivion. Four minutes and 19 seconds stood between the Doors and immortality. These are the minutes a desperate record company dropped from the middle of “Light My Fire,” the seven-minute centerpiece of the debut album that was sinking into its own oblivion when the leadoff single, “Break on Through,” failed to break on through to Billboard’s Top 100. Suddenly a Dionysian dirge was a hit single, snatching the Doors from a doomed destiny as cult figures. Among other things, the Doors were the best example since Presley of how in late 20th-century America, things sometimes happened fast.

I might add now that as the parking guy was cheering my taste, my 13-year-old—considered by his homies suspiciously retro for wearing a T-shirt with somebody as Dawn of Man as the 39-year-old Eminem—snorted from the backseat, “Hippie music.” As well, a couple of years ago I was talking to a smart young critic who was shocked by any advocacy for the Doors: slick frauds, in his view, compared with contemporaries like Love, whose own destiny as cult figures was less doomed than exalted. Decades ago Marcus himself argued that, creatively speaking, the debut was as far as the band got; it’s not always clear whether his new book revises that opinion or elaborates on it. When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them. In that ’67 summer of love and peace, a band so brazenly about sex and death was pretty compelling; compared with how the Doors evoked the forbidden, the Rolling Stones sounded adolescent. The vanguard was bound to embrace the Doors right up until the moment it was bound to reject them, when the new music seemed drowning in pretensions inspired by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and when the sex-and-death guys didn’t have the cachet that the Beatles and Dylan had earned. Blake? Rimbaud? The same critical establishment that would esteem the likes of the Stooges, Patti Smith, Joy Division, and X (none of whom would have existed without the Doors) has had trouble finding its bearings about the prototype ever since, because the Doors understood intuitively what eludes many critics, which is that authenticity is the enemy of audacity.

*****

The best measure of this is that it’s taken someone four decades to write Marcus’s book. Published on the anniversary of the band’s last album and its singer’s death in Paris, the book comes to grips with the Doors without being derailed by the legacy of the egomaniac behind the microphone. It’s a toss-up whether Jim Morrison’s “reputation” as a “poet” helped or hurt the band more; that I’ve put both words in quotation marks tells you how I feel. In a commentary on the DVD of Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie,The Doors, of which only three people on the planet can certifiably be called fans (Stone, Marcus, and me), somebody sneers that Morrison wasn’t just a rock star but an artiste. In fact this gets things backward. Being a rock star was what Morrison was good at. He had a presence that promised sensual derangement and for which women would abandon all virtue; the first major rock vocalist of the time not trying to sound black, British, or like Dylan—in later interviews he confessed his admiration for Frank Sinatra, an influence that makes sense as soon as you become aware of it—he had a voice that floated over a nocturnal soundscape empty of bass and full of space. But Morrison swallowed the Doors’ identity whole, and one of the decade’s half dozen most important American bands became forever mired in assessments of the singer as either a puerile poseur or the shaman savant about whom keyboardist and keeper of the flame Ray Manzarek presumably will continue to proselytize until not a penny is left to be made from the proposition.

If the Doors were the conspicuous anarchists among reigning L.A. utopians like the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, nonetheless L.A. is what’s missing from Marcus’s book. When he connects the band to L.A. at all, it’s as a prophecy of Charles Manson’s roving midnight slaughters—not unreasonable but reduc-tive—and tellingly Marcus identifies the Doors as the utopians, because he views bloody apocalypse as a more likely utopian outcome than bucolic idealism. Naturally he’s disposed to see the band not only in the national terms by which he came to hear it, but also in the terms that have come to define Marcus as a critic. A founding writer of Rolling Stone, Marcus, in the mid-’70s, abandoned the reviewer’s traditional mandate as consumer adviser and/or opinion spouter to tell the story of a country where the Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional within weeks of a 19-year-old Memphis truck driver’s mash-up of black gospel, rhythm and blues, white hillbilly music, and the Tin Pan Alley pop of Dean Martin. Marcus is America’s greatest living cultural observer because he’s less interested in whether a CD or movie is “good” or “bad” than what it contributes to a larger picture; from his 1975 book, Mystery Train, to The Old, Weird America in ’97 toThe Shape of Things to Come in ’06, Marcus has constructed a grand and haunted American narrative, roping in European dadaists in the process (1989’s Lip-stick Traces) and revealing entire molecular universes in the blood drop of a single song. His passage on “Light My Fire” is the best ever written about a record that most people barely can hear in an old way anymore let alone a new one. I met Marcus 20 years ago after he reviewed a novel of mine as “a failure worth more than other people’s successes”—not exactly a blurb for the paperback but a quintessentially Marcusian formulation that, having read Marcus as long as I had, I accepted as criticism worth more than other people’s flattery.

It’s also quintessentially Marcusian that he ends the band’s story where he begins, in the middle. The familiar rags-to-riches arc behind them, by 1970 the Doors were trying to crawl out from under their own ruins, Morrison having long passed the demilitarized zone of the increasingly erratic into the enemy territory of the abjectly self-destructive, culminating in his arrest for exposing himself onstage in Miami. Befitting trite psychological profiles, this happened in the graveyard of his childhood, if it happened at all, which, posthumous pardons by the governor of Florida aside, isn’t clear. As in his oedipal allegory “The End,” about a new generation raping and killing off the one that preceded it, Morrison seemed to yearn for his own end, and the band—unable to get a gig anymore and still ostracized by the same music community that years earlier had pointedly uninvited them to the Monterey Pop Festival, before the Doors rendered most of those who did attend irrelevant—assumed a final incarnation as disciples of the blues they had always loved. At that point the band was carrying the singer, though in fact it had always carried Morrison more than the audience understood: “The End” would be a shambles without Robby Krieger’s guitar and John Densmore’s drums. Marcus, who has little use for the exoticism of albums like Waiting for the Sun or fitful attempts like “Touch Me” to find a new psychedelic language, clearly is moved by the heroism of a band resolved to retreat from audacity into what they hoped and believed was something more authentic. For me, irresistible radio fodder as they may be, and certainly more than the “hippie music” that invites my son’s scorn, “Roadhouse Blues” and “L.A. Woman” could have been recorded by any other band. No one else could have recorded “Strange Days” or “The Crystal Ship,” the latter of which should have ended their first album because its coda expresses the Doors’ enigmas more exquisitely in two-and-a-half minutes than “The End” does in 12. As a more conventional band, the Doors flickered a while longer, glimpsing in the flames who they once were before being consumed by the fires that they themselves lit.

ALSO: Read our Author Spotlight Q&A with Greil Marcus

School of Thought

By Kate Wolf — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Illustration by Viktor Koen

“Language is data,” says Joseph Mosconi as he begins his lecture. “The meaning doesn’t matter.”

Mostly in their midtwenties to early thirties, the students look younger. Fresh faced and dressed in an easy style—some wear tennis shoes, others high-heeled boots—they sit rapt in a circle with notebooks on their laps. If not for the soft hum of an ice machine and the strains of New Orleans jazz wafting from the cocktail lounge below, they could be in a grad school classroom. Instead they’re upstairs at the Mountain Bar, the hipster watering hole on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown whose dimly lit, bloodred interior sports voluptuous light fixtures shaped like lotus blossoms.

As Mosconi, a poet and linguist who works for Google, talks about the rigors of his previous job—creating lexicons for semantic text processing and online advertising—and how that “work-work” bears on his creative process, Piero Golia meanders in and out of the room a few times before flopping onto a low black couch. A well-known conceptual artist, he is one of the cofounders of the Mountain School of Arts, the institution—if that’s an apt term for an enterprise housed in a bar—that has made Mosconi’s lecture possible. Golia is not your typical administrator, however, and this is not your typical art school.

The 13 students present are in week two of a nonaccredited, tuition-free program that is driven only by the teachers’ and students’ desire to take part. Though its curriculum is unstructured, with no course description or syllabus in sight, an average three-month session could include nude-figure drawing with Italian contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft, a talk by conceptual artist Dan Graham, an overnight field trip to Joshua Tree National Park to visit the “High Desert Test Sites” of sculptor and installation artist Andrea Zittel, a visit from dancer Simone Forti, and a performance by punk bassist Mike Watt. There’s just one thing these art students won’t get to do. “At the Mountain,” says artist Eric Wesley, the school’s other cofounder, “you don’t make art.”

*****

Part cultural salon, part grown-up summer camp, and perhaps—though Golia and Wesley deny it—part agitprop, the Mountain School of Arts has convened every January through March for the past five years. Twice a week during that time, 12 to 15 students gather at the Mountain Bar to consider science, philosophy, and cultural criticism. The setting is at once high- and lowbrow: The bar, the former home of Chinatown’s oldest restaurant, General Lee’s, has been renovated by the owners, artist Jorge Pardo and gallery owner Steve Hansen. (Hansen recently moved his China Art Objects Gallery, which helped reestablish Chung King Road as a destination, to Culver City.) The students, meanwhile, are culled from more than 100 applicants, some from as far away as London and Milan. They are mostly visual artists, writers, and curators or occasionally all three. But what students do outside the bar is largely beside the point, since the emphasis is not on their work. Those who wish to be considered for enrollment apply about six months before classes begin, submitting only a one-page application and a short autobiographical essay. Those who are admitted receive little advance information on courses or scheduling. After they complete the program, they receive no degree.

Because of its abstract nature it is tempting to think of the venture—whose acronym (MSA^) is adorned with a diacritical mark that’s intended to evoke a mountain peak—as more of a commentary on an art school than a school in its own right. When asked to describe the place, Wesley responds with something that seems intentionally opaque: “The Mountain School really borders on being elitist and populist. I consider myself both those things.” Though his statement poses a paradox, Wesley’s not wrong. Anybody can apply, regardless of pedigree or credentials or work sample. Once enrolled, students have a chance to meet some of the foremost artists in the world. Billed on its Web site, themountainschool
ofarts.org, as an “amendment to the university system,” this experiment—or is it more of a jab at graduate school hype?—nevertheless has a lot in common with the MFA programs it seeks to satirize or supplement. Much of the reading material is the same, and the classes are discussion based and mainly led by artists without much teaching experience.

Los Angeles is home to some of the best arts-related graduate programs in the country, boasting heavyweights like UCLA and USC, CalArts and Art Center, as well as a host of alternative educational offerings such as the Public School, Machine Project, and the former Sundown Schoolhouse. Many of these were predicated on the idea that you can teach someone to make better art. The Mountain School founders seem to disagree, stressing that if you can’t teach creativity, at least you can provide people an outlet, a way to be involved in the culture—without burdening them with a lifetime of student loans.

That’s more or less how Golia and Wesley sold the idea to the bar’s owners. The school’s purpose seems aligned with a 1960s alternative education model, while its name recalls the famous Black Mountain College, the North Carolina program initiated in the ’30s that made the study of art central to a liberal arts education. But the Mountain School’s true spiritual forebear is, according to its founders, the Italian Renaissance. Golia, who is 36, with a thick black beard, an ever-present baseball cap, and a single diamond embedded in his front tooth, has a background in chemical engineering. He came to L.A. from Naples via New York nine years ago, bringing a certain romanticism with him. Wesley, a 37-year-old part-time instructor at Otis College of Art and Design, grew up in Los Angeles and has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Biennial. His deadpan delivery would make him intimidating but for the sailor hat he often wears while brooding at the bar. Both he and Golia talk about artists as “knights questing for the Grail” and “fighter pilots.” This bravado mixes with humor in their art. A new work by Golia, installed last spring at the Standard hotel in West Hollywood, features a large white sphere on top of the building that lights up only when he’s in town. A recent show of Wesley’s at Bortolami Gallery in New York centered on riffs on the geometric ideas of René Descartes, including golf-cart-like sculptures titled D’Carts Blanche.

Once you hear this you can’t help wondering: Is the Mountain School just an elaborate performance art piece? Or worse, a vanity project? Golia and Wesley say no to both questions and maintain that it’s not about them at all. Responsibility is shared among the many participants. The shifting ranks of the school’s teachers create their own curricula, while administrative duties fall largely on “Lawrence,” a position held by a different person each year whose name remains the same no matter who’s filling it, male or female. Lawrence helps Golia and Wesley sift through applications and find the right balance for each incoming class.

It’s no surprise that a program this anarchic has detractors. In a recent article in the art magazine Frieze, an ex-student writes “…[the Mountain School’s] lack of academic accreditation and agenda might convince you it’s either a hoax or out to hammer the question: ‘How do you form a school that provokes the idea of a school?’ But MSA^ isn’t parodic; it’s just free. And, being free, the big joke is that you get what you pay for.”

*****

Amid a terrible downpour one afternoon, a group of students has gathered in Golia’s living room at his house in the Hollywood Hills. Visible through the balcony window are stilt houses jutting out of the freshly green hills and the lights from Universal City punctuating the gray afternoon with a bright lemon and emerald glow. As more students straggle in, Golia looks nervous. He is waiting for Thomas Demand, the internationally celebrated photographer, to show up for lunch.

A student named Tristan arrives, having traversed the hill from the Hollywood and Highland subway stop, a good two miles away, on foot. “I’m an Englishman; I’m not bothered by the rain,” he says as Golia fidgets, glancing at the clock. Just when it seems that the guest of honor has lost his way, he appears.

In town from Berlin to speak that night at the Hammer Museum and due to leave for Houston the next morning, Demand was only available to talk to the students over lunch. Golia regards the meal, which he’s hosting at his home because it’s more conveniently located than the bar, as a teachable moment for the students. “I want them to see that artists are normal people—they eat lunch, too,” he says in his mellifluous Neapolitan accent.

After Demand retrieves his laptop from his car, the students huddle around the table as he whips through images from his most recent exhibition, Nationalgalerie, at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In a low and calm voice he explains the show, its hanging (constructed photos on thick wool curtains), his collaborator (the famous recluse writer Botho Strauss), and the topic (Germany). Once he finishes, Golia serves some pizza, salad, and eggplant that he prepared himself.

Between bites Demand discusses a lecture series he arranged in conjunction with his exhibition titled How German Is It? that included such speakers as architect Rem Koolhaas, BMW chief designer Adrian van Hooydonk, and Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen. Demand notes that the dialogue addressed everything from German politics to film but never his artwork. The students nod. It sounds a little like the Mountain School.

John Morace, a contemporary art collector and former New York businessman, became a Mountain School instructor in 2005, soon after it opened, when Steve Hansen, who also teaches at the school, invited him to discuss a mannerist painting,Poppaea Sabina, that he had in his collection. Back then, Morace recalls, “people would get the nights wrong, and the doors of the bar would be locked. Or we’d hang out until four in the morning.” Today, he says, the school is more organized, but “the spirit’s the same.”

Another teacher is Richard Jackson, a world-renowned artist who came to Los Angeles 40 years ago and was a contemporary of Ed Kienholz and Bruce Nauman. Often referred to as a neodadaist, Jackson has taught art at UCLA, where Wesley was among his students, but his class at the Mountain School is more pragmatic than the standard survey course. It focuses primarily on the difficulties faced by working L.A. artists who are past midcareer and who often toil without institutional recognition or reward.

“The school’s a little bit about that,” says Jackson, referring to the sacrifices artists make. “If you’re not going to get anything for it, why the hell are you paying so much for it?” he asks, referring to MFA programs. As for why he donates his time to the Mountain School, he says, “I guess that because my experience of school wasn’t very good, I want to change it to make it better, and I have a different take on how people learn.”

So what do students glean from their experience? Connections to L.A.’s artistic network and a chance to make friends, find collaborators, and gain allies. “Mountain School is the basis of my L.A. community,” says artist and alumnus Emily Mast. Another student, who wants to be identified only as Daniel (the pupils here seem to value their privacy), explains his choice to attend this way: “For some people, it’s kind of like school, and other people treat it like a residency.” He heard about the program through friends and was already living in L.A. when he applied. “For the people who come from out of state, it’s a reason to be in Los Angeles for a while,” he says. “It’s loosely academic. It’s nice to have a reason to do some reading and thinking. I got a lot out of it.”

Back at Mountain Bar on another evening, artist Channing Hansen is giving an introductory lecture on the history of science, declaring Isaac Newton “an occult nut job who sniffed way too much mercury.” He goes on to cite lesser-known female scientists he admires (Ada Lovelace, émilie du Châtelet). When class lets out onto Gin Ling Way, everyone is smoking cigarettes and making plans to get dinner. Golia advises students from out of town not to drink and drive, to call if they need something, and to keep an eye out for a list he will soon be sending of all the openings and events happening that weekend. If they have any problems, they should ask him for help, he adds. “But seriously, don’t ask for too much,” he says, half joking. “We don’t have that much to offer.”

The Naughty Potter

By Christa Faust — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles magazine, October 2010

I was at a cocktail party in a downtown loft hosted by my friend Jane Wiedlin when I saw it. There on a shelf was a simple barrel-shaped mug with a peachy beige glaze. What caught my eye was the handle—a nude female figure, bent over, back arched, legs open, hands buried in a wild, curly spill of hair that obscured her face. Her body language was nothing like the calculated come-hither of a professional model or a burlesque queen. She seemed utterly unselfconscious, as if caught in a moment of private, primal ecstasy. There was something graceful, fluid, and intensely feminine about her pose, as if it were intended not just to titillate but to celebrate the natural beauty of the female form.

“Look at how streamlined the figure is,” Jane said. “You can practically see the woman moving. That’s a Dorothy Kindell.”

Best known as a singer and songwriter for the Go-Go’s, Jane has been collecting midcentury lowbrow girlie art for years, which makes sense. If anyone was going to have a cache of naughty ’50s barware—cartoony caricatures of female sexuality known as “Nudie Cuties”—it would be Jane. While she and I have been friends for nearly a decade, we had never talked about her Dorothy Kindell fixation. Jane told me she’d been a fan of the potter since the mid-’90s, when she found a set of six mugs on eBay that depicted a woman stripping. The vessels were “progressive,” in that the figure started off clothed in the first and ended up naked in the last, tumbling headfirst into the cup. The seller described the items as “looking like a Dorothy Kindell set.” Jane, who considered herself pretty knowledgeable about the genre, hadn’t heard of Kindell. “I immediately became obsessed,” she told me. Soon I would be obsessed, too.

I ?write for money—hard-boiled crime fiction but also novelizations of popular movies like Snakes on a Plane. Even before I began doing that for a living, though, I believed in the significance of throwaway pop culture. If you ask me, to understand the zeitgeist of an era, you shouldn’t bother analyzing highbrow art and the self-important stylings of literary masters. Check out the cheap stuff. The kitsch. The quick-and-dirty dime novels, the trashy vintage paperbacks. Because in the process of trying to pay the bills, pulp writers and artists often tell it like it is. Their deadlines don’t give them time for a lot of phony posturing, and as a result, their work tends to reflect how people really are rather than how they want to be perceived.

Much of my work falls into this category. So does Jane’s. To us, just because something is commercial doesn’t mean it can’t be artistic. Both of us have challenged traditional assessments of who can work in particular mediums. Jane was one of the first self-made female rock stars. Unlike many earlier iconic girl groups, who sang songs written by men and were backed up by male musicians, the Go-Go’s wrote every one of their chart-topping hits. These days Jane continues to make a name for herself in what was long considered a man’s world—comic books—with her latest creation, the sci-fi series Lady Robotika.

Similarly I’ve tried in my fiction to take the standard clichés of tough guys and femmes fatales and turn them inside out. My heroine is Angel Dare, a former porn star who, after being raped and left for dead, goes on a quest for vengeance against the men who hurt her. Far from some kick-ass male fantasy, she’s a realistic, middle-aged woman with flaws and strengths who fights back the only way she knows how.

I guess what I’m saying is that long before Jane introduced me to Dorothy Kindell, the stage was set for me to love her. Getting to know her, however, would prove more difficult. Few of the vendors who sold her work seemed to know much about her, other than that she’d lived and worked in Laguna Beach in the 1940s and ’50s producing what is known as “art ware”: decorative collectible figures, including exotic dancers and sexy naked women like the ones in Jane’s collection. As I browsed the images, I noticed that Kindell’s most alluring nudes all had their faces hidden—just as the artist herself remained hidden from casual inquiry.

Other projects came and went, but I couldn’t get Kindell out of my mind. Jane and I talked about her a lot. Our discussions veered from art and sexuality to mortality—and leaving a legacy. Who was this woman who created such erotically charged figures during a time when women were primarily homemakers, actively discouraged from exploring their sexuality? Why had she been largely forgotten? It was Jane’s idea to try to find out.

*****

Robin Donner is the founder and administrator of the Web site DorothyKindell.com. He learned of Kindell from his wife, who discovered her in the mid-’90s. But it wasn’t until he acquired his first Kindells, a pair of Balinese dancer lamps, that Donner became smitten. “Her pieces are unique, high quality, and often whimsical,” he told me. “They are also not abundant, which makes collecting her work a fun challenge.” His collection includes nearly 200 Kindell pieces. He has six favorites: a sequential set of mugs that depicts, in Donner’s words, “an American soldier stationed in France after the war hooking up with a lady of the evening and then dodging the police.” It is worth as much as $1,300.

Donner confessed that he knew little about the woman behind the ceramic babes, but he wanted to help. He sent Jane and me xeroxed copies of some ads for Kindell’s work, which winkingly described her figures as having “eye appeal.” A 1956 ad was for a six-piece stripper set like the one that had seduced Jane. Each cup in the “action parade,” as the ad called it, had a name: Invitation. Fascination. Agitation. Meditation. Exhilaration. Intoxication. “They sell on sight!” the ad read. A 1951 ad for “The Beachcombers,” an ashtray featuring two pairs of nude legs sticking out from under an oversize sombrero, read: “Remember, in ceramics…if it has ‘Eye Appeal,’ it’s from Dorothy Kindell.”

The most surprising detail? These ads were not featured in men’s magazines. They appeared in ordinary design catalogs and home decorating journals alongside unremarkable vases and ashtrays. In other words, they were aimed not at fine-art collectors but at housewives looking for something fun and frivolous for the knickknack shelf. The ads were enlightening, but they weren’t much to go on. Then Donner mentioned that Kindell had two daughters, both in their eighties. Rumor had it that they were “very secretive,” he said. He did not know how to contact either one.

*****

My next stop was Bill Stern, the author of California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism and executive director of the Museum of California Design. “Kindell developed an industry-wide reputation for her distinctive, irreverent figural ceramics,” he explained. Her dancers were unlike the fine-art nudes of Beatrice Wood. Her playful barware had nothing in common with the practical cups and dishes by Edith Heath. Some male artists in Laguna Beach produced the occasional topless hula girl, but their pieces lacked the fierce sensuality of Kindell’s.

Like Donner, Stern could tell us next to nothing about Kindell’s life. But he did possess one piece of the puzzle, the address of her original Laguna Beach studio: 1920 South Coast Highway. I drove. Jane rode shotgun. Big band swing burbled from the radio as we speculated about what sort of revelations might await us. What sort of person would Kindell turn out to be? A rebel flying in the face of the June Cleaver standard for appropriate female conduct? A seemingly meek conformist living out her fantasies through her artwork? An unapologetic protofeminist pioneer?

“Best-case scenario?” Jane said. “We find someone who actually knew her, someone with a personal connection. Maybe a neighbor or a friend of the family.”

We let our hopes run wild, envisioning a wise museum curator with a vast, lovingly preserved collection of Kindells, or maybe a bespectacled librarian whose meticulously organized files would be overflowing with heretofore unknown biographical details. We imagined that we’d feel a deep connection to Kindell just from standing on her street, walking through her town, and looking out at the same stretch of ocean that she would have seen when she was working on her pottery. Most of the outside world might have forgotten her, but surely there’d be someone in her hometown who would remember.

You know what’s coming: None of the people we talked to at the museum, the library, or the historical society had heard of Kindell. We were able to dig up some addresses and numbers from old phone books, and we found her listed as a participating artist in programs for the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, an annual art festival that started in 1932. Other than that, it was as if Kindell were a ghost. Even when we saw the two-story Spanish-style building that used to be Kindell’s studio—it was now home to a flooring company—we couldn’t muster any joy. We were so close, it was hard to admit we were coming up empty.

*****

Back in Los Angeles, a search of the newspaper archive at the L.A. Public Library yielded a 1937 photo of Dorothy Kindell and two of her three young children participating in Laguna’s Pageant of the Masters. They were in 17th-century Dutch costume, posed in an imitation of a painting called Grace Before Meat by Jan Steen. The names in the photo caption also appeared on a genealogy Web site I came across.

What I’d found was the family tree of an 82-year-old woman named June Kindell Applegate. Suddenly with a few clicks, the barest outlines of Dorothy Kindell’s life were revealed. Dorothy was born Dorothy Mae Pemberton on April 5, 1909, in Whittier, California. In 1926, she married William Marion Kindell in Hemet, and a year later their first child, June Pauline Kindell, was born in Laguna Beach. Her sister, Phyllis Darlene Kindell, was born two years later. Dorothy gave birth to a third child, William Jr., known as Billy, in 1933. She wound up dying less than three decades later, in 1961, in Redmond, Oregon. By then her husband and Billy were dead as well, leaving only her two daughters behind. June had listed her address and phone number in Port St. Lucie, Florida, on the genealogy Web site. I wrote them down on a pad on my desk. Then I stared at them for several days.

I can think of few things I hate more than being cold-called by random people I don’t know, so I dreaded the thought of becoming a random caller. I dialed June anyway. As I introduced myself, I was nervous, talking a mile a minute, fearing she might hang up on me. When I finished, there was a long silence on the other end of the line. “This is really a lot to take in,” she told me. I asked if I could telephone her again, once she’d had a chance to think. There was another long silence before June gave me a time to call her back.

The next weekend, on the appointed day, I went over to Jane’s and we sat around drinking coffee and honing a list of questions for June. But when June answered the phone, she had some questions of her own. “Are you the same Christa Faust I found on Amazon?” she asked. “The crime writer?” I was. “Why are you doing this?” she wanted to know. I explained my admiration for Kindell pottery and my confusion over why her mother had not been more celebrated as an artist.

June seemed satisfied, but she refused to allow me to record our conversation and didn’t want to answer any in-depth questions. I asked if she’d be willing to e-mail me answers. She agreed and told me that she’d pass my number along to Kindell’s granddaughter Kathe Nielsen, who was working on a catalog of Kindell pottery.

I e-mailed June my questions. No reply. So a few days later I called a third time. Turns out she had lost my e-mail message. But there was more to it than that: Answering questions about her mother was overwhelming, June told me, though she didn’t say why. Was she wary of letting someone else describe her mother’s work? Was she worried that I would characterize the subject matter in a prurient way? All June said was that she didn’t feel up to it. A week later my phone rang, a Florida number on the display. “It’s June Applegate,” she said. “Have you got a minute?”

*****

Dorothy Kindell’s most active years as an artist were during World War II, which put her smack in the middle of the era best known for Varga Girls and morale-boosting USO cuties. Like Rosie the Riveter, the image of can-do womanhood that was popular at the time, Dorothy went to work out of necessity. Her husband was a plumber whose bum leg had kept him out of the military. Because the materials needed for his plumbing business were diverted to the war effort, the family had to rely on Dorothy’s income. While William helped his wife with her business, fixing kilns and the like, the designs were all Dorothy’s.

June told me parts of this. Her 81-year-old sister, Phyllis, told me some, too. Phyllis’s daughter Kathe filled in a few gaps. I felt like Jane and I had hit the mother lode.

The picture that emerged of Dorothy was of a no-nonsense businesswoman. She attended weekly church services with her family, was a respected member of the community, and even had a credit card when it was almost unheard of for a woman to have a credit card in her own name.

Dorothy often joked that she started the ceramic studio “because June needed braces.” June, meanwhile, was at first uncomfortable with her mother’s subject matter. As a teenager, June told me, she expressed her embarrassment about the sexiest figures. Dorothy replied, “A woman’s body is completely natural and nothing to be ashamed of.”

Dorothy treated her workers, mostly women, in the studio like family and hosted Fourth of July parties for them every year. The business flourished, and Dorothy saved enough money to retire to a horse ranch. But she barely had a chance to enjoy retirement. Dorothy was diabetic in a time when there weren’t many options for treatment. In 1961, a few years after closing her shop, Dorothy Kindell died. She was 52, the same age Jane is now.

The more I got to know Dorothy, the more I felt as if I’d pushed back the tousled hair and revealed the face beneath. It was a face I recognized, a face not so different from my own. She brought a soulful heart to her ceramics that transcended the pop culture idiom in which she worked. Dorothy had become a kind of muse to Jane and me. If Dorothy could be forgotten, so could any one of our pulp and pop culture heroes. So could Jane. So could I. Somehow by remembering her, we were protecting ourselves.

As our search came to an end, I realized I needed something more. Trawling on eBay, I found one of Dorothy’s large pitchers, its handle a dancing woman in the nude. There was a chip in the spout and a fine, repaired crack, but the woman’s body was perfect. In mint condition a piece like this would fetch upwards of $1,200, way beyond my budget. But this one I could afford. She appealed to me, this ceramic lady who’d seen better days but was still sexy. How great it would be to have my own small piece of Dorothy, I thought, to share that kind of tangible connection. I put in the only bid. And I won.

Christa Faust wrote about women in crime fiction in the December 2009 issue.

Photograph by Mindee Choi

Hecho in El Lay

By Josh Kun — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles magazine, September 2010

When Sergio and Francisco Gómez were teenagers in South Los Angeles in the early 1990s, they lived across the street from a drug house. Watching the dealers from the windows of the small apartment they shared with their factory worker mother, they received a firsthand lesson in the finer points of the rock cocaine trade. But the drugs never interested the two brothers, who came to L.A. from Michoacán, Mexico, as young kids in the late ’70s. They were more drawn to the music booming from the car that seemed permanently parked in front of the house.

“They would bump hip-hop all night long,” says Francisco. “They always had their windows rolled down so the whole block could hear it. That’s when we first heard rappers like Toddy Tee and King Tee. It became the model of how music should be for us. We wanted to sound like those guys.”

These days Sergio, who is 36, lives in Moreno Valley; Francisco, two years his junior, lives in Diamond Bar. But on this sun-soaked afternoon they’re back on their childhood turf, hanging out on the shady grounds of the L.A. Coliseum. It’s where they come to reconnect with their South L.A. past. When things would get too hectic at home, they’d escape to this spot on their bicycles and skateboards, occasionally ducking into the California Science Center. “This is a neutral zone for all the chaos around here,” says Francisco, who sports the same look—shaved head, pencil-thin mustache, and chin-strap goatee—as his brother. “It’s where we always felt safe. We’ve lived west of here and east of here, so this place holds it all together. It’s our center.”

Since 2003, the Gómez brothers have been rapping about their history as the hip-hop duo Akwid. Over the course of seven albums—two have gone platinum, three have gone gold, and four garnered Grammy nods—they’ve mixed the African American music they heard on the streets (hip-hop, funk, R&B) with the Mexican music they heard at home to create a distinctly local sound: laid-back West Coast rap layered on top of the Mexican brass band music known as banda. It’s a combination that speaks to the cross-cultural, binational realities of the millions of immigrant and first-generation Mexicans growing up in Los Angeles.

Their latest album, Clasificado R, may tackle some familiar Akwid themes—street drama, broken hearts—but at the core of its lyrics, sung mostly in Spanish, is the paisa. A slang term for paisano, or “countryman,” the word refers to working-class immigrants from Mexico. “I’m a paisa from Michoacán, and I’m proud of that,” they rap on the album’s centerpiece, “Esto es pa’ mis paisas” (“This Is for My Paisas”). “These clothes I’m wearing? I got them at the swap meet. That’s my culture, and I’ll never deny my roots.”

“If you are paisa, you might speak English or you might not,” says Sergio, stretching out on a bench behind Robert Graham’s statue of water polo star Terry Schroeder. “You might mismatch your clothes. You might not have a green card. You will listen to banda, but you might also listen to hip-hop. You might have a bald head, but you might also wear a cowboy hat.”

The brothers based “Paisas” on a song about Mexican Americans that had nothing to do with paisas: Chicano rapper Frost’s influential 1990 brown-pride anthem “La raza.” Rooted in black hip-hop, “La raza” was itself an adaptation of an earlier black-Latino crossover, “Viva tirado,” the 1970 cruising instrumental by the Mexican American funk-and-soul band El Chicano (a song originally composed by black L.A. jazz veteran Gerald Wilson). “People have been asking to cover my song for a long time, and I’ve always said no,” says Frost, who performs on Akwid’s version. “But their idea made sense, to make it a celebration of a new generation of Mexicans. We’re all the same big pot of menudo, and every now and then you need to add some new flavor.”

Akwid gave the song an updated map, moving its focus from East L.A., the city’s longtime capital of Mexican American life, to what have become the immigrant hubs of South L.A., Bell, and South Gate. “This paisa culture has been doing its thing for a long time but hasn’t been given a position to really say ‘This is who we are, and we are proud of it,’?” says Sergio. “That’s why Frost was OK with us changing up his song. We are not diminishing Chicanos. We’re just talking about it from the other side—the way L.A. looks through the eyes of a paisa.”

*****

When the Gómez brothers first called South L.A. home in the 1980s, it was still known as “South-Central” and was synonymous with black, not Mexican and Central American, life. They were part of a major demographic shift that fundamentally altered the area. After the exodus fueled by the 1980s Mexican economic crisis and the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (which provided amnesty for undocumented immigrants), once historically black communities like Watts and Compton became majority Latino.

The changes have produced all-too-familiar stories of black and Mexican conflict: competition over jobs, housing, and education; bitter battles over political representation in city government; and deadly struggles between black and Latino gangs over drug turf. Largely ignored was how, even amid the strife, the cultures were feeding into each other. “Sure, there are cases where you see tensions between black and Latino youth,” says Manuel Pastor, codirector of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. “But what you see most often is the borrowing that goes on between young people. Akwid are a perfect example of that.”

By the time Sergio and Francisco moved to 41st and Wall, they were hard-core fans of Compton hip-hop acts 2nd II None and DJ Quik. Emulating their idols, they started rapping in English and wearing their hair in braids. They called themselves Juvenile Style and played any party that would have them. “We were mimicking a lifestyle that we learned in the streets,” says Sergio. “We were copying what black artists were doing.”

Juvenile Style released two albums—1993’s Time 2 Expand and 1995’s Brewed in South Central—before their label folded. To get by as the band struggled, Sergio started working at McDonald’s and Bob’s Big Boy alongside Mexican migrants, and that’s when he experienced what he describes as an epiphany. “I started to think, Why are all the busboys Mexican?” he says. “Working with other Mexicans really woke me up to what it means to be Mexican in L.A. It woke me up to being paisa. I started to be reintroduced to my own culture.”

This was a time when radio stations playing banda music from the Mexican state of Sinaloa began to rule the L.A. dial, and the quebradita craze—quick-step dancing done to brass band music—swept through Mexican L.A. To look and sound paisa became the ultimate mark of cool. “I remember going to parties and seeing all these Mexican gangsters wearing sombreros,” says Francisco. “They got in their rides and bumped Dr. Dre and Eazy-E, but at the party they were dancing to banda.”

The turning point came in 1992 with the murder of Chalino Sanchez, a beloved Mexican corrido, or ballad, singer from Sinaloa. A onetime Coachella Valley migrant worker-turned-populist icon, Sanchez had a reputation for toughness and truth telling, and his death only made him more popular with young L.A. Mexicans in search of someone to identify with. “After Chalino, you could really start to see the impact of Mexican culture in L.A.,” says Francisco. “It was like suddenly it was OK to be Mexican. You became you. It’s comforting to be able to say ‘I don’t have to be embarrassed to be Mexican anymore.’ When we were kids, we’d get made fun of for speaking Spanish, for being or sounding too Mexican. In the ’90s, that all went away, and it was OK to start embracing it.”

The brothers eventually dissolved Juvenile Style and after a few years working for local technology companies, decided it was time to rethink their music. In 1999, they formed Akwid, a moniker that combines their nicknames, “AK” and “Wikid.” Their first single, “No hay manera” (“There’s No Way”), debuted in 2003, the brothers rapping in Spanish over brassy Mexican horns and snippets of a ’90s hit song from Mexican superstars Banda el Recodo.

“When you are raised around both black and Mexican communities,” says Sergio, “you are able to see both sides and have a wider perspective than if you were raised in just one. You don’t get stuck in one or the other.”

That duality is all over Clasificado R. Slick Rick’s hip-hop classic “Children’s Story” is given a banda makeover as “Por tus pujidos nos hallaron,” and Zapp’s ’80s funk staple “More Bounce to the Ounce” is laced with clarinets and tubas on “Luna llena.” For the album’s musical arrangements Akwid hired Antonio Lopez, a Mexico City banda performer who is based in Fontana and best known for his version of the rapper 50 Cent’s hit “P.I.M.P.”

“They knew I wasn’t the traditional Mexican arranger,” says Lopez. “I’m open to hip-hop. Mixing the two styles together is what
L.A. is all about.”

On Clasificado R’s first single, “California,” the Gómez brothers tried to come up with a new anthem for the California—and the
L.A.—that they believe too few are talking about. There may be obligatory shots of palm trees and bikini-covered beaches in the video, but the California they envision is built on the dreams of undocumented migrants—the mojados hechiceros, or “sorcerer wetbacks”—who root for the Dodgers and the Lakers.

Photograph by Sergio Alvarado

John Wooden

By Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (as told to Raymond Obstfeld) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles magazine, August 2010

The world will remember John Wooden most as one of the greatest basketball coaches in history. Future generations Googling his name will be presented with a long list of his amazing coaching accomplishments. But those of us who knew him personally, and were lucky enough to be coached by him, will remember him not just as a great coach who changed basketball but as a great man who changed our lives. He didn’t just teach us how to be the best athletes, he taught us how to become the best men we could be. His genius as a coach and mentor lies in the fact that we were hardly aware that these valuable life lessons were being taught. We didn’t realize that all the drills and all the practices and all the instruction were preparing us for the most important part of our lives—the part that came after basketball.

Two memories of Coach Wooden stick out in my mind because each represents a totally different side of him. The first happened when the UCLA team was on the road. We’d just finished dinner in the university dining hall and were walking out through the student union. There were several pool tables lined up. Mike Warren and Lucius Allen both fancied themselves as pool sharks. Mike even had his own customized pool cue. They started shooting around, showing off a little to the rest of us. Suddenly Coach Wooden grabs a cue from the wall and starts drilling balls into the pockets. Bam, bam, bam. Within a couple minutes, he’d run the whole table. We all watched in open-mouthed amazement as he set up elaborate trick shots straight out of The Hustler. When he finally finished his demonstration, I asked how he was able to do that. He grinned and said, “The result of misspent hours of my youth.” It was so hard for me to imagine this upright, pious man as a teenager hunkered over a pool table hustling the locals. ...

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Photograph courtesy coachwooden.com

The War Over Nixon

By Scott Martelle — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles magazine, July 2010

Tim Naftali thought docents at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum should be honest about the Watergate tapes. The docents, though, couldn’t talk about what they didn’t know. “I had docents come to me and say, ‘Is there anything incriminating on the tapes?’?” says Naftali, the library director. The tapes were so damaging to Richard M. Nixon that they were a reason he resigned as president of the United States. Naftali also thought the docents should come clean about the White House “plumbers,” the men behind the 1972 break-in to spy on Democratic National Committee headquarters, which helped bring Nixon down. “I had docents say, ‘What are the plumbers?’?”

So Naftali, a Cold War expert hired by the National Archives four years ago to convert the acolyte-run Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda into a federal research center, took what he thought was the best option. He stripped the docents of one of their favorite jobs—conducting student tours—and told them to know the facts and stick to them when they spoke to visitors. “I didn’t want them to say things that would give the impression that we are a legacy shop,” Naftali says. His decision angered the docents. “Some of them quit…. It’s been very intense. They have been very upset. They have written letters to get me fired, things like that.”

One docent openly called Naftali, who is gay, a “fag.” Ron Walker, who worked in the Nixon White House and now is Naftali’s counterpart at the nonprofit Richard Nixon Foundation that created the library, acknowledges that “coded actions” indicating Naftali’s sexual orientation had chilled his reception among some docents and guards. “Jokes behind the scenes are not helpful to anyone,” says Walker, adding that the docent’s name-calling was “unbelievable.” The docent resigned. Naftali, for his part, tries to downplay the incident as a singular expression of small-minded frustration amid a broad clash of cultures, sense of purpose, and historical perspective.

Such is the nature of détente at the Nixon library, where a fight still rages over how to portray the life and legacy of one of the nation’s most divisive politicians. It pits true believers, including some members of Nixon’s inner circle, against Naftali, a respected historian who was a 12-year-old Canadian schoolboy when the president left the White House for de facto exile at his estate in San Clemente. Naftali’s efforts to present Nixon’s history fully and accurately go public this month, when the National Archives launches the library and museum as a center offering unvarnished information about the president. It will be the first time since Nixon resigned in 1974 that his personal papers and his White House records, along with copies of the Watergate tapes, will be available under one roof. At the same time, the Richard Nixon Foundation, a new incarnation of the private organization that started the original Nixon Library & Birthplace in 1990, will mark its 20th anniversary with what it hopes will be a large commemoration. Befitting the strained détente, the celebrations will be held in separate parts of the same building. Naftali and the National Archives will be looking forward to serving visitors and researchers, and the foundation will be looking backward to honor its namesake.

*****

Now an American citizen, Naftali, who is a political independent, studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins before earning a doctorate in history at Harvard. He has written books about the Cold War and terrorism and worked on the 9/11 Commission. Lanky and dark haired, the West Hollywood resident favors slacks and open-necked shirts that make him seem more like a graduate student than a presidential librarian—another point of friction with some of the Nixon partisans. Walker, whose office is a short walk but a world away from Naftali’s, complains about a video in which Naftali welcomed visitors to the library wearing a brown suit and a T-shirt. “A green T-shirt,” Walker says. At the same time, Naftali is just as clear about his frustration with the partisans, especially among the docents. “Without creating a climate of disrespect,” he says, “I’m trying to move them to a position where, when they are in the museum, they work for the National Archives.” (Marg Garvey, president of the Docent Guild, declined a request for an interview.)

In some ways, these culture clashes are echoes from Nixon’s departure from office. After Nixon resigned ahead of his likely impeachment, Congress, fearing that he would destroy evidence, passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, barring him from taking his official papers with him. He was the only president to be so treated. After years of legal wrangling, Nixon’s estate accepted $18 million for the papers and tapes in 2000, and the National Archives kept the collection. It is one of the largest presidential archives: 4,000 video recordings, nearly 4,500 audio recordings, 30,000 gifts to Nixon from average Americans and foreign heads of state alike, 300,000 photographs, 2 million feet of film, 46 million pages of documents, and 3,700 hours of the infamous White House tapes.

By the time the Nixon estate signed off on the deal, his library was a decade old and the subject of running jokes because of displays that even Walker says presented skewed versions of crucial moments in the president’s career. The Watergate scandal, for instance, had been reduced to a single snippet of tape and dismissed as an overthrow perpetrated by Nixon’s political enemies (never mind that Nixon’s fellow Republicans were lining up to impeach him). Moreover, for serious scholars of the presidency, all the best Nixon material was still on the East Coast. The library’s collection on the West Coast was limited to his personal papers, dating before and after he became chief executive, and the papers of some of his friends.

In 1996, two years after Nixon died, John H. Taylor, then the library’s executive director and once Nixon’s post-White House chief of staff, wrested control of the complex from Nixon’s two daughters, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower. A board of directors took over, and eventually “the girls,” as Walker calls them, backed a decision to add the facility to the National Archives system of presidential repositories, which includes the Ronald Reagan library in Simi Valley. The benefits were twofold: This shifted costs to the federal government and removed a stigma by getting the Archives’ blessing. Today Nixon’s official papers and copies of his White House tapes are housed not far from his black marble grave. Only the original tapes, which are still being processed, remain in a federal facility in Maryland. Naftali says it makes more sense to leave them with their working team of archivists rather than try to persuade the team to move west.

The National Archives controls all of Nixon’s holdings and most of the Yorba Linda compound, which encompasses the library and display areas, the graves of Richard and Pat Nixon, and the helicopter in which they flew from the South Lawn of the White House on the first leg of their trip as outcasts to San Clemente. The Nixon Foundation retains control of its offices, the president’s birthplace, a reflecting pool, and a replica of the East Room of the White House, where it holds weddings, corporate receptions, and other events. Think of the facility as a duplex shared by two highly suspicious neighbors, each using the same foyer and elevator but then going their separate ways.

*****

Old habits?—and suspicions—?die hard. In March 2005, Taylor canceled an academic conference on Nixon and Vietnam that would have included such Nixon critics as Stanley I. Kutler and Richard Reeves. Taylor blamed a lack of advance commitments by academics and concern that the library would lose money. The academics read the last-minute decision as a refusal by Taylor and Nixon’s protectors to turn independent scholars loose on hallowed ground. (Taylor declined interview requests.) Some of them feared the incident signaled that Nixonian paranoia at the library might continue on into the National Archives era. But Naftali, who took over two years later, says the passions and anxieties have ebbed. “I knew how much anger there was among historians of the Nixon era about moving stuff here,” Naftali says, “and I’m really happy that we don’t see that anger anymore.”

Nixonians have less confidence. Taylor left the foundation in February 2009, and last summer Naftali asked John Dean to speak at the library. Dean is the former White House counsel whom old Nixon hands liken to Judas for revealing details of the Watergate scandal. “He’s a rat,” Walker says. For a while, the foundation suspended funding for some programs, forcing Naftali to scramble for cash. It was the invitation to Dean that prompted Walker, a former military man who directed Nixon’s arrangements for White House trips, to become the foundation president. Stocky and balding with a fringe of gray-white hair, Walker says he and Naftali get along better than Naftali and Taylor. “It got to be a war between them,” Walker says. Getting along better, however, does not mean agreeing completely. Walker thinks Naftali’s showdown with the docents revealed a lack of managerial savvy. “I could have taken those docents and wrapped them around my finger with just a little bit of humility,” Walker says. “But to push it in their face—taking the school tour away from them…”

Walker also is perturbed over gaps Naftali left behind in exhibits when he removed the truncated Watergate display and others he considered historically erroneous, including one that failed to say it was Ohio national guardsmen who fired on students during an antiwar demonstration at Kent State. Those decisions are Naftali’s to make, Walker says, but he chafes at the months it has taken Naftali, who has been shuttling back and forth to Washington to oversee the transfer of Nixon’s files, to put new exhibits into place. “I don’t like to see empty spaces,” ?Walker says. “That’s annoying. I don’t know whether he doesn’t have the ability, or the capability, or what’s going on.”

Naftali will offer the foundation an opportunity to comment on new Watergate exhibits before making them public later this summer. He shrugs off complaints. “I don’t take everything so seriously,” he says. “Because there are people who really, really care about this, they can be a bit nasty. Some people have this anger from that era. You have to be sensitive to that.”

At the same time, Naftali seems to relish symbols of the clash. During a private tour of the library, he walks to doors leading from the entry hall to a broad terrace. He points to the floor. On a doormat to the left is a new Naftali-approved logo that spells out N-I-X-O-N, so stylized that it could be a sticker on a surfboard. To the right, across an invisible line that separates most of the library from the foundation, the doormat is blank, a silent protest by the last vestiges of what Richard Nixon called his silent majority.

Scott Martelle is an Irvine-based journalist and author. His The Fear Within: Spies, Commies and American Democracy on Trial, is due this winter from Rutgers University Press.

Illustration by Tim Bower

City Center

By David Davis — Sat, 01 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Los Angeles magazine, May 2010

Goya would have painted him: Square jaw on a long neck, soulful eyes, the pilgrim’s beard. Even for professional basketball, Laker center Pau Gasol i Sáez is a giant, yet all seven feet of Barcelona’s pride and joy pirouettes with ease, and the arcing hooks and crafty jump shots come from left and right, confounding his defenders. He’s gone from prodigy to diplomat in his nine years with the NBA and has made friends with every Spaniard of note in Los Angeles, among them Plácido Domingo and Antonio Banderas. The Redondo Beach resident is especially close to José Andrés, the celebrity chef at West Hollywood’s the Bazaar and the only person he says has served him real paella since he arrived in L.A. two years ago in a surreal swap that sent brother Marc to Pau’s old team, the Memphis Grizzlies. In English and Spanish, Gasol talks about dreams of a championship repeat, on-court compadre Kobe, and the new girlfriend in his life.

What was it like to win the championship after eight seasons in the NBA?
The happiness and extreme satisfaction that we experienced last season is hard to describe. You go through a year so hard, so demanding, so exhausting both physically and mentally, and you finally get to win the whole thing. You feel a huge relief and a huge amount of happiness going through your body. It stays for a couple of weeks, actually. It’s beautiful.

As you go for consecutive NBA titles, what have you found to be the biggest challenge?
To stay focused as a team. The hunger that we had the year prior, from losing in the finals against Boston and then having that sense of urgency to get back there and win it, is gone. The teams that didn’t win it are hungry like we were.

In December you signed a three-year contract extension for what could amount to $65 million. Any extra pressure?
Not really. I’m just more thankful. The extension gives me much more confidence that the Lakers and the Buss family have deposited trust in me. I want to make sure I do my best to perform and deliver as much as possible, so I can return the investment on my end.

Growing up in Spain, how did you learn to play?
I was very skinny growing up, very weak for my age. My body was late in developing. I didn’t stop growing until I was 21. So I learned to play outside the paint. I played small forward, even point guard. Having that different perspective has helped me, as a big man, develop other skills to compete against bigger guys, stronger guys.

What have you done to change your game?
There’s definitely an adjustment you have to make when you come here because of the talent the players have. They’re the best of the best. You have to play harder, you have to play tougher, you have to play more physical than you are used to. When I got to the league, I weighed 227 pounds. Now I’m almost 260.

How did you bulk up?
I just worked hard. My metabolism also changed, and I worked on my diet, too. You add everything up—that is how I was able to gain weight and develop muscle.

How would you describe Kobe Bryant?
It’s very subjective, but you can say that he’s the best player in the world. He’s got tremendous will and determination. He carries you with his energy. He’s continuously working on his game. He wants to be better. He’s not content with what he’s got already, which is quite a bit.

Do you feel that you know him off the court?
I think I’ve gotten to know him more and more. It’s not like we get to spend a lot of time off the basketball court. He has his family and commitments, and so do I. It’s hard to develop more of a personal relationship, especially in a city like Los Angeles, where distances are pretty big.

You and Kobe are multilingual. Is it your secret weapon?
On certain plays we communicate in Spanish so the opponents won’t know the call.

Several times this season you said that the ball needs to come inside more. Was that a criticism of Kobe and the shoot-first mentality he falls into?
No. The way I see the game, and the way I see our team and the strengths that we have—we have a size advantage against 90 percent of the teams. So we have to utilize that. I’m a big believer of balance in life. In basketball it’s no different. We have to play with a balance between inside and outside. Working the ball inside out, everything becomes easier for everybody else. It’s a fundamental of the game that teams tend to forget.

Now that you’ve settled into L.A., what’s your favorite part about the city?
The best thing about Los Angeles is that it has a wonderful culinary scene. You have a lot of options. I really like Nobu—it’s marvelous. There’s a place in Marina del Rey that I like a lot, Café del Rey. The first six months I was here, I would eat dinner there almost every day. There’s a Manhattan Beach restaurant that I love. It’s Greek, called Petros.

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How did you meet José Andrés?
It was at a book presentation for Ferran Adrià [of the famed Spanish restaurant El Bulli] about a year and a half ago. Now we hang out. We’ve gone to a concert together. He’s come over to my house to cook, too. He cooked me a very rich paella.

You haven’t found a good paella here?
Well, no. I haven’t found where to get paellas like what I get in Spain. It’s a question of the water, the rice. I am not a cook, but it’s about the ingredients.

When you go to the Bazaar, what do you order?
They’ll cook me things that are not on the menu. There’s a Spanish tortilla that they make that is spectacular. They have an ample variety of tapas—you know, a little bit of ham with bread and tomato.

But how much foam can a person eat?
There’s a lot of foam, yes. It’s really light. It’s not for everybody, foam. It looks like one thing, but it tastes completely different.

Your friendship with L.A. Opera general director Plácido Domingo seems out of the norm, unless you’ve been an opera fan all along.
He sent a welcome card when I was traded to L.A. and asked if one day I would want to attend the opera. The opera had always interested me, but I had never had the opportunity to go. The first opera I went to was Tosca, which I liked a lot. It encouraged me to see six or seven or eight more in two years.

Domingo is known to be athletic. Do you think he might come to you for basketball tips?
That would be interesting. Like if he were to teach me to sing.

Do you sing?
I’ve liked to since I was little. And piano. With my basketball and studies, I couldn’t continue. But yes, I like to sing.

You seem to be at the center of a Spanish cultural club. Coach Phil Jackson, who hands out books every year, gave you Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.
The author spent a big part of his life in Spain, and a few characters in the book are from Spain. Coach told me that once I was done with it, he wanted to read it. I’m halfway into it, so he’s going to have to wait.

OK—Barcelona versus L.A.?
Barcelona is a more compact city. Los Angeles is sprawling. But both places are on the coast with a lot of cultural variety. Barcelona, of course, has more history.

Your new girlfriend, professional cheerleader Silvia López Castro, is also Spanish, right?
Well, my personal life is a subject that I almost never like to talk about. But it’s true that I’m in something beautiful with a very special person. In my professional sports life it’s very difficult to coordinate and maintain a stable relationship. And well, I hope to with this one. It doesn’t matter how high you get—unless you can share it with someone special, it doesn’t have much significance. And to find that person is very difficult, and difficult under the circumstances to maintain, but when you meet that person, it’s worth it.

You’re obviously a calm person, but at times on the court it appears as if you’re close to the boiling point. It is an emotional game. We challenge people, and we are being challenged every single game. The emotions get going, and that is just the reaction going through your body.

Researcher Ashley Alvarado contributed to this story.

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Photograph by Dustin Snipes