After getting the Sportster back in our garage, Richelle and I headed out and about in LA.
First stop: Langer’s Deli. Langers is a landmark, and not for the weak in appetite. It’s famous for the #19, a daunting pastrami on rye slathered in slaw.
My sister-in-law taught me that the better sandwich is the pastrami Ruben with Swiss. It’s the kind of meal that leaves you a little stunned, the Speed Cannon of lunches. Richelle wisely went for an omelette and left some on her plate.
From Langer’s, we headed to MOCA—the Museum of Contemporary Art. The standing collection is largely of mid-century abstract expressionists. My favorite room holds three enormous canvases by Mark Rothko from the sixties. I put my best picture of them on the Moto Blog page.
There’s a lot of alienation in those paintings—a complete turning away from realism. But there is hope in that turn, and the result is a joyous amount of color that is quite emotionally wealthy—warm and rich, so powerful that to me it fills the room not just with color but with sound.
A close second favorite for this visit was Mark Bradford’s 2012 “I Will Vent My Anger in Terrifying Books”—an enormous piece assembled of layered paper.
I tried to capture the layering in a close up, and if you squint in you might see the the torn and curled ends of the various pieces that make up the whole. The effect, I found, wasn’t the venting of anger promised by the title, but a palimpsest of color and texture crosscut by age.
A lot like life.
Daniel LaRue Johnson’s 1964 felt more in the spirit of anger, terror, and relentless darkness.
The piece is so dark that it I had to close in on it to see what it held, and when I got there, I was none too pleased with what I saw.
From MOCA, we headed over to Little Tokyo and the Japanese American National Museum for tea and a walk through their rooms. The museum had three exhibits: a collection of photographs from the ’20s and ’30s by J.T. Sato, a really heartwarming celebration of artists from Giant Robot, an American alternate pop culture brand, and a collection of objects, documents, and images from the Japanese American internment during WW2.
I placed one of Sato’s photograph’s at the top of this page. It evokes a LA noir perfectly. There’s beauty and style in the image, and also a good bit of darkness in the tunnel it shows, a leaving behind of something left unrepresented.
Felicia Chiao’s sketches stole the Giant Robot show, but I couldn’t get a good shot of them, so we’ll make do with Luke Cheuh’s two marvelous rabbits and Taylor Lee’s Mazinger statue.
That darkness of the past echoed throughout the Japanese American National Museum. It was very much a part of the internment story that flowed through all the artworks. Sato was interned, and his drawing and photos illustrated that. All those absurdly-colorful bunnies and robots were also, in glimpses, looking over their shoulders at that past with not a little worry about the future.
This came clearest in Giorgiko trio of images, “Far From Home,” which returned directly to the internment story. Each of the images are set in the internment camps—you can see it in the backgrounds—and their anime figures are stylized in anxiety. Where are we now? Who might come for us? What lessons of the past have we forgotten?
In that the images of “Far From Home” are a trio of enormous canvases, they return us, not just to the internment story throughout the Japaneses American National Museum but to the Rothko room in MOCA. Big images for a big country, one that is premised in its myth on moving forward out of the dark tunnel of the past, and that projects such color and power as to be sonic, but nevertheless is also deeply worried about what the future might hold.
onwards…
Onwards! 
Hi Batman. Superman here. Enjoy reading your blog. I Will Vent My Anger in Terrifying Books is what I imagine my brain looks like most of the time. Thanks for sharing.
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I dreamt of a Superman action figure last night. It was a very specific action figure: the scene in the Dark Knight Returns when Green Arrow has just shot Superman with the synthesized kryptonite, and Superman’s face is really grumpy looking. The action hero had that face.
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What a lovely report – thank you!
My favorite LA museum when Susan was living there was the Museum of Latin American Arthttps://molaa.org/. It was in Long Beach near where she was living (no freeways!) and the work was just different enough from the mainstream to be stimulating. I’m also very fond of LACMA, especially their netsuke collection.
[Dog | LACMA Collections | Netsuke, Japanese, Japanese antiques]
Somehow Rothko in LA reminds me of two of my favorite artists, Giorgio Morandi and Wayne Thibaud, neither of them abstract painters (at least superficially).
[Obras de Giorgio Morandi em exposi??o no CCBB Rio de Janeiro – Di?rio do Rio de Janeiro]
[Wayne Thiebaud Ice Cream Fine Art Reproduction Museum Art – Etsy]
The mention of the Japanese American National Museum reminded me of a worthy non-profit: The Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountainhttps://www.heartmountain.org/mineta-simpson-institute-at-heart-mountain/. It’s a retreat center at the site of a former internment camp dedicated to finding common ground in our polarized times. It grew out of the friendship of Senator Alan K. Simpson and the late Secretary (and California Congressman) Norman Y. Mineta, who met as boys at Heart Mountain where Mineta was incarcerated. They spent decades putting aside their political differences to work together.
[How the Heart Mountain Internment Camp Started a WWII Revolution]
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