Sunday Morning Mimosa

JM, Shoes, 2.16.08

Joseph Mailander a guy in la • elsewhere • email

[UPDATE: Those looking for the Face the Nation transcript in which Antonio Villaraigosa and Richmond, VA Mayor Doug Wilder squared off this morning in support of Hillary and Barack may find a link to the pdf near the bottom of this page. Or save yourself some time and take my word for it: Antonio tried to paint Hillary as the candidate of unity, and Doug said the Dems were headed to another 1968 if the will of the convention doesn't match the will of the delegate count going into the Convention. In a surprise, Doug reminded viewers that Hillary had eight years to deliver on health care and didn't deliver anything, and Antonio said that we have 800,000 more insured in California thanks to Hillary.]

The past is prologue....

The Randal Simmons tragedy was also an enormous tragedy for the family of the gunman, and The Daily News is there to describe the other funeral. Social historians looking across the generations will find it interesting to note that the father, Geraldo, who also lost his life, had earlier lost his farm and had his home destroyed and his ten cattle stolen during the war in El Salvador.

Social historians also used to find Huntington Library to be a target-rich environment, but not anymore. Remember the days when the Huntington was positively indifferent to drawing crowds and "competing" as a museum? It's new Chinese Garden seems out of step with the longtime icily conservatory and academic character of the organization.

"'The garden is a way the Huntington can throw open its doors to an increasingly Chinese neighborhood and an increasingly Chinese world,' [Suzy Moser, assistant vice president for advancement] said." The mere fact that the Huntington even has a vp of "advancement" let alone is worried about "collaborating with communities" on identity-driven projects comes as a surprise.

The new garden opens next Saturday. I suppose the new identity-market Huntington hasn't gone quite so far as to invite the throngs to explore the irony and ponder what percentage of the Huntington fortune was built on Chinese labor.

Then again, it's not surprising that the past is so quickly forgotten; and LA may be the place where it gets its most notoriously extreme make-over. "I thought Europe was a country," Kellie Pickler once said on "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" Are Americans hostile to knowledge? wondered the New York Times a couple of days ago, touting some books that explore the ascendancy of solipsistic culture.

Even so, some local high profile orgs are good at re-acquainting us with the past. LA Opera rolls out the second season of Recovered Voices, opera and song of composers nearly rendered completely obscure by Nazi Germany, and the Downtown News applauds in a cultural editorial. Alexander Zemlinsky's The Dwarf and Viktor Ullman's The Broken Jug are at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the next few weekends, starting today; click the link for ticket information.

For some idea of the impact of this series, see Rodney Punt's description of the ambitions of the series in its inaugural year. Then see his review Forbidden Music to trace the paths of many of the composers who faced suppression, imprisonment, exile, and holocaust in the 1930's and 1940's.

And finally, the long-beloved February Barney's sale at Barker Hanger at Santa Monica Airport continues today and ends tomorrow. Items the final weekend are 50% off and sometimes more. Men often find it's a good place to grab a dress shirt, and women especially like the markdowns on designer shoes, though there are plenty of other items for all. I know it's the west side, but certainly City Hall cubicle farm dwellers on four through seventeen, currently sporting lots of frayed collars and cuffs, can mostly benefit.