Here We Go Again...

Another chapter in the let's remove art for the public good saga is taking shape, this time in San Francisco. This op-ed article by Bari Weiss in the New York Times describes a plan to not only remove a work by an important 20th Century artist, but to destroy it.

The work in question is a thirteen panel mural inside George Washington High School by the Russian-American artist, Victor Arnautoff, depicting the school's namesake in rather unconventional ways. In the panel illustrated in the op-ed piece, Washington is standing at a desk with other "Founding Fathers", his right hand pointing to a map resting on a table while his left points off into the distance where a group of American settlers impassively walk past the body of a dead Native American man. Other panels in the work depict African American slaves toiling away on Washington's plantation.

A detail of Victor Arnautoff's mural "City Life"
in the lobby of Coit Tower, San Francisco.
The conspicuous absence of the conservative
San Francisco Chronicle
on the newsstand is a clear indication of the artist's
political convictions, 

In her piece, Weiss quotes Arnautoff stating his no-holds-barred philosophy of art:

Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me... The artist is a critic of society.

Arnautoff, an avowed Communist who assisted the like-minded Diego Rivera in Mexico, was according to Weiss, one of the Bay Area's most prominent Depression era artists.

Clearly the panels in the school, as is the case for all his work as well as that of his mentor Rivera are radical, provocative and subversive. From this piece I wrote back in 2013, you can read about the controversey sparked by Rivera's "Detroit Industry" which right wing groups demanded be removed during the anti-communist McCarthy era of the fifties, and the response from the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the institution that houses the murals.

An Arnautoff work I am intimately familiar with, "City Life", painted in the Social Realist style popular in the day, graces the interior of Coit Tower which stands on the top of Telegraph Hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. Created during a time of upheaval in the labor movement of the city, "City Life" and other murals inside the tower were themselves considered subversive and protests against them forced the delay of the opening of the Tower, a monument to local firefighters, for several months.

Given today's highly charged political climate, you might assume that the controverey around Arnautoff's high school piece was triggered by conservative groups who are offended by the less than flattering portrayal of the "Father of our Country." But in fact, the move to remove and destroy the artwork comes from the San Francisco School Board. Schools they feel, need to be safe spaces for students and believe that the depiction of dead Indians and black slaves in the school halls, no matter the context, historical accuracy and significance of the art, is a clear violation of what it means to be a safe space.

Weiss in her piece claims that the Board has been swayed by a group called "Reflection and Action Working Group", in her words, "a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district." According to the group, Arnautoff 's work:

glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, (and) oppression... The art does not reflect social justice... (and it) is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

Wow.

Clearly the point of Arnautoff 's work is completely lost on this group. The only ratioinale I can see in this statement is summed up by that last phrase which implies that the "legacy" of the artist, (who happens to be a dead white guy), and in fact, history itself, is not as valid as the "experience"of the students, who presumably are racially and ethnically diverse. Never mind that the vast majority of the school's students are themselves opposed to the removal of the artwork.

What's even more disturbing is the insistence of the board that the work be painted over and effectively destroyed rather than being merely covered up, lest someone in the future decide to uncover them, in defiance of the infinite wisdom of the Board's decree which, if I'm reading it correctly, should be law for the ages, so shall it be written, so shall it be done.

Even beyond that nonsense is the fact that the people objecting to the destruction of these murals, are being labeled as racists by the would-be whitewashers of art and history.

This stuff of course is not new. Thirty years ago a WPA mural was removed from a school that neighbored my elementary school in Oak Park, Illinois. In the lobby of that school was a mural depicting a map of the world containing images of people who inhabited each of the continents. The people depicted in much of the painting were wearing contemporary (for the time) clothing, while in the Africa portion, the people were depicted wearing loin cloths and other accessories many felt enforced stereotypes of the "savage native". Then just this year, two more WPA paintings were removed from schools in the same community because detractors felt they did not reflect the current diversity of the schools.

While I'm not in agreement with the all-out removal of these works, I do get it. However I believe that dated as they are, these works of art, when put into their the proper context, (just like the Confederate monuments that have been in the news recently), serve as useful windows to the past. Simply taking down and mothballing them to obfuscate the less admirable features of our history in order to avoid offending people, serves no worthwhile purpose at all, in my opinion.

But the Arnautoff work is different. That artist clearly had a "progressive" agenda and the idea that his work glorified slavery, genocide, colonization, and everything else that is bad in the world, simply could not be more wrong. A school's job is first and foremost to educate its students. It is important that students know, not only history and the evils of the past, but that even during a bygone era such as the1930s, there were many people including artists, who went against the grain and did not buy into slavery, genocide, colonialism and other evils that were very much alive in their day and continue into our own.

Erasing a work of art because we don't agree with the message it conveys is bad enough, but erasing a work of art because we don't bother to understand the message is beyond explanation. It is misguided, stupid and above all an affront to education, knowledge, and understanding.

I just wrote about the importance of learning from history and the trouble that arises when we are ignorant of it. It seems at least in this case, the San Francisco School Board is fast becoming the champion of ignorance.

This one simply boggles the mind.

The Ken Burns Effect

A recent posting on Facebook of A Trip Down Market Street, this mesmerizing film of a cable car ride down San Francisco's main drag, brought to mind a couple of things:

If this looks familiar, you've probably seen bits of it used as a device in documentary films that deal with a particular time and place: America at the turn of the last century. Coincidentally, this week PBS has been broadcasting the latest Ken Burns film based upon the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sure enough, in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, one of the thousands of clips from hundreds of films Burns uses is a clip from this movie which was actually shot during Teddy Roosevelt's administration. In fact if you look carefully, you can see the clip over and over again as it is used in a promo for the show and one of its sponsors. I'm quite certain that I've seen portions of this film over the years, used in other works of Burns and his contemporaries.

I suspect most people don't immediately recognize the city depicted in the film. As such it could represent virtually any big American city at the turn of the twentieth century, which is why using clips from it is so attractive to contemporary filmmakers. But there is a story behind this particular film that makes it in its own right much more interesting than the documentary films who exploit it simply to establish a time and place.

The film  was produced by four brothers, Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe, collectively known as the Miles Brothers. It was shot entirely in one take, not a small accomplishment given that the cameraman, Harry Miles, had to hand crank the film traveling through his camera at a consistent rate for the entire thirteen minute cable car ride. Another not so small feat is the fact that the cable car does not come to a complete stop in the entire film. The film is beautifully choreographed as obstacles including folks standing on the tracks playing "chicken", not moving away until the last possible second, and daredevil motorists darting in between oncoming cars can't stop our cable car as it moves inexorably toward its destination, the San Francisco Ferry Building at the intersection of Market and the Embarcadero, the heart of the city.

One of the many interesting aspects of the film is the way it shows the traffic pattern of a major artery in an American city before the time when vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine reigned supreme. The cable car, itself powered by a mechanism gripping onto an underground cable moving at a constant rate of speed, had to compete with electric powered street cars, horse drawn vehicles of all types, pedestrians, bicyclists, and automobiles. When I first saw the movie in its entirety this week, I was surprised by the amount of cars, given that the number of automobiles in the entire United States in the first decade of the twentieth century was less than ten thousand. Turns out I was not off base, according to the 60 Minutes piece you'll find below, the Miles brothers employed local motorists to appear in the film, (in some cases more than once), so the depiction of Market Street traffic c.1906 is a little deceptive.

As you may notice, there are no traffic lights, they wouldn't come around until a decade later. I guess it's debatable whether they could have used them in 1906 as vehicles with different capabilities of speed and maneuverability are forced to compete for right of way while only tacitly adhering to accepted rules of the road. Yet here everybody seems to get along just fine as the top practical speed of the "horseless carriages" on the road at the time was probably not much more than that of a carriage-less horse.

The most remarkable thing about this film is not apparent from a casual viewing. It was originally assumed that A Trip Down Market Street was filmed in October of 1905. Film historian David Kiehn would become obsessed with the movie shot in his home town and by taking note of many visual clues and doing some historical research which is documented in the 60 Minutes piece, determined conclusively that the film was shot in late March or early April of 1906, only a week or two before the catastrophic earthquake that took place on April 18th of that year. In all around 3,000 lives were lost in that earthquake and the ensuing fire, roughly the same number who perished in New York City, Arlington, VA and Shankesville, PA as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,

It's very likely that in a week or two, some of the people who appeared in the film would be dead and half of them would lose their homes. Most of the buildings would be gone. One exception is the Terminal Building visible throughout the entire movie, the ultimate destination of the cable car. The building survived the earthquake and today is still the focal point of Market Street. To all who care about such things, that building not only lives as a memorial to the 1906 tragedy, but also to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake which took the lives of dozens motorists who were crushed when the double deck highway they were driving upon collapsed. A similar freeway which once stood immediately in front of the Terminal Building was significantly damaged during that earthquake and shortly thereafter was demolished.

But the building also survived that earthquake intact; it and the film stand today as testaments to a great city and the indefatigable human spirit.


If there is such a thing as an American documentary filmmaker with a household name, it would be Ken Burns. So popular is his work, many people consider his movies to be the final word on the topics he covers. His films which air on PBS, are devoted to American subjects such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Jazz, Baseball, Prohibition, the Civil War, and now of course, the Roosevelts. No matter what subject, Burns's formulaic style does not vary from film to film. In each work, an authoritative voice-over narration moves along the story line supplemented by readings of quotes from correspondence, speeches or text supplied by notable actors, and comments from experts in the field. To set the mood, a soundtrack of period music plays incessantly in the background from beginning to end.

The bulk of Burns's imagery consists of archive film footage and still photographs. Setting a tone, they serve the same purpose as the soundtrack. What little original footage he supplies are images of un-populated historical sites usually shot romantically at dusk, and the "talking heads" of the experts, speaking reverently about the subject at hand. Never content to allow his visual material to speak for itself, Burns cuts up films (such as A Trip Down Market Street), to suit his needs. In a similar fashion, he seldom shows us a still photograph in its entirety, rather  he selectively crops images then animates them by panning or zooming in and out, usually for dramatic effect.  Burns in no way invented the idea of panning across still images, but he has used and abused the technique so often that Apple Corporation has included what they call the "Ken Burns Effect"  in their video editing software.  The Burns Effect is so successful that it has become the default setting when users choose to include still photographs into their videos. In other words, if you want to show a still image in your video without any pans or zooms in Apple software, you have to turn off the Ken Burns effect. Given his reputation as "the people's historian", I can't think of a more suitable metaphor.

Despite being widely admired, Ken Burns has his detractors. His work has a well deserved reputation for being less than rigorous with the facts. Never content to leave any loose ends, many feel his films package their subjects in neat and tidy bundles, avoiding the inevitable lingering doubts and messy questions that real historians deal with on a daily basis. And then there's that inescapable, plug-in style of his which treats every subject exactly the same.

But my biggest gripe with Ken Burns is the way he appropriates the work of others, without giving the authors due credit. You won't have a hard time finding the names of the "talent" who provide the voiceover narration and readings, nor will you have a problem learning who wrote and produced the films. You certainly won't have a problem spotting Ken Burns's name all over his product. But if you're interested in who provided Burns with the visual theme (or as the fancy people call it, the mise en scène) of his films, that is to say the photographers and filmmakers who are responsible for about 90 percent of what you actually see in a Ken Burns film, not to mention the musicians who provided the soundtrack, forget about it. Burns only pays lip service, and that's a generous term, to the archives where the work was found, but never to the creators of the work itself.

Which in my opinion is inexcusable.

To rectify that if only a bit, as promised, here from a 60 Minutes piece broadcast in 2010, is the story of a work of art that Ken Burns has used and abused time and again. A work that in my opinion, far from being merely a brief clip used to establish a particular time and place, is more ground breaking, powerful, and enlightening than any of the films that the so called "most respected historian in America" has given us to date:

Overrated

Like the proverbial train wreck, yet another internet top ten list has gotten my attention. This one is called "10 Terribly Overrated Travel Destinations (And Where to Travel Instead)" and found on the HuffPost Travel Blog. Top ten lists like this one are meant to provoke and this one is no exception. The thing that surprised me about this list was how spot on some of the observations are:

The writer of the piece, David Ladsel, describes overrated Asheville, NC as a

physically and emotionally fragmented mountain town full of people who seem really annoyed by everything -- including your presence here.

My feelings exactly.

On the overrated state of Colorado he says this:

Denver is a weirdly bland, Midwestern snore, with an air quality problem.

Again I can't argue with him there. My lasting impression of Denver was that people in the Mile High City seem to live for the weekend when they can get the hell out of town and escape to the mountains, which according to Ladsel, aren't all that great either. He says Utah's mountains are better, less kerfuffle. I wouldn't know about that.

Here's what he has to say about Austin:

...a city whose entire purpose for breathing is to not be like everything else around it. When you're trying to set yourself apart from a place as large and as bold as Texas, you have to work really, really hard... Sprawling Austin is one of those unfortunate places that seems really smashing on paper. And then one ruins things by going.

Now I don't know Austin so it wouldn't be fair for me to judge. However a city I imagine would be very much like Austin is another college town which also happens to be a state capital, Madison, Wisconsin. In the numerous trips to our neighboring state to the north, we've often stopped in "Mad City" and for the life of me I can't ever recall not being disappointed there. I can't put my finger on exactly why but the idea of the place is so much better than the experience of it. I recently spoke with a family member who lives there and it was he who said that Madison is the most overrated city in the country. I'm afraid I have to agree with him, since I've never been to Austin, the number one overrated place on David Ledsel's list. He recommends visiting Houston instead of Austin while I would wholeheartedly recommend Milwaukee over Madison.

I've never been to the Caribbean of which he says:

Too many of the islands are depressingly violent, pathetically corrupt and / or hopelessly dysfunctional.

Or Vancouver:

there really isn't much below the surface -- nothing unique anyway.

I may not have been there but did get that impression of the city from the coverage of the Winter Olympics a few years ago.

How about Berlin?

The best reason for Americans to bother with pricey Europe these days is to roll around in the continent's colorful past. Berlin is too modern, too sterile, too expensive and too unsure of itself to merit much of your time or money.

Well that's true up to a point; Berlin is a difficult city, it's especially difficult to love. The city Ladsel recommends to visit instead is Prague, a very easy city to love with its picturesque vistas, serpentine passageways, and charm up the wazoo. Yet lovely as it is, Prague is a bit of a museum piece overrun with tourists, while Berlin is a real live city with a proud and devastating history which it makes no attempt to conceal. Contrary to what Ladsel says, the past is all around you in Berlin, it's just not the picture postcard variety of Prague's. The two cities could not be more different and one is certainly not more worth visiting than the other. Here's my take on Berlin from a few years ago.

Ledsel makes some fairly incomprehensible remarks about San Francisco which to me says that he has some kind of bug up his behind about the City by the Bay. As familiarity breeds contempt, his comments make him seem incapable of judging the place objectively.

Which brings up the best which I saved for last. I'll just let you read the whole entry for yourself on his seventh most overrated travel destination, Chicago:

Spend a little time in the Windy City and you'll come to know a people obsessed with the answer to a question nobody else has ever asked: "Is Chicago a world class city?" As a former local, I can help. The answer is no. Chicago is a handsome, reasonably entertaining provincial capital. This used to be enough for Chicagoans, but then it wasn't, leading to a period of time, beginning around the turn of the new century, during which all manner of foolishness -- from baffling things built by celebrity architects to a slew of obnoxious restaurants -- was unleashed upon the city. Suddenly, everything was pretty much the same, except now it was way more expensive. Yes, the city has some iconic cultural institutions and that beautiful lakefront. But look too far past the glittering Potemkin village at Chicago's center and you'll find yourself near or at the bottom of a sad pile of poor to average.

As a "former local", Lesdal has a take on the city your average tourist would not. Now you might expect that I, a lifelong resident and devoted lover and supporter of this town would be appalled by Ledsel's comments about my home town. On the contrary. I'm not appalled because he is right about many of his observations. We Chicagoans are indeed obsessed with the pointless concept of being a "world class city." World class prices do not a world class city make. No truly world class city needs to declare itself one. Our world class braggadocio and world class inferiority complex may in fact be our biggest flaws, or perhaps our greatest charm, depending on your point of view.

As for the "foolishness" quotient, well since the turn of the last century, my wife and I started having babies so I can't speak for the obnoxious restaurants. However I'd say we don't have nearly as many "baffling things built by celebrity architects" as Lesdal thinks. I for one would take our one truly baffling piece of "starchitecture", Frank Gehry's Millennium Park Bandshell, over Santiago Calatrava's über-baffling Milwaukee Art Museum any day.

David Ladsel's coup de gras comes next:

Instead...Go to Detroit. It's more honest. Also, there's a great art museum, a proper public market, some of the country's best architecture, the music scene is fun, the food scene is better than it has been in ages and the beer is better and much cheaper. Everything's cheaper. Also: Detroiters are friendly -- Chicagoans are just polite. There's a big difference.

Now you gotta admire the chutzpah of a travel writer today recommending his readers go to Detroit instead of Chicago. Frankly, even though it comes at the expense of my own city, I'm thrilled he singled out Motown. Still I'm not convinced; reading that passage makes me think either the author...

• is simply a contrarian looking to evoke an angry response (which he did) or,
• he has an ulterior motive like the Vikings of old who named a fertile island above the Arctic Circle Iceland, while naming a frozen tundra Greenland or,
• he really means it.

I hope the latter is true because the city of Detroit to put it mildly, has seen better days, and could use someone sincerely blowing its horn. Everything he said about the Motor City vis a vis Chicago is true, well, except the part about Detroiters being friendly while Chicagoans are merely polite, I mean come on.

I do however take great exception to his last thought about Chicago where he states that the part of the city outside of downtown is "near or at the bottom of a sad pile of poor to average". Clever and pithy as that sentence reads, it's nothing more than the author spouting off a well worn cliché. It was put forth perhaps most famously by A.J. Liebling in his scathing evaluation of this city written in 1952 called: Chicago: The Second City. In a book comprised of a series of essays from The New Yorker, Liebling called Chicago:

• a theatre backdrop with a city painted on it... 

• a boundless agglutination of streets, dramshops, and low buildings without urban character...

• Radio City ...set down in the middle of a vast Canarsie...

..and a lot of other unflattering things. Liebling, guilty of exhibiting his own brand of New York provincialism, nonetheless was dead on with some of his observations of Chicago in the early fifties, some of which hold true today. As someone who spends 50 percent of his waking life in the glittering part of the city and the other 50 in the sad pile, I consider myself something of an expert on the subject. Not a day goes by when I don't discover something new and exciting, mystifying or terrifying about this city, both parts of it. Beyond the steel, glass and stone towers of Chicago's center you'll find the lifeblood of this city, both the good and the bad. It's all there to discover for anyone willing to take the time. Of course it's just the every day lives of nearly three million souls that go on around that sad pile of poor to average outside of the Potemkin village. How dull and mundane that must be compared to a place where you can hear some fun music and can get a cheap beer.

The wholesale dismissal of the city that lies beyond the sound of the bells of Holy Name Cathedral, or the pell-mell dissing any city for that matter, displays a great deal of journalistic and intellectual sloth, even for someone just writing an internet top ten list. 

And yet, who doesn't enjoy getting one's digs in every once in a while? If you can't take a punch, then stay out of the fight as I always say.

It's the Chicago way.

Cable Cars

The fantastic site Forgotten Chicago, has this piece on a largely forgotten piece of Chicago history, its cable car system.

Legend has it that Andrew Hallidie, an engineer and manufacturer of wire rope, came up with the idea for cable cars one day while walking up one of San Franciso's steep hills. In the middle of a snowstorm, he saw a team of horses struggling to pull a streetcar up the slippery grade, then lose their grip on the pavement, sending them and the car and its passengers sliding and crashing at the bottom of the hill.

Hallidie's idea was to propel the cars up and down the hills by means of an onboard mechanical gripping system that a "gripman" would engage onto a continuously moving underground cable. Hallidie's invention is a classic example of 19th Century brilliance and audacity. Building such a system was an enormous undertaking, requiring a tremendous amount of maintenance. But it was a brilliant solution that worked perfectly well for the absurdly steep hills of the City by the Bay. As it does to this day as three lines still exist transporting mostly tourists.

Even without hills, the system worked pretty well in Chicago as well, ours would become the largest cable car system built anywhere. It wouldn't last long however as the cumbersome system was replaced by the much simpler system of self-propelled streetcars in 1906 after only 24 years of operation.

The Forgotten Chicago article lists some extant remnants of the old cable car system, including vehicle barns and power plants. These buildings contained the enormous steam engines with their gigantic pulleys that set miles of cable in motion. One of these buildings stands today at LaSalle and Illinois Streets,  you may know it as the building that once housed Michael Jordan's Restaurant.

The most famous remnant of the cable car system however is the term we use to describe our downtown. The term "the Loop" was originally coined to describe the loop of cable cars that once circled Chicago's central business district, an area much larger than the area defined by today's L tracks.

An interesting fact I recently learned about San Francisco's cable cars is that one of the early investors in the system was one Abner Doubleday, who is today most famous as being the man mistakenly credited with the invention of baseball. He may not have invented the National Pastime but among other significant achievements, was indeed a big player in what would become one of the coolest transportation systems ever invented.

If you ever find yourself in San Francisco, by all means treat yourself to a cable car ride. If you dare, don't sit inside but stand on the platform and hang over the edge as the little Powell-Hyde car makes its way up Russian Hill. It may sound hokey but it is indeed one of the greatest urban experiences anywhere.