California Dreaming: Team Aline!
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
We were looking for a pleasant place to spend a Friday afternoon and evening, and I had never been to Barnsdall Art Park on Olive Hill in Little Armenia. My boyfriend and I checked online, and Silver Lake Wine was having a sunset tasting, right in the garden on the crown of the hill! We love tastings! We love sunsets! But it was $20, and we are unemployed. We moseyed up anyway, and lay in the grass outside the garden and watched the people and their babies arrive for their twee sunset tasting, and I hated every one of them. I hated them all.
My son is 15, and I certainly took him to loads of things when he was a baby; why exactly did I loathe these people for doing just what I had done? They shouldn’t have babies because mine hasn’t been one in a while? Because they’re older?
Because they were loathsome, of course. I could tell just by looking at them.
It was their scrubbed quality, the expensive prams unmarred by sour milk stain and untouched by graham cracker crumb, the smugness of the coupled-up. I could see myself in younger years going to a sunset wine tasting hoping to meet people, or men, and being faced with these upright burghers and their doted-on spawn, and I was angry for the past me, an awkward single; I was angry for my younger self even while my handsome boyfriend leaned up on his elbows, shading my delicate skin from the sun.
Silver Lake isn’t what it used to be. I didn’t see a single dominatrix.
Barnsdall Art Park was given to the city of Los Angeles—which didn’t want it, thanks—by oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, back when heiresses did something interesting with their time. (For what it’s worth, there’s at least one interesting and educated—Princeton and MIT, for fuck’s sake—and really quite lovely Annenberg heiress around these days, god bless and keep her, and that’s why L.A. has Farmlab.)
Barnsdall was a feminist, and a single mother back in the ’20s, when being a single mother wasn’t the load of laughs it is today. She was friends with Emma Goldman—the name under which my mother used to get arrested come Mother’s Day nuclear test site protests—and was followed by the FBI, which named her part of the “lunatic fringe,” for 24 years, until her death in ’46. She was also a passionate producer of experimental theater, and had commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to build Hollyhock House on Olive Hill as an artists colony for poor undercultured L.A.
Hollyhock House
But Frank Lloyd Wright was an unbelievable asshole, an early Hiker of the Appalachian Trail, a shabby man who’d been for all intents and purposes run out of the U.S. following his desertion of his wife and six kids for the wife of a friend (his mistress was later axed to death by a servant during dinner at their home, along with her kids and a few guests). The house he built for Barnsdall—the celebrated Hollyhock House, which you can tour for a very doable $7, and we did, the day after being so angered by presumably very nice people doing nothing more objectionable than getting out of the house for an afternoon—is spectacular and infuriating and slapdash. My sister once had to leave a Christo retrospective in a huff because his wrapped Bundestag, she said, connoted secrets, and she didn’t like secrets. I never understood; I laughed and laughed; she was okay with his umbrellas killing people, but didn’t like whatever intent she’d surmised in the wholly nonlethal Bundestag? Ha ha! And then I entered Hollyhock and was angered for exactly the same reason.
Here are more than 6,500 square feet on the crown of a beautiful hill with gentle breezes and views to the ocean, and it manages to feel entirely cramped, because what does Mr. Great Brilliant Architect of the 20th Century do? He encases it in concrete, a miserable fortress. It’s claustrophobic and sarcophagal; Wright’s idea of contraction and expansion—crushing you like an ant so you’d be even more enthralled with the sudden open spaces—means here that the entryway features a six-foot-high ceiling of concrete blocks of unknown thousands of pounds crushing down right over your poor little head. I haven’t been that terrified since I drove the 5 past Mt. Shasta and couldn’t see the top; it was as though the mountain was a giant that could reach down and pluck us stupid mortals right from the road. So this was like that, but less eerie and otherworldy and more next-worldy. You know: because it will kill you.
Aline Barnsdall hated the house, which came in at triple-budget, years late, and with a staggering inattention to how houses work. It was drafty and damp from the concrete in the un-summer months, and it’s blazing hot now; the side of the house facing the sunset is all glass that doesn’t open, and the windows that do open are as narrow as archery slits. Aline Barnsdall could have roasted a turkey in it, no convection oven needed, if she were the kind of socialist who didn’t actually have an army of servants to do her turkey roasting for her.
I am all on Team Aline, and when I make my millions, I too shall spend them and my time getting innocent anarchist bombers released from prison, and employing servants, who after all do need the work. Screw Frank Lloyd Wright.
There’s a fun slideshow on Slate this week, about Philip Johnson’s terrible Glass House, and how badly made it is, and a rip-off of the Farnsworth House to boot. Frank Lloyd Wright may not have taken inspiration from anyone but himself for Hollyhock House, but only because he apparently considered all other human beings as beneath his emulation. He designed beautiful furniture for Aline Barnsdall, grand and broad and substantial and of a piece with the breathtaking living room (breathtaking, of course, because you’ve just come from being buried alive in the foyer). He designed her dining table for six, because he felt that was the maximum number for a successful dinner party. For another client, he designed not only the furniture and the art work, but the missus’s clothes.
Control freak much? Ugh. His second or third (or something) wife, by the way, was a morphine addict. I can’t imagine why.
I know the rest of society forgives its geniuses for any manner of ickiness; I don’t. I wouldn’t want to dine with Bukowski, and I told my hippie punk high school friends so every time they brought up how fuckin’ awesome it would be. I wouldn’t have wanted to take tea with Hunter S. Thompson or Jackson Pollock.
Maybe Picasso. I guess. He, at least, was never called an asshole.
Comments
Demolish it.
2009-07-05 by Christopher B. Samuelian, AIA RIBAHear, hear; except for Hunter. You just had to know how to get on his good side…..
2009-07-06 by Eric SteinbergAnarchists in LA again are holding a book fair at the Barnsdall Art Park. Aline would have loved it. Although I have my problems with the local Anarchist scene. It is a great location. I used to live around the corner from there at an apartment complex run by Scientologists. They tried to recruit my girlfriend when I was at work.
She wouldn’t go for it the Krishna’s had already gotten to her. But the Park is nice. I agree with her opinion of that monstrosity Wright built. I disagree with her about Bukowski. He was one of Americas greatest poets after Whitman.
An old acquaintance once met Bukowski behind the Golden Bear. Up chucked Bukowski right onto his shoes. Wouldn’t be surprised if he still gets laid off that story.
2009-07-04 by Jaime Lavecaliente