Homenaje a Frida

There’s a new blog, “The Impossible Cool,” which posts a daily black-and-white photo of an icon at his or her most impossibly cool, captioned only by a surname.

Here’s my nomination for the next post: my favorite portrait of Frida Kahlo, taken by Florence Arquin in 1941 in the courtyard of Frida’s house in Coyoacán.

Of course, it’s not black-and-white, which would be an injustice to Frida. You have to see that ultramarine blue, called azul añil, which gave the Casa Azul its name. Frida’s wearing a tlacoyal, a headdress of cords woven into braids and compared to a coralillo serpent. Her wool tomicotón is embroidered with the Tree of Life.

“The Impossible Cool” would not junk up the picture with this much information, but I’m putting it down because I want to remember the specific names of the indigenous fashion items Frida adopted. I learned them all from Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress, one of several new Frida books I’ve devoured recently. The book juxtaposes photos of Frida’s garments with the paintings in which they appear.

Frida’s image and style were omnipresent in my hometown of Tucson. Maybe our proximity to Mexico allowed us to claim her as a local icon. The Arizona State Museum has an online “What Would Frida Wear?” exhibit that allows you to dress a Frida doll in folkloric wear from the museum’s collections.

While Frida mixed-and-matched Mexican regional styles, ranging from the Tehuana to the China Poblana, some elements remain consistent: the rebozo, or fringed shawl, the huipil, or embroidered tunic, the floor-length, often ruffled rebozo skirt, and arracadas, the half-moon earrings.

I was less impressed by Finding Frida Kahlo, also a gorgeous coffee-table book, but apparently of dubious scholarship. The book documents the discovery and unpacking of five containers, from luggage to trunks, containing what the material’s Mexican collectors consider Frida’s lost archive: letters, sketches, stuffed hummingbirds, recipes, keepsakes.

I thought the material was a little too perfect: diaries and poems addressing each one of the “fascinating” aspects of Frida’s life —  the bisexuality, the horrible accident, the Trotsky affair, the love/hate for Diego Rivera, Diego’s philandering — as though they were a skeleton key to her life. While Frida’s art depicts some of these defining events, they couldn’t have been all she thought about. But that’s the impression the collection gives.

Also, the story of how the Mexican collectors came into possession of the archive is specious. It involves a mysterious Mexican lawyer who lives in squalor and wants to remain anonymous. The mysterious lawyer acquired the archive from a deceased woodcarver who claimed to be a confidante of Frida’s.

Frida experts and relatives are currently divided on the authenticity of the material. I’m excited to follow this art-world mystery as it unfolds. I think I’d prefer to discover it’s all a fake. It would be a brilliant act of meta-art and a painstaking comment on the fetishizing of Frida.

Tokyo Drifter and endangered architecture

Endangered architecture is a fascination of mine, though instead of getting involved, I just get wistful. Recently, I was struck by this Tokyo building, Kisho Kurokawa’s Capsule Tower, which Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff eulogized in light of its imminent destruction.

I didn’t know about the Capsule Tower when I was in Japan last year, so I was especially depressed to know I had missed my chance to see it.

The pictures immediately brought to mind the architecture and interiors of one of my all-time favorite films, Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter. The opening scenes show a group of yakuza looking up at the “Kurata Building.” I can’t find anything online about the real-life buildings shown in the film. Anyway, the Capsule Tower wasn’t in Tokyo Drifter, since the building is from 1972 and Suzuki’s film came out in 1966. But it belonged there, immortalized on screen.

And the groovy porthole niches in the Kurata Building are certainly reminiscent.

Apartment-complex memes

As the school bus wended its long path through Tucson sprawl, I had lots of opportunity to reflect on Tucson apartment complexes and to imagine myself living inside them. My parents and I had lived in single-family homes as far back as I could remember, so the apartment complex, with its courtyard, pool, lawn and air of impermanence but community, appealed to me.  The complexes’ names — whether reaching at aristocracy (“The Royal El Con”), evoking the patrician eastern U.S. (“The Briarwood”), or mangling Spanish into a generic Southwesty theme (“Glen Verde”)— were essential to my mythologies.

Get me the Glen Verde leads!

Other developments were, in words that I believe are attributable to Charles Bowden, “named for the things they replaced,” such as “Quail Ridge” and “Saguaro Crest.” Often the names narrowly skirted absurdity, but one howler, “Rancho Sin Vacas,” was firmly in self-parody territory.

My two favorites on the route home from Orange Grove Junior High were “The Geronimo” on the shabby end and “Rio Canción” on the upscale end. I had a whole internal narrative about moving from one to the other and back again, based on changing fortune. Rio Canción meant making it. No tiled hacienda in the foothills for me — no — I just wanted the slightly less shoddily-constructed condo with the swishier name.

Imagine my delight when a new friend happened to live at one of these complexes. Getting invited over was, for me, like a day at Disneyland for normal kids.

Which brings me to the name of this blog — “The Rialto.” A classic cinema-house meme, much like the apartment names “The Trocadero” or “The Royal Arms.” There’s one in almost every city. Bozeman, Mont., has one, as does Santiago de Cuba and Agadir, Morocco. And of course, Tucson has one.

These meme names represent a set of associations. Rialto and Trocadero don’t conjure a bridge in Venice or a plaza in Paris, but a generalized idea of classiness. That many of these apartment complexes and cinema houses are crumbling or derelict adds another layer to the imagination.

Tria Giovan’s Cuba portraits

I recently discovered the work of photographer Tria Giovan, whose book “Cuba: La Isla Ilusiva” documents her many trips to the island in the early 1990s. This was during Cuba’s “Special Period,” after its economy collapsed along with the Soviet Union and before Castro opened up tourism in a bid for foreign currency.

While most of these photographs are nearly 20 years old, the country looks much the same today. As a subject, Cuba is considered a cliché by critics, I’m sure. But I never get tired of the crumbling deco, washed-out colors, vintage cars, revolutionary propaganda and general sultriness that this genre of photography captures.

Here is a favorite, a sort of daylight “Nighthawks”:

Note the groovy modernist mural behind the bar and the lack of seats on many of the bar stools.

The sad window displays are another hackneyed, but highly photogenic Cuban motif. This one is well-stocked compared to many I saw last year in Havana:

Optica, Caibarién — July 1992

It’s not just foreigners who are touched by these scenes. In his poem “Estamos,” Cuban writer Cintio Vitier writes of the “esfuerzo conmovedor” Cubans make to get something from nothing.

“…you are making

a moving effort with your poverty,

my people,

and even horrible carnivals, and even

ugly store windows, and even

the moon.”

The progress of setbacks

The Bullocks Wilshire, built in 1929 and now a law school, was one of the first Art Deco buildings in the U.S. One of my favorite features in Art Deco architecture is the “setback” – practically a contronym! Instead of an unfortunate event, this setback refers to the beautiful stair-step form that creates balconies and keeps the structure from looking like a big stoopid box like the hotel going up across the street from the Art Deco building I live in. Setbacks are progress!

These 1930s cars look so anachronistic to me next to that dreamy building.  Does car design always lag? Maybe it’s just mental sclerosis from images of classic 50s cars against a landscape of Miami and Havana Deco, but these stovepipe cars look so old, and the building looks so moderne. I want to see a kandy-kolored tangerine flake streamline baby!

Oh, Albuquerque

I used to drive through Albuquerque several times a year, road tripping from college in Boulder to holidays in Tucson. To be safe, I drove the stretch in two days, stopping the first night in Albuquerque. The next day, I’d take the cut-off from I-25 in Hatch, get some chiles, and hook up with I-10 going west.

“Albuquerque” became a word in my idiosyncratic vocabulary to mean what the French call “jolie-laide” — a term much more than the sum of its parts, but basically, attractive and ugly at the same time.

Ernst Haas, "Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1969"

A lot of sprawl, especially neon and Western, is “Albuquerque.” Here’s an “Albuquerque” scene I saw at the “Easy Rider” exhibition at The Yancey Richardson Gallery a few years ago.

My drive through Albuquerque was always accompanied by Neil Young’s eponymous song. Young’s “Albuquerque”, like my Albuquerque and Haas’s Albuquerque were all about the road trip. It’s as if there were no other way to experience Albuquerque but to drive through. Later, I met someone in college who has grown up in Albuquerque and stayed at her parents’ house there, and the parallels to my Tucson upbringing were unsettling. Yet I still found it difficult to accept that someone could have permanent ties to Albuquerque.

Well, they say
that Santa Fe
Is less than ninety miles away,
And I got time to roll a number
and rent a car.
Oh, Albuquerque.

I’ve been flyin’
down the road,
And I’ve been starvin’ to be alone,
And independent from the scene
that I’ve known.
Albuquerque.

So I’ll stop when I can,
Find some fried eggs
and country ham.
I’ll find somewhere where
they don’t care who I am.
Oh, Albuquerque,
Albuquerque.

-Neil Young

Edible Architecture

Streamline Moderne buildings look so good I want to eat them. The Academy Theater in Inglewood first tempted me on the cover of Sam Hall Kaplan’s architectural history of Los Angeles, despite its ’80s colorization:

It reminded me immediately of one of Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes, and I thought the two confections would make a nice juxtaposition:

As the land of sunshine and noir, L.A. has a dark side to its modern architecture. There’s something disturbing about both the building and the cakes. They’ve been sitting there a while; you probably don’t want to eat them. They’re bathed in this nostalgic glow which suggests staleness and fading attraction. Empty calories. Flies buzzing around.

Here are the Academy and Thiebaud again, in noir sucré:

Ode to Kate Mantilini

Kate Mantilini is a Beverly Hills restaurant that used to advertise in the dearly-departed Spy magazine. My best friend and I went on a pilgrimage there in the early 1990s, determined to support any business that supported Spy. It was a late-’80s power-broker place, a place where Bret Easton Ellis might stop in, filled with the kind of people Spy regularly mocked. I loved that the name was not possessive; it was in honor of a female fight promoter who was the mistress of the owner’s uncle. A scene from Heat was filmed there.

The martinis were $10, which at the time was a real shocker. We were college students then, with no credit cards and the occasional cash flow problem. We overdid it, and when the check came we realized we couldn’t cover it and leave a decent tip. I wandered down Wilshire Boulevard, trying to get money from several ATMs, unwilling to admit that the problem was my bank account. Mortified, we explained our situation to our waiter, who said “That’s OK; I can’t afford to drink here either.”

That was my wild L.A. story.

I was shocked to discover that Kate is still in business. I thought the L.A. trendies would have moved on. But I guess the menu of comfort classics and the streamlined style of the building have made it timeless. And that beautiful font! What is it, Neutraface?

Soft-focus Occidentalism

Sunset magazine, spaghetti Westerns and the Sedona vortexes — I love mythologies of the American West: a soft “Occidentalism” that, like my favorite Orientalist art (oft-discussed in my other blog), doesn’t hurt anyone, even if it’s romanticized and not always factual.

The MOMA’s “Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West” allowed itself to get caught up in these mythologies, starting with the exhibit’s cinematic name. I would have loved more geographical context for some of the images, but I was so thankful that the curators didn’t try to scold us about our expectations or go on about a photographer’s ironic distance.

This 1979 shot, Joel Sternfeld’s “After a Flash Flood,” was one of my favorites, not least because the stucco-rancho tract, palm-and-chaparral flora and mountain backdrop could the house in Tucson where I grew up. I was always the only killjoy in my cohort to voice apocalyptic predictions about urban sprawl in the water-starved desert, and this scene vindicates me. It took place in a California city called Rancho Mirage, to add to the poetic irony of it all.

You’re a wonder, Wonder Woman

As a kid, I had an impressive collection of Wonder Woman collectibles. I remember a Polaroid of me, dressed in my Wonder Woman outfit, hands on hips, in front of my Wonder Woman-theme wallpapered wall, with my WW memorabilia arrayed around me.

I don’t remember much about the show, though I never missed it. I recently looked up the lyrics to the theme song and discovered some fun lines I’d never noticed in my youth:

“… in your satin tights, fighting for your rights … ”

“Stop a bullet cold, make the Axis fold, change their minds and change the world.”

Kind of subversive! All set to a funky ’70s bass line and girl-power trills from the backup singers.