A Moment: Lois & Carl

Coca Cola Delicious, 2009

After Lois' husband left her, she stopped caring about anything. Friends stopped coming around. She began drinking heavily at night and then throughout the day. She kept company with people who weren’t good for her. She became lax about her appearance and about the care of her son Carl. The boss at her part-time job offered her a full-time position. Instead, she quit, even though she now needed the money more than ever.

She stopped taking care of the house. When her money ran out, she sold the house and moved with Carl to a dingy apartment over a shop on the town’s main street.

Carl was confused by his mother's behavior, but too young and powerless to do anything about it. He had his ninth birthday at a cheerless party in the new apartment, just him, his mother, one of her drinking buddies and three slices of coconut cake from the diner around the corner. "I asked your father to come," she told Carl, "but I guess he didn't want to."

The apartment was on the second floor above the Modern Office Supply store that, despite its name, was not modern at all, having been made redundant by the new Staples store out on the bypass. Modern Office Supply was where people who still needed typewriter ribbons, carbon paper and other antiquated office supplies shopped.

None of this mattered to Lois, or did it that the neighborhood wasn't exactly the best place to be raising a young boy. All that mattered to her was that the rent was cheap and that Stanley Williford, who owned Modern Office Supply and the building, was old and sympathetic to the plight of a single woman. He’d been raised by a single mother himself just after the Depression, and turned a blind eye to Carl's occasional pilfering of construction paper, colored pencils and other things he needed for school projects that Williford knew Lois either couldn't afford or wouldn't be bothered to come downstairs to buy.

During the day when Carl was at school, Lois sat in the window overcooking Eden Street, dreaming of regaining her grasp on life and some kind of purpose. She thought about writing children's books full of playful animals and life lessons. But she didn’t care enough to write them.

Some afternoons when one of Lois’ male friends was hanging around, usually another drinker, she would get a quarter from the guy and give it to Carl and send him to make a donation to the poor at the church down the street so that she could have the apartment to herself for a little while. "You wait til you can give it the Father Rick himself, Honey,” she’d say, knowing full well that the priest was only part-time and wouldn't be there most days.

At night, after Lois had drifted off to sleep on the couch in front of the television, Carl sat in the same chair by the window and watched the traffic light at the corner change from green to yellow to red and then back to green again, whether there were any cars there or not.

Carolina

On the Blvd St. Germain, 2006

I ran into Carolina at a New Year’s Eve party. This has gotten to be the only time of the year we see each other any more. Once upon a time, though, we worked together and saw each other every day.

When I was in college I waited tables at a beachside hotel restaurant. Carolina came to work as a bartender and cocktail waitress. All the guys fell in love with her.

Carolina had the kind of lithe and exotic beauty one associates with, say, Tahiti. Her long dark hair didn’t so much as bounce as dance like a wave in the air. It was her seeming innocence that would captivate you next, though you’d have been way wrong to call her naïve. Carolina came from a boisterous family, the only daughter and youngest of five children. Her brothers followed their father into the officers’ ranks of the Navy. Carolina, though, wasn't cut out for that kind of structure. She liked drinking and riding in convertibles too much. She hung out on the beach and surfed as if she’d been born on a wave. She dated fast guys. She knew her natural beauty was enough to disarm most men. But she was also the kind of woman who never acted as if she was any prettier than any other woman.

Carolina lived with her architect husband and their young daughter in an apartment within walking distance of where we worked. The child was as beautiful as her mother. Carolina’s husband seemed to understand what kind of woman he had on his hands. He stayed in the background, but you knew he meant business if you got too close to Carolina. Looking back, I suppose his pride might have been wounded that it was necessary for Carolina to have to take the bartending job.

There were a few women like this in my youth. They were the kind of girls you dreamed about, but figured you probably never had a chance with. If they paid any attention to you at all, you were probably too flummoxed to know what to say.

I turned twenty-one during the time I worked with Carolina. I like to think she bought me my first mixed drink. But since I wasn’t exactly new to drinking, let’s just say it might have been the first time a beautiful woman ever bought me a drink in a public bar, though strictly speaking, Carolina didn’t even buy the drink since she was the bartender.

Years went by. I went back to college and stayed away for another decade after that. I made new friends, got married and started a family and a career. Another decade passed. The memories of that year at the beach hotel became ancient history.

And then about ten years ago my wife and I were at a New Year’s Eve party given by some friends. There, across the room, was Carolina. To suggest that we’d had a relationship and that this was some kind of “Some Enchanted Evening” moment would have been giving our connection too much credit. But we’d been friends and spent a while catching up. I learned that her marriage to the architect hadn’t lasted much longer. He moved to another state. Their daughter grew up. Carolina married again, this time to a surfer who makes his living doing odd jobs. She and Bo are very happy.

By my reckoning, Carolina must be sixty, perhaps even a year or two older. The years haven’t been entirely kind to her appearance. But her eyes are as deep blue and entrancing as they were those nights long ago when she carried drinks out to the terrace by the ocean.

The iPad Made Me Do It

Serra San Bruno, Calabria, January 11, 2011

Every now and then you get surprised by things that have a bigger impact on you than you expected.

For years I had the simplest cell phones, the less to worry about if I lost them or they broke. Then I got an iPhone and was jolted into another state. I could do a lot of the things I’d previously only been able to do with a desktop or laptop computer on a device small enough to fit in my shirt pocket.

I heard about the iPad, of course. My son-in-law, who is on top of all of this stuff, ordered one before they were even released. Friends and clients started showing up at meetings with them. Photographers started using them as a platform for showing work. That intrigued me.

My friend Walt Taylor even got one and raved about it. But Walt does that about a lot of things, like the time all he could talk about was the cleansing value of blanched okra. That was a fad I was happy to see pass quickly, if you’ll pardon the pun.

I thought about getting an iPad, but just couldn’t seem to justify it. I was waiting for evidence that the iPad could be a substitute for a traveling laptop.

All was resolved when my wife gave me an iPad for Christmas. I didn’t want to seem too geeky that day. But you can be sure that as soon as the crowds cleared and the dust was swept under the carpet I was playing with it.

It’s a marvelous thing to play with, if that’s what you want to do. I had to prove some utility though, and I’m happy to say that since Christmas I’ve demonstrated to myself that it can be a viable tool.

A quick audit:

The iPad does most everything that an iPhone does except that it’s neither a phone nor a camera. But I don’t think its dimensions lend themselves to being either. (Famous last words.)

The image quality on the screen is spectacular, every bit as good as you may have heard. It’s crisp, rich and bright. Still imagery and video look terrific on it. Even the speakers are decent.

The keyboard’s surprisingly good, though I’m not sure whoever designed it realized how much some of us use apostrophes and how much of a pain it is to flip between keyboards to access one. (It is a little disconcerting to not have a mouse, especially when you’re typing more than a few lines. My stubby fingers keep bumping the screen and moving the cursor to places I don’t want it to be.

Apples’ Pages application is no Microsoft Word. But it reads Word files, allows you to edit in its own proprietary format and exports files back to you in Word format.

With an application called PrintCentral I can print anything from the iPad to any of any networked printer. The newest version of the iPad operating system enables printing directly to certain kinds of wireless printers. But you probably have to have bought your printer in the last two weeks for it to be compatible.

The Safari browser is as fast my whatever network you’re using. (I don’t have the 3G version of iPad.) I can listen to iTunes radio or any of hundreds of radio stations on TuneIn Radio.

The killer apps, so far:

FlipBoard. If you grew up on magazines, FlipBoard is an aggregator of social media, print media and broadcasters with a visual interface that’s very magazine-like. Very nice.

My second guilty pleasure is iSpy. iSpy’s an aggregator of live cams, the perfect thing for those of us with insatiable appetites for live visual imagery of the world around us. At one glance, I can watch:

• Surfers at Waikiki.
• Researchers working in the snow along the Wales Strait in Canada’s Northwest Territory.
• People shopping at an outdoor market in Kiev.
• Cruise ships going in and out of the port of Hobart, Tasmania.
• Kids ice skating in Tofte, Norway.
• Tourists in Times Square.
• Waves crashing against the quay in Banff, Scotland
• Edinburgh Castle.
• Sunbathers on the beaches near Melbourne, Australia.
• A bird’s eye view of Istanbul.
• The harbor entrance at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.
• The surf at the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
• Traffic in Dubai.
• Ship traffic in the Hiroshima harbor.
• Street scenes in villages across the United Kingdom, Europe and Asia.

These are just a few of the choices. You can even control the view of some of the cameras remotely from your iPad. Is that cool, or what? I captured the picture above of the Calabrian village of Serra San Bruno (Southern Italy) this morning just before the sun rose there.

They really should have called this thing the “Window.”

Oma, on the Sea of Japan, January 11, 2011

The House that [Name Here] Built

The House that Nat Built, 2010

I was going to call this “The House that Frank Built” because it’s where Frank Sinatra made some of his most famous recordings.

Then I realized I had to call it “The House that Johnny Built” after I learned that Capitol Records had been co-founded by Johnny Mercer. That’s okay. I mean, if anyone in American musical history deserves to have a building attributed to him, you could do a lot worse than think of Johnny Mercer.

It turns out I was wrong altogether. This former headquarters of Capitol Records was known at the time it was built as “The House that Nat Built” in recognition of all the money Nat King Cole made for the company.

It’s an interesting building, certainly one of the most iconic in Hollywood. It’s said to be the world’s first circular office building. Design-wise, it was a modern, earthquake-proof gesture in a landscape of crumbly Deco buildings.

Long before the current “green” building movement, architect Welton Beckett was just being practical when he designed the energy efficient awnings that give the building its distinctive look. People who didn’t know that have always thought the awnings were intended to make the building look like a stack of 45-rpm records.

Like a pyramid, the real business of the Capitol Records Tower is out of sight. Its recording studios, designed by guitarist Les Paul, are still regarded as some of the best in the world. The outside walls of the ground floor studios are ten inch thick concrete. Set in almost a foot from the concrete exterior, the individual studios rest on cushions of rubber and cork.

Thirty feet below ground level are a famous series of trapezoidal-shaped echo chamber studios, some big enough to hold a full symphony orchestra. It’s said the design of these subterranean studios creates an echo effect that lasts up to five seconds.

There’s also some whimsy about the place. Except for a brief period in 1992, when it was changed to say “Hollywood 50” in honor of the label’s fiftieth anniversary, the red beacon on top of the building has spelled out the word “Hollywood” in Morse code since the building was opened in 1956.

Talk about technology span! Here was a state-of-the-art 1950s building purposely topped off with a beacon programmed to flash a language already more than a hundred years old. Samuel Morse’s granddaughter was even on hand to flip the switch at the building’s opening. To me, that makes about as much sense as having one of the Wright Brothers’ descendants flip the switch on the first computers at Twitter.

[What to see a Capitol Records studio in action? Ken Fields brought this to my attention.]

The View No More

The Side View, 2009

The view shown is from the left side of our house looking into the back yard. I built the copper trellis that frames this view about ten years ago. The Carolina jasmine we grew up and across it took years to mature. In recent years, though, it had completely covered the copper arches and formed a thick and beautiful canopy.

This is the side of the yard that was for many years shrouded in shade almost year round. Grass wouldn’t survive there. Even moss had a hard time getting a foothold in that ground. The side of the house required regular cleaning to keep it from becoming completely covered in green shade loving algae.

The removal of two giant dying oaks whose rotten limbs were falling closer and closer to the house opened up that whole area to more sun. The airflow was improved immediately, so the exterior of the house doesn’t require as much cleaning. I reconditioned the soil in the flower beds, cleaned out the weeds, moved some plants there from other parts of the yard and brought in some new plantings to brighten up the area. I installed an old driftwood sculpture that had languished in another part of the yard, giving this new garden area a focal point.

We were rewarded with the view above.

Sadly, the weight of last week’s snow was more than the copper trellis could bear. Sometime early in the week when we weren’t looking the weight of the snow on the jasmine vines bent the curved arches of the trellis and the whole contraption fell to the ground.

My wife was heartbroken that the jasmine she’s been training to grow across the trellis no longer has a host. I was disappointed that the copper arches on top of the trellis, the parts that I’d spent so long making and getting right, were ruined. (Bending copper tubing for decorative use is tough even with the right tools. Making two copies of the same arc is nothing short of miraculous when you have my limited pipe bending skills.)

Several times over the last few days I have attempted to right the trellis. The straight horizontal and vertical pieces can be rejoined without much trouble. But without the curved top, a once elegant view now looks as if you’re viewing through a cereal box.

I’m done with copper. It’s going to take a little doing to extricate the copper pieces from the jasmine. But after I get the messed clean up, one of my spring projects will be to replace the trellis with a sturdier wooden version. I’m partial to Walpole Woodworkers designs. They’re very good, but also very dear in cost. So I guess I’ll be making a trip to Lowe’s, putting a new blade on the radial arm saw and seeing if I can’t create my own knock-off.

Men in Black

Space for Lease, 2008

Thinking about our old house on the house on the dune the other day triggered another memory I’d stashed far away.

As I mentioned before, the house was a duplex. My mother had built it with the expectation that we would live in one side and the income from the rental unit would pay the mortgage and provide her with a little supplemental income in her old age.

It didn’t exactly work out that way. The rental unit did well. My mother sold the place not long after I went off to college, though, and the proceeds cushioned her for many years thereafter.

We didn’t have many problems with tenants. In the fall of 1966, though, the rental unit was taken for the winter by a young couple named Umphlett. The husband had just gotten out of the Army and was working as a handyman at an old beach hotel nearby. The wife still had a year or two left on her military service.

Things went well for several months. Then the rent started being paid a little later and later each month. The husband disappeared. Mrs. Umphlett explained that her husband was away visiting family. Friends of the couple and moved in with their mongrel dog, ostensibly to help with the rent.

Eventually, the rent stopped being paid at all. We didn’t see either of the Umphletts. The friends disappeared.

My mother tried to track the couple down. The owner of the hotel where the husband worked told her Umphlett had been fired some weeks before. We learned that we might have some recourse by contacting the adjutant general at the base where the wife was stationed. But before that happened, the following took place.

It was a Friday night. I was downstairs watching The Twilight Zone. I went to the kitchen to get a snack. Movement outside the window caught my eye. When I looked closer I realized the house was surrounded by men in black suits and trench coats. They also had guns in their hands.

There was a knock at the front door, actually more of a pound. I opened the door and found a federal agent holding a badge up to the storm door. He demanded to know who I was and where the Umphletts were. I was scared, but assured him that he was knocking on the wrong door.

A brief discussion followed, during which we learned that 1) the Umphletts weren’t really named Umphlett, 2) they weren’t married and 3) both were deserters from the U.S. Army.

We provided a key to the rental unit and found that the couple had left without taking any of their possessions, and further left the dog alone and untended. The agents inspected the place, took the dog and left.

It seems ours wasn’t the first wrong door they’d knocked on. They’d started their raid by pounding on the door of an alcoholic divorcée who lived in the next house up the street from us. Long into her cups by that time of night, Mrs. H. was upstairs in her den dozing in front of the television. She didn’t hear the pounding on her door initially, but finally went to a front window to see what was making the noise. “Federal Agents, Mam! Open up!” they yelled at her. Not at all impressed, she responded, “And I’m the f---ing Queen of England!” and slammed the window shut.

The adjutant general at the local base informed us that in addition to being unable to compel the deserting couple to make good on the rent, the law required us to hold onto their possessions for a year.

It fell to me to clean the apartment out. This all happened during the Vietnam War. The personal belongings I moved from the apartment to a locked shed out in the back yard included firearms and photographs that were disturbing in their crudity and atrociousness. More than forty years later my mind has not yet erased the memory of some of those images. Let’s just say that when photographs of the My Lai massacre were made public the following year I had seen enough in Mr. Umphlett’s photo collection to not be surprised by them.

We never did hear what happened to the Umphletts. Rumor had it that both were eventually apprehended and thrown in the brig. We also heard that the man had been released after ten or eleven months. We don’t know anything for sure. But I do remember that shortly before the year was up, someone broke into the shed behind our house and stole a bunch of those incriminating photographs.

At the Salk

Salk Institute (the classic view), 2010

If you read about a place and fantasize long enough about visiting it, there’s a good change it won’t live up to the mythic proportions you’ve envisioned.

Such was my experience with architect Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Named for Jonas Salk—the scientist whose vaccine saved a lot of us from getting polio—and built by the March of Dimes, the Salk Institute is one of the nation’s leading scientific research centers in the fields of molecular biology, genetics, neurosciences and plant biology.

The Salk Institute is also a landmark of modern American architecture. Louis Kahn hit his professional stride late in his career, abandoning the popular International style of the time for designs that were described as “monumental” and “monolithic.” As one reviewer also put it, “They hide little about themselves.”

That’s a good description of the Salk Institute. When it was finished in 1965, its brutal simplicity was more appealing as a sculptural monument than as a strictly practical form-following-function structure.

Brutal might not be a kind word when referred to a building. Kahn’s Salk campus, however, inspires the term, what with all its straight lines, hard edges and sharp corners.

The Institute has a marvelous site just up from the cliffs of Torrey Pines. From its terrace one’s eye is drawn not to the short range of hills in the foreground, but to the vast horizon of the Pacific Ocean just beyond. It’s a majestic elevated platform that brings to mind the way the Trocadero in Paris overlooks the Eiffel Tower.

You enter the campus from the east. The buildings in the original complex are constructed of poured concrete that was purposely left unfinished. There are two large parallel six-story wings of research laboratories flanking a broad plaza paved with travertine marble and interrupted only by a narrow water run than flows from the eastern end of the plaza to pools at the western end. I’m sure people have wanted to add furniture, potted plants, maybe even umbrellas and color to the courtyard. Kahn, however, decreed that the space should be kept free of distraction to encourage greater thought. And so it has remained, an elegantly open and empty piano nobile with the open air and the wide Pacific to set your mind free.

Salk Institute (the north range), 2010

In front of each of the wings are stairway towers that contain offices, studio spaces and utilities. The buildings are punctuated by teak trim that, also by Kahn’s instructions, has never been sealed or stained. (Teak is a handsome and durable material for a coastal site. But if you ask me the teak in the Salk Institute could use a little sprucing up.)

Salk Institute - 75, 2010

I asked a few people who work at the Institute what it’s like to work in such a landmark. I wondered if the lab spaces are as inspiring as the exterior. Opinions ranged from those who are so focused on their work that they barely notice the setting to those who consider it such an honor to be at the Institute that they would never think of speaking poorly of it in public.

I hope these photographs will give you some idea of what the Salk Institute is like. Unfortunately, they also make clear how little I know about architectural photography. Please excuse the misleading perspectives. The buildings at the Salk Institute do indeed stand upright and level.

Salk Institute - 52, 2010

Salk Institute - 40, 2010