Books I'm Reading: Night Studio

Musa Mayer's Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Knopf, 1988) has been in my bookshelves for years - more than 25 years. When I took it down recently to finally read it, the sales slip was still in it. I bought it on September 2, 1989 at a store in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo. I paid $5,900 for it, which in those days was about $40 (¥146/$). I tended to buy whatever looked of interest and was willing to pay what it cost because interesting English-language books were comparatively hard to find in Tokyo at the time.  

Musa Mayer, born Musa Guston, is the painter's daughter. While she is not otherwise a writer, as far as I know, she writes very well, painting a vivid picture (unavoidable pun?) of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a famous man and particularly of her stained relationship with her father who appears to have been more attentive to his painting than he was to his family – which is not to say that he was cruel or manipulative. He was simply devoted to his work. 

Additionally, the book was interesting on a personal level because it turns out that the author left New York and her parents as a young bride and lived and worked in Yellow Springs and Dayton, Ohio – both locations I know well. It's odd how often Yellow Springs seems to pop up. Among my artist friends here in Sonoma County, two have lived in Yellow Springs, and one, like Musa Mayer, worked at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. According to the book, Mayer became a counsellor and worked with youth patients at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Dayton. I walked past Good Samaritan every day on my way to high school, although my school is no longer standing and I've heard that Good Samaritan is gone too. 

Rain: The week of 16 December 2024

In the past few days, we've had rain off and on. Since last reporting, 5.4 inches of new precipitation has accumulated in the rain gauge at my location. That brings our total for the 2024–2025 rainy season to 20.3 inches as of the morning of 18 December. Some stations have reported as much as almost 22 inches. Both are well ahead of normal for this time of the year. Usually we've had about 8.6 inches by this date. Average annual rainfall in Santa Rosa is around 34 inches. It's clear today, but more rain is in the forecast over the upcoming weekend. 

On the Road – Los Angeles 2024 Day 3

I set aside my third and final full day in Los Angeles last week to visit the Getty Center, which I last saw almost 20 years ago. My son and I headed for Santa Monica early, planning to have a quick breakfast in town before our 10 o’clock ticket time at the Getty, which is a short drive into the hills above the city, but we found it hard to locate a place to sit for a quick bite on a Sunday morning. There must be somewhere in Santa Monica with shops and cafés open early, but we didn’t find it. We eventually located a coffee shop in a mostly deserted business district, ate, and headed for the museum.

So much to see! We started with Van Gogh. One of the most famous objects in the Getty’s collections is one of Van Goghs iris paintings. A small one-room exhibit is currently devoted to an analysis of pigments used in the painting showing how some of them have changed over time through exposure to light. The irises are a violet-blue today, but, based on the analysis, Getty conservators believe the irises would have been noticeably more violet when new because the red pigment the painter used to mix his violet – geranium lake (known to be fugitive) – has faded. The original is displayed along with details of the analysis and a re-created version of the painting that the conservators believe is what it would have looked like when fresh. The irises are more violet in the reconstruction, the earth at the bottom left is a more vibrant terra cotta color, the orange flowers at upper left are more orange.

Another one-room exhibit, Magnified Wonders: An 18th-Century Microscope, focuses on a large gilded microscope made in the 1750s, complete with an elaborate case, various accessories, and contemporary slides prepared for use under its lenses – a beautiful instrument. 

Perhaps the main event at the moment is a large, multi-room show called Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800–1600 that examines the human fascination with light from the early Middle Ages to the late-Renaissance/early Enlightenment period. The exhibition presents a wealth of material on the subject from religious, scientific, and artistic perspectives. 

After viewing Lumen, we had a quick lunch and took a break from viewing art as a group of falconers (looking like they had just been teleported from a Renaissance fair) was giving a talk about birds of prey used for hunting in one of the open spaces just outside the museum buildings. I was disappointed that they didn’t let any of the birds fly, but it was fun to see owls (a Barn Owl, a Great-horned Owl, a Burrowing Owl, and a Western Screech Owl), hawks (two Harris’s Hawks), and a Gyrfalcon up close and to hear about how they’re handled. I hadn’t known that owls have traditionally been used by falconers, but not for hunting. They are used instead to stir up birds that get spooked in the presence of owls, such as crows and blackbirds, which are then hunted on the wing by the hawks and falcons. 

After seeing the birds, we looked at a small show of drawings and watercolors focused on how artists have depicted light through history using these media and we also saw the permanent collection, which includes paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and furnishings from various periods. It was a long, tiring, but satisfying visit. 

Between the Getty and dinner, there wasn’t a lot to do. We mostly walked around rather uninteresting neighborhoods back in town until the time of our reservation at a restaurant called Rustic Canyon, which turned out to be excellent. We had an Anjou pear, walnut, honeyed date, and blue cheese salad to start. The pears were extraordinarily fragrant – like perfume. We had a birria of beef with polenta and delicata squash. We had trout with sunchokes and sorrel and we had one other dish, which I can’t recall. Along with the food, we enjoyed a Domaine Breton Bourgeuil Rosé. I’m always happy while traveling when I’ve eaten well and grateful to have the privilege of being able to eat well. 

After dinner, my son dropped me off back at my hotel in East Hollywood before heading back to his own hotel, in Torrance, where he is doing job training. It was a good visit. We had a lot of time to talk.

The following day, after taking the bus back to The Record Collector (as described in an earlier post here), I hailed an Uber to LAX. From there, it was an uneventful flight back to Sonoma County.  When it comes to flying, uneventful is how I like it. 

On the Road – Los Angeles 2024, Day 2

My second day in the LA area started with a visit to The Record Collector on Melrose Ave. in East Hollywood, but the Norton Simon Museum and the Pasadena Playhouse, both in Pasadena, were my main aims on day two. We headed north from the record store in my son’s rented car. The Saturday morning traffic was light. We arrived in less than half an hour.

As we walked from the car to the entrance of the museum, one of several guards in the parking lot (stationed to ensure no one parks and then leaves a car without entering the museum) greeted us and, hearing that we were first-time visitors, enthusiastically recommended a plan to make the most of our time. The Norton Simon Museum building is in the shape of an H, he told us, with the permanent condition consisting mostly of Western painting on the ground floor and Asian sculpture on the floor below. The guard recommended seeing the ground floor paintings in chronological order, which requires starting at the lower-right arm of the H, where pre-renaissance works are housed, going straight to the end of the upper-right arm, going back through the middle of the museum – along the crossbar of the H – to the lower-left arm and then going straight to the end of the upper-left arm to see the most recent works. I immediately thought of driving a four-speed stick shift; essentially, he was saying “start in fourth gear, downshift into third, slide through neutral over and down into second, and then downshift into first." We took his advice. 

I had no idea that the famous Adam and Eve pair by Lucas Cranach the Elder is at the Norton Simon. It would have been worth the trip just to see these, but the collection includes choice pieces from every period through the Post-Impressionists and beyond. I’ve included images here of some of my favorites. Tired after viewing the ground floor art, we looked only briefly at the Asian sculpture collection on the lower floor. It was extensive and clearly top-notch, a collection I’ll look forward to seeing in detail on another visit. Again, a few images are included here. 

Art museums generally close too early for an evening meal to begin, so there’s always dead time between the end of a day looking at art and sitting down to food and drink. After finishing at the Norton Simon, we had about two hours before our dinner reservation. 

My son wanted to visit Yoshan Tea, in Arcadia, about 20 minutes east of Pasadena, a purveyor of fine oolong teas from Taiwan. We had time for a quick visit. The place didn’t look like much from the outside. We entered from the back door, which opens onto a strip mall parking lot. Inside, however, I was reminded of shops like Fortnum and Mason in London and Fauchon in Paris. The teas were beautifully packaged and beautifully displayed, some costing as much as $200–$300 for a small tin. My son bought a very small tin of one of the less fancy offerings. I got a couple of $4 sampler packs. It was a nice diversion.

We then headed back into downtown Pasadena to take a look at the Spanish revival Pasadena Playhouse, which has been the California State Theater since 1937. The place was closed ahead of the evening’s performance with only an occasional staff member slipping in or out from the main entrance doors. Two ticket sellers seated behind glass panels off to one side of the main doors refused to let me even peek into the lobby while preparations were under way. Neither could answer my few questions about the place. The host at the bar housed in a section of the Playhouse complex on the opposite side of the main entrance was equally clueless. I can’t understand working in an historic building and having no curiosity about its past.

Denied entry, we wandered around outside and discovered along a passageway a wall of mounted bricks with names fired into them – hundreds of these bricks. I went back and asked about their purpose, wanting to know whether they were the names of men and women who had studied or performed at the Playhouse, wondering if my father’s name might be among them, but the ticket sellers didn’t know. We examined all the bricks and failed to find my father’s name. We did, however, discover an inconspicuous brick that seemed to indicate that these were the names of deceased alumni. It was then puzzling to find Kevin Costner’s name on a brick and the names of a few other actors not yet dead. Among the dead of note was Groucho Marx, but mostly the names were unfamiliar. Just as we were leaving, I asked a staff member going in if I could have a look inside, explaining that my father had performed there. He kindly let us take a quick look at the lobby but he wouldn’t let us see inside the theater itself. 

We left. We looked around a couple of used record stores – one an inviting hole in the wall called Sibylline Records, another larger and fairly nondescript. Heading back to the car, we noticed a line of bollards that looked very much like lingams we had seen earlier in the day at the Norton Simon Museum (a lingam is a Hindu phallic pillar that represents Shiva and the generative force. These usually have a square base topped by an octagonal section topped by a rounded section. Often the rounded section clearly resembles the head of a penis, sometimes it’s more abstract. The bollards in Pasadena were abstract, but they made us laugh).

By this time, it was time for our dinner reservation at Celestino, which turned out to be something of a disappointment; the service was poorly coordinated, we felt rushed. We did, however, enjoy an excellent 2018 Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino. 

The Pasadena Playhouse was on our way back from dinner again and, as we headed for the car, we passed the front steps just as intermission was beginning. The front doors were flung open. A crowd emerged. We took the opportunity to slip in. I was happy to finally get at least a brief look at the interior of the theater. It has high, curved ceilings with carved beams. There are faux balconies in white plaster on the side walls. The stage appears more modern than the rest of the interior. The seats, too, looked newer. I tried to imagine my father on the stage. He had worked there with Leonard Nimoy, Charles Bronson, and many others.

Outside again, we chatted with a woman who appeared connected with the Playhouse at a more senior level than the others we had briefly spoken with. She wore a name badge with a title, but I didn’t catch her name. She was very interested to hear about my father. On my phone, I pulled up an obituary I wrote for him shortly after he died largely based on old résumés I found among his papers. One of these résumés mentioned the various actors and actresses he had worked with. When I said that he had worked with Victor Jory, the woman lit up and said “you must come see the bell!” The bell had just been rung to alert the crowd to the end of intermission. “That’s the Victor Jory Bell!” she said excitedly. She led us to a small bell across from the main doors that we hadn’t noticed on our earlier visit and directed our attention to a plaque behind it explaining that Jory had given it to the theater for the purpose of alerting patrons to the start of performances and the end of intermissions – the purpose that it serves to this day. The serendipitous timing of our passing by the theater again was responsible for a satisfying end to the day.