CULTURE – HEATHER KING

A GLASS PANEL HOMAGE TO LOCAL FIREFIGHTERS

November 22, 2019November 22, 2019
by Heather King

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Artist Anne-Elizabeth Sobieski’s family lost their Pasadena home to fire when she was 17. “I was frozen. I don’t know how much time went by. We just watched as the roof fell in, and one by one, every room burned.”

Ever since, she’s had a special heart for firefighters. So perhaps it was only fitting that she was chosen by the LA County Department of Arts and Culture (formerly the LA County Arts Commission) to design the fused glass panels for the newly built Santa Clarita Fire Station 104.

“The county’s awarding of public art projects is really an outreach to the community, which I think is the most beautiful thing in the world. They provide arts education programs, fund teachers and individual artists, work with the incarcerated, give apprenticeship grants, and much more. They invite people like me who have never done a public project before.”

From the beginning, she had to consider how she needed to design the panels so they’d look well in glass. Judson Studios, based in Highland Park, is the oldest family-run stained-glass studio in America. She hired them to team up on the proposal and to fabricate the panels.

Her initial proposal focused on the landscape, the history of Santa Clarita, and the community for whom fire tends to be traumatizing.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE SRIRACHA SAUCE EMPIRE

November 19, 2019
by Heather King

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Sriracha sauce is a crown jewel of Southern California foodie culture.

You’ve seen the plastic bottles. They’re filled with bright red sauce, emblazoned with a rooster, stamped with text in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese, and topped by a green squirt cap. For many, this blazing hot chili product is a staple condiment.

Enter David Tran, CEO and founder of Huy Fong Foods. In 1979, Tran fled communist Vietnam on a Taiwanese freighter named Huey Fong. “I didn’t have a plan,” he says. He came to the U.S. because we were the only place that would have him. He ended up naming his Sriracha empire after that boat.

He washed up in the LA area and decided to try his hand at hot sauce.

He was born in 1945, the Year of the Rooster. So he bought a blue Chevy van, stenciled his own rooster logo on the side, and drove his first bottles to Asian restaurants and markets around town.

Over time he grew his company from a 5,000-square-foot facility in Chinatown (1980), to a 68,000-square-foot facility in Rosemead (1987), to its current state-of-the-art 650,000-square-foot compound in Irwindale (2010).

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

COAST TO COAST

November 15, 2019November 15, 2019
by Heather King

I always laugh when people say “I hope you enjoyed your retreat!” or “your vacation!”

I do enjoy it, all of it, but my life and my travel are almost militarily disciplined and at all times retain a pilgrimage aspect. I often fast in my way, I always walk miles. This last trip to NYC was no exception.

And it was a beautiful trip.

Why, however, did I make it? Even I don’t fully know.

Maybe my goal was simply to lay eyes on the faces of my friends: Patrick, Tim, Matthew, Anthony. Maybe it was so I could go to Mass and pray at St. Vincent Ferrer, surely one of the loveliest churches in NY, if not all of creation. Maybe it was to pay my biannual visit to the Conservancy Garden in the upper NE corner of Central Park. Maybe it was to walk the streets of Manhattan (and Queens, and Brooklyn), and to leave a little of my body and blood there, and to pray for the people and places among whom I walked.

Maybe I just had to savor a taste of the East Coat autumn.

All of this was made easier by a $213 round trip ticket and the fact that, because I write for Magnificat, I’m allowed to stay at the Dominicans’ Holy Name Building on E. 65th, around the corner from St. Vincent Ferrer, for a generously small stipend (as who but the wealthy could ever afford a Manhattan hotel for a week). Read more “COAST TO COAST” →

MIKE BIRBIGLIA’S “THE NEW ONE”

November 14, 2019
by Heather King

COME ON, MIKE, I BET YOU CAN AFFORD BETTER TOYS THAN THESE!

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Mike Birbiglia is an American stand-up comic, writer, and producer with a raft of comedy albums and TV specials under his belt. “Sleepwalk With Me” (2012), his award-winning directorial film debut, started with a one-man off-Broadway show that he wrote, directed, and starred in.

In 2011, he launched and then toured worldwide with his second one-man show, “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend.” Other credits include the 2016 comedy-drama film “Don’t Think Twice,” a recurring role in the Netflix web TV series “Orange Is the New Black,” and regular contributions to NPR’s “This American Life.”

Birbiglia grew up Catholic in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, the youngest of four. He is married to poet Jennifer Hope Stein. The couple have a young daughter named Oona.

His “everyman” humor tends toward body image issues, fear of growing up, and the perennial divide between men and women.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE

November 4, 2019
by Heather King

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture piece begins:

Every good Californian knows of Hearst Castle, the ginormous house on an enchanted Central Coast hill built by publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst.

The estate at its height consisted of 250,000 acres, bought at 70 cents per. The property featured its own airfield, a mile-long pergola planted with fruits, vines, and espaliered trees, and a private zoo that was at the time the largest in the world.

A couple of weeks ago I traveled north, boarded the bus at the Visitor’s Center, and gawked for the 5-mile-long trip up the driveway. I was there for the special Art of San Simeon Tour, which costs a hundred bucks, has an eight-person max, and lasts 2 hours, 15 minutes.

We started at the 104-foot-long Neptune Pool, the third incarnation of this luxe water-frolicking venue (Hearst, who as a child asked his mother to buy him the Louvre, changed his mind often). We learned of the Vermont marble, the Roman Empire-era columns, the statues that are a mixture of the ancient and the modern.

Next stop was the eight-bedroom Spanish-Moorish “Casa del Sol”…

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

PROJECTS AND PLOWSHARES

October 31, 2019November 4, 2019
by Heather King

I haven’t much checked in as of late. This is in large part because I have many PROJECTS.

One: I am making a will! That’s right: getting “my affairs” in order, a task upon which I’ve been procrastinating for probably five years. So the ball is rolling. That feels good. It’s a lot of work.

Like just imagine someone having to come into your home or apartment once you croak and start having to try to figure things out. How do you get into her laptop? Where’s her checking account? What about cell phone, wifi, electricity, title to car, pandora, Medicare? WHAT DO WE DO WITH ALL HER TCOTCHKES? I mean that’s just one small facet. And I don’t even own a piece of real estate!

Two: I’m updating my website/blog. Oh my God. Don’t get me started. WordPress. Even though I’ve hired someone, this has required hours and untold hours and the thing is not even remotely near to up and running. However, as my friend Geoff said, “We’ll do this in stages.” Geoff is a person of few words, which is perfect for someone like me, who will prattle endlessly and mindlessly on unless checked. Anyway, so there’s that.

MAKING WAVES: THE ART OF CINEMATIC SOUND

October 26, 2019November 4, 2019
by Heather King

**OSCAR-NOMINATED RE-RECORDING MIXER** **ANNA BEHLMER AT HER CONSOLE**

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Midge Costin’s documentary, “Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound,” is a fascinating and instructive peek into a world hitherto unknown to most of us.

The film traces the history of sound in film, examines the ways directors and sound designers work together, and features the latest discoveries and advances in sound technology, all while managing to remain warm, lively, and human.

Director-producer Costin is a graduate of USC Film School, a veteran, award-winning feature film sound editor in Hollywood, and the holder of the Kay Rose Endowed Chair in the Art of Sound Editing at the USC School of Cinematic Arts given by George Lucas in 2005. Producers-writers Bobette Buster and Karen Johnson round out the team.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

THE PROVOCATIONS OF CAMILLE PAGLIA

October 22, 2019November 21, 2019
by Heather King

**CHIAM SOUTINE, c. 1919**
**WOMAN IN A RED BLOUSE**

I’m no unalloyed fan of Camille Paglia. Her embrace of the New Age and desire to be a man leave me cold.

On the other hand, I’m totally on board with her disdain for political-correctness-gone-awry and her recognition that without religion civilization is doomed.

I just came across a wonderful piece by Emily Esfahani Smith–“The Provocations of Camille Paglia”–in City Journal, Summer, 2019.

Of Paglia’s time at Yale in the 80s, when the thought of French “deconstructionists” Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault held sway:

“But to Paglia, nothing was more important than saving the universities from the “soulless, beady-eyed careerists” who “cynically deny the possibility of meaning” in the great works of the past and have ruined the humanities with their “shallow, juvenile attitude toward culture.” During our conversation, Paglia called them “absolutely the most corrupt and evil individuals on the landscape.”

GORDON PARKS: THE FLÁVIO STORY AT THE GETTY

October 19, 2019October 19, 2019
by Heather King

“Flávio da Silva,” Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1961, by Gordon Parks.
(© The Gordon Parks Foundation/J. Paul Getty Museum)

Here’s how this week’s arts and culture column begins:

Through Nov. 10 at the Getty is a compelling exhibit based on the work of Gordon Parks, a Renaissance-man film director, writer, and photojournalist perhaps best known for his work for LIFE magazine.

President John F. Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress,” launched in 1961, was an initiative designed to promote democracy and economic cooperation across Latin America and to forestall the spread of communism.

In March of that year, LIFE sent Parks to Rio de Janeiro with the assignment to document the country’s poverty.

At the time, the city’s more than 200 garbage-strewn favelas — hillside slum towns — were home to an estimated 700,000 people. The average per capita income was $289. Parks, a Kentucky native, had grown up poor himself, but had never seen destitution of such a degree and kind.

READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

CAMBRIA, CA

October 17, 2019November 4, 2019
by Heather King

Hi. I’m in Cambria on the California Central Coast, on terrible circadian rhythm where I get max five or six hours a night of sleep. No matter. Those are the things of this world. Had fugue state pleasant drive up yesterday on about four hours of sleep, wheeled into town, sprang into action, explored both the West and East villages, walked up hill to cemetery, bought a Virgin Mary mirrored vitrine at one of the approximately trillion and a half tcotchke shops, found my way to Airbnb for which I was and am insanely crazily grateful.

Up before dawn this morning to pray—realize I can in fact make the 9 o’clock Mass downtown and still make it to Hearst Castle for art tour by 10:20.

Nothing matters except Christ, the Sacraments, prayer. Without them, I can do nothing. Started to sink again into anger, self-pity, conflict, doubt re my apt. The workmen have now had ladder against my kitchen window, peering in and talking 8 hours a day while they scrape and paint, taking up driveway so forced to park in street. Really you have to laugh. The weeks before that they were against my bedroom window, and for the 8 months before that they were basically outside my living room window. Just for today let’s not worry about it esp as I’m NOT THERE.

Category: CULTURE

A FIELD TRIP TO HEARST CASTLE