Stimulation

Our juice of late is coming from the week we spent in the midwest in May and a couple recent trips to L.A. here in June. Not that Santa Barbara lacks for points and events of interest at this time of year, but festivals and parades don't always do the trick of lighting up the circuits for our peculiar passions.

Earlier in the spring, when we would mention to acquaintances that we were about to head for Milwaukee, we earned some very blank expressions and the inevitable question, "Why? You got family there?" No, not family, but friends--ones who we normally see only when they come west--and Frank Lloyd Wright. No one questions our good friends Julie and Jim, who've lived in Holland, Michigan and Racine, Wisconsin as well as Grafton (20 miles out of Milwaukee towards Green Bay), when they take the obvious holiday in Santa Barbara every few years, but we need the excuse of pursuing the work of the world's greatest architect to explain a trip in the opposite direction.

It turns out that Milwaukee is a very attractive city of an ideal size and scale, but for us the main gig is its centrality to so many important Wright structures that we wanted to visit and absorb. Wright began his career in architecture in Chicago and opened his first private practice in the suburb of Oak Park. So we made the two-hour drive and spent three days taking in the beginnings of truly modern architecture, not just in America, but in the world: Wright's turn-of-the-century home and studio, the soulful Unity Temple, and a couple dozen early commissions that essentially defined the Prairie Style--all within the modest boundaries of Oak Park, IL. And a short drive onward to South Chicago brought us to the landmark Robie House that's still yielding its secrets as restoration progresses.

Once personal scandal had driven Wright out of not only Oak Park, but also out of the country in 1909, he eventually settled his practice back into familiar territory in Spring Green, WI, a bit west of Madison, in a complex of buildings he called Taliesin. So we spent a day taking that in and trying to comprehend how the succession of structures there corresponded to the triumphs and tragedies of his very lengthy career. On the drive back to Milwaukee we stopped off at the awesomely situated new convention center he designed for Madison in the 1930s--something that wasn't built until the start of the 21st century.

Milwaukee happens to also be within a stone's throw of probably the most important building of the 20th century--the Johnson's Wax administration building in Racine. Though the Fridays-only tour schedule and the robotic tour guides provided by the company feel a bit airless, one cannot walk into that "Great Workroom" and not feel exhilarated and stimulated in a very profound way. This is why we traipse off to odd corners of the country--simply to walk into these brilliantly planned spaces, whether it's the elegant spread of a Prairie house, the curiously intimate public meeting hall of Unity Temple, or the soaring cathedral of commerce that is the Johnson building. The human spirit is always honored in the most simple and logical ways. The visitor is repeatedly taught what modernity can mean in its best sense.

This past Sunday, though, we found ourselves equally charged by an architectural vision of a very different sort: Simon Rodia's towers in Watts. Unlike Wright, Rodia clearly never planned a bit of his assemblage of iron, concrete, and wire. He had only basic hand tools, and employed the most elementary of building techniques. He simply built...and built some more as the spirit moved him. But there is an exuberance in the sheer gutsiness of these towers and arches and walls. We see the joy of building and a brazen courage to pursue an unconventional passion.

The Watts Towers, though, are not all about irrationality and goofy dreams of grandeur. There is a keen, if naive, aesthetic sense at work here that rewards detail examination. The expanses of broken tile, crockery, bottles, and seashells dazzle the eye and tap into a basic feel of what Southern California has always been--cheerful, spacious, and free.

Our motive for visiting the Watts Towers was that we had tickets that evening for performance artist Roger Guernveur Smith's one-person "show" called "The Watts Towers Project" at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. In it, Smith assembles a loose personal narrative as chaotic, emotive, and seemingly random as Simon Rodia's towers, but Smith keeps circling around that neighborhood landmark of his youth and building toward personal identification with the mysterious Italian artisan he calls that "multi-lingual illiterate." Having just been to see the towers that afternoon, and experiencing the ambient surface of Watts, we had no trouble catching Smith's allusions to Marco Polo, helicopters, barbecue, and fireworks.

The excursion to Watts came less than a week after the Springsteen concert at the Greek Theatre--in a very different neighborhood of L.A. The treat here was less visual, though equally invigorating. Springsteen is touring the material on his recent Seeger Sessions disc with a band of over twice the size of his E-Street compatriots, working together as a string band, a brass ensemble, and gospel choir all in one.

If it takes Bruce to get America listening once again to American folk, spiritual, and political protest, then we're in good hands, and the music is well represented when he takes it abroad in front of audiences that are apparently even more enthusiastic than at home. He's also reworking several of his rock standards into jazz, big band, and swing formats, just to celebrate all the modes of great indigenous music beyond the borders of rock 'n' roll. And Bruce hasn't missed several opportunities to update older music by seamlessly blending new and timely lyrics with the received text (see the blog post below this one for two wonderful examples).

Stimulated? Hell, best keep the defibrillator handy.