Gehry, Me and the A.R.B.

By Mark Weiss

Architects are over-represented on the Architectural Review Board but there should be room for a post-modern writer, if he gets 8,888 votes for council but does not get seated, read this

A: They're both mosaic arts in that they're comprised of many, many, many other art forms all put together like a big puzzle. When they're successful, they have a pleasurable dreamlike element - the shape of a piece of sculpture, of a building, the way light hits it, the dream of a movie, the idea of a movie. But in order to achieve either you have to break it down into technical components, which are sort of mosaic in nature. In order to build the building you have to understand all kinds of physics. You have to figure out how to get people in and out of the building, how to get sewers in and where to put the loading docks, etc. If I want to make people moved or cry in a film, I figure out what the room looks like, what the people are wearing, what time of day it is, what the light is, how to photograph it, where to put the camera. It involves optics and costume design and set design and architecture. (Sydney Pollack on Frank Gehry and Dr. Milton Wexler)

[caption id="attachment_12453" align="aligncenter" width="640"] event 9/20/14 Lytton DESIGNED site specific by mark weiss for earthwise of paloalto[/caption]

I'm lampin', I'm lampin', I'm cold cold lampin'

Arrington et al

1. What is it about ARB that is compatible with your experience and of specific interest to you, and why? I design concerts, especially site-specific events like on Sept. 20, 2014, "!Taylor Ho!" featuring Taylor Ho Bynum and Ben Goldberg, free jazz concert at Lytton Plaza, when the music stopped Taylor and I biked from Lytton Plaza (he had started his day in San Francisco), to Bol Park and past Gunn High, towards Foothill where he proceeded on to Cowell Redwoods Park and eventually Los Angeles. I've produced more than 200 events here, most at Cubberley, and, based on that, submitted to Mandy Lowell et al a white paper on the value of Cub as a regional arts venue. I think the board would benefit from non-architect design values. [caption id="attachment_12435" align="aligncenter" width="257"] In Pollock's film about Gehry and his therapist Milton Wexler, the doctor noted that couples come to him to be happy while artists come to change the world[/caption]

2. Please describe an issue that recently came before the Board ...and describe why you are interested in it. I've spoken on about 10 projects in the last six months. Regarding the antennas at the Little League field I wrote, published and read into the record a prose poem about there being no "center field foul pole" which was not quite to the standards of Jack Hirschman or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but borrows form it. I called it "chin music for corporate creep": Old timers recall Art Kuehn bouncing a ball off the library, a long home run -- he is our Babe Ruth. calling a shot Also, because my partner Terry Acebo Davis, the former two-term arts commissioner, once owned a house on Venice beach, which we checked on in July, I commented on a current downtown plan, the one designed by a psychologist but not Dr. Milton Wexler, and lauded it as "sorta Abbott-Kinney". I knew slightly--ok, we met once, on the stairway, between the 5th and 6th floor of 77 Maiden Lane -- Jay Chiat, the early champion of Frank Gehry -- this is 1986 -- and immediately sero-converted to Frank, and just this same July -- we actually stayed Downtown LA at the old Universal Studios buildings -- Pickford, Fairbanks -- now called the Ace Hotel -- with the JESUS SAVES neon intact -- on Broadway but zipped out to Santa Monica Venice to see the Oldenburg binoculars at what is now Google La (goog lay lah) and made a little film there, similar to a film I made just last weekend walking from the new Anderson building thru the Richard Serra corten steel structure, to Cantor. We also, Terry and I, walked on the Disney concert Hall, exterior, a Gehry. Palo Alto needs, if not a Gehry, our version of such. We are more garish than Gehry.

[caption id="attachment_12439" align="aligncenter" width="360"] artwork by Stacey Carter, based on photo by Mark Weiss, NYC, summer 1988[/caption]

I also own a print of the Oldenburg baseball bat; if you want to put one of those on Middlefield and pack that with senders and receivers, that I will support.

3. If appointed to ARB -- but not seated by will of the people to Council November 4, 2014 -- the specific goal I would like the ARB to achieve, and why and how I would suggest achieving, as part of process per se, an effect where, as Thoreau in 1849 and George Packer -- Gunn 1978 -- said in 2013, the leadership seems representative of and responsive to the people, and it's not so much what color stucco or how much glass each new investment into our skyline and walking tour adds, but that there is a little of us in each brick, nail or plate so to speak, and, with due respect, to for example my Fremont Hills, Terman and Gunn schoolmate RP, there is at least a perception of lack. So maybe a sound and ambience slash negative space bricklayer would add a nuance to these proceedings and not just as a finish fetish.

At the Tsuchianura Festival at Lucie Stern Sunday a lady named Nemet (but not unlike "Broadway Joe") suggested we, like our Japanese Sisters, adopt a mascot; maybe we need a monster-mascot, to exorcise from these flippers and tear-downs and carpet-bagging opportunities, that which lurks herein. Maybe a zombie-ice-cream-cone fetish will make the monster homes seem more humane.

4. (long question, but opens doors, so to speak, to these visual aids) [caption id="attachment_12455" align="aligncenter" width="480"] event DESIGNED by mark weiss for earthwise, lytton[/caption]

I like 250 Hamilton just fine, with or without the $4 mil facelift, Phil Ciralsky. (insert photo).

I can also link to or reproduce in entirety here my previous draft of this posted as "Dancing About Architecture".

(I wrote two previous versions of this, from 4:20 to 5:25 while seated in lobby of 7th floor of 250, on my Apple laptop, but twice had the file deleted after answering the 4 questions above; David the clerk said "use Acrobat not Preview" and I admit I don't know everything about this little doo-hicky -- Terry did pay for, it was my 50th birthday -- time at the "genius bar" but so far I have been faking it like an idiot savant, so maybe its just me. Number 5 I could not even get the thing to let me squeeze in a doomed bit of copy between all the links. I did suss out a bit on the previous links, thusly:

Our forty six (46) not 80 zoning ordinances under Title 18 and our 38 not .62 building regulations, (i.e Title 16 et cetera) including the new ordinance about Public art and private development (which incidentally, I privately opposed, although I am somewhat known as proponent of the 1 percent in muni projects, and my partner is a former two-term arts commissioner).

I likes me some Birge Clark.

I think we should be charging Joe Bellomo for his bike racks on Civic Center MKL Plaza -- it is not a park, it is a limited public forum. Can I say that here?

This is my 59th post this month alone and my fourth attempt to be boarded.

Two hundred fifty patters by "Christ" to 618 shields of reality by "King" David.

Ten titles, or volumes, pulled somewhat hastily from my shelves, and then stacked neatly on a table at Peet's about three hours and two posts ago:

1. Hiroshi Sugimoto & Jonathan Safran Foer, "Joe" about Richard Serra and Ando, in this case;

2. Art in America, June/July 2014 for article about architecture at Venice Bianalle,

3. Off The Wall!: A Guide to Greg Brown's Murals in Palo Alto;

4 Trisha Brown, So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing -- if and only if it has the photo of her site specific piece of people waving flags from rooftops;

5. Scott Meacham, Dartmouth College: The Campus Guide;

6. Almanac Chapple-Mazinani-Thomas which I think is about recent grad students at Stanford, and something in a tower, ala Ann Hamilton tower at the art colony up in Petaluma I toured a whiles back; which reminds me to look for content I created or documented when John Barton had some cute young French exchange students talk in a compelling way about 27 University; and further about John Barton, who said, at the time, I could ring him>

7. Al' America, by Jon Curiel, the former Chron writer and friend of a friend thru the dear Charlotte Gerstein (Dartmouth 1986, from West Hartford, CT, whose father made a film about the fact that Mark Twain deliberately made his house there face that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, to annoy here) the connect being that Barton and Carrassco here build a lovely mosque;

8. From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe;

9. Fodor's New York City from 1983 back in the good old days (and very avid Plastic Alto readers or close personal friends my recall that I spent February, 2001 that is in the final seven months of Western Civilization in New York, or Brooklyn for you sticklers and bums;

and lastly a 10. Frank Lloyd Wright Field Guide Clayton, Running Press Cyclopedia, this fits in my pocket although I shlepped all ten, plus David Shields Realty Hunger and a Linda Ronstadt cd in a canvas bag from SXSW 2009;

I regrettably sold off my Christopher "Christ" Alexander, "A Pattern Language" which I bought in 1988 because Rob Bagot had it, Rob a future Howard Gossage winner, compared to Dan Mountain the 1988 Howard Gossage winner, Dan and HISWIFE, who Terry and I saw in July, Clay Kershaw was on the mound and the tv, in Venice Beach, an Abbot Kinney kind of thing, you know.

This is my way of announcing that beyond or technically before in some ways running Mark Weiss me that is for Palo Alto City Council -- and again, since we are on topic, exactly 26 years after conceiving of an actualizing and presenting the 1988 Goose Gossage Award for copywriting-reading to Jeff Goodby+ I am also concurrently little poMo and yes "pomp" (my computer is now ghost-writing this part, on auto-Pilot the pen) that I am applying for the appointable position or seat for Architecture Review Board. Not being an actual architect + although Matt H. Porteus and I, in Clay Leo's 1978 HisGoBAM/APB History and Geography of the Bay Area Metropolis slash American Political Behavior did once design a lovely little piece of fiction, and fishin' for that matter, Port Weissius, somewhere between Escondido and San Diego or in another dimension, an architect. But I have a good eye for music.

More to comb. (Do I get bonus points, in some universe, parallel or on a different plane, for bridging, like the grandfather of a nice lady from Michigan in Old Palo Alto, Claytons Kershaw and Leo?)

edita, ten minutes later: I also shot on my Moto Android a group of 11 photos of works on paper (and in one case tin) of architectural themed art works, that I hope color, shapes, supports and bulwarks (if that is a verb) this application, or essay, or exercise, from a private collection; a private collection {self-edited} and then addendumbed down.