Library as Portal

You might think that, being in L.A., I might have been doing some sightseeing on my down time, but the truth is, I don't consider this down time. Every minute that hasn't been spent getting organized and oriented has been spent on the job search, except for a few stolen moments here and there. Does time spent in libraries count as relaxing if you're a librarian who's job searching? I'm not sure, but if you're going to be sore over not getting a sightseeing report, I'll try to make up for it by telling you about a marvelous sight I did see in the course of my rambles.

My newcomer's handbook pointed out the library I'm going to tell you about as something worth visiting in its own right, so even though I went there with a purpose, I also went to see the building. While many things in life are over-hyped, this library was a case of something you have to see to believe. It brought to mind a restaurant called The Glitz in Kentucky that I've been to a couple of times: it's nearly impossible to exaggerate the decor and the impact it has, especially on a first-time visitor.

The library's metal-clad exterior was striking enough but could have held a conventional interior in the way of many other public libraries I've seen. It didn't. As soon as you walk in, you're faced with a huge tank of tropical fish taking up an entire wall; it reminded me of an exhibit I'd seen at the Long Beach Aquarium. It formed part of the wall for the Children's Department, which one enters through a portal composed of gigantic books. Inside, there's a T-Rex, a lighthouse, an art room, a spaceship, a painted ceiling, and countless other things along with the books to intrigue and delight.

Across from the Children's Department was a very comfortable-looking reading room, with Craftsman-style furnishings and fixtures that gave it the air of a private library in a home or a well-to-do college. A matching area stocked with newspapers, sofas, and clubby chairs anchored the other end of the first floor, past the gift shop and Circulation area. I've rarely seen more inviting spaces in a library of any kind, and this certainly made the point that as welcoming as the library is for kids, it is just as interested in its adult patrons.

The Internet computers upstairs were state-of-the-art, as were the meeting rooms along one side next to the escalator, each named for a famous writer of science fiction. The literature and fiction department, also on the second floor, featured Art Deco styling and art exhibits along with the book collection. Everywhere I looked, there was something to stimulate the eye or the mind. I walked around for the first half-hour with my jaw nearly dropped to the floor in the midst of all those curving lines and soaring spaces. I was told that much of the money for the building had been raised within the community, which strongly supports education and literacy, and I have to say that speaks well for this small city, which--while fairly affluent--is not one of the higher-end zip codes in L.A.

The library was busy (and a bit noisy), but the main thing that impressed me was how well it succeeded as a community center that combined ease of use, modern technology, old-fashioned charm and comfort, creative flair, and an atmosphere almost guaranteed to stimulate the mind. I've rarely seen a building that went so above and beyond in fulfilling its function. It was a true gateway to the imaginative realm, combining some of the best features of a museum, an art gallery, an athenaeum, a children's playground, a teen hangout, and a technology lab all enfolded into a library.

You may be saying, OK, OK, when are you going to tell us the name of this paragon of the library world, and my answer is, I'm not. Perhaps the community would welcome a huge influx of visitors traipsing through, and perhaps not, but if you're ever in L.A., ask around and someone can probably steer you in the right direction. The gods on Olympus could not enjoy a finer library, and in fact, if they have one, it might look quite a bit like this one. It's the library you've always wanted but didn't know you could ask for.

Mnemosyne and the City Block

By chance, I was in the vicinity of my old neighborhood the other day and decided to drive through. I frequently drive by it but very rarely through it, though when I lived in my last place, its streets were almost as familiar to me as the back of my hand. As often happens with the passage of time, I found that I now had a different feeling about it. What was once merely commonplace and familiar now had a heightened significance: the brief excursion was like a homecoming of sorts, in spite of the fact that I still live in the same general area. (You'd probably laugh if you knew how close my current place is to my last one, but sometimes even a small distance can make a big difference. It feels like a different world over here.)

So I drove through and noted something that shouldn't have surprised me but did, a little. The streets of modest bungalows mixed in with a few apartment buildings were mostly intact, but here and there houses had been torn down and replaced with what I take to be student housing, newer construction that doesn't match the look of the older brick dwellings and single-family homes of the neighborhood. I'm not certain if a person unfamiliar with the old look would be struck as much as I was by the patchwork quality of the neighborhood as it is now, but to me it was as if I had seen the handwriting on the wall. The neighborhood is changing--I wonder how much of it will even be there 20 years from now.

A eulogy is still somewhat premature, and I really have no say in what happens to a neighborhood I don't live in, so I'm strictly giving my personal reaction here--but it did make me sad. It's not the fact of change in itself but the way in which it seems to be tearing holes in the fabric of something that used to seem organic and of a piece. I used to walk those streets every day without thinking about them much, but after driving through the other night, I started thinking about Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi." It is indeed true that "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Understand, we're not talking paradise here, but rather a very ordinary neighborhood . . . though I don't know, I guess it depends on how you define paradise.

I started to remember small things from the days when I was a familiar sight on those streets: the day in late April, finals nearly completed, when I suddenly noticed how gorgeous the dogwoods were at the end of one street. The flat-roofed home that I always thought looked like a Florida house, an anomaly in that neighborhood but a reminder of my childhood. The stretch of shady street overhung with trees that somehow gave the impression, for a quick half block, of a country lane, especially on a hot summer day. The house with the lamppost in the front yard that gave me a comfortable feeling, especially that night I was out walking with friends and the lamp was on when we passed by. I couldn't find it the other night and don't know if I just missed it or if it's been torn down.

After my detour through the neighborhood, I was in a thoughtful mood, thinking about things, people, and places that have passed through my life. In a strange miracle of timing, a friend from the old days called the next afternoon to say she was going to be in town. I told her about what had happened. We didn't spend a lot of time reminiscing, but the subject of how much time has passed did arise. She commented on how long ago it all seems, and I said that to me it feels like almost another lifetime. She herself, however, seemed unchanged, which was some consolation.

I was just writing about the inevitability of flux last week. If someone is going to put up a new building, I would rather they did it with some regard for aesthetics, but realistically speaking this isn't always going to happen. Nevertheless, places matter, as do trees, buildings, and homes. One realizes that paradise will occasionally be paved over, as Ms. Mitchell says, for a parking lot (or parking structure, in this case), and you're going to lose a lamppost here and there, and as long as some things remain constant, I guess it's not a total loss. Knowing that it won't always happen, I still wish, though, for some attention to things past and some respect for the spirit of place, something our society hasn't always been good at giving.

If we don't respect where we've been, how can we build something worth moving toward?

Over the Threshold in Newport, KY

Last week I went to see a concert at Southgate House Revival, an old/new music venue in Newport, Kentucky. Southgate House used to be located in an old mansion of the same name close to the Ohio River but has moved to an old church a few blocks away and changed its name accordingly. The original Southgate House is historic, having hosted a number of prominent people, including Abraham Lincoln; it's also known as the birthplace of the inventor of the Tommy gun. Southgate House Revival's new home is an 1866 Methodist Episcopal church that had been abandoned for some years before being adapted as a music venue.

I had been to the old location a few times and was curious to see the new place. The old mansion was quite an institution, with its prominent hilltop situation, elegant facade--including a tower and a widow's walk--and many steps leading up to a wide porch. My first impression of Southgate House Revival, from the outside, was that it exudes a much humbler ambience. The exterior is somewhat dilapidated and lacks signage to tell you where to go; you enter by an inconspicuous side door off a small, claustrophobic parking lot between the church and an adjacent brick building. The surrounding block is plain and unassuming, almost austere.

When I was growing up, Newport had a reputation for vice, but it has traded its notoriety for more family-oriented entertainments these days. It retains some of the feeling of a ramshackle riverside district, even with all the new restaurants, spiffy bars, and entertainment options in the immediate area. The mix of old and new, wholesome and edgy, combined with spectacular views of the Cincinnati skyline across the river, makes for an interesting, unsettled, and slightly fraught energy. So it's probably fitting that Southgate House Revival seems to represent in itself the coniunctio of the entire neighborhood. It is very much a marriage of opposites.

The show I saw was in the Sanctuary, which has been refitted with a concert stage and a bar. The Sanctuary is beautiful: it has splendid pointed arches, Gothic corbels, vivid stained glass windows, hanging ecclesiastical light fixtures, a ceiling that soars--and numerous shadows. There's a phenomenal pipe organ (Cincinnati-made) behind the bar, which is opposite the stage. I was so struck by the sight of that ethereal organ serving as backdrop to all those bottles of spirits that I had to stare at it for several minutes. Talk about the sacred and the profane (or secular) mingling and mixing and creating a complicated third thing! Talk about an axis mundi. There it is, in concrete, architectural terms.

I was stirred by the extraordinary energy in the room, as I think most anyone would be, consciously or not. The union of worldly and spiritual planes rarely occurs so dramatically. I read an article about the owners of the business that made it clear they're alive to the sacred dimensions of the space and feel it's entirely suited to the business of connecting audiences with music (I agree with them). It would be difficult for any performance not to be shaped by the tenor--part mystical and part streetwise--of this liminal, dreamlike interior. You definitely feel you're on the threshold of something. It's a little like C. S. Lewis's Wood Between the Worlds in Narnia: jump in, and there's no telling where you'll end up.

In Jungian terms, the coniunctio expresses the meeting of the conscious and the unconscious, a process that brings the individual closer not only to his or her innermost self but also to the larger concerns of the world soul. According to Jung, it's a messy process and one that's often resisted. Just a guess: I'm tempted to think that any artistic performance, regardless of style or intention, would affect the listener more profoundly in Southgate House Revival because the room itself amplifies the content and carries it past the conscious mind's defenses. It's rare to be any place where the architecture is so revealing of what goes on within.

Pictures Never Seen Before

At the local Gallery Hop last Friday night, I covered a lot of ground, enjoying both the art on the walls and the street life. The Gallery Hop is an event in which a group of artistic venues sets out their punch bowls, crudites, and fancy cookies and welcomes visitors for a special viewing of their exhibits. The event has become a downtown tradition, and you never know who (or what) you might see.

Most of the galleries are well-known and long-established regulars in the local arts scene: those at the local universities, the public library, the Downtown Arts Center, the Living Arts and Science Center. It's especially exciting when there turns out to be a quirky artists' collective behind a nondescript door you've passed thousands of times or when a place you always associated with one purpose suddenly reveals a secret identity: a historic church with a modest corridor that doubles as a gallery for a former basketball star (now a talented folk artist) working with wood, or a restaurant that unexpectedly serves a pop-up exhibit. Finding art in unexpected places always enhances the sense of adventure.

Does looking with intention transform your vision? Would I have noticed how beautifully the tall old-fashioned window in ArtsPlace frames the steeple of the church across the way if I had been casually passing through? It stopped me in my tracks, but would I have seen it if I'd been there on business, with my mind on something else? This question reminds me of the time I went to see Orson Welles' Touch of Evil downtown on a humid summer night. I walked to my car afterwards thinking how noirish and mysterious everything looked, as if the movie's frame of reference had widened to include our familiar rain-soaked streets. I doubt if I'd have had the same thought if I'd just been running to the store for a gallon of milk. The film gave me a new lens for viewing and helped me see what I didn't see before.

Another time I noticed this in a big way was my first visit to The Getty Center in Los Angeles. The building itself is a work of art, and you could wander around quite happily just taking in the hidden courtyards, the changing light on the walls, the views across the garden, and the shadows created by a staircase. I had been doing just that when I suddenly found myself outside, on a patio that looked east and north. The museum has a commanding hilltop view of a wide swath of West Los Angeles, but from that perspective the most arresting element in the landscape is the freeway, with its sinuous, ever-moving lines of traffic, gliding like living things through a dramatic gap in the mountains, rushing onwards with something between a hiss and a roar far below you.

I'm sure framing the landscape as living art was a conscious intention of the architect, and I have to say he succeeded. The view is breathtaking. I gazed down at the scene for quite a while, mesmerized by the scope and grandeur. Years later, when I was in Los Angeles on a regular basis, frequently traveling to and from school on that very highway, I could never pass The Getty Center without remembering that first view. What always struck me was how my role had shifted from onlooker to participant. Instead of just observing the scene, I was now in it, part of that river of purposeful, fast-moving, ever-changing traffic.

Driving on the 405 requires skill and attention. Without that first revealing look from the side of a mountain high above, would I ever have realized the wonder and beauty of what, at ground-level, can be a frustrating, exhausting, and very mundane experience? Maybe not. For that I have to thank the visionary who looked at the scene with an artist's eye and framed it so that the rest of us could see it. Art doesn't imitate life; it provides an opening into it.

Hestia Meets Zen: The Housecleaning Blues

Housecleaning is one of those things that goes better with music. I used to have a habit of cleaning on Sunday mornings, and I always picked something lively that would add some pep to the proceedings. It was almost fun, too, floating a mop easily over the floors, with a dance step here and there. I still clean to music, and it's even more necessary these days because I have more furniture now, which makes cleaning harder.

We're not talking about a lot more furniture, but it's amazing how it's made dusting and mopping disproportionately difficult. The pieces I've accumulated were sensible: a desk and chair to assist with the dissertation process, a book carousel to organize all the additional books and keep them close by, an end table with a bin for magazines, a floor lamp to shed some additional light. Besides those, I also have a few things that didn't used to be there tucked away in odd places: a boot box in a corner, a shoe organizer under the bed.

I remember when it used to take only half an hour to dust and mop all the rooms. A while back, I was wondering why it now takes so much longer, when it dawned on me that I have more things to dust around. My living room, which seemed so spacious when I first moved in (almost like a small ballroom when empty) now has much less open space, and most of the furniture that needs dusting has books or other objects on it that have to be moved and replaced. Mopping is like running an obstacle course. It's harder to get to the corners; I have to mop around desk and chair legs, move things out and put them back, and in general be more painstaking.

I think of those Sunday morning cleaning sprees with regret. I like my furniture but can see how it's complicated something that used to be easy. When I bought my desk, I remember being surprised at how much space it took up in the living room; it seemed much smaller on the showroom floor. (The delivery man told me this is a common phenomenon.) Still, the solidity of it seemed suitable to the task, and I have to say it has served its purpose as an organizing platform for writing. It's just that I liked my living room better when it had more open space.

I remember joking with friends about buying my first couch. I took it as a sign that I was solidly in the adult middle class and hoped it wouldn't lead to buying a mess of other material goods. One friend said he had a goal of not accumulating more than he could fit into the back of a pickup truck, which I thought was a worthy aim. I wasn't too far off the mark with my own belongings, which I was then able to fit into a 10 x 10 storage unit. It would take something a little bigger than that now, although I realize what I own isn't much compared to what many other people have.

I enjoy looking at modern architecture and interior design in magazines like Dwell, where the aesthetic emphasizes making the most intelligent use of space, especially when it's limited. I like the way designers approach it not as a problem but as a spur to creativity, as if they're constructing a haiku with space instead of words. I was fascinated by a story about a tiny Paris apartment, that, though multi-level, had less square footage than mine. The occupants (who, as I remember, worked in a restaurant) did not have enough room in their minuscule kitchen to entertain, and the bedroom barely contained a bed, but what space there was had been cleverly utilized to the max. A New York apartment, while not nearly as small, was still tight; it nevertheless managed to squeeze a tiny library into a bedroom and a full kitchen partly under the stairs.

Most of these modern dwellings are uncluttered and sometimes even spare in their furnishings. I like looking at shining hardwood floors, tidy kitchens, and streamlined bathrooms, and it makes me realize that having a lot of things is not what makes a home appealing. My preference falls somewhere in between the spare and the full; pictures, books, and objects collected over time reveal personality and make a place yours, but there is a point where they spill over and start weighing you down.

My friend with the pickup truck rule described the living room I had in another apartment as being very Zen-like. At that time, I felt I had very little and thought of it as a nice way of saying that I still had the living room of a college student. He wouldn't describe my current living room in those terms, which is good in one way. It looks more like the kind of place I imagined for myself than what I had then. But I also realize that in some ways simpler is better. I was right the first time about not wanting to get saddled with too much stuff.

If I do someday have a home like the ones I enjoy dreaming over in magazines, experience has given me a handy rule for furnishing it: the "does it make dusting harder" principle. If I can experience the ease of dancing and singing, ballroom-style, while gliding the dust mop across open floors, I'll know I've done well.