Summative Statement

My research project started with America’s Pop Art artist Edward Ruscha. He grew up in Oklahoma City and later on moved to California in 1956, which had many influences on Ruscha’s most famous works such as Hollywood and the Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights, also known as the twentieth century fox logo. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute and joined the Ferus Gallery group, where he filmed the movie The Cool School. Not only did Ruscha work with painting, printmaking, and drawing, but he also worked with photography and film as well. (Reference)

Edward Ruscha is known mostly for his Pop Art. His works are simple, but very concise. He uses bright and vivid colors in his paintings and in some, uses typography. Using just one simple word like Scream or Oof, he creates a concise image with a strong, straightforward message. Ruscha’s art works are simple, but very powerful like when people say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

When I started this research, I first focused mostly on the lateral research of Edward Ruscha’s influences.  Many of his artistic influences came from Southern California, Hollywood, and automobile and the road. He was also influenced by Jack Kerouac, Arthur Dove, and Jasper John (Reference).

While researching about one of Ruscha’s influences, Jack Kerouac, I noticed that Kerouac was a writer and not an artist which increased my curiosity of how he influenced Ruscha. After reading about one of Kerouac’s books called On the Road, everything pieced in together.  In one of Ruscha’s interviews, he talked about his road trips and hitchhiking experiences, where he observed the Southern California landscapes and buildings like the gas stations (Reference).  Ruscha then transferred his observations from his road trip experiences into art like the Twentysix Gasoline Stations and Hollywood.

Ruscha’s influences of Southern California landscape had many influences on the Hollywood film industry. The common signs and logos such as the Hollywood sign and the mountains from the paramount pictures were all designs by Ruscha. As an artist from the Pop Art movement, he used bright and vivid colors for these, capturing the audience’s attention and also used typography in perspective, giving the audience a straightforward message.

Another influence of Ed Ruscha was Jasper Johns, especially his painting Target with Four Faces. The art work is a combination of a painting of concentric circles that make an image of a target, and a wooden sculpture of four cropped, eyeless faces. The bold colors of red, yellow, and blue that Johns used for his target reminded me of Ruscha’s paintings because just like Jasper John, Ruscha uses many bright and bold colors for his paintings.

One of the things that I found the most interesting in this research project was the Black Dahlia Case. In one of Ruscha’s interviews, Ruscha was asked if he reads any L.A. writers and he answered James Elroy. After doing some lateral research about Elroy, I learned that he was a crime fiction writer who wrote the book The Black Dahlia. Then my research narrowed down to the Black Dahlia murder case, where a pretty young woman named Elizabeth Short was murdered, cut in half. Though this particular murder case didn’t have much influence in Ruscha’s art works, James Elroy’s writing about the different scenery in Los Angeles could have had some influence on Ruscha.  

Edward Ruscha is one of America’s greatest Pop Art artists. His art was mostly influenced by the landscapes of California. Ruscha’s art works are bright, simple, concise, and straightforward with a strong message. Hollywood’s famous logos and signs were designed by Ruscha, which shows how Ruscha not only plays a big role in the Pop Art Movement, but also in the film industry in Hollywood as well. Looking at Ruscha's works, one can see what he has experienced in his life time, his unique thoughts, and interests. His works may be simple, but they are very powerful.

Typography

Ruscha's Typography Work Examples

    

Definition of TYPOGRAPHY
1

: letterpress printing

2

: the style, arrangement, or appearance of typeset matter

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Mojave Desert

The transition from the hot Sonoran Desert to the cooler and higher Great Basin is called the Mojave Desert. This arid region of southeastern California and portions of Nevada, Arizona and Utah, occupies more than 25,000 square miles.

Situated between the Great Basin Desert to the north and the Sonoran to the south (mainly between 34 and 38°N latitudes), the Mojave, a rainshadow desert, is defined by a combination of latitude, elevation, geology, and indicator plants.

Elevations are generally between three and six thousand feet, although Death Valley National Park includes both 11,049-foot Telescope Peak and the lowest point in the United States 282 feet below sea level at Badwater.

Temperatures are a function of both latitude and altitude. Although the Mojave Desert has the lowest absolute elevation and the highest maximum temperature (134°F in Death Valley), it is north of the Sonoran Desert and its average elevations are higher. As a result, its average temperatures are lower than those of the Sonoran.

The Mojave has a typical mountain-and-basin topography with sparse vegetation. Sand and gravel basins drain to central salt flats from which borax, potash and salt are extracted. Silver, tungsten, gold and iron deposits are worked.

While some do not consider the Mojave a desert in its own right, the Mojave Desert hosts about 200 endemic plant species found in neither of the adjacent deserts.Cactus are usually restricted to the coarse soils of bajadas. Mojave Yucca and, at higher elevations Desert Spanish Bayonet, a narrow-leafed yucca, are prominent. Creosote Bush, Shadscale, Big Sagebrush, Bladder-sage, bursages and Blackbush are common shrubs of the Mojave Desert.

Occasional Catclaws grow along arroyos. But, unlike the Sonoran Desert, trees are few, both in numbers and diversity. The exception is the Joshua-tree. While this unusual tree-like yucca is usually considered the prime indicator of Mojave Desert vegetation, it occurs only at higher elevations in this desert and only in this desert.

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The Tempest

The Tempest, by Giorgione

It was already in 1530 described simply as "the little landscape on canvas with a tempest, a gypsy woman and a soldier..."
 
This painting, the meaning of which has been greatly debated, marks a moment of capital importance in the renovation of the Venetian style painting, and perhaps is the most representative of the very few genuine surviving works of Giorgione.
 
The vigour of cultural life at the beginning of the sixteenth century provided exactly the right fertile ground for the personality of Giorgione. With Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio as examples in his early training and with his attentive interest in Northern European painting of Belgium he soon decided to attempt a naturalistic language. Colour attains to new all-important powers of expression of the poetic equivalence of man and nature in a single, fearful apprehension of the cosmos. The finest of all expressions of this new vision of the world is the 'Tempest', commissioned from the artist by Gabriele Vendramin, one of the leading lights in intellectual circles in the Venice of the day, in whose house the picture was recorded as having been hung by Marcantonio Michiel in 1530.
 
Though many interpretations of the subject of this small painting have been suggested, none of them is totally convincing. Thus the mystery remains of what exactly the significance is of the fascinating landscape caught at this particular atmospheric moment, the breaking of a storm. Anxious waiting seems to characterize the mood of both the human figures, absorbed in private reveries, and every other detail, from the little town half-hidden behind the luxuriant vegetation and the lazy, tortuous course of the stream to the ancient ruins, the houses, the towers and the buildings in the distance which pale against the blue of the sky. The fascination of the painting arises from the pictorial realization of the illustrative elements. In the vibrant brightness which immediately precedes the breaking of the storm the chromatic values follow one another in fluid gradations achieved by the modulation of the tones in the fused dialectic of light and shadow in an airy perspective of atmospheric value within a definite space. Completely liberated from any subjection to drawing or perspective, colour is the dominant value in a new spacial-atmospheric synthesis which is fundamental to the art of painting in its modern sense.

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The 20th Century Fox

The Formation of Twentieth Century-Fox


The 20th Century Fox logo by Ed Ruscha

The modern day media titan known as Twentieth Century-Fox was formed out of the 1935 merger of two important film companies. One was the Fox Film Corporation that had its roots in William Fox's independent exchange that opposed Edison's Motion Picture Patents monopoly in 1909. The other major company was briefly one of the most prominent and promising independent production companies of all time — Twentieth Century-Fox.

Joseph Schenck, the president of United Artists, cofounded Twentieth Century Pictures with Darryl F. Zanuck, former head of production at the Warner Bros. studio. Twentieth Century Pictures was organized in April 1933 as a showcase for the talented 30-year-old producer who resigned from Warners after a salary dispute earlier that year. Zanuck turned down several lucrative offers from other studios in order to devote his efforts to producing quality movies on an independent basis. Twentieth Century signed a distribution deal with United Artists in July 1933, and quickly became the most prolific supplier of films for the distributor.

Unfortunately the new independent took a detour straight into the major studio camp when Zanuck became outraged by United Artists' refusal to reward Twentieth Century with UA stock. Schenck, who had been a UA stockholder for over ten years, resigned from United Artists in protest of the shoddy treatment of Twentieth Century, and Zanuck began discussions with other distributors.

In May 1935, when Sidney Kent at Fox Film asked the independent producer to lead the ailing Fox studio, Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Film merged. The independent company, barely two years old, received top billing; Kent remained president, Schenck became chairman, and Zanuck found himself head-of-production of the new Hollywood powerhouse—the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

Even though Twentieth Century, one of the most high-profile independent companies, had abandoned the independent movement, Darryl Zanuck's initial step of leaving Warners to form his own company had a trigger effect on other studio executives and creative personnel who desired to go independent. David O. Selznick and Walter Wanger, both of whom had considerable production experience at the two preeminent movie factories Paramount and MGM, became independent producers. Walter Wanger left his production unit at MGM in 1934. The following year David O. Selznick did the same with the formation of Selznick International Pictures.

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Jasper John's Target with Four Faces

Target with Four Faces by Jasper John

 

2011 Gallery Label Text

In the mid-1950s Johns incorporated symbols such as numbers, flags, maps, and targets into his paintings. Here, he transforms the familiar image of a target into a tangible object by building up the surface with wax encaustic. As a result, the concentric circles have become less precise and more tactile. Above the target Johns has added four cropped and eyeless
faces, plaster casts taken from a single model over a period of several months. Their sculptural presence reinforces the objectness of the painting, particularly as the faces may be shut away in their niches behind a hinged wooden door.

2009 Gallery Label Text

For Johns the common shooting target is one of the many "things the mind already knows." Using familiar objects "gives me room to work on other levels," he has explained. Though the target is closely linked with the acts of looking and aiming, the concentric circles of Johns's version are obscured and the surface made tactile with encaustic—pigment mixed with beeswax—on collage. Mounted above the target, four plaster casts taken from a single model over a period of several months are arranged in nonsequential order. A hinged wooden lid offers the option of shutting away the small niches that hold these cropped, eyeless faces.

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Sam Doyle

Welcome Table by Sam Doyle

Sam Doyle lived his entire life near the small community of Frogmore on St. Helena Island, South Carolina. After his wife and three children left the island to live in New York, he devoted the last fifteen years of his life to preserving and commemorating the rich cultural heritage of his Gullah community.

He preferred to paint in enamel and acrylic on cast-off pieces of roofing metal and created sculpture, using tar on roots and branches. He also worked with plywood, burned logs, floorboards, nails, bottlecaps, refrigerator doors, porcelain sinks, metal medicine cabinets, bird feathers, and photographs. His paintings, drawings and sculpture include images of himself as "Onk Sam" (1978), local personalities on the island such as "Miss Luckie Food Stamp" (1984), and enslaved ancestors whose stories he had heard as a boy. Doyle also depicted leaders and heroes from popular culture such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Ray Charles and Elvis Presley.


Untitled (Crab Man) by Sam Doyle

A group of painted portraits, known as the "First Blacks" series was Doyle's celebration of the first African Americans on the island to attain professional titles within the local St. Helena community during post-Civil War years. "First Doctor Y.B.," (1970s) for instance, honored Dr. York Bailey, the island's first medical doctor. Other examples of these "firsts" are "John Chisholm, St. Helena's First Embalmer" (ca. 1980), "First Black Cleaner" (n.d.), and "St. Helena's First Black Midwife" (early 1980s). Doyle painted portraits of the local root doctors who offered traditional healing still practiced today and memorialized "haints," or spirits of low-country lore.

Sam Doyle is best known for his painted portraits and his ability to preserve local folklore through his works of art. From the 1970s through 1985 one could pass by his home and marvel at the display in his "Nationwide Outdoor Art Gallery," as he referred to his yard. In 1982, Doyle was included in a groundbreaking exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art "Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980." Art dealers, collectors, and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat became interested in his work, and many came to see this newly "discovered" self-taught artist at his outdoor gallery.

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Contemporary Urbanism

JOSEPH RYKWERT entered his field when post-war modernist architecture was coming under fire for its alienating embodiment of outmoded social ideals. Think of the UN building in New York, the city of Brasilia, the UNESCO building in Paris, the blocks of housing “projects” throughout the world. These tall, uniform boxes are set back from the street, isolated by windswept plazas. They look inward to their own functions, presenting no “face” to the inhabitants of the city, no “place” for social interaction. For Mr Rykwert, who rejects the functionalist spirit of the Athens Charter of 1933, a manifesto for much post-war building, such facelessness destroys the human meaning of the city. Architectural form should not rigidly follow function, but ought to reflect the needs of the social body it represents.

Like other forms of representation, architecture is the embodiment of the decisions that go into its making, not the result of impersonal forces, market or historical. Therefore, says Mr Rykwert, adapting Joseph de Maistre’s dictum that a nation has the government it deserves, our cities have the faces they deserve.

In this book, Mr Rykwert, a noted urban historian of anthropological bent, offers a flâneur’s approach to the city’s exterior surface rather than an urban history from the conceptual inside out. He does not drive, so his interaction with the city affords him a warts-and-all view with a sensual grasp of what it is to be a “place”.

His story of urbanisation begins, not surprisingly, with the industrial revolution when populations shifted and increased, exacerbating problems of housing and crime. In the 19th century many planning programmes and utopias (Ebenezer Howard’s garden city and Charles Fourier’s “phalansteries” among them) were proposed as remedies. These have left their mark on 20th-century cities, as did Baron Hausmann’s boulevards in Paris, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s and Owen Jones’s arguments for historical style, and Adolf Loos’s fateful turn-of-the-century call to abolish ornament which, in turn, inspired Le Corbusier’s austere modern functionalism. The reader will recognise all these ideas in the surfaces of the cities that hosted them: New York, Paris, London, Vienna.

Cities changed again after the second world war as populations grew, technology raced and prosperity spread. Like it or not, today’s cities are the muddled product, among other things, of speed, greed, outmoded social agendas and ill-suited postmodern aesthetics. Some bemoan the old city’s death, others welcome its replacement by the electronically driven “global village”. Mr Rykwert has his worries, to be sure, but he does not see ruin or anomie everywhere. He defends the city as a human and social necessity. In Chandigarh, Canberra and New York he sees overall success; in New Delhi, Paris and Shanghai, large areas of failing. For Mr Rykwert, a man on foot in the age of speeding virtuality, good architecture may still show us a face where flâneurs can read the story of their urban setting in familiar metaphors.

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Road Trip

Definition of ROAD TRIP

1

: a trip taken by a sports team to play one or more away games

2

: an extended trip in a motor vehicle

— road–trip intransitive verb

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Southern California Landscapes

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Jack Kerouac

On the Road - Jack Kerouac



On the Road is considered the greatest book of the Beat movement and Jack Kerouac its unofficial spokesperson. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free is timeless. Through its fascinating depictions of friendship, experiences on the road and the longing for ‘It’ – an expression that could signify anything from frenzy and exhilaration to salvation and bliss, the novel was way ahead of its time. The enormous impact of the book is as relevant today as it was groundbreaking then. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free...

“What's your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”

That’s not the kind of question that an everyday Joe would ask; that’s not an inquiry that would lurk in the mind of a 9-to-5 desk clerk. Hell, that’s not the kind of thought that someone scrubbing for a mere existence in a drab world, living just another static life, in his routine environment, and doing stuff that is decided through rote and careful rationalization, would even dare let his perfectly chiselled mind waver to.

That’s precisely the kind of belief one would be enticed by who adheres to the maxim, “Road is where life is.” And On the Road, for those crazy venture-addicts, is the greatest bible that there ever was. It is a novel that would make the most cocooned of creatures to be hit by the road bug and actually start ‘living’ life.

Written in 1951, by Jack Kerouc – the original King of the Road, was a novel that eulogized the free-spirited life where boundaries, confines and borders cease to exist. And in the process it kick-started Beat Generation – one of the most fascinating American movements where life is equated with jazz (viz. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong et al), hallucinatory drugs, free sex, smoke-filled cars, and above all, life on the road. For them there’s just one answer to the rhetoric question, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”, and that being Heaven.

Though On the Road is considered the greatest book of this movement and Kerouac its unofficial spokesperson – which has been duly acknowledged by the venerated TIME magazine by including the book in its list of Greatest Novels of the 20^th Century – Kerouac essentially formed a part of a hallowed trio also comprising of Allen Ginsberg and William H. Burroughs, the co-pioneers of the Beat Movement. And this semi-autobiographical novel chronicles Kerouac’s experiences on the road. Hence they are all there in the novel, with their names altered. However, it is someone called Neal Cassidy, a common friend of the enlightened troika, who formed the basis for the book’s most celebrated character – Dean Moriarty.

Narrated by Salvatore ‘Sal’ Paradise, an Italian-American resident of New Jersey, a writer by profession, and Kerouac’s terrific literary alter-ego, On the Road is a mesmerizing and one-of-its-kind travel-diary of the narrator, and its apotheosis is his unforgettable friendship with Dean, one of the craziest and alive characters one can ever hope to come across. It tells the tales of his journeys back and forth across America. It is a tale of New York, San Francisco, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. It is a free-flowing account of ‘nowness’ – a word that defined the willingness to reside in present without a worry for the future or attachment to the past. It is a madcap poetry to the Beat life, where all you need to survive is a car that does its 90 mph, beer cans, an uninterrupted supply of cigarettes, friends with whom you can talk all through the night and into the dawn, a few Benzedrine tablets to give you the kicks, and the singular beauty of hitch-hiking.

The novel is peppered with some of the most atypical characters – Carlo Marx, Chad King, Old Bull Lee, Ed Dunkel, Remi Boncoeur, with each representing the various constituents of the Beatific and the free spirits of the world. But the two protagonists – Sal and Dean, are the ones who really draw the readers out with their contrasting lives and yet their common passion. Where Sal is a home-grown, serious, sensitive, college educated intellectual with a steady income – an otherwise regular guy who one can relate to and be in sync with, Dean is an impulsive, irreverent, wildly unpredictable, rebellious, thoroughly alienated soul with an infectious method to his madness. As Sal so brilliantly states in one of his many explanations of who Dean really is, “He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.”

On The Road wasn’t just anti-establishmentarian in its outlook, it was also non-conformist in its style and composition. Legend has it that Kerouac wrote it in an uninterrupted and truly inspired Benzedrine-fuelled three weeks’ session on a manual typewriter in his New York City loft, on a long scroll over 100 feet long. The book is devoid of crisp, literary sentences. It is instead based on improvised, absolutely free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness style of writing, where the words form a direct representation of the writer’s unedited and unadulterated thought processes. It was a memorable kick in the belly for the purists and conservatives. In fact Truman Capote once infamously remarked about the prose, "That's not writing, that's typing." The book was a glorious tableau of a truly liberated form and style of narration.

The enormous impact of the book is as relevant today as it was groundbreaking then. Its tale of lost souls who dared to be free is timeless. Through its fascinating depictions of friendship, experiences on the road and the longing for ‘It’ – an expression that could signify anything from cigarettes and drugs to frenzy and exhilaration to salvation and bliss, the novel was way ahead of its time in its effortless and spontaneous jab at such bogus parameters like morality and preordained requisites for the so-called good and happy life sans adventure and enlightenment.

Some of the most iconoclastic stalwarts like Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Jim Morrison have been enormously influenced by the novel. Dylan once remarked about the book, "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's." Lennon ushered a memorable tribute to the Beat legacy by including the word ‘Beat’ in the name of arguably the world’s greatest boy-band The Beatles, through a subtle change in its spelling. The book may also count such outstanding and legendary movies like Easy Rider, Paris Texas, Five Easy Pieces and Stranger than Paradise as part of its famous legacy. Indeed, the novel’s place in popular culture as well as among the pantheon of great literary works has been preserved for posterity.

“Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” That sort of encapsulates the spirit and the essence of the book. I really feel a huge impulse to say to every bibliophile and lost souls and free people of this world regarding On the Road, “Dig it! Dig it!” And I’m sure, if Dean had been here with in my living room, he would have excitedly affirmed in his inimitable style, “Yass! Yass!”.

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The Black Dahlia Case

  

The case remains one of Hollywood's long-running mysteries and one of the most gruesome of the 1940s. A pretty young woman was found cut in half and posed in a sexually explicit pose in a vacant lot in would be sensationalized in the media as the "Black Dahlia" murder.
 
In the media frenzy that followed, rumors and speculation were published as fact and inaccuracies and exaggerations continue to plague accounts of the crime until this day. Here are the few real facts that are known about the life and death of Elizabeth Short.

Elizabeth Short's Childhood Years

Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts to parents Cleo and Phoebe Short. Cleo made a good living building miniature golf courses until the Depression took its toll on the business. In 1930, with his business suffering, Cleo decided to fake his suicide and abandoned Phoebe and their five daughters. He parked his car by a bridge and took off to California. Authorities and Phoebe believed Cleo committed suicide.  
Later, Cleo decided he made a mistake, contacted Phoebe and apologized for what he had done. He asked to come home. Phoebe, who had faced bankruptcy, worked part-time jobs, stood in lines to get public assistance and raised the five children alone, wanted no part of Cleo and refused to reconcile.
Despite her parents' difficulties, Elizabeth continued to correspond with her father. She was growing up to be an attractive young girl and like many teenagers, enjoyed going to the movies.

Her High School Years

Elizabeth was not academically inclined earning average grades in high school. She left high school in her freshman year because of asthma which she suffered with since childhood. It was decided that it would be best for her health if she left New England during the winter months. Arrangements were made for her to go to Florida and stay with family friends, returning to Medford during the spring and summer.  
Despite her parents' difficulties, Elizabeth continued to correspond with her father. She was growing up to be an attractive young girl and like many teenagers, enjoyed going to the movies. Like many young pretty girls, Elizabeth developed an interest in modeling and the movie industry and set her goals to someday work in Hollywood.

A Short-Lived Reunion

At the age of 19, Elizabeth's father sent her money to join him in Vallejo, California. The reunion was short lived and Cleo soon grew tired of Elizabeth's lifestyle of sleeping during the day and going out on dates until late at night. Cleo told Elizabeth to leave and she moved out on her own to Santa Barbara.

The Next Three Years

There is much debate about where Elizabeth spent her remaining years. It is known that in Santa Barbara she was arrested for underage drinking and was packed up and returned to Medford. According to reports up until 1946, she spent time in Boston and Miami. In 1944, she fell in love with Major Matt Gordon, a Flying Tiger, and the two discussed marriage, but he was killed on his way home from the war.  
In July 1946, she moved to Long Beach, California to be with an old boyfriend, Gordon Fickling, who she dated in Florida before her relationship with Matt Gordon. The relationship ended shortly after her arrival and Elizabeth floundered around for the next few months.

A Soft Spoken Beauty

Friends described Elizabeth as being soft spoken, courteous, a non-drinker, or smoker, but somewhat of a loafer. Her habit of sleeping late in the day and staying out at night continued to be her lifestyle. She was pretty, enjoyed dressing stylishly and turned heads because of her pale skin contrasting against her dark hair and her translucent blue-green eyes. She wrote to her mother weekly, insuring her that her life was going well. Some speculate that the letters were Elizabeth's attempt to keep her mother from worrying.  
Those around her know it that over the next few months she moved often, was well liked, but illusive and not well known. During October and November of 1946, she lived in the home of Mark Hansen, owner of the Florentine Gardens. The Florentine Gardens had a reputation as being a rather shoddy strip joint in Hollywood. According to reports, Hansen was said to have various attractive women rooming together at his home, which was located behind club.

Elizabeth's last known address in Hollywood was the Chancellor Apartments at 1842 N. Cherokee, where she and four other girls roomed together.

In December, Elizabeth boarded a bus and left Hollywood for San Diego. She met Dorothy French, who felt sorry for her and offered her a place to stay. She stayed with the French family until January when she was finally asked to leave.

Robert Manley

Robert Manley was 25 years old and married, working as a salesman. According to reports, Manley first met Elizabeth in San Diego and offered her a ride to the French house where she was staying. When she was asked to leave, it was Manley who came and drove her back to the Biltmore hotel in downtown Los Angeles where she was supposed to be meeting her sister. According to Manley, she was planning to go live with her sister Berkeley.
 
Manley walked Elizabeth to the hotel lobby where he left her at around 6:30 p.m. and drove back to his home San Diego. Where Elizabeth Short went after saying goodbye to Manley is unknown.

The Murder Scene

On January 15, 1947 Elizabeth Short was found murdered, her body left in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue between 39th Street and Coliseum. Homemaker Betty Bersinger was running an errand with her three-year-old daughter when she realized that what she was looking at was not a mannequin but an actual body in the lot along the street where she was walking. She went to a nearby house, made an anonymous call to police, and reported the body.
 
When police arrived on the scene, they found the body of a young woman who had been bisected, displayed face-up on the ground with her arms over her head and her lower half placed a foot away from her torso. Her legs were wide open in a vulgar position and her mouth had three-inch slashes on each side. Rope burns were found on her wrists and ankles. Her head face and body was bruised and cut. There was little blood at the scene, indicating whoever left her, washed the body before bringing it in the lot.
 
The crime scene quickly filled with police, bystanders and reporters. It was later described as being out of control, with people trampling on any evidence investigators hoped to find.
 
Through fingerprints, the body was soon identified as 22-year-old Elizabeth Short or as the press called her, "The Black Dahlia." A massive investigation into finding her murderer was launched. Because of the brutality of the murder and Elizabeth's sometimes sketchy lifestyle, rumors and speculation was rampant, often being incorrectly reported as fact in newspapers.

Suspects

Close to 200 suspects were interviewed, sometimes polygraphed, but all eventually released. Exhausted efforts were made to run down any leads or any of the several false confessions to the killing of Elizabeth by both men and women.

Despite efforts made by investigators, the case has remained one of the most famous unsolved cases in California's history.

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James Ellroy

      

James Ellroy is best understood as an historical writer who specializes in evoking the sights, sounds, dialogue, and feel of hard-boiled Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which his own personality was formed through family tragedy. Though he has recently written about other places and periods, his best work, known as the "L.A. Quartet," derives from the famous Black Dahlia murder case, which was eerily parallel to the murder of Ellroy's own mother.

The only son a German father and Dutch mother, Ellroy was born in L.A. His parents divorced when he was six, and Ellroy lived with his mother, who "drank Early Times bourbon and chased men." 1 At ten, when he chose to live with his father, his mother slapped him, and he called her a whore. Three months later, in June 1958, he went to visit, but she was dead. She had been strangled after leaving a bar with a man and woman. The next year his father gave him The Badge by Jack Webb, which included a summary of the Black Dahlia case. Elizabeth Short, a starlet and sometime prostitute, had been found naked in 1947, tortured and mutilated, her body cut completely in half. Neither murder case was ever solved. But Ellroy was so hypnotized that around 1960 he began to visit the crime scenes, have dreams and visions of Short, and to visit her grave. He says that then he began to read crime fiction.

At seventeen, Ellroy, expelled from high school for truancy, joined the U.S. Army, but he was kicked out after faking a nervous breakdown. His father died and Ellroy hit the streets, stealing and drinking, using a variety of drugs, sleeping in parks and dumpsters. Between 1965 and 1977 he was arrested over a dozen times, convicted twelve times, and imprisoned for eight months. His chief offenses were breaking and entering, shoplifting, and trespassing. Felled by near-fatal double pneumonia in 1977, Ellroy joined Alcoholics Anonymous and found a job as a golf caddy.

"Caddying was good tax-free cash and allowed me to get home by 2 p.m. and write books," Ellroy said. "I caddied right up to the sale of my fifth book." 2 Having read, by his estimate, over two hundred crime novels, Ellroy was able to condense their elements in ten months of longhand writing to Brown's Requiem (1981). His next novel, Clandestine (1982), concerns an ex-cop who tracks down his ex-lover's killer. It received an award nomination and revealed some autobiographical touches, as well as Ellroy working on his major theme. He followed, however, with three "Lloyd Hopkins" cop novels -- Blood on the Moon (1984), Because the Night (1984), Suicide Hill (1986) -- and a first person serial killer narrative, Silent Terror (1986), somewhat in the Jim Thompson mode.

His major work is the "L.A. Quartet," of which the first novel, The Black Dahlia (1987), is the best known. It treats two cops, Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard, both boxers, who share a girl-friend and an ambition to solve the Black Dahlia case: "It was a book I had been waiting almost thirty years to write," he said, 3 An extraordinary recreation of L.A. police politics, racial and sexual attitudes, and slang of the 1940s, "Ellroy's novel is true to the facts as they are known," wrote David Haldane in the Los Angeles Times, "but it provides a fictional solution … consistent with those facts." 4 Ellroy continued to "conduct an uncompromising tour of the obscene, violent, gritty, obsessive, darkly sexual" L.A. underworld in The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990) and White Jazz (1992), a stream-of-consciousness tour de force.

It's easy to guess wrong about Ellroy personally: he does not drink or smoke, and he goes to bed early. He lives by choice in Mission Hills, Kansas, with his second wife, feminist author and critic Helen Knode. He calls producer Quentin Tarantino "a fatuous child" and he says that "Reservoir Dogs is garbage and the forty minutes of Pulp Fiction that I saw is the most excruciatingly naïve shtick, boring tedium that I've ever endured." In fact, Ellroy is a proponent of gun control, his favorite recreation listening to Beethoven. 7

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Gas Station

Transforming a Berlin Gas Station Into Art



Freie Internationale Tankstelle, or FIT, is back in Berlin, offering passersby a “fueling station for the creative spirit” in the most unlikely of art venues: a gas station. Founded in 2002 by the artist Dida Zende, FIT sits just off the beaten path on a leafy street in Prenzlauer Berg. The station itself dates back to the 1920s, a quirky historical monument that Mr. Zende has transformed into what he describes as an “inverse white cube” for contemporary artists.

Starting April 6, FIT (Schwedter Strasse 262) will host “The Fountain of Clarity,” by the artists Mark Jenkins and Sandra Fernández, on view through April 28. The show is part of the Pictoplasma Festival for contemporary character design and art, which features as part of its program a “character walk” of exhibitions at 25 galleries and project spaces around Berlin-Mitte.

Mr. Jenkins, an acclaimed street artist, casts life-size sculptures that combine the macabre and the absurd with a dose of dark humor. Using his own body (or that of Ms. Fernández) as the models for such urban interventions, Mr. Jenkins clothes his creations in modern street wear and wigs before positioning them in compromising public situations: face down in a canal, attached to helium party balloons, for instance, or with a head seemingly embedded in a solid wall.

Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Fernández, collaborators since 2005, have left such anonymous urban pieces in cities across North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. For their Berlin debut, the artists plan to make full use of the FIT’s exterior structure as an urban canvas, essentially turning the entire building into a public artwork.

In truth, FIT serves the community more as a social sculpture than a classical exhibition space. Mr. Zende’s philosophy derives from the German artist Joseph Beuys and his Free International University (from which FIT takes its name). In the spirit of accessible art, Mr. Zende has replicated his stylized white and red Berlin FIT in cities including Miami, Copenhagen and Cologne, with plans for an upcoming FIT Vancouver later this spring, in collaboration with the Goethe Institute.

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Abstract Expressionism

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionism

Unconventional application of paint, usually without a recognizable subject (de Kooning's Woman series is an exception) that tends toward amorphous shapes in brilliant colors.

Dripping, smearing, slathering, and flinging lots of paint on to the canvas (often an unprimed canvas).

Sometimes gestural "writing" in a loosely calligraphic manner.

In the case of Color Field artists: carefully filling the picture plane with zones of color that create tension between the shapes and hues.

Example Paintings from Abstract Expressionism


Number 8, 1949 (detail) by Pollock, Jackson


Night Creatures, 1965 by Krasner, Lee

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Automobiles

The History of the Automobile


Starting in the late 1700's, European engineers began tinkering with motor powered vehicles. Steam, combustion, and electrical motors had all been attempted by the mid 1800's. By the 1900's, it was uncertain which type of engine would power the automobile. At first, the electric car was the most popular, but at the time a battery did not exist that would allow a car to move with much speed or over a long distance. Even though some of the earlier speed records were set by electric cars, they did not stay in production past the first decade of the 20th century. The steam-driven automobile lasted into 1920's. However, the price on steam powered engines, either to build or maintain was incomparable to the gas powered engines. Not only was the price a problem, but the risk of a boiler explosion also kept the steam engine from becoming popular. The combustion engine continually beat out the competition, and the early American automobile pioneers like Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford built reliable combustion engines, rejecting the ideas of steam or electrical power from the start.

Automotive production on a commercial scale started in France in 1890. Commercial production in the United States began at the beginning of the 1900's and was equal to that of Europe's. In those days, the European industry consisted of small independent firms that would turn out a few cars by means of precise engineering and handicraft methods. The American automobile plants were assembly line operations, which meant using parts made by independent suppliers and putting them together at the plant. In the early 1900's, the United States had about 2,000 firms producing one or more cars. By 1920 the number of firms had decreased to about 100 and by 1929 to 44. In 1976 the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association had only 11 members. The same situation occurred in Europe and Japan.

The first automobile produced for the masses in the US was the three-horsepower, curved-dash Oldsmobile; 425 of them were sold in 1901 and 5,000 in 1904--this model is still prized by collectors. The firm prospered, and it was noted by others, and, from 1904 to 1908, 241 automobile-manufacturing firms went into business in the United States. One of these was the Ford Motor Company which was organized in June 1903, and sold its first car on the following July 23. The company produced 1,700 cars during its first full year of business. Henry Ford produced the Model T to be an economical car for the average American. By 1920 Ford sold over a million cars.

At the beginning of the century the automobile entered the transportation market as a toy for the rich. However, it became increasingly popular among the general population because it gave travelers the freedom to travel when they wanted to and where they wanted. As a result, in North America and Europe the automobile became cheaper and more accessible to the middle class. This was facilitated by Henry Ford who did two important things. First he priced his car to be as affordable as possible and second, he paid his workers enough to be able to purchase the cars they were manufacturing. This helped push wages and auto sales upward. The convenience of the automobile freed people from the need to live near rail lines or stations; they could choose locations almost anywhere in an urban area, as long as roads were available to connect them to other places. Many states in the US established motor fuel taxes that were used only to build and maintain highways helping the auto highway system become self-supporting.

Popularity of the automobile has consistently moved with the state of the economy, growing during the boom period after World War I and dropping abruptly during the Great Depression, when unemployment was high. World War II saw a large increase in mass transit because employment was high and automobiles were scarce. The rapid growth of car owners after World War II, particularly in the United States and Western Europe demonstrated the population's favor towards automobiles. During the war, automobile motors, fuel, and tires were in short supply. There was an unsatisfied demand when the war ended and plenty of production capacity as factories turned off the war machine. Many people had saved money because there was little to buy, beyond necessities, in the war years. Workers relied heavily on mass transportation during the war and longed for the freedom and flexibility of the automobile.

A historian has said that Henry Ford freed common people from the limitations of their geography. The automobile created mobility on a scale never known before, and the total effect on living habits and social customs is endless. In the days of horse-drawn transportation, the practical limit of wagon travel was 10 to 15 miles, so that meant any community or individual farm more than 15 miles from a city, a railroad, or a navigable waterway was isolated from the mainstream of economic and social life. Motor vehicles and paved roads have narrowed the gap between rural and urban life. Farmers can ship easily and economically by truck and can drive to town when it is convenient. In addition, such institutions as regional schools and hospitals are now accessible by bus and car.

Yet, the effect on city life has been, if anything, more prominent than the effect on the farms. The automobile has radically changed city life by accelerating the outward expansion of population into the suburbs. The suburban trend is emphasized by the fact that highway transportation encourages business and industry to move outward to sites where land is cheaper, where access by car and truck is easier than in crowded cities, and where space is available for their one or two story structures. Better roads were constructed, which further increased travel throughout the nation. As with other automobile-related phenomena, the trend is most noticeable in the United States but is rapidly appearing elsewhere in the world.

Before the automobile, people both lived in the city and worked in the city, or lived in the country and worked on a farm. Because of the automobile, the growth of suburbs has allowed people to live on the outskirts of the city and be able to work in the city by commuting. New jobs due to the impact of the automobile such as fast food, city/highway construction, state patrol/police, convenience stores, gas stations, auto repair shops, auto shops, etc. allow more employment for the world's growing population.

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