Today is halloween, and this is my second time for the holiday in a retirement village.  I think, remembering last year that I have carried over to my retirement years the same slight dislike for halloween.  There is something about it that bothers me.  Perhaps it is the idea of having kids out in the community begging for treats that bothers me.  Perhaps it is the emphasis on pleasurable eating of the sweet candy that turns me off.  Anyway, it is clear that I am almost alone in my dislike of the holiday because the run-up to the day found people, old people like me, expressing excitement for the season.  Paradise Village was covered with reminders of death and goblins... bare bones on walls... pumpkins all over the place with painted faces on them.  At lunch today all the serving staff wore costumes.  I admit that they were cute... and it was clear that they were having fun.  In the middle of the afternoon the community had a costume competition.  Actually there were two competitions: The first one included residents who were dressed in costumes, and the second one was staff.  I didn't wear a costume, and I was relieved to see that many other residents didn't "dress up."  The winner of the residents' competition was a good friend of mine, someone whom I respect.  He was Charlie Chaplin.  Ben Taylor makes a very good Charlie Chaplin.  The staff were dressed beautifully and creatively.  The executive director of the village was a dinosaur... a perfect dinosaur.  Anyway... I won't come dressed up next year, but I'll come to the event feeling glad to be there... and glad some old people have an appropriate sense of humor... and I was completely convinced that I have been wrong to think the holiday is silly when I saw  one of the chefs dressed in a pilot's outfit... and the young women who serves coffee in the morning had painted her face and dressed like a performer... and the receptionist was "Rosie the Riveter"...  And the dinosaur was the perfect costume for a very serious man.

This is National City... My Home City... This picture taken on our balcony shows a little bit of everything.  At the far right you can see part of a church building.  Macdonald's golden arches reassure that us that this is America.  There are schools and hospitals and all kinds of homes scattered around this place, and all of them we can see from our balcony.  A couple of trees are among my favorites, but this is a place where palm trees decorate the area we see, so I feel compelled to include some of them this picture... because I see them from our balcony.  The balcony isn't very big, but it's exactly the right size for St. Francis who has followed us around the world.

These are the last of the pictures from last Sunday's visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that I'm going to post.  My imagination was captured as much by the little boy sitting watching the movements of the Chris Burden sculpture as I was by the sculpture itself.  Burden was the artist who gathered street lights and installed them in front of the museum... He called it Urban Light. The sculpture above, which he calls Metropolis I or II, I can't remember if it is I or II.  The work features Hot Wheels zooming around a model city on single-lane roadways.  Nearby is a remarkable sculpture which the artist Richard Serra calls Band.  It is 12 feet tall and more than 70 feet long.  It is steel and very impressive. 

After seeing the Marc Chagall exhibition at LACMA, we went to a couple of other exhibitions, but the one that is most worth rethinking and going back to see and then rethinking again is the Carlos Almaraz exhibition.  Almaraz was born in Mexico City in 1941 and after he came to the United States as a child, his family lived in Chicago until they moved to Los Angeles.  He became one of the most gifted, bravest artists to come on the American art scene, especially in the Los Angeles area. He died in 1989.  The exhibition is called by the same name as the book about Almaraz’s work… Playing with Fire:Paintings by Carlos Almaraz

The first painting here is The Red Circus.  I include here several of Chagall’s paintings with violinists, but I like starting with  The Red Circus.  Chagall clearly liked the color, and it reminds me that in many ways he thought of life as a circus.  

Chagall painted violinists many times, and it is understood that these musicians are symbols of the artist’s Jewish roots and reminded him and the world of his childhood in Vitebsk, Russia.  In his childhood in Vitebsk, violinists were usually traveling musicians.  In one of my favorite pictures the fiddler is pictured on a curving dirt road that links the foreground and background. Chagall associates the nomadic musician with his homeland.

More Chagall costumes... He continued to explore the intersections between the visual and theatrical arts. He continued to include floating lovers, men and animals playing violins and flutes, and especially a rooster.

Chagall's violinists became the Fiddler on the Roof.

The backdrop for Daphnis and Chloe is typical of Chagall's abstractions, this time with the lovers in an embrace hovering over the dancers.  Chagall was a modern painter with abstract images and colors used in a way that definitely suggests the reality of what is happening.  He said the use of yellow in this backdrop suggests flowers.  The lovers embrace at the finale of the dance.

The costumes for the dancers were designed by Chagall.

Marc Chagall... the exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is worth a visit to Los Angeles.    I was most taken by the costumes he designed for operas, but those and the paintings and drawings can take a long time to see... especially if you are interested in Chagall and especially if you like the music for which he designed the costumes.  My favorites are The Magic Flute and The Firebird. 

In the next couple of days, I'll post a few of the many photographs I got from the exhibit.  The image above is a Variation on the theme of Aleko, or the Red Roster. Below are a few of the many costumes Chagall created for music he liked.  

Revolution Avenue in Tijuana hasn't changed as much as the entrance and exit places and procedures have changed at the busiest border crossing in the world.  Patrick, Dael, Pierre, Laurent, and I went down to this "foreign" place in the middle of today.  We played the role of sight seers, and exhausted ourselves in this place which is only ten miles down the road from where I live.  I like very much the idea that another country, an exciting place, a place with foundations of art and culture that are as old as anything found in Europe exists south of us.  The news here is full of ignorant statements about the people who live south of our border.  The news is also full of information about prototypes of a border wall that are being finished... and, according to reports, one of the prototypes will be chosen the run across the entire border between the U.S. and Mexico.  The president who is declaring that a wall is needed and will be built evidently doesn't know about the historical artistic forms that were developing south of the U.S. at the same time that historical artistic forms were developing in Europe and Asia. What we are that is peculiar to our place in the world would be walled off if the wall is built.  Of course, we need border laws, and we need lawfully managed border crossings... that only makes sense, but a wall?  What would that accomplish?

I haven't forgotten that I have promised to post more photographs of our visit to LACMA on Sunday. That will come later this week.  Stay tuned.

Margaret and I went to Los Angeles with David today.  We went specifically to see the Marc Chagall special exhibition with a bunch of other people from the San Diego Museum of Art...on a Docent Trip.  Margaret and David stood outside the Museum's collection of light posts for the picture above.  The light posts are real, and all of them stood once somewhere in the Los Angeles area to lighten and brighten the night.

Later this week, I will send on my BLOG several photographs from the Chagall show, but today, I will send pictures of a work of art that moved me more than anything else I saw today or, for that matter, anything I have seen or heard in a long time.  Chagall can wait.

A Poem by Mark Bradford is perhaps the biggest painting I have ever seen.  The story behind the painting is told in a museum explanation on the wall beside the painting.  The painting covers an entire wall.  You can see David standing beside the wall.  Read Bradford's reason for doing the painting below.