The anonymous crowd and its search for amusement

"Inside the air was a pestilence; it was heavy with disease and the emanations from many bodies. Anyone leaving this working mass, anyone coming into it...forced the people into still closer, still more indecent, still more immoral contact. A bishop embraced a stout grandmother, a tender girl touched limbs with a city sport, refined women's faces burned with shame and indignation—but there was no relief. Was all this an oriental prison? Was it in some hall devoted to the pleasures of the habitues of vice? Was it a place of punishment for the wicked? No gentle reader, it was only the result of public stupidity and apathy. It was in a Los Angeles streetcar on the 9th day of December, in the year of grace 1912.

— "A Section of Hades in Los Angeles," Los Angeles Record, December 11, 1912.

Los Angeles' general public has always been one of tremendous ethnic diversity, a resilient mixture of Mexicans, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, African Americans, Midwesterners, Jews, Germans, Scots, Greeks, Italians, and "Okies." The beach was a natural recreational escape for Los Angeles' expanding immigrant class, and once the Santa Monica Air-Pacific Electric streetcar line went from downtown to the beach, it provided accessibility to pleasure seekers of myriad ethnicities, so long as they could afford the train fare. Early in the century, numerous amusement parks including Venice Pier, Ocean Park Pier and the Long Beach Pike rimmed the Pacific Ocean and were even connected to each other by train. With their carnival atmosphere and rowdy good humor, these parks allowed Angelenos and tourists to immerse themselves into mainstream modern American culture. by abandoning oneself to mixing with an anonymous crowd.

Historian Eric Avila argues that the disappearance of streetcars, which began in the 30s and continued well into the 50s, severely undermined the popularity of the amusement park, the urban ballpark, and other public cultural institutions whose inner-city location gradually lost favor. A new generation of more affluent motorists were more likely to engage in activities that were increasingly dictated by the availability of parking space.

But by the end of World War II, more and more of Los Angeles was dedicated to privatizing exclusive space away from the larger social identity of the city. Compared to the unruly crowds and the threat of an unhygienic beach, swimming pools presented a regimented, controlled landscape that orchestrated the movement and interactions of swimmers. Eventually, those who could afford to built private pools in their suburban backyards, further distancing themselves from the larger social and sexual identities of the city.

Ancient Chinese Wisdom: an interview with Victor Wong

Artist, actor, journalist, Protestant minister in training Victor Wong, 1976. Love the budweiser plus t-shirt (3rd International San Francisco Book Fair).I wish I knew more about Victor. I've only read profiles and a smattering of interviews here and there, and I've been lucky enough to briefly meet and interview Olive Thurman, his first wife. I'm curious about his artwork and early life growing up in Chinatown, etc.

Victor Wong was the eldest son of an eldest son in a Chinatown family with rich connections to Sun-Yat-Sen and Chiang-Kai-Shek. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti introduced him to Jack Kerouac, Wong lived in two worlds only an alley apart, Chinatown and North Beach. In the early 60s, after several rounds of binging and isolation, Jack imposed on Victor to allow him to talk to his father.

"For a few days of happiness, Kerouac's strategy had worked. He had company with him when the wind swept off the ocean and rattled the trees, but one by one, as the city pulled them back, the crowd dwindled, and Jack had followed rather than stay on alone. Within a few days of returning to San Francisco, Jack was into his old pattern of recruiting acquiantances to join him for a drink. One drink led to many more, and Jack might announce to a barful of strangers that he was a famous novelist. "I'm Jack Kerouac!" he would shout.

They found him in a flophouse and Lawrence took him up to his place. After that he came to me and said, "You know, I'm really in a bad place, and I need to get some wise person. Can I talk to your father?" And I'm saying to myself, "Shit here's this guy, he's drunk all the time and he's got these terrible clothes on, and he's unshaven. What will my father say?" I lived in a world that was so far away from him, that was so distinct, even though it's around the corner from the whole scene. So I talked to Lawrence and we figured it out. I remembered that I had a maroon cashmere sweater which had little holes in it, but you couldn't see them too well. Lawrence shaved Jack, or he somehow shaved himself. Then we put this shirt on him and sweater. My father was in this store on Jackson Street, a grocery store. But it was kind of dirty. Nobody ever went in there to buy stuff because it wasn't really a grocery store, it was my father's political office, like one of those ward offices in Chicago. In the back there's a fifteen-watt lamp up there with a shade so that only the person who sat in front of it had the light. But there was this couch there because people would come in to talk.

So we got Jack shaved, sprayed, and gargled, and he walks in there, but his face is still red. Obviously he's been drinking. So he sits there on this couch where all the politicians sit. My father says to me, in Chinese, "What is this?" I say, "This is a very noted poet. He's a very literary man. He's just as literate as you are in Chinese." He says, "Why do you bring him here?" This is all in Chinese. Meanwhile, Kerouac is sitting there, and he doesn't know what the hell to do about it. So I say, "Come on, talk to him. He's in trouble and he needs something from the Chinese that's wise."

My father turned around, turned his back to Jack and went back to writing his calligraphy. Went on for about ten minutes. Ten minutes in silence is a long time. I said, "Well, Id' better play it cool. If I say something it will prolong the damned thing." It would get too embarrassing and we would have to leave.

So I'm looking at Kerouac and he doesn't look at me. He's just looking at my father's back. Finally, my father turns around and says to Jack in his broken English, "What do you want?"

Kerouac says, "I'm not doing so well. I'm having troubles."

My father says, "What do you do?"

He says, "I write poetry."

So they banter back and forth, but finally my father said to him, "Obviously you like to drink."

He said, "Yes, of course."

And my father said, "You know, you should be like the Japanese monks, the Zen monks. You should go up in the mountains, drink all you want and write poetry." -an interview with Victor Wong, from Jack's Book: An Oral History of Jack Kerouac. St.Martin's Press, 1978. For an excellent article on Wong's eclectic life, go here.

Duke Kahanamoku: the Hawai'ian Olympic Hero in Los Angeles

The United States took a total of 41 gold medals including eight in the diving and swimming competitions, but the 1932 Games were fondly remembered as the final hurrah for an Olympic hero by the name of Duke Kahanamoku.

While Kahanamoku wasn't technically American since Hawai'i had yet to join the union, his prowess as a surfing and swimming champion earned him a spot on the U.S. team starting at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics,winning Hawaii’s first Olympic gold medal for 100-meter freestyle, and a silver medal for the 4×200-meter freestyle relay.

Kahanamoku competed again in 1920 at the Antwerp Olympics winning two more gold medals and the 1924 Paris Olympics winning a silver medal in 100-meter freestyle race behind gold medalist Johnny Weissmuller.

Kahanamoku and Johnny "Tarzan" Weissmuller, 1920.

LAAC (Los Angeles Athletic Club) Swim Team posing in front of a mirrored pool. Some of the identified members are: Josephine McKim, Georgia Coleman, Buster Crabbe, Duke Kahanamoku, Mickey Riley, etc. Shades of LA collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

Kahanamoku's dark, sensuous face and Adonis-like physique had caught the eye of Hollywood producers, who invited him to move to Los Angeles in 1922, where he was made a member of the all-white Los Angeles Athletic Club, an act that was unprecedented for a person of color.

From 1922-1929 he worked for various movie studios, usually portraying a native chief or a Hawaiian king while popularizing Southern California as a mecca for surf and swim.

Wing Kwong Tse's skylighted studio atop City Lights Bookstore

Despite a lack of formal training and not beginning his career as an artist until his thirties, Wing Kwong Tse became a successful SF painting known for his photorealistic portraits and still-life watercolors. After the Chinese Revolution in 1911, the family fled Guangzhou for Hawaii, before enrolled at USC in 1922. During his third year at USC, Tse dropped out to pursue a career in acting, but was discouraged to discover that he was only offered roles as stereotypical Chinese.

In the early 1930s, Tse moved to San Francisco, with a studio in North Beach above City Lights Books. He became a well-known, respected fixture of the artistic community and knew writers such as William Saroyan and Allen Ginsberg, living and working in the Bay Area for nearly fifty years. When he died in 1993, famed columnist Herb Caen described him as "one of the last of the real old north beach crowd. When Wing had a skylighted studio, right out of "La Boheme,' atop poet Ferlinghetti's bookstore on Columbus—yes, that was San Francisco."

from Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 by Chang, Johnson and Karlstrom.

Fong-Fong Bakery Fountain, San Francisco Chinatown 1941

We started the Fong-Fong Bakery-Fountain in 1935. We had a beautiful, long counter, the latest equipment, stainless steel, nice-looking bakery cases full of fancy, decorated cakes and flaky French pastries, and it was the first place, you know, that had uniforms in Chinatown, regular soda fountain uniforms, all white. I told my partners my policy. "Now we're going to cater to the younger generation and turn this into a gathering place for all of the young American-born Chinese in San Francisco." And we did. On weekends, students from Berkeley and Stanford would come in droves. On Sunday morning, people waited in line to get in. And we really fractured those hawk-sawed old-timers with goodies Chinatown had never seen before— Napoleon pastries, wedding cakes, bon voyage baskets, nobody had ever seen a banana split made in Chinatown before, nobody ever saw a parfait decorated nicely. At the time, I had enrolled in the University of California's Davis Farm Dairy School, and as I became a little more adept at ice cream making I had an idea; Ever since we opened, tourists in Chinatown would keep coming into Fong-Fong's and after staring at the twenty-flavor ice cream listings they'd say, "Cheeze, don't yuh have any Chinese ice cream?" That's when I started to invent Lichee ice cream, Ginger ice cream, Chinese fruit ice cream, and finally we even invented Chinese Sundaes, which were unheard of before.

—Johnny Kan (who formerly worked at Foster's Cafeteria and Sam Hing Groceries before opening the wildly successful tourist restaurant, Johnny Kan's in the thirties.)

photo caption: The exterior of Fong Fong Bakery in Chinatown. Photograph by Peter Stackpole. San Francisco, California, USA, 1941.

A Celebration of Nanao Sakaki with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Gary Lawless, Malcolm Margolin and oh, Patricia Wakida as guest eMCee

Hi, Gary! Hi, Nanao! Hi, McRoskey Mattresses!

This actually happened! On May 10, 2013. Two of the original poets from the Six Gallery reading in North Beach read. Wow.

It's said that Nanao Sakaki made a practice of never sleeping in the same place twice. The Japanese poet worked many jobs, sometimes living off the generosity of neighbors while studying English and reading. He became interested in primitive art, and his visits to forests all over Japan inspired him to start writing poems. When he co-translated his book Bellyfulls into English in 1961, Sakaki became friends with Beat poet Gary Snyder, who sought him out after having been given the book in India. Sakaki was also founder and lead personality of the Tribe, a loose-knit countercultural group in Japan in the '60s and '70s that, among other things, built and inhabited the Banyan Ashram on tiny Suwanosejima, one of the Ryukyu Islands (and one of Japan's most active volcanoes).

He spent nearly 10 years in the U.S., mostly in San Francisco but also wandering by foot. A pivotal nexus between Buddhism and the Beat movement, the publication of Sakaki's first collection of poems will be celebrated with tributes and performances by major writers Snyder, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and Gary Lawless, along with author and Heydey Books guru Malcolm Margolin and host Patricia Wakida. A Celebration of Nanao Sakaki starts at 7 p.m. on Friday May 10, at McRoskey Mattress Company, 1687 Market, S.F. Admission is $5-10; call (415) 338-2227 or visit sfsu.edu/~poetry/index.html.

I also made a special letterpress lino broadside to commemorate Nanao.

Stuck in the Shallow End: Swimming Pool and Segregation in L.A.

Sammy Lee, first Asian American gold medalist.

As a twelve-year-old Angeleno in 1932, Korean American athlete "Sammy" Lee dreamed of becoming a world-class competitive diver, but at the time, Latinos, Asians and African-Americans were only allowed to use the Brookside Park Plunge (Pasadena's public pool), on Wednesdays, on what was called “international day”: the day before the pool was scheduled to be drained and refilled with clean water. Because Lee needed a place to practice and could not regularly use the public pool, his diving coach dug a pit in his backyard and filled it with sand, which Lee used to practiced his dives in, despite bone-jarring impacts upon landing. In spite of the bigotry, in the summer of 1948, "Sammy" Lee became the first Asian American to win a gold medal in the Olympic Games held in London, and the first man to win back-to-back gold medals in Olympic platform diving.

Early city parks and playground ordinance in the early 20th century made no reference to race, but by the 1920s, everything had changed and rules proclaiming pools "For Whites Only" barred low-income, people of color from access. With few exceptions, Southern California’s public beaches were off limits. In those days, people of color had two choices: a 200 foot roped-off stretch of the Santa Monica beach designated "For Negros only" known as the "Inkwell", and Bruce's Beach in nearby Manhattan Beach. When Manhattan Beach was incorporated in 1912, a two block stretch was designated as an all-African American resort, owned and operated by Charles and Willa Bruce. Both of these segregated beaches provided refuge and relief for minorities who wanted visit the ocean and enjoy the good life promised in Southern California without harassment. But by 1920, even Bruce's Beach was also proclaimed off limits, marked with "No Trespassing: signs although it was city owned.

"Hayride at Bruce's Beach, c. 1920s" When Manhattan Beach (in Los Angeles) was incorporated in 1912, a two-block area on the ocean was set aside for African-Americans.

An end to racial segregation in municipal swimming pools was ordered in summer 1931 by Superior Court Judge Walter S. Gates after Ethel Prioleau, an African American widow of an Army major, sued the city, complaining that she was not allowed to use the swimming pool in nearby Exposition Park but had to travel 3.6 miles to the "negro swimming pool" at 1357 East 22nd street. Other city pools were opened to Negroes but closed to whites one day a week, although in most of South Central and East LA suffered from a complete lack of parks and pools. As the city grew, and as racial housing restrictions were finally overturned by the Supreme Court in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the racial and ethnic geography of Los Angeles changed, but so did the growing preference of privatized, and predictable recreation which required entrance fees. Changes in technology and the growth of white suburban neighborhoods brought an unprecedented boom of private swimming pools in the mid-1950s, which only further widened the race and class divisions in LA.

After the Los Angeles Playground Commission initiated a policy of discriminating against people of color in 1925, the local chapter of the NAACP went into action. The name of the case was "George Cushnie v. City of Los Angeles" but locally it was known as "The Bath House Battle." Although the original case determined that the city had provided facilities "separate but equal" enough to comply with the 14th amendment. That wasn't enough for civil rights activist Betty Hill, who was determined to win through persistence. She went to court 25 times over a period of several years and lobbied each city councilperson individually until 1931 when Judge Walter S. Gates decided that the Playground Commission could not continue its policy of discrimination. This became known as the infamous “swimming pool case.”

In addition to the history of swimming pools and racial covenants, I'm exploring other aspects of swimming pool culture as it emerged in the city. While Los Angeles isn't the birthplace of the swimming suit, Hollywood in particular has singlehandedly developed the lasting, popular vision of swimming attire and the lifestyle it lends- cosmopolitan, sexy, and relaxed- since only the most successful could lead a life of lassitude spent by the pool, working on one's tan. Suntans and sunbathing is another bizarre ritual (particularly to people of color) that might be examined, especially when reviewed with today's UV ray and the particular elements of Los Angeles' air.

The environmental impact of swimming pools is also of great interest. In 2004, the LA Times reported that 19,659 gallons of water evaporate from a typical uncovered pool each year, according to estimates from the Metropolitan Water District. I'd be curious to further research the average annual water used to fill LA's swimming pools, the gallons of chemicals used, and perhaps interview one pool service company on a daily routine as they go from home to home (or neighborhood pool to neighborhood pool) to clean, chlorinate, and care for the city's pools.

Finally, there are the stories connected to abandoned pools. With the recent foreclosure of homes on the rise, festering swimming pools, fetid and green, that harbor mosquitos and other pests has given rise to concerns about West Nile virus and other transmittable diseases, which I understand has led to helicopter surveillance of murky swimming pools. In suburban Los Angeles, dry pools are the playgrounds of skateboarders, another major culture that emerged out of Southern California, who use the concrete bowls to perfect their acrobatic vertical aerials. Sharing maps of abandoned pools to drain and skate in have been part of the secret lives of skaters for decades.

Got thrown a bunch of sugar

{painting by Christine Wu}

In the first months of my working as curator of history at the Japanese American National Museum, I was introduced to a blazingly smart, generous woman who was part of an informal network in Los Angeles of Asian and Asian American arts curators. This cordial group of individuals, from as far south as the Clark Center of Japanese Art and Culture in Hanford, and as neighborly as the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, took turns hosting the group to their museum spaces for lunch, tours, and roundtable discussions about our upcoming projects and exhibits, new technologies, new scholarship, and other factors that were shaping the way that we worked.

This one particular curator was already in conversation with JANM since she had proposed a wonderfully compelling proposal to put together an international show of innovative origami, and for the first Asian art curator's gathering, she offered to give me a ride across town to the Fowler Museum at UCLA. Her name is Meher MacArthur, and I'm lucky enough to say that our friendship has endured.

Meher's origami show, "Folding Paper" was a smashing success, and in the meantime, she's picked up a great gig writing about Asian influence on Los Angeles art and artists, for KCET's artbound website, which is another revelation and astonishing resource.

Now here is where the sugar part comes in- last week, just in time for the Lunar New Year observances, Meher interviewed and featured one of her articles on Los Angeles artists whose muse were snakes- and whaddya know- she plucked little ol' me, with my obsession with legless, shedding carnivores, as a highlight.

Triple blush! It is such an honor.

Serpentine 2013: LA Artists Celebrate the Year of the Snake.

All hail the serpentine Year of the Snake!

Ironically, 2011 we were a two snake household, and now we're down to none.

2012 was actually quite splendid- I dubbed it "My year of benevolence" and felt that I was getting away with all kinds of luxuries and wild ganders, like donating salaries and honorariums because it simplified my life; taking a month off to live in Minnesota to write; floating up and down the coast of California to huddle over cups of volcanically strong coffee and fine, wrathful glasses of syrah, engaged in lazy conversations about ink, maps, and books. But I have another year to look forward to; perhaps the snake is just a tamer, more evolved version of the dragon.

Two block linoleum print on chipboard nengajo, with polymer text letterpress printing on the nether side. And for the first time in thirteen years, I got the bulk of the postcards printed, addressed, stamped and at the post office on December 31st.

May this auspicious beginning set the ambient tone for the whole year.