What Makes a Car Museum Any Good?

The article below is also published on the blog for automuseumguide.

There was a time when I thought of automotive museums as nothing more than an occasional diversion, something to be discovered unexpectedly in a location far from home. I remember, for example, coming across a billboard advertising a car museum in some small town in East Texas; it was many years ago, and may have been the first time I went to such a place. There were about twenty cars in a line, most of them older than me (I was born during the Eisenhower administration), and it cost next to nothing to walk through and see them.

    I've always liked cars. Like most boys in the 1960s and ‘70s, I could identify almost every car on the road from three blocks away. So it was a good bet that I'd enjoy seeing all those cars lined up in that old brick building. I expected that. What I didn't expect, though, was this: that line of old cars made me realize -- and begin to appreciate -- automobile design and styling as an art form. 

Somebody at corporate liked it...

    Cars were uniquely distinctive in my youth, as styling came down from the exuberant extravagance of the 1950s. In those days, no one could have mistaken a Chevrolet for a Ford, or a Ford for a Dodge. Even marques of the same corporation — GM, Ford, Chrysler (in those days, pretty much everything on the road was from one of those three companies, or Volkswagen) — were clearly set apart from one another by their styling, though that was beginning to change. Cars were things of beauty, or its opposite. The joy of seeing a '72 Grand Prix was palpable and inspiring; seeing a '67 was not. A rare glimpse of an E-type Jaguar was something to be remembered and talked about; the sight of a pale green 1962 Renault Dauphine remains with me nearly sixty years later. The offputting lumps and bulges of many a Plymouth were things to snicker at. (I had my preferences, and they’ve stayed with me to this day.)

    Even later, when car designers seemed to be avoiding flair with near-religious fervour, choosing body parts from a catalog like a postmodern architect of strip shopping centers, the styling of new models was something to be focused on. How could anyone actually want those funny-looking taillights, that hideous grille? Why don’t car companies try for classic proportion, an elegant line, the inspiring shape that makes blood pump faster? Why make a car that looks like shoe box à la mode, or an over-inflated bladder?

    It’s that fascination with design and styling, and the choices made long ago by stylists and corporate executives, that brings me into car museums today. Now that automotive museums have shifted from a discovery to a destination in my travels, I’ve come to see more clearly the progression from the horseless carriages to pragmatic sheet-metal boxes of the early 20th Century, to the committee designs of the early 21st. I’ve come to appreciate aerodynamics, materials choices, Virgil Exner and Harley Earl, and the way one car’s design is inspired by another. And it still fascinates me.

   Many people are more interested in what’s under the skin of a car. Lots of guys want to know how the motor is laid out, what tweaks to the power plant have been made, what inspired engineering has changed the way a car runs and looks. They are mechanically minded, and may know what difference a four-barrel carburetor made, while I’m not really sure what that is.

    I think about engineering in terms of design, myself: how did the development of suspension systems change the height of a car’s waist?  What determined the relative length of its hood? the design of the wheel wells? the number and placement of headlights? The density of flourishes?  How did improvements in glassmaking change the way windshields are designed? Was engineering the kiss of death for the running board, or was it paved roads (or just fashion)? And as a retired lawyer, I see regulatory changes in the same way: why did bumpers go from one form to another, to another, to another over the years? How did safety requirements change the styling of the B-pillar, and what design changes were made necessary by changes to regulations of gas tanks? When fuel-efficiency regulations doomed the heavy chromed steel and the capacious trunk, just how did the demise proceed from year to year?

heavy chromed steel: 1953 Buick Roadmaster

    All those thoughts come to mind when I visit a car museum, but in the end, the main objective of my visit is seeing the beauty of the finished product. I visit car museums now the way others visit art museums. I want to see magnificent mechanical creations, I want to linger over the fairing of a headlamp and the line of a door sill. And I want to be able to photograph it.

    I’ve reached the point in life where the only souvenirs worth having (now that the house is furnished to excess with bric-a-brac) are memories, embodied in T-shirts, fridge magnets, and photographs. (In fact, I’ve even reached the point where I have to be selective about T-shirts and fridge magnets.) But I keep two digital frames facing my favourite chair, one in landscape orientation, the other in portrait; and on each are thousands of photographs I’ve taken in a lifetime, changing twice a minute. When the photograph of a fender or grille comes up, I feel a frisson of pleasure, remembering the car in the picture, and by extension, the museum where I saw it, the town it was in, the trip that put me there.

    And taken all together, I can think about what made one auto museum a pleasure, while another was a disappointment. Having seen more than twenty such museums now, I think I can say what to look for in a car museum.

    It comes down to three main things:

• the qualities of the collection;

• the visitor’s access to the display; and

• the information given about the cars.

 

 

Don Laughlin Museum, Laughlin, Nevada

The Collection

    What’s in a museum’s collection of cars? Is it a carefully collected group of vehicles, or a smorgasbord? Does it include unusual vehicles? Exotic ones? Important ones? Are they restored, or do they look like they just came out of the barn? Are they representative of something in particular?

    Consider the Auburn-Cord-Duesenburg Museum in Indiana. I don’t know how big its collection is now, but when I went there about ten years ago, there were only about twenty or twenty-five cars on display. All were glamourous relics of America between the world wars, lovingly restored to showroom quality (fitting, since the museum is in an old car showroom). This museum’s purpose was to showcase the exceptional qualities of design and engineering of three local manufacturers.

Panhard Dynamic

   Or the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum in Pinellas Park, Florida: its collection is focussed mainly on European cars, and at least half of what I saw dated to the Interwar years. It included a unique replica of one of the most important vehicles in automotive history, Cugnot’s gigantic 18th-Century steam engine. It also contained more than one automotive oddity, like a Panhard Dynamic from the 1930s, a French car notable for its centrally-placed steering wheel as well as its elegant and unusual design details; or a German car that reminded people of a loaf of bread (the 1925 Hanomat “Kommisbrot”).

    Both of these are examples of good car museums with specialty collections, and I’d put both among the top museums I’ve seen so far. Other such museums would include the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar, California, and the Mullin Museum in Oxnard. Examples of top museums with more general collections would include the Petersen, in Los Angeles, and the National, in Reno. These museums are sufficiently well-funded to have the entire range of vehicles, and large enough to display a great many at one time.

    If size of the collection on display were the determining factor in a museum’s quality, the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg might not make the cut, while the Pioneer Museum, in Murdo, South Dakota, would. So would Elmer’s Auto and Toy Museum, in Fountain City, Wisconsin. There are car collections in the U.S. that number over a thousand. But how much time am I willing to spend looking at cars in one stretch?

    The answer to that, I find, is, about two hours, tops, and that's only long enough to see about forty well-displayed cars.

 

 

Grice Auto Museum, Clearfield PA

The Display

    Like most car museums, Elmer’s is the result of one man’s love of cars. I have the feeling that, if I had the money, it’s the kind of collection I would put together. There are lots of collections like that around; most car museums start out as one man’s baby, and how it goes from there depends on many things, most especially money and objective. The family that owns Elmer’s seems to have had enough funds available to put together a sizeable collection, but their objective isn’t focussed on anything beyond showing visitors what-all they have: not just a lot of cars, but tractors, motorcycles, bicycles and toys. In fact, the most memorable part of the museum (besides its location) was the building containing most of the toy collection. I could get lost in there, and nearly did.

    They have a lot of things to show, and they show it. They show all of it. The problem is that, as an aficionado of automotive design and styling, I can’t enjoy it as much as I would expect to, because of how it’s put together. The cars are shown in a series of barn-like buildings spread over the top of a high hill. (The view from there is another thing they have to show off to visitors.) Inside each building, cars are crammed in with just enough room for an aisle down the middle. There’s no way to see the back end of most cars, or even the sides; and the lighting is so basic that it’s difficult to make out details, or to get a good photo. (In fact, looking back through my ten thousand pictures, I see that I took not one photo when I visited Elmer’s.)

    The pictures on the museum’s website illustrate what I consider the major flaw in this type of display. An early-50s Chevy sits between a mid-60s Thunderbird and a 1940s woody wagon, all barely visible behind other, unidentifiable cars. They’re so close together the doors can’t be opened; each one was obviously driven in and parked in no apparent order, then the driver got out and parked the next car right up against the one before. The only consideration seems to have been getting all of them in, and consequently a visitor can only see the exposed front end, and barely even that. If you’re interested in a side view, or the arrangement of instruments on the dashboard, or of tail lights or the shape of a rear bumper — anything but a front view — you’re out of luck.

    There's a similar problem at the Pioneer Museum. The collection seems huge, and includes such unusual and important cars as a Chrysler Airflow sedan and the world’s first solar-powered vehicle. Both these significant cars were stored in an open shed when I visited, and coated in thick dust. My presumption is that the owners of the museum lack the space to store — and the money to restore — these vehicles and many others the way they deserve. And as at Elmer’s, decent photographs at the Pioneer are a tough ask. The Pioneer’s cars are parked with room to walk along the side of each car, but they’re also bumper-to-bumper, putting two or three sides of each vehicle out of reach and out of sight.

    I should point out that both these museums are in pretty remote places: one in rural western Wisconsin, the other in south-central South Dakota: in small towns far from any large city, and from any major attraction. At least partly as a result of this, they simply don’t have the financial resources to operate in the same upscale way as, say, a museum in southern California. The bulk of whatever revenue they do get from entry fees is probably barely enough to keep the lights on, and it may seem ridiculous to them to choose to display only a fraction of their entire collection at any one time, so that those cars can be appreciated fully by visitors, rather than the chosen method of putting everything out there, even if it mean that most of each car is inaccessible to visitors’ view. They may be right, but among the costs of that decision is the fact that visitors who do turn up, already unlikely to come back, will pass on their unfavourable views of the museum any time the subject comes up.

    Other museums give each car greater space, but put up different kinds of barriers to enjoyment, often as much a matter of security as of cost. For example, the excellent Nethercutt Collection has two large buildings in California’s San Fernando Valley. In the smaller building, exquisite vehicles are spaced widely around the room, and visitors are allowed to wander through the exhibition as they please for a set time, under the watchful eye of docents. (The entire display -- room, cars, décor -- is designed like a car dealership of about 1925.)

some of the Rolls-Royces lined up at the Nethercutt

But across the street, in the larger building, cars are lined up side-by-side, in rows like an angle-parking lot. There’s enough space between them to allow fair views of the fronts and most sides, but visitors are kept at a distance by velvet ropes. The visitor can see only one angle of the cars’ lines; nothing inside the vehicle; and nothing of the cars’ rear ends, except what may chance to be visible from the next aisle over: a tail light, maybe; rarely more. And if the line of cars is next to the wall, then even that little bit can't be seen.

    All three of these collections demonstrate the limitations of space and money. Would it be better to show fewer cars, but allow room for each to be appreciated in full? Is it better to leave an important car like the Airflow out in a shed, where it can be seen (at least, some parts of it), or move it to a clean storage area not open to the public? What if the museum doesn’t have such an area, and can’t afford to create one? Is it maybe time for the museum to see about loaning out some vehicles?

 
    There are other barriers to a full enjoyment of the display. Many museums place descriptive signs on pedestals in front of each of their cars. This is the primary means of conveying information about the car on display. Unfortunately, for someone like me who wants good photos of the cars, these signs are too often put right in front of the car, instead of a little off to the side. I’ve gotten to the point where I almost automatically move the signs to one side in order to photograph the car, but sometimes the signs themselves are out of reach, behind velvet ropes. Since pictures are, to me, the most important souvenir of my visit to the museum, having my view of the car blocked by a sign, however informative, leaves a poor impression in my mind. The sign is like your sister’s new boyfriend: you may invite him to Christmas dinner at the house for her sake, and you may be interested in what he says, but you don’t really want him in the pictures.
    
    

The Nethercutt Collection's Lower Salon

Obviously, auto museums are concerned about visitors damaging their expensive vehicles, and rightly so. When I visited the Nethercutt’s “Lower Salon,” where a couple of dozen visitors are watched by two or three docents, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was no damage visible on any of the thirty or so cars in the room. The same is true of the National Museum’s collection, in Reno. By contrast, when I was at the Mullin Museum a year later, I was saddened to see that a spectacular red Delahaye Cabriolet, one of the most beautiful cars I’ve ever seen, had been lightly scratched on its fender by some previous visitor. It was minor scratching, possibly unintentional, and barely noticeable, but it illustrates the risk a museum runs by allowing such access to these wonderful exhibits.

  

the Petersen Museum, L.A.

A mixed approach is the one used by, for example, the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles. Some of the cars are kept behind wire cords, and all are watched over by docents. (I’ve heard that there’s some kind of electronic security related to the wires around the vehicles, but I don’t know if that’s true.) And a number of vehicles are placed on raised and bordered podiums. This sets the cars apart from the visitor without restricting the visual experience; in fact, by raising the car closer to eye level, it makes the lines and attributes of the car easier to appreciate in many ways, and certainly easier for old farts like me to photograph. (I can still remember discovering just how hard it is to get down on one knee to photograph some detail of a car at the Wheels of Yesteryear Museum in Myrtle Beach. Well, not so much getting down as getting back up.) Plus, the platforms themselves provide large spaces for signage that doesn't interfere with the views of the artworks being exhibited.

    And what about the engine compartments, the trunks, the doors? Some visitors are particularly interested in seeing inside the cars. I, for example, am always curious to see how gauges and instruments are laid out on the dashboard, and what peculiar things a manufacturer thought worth the cost of including in 1935 or 1950. I can often see these things through the side window, if I’m allowed to get to the side window. But how  do you access the back seat of a coupe? I don’t expect to be allowed to try moving the front seat. Or, what’s in all the little cubbyholes in a car: the glove box, the seatback pocket, the console? What’s under the hood? How is the motor designed and laid out? How much empty space is in there? How large is the trunk? What archaic things might it contain? Tools? Spare tires? Picnic baskets or suitcases? In most cases, I’ll never know, because in most cases there’s no docent there to open that door, that hood, that trunk, or at least describe to me what I would see if he or she could open it.

    Some museums choose to deal with this problem by displaying some cars with the hood up, or the trunk open, or a door swung wide. This is helpful to those who want to see what’s under the skin (and that includes me), but it also interferes with appreciation of a car’s lines. In the San Diego Automotive Museum, one of the best I’ve been to, a number of cars were shown with doors, hoods and trunks open. This was fine in most cases: after all, the main thing about a ’68 Dodge Coronet is what’s under the hood. But two of their most beautiful cars, a ’53 Jaguar XK-120 and a ’58 Mercedes coupe, were shown with the hoods open, meaning that the glorious lines of those two singular cars could not really be appreciated. I regret this fact every time I see the pictures I took of them. (In the Mercedes’ case, the doors were also open, but that’s OK. The gull-wing doors are the car’s most interesting and innovative feature, along with the custom-made luggage stored in the back of the cabin.)

    Other museums deal with the problem by having docents on hand to talk about what’s under the hood, and explain what’s inside. In some ways, this is the best possible solution. These are people, whether volunteers or paid, who have frequent intimate exposure to the car, and they can talk about them with authority. Sometimes they’re authorized to open and close doors and hoods and trunks, but even if they’re not, I find it useful to have someone there to explain how a feature works, and what that thingamajig on the floor is, and talk generally about the cars and their history and design. (Why are there so many hinges on each door of the Duesenburg Twenty-Grand? What’s that odd little pedal for, in the passenger side footwell of the 1924 Mercedes Targa Florio? Just how loud is Steve McQueen’s 1955 Jaguar XKSS? And what’s that brass tube on the side of the 1911 Stanley Steamer, that looks like it belongs on a circus organ? Thanks to knowledgeable docents, I now know these things. Or used to: I forget why the Twenty-Grand has four hinges on each door.

    Lastly, a car museum’s lighting is vital to the display of the cars. At some museums, especially the larger (and probably richer) ones, this issue has been carefully thought out. The Petersen, the National, and the San Diego museums are the best surviving examples I know of; Dick’s Classic Garage, in San Marcos, Texas, was another, but it closed a couple of months after my visit and the collection was sold off. In these museums, every car is well-lit, and only the glare from the highly-polished bodies creates a dilemma for amateur photographers like me. The Mullin Museum is mostly in this same top category, though the cars upstairs aren’t as kindly lit. The Tampa Bay museum is a similar example, where almost the whole display area is thoughtfully lit, except one small room with a glass wall where Florida sun was allowed to stream in and ruin my pictures. And the Nethercutt has excellent lighting in both its buildings, except for the cars between the front door and the desk in the larger building, where the blinding glare of Southern California’s morning sun kept me from getting decent pictures of a couple of stunning 1930s-era coupes (a ’31 Bugatti and a ’36 Talbot-Lago, if you’re curious).

    Some museums, though, are way too dark. Even if there’s adequate light on one part of a car, too often much of the body is hidden in shadow. At both Elmer’s and The Pioneer, for instance, there was little thought given to lighting. Maybe that’s because those places operate more or less at break-even, spending available funds on operations. One of the reasons I didn’t take any pictures at Elmer’s was, as I recall, that I couldn’t get a decent shot in the darkness of the display barns, even if I could see enough of a vehicle to make a photograph worth taking. And at the Pioneer, I probably took fifty or sixty photographs, with and without flash, but deleted all but a handful because they just weren’t worth the photons. Even the ones worth keeping are poorly lit.

    Sun is a killer for the visitor who wants to photograph the beauties on display. Poor lighting leaves a lasting impression: every time I see my sad pictures of that ’36 Talbot-Lago at the Nethercutt, I feel a little less favourably disposed to that otherwise excellent museum. (The phrase “Go into the light” comes to mind.) And every time I see my pictures from the Lane Motor Museum — a museum that was enough of a draw for me to require two trips to Nashville — I think two things: they have an uncommon and interesting collection, and they really need to paint over the glass that makes up much of the ceiling. Almost all my shots of their cars — almost all my memories of the place — are flawed by glare and shadow.

Nethercutt Collection, Sylmar CA

Information

    I suspect every visitor to a car museum, and certainly every regular visitor like me, wants to know about the cars on display. I can recognize a 1957 Chevy Bel Air, but there are lots of interesting facts about even that most familiar old car that would be worth putting in front of a visitor. One that I saw at the Tallahassee Automobile Museum, for example, had a sign describing an optional “traffic signal reflector” mounted on the car’s dashboard. But few old cars are as widely familiar as a ’57 Chevy. The cars displayed have to be identified and described.

    How a museum chooses to communicate information to the visitor goes a long way in determining what a visitor will think about the museum.

    Short of providing guided tours to each visitor, an economic impossibility, or a flock of docents trained in the details about each vehicle in a section of the museum, signage is the best way to convey information. (Recorded audiotours, such are common in art museums and zoos, may be feasible too, but I don’t know a thing about the technology involved: how it’s done, what it costs, or how well it works; and my own experiences with audio guides isn’t a source of inspiration to me.)

    Signage relating to each car should convey, at an absolute minimum, the car’s make, model and year. (And — I shouldn’t have to say it, but I do — that information should be accurate.) I’d have thought that every museum’s people would know this, and provide for it accordingly. But now I know that, in fact, it’s not treated as a rule in all cases.

    A lot of museums operate on a shoestring, and visitors are willing to cut them a lot of slack, as for example when cars are newly added. But even the most bare-bones automotive museum ought to be able to afford a piece of paper mounted on a windshield, even if it has to be hand-printed. My experience shows, though, that even this isn’t always done. I have to believe that it’s because the operators of these museums just don’t give a damn about such things; and if they don’t care enough to properly label their cars with that basic information, then why should I spend my money to see what’s on their floor?

    The more information a museum provides, the better: about the history of the car and the manufacturer; mechanical and design information; engineering information, production and marketing information, sales information. No museum that I’ve ever seen provides too much. The best, though, will tell visitors a little about the history of a car. Consider this example from the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, which is one of the very best I’ve seen at passing along information about the cars in their collection:

1942 Mathis VL333 Prototype

Mathis was a firm in Alsace, France, that produced cars between 1910 and 1950. Before WWII, Mathis was the number 4 car manufacturer in France. The VL333 is built from 20 guage aluminum sheet metal. The body is welded together with nearly 6,000 weld points. There is no chassis, it is a bubble. The engine is a flat twin 700 cc and the car is front-wheel drive with a fully independent suspension. Only 9 Prototypes were made during the war from 1940 to 1945; they were hidden from the Germans, as any work on automobiles for the civilian sector was forbidden.

The car in front of you was presented at the Paris Auto Show in 1945. Unfortunately, the French Government refused Mathis acces to supplies to manufacture the car. The VL333 was doomed and this car is the only survivor.

Wow. That amount of information is great! Pedants and English majors will quibble about the punctuation — just try and stop us! But the rest of the world isn’t going to notice that. The museum’s reputation is enhanced as a result of all this information. It shows that they care about their car collection, and want their visitors to appreciate it as much as they do.  If I’m not interested in these details, I don’t have to read it all. And if I should want more, the sign quoted here has a QR code mounted above it.

    Another example of superior signage is the Don Laughlin Auto Museum in Nevada. Each vehicle is accompanied by an inexpensive printed sign. All give the minimum amount of information; some include specifications for the vehicle, like engine capacities, list price (one of my favourite bits of information, by the way) and details about the transmission; others include notable options on the car, or even a brief rundown of changes in the model over the production run. A few discuss the styling choices or the car’s place in the automobile market of its day.

    But even when the museum makes the effort to provide the information, proofreading is often the first corner cut. Spelling and punctuation are victims, perhaps, of our declining educational system, and it’s so common now that people like me have almost given up on the expectation that someone making a sign might know how to spell or use an apostrophe or a comma, or that they might ask someone who does know.

'63 Buick Riviera

  Besides, there are worse sins in the world. Consider this excerpt from a sign for a 1963 Buick Riviera: “They have machined on the face around the instruments and the glove box area.” There’s no context that might give a clue about what this is trying to say. I have no idea what it means; presumably it’s meant to convey some detail about the dashboard, but it appears a word (or more) has been left out. If I could have seen the dashboard I might have been able to tell, but the car was one of those parked behind a velvet rope.

    There are a lot of good automotive museums in this country, promising a lifetime of road trips in my future. Most start as the collection of one guy who loves cars, and who wants to show them to other car-lovers; and many remain just that. Those museums — like Elmer’s, like the Pioneer — do what they’re intended to do, and that’s fine for them, even if they tend to disappoint destination visitors like me. (No museum, I should probably say, has ever disappointed me completely. Even the most desolate collection of a dozen old cars has something of interest.) But the better the collection, the better the display, the better the information, then the more enjoyable the museum will be, and thus the better able to attract visitors.

2021 Huntsman Trip, part three

This is part three of a multiple-part post. You really should read them in order. You can find Part One here, and then click "newer post" at the end of each section. Pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

 So, a couple of developments. First, I'd planned to go over to Los Angeles for a couple of days, to tour a car museum or two and visit with a friend. I'd made arrangements to see my friend, but I got no response from any of the museums I'd contacted about interviews; so I decided to cancel that little side-trip. I'm sure that was more a disappointment to me than to my friend, but I had seen him not that long ago when I was out there for the stained glass exhibit. 

 Second, my friend Curtis can't go hiking this year. Those few days of hiking each year are the real reason I come on these Huntsman trips; the tournament my wife plays soccer in is only the excuse to justify wandering around in Nevada and Utah with Curtis and Carly. But this year, Curtis has to stay close to home to look after his wife, who is having some serious medical issues. 

 The upshot of these developments is that, this year, I'll be spending the entire trip here in Lake Havasu City, which I often say is two and a half hours from anything to do. That's not technically true, but compared to any major city, it's pretty well devoid of things I like to do, especially alone. And I don't know anybody here. So after Nancy and Bryan return to Colorado, and Sherry goes up to Utah, I'll be sitting here twiddling my thumbs, unless I can get more ideas on my List of Activities than "Watch old DVDs," "Walk dog," and "Play on computer." 

 So far, though, all I have is a plan to visit a car museum in Laughlin and meet up with Curtis there, to hand over the small box of stuff I've been holding onto for him for the last year or so. That will occupy one day; one other day, there's a soccer match I plan to watch at some local bar; leaving me with three and a half days to fill on my own. I suspect that DVD player is going to get a workout, and Carly will sniff a lot of gravel landscaping. (Grass lawns are most definitely not done in Havasu.) I expect I'll also shop for T-shirts and fridge magnets (like I need more of either) and I suppose I might as well spend an hour at the LHC history museum. If I weren't such a cheapskate I'd go drop a C-note at one of the local casinos (Laughlin, where I'm meeting Curtis; Parker, half an hour south of Havasu; and across the lake at Havasu Landing; I hear there's a ferry that will take you across). But that just seems like a waste of both time and money. We'll have to see how desperate I get. Can I convince myself that I might actually win something?

 Saturday, the finest weather returned; the sky was a cloudless blue, the morning temperature around seventy degrees, the forecast high in the low-to-mid 80s. A perfect day for a short, easy hike through the Crack in the Mountain.

 Every time I've made that hike -- this may be my fourth time -- I've gone through the Crack both ways. The hike is about three and a half miles each way; it starts with a more or less flat walk along a wash until you get to a slot canyon that is so brief and so wide (maybe twenty yards) that you hardly even notice it. Then another stroll through a gravel-bottomed wash to the Crack, where the main attractions of the hike reside. Here the walls of the slot canyon are so close together that you have to brace yourself against one side and slide your butt along the other side to get down over an eroded channel that drops just a little too far to jump; getting back up it on the return trip depends on being able to get some traction on the smooth rock. In one place, there's a belayed rope, and you have to rappel down a short drop, maybe nine or ten feet, over a large boulder. This spot is my entire experience with that technique. Somewhere beyond that, another boulder has recently (within the last 3 years or so) gotten lodged in the Crack, and there are stumps of a metal ladder placed to help hikers over the obstruction. 

 Other than that, it's just a very narrow passage with a floor of gravel mixed with rocks: not easy, but not hard to pass through. 

bighorn sheep

The Crack opens onto a longish stretch of wash that curves between two low ridges. Here, for the first time, we saw a couple of Desert Bighorn Sheep, a threatened species that has a wildlife refuge a little farther to the south. They look like deer from a distance. This is probably the longest discrete section of the overall hike, about two-thirds of a mile through loose sand, gravel, and rocks. At a certain point, the trail rises onto the right-hand ridge, then you can either go left to the trail bottom at three tall mushroom-shaped rocks on the lakeshore, or right to a point higher up that gives a view of the lake, the rocks, and a picnic area on a point of BLM land.

 This time, we decided to take a different route back, the Blue Trail, which winds along the top of the right-hand ridge parallel to the Crack trail. It involves a few short climbs; one scary point (for people with acrophobia, like me) where the trail crosses a saddle that is just wide enough for the trail; and a few very badly marked junctions. At one, the trail marker had an arrow pointing diagonally down on one side, and diagonally up on the other. It seemed to indicate that the trail goes up a very steep slope for about a hundred and twenty feet. While Sherry and Carly went up that way, Bryan tried the lower trail, which turned out to be the correct one. Thank God. I really wanted that to be the right trail.

 And there is no shade at all along the Blue Trail. Even Carly was completely exhausted and had to be carried for a stretch. The last mile or so was like a Death March, except without the Death part, just an air-conditioned vehicle at the end. I ran out of water, then got resupplied by Nancy or Bryan, then ran out again. It's now two days later and I'm still feeling the aches in my feet and legs that came from this "short easy hike." A sure sign of aging. As if I need one.

Carly at the Lake

 The plan for Sunday called for trail riding in the rail and the Jeep in the morning, and boating on the lake in the afternoon. Now, Nancy and Bryan have a lot of experience with all manner of outdoor activity, and they are our Source Authorities for all such things. Sherry has more experience with it than me, but her knowledge of such things isn't nearly as exhaustive as Nancy and Bryan's. Their knowledge of The Outside World seems to me literally comprehensive, and I defer to them in almost every detail.* They grew up doing these things, while my childhood experiences of the Great Outdoors consisted largely of rare occasions wandering around undeveloped lots bordering edge-of-town subdivisions. 

But they (and Sherry) seem to have no concept of how long things take at the house. Specifically, the getting-things-together part of each expedition. 

 I've noticed the same circumstance applies at home: whenever Sherry announces to me that she's going to take Carly for a walk, on average around 45 minutes will elapse before I hear her phone say "Begin workout"; and it's only at that point that the walk begins. I don't know what goes into the preparations for a railing expedition or a boating trip, but on those occasions when I am a part of the planned activity (that is, the land-based activities), the group seems to be ready, and then not ready, and then ready to go, and then not ready, and then ready. And then we're not ready quite yet. And then we're ready to go. (And if you're thinking, "Why doesn't he help?" rest assured that that's been tried, and it doesn't move things along. I stay out of the way while those who know what they're doing do what they know needs doing. My job is to drive in the direction I'm instructed to go.) To the uninitiated eye (mine) it all appears as random slow-motion chaos; yet everything gets done, eventually, and we never end up out in the middle of nowhere with somebody saying "Oh, we should have brought such-and-such." Well, almost never.

Jeep & Cactus

 So when they told me the plan was a trail ride Sunday morning and boating Sunday afternoon, I snorted derisively to myself, in the manner of Sheldon Cooper. (I didn't do it out loud, because there was just the slightest possibility it might actually happen.) And sure enough, about an hour elapsed between the first "Let's go" and the actual "Let's go." I put my hat on and took it off four times, perhaps five, each time thinking despite my own experience with this phenomenon that we were really ready to go trail riding.

 Our ride lasted until late-late-late in the afternoon. But it was great. Bryan had plotted a course out farther than we normally go into the desert, out beyond nearly everyone else; and we encountered some trails that proved to be a real challenge for the rail (though not, of course, for his Jeep, which seems almost to glide serenely up or down any available slope). We even found one hill the rail couldn't climb at all, but there was another, easier route up a short distance away that Sherry found after going up in Bryan's Jeep. 

 By the time we got home, it was way too late for boating, which got pushed back to today -- Monday. Preparations for that expedition got started around nine this morning, and owing to an unexpected problem with the truck (which got a trip to the auto-parts store for a new battery) they continued long enough to make lunch at the house appropriate. That done, further preparation ensued until a shade before 2PM, i.e., just now, when Sherry came in from the garage to tell me that the wind had picked up too much and they weren't going boating.

 All this seems meaningful right now, while it's happening; later on, not so much.

* The one occasion on this trip when I didn't was when they formed an ad hoc committee to discuss which of four paths to take at the start of the Blue Trail. I got frustrated standing around in the hot sun while they debated the pros and cons of three paths that were, to me, obviously wrong, so I just said "This is the trail" and left. They caught up with me about three quarters of a mile along. At the time I felt pretty smug about the whole thing, but further reflection has softened that as slight possibilities for great disaster begin to appear among the fog of what might have been.

Postscript: If you're interested (and why wouldn't you be?) you can read the article I wrote for AutomotiveMuseumGuide.com about the Laughlin museum at this link.

2021 Huntsman Trip, part two

This is part two of a multiple-part post. You really should read them in order. You can find Part One here, and then click "newer post" at the end of each section. Pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

 Unfortunately, the blog post I'd written about this trip for the days between Monday, October 4 and Friday, October 8, got deleted. I don't know how; I'd highlighted a single sentence near the end that I was going to rewrite, and hit "delete," and the whole post's text was replaced by a symbol that looked like two wavy lines. I then hit "undo" (Command-X on this Mac computer) and an Omega symbol appeared. At that point the blogging program saved the post. And there is no way I can see to get it back. 

 So I can't really say what-all happened on those days. I apologise for the rambling nature of this replacement post, and who knows; I may actually be able to reconstruct something like a cohesive narrative. But it will never match the lost original, which was perhaps the single most significant piece of non-fiction literature written in the past two and a half centuries, a classic to rival, nay, to surpass Common Sense, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Walden and The Glory and the Dream. Such a loss to the world of letters. I blame technology.

 I remember that the other folks took the boat out one day, and they took the jetski out another day; I know I went to watch Italy lose to Spain in the Nations Cup, and I recall that the fly perched on the screen for most of the second half was the most interesting thing on that screen. At some point, while everyone else was out on the water, I watched a movie on DVD called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, with Judi Dench and Dev Patel, which was pretty good; and another called Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith, which was not. I also remember that I rode out into the wild lands in Bryan's Jeep, with Nancy following us in the rail, one evening, and that it was kind of eerie being out there in the dark. But we saw not a single bit of wildlife, not even the reflection of headlights in eyeballs. Not so much as a rabbit. 

 I know that on one afternoon, I went next door and talked to the neighbour who trades in antique cars. He has just acquired a bug-eyed Sprite, a '49 Chevy, and a Rausch Mustang. The cars he currently has that are most of interest to me, though, are a '71 or '72 E-Type and a '52 Rolls. If memory serves, he spends his working life, about half the year, in Wyoming where he owns a craft brewery, and the other half of the year he's here, tinkering with his collection of old cars. The garage on his property holds about a dozen cars, and the garage attached to the house holds two more. He's serious about it. So you'd think he'd be a great person to get to know, a man with interesting stories to tell. So far, though, there has been no spark to suggest an incipient friendship there.

Carly in the English Village

 And I remember that Sherry and I went downtown to watch the US beat Jamaica 2:0 in a world cup qualifying match. That must have been on Thursday, because it was Old Car Night in Havasu, and the main drag downtown was full of maybe 100 interesting cars, mostly authentic American classics like Chevies from the 1950s and '60s, many of them modified, with a smattering of European cars (I recall a '60s-vintage Volvo and a Triumph TR-6), and there were a couple of replica cars, including a beautiful 1933 Mercedes replica in candy-apple red. And it was Taco Night at the bar where we watched the game, but we didn't have any because later that night, we had plans to get together with some friends of Sherry's family who live here now. This we did, at a restaurant in the English Village by London Bridge that had a nice outdoor seating area and live music. And finally, I remember that on Friday, we went back to the English Village to do the walking tour of London Bridge, which none of us had ever done before, despite having come to Havasu over and over for the last 30 years (longer than that for Sherry and Nancy).

Maybe I could dredge up a few more memories of that missing four days, but who really cares?

 

2021 Huntsman Trip, part one

All the pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

Something went right to start out this trip. Actually, two things went unexpectedly right, but I can't remember the second one, so let's not dwell on it.

The thing I remember that went right is that Sherry noticed there was a yellow jacket inside the car before we had gone very far, and before it got warmed up enough to start flying around in the cabin. That would have been more excitement than either of us would care for. 

Against that one good thing, and the second good thing that I can't remember -- Oh, plus the fact that Carly didn't throw up all the way to Havasu, a first for her -- there's the fact that none of the electric window switches in the Subaru are working, for some reason. This means that we can't leave Carly unattended in the car when it's the least bit warm out. Which in turn means lunch is a take-away sandwich eaten at a city park -- once in Fort Stockton, Texas and once in Tucson, Arizona. Not really too bad, except that the Subway sandwich we bought in Fort Stockton cost like ten bucks, which is way more than it costs back home.

Also, the electric door locks on the driver's-side door don't work now. A minor inconvenience that probably has something to do with the window switch malfunctions.

And the rearview mirror came off in El Paso. That was more of a surprise than a problem, since it was easy enough to slip back onto the holder. Just a weird thing to have happen, and of course it happened where there was no place to pull over for a couple of miles

Other than these oddities, the trip over to the Lake was uneventful. We listened first to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, one of those books you're supposed to read in High School, so of course neither of us had ever read it. A short book, a novella really, and in audio form only about four hours long. So now we're familiar with it, and neither of us is entirely sure why it's considered such a classic and important piece of fiction. (I had chosen it because I've seen so very many references to it in the last few years.)

After that finished, we started the new murder mystery featuring the Thursday Murder Club: The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. I actually thought to myself, in one of those moments where you reflect on Life In General and Your Place In It, that I was happy to have lived long enough to hear (or read) the first two of these amusing mystery stories. We're only about 2/3 of the way through the current story, so I won't talk more about it.

We got to the Lake in time for dinner yesterday, Saturday. Nancy and her son Bryan were already here, and Nancy had prepared dinner for us. My only function was to figure out where we'd be able to watch the Liverpool-Manchester City match at 8:30 this morning. Juicy's, a burger bar near downtown, opens at 7am on Sundays, so we thought we were set.

Headed out this morning to watch the match, only to find that Juicy's has only one full-sized TV, which  was tuned to an NFL Preview show, and they "couldn't" change the channel. So we started back to the house. (All the other places listed under "sports bars in Lake Havasu City" open at 10am or later on Sundays, by which time the match would be almost over.) Sherry noticed a little grey building with several cars outside that looked like an open bar or restaurant, so we circled back to check it out. They didn't open until 9, but they were perfectly happy to have us sit in there and watch their television; they put the game on, coffee was available, and we were as happy as Granny Clampett with a fresh batch of potion. They had a buffet that included all the Mimosas you can drink, so the price was a little steep but no more than we would have spent on food and drink at the bar back home for a match that isn't available on our TV at home. (There are a few.)

After a disappointing but not upsetting result (a 2:2 draw, leaving Liverpool in second place, a point behind Chelsea and a point ahead of both Manchester clubs), we went back to the house and planned an excursion out in the wild lands east of town. Bryan had driven his Jeep down from Colorado and wanted to take it out on the trails; and we took the rail, which is like a dune buggy without a body: it's basically a VW engine mounted on an open chassis. 

Made it! Bryan tops a rise

Something goes wrong with the rail every time we take it out. Last time it was the steering. This time it's the suspension. But it was functional, in a minimalist sort of way, and we had a great time. Nancy drove this time, and started out nervous and overly cautious (just like I do when I start driving it), but by the end of the afternoon she was slammin' over rocks and up and down steep hills like a pro. Which is a fortunate thing, because Bryan led the last segment in his Jeep (because he had some kind of satellite software on his phone that would enable him to figure out a way back to the part of town our house is in), and he was like a stately ship on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise, while we followed along like we were on the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags. 

Bryan's planning to go out on the trails at night some time soon, and I said I'd like to go with him. He's used to much more challenging excursions in his Jeep Club back in Colorado, so none of the trails out here will be beyond his capacity, I don't think; probably nothing to require the use of a winch and a second vehicle, which seems to be par for the course from the stories he tells of his club trips.

A First! Well, a Second. A Second!

 People often tell me I should be a writer. This ought to shut them up:

 I used to write a lot, for my own entertainment, and occasionally for other, more serious purposes. College pretty much ruined writing for me. 

 Law school put the tombstone on the grave, though afterwards I would on rare occasions put together enough of a coherent thought for a law review article and, on one occasion, an editorial. But there was no real joy in it. It was nice to see my name in print, and even nicer to see my work referenced in a court opinion (that happened once or twice, no more), but by the time I retired from the practice of law -- or, more accurately, quit -- I was ready to go the rest of my life without putting words on a page. Comments on soccer websites we're about the extent of my public expression.

 And then I found blogging. By the time I started doing it, in 2009, it was already passé, but it has limped along as an alternative medium, one where anyone can have their say, confident that few people will ever see it. 

 And now, after 14 years, I have finally returned to the exciting world of journalism; meaning, writing that somebody else publishes. There's no money in it, but there's an undeniable ego boost. 

It's a thrill.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Epilogue

This is the last post of a series; you really should read them in order. You can get to Part I here, and then click on "newer post" at the bottom as you finish each part.

The pictures from this trip are all in this album. 

OK SO ONE LAST LITTLE BIT. The rest of the trip went pretty much as I anticipated. I spent Friday morning at the Petersen Automotive Museum, They have a parking garage, but there's also metered parking on all the nearby side streets, and it's much cheaper, a dollar an hour.

I had parked at a meter the other day, farther up towards town. The meters LA uses have LCD screens that, after a certain number of years in the Southern California sun, are pretty much unreadable. But on that occasion, I stuck in my credit card and kind of guessed at what the screen was saying, and ended up buying two hours' worth of parking when I only wanted about half an hour. This time, when I saw I couldn't read the screen, I checked the other five or six vacant meters in that block and couldn't read any of them. Then I noticed a phone number to call when there's a problem with the meter; so I called it, thinking maybe they could walk me through the steps. There were 26 calls ahead of mine. Their recording kept telling me I could report problems with a meter on their website, and after hearing it 2 or 3 times I could remember the URL well enough to plug it into my phone and see, while on hold, what it might tell me. After wandering around their poorly organized website for about ten minutes, I finally located a link that allowed me to report the meter. I put in the information, got a confirmation email from them, and went into the museum. When I came out two hours later, I had a $63 parking ticket which I expect to get dismissed when Monday comes. 

1924 Mercedes Targa Florio

Jaguar XKSS

Ferrari Barchetta

The Petersen is nearly completely rearranged since my last visit. The concept cars that were on the third floor, the ones I found so interesting last time, are all tucked away in the Vault (a separate storage area of the museum). The movie and TV cars are now down on the first floor. The top floor now hosts an exhibition that deals with the relationship between auto racing and production. It starts off with a 1924 Mercedes Targa Florio that was built to be both a racer and a road car; it ends with a line of "supercars" that ... well, you can figure out that relationship yourselves. I was particularly struck by the juxtaposition of a 1952 Ferrari Barchetta Superleggere (super-light), in gorgeous black, with a 1955 Mercedes-Benz SL (for SuperLeight, a designation they still use) gullwing coupe, also in gorgeous black. Each car influenced the designs of a number of later vehicles, but in two distinct lines. The Ferrari became the Ford Thunderbird and cars in that line, while the Mercedes, after a long interval, is the stylistic ancestor of a great many currently manufactured sporty vehicles, particularly from Audi, Volkswagen, Hyundai and, yes, Mercedes. 

After the museum I spent some time with a friend of mine, a lawyer formerly in banking but now doing non-profit work. I met him on an earlier visit to LA and have sort of kept in touch. Then I went back to my hotel and started writing my article for automotivemuseumguide.com. 

Saturday morning I checked out of my hotel and went down to Culver City, a suburb about half an hour south of LA, to watch the Norwich:Liverpool match with a couple hundred of my new best friends, the Los Angeles chapter of the Liverpool FC Fan Club. Wow! what an atmosphere! It's like being in the Anfield Road end of the stadium. They sing pretty much the whole time, and loudly, and every now and then I could even understand the words. (About half of them had British accents, but I don't know if that had anything to do with the trouble I had understanding their songs.) A really fun way to watch a match. I compare it to those occasions when we go watch a match at the Winchester in Alamo Heights, where the San Antonio chapter of the fan club meets. There, nobody sings; there are seldom more than fifteen or twenty people there and nobody talks to anybody not at their table. 

After the match I headed east, getting as far as a suburb of Phoenix before calling it a day. (I nearly killed myself shortly before that, falling asleep at the wheel. Thank God for those noisy ruts they carve on the edges of the freeway these days. Naturally I was wide awake after that.) Today I felt a little tired early in the day, but after taking a walk in Deming, New Mexico I felt fine the rest of the trip, and have now arrived in Fort Stockton, Texas for the night, about six hours from home.

The last picture of the trip.

Postscript: while reading one of my old blog posts, trying to fix dead links from years ago, I came across this in a post from September 2009:

Had I had the luxury of time, I could have made the trip from San Antonio to Phoenix, and presumably on to San Diego, much more interesting than it is when we just get on I-10 at Hildebrand and get off at the 202. I could drive west out of San Antonio to Camp Wood, and up the South Llano River, or over to Langtry and up through the Big Bend Country or the Davis Mountains; I could cut across the corner of New Mexico, through Cloudcroft and Alamogordo, and up through Silver City and into Globe. It'd take a long, long time, and it's all country I've covered before.

 Considering how this trip started, I find that almost eerie.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part V: What I Came For

 This is part five of a series; you really should read them all, and in order, starting with Part I. All the pictures for this trip are in a Google Photos album that you can see by clicking on this link.

I had planned to be at the museum at Forest Lawn, in Glendale, when it opened at ten o'clock this morning. I woke up right at 6AM, so I guess I must be used to Pacific time. Had breakfast at Noah's Bagels, a couple of miles east of my hotel. I had breakfast there a year and a half ago when I'd just bought the Sacramento Jag & was taking it to its new home, & I remembered that I really liked everything about the place. It's a little different now -- all the restaurants here are, because of all the restrictions about masks and indoor dining. But the food & coffee were still good, the employees were still helpful, and the prices were still reasonable (for Los Angeles).

Being up so early meant I had some time to kill. First I went for a walk down Beverly Boulevard for a few blocks. I seem to be in the Jewish District. I passed two synagogues, and there are several Kosher restaurants (including a Kosher French Bakery & Cafe), and some other businesses with signs in Hebrew or names that reflected their Jewishness; all this mixed in, of course, with Salvadoran and Thai and Italian and Greek and a few things I don't really recognise. 

There was a guy standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a doorway, and he had some kind of black box on a strap on his head. It looked at first glance kind of like a jeweler's loupe, pushed up onto his forehead. Overall, he looked like I imagine a diamond merchant would look during a break from work. We said hello as I passed by headed east. A few minutes later I'd turned back, and he was still there. He said hello again and commented on my having just passed not five minutes before. I said something about it being as far as I'd wanted to walk, and started to go by when I decided I was going to ask him about his loupe. So I said, "Are you a jeweler?" and he said yes. I asked him about the thing on his forehead, which he called by a word I couldn't catch (it was probably in Hebrew) and said it contains a scripture verse on a little roll of parchment. It's used when you pray in the morning. Kind of like a mezuzah, I guess; that little metal box you put on the front door frame. We talked about that for a while, and about judaism (like I know anything about it) and then I moved on, back to my hotel. It was only when I got back to the room that it occurred to me that he must have thought I had asked him, "Are you a Jew?", which even I would think a rude question, coming out of nowhere like that. Especially since, as I started to tell him I was curious about his loupe, I couldn't remember the word "loupe", so I just kind of waved at the thing on his head. 

Still a load of time to kill, so I got on the internet, where wasted time goes to live forever. Some of you may have gotten my morning blast of funny signs put up by the Indian Hills, Colorado, Community Center ("Welcome to the Assumption Club! I think we all know why we're here!"). Putting that together and sending it out took up even more time than I had to kill, mostly because I was laughing and not paying close attention to the time. But I got to Forest Lawn pretty soon after ten.

I thought Forest Lawn was where all the famous movie stars are buried. Maybe they are, but if so, it's an oddly understated cemetery. There are, actually, half a dozen or so Forest Lawn Cemeteries scattered around California, so maybe there's another one somewhere that features the kind of self-important carved marble tombs one expects the very vain -- and ordinary New Orleanians -- to be buried in. This one has a number of mausoleums scattered around, each with a name like you'd expect an unctuous sales committee to have given out in the 1950s. All the graves have flat headstones in the modern style, with just names and dates and maybe one short descriptive line ("beloved husband"; "together always now"; that sort of thing). And the place is huge; L-shaped, probably two miles front to back and side to side.

The attendant at the entrance helpfully gave me a map with the route to the museum highlighted, so I had no trouble finding it. Besides, there were signs at every intersection. (Temple of This to the right, Temple of That straight ahead, museum to the left.)

museum on the right, cathedral on the left

The museum looks like a small building. That's partly because it stands next to a large Gothic Revival building that looks like a medieval cathedral from some unspecified place in Western Europe. Inside it's a cross (get it? Cross?) between an underused convention hall and a government building. The main attraction in the place is a painting called The Crucifixion. The painting is enormous, nearly 200 feet from end to end and fifty from top to bottom. It was painted for a worlds' fair by an artist from Poland who couldn't afford to get it home with him. Now it hangs on a curtained wall behind a shallow stage and in front of seating for probably three hundred people. It is an impressive painting, and not just for its size.

But the museum. It's showing an exhibition called "Judson Studios: Stained Glass from Medieval to Street". This is why I'm in Los Angeles, to see this before it goes away.

St-Gaudens, Lincoln

When I stepped into the museum, I was taken by surprise. It never occurred to me that the Forest Lawn Museum might have its own permanent collection of art, real art to exhibit, but there it is. Not a lot of it, just one good-sized room; they may have more, of course, but there's just the one room on show: half a dozen exquisite bronzes by famous American sculptors like Remington and Borglum and St-Gaudens. Beautifully carved marbles. Copies of a few famous sculptures. (They used to have a full-sized copy of Michaelangelo's David, until an earthquake knocked it over. Now they exhibit the head, and so for the first time I could see, up close, just how monumentally big that statue is.)

It was truly an impressive little collection. 

In the room behind that is the museum's gift shop. And in the two rooms behind that is the glass exhibition I've come all this way to see. 

Can you feel tension building? If you're not really interested in the techniques of glass, I suggest you skip pretty much the rest of this post. I'm really only writing it for me anyway.

There are now three kinds of stained glass in the world. (Four, if you count dalle glass, which is big chunks of brightly-coloured glass stuck into cement; it was popular mainly in church architecture in the 1970s and '80s, but we got over it.) All three kinds are usually called "stained glass", but actual Stained Glass is the kind of thing you see in medieval churches: pieces of coloured glass, painted (or stained) with a dark layer of something like soot, most of which is then removed, leaving behind part of a picture. 

actual stained glass

Look at the face of Mary Magdalene in this photograph. The thick, heavy lines that go across her mouth, along her jaw, over her eye? Those are lead-lines, where pieces of "stained" glass are joined together. Her face consists of five or six pieces of flesh-coloured glass. Each of those pieces was painted with a soot layer, then an artist scraped away soot to leave behind her features -- eyes, nose, mouth, teeth -- like a drawing. The shadow on her neck is made by leaving behind some of the staining layer, sort of like an artist working with pencil will do crosshatching to make the appearance of a shadow. The glass, after the extra stain is scraped away, is then fired and the bits of the soot layer that were left merge into the glass, and these stained pieces are assembled into a whole with lead.

Then there's the kind of craft that I practice. It's called "stained glass," but it's more properly called "leaded glass," or "leaded-and-foiled glass." The technique I use takes pieces of coloured glass and assembles them into an image or design without using the staining process, which takes an artistic talent that I've never exhibited, like the ability to draw.

Torrey Pine

This is the kind of work I do. This panel is done by foiling, where the edge of each little coloured piece of glass is individually wrapped in a thin piece of copper, and the wrapped pieces are then soldered together to make the image. You can also join the pieces using long strips of lead, which is soft enough to bend around the edges of pieces of glass. Copper foil (now, thankfully, manufactured with adhesive backing) is much more flexible than lead, while lead produces a more even line. You can zoom in on this picture and see that the black lines where pieces are joined together vary in thickness; up close, they're irregular. (The lead lines on Mary Magdalen are a little bit irregular, but that's because lead calme -- the strips of lead that join the glass pieces together -- were made by hand back then; nowadays, they're just extruded from a machine like pasta.)

Then there's fused glass. This technique started to become popular back in the 1970s, but unlike dalle glass, which was just an architectural fad of the era that required no artisanal sensibility, fused glass has become more and more popular with wider availability of the needed equipment and supplies. I've never tried it myself; I don't have the equipment, and it's only recently that I've given some thought to getting it.

This is fused glass. Tiny pieces of coloured glass called frit are laid out in a design and slowly melted together to form an image. The ovens needed for this process are now cheap enough, a couple hundred dollars, that normal people can afford small ones; that's why, when you go down to the Sasquatch Hunt or the Boudin Festival, you see pop-up booths where people are selling jewelry made from glass beads they've made themselves. Commercial concerns, and serious artists, use ovens that have gotten bigger and bigger; they're similar to the room-sized ovens that ceramics companies use. 

Most of the works in this exhibition are a combination of fused and stained glass.  All of them show a level of artistry and technical expertise that blow me away. I'm tempted to put all the pictures I took of them into this post and describe each at length, but nobody I know is really that interested in any of it. If you wanna see some pretty glass art, look at the photos in the album that goes with this series of blog posts. I will, though, show you my favourite piece, a modern piece of actual stained glass:

 

 

 

Sangre Nueva, by Mike MacGregor

Now, then: plans for the rest of this trip consist of a visit to the Petersen Automobile Museum tomorrow morning; lunch with a lawyer I know out here, and watching the Liverpool match on Saturday morning at a bar in Culver City, half an hour south of my hotel, where the local LFC fan club hangs out. I had planned to drive the Palos Verde Peninsula scenic route, but now I think I'll wait until I can put the top down again. 

My point being, there probably won't be much to write about after this. Besides, I'll probably be starting on my article for automotivemuseumguide.com, and that'll likely take up all my computer time. So don't expect more of this weird prolix drivel. It may come, but no promises.