James Ellroy

      

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Gas Station

Transforming a Berlin Gas Station Into Art



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

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

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

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

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

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Abstract Expressionism

Characteristics of Abstract Expressionism

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

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

Sometimes gestural "writing" in a loosely calligraphic manner.

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

Example Paintings from Abstract Expressionism


Number 8, 1949 (detail) by Pollock, Jackson


Night Creatures, 1965 by Krasner, Lee

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Automobiles

The History of the Automobile


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hollywood

Edward Ruscha, The Back of Hollywood, 1977

Hollywood is a district within the city of Los Angeles, California, U.S., whose name is synonymous with the American film industry. Lying northwest of downtown Los Angeles, it is bounded by Hyperion Avenue and Riverside Drive (east), Beverly Boulevard (south), the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains (north), and Beverly Hills (west). Since the early 1900s, when moviemaking pioneers found in southern California an ideal blend of mild climate, much sunshine, varied terrain, and a large labour market, the image of Hollywood as the fabricator of tinseled cinematic dreams has been etched worldwide. The first house in Hollywood was an adobe building (1853) on a site near Los Angeles, then a small city in the new state of California. Hollywood was laid out as a real-estate subdivision in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, a prohibitionist from Kansas who envisioned a community based on his sober religious principles. Real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley, known as the “Father of Hollywood,” subsequently transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and popular residential area. At the turn of the 20th century, Whitley was responsible for bringing telephone, electric, and gas lines into the new suburb. In 1910, because of an inadequate water supply, Hollywood residents voted to consolidate with Los Angeles.

In 1908 one of the first storytelling movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was completed in Hollywood after its filming had begun in Chicago. In 1911 a site on Sunset Boulevard was turned into Hollywood's first studio, and soon about 20 companies were producing films in the area. In 1913 Cecil B. DeMille, Jesse Lasky, Arthur Freed, and Samuel Goldwyn formed Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company (later Paramount Pictures). DeMille produced The Squaw Man in a barn one block from present-day Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, and more box-office successes soon followed. Hollywood had become the centre of the American film industry by 1915 as more independent filmmakers relocated there from the East Coast. For more than three decades, from early silent films through the advent of “talkies,” figures such as D.W. Griffith, Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Harry Cohn served as overlords of the great film studios—Twentieth Century-Fox, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, and others. Among the writers who were fascinated by Hollywood in its “golden age” were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Nathanael West.
After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood, and the practice of filming “on location” emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned them over to television show producers. With the growth of the television industry, Hollywood began to change, and by the early 1960s it had become the home of much of American network television entertainment.
Among the features of Hollywood, aside from its working studios, are the Hollywood Bowl (1919; a natural amphitheatre used since 1922 for summertime concerts under the stars), the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park (also a concert venue), Mann's (formerly Grauman's) Chinese Theatre (with footprints and handprints of many stars in its concrete forecourt), and the Hollywood Wax Museum (with more than 350 wax figures of celebrities). The Hollywood Walk of Fame pays tribute to many celebrities of the entertainment industry. The most visible symbol of the district is the Hollywood sign that overlooks the area. First built in 1923 (a new sign was erected in 1978), the sign originally said “Hollywoodland” (to advertise new homes being developed in the area), but the sign fell into disrepair, and the “land” section was removed in the 1940s when the sign was refurbished.
Many stars, past and present, live in neighbouring communities such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains the crypts of such performers as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tyrone Power. Hollywood Boulevard, long a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry with the demise of old studio Hollywood, but it underwent regeneration beginning in the late 20th century; the Egyptian Theatre (built in 1922), for example, was fully restored in the 1990s and became the home of the American Cinematheque, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the presentation of the motion picture.

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