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hokum : an anthology of african-american humor
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, lawmakers in virtually every statehouse across the country are advancing bills and constitutional amendments to limit use of the government's power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development purposes.
The measures are in direct response to the United States Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision last June in a landmark property rights case from Connecticut, upholding the authority of the City of New London to condemn homes in an aging neighborhood to make way for a private development of offices, condominiums and a hotel. It was a decision that one justice, who had written for the majority, later all but apologized for.
If all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn, all American surf culture comes from Gidget, the ostensible diary of Kathy Kohner, a teensy, gutsy teenage girl who crashed the all-male scene at Malibu Beach north of L.A. in 1957 and earned, from Moondoggie and others, the nickname Gidget, which meant "Girl Midget." Her father, the German immigrant screenwriter Frederick Kohner, fascinated by the beach-shack counterculture, interviewed his perky daughter at length, eavesdropped with permission on her phone calls, fictionalized her adventures, and batted out this influential bestseller. He nailed a tiny subculture's new form of speech ("If you want to know what goes on in Loveville ... Dig Number One: being gone on a boy is more important than having a boy gone on you.") and made it a pop-culture staple. Newly reissued with the real Gidget's picture on the cover (as on the original hardback), the book is very slim (appropriately enough) and historically beguiling. You'll like her--you'll really like her! --Tim Appelothat first sentence contains double overstatements but you can see where he is going with it. gidget was a significant pop culture reference point. The real world moondoggie turns out to be west coast abstractionist bill jensen. (who is not moondog. whom some of us may remember as a ubiquitous viking garbed busker in midtown manhattan in the 1970's.)
It took a dozen years and two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to renovate the villa and surround it with a series of modernist buildings, including an entry pavilion, an amphitheatre, a parking garage, a café, an auditorium, an education center, and a shop. The project’s architects are Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti, of Boston, rigorous modernists who have a love of classicism and believe that an architect best respects history not by imitating it but by teasing its spirit into new forms. Machado and Silvetti are about as far as you can get from Norman Neuerburg, who designed the original villa, and it seemed an odd match: there is nothing overtly charming about Machado and Silvetti’s work, while Neuerburg’s design was a vast, sprawling exercise in cuteness.
The campus that Machado and Silvetti have created is a bracing collage of old and new, and the villa has been nearly magically transformed. The task was surely made easier by the fact that the French furniture and Old Master paintings are gone from the villa, and its new contents have a genuine connection to ancient Rome. (In fact, some items in the collection may belong to Rome; the Getty has been accused of acquiring a significant number of looted artifacts.) But it takes more than hauling away some gilded frames to make a ponderous building into a gracious one. Instead of slavishly replicating Roman architecture (although various touches, such as new floors of bronze, mosaic, and marble, reveal a high level of scholarship), Machado and Silvetti have acknowledged the past without imitating it. They have boldly reorganized the villa, creating more logical routes through it and adding fifty-eight windows and three skylights, to bring natural light into the galleries. One of the best things in the villa now is a new main stair, of bronze, glass, and hand-carved Spanish stone; a meticulous modernist composition, it is broad, sumptuous, and serene, and a crisp counterpoint to the classical-looking environment around it. The effect is playful and knowing: in Italy, contemporary alterations to ancient Roman structures are often made in such a bluntly modern style, to make clear which elements are authentically old. Here, of course, the “original” details date from 1974.
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