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For ages I have wanted to visit the stone house built in Pasadena's Arroyo by Charles Lummis, who walked to Los Angeles from Ohio after he graduated from Harvard University. Does it get any more peculiar than that? Remember, this was around 1885 (He built the house over 12 years, from 1898 to 1910). Let me tell you what I have learned about the Lummis and his home.

We were the only people to be seen on the grounds, which is astonishing considering that it's set smack dab in the middle of Los Angeles, and right next to a freeway exit, to boot. There's sign on the freeway designating California Historical Marker number 531: "Lummis Home, Next Exit".

Wouldn't you think the place would be swamped?

The grounds are planted with native Californian and other Mediterranean-climate-friendly plants, extremely well labelled, with many of them in bloom. Three panels in a far corner describe irrigation methods and the kinds of plants which do well in arid climates. Are you a gardener in Southern California? Make sure you visit the gardens at the Lummis Home.

There was a lone representative of the California Historical Society, which has offices in the building, and she took us on a short guided tour. (Special note: on the bookshelves of the Historical Society office three well-worn computer manuals may be seen: DOS for Dummies, Windows 3.1 for Dummies, and Wordperfect 6.0 for Dummies. In the "historians using computers" category, these guys are in the pantheon as far as I'm concerned: no new stuff for them!)

Lummis built with stone, because he wanted the house to last a thousand years. He felt furniture should be integral with the building, so for example, he built a bench in underneath a window, and he built a chest of drawers into a wall. Where the mirror would be on the dresser, instead a glass-paned window gave forth onto the outdoors. I wonder at what point people realized they weren't seeing their own reflection in the mirror?

Beams supporting the roof were telegraph poles from the Southern Pacific Railroad. Of course Lummis built his own doors; they were huge and heavy, the exterior doors weighing a thousand pounds apiece, emblazoned with a piece of ironwork bearing the initials C.L., in a form he copied from the Spanish explorer Pizarro.

An interior door was copied from one appearing in Velasquez' painting Las Meninas (Maids of Honor) , in which Velasquez painted himself into the painting, standing inside this door, which Lummis copied for his home.

The home was also equipped with a tower reachable only by ropeladder. If Lummis saw someone coming who he didn't like, he could just climb up into his tower, pull up the rope and pretend he wasn't at home. Nice plan! (note to self: build own house.)

Another unusual way Lummis customized his home was by putting photos in as window panes -- glass positives taken from his negatives. An old indian, a young girl working in a field, a crucifixion are among the images shown as windowpanes.

Curious about the kinds of books they would be selling at The Lummis Home, I paged through IRON: Erecting the Walt Disney Concert Hall [buy at amazon] . by Gil Garcetti. I thought that it was Gil Garcetti the district attorney of L.A., but evidently there is another Gil G, a photographer. 'Iron' is a great-looking book.

Naturally, there was a copy of the recent American Character : Curious Life of Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Rediscovery of the Southwest [buy at amazon] . by Mark Thompson, which has been well-reviewed on amazon.

Afterwards, we drove over to the Fair Oaks Pharmacy and Soda Fountain on the northwest corner of Fair Oaks Boulevard and Mission, and had the 'Route 66 Burger' and the ice cream sodas which caused it to be reviewed in Sunset Magazine.

J Mays, whose work is on display until March 8 at Los Angeles Moca on 152 Central Ave, designed the new Beetle for Volkswagen before he went on to become head of design at Ford. If you design anything, this well-curated and fascinating exhibit is well worth seeing.

As you go down the steps into the Geffen Contemporary branch of Moca, a huge warehouse that used to be a parking garage for the Los Angeles Police Deparment, the first thing that confronts you is a pedestal with the Eames chair and ottoman, and the driver's seat from one of the cars J. Mays designed. Other car chairs and parts are spread out here and there. Dashboards, wheels from Ford's "24.7" internet concept car, photos of the futuristic cars of the past, halves of front grilles.

Then, around the corner, is the "ma" car. Fascinating: all the parts of the car, including the bolts, are arrayed in rows along the opposite wall. Two models, a foam model and the fully fleshed out balsa wood model, take up the rest of the large room. Designed entirely on computer, the ma car is a design tour de force. It isn't like any vehicle you've ever seen, but it's quite real. It looks like a combination between an Adirondack chair and a old-style lobster trap, except the size of a car.

You really begin to take J Mays seriously when you round the corner into the next room, and there's a 2003 New Beetle positioned next to the original 1946 Volkswagen Mark 1 with the split rear window. A series of design drawings show the large number of design options presented in the course of designing a car. A small raft of sales and marketing collateral and marketing strategy propaganda are also shown. You get the feeling that Volkswagen really lost someone exceptional when J Mays went to Ford.

Five of the concept cars he designed at Ford are shown in their entirety. One, the GT40, is going into production next year. None of the rest are being produced. The way I see it, Ford made exactly the wrong decision(s). They should have produced all these other exceptional vehicles, and left the trans-500 horsepower GT40 on the design ledgers. But at least the cars got designed, and collectively they are the very embodiment of retrofuturism.

The best part of the exhibit for me was not the cars, but the design drawings, notebooks, scrapbooks, and informal communications. Feast for eyes, food for thought. See & dine on Retrofuturism: The Car design of J. Mays before it closes.

Yesterday I talked with a man whose family lost their house, their business, everything, when he was incarcerated by the U.S. Government for six months during World War II. We bumped into him by accident on an Art Adventure. Our destination was the Geffen wing of MOCA, where we were going to look at some retrofuturistic modern art, but as it turned out the "Go For Broke" monument, dedicated to the Japanese Americans who fought in World War II, is located right next to the art museum.

Later, we strolled through Little Tokyo, where I saw a bronze sculpture of Toyo Miyatake's camera. First-generation Japanese American photographer Toyo Miatake (1895) opened his photography study in Little Tokyo (Los Angeles) in 1923. When Miyatake and his family were sent to the Manzanar concentration camp in California during World War II, Miyatake smuggled in a film plate and camera lens, and built a camera in secret. Using this camera, he documented everyday life in Manzanar.

But that was Toyo Miyatake. The man I talked to, his father had come to this country in 1902. They worked hard, and had a home and a business. But as he put it, his family taught that "war changes everything". They were shipped off to one of the 10 prison camps maintained by the U.S. for the purpose of incarcerating the Japanese-American citizen population. I told him that I had stopped by Manzanar, and the other camp in a particularly desolate part of Utah. He said that he had been incarcerated in one of the two prison camps south of Little Rock, Arkansas. He was 18 at the time. Most of the people, he said, remained loyal in attitude but that some of them expressed their anger by hanging out signs that said 'F*** America' There were fights between kids of his age over disagreements about their circumstances.

It was clear the memorial was an important part of his life today. He said most of the men came down there for a couple of hours everyday. He pointed out some of the others -- one of them wielding a gigantically long feather duster on the well-polished marble surface of the monument -- and recounted their ages. Seventy-nine, eighty-one, eighty-three, all in good health.

We talked a little bit about Howard Coble, the U.S. Congressman from North Carolina who thought Roosevelt made the right decision in shipping 120,000 Japanese American citizens of the U.S. off to concentration camps. We agreed that anyone who thought that was a correct decision had no concept of what it means to be an American, and that they should not be involved in making the law of the land.

Go for Broke Memorial

Japanese American Memorial; A Reminder to Future Generations

Last night we heard a spirited and edifying performance by the Marian Anderson String Quartet in Herrick Chapel at Occidental College.

Then they took questions from the audience.

Unlike other string quartets, which may fly in, play, and then fly out, the Marian Anderson Quartet, named for the great African American contralto Marian Anderson, likes to stay awhile, hang out, play with the students and take steps to make sure an audience is being created for classical music in the future. Last night they played music by Beethoven, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and Dvorak.

It was a joy to experience such good humor in times so serious.

Marian Anderson String Quartet Los Angeles Times Review by Josef Woodard

The United States will close its air bases in Saudi Arabia after the war. Then from Germany we'll bring home 70,000 troops and 70,000 dependents. Lots of changes are coming up. Pixar is changing from Sun to Intel. Screenwriters are looking for work, as reality-based TV shows replace scripted sitcoms.

What's the world coming to? We even had to wait in a long line to get into an art exhibit opening, the celebrated Lucien Freud (b. 1922) at LA Moca. No, that is not Tom Hanks you see. I had never seen so many depressed-looking people at an art show, most of them wearing dark colors except for one woman tottering around in a bright blue miniskirt and six-inch red stiletto high heels.

Although Freud was a portraitist, the painting that inspired the most comment was a view out the back of someone's flat in Paddington. It was a typically London view, and the familiarity of it inspired people to comment. "I bet that's London," one said. What's more, they seemed to like it a lot more than the depictions of all the depressed sad-looking portrait subjects and naked fat people. I guess that's just one of the hazards of being a realist painter. If people are sad, depressed, fat or perverted (there were some very questionable dog paintings in the exhibit) you basically are just stuck with it and have to paint them that way.

I liked the other half of the show better: "Conversations". One of the installations, in celebration of the primordial ooze and the beginning of rock music in a park in Jacksonville Fla, set a replica of the park in a large room next to a tarpaper shack. On the front porch of the shack were a couple of rocking chairs and a couple of turntables spinning LP records. A sign clearly indicated that you were supposed to get up on the porch, and change the record, so I hopped up there with this asian babe and we started spinning some Allman Brothers LPs. Vinyl!

A couple of rocks, and a familiar-looking composite-stone trashcan had been wired for sound, and the place started ... rocking.