Across the Pond

Showing off in pinks: magnolia tree at the Huntington Gardens Roses, camellias, cacti; sages, jacarandas, and palm trees: last week a friend invited me to spend an afternoon at the  Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens  in San Marino, an affluent suburb of L.A. The Huntington boasts more than 14,000 varieties of plants in 14 principal garden areas and one section or another is always at its best. Right now the magnolias and parts of the cactus garden are showing off in oranges, reds and pinks. Natural habitat, home base: cactus garden As my companion and I were wandering down through the desert garden, into the Australian garden, and, later, through the Chinese garden it struck me how the Huntington is a mirror for life in Los Angeles. Botanical sections adjoin and sometimes blend into each other the way neighborhoods in L.A. do. To the immigrant from Europe some parts of the Huntington such as the Asian areas and the jungle see...

Chins and cheeks from catalogs: exhibition brochure Flawed chin? Albrecht Dürer, Venetian* Receding hair line? Albrecht Dürer, Male* Were Albrecht Dürer's models happy with their looks? Did the guy in green fret about his receding hair line? Did he find his nose too large? Did the Venetian woman long for a more prominent chin? If the two lived today: would they opt for plastic surgery? Simultaneous exhibitions on two continents inspired me to think about faces, honesty, beauty, and ideals; about how we deal with what is different - in us and in others. The one show, Dürer, Cranbach, Holbein - The German Portrait Around 1500, is on view at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna  and will later travel to Munich; the other, Beautyculture, opened at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles  in May. I saw the portrait exhibition a few weeks ago, during a visit to Vienna, and was especially taken with Dürer's art, with the honesty in hi...

51 percent of Californians under 18 are now Latino, and for L.A. county the number is even higher (62 percent). These details of the 2010 census results were published this week. What does the shift in balance mean for the future of the golden state? NPR's Morning Edition ran an interesting interview on the topic this morning. UC Irvine anthropologist Leo Chavez talks about white Californian people's fears, about how Latino immigrants add to the existing culture, about the economic challenges they face, and about possible changes in voting habits. To listen to the piece go to the NPR website and click on the link that reads: Hispanic Population Grows Dramatically in California. More on the topic also in my previous post Diversity in Numbers: Defining the Angeleno Family  and in the comments to it.

What makes L.A. the city it is? What separates it from the rest of the U.S. or at least from most of it? Why is Los Angeles the perfect place for people like me? Diversity. That, for me, is what it comes down to. According to the  U.S. Census Bureau Almost one in two persons in L.A. county - 48 percent to be precise - identified themselves as Hispanic/Latino in 2009. (The corresponding number for the U.S. as a whole is 15.8 percent.) 13.4 percent of Angelenos identified as Asian; 9.3 as black. (Multiple answers were possible.) More than every third person in L.A. county (36.2 percent) is foreign born as opposed to one in ten (11.1 percent) for the U.S. overall. More than half the population of L.A. county older than five years (54.1 percent) speaks a language other than English at home. The U.S. number is 17.9 percent. The numbers as such are mind boggling but what really amazes me is that all these different people - a total of almost ten million - basically get along....