Parking Lot Orpheus
Cy Twombly, car crash, and a happy return
My birthday was Thursday, but Saturday was the official day of celebration: Jason took me to my favorite breakfast place (Kitchen Mouse) and to a bookstore (Skylight), we got swatches for the chiclet sofa at Design Within Reach, and later we went to dinner at the brick-and-mortar restaurant of a beloved Below Deck chef (Chef Marcos’ Marlou in DTLA) (J knows me well, can you tell?).
But first there was one more mystery activity in the afternoon. We were heading west and I thought … Hammer Museum? Topanga? The beach?
But then we got on the 405 and I started seeing signs for the Getty, advertising a Cy Twombly exhibition.
But things took a turn when I pulled into the Getty Center parking structure. I was backing into a space (surrounded by lots of other cars that were parked tail in, I’ll have you know), and … crunch. Glass shattering. I had backed into an HVAC bulkhead that stuck out from the wall. There was a sign that said “pull in parking only,” but it was on the back wall where you would only see it if you were already pulling in. And the edge of the HVAC bulkhead was just perfectly positioned to shatter the rear window. Like, completely. Little tinkly shards of glass falling out.
We sat there for a minute. I googled nonsensical things on my phone: enterprise rental car accident. What to do enterprise rental car accident. Enterprise rental car accident phone number. We’ve been in a funny musical chairs situation for a week because of our cars has been at a massively overbooked collision repair place (lots of collisions in LA apparently, can u believe) and I’ve been driving a rental. The only thing they could get me at the collision place was a piece of shit Toyota Highlander that smells like weed and has choppy brakes. (If you’ll remember, the Toyota Highlander was also my steed for the kind of disastrous journey west. “Are you having flashbacks?” J asked when I picked it up. I mean, I kind of was.)
I suppose we could have taken this as a bad omen or a reason to cancel our outing, but instead we took the elevator up to the entrance area, stationed ourselves at two ends of a picnic table, and called roadside assistance (me) and our insurance company (J). Within 15 minutes we had filed a claim and made an appointment to trade the car in at the Burbank airport, and we strolled onto the Getty tram exactly on time. J pointed out that all these people had been staring at us in the parking garage (reasonable; it sounded like a big, smashy collision) and we just got out, cool as cucumbers, and went into the museum.
Interlude: I love Cy Twombly. I like a lot of abstract artists, but I love him. For one thing, he’s one of those painters who you can tell really loves poetry. He gets the freedom of poetry. He works with the empty space between a title and a first line in the same way that Frank O’Hara does, to a similar effect: it is fun, it feels like something, it is smart, and it is also somehow without ego. Hard to do! When I stand in front of one of his paintings, I almost always crack a smile. His intelligence just feels so immediate, his intelligence and also his love of looking. The intensity! The scribbles! With a lot of art (and a lot of books, tbh), I can look at them and go, “Oh, interesting.” I can see what it’s up to, where it connects, assess its ideas with interest. But there’s no, for massive lack of a better word, heart thing. Which is a funny thing for me to say, I guess, because there’s a lot of art that is heavy on heart thing, which I hate.
Maybe this is why the prevailing sentiment among people I know is also: I love Cy Twombly. (“Twombly is my guy,” J says as we’re walking in.) We are stoked. And honestly, the exhibition is pretty great. It contextualizes Twombly’s work through his fascination with antiquity, his engagement with Catullus and Sappho, his time living in Rome. A good, focused exhibit which taught me a few things about an artist whose work I can now appreciate in new ways.
The rest of the Getty’s collection is a bit of a snooze. Sorry, I just don’t care about portraits of wealthy people or naval battles or gilded chamber pots. And yet, the other galleries were gridlocked with people—zoomers lacking spatial awareness standing in the middle of a throughway editing a picture for instagram, people determined to take a picture of every single marble bust (what happens to these pictures?), just masses and masses of people. Why are there so many people in these other galleries? What experience are they having? I know I should probably just let people like what they like, but something about the way people en masse interact with art makes me feel restless and maybe a little angry. I have some embattled attitude about this, but am I really just demanding that other people like what I like?
We return to the car. Nobody has stolen my Skylight haul out of the backseat, although really, if someone wanted to crawl through a broken window to get the Niina Pollari book I just bought, I would be much more likely to befriend them than press charges. J knocks the glass out of the rear window with his Leatherman, and we set a course for Burbank.
And just as we’re pulling away, we see another vehicle about to back into a spot just a few feet down.
“No fucking way,” I say.
“Dude, don’t do it,” J says.
Crunch! Broken glass falling.
J considered going over to the guy and to say don’t feel bad, the same thing just happened to us, etc. Which I think is very kind. But after a few seconds, we unanimously decided that we needed to get the hell out of there.
The Burbank Airport Enterprise Rent-A-Car is a tiny booth in the middle of a massive parking garage with two guys inside. After some problem with the passports of the Italians ahead of us, we get to the front of the line and I begin explaining our situation to Vlad, the Daemon Targaryen looking guy who holds our fate in his hands. I tell him how the window was broken and he writes it down in his little iPad. And then he says, “Getty Center or Getty Villa?” Center! I say. I’m this close to telling him that he has to check out the Cy Twombly exhibit, but it feels a little bit like this weird people-pleasing thing I do sometimes, where I find a connection with someone and then try to really lay into it, so I stop myself.
Anyway, Vlad gives us a Kia Soul and tells us that we’re very unusual people, and we get vegan ice cream and go shopping at Crossroads, where J finds a sick Dio roadie jacket and I find a T-shirt for a Temsco Airlines of Ketchikan, Alaska.
A perfect day. J said he was glad that the whole car thing didn’t derail us. But I love a story. I love how a story emerges from the sea of minor events and fades away again. You couldn’t get me a better gift.
Thanks, as always, for reading! All my love. Go see the Twombly exhibit at the Getty while you can! And stay well away from Toyota Highlanders.