30 Windows o f Oakland Firenzi Clinton St. Quarterly I t has been twenty-five years since JL an April tailwind sent my only Little League home run over the center- field fence and through a neighbor’s window. “ Those are the breaks,” my brother innocently remarked, as we boarded up that shattered pane. An auspicious baptism for what has since become a permanent fixation. Glass seemed to be breaking everywhere in Los Angeles those days. On the silver screen, moribund mobsters Portland Watts Richard Posner Is a Seattle artist whose work has been exhibited at the Henry Gallery of the University of Washington, the Portland Center for Visual Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Coming Museum of Glass and the American Crafts Museum. His work Is In the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the American Embassy, Stockholm; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art In New York; as well as numerous private collections throughout the United States, Europe and Japan. Richard Posner Is currently at work on “The Crystal Pallets: deFence of Light,” an Art-In- Public-Places project for the Multnomah County Elections Building In Portland. “The Crystal Pallets” is a fifty-foot plate glass picket fence assemblage. Life-sized animal silhouettes along with archival photographs will rise off the fence and Illuminate the electoral process. Research for “Windows of Vulnerability” has been funded In part by grants from the University of California at Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission and/or Gallery. Special thanks to Louise Steinman, Seymour Rosen, Buster Simpson, Patrick Reyntlens, Marvin Llpofsky, Paul Marion), Norman Courtney, Jock Reynolds, Elizabeth Newman and Shoji Kurokami. shot out television sets; svelte starlets shimmied atop glass carpets; March of Time athletes ate ground glass; and pimply teenagers heaved rocks, g i f t -w r a p p e d w ith ransom notes, through Senators’ living room windows. In my own living room, TV salesmen shot Bic pens through p I a t e - g I a s s screens; Ella F i t z g e r a l d ’ s v ib ra to sha ttered w ine g lasses; and under the ruse of frontier just ice , square- jawed heroes dove through saloon windows in hot pursuit of d a rk -s k in n e d hombres. In this preDodger, post- zoot-suited City of the Angels, on the same bicycle I still ride, I delivered the Los Angeles Mirror every day after school. In stride with each choreographed lob of my “ p e d a l - p ic k throw” routine, I’d chant, “Aim for the porch, past the grass, atop the steps, avoid the glass.” A ritual which somehow devitrified my sack of Mirrors, and exorcised god- only-knows-how- many-years of bad luck. I did not break another window until my senior year of high school. At the end of a balmy summer evening at the drive-in, I in a d v e r te n t ly backed Dad’s ’51 Plymouth out of the stall with the speaker still attached to the passenger window. That deafening sound still rings in my ears. A night’s reflection on the situation culminated in my first “ Q-N-D” (quick and dirty) repair: a drive-in speaker remounted onto the window it broke. This inaugural foray through the perpetually revolving doors of the Cope-Aesthetic School of Window Repair was a harbinger of things to come. It revealed a translucent truth about the eternal wrestling match between shape and content. At age 16, it taught me that Frank Lloyd was right: Form does follow fracture. The germinal seeds for these photographs floated past me while on a slow boat to Finland on Christmas Eve, 1978. As dusk approached, I found myself surrounded by a sea of
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