18 Windows of Oakland Firenzi Clinton St. Quarterly t has been twenty-five years since 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 shot out television sets; svelte starlets shimmied atop glass carpets; March of Time athletes ate ground glass; and pimply teenagers heaved rocks, gift-wrapped with 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 Fitzgerald’s vibrato shattered wineglasses; and under the ruse of frontier justice, square- jawed heroes dove through saloon windows in hot pursuit of dark-skinned hombres. Portland Watts 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. Sponsored by the Metropolitan Arts Commission, “The Crystal Pallets” is a fifty-foot plate-glass picket fence assemblage which will span the Morrison Street windows of the Elections Building. Lifesized animal silhouettes along with archival photographs (courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society) will rise off the fence and illuminate the electoral orocess. Once installed in spring 1983, Posner hopes the fence “will evoke the spirit of Tom Sawyer, Tom Paine, and Tom McCall... and reflect the extent Jeffersonian Democracy is alive and well, in Portland, Oregon.” Richard Posner’s work has been exhibited at the Portland Center for Visual Arts; the Henry Gallery of University of Washington; the Smithsonian Institution; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Corning 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. 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 Reyntiens, Marvin Lipofsky, Paul Marioni, Norman Courtney, Jock Reynolds, Elizabeth Newman and Shoji Kurokami. In this pr3- Dodger, post- zoot-suited Cty of the Anges, on the same li- cycle I still rid^ I delivered tie Los Angeles Mr- ror every day offer school, h stride with ea<h choreographed lob of my “ pedal-pic k- throw” routins, I’d chant, “Ahn for the porch, past the grass, atop the steps, avoid the glass.” A ritual wiich somehow devitrified mysack of Mirrors and exorcised god- on ly-knows-how- many-yerrs of bad luck. I did net break another window until rm senior year cf high school. At the end of a balmy summer evening at the drive-in, I inad'ertently 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 if 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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