Under the Baobab Tree

Etruscans and Fossils in Santa Monica

The day started with our expert accountant picking me up under the giant magnolia tree at the Miramar at 8:30 this morning. Our expert accountant is very fashionable. She drives a brand new Mercedes, she has the stylish black leather Prada jacket, she has useful yet fashionable sunglasses (mine are fashionable but not useful -- they fall off my face all the time), she has red hair and blue eyes. She was wearing Manolo Blahniks. She made me feel very dowdy and uninteresting-looking, pale, lumpy, bland, etc. Her father was Canadian Air Force pilot; her husband builds movie theatres in Australia and New Zealand; they live in Pacific Palisades with their two daughters. She appears to be swimming in money. She is very nice.

The deposition was downtown in one of those LA skycrapers that you see on TV shows like Family Law and LA Law. The conference room we were in had a view right down onto the Staples Center. After the deposition, the expert accountant, our local counsel and I went to lunch. There was a hairdresser's convention going on at the Staples building. You can imagine the people-watching.

After the work day was done, the expert accountant drove me back to the Miramar, where I got into my Pontiac Grand Prix and headed for the new Getty Museum in the Santa Monica hills. This is the famous new museum on top of the hill, designed by Richard Meier. It is WONDERFUL! First, to get there, you have to drive to a subterranean seven story parking garage in a gully and leave your car. Then you stand on a platform surrounded by jacaranda trees, and wait to get on a very slow moving tram that goes up the side of the hill through a grove of trees I later learned were California Pepper Trees. As you get higher, the LA Basin begins to spread out below you. You can see Palos Verdes, downtown, the Hollywood Hills and the ocean. The tram goes very slowly (my brochure says its maximum speed is 10 mph). It's very calming. Everyone starts to get excited about getting to the museum. First no-one is talking; as you go up the chatter begins a little, people who have been there before say to first-timers, "oh it's beautiful, you'll love it, the gardens are just...." People start to say, "I can't wait!" You can see the museum coming -- it's a big white stone structure that looks from afar like a collection of not very attractive apartment buildings -- the kind you might see on the way in from an airport in a European city.

When you arrive, you step out onto a platform of white marble-type stone and everyone scatters over a very large open space, going every which way. One is, at this point, very high up on the mountain. This is called the Arrival Plaza, and the stones you are standing on -- like the rest of the museum -- is travertine which was brought all the way from Northern Italy. The stones contained fossils of fish and other animals if you look closly. The maps all have little conch symbols to indicate the best fossil viewing parts of the exterior walls. The travertine walls are earthquake safe, they say.

There are two parts of the Getty to see -- the inside and the outside. The outside is a series of beautiful gardens cantilevered out over the hills, with amazing views of the whole basin. They are designed to feel like a Mediterranean garden. There is a flowering maze set into a large pool of water. There are sycamore yarwoods (the California version of London plane trees) leading down through a rock garden on a zigzagging trail to a set of six steel bowers -- called steel parasols -- that are over 12 feet tall and which support gigantic amounts of bougainvillea. There is a cactus garden to the south of the museum. There is a forest of New Zealand irises. And there are expanses of golfcourse grass everywhere. These expanses of grass attract hoardes of people who just lie on them in the sun and look out over all of Los Angeles. People are very happy at the Getty. It reminded me of the Campo de Pisa in Italy -- where I once lay in the sun on the grass around the leaning tower for about three hours, doing absolutely nothing, anticipating buying a pizza margherita later on. The only thing missing from the Campo de Getty were dogs -- I don't think dogs are allowed on the trams.

After soaking up the amazing view, I went inside to view the Ancient Art exhibit. I saw a few interesting things. First, I saw a goblet made completely of gold, that was found by some sponge fishers working off the coast of Turkey somewhere. I had never seen a completely gold goblet before. I also saw some terracota sculptures of what the sign were sirens (the ones Oddyseus encountered, to be precise), but these sirens were depicted as women with stork legs. I stood in front of this for a while. I have read the Oddysey, and I have read the Iliad, but somehow I missed the part where we learned that sirens were women with stork legs. I saw a very beautiful object carved by the Etruscans out of a geode. Seing as I bought a geode yesterday at the mineral store, I thought that was nice. After checking out the ancient art, I only had time to cruise at high speed through the 18th century European paintings. I found a fabulous painting by someone I'd never heard of, Lawrence Alma Tadema, who as either Dutch or English (he's desribed in the museum literature as Duthc/English). The painting shows children heading out on May 1 to collect flowers.

Then, it was time to go back outside. Before the museum closed, I bought an orange at the coffee shop and sat out on the gigantic rock piazza and looked out over LA and at my orange. The sky was bright blue. The walls of the Getty were bright white. And my orange was fresh from just down the road in Anaheim (Orange County). I watched airplanes take off from LAX. From that far away, they look like they are going so slowly. Everyone else in the museum came outside about now too, and we all hung over the railings and watched the sun go down. Then, instead of taking the tram back, I walked the .75 miles back to the subterranean parking garage, through the peppertree grove and under the jacarandas.

Now I'm back in my hotel. Santa Monica really is an ocean-side village. The windows of the hotel are streaked with salt spray. Everyone's hair is windswept, the breeze is constant, and the flags on top of the white art deco buildings on Ocean Boulevard never get a chance to relax. You can tell when the sun is coming up because you can't hear the surf as loudly for that brief moment when the temperatures of water and air begin to equalize. You are just as likely to see people in a parking out step out in wetsuits with surf boards as Manolo Blahniks and sequined halter tops.