Washed It!

Long before Arnold Schwarzenegger began a routine of heavy legislative lifting in Sacramento, the governor popularized the sport of bodybuilding in his 1977 cult classic film “Pumping Iron.”

And when the paparazzi descended on Schwarzenegger and fellow celebrity bodybuilders in the film’s wake, the place where he went to work out in private was World Gym, the no-frills Santa Monica haven founded by weightlifting guru Joe Gold. The place became a second home for Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno and other famed iron men.

On Wednesday, the three-story building at 2210 Main St. is slated to go to auction through AuctionPoint, an online outfit. In addition to World Gym, the building for a time housed Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno in an apartment with a surprising amount of girlie-man pale pink tile.

The starting bid for the former weightlifting den: $3.1 million.

“I think this is the right time because we’ve seen the value go from $6 million to $4.75 million,” building owner Jerry Breeden said recently. “Quite honestly, I have many uses for the profit margin we’ll derive.”

Until about three years ago, the building held the offices and sample rooms for Breeden’s Aviva Group, a manufacturer of pricey handbags and Swarovski crystals. It also was home to Breeden and his wife, Maggie, who shared the ocean-view penthouse that Gold occupied for many years. Their daughter’s family lived in Schwarzenegger’s former quarters on the Main Street side. And their son and his family occupied a second-floor apartment. (Breeden is now based in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif.)

Gold, a close friend and mentor of Schwarzenegger, died in 2004 at age 82. He served in the Navy during World War II and was badly injured when his ship was torpedoed in the Philippines. After the war, he joined the merchant marine and sailed the world, lifting weights and building a remarkable physique.

He became a Muscle Beach regular and opened Gold’s Gym in Venice in 1964, developing workout machines that went beyond dumbbells and barbells.

“In 1968, when I first came to America, Gold’s Gym was the gym where I first went to work out,” Schwarzenegger wrote in a public statement after Gold’s death. Although the Austrian by then had become the youngest Mr. Universe at age 20, Gold nicknamed him “Balloon Belly” and put him to work toning his abs. “Joe looked after me and encouraged me,” Schwarzenegger said.

Gold sold Gold’s Gym about 1970, but got back into the business in 1976 when he opened the first World Gym at 2210 Main St. The chain grew to more than 300 locations. The machines and buff bodies of Main Street are long gone, replaced in part by Alchemy Wellness, which offers “raindrop therapy.”

Tom Corte, the agent handling the listing, said Schwarzenegger’s love of Santa Monica was fostered at the location. Schwarzenegger later bought a building nearby.

martha.groves@latimes.com
Former Santa Monica weightlifting haven up for auction

Rob Canty heard the news on TV Sunday morning at his home in St. Tammany Parish, La.: The wild oil well that changed his life — and the lives of thousands of others along the Gulf Coast — was sealed up, safely and permanently, thanks to an injection of cement 18,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

After nearly five months of heartache, misery and worry, the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was dead.

The news was “real good,” said Canty, a 31-year-old shrimper, but it wasn’t likely to change his life back immediately. His shrimp boat is still contracted out indefinitely to BP, he said, and for the time being, he expects to remain among the 25,200 people hired to finish cleaning up the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

“We’re ready to try to go back fishing, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon,” Canty said. “We still got oil out there.”

Sunday’s announcement of the successful “bottom kill” of the BP well was met with relief, but only muted fanfare, as nearly all the players in the drama — including President Obama, outgoing BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, and a number of Gulf Coast residents — emphasized that the story was far from over, and that much more work remained to be done.

“Today, we achieved an important milestone in our response to the BP oil spill,” Obama said in a statement, adding that members of his administration “remain committed to doing everything possible to make sure the Gulf Coast recovers fully from this disaster.”

“This road will not be easy,” he said, “but we will continue to work closely with the people of the gulf to rebuild their livelihoods and restore the environment that supports them.”

Hayward — whose gaffes during the spill resulted in his ouster, effective Oct. 1 — declared that the well “no longer presents a threat to the Gulf of Mexico,” adding that BP’s commitment to repair the damage “remains unchanged.”

The final plugging of the well was a somewhat underwhelming denouement to one of the great engineering challenges in modern times. After a number of missteps, BP was able to seal the well in mid-July with a temporary custom cap. Once the oil had stopped flowing, experts embarked on a slow, careful, multistep process to ensure that it would be shut in for good: In early August, the seal was improved with a shot of drilling mud and cement from the top. Later, crews swapped out the old blowout preventer — the safety device that failed during the April 20 blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, killing 11 workers — with a newer, stronger cap.

Throughout the process, Thad Allen, the federal spill response chief, asserted that the well could be considered dead only when the outer ring of the well, called the annulus, was also plugged with cement from deep underground.

After testing to ensure that they would do no harm, crews on Thursday drilled into the annulus nearly 18,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, then began filling it with cement to ensure that oil would never again flow from the reservoir below.

Pressure tests were conducted late Saturday night that showed the cement job had been a success. On Sunday morning, Allen declared the well “effectively dead.”

“From the beginning, this response has been driven by the best science and engineering available,” Allen said in a statement Sunday. “We insisted that BP develop robust redundancy measures to ensure that each step was part of a deliberate plan, driven by science, minimizing risk to ensure we did not inflict additional harm in our efforts to kill the well.”

That was about as happy as anyone allowed themselves to be, at least in public. Even on the drilling rig some 50 miles off the Louisiana shore, the Associated Press reported that crews wouldn’t celebrate much. They’d treat themselves to prime rib on news of a job well done, but Rich Robson, the offshore installation manager, said the mood was bittersweet.

“To a lot of people, the water out here is a cemetery,” he said.

With the cement job completed, oversight of the well will shift from the National Incident Command, which was set up to deal with spill-related issues, to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which regulates offshore oil drilling.

BP plans to complete the abandonment of the well, removing portions of casing and further securing the well. The company will also begin dismantling and recovering the various equipment used in the effort to plug the well that has gathered around the wellsite over the months.

The more complicated work, however, is the ongoing effort to find and clean up the remaining oil, and measure and mitigate its effects on the environment.

Before it was capped, the well spewed 205.8 million gallons of oil. Much of it remains at sea.

According to the federal government, about 110 miles of shoreline are experiencing “moderate to heavy oil impacts,” most of it in coastal Louisiana.

Of great concern to scientists is the huge amount of oil — about a quarter of the total — in droplet form that is floating in vast clouds in the deep water. The long-term effect of these clouds, and the ability of bacteria to break them down naturally, is not clear.

Aaron Viles, campaign director of the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental nonprofit in New Orleans, said the sealing of the well gave him a sense of “trepidation.”

“Because I know that as that news comes out — that it’s the ‘final seal of the well’ — it’s kind of the final real attention this issue’s going to get, in the world’s eyes at least.

“I do think that, while we’re likely at the end of the big telegenic story, the more challenging piece remains,” he added. “Which is quantifying the impact and responding in the most effective way to ensure these resources can recover.”

richard.fausset@latimes.com

Blown-out BP well is declared dead

Although Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” came out only on Tuesday, it has been the subject of impassioned debate for the better part of a month now, both in the review pages of most major media outlets — he is the first living writer to appear on the cover of Time magazine in a decade — and in the more ethereal corridors of the digital world.

Well before publication, novelist Jennifer Weiner organized a Twitter campaign, under the hashtag “franzenfreude,” to gather negative reaction to the book, which tells the story of a middle-American family in slow collapse.

Weiner’s label is a variation on “schadenfreude,” or pleasure taken in the misfortune of others: “Franzenfreude,” she told NPR late last month, “is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”

Yet in an irony noted by several Twitter commentators, Weiner tangled up the reference. “Franzenfreude,” one Tweet suggests, “would translate to pleasure in Franzen”; apparently, it would have been more accurate to call it “schadenfranzen.”

Word games aside, Weiner is incensed about what she perceives as the engrained sexism of mainstream media, especially the New York Times, which showers coverage on male writers such as Franzen while leaving women out.

That’s a valid concern; this week, Slate reported that, of 545 works of fiction reviewed in the Times between June 29, 2008, and Aug. 27, 2010, only 207, or 38%, were written by women. Even more, of the 101 books to receive two reviews during that stretch (one in the daily paper and the other in Sunday), just 29 were by female writers.

The numbers are probably similar at most major newspapers, including this one. It’s exactly the kind of issue we should be discussing. But none of this, really, is what the uproar over “Freedom” has been about.

With 300,000 copies in print, “Freedom” is No. 1 at Amazon.com; it has received critical raves and even the president is said to be reading it. The furor over its success smacks of gossip, envy, a mean-spirited approach to literary life. It’s personal, people reacting to a writer they don’t like.

An Aug. 26 Newsweek piece made that point explicitly, calling Franzen “the writer we love to hate.” For writer Jennie Yabroff, the issue isn’t Franzen’s writing, which she acknowledges is, at best, “fantastic,” but his position in the culture, his “peevishness,” which, she believes, “undermines the humanistic intentions of his work.”

In the age of the Internet, Yabroff insists, it is “difficult to separate how you feel about an author’s personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.”

She continues: ” ‘Freedom’ comes from the man who dissed Oprah, complained that the Tony-winning musical ‘Spring Awakening’ was a bastardization of the 1891 Frank Wedekind play (which Franzen himself had recently translated from the German), called [New York Times] book critic Michiko Kakutani ‘the stupidest person in New York,’ and claimed such affectations as writing in an earmuff-and-blindfold-equipped sensory-deprivation chamber.”

Really? Is that where we are now, framing the discussion over literature in terms of public image rather than language and narrative? What does this have to do with the quality of Franzen’s work?

Writers have always been eccentric, outspoken, unpleasant, even dangerous — it’s an inevitable side effect of a profession that requires you, to steal a line from sportswriter Red Smith, to “sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

Norman Mailer brawled and bragged his way to literary celebrity, stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, at a party, and writing about himself in mock-heroic terms.

Hemingway was unbearable, Celine a Nazi sympathizer, Dorothy Parker a maudlin drunk. It’s all irrelevant to their writing, which sings and screams with a music of its own.

This is true of Franzen’s work as well. He is the most ambitious novelist of our moment — not for who he is, but for how he writes, his willingness to explore the emotional depths and complexities of the most apparently mundane lives.

At heart, the tempest over “Freedom” reveals a fundamental immaturity in our collective thinking, a child’s eye view of the way art and culture works. This is not a new thing, but it’s distressing to see it so widespread.

Rather than a discussion of what gets covered and how, we have a campaign of personal invective, turned against a single author. Rather than a consideration of the book, we have a conversation about the writer’s image, as if that matters in our reading of the work.

In his 1968 book “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” Mailer described his ambivalence about a youth culture that seemed to him as much of a threat as the conservative status quo. He did not want “to lose even the America he had had” because “it had allowed him to write…. He had lived well enough to have six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good meals, good booze, he had even come to enjoy wine.”

Had Twitter existed then, Mailer probably would have been pilloried for his counter-revolutionary sentiments, but all these years later, his observation rings with the weight of truth.

What he is talking about is the difficulty of being a grown-up, the necessity of looking inward, at our contradictions, and reconciling them as best we can.

That’s the message of “Freedom” also, as it was of Franzen’s previous novel “The Corrections,” and it stands as a powerful rebuke to those who judge the novel — or any novel — on terms other than its own.

david.ulin@latimes.com

Critic’s Notebook: With Jonathan Franzen, judge the novel, not the man

“Chefs-d’Oeuvre?”

The question — “Masterpieces?” — posed by the inaugural exhibition at the Centre Pompidou-Metz is a matter of many opinions.

Four months after the quirky museum with a swooping white fiberglass and Teflon roof, designed by Shigeru Ban of Japan and Jean de Gastines of France, opened its doors in this little-known town 175 miles east of Paris, visitors continue to ask if the strikingly modern building near the majestic old train station resembles a Chinese straw hat, a hut for the Smurfs or a manta ray in flight.

The masterpieces query is a weightier matter and it comes with lots of historical baggage. Composed of about 800 works, the sprawling show is a think piece about the ever-changing meaning of a term coined in the Middle Ages to judge the work of craftsmen in the European guild system but often dismissed as quaintly irrelevant these days.

“I have no definitive definition of a masterpiece,” Laurent Le Bon, director of the Metz museum and curator of the exhibition, states in a publication accompanying the show, “but, in my view, it is a work that permits diverse interpretations, indeed contradictions.”

Critical reactions to the show include proclamations that it’s the most impressive assembly of 20th century art in all of Europe and accusations that it’s so confusing and anti-hierarchical as to be meaningless. In art historical circles, the exhibition has revived a debate about the concept of masterpieces. Interviews with curators indicate that there’s hardly a consensus on the subject, with some saying it’s a valuable way of measuring quality and others pointing out the flaws of any such system.

The Pompidou Center, a Parisian cultural powerhouse that houses the French National Museum of Modern Art, built the satellite in Metz to share its 60,000-piece collection with a city of about 200,000 people. But visitors expecting the Pompidou’s greatest hits are in for a surprise. What they get is an eclectic array of paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, installations, architectural models, furniture and printed material.

An introductory section on the ground floor tracks the evolution of masterpieces “from Middle Ages to revolutionary genius” in works lent by various institutions. But the bulk of the show ending Oct. 25, which continues on three upper floors, is drawn from the Pompidou’s 20th century and 21st century holdings. The final display, “Masterpieces ad infinatum,” grapples with notions of uniqueness in an age of endless reproductions.

As the exhibition unfolds, major works by such stalwarts as Henri Matisse, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman share gallery space with examples by relatively little known European figures and a few sculptures from Africa, Asia and Oceana. The works on view rarely conform to conventional ideas about masterpieces as paragons of beauty or tours de force of skill and they aren’t necessarily the best examples of the artists’ output.

But pieces such as Bourgeois’ enormous installation “Precious Liquids” sum up essential themes — in her case, conflict between the artist and her father and bodily liquids that symbolize pleasure and pain. Other works mark zeitgeist moments that have influenced ideas about what a masterpiece might be.

Marcel Duchamp, who famously said that a masterpiece is created by the viewer, not the artist, is represented by his first “readymade,” a bicycle wheel mounted on a wood stool in 1913. Georgio De Chirico’s 1914 painting “Premonitory Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire” is a Surrealist tribute to a leading avant-garde poet and critic, portrayed as a classical statue wearing sunglasses.

Alain Jacquet’s 1964 painting “Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” is part of his “Camouflages” series based on widely distributed reproductions of masterpieces from bygone times. His version of Edouard Manet’s celebrated Impressionist work recasts the luncheon on the grass as a poolside picnic obscured by a silk-screen pattern.

The most recently made pieces have yet to pass the test of time. A stunningly detailed photograph of commercial goods packed into a 99 Cents Only Store is a seminal image by Andreas Gursky. But it was made in 1999 by a German artist whose reputation and work continue to grow.

Experts’ views

Once upon a time, a masterpiece was a creation that met rigid standards of artistry and craftsmanship. These days, the term usually refers to the best work of an artist’s career or an example of outstanding creativity or skill, but there’s little agreement on the meaning and relevance of the term, particularly in modern and contemporary art.

Consider what a few Southern California authorities have to say in interviews and e-mail exchanges:

Douglas Fogle

Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, Hammer Museum

That word has so many heavy connotations with connoisseurship and a certain attitude about art history, that one masterpiece comes after the other. There are great works, absolutely. In contemporary art, there are seminal or building-block works that changed everything. You can point to a Rauschenberg combine painting. “Monogram” is a great work in that way. You can point to Jackson Pollock’s first drip paintings.

It’s a masterpiece, whatever that means

Revamping teacher evaluations with the goal of helping instructors improve has become an urgent priority in the nation’s second-largest school district, Ramon C. Cortines, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said in an address to administrators Wednesday.

Cortines said the district will develop and adopt a “value added” method that determines teachers’ and schools’ effectiveness based on student test scores. And he told a packed Hollywood High School auditorium that he’s committed to using these ratings for at least 30% of a teacher’s evaluation. The plan would require the consent of the teachers union.

In a later interview, Cortines also said he was disappointed that California lost its bid Tuesday for $700 million in federal Race to the Top school improvement grants. L.A. Unified’s share would have been $153 million.

But the district also learned late Tuesday that it will receive $52 million in unrelated federal grants.

Overall, the veteran educator, who has led five school systems and plans to retire in 2011, used his 30-minute speech to celebrate progress at various schools, including Hollywood High, and challenge educators to do more.

Linking student test scores to individual teachers became an especially heated topic after The Times published a series of stories based on a value-added analysis of teachers and schools. The Times also plans to publish this month a database with the rankings of about 6,000 third- through fifth-grade teachers.

“It is critical that we look at multiple measures to support our employees,” Cortines said, and “how value added fits into our overall strategy.”

The district plans to publish such data about schools “once this information has been validated,” but not the scores for individuals. “Supporting all employees is about creating a culture of collaboration and trust,” he said, echoing recent comments by his deputy, John Deasy.

Cortines talked later about being part of a five-member state delegation that met with federal evaluators for the Race to the Top funding bid.

“I was grilled, no doubt, on bringing the bargaining units along” on accepting test scores as part of evaluations, he said.

The winning state applications all scored at least 440 on a scale of 500; California fell 17 points short, and union buy-in could have put it over the top. But evaluators most consistently dinged the state for an out-of-date student data system. That problem alone cost it 14 points.

Rapidly and fully funding a better data system has long been a sticking point between state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wasn’t won over by O’Connell’s proposals to pay for such a system.

The state also consistently lost points for perceived shortcomings in developing and evaluating principals, and its plans for turning around persistently low-performing schools.

Cortines said some evaluators seemed to favor aggressive approaches, such as closing schools, that have a mixed record.

But L.A. Unified will receive another competitive federal grant, aimed at troubled schools, that was scored by state evaluators.

L.A. Unified was initially shut out because the state’s scoring system gave the district virtually no chance against smaller school systems. But the state Board of Education agreed to reconsider. This week, the board lowered some award amounts to others, and federal officials released funds previously held in reserve.

The biggest beneficiary will be five schools under the purview of L. A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. His nonprofit, which runs 15 schools within L.A. Unified, qualified for more than half of the $52 million; he personally lobbied the state board on the matter.

Five other district schools will split the balance.

Cortines had wanted some of this money for Fremont High, where he’d ordered all staff to reinterview for jobs, resulting in massive turnover. Fremont, however, won’t receive money because its test scores, although very low, have improved too much to qualify.

As he concluded his address, the superintendent lost his composure as he expressed thanks to those assembled for the opportunity to work with them. He stopped, unable to continue, and the audience responded with a 45-second standing ovation.

howard.blume@latimes.com
L.A. schools chief says district will adopt ‘value added’ approach

Some architects reach the point where even a minor or obscure example of their work becomes significant. That may be the case with architect John Lautner, whose underdog individualism has propelled his reputation skyward.

Supporters hope Lautner’s prestige can help save one of his earliest commissions, a 1951 house north of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills known as Shusett House. The current owner, Enrique Mannheim, wants to knock it down and build a new place to live. The demolition could come in the next few days.

Mannheim says he’s tried to make the place work for his family, but after 23 years, he’s reached the end of his patience with the structure – as well as with Lautner fans.