This was all torn down to build the W Hotel…
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A recent trip up Highway 395 from Los Angeles to Yosemite didn’t yield too many sign discoveries. We where rushing a bit to cover as much ground as we could while the baby slept, and then spent most of the week three miles down in a canyon above Yosemite Falls. However, this incredible deconstructing sign deserved a stop. This was an experience of “Just Passing by. Intimately Unforgettable” a phrase coined by art critic David Pagel to describe the work of the artist Kirk Pederson. Pedersen is a friend and colleague who’s paintings, photographs, and books explore the intricate beauty of urban decay.
It’s an incredible, thrilling, twisty lonely 250 mile motorcycle ride on old Highway 3 from Ferndale on the Humbolt Coast to Yreka in Siskiyou County. Halfway between Weaverville and Yreka is the dying lumber, mining and ranching town of Callahan. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. It’s not a ghost town yet because the little general store is still opened sometimes. Farrington’s Store (since 1860) was open, so I stopped for a soda and chatted with an old-timer who told some good stories. The Callahan Ranch Hotel was opened in 1854. He said it has been abandoned pretty much forever, although every once in a while somebody passing through says they want to buy it and fix it up, but “why the hell would anybody want to come and stay in a hotel in Callahan?” The dimensional lettering on the facade is remarkably well preserved considering the condition of the rest of the building. The dimensional lettering is really unusual: it’s painted with an above-looking-down perspective although the viewer sees the sign from below looking up. It’s a bit disorienting… kind of like the town itself.
The desert climate is interesting because it simultaneously destroys and preserves. This beautiful mid-century neon sign for the now abandoned Hacienda Riviera is located on Hacienda Avenue in Desert Hot Springs, California. The wind and sand have stripped away much of the paint subduing the original colors and revealing the artists brush strokes in the lettering. The neon tubing has been destroyed by vandals or the elements. However, because of the dry air, the structure is not rusting, so there’s a lovely sad sense of arrested decay. Remarkably the sign is completely graffiti free.
On Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese architect Tadao Ando writes:
Pared down to its barest essence, wabi-sabi is the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death. It’s simple, slow, and uncluttered-and it reveres authenticity above all. Wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this planet-that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in the process of returning to the dust from which we came. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace liver spots, rust, and frayed edges, and the march of time they represent.
Wabi-sabi is underplayed and modest, the kind of quiet, undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered. It’s a fragmentary glimpse: the branch representing the entire tree, shoji screens filtering the sun, the moon 90 percent obscured behind a ribbon of cloud. It’s a richly mellow beauty that’s striking but not obvious, that you can imagine having around you for a long, long time-Katherine Hepburn versus Marilyn Monroe. For the Japanese, it’s the difference between kirei-merely “pretty”-and omoshiroi, the interestingness that kicks something into the realm of beautiful. (Omoshiroi literally means “white faced,” but its meanings range from fascinating to fantastic.) It’s the peace found in a moss garden, the musty smell of geraniums, the astringent taste of powdered green tea. My favorite Japanese phrase for describing wabi-sabi is “natsukashii furusato,” or an old memory of my hometown.
For the complete text by Tadao Ando visit http://nobleharbor.com/tea/chado/WhatIsWabi-Sabi.htm