Public Eye

It’s not that I was too young in the heyday of the Happenings to get hep to the jive. I mean, I remember my parents and their circle going to Be-Ins and whatnot and my mother and step-father participating, with the performance-art collective Metastasis, in what I believe was called a Die-In at the Music Center in protest of the Vietnam War.

It’s just that in 1967, when Pasadena was both hipper and squarer than it is now, I was not yet cool enough to know Peggy Phelps, and so missed the amazing Happening in her front yard in which the late conceptual artist Allan Kaprow piled hundreds of blocks of ice only to watch them melt as part of his definitively ephemeral series, “Fluids.”

"The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible," Kaprow once wrote. I don't know if that was before or after the piece "Fluids."

Well, with Faulkner, we know that the past is not dead — it’s not even past. So today all of us can relive that Happening in Old Pasadena’s Memorial Park, Raymond Avenue and Walnut Street, as “Fluids” is recreated with entirely new ice in the form of a 30-foot-long, 8-foot-high sculpture.

It’s theoretically on from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; I would have guessed timing’s dependent on Mother Nature, but wiser artists say it’ll hold on through Saturday’s city of Pasadena Greening the Earth Day and Armory Family Arts Festival in the park, and will be free and open to the public for viewing.

“Fluids” is coordinated by LACMA and MOCA and the Union Ice Company — 41 years ago, also the ice men. . . .

Along with the Armory Center for the Arts, that other rightful heir to the old Pasadena Art Museum’s hipness, the Pasadena Art Alliance, is Saturday night holding its 14th biennial Art Auction at Art Center’s South Campus. Such sales have helped provide $3.6 million to the contemporary visual arts community here since 1954. Artwork to be auctioned is online at www.pasadenaartalliance.org. Tickets are available by calling (626) 795-9276. I’ll see you in the Wind Tunnel. . . .

Thursday I was talking about the Art Alliance auction with Heidrun Mumper-Drumm at lunchtime at Sumi Chang’s Europane, which I should never enter without a camera to document the amazing. But all I had was a pen.

Because as I took my quite large piece of kabocha squash quiche from the counter over to the new communal table there, another fellow who had ordered the same — along with a bag of potato chips and an Orangina — sat down at the opposite end. He took a lot of calls and made a lot of calls during lunch, referring to himself as “Dr. . . .” — well, I won’t use the name.

After his quiche was quaffed, somewhat to my amazement, he ordered an egg-salad sandwich on a baguette. OK — hungry doc. Then, and I am taking notes at this point, he comes back to the table with a bowl of chicken vegetable soup, along with a large roll on the side. Those dispatched with a lot of slurps, I’m betting on a chocolate-chip cookie as the fitting finish to such a magnificent meal. Instead, soon enough, one of the servers walks through the room, calling out, “Chicken salad sandwich?” “Here!” Our doc ate every bite, heartily.