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This essay was written one year before the war in Iran
When I was a boy, my mother took me on a trolley car to downtown Los Angeles. As we entered the train she said to me, “I want you to remember this ride because you will never experience it again.” This marked the end of the Pacific Electric Railway, that was once the largest commuter train system in the world.
Growing up in sunny southern California, it would have never dawned on me that the demise of its electric public transportation system and simultaneous boom of the automobile industry was intricately related to dramatic world events that would impact everyone’s lives in any number of ways, while directly inspiring an art project many years later that I have worked on now over four decades. As car sales and suburban sprawl exploded after the end of WWII, freeways were built that tore through suburban neighborhoods, including within walking distance of the home where I grew up, that my father had built from scratch just a few years earlier. A resulting thick brown ozone layer became such a health hazard that during the summertime I would cough uncontrollably after just one lap in a swimming pool. Strict exhaust regulations were then imposed on cars and buses that dramatically improved air quality, still this served as a harrowing sign of things to come. When enrolled years later at the University of California at Berkeley, students shut down the school in protest of the US participation in the Vietnam War, which was increasingly perceived to be immoral and imperialistic. Some people have theorized that Vietnam was the first of a series of wars waged over access to fossil fuel reserves abroad. As the war came to an end, in 1973 an oil embargo threatened automobile transportation that almost everyone in southern California depended on. From the website, History:
In the United States, the effects of the Vietnam War would linger long after the last troops returned home in 1973. The nation spent more than $120 billion on the conflict in Vietnam from 1965-73; this massive spending led to widespread inflation, exacerbated by a worldwide oil crisis in 1973 and skyrocketing fuel prices.
As if this were about what has dominated the news today, the “skyrocking fuel prices” then occurred when the average cost of a gallon of gasoline was less than 40 cents per gallon.
Decades later, complaints about gasoline prices following the Covid pandemic had profound political impact, incumbent leaders of nations losing elections across the world, while the war in Ukraine exacerbated the problem. My preoccupation with this matter, way back in the early 1970s, would dramatically impact a sense of purpose behind what started as a contemporary artistic exploration of the medieval craft and art of architectural stained and leaded glass, that is more vitally important now than it was back then, while myopically the U.S. government is heading the fight against climate change back in the polar opposite direction.
My earliest stained glass artwork was directly inspired by this topic and one of my first experimental artworks was composed of a graph I found in a 1975 edition of Scientific American. It accurately projected the rapidly growing US dependence on foreign oil between 1960 and ’90. This prediction clearly reflected the consequences of the Arab-Israeli War in 1973, resulting in an oil embargo. The outcome was both a surge in petroleum product costs in the United States and 2 to 3 hour-long waits in line to fill up one’s gas tank.
Please see the full page regarding the artwork, “Vision After the Sermon,” by clicking here
Between the time that my mother took me on that trolley ride in the early 1960s and the oil embargo around a decade later, Southern California’s dependency on the oil industry for transportation became a serious threat to what had become an accepted lifestyle. Southern California has been paying ever since for this grossly shortsighted civic mismanagement, during a period of dramatic real estate development in the Wild West, without government regulations controlling sprawling growth. Some alleged that it was caused by what became known as the “General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy.” It has been argued that the burgeoning automobile industry’s ambition was to dismantle public owned transportation systems throughout the United States. While apparently there is some truth to this, further investigation has uncovered the fact that the first commuter train lines themselves were privately built to transport prospective buyers to areas where the train line owners also owned vast areas of land that was for sale. Quite simply, southern California became a haven for the automobile industry during a period of dramatic expansion, as the train system was not properly cared for and was eventually dismantled.
This article outlines the story of the Pacific Electric Red Car system that in its prime covered 25 percent more mileage than today’s New York Subway:
The Scientific American graph projecting U.S. sources of oil proved to be prophetic. Not only did it’s projection over time come to pass, but it is equally striking that in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, as he set fire to hundreds of oil fields. Then, in January 1991, he called for a worldwide “Holy War” against the US and its allies.
Though the natural beauty of stained glass as a classical light art medium was what first drew me to learning the craft, its original ecclesiastical function of storytelling had led me to exploring the tragic historical links between oil production, religion and war. Alas, the subjects I chose may perhaps be perceived to be sacrilegious, given the medium’s traditional purpose, for they concern evolution, as opposed to creationism.
As public transportation systems are ever evolving, so is the very concept and process behind the creation of The Underground Cathedral. Among my other very first artworks in stained glass, conceived in the mid-1970s, were literal interpretations of the first recognized forms of life found at the bottom of the ocean. In 1976, I designed and executed an architectural stained glass commission for a residence in Santa Monica, California, its composition a technical diagram of one of these undersea forms of life that I found in a zoology book. Its unusual linear form provoked me to name it: “A Proposal for the Los Angeles Subway System,” something the city desperately needed.
Eventually, a curiosity about other cultures emerged, as travel taught me about urban life where transportation by car was not a necessity. My first trip to Europe changed everything, when I took a ride on the Paris Metro. From this would emerge an unanticipated preoccupation with the artistic study of subway systems from around the world. Both travel and artistic development had become wedded as a continuous journey rather than aiming for a finite destination. Upon returning home, I embarked on the conception of an enormous freestanding stained glass artwork, its composition derived from a hand sized map of the Paris underground. “See “Les routes de La Grande Odalisque (The Large Brain.”)
Thus, a stained glass subway map became the impetus for the ever evolving The Underground Cathedral.
From the first forms of life on earth to an underground subway map, my exploration extended to the realms of Quantum Physics, which integrates spirituality with science. My work’s development became an examination of the process of evolution of civilization, how we move about being a big part of this, primarily, though not only, in the form of studying underground subway systems of the world. This preoccupation has continued in other media including photography, computer graphics, video art, sound, music, writing and even web design and it has continually evolved since high technology entered the marketplace during the 1990s. My first of three websites, The Underground Cathedral, was uniquely designed in 1998, so that its menu is navigated by clicking on the color-coded links of what appears to be an interactive subway map. That site is integrated with the updated Underground Cathedral segment of this website.
My fascination with the maps as aesthetic iconography of actual underground transportation systems gave further rise to a long journey of personally experiencing various undergrounds, until recently primarily throughout the Western Hemisphere, which opened up entirely new vistas of my artistic creation. This underworld became my playground, where one inevitably encounters a potpourri of humanity from diverse races and cultures. Though it started in 1989, in a most unanticipated place: Poland, where I was taken on a personal private tour inside of the far from finished first line of the Warsaw Metro at communism’s end. I continued taking still shots in European undergrounds, as my fascination expanded in new directions, in sync with an explosion of new creative technological possibilities. Thus, this began with the recording of the sounds of various undergrounds and later by shooting video, which evolved into the realm of music and multimedia storytelling.
At that moment a new direction of The Underground Cathedral emerged, as I began taking photos and capturing videos of a potpourri of individuals performing music of all sorts and with all sorts of musical apparatus, in undergrounds from New York to London, Barcelona and Paris. As I also compose music and write songs, I further became adept at conceiving and recording musical compositions that integrate sampled sounds of undergrounds and thanks to the latest advancements of high technology that were also rapidly evolving at that very time, simultaneously it became possible to creatively record eclectic pieces with a wide variety of instruments and styles for my own videos. Ultimately, I made both films and live performances with edited film projected in the background. My ever-growing obsession with life in the underground continued throughout much of Western, Central and Eastern Europe, before I returned home two decades later.
The very first inspiration for video filmmaking occurred in 1992, when I recorded a spontaneous interview and musical performance inside of the New York Subway. The subject was a saxophone player wearing an army jumpsuit, a CIA badge and a cap on his head with two small antennas sticking out, who claimed to be from another galaxy. He saw me holding a tiny pocket camera in one hand, a microphone attached to a tiny digital sound recorder in the other and asked me if I was a reporter. Based on an ensuing literally other-worldly conversation, which I recorded and just a few photos I shot of him, I made a short film called, Antenna Man. Here is a 2021 remake of the original 1997 video clip, which is currently again undergoing an evolutionary change, for as is the case of my visual art, as technology continues to evolve for creative purposes in remarkable ways, decades later Antenna Man will soon be coming to life in the 7th galaxy, 4th planet vibration!
Around 30 years after the last segment of the Los Angeles electric streetcar system had been dismantled, in 1990 the first legs of the new LA Metro opened. At that time, I was frequently riding the metro in Barcelona, Spain, where I was then living, while creating my first music videos of The Underground Cathedral. That same year, a cover article that I wrote about my project, was published in the quarterly magazine of The International Union of Public Transport in Brussels, Belgium.
In 2013, a history of The Underground Cathedral was documented in the book “Going Underground – New Perspectives,” published by the London Transport Museum commemorating the 150th anniversary of the London Underground.
In May of 2016, a new line of the LA Metro opened, connecting downtown once again to the seaside in Santa Monica, which passes not far from my home and new art building, Abrams Tower West.
While it has continually expanded ever since, despairingly this has done nothing to alleviate traffic congestion, while severe drought conditions have plagued California that have caused monumental damage from devastating fires.
Incomprehensibly, the critical nature of this matter did not stop the reelection of a man who claims that climate change is a hoax and remains intent on abolishing all environmental standards, when they are more vitally necessary than ever. Further, with senseless wars never ending, never has it become more urgent for humanity to come together, to find a common spirit and reason for mutual cooperation and to recognize the incredible beauty emanating from each culture that I try to draw from creatively, and which I believe we all should share with mutual respect and pride. It is ultimately in this spirit of universality that The Underground Cathedral exists and continues to evolve over time.
Continue here: The Church of Evolution
