Biography
of MICHAEL E. ARTH
 Michael
Edward Arth was born near Liverpool, England at a U.S. Air Force
Base on April 27, 1953. In 1955 his parents moved to New Mexico.
This was followed by a move to Midland, Texas where he was taught
at a parochial school by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception,
all of whom were named Mary, but none of whom were immaculately
conceived. His own mother however was born on the feast of the Immaculate
Conception, but named Evelyn Yvonne instead of Mary.
The
family genealogy is known quite well in the far distant past and
the recent past, but it is the chain of ancestors in the middle
that is less certain. More than 3.8 billion years ago his ancestors
were rather rudimentary life forms that either immigrated to Earth
on an asteroid or were cooked up in the primordial soup. Leaping
forward to modern times, it appears that his mother is a mixture
of black Irish and American melting pot, including perhaps some
Native American. A family genealogy traces her side of the family
back to some Irish kings, including “Art Boy Cavanaugh”
and Dermot MacMurrough Kavanaugh, who was the 12th century scoundrel
from Leinster who sold out the country to Henry II of England in
order to save his tee-na-na from a neighboring tribal chieftan who
wanted revenge for kidnapping his wife. The same genealogy also
claims that the family’s ancestors came to Ireland from Greece
in the 2nd century.
On
his father’s side the family name, Arth, means “Bear”
and is an ancient Celtic form of the name Arthur, which may just
be a lazy way of saying the Welsh phrase, “Arth Vahr.”
Arth Vahr means Bear Great. It is not known why they did not just
say “Great Bear,” but backwards or forwards it still
refers to the Great Bear Constellation, the mythological source
of the King Arthur legend. Michael’s father, now deceased,
was descended from a German immigrant, however, not a Brit. Apparently,
Continental Celts from the area of present day Arth, Switzerland
migrated a few thousand years ago to the British Isles, but a few
of them walked as far as Germany and either got tired or figured
the going was not going to get better. Interestingly, there is another
Michael Edward Arth whose grandfather is from Ireland, so it seems
that at least some of the Celtic Arths made it to the British Isles.
Irish writer James Joyce was intrigued by the name Arth in his book
Finnegans Wake (which seems to have everything else in the
world in it) and on page 380 curiously puts both sides of Michael’s
family together:
….he
was the eminent king of all Ireland himself after the last preeminent
king of all Ireland, the whilom joky old top that went before him
the Taharn dynasty, King Arth Mockmorrow Koughenough of the leathered
legions, now of parts unknown, (God guard his generous comicsongbook
soul!) ….
If
you have not guessed by now, this is actually an autobiography written
in the third person partly because some of the Marys considered
I-itis a disease. I was also convinced that it looked more professional
to pretend that I just happened to find someone to write my biography
who knows as much about me as I do….
So
anyway, I sought solace from the frocked Marys and the scorching
desert sun by digging underground forts in the desert wherein I
could utter the shortest word in our language without shame. The
nuns would surely have found my underground activities to be quasi-pagan
in nature, thus adding the lure of the forbidden to one of the reasons
for crawling into a desert spider hole long before a certain ex-dictator
publicized the practice. Another reason for the hideout was to escape
the domestic mayhem from my five younger brothers and sisters who
had all been born by the time I was seven. After we moved from the
desert to the moist but hard-packed clay of effluvial Houston, I
wisely gave up cave digging and began building above ground forts.
This would lead to grander construction projects as an adult.
Michael, his fort, his
siblings and some cousins in 1964
(click for larger view) |
Michael, front and center, with his crew during construction
of "Casa De Lila," a mountaintop villa he designed
and built 1990-1994 in Hollywood Hills.
(click for larger view) |
Casa De Lila,
completed, 1994.
(click for larger view) |
Almost
all of the things I have done as an adult were childhood hobbies
and activities: art, architecture, philosophizing, photography,
filmmaking, travel, designing towns and neighborhoods, building,
reading, writing, swimming, and walking. In high school, I had a
little off-campus newspaper, and I wrote a few things for area newspapers,
including this op-ed piece for the Ft. Worth Star Telegram about
the popular bumper sticker at the time: “America: Love It
or Leave It.”
 This
shows my burgeoning interest in social and political reform
which would not come into full flower for another 30 years.
After
graduating from high school I worked briefly for the well-known
illustrator Don Punchantz. This was followed by my own brief career
as an illustrator before I had a 10-year career in fine art and
photography. That was overlapped and followed by a 30-year career
in home and urban design and construction, mostly in California.
I met
my Bulgarian wife, Maya, in May 1998, the day after I moved to Santa
Barbara from Los Angeles where I had lived for many years. For the
last decade I also worked on The Labors
of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems,
a book that turned out to be much more Herculean that I had bargained
for. Partly as a desire to create a living laboratory for the book,
we moved to DeLand, Florida in 2001 so that I could rebuild a small
slum neighborhood, which I renamed The Garden District.
Our
daughter Sophie was born on December 15, 2001, in DeLand, Florida,
which is where we live now. I love being a dad, and in a way I have
come full circle, because I recently built a playhouse for my daughter.
Reprinted
with permission: Southern
Living Magazine
Sophie, Michael, and Maya Arth in their living room.
(click for larger view)
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Sophie's Playhouse
(click for larger view) |
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