Happy Halloween

As always, the neighborhood is putting on a fine Halloween show.  Nothing can ever beat the annual Party Girls, who this year are being kept company by an excellent skeletal Archaeopteryx or a version of it.

Then across the street from this exuberance was a decidedly sinister party boat.

The bruja, of course, was wearing her cat on her shoulder, as usual.  Unfortunately I couldn't take him into USC, but I did find a long black dress/coat/thingy, and some designs in the shape of bones for earrings.

 

lunch, en route to the airport

The only good thing about not having cats with us when we're in Santa Fe for a couple of days is being able to stop for lunch en route to the airport: Harry's, of course (half a grilled cheese and green chile sandwich and a cup of curried pumpkin soup, since you asked).  And then back to grind my teeth for three and a half hours watching the Dodgers - but, miraculously, they pulled it off!  And of course, Gramsci and Moth are delighted to have us back ...

 

too true

This just about says it all.  I suppose I can take another week of it all, just, but it'll be touch and go (and this is not a night in which one can take cheer from the Dodgers).  

 

late October signs

Very muted Halloween decorations, compared with Los Feliz (although there are occasional skeletons resting in Adirondack chairs, and one house has one of those huge Skellys looming over it).  I rather like this understatement - it's like Halloween laid out by a curandera, a traditional healer.  I should say that the house also has a Harris-Walz sign - as do very many round here.  

And here's one of the best of these signs - the guys up the street who have the over-the-top Christmas lights seem to have gone with a cat (understandable, even though they're dog people) - er - pirate? American vet? - theme.

 

the sunset

This is a wonderful manifestation, in the clouds, of how the weather, at this time of the year, doesn't really know what it wants to do.  But I'm just happy to be here for a couple of days, despite living hour by hour in a different form of (politically charged) uncertainty.

 

winterizing

Today in New Mexico it's still in the 70s ... but by Tuesday night, let alone Wednesday, we get the first frost. There's a fair amount of snow up on the mountains, too.  So we're here to finish making sure that everything's ready for winter (which by now means only bringing in the hoses) and to get some fresh air, and to watch LA (in the shape of the Dodgers) from afar ...

 

autumnal omelette

of braised fennel and cheese, with a topping of some delicious smoked paprika brought back by a friend from Australia.

I should, really, have posted a picture of dinner (delicata squash salad) eaten while watching the Dodgers (yay Freddie!), and labeled "on not going to watch USC vs Rutgers."  Every year I get an invitation for myself and a guest to go to a game in the President's suite.  This year we'd especially been looking forward to our chosen game: USC vs Rutgers (for obvious reasons).  But ... SC has so depressed and disgusted me this week with its decisions around fund cutting in relation to graduate education (in a nutshell: if our students get an outside fellowship to do research in their fifth year, they've always been able to take it and then get their final year of funding from the university in their sixth year.  But SC has just pulled the plug on this - with no warning - leaving some students effectively stranded). And there are other rumored cuts of all kinds affecting our benefits, and other things.  And there is just a steady drip drip drip of this stuff, with no clarity (transparency would be far too much to ask for).  So in all conscience, we didn't feel that we could accept the university's glitzy hospitality - and effectively endorse them having given what turns out to be a far from brilliant football coach a 110 million $$$ 10-year contract - and cheer on the Cardinal and Gold.  I cannot imagine for a moment that anyone will register this protest, but it's a symbolic act of solidarity with our students ...

a pollinator vehicle

A very quick trip to the Huntington today to see the Storm Cloud exhibition again - before our conference next week - and I carried on loving it as much asa when I first saw it.  As a student said to me after she saw it - Oh! It's just like your class!  Well, quite.  Parked outside was this transporter, which had a great assortment of bees and butterflies tracing their routes between flowers.  

 

more spectrality

and that would be our campus, looking faintly ghostly, as I make my way back from gabbling briefly about science and entertainment and illusion and deception and spirit photographs and Tyndall's experiment demonstrating why the sky is blue, and suchlike.  The truly impressive part of the evening was the students performing magic card tricks - we're talking performing at the Magic Castle standard card tricks.  I cannot begin to imagine how these particular ones are done, and it makes talking about nineteenth century questioning about whether or not seeing is believing both highly relevant, and highly - well, amateur.

 

spectral science

The final installation day for the Spectral Science exhibition in the USC library.  Who knew we had such a collection not just of things like magic lanterns (that I did know), but of books about spiritualism, magic, ghosts, optics, and the rest of it?  I felt that I was looking at masses of things that I should have (but didn't) consult for The Victorians and the Visual Imagination.  And tomorrow I get to talk about the issues set in motion by all of this material ...

 

a bit of a wall

An underwater garden, a man dangling some tiny puppets on a string, some miniaturized pyramids (and a car hood) - there's a lot going on here.  Far too much to unpack when I was sitting at traffic lights ...

 

(not) sitting in a park in Paris, France ... California, here I come

You might well have thought that I'd spend another day in Paris - but since I'd had tickets for tonight's Joni Mitchell concert since ten minutes after they went on sale, for once, no.  It was utterly amazing.

Compèred (and master-minded) by Brandi Carlisle;

with guests - Annie Lennox,

and look - Elton John and Meryl Streep - not bad for backing singers -

and a great audience, loving it: this, of course, is accompanying "Shine."  (Remember when people used to bring lighters to wave at concerts?  ah, cell phones ... You could see Meryl Streep waving hers, too ...)

 

American cheese

I'm back!  And there was just enough daylight left to eat cheese and have a glass of wine outside.  Computer still drowned-dead - and this emergency back up one crashes every ten minutes (it's 2017, and on its last legs ...) but after getting up in Paris at 4.30 a.m., I'm not going to try and solve any problems now ...

 

Another conference day …

 without a working computer.  Not a whimper of life in it.  So another day in which I try a workaround to upload a few pics  … which emerge in reverse order, but you can’t win em all …

So here is some wonderful spicy chilled green pea soup with burrata and strawberries- a celebratory end of stay treat (followed by cod);

A figure above a doorway

A different kind of view from the Pont des Arts

And you can see why I, en route to the conference- the Flash conference- thought this was a good omen.  It was an amazing couple of days - I felt as though someone had thrown my book a completely unexpected party.  I was so touched that it got a celebratory shout-out in the concluding session…Of course it - the conference- foregrounded all kinds of work on Flash - but it was very interesting revisiting the issues I’d spent so long thinking about, and in Paris, too …

 

In which it is very wet, and my computer drowns on the way back from a day’s conference-ing

 Keep your fingers crossed that it dries out and starts in the morning!   Here are some meteorological images of Paris

OK - so Colbert isn’t damp. He was presiding over the conference dinner …

research and walking

First stop, a sculpture of a straw beehive that told passersby of a honey shop, back in the C19th.

This isn't research - it's just a shop window completely full of models of Japanese food, disconcertingly realistic.

But not a lot can possibly be as disconcerting as the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature - there seemed to be a great deal more Chasse than Nature.  Some of the victims had clearly escaped - most of the antique chairs had teasels on them to stop one sitting, but the one went for a more aggressive message.

Two of my chapters seem to have got together at some point in the C19th and made a sofa - bees and snails.

But the best bits for me were where contemporary art worked as a commentary on all the paintings and sculptures and tapestries of dead or dying animals - let alone on the stuffed animals and antlers and guns.  There was a Mark Dion hunting cabin; an urban owl;

and this terrific collage by Daniel Horowitz, Cervus armatus, which could stand in for my whole argument about moorland and peatlands being underpinned by violence.

Then, as an antidote - and it was a beautiful day - I walked down the Coulée verte from Bastille to Vincennes - a million thanks to Avigail for the recommendation.  This was the inspiration behind the High Line in NY.  It started off park like and manicured;

passed through a more urban section;

became very dark and bosky,

and by the end was, indeed, abandoned railroad tracks.  And then there was a bus back right to Saint-Michel!

And happily, at dinner, I was able to order the lentilles that I never got to eat in Puy this summer ...