nature red in beak and claw

A strange scene by the reservoir this morning.  A beautiful red-tailed hawk was sitting close to the path, on a tree branch - I was just pulling out my phone when s/he took off into some taller trees, seemingly in pursuit of ... crow eggs?  crow young?  S/he was on a mission. A half-minute later, there was a screech - and the hawk exited, pursued by two, then three, then two hawks.  

It looked like a fairly typical savage raid.  But just as we started off walking down the path again, I realized that there was a very dead hawk caught in the fence - and indeed, although I hadn't realized this at the time, I think one can see it in the image below.  My assumption - but who knows? - is that it had become irrevocably tangled in the barbed wire.  It was certainly bloody.  But had the crows been doing their ecologically sound carrion-removal activity?  Had Hawky 1 been seeking revenge on the post-mortem mutilation of their mate?  Were there any connections to be drawn at all?  It was somewhat baffling, and in the end distressing.

In other news, USC's Office of Diversity and Inclusivity has been merged with the "Culture Team," which will "continue to develop our shared sense of community."  And tomorrow - still obeying the purchasing boycott today - I'm going to order a whole lot of sunflower seeds.

 

behind closed blinds

So what's going on in there?  This is the office of our Provost.  He is more or less in charge of The Institution at present, since the outgoing President is a compound of useless with lame duck status; a ball of cottonwool combined with a cheerleading persona that kids no one - not even the actual cheerleaders, or Song Girls, or whatever they're called, with whom she loves to pose, presumably reliving her glory days.  She issued (but who knows who wrote it?  AI? McKinsey?) a "Dear Trojan Family" statement yesterday that said absolutely nothing, other than a commitment to excellence, blah blah blah, and the ominous lines "Moving forward, we will continue to review our programs and practices to ensure both that their direct relationship to our academic mission is clear, and that we comply fully with evolving legal requirements."  Uh huh?  Maybe they didn't think that we'd read that far?  The whole email ends "When I walk across our campuses, I see a place like no other, where joy, creativity, success, and excellence thrive. It’s the Trojan Spirit in action – and I know we’ll continue to do great things together for our community, for our country, and for humanity."  All I can say is that our President absolutely can't have encountered any faculty on her walkabouts.  And our contact with her second in command is about as direct and effectual as tapping on that window would be.

 

industrial restauro-chic

There's something very aesthetically satisfying about the warehouse decor en route to the bathroom at Manuela, the restaurant attached to Hauser and Wirth in DTLA ... My second meal there in three days! (job candidates), which included an exceptionally tasty cocktail with some gold leaf on top of it.  And lunch with another job candidate, in my secondary department, in the University Club - I feel absurdly overstuffed.

 

first thing in the morning

Yes, I needed an early start (it was an another extremely full day) - but Gramsci was perhaps a little over-insistent that I get out of bed immediately.  Is there any wonder that one of his names is Mr Whiskers Akimbo?  Look at them.  Also, the long one on his right side - disappearing out of the picture - is now four inches long.  That is impressive.  In any case, you don't stay in bed long with that face staring at you, pointedly.

 

a large stump

I never noticed a large, dying, rotting, precarious tree on campus - but I guess it must have been is a sad way, because it is Felled, and the ground covered with sawdust.  There are many metaphors to be extracted from this.

 

draconian

Some years ago, back when Santa Fe had a very good pharmacy called Pharmaca that also sold an assortment of often unusual gift-like goods, I purchased a long dragon.  You can't see his length here, but he goes all the way across two solid bookcases.  I'm not sure what he is - a scarf?  A draft excluder?  And yes, of course I bought him vaguely thinking he was in USC colors, but somehow I haven't quite summoned up the - the what?  The courage? The craziness? to wear him round my neck to a football game.  I may yet ... Of course, the coloring may have something to do with Harry Potter - there's an uneasy overlap between USC and Hogwarts in that respect - but whatever the truth might be, and even if draping him over a bookshelf mightn't be his intended role, I've always been cheered by him, and the institutional flames emanating from his nostrils.

 

birthday photobomb

I was just setting up a tasteful still life - the card that the cats had sent me, and, rather wonderfully, the camellia that Alice had picked for the birthday breakfast table (for which: read the kitchen butcher block) and that happened to be the very same flower that I photographed yesterday.  But Moth, having other ideas, leapt into the picture ...

It was one of those days oscillating between the festive (Alice cooked some excellent salmon for dinner) and the desperate - (when am I going to get my teaching prep done? - that is, the right images lined up for the right power points).  It's not just years, but decades since I last taught an undergraduate long-C19th British art course - plenty of grad courses in this area, to be sure, but not the bread and butter stuff.  So what power points I might have for some of the material - material that's not formed part of grad courses, and of course there is plenty of overlap - is decanted onto jump drives that are sitting in Santa Fe; and before that, back in Oxford, it was, of course, the weekly trek over to the Art History slide library in Beaumont Street to, yes, borrow slides that then went into a carousel ... I know I should have put together my own efficient slide cache by now (and of course I have, so far as my research goes) - but that's one of those resolutions that never quite happens when it comes to Possible Teaching Needs.

It's been, however, a very good birthday!

 

velvet in the velvetty gloom

I'm sure that I ought to be able to draw some kind of metaphor out of this.  However, it is what it looks like: a camellia is a camellia is a camellia (on the back steps leading down to our yard).

 

more railings, more wires

 - that is, another set of abstract shapes seen while driving up S. Hoover Street.  Two days running: this of course is evidence of stalled traffic, and days crammed so full of teaching and teaching prep and meetings that there's precious little time to look around me inventively.  Well, I could have offered a shot of the dentist's fearsome array of tools - picks and grinders and a syringe containing - what? At least it wasn't for poking in me, this time - but there wasn't really the opportunity.  Slowly, slowly, slowly with the mouth, but all's going as it should.  Maybe I'll be able to eat something more solid than yogurt and pasta and fish, one of these days ...

 

railings

Driving home, on S. Hoover St - one of those moments when lines and light fall into some excellent relationships with one another.  

 

vegetable curatorship

This onion is destined for the compost.  It didn't really appreciate us going away for the week, and it was starting to become a little whiffy, even if there's something aesthetically appealing in its decomposition.

One of the papers that I heard at CAA - on a panel about toxic media - had to do with what to do with toxic materials in an archive or museum (think of Eva Hesse's use of asbestos fibers, say) - including one particular installation that the speaker had visited that included - even consisted of - a heap of potatoes, that, it turned out had been treated with fire retardant (a notoriously toxic substance, even if, obviously, a useful one).  The whole paper raised some fascinating questions about what it is that museums actually collect - antique formaldehyde, for example.  But somehow (albeit in a sanctioned fashion) the speaker had abstracted a couple of potatoes from the heap - and one of these she'd let grow, and grow, and grow ... when does the organic impetus for decay contained in an art work take over?  

Unfortunately, I think this onion has reached the end of its natural/abnatural days ...

 

a winter's morning

Although these slopes may look brown, after the rains there is, by now, a miraculous sprouting of green: the wildflower seeds that I scattered, optimistically - oh, maybe back in November - are starting to grow.  Another substantial shower or two - not that there's anything significant in the forecast - and we may yet see some flowers.  Meanwhile, I'll just keep admiring the Meyer lemons ...

 

reunited!

It was a long ride home ... but look who couldn't wait to get on my shoulders!

 

the dull, the droll, and the delicious

The view from our window was ... dull - at least in the sense of the weather: a couple of hours of snow, and now it's switched to some dismal rain.  But most of the day I was in conference sessions, hearing many many really good papers (and one woman who didn't seem to understand the concept of Timing, even after a cell phone timer gave her the nudge, and then she was given a verbal, very pointed nudge: some minutes [or so it felt] later - "so now I'll come to my conclusion."  Reader - never, ever be that speaker).

Perhaps the most memorable image was that shown by Wanda Corn (who not only gave a great paper on Grant Wood, but had, deservedly, a wonderful reception) - of Wood's American Gothic, sculpted in butter by Norma "Duffy" Lyon, doyenne of butter sculpture and shown at the Iowa State Fair in 1996 (she also showed a slide of Lyon's fine butter cows).

And then a wonderful (early birthday) dinner at 53, which is - unsurprisingly - on 53rd street - and wins this trip's culinary prize, hands down: salmon carpaccio, and then miso black cod tossed up in some kind of crispy rice bowl, and then miso butterscotch icecream. I'm much looking forward to coming back to NYC, whatever the weather's like ...

 

Valentine's Day in NYC

I went up to the Met to see the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition (having reached that CAA point when one want to see actual art work, not power points) - amd walking back, this sun dog, above the elms in Central Park, seemed like a perfect restaging of his fusion of the natural and the divine (minus the fir trees that, he was convinced, had a great deal to do with inspiring Gothic church architecture).  The show was terrific: go, if you can.

En route - more mundane kitschy Valentine's stuff, but surprisingly wound round construction scaffolding, all the same.

Every time I go to the Met I try and go and see something new - or that I haven't seen for a long time - and today it was Renaissance portraits.  This is Fra Filippo Lippi's Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, from c. 1440 - the first surviving Italian double portrait, and surely highly suitable for Valentine's day.

Then Central Park again, walking back -

and a Valentine's Day dinner in - where else? - the Oyster Bar on Grand Central Station.  Admittedly we had to wait a very, very long time - let's say we had a 7 p.m. reservation, and the food arrived at 8.20 - and my fish was very, very cold (and yes! we got a comp on that, because of the wait and the far from ideal temperature when it arrived) - which made it a very cheap, but delicious martini.  The dinner company was pretty good, too.  I couldn't believe Alice had never eaten there before - such a longterm favorite spot of mine.

 

Inside and outside CAA

I'll start with the good news - our graduate admissions portal has now unfrozen, and all is rolling along again.  But that was a very queasy-making 48 hours, and who knows what is to come.

Today's serendipity - I was sitting over on the very far side of a session, and had to take a photo of the slide on the screen and blow it up in order to read its caption - and realized that in doing so, completely inadvertently, I'd taken a happy photo of one of my colleagues.

And then, outside, on 6th Avenue, in the real world, the notice on a lamppost advising one what to do if ICE turns up at one's home, and what one's rights are.

 

Big Apple (and CAA)

This is the perfect metaphor... doubtless someone already positioned it thinking just that, but I was delighted to take advantage... It was at the top of the steps leading down to the Broadway-Lafayette subway stop, and nb the remnants of snow.  All day, the temperature has hovered dankly around the mid 30s, but it hasn't yet precipitated, so I managed to do some errands while dealing, yes, with graduate studies business with the other hand.  No good news (but no new bad news) to report.

I so love being in NYC - and have done since 1979 - even when it's cold and grey.  Some bits of it never seem to change, at all.

and then back to the mid-town Hilton and CAA, and the customary irritation of clashing panels, when one really can't be in two places at once (and yes, this is happening again tomorrow ...).  But I was very glad to go to one on C19th seaweed albums, by Amber Hickey - for a while, I thought Well, this really isn't telling me anything I don't know ... I really should have gone to ... and then it came alive when she started to talk about (with video) her own experiences pressing seaweed, and everything that isn't in the standard Victorian manuals, and handing round her own examples, and once again the importance of integrating practice and historical research was brought home ...

 

looking down, coldly

Looking down - onto Lake Michigan; onto Manhattan.  Hello NYC!  But what a welcome - I opened my email on landing to find that ... USC has "temporarily" suspended graduate admissions, while it "evaluates" the impact of the NIH indirect costs reduction, should that go ahead (right now, being held up by a judge ... but for how long).  How much will that cost USC?  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, around 65 million dollars a year.  For a university currently running a deficit, that's a lot of cash.

 

examining tree branches

Not, however, our own tree branches.  Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the fires has been the number of neighbors who have undertaken major, major tree pruning, especially of those highly inflammable tiki torches known as palm trees.  However - this resulted in a deluge of foliage landing on our deck and in our plumbago, courtesy of a house above us further up the road (slightly embarrassingly, the guys who came to clear it up were gardeners who we'd let go a couple of years back, after the patriarch of the team sadly died, because the ones who took over his work were ... inefficient.  I guess they still are).  But this gives one more view of the blossom, before it gets beaten off by the next round of rains ...

 

moon, blossom

 The Asian Pear is still holding its own - as is the moon.  I'd thought that I'd be bringing you a photo of Moth staring fascinated at Kendrick Lamar - she was enraptured - but it really wasn't very flattering of her - let's just say that it was taken from behind.  But it was a pretty good show, unlike the lopsided game itself - although this household certainly appreciated the quantity of pro-women in sport ads.

evening camelias

I'm glad to say that the camelias have barely been dented by all the recent rain - and nor has the blossom on the Asian pear.  But I barely noticed the floribundance at this side of the house today, since our attention was preoccupied by our neighbor - and two little kids, and nanny - moving out.  This was a surprise to us, to say the least.  She has been there for four and a half years; is a fairly successful screen writer (in our neighborhood, that's par for the course), and has been perfectly friendly - via email - over such things as misdelivered mail.  But she very much kept herself to herself, and no one ever seemed to visit other than people who worked for her.  The last time I saw her was three weeks ago, when she was evacuating to Anaheim - maybe the fires were too much for her?

 - I just wrote a much longer chunk of prose, and deleted it, because it seemed a bit invasive or her privacy, and she seemed the most private person possible.  Even her two pregnancies were planned and executed - so far as one could see - entirely solo.  I'm just mystified by such reticence, such - well, at least she was very, very quiet.  Whether the house is now for sale or to rent, we'll find out - but it's just so strange to have one's neighbor melt away, and all her goods trundle off in a couple of removal vans, without one having a clue about this being about to happen.

a slice of rainbow

in the atrium of the Getty - a Charles Ross installation, Spectrum 14.  The bands slowly, slowly move with the earth's rotation, though I didn't hang around long enough to measure that.  I wish I could see it as some symbol of hope (no, not for my mouth, which is marginally less painful today) but for Trusk's America.  This latest NIH decision - which is going to impact all RI universities, especially those of us with medical facilities, horribly - even had me going to the full text of Project 2025 to see why the government should object so strongly to paying overheads.  Ah ... because these get shunted sideways to fund DEI initiatives, and woke gender ideology, apparently.  Three weeks in, and it's so much worse - because so much faster - than I'd anticipated.  

 

into a cloud

 

I came out of a meeting at the Getty this afternoon in what ought to have been dusk, and turned out to be a very damp cloud.  A long and interesting discussion about trends in Art History graduate education - fuel for our next department meeting - before the annual grad symposium tomorrow.  I wish I could sensibly have stayed for dinner, but since I still can't eat anything that's more solid than puree, and my head aches in a dozen different places, and can't drink because of antibiotics, I was happy to hand over attendance at this normally happy event to a colleague ... and then drive back through pouring rain.

 

the endless lines of furled umbrellas

USC tends not to look at its best when it's raining, and today was no exception ... these tables were waiting for some kind of job fair, which heaved itself into life later in the day. All the same, it still looked dismal.

 

the rain is coming!

... at least, it looks like it, and this time it's coming from over the Pacific, so with luck we will get a good, steady drenching.  The bands of grey and cream and faintly orange-tinted clouds are lining up.  After the last round, at last I've seen some of the many, many indigenous wildflower seeds that I disseminated all over the slopes at the back of the house sprout - this should encourage them further.  And I'm teaching Turner, and seascapes and storms tomorrow - that should be pretty appropriate.

 

a found photograph

In order to carry my mother's old desk downstairs - it helpfully divided into two sets of drawers and a top - I had to take the drawers out to lighten it, and found a few of sleeves of photos that had fallen down behind them - some of which I swear I've never seen, including this one of me.  That would make sense - I went on to Italy for a month after this was taken, presumably by my father, and he would have had the film developed back in London.

So where and when was it taken?  As I said, I have no memory of it, although the Biba top semi-dates it.  La Rascasse?  The scorpion fish?  So, France.  There are, of course, a number of La Rascasse restaurants, none with lettering like this ... until I hit upon an old photo in Getty Images, and, yes, it was in Marseilles!  So that would date it to latish August, 1975.  What I do remember, then, was that it was a ghastly, nightmarish evening.  I'd been in Corsica for a week with my parents, who emphatically were not getting on.  It was just after Bastille Day.  My father had totally failed to comprehend the impossibility of finding somewhere to stay, in France, at that time of the year, if one hadn't made a reservation.  I can't remember him having a row with my mother, but he must have done - we'd ended up, all three of us, in one room in a very seedy port hotel, and at some point, after dinner, he and I both found ourselves, separately, in this room, wondering if we could each sneak out and away.  We didn't, of course - having caught each other in the thwarted act of non-escape.  But what would then have happened?  My mother would have been stuck in Marseilles?  With or without the car, or would he have taken that, figuring that she and I could work out what to do?  What I certainly remember was how happy I was to be on a train the next morning - first stop, I think, was Milan.  No wonder I'm looking pained and sultry.

 

Lugging

Big shout-out to Lugg, who are a local moving company who are doing free furniture transport for people affected by the fires.  So off go three Room and Board tables (one small and wooden, two larger and glass) to a friend's rented house.  This, with luck, solves my problem as well as hers - I want to bring downstairs my mother's old desk, and another desk from 20 Hillside, which are both still sitting in the garage - but needed to find good homes for the glass desks first.  The two guys who came round were super cheerful and efficient, so this seems like a win-win (and free or not, they of course were tipped generously by me, because, honestly, Those Stairs).

 

not quite a lighthouse

The left-hand lake of the Silver Lake reservoir has water in it again ... and some newly painted hardware that presumably filters the water, or drains it, or - in Trump's deranged fantasies - provides ingress and outgress for Delta smelt.  In whatever case, it's been painted as though it has aspirations to become a lighthouse somewhere on the NE Atlantic - an effect intensified by the quasi-fisherman's cottage behind it.

I was unquestionably up for a walk this morning, even if my face had swollen up in a rather chipmunk-like fashion.  Thank goodness for the pain meds ... but in general, things are less sore, even if I still feel rather battered.