iconic

It's all too easy to forget that where one lives contains elements of the iconic - here's the Griffith Park Observatory, just under a mile and a half west of us - and very visible from this morning's traffic as I headed off to have my hair done (and is it weird to have a male undergrad complement one, after class, on one's hair?  Maybe not, since he's obviously a hair-conscious guy - shaved sides, and then the top an Afro that looks like a flying saucer, with blond edges - much more striking, I hasten to add, than my own).

Icons are on my mind, since we were having a nineteenth century visual culture day, with each of six groups (it's a class more or less of twenty nine) researching and presenting on the context of six icons/images containing them - Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Flag, the American Eagle (and the fact that rather mysteriously, the Quail is California's state bird - I couldn't have told you that), the Liberty Cap, and Columbia (so also a chance to talk about cartoons and how they function, Peale's Museum, Samuel Jennings, and, inevitably, John Gast.  So have any of you picked up on where Gast's American Progress has appeared recently? I asked.  Silence.  The Department of Homeland Security's website.  That loud clicking sound?  It was the sound of twenty six (not everyone could make class) jaws dropping (and then I posted an article from the LA Times about this to our Brightspace site).  

And yes, amazingly, we managed all this in our designated 100 minutes.