turning purple

It's jacaranda time!  Only ... as I noted a week or so back, when they first started to create their purple haze, it's really very early in the year.  I usually associate them with graduation time - sometimes not even then.  Plenty of rain, periodically; a couple of mini heatwaves (not right now: it's surprisingly chilly) - I guess that's a recipe for encouraging premature flowering?  They look good, at any rate, against various bits of USC architecture (a residential hall, and the University Club).

 

and this time in (better, different) focus

... the penstemon and some (other) poppies, redux.  It was raining this morning, so everything was pleasantly soaked, and that's why, too, there's a faint haze over the bottom picture, as though it's a Russian painting (or an early Klimt) from around 1895.

 

garden, again

Some experiments in focus: the poppies and the garden path - and yes, some bits of each are in focus, which is a bit like me, today.  It's a Saturday: you'd think that I wouldn't be spending much of it doing USC admin, but alas ... On the other hand, it was indeed a beautiful day, albeit with big clouds suggesting the rain that's supposedly coming in, and so it was very tempting  to keep wandering around the flowers and admiring them ...

 

polished

I've been feeling bad about my father's silver tankard for a while: it's been looking very tarnished.  This was the tankard out of which he drank his beer every night: it's got one big dent in it, and various little ones.  I hate to think what falls off the outside table or garage bench it may have suffered during its life.  Or perhaps these blemishes happened much earlier: this was my maternal great-grandfather's tankard, judging by the WB initials on it: William Barber.  I suspect it was a retirement gift when he stepped down from the Midland Railway Police.  He kept his truncheon: I have that, in case of ... well, in case I meet the person who tried to extract 317.07 from Autozone this evening, using my credit card number, even though my card was snugly in my possession.  An Autozone in Marrero, Louisiana.  Since I made a reservation on line yesterday for something next week in New Orleans, I don't think that one has to be brains galore to work that one out.

Anyway, luckily I had already done the obvious thing, and bought some silver polish.

 

early summer

We have an early pot-full of strawberries ripening nicely - not that I'm going to wait until they're all ready, because I know what happens: one of the raccoons that lollops through the yard will snack on them, and that will be that.  They taste so very good - like, you know, strawberries are meant to taste - that it's impossible not to help oneself as they ripen.  I know how raccoons must feel.

Also - the early summer light (or polluted haze - take your pick) was particularly good today.  Yes, I know it's still early April; yes, I know it's due to rain at the weekend, but there was much to be grateful for outside today.

 

signs

... from the ride home: two sets of big neon signs in the sky.  On the left, the easy ones: a pair advertising the Asbury Apartments, built overlooking MacArthur Park (then called Westlake Park), and super-luxury when they opened in 1925: they even had an elevator that went down all the way to the parking garage, and were electrified throughout.  They were originally to have been called the San Jacinto Dwellings: were they renamed after Asbury Park, New Jersey?  The 1939 WPA Guide to Los Angeles - my favorite reading material on the city's history at that time - is no help.

You can rent one right now!  There's actually rather a nice looking studio apartment, just $1,590 a month for all 600 square feet of it (and for the privilege of navigating the MacArthur Park area at night).  Oddly, there's no mention of the garage in the details.

But what actually intrigues me is the Storage sign - intrigues me, because unlike the Asbury outfit, I can't find any reference to it online.  When does that date from?  $20 is impossibly cheap now, but would have been reasonable ... when?  The lettering looks as though it, too, belongs to the 1920s or 30s, when I would have thought that was hugely expensive for a storage unit.  Has it, too, been renovated, like the Asbury signs, by LUMEN, LA's project that expands into the Living Urban Museum of Electric and Neon Signs?  Of course, it might be easier to think this one through exploration ...

 

I want the part where ...

This billboard has been giving me such pleasure on my drive to work for the last month or so.  It's now beginning to fade, so it may not be long for this world - but each day I pass it I think: so, how would I end this sentence today?  Here's a gap for you to fill in today's fantasy ... 

["you don't have to buy anything for dinner - we're going out"; "I've bought tickets to ... no, I'm not saying - just bring your passport"; "the semester is going to end three weeks early" ...]

But actually, I think what I'd really like to hear is - this billboard's going to have a different thought-provocation each week this year: just something that will get one thinking - how would I answer that?

[and yes: I know this billboard is probably a music promotion: this is a phrase from Hilary Duff's song "Roomates," that came out at the beginning of the year - maybe the end of last, and is about a relationship that's already ending: "only want the beginning, I don't want the end/Want the part where you say, 'Goddamn'/ Back of the dive bar, giving you head" - but still: that doesn't stop my conjecturing ... And any case, it might not be: "Mature" was the song that got all the attention on luck...or something]

 

working from home

I didn't have to go in to USC today - which isn't to say that I wasn't doing nose-to-tail USC work, of one kind or another.  But with Alice on a plane to DC and therefore with a very quiet house (cats notwithstanding), it seemed like a day, for once, where I could read/do admin in the garden (and carry on curating and culling that shoe collection, to be sure).  And it was wonderful - however much I claim to enjoy heading in to work and sequestering myself in my office, it's indisputably more comfortable here.

one of these things is not like the others

It's getting to that time of the year when I start to tidy and purge my closets and drawers: this weekend it's been shoes.  I do, admittedly, have more shoes than I strictly speaking need, although this year I am really being ruthless, and I'm going to rehome some (not shown here) that I love, but that are quite definitely too small for me.  Shoes aren't like clothes - as one's feet get older and flatter, there's no way that one's ever going to fit into them again.

This purge, however, has to be understood in the light of the disruption that it's caused, because Gramsci ... is terrified of shoes.  He thinks that they all have spiders, or maybe centipedes, in them.  He approaches them warily; pounces on laces with a sudden outstretched paw; creeps, here, round the left-hand edge.  Clearly, at some formative moment that we didn't witness, something Very Bad attacked him from a shoe (we suspect a Santa Fe centipede, but we lack proof).  So he's found today very distressing.  I even had to carry him past them, at one point.  So ... why is it that I think that Moth is making some kind of point involving superiority, courage, or general one up-cat-ship?

 

stripes

I've only once had a camera card get corrupted on me before I had time to download photos, and that was a card that recorded Alice and my first trip together to Italy, in 2006.  So there were pictures of Spoleto, maybe of Rome, certainly of Venice.  What's strange is that I printed out a handful - but if they were ever on a computer, the likelihood of my being able to find the right cables to open it up again is slender, and in any case, if they were ever on a computer, then I surely would have been able to find them when the card stopped functioning.  Etc.  Etc.  In any case, one of the photos I remember most clearly - and so was most sorry to have lost - was taken in Spoleto, and since it involved test patches of external paint, it was near abstract.  You can imagine how happy I was to find a comparable set of patches on a wall down our street today, and indeed this image is even more satisfying, because of the shadows.

There's also a tale here about one remembering images that one once framed in a camera viewfinder, even if the image itself was lost twenty years ago.  

 

morning corner

This was some perfect illumination as I walked into the living room this morning.  But the presence on the shelf of my much treasured bulto by Ernie Lujan, Nuestra Señora de los Afligidos (very useful when one's feeling low), gives me the perfect opportunity to say how very much I appreciate Pope Leo XIV (no relation to Leo in my office) and his sustained attack on those who wage war in God's name.  Jesus "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them,” he said in a homily in late March, and he's not let up since.  Go Leo!  

 

proof of Leo's longevity

and what did I find today, in a box in my office, but a picture of me with Leo in my very first Oxford office, in Mansfield College, when he was a very new purchase indeed.  I can tell that I've only very recently arrived, because I quite soon painted the whole thing a strong deep blue, like being inside the heavens but without the stars.  Note two other things: the sagging rubber plant on top of the filing cabinet (there was always a rubber plant, back last century), and, on the desk, my very first computer, an Amstrad.  I thought I was so hip and cool having such a thing!  If you remember them, green lettering stuttered its way across the screen - one font only - and then, if the connection worked ok, one could print stuff out on a rattling dot-matrix printer.  The pic also works as a reminder that my current office is the smallest that I've had in my whole career: definitely downward mobility in terms of academic real estate, but I'm curiously fond of it, all the same, even if it's full of - because it's full of? - books and storage boxes and, seemingly, lions.

 

car park roof

Today was one of those miraculous Southern Californian days when the air was very fresh and clear after last night's (welcome) rain: just some remnants of clouds heading off to the mountains.  And they, and the light and puddles, rendered the morning transcendent (at least until, of course, I shuffled off to sort out travel and research grant awards for our grad students).

 

a graduating scooter?

If a scooter had a major, what would it be?  It's getting closer and closer to Commencement time, and students can be seen carrying packets with sashes in them.  This scooter, however, seems dressed in cardinal and gold rather as a statue of Buddha might have a garland thrown casually but reverently round its neck, or a sacred cow might be wreathed with marigolds.

 

owl pellet

and, right on cue, after I wrote yesterday that the black walnut is also the Owl Pelleting tree, what do I find underneath it today but a freshly hoiked pellet?  This is a particularly fine one: lots of little bones.  Too small for squirrel, I think, although there is a lot of grey fur - but I' thinking it's probably mouse fur, or just maybe a small pack rat.  Whatever it was must have slipped down a treat, been digested by stomach juices, and then ... owls are the most admirably tidy birds.   

 

squirrels

We have one tree that arborists can seemingly never agree about: the majority view is that it's a black walnut, but occasionally we'll talk to one who says No, Rubbish, It's a Northern Pecan.  It would be helpful (and doubtless tasty), if they bore fruit, but they never seem to get that far.  Maybe the squirrels pillaging the blossom explains why not ... I was sitting outside trying to read, this afternoon, but they were very distracting (there are indeed two separate squirrels here, and they kept breaking off from their gorging to chase one another.

It's also the tree on which one of the owls often sits, so one finds pellets, stray bits of bird (though, now I think about it, not squirrel, so far) underneath it.  Once, there was half a rabbit, which happily disappeared.

And yes, the sky was this blue, and the mountains that lovely.

 

No Kings 3

My poster this time was a little better in the conception than the execution - but huge fun to work on it, even if I wished that I'd started drafting it weeks ago, not late last night and early this morning.  And every demo, I wish I'd been practicing my always-emaciated lettering.  It did, as ever, feel good to go out there and stand up for democracy, against war, against corruption, against state violence, against - well, everything that's happening with the scary-clown show in D.C.

Good to run into our friends Dorothy and Leo (Dorothy's poster is wonderful!)

One of my favorites ... (with a properly fitting crown ...)

Harking back to the (Portland) frogs of the last No Kings - sadly, no amphibian inflatables today, but the temperature was 85 degrees;

Miscellaneous signs:

and, some flyposting: in keeping with the spirit of the day.

 

poppies

Visual evidence of how greenery is taking over parts of our yard - plus all the poppy seeds that I threw around with energetic enthusiasm.  They are so bright and startling that in person, it looks as though there are more of them than perhaps there are.  Anyway, spring.

 

Blue and gold - Dodgers opening day

Moth has always been a keen baseball fan, so she's delighted to be back watching the Boys in Blue.  They have some particularly fetching new blue (not really Dodgers blue - more like Royal Blue) and gold caps.

I dashed outside to try and catch the military jet flypast, but F 35-Cs move rather fast, so all I had to record was some very blue sky.  As happens every year, the anxious commentators of Nextdoor and Ring were quickly online, asking Why The Military Jets? and saying We Think That Was a Missile - a new level of anxiety.  In the current climate, who can blame them ... although it always amazes me that even if these people weren't like me, with Dodgers opening night firmly marked in my calendar, you'd think they'd guess what those jets were up to.

And here, to complete the palette, are some yellow flowers by our front door.

 

feet

There are some days when I deliberately push back against Professional Academic Norms in what I'm wearing: days, usually, when I feel I'm wobbling on the edge of the job swallowing me whole.

Mind you - do such Norms even exist any more?  I have male colleagues - well, one in particular - who wear shorts from one end of the year to the other, ready to take up a trowel and sieve and plunge into full archaeological excavation mode (not very convincing in South Central LA, but it's certainly a costume).  On the other hand, some other colleagues hit what would be, for me, a level of unattainable elegance, daily.  I try for respectability, at least - but it wasn't always so: once upon a time I was my department's sartorial rebel, and fondly cherish the memory - from sometime early in the 1980s - when a student asked me, incredulously, "are lecturers [remember, this was the UK, so that meant a TT faculty member] allowed to wear jeans?"   Today, it was mood-lifting when grads passed me in the corridor and went "ooooh, SHOES."  (and if you're wondering, they're made by a Spanish firm called UIN, and are ridiculously comfortable).

 

a remarkable ceiling

... in the Tyler Pavilion, the room we were using for the dinner for our open house for admitted grad students.  All the contellations are there, and what's weird is the echo if you stand underneath and talk - like the music of the spheres.

 

garden, spring

It was a very misty morning, but - when I took a quick tour round the garden before heading off to USC - that didn't prevent me seeing quite how much had grown during the heatwave that happened while we were away.  This is looking up the slope to a house above us; past the lemon and lime trees that were planted out and seem to be doing much better now that they've been liberated from their pots; some poppies, sage, mustard ... it's (deliberately) one of the more wildernessy parts.

 

beauty at both ends

Waking up to St Pancras; welcomed home by Gramsci (and Moth - busy eating).  And that was Spring Break!  Back to the grindstone in the morning ... 

 

Penzance to London

Penzance dawn, with seagulls.  Our Cornish daffodils (and there are jars and vases of them all over the little hotel) had come out a bit further.

And then a long rail journey back to London.  The advantages of being Aged include being able to purchase a UK senior railcard, and so it becomes ridiculously cheap to travel first class.  On GWR - Great Western Railways - this certainly gives one a bit more leg room, and some free ... water.  Sandwiches? Not on a Saturday.  "Please could I have some sea salt flavoured crisps?" "You have to pay extra for those.  You can have ordinary salted ones."  Sigh.

This, however, is the lovely view from our London room.  Only the Piccadilly line is closed tomorrow (so that they can introduce 92 new trains), so it'll have to be be a cab to Heathrow ...

 

Penzance, Truro, Penzance

Signs of spring - the Cornish daffodils on our mantelpiece ...

A walk down by the Lido this morning, before we found ourselves foiled by closed National Trust gardens (the effects of the big storm here earlier in the year); by train times, by ...

so we did catch a train to Truro, which has a rather fine, rather plain late Victorian neo-Gothic cathedral - built on a site that had been a church since 1259, but the foundation stone of the actual cathedral wasn't laid until 1880.

It manages to be remarkably unremarkable, unflamboyant, its stained glass windows complicated, but not especially - well, anything, unless one counts the rather unChristian violence involved in chopping off Charles I's head,

and then the fact that in this bas relief of Christ's crucifixion, the figure of Pontius Pilate  was modeled on ... Bertie, the then Prince of Wales.  That's an odd casting.

Outside, in the cathedral square, what looked like a woman holding a bouquet and a tennis racket until you see that actually it's more theatrical - it's a mask and a mirror.

Here's the cathedral from the river;

and now, back in Penzance, the view from the edge of the sea as we walked to our very good, very fishy dinner at the Tolcarne Inn in Newquay (and back again).