forms traced by light

flying over the handlebars

2012-01-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure where this week's bicycle obsession has arrived from - though they certainly manage to penetrate frequently enough into my daily consciousness (ditto skateboards. I'd be run over, if this wasn't so). Here's one staring at a terra cotta carving on the wall of the student union: one of the series entitled "Student Activities." Designed by John Parkinson (1861-1935) and his son Donald (1895-1945) and executed by Gladding-McBean (the builders), these carvings depict "the scholarly and athletic pursuits integral to university life" - or so the official guide tells us.

Only what might these be? Not anything featured in the James Franco Undergrads program, that's for sure. This looks like some strange form of pole vaulting, involving a fence post and a bendy longbow, perhaps with some semi-comatose studious monks looking on. Or perhaps not. It's one of USC's architectural flourishes intended to convince us that we're in a serious seat of learning (and sport?).

You will observe the sunshine: warm enough for dinner outside, tonight. Is it spring?

bicycles

2012-01-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

I'm very, very glad to see stationary bicycles. They are - not the first time that I've remarked on this, I know - the most lethal objects on campus, despite some completely unobserved KURT-SC campaign, which makes no apparent difference whatsoever. All the same, they facilitate some quite amusing sights: this morning, a leggy blonde on a very pink bicycle (complete with wicker basket, of course - although with no white fluffy dog) pedaled elegantly by, wearing a large white t-shirt that said, in big black block lettering, CHICKS DIG DIAMONDS.

I have a grim certainty that students like that may well turn up in the new James Franco reality web-show, Undergrads. This sounds like a grisly drunken exposee (actually it sounds just like Rutgers, but with fewer clothes, given the weather), and toe curlingly embarrassing.

departmental democracy

2012-01-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

How pretty - when there are lots of different things that need voting on - to have lots of different colored pieces of paper. What one now needs is a shredder, and then to convince the cats that they've always dreamed of using highly colored paper litter. Maybe that one won't work. Maybe we could sell the idea to Florida for use in their primary? This is a supremely good candidate for "when I was young, we didn't used to ..." - in other words, remember when anything like this would have come on plain, boring, white departmental paper? with, maybe, a few muted beiges and pastel blues creeping in? The advent of colored paper for boring office xeroxing is one of those social changes one didn't really notice happening at the time - only there came to be colored post its, and colored folders, and then, one day, lo! Colored paper in the xerox machine.

Christmas card, reprised

2012-01-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

Yes, indeed, for those of you lucky enough to receive it, you'll spot a distinct similarity between this year's Christmas card and tonight's campus view. I suppose I might get tired of how stunningly beautiful the campus can be - but I hope not. Tonight's sky was a stand-out, and there were whole little crowds of undergraduates taking pictures of the sunset on their cellphones - though they were ignoring all the calendar-photogenic powers of the reflecting pool - which, to be honest, almost makes it too easy.

oranges, again

2012-01-23T23:10:00.000-07:00

Sitting there, in the steady rain, is the latest example of whatever mammal has been raid in our orange tree this time round. Coming back from dinner, we saw a possum scurrying across the road, but there was no way of telling of he was the thief. The oranges, for me, stand as such a powerful symbol of living here rather than in New Jersey, and I feel powerfully bonded to them (can one feel bonded to a half eaten orange?). I think what I mean is that in New Jersey, I was very aware that I never walked or drove around and thought yes! This is me! This is a part of me - indeed, quite the opposite, which is probably why, last weekend, I mysteriously only felt a small whisp of nostalgia for a state in which I spent ten years, And yet, coming up the stairs to the house, I only have to smell a faint whiff of orange, and I know I'm home.

the one legged bass player

2012-01-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

... or, an amazing feat of acrobatics ... sometimes, one is just very glad to have a camera on one. And before anyone points out that this is a six-string guitar, and therefore not a bass, I'll point out that a Certain Friend of mine who collects (and plays) interesting guitars has recently acquired this spectacular piece (only ten, apparently, of this particular design were manufactured) and no, I didn't, in my ignorance, know that bass guitars could come with six strings, either.

not my research

2012-01-21T20:52:00.000-07:00

In grey, cold, slushy New York, I went on a research trip - not for myself (though I spent a long time at the Weegee exhibition first), but to see the hotel where Alice's grandfather spent his last weeks. It's not my story to tell, but let's just say that the detective who recognized him from his photograph in True Detective Mysteries (a periodical not in NYPL, irritatingly) arrested him as he was going into or coming out of what was then the Gramercy Park Hotel. This was a newish building back in 1932 - it may have looked even bleaker and uglier than it does now (see below). What amused me hugely is that today, the image of the man - or rather, the image of the man playing the man - who was leading the FBI at the time is plastered over the side of a building just up the street.

And as for hotel views - this is what I saw from the Heldrich in New Brunswick this morning. It looked like they'd all been staying in the hotel; all had red ? carnations in their button holes. Where were they going at 8.40 a.m.?

hair. And chilly NYC.

2012-01-20T19:28:00.001-07:00

Ah, there are, indeed, compensations for traveling on NJT. Not many, but this woman's hair was one of them (and her fingernails - not shown - alternately deep red and royal blue). Of course, it would have been lovely to have taken a less grainy portrait of her, but such is the reality of sneaking images on one's iPhone. This came at the end of a fascinating day reading a periodical from the late 1930s called - yes! - Flash (I've been waiting to get my hands on this for a long time). Unfortunately the NYPL run isn't complete, but I saw enough to make me want to see more. It was a photo news magazine aimed at the African American community - very much at the Talented Tenth - indeed, a lot of it consists of graduation photographs of traditional Black colleges, and of society weddings, and balls and dinners, and bridge parties, and fashion. But then there's showbiz, and sport, and articles of social concern, whether these are about lynching, or police shootings of young Black men in DC, or about workers on the railroad, or about the rural poor, using FSA photographs. Some of these are by white photographers - I traced a couple, through their locations, in the FSA archives, and they were taken by Arthur Rothstein in Alabama - but overall, almost all the photographs are by major African American photographers of the time - Teenie Harrie, Morgan and Marvin Smith, Larry Grymes, the Scurlocks, and so on. I knew Robert McNeill had taken photos for the magazine - that was how I'd heard of it in the first place - but here were a whole lot more, with the preponderance of indoor settings demanding that they use flash.

And the interesting thing - or one interesting thing - about that? With the exception of some carefully posed showbiz shots (which in fact probably used studio lights rather than flash), the tendency of this technology was, in these news photos, not to profit (as many photographers, black and white, have subsequently done) on the aesthetic potential of a dark skin, but was to bleach their subjects. Flash, in other words, serves as a skin lightener in these images. Those who get closest to the photographer may look unnaturally whitened by the bright light, their faces deprived of texture and detail. But, unmistakably, they look as white skinned as they possibly could.

It's a good job that I was completely absorbed by this, because NYPL was very, very cold (presumably to deter people from coming in there to keep warm). Outside, I just wished that I was 8 again, and could buy a furry animal hat to keep my head and ears warm ...

clocking in

2012-01-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

If one is talking about University Schlock, I'd like to nominate this clock to go up against the life-size equine statue of Traveler at USC. This picture doesn't capture the full glory of the Rutgers Red color of the letters. Curiously, describing it earlier this evening, I pointed out how badly the face was designed ... that there are 12 numbers in 1-12; 14 letters in Rutgers x 2, and that what I would have done is ... well, it turns out what I would have done is exactly what this designer did. And in fact, it doesn't work - I think because one can't actually read clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously - it's tantamount to asking time to stand still. Which is, of course, what it felt like for much of today (back to do orals and meetings) - its familiarity brought home how new USC still seems.

mosaic fountain

2012-01-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

Oh, believe me, there are probably many worse things than arriving in New Brunswick at half past midnight and finding that one's carefully taken Picture of the Day - taken at 8.45 a.m., in a timely manner - is badly blurred (that's what comes of shooting in haste en route to a meeting). Let's start with the fact that there's no mini-bar in the room - not usually my first port of call, but with only a bag of sesame stick trail mix for lunch/dinner (no foresight there), I had my fantasies focused on vodka and Pringles. Foiled. So instead, I'll try and calm my wide awake brain and find some sleep before a very very full day tomorrow ... with apologies for cheating so blatantly with this image.

star tree

2012-01-17T23:04:00.000-07:00

It clearly isn't the holidays any more - unless one's obeying the o.k. until the beginning of Lent decorations tradition - and yet just round the corner, at the bottom of Manzanita, there's a tall tree that is still shining bright with strings and strings of lights that are wound round it, with a big shining star on top. Really, I would have needed my tripod to do this justice - but I had to snatch a quick picture in the dark, since the Two Sinister Neighbors were standing on the sidewalk discussing a rusty-looking van.

Invisibility? Ah, the wonders of Photoshop ... ratchet up the exposure, and what do you find? People!

not about invisibility

2012-01-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

... that is, I could doubtless make it be about invisibility, if I put my mind to it: having been re-reading James Elkins's The Object Stares Back for class tomorrow, I'm baffled by his propensity, his desire to see faces everywhere. To make sense of abstract or unknown forms through the projection of a face or body onto them perhaps makes sense (and indeed, I could well have chosen a spot on the crumpled and lumpy plaster of the dining room wall that looks much like a man-in-the-moon face). But to see them in forms that are otherwise recognizable? Do I, can I see eyes looking back at me here? Even if I enlarge it, and cast my own eyes round it, I just don't have the visual habit of anthropomorphization, of sensing that I'm being stared at by the inanimate world.

This has been troubling me since I read it - but at the same time, it provides a real example of the visual subjectivity. It makes me realize once again how my viewing habit is one of thinking about representation - of seeing things as planes and textures and shadows and conundrums - conundra? - of lines. This isn't to say that I actually do turn things into two dimensional art - except through taking photographs of them - as often as I'd wish, but it certainly means that I've self-trained my perception to operate in a very different mode from Elkins's (which is, I think, no bad thing - but I want to see what others in class have to say. Maybe the only honest way to write about looking is to be thoroughly subjective?).

the larder

2012-01-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

Looking out of the bathroom window, one can see that someone - a raccoon? a possum? - is hiding half eaten oranges deep in one of the cypress trees. Pretty though the orange is against the green, it turned into a technological feat capturing it more or less in focus - a telephoto lens was most unwilling to home in on a tiny patch of color deep in the tree (probably my deficiency, not that of the lens, but still), and finally I resorted to the finger-on-screen approach of my point and shoot, plus flash. Even so, it doesn't adequately convey the startling and secret quality of the little stash of fruit.

seagulls

2012-01-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

There was something ridiculously satisfying about this row of seagulls on a campus rooftop this morning. Actually, they worried me - we were spending the day interviewing prospective art history graduate students, and one of the major, major selling points of USC is bringing people out to sunny Southern California in mid January, when yesterday morning they were shoveling snow off their front steps somewhere in the mid-west. Obviously there are many other selling points too - but the weather, even before they get to go on their half-day trip to the Getty, is a huge plus, especially for those who've never previously been to California. But seagulls? Inland? That is, twenty miles inland, or whatever we are? Did that portend a storm? Happily, they didn't seem to be feathered barometers, but they had me worried.

hibiscus

2012-01-13T22:03:00.000-07:00

The most invisible thing today was the memory card in my little camera, which I'd left sticking into this computer (indeed, it would have been good to have had the computer with me, too, but that's another issue ...). So what did one do before the emergency photographic back-up known as the iPhone? Here is one pristine hibiscus blossom lying on the edge of the long reflecting pool that I pass every day on the way from the car park to my office. And yes, I have to pinch myself - it is January ...

invisibility iii

2012-01-12T23:52:00.000-07:00

I'll try not to make all my Invisibility pictures dull ones - but in fact, maybe that's partly the point: a dully ordinary scene hides all kinds of expectations and befores and afters. For yes, this is a seminar room - a handsome seminar room, even if the combination of chair backs and carpet pattern is faintly nausea inducing (and not unreminiscent of Murray Hall in that respect), with people getting ready for a talk, and a whole lot of card signs reading (not visible from this side) "Reserved".

Reserved for whom? Ah, that would be Barbra Streisand and entourage! Attending one of the Streisand Lecture Series, which today was given by Stephanie Coontz, on intimacy and the family. So of course, I could have extracted my camera, or cell phone, and taken a surreptitious, or even overt, picture at some point, although no way was I going to be that tackily obvious. Not that photographs didn't figure in her own actions - I saw the guest of honor, just prior to the talk, lean over to our Dean and show him a picture of her fluffy white dog on her iPhone. So this is the invisibility inherent in anticipation, the invisibility of the event that's about to take place. Of course, if I'd taken the picture that I actually never would have taken, it would have revealed the invisibility of Barbra Streisand's wrinkles. I headed straight home to try and find out (successfully! Wexler's!) what brand of face product she uses ...

invisibility ii

2012-01-11T22:08:00.000-07:00

Invisible people? Invisible purpose to picture? No ... invisible blue light, because its bulb is out, or whatever. A dusk image of a police station on Vermont, which looks curiously sinister (I continue my theme about invisibility's connection to dread and menace), in part because of the absence of any activity, not to mention the unmistakable deadness of the tree in the center. It's also an image that I like precisely because of its banality, and its complete absence of any pretense to aesthetic gratification. Ah, but invisibility isn't the same as absence, I know ...

invisibility i

2012-01-10T22:47:00.000-07:00

Today - Day 1 of Lisa Bitel and my grad course on Arts and Technologies of the Invisible - which was an interesting collision of different approaches - she coming from History and Religion, and me from English and Art History (though truly, we need a cognitive psychologist and a magician or two, to). Next week - we're all bringing in Something Invisible - or that signifies or seeks to represent - invisibility, in order to talk about it through James Elkins's The Object Stares Back. So it's a week, for me, of trying to photograph invisibility.

So ... one might argue that things here are pretty visible, despite the darkness: a spiky cactus, a geranium, a spiral staircase, the lights of our dining room - very over-exposed, because the picture itself is a long exposure, without flash (my current fascination with flash photographs, indeed, is with what they don't show - with the darkness they produce). And why could I take this photo at all? Because the security lights had come on - and yet (and this was true four or five times this evening) I was never quite in time to see the moving presence that set them off. Last night, it was a skinny cream cat, and earlier - smelt but not seen - a skunk. Tonight? Maybe the same, maybe the raccoons, maybe Spotts the evil Bengal kitty, maybe a possum, maybe ... So our first, common or garden, non-metaphysical kind of invisibility nonetheless has a very close relationship to the uncanny - something that unsettles the ordinary; that makes one realize that something is out there, in the darkness, unseen.

waste

2012-01-09T22:59:00.003-07:00

At the end of last semester, a plea for help went out from Josh Goldstein, one of our colleagues in History:

I am teaching a course next semester on the history (and present) of waste (HIST 441) and the USCDornsife packets that college faculty all received yesterday seem like a great object lesson to kick off my semester. If you have not already disposed of yours and would like to, could you please leave whatever part of the packet you would otherwise throw away in front of my office? I come in daily and hope to have a large collection by next week. My office is in SOS, second floor, SOS 260.

I am also willing to pick up packets from departments if you collect a few but find crossing campus a bit too much trouble.

Aimee Bender, in our department, was good enough to place a couple of cardboard boxes outside her door to facilitate collection: I was terrifically happy to place my contribution within it. Context: our College was Named last year, thanks to a very, very generous gift. And I'm very happy to celebrate and thank the Dornsifes in all kinds of suitable ways, and, indeed, to make sure that the College's New Name gets out there - I think I've remembered to put it on my email signature, and so on. And when I get round to ordering some business cards - or rather, when I decide if I ought to have ones that place me in Art History, or English, or both (oh, complexity), I'll make sure that they say Dornsife loud and clear - just like the helpful booklet that was included in this package, encased in mock leather like an upmarket hotel room directory and menu, directs me to do. And of course I'm always happy with a new pen. But. Honestly. What dreadful piece of gratuitous conspicuous consumption is this tacky plastic car number plate surround? I am going to look at the cars in the car park in seven weeks time, and see if I need more than one hand to count the number that are proudly sporting what I'm quite sure much have provided a tiny boost to the corner of the Chinese economy, and must have added a whole lot more liters of toxic fumes into their polluted air. Of course, having donated this as Waste, I can't now double check the place of manufacture. But even if it had been handcrafted from recycled telephone directories in Detroit (which it manifestly isn't), is this really necessary? Indeed, not. Indeed, it's embarrassing.

conference food

2012-01-08T23:30:00.000-07:00

or, in this case, lack of it. Not that I would have been likely to have been tempted. Conference food is such a strange amalgam - on the one hand, so long as one organizes it, some wonderful meals out and catching up with friends. On the other - snatched bites (in my case it usually seems to be slices of Starbucks pumpkin bread, which is doubtless not healthy) at times that probably don't correspond with normal meal times at all. This, however, seems especially suitable for someone who's about to start (co-) teaching a course on invisibility - it's the non-existent croissant! It's a perfect example of an empty signifier! Wow - it's a long, long time in conference years, or decades, since I worried about the concept of the Empty Signifier.

walking around

2012-01-08T00:45:00.000-07:00

... except I haven't done very much of that, at all - just down the street to get a salad at lunchtime, and then over to a divisional committee meeting in another hotel. Even the dinner that I organized (for the Society of Novel Studies, and Nancy Armstrong unveiled the splendiferous line up of speakers and panels for our conference in April, and Jonathan Arac and I somehow agreed that the 2014 conference should be at USC) - even the dinner was in a restaurant attached to my own hotel (for the record, Tulio is a tremendously authentic Italian place to eat). All the same, the last time that I was in Seattle I didn't take on board quite how spectacular all the different collisions in architecture are - and this time I wish that I had more opportunity to look.

The one thing that I've learned from this convention is the monstrosity of having the MLA now colliding head on with the semester. It was fine, at Rutgers, when we didn't start teaching again until after MLK day. But I'll be behind a desk on Monday. Or behind several desks, since I'll be wearing different heads, or do I mean hats, in different departments. On reflection, probably heads.

interviewing

2012-01-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

Although, of course, one can't actually write about interviewing, can one? Only to say that this is the view from the position of the Search Committee's Chair, and that despite being truly interested in what every single candidate today had to say, I did spend some stray minutes looking at the way in which they were neatly reflected, in inverted form, on the shiny table top (for yes, I did manage to obtain a meeting room - this is not some item of furniture in my non-suite suite), and wishing I could photograph them. Instead, here's the reflection of the flat screen TV ... some papers ... and that general interrogative atmosphere that pervades - how could it not? - an interview room.

And here, since my head hurt too much to post them yesterday, are a few belated images from the Art Museum ...

... and the cheese, in vats, at Beecher's Handmade Cheese, at Pike Place Market. I do wish I felt more like eating at this MLA, and will continue to ponder my ability to get sick, in one form or another, at this annual event ...

looking at art

2012-01-05T23:46:00.000-07:00

Looking at SAM - the Seattle Art Museum - was today's high spot, before a migraine settled in like Pacific Coast fog (too painful to write ... aggghhhhh).

welcome to Seattle ...

2012-01-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

Well, o.k., yesterday's wasn't the final holiday picture. This one continues a theme: strange seasonal decorations in airports. I guess these supernally illuminated quasi silver birch trunks are meant to suggest the Pacific North West - hell, it IS the Pacific North West. And, just as it's meant to do in Seattle, it's raining. I would be happy to be here, were it not for the search committee chair's nightmare - that the Interview Suite one reserved back in the summer turns out to be one very, very large room with a very large bed in it. So, whatever other plans I might have had for tomorrow, they're going to have to be subordinated to talking to the hotel manager, etc etc. Perhaps the chilliness of the arboreal welcome was telling me something.

reindeer. And Santorum.

2012-01-03T22:51:00.001-07:00

I think that this must be the last seasonal image that I'm posting - an illuminated reindeer head in Casa, just off St Francis. Or perhaps it's the first seasonal image of 2012 - a Christmas card candidate that's risen to the top early. But who knows what things will be like in eleven and three quarter months time? I'm typing this watching the tail end of the Iowa caucus, with Santorum leading Romney by just 5 votes, and with him having just given his nearly-well-maybe victory speech. The scary thing about this (over and beyond the "I have a tiny daughter who might well have been aborted if she'd been conceived by some callous Democrat" line at the end - I paraphrase, or read between the lines, of course ...) was that he can make a good speech (Romney is toe-curlingly carrying on right now, Obama bashing - just remember that trip he made with his dog on the car roof). Santorum, indeed, was credible in his populism; in his appeal to workers by endorsing hard work; in his straightforward energetic cheerfulness. That is, he looked like a version of Obama four years ago, so far as a conservative Republican could possibly resemble such a thing. I'm so hooked - have been hooked, I think, since I first went to the polls with my mother in Brampton, Cumberland, in 1959 (effectively Harold Macmillan vs. Hugh Gaitskell) on politics that of course I love every last twist and surprise and even dull political debate. But I don't want this to turn into a scary close election - and I was (oh no, Romney is rambling, and quoting America the Beautiful, at length, and perhaps forgetting he's speaking - another verse! patriot dream! - to a national audience) alarmed to see a half-way to viable speech from Santorum tonight. Eeek.

domesticity

2012-01-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

In the perfect gold of evening sunshine, even slicing brussel sprouts turns into an idyllic seeming activity. It's also profoundly hard to contemplate leaving this for the rainy wilds of Seattle - not that I didn't like Seattle on my only previous trip there, but this has been such a travel-filled couple of weeks that I could very happily pass a few more days here and then drive gently back to Los Angeles.

celebratory! (three years, and counting...)

2012-01-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm quite sure that the occupants of 66 Monte Alto Road didn't put the balloons on their mail box for me - but I'm very happy to hi-jack their celebratory spirit - for today is the third birthday of Forms Traced By Light! (the very first entries were FaceBook-only ones, before I got brave, so they don't show up in the archive here. Nonetheless, they exist ...). So - three years of a daily image, a daily chunk or less of prose, and only a very few of these posted a few hours late, when technological circumstances demanded it.

Some time around October, in particular, I start to fantasize about how good it would be to be liberated from the daily ritual (inevitably, this is about ten o'clock at night on a busy day, when I'm teaching on the following one, and not a single object in the house [or cat] seems to have gone unphotographed or unremarked upon). But then, as January 1st gallops towards me, I realize that it would be so very hard to stop, or even to be more selective - only posting when I've taken a really good photo, or I have something noteworthy to remark upon. That, however, would be to forego the dailiness that has come to characterize the practice - and indeed, sometime during the last month or so, I even managed to write that piece on fiction and the everyday that's been haunting these postings for the last year or so, and which has helped me to realize the impulse towards noticing more, or noticing more thoughtfully, or simply taking cognizance of unexpected beauty, or textures, or for that matter street art that comes across my past. Best of all, though, is having this kind of visual diary to look back on - a public one, to be sure, but from my private perspective, I can easily read between an awful lot of apparently blank lines.

So - onwards with another year ...

2011 fades away ...

2011-12-31T22:19:00.000-07:00

It's the end of 2011, fading away over the Sandias. It's the end of the year ritualistic sunset post. It's a time for reflection on the year past, of course, a great deal of which seems to have been spent in motion - not just between New Jersey and California and New Mexico, although, admittedly, that's been the most frequent trajectory. So a good number of my New Year's resolutions seem to have to do with trying to feel focused (settled might be too much to hope for, and in any case, I don't know that I like "settled"), and trying to calm distractions, digital and otherwise. Not that this excludes travel (and indeed, 2012 promises to be a year with a good deal of traveling in it) - but it does mean managing to sit still for more than five minutes at a time without either googling or reaching out my hand for another book, a different book, another piece of paper (yes, I still use the products of dead trees). And if I do, indeed, reach out for paper, I want, this year, to make myself draw on it, rather than read it (or write on it), more often than I do, or more often than I've done for years. So ... an hour and a half to go, here in New Mexico, and it'll be 2012, and all those resolutions, voiced and private, will roll into being.

It's going to be a good year. Happy 2012, everyone.

wedged

2011-12-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

People are very good about telling us their own versions of a feline It Gets Better. She'll offer herself up to be stroked when she's five! She'll jump in your lap when she's eight!! One day, when you least expect it, she'll walk up to you and ask to be petted!!! The horrible fact remains that Bitzi, aka DandyLion, aka The Orange Thing, is - at three and a half - showing no signs of any of the above as yet. At least she's no longer hiding under the bed - but one can hardly cite this as proof of advancement in socialization, since we've blocked it all off with many plastic storage crates. Indeed, we can stroke her, in this corralled state, between a bedside cabinet (note the traditional northern New Mexico woven willow twigs) and the wall, but it feels like a rather hollow victory, as she crouches back and cowers at our approach. She can't even be bribed, face to face, with an illegally imported Waitrose cat treat of freeze dried whitefish (though a cube of the same, left an inch from her pretty little ginger muzzle, disappeared once I was out of the room). Maybe 2012 will be the breakthrough year?

visi?

2011-12-29T21:25:00.000-07:00

At the corner of Don Diego and Cordova, a wonderful piece of street art (one of Santa Fe's many decorated electric boxes that contain - what? - transformers? fuses?) - in the wintry evening sun. But what does this mean? Visi-bility? It seems like some Latin past tense, but if so, I can't hit on it. "Visi" means "all" in Lithuanian, but frankly, that seems even less likely. And what is this woman wearing on her head? Some kind of veil? A Madonna like headdress? And what are those designs in the corner, like scarabs with wandering legs?

Sunset. With icicle.

2011-12-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

We are so very happy to be back in New Mexico ... and were treated to a spectacular winter's sunset. There are many icicles hanging off the canales at the side of our house, and some huge lumps of ice that seem to have fallen off, as well. One of the benefits of being shockingly tired is that one can really enjoy looking at the sky.

six thousand miles

2011-12-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

or thereabouts separated waking up in Wimbledon, and being home for dinner (and gin-and-orange, the oranges being picked and squeezed fresh off the tree) in Los Angeles. And this evening scene could, really, be at either end of the spectrum. All the same, given this morning's dull London sky, the perfect blue here surely gives away the location of the image. I'm still shaking my head at how both ends can be so familiar, be so obviously Home - whether it's the crumbling stucco of all the West London semis that we passed in the cab this morning, or the camelias and oleanders lining the front gardens here. And it's the same very young moon in both places, too.

sheepy

2011-12-26T16:43:00.000-07:00

Back home for Christmas? How doth one revert to childhood - ah, let me count the ways ... At least one has one's old stuffed toys for comfort ... That's hyperbolic cheating, of course: Sheepy is only about thirty five years old - a veritable lamb. However, I do wish I could capture that sense of identity with objects (books? pictures? place, even?) that constitutes a recognition of one's selfhood, and that offers a sense of continuity. To remark on that goes flagrantly against every residual post-modern bone in my body, and perhaps constitutes pretty much a dismembering of the same. For I certainly do viscerally - if not always intellectually - believe, or need to believe, in such a continuity - the kind that makes me lie in bed at night, hunting after sleep, and piecing together an autobiography that would be pulled together through paintings/illustrations that I recollect, going way back in time (but there again, sleep-seeking, maybe I'd do better counting sheep).

recording Christmas

2011-12-25T16:45:00.000-07:00

A Christmas photo essay. My father comes into the living room. Flip camera in hand, making a record of the day (complete with commentary). My mother looks decidedly apprehensive.

Nonetheless, she leans forward, obligingly, towards the camera - if still looking as though it's not quite what she wants to be happening ...

... but all is well! Simba is, indeed, the true star of the show.

farolitos

2011-12-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

These may be the only farolitos burning in London SW19 tonight. If we can't be in Northern New Mexico for Christmas, let's import what we can here. So the sandwich bags - of exactly the right height and thin heft - are from Kaune's food store in Santa Fe. The tea lights, admittedly, we bought down the hill in Waitrose. And the ballast? Inspiration struck around 3 p.m., and we went out and bought a bag of cat litter. Of course, the only cat litter on sale in Wimbledon Village at 3.30 p.m. on Christmas Eve is 99% dust free, "gold quality," lightly perfumed, and costs nine pounds fifty. But this is a small price to pay for having little lit lanterns lighting their golden way down the front steps to my parents' house.

mugs

2011-12-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

There are very many things that I like about the V&A's new-ish sculpture gallery - the eclecticism, the democracy of jamming many disparate objects of one type together, the sense that what's on offer is a history of taste rather than of excellence. And then, there's the commitment to considering the works on display as installations rather than exhibits. This even extends to showing ceramic pieces en masse - not as a tea set, say, but as recognizing that they can best make their impact when lines up. or ranged in rows, or - as in the case of Edmund de Waal's Signs and Wonders piece, floating (all 425 vessels) on a red metal shelf suspended somewhere in the ceiling dome. Best of all is Bodil Manz's The Russian Group (2007). She's a Danish ceramicist who works in very thin slip porcelain - so thin that one can see the shadows of the geometric forms that she employs through the porcelain itself - and here she's borrowing wholesale from he effects of Russian constructivism in a way that brings out its links to, say, the chunky form of Battersea Power Station (the largest brick building in Europe - how I wish I could dream up some plan to rescue it ...).

ponies

2011-12-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

It's always good to touch base with these ponies, who have hung on my bedroom wall since - I should think 1966, but I'm not quite sure. They were an inspired Christmas present then, and an inspirational one - I spent a long time trying to copy Charles Tunnicliffe's watercolor hills and trees in the background (on those grounds, I might have done better, artistically, in the long run, if I'd been given a Turner reproduction - but then, unless it had discernible horses, I might not have found it so copyable). I've resisted all attempts to have it replaced: these Welsh-looking ponies standing in a field at one time in my life summed up all I ever wanted.

England. Christmas. Arrival.

2011-12-21T16:29:00.000-07:00

First, the Heathrow luggage trolleys, lined up waiting for the world's heavy suitcases.

Then, the curious fact that there are many, many fewer illuminations, whether public or private, in London than there are in the US - Christmas trees in people's front rooms, to be sure, but hardly anything in the streets, and even shop windows look somewhat desultory in their tinsel. Is this The Recession? Certainly there was a piece on the news tonight about how local councils are spending much much less on Christmas lights this year (apart from those who want to lure in customers so that they make lots of money from carpark fees) - and as here, in Wimbledon Village, there seems to be a strange tangle with commercial advertising.

And then, there are, indeed, some rather frost bitten flowers from the garden on my windowsill - I'd forgotten about this pretty blue vase, which, actually, I always think of as being a snowdrop vase.

the other side of oranges

2011-12-20T15:06:00.000-07:00

It seems incredible that we're setting out for England for Christmas, when it's sunny and warm here in Los Angeles, and the oranges are just ready and ripe on the tree. Ripe oranges also means ... Raccoons! They live, or at least temporarily lodge, in our big cypress trees out front, and gorge themselves on oranges, tearing into them with their big sharp claws, neatly bisecting them, and sucking out the insides like a hungry sports team at half time. And all the little shreds of peel makes it look as though they're into marmalade making ...

graffiti good and bad

2011-12-20T00:12:00.000-07:00

There are attractive little pieces of graffiti - like the No Matter What-ness that's suddenly appeared on our sidewalk - and then there is the spray-paint kind - not the sort that gets commemorated at MOCA, but the scraggy thin letters proclaiming the territory of one local gang or another that periodically marks its turf on our garage doors. This time, it had also primed up its can of silver-white paint on our front steps. Not what one needs. Or not what Alice needed, since she valiantly took on the task of cleaning. I spent most of the day trying to get my slide scanner to work with an up to date Mac - and finally succeeded in doing so around 10.45 p.m. A long and frustrating day, in other words.

the abandoned chair of eldorado

2011-12-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

After those long sequences of abandoned chairs in Highland Park, and the occasional abandoned chair in Silver Lake, I bring you - at long last - an Abandoned Chair in Eldorado. This one looks as though it's been not just abandoned, but joyously, wantonly mauled - by a pit bull puppy, perhaps? Indeed, it doesn't look too bad a chair at all, apart from the fact that someone has viciously disemboweled it. Maybe it has fleas, and someone executed this butchery as an act of charity against the possibility that someone might want to give it a good home? In any case, it may well be covered by snow in the morning. We've fled back to LA, to avoid two years running of Christmas travel being completely mangled by the weather - so it had better snow ...

trinkets and trains

2011-12-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

Just before the train pulled into Albuquerque, we were told - there was a half hour stop, and there would be vendors on the platform selling jewelry and trinkets. Imagine! it must have been just like this a hundred years ago, when the Southwest Chief - or whatever the Santa Fe Railroad main daily train was called them - pulled in. And there would also, too, have been the urban cowboy getting off the train for a smoke (check out those leather trousers, and leather studded wristbands, and leather hat, and - yes - those are platform soled shoes).

I decided that I'd take the train back from Los Angeles (this was planned some time ago, and certainly before I found out that there's such a huge storm supposedly coming in that we're heading back to Los Angeles tomorrow, so as to avoid the risk of being snowbound on Monday, and not making our flight to England). It was huge fun - though weird, since it only occasionally could be said to feel like unfamiliar territory, since for a lot of the route the line runs very close to I-40, down which we drove only last weekend - so one's seeing familiar landmarks from different angles. The mountains round Flagstaff - very snowy - at 5.30 in the morning, with lights on in little cabins, could have been any European mountain town. And it was so very excellent to get off at Lamy, just five miles down the road from our house, and the old stop for Santa Fe - D. H. Lawrence, for example, arrived here ...

after rain

2011-12-16T16:40:00.000-07:00

Ah, Los Angeles is looking very beautiful this morning (it was looking less so when seen from above, yesterday evening, circling round and round whilst a storm dumped a whole lot of rain on LAX). So this is a crystal clear puddle reflection on an old metal table on the deck outside our bedroom. And it's an early post ... because I'm off on a Surprise Travel Adventure (more tomorrow ...).

gingerbread houses

2011-12-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

One never knows quite what one's going to find in the Albuquerque Airport - but I've never previously seen a large display of gingerbread houses - thirty or forty of them, all ranged round a big Christmas tree. And these have all been constructed by different groups - everything from the workers at restaurants who have branches there to the people who are on the crew of particular airlines (the folks at Delta seem especially gifted in this respect). But who knew? Did people go to classes in how to put together not just chunks of gingerbread, but tiny graham crackers, and marshmallows, and pinwheel mints? One display even managed little miniature gingerbread airplanes. The whole circular village of these little houses added up to an extraordinary display of vernacular kitsch.

predator

2011-12-14T21:29:00.000-07:00

Here's one very good reason why the cats never go outside - at least, only under the very strictest backyard supervision. For here - out at the front, and loping past the bathroom window - is an extremely fit and apparently well-fed coyote. I also saw a rabbit in the driveway, later, which, all things considered, is quite a miracle. (He was even closer to the house, but couldn't be bothered to stand still whilst I fetched my camera).

rain!

2011-12-13T20:54:00.000-07:00

Rain is something to get excited about. It's probably rained more in the last twenty four hours than it did all of last summer - which given the drought conditions here in the Southwest is wonderful news. The weather forecast thought that it might come down as snow ... but it didn't (yet). Driveways were turning to mud slides, looking like sets on which to film the Battle of the Somme - we saw one, where some movers were just leaving in a van, leaving deep trenches of tire ruts. And the light was a murky grey brown, the mountains invisible, the clouds dull and heavy - very like December rain in England, indeed, but decidedly more welcome here.

wire bear

2011-12-12T21:17:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I've noted in the past that there's a menagerie of barbed wire beasts outside our Santa Fe vets (where we were taking Emmett to be hydrated, blood tested, and so on - the splendid boy revived enormously after his visit). Here's a bear. It's a sad picture, to me, because of the images last weekend in nj.com of the annual NJ bear cull - not that I've ever seen a bear in NJ, whereas I have encountered a couple, over the years, in NM. I've seen none here in Eldorado, either, although there was a great story a couple of years ago about someone who'd just moved here from Northern California, who'd got tired of finding bears swimming around in his pool in the back yard - and what should he find sitting in his tree in the back yard? In other wildlife observations, the Crime Notes in the Eldorado News for last month recorded one break-in (not in Eldorado itself), and a bobcat and kittens seen crossing a road.

bird feeding

2011-12-11T22:46:00.000-07:00

In fact, this isn't a particularly functional bird feeder - it's an old dish hanging in a tree that we employed last summer to try and tempt bluebirds to come and feed mealy worm grubs to their young - young that never showed the slightest bit of interest in said grubs. All the same, we - I mean - they - reared at least two families, and possibly three. I say "possibly three," because although we only saw two, there was another nest in the birdhouse when I came to inspect it yesterday - and I know I cleared the last one out. Today - war restocked the main bird feeder, and the water bowls, and bought two separate kind of suety seedy things for the wire holder, and are now sitting back to see who turns up.

eastward

2011-12-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

Ah, it's spectacular out here - today, driving between Winslow and Santa Fe, with miles and miles of emptiness, intersected by an occasional train ...

on the road, yet again

2011-12-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

Here we are, once again, on the road - en route from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, and staying at La Posada in Winslow. One of the very hardest parts of thinking that we'd moved to New Jersey for ever was that we wouldn't ever be staying here as we drove back and forth from California ... but here we are, back again, in the old railroad hotel - this time in the newly converted wing, and very beautifully done it is, too (and warm - it's going down to 15F outside, tonight). And here is LucyFur, exploring ...

choreographing

2011-12-08T22:39:00.000-07:00

I love the fact that kids from local schools come onto campus for various activities - but it was impossible to tell quite what was happening outside the Art History department's Holiday Party this lunchtime - although it wasn't scheduled entertainment for us, it certainly involved a lot of very elaborate dance routines. I do wish this particular building didn't remind me so much of EUR - the Fascist showpiece part of Rome's outskirts. I realize, looking at this picture, that this school evidently has a kind of uniform - everyone's wearing fawn pants or skirts of some kind, all of them in the same shade that, for some reason, is always adopted by football coaches.

meetings

2011-12-07T22:35:00.000-07:00

I've been in meetings all day - so what else is there to take a picture of? Admittedly, I had my camera out to take a picture of all the names that we'd just written up on a white board, ordering and column-ising them (grad admissions, on this occasion) - just so that we had a definite, unarguable with record in case such a thing was ever needed - it's not that I imagine a conference room is going to provoke visual inspiration. Coffee, water, artificial light, computers, papers, pens: that's been today.

catching an orange

2011-12-06T23:37:00.000-07:00

Nothing - well, pretty much nothing - gives me more satisfaction than realizing that I need an orange for a recipe, and then going out and plucking one from our orange tree using this wire basket on the end of a stick. When I was small, and our garden in Wimbledon was full of apple trees, my father made a very similar implement for gathering the fruit - only this one was a old broom handle with a wire loop at the end of it, which held a little basket made of material - probably a bit of old sheeting - and that tapered to a point, like a shrimping net.

dusk

2011-12-05T22:47:00.000-07:00

I don't normally tilt my head sideways walking back across campus, but the reflection fitted in rather beautifully this way round. And after a day of meetings and forms and bits of paper, my head, in turn, was quite comfortable not gazing straight ahead. The light, here, is a wonderful treat when one emerges from said meetings. Today's big discovery? A major difference between Rutgers' chairs' meetings and USC's - holiday cookies! With green, Christmas-tree colored sprinkles! (for the record, I abstained, but took note of their festive presence).

bathroom window

2011-12-04T22:51:00.000-07:00

... another small instance of the everyday - or the not-quote-everyday, but very many days - sunset from the bathroom window. I still don't think that I can quite get used to palm trees being something that are quotidian. I also think that my piece on the everyday, whilst deliberately humanist, may be too human-centered, too focused on human perception and possible transformation. Somewhere down the line I swallowed too much George Eliot in large influential lumps, and still find it hard to focus on the Woolfian prescription to write about, to imagine, the world seen without a self. Or rather, the idea intrigues me - would it still, therefore, count as "the everyday"? But I'm already over my word limit, even if slightly, and maybe this is where to start my next speculations.

the everydayness of the amaryllis

2011-12-03T23:43:00.000-07:00

... yes, it's yesterday's amaryllis, again - this time caught in a shaft of very late afternoon sunshine. So it's still on my desk, and I'm still at my desk - give or take an evening at the President's Holiday Dinner, which was most spectacular and indeed fun - having just, more or less, at last, finished writing the piece on the Novel and the Everyday that I've been worrying away at for - how long, now? - probably eighteen months. I daren't check, in case it proves to be longer. In that time, I've learned a lot about the everyday, or, rather, about theories concerning the everyday. Even though I'm still trying to fine-tune a final sentence that says something about how acknowledging and appreciating the everyday shouldn't mean complacency, but should be a springboard for action, for transformation, I'm not entirely sure that this will stick. It may - but at the same time, what I love about the everyday is that, just for a moment, like this afternoon at my desk, everything can suddenly seem completely beautiful. And seeing and recording this is, I know, part of what writing Forms is about - even as I feel, from day to day, that I'm ducking and weaving under the surface of writing about - oh, the Occupy movement, or the unbelievable awfulness of Newt Gingrich - I mean, although I wouldn't do it myself, I can see why someone would go for Michele Bachmann, but that slime ball? Yet I do think that the miniature essay form, or whatever it is that I practice, is a form of recognizing the everyday, and as such, it's perhaps unsurprising that I should turn to it as more intellectual subject matter.

amaryllis

2011-12-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, even in Southern California, one can tell that it's December, not just by the tinselly snowflakes and tiny glittering lights that are starting to appear in the streets, but by the fact that one can buy amaryllis bulbs in pots, that then bloom with amazing rapidity and enthusiasm. They really are remarkably complicated inside, too. This one's sitting on my desk: since it's now the end of the semester, it's fighting for space with a million other different things - but I promise myself that there will be a clear, gleaming surface by the end of the weekend (oh yes, and a completed article, and all my expenses receipts logged and claimed for, too ...).

a weather event

2011-12-01T14:36:00.000-07:00

an early post, but who knows when we will have power restored back home? It went out around one a.m., and when I try and call our home phone, it still says "the person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at present," which is ominous. So here I am, in my office (and that's the corner of Taper Hall, home to the English dept, just to keep the week's motif rolling). And emerging from the building to go and hunt down some lunch, I find that we're one tree the less on campus - already sawn up, but still impressive for the roots that are waving in the air. That red balloon? One of many on campus, signaling National AIDS awareness day.

Winds were around - oh, sixty or so mph last night, and may be the same again tonight. At least we're not in Pasadena, which seems to have been swiped especially hard. I would say that it was terrifying, were it not for the fact that I was so emphatically trying to sleep that I can only remember Alice telling me at the time that it was terrifying, and watching the flashes of electric transformers flashing off in the distance, and thinking, oh! Flash! oh, research! before heading back to sleep until the next howling gust. All the same, I think we might try sleeping in the living room tonight, complete with the wind-up radio that I so perspicaciously ordered as a thank-you gift for this year's subscription to KPCC NPR radio station.

cornered

2011-11-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

I think this is the week of corners. This, in fact, is looking higher up at the Wilshire/Vermont corner than the security camera is positioned on - that really isn't a grammatical sentence, but I've just written 500 words for the London Time Out and feel verbally addled. What's more, this isn't through a car window - I was getting gas opposite these buildings, which, with their huge murals (there's another one on the side at more-or-less right angles to the opposable thumb, the other side of the diagonal in the middle) add considerably to the attractiveness of that particular bit of the commute. They aren't quite tromp d'oeil, I think, since the surfaces of the buildings themselves offer slanted planes), but they certainly create a good deal of visual uncertainty.

another day, another street corner

2011-11-29T22:43:00.000-07:00

... though for once, with me as passenger, and hence able to give a moment's attention to (carrying on yesterday's theme) the fact of recording experience, my experience - in other words, actually being in the car. If I'd given a further moment's attendance, I'd have realized that the camera flash was on, hence depriving you of a self-portrait in the side mirror, and rendering the faintly tinted windows of the car a jaundiced yellow - hence the conversion to black and white.

This is Beverly Hills City Hall. I quote the laconic entry in Gebhard and Winter's Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles, p. 159: "Spanish Renaissance magnificence built significantly at the beginning of the depression when the people in this vicinity felt little pain." If that indeed is true, it must have been a slap in the face to anyone who somehow slid through this confidently comprehensive generalization.

surveying one's choices

2011-11-28T22:57:00.000-07:00

Stephen Shore has a brief piece in this month's Aperture, in which he talks, among other things, about photographing Los Angeles in the early/mid seventies, and in particular about "the jumble, the signage, the space" (exactly! that's the combination that I love when driving to work) and how much information there is to organize when taking a picture. For, as he says, he found himself juggling ever-increasing visual complexity, and yet, at the same time, he "recognized that I was imposing an order on the scene in front of me. Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar - it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable. This order is the product of a series of decisions: where to position the camera, where to place the frame, and when to release the shutter. these decisions simultaneously define the content and determine the structure."

These two pictures follow this logic - bringing form to a little jumbled corner, together with its signage. They also tacitly demonstrate the difference between a camera held by an individual, and the impersonal frames taken by an un-personed security camera. But. Neither of these two has been cropped; both are the result of my seeing the curiously semi-mutilated sign out of my left eye as I was stopped at lights. Both are the result of my taking two very quick shots, so there was no time for deliberate framing. But one, with its fringey palm tree and hint of sunshine in the reflection, is - to me - definitely Los Angeles, or at least Southern California, given that it's late November. The other - urban anywhere. So there's clearly another principle lying beyond Shore's: that of selecting one's image from more than one shot.

But. I don't know if Shore took just one picture - at Beverly and La Brea - choosing a carefully perspectival approach, imposing - as he puts it - a seventeenth century solution onto a twentieth century problem. What he does tell us, however, is that he went back the next day, and re-structured the picture - or rather, structured another image, one that "communicated my experience of standing there, taking in the scene in front of me." So this one is full of rushing cars, and has nothing of the still, almost contemplative (and hence rather inappropriate, however beautiful) qualities of the earlier image. I'm not sure that I'll think of reshooting this tomorrow (though I always end up stopped at those lights - corner of Vermont and Wilshire), but I think, on the grounds of personal experience, I'll choose the left hand side one over the right, perfectly formed though that right-hand one may be when it comes to illustrating the impersonality of the photographic technique it contains and references.

smile at this experience

2011-11-27T21:26:00.000-07:00

Silver Lake reservoir, late afternoon. And really, this is a pretty good motto for most occasions, even if the expression on this guy's face suggests that he's facing something harder than the last week of a long semester.

purple dog

2011-11-26T23:53:00.000-07:00

Yes, this dog is purple, and no, I've not been playing around with Photoshop. I encountered her - name of Tallulah, somewhat unsurprisingly - in Silver Lake today. Apparently she's colored with completely non-toxic vegetable dye (I should think so, too) and, I was told, this is "quite the thing" at the moment. The pink collar and leash is just too, too color toning. Going for a walk in Highland Park was never thus.

strolling around

2011-11-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

... indeed, how wonderful to have some time to stroll around, on Abbott Kinney, in Venice, and then down to Venice Beach. This horse - on a large metal rocker device - is a cousin of one that we've seen looking more and more decrepit in Colorado Springs - maybe we could hire a UHaul, and rescue that one, and set him up in search of a new home outside a shop that always has the most surreal, and elaborate, collection of glass cake stands. I just can't get over being able to go to the beach as part of an everyday leisurely afternoon out (whilst everyone else is tearing themselves to bit shopping, I suppose). It's incomprehensible, but delightful, that this isn't absolutely packed.

thanksgiving

2011-11-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

I'm glad to say that nothing more pharmaceutical than a bottle of Lanson black label champagne was consumed today - we didn't call in at the Echo Park pharmacy, but were merely drawn up at the traffic lights on the way back from a circuit of Occupy Los Angeles. But this looks suitably festive for today. One part of me, of course, desires the full Norman Rockwell folk myth version (which writes out of the picture, of course, every possible kind of non-normativity as well as family bickering and tensions, and therefore is peculiarly un-attainable). One part of me thinks that turkeys and corn and sweet potatoes were a pretty bad trade-in for smallpox and measles. On the other hand, I'm deeply thankful for a day in which no one wants me to attend a meeting or even answer their emails - so I didn't; in which I can spend a morning doing that rare, rare thing, writing; in which we can go up to Griffith Park on a balmy afternoon in late November and be appreciative of sudden deep, perfect quiet; and on which we can have a perfect Thanksgiving dinner of pasta with grilled baby tomatoes and onion and parmesan, and chocolate mousse cupcakes. No weird casseroles involving beans and mushroom soup; no weird desire to place marshmallows in perfectly decent yams (believe me, I've pretty much been spared these, in fact, during my years in the US, but they go along with the mythic territory): a quiet day to ourselves is something for which we offer up many thanks.

massacre

2011-11-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

At first sight, this looks like a little scattering of light green blossom, or maybe of young leaves. But no. These are feathers: white fluffy feathers, pale green feathers, and a few longer lime green ones. I fear that something Bad must have happened to a baby parakeet. There's no sign of a corpse, but this feathery litter on some doormats that happen to be hanging on our terrace rail suggests an attack - a hawk? Spots, official name Lyra (according to her collar) - the neighborhood independently minded predatory Bengal cat? Or what?

Of course, says the Pollyanna in me, it might have managed to struggle free and get away. There's no blood. For someone who was jumping in scared shock all the way through Puss in Boots this afternoon (my first ever 3D movie! amazing!), and who was feeling the terror at every slip and slide into dangerous space, this is an odd form of optimistic reasoning. Because in a movie that's likely to have a substantial audience of children, of course Puss is going to be all right - however tight a fix he seems to be in - but one's body responds otherwise - as when one's favorite detectives get into scarily entrapped or violent situations - one knows they'll get out of it (or one trusts that they will - those authors who break the silent pact with their reader in this respect truly know how to unsettle). But do I really think that this small scared parakeet is all right now, just gazing with relief at her missing tail feathers? Ah, it would be so good to believe in the power of magical thinking, here.

the final Ferris

2011-11-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

...at least, surely I can't cram too many more Ferris wheels into this year? Here's the one from last night, waiting to be dismantled, reflected in yet another piece of USC's water. The original Ferris wheel was designed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr in 1893 for the Columbian World's Fair in Chicago - it was meant to "out-Eiffel Eiffel" in terms of the views that it gave. Powered by steam boilers, it carried on rotating until 1906 - poor Ferris doesn't seem to have received anything like the share of the profits that he should have done - but it moved around, going first to Lincoln Park, Chicago, and then heading down to St Louis for the 1904 Exposition (and it was eventually, deliberately, blown up by dynamite). Quite why anyone thought it would outdo the Eiffel Tower's panoramic scope mystifies me - it was only 264 feet tall, as opposed to the Eiffel Tower's 1,063 (the London Eye, if you're measuring, is 443 feet). I'm not sure how good a view one would have got from this one - like so many modern wheels it seemed to spin and rotate and dip and go through a whole lot of other motions that I know would make me pass out ...

Conquest

2011-11-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's a little strange that I should post three pictures of Ferris wheels during the course of a semester. But I couldn't resist this one, actually on campus - it seems to be something called Troy Week, popularly known as Conquest (no one prepared me for this ...). It's all part of the big build up to the USC-UCLA football game (yes, that same event that has Traveler, and Tommy Trojan, wrapped up in protective duct tape). So tonight there's a marching band, and other bands, and goodness knows what on stage, and fireworks - really, I should have stayed, rather than scuttling home to do teaching prep.

And the view from the top of the parking structure (that's becoming another recurrent motif, I know), was insanely beautiful after yesterday's storm, too.

dead flowers? live flowers?

2011-11-20T22:03:00.000-07:00

I thought, when I took this picture round by the back door of Trader Joe's this morning, that I was going to write a disquisition about wastefulness (coupled with a snatch or two of the obvious Rolling Stones song). But now I'm not so sure - maybe this is just carelessness? Maybe these flowers are going to be plunged in buckets of water at any moment? Maybe they'll revive? It's worrying that I can't be sure of their state, one way or another. In any case, I always stay clear of miscellaneous bunches, especially the cellophane wrapped ones that look like guilt-offerings from gas stations.

But what does happen to less than fresh flowers? Actually, probably much the same as happens to their food. Which is what, here in Silver Lake? Unlike some food stores, TJ's doesn't have a completely firm policy about what happens to surplus, spoiled, waste food, although its website does boast the amount of food that gets given to food banks and individual organizations - about 656 truckloads in 2010, or 20 million meals. That sounds like a lot of food, until one thinks that in the same year, 46.2 million Americans were reported as being below the poverty line - so less than .5 of a meal per person gets given away a year (yes, I know that's screwy math, given how many parts of the country don't have a TJs, but still ...). Maybe that just means good store management. Maybe that means that the so called Donation Co-ordinator that each store supposedly possesses isn't always completely pro-active. But do the same organizations also get slightly wilted flowers? The really dead ones presumably end up in a dumpster - let's hope composted. What does waste mean when it's something inedible yet organic that's wasted? I guess the real waste lies in things like the gas used to transport the flowers in the first place (growing them presumably kept someone in a job?). Whichever way one looks at it, these seasonal bunches were not being well or respectfully treated.

self-portrait. With decorated bottles.

2011-11-19T23:17:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't a split frame, in the sense of being a composite picture - but it struck me as I was typing, this morning, how neatly the screen of the computer was functioning as a mirror. It wasn't, of course, straight upright - that's an optical illusion - and nor are the bottles listing at some drunken angle, but the quirkiness is part of its appeal, to me, at least. Though my visit to the opening of the excellent Weegee in Hollywood show at MOCA this evening - curated by my colleague Richard Meyer - was enough to cure me, through aversion therapy, of quirky photographs for ever and ever. If sometimes Weegee's own sense of humor is forgivable (the Laughing Mule at the Pet Oscars, or whatever the awards were called, next to a society woman arching her own head back, and opening her mouth toothily wide in braying amusement), most often it's jaw droopingly sexist, or just plain silly. I admire Richard hugely for putting together a show that makes us think about Weegee in context, and think about him in interesting ways (and about the society that he was not just photographing, but photographing for), when the personality (and a number of the photographs, despite his slick technical ability) seems not to have been the most endearing. Still, there's a whole lot of Flashy material to get me thinking in the show, too - including some Weegee how-to manuals written for Westinghouse ("I can honestly say that my new book, 'Naked Hollywood,' could never have been done without dependable Westinghouse flashbulbs," goes a 1953 advertisement in Popular Mechanics) that are super-tough to track down, and are now, very frustratingly, sitting in full view, but behind plain glass ...

unpacking

2011-11-19T00:04:00.000-07:00

I managed, at very long last, to finish unpacking the last couple of plastic containers in my office today - very good to greet various items that have moved with me from one office to another over the past decade or so. This mug - which has been minus its handle for a long time - I bought in the Cowley Road, in Oxford, a long time back. But the flowers, the dried roses, tied together with a ribbon? I think they date from my time as chair at Rutgers, but then again, they may not. That's the sad thing - one keeps things for a memento, and then completely forgets what one's meant to be reminded of. Then there's a copy of Vanity Fair, a novel which I suspect I've not read in twenty years (though I remember it pretty vividly, or think I do) and Barry Lyndon, which I have a suspicion I've never read at all - and, of course, my bright blue office bookshelves.

occupy LA

2011-11-17T23:27:00.000-07:00

Those are not tiny specks of dust on your screen, above the downtown skyscrapers. Those are helicopters, circling over and over the - how many? - 20,000? - protestors, marchers, sit-downers, arm linkers, passive resisters, and general 99%-ers in central Los Angeles today. It's also an example of how deceptive a picture can be: this looks like extraordinary tranquility (give or take the pollution that's giving an orange glow to the evening sky), but there's so much going on down in the streets (given that we were in the middle of an External Academic Review in Art History today, my active support was decidedly limited to watching the live stream on line: there's something very surreal about watching local action - or at least listening to local drum-beats - whilst preparing one's next set of supposedly persuasive arguments and positions). That thing on the left? That's the Shrine auditorium - aka the Al Malaikah Temple - built in 1920-26 (after its predecessor burned down) - and more about that on some other occasion.

face

2011-11-16T22:58:00.000-07:00

Why, I wonder, has our green trash bin - the kind that one puts garden waste in - grown a face? I assume that this isn't absolutely recent: it doesn't seem entirely likely that the family of adolescent raccoons who've been bounding around the terrace have been out there with a spray can. although they are certainly delinquent enough to have considered it. I guess it must have been done on the street - but I've not noticed it before, even when tugging this bin - and its compadres - back up the 22 steps from the street every trash day. It's one thing admiring street art when one considers it part of public spectacle, but quite another when it seems to have moved, unbidden and grinning, onto one's own property.

shading

2011-11-15T22:09:00.000-07:00

This young (and clotheless) man is a bas relief on one end of Taper Hall - the end closest the administrative building, the food area, the bookstore, the libraries - in other words, the directions in which I'm most likely to be heading if not to the carpark (and yes, I notice the depressing order in which I wrote those locations - truth comes out, when one's writing at speed). He seems to be shading his light against the sun, but in fact he seems most likely to be assaulted by this barrage of leaf shadows. I've stalked the image for a while, waiting for the moment when the light seemed just right.

wrapping up traveler

2011-11-14T21:38:00.000-07:00

Traveler, as I've remarked before, is USC's football mascot - a pure white Andalusian horse. Back in the days when I was a demon at Pony Club quizzes, I knew not to say "white" to describe a horse's color - "light grey," yes, but not "white". Still, that particular no-no doesn't seem to have crossed the Atlantic, or at least it hasn't made it as far as the football program. A year or so ago, a life-size replica rather startlingly appeared on campus - a gift to recognize the former President and his wife - styled with what even my ten year old self would have recognized as formidable tackiness. However, it doesn't look nearly so bad when wrapped in industrial quality cling film. This isn't some sub-Christo art expression: rather, the imitation Traveler and the statue of Tommy Trojan (maybe I'll feature that later this week?) have been protected against potential depredations at the hands of the local football mega-rivals, UCLA. The game is on Saturday November 26th, but clearly, security measures get under way well in advance.

impaled chair

2011-11-13T22:53:00.000-07:00

After the Abandoned Chairs of Highland Park (there are a few to be found around here, although mattresses and broken down desk units seem to be more common), the Impaled Chairs of Silver Lake. There's a whole fence full of them that we sometimes pass on our walks - not large chairs - six or eight inches across, let's say - and painted in patterns and colors that one rarely sees in an average furniture showroom. Their precise meaning and function (if, of course, any, beyond artistic entertainment and pure dysfunctionality) is happily impossible to guess.

football

2011-11-12T22:36:00.000-07:00

The major difference between watching a mid-November football match at USC and one in Piscataway is that - for all the threatening clouds and general dampness as a winter - "winter" - storm came through this weekend - one wasn't freezing cold, and slithering away afterwards through sleet and half slouchy puddles. Other than that, I seem to have moved 3,000 miles to exchange one shade of red for another, and one Scarlet Knight in armor for a Trojan in a helmet cantering decorously round on the handsome Traveler (sorry that there's no picture of him, but my efforts were too blurred - one can't take in cameras "with a lens bigger than a credit card"). Still, the martial side of the Trojan spirit is a vaguely familiar concept after all that RU medievalism, even if it's set a millennium earlier: I would find it very odd to be supporting ducks or badgers or even the Washington Husky (today's guests, beaten 40:17), whom one imagines show off a live canine when they're playing at home, but here just had a guy dressed up in a grey fluffy suit. I would say that the other big difference, apart from the weather - and, of course, having a marching band big enough to spell out the school's name - is that the team wins - but then, Rutgers came back handsomely against Army, even if, for a while, this was in doubt. For, yes, I might well have been the only person in the stadium whose eyes kept swiveling round to the screen on which the scores from other college football games were being flashed up (see below), and checking in on Rutgers's fortunes. Old habits die very hard. Chop chop.

And yes, that is an Olympic flame ...

reflecting

2011-11-11T22:44:00.000-07:00

So still was the air in downtown Los Angeles today that reflections on the water of the ponds outside LA Public Library reflected back the skyscrapers, the bird sculpture and the clouds so clearly that the pool doesn't look as though it has any water in it. Indeed, even though I know that I was photographing upside down skyscrapers, I can't tell myself, now, what's a reflection and what's a granite tile - if, indeed, any of the tiles aren't blue. It's most disorienting.

Memory. Oops.

2011-11-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a particularly fetching piece of street - or at least campus - art, right outside Taper Hall! Doubtless it will be gone by tomorrow, but it was very cheering to emerge to it this evening. However, my memory went nearly as badly askew as Rick Perry's when it came to what I planned to write about. I usually have pretty good visual recall and association, but my mind came up with a composite mangle this evening. I'd been going to call the post Get Yer Ya-yas Out - which of course was a Rolling Stones live album of 1970, and which I was convinced had a picture of someone sticking out his tongue on the sleeve. Absolutely wrong - that's the album cover that shows a leaping Jagger - I think - and a donkey with drums on either side of what looks like a small runway. So a ya-ya isn't a tongue. It ought to be - it suggests a derisory, yah-boo-sucks jeer - but it isn't. In fact, the album with lips and a tongue is Forty Licks, and I realize that it's taken me nine years to make the connections between licks and tongues - though that much used tongue design (by John Pasche) dates back to 1971, when I think it appeared as an insert card in the Sticky Fingers sleeve. Somehow, though, familiar though that particular Big Lips design is, I'd also managed to conflate it with all the heads - some of them in reduced black and white form similar to this - on the 1978 Some Girls. Perhaps I should develop some kind of sympathy with Rick Perry's brain freeze? Oops.

a rose is ...

2011-11-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

It's a long time since I hit 11.30 at night before realizing that I didn't yet have a Picture of the Day - thank goodness for (a) an iPhone handy and (b) Alice having very sweetly bought me some roses that are sitting in a - yes, rose bowl - on a shelf at the side of my desk. This quick Hipstamatic number manages to look like a rather delicate botanical drawing (or apparently quick - of course, I played around with a number of "camera" combinations and angles). And if my sense of it being a long and meeting filled day wasn't bad enough ... I just sent off a chapter description to someone in London and had an instant reply, and realized that it's already 9 a.m. there. Truly, one occasionally feels - despite the reassuring Englishness of a rose - a long way away.

puss, with and without boots

2011-11-08T23:01:00.000-07:00

This billboard, on Fig, is always my favorite in LA, and never more so than when Puss in Boots is staring gingerly out from it. Our own Lola and LucyFur, meanwhile, have adopted a curiously Madonna-and-child pose. Lucy may be four and a half, but she still hopefully tries to milk-dance Lola, who isn't even her biological mother. Enough! It's a punishingly hard day's work, and back I go to it.

turtles

2011-11-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

Yes, turtles - not in a park, but in a kind of large fish pond outside Lloyd Klein couturiers on Beverly - the kind of store that I am clearly the wrong size and shape even to contemplate going inside, ever - one can tell that just by sniffing the air. But the turtles (and koi) were a wonderful surprise (as was the fact that Beverly, at least at that part, has vacant spots at parking meters at lunchtime) - and the building that houses the boutique, too, was a classy attempt at mock Italian renaissance, complete with a lion's head fountain and faded Giotto-esque frescoes. I can't find it in my Gebhard and Winter Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles - my go-to consultation volume and constant inspiration for future trips - but it's absurd enough to be worth a visit.

dome

2011-11-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

It would be easy to mistake this for the inside of some temple, but the nearest that this setting came to housing a cult was to be the hotel-location for NAVSA these last few days. It's so strange when one's lingering on in the hotel when most people have left - not for pleasure, but because I had a 6.20 p.m. flight, and needed a quiet space with wi-fi. Whether a bar when the Titans are playing is exactly a quiet spot is a moot point, but it certainly allowed me to be on line.

It was a wonderful NAVSA - a happy NAVSA - not only because of seeing old friends, but because - despite all the grounds that so many people must have for complaint (no money! few job vacancies! uncertain politics - the next election is a year away today), I hardly heard any sharing of woe - people seemed genuinely to be talking about the papers and ideas and their work. So many many thanks to Jay and Carolyn and Rachel - I hope very much that you're basking in your success. Or asleep.

conference hotel

2011-11-05T21:18:00.000-06:00

There has been barely a moment to step outside the conference - at least, not if one doesn't want to miss stuff that one doesn't want to miss ... but this tree lies between the hotel and Starbucks, and of course made me wish that I'd taken the time - when I did have a few spare moments - to wander around in the kind of glorious fall colors that one doesn't get in LA. There, the deciduous leaves, for the most part, just get very desiccated and brown and then sulkily fall off when it rains. Whereas here ...

I have such fun at conferences - seeing people, above all (though among the papers that I heard today were a couple of life-saving references, quite apart from their intrinsic merits) - and NAVSA always seems like a big party and reunion. And I particularly like running into people (You Know Who You Are), who tell me that not only do they enjoy reading/looking at "Forms," but appreciate the fact that what I write tends to be fairly short, rather than screeds of polemic. You can't imagine how much that assuages my guilty apprehension that I should be coughing up intellectual commentary, rather than a daily version of paragraphs from an Occasional Essay.

seats

2011-11-04T23:35:00.000-06:00

All I can say is that this view is the complete opposite of the conference - emptiness and silence in the football stadium outside my window, but inside ... it's 12.30 a.m., in other words, and this is the first chance that I've had to post a picture of - well, abstracted emptiness.

golden Nashville

2011-11-03T22:19:00.000-06:00

Perhaps NAVSA this year has been sponsored by Midas? I don't have the stunning park-and-Parthenon view, but the football stadium at dawn, though the curtains, was quite picturesque - at least until the rain descended a few minutes later. The true star of the day, though, was inside the Parthenon, where we had a sumptuous and fun reception (as a 2013 co-organizer of the conference, I find myself looking at the excellence of this year's organization with admiration and trepidation. And, o.k., it may be admissible for it to rain here, but people will want their money back if it pours in Pasadena ...). I didn't even know that there was an inside to this replica. But there, on the upper level, is a quite extraordinary sight - a 41' 10" gilded statue of Athena. Just like in Ancient Greece ... And this isn't some piece of monstrous Victorian kitsch, but was built between 1982-1990, left pure white for twelve years, and then gilded in 2002. I really don't know what to say, other than that it's startlingly big, and that if this is ever rediscovered after some monstrous Armageddon, people are going to come to some strange conclusions about life in late C20th/early C21st America.

downtown

2011-11-02T20:45:00.000-06:00

One very good thing about taking the Flyaway to LAX is that one can raise one's eyes up and away from the traffic, and appreciate the beauty of downtown in the relatively early morning light. To be honest, the best specific thing about this bus was that it left at 9.10 a.m., rather than the 9.00 that I'd feared.

cleaning up after Trojans

2011-11-01T22:44:00.000-06:00

I'm getting habituated to the amount of Trojan stuff around campus - the helmets, the torches, the injunction to Fight On! that - in electronic red lettering - sends me off on my way home from the car park each day. Given what happened to the Trojans, that always seems to me to smack of heroic defeat ... and that was very much brought home today by this, a trash truck. What cleaned up after the Trojans? The Greeks! Is this a wonderful piece of deliberate irony? I wish I knew - but a little bit of Googling reveals that they're quite a wide-based SoCal firm, so they're not a locally generated piece of inspiration. Still, it made my morning, and it's not often that one can say that about trash collection.

bat

2011-10-31T22:26:00.000-06:00

Happy Hallowe'en! Here's my bat - a finger puppet, bought at the Huntington on Saturday. Unfortunately I haven't had all that many opportunities to flap her around today (though I was quite relieved that no trick or treaters rang our doorbell - we didn't think they would, and so hadn't laid in any store of miniature Snickers bars and the like). And even more upsettingly there was a feature on NPR this morning about the white-nosed fungus that's killing off bats in large numbers: this made me think that it would have been most appropriate if a percentage of the proceeds from these gauze and velvet critters had gone on bat conservation - on such means as lowering the temperature in bat caves to levels where the corrosive fungus no longer thrives.

fair

2011-10-31T00:31:00.000-06:00

Here's the Ferris wheel again, as seen from our top deck, just starting to shine out under a ridiculously beautiful sunset. I'm not sure whether this is a Halloween fair, or a Day of the Dead one, or just something that happens to be there at this season - which, in turn, seems very much like an old autumnal hiring fair, a Michaelmas ritual. This is a very anachronistic association, and I think may owe something to seeing Weekend this week, with a scene set briefly (candy floss, dodges) at the Nottingham Goose Fair (held in the first week of October, so I'm nearly a month out) - something that, in turn, led me to try and concoct a completely anachronistic and probably utterly untenable link between the film and D. H. Lawrence.

lantern

2011-10-30T01:22:00.000-06:00

Dear friends in New Jersey (and elsewhere in the North East) - it's with apologies that I post a picture of one of our halloween lanterns hanging from the orange tree - with a perfect blue sky, and temperatures in the mid-80s ...

parents' day

2011-10-28T22:17:00.000-06:00

And this is the campus, showing itself off at the very end of October in the sunshine (mid 70s today), with parents being welcomed in every corner; being fed lunch; being taken to classes by their offspring - all of them wearing labels round their necks with their names and the place that they've come from. Placards everywhere, promising everything from the Christian Parent Challenge to a seminar to "Coming Out at College". What I'd really like to document, of course, would be the variety of student relationships with their parents, ranging from apparent we-are-best-friends to acute embarrassment (the young man with an invisible, but highly legible bubble over his head reading "Mom! I don't believe it! How could you wear That? I mean ... a leopard print mini-dress and titteringly high mock wood platform sandals?? GEE - you look just like a hooker ... it's so embarrassing.") But of course, being moderately well behaved faculty, I confine myself to one of the many, many clumps of balloons.

band practice

2011-10-27T22:18:00.000-06:00

So this is what I hear from my office, afternoon after afternoon. The entire marching band was working out in the track and field area when I was on my way to a talk at 4.30 - they'd been there for a while; they carried on through the talk, and I think I'd never appreciated what hard physical work it must be - not just for the people carrying the heaviest instruments, but for everyone having to walk around in formation, and wave flags, and make moves that look as though they had their origins in C18th quadrilles rather than in military formations. But seeing them hard at work brought home quite how different US universities are from UK ones - yes, of course I'd noticed this in a million different respects, but seeing a band and its entourage play fanfares and uplifting tootles and whirl in formation made me feel like a Martian.

puss in boots 2

2011-10-26T23:39:00.000-06:00

And then there's this little piece of irony: the alluring bad-boy ginger cat poster on the bench, saying, in mock-menace, I KEPT THIS SEAT WARM FOR YOU. The street person, wearing an unusual combination of non-gendered clothes in order to keep warm, one imagines, for fall is indeed here, may or may not have appreciated this sentiment - though it's unclear whether this was, indeed, his bed for the night, or whether he's parked his belongings on it having rescued a paper for reading from the bin. And I was driving past listening to an NPR piece about why Americans don't riot as much as people in Europe (hypothesis: that those who are rich because they've worked hard aren't resented - though evil bankers, say, are resented plenty) - but surmising that this national non-characteristic might be starting to wear thin. Indeed.

puss in boots

2011-10-25T22:44:00.000-06:00

If it's not something growing in the yard that I'm featuring, it's a cat. You can tell what part of the semester we've arrived at. And it's raining. We are all awaiting the emergence of the new 3D Puss in Boots film. In the meanwhile, the Senior Cats have a new thermal blanket - not an electric blanket, but something that picks up the warmth from their bodies and relays it back to them (in other words, it's a mat filled with some probably totally toxic substance). This has proved extremely popular - I rushed to find my camera when I came upon Lola (above) and Emmett both crowded onto it, although Emmett confused my rapid disappearance with the fact that I might be about to give him his dinner.

flowering cacti

2011-10-24T22:03:00.000-06:00

in our front yard, and really quite remarkable. A couple emerged yesterday, and this morning, when I went to pick the paper off the steps and inspect the shells of the oranges that had been sucked out by the raccoons, I found that a whole new forest had sprung into bloom. Actually, it was a rather cloudy day, and by the time I was home, they already seemed to be folding up again, and I don't know if they are a one day wonder or not.

contemplating gardening

2011-10-23T22:29:00.000-06:00

There are many good reasons to go to Sunset Nurseries, very close to us in Silver Lake, and one of them is the amount of serenity that they manage to pack into a small space - it's full of little alleys that in turn are crammed with happily growing plants, and various calming statues. And (by now I'm sounding like a commercial, but they deserve it) when I came home with a dozen pots of herbs, and two wooden troughs to put them in, and some high end potting compost, all the herbs were in perfect condition - not root bound, not dried out, not sulking in any way. So I'm hoping that raccoons aren't partial to them - we were rather surprised last night, having gone to bed, to have three rollicking, partying raccoons on the top deck outside the French doors into the bedroom - jumping onto the trellis, up and down the curling fire escape, up onto the roof, and clawing at the doors so that they could come in - probably their plan was to bypass the cats (who by this time were staring very hard indeed, straight into an inquisitive raccoon face), and head off downstairs for dinner. Eventually they left, but not without convincing me that there's a parallel animal universe very close at hand.

suspended toy

2011-10-22T23:30:00.000-06:00

This is something of a puzzle - a small green rubbery toy suspended on the telephone wires outside Intelligentsia, our local coffee house in Silver Lake. When I first was in Los Angeles, Alice told me that a pair of grubby sneakers hung over the wires was the sign of a drug dealer hanging out somewhere in the vicinity (I'm not at all sure whether that's true, or - there seem to be some exceptions to this, or at least places where I see sneakers and it's hard to imagine that a drug dealer could ever hover around there. And there are some variations cropping up around L.A. of late - like sparkly painted high heeled ladies shoes. But who knows?). How to read this, however? The coffee might count as a pretty good drug, but that may not be the point. Does one decipher it the same way that one does the local surreal street art - as, simply, something disconcerting, though benignly provocative?

back of a street sign

2011-10-21T22:31:00.000-06:00

Walking round the Silver Lake reservoir (or should that be the Silver Lake silver lake?) is always a great source of baffling street art. Here we have what looks to be a torn and peeling depiction of a multi-racial junior school - though the kids look far from happy - and - and what? An androgynous tiny plaid shirted figure sitting on a mask. Can one try and interpret this (except within traditions of surrealism and collage)? Should one see the images in relation to one another, or as accidentally juxtaposed and separate? How might one factor in the clean and shiny car, which doesn't seem to belong to the same gritty world that these stuck-on subjects do? One thing that I didn't write about yesterday was the sense of touch that goes along with photographs (think about how they become dog-eared, or creased, or simply about the texture of a print). Here we can consider two types of touch: the textures of rough paper edges and of slightly burred street sign and of polished black car, and then the way in which, these days, touch becomes a component of looking at the picture or its details. Pull your fingers across the computer's trackpad, or across an iPhone or iPad screen, and, as well as leaving greasy little fingermarks, you can make the picture go much larger, or shrink the plaid-shirted person, at will.

teaching prep

2011-10-21T00:22:00.000-06:00

OK, I said in class today, get out a photograph. They all looked blank, or horrified, or as though my colleague (whose class I was visiting) had forgotten to tell them to bring something rather important. But pretty soon it struck them ... they had identity cards round their neck (the class was at the Getty); they had images on their cell phone or on their computer; they had covers to their books, photos on their drivers licenses ... point about the ubiquity of photographs readily made.

I'd taken this just before class - not really with the idea that it would illustrate the points that I wanted to make about the different heads under which photography can be discussed, but actually it does so extraordinarily well. Formal aesthetics? Look at those triangle and balancing curves; at the two flowery cases; the line made by the chair back and the woman's back, or the straw and the shadow. Social context? One could riff for a while on the representation of books for class, which look as though they've been formally stacked like props in a C19th photographer's studio; or on the Getty itself as an institution; or on the ubiquity, these days, of such treats as an iced latte. Personal photography? These are my things - and I'll be able to use this image as a memento docendi, or whatever the right phrase is, that suggests that at some future date, I'll use it to remember doing teaching prep in the sun, and the lunchtime conversation that followed, and indeed the class. Technology? It's the ubiquitous iPhone, the camera that's always there ... or I could instance the ability of an App to turn a photo back into a kind of architect's drawing ... Materiality ... or maybe technology ... is that the appearance (and the social resonance) of this blog, or is it the fact that inadvertently, but rather fetchingly, I've managed to position the manipulated image to the right of the page. And to think I never got to show the (admittedly indifferent) photograph at all, because indeed, reading it this does indicate that one can do such a lot with almost any image if one just free associates under this set of headings ...