farmers' market haul

Today's Farmers' Market haul was a good one.  One French Hen (un poulet rouge ...); one packet of Rosy's tamales and some of her posole, and some of her cherries which she swears are perfect and come from the top of the tree (they are, and they are mostly eaten by now).  One bunch baby leeks, one bunch diverse onions, one small bunch chard.  One tub of peas, one of green beans, and a large bag of fava beans.  One bunch yellow beets.  One large bag of very peppery wild arugula.  One bunch of garlic chives.  One small goat cheese molded into a heart, with pansy flowers, and one packet of goats' curd with green chile (both from the woman-run It's All About the Girls goat herd).  And one large bunch of New Mexico wild flowers.  In other words, the market is in full and wonderful summer swing - and in addition to produce, we have (though unpurchased)

dried chiles and grasses

people wearing their summer hats,

and strings of marigolds.

cranes

Our favorite nursery, Santa Fe Greenhouses, aka High Country Gardens, has been having its three day summer sale, and we came back with a car load of geraniums and herbs and strange dark brown and yellow striped petunias - like wasps - and a huge pot of flowering basil, and of course catmint, to augment the flowers that we already have.  I'll draw a veil over the unfortunate moment when I thought that - at last! - I'd spotted a little pot of cilantro, and was almost assaulted since I was, in fact, stealing it from someone else's tray of plants ... but the victims of my attempted robbery were kind enough to point out another specimen for me.   Round the back there's something called a Garden of Inspiration - which isn't (or isn't primarily) somewhere one goes and sits when one's stuck with one's writing, but rather shows one what one can do with judicious planting and water systems (and purchases from SFG, no doubt), and garden sculptures, here in our desert climate.  Along one wall was a whole flock of cranes in flight, made out of goodness knows what substance, but most arresting - not that I can see us adopting these, since we have quite enough live birds of our own, including a baby flicker - like a black and white woodpecker with a red head - at the bird bath today.

street art and the transatlantic

It's another eclectic corner of Silver Lake, en route to the 704 bus stop, via Intelligentsia for a cappuccino and my latest discovery, their feta and scallion scone.  There's another trainer at the bottom, a ballet dancer, an Indian wearing two kinds of formal dress, a lot of painted hearts, and some strange robot-cop looking figures - plus a lot of torn scraps and fragments.  Contemplating why it should be that in England there's Banksy (a barely disguised portrait of him, or at least a wannabe Banksy, called Smitty, helps the plot along effectively in the new John Lanchester novel), who's deliberately pseudonymous, yet in the US we have Shepard Fairey (he of the Obama HOPE poster), who most definitely isn't, I found that, very suitably, Banksy had his first LA show at a tiny gallery in Silver Lake in 2002.

I guess these are (apart from the painted hearts) wheat pasted images, and they had me nostalgic for my old fly-posting days as an undergraduate in Oxford, heading out at the dead of night to plaster hoardings and occasional walls with posters advertising upcoming theater productions, and keeping a constant lookout for police.  I had an old green winter coat - it'd been my best winter coat at school - with a right arm that had turned stiff with all the glue that had slid down it, and frozen and solidified.  But - and this was scary, to find my memory failing me - where did we get the glue, and presumably the plastic buckets from?  Maybe Woolworth's?  And then I panicked when I wasn't sure that I could remember where Woolworth's was (I was right - on the Cornmarket, since 1957 ... although the company had owned the site since the 1930s.  There was previously a Clarendon Hotel there - just where the ugly Clarendon Centre is now.  But I can't be totally sure about those plastic pails, and the brushes, and where we bought or borrowed them - and what did we do with the gummy evidence?

Boots

Perhaps the oddest thing about this image is that (unlike those of the past two days) it isn't manipulated at all.  It's just a stencil on the sidewalk on Santa Monica Boulevard, at the top of Myra, seen where I was on my way to catch a bus.  I don't know whether stencils quite fit into my arguments about pavement art for next month's conference.  I was talking about something quite other (Tristram Shandy, to be exact) to Emily Anderson this afternoon, and what she was saying really prompted in me some thoughts about anxieties of artistic impermanence, transience connected with pavement art (for pastels get rained on, trodden on, spat upon ...).  But nothing as violent as that tends to happen to stencils (though, to be sure, they can get painted out, deliberately) - rather, these boots, walking nowhere (though I now have a dim sense of having registered the fact that there may be some large footprints stencilled on the pavement too, marching off round the corner) - these images of boots are only likely to suffer being trampled on and obliterated by real, rubber and leather soled footwear.

morning glory

Sometimes, messing around, I just come up with an image that gives me a lot of pleasure  - probably an antidote, too, to my near-obsessive checking of the Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs.  And the latter isn't because I'm some kind of disaster junkie, but we were both in the Springs so very recently, and because Alice's research project (and ancestors) are all based in CS and in its history, that means that I have an entirely insubstantiatable feeling that's its somehow connected with me.  Here, though, is a morning glory, gently curving its way round the cypress tree - and hence, in turn, completely failing to convey how tinder dry it is here in LA, too.

orchid

It's very good to return back to Los Angeles and find that one of the dormant orchids is in full flower.  It's less good to find that various things that I thought were here (a lens for one camera, a battery charger for another) must be back in Santa Fe, or for that matter, in the case of the charger, back in Serbia.  Or somewhere.  So I'm stuck with an iPhone for images for a couple of days.  It's always strange to re-enter one house or the other and revisit all one's personal possessions - that sounds very materialist - revisit even the light, and the floorboards, and the books one left on one's desk.  There will be one less ornamental plate to greet me when I get back to SF, however - yes, dear Moth, in investigating how to climb the fireguard, apparently sent a large Mexican painted plate crashing to its doom (she's fine, and apparently without remorse).  I think this house may need marginally less kitten-proofing - but on the other hand, I'm probably practicing serious self-delusion.

bowl eligible

Walter Gomez likes his bowl.   There is a strange mis-match between sitting reading photographic theory and continually interrupting oneself to take photos of kittens.  I think that taking an image of Walter G can just be ascribed to the Perfect Instant approach (you don't imagine he stays still there for very long, do you?), and I'll leave it at that.