Tommy's, post rain

Tommy's Hamburgers is one of those LA icons that I drive past every day, and that I've never stopped at, and very probably never will (you are much more likely to find me eating a taco than a burger, any day).  Tommy's has been there since ... they change their sign every year, in May - 1946, when it was started by Tom Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants.  It expanded further onto this lot, and then onto the opposite corner, and now has a whole lot of other locations.  Apparently.  I've just found this out from their website, after checking the date of their founding.  At the same time I find they serve a chili tamale, which makes them marginally more tempting - but I doubt it.  And, nb, it's a regular eating place for cops.  But I do love the architecture.

Also, it poured - absolutely poured - last night, and these thick clouds are just wandering away.

 

reading at the car wash?

This is part of a wonderful long mural at a car wash behind the Mobil gas station on S. Hoover - I'd not been stopped in traffic and looking carefully at it before - one of those things that, having taken on board, I'm sure, but not having previously noticed properly, one wonders how long it's been there.  And one speculates, too, who painted it, and why they included a girl immersed in a book (maybe done by a local school?).  And of course one ponders whether the car wash is fully functioning and fully staffed, given the propensity of 🧊 to kidnap people from this particular genre of employment.

 

contemplating the garden path

... as one does, when rain is on the way, and when we've just been talking to our garden person - not the landscape designer herself (who lives in Tucson), but the plants and water and maintenance and general expert guy (who now has a wonderful German boyfriend, and lives in ... Berlin).  This is not 100% ideal, since we only get to see him twice a year - though now he has a visa this should become once a season - and facetiming him with, say, problems with dwarf lavender (very dwarf - not visible here, and barely visible if the camera were pointing in the other direction) isn't super-convenient.  But he is a lovely person, even if given to enthusiasms that sometimes prove to be a bit hit or miss.  Today's real issue were the citrus trees in pots, which seem not be be draining, and they're not doing well in them anyway ... we do love the pots, like a Mediterranean garden, but it would be great if the Meyer lemon wasn't drooping and wilting ...

 

hawk, seahawks

This handsome red-tailed hawk was disemboweling another bird this morning at the reservoir.  I'm hoping it wasn't a heron (it does have rather long legs, but I'm hoping not long enough ...).  I love those herons, but I also love raptors, and do understand their need for breakfast.  Still.  It was a very nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw start to the day.

And later ... Moth and Gramsci were as riveted as us (yawn) by the Superbowl, but yay to Sam Darnold, our former USC quarterback, for his performance.  And yay to Bad Bunny (and Villa's Tacos!) for the half time show, which was fun, and went far beyond that.  But oh, all of those endless ads for different forms of AI (or clearly made using AI), which made me very grateful for the reality of feathered, bloodthirsty hawks.

 

what retirement looks like ...

From my own perspective of being four weeks into the semester, I'd say that Alice looks enviably happy and relaxed ... (outside a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena where we were meeting some friends for lunch: exceptionally good guacamole).  Mind you, it does seem to be the case that her wallet is empty.

 

Getty graduate conference

A long day of graduate art history papers from nine Californian universities - and our representative, Margot Yale, did us proud.  There were many more people than one can see here (and those empty chairs on the platform are for the conversations that followed each of the three groups of papers) - I don't know why it looks so sparse!  As always, the Getty Research Institute organized this splendidly (and fed us well).  And outside, Bird of Paradise flowers, and (though on this visit, I only grabbed a very quick look) a Guerrilla Girls exhibit.  Despite the admin that kept hurtling into my inbox like a rattle of little pebbles against a window pane, it was wonderful to be immersed in a range of very different research projects for the day (although nothing between the C12th and the C20th!).

 

academic conversations

It's time for the annual Getty Graduate Student Symposium, preceded, this afternoon, by a get-together of Directors of Graduate Studies/Chairs and lots of Getty Research Institute staff, discussing - discussing what, exactly?  The state of graduate studies; the form that PhDs should/might take; preparing grad students for a world in which they might start thinking earlier in their graduate careers than they do of ways in which their skills might be used for things other than academic jobs and high-flying curatorial positions.  But we never got to the nitty gritty of how to manoeuvre students away gently, ever so gently, from the fantasies of jobs that just don't exist ... (and that carry with them, of course, the privilege of having a glass of wine outdoors on a warm February night, with the sun setting on the Pacific in the background).