New Orleans miscellany

This morning began at 1.10 a.m., with the fire alarm going off, and the whole building having to evacuate.  No fire was ever in evidence.  11 floors is a lot of concrete staircase.

New Orleans has a better class of electrical junction box.

I hope this couple enjoyed their praline-filled fresh beignets as much as I did.

A hut painted with houses.

Some people do strange things with windows.

Some people try very hard with their balconies (that's a bubble machine on the right hand side).

Some houses are very small.

A centre figure, Europe (even if she does look like Queen Victoria), an 1860s figurine which is part of a Four Continents set - any connection with the Albert Memorial?).

A nineteenth century snail.

Perhaps my favorite thing in the museum: Mary Proctor's Freedom of Expression (1998): Proctor's art is intentionally celebratory of women, and painted on salvaged doors.

From the sculpture park next door: only three of these people are live.

 

flowers in New Orleans

A very academic day in New Orleans, giving a lecture in the Tulane art department, and when not doing that, or eating some very good food, I was polishing and burnishing the talk and making the slide show as impressively slick and apposite as it could be.  So that was all fun, if tiring.  Top - a mysterious bit of fly posting on a doorway very close to my hotel.   Bottom - a pottery lamp post outside the art department, which is faintly creepy.

 

the delights of today's travel

Greetings from DFW, where I am waiting for a very, very delayed plane to New Orleans.  I do know how crazy it is to fly late in the day into Dallas (I gather they no longer call it "turbulence" in in-flight announcements, but "air disturbance"), and that this can happen, but I had a department meeting this morning (unanticipated by me when I arranged to give this lecture - I didn't realize meeting dates would be different this month because of Passover.  You'd have thought I'd have learnt that, too).  At least I'm in a lounge where I've found the screen that will have the Dodgers on ...  Let us hope that the flight actually happens, or it'll be a night somewhere less than ideal and then an 8 hour drive.  But that would be doable, I guess ...

 

the domestic and the feral

We trust that Mothy knows how lucky she is (and Gramsci too).  Here she is, at breakfast time - and here's one of her figurative brothers or sisters in a cat colony in Mount Washington, where we went out to dinner,  This guy is, of course, fortunate to have shelter and kibble, but nothing like his spoilt domestic counterpart ...

 

turning purple

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

 

and this time in (better, different) focus

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

 

garden, again

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