Saturday, March 26, 2011

the shortest railway in the world


Supposedly the shortest, anyway - Angels Flight, just outside my window - all 298 feet of it.   Olivet and Sinai (that's what the two cars are called) have been going up and down between Hill and Olive - on Bunker Hill, Los Angeles - since 1901.   Only ... things get re-invented: the Flight closed in 1969 when the area underwent "urban renewal" - i.e. had its heart and soul and old houses torn out - and in fact was relocated half a block south, re-opening in 1996.   Then there was a nasty accident in 2001, and it was closed until March last year (Wikipedia is extraordinarily expansive on all of this).

I feel that this is fall-back tourist photography: having spent the day at a forum on contemporary art and how to converse across its various moving parts (artists, critics, curators, journals), I need more time to get my thoughts in order about the ways in which such conversations work, or don't.   But I was certainly left in no doubt that they matter.

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