the end of 2012

Here's the ritualistic post: the end of the year sunset.  Four years, now - or rather, four years tomorrow - of a daily image and sentence or paragraph or two.  There are days when I'm completely exhausted; when I should be doing other things; where the act of finding something to photograph just seems like one task too many; when I clearly have Nothing To Say (or, much more frequently, when what I do have to say is not suitable for mass consumption - this is not a blog about the trials of chairing a department).  One more year?  Can I do one more year?  There are always those evenings in which I swear blind that I will never, ever, carry this on after this year ... but then I look back over past entries, and I'm immensely grateful not just for their journal-esque quality, but also for the sheer fact of a daily task, or practice, that takes me beyond my immediate preoccupations.

So - thank you 2012: it was a good year.  A sad farewell to Emmett and Lola, but a rapturous welcome to Moth and Walter Gomez.  Lots of travel.  And now - the possibility, even the likelihood, of a new house within the next few weeks ...

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

oven cleaning

Another piece of found metallic sculpture.  OK, it's the inside of our oven, now beautifully cleaned.  Honesty compels me to admit I had nothing to do with cleaning it (although my propensity for roasting chickens from the farmers' market probably had a great deal to do with its engrained and greasy state).  I am clearly the kind of maddening girl friend who hangs around with a camera at the ready waiting to record abstract shiny surfaces when they have been meticulously prepared, but I'll take this opportunity to reiterate my gratitude.

railyard art

On the way from the carpark to the farmers' market - the exposed innards of this electricity box are decidedly sculptural.  There's a Virgin of Guadalupe on the old container behind, and then, round the corner, Site Santa Fe and so on, but for today, I'll happily take this piece of found art.

dawn

After a week in England and a very long day on planes, my body clock is spectacularly misaligned.  The good part of this is that I was up and alert at dawn (indeed, well before), and so able to witness the stunning light (and cold).  The less good part is the inability to concentrate on anything.

a welcome sight

It's the Albuquerque Airport!  Or, as they persist in calling it, the Albuquerque International Airport, although I'm not sure where it offers international flights to - Mexico, maybe?  After a long, long day, it seems a long, long distance from a very wet Heathrow.  And we're now delighted to be back in Eldorado, and are very close to being asleep.

bridge

This picture is a puzzle - not in terms of its identity (it's the railway bridge between Wetheral and Corby, in Cumbria, painted by my father in 1957), but in terms of its weird perspective - it's hard to work out what the stable viewpoint must have been.  Or maybe the scale is strange.  I don't think of my father as ever having been less than mathematically exact and perfect about things like perspective (he did, after all, design the house I'm sitting in right now, and the walls seem to have gone up in the correct proportion and the roof fits quite well.  This bridge may not be Rain Steam and Speed, but it has its great points - the signals; the delicacy of the white iron railings.  But something about it just doesn't work.  Curiously, I think it must have been rehabilitated from up in the loft or from under the stairs very recently - I've not seen it for decades - and although I thought I remembered it perfectly well, I don't recollect it in its flawed state (indeed, I remember the painting as having been done from a quite different, much lower angle - which probably means that I was remembering the bridge itself).  Visual memory, in other words, is once again proven to be highly fallible.

Christmas portraits

Both of these images - especially the one of my father, above - seem ready for a caption contest.  And both of them seem to capture so many different emotions going on, simultaneously, under the surface, that all things considered, captions might, in the end, be ill-advised ...

fielders

I've been going to Fielders on Wimbledon Hill as long as I can remember.  I thought that I'd better check this, and found that the shop was, indeed, founded in 1928, so I'm safe in that assertion ... it was set up by the sons of the guy who was a pioneering Wimbledon photographer, for their wives.  When it started - and when I first remember it - it was a bookstore.  I used to go to the children's paperback section at the back to spend Christmas book tokens and the like on Armada paperbacks like Jill Enjoys Her Ponies and Show Jumping Secret, and the store also sold stationery, so I'm sure that it fed my early stationery fetishist tendencies.  And it sold things like Osmeroid fountain pens with Italic Fine Oblique nibs that were indispensable to me.  Sometime in the 1980s, I think, it gave up on books and went over entirely to art and crafts supplies - as indicated by the current festive decorations - masks strung around, and a wild white paper dress being worn by, a huge wooden artist's model doll, then threaded with tiny fairy lights.

family!

A Flint family party in Godalming, Surrey, minus my parents, who didn't feel quite well enough to be there (understandable, I guess, since it was an exhausting, if wonderful, crew, and both my parents currently tire easily).  Here's my aunt Nancy, and my - what are they, exactly?  Second cousins? Hannah and Alex, my cousin Jon's children.  It was, in the very best sense of the word, a very English party (imagine! Alice had her first ever sausage roll! and there were mince pies, and a Yule log).  And here were we, the semi-exotic semi-Californian branch, which all had the effect of making me feel culturally very - well, dissipated.  Or maybe disseminated.  I have a feeling that I invited all kinds of different people to stay in what I hope will be our new house - the good thing being that it'll be a house large enough for us to be happy when they actually show up ...

remember what happened to the dinosaur

It was pouring wet in Oxford today, or this image wouldn't be so deeply murky.  It must be forty years to the month that I first made the acquaintance of the Keble Dinosaur (s/he has been repainted many times since then, and grown a couple of siblings - notably a blue one to the right that's labeled "I did, and look what happened to me."  I read it first (and, I'm sure, correctly) as a warning to Oxford's establishment about what happens if one doesn't embrace, or believe in, change, or if one simply can't adapt.  Now, it seems like a warning against Going Back in any way except on the briefest of visits to see dear friends (or, presumably, on some occasion, to do some kind of academic business) - it does, indeed, feel very good to have Moved On.

anyone for tennis?

One couldn't have posed this if one tried - unless the crows around here are trained for the movies - but here's the evidence: even the crows on Wimbledon common play with tennis balls ...

port

This has been a very good decision - made on December 27th last year - to come and spend four of the seven nights that we're in London not actually at my parents, but at a hotel ten minutes or so walk away.  Cannizaro House backs onto the private park where, I believe, I took my first steps (and where, years ago, Alice ate her first English cream tea).  When I was much younger, it had a sullen air about it - it was a nursing home, and then became offices for Wimbledon Borough Council.  The gardens (especially the big bird cage, full of budgies and canaries) were much fun.  But I never thought in a million years that I would be staying here - let alone finding that the luxury service includes a rather pleasing little carafe of port.

travel

Through the cracked window of the rental car shuttle bus at Albuquerque airport.  Let's just say that holiday travel, a sudden snowstorm bearing down on Santa Fe (making the drive from town to La Bajada quite treacherous) and buying/selling houses don't add up to an entirely stress-free existence.  Oh yes, and grading those graduate papers ...

repairing shoes

I love our shoe repair store in Santa Fe: it seems as though it's straight out of the 1950s.  The fact that it says on the door that it's been operated by the Ortega family since 1975 is neither here nor there: City Boot and Shoe Repair takes me straight back to stores that existed even further than this, in its placard advertising, its smells.  I save my shoes with holes in the soles and scuffed heels and all other malformations to bring here - and they manage to convey that the more worn and horrible they look, the more I must in fact love them since I've brought them in ...

painting walls

Somewhere to the side of Walgreens and behind Ohori's, someone has tried to decide what color they might want their wall, and they appear to have given up.  We, on the other hand, are fervently hoping that we won't have to paint any walls at all.  Somehow, that letter to the sellers of the house we want to buy seems to have worked (our promise of mortgage money may have had something to do with it, too), and if all goes well, we'll have a new house in a month or a little more.  Can this be possible?  We are still crossing all our toes and fingers and shaking ourselves, but the realtors' site does, indeed, say "In Escrow."  Oh yes, and we have 5 current offers on 962, and two more possibles ... so we hope that by Thursday morning, we'll be able to make someone as happy as us ...

le cochon est content

We're very happy indeed to have Cafe Fina up the road in Eldorado - even if I'm far too wired about house buying and selling to have been able to do anything other than gnaw absent-mindedly on a few chipotle shrimp.  When you place your order, they give you a little card in a holder to stick on your table as you wait (and gaze outside at the snowy landscape).  

I will be very glad when all this real estate frenzy dies down.  Apparently there were over 100 people at our Open House today - we already have four offers in - and - a new phenomena to me - love letters.  Love letters to us and the house, that is - from potential buyers imploring us to take their offer.  Indeed (because we're in a bidding war on another property), we even wrote one ourselves, today.  I guess it's impossible to be original in this genre, but ever since we sent it off, I keep thinking of more original openings and narratives.  No way can we trump, I fear, the pull-on-the-heart-strings language of "wanting to bring up our family in your lovely home" that we're convinced will make other buyers irresistible.  "Ever since we walked through the front door, we were planning where we would put the kitty litter box" just isn't, somehow, a phrase that seemed sensible to use.

Happy by choice

This seems to be a pretty good maxim to live by ... pasted to a pole by Trader Joe's in Silver Lake, where I was visiting in order to get yet another armful of flowers destined for house-selling (much though I loved Roberts' in Highland Park, TJs is very significantly cheaper).  Ah, the stress of it all ...

holiday lights

Taking a job candidate out to dinner - how could one not want to be in a city which winds holiday lights up the trunks of palm trees and all other kinds of arboreal growth.  Admittedly it was puring with rain, but, relatively speaking, it's warm rain ...

ragged

... as in: run ragged.  It was a long day.  And then one looks at the cord that hangs down from one's walk-in closet light, and thinks: maybe we should have fixed that, before putting the house on the market.  A house which has had its first (and very reasonable) offer made on it - which is very well and good (ah, how unlike Highland Park ...) - but now what?  Do we hope for a few more, in competition? Do we accept immediately?  Where do we live?? (etc).

season's greetings

Yes, this is a huge, university-specific gingerbread house.  How can I respond to working in this country - or perhaps, and more specifically, in Los Angeles - with anything other than ethnographic incredulity? O.K., yes, of course, I could produce all sorts of other analyses, but that would not be in keeping with the festive spirit that sent me trotting along to the Holiday Party to see Alice receive one of the General Education teaching awards (a certificate! In a frame! with a check!).  And then we went out to dinner to celebrate, to the kind of place where one can confidently say to one's waitperson  ... "You know ... I'd like a vodka based cocktail ... something citrusy ... and peppery" ... and get something back involving not just vodka, but grapefruit and honey and serrano chile - which went extremely well with LA's obligatory kale salad ...

staging the back

Actually, it looked even better by the time the first punters rolled up on the dot of 11, since I'd swapped round the rather puny plant on the left with a large bushy fern.  The Conversation Pit has never looked so good.  I just hope that the raccoons don't have a beery party in it tonight.  I was deeply dismayed when I went out on the deck this morning and it was covered in large muddy raccoon paw prints.  Of course, I hoped against hope that someone would roll up with $50,000 over the asking price in faintly used bank notes.  Instead of which (according to the realtors), they thought the house was dark; that their cars wouldn't fit in the garage; that there wasn't a patch of grass outside for their cats to enjoy.  Well, yes, I guess ... But what cat wouldn't love these seats?

December morning

New Mexico was almost unbearably beautiful this morning (this light was my compensation for getting up early to roll the trash can down the driveway at a very early hour).  Los Angeles seems, by comparison, not exactly tranquil ... and we've learned a lesson: never clear out of town and assume that the contractors will actually do all the things on the list that they've been contracted to do before the Realtors' Open House tomorrow ... arggghhhhh.

ready for Christmas?

The answer to that question is an extremely emphatic No.  Not by any calculation.  But we do have a very New Mexican wreath hanging from our front door ...

iron horse

OK, so Siri Hollander's wonderful horse - on show outside Mark White Contemporary, in the Railyard in Santa Fe - isn't made of iron, but steel.  But the idea of iron seems appropriate for the railroad setting, even though the idea of the Railrunner (our local train to Albuquerque, that goes at odd times, and even odder times since Susana Martinez has been governor) is a long way from an old-style steam engine.  There are, indeed, a small herd of these sculptures plunging around the gallery's forecourt.

state line

It's always so very good to cross over the borderline from Arizona to New Mexico!  Even if I have to turn round again almost straight away, it's such a quiet haven after the past week of House Readying.  The kittens have been sniffing around, realizing that this is where they spent some Formative Months ...

coming soon

 

OK, anyone - want to buy it?  

There are times that I think that over the last few years, this blog has been about nothing but real estate.  This morning took for ever and ever and ever to tidy, and hide things, and de-clutter, and minimize - and eventually get into the car, with the cats, and leave it to be photographed by the realtors themselves ...

chairing

is a fine occupation for a cat.  The human, academic variety - let's just say that at this stage of the semester, it takes up a lot of time ...

pre-staging

Here they are, all lined up - flowers ready for vases ready for the realtor to come and take pictures ... but at present perching, slightly nervously, on the top of the washer and drier.  It would be very good to be able to find a house that didn't have an outside laundry ...

uncertain mugs

It's too late in the semester (we won't even mention having a houseful of painters and patchers and all the effort involved in trying to put a house on the market, which is crazed timing on our part) to be putting together next semester's syllabus, but that's precisely what I have to be doing right now.  It'll be another incarnation of my Writing and Photography course, and once again I find myself drawn to images that are on the edge of abstraction; that suggest but refuse to be precise and clear and - well, photograph-like.  They'll find their place, together with some writings about obscurity and the indefinite ...

behind glass

Behind glass, dimly.  This is a kind of foliage panel/decoration in the small but perfectly formed yard at Jin's Patisserie, on Abbot Kinney, in Venice CA - a Japanese-ish tea room and tiny restaurant (actually, the woman who runs it is from Singapore).  Alice comes and buys tea here whenever we're in the area; I ogle the macaroons.  Today - I actually bought four: tiny, delicate little macaroons, the diameter of a half-crown piece (yes, I know they stopped being legal tender in 1970.  But.  Still).  What prompted this?  The shock of discovering that they're moving - but they know not where ...  Who knows if I'll ever get another chance ... We shared two at dinner: one expresso flavored; the other, quite amazingly, jasmine.

anxiety levels

are mounting in this household ... There has been much sorting, and chucking out, and De-cluttering today (of course, the house is going to be so beautiful when we've finished that we'll want to stay here. But no.  There's always the dodgy neighborhood.  I went out to the car today, and my suspicions about the pigeon feeding-activities of our two decidedly strange neighbors were confirmed when I heard a woman visiting the two guys, chatting away, say "Tan sabroso como pollo?" in a tone of understandable incredulity).  Alice left (I know not why) a suitcase open downstairs - guaranteed to provoke feline concern.  Someone (doubtless Moth) left a small, half disemboweled toy mouse in it - hard to tell if she's doing her own packing, or thoughtfully giving us something to take.  LucyFur, meanwhile, just stares into its suitcasely depths, thinking morose thoughts.  It's impossible, of course, to explain to them exactly what's going on ... 

Things I'll be Glad Not to See Again Part I

The O'Keefe and Merritt Stove.  Why, you might, ask, would we want to sell this delightful, bijou, one of a kind Silver Lake Gem?  Let's start with the size of the kitchen - the dimensions might be generous in a cramped New York apartment, although that's debatable, but that doesn't mean that it's really big enough for two people cooking at once.  Nor, although I'll admit it has a certain retro chic, would want want to cook anything elaborate on this uncertain, and perpetually hot piece of kitchen hardware.  No - this is, most certainly, not an item to be regretted ...

behind Caillebotte

If one has to be stuck in traffic, one might as well be stuck behind an attractive van ... I was particularly happy to see Caillebotte's Les raboteurs de parquet (1875) wrapped around this van: I bet Monsieur C. never thought his strapping laborers would end up gracing the vehicle belonging to a hardwood floor company in Los Angeles ...

scanning

At last, I'm getting round to scanning a whole lot of old slides - the idea (yes, I know it's already late November) is to put together some kind of iBook for my parents - largely pictures taken before I was, say, fourteen - and there are all kinds in the stash that I carried off (with permission) earlier in the year from Wimbledon.  And some make me cry - one of my father, when I was about eighteen months, and he was - what? - thirty two-ish.  And there are others that are of moments, or places, that I can't remember at all - they are the strangest, since many of them are, broadly speaking, familiar - and I've attached memories to them - because prints were made of them, or whatever.

And then there are some that have crept in from later years ... here I am, round about December 1980, designing my Christmas card for that year.  I wish I'd realized at the time that I'd look back thirty two years (really?  surely not?  really ...) later, and think that I was cute ... The most striking thing to me, however, is that this is BC - Before Computers.  It's not just that I'm drawing with a trusty Rotring pen - it's the Letraset sheets to my left.  Remember Letraset?  Did it exist in the US?  Kind of transfer letters, where one had to press hard on the back of a semi-translucent sheet, and hope that the black stuff didn't flake off, and that one had worked out the spacing properly beforehand ... I'm more than amused that the only really identifiable books on top of my desk are Terry Eagleton's Criticism and Ideology, and John Berger's About Looking, and Linda Nochlin's Realism.  And - look! - real live index cards.

moonlight

Full moon rising, as I left campus this evening ... I wish there'd been something to rest my camera on, so it's a little blurred.  The haziness, though, isn't due to shake so much as it's a product of the slightly clammy air - supposedly there's rain on the way tomorrow, which means that all of those carefully purchased, posed, staged, plumped up, inviting cushions in the conversation pit outside the back door will have to be rounded up and stowed ...

luminous light

This is the very bare, violently pistachio colored wall of a school that I pass on Vermont every day - and proof that late afternoon sunlight, at this time of the year, will make a couple of spare clumps of grass and the shadow of a tree look completely beautiful.  If you're looking at this, try moving your head around - on my screen, at least, the colors shift a surprising amount according to the angle.

pink

Yes, this is pink - I can see why it says so (even if I'd be more inclined, myself, to call it a deep cyclamen).  But I don't really understand its presence (on a half-boarded up store front in Los Feliz, where we went looking for a fishmonger/butcher that turned out to be closed due its extensive, and probably well deserved Thanksgiving break), and still less do I understand the graffiti.  For the graffiti - "GOAIS"? - I keep trying to make it read "goats," but it doesn't, really - also seems to be in matching pink, and really, it's improbable to think that local gangs, even in hipsterhood, go around armed with color-toning cans of spray paint, waiting for just the right shade of sub-Picasso pasting to appear.

paint store

Before we sell this house, we'll need to do some cosmetic painting, especially outside.  This may, of course, also be an excuse to visit our favorite paint store, Jill's Paint, in Atwater, which manages to be superbly stocked, and friendly, and quirky, and animal-filled, all at once.  It's a store that instantly makes one want to repaint everything.  They even seem to have taken some of their own products and talent to the wall outside.  Quite why chicks, I don't know - and there's something very Easter-y about this, which is totally inappropriate to the time of year, since colored lights are starting to flicker on and off among the palm trees.

caged

One of the reasons why we are getting round to the idea of moving is the smallness of my study.  Whilst I totally appreciate that I'm lucky having a Whole Room as a study, it couldn't be thought of as an expansive one - here I am, sitting at my desk, with the study door closed, taking a picture of myself reflected in the mirrored closet doors the other side of the corridor ...

I can't resist a picture of Walter Gomez, growing into a fine figure of a young cat.

tail; paws

Things to be thankful for: beautiful light even in late November; tails; paws.  Visible here - Bitzi (aka DandyLion's) tail, and LucyFur's back legs.  Invisible (but I am no less thankful for) - Alice (not that she has paws or a tail), Moth, and Walter Gomez.  Also invisible - and for which I am not one little bit offering up any thanks - is the very loud party that's going on opposite - we've been back for the length of for or five tracks, and have so far had Hotel California (fine, and curiously quaint and apposite); some Bowie like music; a couple of generic Hispano-rock numbers, one rap song, and now some very nasty Hispano-electronica, going Loca Loca Loca rather too often.  There are reasons not to be too attached to N. Hoover St.

new art in old places

Back to the Huntington - not for wandering the gardens, this time (although it's impossible to walk anywhere without walking past the most wonderful trees and flowers.  And, rather oddly, a big burly Santa, who seemed to be on his way somewhere) but for more meetings, and then a very brief visit to the Gallery - in the Mansion - to check out a couple of the Victorian paintings and the Arts and Crafts room - in part with an eye on next fall's teaching.  There was also their First Ever Exhibition of contemporary art - paintings and sculpture by Lesley Vance and Ricky Swallow.  The thick swept oil paint on the fairly small paintings - reminiscent of wood grain, reminiscent of leaf veins, reminiscent of how I once upon a time drew a comb across a thick gummy surface to produce marbled paper - produced images that were ok - I thought rather safe and unexceptional, but pleasant enough; the sculptures, which were for the most part modeled on everyday objects that were undergoing some uncomfortable metamorphoses, were more interesting.  Both worked best when they were juxtaposed with older art and furniture rather than being left, slightly scared and out of place, in a room on their own.  It was good to see the space being used for some current work, though - so much potential for echoing form and color and turning one's gaze back to the more familiar collection.

the memorial dashboard

I was very worried, before taking my car in to be serviced today, that some assiduous mechanic would wipe clean the paw marks on the dashboard - where Emmett made his last exploration, back in the spring, on his final car journey to the vet.  They're a poignant reminder each day - and, I suppose one might say, a mawkish, even Victorian memorialization, but I can't bear to clean them off.  Luckily whoever cleaned and tidied the car couldn't bear it, either - and I know the dashboard was cleaned, because the plastic lizard was moved.  Yes, that is indeed a plastic lizard - when I took an alt pro photo class with Christopher James a few years back - a totally wonderful experience - we were all given lizards at the end of it, and told to display them, so that we'd recognize that yes, elsewhere in the world there are people who enjoy, say, doing albumen prints.  Only I've never seen another one, even at the Eastman Museum in Rochester, where I had high hopes ...

more peaceful than yesterday

So much quieter than Hollywood Boulevard!  I actually managed to get to the library today ... to the Huntington, where I had a couple of meetings, and yes, sat in a quiet space full of books (it's Thanksgiving week, and this is the first time I've made it to a proper library to do anything more ambitious than check a reference or borrow a volume).  And then I went to look at the restored/renovated Japanese garden, which seemed to have many more bonsai trees than before, and ginkgo leaves - a couple have fallen here, in perfect orange slight disymmetry, on the raked gravel - and a great deal of calm, apart from the large russet brown hawk that swooped through, probably looking for young carp.

tourists on Hollywood Boulevard

Today the Intro to Visual Culture grad class went to Hollywood Boulevard (armed with some theoretical reading, some guidebooks, some iPhones with downloaded apps, and an assortments of cameras).  Not to mention a bright pink fanny pack, and variegated forms of sneakers.  We clearly Passed - hustlers were continually trying to sell us tours, or bus rides, or give us sample sizes of hot chocolate.  It would have made for a better anthropology field trip ...

...but we looked at The Stars, and noted the visual symbols that told us if they were theatrical, or cinematographic, or from the golden age of radio (and mused for how long a radio microphone would be a readable symbol).

We took tourist photos ourselves, of course (this is Grauman's Chinese Theater)

and posed for pictures, in the places where one's meant to,

and admired the pictures we'd taken.

We dutifully put quarters into a slot so that we could look through a telescope - visual prosthesis! - at the fact that they're painting the Hollywood sign (reference back to the class where we read a chapter of Leo Braudy's book), and we noted how the whole Hollywood and Highland tacky shopping center (complete with white elephants referencing D. W. Griffith's Intolerance) is set so the sight lines direct us straight to the sign (note the red Aids ribbon on the church tower).

We looked at (and listened to) other tourists, who weren't necessarily having as good a time as we were.

We looked at really awful Christmas ornaments (as a pun on Holly - wood, this is terrible) - they do, however, often enshrine the importance of visual culture to the associations that attach themselves to Hollwood.

Or, year-round, you can by as Oscar for your best cousin, or grandpa, or girlfriend, or - more mysteriously - accountant, or dentist.

Or you might prefer to purchase underwear - for women

or for guys.  We didn't like to think what these said about the act of souvenir gift giving.

More classily (thank you, MacKenzie), we went to the Roosevelt Hotel with its swimming pool that has a David Hockney fresco at the bottom (which has fairly recently been renovated).

and we ended up outside a garden apartment complex from the 1930s on Sycamore, complete with tiles illustrating scenes from Don Quixote.

We did a lot of looking ...