Harbinger

It is, by now, raining again, and quite probably snowing in the mountains.  But we have some grape hyacinths in flower in the beds by the front steps - together with snowdrops, I always think of them as harbingers of spring.  I've forgotten why snowdrops apparently don't grow easily here - it's not that they're like peonies, and need frost (on checking, it seems to be that they don't survive if the soil around them dries out, which it doubtless would do, regularly).  These, however, have come up each year since I planted them.  In other horticultural news, some packets of Morning Glory seeds arrived today, which, if I can climb down at some point to the back of the fence - nay, ugly impermeable barrier - that the owner of the house in the street below has erected, I intend to scatter in the hope that they'll climb rampantly up it: guerilla gardening.

 

ridiculously handsome

Young Gramsci.  It's really cruel that he hasn't been given any kibble for several hours.

 

today's views ...

Today was a day - until it clouded up later, at least - when everyone who was out for a walk, or being exercised by their dog, was smiling at everyone else, because it was stunningly beautiful, with clear air and snow low on the nearby mountains.  This was the view from our living room first thing, with pockets of cloud floating around over Atwater Village;

and this, the view from our trash cans;

and then two shots of Silver Lake, looking like somewhere in Switzerland, and not like Los Angeles at all.

LA River

Somewhere around the middle of the day, there was a little gap when it wasn't raining, and the radar online made it seem as though it would stay like that for a bit, so we headed down to the Los Angeles River - not far; it's maybe half a mile away at most - to see what it was like.  Wild, would be the best description - grey-brown water hurtling along, and completely covering the islands mid-stream.  You couldn't really have cars racing down the concrete banks here as they do in Grease ... We skedaddled when three big black SUVs with tinted windows pulled up and some very Sopranos-type guys got out, looking as though they were wondering if anyone would notice them leaving a body or two off there, and just made it home in time for a huge thunder-clap, and the heavens opening again.

 

at the start of the day's rain ...

You were wondering how our terrace reconstruction is going? ... Luckily, we have a team of efficient and responsible contractors, or so it would seem - they have covered everything in thick black plastic, or the bare hillside would have washed right down into the pool of the house below, by now ... Those gallow-like structures are in fact winches, for hauling up buckets of earth.  I suppose this will turn into a new back yard, eventually?  For now, the rain - twelve hours later - is still coming down in torrents, and apparently will do so for another day: it's quite something.

 

a rainy day on campus

... or at least, showers - one intense shower of hail - and a few sunny moments.  Quite appropriately, in my grad class, we were discussing representations of water in C19th British and US painting in the lights of some recent pieces of blue humanities theory, but it was a little distracting to have some of the real wet stuff happening outside our window ...

 

storm rolling in

This is some kind of a vanguard: we are being promised - or threatened - inches of rain in the days ahead.  In fact, the skies have cleared this evening, making it very chilly - and they are saying that there may be snow down to 1500 feet.  The highest spot in Griffith Park, behind us, is just over 1700 feet ... The workers in our back yard have decamped for as long as it takes, leaving everything impressively covered with black plastic sheeting and sandbags.  You may look for us in the days to come huddled under cats ...

 

midnight party-goers

At about 2.20 a.m., there was a terrible rattling and clanking sound below the bedroom window.  Of course my first thought was that burglars were stealing the workmens' plastic buckets from Home Depot, or their wobbly planks of wood, or even a whole load of freshly excavated soil - but on closer inspection it was a couple of very plump raccoons, who climbed the little metal ladder with great glee, and then started to excavate the plastic garbage bag in which the men had left all kinds of tempting things like old burrito ends.  There's one visible here, behind the mound of netting, just to the left of the tree - the other, I think, is actually in the garbage bag.  A still from a security camera video gives an even better idea of the fun party time that they were having - it went on for an age.  The ground was covered in debris this morning.

But how can you not love their stripey tails?

 

tulip

When I came back from New York, there were tulips in the hall, tulips in the living room.  They are all, we trust, safely in cat-unreachable places - that is, I wouldn't have trusted LucyFur anywhere near them (her penchant for chewing vegetation was why we stopped having almost all flowers in the house), but these are on a pedestal and on a small table. These have particularly shiny surfaces, like silk. 

 

Alice's birthday walk

Springtime in Los Angeles ... and a painting of a pier propped up against someone's garden fence in Silver Lake.  An exquisitely beautiful spring morning - and warm, to go with the blossom.  It looks like it'll change to a chilly deluge by the end of the week, but for now, it was as perfect as February can be.

 

Central Park and the carousel

A tourist shot, to be sure, but it was a cool, still morning and I couldn't resist it.  A few yards further along the path, and intently watching a whole flurry of sparrows, was this ginger and white cat, helping protect the landscape.  I don't recollect ever having seen a cat in Central Park before...

Not having a lot of time before heading off to the airport, I went and indulged my four year old self by going and admiring the carousel/roundabout - the horses are all exquisitely different (the bottom one isn't for riding - he's one of the little decorative metal ones on the outside).

 

framed

From the fifth floor of MOMA - one of the many benefits of being at a conference in NYC (as well as having had a couple of spectacularly good and fun dinners) is being able to see lots of art ... very impressed by the curatorial work at MOMA right now, and the emphasis on the modern urban in the late C19th and early C20th on the top floor works very well with the city right outside.

In a further report from the contemporary urban, even on the 17th floor I can hear someone singing God Save the King outside.  That seems an unimaginative choice.

 

Intelligence awakening mankind

That seems a suitable enough message for a conference, no?  Particularly the people on the left going down into a fiery inferno labelled Ignorance.  This is a section of the elaborate mosaics above the entrance to the Rockefeller Center, called Intelligence Awakening Mankind - which I've taken on board as being there, but had never really stopped to look at properly until today.  The Rockefeller Center itself was, of course, an enormous Depression Era initiative, and these mosaics were designed by Barry Faulkner - probably the best known American mosaicist in the first half of the C20th - made by the Ravenna Mosaic Works, and installed in 1933.  In the center is Thought, flanked by two figures representing Written Words (sending off messengers labelled News, Politics, and Poetry) and Spoken Words (the emissaries are Religion, Drama, and Music) - and you can see the Spoken Word brigade here, bearing down on a man in overalls.  The woman appears both to be blindfolded and to be shielding her eyes, which given that she's facing towards hell seems like a bad move on her part, and a disastrously misogynistic one on Faulkner's.   

But what I didn't know at all before today - and digging around trying to find out when the Rockefeller Center was built - is that in the early part of the C19th, this was the site of the Elgin Botanic Garden, the first public Botanical Garden in the US, founded by David Hosack (the physician who tended Hamilton's wounds after his 1804 duel, though obviously not successfully) in 1801, filling it with native and "exotic" plants - 

he especially was interested in those with medicinal value.  He had hothouses, and forested areas - but absolutely alas, he didn't have the money to keep it up; sold it to the city; they in turn sold it to Columbia, who thought they'd build the university there, but didn't; it fell into complete disrepair (Columbia couldn't be bothered to keep it up) by 1823; bits were leased out; a lot of the plants went off to furnish the grounds of the Bloomingdale Asylum, and Hosack's botanical library is now at NY Botanical Gardens.  And then the site was taken over by row houses - which became boarding houses, and speakeasies - and then the Rockefeller Center.  Maybe my book after next should be called something like Under 30 Rock?

 

NY Victorian Gothic, and bits of Harlem

I've been wanting to come here for a long time, and I wasn't disappointed.

Back in 1863 - and yes, they found the labor even during the Civil War - Peter Bonnet Wight got the commission to build the National Academy of Design, on 4th and 23rd: it opened in 1865, and was one of a handful of Ruskin-influenced neo-Gothic buildings in New York - perhaps as faithful as any building to Venetian principles.  It was stunning:

 Harper's called it a "magnificent Temple of Art," and the architectural wonders continued inside, too.  But it became too cramped and crowded.  By 1901 a new site was found; the old building was sold to the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company - who promptly tore it down.  And I thought for a long time that that was that: a horrible story of desecration.  But then (from a comment on the website I linked to above), I found that in fact, a significant part of the façade was re-purposed, and incorporated into the front of Our Lady of Lourdes, on W. 142nd St. So I went on a pilgrimage.

Just round the corner was a community garden,

and this (and many other) murals;

on W. 125th;

and then I went all the way downtown (stopping in at CAA on the way, to be sure) to Thomas Street, just up from the WTC, where I'd heard there was another magnificent piece of neo-Gothic, this time a domestic house (now apartments).  Poor house - it was sandwiched between vacant lots and boarded up buildings, and suffering from a depressing location, but must once have been someone's pride and joy (and yes, I've seen pictures of the buildings that used to be there, and are now lost ...).  But all in all, this was a celebration of the Ruskinian principles that found their way across the Atlantic and into NY's architecture.

 

a valentine from NYC

I seem to find myself in New York for Valentine's Day rather often - not out of some kind of romantic attachment, but because of the timing of CAA, which, as today, often finds me exchanging valentine's cards in the pre-dawn before scooting across the country ... But here, just off Bryant Park, is a magnificently strange installation in the Steinway showroom, which stopped me in my tracks on the way back from what I ought to know by now (but hope springs eternal) is by far the worst Whole Foods in the city, or possibly anywhere other than Laguna Beach.  In any case, love to you all.

 

February in Los Angeles

Even on an overcast day, things look pretty good.  This is, of course, a huge advantage that we have - we hope - when it comes to wooing candidates who've been given job offers ... I can't think of many good reasons why I'm passing this up tomorrow to head to NYC and CAA - apart from the opportunity to catch up with good friends.  Poor Gramsci is devastated at the sight of my little suitcase re-emerging ...

 

cooking with lemons

I'm fervently hoping that we'll be able to plant a lemon tree - and a lime tree - somewhere in our garden when it's redesigned (rephrase that: when it's designed, at all ...).  Our neighbors across the street gave us a huge bag of lemons from their house - not, actually, their house here, but one the other side of Palm Springs - which are incredibly juicy, and which also produce fragrant zest when you grate them.  So this is an almond cake - basically just lemons, and ground almonds, and a pinch of cardamon, and half a cup of sugar, and four eggs (I guess free lemons make up for the cost of eggs ...) - with the egg whites beaten up in soufflé fashion, and then baked for half an hour.  We've been very restrained in not eating it all.

 

tulips

... believe me, I identify with them: looking their very best to seem cheerful,  but actually drooping somewhat.  

In the corner of our sitting room, they weren't the only tulips I saw today: at the retirement event for Karen Halttunen and Richard Fox, there was a big bunch of decidedly more sprightly tulips on the lectern.  Somewhere hidden in their depths was a microphone: not, alas, to amplify the voices of the speakers to the room (room 240 in the Doheny Library has never been known for its audibility), but to capture the sound to accompany the video.  It was well disguised among the petals.

 

outside the library

This is quite a startling floral sentinel to greet one as one enters the Huntington Library - on a day on which, thank goodness, I finished writing my paper for CAA (which involved reading a number of manuals of nineteenth century ink manufacture, and finding out where oak apples - or oak gall - mostly came from: since you, too, were wondering, the answer is Northern Syria, especially around Aleppo, and also Italy.  I now have a burning desire to find the import ledgers of C19th ink companies).  

But I also mentally set this against images that came in via Twitter of picket lines outside the English and History faculties in Oxford.  I'd say - if I was still there, I would doubtless be on them, but that's a non-existent parallel universe, since if I were still there, I'd have been kicked out at Oxford's mandatory retirement age a couple of years ago, and - and what?  No way would I have felt ready to collect my pension, the existence of which is, however, in part, one of the reasons why faculty are now protesting: investment to keep the wolf from the door of my generation wasn't sustainable for those who followed us on the same terms.  And yet it feels vaguely indecent to be swanning into an excellent library (no, not the Bodleian, to be sure, but a pretty good library, all the same) set in impeccably manicured gardens on a warm and sunny February day, looking at images of the dearly familiar - if grey and chilly - steps of the St Cross Building.

 

tree decor

Plane trees, from my office window.  Our British/US art grad seminar was on the topic of "the detail" - and scale - today, which meant that my eyes were even more attuned than usual to the apparently small and insignificant.  I'm not sure whether that prepared me to concentrate, attentively, on these particular trees, but their seed balls are handing down like an array of pompoms.

 

a fern

No, not one of ours, but seen in a planter outside a building at Keck - the USC hospital.  I was waiting there for Alice whilst she had an eye exam - waiting in case they wanted to dilate the eyes, and she needed a ride home.  I hadn't anticipated quite how hard it would be sitting outside a hospital - not that Los Angeles spring sunshine and a decent cappuccino was quite the same as sitting on a very damp bench at St George's Tooting, with a coffee from the Marks and Spencer's Food take-out counter - but hard because of all the very sick people who were, nonetheless, still alive to enjoy the sunshine.  And hard, too, because of my acute consciousness that some of them soon might not be.  It's not that there's anything remotely unusual about the parade of the unsteady, the uncertain, the injured and the ailing that go past one in such a venue - but it was a bit soon, I found to my surprise, to be spending time voluntarily, as it were, on hospital premises.

 

tree, construction, Griffith Park

It's a good thing that there's no heavy rain in the forecast - what was our terrace is becoming more of a mound of soil by the hour.  However, when all this is completed, we should be able to sit down there and enjoy the view ... This is what it looked like from one of the upstairs balconies this evening: the vantage point gives a particularly good sense of the challenges thrown down by the slope of the hill.

 

by night, too

The Asian Pear is too wonderful to leave unilluminated in the evening - this is the view from the bedroom... One of the plans for the new garden landscaping will be to have subtly positioned lights - non-owl-scaring lights - that will show off the trees, although right now, as the workers dig away and produce yet more rubble and some mounds of surprisingly fertile looking earth, this all seems a very distant dream ...

 

February dawn

We had a band of rain move through overnight - nothing dramatic; just enough to encourage the grass and the wildflowers - and to give a pale apricot tint to the dawn.  The hills of Griffith Park behind us were in cloud - and there's a band of cloud here, too, hiding the snowy mountains beyond. This really is the most beautiful time of the year here.

 

annual tree celebration

We love our Asian pear so much ... This is the view from the bedroom window this morning.  We were so surprised, when the cracked concrete on the terrace was pounded up, not to see any roots breaking the surface - so many people had told us that the large cracks were due to the tree's activity, but, seemingly, not a bit of it - all we can see is soil.  All the same, we will treat her very gently when we come to do the landscaping - there will be a large circle with bark around the base of the trunk, because we want her to carry on looking like this for many years to come.

The workers were here all day again today, moving the rubble off and away on a very rudimentary conveyer belt (watched by a fascinated Gramsci).  You'll see planks in the background, which doubtless will shore up something next week.  I really can't believe that this transformation is slowly taking place ...

 

feline geometry

It's true - they really are getting on better than they used to.  This evening I caught Moth giving Gramsci's pretty head a fairly robust wash.  They may not be quite as inter-twined as this picture suggests, though - this represents Gram's head firmly in a bowl of kibble, whilst Moth waits as close by as she can.  Anyone thinking "oh, poor Mothy," though, should bear in mind that she has the physique, these days, of a very solid bolster.

 

how's my work going?

Thank you for asking.

Quite apart from any other recent interruptions or impediments, I think this picture tells you all that you need to know.  

 

the tower

Here's our campus carillon - all 167 feet of it - and its reflection.  I didn't really think anything more about it than usual this morning (which is to say, not much) - I was more concerned with feeling happy that we still have a Wednesday Farmer's Market on campus, although it's a shadow of its former pre-Covid self.

But walking back to the carpark after dinner with today's job candidate in Art History, he asked ... what's inside the tower?  A perfectly reasonable question that I'd never before thought of posing.  Errrrr - steps?  The mechanism for the (electronic) bells?  I felt more than a little sheepish that I'd never previously given a thought to the bell tower's innards.