feeding the seagulls

A very quick gulp of sea air - makes a change from course prep, of which there seems to be an inordinate amount.  On the other hand, I do enjoy the prep, especially when it means putting together intricate combinations of slides - and then putting half of these in a kind of reserve cache at the end of the presentation - for the improbable circumstance of my running out of things to say.  And there's so much to say - sometimes I feel as though I'm endlessly throwing large chunks of bread in the air for students to catch, and have to remind myself all the time that less is more, and that I should be pleased with myself if I can construct a three point plan for each undergraduate class (tomorrow -  ruins, Italy, Cole [or rather the Coles, because Sarah gets a look in too], The Course of Empire, and Robert Duncanson.  That's all ...).

 

LA skies

Driving down S. Hoover this evening - if I hadn't seen these with my own eyes, I'd be tempted to think they were AI generated.  I was very glad, for once, for slow moving traffic.  As you can tell, there's supposedly a very wet storm on its way (to be followed by a another very wet storm) - but it's prefigured by such beauty.  We were reading Thomas Cole's "Essay on Landscape" in my undergrad class today - I think he would have approved (of the grandeur of the sky, that is - not of the urban landscape.  I can't see him having a happy time with billboards, let alone a donut shop).

 

reaching skywards

Yes, that's a huge, 450-feet crane (and a smaller one, too).  At 10 p.m. tonight, the cranes will slowly, slowly, slowly start to lift Space Shuttle Enveavor into its final, upright position, surrounded by booster rockets and whatever else she needs.  This is her final resting place (just over ten years ago, as we were getting ready to sell the Hoover Street house, I saw her sailing slowly, slowly past on her last flight, like a great big airborne whale.  Maybe tomorrow, if I park up on the roof again, I'll see if her 155-foot body has been hauled into position by tomorrow (apparently it could take anything between 4 and 24 hours, which seems a little bit vague and uncertain. And slow).

getting there ...

It's not there yet ... but it almost is.  Today Facebook coughed up this bottom image - "one year ago" - and there's been quite a transformation.  Of course, there's a sneaky bit of me that sees the bottom image as having a certain funky ramshackle quality - despite the fact that what you're looking at is some demolition that shows quite how vulnerable the hill would be to earthquakes or even heavy rains - but wait until all the planting grows up into Grownup Plants.  And wait until we have some real furniture for the deck (that's still my office coffee table from Oxford sitting in the middle, with remarkable endurance).  And of course I missed this morning's slivers of sunshine.  But I still can't believe we've got to this point.

 

berries

... of some kind - they look like very tart cherries, but almost certainly aren't.  I'll leave them to the birds and the squirrels.  They are one of the medium height trees around which the new garden is starting to grow: you can see some plants, and tufts of ornamental grasses here - but we need both the rain that's promised at the end of next week and for it to get warmer before the Miraculous Transformation starts to take place...

Also of note - it's Forms Traced By Light's fifteenth anniversary today!  I feel I should throw it a party.  That's fifteen year of posting an image (or several) and writing something, daily.  Admittedly, these days, it's much more like a daily jotting, a scribble in a diary, a note to myself - when it started, I was solemnly engaging with photo theory and history, since the blog went along with a class I was teaching on Writing and Photography.  But it's still, where time and circumstances allow, where I go down the occasional rabbit hole.  And it's still fun reminding myself to look for things that will make an image that will also give me scope to say something - or a light effect that's given me pleasure.  If my own sense of myself as a photographer has become a lot less self-aggrandizing, it hasn't stopped me using my eyes - and that's also a big part of the pleasure I get from this.  But - gosh - fifteen years!  That's something like 5,478 posts - though I may have miscounted, because of leap years ...

 

symmetry

A long meeting at the Huntington today left me, happily, with enough time to walk (on a glorious spring day) through the very pruned Rose Garden to the 320 year old Shōya house - built in Marugame, Japan (close to Takamatsu, and I think I must have gone past in on a train)  in 1700, where it was the center of village life.  It was painstakingly brought over here and reconstructed, over 7 years; it opened last year, and the Huntington - rightly - are taking much pride not just in its beauty, but in the example that it affords of a house designed, in its little compound, for sustainable living.  It feels ... very very Japanese, and is extremely beautiful.

 

unexpected downpour

So where did last night's rain come from?  When it woke me up around 4.30 a.m., not only had it not been in the weather forecast, but the radar didn't show any precipitation.  That was clearly not true.

This is from the top of the Royal Street carpark at USC: the most noteworthy thing about it is that it's actually a color photo.  If you peer closely, you can see that yes, the far sky may have a faint tint of blue to it.

 

renamed

Kiki?  I've been at the receiving end of a number of different spellings in my time: Cait, Cate, Katy ... but Kiki?  Has anyone been called Kiki since Kiki Dee (as in "Don't Go Breaking My Heart")?  Googling her I find that she was born Pauline Matthews, in Bradford (didn't know that!); that she worked in Boots in Bradford, sang back-up for Dusty Springfield, and that Dusty had originally been going to do that hit number with Elton John, but was too sick to do it.  But still - Kiki?  Anyway, the coffee kept me going through a morning of interviewing prospective graduate students ...

 

brief cloud

The view from our dining room this morning - briefly but magically, a thin band of cloud drifted over the hillside behind, and looked as though it was going to swallow us up - and then slid off in the general direction of Atwater Village.

 

wet campus

It was a very, very wet day today.  I don't know what these tables and umbrellas had been set up for - but they were clearly defeated.

 

Algae

Under a sullen sky, Silver Lake was not, this morning, looking very silver.  It fairly often gets a thick sheen of algae in the spring, which the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is quick to assure people doesn't harm the wildlife (not that I've seen them comment on it so far this year).  I'm not sure what the relationship of algae to rain might be: I do know, however, that I'm very glad that this isn't a working reservoir any longer.

 

autumn in January

Every year, I think that the Asian Pear is never going to turn autumnal and lose its leaves - and then it does.  You can observe how the deck is coming along - some of these plants are already in the ground, and some waiting for the next big planting, on Tuesday ... nearly there.  As you can see, it was very wet today, which should be helping everything take root and grow - and there's another band of dampness coming through.  

 

belated

I would think that this decorative, artificially frosted stripey ball (and its companions) was outrageously belated - were it not that one house down the street still seems to have a Hallowe'en ghouly or two hanging around their front yard.  Maybe it's the climate?  Maybe because Southern Californian seasons, although quite distinct from one another, don't feel like the rest of the country, people feel that their decorations don't really have to correspond to conventional systems of dating? In any case, the white concrete wall here - if you don't look too closely - could seem like the semblance of a snowy background.

 

underviewed corners

Here's one of those Los Angeles views that one never really takes on board: on the right of the Westbound on-ramp from Vermont onto the 10.  Not that I was taking this particular route - I was on a northbound 757 bus on Vermont.  Currently, we're navigating existence with one car - going in, and then coming back on the bus (which, although it involves a change, is absolutely fine so long as it's not night-time) feels like being back at school, and doing my homework en route.  It also, of course, gives one plenty of opportunities to look out of the window ...

 

an inexplicable chair

Some long-term readers may remember that way back, when I lived in New Jersey, I would often photograph Abandoned Chairs.  Or, to put this another way, there were a peculiarly large number of homeless chairs - sometimes a kitchen chair, sometimes an arm chair - on the streets of Highland Park.  Doubtless some of them found good homes (I last remember an old office chair of ours being wheeled away up Second Avenue to its new lodgings). But they have rather disappeared from my repertoire in LA.

But - yesterday - this chair (almost certainly not, strictly speaking, abandoned) appeared outside my office.  Why?  I have yet to see anyone sit on it.  There are perfectly adequate wooden benches built into the walls opposite.  Admittedly, Taper Hall is in a state of disarray because of the flooding (not that you'd know it from this empty corridor), but I'm not sure that explains the migrating patterns of furniture.

 

I went shopping this evening

unpacked things into the fridge, turn round, and ... I seem to have snared a Gramsci. It's probably a very good thing that he doesn't realize that he's completely ridiculous.

 

it's getting there

This plant is, indeed, flowering in a pot ... but beyond it, you can see the garden coming along happily (it'll be especially grateful if it does, indeed, rain next weekend, but the irrigation now comes on ... and somehow is tied in to the National Weather Service, so should do so when appropriate).  You can see how the slopes have been planted out, and then covered with mulch.  Behind me is a whole curving re-stuccoed wall, which needs to dry out, and then be painted; and then more planting happens in front of it, and eventually we'll have some garden furniture, and then ... It's been very nearly a year since work started on this, but it's getting there ...

 

hyacinth

I feel this hyacinth, straggling out of its bulb on our kitchen window sill, should be labeled something optimistic like "signs of spring."  But it's very cold (yes, I know, compared with most of the country it's warm and balmy), and I've spent most of the day huddled over a heater doing teaching prep ...

 

sunset, somewhere

There are very many things that I love about our house, and street - this is taken from right outside.  But it's a little frustrating, sometimes, when the light that falls golden on the San Gabriels tells us that somewhere, there's an exquisite sunset: we just happen to have a hill in the way.

That being said - we do have the most wonderful dawns.

 

after the dentist

As some as you know, I'm having some extensive and uncomfortable dental work done over the next - who knows how long?  Six months?  But luckily my dentists are on the Westside, and today I planned ahead, taking a (soft to chew) lunch, and some trainers, and after the appointment went and had myself a soothing picnic and a restorative listening to the waves on what proved to be an almost entirely empty, warm and sunny beach.  Not bad, for mid January.

 

workplace woes

When this blog started - very, very nearly fifteen years ago, but we'll celebrate when the time comes - it was punctuated with laments about the crumbling state of Murray Hall, location of the Rutgers English Department, and of the house on Union Street where I had my office.  I just checked on Google Street View, and surprisingly it's still standing - the walls seemed to sag and crumble a bit more every semester.

But Taper Hall proves to be nothing to write home about.  A couple of weeks ago, the company charged with mending the bathrooms - or rather, taking asbestos out of them, and other such tasks - managed to flood two and a half floors (at one end of the building) because they didn't follow protocols.  It's ... being cleared up.  We're lucky, in departmental terms, that our offices weren't affected by water - but plenty were, and aren't habitable.  And all the same, we can't access one corridor of offices, including the department office - and that means no xeroxing, say (and yes, it's the start of the semester). I take it this van (which ominously says, among other things, "National Disaster Team") is sorting out the damaged HVAC system - and next week we should learn when normal operations may be resumed.  Or not.  I made a semi-illicit dive into the department office, because I really needed that cup of coffee, and it smelt very weird indeed.

 

oranges on the drive home

I took this photo because of the oranges ... and because it's been such a work-busy day I didn't have time to even think about looking around me.  But the pay-off is, in fact, the sign - which I didn't take on board until I downloaded the picture.  There's some exploring to be done.  Alvarado Terrace is, apparently, a Historic Preservation District - built inside the lands that constituted the old Spanish pueblo, and that, under the hands of late nineteenth-century developers, were turned into a park, complete with a country club style golf course, with a terrace of upscale homes being built in 1903.  And the church?  Built in 1912 on the corner of Alvarado and Hoover, it was the home of Jim Jones's People's Temple from 1970 until he moved this to Jonestown, Guyana, in 1977 ... I will report back when I've been to look at the houses ...

 

parking permit time

You'd think, wouldn't you, that at the very start of term the Parking Office would have more than two people working in it - and having to juggle dealing with a long, long line of people like myself who wanted to buy parking permits (or who had far more complicated issues), and field phone calls from people who are driving a rental car this week - not the car that they have a permit for - and so on?  But no.  The car park itself has become crazily complicated if you just want to buy a day pass (which of course I had to do, in order to park and buy a permit) - one must text a number, then get sent a mini-form in which to insert one's plate number, and then feed them one's credit card details, and at the end of that find that one's been charged a $.50 "convenience fee."  

At least someone had the thoughtfulness to place a toy car on top of their computer for one to speculate about.  It seems to be a simulacrum of a customized stock car - and the writing reads "Cranston Fire."  But is that a reference to the Cranston Fire that threatened Idyllwild in 2018?  Or is it somehow a homage to Cranston Fire Department? - though that's situated in a little town just south of Providence, RI, and therefore seems unlikely.  Other theories welcome ...

 

On the 14th day of Christmas ...

... my true love sent to me:

A Santa in a palm tree.

Yesterday, I spoke too soon.  The decorations are still flourishing on the streets of Los Feliz (where it's certainly seasonably cold enough ...).  But it really is time to move on ...

 

surely the very end of the Christmas decorations ...

The end of Christmas decorations ... Southern California style.  What could be more perfect than a pair of plastic flamingoes wearing Santa hats?

 

epifanía in Winslow

Waking up this morning in Winslow - just about at dawn - January 6th, so one imagines they will have been taking down their Christmas decorations today.  Or not, since people seem very vague about these things in the US, but in my upbringing, January 6th - Epiphany - was absolutely when one dismantled the tree and all other baubles and festive bits, or, somehow, it was Very Unlucky.  

We had a good drive back to LA - no bad weather, and apart from the usual crazed trucks and speeding cars on the 15, no bad traffic.  But hard to imagine the chaos that will be caused as they build the new fast bullet train from LA to Las Vegas - down the median, apparently.  I think we'll have to find another route ...

 

traveling back

On our way back to LA: the view from our back yard this morning, with the Cerrillos Hills shining in the sunshine; La Posada, Winslow, and Grammy on top of a bookcase in our room - margarita in the foreground.  Mine, not his.

 

where's that white stuff coming from?

Grammy seems uncertain about the weather.  So are we - due to hit the road tomorrow morning.  It should stop snowing in an hour or two - and the roads were gritted today - so we will see.  As ever I'm an eternal optimist ...

 

remnants of snow

Remnants, indeed - but more is due overnight.  We're crossing our fingers that it will have sufficiently melted, and that the roads will be sufficiently gritted, for our return trip on Friday/Saturday - if so, it should be a pretty ride!  But cross-country travel is always a bit of a gamble at this time of the year ... This is a bridge on the railway line between the mainline station at Lamy, and Santa Fe - the route of the Sky Railway, owned by George R. R. Martin (who lives in Santa Fe) and with one engine painted as a dragon, one as a wolf.  We went on a sunset trip a decade or more ago, when it was the Santa Fe Southern Railroad - the new outfit seems decidedly snazzier, with carriages refurbished to look like the 1920s: it promises an "immersive experience" (which had better involve cocktails, as it promises).  Come and visit, which will give us an excuse for a touristy outing ...

 

paw

Gramsci was sprawled on my desk for a lot of today.  I was grappling with the final bits of my syllabi; he was trying to insert himself between me and the computer.  Those final bits of syllabus pruning and shaping are so tough - I have to temper my inclination to throw everything in, in the interests of - what? intellectual coverage? - with the realism not just of what students might actually read, but what they might find interesting to think about.  And in turn, that means juggling the possible curiosity and ambitions of art history majors with those who are majoring in business administration - at least, so far, I don't seem to have any Real Estate Management majors ... But I'm nearly there, if Grammy's demanding presence will let me.

 

juniper berries

It's too early yet to say if it is, officially speaking, a hard winter or not - but since we've been here, it's only been in the 40s during the day, and invariably well below freezing at night.  So it's great to see what a good year it is for bird food - at least, for those birds that eat juniper berries, like bluebirds and blue jays and robins and grosbeaks and - well, lots and lots of birds like them.  Happily, there seems to be a bumper crop of them this year.

The strange thing about blueberries is that they aren't actually berries, but are a gabulus - or I suppose one would say that they are gabulae - that is, fruit-lookalike coverings to the tips of cones on female juniper trees.  One can, of course, use them to flavor gin, and they have a long-standing reputation as an abortificant (don't tell the Republicans, or they'll be chopping down junipers all over the Southwest) and apparently were once used - how effectively, I don't know - as birth control.