and the sun sets on ... 2024

... from our driveway: good bye to 2024 (which seems to have passed very quickly), and - to all of you reading this in 2025 - a Very Happy New Year.  

 

running errands

After a day of footnote curating and syllabus polishing, it was time to head into town: Petco (that should make two small furry creatures very happy); Whole Foods - above - which seemed even more manic than Christmas Eve, but provided supplies for the next few days; Susan's Wine and Liquor (that's New Year's Eve taken care of), and Tulsi.  Tulsi is the new Indian restaurant run by Paddy Rawal, who was the chef behind Raaga, which closed a few years back.  I have always been fairly snooty about Indian food in the US (although I do like the South Indian food at Paper Dosa, to be sure).  This - we ordered take out, carried it home to Eldorado - was stunning: as good as anything I've had in London (and that's saying something) - right down to the pickles, which is surely as good a test as any of Indian culinary achievement.   I don't think they yet have a liquor license (the usual long, long, long wait in New Mexico) - so take-out might also be a solution for you ... and I don't think they take reservations, but at 6 p.m. it was not packed, though busy.  Anyway - if possible - go.

 

ridiculously relaxed

To say that Gramsci loves his Christmas present would be an understatement.  For three year's, he's had to make do with a mid-sized Sherpa - which in its turn was a hand-me-down from LucyFur.  So I thought he deserved his own, full-sized (as befits a long cat) luxury model.

From the moment it was unpacked, he's been inseparable from it.  This is his new flat, his man-hut, his very own carrier.  He appears to be quite comfortable.

I do not have Gramsci's permission to post this image.  He may feel that it's just a little too revealing.

 

the end of the hallway

Here, shining away on top of an Indian cabinet (from Jackalope, years and years ago), is the solar system.  Another form of illumination behind - a devotional candle featuring, I think, St Martin de Tours - Martin Caballero - patron saint of horses.  Then a metal horse, made by an incarcerated person somewhere in the New Mexico penitentiary system, ridden by a small Harriet Tubman doll - and in front, a ceramic bowl - bought in Durham, NC - from, I believe, Kenya.  One might call this an eclectic little grouping ...

 

evening light: 4 takes

The evening light was quite extraordinary today: dark, dark, dark over the Sangre de Cristos, and then cloudy over the Sandias, but with plenty of streaks of sunset coming through.  These first two pictures were taken within five minutes of each other, and you can see how the light changed from a rather ghoulish green to warm gold.

And then here's the dining room end of the main room, truly bathed in sunset-light (with Moth on the side, rather dismayed that I'm cooking a decidedly vegetarian - and excellent - dinner from the new Rancho Gordo bean cookbook: white beans and caramelized fennel, but it was a lot more complicated than that sounds ...)

And then, round the back, here's a bluebird waiting on top of the bluebird house.  The whole bluebird family sleeps inside there in the wintertime, keeping warm.

 

not your normal boxing day panto

... indeed, not that I think I ever went to a pantomime on Boxing Day - unless it was in 1960: at some time that winter we went to see Aladdin in Carlisle, which I remember finding excruciatingly embarrassing, especially the portrayal of Widow Twankey (because of its racism? its cross-dressing?  I only remember the embarrassment ...).  However - we did go to things like The Blue Bird, at Richmond Theatre in 1962 - when we came out it was snowing, and snow sat on the ground for six weeks after that.

No snow today - just cold.  The movie was terrific, from beginning to end - a complete immersion into the early sixties, the music scene in New York, Dylan's music, and Dylan's complete assholeness, whether towards women, or politics, or those who worked for him.  It can win all the Oscars that it can, in my view.  Timothée Chalamet to all intents and purposes was Dylan.  Yes - I know bits of the story were fictionalized (and believe me, going to see this with a sixties/music historian made me feel as though my immersive engagement with the film was perhaps on the acritically shallow side) - but the general sense of both the time, and of Dylan himself - and Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger (with Edward Norton looking oddly like Adam Schiff) was spot on.  It made me feel old - which, in fact, is probably testimony to its spot-on-ness.  I know it only opened yesterday - but go and see it if you can.

 

In which the cats enjoy their Christmas (as do we)

A splendid sky tonight: inky black, with a few lights and a plant visible ... the weather forecast promised some snow, but that materialized only wetly for about a minute much earlier in the afternoon.

This is ... two cats, inhabiting the top of the kitty palace together, Moth's tail protruding from between Grammy's forepaws.  They were fairly amicable all day, bonded by catnip.

Here, Moth tries to work out which packets might contain this year's supply of catnip bananas, cigars, rainbows, and so on.

She's not a actually right, here - although she has managed to point out some wrapping paper that I would totally, totally have loved when I was ten.

The star present, however, was Gramsci's new carrier,  He's had to make do with hand-me-downs all his life - smelling, doubtless, of other kitties - and his previous one is certainly smaller than Moth's.  And he is a Long Cat.  So here he is, in his new Luxury Model Sherpa.  He's hardly left it all day.  He loves it.

 

brunch outside

at Cafe Fina: it was, indeed, a little chilly on the legs, but quite definitely sunny enough to be outside.  And it was recuperative: I did all the right things by way of getting up, going into town early - to find that this year, retailers are clearly being very, very careful about what they have in stock - and there were no turkey breasts left at Whole Foods (yes, serves me right, I should have ordered one ... one cannot go by what was there last year - and indeed, much of the entire meat counter was Bare).  Do not worry - we will not starve - I nabbed a very nice piece of salmon from a fish counter that was likewise rapidly depleting.  But of course, my sense of the symbolic resonance of turkey; the ghost of all those Christmases past; my desire, as ever, to recreate forms of stuffing I've been making and eating for decades - this sent me into a desolate spiral of Christmas absences, exile from natal shores, etc etc.  I will recover ... and my sense of tradition was not such that I embarked on some desperate search round all the stores of Santa Fe, and a green chile-covered omelet reset my equilibrium.  It was, however, an object lesson in - well, stuff in which one invests an unsuspected depth of emotional capital.  

 

dawn

It really did look like this, this morning!  I hope the cats will forgive me - I dashed outside before feeding them in case this extraordinary sky dissipated - which it did, very shortly afterwards, becoming a pleasant but dull grey.

 

morning light

Especially in winter, the early morning sunlight comes through the kitchen window at precisely the right angle to illuminate anything there.  These are some heads that came off the TJs carnations that I bought yesterday - trying to fill the house with cat-friendly Christmas flowers - sitting in a coffee mug that I bought at the farmers market a couple of years back.  

 

candles

This could well be next year's Christmas card ... candles for sale in the farmers' market (the other half of the stall was selling honey).  For a couple of minutes, they were bathed in sunlight from the window behind, like some illuminated miracle.  I now wish that I'd bought one - not the BVM herself, but one of those adorable little beehives which, truth be told, I've only just seen as I was posting this.  I guess that my bag was already full of onions and kale and parsnips and potatoes and goats cheese and other treats for the days ahead - though the first treat has already been consumed for dinner: buffalo tamales!

 

yucca pods

Some proof, perhaps, that I didn't spend all day at home with cats, Christmas tree, imitation birds and catnip bananas ... the intricacies of yucca seed pods are quite something.  By the middle of the afternoon, it was warm enough for a good walk.  On the other hand ... who knew that yucca pods are quite so hard to photograph, without them appearing like a dark brown glommy mess.  Black and white improves things, sometimes ... 

 

the allure of the catnip banana

Ah, Mothy.  Not tempted by the birds on the tree, she's happily gnawing on a catnip banana.  And the plum pudding dancing cats are progressing in their festive way across the top of the fireplace.  That instrument of torture isn't a thumbscrew, but is a rather fine press that I bought out of a garage here in Santa Fe - oh, I think twenty years ago, and I'm dismayed how little I've used it ...

 

some progress

Grammy finds the red birds resistable - mostly.  That doesn't answer the question about why the white ones are, for him, so much more - well, bird like.  So now we have (scarlet) birds, and lights, and tomorrow, with a bit of luck, I might complete the tree's decoration.  In the background ... Moth, looking vaguely sceptical.

 

more white birds

No, I won't be posting images of these white birds every day - but Gramsci's assault on them as tree decorations certainly has launched a million possibilities.  And yes, it was a wonderful sunset.  And what else was I going to photograph today?  The inside of the trailer where I waited while my car was being serviced?  The endless graduate admission dossiers? (obviously not the latter - but they are what have been most prominent in my line of vision all day ...)

 

on (not) decorating the Christmas tree

Decorating the Christmas tree didn't go as well as I'd hoped (quite apart from the fact that none of the strings of lights seem to work).  Last year, we brought the tree inside - we decided that Gramsci really wasn't a kitten any more, and could be trusted.  And the red birds were all over it, and he ignored them.  This year, I went full-on avian camp, and bought thirty six more white birds to match the scarlet ones.  They were irresistible!  Grammy tried to pat them off their branches, pulled out some tail feathers, looked as though he was going to climb into the entire tree ... This clearly wasn't going to work.

So I rehomed the white birds onto the withered stalks of the morning glories outside, where they are now probably confusing the real birds (or not - they're still happily splashing around in the heated bird bath), and are glowing interestingly in different lights.

 

our house truly has warmed up

One burrito, and one donut.  It's not just that the underfloor heating is now working ... it's that the house has passive solar heating - a posh way of saying that it faces south and gets really hot when it's sunny, especially in winter when the sun is relatively low in the sky in relation to the windows.  These two aren't complaining.

 

varied produce

So ... what to buy at the farmers' market today?  Some turnips? (we didn't).  Some scallions?  Yes.  Some spinach? - seen in the basket beyond.  Definitely yes!  Even though it's winter, there was fresh produce aplenty - we had spinach salad for lunch, and I had arugula sprouts for dinner, and I'm eyeing the newly dug nobbly potatoes, which I'll have with some of the Camino de Paz Montessori School goat cheese - an agriculturally-based school that's somewhat precarious, at the moment (they suspended admissions for last academic year), and admittedly I know nothing about the actual education there, but I've appreciated their cheese for years and years.

Or maybe some herbs, or cyanotypes of herbs?

Or maybe a poem?  Not so easy to cook for lunch, though.

 

two takes on a chilly morning

The sunrise was spectacular this morning - as seen from our kitchen window.  The house might have been (relatively) cold, but when I went outside a little after I took the photo here to fill up the birdbath, I could appreciate that it was relatively balmy, compared with outside... A huge shout out to Territorial Plumbers, who came and sorted out our malfunctioning boiler (a valve wasn't allowing enough water to come in, and needed replacing - and they serviced the whole thing, and sluiced the underwater pipes, and and and.  Anyone who knows Santa Fe plumbers - and after 20 years we feel that we know them all - will realise that finding one who seems honest and knowledgeable is worth their weight in gold dust - he was recommended by the same guy who installed the a/c units that kept us going, since they double up as heaters in a small scale way).  Many many thanks to those who showed concern!

Moth and Gramsci, however - despite finding a need to huddle close together on the bed last night, for obvious reasons - are back to their usual performative antics on the Kitty Palace.

 

cold air

The Cholla power plant, between Winslow and Holbrook - puffing away into the very chilly morning air.  Back on January 10th, 2011, I wrote about this at some length - and noted that it was meant to be retrofitted to comply with the Clean Air Act by 2020, and that I must remember to take another photo (in 2020! little did I anticipate the pandemic ...) to see whether there was any difference ... hard to tell, but it doen't much look like it.

I don't know whether any smoke from the Franklin fire has made it over here yet - it will surely drift, slowly - but tonight's clouds made for a spectacular sunset.   As for cold ... luckily we have someone coming out tomorrow to service the central heating boiler, which seems to have completely stopped serving the house.  The new a/c units can be made to puff out hot air (thank goodness), but we and the cats will be heading to bed early in order to huddle with some hot water bottles.

 

la posada lights

We're on our way!  An easy drive to Winslow, and La Posada seems to have outdone itself in Christmas lights this year - not so much here (good though they are!) but in the hotel itself.  This always feels like the real beginning of the holidays - not least because it's freezing cold outside - even if we've both brought bags and bags of work with us, and Zoom links ...

 

the invented tradition of USC

I was in and out of USC several times today (a complicated story of cars, various appointments, and the rest of it), but ended up waiting by the statue of Hecuba, with a very mock Gothic pinnacle in the background.  As ever, this was an opportunity to gaze, sadly, on manufactured mock Gothic and manufactured - well, Hecuba, supposedly bringing gender equality to Trojan symbolism.  Yeah, right.  Seven and a half years after all this University Village opening and fanfare, I'm still left wondering how much it cost, how it all got funded, and and and - the context was yet another bit of sobering funding news today.

 

wall mending

or at the very least, patching with decoration.  The rest of the wall has other randomly placed tiles on it - rather like a very, very minimalist Gaudí mosaic job.

 

an abandoned owl

So what's the story here?  This plush owl was lying on the verge near the reservoir.  Clearly he'd been dropped.  But did no one notice at the time?  Did no one hear the fevered, desperate sounds of Mommy, mommy MOMMY - OWL! OWL!   Did they all just carry on walking?  When they got to the car, or arrived home, did no one say - but WHERE'S OWL?  And we were walking, ourselves, for maybe half an hour, and the plush snowy bird was still there on our return.  I hope that he found his way home - or if not, into some new loving hands.  It was unbelievably sad seeing this abandonment ...

 

kitchen, morning

This was the strangest optical illusion.  A tulip - not quite, yet, a dead tulip, but one that's starting to feel decidedly sorry for itself - and ... well, one might think it's some kind of transparent box, but no.  The eye is being deceived - these are some absolutely flat green wall tiles.  So this is a flower photo, masquerading as some kind of deceptive still life ...

 

from the carpark

From the Royal Street carpark's fifth floor.  The crucial detail here (apart from the all important sliver of sky and downtown) is the cardinal and gold jacket of the USC Ambassador (aka fancily named lower tier security guard) right down in the bottom left.

And, speaking of security, what was happening on the UPC campus today?  Or rather, who was visiting?  I was crossing over to the library in the early afternoon, and saw a few suits walking down Trousdale Parkway - I assumed they were trustees, heading into Bovard - but I think they carried on walking past.  What really caught my eye was one particular man (tall, assured, maybe mid fifties, made to measure suit - you know the executive type).  And walking behind him were two regular serious security guards, guns on hips.  But then, I saw that the man to his left (in regular, non-security clothes) also had a holster and gun on his hip.  What to make of this?  A top health executive?  Gavin Newsom (nothing to indicate that he was on campus today, but I could only see this man from behind, so who knows).  Any ideas?

 

Light

 

I was so glad that I made time before a lunchtime meeting at the chilly and misty Getty to go and see the wonderful Lumen show - medieval light, from Europe and North Africa.  Cosmology, astral systems, optics, light for illumination, divine light - it was all there.  A few highlights - impossible, really, to pick them out, but among many extraordinary illuminated manuscripts, Hildegard of Bingen's On the Construction of the World (there's Hildegard herself, in the lefthand corner, painting away);

the Flemish Tapestry of the Astrolabes - from Toledo - here's an angel turning a crank to operate an astrolabe, while God emanates light while directing the movement of the cosmos.

And here some Giotto angels - one looking through a glass, darkly, and the other two shielding their eyes from divine light with their hands.

Then lots of golden rays,

and contemporary reinterpretations of them - there were just a handful of contemporary works scattered among the older ones, like E. V. Day's Golden Rays/In Vitro ...

down the street

And Halloween decorations give way to Christmas lights ... Actually, this house doesn't go in for Halloween all that much, but it certainly strings up its illuminations with great care come December.  Or rather, most probably, some company comes round and hangs them tastefully and decoratively for some huge fee.  We, on the other hand, have (still) a decidedly home-made, home-grown bunch of branches with berries on them hanging on the front door - a left-over from Thanksgiving.  But at least it's very much our own display (and I'll change it out for something more Christmassy tomorrow ...).

 

campus avenue

Somehow, I've never really noticed this avenue of trees on campus before - as an avenue.  Obviously I've seen the trees themselves plenty of times - especially when it's more summery, and people are strung between them on hammocks, or at the very least sitting underneath them as shade.  But today, this could have been an European allée, with the shafts of sunlight coming through and hitting the yellowing leaves ...

 

longevity plate

Slowly, slowly, I move things that came from Wimbledon out of the garage, and into new homes.  Among a handful of ornaments and pictures that I took into the office today was this tin plate, which my father acquired in Hong Kong at the end of the war, and was always on display somewhere.  Until packing things up in London, I don't think that I'd ever realized that it was tin, not china.  And until yesterday, I'd never noticed that he'd stuck a label on the back, saying "This means Longevity."  I think it does - if any Chinese speaker is reading this, please confirm (or not) - it doesn't, when I check on line, look quite like the standard longevity symbol - but it doesn't look that far removed from it.  If this is its meaning, it certainly worked, so I should definitely keep it close by ...