Lugging

Big shout-out to Lugg, who are a local moving company who are doing free furniture transport for people affected by the fires.  So off go three Room and Board tables (one small and wooden, two larger and glass) to a friend's rented house.  This, with luck, solves my problem as well as hers - I want to bring downstairs my mother's old desk, and another desk from 20 Hillside, which are both still sitting in the garage - but needed to find good homes for the glass desks first.  The two guys who came round were super cheerful and efficient, so this seems like a win-win (and free or not, they of course were tipped generously by me, because, honestly, Those Stairs).

 

not quite a lighthouse

The left-hand lake of the Silver Lake reservoir has water in it again ... and some newly painted hardware that presumably filters the water, or drains it, or - in Trump's deranged fantasies - provides ingress and outgress for Delta smelt.  In whatever case, it's been painted as though it has aspirations to become a lighthouse somewhere on the NE Atlantic - an effect intensified by the quasi-fisherman's cottage behind it.

I was unquestionably up for a walk this morning, even if my face had swollen up in a rather chipmunk-like fashion.  Thank goodness for the pain meds ... but in general, things are less sore, even if I still feel rather battered.

 

recovering

I was made so happy by Alice buying me a whole jugful of white roses!  And my mouth made it through a whole day of Zoom interviewing potential grad students, and even if still painful (muffled by meds, admittedly), and even if I'm still lisping, it's no longer bleeding, and isn't so swollen, and and and.  And I managed to stop myself before I ate a whole tub of ice cream (one of my allowed soft foods).  So that was all good.

 

a new lobby, familiar torture

Seemingly, one of my dentists - whom I normally see in Santa Monica - also operates out of a Beverly Hills office, in a building full (of course) of plastic surgeons.  I prefer the view from the waiting room of the other place, but this one is easier to get to.  And the view from one chair (where I was for three and a half long painful hours) is much like another.

This was redoing, replacing work done over twenty years ago in New Jersey, in a shopping mall in Rocky Hill - a far cry from Beverly Hills, but an excellent dentist - with rock music, and nitrous oxide, and conversations about how he never knew how on earth his son, who was academically interested in art history and economics, was going to make a living.  At that time, Noah Horowitz was at the Courtauld, and I'm sure I offered useless platitudinous advice.  He's now CEO of Art Basel.

 

work in progress

For ages, our graduate students have organized a Works in Progress seminar - which meets, ideally, every month, and which features .,. well, work in progress, whether by graduates or faculty.  I know that in the past, I've been terrifically grateful for robust critique delivered in what's always a kindly critical context.  Today we were hearing Elissa Watters running through the talk that she's going to give at next week's Graduate Seminar at the Getty Research Institute - she's going to do us proud.

 

skying

That's what John Constable used to call it when he made quick sketches - in oil or in watercolor - of the fleeting forms of clouds. He was informed and intrigued by the meteorological investigations of the time by Luke Howard, above all, who first categorized clouds and gave them their scientific names.  It was Constable in the grad class today - and Gainsborough, and Thomas Cole, and a handful of others; it's Constable tomorrow in my undergrad class - and that means that it becomes quite hard remembering and calibrating who knows what ...

 

auditing

Suddenly, this very handsome Western red-tailed hawk landed outside my graduate class today.  She seemed more interested in the nearby squirrels than in the finer points of art historical prose, but there you go.  Her sojourn didn't last long - a pair of ravens chased her off very indignantly.  

 

a difference in the weather

It has rained - well, but not violently.  It is much, much cooler.  So this was the view from our front gate this morning, which we could well pretend was - where?  Oregon?  It is so wonderful to see snow where just a couple of weeks ago the ground was smoking. It's hard to tell, of course, whether the weather cycle has truly shifted, but this has been a huge relief.

 

Valentine's day approacheth

I know!  And it's two and a half weeks off.  Maybe we all need cheering?  This florist's display - including inflatable flamingoes curving their necks together, under the reflected palm tree - certainly seems to be heading over the top.

And - as I write! - the unbelievable is happening.  It's raining!!

 

incipient blossom

The annual splendor of the Asian Pear is about to happen - or maybe not.  The winds of January 7th stripped almost all the old leaves off the tree - although the new ones are coming through in a very spring like fashion - and I suspect it took a fair amount of the blossom buds off, too.  And some enthusiastic squirrels, and battalions of finches, have been grazing on it, too.  So it remains to be seen whether it will look anything like as magnificent as it usually does.  But also - I'm still finding it very hard to look out of the bedroom window at our magnificent view and see anything other than fuel for fires ... which is not the most comforting way of looking at it.

 

teeth

These are, to be sure, a very fine set - on Santa Monica Boulevard - seen while in stationary traffic en route to, yes, the dentist.  My dentist will be able to move back into her Pacific Palisades house tomorrow - she was one of the lucky ones, on the fringes of the fire - but has, of course, a house still very much smelling of smoke.  Four large air filtering units were delivered to her office today, while I was inverted in the chair.  Could the delivery guy possibly take them downstairs again, and put them in her car?  No, he could not - despite the promise of a large tip/bribe/extra payment being dangled in front of him.  If I'd been her, I'd have run after him with an electric drill ... there has been so much helpfulness all over LA to those dealing with all sorts of different degrees of post-fire disruption, trauma, and endless organization, but he seemed to have missed that memo.  May he suffer deep and excruciating toothache in the very near future.

 

strategies to gain a second breakfast

I'm sorry to say it, but Moth is a greedy little cat.  She prefers the word "hungry," but either way, we never feed her enough breakfast (according to her).  Her most recent strategy?  We keep old supermarket paper bags in the larder - neatly, in a vegetable rack - ready to be used for paper and bottle recycling.  So ... she pulls them all out, one by one - crinkle/thwack, crinkle/thwack, crinkle/thwack.  Her logic seems sound enough - surely we'll want to put them back in place, and then we'll realize that we're just by the cat kibble container, or the cans, and ... In any case, how could one possibly resist her?

 

in which the day takes an unexpected turn

Way back last summer, I was full of (quite reasonable) dread that Trump was going to win this election, so I put in my naturalization papers - figuring that then I could get arrested on a demo, or, if needs be, leave the country for over 365 days without losing my green card in the process.  When, eventually, I got my interview date, I was howling with dismay at the irony of this being the day after inauguration day.

So (I'll spare you the melodrama of trying to find parking near the Federal Building) I went to the interview early this morning,  and was in conversation with a very nice Ukrainian woman - just checking all the answers on my form were correct, and adding in two more overseas trips since I filed the application. And then she asked "so, have you been studying for the questions?", and of course I had, and then the computer spat out questions for me to answer - who was "the father of the country?" "who were the original inhabitants of this country?" "what was Susan B Anthony known for?" - one has to answer six out of ten correctly, but happily I aced six out of six (not that hard, if one teaches C19th US art history, but of course I'd been mugging these up for months like it was my O levels). They waived the writing test and I guess that just chatting along was the speaking test - and then it was Right! You're done! And we're having a Naturalization Ceremony in a minute, so just go and wait in a room down the corridor ... 

... where there was a little holding pen of us, and we got to stick our hands in the air and say I Do after Officer Padilla read the Oath of Allegiance, and we were all given tiny cheap American flags and passport and voting application forms - and that was that.  No big conference center ceremony; no Star Spangled Banner being sung; no welcoming address ... it certainly seemed to me like they fear - well, I know they do - all hell breaking loose with Trump's immigration policies, and are trying to process people as quickly as possible.  My interviewing officer was certainly horrified at the thought of whatever's coming. So that's THAT.  I feel a bit shell shocked.  And also rather under-sold: I was counting on the Anaheim Convention Center in March (the next official date), and staying the night in a hotel with a view of the Disney fireworks, and had even planned what I'd wear (yes, I know, I know).  

 

dubious air

The air was very still this morning ... but full, once again, of goodness knows what.  This is looking towards Altadena.  There are meant to be mountains there.  They were not visible.

And, then, the winds - so far, nothing beyond breezy: please, please can they stay that way (though even breeze will blow that toxic stuff towards us).  My phone pinged sometime around 1.15 p.m.: there was a fire in Griffith Park - just below the Observatory, so just over a mile from here.  So we very calmly corralled the cats into one room; I gathered up my bag and computer, and we were ready to flee - but efficiently, a helicopter dumped water on it, and ground crews bashed it out.  But thank goodness the winds weren't strong.  It was an arsonist, and the police caught and detained him - but that's precisely what one fears, all the time.

It was distracting - not that there wasn't enough other distracting stuff going on, if we had turned on the television (I resisted doing so for a long while - just checking in to the Guardian website to catch up on the worst - though what the very worst might be is hard to say ...).

 

improbable peacefulness

And yes - little corners of Los Angeles, like this, in January, remind one why one lives here (apart from the not insignificant matter of one's employment) - one wouldn't think that anything was ever amiss round here, or that we weren't descending into gibbering wrecks at the thought of the Santa Ana winds coming back, reducing us after what was, at the outset, an extremely healthy dinner, to the remaining third of a bottle of cucumber vodka (organic, mind you), and a whole lot of Trader Joe's ginger nuts.

 

bird watching

There are a lamentable number of birds in the Asian Pear just outside the bedroom window - lamentable, because the winds blew off all the leaves - some lingering and autumnal, others still green - leaving just the tender green buds of new foliage, and the first blossoms of the spring.  It's so unusual for it to look like this that it's impossible to know whether the usual stunning spring bloom will happen, or not.  But Gramsci doesn't mind - all the better for finch-spotting.

 

Dew

This was such a welcome sight this morning - not the post-winds tuft of pine tree still tucked into a corner of the windshield, but the dew - the incontrovertible sign that there is, at last, some moisture in the air.  This mightn't last, but still ...

 

Diego

Today was so busy - again! - that I barely had time to look around to see what was on my desk top at work.  Here's Diego, a temporary resident until - at least - after the return of the Santa Ana winds next week (please: no.  Please make it rain ...).  He actually belongs to Alice, and looks as though he might bolt and clatter off on his purple hooves at any moment.

Behind him, dimly - and with an discolored sky, for such is the unsustainability of whatever ink I used - is a drawing of Runswick, in West Yorkshire, that I did as a Christmas present for my grandmother in 1975, only she died ten days before Christmas that year, and so I kept it.  I hope that she would have liked it: she used to go on holiday to this seaside fishing (and artists') village as a little girl, and used to tell a memorable story about being in church one sunny summer's Sunday, and - the church door being open - looking back at the doorway of the cottage in which they were staying, and seeing the lobster that was destined for Sunday lunch walking down the path.  I hope it made it back to the sea ...

 

Wood Pizza's demise

No, nothing to do with the fires - an economic casualty of some kind, I suspect.  Wood Pizza, which had been open for ten years, closed in December: by now, it's boarded up and completely covered in graffiti. It was a mystifying establishment: the pizzas were - average, to say the best - utterly unmemorable, and likewise the atmosphere.  We ate there once or twice when it opened, but it never became a regular ... and nor, it would seem, was it anyone else's favorite.  It usually had just a desultory, scattered few diners - and so, how did it keep going this long?  I guess, in the end, it didn't.

Fires: air still hazy; so many lives absolutely upended.  But, for now, the winds have died down, even if the fires themselves are burning on, albeit with ever-improving containment.  It's Wednesday - it feels like Friday.

 

particulate matter

Beautiful clear days may well be deceptive, although of course, in fact, the golden haze of the sunset, as seen from the USC parking structure roof (more or less over the Palisades fire) should give the game away in the first place.  It might have looked like an idyllic Californian winter's scene, but not all pollution is thick and sooty and like an illustration to Victorian industrialization.  This air, indeed, could well contain asbestos, from properties built before the mid 1980s, and heavy metals, and plastics, and who knows what - such things, I learned today, don't (unlike smoke) show up on air quality indices, which state, unconvincingly, that the AQ is Good today.  It's a good job that we all have stocks of Covid masks, still ...

 

collateral damage

Taking a couple more bags to my USC office for temporary safe keeping - and finding that some of my possessions look surprisingly happy there - I wasn't pleased to hear a clunk of this (I had thought carefully wrapped) mug against stone - and the handle broke off.  It's mendable - this is no major deal.  The mug belonged - a christening present, maybe? - to my great grandfather, William Arthur Parker - a shoddy manufacturer (i.e. someone making blankets, etc out of recycled clothes) in Hanging Heaton, near Batley, near Leeds.  I'm not distressed by having to glue together the handle: this seems quite sensible since almost all my parents' ornaments and antiques have been lovingly mended in their time: not only was this how they could afford them, but my father took enormous pride in the neatness of all his careful repair work.  

Meanwhile, outside, we're told to expect horrible, gale force winds again tonight.  It was actually great to be on campus, and catch up with others, and even to teach - but so many stories, all harrowing, in various ways.  I've been pretty impressed by the displays of human resilience: given how jangled I am, I can't believe that everyone else is as inwardly calm as they appear to be outwardly.  They can't be.  I'm sure there's a metaphor in that mug, somewhere, but I'm not forcing it.

 

Fiddling, Rome, burning etc.

A second carload of things had been sitting at the friend's who so kindly put us up for three nights - and we took them off to our USC offices today, not a little upset by meeting the daughter and son in law of some neighbors opposite, who were just off to Altadena to see the ruins of their house - an allocated 10 a.m. slot.  That's now five households I know who no longer have homes there in Altadena.

And the winds are due to return tonight, until - maybe - late Wednesday.  The forecasters say that they won't be as strong as last time, but that doesn't mean that I'm not already on edge. Very on edge.  That's not so much because of the current fires - which are much more under control, although winds can cause so much damage by spreading sparks and cinders, who can really tell - but the fear of new electrical sparking, and even of arsonists and others who light deliberate or thoughtless conflagrations.

And then, yes, there's teaching tomorrow.  While I know some students will be horribly affected, others - well, let's just say that this was the scene in Taper Hall today, where lots of sorority girls were tripping around in long diaphanous dresses.  When I say "lots," we're talking maybe a hundred - that's quite enough.  It would be good to think that they went off to change, and then to help hand out food or bottled water or whatever - and so proving my anger misplaced that here was more USC tone-deafness - of a different kind to that practiced by our administration, but all part of a whole, really.  I periodically disintegrate into rants of rage against that administration.

As it was, I - dressed in sweatpants and a ratty tee shirt, pulling a little cart stuffed full of things, wearing a backpack and carrying a little leather suitcase from the 1930s - felt as though I learned exactly how sorority girls (and, indeed, campus security) look at the unhoused.

 

evac and back

We couldn't sleep. None of us could sleep.  I kept looking out of the window at the flames from the Palisades fire, and the huge red glow in the sky (about seven miles from where we were staying, and about the same from our house).  And once it was light, then we were back watching endless live TV footage, very much of it of planes and helicopters dropping water on the Mandeville Canyon fire - which meant getting aerial views of a house belonging to a friend of ours.  We so hope it makes it: we were so impressed by the firefighting techniques, whether from the air or the ground - an absolute case study on what a difference is made when the wind is gentle enough to let aircraft up.  

Moth is, in fact, illuminated by a large globe.  We headed home to pack up some more things and take them to relative safety -for these big fires are by no means tamed yet, and the winds are getting up again over the next couple of days - so we remain very nervous.  But we have power back, and the back yard looked wonderful - a reminder of why, despite all, we live in Los Angeles.

And, of course, because we have jobs here ... and that means that we have offices into which we can decant our possessions.  Indeed, back down at USC, it was hard to realize that there are fires raging away - which in turn perhaps explains the ongoing tone-deafness of our administration.  So ... one day, or at least some of it, in which to do my teaching prep - assuming, or at least hoping, that there'll be no fiery interruptions.  

The sonic backdrop to this week will be the pinging of the Watch Duty app - which gives us updates and more updates on the fires, and the sound of sirens.  

Wish us a quiet night.

 

evacuation, day 2 - calm to newly terrifying

For much of today, things seemed quieter: very little wind, and therefore a sense that the firefighters were getting a grip on the fires.  And then this evening, the plume from the Palisades fire started getting thicker; and a couple of hours back exploded again, with television images of huge flames moving west and north.  Indeed, still not much wind - but it's due to come back.  And arsonists seem to be setting little fires in various other places - so far, not spread by wind - but also terrifying.  And yes, more emails from USC about Monday's teaching, paired with emails arriving from students saying their parents' house has burnt down, etc.  I can't imagine getting much sleep tonight - and if this gets worse, then what?  We were hoping to head back to our house tomorrow, but it's so close to Griffith Park, it doesn't feel safe to me.  But.

The fruit above?  Pomelos.  Exotic Californian thingies.  I guess that a dream of lotus (or pomelo) eating in the citrus state isn't quite working out.  

 

(voluntary) evacuation life

First, we are so lucky to have a good friend prepared to put up with us (and cats) in her spare room - and to watch the heartbreaking and devastating pictures on TV.

And second, weird and preoccupying though today has been, we know that we're so lucky compared with many - it's just heart rending to learn of friends losing their homes.

Gramsci, however, is delighted to find a magnificent kitty palace in his temporary lodgings.

We went back home - still no power; maybe on Sunday? a major power line was brought down - to retrieve a few more things (like books for teaching ...), and clear the fridge of anything that might decay and stink ... here's the view from outside our front gate, with the moon above - and then just thick yellow haze where one would hope to see Mount Wilson - fire climbed almost all the way up there today.  Everything is covered with little flakes of pale grey ash. And now they're talking of more winds coming back, and swirling around, maybe until the middle of next week.

And then - a maddeningly chirpy upbeat email from our university president, celebrating the Fight On spirit of the Trojan Family, etc etc, and confirming that yes, we will be back in person on Monday (her choice of bold type, not mine) - sure, she acknowledge the hard work of emergency services, more etc etc, but not a meaningful squeak about the sheer and utter hell and trauma that some of her faculty and staff - and presumably students, too - are going through.  And even for the rest of us - we're expected to concentrate???  I can't begin to say how angry this makes me.  Couldn't she take the opportunity to suggest that those of us who can do a week of community service?

 

fires

Dawn, or what passed for it, from our living room this morning - with the Altadena fire in the background.  Midday, and the sun - "sun" - from our house.

and early evening, with dark and light smoke.  We didn't have any power after around 7 this morning - maybe back tomorrow midday? - and have evacuated to a dear friend's - cats included, of course (and lots of paintings). Though the wind has dropped a bit, everything is dangerous and unpredictable - and the whole day has been punctuated with dreadful news of friends and colleagues who have totally lost their homes.  

Fairly obviously, I haven't gone to MLA (and canceling flights, room booking, etc etc was quite a challenge in itself).  And I remain bemused that USC thinks they can start classes as usual on Monday.  I wrote to our Dean in protest, but he seemed unpersuaded if sympathetic...

This is exhausting, in those moments when it's not terrifying.  And, basically, dreadful.

 

fire watching

The Palisades fire, as you can see, has an evil face.  And we can see the Altadena fire from our living room, bright and furious, which is also terrifying.  It goes without saying that we have friends who are seriously affected.  And the wind, the wind ...  Should we need them, we have bags packed if we have to flee (for who can tell if there'll be another fire breaking out, wherever - and we back onto very dry hilly parkland).  Whether or not I make it to MLA will be an interesting question.  

 

from Winslow to wise owl

Just after dawn in Winslow - some of the town, and a far mesa, just visible through the gap between two train cars.  We were off early this morning - after breakfast in La Posada - and a relatively uneventful journey back to LA - this time, early in the New Year, is usually a good time for driving, so long as the weather is fine.  Uneventful, that is, until we arrived home, and found a Great Horned Owl seated outside the bedroom window, not looking at all pleased to see us.  I think she must have thought the house wonderfully dark and quiet and empty.  She has a white chest very similar to Gramsci's - indeed, she's most cat-like, apart from the tail feathers.  She puffed herself up a bit - here (despite the problems of photographing through a window in the gathering dark) you should be able to see her baggy feathery pantaloons.  After bobbing up and down a few times, she turned her head away and emphatically gobbed up a neat little owl pellet - presumably of digested mouse (we approve of her powers of rodent control).   We backed away - I felt very much as though I'd invaded her privacy.  But it was a great welcome home.

 

Winslow

On our way back ... driving into Winslow in the sunset, and then the view from our room.  Note Arizona's most ridiculous cell phone tower, pretending to be a spindly pine tree. The cats, having slept all the way, seem ominously lively, so we're hoping for a quiet night's sleep ...

 

illuminating research

I am so very happy that one of my Christmas presents this year is an illuminated dandelion seed head.  It's enormously satisfying to have a research project that one can encounter as ornaments (lit up or otherwise), wear, and generally celebrate ... this break - "break"? - I've manoeuvred myself to a point where the final main chapter is written, and there's just the middle part of the Introduction to go (I will, of course, be devastated when it's complete, as well as delighted) ...

 

Ice

To Site Santa Fe, to see Tristan Duke's wonderful show Glacial Optics.  I met him when he came to the Huntington conference back in March, and he told me about this, and was very apologetic that it wasn't in LA, but in Santa Fe.  Well, I said ...

I really love his project - making ice a collaborator in his records of climate change.  Below, an image from his Ice Core series, taking ice cores that were stored in a lab - some from what's now melted glaciers - placing them on giant sheets of photo paper and exposing them with - yes - flash, to bring out all the annual deposits in a glacier that have accumulated through deep time.

And here, he uses glacier ice itself as a lens - constructing what he calls a "glacial gaze."

In yet others, he used ice lenses to record the aftermath of the Marshall Fire in Colorado, and the Hermit's Peak Fire, not far up the road from us.

And somewhere in all of this (because there was much more to think about) I feel the germ of a NAVSA conference paper coming on ... watch this space.

 

tranquillity

Compared to the scene we came home to, half an hour ago - this is an earlier image of utter tranquillity.  We went out to dinner at Harry's - wonderful dinner, with friends - and came back to ... Over-Excited Cats!  There was a bird in the house!!  A House Finch!!!  Sorry, no pics ... I was too busy trying to escort him out of the house (after we'd shut the cats away ...) - which involved turning off the lights - watching him perch on top of the lights, on the dried lavender in a pot on the fire place, on picture frames (though disappointingly, not in the Christmas tree with all the artificial red birds).  I stood outside under the portales, playing him house finch calls on the iPhone ... Eventually, he departed - one hopes not too traumatized (he didn't seem in a huge panic - to be honest, one had the impression that it was much nicer and warmer inside than in freezing Eldorado) - but I can't imagine that the (now released) cats are ever going to calm down ...

 

and the first of 2025 ...

... well, yes, this doesn't show very much variety or imagination, does it ...? ... but much of the rest of today (unless you count a cold walk in not very picturesque grey light) consisted of my chaining myself to syllabus writing, and that doesn't make for anything especially inspiring by way of visual accompaniment.  I thought I had a perfectly formed, new syllabus for my undergraduate course (on British art 1780-1914, or thereabouts)that just needed a small amount of tweaking - but since it meets on Monday/Wednesday, and there are two Mondays out - because of MLK Day and Presidents Day - my carefully sculptured plans now have developed some very ragged edges (that is not to be read as a complaint against fewer teaching days ...).  So it's been a day of compression and scissors and paste ...