my regular gas station

I don't, to be honest, stop here because of the billboard.  This just happens to fulfill all my criteria: one can fill up at the pump, as opposed to heading inside to pay; the pumps usually work; it's not in too bad a neighborhood (cf that comment about being able to use one's credit card at the pump) and there are always people around, certainly in daytime; the prices aren't too outrageous (for Los Angeles); and it's on my regular route to and from USC.  This last point might be of minimal importance, but I'm a creature of habit in some respects ...

And that billboard doesn't hurt, either.  A substantial sign of resistance.

 

colleague's door

This was a really excellent thing to see hanging on a colleague's door this morning: not just because of its message - though that's unarguable and essential in its own right - but because of the block manifesto-style lettering: a masterpiece of design as well as of statement.

On a completely different level, I failed to Remain Vigilant today.  I left a shiny cakebox in the department kitchen fridge today, containing cupcakes - from Lark - for the final grad class.  When I went to retrieve them at 1.55, two were missing. Eaten.  Gone.  Predators.  (luckily there were enough - I had bought a couple of spares in case people were fussy over the selection. But.)

 

white chair black chair

And the chairs weren't even posing.  I was just walking past this just-about-to-be dismantled tent - the remnants of the Los Angeles Festival of Books - and the triangles were just aligned, in perfect symmetry.  Admittedly I had to crouch in a few different poses before I could make this work - it was hard to evade my own shadow - but it seems apt, too, for a final class in which we're moving towards - and past - Vorticism

 

Both sides of the reservoir path

From the faintly sublime to the definitely ridiculous: the path around both Silver Lake reservoirs this morning.  Who is Jason?  Why is he represented by a carved apple?  And aren't those fluffy clouds (soon to be replaced, for the rest of the day, by a sullen and cold grey sky) just wonderful?

 

a pruned tree

A deceptively leafy picture: one can't, of course, see the massacred plumbago from this angle, and the Asian pear is chopped back so that one can see the hills of Griffith Park rolling away in true rural fashion from the dining room.  Here are the remainders of the rain clouds: with a bit of luck, the fairly substantial amount of precipitation that arrived this morning will help things start to grow back ...

 

desktop roses

Saved by Alice from the front garden, where they were doubtless about to be mangled by this year's tree trimmers, brush clearers, and general savage maulers of greenery.  They have cut back the plumbago in the back ... violently, like an application of a scorched earth policy.  Admittedly, it's probably now less flammable, since they carted away masses and masses of dead brush underneath, but it looks terrible; and the trees at the front are denuded.  Yes, I know it has to be done annually (and no, no actual rose bushes were harmed, but we knew that The Poet's Wife (yellow) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (red) would have been in their way).  And yes, I do appreciate that Alice found an old bottle that had contained Kew Gardens' very own honey vodka (much recommended).

And as for the work desk - it's the old dining room table from James Street/Graham Street, and I'm very fond of it - for some reason I've always liked working at a round table.

 

a corner of a tent

Outside Taper Hall - but in reality, mushrooming all over campus.  It's time for the annual Los Angeles Festival of Books, an event that I've singularly failed ever to attend/visit, for a variety of reasons (i) the only time I've ever proposed to appear to promote a book I'd written, I was turned down - I guess I should have put together a whole panel of ... of what?  other books about flash photography that happened to be coming out at the same time (ii) fear of lack of available parking (iii) all the books I have at home, and haven't yet read - do I really need to know about any more? (iv) the book(s) that I should be using any spare festival-going time to write (v) fear of all the people who have quite self-evidently managed their time better than me and have managed to write something.  And so on.  Next time I have a book emerging, though, I'll try and be a bit more together about its local promotion than I was last time ...

 

a yellow corner

Maybe this is turning into a whole week of Los Angeles corners?  Why not?  This one is remarkably egg-yolk yellow ... 

 

documentation of deterioration

My chronicling of the building formerly housing Wood Pizzeria continues - its decline during this semester has been nothing short of spectacular.  On the other hand, since this semester has been going on approximately 166 weeks so far, perhaps that's understandable.  A perceptive reader will note that I seem to be grabbing shots when stationery at traffic lights while on my commute: yes, it's been another day like that.

 

corner

I pass this corner every day on my way home, and every day I'm reminded - just for a second, but I guess it's now become a routine piece of association - of a French street corner.  Oh, of course, it needs a mansard window or two; and a sign saying Tabac, and (if we're going full nineteenth-century - say, from an Atget photo) some advertisements peeling from the walls.  But it does have that strange wedge-like corner; the orange and ochre of continental wall paint; the naked winter tree ... although, come to think of it, the tree might very well be dead, since it's late April.  (It's lucky to be still standing - someone went round downtown LA on a bicycle with a chain saw - no, not Elon Musk - this weekend, senselessly chopping down small trees.). And it does have what, surely, in a nineteenth century French view would be a chiffonier, or rag-picker, or whatever one might call the bundled person wheeling a trolley on the right.  They are passing some graffiti - there seems, over the last few weeks, to be a nightly rash of very bad, very crudely executed graffiti, quite a lot of it celebrating MS 13.  I don't know what to make of this: bravado? Or, more likely, copy-catting? Provocation?  A questionable form of protest?  Every day, now, on my way in, I seem to be passing men with brushes on poles and large buckets of paint, obliterating it again.  I live in hope of traffic being stopped, one of these days, under the 10 underpass on S. Hoover, where my favorite new graffiti has appeared: the one word, APOCOLYPSE.  I need to take its photo.

 

Easter walk

A fairly quick walk, at the reservoir: how I wish we had even a day off, in this country: as it is, I suppose that I might finish my heap of grading (papers done, now on to exams), and have a power point ready for tomorrow afternoon's class, but it's going to be a tight squeak... All the same, wonderful to see wildflowers.

 

deck lizard

This particularly attractive little lizard on our deck is camouflaged to look like he's a small branch covered in lichen ... it's just about getting warm enough to sit out there again, even if all that I was doing was, in fact, grading ... (and I'm so please with my long C19th British art students: who ever thought that I'd get a paper on William Wyllie ... one never knows what's going to inspire people ... )

 

campus squirrel

A very grey squirrel, indeed, on a very grey day.  It's also posing as though it's been donated by the Lebanese Cultural Club of USC, which seems dubious.  Under current anti DEI scrutiny, are we even allowed such an institution?  Does this solid plaque refer to the tree above it, which almost certainly doesn't have the spreading grandeur of a Cedar of Lebanon?  I confess I didn't really look carefully, since I was unsuccessfully trying to get the squirrel to re-adopt the cute nibbling pose he'd been holding a minute before.

 

something cheerful from the garden

... because we all need it, and they are blooming everywhere.  Otherwise, it's been an aggressively grey and rather chilly day, made extra gloomy by my heading over to the main library to fill in a few errant footnotes - or so I thought.  Wouldn't you expect an R1 university library to have standard canonical texts on the open shelves?  I was looking for a copy of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (I have no idea where my own is, but it certainly wasn't with the rest of the Hardy volumes in my office).  This is hardly a rare thing to be searching for.  There was, technically, a copy - in an omnibus volume with some other Hardy novels, but that's hardly proper for footnotes.  Instead - half empty shelves.  I checked later, and no, of course it wasn't out - the library's various editions, including the Norton one, the OUP ones, etc etc etc, are all in the Depository.  Who makes these decisions?  Why?  What's wrong with having books in a library?

 

cyanotype failures

When I've made cyanotypes with a class before - to give them a taste of early photography - after a good dose of Anna Atkins - it's always been a terrific success, and everyone - well, most people - have gone home with a a real artwork memento.  Not today. Not at all.  I probably should have tried a test one or two just before class, to see how long we should be exposing them for under a sky that was sometimes cloudy, sometimes sunny - I think we all over-exposed, and it was a ridiculous disappointment.  One cyanotype sheet even went floating away, with a petal on top, over the campus water feature.  Ah well ...

 

blurred spring

Spring is, doubtless, out there, and someone has put together a lot of little vases that indicate as much - but not only was it grey and chilly again today, but work delivered a depressing amount of unexpected blips - at least, the being-graduate-studies-director side of it did, which was... exhausting.  Also, if anyone can tell me where I've put my spare black printer cartridge, I'd be grateful.  Since it's wrapped in bright yellow plastic, you'd think it'd be even more luminous than yellow tulips, wouldn't you?

 

copper wire thieves

We haven't had any light on our street for a couple of weeks.  Tonight, when we went for a walk, we saw that the whole of the next street has now been hit, too - and this (according to TV news, etc) is happening all over Los Feliz.  Thieves are pulling up the LADWP concrete covers, and then taking all the copper wiring - and leaving these holes in the sidewalks ready for us to fall into.  Obviously this causes damage to the whole infrastructure; obviously it's not's safe for a whole range of reasons; obviously, seemingly, no one can say how long this will take to repair - a year?  The city doesn't have any money ...

 

footnote hell

Last year, sometime, I grappled with my lifelong terror of writing about Walter Pater, read lots of him, and penned an essay called "Pater, Looking," for the Cambridge Companion to Walter Pater.  This was to have been edited by Francis O'Gorman, who sadly died almost exactly a year ago.  He'd handed over the volume by then, but I still wanted the essay to be the best it could possibly be - a kind of academic homage to him.

And I'll admit, I was pleased with how the essay turned out - I still am.  Until, that is, the request came back from CUP that each chapter has no more than 20 footnotes, and that none are discursive.  I like footnotes, at least in generous moderation.  Only one of mine could be called discursive, and I still maintain it's a necessary gloss.  But you try and get a multi-quotationed chapter into 20 footnotes or less... In the end I managed 22, but I do think this is a crazy editorial decision that's been passed down from on high.  And I'm sure I've introduced all kinds of new errors - it's bad enough remembering to do British, not US punctuation.  

Let's just say that Gramsci wasn't any help.

 

Bernie, AOC, and fans

That's some line-up - Bernie, AOC, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers - Neil Young is somewhere around, too, having been belting out Keep on Rockin in the Free World (of course).  Today was right up there with the Best Ever Rallies of All Time - all 36,000 of us, or more, according to some estimates.  Bernie and AOC were both terrific, as all the press reports attest - but so were the other speakers, especially local congresswoman Eunisses Hernandez.  And the nurses who leapt off the stage when someone in the crowd needed medical attention (it was hot).  And the gospel choir singing Power to the People.  And everyone crowding up the steps of City Hall.  I was lucky, or wise, enough to get there fairly early, so I was probably 20 back from the main stage - and even then was horribly conscious of being short - but it was a great view.

So interesting seeing what points got the loudest cheers/boos.  Oligarchs, insider trading, billionaires, of course. The Los Angeles crowd is one that really, really cares about housing.  And education, at all levels.  And incarcerating and deporting people without due protest.  But also threats to defund PBS/NPR - and, yes, history.  Much enthusiasm for the Gettysburg address, Frederick Douglass, Selma, 1776 and rising up against the monarchy, and FDR.  I'll look forward to teaching my Picturing Democracy course again in the fall ...

But it was HOT.  I was so grateful that they were handing out free water.  And a lot of people, sensibly, had fans.

 

share your emotions

Fair enough, as imperatives go.  But - what kind of emotions might be expressed by the gift of a smallish green bush?  I was driving past, en route to the dentist (did they have plants ready to convey or acknowledge apprehension?), and so couldn't really ponder the selection.  Promise, hopefulness, endurance?  

 

a fierce hunter

OK - let's be honest.  He's practicing.  But practice is important.  And this morning he tracked down, and captured, the string on one of my hats.

 

froggy

 

Froggy.  On my way home today, looking roughly how I felt.  I don't think I ever imagined that I'd be working in an environment where we sat around in a department meeting sharing knowledge about resources to share with our students should they, or someone they know, suddenly find themselves in danger of having their visa status revoked, or being arrested, or ... 

Iris at night

One of those shockingly busy days when I didn't stop ... lunch was a handful or so of sesame sticks while I finished a power point for the 2 p.m. class, and when emails came in faster than I could answer them.  But I did go and sit in the little patch of graveled garden outside my study window after dinner: a warm night, at last, so this wasn't masochistic, and all the irises are blooming; and I've always fancied it as a quiet spot for sitting - in this case, on a boulder (artfully positioned there by our landscaper - I'd never previously thought of it as a stone seat, but it functions perfectly as one).  That last a few minutes, anyway ... now for the graduate summer grant applications ...

 

chromatic

This is quite some bicycle get-up!  It seems appropriate to mention that at long last, I received approval to teach a GESM - a General Education Seminar - called "On Color."  I've been wanting to do this for an age, but only did the final persnicketty corrections to my mock syllabus over Spring Break.  I'm not sure when I'll do this, but it's on the books, and moves between scientific color theory and Derek Jarman, with a whole lot of pigment grinding and sourcing in the middle.  Oh, and we'll make a playlist for Spotify, starting, I suppose, with Donovan's "Colours," though that may get them pedaling off on their bicycles quicker than they can say "unenroll" ...

 

redbud leaves

A decidedly quieter post than yesterday: no muskrats involved, although it was a lively late afternoon for coyote squeals, and there's currently much Great Horned Owl hooting going on right outside.  I was sitting outside reading graduate work this afternoon, but kept getting distracted by the sheer beauty of the translucent - more translucent than they look here - young redbud leaves.

 

whose streets? Our streets!

I so enjoyed painting these signs!!  Admittedly, the lettering on the Delete key is a bit iffy, but the muskrat is delectable.  Perhaps not entirely anatomically correct - few muskrats have teeth quite as sharp and white as this - but he looked better with them (and with blood dripping from his claws).  

And off we went to the local demo in Los Feliz, which sprawled around one complex intersection and over another - there may have been five hundred people in all.  Here's Alice with her sign ...

- and not only was it heartening to have so many cheerful (if basically angry) people out on the streets, of all ages, but wonderful support from cars and trucks honking as they went past, and a USPS driver, and an ambulance driver.  There's so little one can do by way of fully active opposition, seemingly, so much of the time, that at least participating in solidarity gives one a forward propelling sense of strength in numbers.

 

conference vegetables

There was time, at today's lunchtime conference break, to go and see how spring is coming along in the Huntington's gardens - unsurprisingly beautiful, especially some beds of very pale yellow poppies.  A colleague and I went and crushed leaves of sage and thyme and geraniums in the herb garden and pretended for five minutes that all was well with the world, which it so very clearly isn't.  I so love how the Huntington appreciates the beauty of what one might conventionally think of as vegetables: the yellow and reddish stalks of the chard, and the very fat globes of artichokes.

 

a wedding bouquet

At the time of the fires, in January, I moved a lot of things - like paintings - into my office at USC, and now I'm slowly moving most of them back.  But some objects - like old photographs, and old family memorabilia, seem safer there, or at least less combustible.  On the other hand, since Taper Hall can have dicey water pipes ... I've been moving them into my deepest filing cabinet.  Today, I unearthed my paternal grandmother's wedding bouquet ... or at least a fragment of it: the actual bouquet (some wedding photos emerged a few minutes later) was a magnificent creation.

The wedding was on May 24th 1920: Gran would have been just 21, and Joe, my father's father, 29.  He'd been back from the First World War for a year and a half.  They were married in the Primitive Methodist Church in Hunslet, Leeds (my grandmother's family were Methodist; his C of E), and then, by the look of it, returned to her family home at 22 Cranbrook Avenue, Beeston - also in Leeds - which is where they then lived.  My uncle Don was born just over a year later; my father in 1923.  It's unbearable to think that by the end of 1928, their father was dead - he looks so happy and full of life, here.  But he caught pneumonia in a flu epidemic, and his lungs had been damaged by gas in WW1 (so the family story that was passed on to me by my mother went - but she was an unreliable narrator) - but whatever, that was it - leaving Gran with two very small boys.

They look rather solemn here - but I cheered them up a little with Photoshop's colorizing smart filter ...

 

obscurity and obliteration

The demise of Wood pizza restaurant - seemingly an economic casualty, like so much - has left a torn postered, graffiti scarred, dead tree environment, which seems like a visual metaphor for so much about the country.  And there am I, trying to talk about the Ruskin-Whistler trial, aestheticism, and Pater's aesthetic beliefs all in one 100-minute segment (with class discussion in groups, in which they all battled with different segments of Whistler's Ten O'Clock lecture, quite successfully), and wondering quite how to make it speak to the state of things today, beyond dropping in some asides about being able to visit The Peacock Room, say, in the Smithsonian's Freer/National Museum of Asian Art, assuming the Smithsonian is still opening by the time they get there ... On the other hand, a class period talking about Victorian art is, at the very minimum, a little spell when I, at least, am not glued glumly to the news cycle (and yes, that case of tariff-beating French/Italian/Spanish wine arrives tomorrow from wine.com ...)

 

next door ... coming soon!

The vans full of Staging Furniture were there bright and early this morning, and apparently were there all day ... any moment now, we will be officially looking for new neighbors.  The screen writer next door realised that much though she loved the house, it somehow wasn't suitable for two very tiny children (given that it's on a steep hill, and is all stairs, inside and out, with no flat outside play space whatsoever, you'd have thought that she might have considered that before buying it in the first place, but people are ... well, let's just say that she must have fallen in love with the view).