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).