two green bicycles

Definitely a sustainability metaphor here!  Since these were on campus, parked outside the School of Social Work, quite the best thing about them is that they were stationary, and not part of the battery of wheeled objects that hurtle towards one with students on them.  

 

tree shadow

Coming out of Taper Hall this evening, I was stopped by this beautifully framed shadow.  I feel there ought to be a metaphor lurking within this ...

 

the poet's wife

She's starting to wilt, somewhat - who can blame her in this unseasonable heat? - but I picked these two flowers that were drooping over our fence and onto our neighbor's property, and brought them inside where we can enjoy them.  It was a somewhat perilous climb to get them - perilous because a neighboring rose had aggressively sharp thorns.

I wish I could remember more about the little blue and white vase.  It seems to me that I've always known it: it was among a small number that lived in the bottom of the corner cupboard in the dining room - one of the vases that was habitually used for the miniature posies and couple of stems that my mother delighted in.  But where did she get it?  Was it a junkshop find; a gift from her mother, or ...?  Whatever, it's perfectly balanced, and looks perfect with the yellow roses.  

Also, none of the horticultural websites that sing the praises of this David Austin rose seem to worry - unlike me - if she had a name of her own ...

 

the final round of our birthday celebrations

... and yes, it is late February, but it was warm enough to eat outside on Connie's deck, with Lydia, and we feel so wonderfully stuffed (salmon, red cabbage, mashed potato, Erewhon's terrific kale and white bean salad, a Tartine brownie, ice cream) that we may never move, let alone eat, again - or at least, not for another twelve months.  

 

a very large pot with a very small hole

Of course there are some tricks of perspective here - but nonetheless, this is a large pot - maybe the height of my elbow - one of two that had citrus trees in them (one lime, one Meyer lemon).  These fruit trees were doing - well, not brilliantly, but were ok, until our gardener decided that the rosemary and oregano that was also in them needed to come out, since they were sapping energy from around the roots, and the trees needed repotting in special citrus compost.

This didn't work.  Somehow, the pots then didn't drain at all - we think their tiny, inadequate drainage holes must have been flat against the ground, and over time, and some really drenching rains, the water has been an inch or so deep at the top, forming swimming pools for bees.  The trees hated this; their leaves started turning yellow and dropping.  This is not the California dream ... So now the trees are planted in the ground; the pots will be raised off the ground on bricks, and, once the spread-out soil has dried out, planted with bay trees and trailing rosemary.  Keep your green fingers crossed.

 

workspace

One of my favorite work spaces - or if that's a bit too specific, because of the lack of shade at this precise spot - locations.  I had to go to a meeting at the Getty today, and stayed on a good few hours to inhabit the quiet of the library, despite the howlingly great volume of graduate studies business.  And yes, the sky really was that blue - only we have a heatwave barrelling towards us, and I'm apprehensive for the fate of my carefully cherished California poppies, which are (judging by precedent) about a month from blooming.

 

is that a moth?

No, not a Moth - she's sitting at the other end of the counter, claiming indifference - but a lepidoptera specimen.  I've already explained that we keep non-feline-friendly flowers outside, on the table in the front yard, but we brought them in briefly this evening to change their water, and a brown, speckled moth - about an inch long - hitched a ride inside, and fluttered up to the ceiling.  Gramsci is, clearly, riveted.

 

flowers and the kitchen sink

One excellent thing about us having had two birthdays and one party within the space of six days is that there are lots of flowers everywhere - and these ones arrived with this morning's vegetable delivery.  We do a good deal of Googling to check that various blooms are safe for cats - which these are! - the others get banished to a table outside the kitchen window and, happily, were being visited by hummingbirds today.

 

illuminated orchid

Strange, how an orchid in front of a pillar lamp with semi-opaque sides - are they very thin marble? - that's the general effect - renders the light insubstantial, like a projected beam.  After the excitements of the past few days, one would have thought it would be a tranquil day - but somehow, trying to cram in too many catch-up errands, and an eye appointment for Alice, it didn't feel that way, at all.  It really isn't a good thing that the entrance to the parking for the USC eye clinic in Glendale is somehow mangled up with a Macdonald's drive-through, and both Macdonald's and USC have scarlet and gold as their chosen colors.  Errors can happen.

 

various yellows

First and above all - so many thanks to people who wished me a Happy Birthday today!  It was a wonderful, sunny day - a very welcome quiet day, after yesterday.  It included a walk (admiring other people's lemon trees - ours shows no signs of blossom, let alone fruit, but we're hoping that will change this week when it comes out of a pot and into the ground);

working (that's Moth, behind the sunflowers); and having dinner at a very good Mexican restaurant, Mirate, on Vermont: next door, indeed, to where I had dinner back in 2004, on my first ever visit to USC - that's now a sports bar.  Calling that lump of ice "yellow" might be rather a stretch - more like - well, what? Pale seaweed? - I think it may be frozen pineapple juice? - whatever, it contains a wondrous little hollow holding avocado and cilantro oil.  Yes, I know - that's maybe a tad pretentious, after margaritas that we know and love in New Mexico, but it was, like the tacos, extremely tasty.

 

West Coast Book Party

Time for the West Coast celebration of Black Power White Heat - and, as befits Los Angeles, decidedly less formal than on the East Coast (both were much fun, though ,,,).  Luckily, the rain cleared off and out, and although no one could remotely call it warm, especially as the sun went down, we were definitely all out on the deck, which is a wonderful party space.  And it was a belated retirement party, too, in that some of the people who had been invited to bounce out at Alice on her last day of teaching couldn't be there then ... so all in all, it was truly celebratory, with food from Porto's (for those of you who don't know, Porto's has been in business since 1960, so only a little younger than us, and serves wonderful Cuban American food - my favorites are the cheese/pepper/potato balls, and the dulce de leche bisochitos, which gives you a sense of quite how deliciously unhealthy they are).  We picked them up so as to be as fresh as possible, which meant that we weren't back here until 3.15, unshowered, for a 4 p.m. party ... but by the time people turned up, we were clean, and ready ...

and the Cake!  A shout out to Sweet E's Bake Shop, who do custom photo cakes ... and who deliver via Doordash ... I was so nervous about how this might turn out, but this was perfect.

 

a new use for utility meters

Somewhere down the street and up Effingham: a resourceful neighbor has realized that utility meters make highly adequate shelving for variegated heads.  I must go and look and see what repurposing ours could be put to ...

 

Not actually Moth's birthday

... but Alice's.  Moth, however, is taking a decidedly proprietorial interest (her birthday is March 8th, she might point out, and she'd like some butter, or some ice cream, please - both of which are forbidden her on medical grounds).  She would doubtless have liked the Birthday Dinner, too - foiled by the weather in our plans to go to the ocean, have lunch over there and walk on the beach, I devoted several hours to making an exquisite Julia Child coq au vin - perfect down to every little individually cooked pearl onion.  OK, I'll be honest: Moth did sneak one quick lick of Alice's plate.

 

the dampness of carparks

The top of the Royal Street carpark, drying out, but that won't be for long.  

Why should Royal Street, however, be called Royal Street?  I suppose, maybe, possibly, improbably, but why not? someone wanted to evoke the old Camino Real, linking the Jesuit Missions - not that I'm confusing the car park with one of these structures, and in any case, the CR more or less followed the 101, not the 110, which is the freeway by campus.  That is, the 101 followed the route of ... Or maybe it's named after the Royal Cinema, which was a theater that opened in the 1940s and showed Latino films.

I can't find any regal connection between the street and the Shrine Auditorium, opposite the carpark (Royal Street runs up its side), so I was on the point of saying No Kings, until I found, at last, a Kingly connection: the scenes in King Kong where the giant ape is chained and displayed on stage were filmed in the Shrine.  I think this is what's known as an interpretive stretch.

 

bathroom assemblage

Not, by any means, a deliberate assemblage, but a surprising combination that caught my eye as I was exiting the bathroom this morning: some drying clothes (not ones for the drying machine, and it's not exactly the weather to hang anything out of doors); the window tied shut (it blows open in storms, with wind) with a string from some pyjamas; and hanging from its knob, a Northern New Mexico sage bundle, with grasses and dried statice and some red twine.  Hang it in your bathroom, said the woman at the Farmers Market.  It'll make it smell wonderful.  It didn't, of course, make any difference, but it looks pretty...

 

when it rains ...

... it really rains - that is to say, pours.  The garden seems to have grown a great deal more green stuff very quickly - that is, where plants haven't drowned in water-logged pots or bits of ground; and out on the street, in front, we have a fast flowing hillside stream.  I think it's raining on and off for the next week ...

 

Gramsci, shoulder cat

For once, the tabby stole is gracing Alice's shoulders.  He's quite happy up there.  Indeed, he prefers moving around the house this way, much of the time, and he'll leap up there from a stair, a bed, a table, or when one's sitting down (as happened when I was in an administrative Zoom meeting on Friday).  If he can't find a suitable surface to launch himself from, then he yells at one to bend down.  When I go to the dermatologist, my shoulders are covered in a million scratches (he's especially lethal jumping from the bed when one's getting dressed or undressed).  And then he purrs.  Indeed, as I'm writing this at my study table, guess who's just arrived ...?  Of course, we find this utterly adorable.  If heavy.

 

around the 'hood

Because of various errands that needed running this morning, we found ourselves on a slightly different set of walks than usual.  Primarily, Alice's car needed a smog test, which is why we found ourselves parked outside a truck advertising, and possibly delivering, Donna's Pickle Beer.  Before this morning, I had no idea that there's such a thing on this earth as pickle beer.  Someone tell me if I want to try hops that have been blended with dill and cilantro and gherkin juice?  Who ever thought of that?

Reeling even from the contemplation of this beverage, we came upon these fire hydrants, and then a tree - look closely! - that's full of chandeliers.

Then taking the smog certificate, and check, to the mail at the Atwater Village post office, there was a little store next door to it with lots of cat themed gifts, and vintage clothes, and apparently some live kittens wanting rehoming, and a large orange plaster cat on the roof.  I'll be back, sometime soon, when it's open (not for the kittens, or Moth and Gramsci would never talk to me again) to investigate further ...

 

campus life

I'm not sure whether coyotes have been seen recently on our campus or not, but the warnings remain: warnings tastefully printed in the campus colors of cardinal and gold.  It's the season when groups of prospective and - for all I know - early admitted candidates are earnestly looking at where they're going to spend the next four years: I'm not sure how much of a selling point our local wildlife is (the squirrels are cute, but also, presumably, function as readily available coyote snacks), which is quite probably why this informative board is a little obscured from view.

 

Glendale's global welcome

To Glendale, to get my favorite carry-on suitcase's handle fixed at the Americana (I know: it's only taken me three months to find time for that) - and I was very happy to find a parking space by the public library: I always feel as though paying for parking in the Americana itself is giving even more money into Rick Caruso's pockets.  The junction box outside the library is wonderfully welcoming on all four sides - international architecture (in Glendale, you might well expect everything to be Armenian ...), and greeting you in a very polyglot way.  And nonetheless, there's a Californian poppy proudly in the center.

 

Tommy's, post rain

Tommy's Hamburgers is one of those LA icons that I drive past every day, and that I've never stopped at, and very probably never will (you are much more likely to find me eating a taco than a burger, any day).  Tommy's has been there since ... they change their sign every year, in May - 1946, when it was started by Tom Koulax, the son of Greek immigrants.  It expanded further onto this lot, and then onto the opposite corner, and now has a whole lot of other locations.  Apparently.  I've just found this out from their website, after checking the date of their founding.  At the same time I find they serve a chili tamale, which makes them marginally more tempting - but I doubt it.  And, nb, it's a regular eating place for cops.  But I do love the architecture.

Also, it poured - absolutely poured - last night, and these thick clouds are just wandering away.

 

reading at the car wash?

This is part of a wonderful long mural at a car wash behind the Mobil gas station on S. Hoover - I'd not been stopped in traffic and looking carefully at it before - one of those things that, having taken on board, I'm sure, but not having previously noticed properly, one wonders how long it's been there.  And one speculates, too, who painted it, and why they included a girl immersed in a book (maybe done by a local school?).  And of course one ponders whether the car wash is fully functioning and fully staffed, given the propensity of 🧊 to kidnap people from this particular genre of employment.

 

contemplating the garden path

... as one does, when rain is on the way, and when we've just been talking to our garden person - not the landscape designer herself (who lives in Tucson), but the plants and water and maintenance and general expert guy (who now has a wonderful German boyfriend, and lives in ... Berlin).  This is not 100% ideal, since we only get to see him twice a year - though now he has a visa this should become once a season - and facetiming him with, say, problems with dwarf lavender (very dwarf - not visible here, and barely visible if the camera were pointing in the other direction) isn't super-convenient.  But he is a lovely person, even if given to enthusiasms that sometimes prove to be a bit hit or miss.  Today's real issue were the citrus trees in pots, which seem not be be draining, and they're not doing well in them anyway ... we do love the pots, like a Mediterranean garden, but it would be great if the Meyer lemon wasn't drooping and wilting ...

 

hawk, seahawks

This handsome red-tailed hawk was disemboweling another bird this morning at the reservoir.  I'm hoping it wasn't a heron (it does have rather long legs, but I'm hoping not long enough ...).  I love those herons, but I also love raptors, and do understand their need for breakfast.  Still.  It was a very nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw start to the day.

And later ... Moth and Gramsci were as riveted as us (yawn) by the Superbowl, but yay to Sam Darnold, our former USC quarterback, for his performance.  And yay to Bad Bunny (and Villa's Tacos!) for the half time show, which was fun, and went far beyond that.  But oh, all of those endless ads for different forms of AI (or clearly made using AI), which made me very grateful for the reality of feathered, bloodthirsty hawks.

 

what retirement looks like ...

From my own perspective of being four weeks into the semester, I'd say that Alice looks enviably happy and relaxed ... (outside a Mexican restaurant in Pasadena where we were meeting some friends for lunch: exceptionally good guacamole).  Mind you, it does seem to be the case that her wallet is empty.

 

Getty graduate conference

A long day of graduate art history papers from nine Californian universities - and our representative, Margot Yale, did us proud.  There were many more people than one can see here (and those empty chairs on the platform are for the conversations that followed each of the three groups of papers) - I don't know why it looks so sparse!  As always, the Getty Research Institute organized this splendidly (and fed us well).  And outside, Bird of Paradise flowers, and (though on this visit, I only grabbed a very quick look) a Guerrilla Girls exhibit.  Despite the admin that kept hurtling into my inbox like a rattle of little pebbles against a window pane, it was wonderful to be immersed in a range of very different research projects for the day (although nothing between the C12th and the C20th!).

 

academic conversations

It's time for the annual Getty Graduate Student Symposium, preceded, this afternoon, by a get-together of Directors of Graduate Studies/Chairs and lots of Getty Research Institute staff, discussing - discussing what, exactly?  The state of graduate studies; the form that PhDs should/might take; preparing grad students for a world in which they might start thinking earlier in their graduate careers than they do of ways in which their skills might be used for things other than academic jobs and high-flying curatorial positions.  But we never got to the nitty gritty of how to manoeuvre students away gently, ever so gently, from the fantasies of jobs that just don't exist ... (and that carry with them, of course, the privilege of having a glass of wine outdoors on a warm February night, with the sun setting on the Pacific in the background).

 

the annual magnificence

For a couple of weeks, this is the view from my bedroom window in the early morning, when the sun is turning Griffith Park gold (I know it looks like autumnal leaves, but it's just grass and shrub), and the Asian Pear is ... blossomy. We think it's as old as the house, which is why it's so unusually huge, despite (or maybe because of) its annual pruning.  I know I post what must look like the same photo every year ... but it's a celebratory ritual, or has become one.  Looking back, I see that when we first moved in - thirteen years ago this week!  Can that really be the case? - I thought it was a Camphor Tree.  I wonder why ...

 

perched on the handlebars

Very springlike, to be sure.  These birds are on a slightly decrepit bicycle parked outside Taper Hall: an endearingly normal, non-electric bicycle - in other words, one of the vehicles that's marginally less likely to run you over on campus.  The electric bikes, the scooters - not too long ago, there were Campus Safety goons on their own bicycles making people get off and walk in the crucial central parts, but these days there is zero effort made to stop speeding students mowing one down.  To state the obvious, this must be a nightmare for people with mobility or vision issues.

 

not getting excited

I've been passing this hoarding for a week now on my way home (underneath it says that Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted, but I doubt that Bill will get into all that much trouble).  It's hard to say quite which aspects of the advertising for this new adaptation of Wuthering Heights turn me off the most: the mock Victorian mirror vignettes? The lettering, like the cover for some really bad supernatural drama set in a New England boarding school?  The vague sense that the mirrors are hanging on cheap Victorian boarding house wallpaper?  I will be phenomenally surprised at myself if I go to see this: thank goodness I haven't taught a course on Fiction Into Film in living memory, and so don't feel semi-obliged to go and see whether, in all its awfulness, it would make a good compare-and-contrast with the 1939 version with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, or (quickly glancing at Wikipedia), the Hindi or the Urdu or the Filipino or Japanese or any of the previous English language versions.  Of course, checking all of this out makes me feel fleetingly nostalgic for that course ...

 

full moon and blossom

I haven't had the greatest success, tonight, with taking a picture that captures both moon and the Asian pear's luminous blossom well: I've tried both my iPhone and a camera, and have come to the conclusion I need to spend more time practicing ... in any case, it's a beautiful night out there, apart from the deep roar of motorcycles down on the 5.  Sometimes, from the garden, one hears the traffic so loudly, and at other times one's hardly aware of it at all: it's best when the neighbor has her fountain on, which distracts the ear.  Memo to self: I keep meaning to get a fountain ...

 

sky slices

Why, yes, it was warm enough to go out to brunch today and sit outside, and then later the temperature went up to 85 degrees.  This is, of course, as much a result of global weirding as is all that snow and ice and bomb cyclones, and I'm not the biggest fan of hot - really hot - weather in any case, but I'm not arguing with the pleasures of eating on a patio in January.

 

sidewalk scene

Seen this evening in Mount Washington, and very, very bizarre.  It doesn't seem to have been deliberately posed, but it's a strangely satisfying juxtaposition.

 

roots

 

It was the end of a long dental journey today.  Over the last couple of years I've needed some failed dental implants replaced - technology not being what it is now, well over twenty years ago - but this long, expensive, and at times inordinately painful process came to an end this afternoon.  I'm told that yes, I can now bite into a carrot.  You can't believe how exciting this is as a possibility.  I had plenty of time - as I've had over the years - to contemplate the window sill of my wonderful dentist, but it was only today that, for the first time, I realized that the roots of these orchids bear an uncomfortably close resemblance to tooth roots.

an off-duty mascot

Strapped into a Facilities van on campus: here's the Trojan Warrior who (with a human inside him) makes an appearance at the Galen Center for basketball games. I've never seen him at volleyball, for which I'm thankful: he's lumpy, ugly, and in some way I can't put my finger on, faintly embarrassing.  Aesthetically embarrassing, I guess.  And he's also more or less indistinguishable from a Rutgers Scarlet Knight - just with more "gold."  His slump is doubtless a response to the current underperforming women's basketball team, who keep being Not Quite Good Enough on offense - not at all good enough, for the most part.  It was a sad, surreal sight.

 

time, passing

This blog is fifteen years old today.  I'll leave you a moment to think about that: 6,373 consecutive days of taking a photograph, and writing something - even if only a sentence - and posting it.  

It started, of course, as a teaching-related exercise: I didn't think it right to ask my students in my "Writing and Photography" course to write a blog if I didn't have any experience of doing so myself.  I think I told them they need only write a couple of entries a week: I embarked on it as a daily exercise, and never looked back.  It's a strange way of keeping a public diary, because of course it's highly selective and self-censoring, but it's also very effective as a memory placeholder.  Memory, indeed, featured centrally in the course itself - I think I envisaged myself writing a book on photography and memory (hardly original as an idea ...) which then morphed into one on writing and photography, which then, in turn, morphed into Flash!  

But I'm still drawn back to that theme of memory, even if only at a personal, non-academic level.  I was ruffling around in a box of old photos in my office today and found this - which I don't, indeed, remember.  The fade-away on the right hand side seems the perfect visual analogue for recollections fading away ... and also, as a big-time imperfection, surely was the reason why this wasn't kept alongside the small, familiar collection that lived in a wooden box on the other side of the room from the window you see here.  I guess it's 1961: I'm wearing my new school uniform - I do remember my father posing me, presumably at the same session, on the house's doorstep - and there's Rama, barely visible, turning his big blue Siamese eyes towards me on the sitting room window ledge.

What I admire about my father's photographic skills is how he's used the lighting to make the room seem large and elegant.  We'd only moved in fairly recently (where and when did the curtains get sown?), and didn't have much money, didn't have much by way of furniture apart from what had been bought in junk shops up in Cumberland.  There's no sofa, no rug.  But it looks quiet, settled, idyllic.  It also looks, and was, a long time ago.

 

the deception of peaceful symmetry

When this is one's morning view, walking from the car park to one's office, it's hard to take on board the precarious state of democracy; or the fact that so many of my US friends are badly shivering, rather than enjoying temperatures in the mid 70s; or the fact that this very university is fraying badly at its administrative edges (and, for all I know, at its administrative center, only that center seems hell-bent on replacing itself with AI).  I have spent so much time over the past couple of days doing tasks that would in the past have been done by office staff; and the office staff I've encountered are beyond demoralized.  So yes: nothing could be a less apposite image, in so many ways, for today.

 

a Japanese aesthetic

The Asian Pear in our back yard is just coming into its annual majestic bloom, and set against the back wall of the house, it looks as though it's auditioning for some Victorian wallpaper.

 

fleeing the storm

If we hadn't been able to change our flight to today from tomorrow, we'd have been stuck in NY for - well, who knows how long?  The flight we were due to take is already canceled.  And I have a PhD defense on Monday morning ... So here we are, back in LA - and the cats are very glad to see us early!