Alice's book launch

... Black Power White Heat is now out in the world , and today Alice gave a wonderful short talk and answered Q and As at a private gathering in a most wonderful apartment on the upper east side.  Indeed, the apartment was not only wonderful in itself, but the art work was extraordinary - with the result that I can't, I feel, show pictures of the interior since, well, it's not mine, and not a public museum, and that, alas, rules out pictures of the gathering as a whole.  But it was a terrific event, and glasses were most definitely raised.

 

another chilly day in NYC

Same apartment; different direction; even more freezing; same kind of work, and lots of it.  BUT - it was Alice's book publication day, and we just went out to celebrate!  And the proper party happens tomorrow!  And the cat sitter tells us that the copies have just arrived in LA!

 

a day's work

Or: from dawn to dusk.  It was horribly cold today - and yes, it's going to get worse (apart from Thursday).  Of course I went out - what are coffee shops for, if not to be visited? - but, given that a lot is closed on MLK day by way of museums, etc, in New York; and given that I had a lot of admin to do (sorting out interviews for potential graduate students - the kind of thing that office staff used to do; letters of rec, and so on), I was extraordinarily grateful that out VRBO apartment has a completely compelling, endlessly changing view.

 

snow in NYC

It's chilly and slushy here in New York!  We're here to ... drum roll ... celebrate Alice's new book (book launch Wednesday!).  We could do without it being quite so ... well, New York in January like.  Something of a nightmare cab ride from JFK through the falling snow to our VRBO in Hell's Kitchen - our apartment is in a very shiny, very tall building on the 52nd floor, overlooking (not in the image below, but if you turn your head to the right) the Hudson, and a whole lot of piers.  

 

Hollywood and Western

I've driven past this building on Western so many times, and idly wondered about it, and then the lights have changed, and I've forgotten quickly about my musings.  But today I was opposite it, in stationary traffic, for what seemed like an age ...

The Hollywood Western, also known as the Mayer Building, opened in late 1928: it's a very Greek version of Art Deco, with the little friezes and the heads at the top of the building.  It had some great tenants!  It was the first home of the Motion Picture Association of America, of Central Casting, and of the Hays Office (who regulated the movie industry, especially around sexually explicit conduct, so the government didn't try and impose codes).  Hollywood Billiards, Hollywood's oldest pool hall, was located in the lower basement - and all kinds of firms have been there over the years, with it clearly heading down a declining path: by the 1970s it was a heavy metal band rehearsal space and was used to produce porn.  And then it was badly damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and then was vacant before slowly, slowly coming back to life as office space (Adam Schiff's office is there) and it's now being converted into apartments, with a fair number of these being low-income senior apartments.  

I didn't find all of this out while waiting at the lights, of course,  but I now have a much better idea what I've been looking at all these years.

 

the strangeness of Los Angeles seasons

After the excitement of yesterday, it was business as usual.  Or rather ... business in the New Usual, which as Director of Graduate Studies meant heading in to the department to proctor an 8.45 a.m. 3 hour language exam, and then xeroxing the translations and sending them to the examiners, and and and.  And talking to students, too, but that's the good bit of normal.  But as one of our former office staff said, moreover, one of the things that The New System doesn't allow for is anyone being out sick, or for family issues, or - well, anything.  There simply is no slack.  So there were some other things - answers that I needed to, say, complex grad financing questions - that were just unretrievable.  And that, of course, makes me feel as though I can't deliver in my particular role what I should be able to deliver.  The end of this semester can't come quickly enough - and yes, it's only Week One.

A picture of autumnal leaves?  I got home when the light was waning, and I was visually uninspired - but very struck by the pathetic fallacy of the autumnal suiting well the mood of the day. Only it's January.  The Asian Pear, however, is always the last tree whose leaves turn golden - in a perverse way, it's a sure sign of spring.

 

in celebratory mode

... at least, I felt celebratory, until the Internet told me that my version of Chrome didn't support this blog (it did, yesterday), and shifting to Safari, it didn't want to upload a photograph ... eventually I dragged this image of my passionfruit margarita onto this page, but who knows if it will stick, or if you'll be able to see this, or or or.  

But, out at dinner, glasses were raised: most improbably, and with much gratitude, I've landed an NEH Fellowship for next year (I heard two days ago: was told I could tell people today) - which is all rather unbelievable.  Unbelievable, not out of false modesty, but because I put in the application last March, and I thought that the chances of anyone being successful who wasn't writing about the birth of the Constitution were slim.  This is to work on my wayward, chromatic, Oxford History of English Literature 1880-1910: a deliberately unorthodox volume in its conception (and it's been a long, slow time in that conception).  I think, though, that it must have sounded like a suitably safe topic ...I'm certainly looking forward to having the time to write it, and if anyone out there was a reader for the proposal, thank you, thank you, thank you.
 

leaving campus

This is not a bad view to have when waiting at a red light to exit a campus parking structure - although it's slightly improbable - improbable, that is, almost anywhere in the US other than Southern California.  It was such a long and grueling day that I'm frankly amazed that it was still more or less daylight.  The new administrative arrangements have left our (rearranged) office staff completely overworked and thoroughly demoralized (with basically 15 of them doing tasks that last semester were covered by 32 people), and those of us in administrative roles within our departments newly burdened with both unfamiliar tasks and considerable confusion.  What's going to happen first?  Collapse, or mutiny?

 

today's office

I had to work from home today - various work people, deliveries, etc. - and also had to retreat outside because of said work people, and grapple with the intricacies of writing letters of recommendation, graduate admissions, room allocations and the rest of it from afar.  But really, who could complain? - this is mid-January ...

 

drooping forms

There has been, indeed, so much rain in our absence that some of the plants haven't liked it at all.  I'm hoping the ground will dry out this week - and/or the pots will - it is, indeed, due to get improbable warm.  But still.  I'm going to have to design little pot rain-covers for the next time there's so much precipitation.

These things, as George Eliot would have said, are a parable.  To be sure, she mightn't have had in mind the correspondence between over-watered foliage and my state at the end of the first day of the semester, which was far, far more grueling than the ordinary (and indeed often exciting) exhausting buzz.  There was ... a great deal of administrative confusion about who, under our new hub system, is responsible for what - and what's worse, people who designed the outline of the system seem not to have considered so many things - so many things that people now don't know who's responsible for them.  How do I reserve the Art History seminar room? ... to take a very basic example.  I'm exhausted.

 

LA re-entry

We're back!  Exhausted (a poor night's sleep - thank you, Moth, and La Quinta's overheated room ...) and the usual assortment of crazed drivers coming back into LA - but we're here.  And gosh - it's noisy - that always strikes me, after New Mexico.

And the garage didn't flood, even if a few of the plants look decidedly the worse for wear from rain.  Now staring at the undeniable reality of The Semester Starting tomorrow - but rest assured, if you're waiting/hoping for an email from me, I'll be playing catch-up then!  

 

on our way back

It was very cold this morning - with icicles.  Horribly cold, when it came to packing up the car, with a thin wind blowing sideways.  And we were late getting off, and that meant driving for eternity into a low, blinding sun.  

We decided that, for once, we'd try staying a bit further along, a bit closer to LA - so we're in the pet friendly La Quinta, in Flagstaff.  Let's just say that it would be fine in an emergency, which this isn't.  It has the advantage of a fridge, and a microwave (take-out eggplant parmigiana bucatoni, from Fable - very welcome) and the advantages seem to stop there.  Gramsci jumped onto my shoulders to get to the top of a closet, and then said it wasn't up to his standards, either.

It's amazing how quickly one can drink a bottle of Albariño, under such circumstances (us, not Moth and Grams).

 

even more wintry

Yes, those are our magnificent icicles.  And yes, that was the one moment when the clouds lifted today.  It's been snowing again all evening, and the temperature is going down to 12 degrees tonight, and we're very much hoping that we'll be able to drive - as opposed to slide - out of town in the morning.  But it is, emphatically, beautiful ,,,

 

wintry

It was so very beautiful at dawn this morning that I went rushing out of the back door without even putting on any socks and shoes: that was doubtless foolish, but I didn't want to miss this magic light.  All other photos, though not from much later, were taken with feet fully shod.

I'm trying to grab the last few days/hours of quiet, although the barrage of admin today has been so intense that I've had to shake myself to see if I missed the start of the actual semester.  Evidently no.  I'll be there in person, of course, further snow permitting ...

 

a lunch outing

I've been to the old mining town of Madrid - about forty five minutes south west of us - numerous times over the last thirty years, but for whatever reason have never been to the Mine Shaft Tavern before.  Well, ok, I've always thought it was a bikers' pub, and I'm sure that there are times when it is, but we'd agreed to meet friends for lunch there today (a green chile buffalo burger!) which, though our spirits were dampened and darkened by the news coming out of Minneapolis, was excellent.  And the atmosphere was more like a regular old style English pub (bar, dark panelling, lots of dark wood tables and chairs - though admittedly English pubs tend not to have cut out cowboys and cowgirls marking the way to the restrooms.  In any case, it was a sanitized, but very visitable, version of a rustic/mining saloon, minus the sawdust, the cussing, and the horses (though there was a stuffed buffalo head).

That sullen looking sky?  There's likely some snow on the way ...

 

it's our room

Actually, I honestly thought that it was my study.  But apparently arguing with these two isn't an option.  I retreated. 

Well, obviously I didn't.  What with graduate admissions business, and a million and thirty letters of recommendations suddenly being asked for, and and and, the semester seems to have begun, even if it technically hasn't.

 

 

from the front door: morning, evening

It would, of course, be a lie to say that I'd forgotten what the semester is like - and in any case, it's not the semester, yet.  But that being said ... it's the Monday of the week before the semester, and emails kept thudding into my inbox, needing to be dealt with.  It has not been a quiet day: the sky maintains, nonetheless, some semblance of tranquility.

 

and onto the next season

It's not even Epiphany yet, and our little local supermarket seems to have decided that, yes, bzzzzz, it's time to get ready for Valentine's day ...

 

breakfast light

Honestly, waking up to this morning's news sent us running straight off for breakfast at Harry's (it helped that their "plato tipico," which includes eggs scrambled with nopales, and black beans, was on the menu).  It's not that I'm a Maduro supporter far from it: nasty crook.  But this latest action on the part of our regime is - in addition to being a major distraction from the Epstein files - what shall we say? - not the way to go about it.  It's as though DT thought: well, if I can't get a Peace Prize (except a chocolate coin covered in gold foil from FIFA), I'll get a War Prize.  So what next?  

 

beady eyes

Downtown: an excellent lunch with friends at La Boca (this bead and whatsits store is next door) before heading with them to see the Gustave Baumann exhibition at the NM Museum of Art.  I thought I knew Baumann's work fairly well - probably everyone in and around Santa Fe thinks so - beautiful, slightly mannered, often slightly over-bright complex woodcuts of the city and landscape nearby; of Taos Pueblo, the Grand Canyon, the Californian coast, and so on.  But I wasn't expected to be surprised by his versatility, including his abstract, or near-abstract works: these turquoise eyes are staring out of a corner in Curiosity Killed the Cat (1951), which the wall panel (the wall panels were very hit or miss in their interpretations) tells us "infers [the writer presumably means "implies"] that an undue interest in modernism might be dangerous."  Or it might be that Baumann liked painting black cats: it wasn't the only one.

This view onto an inner courtyard captures the at-one-moment raining, at-one-moment sunny nature of the day: the mountains were covered in a wonderful dusting of snow,

and later, the racing bands of dark clouds made for the first spectacular sunset of the year.

 

the ubiquitous mailbox crows of Eldorado

Let me be clear - we don't have one ourselves.  But if there's any local vernacular art - local to Eldorado itself - it's surely oriented around mailboxes: painted, personalized, and yes - in a number of cases - adorned with tin crows.  Sometimes, indeed, there's a real live crow instead, but they tend to flap away.  This one seems to have a shiny glass lozenge in its beak: I can't tell (given that it's New Year's Day) whether that's a piece of festive decoration, or an attempt to make this particular corvid stand out from the flock.