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 ...