of the people, by the people, for the people

is the title of a huge mosaic that greets you inside the Federal Building at 300 N. Los Angeles St. - after you've passed through security, that is, which takes a while (and was entirely conducted in Spanish, which I hadn't been expecting, but was therefore user-friendly for most of the long line). The mosaic is by Richard Haines, who started his public art projects with the Works Progress Administration; came to California to work for Douglas Aircraft during World War II, and then went on to become a painting instructor, first at Chouinard and then at the Otis Art Institute.  This dates from 1962, and certainly conveys Pride in the Systems of law, and also in what I take to be religious inclusiveness.  

    I was there, of course, to get a stamp on my passport that will let me leave and get back in to the country whilst I wait for a new Green Card to replace the one that disappeared, with my wallet, at Columbus Airport.  I've been overwhelmed, genuinely so, by how friendly and helpful the USCIS have been - I had a long chat today with an officer about how no, I have nothing to do with Flint, Michigan (its name coming from the Flint River, which in turn is a translation of the Ojibwa "Biiwaanagoonh-ziibi" (Flinty River) - so now you know), and about the ongoing water crisis there, and about how a different sort of crisis was bound to be unfolding because of the crazy number of plastic bottles that are being deposited there.

   And I was very grateful to be processed quickly, and to have gracious and understanding colleagues who coped very well with the fact that I was a little late and sweaty when I eventually arrived at the meeting that I was supposedly chairing ...

bark and sap

A damaged tree en route to the USC car park that I use.  The sap has dried in glutinous strands and globules - it reminds me ever so much of how the trees outside the house that I grew up in used to bleed sap - probably still do, though I don't remember noticing it for a decade or so.  They are false acacias - these are maybe locust trees, and the sap is much more green, much more opaque than that of the false acacias, which, when I was nine or ten, I always wanted to think could be used as amber, since it was rich and golden.  I used to look, hopefully but in vain, for embalmed flies and spiders.

some lichen that wants to be an owl

Well, maybe.  I'm always deeply skeptical of the James Elkins argument that we go around looking for - or rather, finding - faces everywhere: a form of anthropomorphizing our surroundings, perhaps; an act of safety (are they looking for me? are they out to get me?) and probably of paranoia (there's another face!  It's looking at me!).  I've never found that I see faces at all as I'm walking about.  On the one hand, perhaps that's good - I don't put any check mark in the paranoia box.  On the other - well, maybe it's related to my scarily unreliable abilities when it comes to facial recognition.  I didn't see a face in this tree trunk, either - -just some rather fine lichenous spots.  But when I looked at the photograph itself - quite definitely a bird face.   

where next?

This squirrel seems to have reached The End of the Branch.  We always refer to it as the Bad Squirrel, above all because it sits in a tree, or on a fence, and taunts the cats.  In all honesty, there are probably about 17, or 117 Bad Squirrels out there, all with attitude.  As for the strange dappled effect; the fact that our yard appears to have grown high brick walls - that's what you get when you take a photograph in a hurry without making any adjustments for the fact that there's a screen in the window, but, albeit inadvertently, it gives the effect of early fall ...

late season geranium

How is it, exactly, that I can tell that this is a late-season geranium - given the fact that without frost, there'll probably be some geranium blooms that continue, bravely but with a somewhat puzzled air, right through the winter?  It may have something to do with the light - by now, the afternoon shade is more dull, and so the pink shines out with more luminosity.  But there again, the flower doesn't look especially sure of itself.  Of course, it may just be inhaling all the particles of burnt plastic in the air from the recycling plant that went up in flames about a mile away, yesterday, and that's made the air reek with toxicity - or maybe that's also the body shop, a further mile or so distant, that also blazed up last night.  Either way, it definitely wasn't walking weather today.

more pieces of the sky

It's Parents' Weekend, and the awnings have all gone up again before tailgating and football tomorrow.  I was super-pleased with this little piece of abstraction outside Taper Hall ... 

wearing a bat

I was rather hurt today: no one seemed to take any notice of the fact that I was wearing a carefully crafted fabric bat for Halloween, despite the fact that its gauze wings were flapping around lightly in a rather fetching manner.  Perhaps people thought it polite not to remark?  Perhaps they were trying to get their head around Thomas Nagel's wonderful essay "What is it like to be a bat?"  Is it possible to imagine, or can one do no more that extrapolate from human experience - despite our unarguable difference from bats (no high frequency sound signals through which to interpret the world)?  Can one ever bridge the gap between subjectivity and objectivity?  Might one start by contemplating whether there's a difference between projecting perception and feeling onto a Halloween bat and one flying around outside (no, Nagel doesn't go there ...).  So many missed opportunities, today ...