Oklahoma City Memorial — Rainy

Here’s the rainy version of the monument shown in the post below:

I took this photo on my way to a reception that I was surprised to see anyone attended, seeing as how a tornado had (possibly) just struck Oklahoma. Just an hour or two earlier, sirens were blaring, and I saw this kind of stuff on my hotel TV:

They shrug these things off in Oklahoma City, but first they have to go into full-scale panic mode on the TV news. That curled appendage above Britton — what the meteorologist called a “hook echo” — was the alleged tornado, one of two. But my colleagues at this conference never saw this, and blithely got on a bus heading to the Memorial Museum.

I waited til the tornado watch was over, and then took off by foot, carrying a borrowed umbrella. Took me so long to get there, I missed the reception. My friends were surprised when I told them about the tornado, although they admitted hearing a couple of sirens.

I’ll admit it: I’m more afraid of tornados than earthquakes. That’s probably why I live here and not there. I was in a tornado once, when I lived in Barrington, Illinois. Deep in my psyche, I have post-tornado traumatic stress syndrome. I was too young to remember anything about it, but my mother says she took me and my brother, then a baby, into the cellar to wait it out. The cellar was flooded. I stood in the water next to my mother while she held the baby. There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, flickering on and off. My mom thought if she could just reach the lightbulb and tighten it, it would stay on.

But she couldn’t quite reach it, and that’s why all three of us are alive today. Happy Mother’s Day!

Oklahoma Monument — Sunny

I’m jumping around the timeline now.  I was in Oklahoma last week.  The day I arrived, within about an hour, Oklahoma experienced a tornado. But a couple days later, all was sunny.  I saw the Memorial to the victims of the Murrah Federal Building bomb attack on both the rainy day and the sunny day.  On the sunny day, I was looking north.

Visiting the memorial museum was, of course, intense. It explores the bombing and its aftermath in very specific, detailed ways, using every medium available. It is the ultimate “found art” museum, and since all the found objects were thrown off by this horrific attack, they connect you directly to the lives of the victims — and their murderers.

I saw a datebook, all scuffed and crumpled, open to April 1995. The owner of the book died. For some reason I found it quite moving that he had put a yellow sticker on April 15 to mark the full moon — the last one he was alive to see.  I saw the famous axle from Timothy McVeigh’s rented truck, the one bearing the VIN number that helped the FBI finger him.  I heard a recording of a water board meeting in a nearby office, which picked up the sound of the loud explosion.  I saw shreds of clothing, shoes, watches, jewelry recovered from the blast, often damaged, and now on display.

These little items are the only way to understand what happened.

This museum has hundreds of such items, plus photos, TV clips, and lots of text explaining the various things that happened. The writing is clear and restrained, and never indulges in the bathos of political posturing. The only place you see that kind of thing is on the contemporaneous video clips — mostly from Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose “feel your pain” exercises apparently worked for them back then, but seem like self-parody from this distance.

When the bombing happened in 1995, my son was 4.  I still remember his little toys from back then.  We got a lot of Disney stuff, some of it from McDonalds, promoting movies like Winnie-the-Pooh and The Lion King.  The last room of the exhibit is for photos of those who were killed, each one inside a clear plastic box with a little ledge for personal items family members might have wanted to include.  Many of the kids from the day-care center who died had Disney toys just like my son’s in their boxes. Seeing those things was a blow to the gut.  Thinking, my boy’s almost 18 now, ready to graduate from high school, thank God, something those Oklahoma children never got to experience.  The whole world was made up of these toys. That’s what they knew.

In Bolinas

The estuary there was at low tide.  This was from the same trip as the de Young photos. My wife and I drove a rented Prius out to see Bolinas and have dinner in Stinson Beach.

I’ll post a picture or two of the main attractions of this estuary — birds and other wildlife.  But I wanted to show this one first.

Falling Embers

This was a powerful representation of the civil rights era:  A sculpture made from the charred remains of a torched church from, I believe, Birmingham, Alabama in the early 60s.  The pieces of wood dangled in a precise arrangement from the ceiling. 

Update:  Thanks to a commenter I can now credit the artist: Cornelia Parker.

Portals of Andromeda

Jon Kuhn’s kaleidoscopic, prismatic sculpture at the DeYoung.

Does the title refer to the mythical Greek character punished for her mother’s pride in her beauty?  Or to the constellation?  Or to the galaxy nearest to ours, containing a trillion stars?

Nature Nook at DeYoung

From the outside, it isn’t easy to see how the museum’s designers have created these little open-air nooks that have mossy landscaping…

I like the picture enough to show it to you, even though there’s a reflection from the window.   Also note the bumpy surface of the museum’s exterior walls, like someone stamped the wall tens of thousands of times with a spoon.

Hanging Sculpture and its Shadows

Floating and falling are unconscious themes in a lot of the art we saw at the DeYoung…

I’m in this picture somewhere…

Detail from a sculpture at the DeYoung…

Enough Politics, Time For Pictures

From the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, specifically the tower, which is like a new hill from which to see San Francisco:

More to come after Mother’s Day festivities…

Blogger, Interrupted

Sorry for the delay in posting. I’ve been on two business trips this past two weeks, to Phoenix, Arizona and to Richmond, Virginia.  I didn’t bring my camera to AZ, but I had it in Richmond, a city I’d never seen before.   I spent most of my time there in the ER at Virginia Commonwealth University Hospital, which was not the plan, obviously.

After discharge and navigating through a Soviet-style pharmacy, I decided to walk back to my hotel. 

Here is a plaque on a building near the hospital.  It seemed strange that I would get a serious diagnosis at such an historical location:

Then I saw this great old building, which wouldn’t look too out of place in San Francisco.  It was on Governor’s Road, not too far from the Virginia governor’s mansion:

A little further away from all the Commonwealth’s majesty, I found this odd salute to the classical style of the old city:

I rested up and reunited with my colleagues for dinner at a restaurant that unabashedly bears the name, “The Tobacco Company.”  You walk in, it smells like smoke.  It has cigarette girls.  You almost want to embrace and love all the tradition.  Almost. My own condition is the result of overyielding the seductive calls of bad food.  The evil of the American diet is in the vast amounts of sugar hidden in it. Tobacco is right out there, telling its users, “I’m killing you.”  Maybe that’s part of its appeal.  If James Dean had a chocolate-chip cookie hanging out of his mouth instead of a cigarette, how many posters would he sell?

So I told my dinner companions about my day at the hospital, then wandered out into the cobblestone street on a cool evening, immersing myself in this curiously timeless little city for the few minutes I had left to enjoy it. 

I would have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to catch my flight — 12:30 a.m. Los Angeles time, which is my approximate bedtime.  The cab driver who took us to the airport is a local historian who regaled us with tales of the Byrd family and what a close call the ratification of the Constitution had been.  That unassuming plaque commemorates a pivotal moment in the nation’s history, it turns out.  Only fitting that a pivotal moment in my life take place on the same site.

Union Station, Cathedral of Rail

After dropping my son off Thursday evening for his annual winter trip to San Diego, I walked back to my car, turned around, and saw this:

Isn’t it cool how Metro has revived this architectural gem? The lobby was full of people.  I remember when going to Union Station felt like coming to a Greyhound station.  My son’s 17.  Seventy years from now, he’ll remember it not as a museum, but as that lively place where he caught the train to Nana’s.

Mysterious Holiday Self-Portrait

It Must Be December in Southern California

….because that’s when the sky looks like this.

Breezin’ Along with the Breeze

I have been trying to keep in mind Tony Soprano’s sixth-season admonition, “‘Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

I’m in my fifties now, I’ve seen a lot of things here in my little world, and I find history both pleasurable and important. But I also think change is good, new things excite me and as a father of an incoming high-school senior, the future is far more important to me now than the past. For me, too. It has to be. What I once thought of as my life has ended abruptly, twice, with no turning back. This is a condition of everyone’s existence. Sometimes this truth is hidden, but it’s there.

I remember floating on a water taxi in Venice early one foggy morning, seeing these ornate palaces emerge from the opaque dampness, one-by-one like a procession of ghosts. Whoever built these gilded homes never imagined that mighty Venice would ever lose its grip on the world of commerce. But it did. When the end came — in the form of Napoleon’s armies — Venice didn’t even put up a fight. They wanted to save the palaces to remind them and future generations of how rich and powerful and glorious they were, once. So, in exchange for no bombardment, Venetians handed over the keys to the invader. And now the whole place is sinking.

Someday they’ll say of Venice: “Remember when?”

Curiously, I thought of all that when I came across LA Observed’s link to a post on Life on the Edge, a San Pedro blog. The post is about the Daily Breeze, the supposed newspaper of record for my part of Los Angeles, the South Bay and Harbor areas. When longtime owner Copley News sold it to Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group a year or two ago, it was inevitable that we would read about the Breeze’s descent into the lower depths of journalism. LANG’s a cheapo-cheopo organization, proudly so. They buy up newspapers in a region, they consolidate as much of the operation as they can, and then they cut cut cut.

Thank You Oregon

Some coastal views:

And this one, the result of using the “solarize” setting.  That button seldom helps as much as it did here:

Portland has a lot to recommend it, especially:

…which is about to have an onslaught of Harry Potter fans.  The store will welcome them, but the folks at the coffee shop? 

 

Maybe not as much.

Scary Oregon

Signs like this one are posted up and down the northern Pacific coast of Oregon.  My son has a lifelong fear of tsunamis, so when I told him about the sign, he urged me to leave immediately.

“You know what happens just before a tsunami, right?”

“Yeah, the tide goes way out, and–”

“I could just see you running out to take pictures instead of finding higher ground!”

“There won’t be any tsumanis while we’re here, I swear.”

“How do you know?”

“We’re leaving now, so stop worrying.”

I knew it would freak him out.  Long before I became a father, I was an older brother. It’s a hard habit to break.

The little guy, running away from the big wave…doesn’t look like he’s got much of a chance, does it?

P.S.  Just figured out, this was my 500th post!  That hardly seems possible.

Love Goes to a Building on Fire

Why would a property owner paint their building to look like this?

This trim would look better on an old Dodge Charger or something.

This is, by the way, one more picture from Baltimore.

Summer Begins on a Friday in Baltimore

I’ve never been to Baltimore before, other than its airport. But I was there yesterday, with an afternoon free in between my morning meeting and my evening flight. The less said about the flight the better. But the afternoon was lovely. I felt light as a feather. Good way to see in a new summer.

Old buildings, some of them empty, downtown, with window ornamentation that casts great shadows…

And great reflections…

Musicians come out to entertain the lunch crowd…

A few blocks away, the pride of Baltimore’s developers and planners, the waterfront, a haven of brand name “anchor tenants.” But on a day this pretty, even they look inviting.

But your attention keeps going back to these weird old buildings, tucked away in corners of the city…

“I’m Not Too Happy With Your Inability to Provide Me With Some Cookies. If We Could Fix This Situation, That Would Be Great.”

Ever had a roomate?  Ever worked in an office with a shared kitchen?  Then this is the site for you.

If you’ve ever written one of these “passive-aggressive notes,” now you’re on notice. It might show up on a website, like this:

or this:

Fast-Moving Storm in LA

I was driving downtown, north on the Harbor Freeway around mid-day yesterday, and the traffic was backing up.  There was a lot of wind.  I called who I was meeting with, who told me about a big rainstorm downtown.  I could believe it, because here’s what I was driving into:

But by the time I got downtown, here’s what it looked like:

Within a couple of hours, I was back in the South Bay, driving through Redondo Beach, about to hit the Esplanade from Avenue I.  Looking toward Malibu:

If I ever left LA, I think I would miss the winter/spring the most!

A Couple More New Orleans Pictures

Where you could look out on a levee. 

Where you could live with history and ghosts.

New Orleans from a Cab

As I write, a local news anchor has just reported that it is 64 hours until kickoff for the New Orleans Saints’ game in Chicago against the Bears. If the Saints win, they go to the Super Bowl, a goal the team has never achieved, or even come close to.  The idea that it would be now, a year and a half after “the storm” that changed everything in the Crescent City, is just too much. 

I got an earful of what’s right with the Saints from a cab driver tonight: The coach, Sean Payton, the long-time star Deuce McAllister, the maturing rookie Reggie Bush, and especially the fans who, according to the cabbie (who had the classic N’awlins accent) willed the Saints to victory against the Eagles after Bush’s late fumble revived nightmare visions of past Saints fiascos.

“We was just screamin’! I never heard anythin’ so loud. We were just all sayin’, ‘No way! Not this time!’”

My morning ride’s driver seemed oblivious to it all.  He was a Bosnian, only in New Orleans for six months after ten years in Pittsburgh, PA.  He was looking for work.  I had my camera and took a few pictures from the window. It was a dreary day and these pix aren’t my best, but they couldn’t be of anyplace but New Orleans:

Now it’s 63 1/2 hours…

Big and Quiet

A container ship slips quietly through the San Francisco Bay…

The sun streams onto a patio at Nepenthe in Big Sur…

…and the wind swirls around Coit Tower.

Belated New Year’s Gift

If you have a blog that takes comments, you find out a lot about the inner workings of spam.  WordPress equips you with a spam filter, but it doesn’t catch all the spam.  Some spammers are better at disguising their links in seemingly benign comments like “Nice site,” or “I was looking for information on this subject, this was helpful,” and those comments sometimes slip onto your site.  

One giveaway is when you click on the website or name link and it takes you to a site selling…whatever.  Insurance is the most common.  Another giveaway is when the comment is made to an old post that no one has commented on before. The game for these spammers is to trick the Google algorhythm into ranking them higher, so they will get more hits and, they hope, more sales. 

So, when I saw this comment — “Lovely Blog!” — on a boring year-old post about urban sprawl, it had all the earmarks of spam.   But then I looked at the website associated with the post: http://sureshg.wordpress.com/.    Hmm, a WordPress blog.  I hadn’t been aware of any spam being hosted by WordPress.  So I clicked.  And here is a screenshot of what I saw:

This is an absolutely gorgeous site! How its owner could find mine “lovely” by comparison is astonishing.   Every photo on the site — by Suresh Gundappa — is as penetratingly beautiful as this one.  Each one is accompanied by a “meditation,” a beautiful, Zen-like prose poem about applying the wisdom of nature to our strange human anxieties.  Today’s top post starts off like this:

It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense.

But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life. You are living in competition — that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison — that will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present which is the only reality — that will create tension.

IT IS A QUESTION of simple understanding; there is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good.
Accept yourself.

This is the way existence wants you to be. Some trees are taller; some trees are smaller. But the smaller trees are not tense — neither are the taller trees full of ego. Existence needs variety. Somebody is stronger than you; somebody is more intelligent than you — but in something, you also must be more talented than anybody else.

Just find your own talent. Nature never sends any single individual without some unique gift. Just a little search… perhaps you can play on the flute better than the president of the country can be a president — you are a better flautist than he is a president.

There is no question of any comparison. Comparison leads people astray. Competition keeps them continuously tense, and because their life is empty, they never live in the moment. All they do is to think of the past, which is no more, or project in the future, which is not yet.

Reading this, and looking at the incredible mountain landscape… it relaxed me!  I’ve got a lot going on, as you might know.  This has the potential to be a very restless weekend.  But somehow, reading this put me at ease.  

Mr. Gundappa is, from what I can tell, an investment banker and photographer in India.  On a Blogger page he lists his age as 250.  What, if any, religious tradition these thoughts come from is not identified, at least from what I can find.  It was an unlikely path that brought me to his wisdom, but, ya know, that’s how life works sometimes.

San Francisco, Looking at the Pacific from Pt. Lobos, 12/28/06

Clear, cold and windy here, just like in LA.

Christmas Night, 2006

A  belated Christmas card from Southern California to the world.  Taken Christmas night off Paseo Del Mar.  

A December Night in Redondo Beach

My son, my dog and I wanted to take a walk on the Esplanade in Redondo Beach on Sunday afternoon, but I had chores to do first.  But I stubbornly persisted with the idea, despite a little rain and approaching darkness.   Here’s a southerly view: 

Here was a heartfelt plea, taped carefully to a lamppost.  I hope the gnarly dude in question gives it up.

Some Desert Visions

I took these last weekend.  I’ve been messing around with them on Photoshop.  I know that’s wrong.

 

 

You Are There…When Two Galaxies Collide and a Million Stars are Born

“This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies,” according to Universetoday.com. “During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.”

The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars. The orange blobs to the left and right of image center are the two cores of the original galaxies and consist mainly of old stars criss-crossed by filaments of dust, which appears brown in the image. The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant blue star-forming regions surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.

Just…wow.

Nothing Better than Griffith Observatory

Is there any public space in Los Angeles more wonderful than Griffith Observatory?

It is an architectural gem set against a cliff overlooking a vast expanse of Los Angeles. It is a celebration of a branch of science, astronomy, to which Southern California can stake a proud claim. In a few weeks, it will reopen after a five-year renovation project, but because our friends Todd & Robin Mason have gained the affection of both the scientific and science-history communities in this area, they were invited to a preview opening Sunday morning — and let my wife and me tag along.

The Masons are finalizing a documentary, “Journey to Palomar,” the story of George Ellery Hale’s creation of the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Telescopes that profoundly expanded humankind’s understanding of the universe, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s first observations of  the universe’s expansion, which led to the development of the Big Bang theory that is now almost universally accepted. The Mason’s documentary will be one of the films you can see at the Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon, a new theater that the “Star Trek” actor and his wife made possible.

As will the public after November 3, we met a shuttle bus on the Orange Street side of Hollywood and Highland and presented our tickets there. The Observatory will accept visitors via a registration system, but as before the renovation, admission will be free. Waiting for the bus gave us a minute to check out the old Grauman’s Chinese Theater:

We arrived to hear a talk from a volunteer who was clearly excited and proud of what had been done to bring the observatory back — and asked us not to take pictures of the few still-uncompleted details. Rather than going into the front door, which is what past visitors are familiar with, we were guided down a flight of stairs on the observatory’s west side, which leads to a new exhibit area — the Gunther Depths of Space, which covers a lot of information — our solar system and what we know about each of the planets; the stars, galaxies and nebulae; and “The Big Picture,” a 152 x 20 foot image of the “cosmic wilderness” — the Virgo cluster of stars and galaxies.

Here is what the Gunther room looks like:

And here is a detail from “The Big Picture,” which in its entirety shows you a million stars. Each lighted object on this image represents not a star, but an entire galaxy:

Upstairs, you’ll find some of the exhibits you recall, such as Foucault’s Pendulum, and the arresting murals in the rotunda, all nicely restored and probably augmented. But for me, when I got to this floor, I was less focused on the scientific information, and more on the sheer artistry of the building, indoors and out:

You probably remember this monument that depicts Gallileo and Copernicus and other early explorers of the heavens:

…and the walkways around the domes, up on the roof, opening up fantastic views of the city…

…as well as beautiful little architectural details like this:

I am really grateful we got to see this. It felt like a pilgrimage to the L.A. of old, the city and region with a spirit of adventure and discovery–a better place and a better time than L.A. now. But Griffith Observatory is here now, so the present-day is ennobled by it.

(Photo credits: From the top, #1 and #9 are by Todd Mason; #2-8 and #10 are by yours truly. And I hope the volunteers at Griffith Observatory will note that everything shown here is ready for public consumption!)