Faux Vintage

Winter Sky

I've gone on about this before but it's worth repeating: LA has one good season and it's winter. After 360 days of sun it's nice for a bit of change that comes with the .25 inches of rain Los Angeles gets every year during the winter. On one hand it sends everyone scurrying to their BMWs to drive as fast as they can while gazing anxiously up at the sky and calling their agent / guru / drug dealer to lament the passing of the world. On the other hand it scrubs the skies clean of all the crud that's accumulated over the last year and you can see the horizons as clear as crystal.

New T.

Thanksgiving...

Our T-Day (which really stands for "Thomas day") was pretty low key. With no family near by and no friends to speak of we were faced with a day of cooking and entertaining ourselves. It started off with fashion show of W's newest threads.

Squirrel outfit from my sister Roz.


Bulldog hat makes him look tough.


hors d'oeuvres


The finished meal (I skipped pix of cooking because it wasn't that exciting).
Pot roasted pork with prunes, cognac and walnuts, braised leeks with coriander and orange vinaigrette and polenta. We had bread pudding with a whisky sauce for desert but I don't have a pic of that. It was all pretty good and unlike last year we only had leftovers for one night, perfect!


Last minute preparations. W was ready to eat.


He also got to sit in his new highchair for the first time. Seemed to like it, for a bit. It got us through dinner but that was all he could take. I think we need a cushion for it, we used dishtowels which can't be that comfy.


All in all a happy and successful Thanksgiving dinner. Next year we should have people over.

New Family pix...

Goofing around in W's room.




W in his office. I'd disturbed his important work.

Halloween!

This is coming a bit late. We didn't do anything special but he looks cute as a pumpkin.

Sinister...

We are special.

Santa Fe Springs, CA

New W.

A bit more Wallace...

I've been uploading a bunch of new pix of TF to Flickr. This one I like better in BW.




This is a mirror in our hallway. The pic of J and I is right before we were married, just under a year ago. And the other is TFs footprint. It's been a busy year.

JPG Mag

I've been submitting photos to this site for a while and don't know if I'm doing enough to get the word out that I need votes. I've submitted two for the next issue and would like to get published. Check it out and if they fit please vote yes.

Tools of the trade is one theme:




















From the site: "Nearly every profession has a tool, the thing that helps get the job done. Tools of the Trade is all about those indispensable items. Be sure to include what the tool is and the job in the description."

The second theme is Passport: "A passport is an invitation to see the world. Exotic destinations, new places, unique discoveries; travel photography is a way to bring the world home. For this theme we'd like to see photos that show us the destinations that you find most exciting in the world. Where is that special place that you can't stop talking about?"















Hope this works. Hope you like them.

New Pix on Flickr

I just posted a few new pix on Flickr. Mostly stuff from a trip we took to Chinatown when mom was in town and a few random things. I'm getting my photostream organized and hope to add more as I get the chance. Just a matter of doing it I guess.

Take a look here.

The Sandman

The boy has had a hard time sleeping the last two days. I've spent a lot of time trolling around the apartment like a shark trying to get him to go down. If I stop moving or put him in bed it's usually all over. On the bright side my right arm is getting a pretty good workout.

It's about time...

Wallace has arrived! He's tiny and he sleeps a lot but he's also super cute so we're going to keep him.

Finally...

I've done it. I've finished (maybe) futzing with the pix from our road trip. It's not all of them, just my faves. You'll notice only one of J, and that's because it's the only one she didn't expressly forbid me from showing. So, it's her fault. I like it though. Anyway here they are. Enjoy.

Jury Duty

I dodged a bullet last week when I had jury duty. First day there I got called in right before lunch to sit on a panel. Sat there all day and had to come back the next when I was thanked and excused. I've only had to go in one other time previously and I was loathe to go both times. But both times I left wanting more. No doubt it's long boring days but the procedures are fascinating and I want to know what happens. I also leave wishing I'd gone into law.

The real highlight of the two days I was there though was this. Moca is just a few blocks from the courthouse and they offer free admission with your jury badge, which I think is really cool. So I stopped and checked it out. The pix on the site don't do the exhibition justice (perhaps a job opportunity). The Livia Marin installation Fictions of a Use is a bit staggering. Imagine 2,200 lipsticks, carved as if they were game pieces. And they smell like lipstick. My favorite though were the Marco Maggi pieces. The image they use on their website, again, doesn't do justice to the work. The bulk of them are made up of framed sheets of Aluminum foil with a drypoint etched design in each reminiscent of circuit boards or the aerial view of a city. They were fairly big and the detail was amazing. Consider my mind boggled. He also had an installation consisting of several (maybe 40?) stacks of white copy paper with these tiny slivers cut from them and curled back into delicate designs. It's the kind of thing one would do if they were locked in a cell with no companionship and nothing to eat but buckets of Ritalin. And the sharpest exacto in existence. I had a really hard time finding pix of his work on the inernet but I'm sure they're out there. Well worth the effort. Or the trip to the museum I guess. My other favorite was Maximo Gonzalez's installation. The image he made is kind of collage-y but it makes a picture that covers 4 enormous walls and is made of "devalued currency from around the world". He cut what must be thousands of tiny flowers and shapes from old money and made this tableau representing a scene war. With tanks and aircraft etc. Again, I've had a difficult time finding pictures so all I can say is, if you can make it to the museum, do it. And the truth is I don't typically get into the shows at Moca. Not usually my thing.

So that's it. I posted some more stuff at JPGMag so check it out if you get the chance and vote for my submissions. I didn't get into the first issue I submitted to (#10) but I did submit to #11 and it's being finished now. I also submitted to #12, the newest issue. Cross your fingers.

Glendale CA: City of Car Alarms.

Imagine living across the street from the International Car Alarm Factory Outlet. And every day the entire staff of salesmen would showcase their wares, demonstrating them to everyone they could wrangle in to the store. Imagine the din of a dozen car alarms going at once, all day every day 24 hours at a time. Imagine the beeps and wails. Honks and headlights and crying babies and you have an excellent idea of what it is like to live in Glendale. I'd kill myself but the gunshot would set off a dozen car alarms.

We've got one neighbor who's car must announce its every lock and unlock with no fewer than 5 honks of the horn and a beep of some kind to signal that the process is over and it's safe to open the door/leave the car alone. Not only that but the cars alarm will sound randomly and often, like Gabriels trumpet, at all hours of the day and night for no reason AT ALL. It just likes to burst into song I suppose, like that skinny kid you went to high school with who was so into Gershwin. It only ceases when when whoever owns it rolls out of bed and digs through his jeans pockets to find the keys and shut it down. It's a process to say the least. Of course we never see the guy and we're not even 100% sure which car it is because by the time we roll out of bed and get to a window it's usually done. And I think the owner just points his fob out the window, indiscreet as that sounds. Here's the weird part: the car never moves. Not only is there no rhyme or reason to its wailing for attention, but there is no reason to lock/unlock it in the first place. Does he/she store the pots and pans in there? Is it used as a second bedroom? There is NO reason to access a car that often unless you are a pizza delivery person. NONE! It's getting flat spots on the tires and people are scrawling "wash me" in the coat of dust currently blanketing it. There's a smiley face on the windshield! The car does, however, have a flash spoiler on the back, to indicate its potential for speed. Stay classy Glendale!!

France!

I went to the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. Lots of fun. After we left the festival Roz and I drove up to Paris and saw the sights along the way. Here are some shots from the drive.

U ax'd frit!

It's the only picture I've been able to take so far. She's shy.

Excitement at the Park

I was talking on the phone with my sister who lives in Gainesville FL the other day and she was complaining about how the place was on fire. "oh it's so crazy" she says. I says "welcome to our world, every summer LA goes up in flames". Not two minutes after those words come out of my mouth I look up and see the plumes of smoke that signal another conflagration somewhere in the hills. Turns out it's a huge fire in Griffith Park. Our new place is on the eastern border of the park so we had a decent view of it. Pretty wild, I don't think we've had a real fire there in forever. Anyway, you can see the pix I took here. I started a Flickr account to show my pix. It's a bit easier I think so hopefully it will work out. A note about the pix: I should have used a tripod. I'm lazy and that's what seperates me from the pros probably. They give you an idea of what it was like though.

Gimme Shelter

Well we've settled on a new place. It's not too bad, 1920's building with 8 units. The owner gutted it and replaced all of the windows, cabinets and fixtures and added central air and heat and a washer / dryer and dishwasher, both of which were prerequisites to any place we considered because of the imminent arrival. And it's bigger. An extra bedroom and larger livingroom. So, it's ok.

The flaws became apparent right after we signed the lease and handed over a bunch of money. When you're alone in a place and can really look at it, the whole thing changes. All of the scuffs and worn knobs stand out. The views suck and the garage is fit for nothing larger than an RC MGB. And it doesn't help that all of the sudden we remember all of the things we put in storage a year ago. We have a bike?

So we'll see. I'm sure it will work. It's not a bad place, we just don't want to leave where we are. Who knows what the next year will bring?

One more...

Here's another new one, for me anyway. Jessica showed me a website with this kind of thing months ago and I recently came across it again on another website. You basically take a picture by shooting down through the waistlevel finder of an old medium format camera. In this case a Rolleiflex. I could probably use my Hasselblad just as well (or anything with a waistlevel finder) but the Rollei is suitably beat up which is what I like about it. It's a bit of a hassle because you have to deal with two cameras at once. Not ideal for hand holding.



I like the effect though.

Tiny Pictures 2

Here are the rest. Some are more successful than others.

Arles

The Loire Valley

Mougins

Silverlake
Downtown LA

The French pix work better, I think, because I had a higher perspective. The trick works by mimicking the very shallow depth of field of a macro lens. But if you're not looking down on the subject it falls apart and doesn't work as well.

Tiny Pictures

Part of my time during my semi-unemployment has been spent honing my photoshop skills and to that end I've learned a couple new tricks. One is how to make pix look like tiny models of things. Like toy trains or something. I got the idea from this site. It's got a lot of cool stuff but I found it looking for Olivo Barbieri photography. There is a link on the page. So I thought I'd give it a whirl and found the following pix in my collection that suited the experiment. Sort of. I think some of them worked and others didn't.






These were taken on our honeymoon on Kauai. I learned the technique here. Anyway, kind of fun.

Ludlow

The next stop, just down 66, was Ludlow. One of the guys taking pix at Amboy said it was a neat place to check out old buildings and it was on the way back to 40 so... We decided to have lunch there at this great old cafe, the Ludlow Cafe (in its second incarnation I believe) and listened to this guy go on about how those nosy Anglenoes are keeping him from smoking when and where he wants. He was very upset and wanted everyone know who to blame. He was pretty rough around the edges with a gold cross dandling from one ear and a bluetooth phone in the other (Really? Who's he talking to? Is he plotting revenge against the Jewish cabal on the coast responsible for keeping him and his Salems apart during the lunch hour?) and a kind of gross looking bandage on the back of his neck with something weeping through. It wasn't pretty but I've got to give the best description I can in case someone sees him hiding in there bushes blowing a butt and muttering about those damn angelenoes. The woman working the counter wore what may have been the oldest waitress uniform in the western desert and I think the guy working the counter with her was in a gang, and the mens room smelled like meat but they got an A so were were in. I thought it was a good patty melt so there you go. Afterward we backtracked a little to check out the old buildings, took some pictures and were were off again.

Once the repair shop.


I think this was the original Ludlow Cafe. There was a pic in its current location, where we ate.


The old gas station.


No idea what this is but I like the star on the sign. Jess pointed that out, I'd missed it. Ludlow used to be a railyard of some sort. Maintenance or something. Maybe it was part of that or an inn. Who knows? It's nothing now.


After we got back on the road we just put it on autopilot and let it go. In Travels with Charley (which I read on this trip) John Steinbeck writes about the point where a trip is over. About how everything falls away but the getting home and how every ounce of your attention is focused on that goal. That's the point we both found ourselves. We were so close to home that nothing else mattered. So there you go.

Amboy

There was a little article on Amboy California in the LA times right before we left. It's right along Route 66 at a spot that was bypassed by the 40 when they built that and it's all but dead. But it has this great example of Googie and some restauranteur has bought it to renovate. So it seemed fun since we were in the vicinity to stop and check it out. So we took an 11 mile detour to 66, which is really pretty right there. You drive down into a valley and it's really isolated. It's hard to imagine what it was like to drive through that stretch during the depression looking for a new life. Anyway as we pulled up to Roy's (the little hotel, and about all that's there) another car stopped and two guys got out with fancy Nikons and started doing the same thing I was. Then as we left another car stopped and a young couple got out and hoisted a big camera bag onto their hood and started hauling out lenses and bodies. I guess it's a bit of a photo mecca.

This is one of the bungalows at the motel. They looked to be fairly stripped but for the window treatments. All of the tiles were gone but the bathroom fixtures were there and a couple had some furniture, though not of the period. They were small so I could see the entire interiors. I should have tried a door though.


Here's the sign. I think it's pretty famous, it looks familiar anyway. This may be my favorite picture from the whole trip. It's so clean.


This is the main building. I can't tell but it looks like a lobby and offices in back. Thee was a cactus inside and it was really pretty clean.


The Amboy Crater. I'd never heard a thing about this but it's right there down the road from Amboy. Apparently it's a volcano and there is a dirt road leading to it though it was a little out of the ole Honda's league. The surrounding area is covered with black volcanic rock (Igneous?) resulting in a pretty wild landscape. We saw one other crater and much more of the lava flows. That's when I began to wonder what it would be like driving past as the Joad family. It's a far cry from Oklahoma.

Last day out

We got home today. Not a very long drive from Kingman, got home by 3. We even took a couple little detours.Couldn't have asked for a better day to travel. Not a cloud in the sky and 60ish degrees. Always a bit bittersweet coming home. We're both excited to sleep in our own bed tonight and lounge amongst our own things. It also means back to real life though and I think I was hoping to put that off a little. I like being on the road. All in all we had a very nice trip though.

Meteor Crater! Experience the Impact!!

The last few times I've made the drive across Arizona I've considered taking the time to check out the big meteor crater. I thought it would have a cool name or be buried deep in some national park so I never really looked into it. Imagine how excited I was to find out that not only does it have a very straight forward name (Meteor Crater) but that it's right of I-40. And since if figured so heavily in the finale to Starman I knew I had to go check it out. So, with that in mind I woke up bright and early and we hit the road. The weather turned kind of bad right around the AZ border which is a bummer because we went right through the painted desert and skirted monument valley but missed a lot of scenery because of some snow and low, kind of ominous clouds. And it got cold again. The crater trip was looking kind of like a long shot. We seemed to clear the storm though and as we passed through the other side it got really pretty. We were in a clear spot but all around were big storms and as we came through the passes we'd be able look into the valleys and see the rain coming down on the horizon. Pretty dramatic stuff for someone used to 360 days of sunshine a year. Good news is we finally made it to the crater. Pretty overpriced at $15.00 each but we figured we're never going to make it back so... The museum was fairly informative. Interestingly we were listening to Bill Bryson's A Short History of Almost Everything (Thanks again to Arthur and Liza, I loved In a Sunburned Country) in which he discusses the crater in a portion about extinctions and the part cosmic impacts play in them. As an aside, I really liked this book to. It makes you feel very lucky to be alive. It was cold and windy so they cancelled all of the walking tours of the rim and closed the topmost observation deck which was kind of a bummer. With the tour I think it would have been worth the bucks. If you want to see more check out their website: www.meteorcrater.com . It's a big hole in the earth to say the least. After that we got back on the road and drove into Kingman. Also a very pretty drive through some forests and hills. This will be our last night on the road since we plan to make it back to LA tomorrow evening.

In case you don't know where to take your picture from. This was at an "Indian" trading post along the freeway. As you get into AZ there are many more and they just get more elaborate with teepees and wildcats outside. By the time we saw those though it was snowing. Big lumps of snow that blew around.


Pic through the windshield. I took a lot of these and they never turn out as good as the view. But you keep trying.


The courtyard of the crater museum had this big window overlook of the valley. Kind of goofy but it was a great view.


Jessica and the other freezing tourist family.


And finally, Meteor Crater!