Mo’jave
Two days, six high-clearance vehicles, eleven low-altitude aerial photography rigs, no injuries.
tripfield
"There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California." -Edward Abbey
ventura highway
Neo-gothic. Quonset hut. Car wash.
Carpinteria to Ojai
two postcards
Mrs. Clarence Dement
San Jose, Cal.
Box 650
Dear Grace: -
We heard in a round about way that your Mother was sick, or had been. If possible, won’t you write and let us know, as we are anxious to hear.
Lovingly,
Josie.
[Posted from Redwood City, CAL, June 28, 6:30pm US Postage 2 cents. George Washington stamp. Postcard states "Made In America by Edw. H Mitchell at San Francisco". No image caption.]
Miss Augustine Rencurel
36 Hartford st.
San Francisco
Cal.
Dear August
I know you like oranges so I send you some, don’t they look nice. Hoping you are well. I remain your loving coz.
Marie P.
Love to all
[Posted from Whi-- CAL, August 1--, 3pm. US Postage 1 cent. Ben Franklin stamp. Postcard states: "M Rieder, Publ., Los Angeles, Cal No9345 Made in Germany" and is captioned "Oranges and Blossoms".]
further afield…
We (royal) are recently returned from Tbilisi, which is not Malibu and never will be and that is probably a very good thing. Here is a brief dispatch from beyond the wilder shores of California.
First, here are some links to Georgian contemporary art centers and events: Anything Goes In Tbilisi; Annual arts festival Artisterium; The Center for Contemporary Arts in Tbilisi; Garikula Art Villa; Annual Garikula contemporary art festival Fest I Nova; the Tbilisi events calendar. Last and best, my favorite restaurant in the world: Cafe Purpur, which is the farthest peach building in the photo below, in Tbilisi Old Town:
A tower in Sololaki with a romantic past.
Lasha and Tea’s apartment, looking in to the sun porch.
Khachapuri, a ubiquitous Georgian specialty.
Sarah and the voodoo electrics at Lasha’s apartment in Sololaki.
Tbilisi Ministry of Transportation.
Lasha and Roland at the Cloud Library.
Mamuka Japharidze in his kitchen at the Cloud Library.
Feasting on organic local goodies.
Mamuka getting set to cook.
Tbilisi at night, from the fortress at Narikala.
This next set is of Garikula Art Villa, in the village of Alkhalkalaki:
The Rkoni Valley
Karaman and Sarah in the wine cellar.
Kvevri (earthenware wine vessels) are sunk into the floor of the wine cellar.
The Bolgarski Villa, built in 1885 by Polish architect/enginner Vasily Bolgarski as a summer residence.
Lasha, Karaman, and Sarah tracing the original hydrology system engineered by Bolgarski.
The Villa at night.
bonus car wash
There’s nothing really great about this car wash except that it looks like the United Nations. In fact, I was hoping to read some get some insider scoop on which are the great places to sudz my ride, when I discovered some rather unsettling information about this place: Apparently the state of California is suing the owners for exploiting their minimum wage workers.
“The lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court claims members of the Sikder family routinely denied workers at the carwashes that they own minimum wage and overtime, failed to pay wages owed to those who quit or were fired, denied rest and meal breaks and created false time sheets.”
So we won’t be going there anymore. Even if it does look like this.
Bonus Car Wash, Lincoln Boulevard.
hiking in l.a.
From our house to Escondido Falls is a short (45 minute one-way) hike. The first 15 minutes takes you up a winding road through a new development, then you follow the stream up the canyon to a series of waterfalls. The last part of the hike is more of a muddy scramble and grasping at bushes (or maybe a rope that someone’s graciously tied to said bush). It’s a cool and shady walk most of the way, and best of all the trailhead is across the street from us, so we don’t even have to get in the car.
Today we drove up to Charmlee Wilderness Park, which is about 15 minutes northwest of here in Encinal Canyon. We arrived at 3pm and there was only one other car there. The parking fee is $4, and you just leave it in a little envelope. I had printed out the trail guide from home, which was a good thing because there isn’t a map and the trails are poorly marked. Anyway, it hardly matters because all trails eventually loop back and the whole park is only 530 acres. But what stunning land it is! Meadows, chaparral, and cool live oak groves all overlooking the Pacific, with views from Long Beach to the Channel Islands. Narrow, twisty paths among outcroppings and sagebrush give way to broad meadows of swaying waist-high spring grass and wildflowers — apricot mallow, California poppies and bush lupine are in bloom right now. We saw lots of bunnies, and something that looked like a gopher but disappeared into its hole before we could get a good look. And we saw this baby rattlesnake curled up in the rocks. You’ll have to be satisfied with this one snake photo of Charmlee taken with the crappy phone camera and then go to there and experience it for yourself.
tuxedo and ticket
Tonight I met an unlikely couple – Tuxedo and Ticket – having a snooze on a newspaper box on Abbot Kinney. They have another friend, Scarface the Pit Bull, who is too big to sit on the box. Scarface wears sunglasses. At night.
All three are friends with Brian Cottrill, aka the “Animal Whisperer” of Venice, CA.
a repository for doing almost anything
“I would still cling to the fact that invention and optimism are characteristics that are undervalued in architecture.” -Peter Cook
Peter Cook, knighted architect and founding member of the futurist group Archigram, gave a lecture at SciArc recently. And we went. See how serious we all are with our black outfits and shades pulled tight against the raging sun?
This time we were treated to a very formal discussion of formal composition. In fact, the title of the lecture was “Part 1 – The Forgotten Art of Architectural Composition”. The gist of it was “since when did composition become a dirty word in architecture school“? But Cook is the master of ambiguity; he understands that perfectly healthy and sane adults otherwise possessing “good taste” can earnestly like something that is downright tacky.
I arrived plenty early so I had the opportunity to study Sir Peter Cook’s computer desktop, as if there, brightly colored, bulbous, and in plain sight might lie his secret formula for combining delight and scathing social critique.
Lucky for you, SciArc is in the habit of recording and web-posting all of their lectures. Unlucky for you, Cook has a habit of stepping away from the mic to make his snarkiest comments, so you’ll have to fill in the blank in a few spots. You can watch the lecture here.
And while we’re having this little love affair with L.A., it’s good to remember that we’re not the only ones. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Peter Cook in ArchRecord:
BR: From a purely architectural perspective, what is your favorite city?
PC: I have a group of cities that I always can trot out: Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, and London, obviously, because I still enjoy it.
BR: Los Angeles is a very interesting choice.
PC: I enjoy it tremendously. It’s rather like London; certain things are hidden. It’s a repository for doing almost anything. Whenever I land in Los Angeles, a smile comes on my face. I like its low scale. I don’t like LA downtown, I think it’s a waste of time, but I love the fact that there are these mysterious things up in the Hollywood Hills. I’ve been many, many times to LA, but you never can discover it all. And I like the fact it’s actually measurable; if you go along certain freeways you can actually identify the different villages as you move along. I always associate it with a lot of good conversations and interesting designers. I first went at end of the ’60s, and I didn’t go back for 10 or 11 years. I was bracing myself for disappointment, but it actually got better. Ever since that time, I’ve been going at least once a year on any excuse I can find.
