Dispatch From LA

A Pocketful Of Treasure Maps

By the time this posts to the blog I'll be having dinner on the plaza in Kansas City, Missouri with Mama Moss and Sister. 

This is the first of many excellent adventures of my long and luxurious vacation.  The rest will be taking place in new and undiscovered parts of California.  I have a pocketful of treasure maps, a tankful of gas, a camera, journal, and a magnificently active imagination.  Who knows what I'll find along the way.

When I'm not on the road I'll be home making more postcards.

Monday, 77 Degrees, Mostly Cloudy

Old spray paint experiments were unearthed from the bowels of the workshop yesterday.  I've become an efficient saver of scrap.  I can usually tell what will still appeal to me a year or two from now.  The rest gets chucked.   For me, nothing blocks new ideas faster than a pile of crap scrap. One look at those old burst of rays with floral sprays over the top, and I knew how I would construct the postcard idea that has taken root in my mind.  

I am going to make 9 or 10 million trillion thousand billion of these.  I'm flying to Paris tomorrow.  Going to set up shop along the Seine.  Take photos by day, cut and glue by the light of the moon, sell neatly bundled stacks of these the following day.  Buy a ticket on the old Orient Express.  Head to Istanbul.

Oh the dreams that inhabit an idle mind.  So refreshing!

Next stop Kansas!  Mama Moss and I have a date to watch the Biden/Palin debates on Thursday.  She's saving a basket of things to throw at the television.  I'm bringing our Hope-Nope-Dope t-shirts.   Should be a rollicking good time!  Speaking of which, if you've missed any of the SNL Tina Fey does Sarah skits, there's a great one right HERE.  

There Are Passages To Be Underlined

My 45 day flight from reality began in earnest this morning.  First stop HOMEGIRL BAKERY.  

 

A swell location for a morning tea latte and a muffin baked fresh by someone trying to turn their life around.  I like their motto, "Nothing stops a bullet like a job."    I'm all for giving second chances.  And thirds and fourths if needed.  A friendly young man with a tattooed face and neck took our order.

A very talented and prolific artist (and teacher) from my school has some of his gorgeous paintings hanging throughout the cafe.  I withhold his name only because I'm trying to keep my blog flying under the school radar.  I haven't been completely successful.

Note to self:  come back here soon.  Take the Goldline.  Bring journal.  Write.  Wander.

After Homegirl we headed for errands in Little Tokyo.   Straight down Alameda.  Past Union Station.

Turn the page.

Like a book, one chapter of the city opens onto another.

There are passages to be underlined.  Walls to be leaned against.  Thinking to be done.

I'm A Free Agent

The Calamity Physics course I've been enrolled in at a little elementary school close to downtown has ended.  For the next 6 weeks I'm a free agent.  Filled with the knowledge of my impending flight from responsibility I took a different route to school this morning, straight through the Broadway Theatre District.  The rising sun cut wide swaths of gold across the drowsy streets.

With 20 minutes to spare before the first bell rang, I put down the camera and headed west.  Leaving behind that river of morning light trickling down through the buildings.

After school I began preparations in earnest.  More english breakfast tea and cream were purchased, books were gathered, the bed  was plumped, pillows fluffed, play clothes laid out, house shoes located, porch tidied, art table straightened, phone unplugged.  I take getting ready to do NOTHING very seriously.

Yes siree bob, I do.

Oh by the way, one of the photos above is a figment of my imagination.  More rearranging to suit my needs.  I knew you wouldn't mind.

Stars Have Replaced The Moon

Largeness is a lifelong matter.  You grow because you are not content not to.  You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't its teeth grow long and lock.  You grow because you are a grower:  you're large because you can't stand to be small

-Wallace Stegner

I finally, reluctantly finished Angle of Repose and started The Spectator Bird.  Wallace Stegner is my new hero.  I'm just saying.

Last week, I saw through the lens of my camera the last of the summer moons.  I love staring up at the night sky just before going to bed.  Thinking big thoughts.  Imagining the possible.  And impossible.  Feeling the cool air.  Listening to the night birds and crickets. 

 And in the early morning finding stars have replaced the moon.

PLAYLIST

I've added a playlist to the blog sidebar.  If you find it annoying there are a couple of things you can do:  adjust the volume on your computer's speakers, or press the pause button in the playlist.

If you want to listen to the playlist at another time you can click POPOUT PLAYLIST.  This will take you to a stand-alone playlist that you can listen to in the background.  You can even bookmark it, and just return to the playlist.  I just discovered this feature.  When I go to blogs with music I like I often do this now if I really like the music. 

A Sea Of Pink

The silk floss trees are blooming all across Los Angeles!!!  Opening up their enormous shaggy flowers and creating stunning canopies of PINK.  Soon the flowers will form pods that will grow larger and larger until sometime in deep winter they will burst open and be devoured by wild flocks of parrots.   Nothing, and I mean nothing, thrills me more than spotting a wild flock of parrots flying overhead, squawking madly, flashing green feathers.  

Well, nothing that is except for puttering along through downtown last week with my windows down and sunroof open, warm air streaming in, blue sky the perfect backdrop for a sea of pink.  

Finding a perfect parking spot with an hour left in the meter.  I practically ran out of my car and into this shady oasis.  Not for the trees, not for the breeze, or perfect temperature of air, or even the sheer fabulousness of my new discovery.  Nope.  None of that.

I came for ... THE GOATS!  Just as I swung left onto Hill, on my new route home, I happened to look up and see an entire herd.  Imagine my delight!

Real, live, GOATS!  Brought in to graze a steep slope in Angel's Knoll Park.

It's pretty amazing what 100 goats can do in a week's time.

I I smiled and smiled at those goats.  And at the people who had come to see those industrious girls grazing away.  We all smiled at each other.  Everyone happy as pie to see GOATS in the middle of our city.

And even though I got a $75 parking ticket for staying 2 minutes too long, I was not put out.  The goats were mesmerizing.  

The thorny trunks of the silk floss trees were grand.  The steel and glass surrounding the park mirrored the sky.  The entire episode a testament to why I love Los Angeles.

Yes indeed.

4:39 p.m.

A sad sad weekend in Los Angeles and Ventura where a head-on crash on Friday between a commuter train and a freight train killed 26 people and injured over 100 more.  Many of the passengers were on their way home to Ventura.

 

Watching the interviews with family members and fellow train riders is so heart wrenching.  This accident is the worst train wreck in modern California history.

All of these photos came from online newspapers

I heard this afternoon on the news, of one couple who were returning from his mother's funeral when the crash occured.  She survived, but he was thrown into the stairwell and sustained massive head injuries and died on the scene.

And there is story after story just like that one.

Then there are all the offerings left on the tracks.  It seemed right to leave something here on the blog.  

Devise Unfathomable Plans

My brood and I trudged to the auditorium for the awards assembly this afternoon.  We are tired.  After 47 days of 2nd grade, some of the monkeys have broken from the pack and are sprinting down the track.   Their minds like steel traps, they gobble up whatever I'm serving.  Another third are swimming in a sea of confusion.  The rest are perfecting their circus tricks.  Slipping on banana peels, playing pranks, chewing the erasers off their pencils, juggling wadded up paper.  Pure chaos unleavened by self-awareness.  The year is young.  My mind grows weak.

I consult my dog-eared copy of The Art of War.  Time and time again it has proven useful when my right is in retreat, my center is collapsing, and my left is nowhere to be found.  Sun Tzu to the rescue!

Carefully study the well-being of your men, and do not overtax them.  Concentrate your energy and hoard your strength.  Keep your army continually on the move, and devise unfathomable plans.

Journal work resumes unabated.

And a farway friend is sent a postcard.

In these ways I keep my wits about me.  Oh let simplicity do its lovely work!

Thinking And Gathering

In the morning on the porch the light was lurid and lovely.   I sat out there thinking and gathering the day around me.  Two full days with no small children to hop over, or desks to reach across.  

No talking.  No being talked to.  Cutting.  Pasting.  Humming.

Sorting through the Chinatown photos.

My admiration of the paper lanterns isn't over.  

Active Imagination

Years ago in my mid-thirties, I spent every Tuesday afternoon on a Jungian analyst's couch.  I would offer up my compulsively recorded dreams and we would dive in.  Eyes shut, intuition and hunch on warp speed.  Certain elements would get amplified.  Conversations happened with dream characters.  

This morning I pulled over and laid, what felt like my dream, out on the sidewalk.  It was certainly a dreamscape - early morning, the city still drowsy, the sky, a soft veil of light that hadn't turned yellow yet.  In that moment when I let the paper float out of my hand I understood what active imagination meant.  Imagination as a living breathing part of a life.  For an artist, maybe the most important part - the realest part.

I didn't put my collage on the street for someone to find.  I didn't know that until I did it.  Until I looked at the photo I took of it lying there.  Until I felt the volume knob of my creative imagination being cranked up.  If a bus rolled over it two minutes after I left, or if it really did blow into the Big Mama Donut Shop parking lot, or if it drifted down into a storm drain it doesn't matter.  In my mind it's  still sailing off across the city to parts unknown.  Amplifying my creative self as it meanders along.

After school I headed north on Hill into Chinatown.

Late summer in Los Angeles.  A hot dry breeze was blowing.  The air felt good on skin that spent the day in an air conditioned classroom.  No one was around.  This lovely worn courtyard empty except for a few shufflers or shopkeepers.

A firetruck could have gone by and I wouldn't have noticed.  The heat and all the dangling lanterns had me in a trance.

Blissed out on shadows and lanterns.

And I Will Build New Things

Experiments.  

In my mind these are a series of postcards.  Or messages.  You find them crumpled up, stepped on, blowing down the sidewalk.  You pick it up.  Huh?  Where'd this come from?  I'm printing it out and tossing it out the window tomorrow on my way downtown.  It will float through the air and eventually make its way onto the sidewalk.  Or maybe end up in the parking lot of Big Mama Donuts on Figueroa.

Poetry fragments.  I don't want anything in its entirety.  Give me bits and pieces and I will build new things.

 

...this hive of restlessness,
this wedge of want my mind calls self,
this self which doubts so much and which keeps reaching,
keeps referring, keeps aspiring, longing, towards some state

This ramshackle, this unwieldy, this jerry-built assemblage,
this unfelt always felt disarray: is this the sum of me,
is this where I'm meant to end, exactly where I started out?

by C.K. Williams

The Curve Of R

I am a devotee of bridges.  And letters.  I raced home through the yellow sunshiny streets dreaming about the curve of R.  The two ball shapes curling under and over the tips.  The wide sweep of purple across the page already thick with layers of paper.  outlined in red!  At stoplights I lunged forward in my seat, hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel.  Must get home.  Must add letter to book.  must must must.

There now.  All better.

From Angle of Repose which I am STILL reading:

Good night, good night.  I feel smothered, lonely, eager, I don't know what.  The future is as dark as the corridor out there, but might be every bit as charming once light comes on it.

I love reading words in a book that express what I feel or have felt, but didn't have the words to say.   I learned recently that the correspondences in the book are all actual letters written by a woman who moved west in the 19th century.  The descriptions of the west are so startling, so achingly beautiful.  I've bent the pages back, folded and unfolded the book so many times it literally has fallen apart.  If someone were here with me I would say, "Have pages 3-114 .  Let me know when you need the next section."  But of course, someone is not here and the cat posse hasn't learned to read.  Yet.

It's just me.  Finishing up my book, dreaming about the West, painting my letters, scribbling away in my journal, and making blind contour drawings in bed (thanks to Carla).

Good night.

Drunk With The Possibilities

What is the visual journal if not one big experiment?  I continue making marks.  Adding some things, subtracting others.  I like having a big container to pour out the visual contents of my brain.

In LA there is an endless supply of rich content to feed the creative imagination.  A visual banquet yours for the taking.  

Now that my night classes have ended until mid-autumn I have time to persue a few things.  Like napping for instance.

Some days I go back and forth between the computer to mine through photos I've taken.  Print it, paint it, re-photograph it, upload, add digital texture, print again, glue in book, shampoo, rinse, repeat.

With a 6 week vacation looming on the horizon I'm drunk with the possibilities of so much time.  

I added a photo album just for the signs.  The type is having a hypnotic effect.  You may be just getting sleepy.  SNAP OUT OF IT already!

 I told you this wasn't ending anytime soon.  Didn't I?  

And besides, I cannot be held responsible for ideas that get stuck in my craw.