Floating By

Los Angeles. 2008.

Staying Calm in Earthquake Country

L.A. 2007.

Simplicity soothes me down, gives me space to think. The books are more of a to-do list than a subset of options. I feel guilty for kicking Teddy out of bed, but silly for keeping her in. Still, the clean surface of the shelf is a place to put things, a place to lay out the immediate pieces of life, to examine and sort them. Then away they go, to make room for tomorrow's coins, lint, found objects, buttons, notes, earrings, bracelet, dollar bills, bus pass, stickers, hair clips, lists, headphones, tissues, flowers, floss, pens, chapstick, and all the other things than found their way into my pockets while I lived in LA.

When I wipe the grime of my stress and depression from my memories, I find that I loved LA, and I miss it. The warm evenings; the path down to the beach; the night rides across town; running along old--but soon to be reused--railroad tracks; views from a grassy cliff; rides in the steep canyons; the nearness of the desert.

The people on top and the plates beneath: both hold against each other with a fierce tension that everyone knows and everyone ignores. An earthquake; a riot. Then tension again. A dry, dessicated land, full of orange trees and lawns and immigrants, all hungry for water and their own small piece of earth. A land still so new that two years makes you a native.

I miss you.

Palms

Palms, L.A. 2006.

Some sky, for Lillie.

Headwaters

Warner Center, L.A. 2008.

This is where the LA River starts. Calabasas Arroyo on the left merges with the recently-joined Bell and Dayton Creeks, on the right. At this point, at least one map I've studied starts using the name Los Angeles River. The river continues east through the southern San Fernando Valley, wraps around Griffith and Elysian Parks, skirts downtown, then heads south to the port.

There are grand plans in the works for rehabilitating and de-channelizing this river. Currently, it is mostly ignored, other than for fire truck drills in its dry concrete basin. Livestock live next to the channel in some of the poorer areas. A bike path follows it from Long Beach north to Vernon, where it quits suddenly and without comment or direction.

In the picture above, there are about four inches of water flowing over that flat sheet of concrete--just enough for a duck to paddle in. This seemed like more than the usual for late May, but that's just a guess. I'm eager to see what the river becomes.

Lofts + Retail

East LA (the gentrified part, not the scary part). 2009.

Sitting outside in the sun, supposedly doing work for a group meeting. Really just shooting the shit, boasting about how much work we all have, feeling the sun on our faces, slowly getting too hot.

Ran into someone I knew from Boston. We talked for a few minutes, caught up. I love it when the world feels like a small place.

(I miss LA.)

Educate! Agitate! Organize! ...Vernon

2007. Vernon, CA.

That's downtown LA in the background. My brother Tom was nice enough to drive me out to a site I was photographing for my one and only photo job. A college friend working as a professor's assistant in New York suggested my name when the professor needed photos of a few sites in LA for his new book.

It was fun to track down the sites and sleuth around for good angles. For the site in Vernon, I ended up climbing up a tippy stack of wooden flats so I could get a good angle. There were bees living in the crates. Even my memories of the place--a large parking lot, scattered with trucks--are in black and white. Ugly industrial buildings on lumpy pieces of land, bulging asphalt smeared over unused railroad tracks; Vernon seems like something that should have been left to rust long ago. Instead, it's part of the ever-more-heavily used port and distribution center of Los Angeles and Long Beach ports. The grit keeps layering on, and the sky gets paler with the years.

After I finished taking photos, Tom and I walked around a bit, exploring. I had some film left in my camera (still a few months before my trusty cannon rebel 2000 quit for good), so I had Tom think of a story, then tell it to me as we walked across a bridge over one of the trickle-sized "rivers" of LA. I took pictures as we walked and he talked. He's very expressive with his hands, but I liked this photo better than a close up of his gesturing. The tee shirt doesn't describe Tom so much as it sums up an inherent part of his beliefs and goals. He's a great guy, a great brother.