Malibu morning picture of the day - Monday, November 24, 2014

Good morning dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

The winds have picked up and it's yet another Red Flag Warning Day for wildfire here in Southern California. The sky on the coast is blue.

Yeah, yeah, I know. This picture is rather sepia-toned. But trust me, it's basically blue. Here's another for contrast.

A LOT of jet trails out this morning. Somebody was doing some practice rounds...

It's a rather rare phenomenon in Los Angeles for an older person to be living in the house that they grew up in as a child, but that is my case. I have resided in one of two houses adjacent to one another in the southeastern portion of Hollywood near Silverlake nearly all of my 56 years.

East Hollywood on Sunday night

As I was working on my fiction writing last night, I glanced up to see that the sunset was that smog-colored vermilion that we get here in the Southland. I went out on the porch just to capture a few pictures with my phone. I felt I was looking back through my eyes as a 9-year-old.

The trees are probably bigger, but I don't think those Mexican Fan Palms nor that fir tree that you see silhouetted are very much bigger. I believe they are at a plateau-maturity. In fact, that palms are starting to die and fall over my street, one by one. Mine fell over years ago. OK, my ex-wife knocked one over, but I'll take some of the blame since I taught her to drive. She was a new driver at the time. I understand that the City of Los Angeles planted many of these palms for an international exposition  (for which Exposition Park in South L.A. was named) that was hosted here nearly a century ago. All the houses were there from 50 years ago.

Beata Beatrix by
Pre-Raphaelite Dante Rosetti

NOT a Greene & Greene interior (replica from Fine
Homebuilding) but all my friends' houses in Hollywood
(we all lived in old houses or in modern apartments)
FELT like this, but weathered and beaten up,
usually painted Sinclair Navajo White.

For some reason, the pictures in my head of my childhood all feel like Pre-Raphaelite, glowing landscapes at sunset, with quarter-sawn oak furnishings designed by Greene and Greene. It's a mental landscape where it's easy to imagine ghosts floating about. The movie Chinatown gets the sense just right. I think its because all of the public spaces and other people's houses had a dark shadow essence to them, in contrast to the bright sun of noonday L.A. Roman Polanski was not from L.A., but he certainly got the interior sensibilities correct. Interiors of the 1960s, unless recently built, were poorly lit by today's standards.

That's all for today. Have a wonderful week.

Love,
Pops


A personal note to my daughter and son-in-law who follow this blog (everybody else disregard):

We had a joint service a church on Sunday to dedicate a remodel of the sanctuary. Here are two pictures. The lighting was changed to low-cost LEDs but is much brighter now, the paint is white rather than beige, the platform is now hardwood, and the carpet is blue instead of rust-orange.

New Dawn did all of the construction. We hosted the Thanksgiving Luncheon after a late combined service.




If you ever want a lively choir piece, program "We're Gonna Have Church" by Pepper Choplin--that's one of the things we performed.

They had me carve turkeys for this crowd. There were five, and there were NO leftovers. I guess we were hungry...

Hope you got the baby shower stuff from me, The electrical plug stuff is from me FYI. That vendor does not gift wrap. (pillow too)

You realize of course if you call her Hattie, she will probably NEVER wear a hat out of spite...

And apologies to BP for hauling you into my "Breaking Bad" riff. That posting came just as I was done writing up a bit of criminal fiction, so my head was in the mood.

Pop