the parsley.blog.landscape.life

mosaic street art by Isaiah Zagar, near South Street, Philadelphia

the word of the day is Sehenswürdigkeiten - objects deserving to be seen.  I suppose some of my German ancestors are twanging somewhere on an obscure strand of my DNA, when I fall so helplessly head-over-heels for a German compound word.  a few of those German-derived ancestors were actually born in Philadelphia, as it happens, but it is a mere life coincidence that my sister and brother-in-law wound up there too.

why do I always have such an idyllic experience of Philadelphia?  if I actually lived there I’m sure many things would come to annoy me about it.

I come off the plane, where I had read just a few pages into “The Necessity of Ruins”  (at least enough to learn about Sehenswürdigkeiten)  but spent most of the flight  hugging my knees like a sullen teenager, listening to my ipod too loud and brooding.  if only they had had ipods when I was an *actual* teenager, I could have brooded so much more efficiently.  I should not be hugging my knees and indulging in black moods at my age.   bad for the knees, for one thing.

but then I roll off the plane and find packing tape art in the airport:

"Tape Noir," packing tape art by Mark Khaisman, Philadelphia International Airport

"Tape Noir," packing tape art by Mark Khaisman, Philadelphia International Airport

and the attitude adjustment begins.

this was a joyous family occasion and a quick weekend visit, so not a lot of photo time.  but snuck in a few shots.  and read, in the estimable journal Technology and Culture (Vol. 50, No. 1) about the mechanization of brickmaking in Philadelphia.  in the 1850s, the 50 brickyards of Philadelphia produced upwards of 50 million bricks a year.  bricks could be shipped; clay, not so much, so the brickyards were located where the good clay was.

near South Street, Philadelphia

the itsy-bitsy side street where the family mansion resides, a 16 foot wide row house, becomes a ‘kid street’ in the afternoons.  they set up a cone and the kids play in the street; if you come driving along someone will move the cone and the kids will stand aside long enough for you to go by.  this could explain why I so often hear kids yelling when I’m on the phone to my sister; the street life is right outside the window.

Philadelphia still life with coffee

my brother-in-law described to me the night the Phillies won the world series.  they had been listening to the radio, but when the final score was called, they shut off the radio and listened to the crescendo of yelling arising from a thousand houses.

when I wander in Philadelphia I always get great street moments here and there.

security gate, Philadelphia

the thing that looks a little bit like a music stand, sticking out of the window, is called a ‘busybody.’  the awkward thing about a row house is that you can’t see who is standing on your step without poking your head out the window in a possibly indiscreet and indecorous manner.   so this device has a mirror in it that allows you to peek out without doing anything fishwifey.

just beware.  you may find someone at your door that you didn’t expect.

I spent a short amount of time in Rittenhouse Square, enjoying the Jane Jacobs vibe of it all,

Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia

and on this fine late May Saturday, the place was lousy with wedding parties.  this was one of three.  but the most notable for bridesmaid dresses:

Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia

oh, miss Jacobs, the urban juxtapositions of Center City Philadelphia could break an Angeleno’s heart.  kids in the streets!  restaurant diners on the sidewalks!  everyone together in the parks and on the public transportation!

and in a park down by the Schuylkill  river … where in signage I learned about the Baptisterion, the historic  ‘preferred immersion site’ of the Baptists … the freight train tracks coexist with park users.  we stood in the moonlight and watched a long train go by across the path, completely filled with orange juice.

Schuylkill Banks, Philadelphia

while i was in Philadelphia I read about the proposed budget cuts back home in California, including the proposed closure of 80% California state parks.  and, not for the first time, pondered whether going home was really the wisest thing to do.

however, too many obligations called me back to the hard clear light of California, the broken back of our public realm.  but not before one last stolen moment in Philadelphia.

“hey,” said my sister, “do you want to see an overgrown old cemetery in a bad part of town?”  DO I??  oh, they know me too well.

many, many, many pictures later  (which will find their way into future posts,)

Mount Moriah Cemetery, West Philadelphia

I’m more or less ready to shoulder my burdens again.

back on the plane.  got just a few pages into “the poetics of space.’   then zoned back out,  listening to dogtown clash with the last few minutes of life left in my ipod,  hoping we wouldn’t land too hard on the broken back of California.

somewhere along Firestone Boulevard, where I must have been taking the opposite of a shortcut from one place to another, I saw a big warehouse with its wall painted in giant letters:

TESOROS MISTICOS

with a legend that went on to list what even I, with my non-existent Spanish, could identify as amulets, candles, oils, incense, other things of that nature.  a whole warehouse full of tesoros misticos.  this must be where the botánicas get their stuff.

a few years ago, the Fowler Museum at UCLA had an exhibition about botánicas, accompanied by altars created by some local spiritual practitioners.  apparently the various spirits of Santería each have their own aesthetic, their own set of objects and colors that attracts them, that makes them comfortable, that puts them in a better frame of mind for coming to lend assistance.

I don’t have pictures, but there are some impressions I remember.  one spirit really likes yellow; another wants a space draped in green vines; another is attracted to clear glasses of water; and another likes feminine trappings, bottles of perfume, fans, shawls.  there are bottles of liquor, spangles, photographs, flowers, plastic toys.

clearly, the spirits like a lot of the same things we do.

‘materialism’ isn’t just about SUVs, McMansions, designer sunglasses (although that tends to be what we think of first when we use the word here in Los Angeles.)  as a kid, like most kids, I had my little treasures; when we were taken to museums and cultural attractions on our epic family road trips, I always wanted to get some little thing from the gift store, some object to mark the occasion of having been somewhere.

this impulse may be born in us, rather than being only the result of living in a society drenched in floods of material goods – much if not most of it cheap, disposable, lacking any essential integrity.   as shoddy and imperfect as much of our stuff may be, it still addresses a deep need to speak an older and more fundamental language than the ones that rely on words – the language of objects.

it seems our belief in the language of objects is so strong that we use it to communicate with the dead.

despite sharing this primal urge to possess, to somehow say something about myself and where I have been through accumulating things … I find that having lived some years and hauled it all from place to place (tiny apartment to tiny apartment), my appetite for accumulating treasures has definitely waned.

but I am sure I am as greedy and possessive as ever, only now my appetite is more often directed at images, impressions.  I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for when I set out to wander, but I often manage to bring back something of value, if only to me.  I think I can define some of the things the spirits I commune with are attracted by; but some of them I can’t quite manage to put into words.

earlier:  raw materials

originally posted December 31, 2008

I’ve just returned from Denver again, this time not just for Christmas but for a family reunion on the occasion of my mom’s 70th birthday, just two weeks after my 40th. a wonderful time was had by all; and I am now happy to be home.

the connections with Colorado go way back on my mom’s side of the family, many of them involving a certain summer camp in the Rockies where my grandparents first met; several generations of the family later went to the same camp and some in the family have settled in Denver over the years.  my mom moved to Colorado the year I graduated college and has been there ever since.  the love of this wild mountain landscape is in my bones too.

but…the suburban sprawl is not my favorite thing about Denver.   you can look up and see the sky and the mountains doing all kinds of dramatic things, especially in the winter when it’s always storming in the high country:

but at the ground level…chain stores and cul-de-sacs for miles and miles.

the first night that the whole family rolled in from their various home bases – New Mexico, Utah, Texas; nobody’s left in the old hometown in Iowa any more – we all went to a nice chain restaurant that serves, among other things, bisonburgers.  some of my young cousins were not at all sure how they felt about eating something so exotic, and opted for chicken instead.

speaking for myself, I love bison. my fascination with bison goes way back, but probably mostly dates to a time I read a book by Dan O’Brien called “Buffalo for the Broken Heart,” in which the author describes how after years of frustration trying to raise cattle in the harsh climate of a South Dakota ranch, he came to be a bison rancher instead. he had just gone through a painful divorce, and called his ranch the “Broken Heart Ranch”; he found that the animals native to that landscape were better adapted to it, and the landscape to the animals, leading to the ultimate healing of a damaged piece of land.

without going into a long screed about bioregionally appropriate agriculture (and believe me, I have one ready) it might suffice to say that although I have eaten bison many times (Lindner Bison, Santa Monica Farmer’s Market on Saturdays, Hollywood Farmer’s Market on Sundays)…I have rarely had the opportunity to see them, you know, roaming.

one day before the big party, in all our errand-running, we got lost and came across yet another neighborhood of hideous mcmansions:

adorned with a fine bronze sculpture at its entrance:

oh, says my mom, we must be near that park where they have the bison.

me:  WHERE?? CAN WE GO SEE THEM??

well, we might get back here later if we have time.

lots of errand running and family time.  not a lot of excursion time.  but we did sneak in one little excursion to the Colorado Historical Society Museum, which was very good and we ought to have taken more time to see it.  out front, glowering at us:

and my desire to see the buffalo roaming only intensified.

the party went off well, most of the extended family departed the next day, and my sister and brother-in-law had one day left in Denver.  everyone else had forgotten the intention to go see the bison, but I assure you I had not.

we found the place all right:

but the bison were not there.  we speculated with someone we met in the parking lot that they had been moved, since a new access road was being built in the park. there was nobody inside the fence but a lot of prairie dogs.

well, you might have to take my word for it, but there are prairie dogs in that shot.

nevertheless, Daniels Park turned out to be a nice spot to have discovered. if you looked to the other side, you could see a grand vista of the mountains, and a valley in front, which my mom said was the Plum Creek valley.

of course, it was better if you didn’t turn around to see what was right on the other side, creeping along every ridge top:

down there in the plum valley, said my mom, I know a really nice little church with a cemetery around it.  you might like to see it.

of course I would.  my family knows how I am about cemeteries.

so, we drove down into Sedalia, a real place with houses and ranches not yet stamped out by a developer’s cookie cutter, and a real church, St-Martin-In-The-Field:

and all around it, a little rural cemetery, with all the quirkiness that such places can acquire over the years of people being there and caring about it, and not buying every gravestone out of a catalog.  some of the markers were homemade, a few were very elaborate:

the little sign on the neck of the bass reads: “Most people go to their graves with their music still in them.”

realizing that we were losing the light, I ran around as quickly as I could to photograph everything; another cemetery for my collection, and one that I really liked. although we had the place to ourselves on this cold December afternoon, it felt like a place visited and loved by the community, a real place.

I headed home from Denver to Los Angeles the next day, getting stuck in the Denver airport for a while waiting for a delayed flight: I sat in a patch of sun I found at the end of the terminal, reading “A Sand County Almanac” and thinking about what makes a place a place.

every time I start to think I’m only loosely connected to Los Angeles, a place where I wound up for reasons that have now vanished from my life, I come home from a trip and realize how the light and the crappy streets and the smells of the ocean and the chaparral plants have rooted themselves in my heart.  somehow, if only for myself, I created Los Angeles as a real place.

I’m cooking bison for new year’s tomorrow.  I had to go to Whole Foods to get it and it’s not Lindner’s; but it will still make my tiny apartment smell amazing all day.  Ten hours in the slow cooker with red wine, garlic, onion, salt and pepper, rosemary, thyme, and a couple strips of bacon.  I recommend it as good for many ills, possibly even including broken hearts.

Originally posted October 31, 2008

Pictures from October 27, 2007

I won’t be making it to the Day of the Dead celebration at Hollywood Forever this year, owing to other obligations. but I do recommend the event to those in Los Angeles who can make it.

this year, like last year, we’re getting the first few little spurts of rain and cloudiness right on this particular weekend, but that shouldn’t slow down the festivities. it’s a huge event, allow time to deal with parking and crowds.

the altars/art pieces are a major production. anyone can apply to create one, and they are often very personal, pop-cultural, and/or political.

this one was a tribute to Mel Blanc, who is buried at Hollywood Forever.

this was one of several protesting the iraq war.  I imagine there will be even more political themes this year…

there is an art exhibit of  “Calaveras” at the Cathedral Mausoleum:

live performances on several stages:

and food, drinks, and stuff to buy.

I don’t suppose this is an event that would work at every cemetery, and there are a lot of things about Hollywood Forever that may be “only in Hollywood,” but the success of this event does provoke some thought about the role cemeteries could play as community space, but most often don’t.

cemeteries used to be community centers, and going there was a normal part of life, instead of a rare and burdensome obligation. I believe very strongly that modern cemeteries have lost their sense of larger purpose in the community. in a time when open public space is in very short supply, we can and should expect more of our burial places.

I’ve got a lot more cemetery photos and cemeterious thoughts to share, but for now I’ll end with this moment about life, death, and love. (this post was originally written in the last few days before the election at which proposition 8 was, most unfortunately, passed.)

vote no on Proposition 8.