the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Suppose he’d listened to the erudite committee,

He would have only found where not to look;

Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed,

It would not have unearthed the buried city;

Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid,

The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

- W.H. Auden, “The Lucky”, from “The Quest”

streets of Paris

we’ve finally coined a term for an odd family habit.  well, I never thought it was all that odd; seems perfectly normal to me.   but my sister’s husband, and the husband I used to have, both have spoken rather feelingly about it.  it’s now known as the “mystery errand.”

streets of Seattle

my ex used to complain about my habit of wandering off at random in public places; he saw the genetic link immediately when my dad was visiting, and he found himself watching father and daughter both drift off on some eccentric orbit of their own.

now, it seems to me that wandering is the most natural possible thing to do in any environment, but most particularly an urban environment.  and not looking back is a very healthy habit to have.  except, of course, when it gets you completely lost.  (not to mention forgetting where I parked my car, a frequent habit of mine.)

streets of Denver (that's NOT my car)

is getting lost a productive habit? it’s not my favorite thing, when I’m late for a meeting.  my sense of direction, always dodgy at the best of times, can become completely unhinged when I’m under stress, and cause me to make a disastrously wrong turn at just the moment when minutes count.

but when I’m on my own time, getting lost can lead to Discoveries, not otherwise available.  in fact I’d say in those instances, getting lost is the end in itself.

I don’t think I totally lack a sense of direction; what I often lack is the ability to focus on cues to orientation, usually because I’ve been distracted by something just over…THERE…that I feel absolutely compelled to go and see.  “must remember, I parked my car at the corner of….ooooh, shiny!”

streets of Philadelphia

there is another member of the family who may be germane to this discussion.  her name is Caroline.  she joined the family a couple of years back.  she belongs to my dad and stepmother, and she is, in fact, a talking GPS device.  while my dad may be a pedestrian wanderer like myself … when he’s in the car driving somewhere, he really wants to get where he’s going efficiently.  that’s Caroline’s job.

strange to relate, I very quickly got into the habit of referring to Caroline as a person.  she comes along on trips.  when everybody was visiting me last summer, Caroline came too and rode along in the rental car.  I was in my own car, but I always heard later about how Caroline got confused trying to pronounce La Cienega, or how she reacted when I was in the lead and decided to correct course with a hugely illegal U-turn in the middle of Pico Boulevard.

streets of Washington DC

I’ve thought about getting my own Caroline, strictly for the sake of not being late for meetings; but then I wonder if my Caroline would destroy the serendipity of my weekend and vacation wanderings.

actually I wouldn’t get a Caroline; mine would have a male voice, and I would name him something very manly, like Chip or Chad or Brent.  the nice thing about Brent, or Chip,  would be that I could completely ignore him whenever I chose.  maybe turn him off altogether.

but then there always comes that point when you are just plain worn out, footsore, overloaded, and no longer in the mood to make discoveries.  at that point, Chad would get me safely home, my mystery errand for the day accomplished.  he would never judge me for the many times I ignored his advice.

streets of Los Angeles; the LA Public Library, my spiritual home

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.

my thanksgiving dinner in absolutely-not-near-anything, colorado.

about an hour and a half out of Denver. a friend of my mom’s had us over for thanksgiving dinner.  she lives way out on the high plains, at about 7000 feet elevation, just where the ponderosa pines start to creep into the landscape.

this friend lives a semi-homesteader life, due to her health issues she has raised most of her own food for years now, and shares five acres with goats, sheep, guinea hens, rabbits, ducks, and lest one forget, turkeys.  these are the ones we didn’t eat:

the one we did eat was fantastic. plus, all kinds of other things, not 100% backyard produce, but close.  greens from a cold frame, even in this bleak-looking November landscape.  (I understand the high plains wildflowers are spectacular, but I’ve never been out that way at the right time to see them.)

the goats and sheep had no interest in us, but were VERY interested in the trough at feeding time.  some of the sheep had two goats at a time standing on their backs.

this was a quick visit to colorado.  there will be a longer one at christmas.  most of the visit I spent at my mom’s house in the massive blanditude of the Denver suburbs, trying to get her set up with her new HDTV and DVD player (the digital transition is coming!!) and help her figure her way around the brave new world of digital photography.  she’s been going through years and years of family photos and slides and sending slides off to be digitized, but learning to manage the digital files is a whole other thing.  (let those among us who are perfectly organized with our digital files cast the first stone.)  and…there are a LOT of family photos, it seems we are a family of shutterbugs, and my strange addiction to my camera no longer seems so strange when I contemplate this.

a few last minute instructions on how to use flickr.com, and I’m out the door again for my flight home. I had last-minute tickets, the only affordable ones I could find had weird connections, making what should be a short LAX-DIA hop into a slightly more elaborate connection through San Diego on the way out, and Santa Barbara on the way back.

I actually have no fear of the little puddle-jumper airplanes, I sort of love them.  less insulation from the actual experience of flying; the better view of the propeller I have, the happier I am. however, the LAX-SAN hop was rendered much less enjoyable by the fact that the guy sitting opposite me lost his breakfast halfway through the flight.  I think last night’s dinner and possibly yesterday’s lunch may have been included too. it is at moments like these that one becomes aware of the very limited supply of air circulation on a small plane.

but, last night’s return through Santa Barbara (had to look that one up – SBA) was much less eventful.  somehow my travels had never taken me through SBA before.  it is unbelievably miniature! it looks like an old-timey mission-style restaurant.  I half expected the TSA guys to be wearing peasant blouses and describing the enchilada special.  well, it turns out there is not quite that much of the romance of Alta California to be found here, but nevertheless it is pleasant to wait for your connecting flight outdoors.  my very bad pic:

use your imagination; there is a propeller in this shot.

then, across the blade runner vision of the san fernando valley, and home.

originally posted October 27, 2009

Two years ago, I was at the new Frederic C Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum, just a short time after it opened.  The building, an extension of the original Gio Ponti building, was designed by Studio Daniel Libeskind, and was the first building by Libeskind to be completed in the US.

I never did get a good shot of the entire exterior; it was a blustery day when I went (the titanium skin doesn’t look nearly as pretty when the sky’s not blue) and I didn’t manage to stand far back enough.

but I guess any effort on my part to take some kind of iconic shot of the exterior would have been superfluous, considering the many better photographers that have already done so.  and it sure does make a striking photo.

I had read some reviews of the museum, which generally liked the building but felt it was ‘inimical to the art,’ that the angled walls were gimmicky, that it made for too many weird situations trying to fit the program and services into the jaggedy shapes.

but I experienced the building just a few weeks after it opened, and it was filled with enthusiastic people clearly enjoying themselves, and in short, it was a trip.

(literally, in some cases, as I got some closeups of the problems caused by the angled walls, including tiny guardrails placed on the floor to keep people from bumping their heads on walls that were angling in toward them:

and places where the walls were already scuffed up, weeks after the opening, by people stubbing their toes on talls that had angled away from them.)

maybe there could have been better solutions to these problems.  but, on the other hand, if we let nothing but practical considerations rule our decisions, will we ever see anything new or exciting?

I don’t know how I’d feel about the building if I’d seen nothing but glossy architecture magazine pictures of the interiors. like the exteriors, the interiors are a shutterbug’s dream, but what really makes them worth seeing is noticing the ways in which people interact with them.

this building has a lot of surprises in store. the interiors themselves surprise you, because you never know what’s coming around the next corner. the way you interact with the art surprises you, as you never know what you will see next, from what angle you will approach it, or how it will affect you. and the unexpected angles and turns also bring you into contact with the other museum patrons in ways that catch you off-guard.

granted, I was there with a happy Denver crowd, not grumpy Easterners, but I found myself talking unexpectedly to strangers more than once, or at least experiencing eye contact…

it’s not all that often that we get to see a truly new thing. I’m as skeptical as anyone of some of the flights of fancy of architecture.  just because we can model it, doesn’t always mean we should build it. but for me, the real test is getting in there and experiencing a place.

a lot of movies have predictable plots. I like to be surprised for a change.