bi [sic] le

In response to my post about helping my daughter learn how to drive at the Hollywood Bowl (where I also had my first driving experience at 10 years of age), reader Gary commented that he, too, experienced his first motor vehicle operation at the fresh age of 7 running over empty beer cans with his dad at the Hollywood Bowl parking lot, and surmised that there are probably a buncha angelenos who had impromptu lessons on that landmark’s blacktop.

Gary had the excellent idea of forming a club and throwing an annual picnic, and I responded to that telling him the least I could do was create a t-shirt.

And so on my lunch break, I did (click it for the bigger picture):

If you absolutely love it and gotta have one, it’s available here at Zazzle.

In honor of Bastille Day I resubmit a photo of the Seine and Notre Dame Cathedral taken from our wonderful room at the Hotel le Notre Dame on Quay Saint Michel  in the Latin Quarter along the left bank of the river during our visit in May 2007.

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The towers on the left, visited this past weekend, put the spire in inspire. Whereas I’ve long put the dis in disdain whenever regarding the tower on the right, visited late Monday afternoon — in surprise at how almost beautiful it looked illuminated in the last rays of that day’s sun.

Both are markedly incongruous to their surroundings. The ones on the left rise from a wedge of backyard surrounded by inner-city blight, the vision and arduous 30-plus-year creation of an untrained but entirely skilled loner who “set out to do something big, and did it.” The one on the right dominates an easily mocked revision to the city’s oldest public park from an architect no doubt well trained and skilled but who set out to do… something.

From my jaded point of view that “something” was to reject any connection to the city’s downtown core and garishly set the open space apart with a color scheme that pays all its tribute to the superficial 1980s and none to the historic 1880s when its first design as a park was realized.

At one point early on in the history of the towers on the left, the city tried to reject them. With little in the way of proof, civic officials dismissed the monumental achievement as unsafe, little more than a worthless and poorly built hazard whose demolition they unconscionably ordered.

It was spared the wrecking ball thanks only to the dedicated efforts of a few citizen heroes who, realizing its immeasurable cultural value,  first purchased the site and then engineered a stress test to prove its structural integrity. Convincing the reluctant bureaucrats to allow the test to be conducted,  it ultimately proved the towers were completely safe, sound and thus saved.

With the return to service of the Angel’s Flight train this week, LA Observed has been great in posting various existences of the fascinating funicular in art and popular culture, such as this favorite of mine below, the cover of an issue from last year of Black Clock magazine. I’m subscribing.

With the woman’s look, the light, and of course the dark, there’s plenty of mood and tension inside the apartment to love in this illustration by Jeff Bridges (no, not the Academy Award-winning one). But by far my favorite aspect of the image has to be the Angel’s Flight car in the background slicing across the window like a guillotine blade. Genius.

(click for the bigger picture)

With the world’s shortest railway’s 33% grade and its twin cars Olivet and Sinai shaped accordingly, I’ve always thought of it more as an Angle’s Flight than an Angel’s, but that’s irrelevant.

What’s relevant is that starting this past Monday the funicular returned to service after a 9-year absence, and I took the long way home from work to take a ride on the beloved landmark and some pictures, such as the highly stylized one above.

I wrote about my first ride on it way back in March of 1996, here on LA Metblogs.

The buzz on the blogs is that the Hollywood Sign is soon scheduled to undergo an authorized transformation of some sort. I’m fuzzy on the details of the metamorphosis but I believe it has something to do with raising money to publically procur the parcel of land near to it that’s been for sale some time.

Anyway, since our second floor guestroom affords us a view however distant and semi-obstructed of the landmark through the palms standing atop the Micheltorena ridgeline, I thought I’d zoom the webcam in as far as it could go in hopes of maybe capturing a timelapse of any activity undertaken.

Here’s a still from this morning. As you can see it’s signage as usual:

The image updates (and archives) about once a minute so for a current view (probably of more of the same), click on the Webcam thumbnails in the right column or visit my Webcams page.

On the morning of November 28, Susan and I drove through a pretty steady drizzle from Mesquite Springs campground to Ubehebe Crater, which is next to the road to Racetrack Playa, with long-wanted plans for me to bike its 26-plus miles of washboarded badness while Susan drove it.

Arriving at the crater we were confronted by cold and wind and the reality that the storm that had done not much more than sprinkle us on its outskirts was pretty much parked over the valley the racetrack road traversed, leaving the bracketing mountainsides nicely blanketed with snow, and me realizing the long and the cold and wet haul getting from the crater potentially above the snow line and down to the playa would be seriously lacking in The Fun.

So I climbed along the lip of the crater, grim and gruff and bummed that the challenge that initially drew me to this wonderful place back in the winter of 2002 would go postponed once more… to be done either next spring or fall under what I hope will be less meteorologically challenging conditions and thus more with The Fun.

Turning around to head back down to the camper, the sun peeked out from a break in the clouds, and in a heartbeat my camera was out to capture what I expected to be a brief illumination. It lingered a little longer than expected and I was able to end up with a rough three frames that allowed me to show you the whole 2,000-year-old hole:

(You’ll wanna click it for the bigger picture)

Ubehebe Crater is 600 feet deep and half a mile across. Known as a maar volcano, the crater is estimated to be between 2,000 to 7,000 years old, and was created by steam and gas explosions when hot magma rose up from the depths until it reached ground water. The intense heat flashed the water into steam which expanded until the pressure was released as a tremendous hydrovolcanic eruption.

Eastsider L.A. has a post up considering the present loss and future restoration of the Echo Park Lake lotus. Showcased in the entry is an absolutely amazing picture of a lotus pad floating atop the reflecting waters while holding what looks to be someone’s spilled fruit punch. The unlikely combination of elements somehow combines to speak so fluently of the spirit of the lake as an urban oasis and the landmark it is for those who frequent it. But the photo tells of something else as well, something ominous — the lotus is bleeding.

If the magnificent and historic plant was still thriving as it had for years, I’d think nothing of the garish red fluid. But with its demise, the invasive beverage indicts us. Whether such a foreign substance, and one the garish color of blood, was added carelessly or intentionally does not matter. What matters is it was done. Just as was done whatever manmade events and toxins ultimately conspired to doom the lotus, be it fouled stormwater runoff, polution. They weren’t purposefully added. But we added them just the same.

Turns out that foretelling image was taken back in 2005 by my friend Hexodus who lives in Echo Park but who I last saw last summer when Susan and I were vacationing in Guanajuato at the same time he was doing an extended-stay study program at the university there. He introduced us to the Truco 7 Cafe (pictured at right), which is THE place to go for breakfast in Guanajuato, so write that down because Guanajuato should be on your list of places to go.

Similar to the “Office Trees Over Time” set I’m compiling over in this set on Flickr, I made a resolution in 2008 to stand in the same spot beside the lotus lagoon every day and take a picture to document the growth of that year’s bloom. I broke that one immediately and it’s just as well because it never happened. Instead, the only blossoms that rose last summer were prints of his photos of the flowers that another Echo Park friend of mine, Mr. Rollers, had staked out along the lake’s banks as memorials to the vanished beauty.

Here’s one I took of a blossom in 2007, pretty much the last year they bloomed:

Well, I’m back home in L.A. and that rhymes with yay! I’m still getting re-settled while avoiding a laundry list of things to do — one of which is laundry. So in the meantime, allow me to share with you this outrageous flyer found upon a return visit to Dealey Plaza on my last day in Dallas. It was plastered upon the light pole nearest to the “X marks the spot” Elm Street location where the second bullet struck President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 (click for larger image on my Flickr photostream).

Why is it such a really  good idea as breakfast on Christmas Day at one of my favorite never-closed places in LA is an idea that never occurred to me until now.

Oversights like that frustrate me to no end, but I guess it’s better late than never to start an annual Breakfast At The Pantry tradition, which we kicked off with my mom, who came over for Christmas Eve and then spent the night trying not to freeze while asleep on our couch.

Coincidental bonus points for our server’s name being Jesus — who we left a 50% tip because anyone forced to forsake their own lives and those of friends and family on this day to instead serve strangers deserves nothing less!

Merry Christmas!