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So, while I was up on the roof last night getting this shot to the west of the Moon, Saturn, Mars and Venus all gathered together in the western sky, before I came down I also pointed the camera to the northwest and got this shot of that view (click it for the bigger picture):

I don’t ever need an excuse to go to my favorite restaurant, but this time I have one. After attending the party celebrating its grillmaster’s 1941 Tatra T87 win in the New York Times Collectible Car of the Year contest, I did as I said I would and took the photo I snapped of the car’s badge, goofed with it a bit in Photoshop and ordered up a mounted canvas-ized print of it from Snapfish.

I told Susan that if it arrived this week and it didn’t look like a total piece of crap, we’d be dining at Blue Star Saturday so as I could present it to Paul as  token of my esteem and admiration.

Sure enough, it arrived yesterday and I think it looks pretty cool (click it for the bigger picture):

Date burger, here I come!

A little over a year ago my friend Stephen Roullier introduced me to Blue Star Restaurant, a retroasis in the middle of a scrap metal wasteland south and east of downtown, and since then I’ve gone to no place more times for Saturday morning/early afternoon eats, in large part because the grillmaster there rustles up the most awesome burger I’ve ever had.  Ever. That grillmaster’s name is Paul Greenstein, and if you’re familiar with the downtown scene that thrived waaaaaay before the gentrified downtown as we now know it moved in — with places like Atomic Cafe, Gorky Park, Madame Wong’s, Al’s Bar — than you might recognize Paul’s name since he was a big part of it.  I believe somewhere else on his curriculum vitae you’ll find he once owned Millie’s here in Silver Lake. On top of that he’s a master neon-sign maker.

I had no idea who he was, of course, seeing as how my connection to that bygone era as a chronic Valley dweller involved one tentative late-night stop at Gorky’s sometime in the mid-1980s after a wide-eyed visit to the old Power Tools club when it occupied the ground floor ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel.

During that same first visit to Blue Star with Stephen that I met Paul and fell in love with his fantastic Date Burger, I also met his car parked out front, hands-down one of the most unique vehicles you’ll ever see. Ever: A 1941 Tatra T87.

A what? Yeah, me too. The rear-engined jet-black sexy beast looks something like a VW Bug on steroids, only with a third headlight and the most hot-damn dorsalist of dorsal fins. It also looked brand spankadankin’ new, not at all like it had been almost 70 years since it rolled off the Czechoslovakian assembly line where it had been built.

There’s one reason and a whole bunch of money behind why. After winning it on eBay in 2001, Paul and his girlfriend Dydia meticulously brought it back — even sent it back to the Czech Republic for a 3.5-year restoration process that they estimate came with a $60,000 pricetag.

And it’s paid off pretty handsomely. There was a great spread on the car in Motor Trend Classics magazine, a precursor to the Tatra recently being announced as the winner of the New York Times’ Collectible Car of the Year Contest.

So why am I writing all about this? Mainly because I’m a sucker for awesomely authenticalized automobilage, but also for a simple little reason. Paul and Dydia had a party this past Sunday at Blue Star to celebrate the victory and Stephen was kind enough to pass along the invitation to attend. And while Susan and I were there I got a good enough shot of the T87′s fantastic badge, above, that I’ve goofed with in Photoshop and may put it onto a t-shirt or frame a print of it.

The picture you see framed and hanging above was snapped of a gray wolf at the Los Angeles Zoo 10 years ago. So enamored was I with the portrait that I cropped the 3″ x 5″ print to what you see and enlarged the hell out of it with my scanner, surprised that it held together.

Around three years after that I had a poster made of it and took it to a local framing place so that I could properly display it. Trouble was the difference in price at this place between getting it custom framed or just getting it mounted in a standard 24″ x 36″ off-the-shelf frame was hugely more than my budget could bear at the time, and so I chose the lesser-expensive option and ended up with one of my favorite photos drowning in a sea of dark brown matte (visualize the wolf centered in the middle of a frame/matte that was basically three times as tall as what’s above and you’ll get the idea). Yeah: lame.

Not lame enough not to hang in the livingroom of the Silver Lake apartment I lived in at the time. But after I moved in with Susan in 2004 the best I would allow it to do was occupy space either in the basement or leaning against various walls in the study.

But this is not the boring story of me finally running the picture down to a different framing place and getting the whole thing redone. Of course not. Instead, this is about me going Capt. DIY armed with nothing more than a pencil, ruler, X-acto knife, box cutter, scissors, hacksaw, staple gun and a half-baked idea that I might just be able to reconfigure the whole thing. So I dismantled the pieces, crudely measured, semi-cautiously cut and then reassembled everything and voila!

Don’t look too closely unless you want to see imperfections in where the top corners come together, but regardless of that I ended up with a frame proportional and complementary to the image, making it suitable to proudly and finally hang in the window above what’s now our landing room.

/horntoot

As I regularly do when I’m out in Death Valley, I’ll usually set up the digital SLR on a tripod after the campfire dies down and just before turning in, point it at the night sky and leave the shutter open for  however long it takes me to get bored on top of cold, which is usually less than 15 minutes.

This time I took a risk in losing the entire rig sometime during the night to go for a longer time span. So  I planted the tripod outside the northwest corner of our tent around 9 p.m., opened the shutter and went to bed, figuring I’d get an exposure either for as long as the battery lasted or when I got up for my usual pre-dawn trip to pee.

Sure enough, my bladder woke me up around 5 a.m. and when I checked the camera I found it powered down, its battery having lasted an unknown amount less than that eight hours.

The result looks a little something like this (click it for the bigger picture):

There is some light leakage along the right edge of the frame, but it’s decidedly less faint and more understandable than the dramatic eruption up into the center, of which I have no explanation. There were no campfires going on the ground out from our tent in this direction and even if there were, the camera was pointed up into the sky at a pretty wide angle to the ground, at least 30 degrees. My guess is it’s light from vehicles coming down the two-mileroad to get to the campground.

If you click to go to the bigger version of the image you’ll see it’s not a very clean image — she’s an old camera whose been many dirty places and snapped many shots — and there are a lot of damaged pixels, but then again some of the red points of light could be satellites and such. But still… look beyond the marring and the star tracks and you’ll see a ridiculous number of weeeeeee points of light waaaaaaaaay out there. They can’t all be dirty bits.

This next vista below  greeted us on our way home as we emerged from a surreal scene encountered while traveling along the back side of Owens Lake on our way to Lone Pine. Serious winds were blowing a major amount of the dry lake bed in a northeastern direction and after passing through the massive dust storm and understanding why Los Angeles is or should be hated by everyone in the Owens Valley, I’d been hoping everything would open up and my cousin Nathan would get a dramatic view of the very dramatic Eastern Sierras. Instead we found them looking veiled and encapsulated in a dome rimmed by an exploding aurora that was pretty dramatic in its own right (click for the bigger picture):

8Ball  posed for me at LACMA’s Urban Lights exhibit on the way home from work one night this week.

Just a highly fauxtified still from my sunglasses videocam, supplemented with a bit of the incongruous intrigue thanks to the planted weapon from which the jogger (suspect?) seems to be running.

In these years of fading memory I can’t seem to recall the specfix of how I came to have this image below that I rediscovered this weekend whilst stumbling around my archives. My best recollection is that I found it via my fellow LA Metblogger Frazgo, either via a post he made on the find somewhere or from his Flickr photostream.

What is it? Well, I’m a little fuzzy on that as well. Obviously it’s a weathered treasure from the 1932 summer Olympic games here in L.A., but specifically I’m thinking that in the original image the badge was attached as an ornament  that adorned either the grille or the hood of a car from that time, and that the end result you see above is from my efforts in Photoshop to separate it out and stand it alone, maybe to put it on a shirt or a —.

[Sound of tires screeching]

Mystery solved! Instead of sitting here writing about scratching my head about it, I zipped over to Frazgo’s Flickr photostream and found the original image. Yep, it’s just as I’d thought.

Next stop: shirt creation!

You might have checked out my post earlier this week on LA Metblogs cumbersomely titled “89 Snaps Of People I Passed While Biking This Morning On The Strand Between Hermosa Beach And The Ballona Creek Bridge.”

If not, in a nutshell, I had my sunglasses digicam on while biking from Hermosa Beach back to work this last Wednesday morning, and when I later reviewed the video I decided to capture stills of the frames featuring people I encountered along the way and ended up with 89 of them, which I then ran through some basic Photoshop filtration to give them an illustrative look.  Liking the results and feeling  it made for an interesting slice of SoCal life I tossed ‘em all up on Flickr and linked to them from the aforementioned Metblogs post made that evening.

Then came this arrogantly assuming comment yesterday morning from someone who apparently thinks they know everything  and to prove it used the pseudonym “Privacy rights violated:”

Apparently you are unaware of the rights of individuals to control the use of their image in publicity. You legally are violating their rights to privacy. Just because people appear in public, does NOT mean you have the right to publish their images online for the world to see, and associate this with a blog. You have a right to take a photo for yourself, but not the right to make them public. An exception is when they are PUBLIC FIGURES and most all of these people are not. You need signed releases!

It was chuckle-worthy both in the person’s intense disregard for the true applicability of a person’s expectation of privacy in public places, and his or her blatant lack of awareness of my rights as a photographer and — for want of a better word — artist. Not to mention my 19 years’ experience in various journalistic endeavors.

I especially enjoyed the person’s apparent Freudian slip of “You legally are violating their rights…” Because that’s, in effect, absolutely correct. I am well within my rights not only to take photos of anyone and everyone on that bikeway, but also to publish them to Flickr and LA Metblogs.

And while it amazes me that there are people like “Privacy rights violated” who are so ignorant and adamantly demonstrative of it, at its core such a dimwitted display is an appreciated opportunity to explore and enforce the truth.

These five cactus pads were rescued as tiny sprouts a from a single dying pad (its remains visible on the right side of the pot) that had disconnected from the main plant. I’m particularly fond of the  exulting “arms” the pad in the middle has grown.

After Saturday’s rains, this tiny forest of mushrooms sprang up literally overnight.

One of my favorite signs of spring, this little flowering plant beneath the behemoth bougainvillea to the north of the front steps blooms annually, but usually only with one or two flowers. This year thanks to the increased rains it got an early jump and is really putting on a show.

Speaking of getting an early start, the backyard stand of callalilies has wasted no time making its presence known.