Remember these? When overhearing someone else's banal phone conversation was due to the limits and logistics of telecommunication? And not the proliferation of such (when you could choose to avoid the chitter and din of someone recalling last night's bar-scene, simply by avoiding the phonebank). This is Paul Newman in The Verdict. Circa 1977, Boston-- the waste cans a few feet out of frame are still wrapped in grubby bicentennial banners. The art direction is grande. It shows how frayed and derelict and homespun our world was. How real and tactile.

The internet as bulletin board.

This reminds me of that great bit in Spaulding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia where he talks about the antiquated Soviet Submarine communications (metal tubes closing the audible gaps) as compared to our superior (U.S.) technology. How in the tinny crackle of the soviet tubes, when soldiers communicate with each other, each side can hear the other's fear and anguish in their comrade's voices. How the humanity is stripped from our communiques in our quest for technical proficiency-- and it's impossible to gauge the true emotional timbre at the other end of the line. Not that we didn't have issues with land-based lines... but the fact that everyone seems to be holding a cellphone to their ear or in front of their face at every available moment. Something about the fact that it seems as if no one can stand to be alone with their thoughts for more than a nanosecond.

The sad fall-out of our on-demand talk-to-me-tell-me-twitter-me-text-me storm of contact is that reaching out and touching someone.. has simply lost its specialness.

The chair

Venice, a few years back. Struck me as odd that people discard sizable hunks of furniture on the sidewalk... something I thought only happened in destitute third worlds and crumbling American cities. Large item pick-up the city calls it. And then there are the only hinted-at little dramas from the recent downturn....

golden smog

In and around the city of angles... the palette changes in interesting ways.

Not far from here... a few hours by car, many more by foot. The desert looms. I wish I'd taken this-- this is the only photo posted that I have not taken. I was leaving LA a few years back. Lost, stolen, broken (when am I not?). I came to wander here, as I do. Joshua Tree. I found this memory card among the rocks. Found it because I slipped while responding to an emaciated coyote watching me. On the card, photos of a campfire, the night sky and this magic that crystallizes at any given moment out here where they sky meets your expectations without irony. And exceeds them. Tried to return the card at the ranger station. No takers. No callers. Took it as a sign. Didn't have a camera for some reason. Left in a fiery blur of wildflowers in my wake. And on to Flagstaff, Sedona and more expectations summarily met...

A discrete parcel of time

I never bring a camera on the run up Bronson... and I still regret I never brought one to Dante's Peak. And then it burned and it all went away... took a walk this time, brought a lens (just the point and shoot). If you live in LA and don't make the hikes, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that concrete is not a naturally occurring element in nature...

As you make the slow incline. It's more than an elevation of dirt in the hills that ring Hollywoodland. It's not Shasta nor the Alps, or Bryce or Yo-se-mite. But it has coyotes and rattlesnakes within view of the Capital records building. The city takes pennies from us and in exchange, they cede us this -- floating above the exhaust and poison (ivy not withstanding).

love and ruin among the jacarandas

Just two in a trail of random sketches littered among the fading Jacarandas (Jacarandai?) on Hayworth. Handsome boy. Lovely girl. The end of an affair? Or the early, heady come-what-may throws of disregard? We should all be so lucky to find the handmade articles of someone else's faith, strewn about us like so many leaves. Inviting us to engage.

But, the experience of being me suggests that some dude with a uni-ball and a penchant for watching, well, his man-bag simply popped a rivet on his way to meet this week's muse at El Compadre. And creative commons just took care of his afternoon's worth of loadstone, fashioned over sumatra boengie, at the coffee bean on Sunset.

Detail of same. Winking or crying.

A bit of nonsense on Sunset, heading to Coach and Horses with a guy named Mohammed, S. Someone scratched "9/11 ha ha ha" with an lapping tongue, along various surfaces (telephone boxes, doorways, street signs) along the way. Random. Disturbing. Not sure what to make of it, still. Kids. Youth. Yes. Youth: the indiscrete lack of suppuration that defines the ignorant. And the base.