Zowie, From Before

January 30

Pauli and I went to the Photo LA show tonight. Jo Ann is the featured artist this year so that was especially cool.

Us, on the way out, all arty and stuff.

January 30

I’ve been watching a lot of movies these last weeks in readiness for the Oscars. Of these categories, Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, and Cinematography, I still need to see A Star Is Born, Cold War, At Eternity’s Gate, First Reformed, and Never Look Away.

There are plenty of others I haven’t seen, documentaries, animations, etc. so I’m not worried about running out of movies to see.

January 29

One of those stop-and-look sunsets.

And Oliver and his Mini-me.

My haircut. Can’t be one snip shorter but the top grows in and it’ll look good for weeks.

January 27

Lill and I and Lill’s new dog Marty took the walk at Will Rogers up to Inspiration Point today…

…and this view is always there waiting, it’s just a question of if you can see it. Today we even got the snow capped mountains in the distance.

Lill and Marty, what a team.

January 26

Happy Birthday Angela!

Everyone wants a turn with the little snuggle bug Oliver.

January 24

Sharon and I walked around the Palisades today and I was taken with the effectiveness of this ground cover.

And this water feature. I want it bad.

January 23

With Alex and Carol today I enjoyed a tour of their Shoreline Yacht Club, a very nice extension of one’s home when living on a sailboat.

Here’s the marina where they are living when not somewhere else, which is often.

We saw If Beale Street Could Talk which was moving in a horrifying way and was giving me flashbacks to the James Baldwin I read back when I was young.

January 22

BFFs, Lilly and Roxi.

Lilly and Oliver, having a break.

January 21

Ann couldn’t make it to the Monday night potluck because she was in Seattle watching all these grandgirls. Awww, right?!

January 16-19

The cousins Sharon and Nancy. We had one plan but then it changed on the fly and we made another plan. We know however it turned out would be fine.

January 20

Not their dog, just a dog. A cross between a Bernese Mountain Dog and a Poodle, a Bernedoodle.

Liz and Gary came over for lunch and a nice walk. It was lovely, and a bright clear dry day for it.

Yes I do, all pretty much the same.

Then we got it, the Total Eclipse of the Super Blood Wolf Moon. Cool!

Do I have a thousand more?

Finally it stopped raining but this guy was still wearing his bad-weather gear.

A job I had been putting off for many hundreds of miles. Take in the car. They just had a big delivery of tires, this is just some of them.

…so we could take this picture. Thanks for coming out Rome, it was fun!

January 15

Lilly and Oliver, kickin’ it after school.

While Lilly was at her dance class Rome and I took a buzz down to the pier for some photo-photo in the rain.

So fun, so wet.

Rome likes the rain and took advantage of the opportunity to take some great shots right out there without regard to getting wet while I, her grandmother, snapped some pics from the protection of doorways and awnings.

Here’s Rome positioning a prop…

January 14

Alex, having sailed the Seven Seas living aboard for more than a decade, in his favorite foulies ready to climb up on my roof in the pouring rain to fix one of the vents. Oh Alex, what a guy.

Sailors do get attached to their foulies and Alex’s friend Paul has advised all his near and dear that he is to be cremated in his favorite set, no questions, no deviations.

January 13

Walking with Lona at the Marina outside their front door…

…and then going along with Hartley on his two minute sprint down the hall and back. He gets going so fast we girls have to trot along to keep up. He does this round-trip 6-8-10 times per day. Yay Hartley, you go!

January 12

Marsha and I went to see Vice at the Arclight in Santa Monica where you can kick back and enjoy the show with popcorn and candy and a nice glass of wine. Then we ate at Ye Olde Kings Head and a lovely day it was.

January 11

All the Brown Boys are in town and here are Trevor and Caleb, with their property manager and construction guy, working on a project at one of the apartments. It’s on a busy street and they’re upgrading one of the yards with noise-damping water features and it’ll be great.

We went to the Century City Mall and I got to enjoy again the image of the Viking Cat from the last Annenberg show. She’s actually called ‘Brünnhilde’ and was first published in 1936.

January 10

Sharon, Nancy, and I saw Bohemian Rhapsody today and we all liked it very much. These are the only potential Oscar movies that I’ve seen so far, on airplanes, streaming, and in theaters. I’m going to be going to some movies in the weeks ahead!

January 7-9

I had Tuesday with the girls, went to the dentist on Wednesday, I can’t remember what else so how important could it be. I have to pick up antibiotics for that thing in my mouth and now I’m thinking, wait, oh goodie, infection is bad, and when it’s gone I’ll be better!

Darryl took this picture of Rome at our arts outing on Sunday. Rome had just bought that pin for her jacket, so appropriate that we all loled.

From Merlyn, it’s Hilda and Merlyn’s always Dressed UP NYE Extravaganza.

mc.

January 6

Hauser & Wirth, a fine art space in the DTLA Arts District. I went here with Darryl, Rome, and Lilly. Angela stayed home with the puppy.

I got this from the H&W website, for an idea of the neighborhood. The building is “situated in the former Globe Mills complex. a collection of historic buildings dating back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ..The mill was an example of the shift in California’s economy from the Gold Rush of the 19th century to farming, its 20th century mainstay.”

internet.

The venue was totally worth a visit in itself, and the shows were wonderful so win-win.

This is one of the courtyards here with an herb garden for the restaurant and behind me are the chickens. There is another courtyard big enough for many large-scale Calder pieces.

I had to have a picture of his shoes.

Rome, Darryl, Lilly.

The restaurant is behind me. We didn’t eat here because Lilly needed a vegetarian soup due to her super-loose tooth. The tooth fairy definitely has Lilly on her schedule.

There were three exhibitions available today, Calder: Nonspace, Manifesto by Julian Rosefeldt, and Analogue by Zoe Leonard.

I hope you can’t read the text here because what made Manifesto such a big hit with all of us was not knowing what was going to happen. It’s that slow dawning that something is going on here and then the smack in the face when you get it. It’s huge and I’m so glad we got to have the experience together.

Calder. I just love this stuff and I could look at it all again and again.

I’m looking around my house as I type. Nope, I really don’t have any place to put it.

This was the first time I was at an exhibit where you couldn’t use any cameras at all but you could snap away with your cell phone. I can see not wanting people to take up space with a lot of gear but it seems they could handle this maybe differently than banning all cameras but allowing cell phones.

January 5

Marsha and I saw Green Book this afternoon and then went to her house so I could meet the three new cats. The house was alive, a-swarm actually, with cats!

There’s one old cat left from the previous population of cats and he’s not having any of it.

Roommates Kris and Kelly came by too, after a party. Kelly is wearing a shark suit. Because she can.

January 4

Susie and I went to two Ai Weiwei exhibits today, both closing tomorrow, and we were SO happy to have made it. I had to cancel the first time we planned to go and thankfully Susie could still get tickets.

It was AWESOME. All the quoted material I copied from the exhibition’s flyer.

Set in the largest space at the Marciano Museum, the overall effect is massive. Note there are two floor coverings before you reach the main display…

…the first being “49 tons of individual porcelain sunflower seeds made by 1600 artisans in the ancient porcelain production center of Jingdezhen, in China’s Jiaugxi Province.”

There’s more information on all of this and you can find it on the internet.

The second floor covering “Spouts piles together thousands of antique teapot spouts dating as far back as the Song dynasty (960-1279). Following Ai’s practice of repetition and multiplication, Spouts can be seen as a mass of mouths, a metaphor for the widespread yearning for freedom of speech.”

I loved that, “a metaphor for the widespread yearning for freedom of speech.”

Around the walls surrounding the boat are dense, complicated, and fascinating images made with the bamboo strips that make the boat, and the shadows add to the visual interest.

There are ten vignettes in this series called Windows although for me they all pretty much ran together.

“Suspended around the boat installation are figures crafted from bamboo and silk. In 2015 Ai began creating these figures based on mythic creatures from a classic Chinese text which compiles mythic geography and myth.”

“The underlying theme running through the ten vignettes is freedom of speech and Ai’s efforts to defend it. Motifs recurring in Ai’s practice – the bicycle, the alpaca, symbols of state surveillance, and control – are repeated and multiplied.”

And stools, note the stools for later.

A section called With Passport.

Closer of some of the figures in the boat.

All along the floor outside the boat were quotations speaking of various forms of freedom.

The central piece is called Life Cycle and “is Ai’s latest response to the global refugee crisis. Created in monumental scale, the work is crafted from bamboo using traditional kite-making techniques, and depicts an inflatable boat, the kind commonly used by refugees to reach Europe. Within the boat are figures, some of which bear the likeness of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.”

A cool guy in the Shanhaijing series.

We drove to another location where, at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, we have four different installations, Stools, Zodiac, and That Looks Like a Llama But is Really an Alpaca, and various cubes including The Crystal Cube, and more, but these four grabbed my attention most.

All the quoted material I copied from the exhibition’s flyer.

“Stools (2013), comprised of 5,929 wooden stools from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties and the Republican period, gathered from villages across northern China.”

“Zodiac is works composed from thousands of plastic LEGO bricks. The set of twelve works incorporates imagery from two well-known series by the artist. The twelve LEGO Zodiac animal heads deriving from his sculpture series Circle of Animals are overlaid onto twelve landscapes and monuments from Ai’s Study of Perspective series of photographs.”

“The Animal That Looks Like a Llama But is Really an Alpaca from a distance looks like French eighteenth-century ormolu and becomes, upon closer inspection, ominous arrays of surveillance cameras. During his years of domestic house arrest (2011-2015), the Chinese government surrounded Ai’s studio in Beijing with over twenty cameras, recording his activities twenty-four hours a day. He draws on his personal experience to comment on the encroaching surveillance state both in China and in the West.”

Also we have The Crystal Cube “which is possibly the world’s largest crystal object.”

1947, our Year of the Boar.

Remember the old Campanile restaurant? Republique opened in that location in December 2013. This was my first visit to Republique, and definitely not my last. We shared three things and they were all delicious!

I copied this from their website.

It’s long…”The building that houses République is both timeless and unique. Built in 1928 by Charlie Chaplin and designed by architect Roy Sheldon Price, it was initially conceived as a mixed-use space — with shops on the ground floor and office space above — surrounding an idyllic tiled courtyard. It first became a restaurant in 1989, when Chefs Mark Peel & Nancy Silverton made extensive updates and opened the seminal La Brea Bakery and, six months, later Campanile.

“Campanile closed in 2012, and the building was updated yet again to make way for République…though this time, the primary aim of the design was to strip layers away–down to the original brick, tile and ironwork–and return the space to the airy, open feel of the original construction.”

January 3

I walked with Sharon this morning and then we enjoyed one of our favorite food stops.

That was good, very good, but also very good was that before our walk I made a tech support call, wondering if I’d have to end the call without an answer, to go meet Sharon. But no! The call was amazing. Did you even know that you could call google? Well you can, and the person who answers the phone, who lives somewhere you’ve never heard of, will help you. In One Minute. That’s right, I put in a help call and got a call back in One Minute.

Ok, my expectations are so low, but still.

January 2

Windy and I enjoyed one of my favorite outings this afternoon: park at the Promenade, walk to the pier, eat at Marisol…

…have a ride on the Ferris wheel, and walk back. It was a beautiful day too, bright, crisp, fresh. We liked it.

January 1

I’ve been back from Saint Paul for three days now and I have no pictures having done basically nothing so here’s a few from other people and some I haven’t used yet. I should have taken a picture of my suitcase yesterday when it was finally empty but not yet taken to the garage.

Oh the time I spend scrolling through memes. I needed a literary diversion after finishing Proust and no big reading project has presented itself…so how about scrolling through memes?

internet.

Remember when I was trying to learn Japanese? My teacher, and her husband who was one of my colleagues at work, moved back to Japan a few years ago. Hana-san was very sick recently, in the hospital and rehab for months and months in Tokyo, and now they are home to their own town near Kyoto.

Here’s a picture of Hana out for a walk under the autumn trees.

ts.

Lill and Tony have chosen their new dog, somewhere between 12 and 18 months old, and quite the cutie. I hope to meet him soon.

lg.

I’ve been travelling almost non-stop for more than three months and every time I open my suitcase I find this little treasure from Rome.

I forget when she gave it to me but it’s lived in my suitcase ever since.

I don’t remember what airport this is from but I like the feeling. I do really like airports.

Coming into LA from the south, the view for about an hour.