The third full week of November in Southern California, from 2015 to 2020, from the archives –
Hollywood Muse (25 images): David Lynch made that puzzling movie “Mulholland Drive” and no one ever knew quite what that was about – but it was somehow about Hollywood. Mulholland Drive runs along the spine of Hollywood Hills, with Hollywood far below, and this is the overlook above the Hollywood Bowl. Lynch was right. It is surreal up there, and down below, at the entrance to the Bowl, there’s George Stanley’s “Muse of Music, Dance, Drama” – a bit of Art Deco madness from 1940, the largest and last of the WPA arts projects on the West Coast. Stanley also designed the famous Oscar statuette. This is a surreal town. ~ Thursday, November 19, 2015
Friday Afternoon Light (30 images): November afternoons are rather fine out here – the play of light down at La Brea and First, where the odd apartment buildings from the thirties give way to the arts district down there. ~ Friday, November 20, 2015
The Big White Jump (27 images): The Emser Tile building on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood – the Suicide Building – in the 1987 movie Lethal Weapon, Mel Gibson goes up there to talk a “jumper” down. They end up jumping off the roof together – but the building does have an existential blankness to it. The location manager got this one right. ~ Saturday, November 19, 2016
Washed Clean (30 images): Palisades Park, Santa Monica, the day after a rare day of heavy rain – washed all clean and new. ~ Monday, November 21, 2016
November Zen (30 images): At Melrose and Crescent Heights, a Buddha and an angry black man, the walls of dead comics at the Improv, a giant threatening Marilyn Monore – and the blank pink and blue and Art Deco walls under mysterious skies. It’s a bit of Hollywood November Zen. ~ Monday, November 20, 2017
Somewhere Cool (28 images): Ninety-five in Hollywood, twenty-three degrees above normal – a new record high for the day before Thanksgiving – so it was off to Echo Park Lake. It’s always cool there, very cool. ~ Wednesday, November 22, 2017
The November City (35 images): Forget the sunshine. This is Los Angeles in November. ~ Monday, November 19, 2018
Three Women (35 images): Dangerbird Records, the independent record label in Silver Lake, on Sunset Boulevard at Lucile, keeps changing. Now it’s three dancing women and odd drawings on the sidewalk – but this is the home of Fitz and The Tantrums and Minus the Bear. This is the home of ironic beyond-hip music. The women are fine. The neighborhood is fine – full of color. It’s all fine. ~ Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Watching the Skies: The light is extraordinary in Los Angeles in November. Then it’s best to sit quietly and watch the skies. ~ Monday, November 18, 2019
Above Olive Hill (41 images): The skies above Olive Hill at the east end of Hollywood Boulevard – ignoring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and the art gallery and art school and the big theater – because sometimes, after a winter storm blows through, the sky is enough. ~ Thursday, November 21, 2019
South of Pink (35 images): The block down the street from Pink’s Hot Dogs, on North La Brea at Melrose, isn’t pink at all. It’s severe black and white Art Deco, with an abandoned pastel movie theater from the thirties, next to the giant colored cubes of Torath Emeth Academy. And there’s Spider Man too. It’s very Los Angeles. ~ Friday, November 20, 2020
Misplaced Concreteness (45 images): Industrial geometry old and new, Romaine and Sycamore by the CEMEX plant – ready-mix concrete moving out in giant mixer trucks all day long. In Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is central to his analysis, a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity. So, what is this Mexican concrete plant doing here? ~ Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Just Above Sunset 