Shakers: Nighthawks Style

This isn't the first time South Pasadena has made me feel like imitating Edward Hopper. (This time my homage is a little more literal.)

Cool Art

Want a great spot to escape the August heat? Head on over to San Marino to The Huntington Library and Art Collections. Last week I ducked out of the 100 degree blast and into the cool, comforting European Art gallery. (Gainsborough portraits! French marquetry pieces! Really icy air conditioning!!!)

Figurative art lovers, be sure to check out the latest exhibit of 16th and 17th century drawings: Royals, Courtiers, and Confidants: Early English Portrait Drawings on display until October 29th.

Pondering on a Summer Morning

There are flowers on the table, coffee is brewing and the parrots are gathering in the camphor trees above my house. I know it's the big things in life that we always remember -- the births and deaths and graduations, the promotions and colossal failures and serendipitous acts of grace.

But I wish we'd remember more of the little moments. You know what I mean ... all their clarity, ease and boring, wonderful idleness.

I'm sure I won't remember these specific pink roses from Trader Joes. Not after a few weeks, anyway. I'll remember the concept of pink roses from Trader Joes -- after all, they're always there and always bright and ridiculously beautiful -- but I probably won't remember these roses. Little Bit picked them out the other day because "they looked like they needed us."

(Well, maybe I'll remember them now.)

The Most Mysterious Cabinet in the World!

Hey, does that thing belong to Dr. Caligari?

I'm betting there are wizard hats, magic wands and a few books by Linda Goodman stored in there. What do you guys think?

Noir Week (#6)

One of my favorite film professors in college taught that the simplest settings offer the most subtext. It's all in how you reveal (or don't reveal) the scene.

I'm getting mighty pretentious with Noir Week here at Glimpses, but it's all in good fun. Just a few more days of my darkness and light.

Room With a View

I tend to look out of this window a lot when I need to think about something. (And sometimes the subject of my thinking renders the scene decidedly more bleak than the sunny, blue-skied view I present today.) I don't know what it is about antique lace curtains over my 112 year old water glass sash windows but when I look out -- or maybe just at -- this window, the whole world seems to open up.

Perhaps I'm being too literal...

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

--Margaret Fuller

Shadows and Light

The afternoon light through my old water glass windows makes these wonderful shadows on the wall.

Simple, everyday things. So beautiful ... and always there if you just pay attention.

I am reminded of the old poem by William Carlos Williams. It has been repeated so much, it has almost lost its original message. (But not quite.)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Still Life With Dirty Hands

I hadn't noticed Little Bit's fingerprints on the window when I took this photo. Now that I see them, I like the picture even more...

Good Eats

Need a healthy dose of old-school diner goodness? Shakers is the place. In a world that changes so fast it gives you whiplash, Shakers is a wonderful constant. It's like South Pasadena's home base where you can go to regroup, relax and cure what ails you with a heaping plate of eggs and hash browns.

I was doing just that this past weekend when I asked the waitress about another South Pas staple restaurant, Wild Thyme. It's owned by the same family who brings us Shakers as well as Central Park Grill in Pasadena. Wild Thyme is being renovated and will reopen with a new name and a new menu. I was told it's going to be called Canoe and it will serve Hawaiian food. I'm not sure what Hawaiian food is exactly, but I'll give the proprietors benefit of the doubt. They haven't let me down yet. (Although, I'm going to miss Wild Thyme's Italian chopped salad. Sigh.)

Sunny View

Pull up a chair at my dinged-up, well-used dining room table. I just brewed coffee, but I can also put on a kettle for tea. Hell, just give me a good reason to uncork one of the dusty bottles of Bordeaux sharing space with laundry detergent and cat litter in my wine cellar. What's that you say? It's Wednesday? That's a good enough reason for me.

Sometimes the prettiest thing in the world isn't necessarily fancy but familiar. This sunny spot is always a feast for my eyes. Well, maybe not when it's cluttered with dirty dinner plates, but even then it reminds me of the gorgeousness of everyday things. In a world that disrupts and deconstructs, this old table grounds. It also offers the perfect surface for art projects and Monopoly. And every afternoon, regardless of all the dour headlines, it grabs some of the setting sun's rays and splashes them around the room as if to say, Life is golden ... just look around!

Pretty Things Week continues here at Glimpses. Consider it a "Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty" bumper sticker that I'm sticking on the Internet.

Abstract by iPhone

I've always thought the angles of my bedroom would make an interesting picture, but I never got around to taking any shots. This one came about by mistake. I hit the shutter button shortly after I downloaded the latest update for my iPhone Retro Camera app.

I love happy accidents.

(Close en)Counter

There's something festive about restaurant counters, and South Pas has a few choice ones. You'll find this one at Gus's BBQ. It's a great spot, and I can think of a few more:

The brass-fitted soda counter at Fair Oaks Pharmacy with the tall bar stools and the perfect view of all that ice cream...

The long diner counter at Shakers with old-school swivel chairs...

The antique wooden bar at Bistro de la Gare with flickering votive candles and organic bordeaux by the glass...

That's just off the top of my head. Any others that I've left out?

Caption This Photo (#64)

Anyone?

Digital Dystopia

As you might have noticed, Blogger was down for most of yesterday and this morning. This is the first time I have missed a post in my almost 1050 days as your trusty daily photo blogger. (It wasn't my fault!) Our pal Petrea from Pasadena Daily Photo tweeted last night that it was good for blogging addicts to be forced to take a break. I would directly quote her, but as of this moment Twitter is also down. Okay, people. Which one of you is responsible for breaking the internet?

While the Blogger team works to restore missing posts (mine from yesterday has disappeared) I will deal with other connectivity snafus. AT&T U-Verse screwed up the Allee household's autopayment and disconnected our phone, internet and cable. (Thank goodness for Charlie's free WiFi. And strong coffee.)

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.

Musing at Kaldi

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...

--T.S. Eliot

Caption this photo (#57)

I need help with this one...

Multicolored

When Jon and I were first married, we painted the walls and doors of our West LA house about a dozen different colors. It was kind of like living inside of a kaleidoscope. All you had to do was turn your head for festive, ever changing views of what would have otherwise been a fairly nondescript late 1940s bungalow. In a part of town known for its beige stucco, the inside of that house was a welcome change. It was hard to stay bored staring at a ceiling painted with multicolored flowers, hard to stay mad at a dinner table surrounded by red walls and gold stars. If there had been a staircase in that house, I probably would have painted it just like this one at Busters.

I've been musing about South Pasadena's multicolored landscape lately ... just check out my latest column at Patch. It should post sometime before lunch today.

Update Tuesday Morning: Thanks to the readers pointing out my latest article and video aren't showing up under my column heading at Patch this week. Until it gets fixed, just click here for the South Pas Patch front page and you'll find my column.

Make mine a double

The Allee family has been visited by the Kindergarten Rhinovirus Fairy yet again, so I'm fresh out of ideas and feeling mighty cranky. Plus, it's been so long since I've been to a bar, I had to refresh my memory with this picture from my files. (It's from Carmines. Just look at how much fun you can have if you brave the Fair Oaks Avenue construction zone!)

Basically, I got nothing today, gang.

So what topic can we talk about ... Charlie Sheen? Japan? Libya? Another oil spill in the gulf? Nuclear fallout? Jeez, we could all use a drink.

Homework

There are a lot of us in South Pas. We're the parents who work from home during the hours when our kids are sleeping or at school. You'll notice us everywhere. We're waiting outside the kindergarten door before class lets out, checking email on our smart phones. We're dragging paperwork to the park -- paperwork which, for the most part, remains in the backpack next to the juice boxes and handiwipes while we attend to items higher on our task lists like building sand castles or playing hide and seek. We have desks, but they're usually piled with overdue bills. (We eventually get to those bills. But only after the playdates, the dinner dishes, the laundry, the email and our own work -- which is also usually overdue.)

So, instead, we spread out on the coffee table. Late. With ice cream. And if we're photobloggers completely at a loss for ideas, we resort to a time-honored tradition that seems to work for five-year-olds: show and tell.