There Are Time Machines All Around Us

(Look! I caught one waiting at the railroad tracks!)

Settings: Part 41

Okay, my noir friends ... this could be a setting for something spooky and nefarious. Put on your best Chandler fedora and tell me: if this shot were part of a scene in a movie, what would happen here?

My Kind of Garden...

Maybe it's just me, but I think this fabulous green machine is as pretty as a flower.

like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology

Telephone Poles

They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washed clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris¬
Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.

--John Updike

Look Up: (#3)

At some point telephone poles will become as obsolete as Victrolas, dictophones and typewriters. Sure, it will be nice not having to worry about downed power lines in storms, but underground cables and wifi hubs just don't have the romance of these wonderful, old relics.

It's Look Up Week this week here at Glimpses! Join me as I point my camera toward the sky.

Tucked Away Modern

I'm always surprised by the examples of contemporary architectural design in a city known for its historical buildings. This one sort of blends into the trees just south of Huntington, offering a nice mirror for those old-fashioned telephone poles.

Ever had one of those weeks...

...that feels like nothing but Mondays? A week where by Friday all you want to do is unplug, unwind and undo the kinks in your back and brain?

Well, then. This picture is for you.

Storm Watching

The parrots chattered more than usual before the storm blew in. As for the weather forecast, winter doesn't want to leave Los Angeles just yet, despite the vernal equinox.

Winter is Coming

Yesterday's chilly weather and cloudy skies definitely made if feel more like the end of November...

Overheard (Part 2)

"It's really a great view up there," he said. "We should climb over the fence."

He was young. High school, definitely. She looked older than he did, like most high school girls.

"How would you know?" She said. "Who have you been up here with?"

"Nobody. I mean, with some people. You know."

She knew.

And then they both knew I was listening.

(So I took this picture.)

Settings: Part 30

It's no wonder South Pas acts as a backlot for Hollywood. Not only does our city play a recurring role in film and television as America's hometown, but at ten minutes from downtown Los Angeles it still has a few unpaved rural pockets like this one. So... (you all know what's coming) if you were going to set a scene for a movie here, what would happen?

At Such Great Distance

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one,
at the end of the path which I've only just begun.
So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp,
at such great distance, so fully manifest—
and it changes us, even when we do not reach it,
into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a sign appears, echoing our own sign...
But what we sense is the falling winds.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

Red Zone

Sylvia Plath saw it one way:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Springsteen sees it like this.

My daughter calls it "mermaid hair" after Ariel's locks.

I just call it way cool.

Everyday Wonder

I love the stretch of Hawthorne that runs along the train tracks. Most of the time it's just a quiet, small town road. At sunset, however, it transforms into a lacy study of color and light. Just look at the leafy silhouettes, the relics of our wired world and that MGM technicolor backdrop of a sky!

I know, I know. They're just trees, telephone poles and clouds. (But aren't they grand?)

Telephone Poles

I noticed this line of telephone poles the other day while wandering around Monterey Hills. Wires in a digital age...

I wonder if images like this will someday be as quaint and far away as pictures of gas lamps and horse-drawn carriages. While I certainly love the cool convenience of my Razr -- and admit to secretly coveting a friend's iPhone -- there is something so stalwart and romantic about telephone poles. I think Carl Sandburg identified the soul inside the structure when he wrote this:

Under A Telephone Pole

I AM a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
tears, the work and want,
Death and laughter of men and women passing through
me, carrier of your speech,
In the rain and the wet dripping,
in the dawn and the
shine drying,
A copper wire.