Mission Station

I haven't taken the brand new Expo Line from downtown LA to the beach yet, but I'm already an old fan of South Pasadena's Gold Line which now goes all the way out to Azusa and will eventually end up in Montclair.  I can't resist taking pictures whenever I wait at Mission Station.  Those columns!

Chugga Chugga Chugga Chugga

The Gold Line tracks sweeping underneath the Oaklawn bridge traverse the same terrain as a bygone Southern California railway. Posting this picture is a great excuse to link to a wonderful collection of photographs from an era when Los Angeles boasted the largest interurban electric passenger rail service in the entire world. Check out the Pacific Electric Railway Historical Society.

There Are Time Machines All Around Us

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

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

Brainstorming

Rainy day bad idea:

Decide to do a big grocery shop at Ralphs, grabbing the umbrella with the broken spokes and wearing the wool coat that soaks up water better than a squeegee, getting stuck standing in the parking lot as an elderly woman in an 80s Lincoln Continental pulls out and then desperately tries to clean her wet glasses with her crocheted shawl as you helplessly watch your cereal boxes get soggier and soggier and you wish that you had included a bottle of scotch on your grocery list.

Rainy day good idea:

Put away the wet groceries, dry off and head over to Charlie's for great coffee, warm atmosphere and cool tunes. (Which is exactly what I did when I was stopped by the train crossing, and noticed this lovely shot.)

Train in Motion

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Poetry in Motion

Whenever I post a picture of the Gold Line train, I usually post a poem along with it. But today, I'm posting an entire collection of poems. I recently discovered this great blog -- a New Yorker writes a poem every day on his train commute to work -- and I wanted to share.

From west coast to east coast, trains don't just transport ... they inspire.

A View from Oaklawn Bridge

(Clickety clack. Clickety clack. Clickety clack.)

On the Right Track

The Metro Gold Line tracks stretch out and disappear into the west, reminding me of so many great train scenes in film: Marilyn Monroe falling out of an upper berth in Some Like it Hot, Cary Grant pulling Eva Marie Saint into an upper berth in North by Northwest, Farley Granger trying not to get too creeped out by Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train...

Freeways -- even empty ones -- just can't compete.

Keep Clear

When the warning lights flashed at the intersection I cut the engine, adjusted the camera settings, opened the sun roof and used the top of the car for an impromptu tripod.

(It was a lucky shot.)

Subliminal

If you ever need an excuse to skip your commute and play hooky, you might be tempted by that message on the platform. Decisions, decisions...

Oh, the Doo Dah day...

It was just a quick Metro ride from South Pas to Pasadena yesterday morning. Madcap fun filled the streets as the Doo Dah Parade made its way through Old Town. Check out the silliness on my overflow blog here.

Silver Charm

The Metro Gold Line trains aren't gold. Actually, most of them are white. But ever so often this classic silver one rolls into the station, which makes my little daughter squeal with delight and say, "Look! It's that special train!" We decided that if finding a copper penny is considered a good omen, then spotting a silver train must be really lucky...

Train of thought...

Ray Bradbury once said that "half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness." (And half the fun of Mission Station is getting lost in its aesthetic.)

Ad-libbed Lines

In an age of countless forms of visual enhancements that frost the real with a sugar-candy illusion (High def CGI, Photoshop, "reality" TV, Botox, plastic surgery, infotainment, the nightly news...) I'm drawn to the concept of lomography. Its genesis is somewhere in the many snapshots taken with the lowly 35mm LOMO LC-A Compact Automat Camera, produced by former Russian state-run optics manufacturer LOMO PLC of Saint Petersburg. Lomography's motto of "Don't think, just shoot" is the flipside of everything you ever learned in photography class. No need for image stabilization and polarizing filters -- just wave your camera and start clicking. It's the same kind of happy, spontaneous, unencumbered philosophy that inspired the French New Wave film movement, challenged artists to think outside of the purely representational and fueled free-thinking novelists to sidestep the rules established by the canon.

I know, I know... a lot of this is just a viral advertising scheme to get everyone who bought an expensive Canon digital SLR to throw down more bucks for a weird, low-tech camera. But let's take away the marketing tricks and just look at the idea...

Don't think, just shoot. Don't think, just shoot again. Forget setting up a frame or manipulating the light. Don't think, just shoot. Somewhere in this lighthearted approach you might discover wonderful little details of everyday life (sometimes literally) right under your feet.

Like here, for instance. Why had I never noticed the abstract beauty of the train tracks crossing Mission at Meridian in the late afternoon?

(Hat tip to my fellow Los Angeles photoblogger Kevin at The Jimsonweed Gazette for the inspiration to think -- and shoot -- outside the box.)

Quatrain...

You'll forgive me a little John Milton. I hardly recall his verses, but while waiting for this train to pass, bits of the following poem also passed through my mind:

"Sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild; then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train."

I know, I know, Milton was using metaphor. But on this particular evening mild and silent night, it looked for all the world to me like a starry train...