Kevin, EOU film and design instructor (and fellow Porschephile and computer programmer) is on a loop from Boise to Glacier Nat’l Park to Yellowstone and back to Idaho on his motorcycle (BMW 1200GSA). We have been in more or less constant email contact, and he sends back pics like these:
Swallowing the bitter disappointment of the carrot harvest, I walk downtown at 9am in the 80-degree-and-climbing warmth, taking Catherine Street for its shade, pausing for a brief conversation with a neighbor about dogs who think they are people, and spotting an 80s Carrera Cabriolet.
The sum total of our WaWaWA garden’s carrot production:
Bill, my old photography-partner/recluse-artist, sends along evidence of his safety and kitchen’s intact condition, reporting that a 4am earthquake only resulted in the scattering of his collection of Folger coffee cans.
Whereupon I meet Bob and his SteinTrike …
On my walk to my downtown workspace today, I chance upon the three-wheeler cruising up our street. Stopping to talk for a minute — that turned into one hour — I learn that this 82-year-old pedals a good ten miles a day around town, favoring the Prospect/Taumarson loop around the south part of town and past WalMart and Verizon and on to Andy’s, for its smooth surfaces.
Turns out that he took this up because his doctor tells him not to drive, but he was always a mountain biker on two wheels before now. He recounted a few near misses in traffic, but his most dismaying incident on the streets was when a lifted diesel Dodge pickup jumped in front of him into the bike lane, stopped, then spewed clouds of black smoke over him, then squealed away. (See “coal rolling“, referring to the sociopathic so-called “sport” that seems to have taken hold with a certain segment of society in the past couple of years or so.) Bob turns out to be a two-block-distant neighbor (and also has a classic MG Midget stored in his garage). Almost every time we go shopping or driving about town, we see Bob, fearlessly pedalling along.
In the New York Times piece, “Do You Like ‘Dogs Playing Poker’? Science Would Like to Know Why“, questions about the science of art are explored.
Roused from bed at 6am by Kim and Charlie, I submitted to the program and joined in for an early morning dash to Harris Park and the South Fork of the Walla Walla River. This was new territory and we struck out through the country roads between WaWaWA and M-F. My demeanor took an upward surge as we found ourselves in the middle of an almost surreal, desert-like landscape wonderfulness just a few miles out of town. Windshield photography was invoked. Part II, into the mountains and Harris Park itself, some twenty miles distant, will have to come later.
Just discovered some rather ragged 49-year-old negatives, previously buried. Most seem to be from Griffith Park, within easy walking of my Hollywood apartment then.
Further unpacking from our recent move revealed this (among many more) photograph — if you can call it that, given the horrendous lighting conditions, my slow and unsharp lens and the work I had to do to coax any detail to speak of out of the thing — taken during my attendance at a 1969 L.A. Lakers game. I’m pretty sure it shows Wilt Chamberlain doing some damage against the Boston Celtics. I saw some of these live games from time to time as one of my co-workers had season tickets.
