Dan’s String Art
Dan’s String Art
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Tag Archives: LA
Silver Lake Chandelier Tree
Silver Lake Chandelier Tree
Pictured is a stately century-old sycamore that grows along West Silver Lake Drive. It has been decorated with thirty vintage chandeliers that have been strung among its branches. Dan showed us this tree, last year when we visited him in LA.
We saw the Golden Globe awards last night. Anne won our little bingo game, but La La Land was the big winner, with its seven awards, a record. Also, here is a big shout-out to Meryl Streep. She is a three-time Oscar winner, which hardly makes her an over-rated actresses.
I put away Christmas today. Although, Anne talked me into leaving two strings of lights up. We had left Christmas up for Dan, but after his departure it was time to put it away. Dan made it back to Brooklyn last night and his gamble of turning off the heat while he was gone worked out just fine. There were no frozen pipes when he got back to the city.
La La Land
The City of Stars as Seen from the Griffith Observatory
When you climb up to the Griffith Observatory at night, you can’t really see the stars anymore. The light pollution from the sprawl below, night blinds you to their radiance. Located on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood, the observatory has long since ceased to be a good place to observe the heavens, yet it still remains an iconic LA sight and it does have an excellent view of the city. It is no wonder then that writer-director Damien Chazelle keeps returning to it, to set many of his scenes, in his delightful new movie La La Land.
The movie’s tag line, “Here’s to the fools who dream”, speaks to the fact that the movie is not dedicated to two star-crossed lovers, Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone), but really to their dreams. Sebastian is a pianist who wants to play jazz and have his own club, but when we first meet him, he is killing time with gigs playing Jingle Bells. Mia is an aspiring actress, who in-between a gauntlet of auditions and call backs, tortures herself on the Warner Brothers lot as a barista to the stars, so close to her dream, yet so far, just another face in the crowd. Sebastian captures the essence of their struggles, when he describes LA, “This town worships everything and values nothing.”
Overlaying all of this melancholy is Justin Hurwitz‘s score. This clip of “City of Stars“, is a good example of his music. La La Land is an homage to the golden age of the musical. Between its use of CinemaScope and choreography that Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly could once have trotted, the movie looks like a beautiful anachronism, but is overlaid with modern sensibilities. It is a romantic movie, but the true love that Chazelle shows us is not between Sebastian and Mia, but the love that he has for Los Angeles and all those fools who dream there.
We said so long to Dan today and dropped him off at the airport. This time, after living for six years in La-La-Land, he will not be wending his way west. He left LA, but he hadn’t returned home to give up. Instead, he exchanged the LA scene for Brooklyn, living the same dream, just in a different locale. If La La Land teaches you anything, it is that dreaming is only foolish, if you give it up.
LA Mural – Bunnie Reiss
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Blacklist/LA Marathon, Bunnie Reiss, 2016
A Cyan of Relief
Aunt Pearl, Anne and Uncle Lou
It all started when Anne wanted to print the above picture of her with her aunt and uncle, so that she could send a copy of it to them in LA. Except that the photo came out too yellow. I tried telling her that the walls there really were that yellow, but she was unconvinced that we couldn’t do better. She bought new ink cartridges, installed them and we cleaned the print heads, several times, but all to no avail. I went to the store and ordered a new print head with the assumption that the cyan one was clogged. I left the store with some trepidation though, because a single print head was half the cost of a similar all new machine. I think that HP should really just give away their printers, because the real money is in parts and supplies. If another print head goes out then so does this printer. Out to the curb. Before I left the store, I got the sales clerk to demonstrate to me on a similar, but actually quite different machine, how I would actually change it, when the new print head arrived. The print head showed up last night, while we were waiting for Dave to arrive home from Purdue. It turns out that the printer offers a little instructional, which was helpfully and I was easily able to swap out the old print head for a new one. When I closed it back up the machine proceeded to whirl and click for about ten minute, while it digested its new component. It automatically printed some test pages and lo and behold the cyan was back. Then I printed Anne’s pictures for her, which did look a lot better, but the walls were still yellow.
LA Arts District
First off, let me be clear, this is Anne’s photo. I’m just posting it, because like her, I find the juxtaposition of the warning sign with the booty to be funny. This time and the last time we visited LA, we stayed at the Miyako Hotel in Little Tokyo, which is adjacent to the Arts District. Nowadays, the Arts District is a gentrified and trendy place, but it wasn’t always. I think that there are even more condos in the Arts District now then there were just two years ago. Even the wall murals that we are poking fun at here or at least some of their artists have become mainstream. Dan pointed out that this other mural that I posted a picture of after our last visit to LA, was done by the same artist that made the 2008 Obama ‘Hope’ poster, Shepard Fairey. Dan recounted to us some of the memories of the LA Arts District that his CalArts professors had related to him, back when it was still quite seedy. This led to a discussion as to whether or not artists are really the initial catalysts of gentrification.
This discussion dovetailed nicely with a podcast that we had listened to from, 99% Invisible, by Roman Mars. In it Mars details the rise of the acro-names. These are names for places that smash together their longer original names into a sort of acronym. The most famous ones exist in NYC. SoHo is an acro-name that originated for the district in Manhattan once called, “South of Houston street”. Another one is Tribeca, which came from “Triangle Below Canal street”. This naming process has become so derivative that it was lampooned in the TV show, “How I Met Your Mother”, with the fictitious acro-naming of the real neighborhood, DoWiSeTrePla (Down Wind of the Sewage Treatment Plant). The funny thing about this last neighborhood is that in an example of real life imitating art, realtors have adopted this acro-name, because it sells better than the original. I don’t think that we ever decided whether or not that the association of artists with these once downtrodden areas transforming into their now tonier selves was causal or simply coincidental. Dan felt aggrieved about being blamed for the LA Arts District becoming something that he doesn’t like.