June 18 and 19

I've spent the last four days mostly in the bowels of the this building - the Los Angeles County Courthouse. I know it doesn't look like it's nine stories, but that's because it's on a hill. On this end street level is the fourth floor. I won't go into the trial issue except it's a business case that my son is a party to. It was good to be with him four days last week in the Bay Area and see him in his current home and work environment and now to be with him while this is going on. Unfortunately, I won't see the rest of the trial, but fortunately I'll be back home with my wife over the weekend.

So this is just a quick post of a few pictures outside the courthouse.




We left home each morning at 8am. Went to court. Had lunch meetings. Back to court. Short to long meetings afterward. But I was amazed to see this tree growing through the asphalt and concrete of the Santa Monica Freeway.




Then we'd turned north onto the Harbor Freeway (which becomes the Pasadena Freeway after downtown.)









Last night after the trial, we met in the attorneys' conference room. This was a building as I walked over to their office.



And past Little Tokyo.





The conference room during a break. We got home at ten last night.







This morning before the court I got this picture of Bunker Hill buildings.






After lunch - we had a longer lunch because the judge had other cases to deal with - I went through the garden at the Disney Concert Hall which is kittycorner from the courthouse. I met this Belgian man who was here for a few days on business and trying to figure out how to see the places he wanted to get to. Actually, we 'met' when we were both trying to find the name tag for what turned out to be a naked coral tree.




And these are two more pictures of the Disney Hall at the entrance.

Lakers Celebration Traffic on Way to Court

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday that it only took us about 40 minutes to get from Bundy to the Courthouse on the Santa Monica Freeway. (I know, people nowadays call them all by numbers, but for me it's the Santa Monica Freeway, not the ten.) That was starting at 8am, the middle of rush hour. But today it was different. We left at 8am again and thought the Laker celebration traffic would be later (it was supposed to start at 11 am). But there were a lot more cars than yesterday. The one above was our first with Laker flags.

Getting close here to head north and past downtown.

And a little Laker support on this building.

And we passed the Staples Center. Then on to the courthouse where we missed all the celebration completely. I imagine the traffic got worse. One of the jurors was 45 minutes late. But the other eleven, plus the two alternates. got there on time.

Downtown LA and the County Courthouse

Here's where the trial is.

There were 8 floors just like this one, with people who couldn't have been too happy since, if they were here, they were probably involved in a law suit. Made me feel lucky to live in Anchorage. At least our court buildings have windows. I'm not going to go into the details of the trial (it's unrelated to the accident,) though it was interesting to contrast it to the Federal trials I attended in Anchorage. Today was was jury selection. An interesting collection of people.

This is on Bunker Hill down the street from
the Disney Concert Hall.

Some of those same buildings from down below.

The Grand Central Market used to be one of my
favorite places in LA. It used to be like going to Mexico.
It still has a sense of those days.

I was surprised by how empty the streets of downtown are. I've noticed the same thing in Anchorage mid-mornings. In LA these mega-developments pretty much wipe out all the street level, human scaled shops and turn the blocks into giant sculptor parks, but without the human interaction of small shops or other human scaled buildings.

And this one on the LA Times building. With an agapanthus in front. I hope that is just a wrinkle of wisdom and not a crack of foreboding.

Disney Concert Hall

I drove J1 to the LA Superior Court this morning and I got a chance to wonder around downtown LA. I'm one of those who thinks the Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall is a great building. Well, I haven't been inside - well only in one lobby once - so I can't judge how well it works as a building, but visually it's enchanting.

Here are some notes from the tourist kiosk across the
street about opera in LA and the concert hall.

This shot was from the 9th floor of the court building.

I took a couple of night shots in February 2007.

[UPDATE:  Yikes!  The brain and fingers do strange things, but I've replaced "Geary" with the correct "Gehry."]

Getting J1 at the Airport

J1 and I were supposed to come to LA last Thursday for a trial he is involved in from a job he left two years ago. They've been setting trial dates since January 2008 and then postponing them. "They" meaning the court, not the parties. The trial was scheduled for last Friday. Then that was postponed until Tuesday (tomorrow) and J1 was told today it was still on so he came. I ended up leaving SFO Saturday so I could spend some time with my mom.

And we parked in a lot that had electric car only spaces which I hadn't seen anywhere before.

Then at J1's insistence, we stopped at the In-N-Out right at the edge of the airport and watched landing planes fly close overhead every two minutes.

And then we stopped at Hurry Curry on Venice and Beethoven and got real food to take home.


But Wikipedia confirms J1's claims

The company's business practices have been noted for employee-centric personnel policies. For example, In-N-Out is one of the few fast food chains in the United States to pay its employees significantly more than state and federally-mandated minimum wage guidelines – starting at $10 per hour in California, as of January 2008.[4]

In-N-Out was one of the very few restaurant chains given a positive mention in the book Fast Food Nation. The book commended the chain for using natural, fresh ingredients, cleanliness and great treatment of employees.

According to J1 they don't use frozen food, so all the food is more or less local.

Run down to Venice Beach

Today I ran down to Venice Beach. I ran on Half Moon Bay (south of San Francisco) beach on Saturday morning. Venice is my obligatory run whenever I visit my mom in LA. And you could even see Catalina, just barely, on the horizon. I admit it's a leap of faith based on the photo. But it was out there. I did try to play with the contrast to make it more visible in the picture.

It didn't help, but I thought wiping out the contrast offered an interesting picture of the runner.

If you double click the picture and look at your screen from the right angle, you might be able to see the outline of the island. It's only 26 miles away. Makes you appreciate being able to see Denali from Anchorage 150 miles away. You can see it better and listen to the song at this post I did last October.







Here's looking north toward the Santa Monica Mountains. As you can see the surf was decent sized today.





Here's another picture of the surf with a couple people in front to get a sense of the waves.

And as I left the beach for home I passed this sign at a pre-school. I realized that I agreed with the sign and that our country has weirded out enough that there are people who would be disturbed by this sign. Like people opposing the ordinance before the Anchorage Assembly offering equality (freedom from discrimination) to gays, lesbians, and transgendered folks.

Botany of Desire

I've heard about the Botany of Desire for a while now. It was a best seller, but somehow it didn't really get my interest until I read a chapter of it in Sun Magazine. So when I found it cheap at Costco I took it for this trip.

I've only just begun it, but it's good on several counts. It's making me think about things from a totally new perspective and it's so well written that it zips right by.

So, this is for those of you who also never found your way to this book or never even heard about it.

Michael Pollan's premise, well he seems to have several. One is that we've taken a human-centric view of the evolution of plants that we've cultivated. Humans, from this perspective, have played with the plants for our benefit. In this book Pollan wants to look at four plants - apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes - from the plants' perspective.

These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty that they would inspire human beings to seed, extol, and even write books about them.(pp. xx-xxi)

Pollan makes clear this wasn't done consciously.

In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties act on each other to advance their individual interests but wind up trading favors; food for the bee, transportation for the apple genes. Consciousness needn't enter into it on either side and the traditional distinction between subject and object is meaningless.(p. xiv)

Humans, he points out, weren't as in control as they think. This worked both ways. The oak, for example, did fine with the squirrel burying (and often forgetting) acorns, that it never had a need for humans.

So Pollan figures that we can learn about ourselves by studying four desires that the four plants exploited - sweetness (the apple), beauty (the tulip), intoxication (the marijuana), and control (the potato).

One thing we learn is that we tend to underestimate the characteristics of other species and overestimate our own.

Plants are so unlike people that it's very difficult for us to appreciate fully their complexity and sophistication. Yet plants have been evolving much, much longer than we have, have been inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs for so long that to say the one of us is the more "advanced" really depends on how you define that term, on what "advances" you value. Naturally we value abilities such as consciousness, toolmaking, and language, if only because these have been the destinations of our own evolutionary journey thus far. Plants have traveled all that distance and then some - they've just traveled in a different direction.

Plants are nature's alchemists, expert at transforming water, soil, and sunlight into an array of precious substances, many of them beyond the ability of human beings to conceive, much less manufacture. While we were nailing down consciousness, and learning to walk on two feet, they were, by the same process of natural selection, inventing photosynthesis (the astonishing trick of converting sunlight into food) and perfecting organic chemistry. As it turns out, many of the plants' discoveries in chemistry and physics have served us well. From plants come chemical compounds that nourish and heal and poison and delight the senses, others that rouse and put to sleep and intoxicate, and a few with the astounding power to alter consciousness - even to plant dreams in the brains of awake animals.

I'm only into the first part on apples, but already he has burst a common myth for me - the story of Johnny Appleseed.

Actually, apples and the man [Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman] have suffered a similar fate in the years since they journeyed down the Ohio together in Chapman's double-hulled canoe. Both then had the tang of strangeness about them, and both have long since sweetened beyond recognition. Figures of tart wildness, both have been thoroughly domesticated - Chapman transformed into a benign Saint Francis of the American frontier, the apple into a blemish-free-plastic-red saccharine orb. "Sweetness without dimension" is how one pomologist memorably described the Red Delicious, the same might be said of the Johnny Appleseed promulgated by Walt Disney and several generations of American children's book writers. (p. 7)

It turns out that apple seeds do not replicate the fruit they come from. To do that you need to graft a slip of wood from a desirable tree onto the new tree. Apples from seeds tend to be sour enough

"to set a squirrel's teeth on edge and make a jay scream."(p. 9)

Therefore, the seeds that John Chapman took into the wilderness, were way too sour to eat. Instead, the reason settlers welcomed Chapman, according to Pollan, was that Appleseed's apples were essential for making apple cider about the only alcoholic beverage on the edge of frontier.

Since I've been talking about people's narratives about how the world works, this book naturally appeals to me because it too challenges long held narratives.

[Nov. 1 update: Click the link for the PBS site about the movie.]

Jacaranda Tree and Agapanthus

When we moved into the house where my mom lives now in LA, I was about ten. There was a row of agapanthus plants (the one's in front in the picture). That's why I even know the name. This amazing stalk, nearly three feet would zoom out of the leaves and then it would burst open with this splash of pale blue flowers.

So I stopped during my run today to get this picture of the agapanthus AND the jacaranda tree behind them. The jacaranda tree is another LA spectacular, boldly making its Junish statement in lavendar solidarity with its jacarandan brothers and sisters scattered around the city. A good time to be in LA.

From Botany.com

Agapanthus - African Lily, Lily Of The Nile (Agapan'thus)

DESCRIPTION: This group consists of tender, evergreen or deciduous plants, which are natives of South Africa and belong to the Lily family, Liliaceae. Most African Lilies are evergreen in mild-winter climates. The fleshy rhizomes of these plants spread over the soil's surface and support a short, more or less tuberous rootstock. Agapanthus, also known as African Lilies and Lilies-of-the-Nile, produce clumps of long, shiny, strap-like leaves, which look attractive even when the plant isn't flowering. Tall stems, reaching 2 to 6 feet in height, are topped with clusters of pretty, white to dark blue flowers from late spring to early autumn. Each flower resembles the flowers of a lily, but are borne in umbels like those belonging to the group, Allium. African Lilies are suitable for growing in the garden, in containers, and as houseplants. They flower better when their roots are rather crowded in a container. The flowers of these plants can be cut for use indoors; they can last up to seven days in a vase. The dried seed heads also look attractive in arrangements.

Just Pics

Yesterday was a quiet day.






Breakfast out with my son. Then worked on some projects while he was at work.







We picked up Des at the airport and took him to dinner and got him back into the car he lent J1 - minus the Kona hairs I so carefully cleaned out.








Then a little shopping at Ranch99 a supermarket owned by someone from Taiwain.

Robert Lapage's The Blue Dragon in Berkeley

Wow! I just saw the future of theater. I had no idea what I was going to see. I went into Oakland today to see friends I've known forever. They were going to a play tonight and asked if I wanted to come along. I said sure.

Then we picked up my ticket at will call after dinner and walked around campus till it began.

No pictures during the show, but I took this before and it will help a little to understand why this was so incredible. If you look at the stage, you can see the three vertical lines that divide the stage into four units. Think of the stage more as a computer window that can be divided into eight frames. Four on top and four below. The stage was alternatively one large frame, one half screen frame, or one small frame; two frames (top and bottom, two small frames, though I can't remember how often or how configured, I remember one small one on top and another below over to the side open together.)

But there was also a "curtain" that was the canvas for computer graphics, which again could be part of the whole or the whole itself. This is like describing someone tying his shoe. It may get you the info, but the reader still can't tie the shoelace, or, in this case, imagine the stage.. It rained and it snowed, for example, it was an airport with perfect arrival and departure signs.

The play opened - I'm not even sure which of the following was first, but I think I have it right - with a man standing on the lower half of the screen/stage, at a small table about to do calligraphy. As he uses the brush to make his strokes, a single solid horizontal stroke appears above him in the upper left frame. And he talks about the Chinese character for the number one. Then he makes a tree and then a forest. Then he does child and it appears in the next screen. Immediately I knew this was going to be my kind of experience.

I think this was followed by the Chinese dancer in white came out. (Though she might have been first.)

She danced with her scarf flowing. Then suddenly puffs of white exploded out of the end of the scarf as the computer extended her dance magically. And as this was happening on the lower half, the black screen also became a movie screen with the credits. (Don't bet on the sequences exactly, I'm trying to pull this out of memory totally.)

This all could have been a big gimmick, but it wasn't. Robert Lapage managed to use a much greater variety of tools to help him create his stage and it almost all fit absolutely perfectly. The actors at times blended in with computer graphics.

The almost two hour play just flew by. In part, I think because the scenes changed more like television than a play. We didn't have the stage simply go black and wait as actors moved furniture for the next scene. Instead the scenes evaporated and appeared through the graphics. The stage was a perfect passenger section of a jet, it was a commuter train, a regular train, a boat. It was the Canadian ex pat's two story loft apartment, an art gallery, a bar.

What I've always liked about movies is that when done well, they could tell the story in visual - color, light and dark, etc. - and audio and tell the story with more than words. They went beyond theater because you could have the real world as your stage. Lepage has used the computer to make this possible on stage too.

Now, since I've spent all this time on the stagecraft, you might be wondering about the play. Surely it was upstaged by all the glitz. Perhaps in the same way that seeing one's first movie would cause you to talk about the technology more than the story. Well, it wasn't glitz. All the techie stuff was exactly right for the story. It wasn't gratuitous. I've seen computer generated backdrops, and lighting, and the incredible dancing of Bridgman and Packer who danced on stage with live video of themselves dancing. In their performance at times you couldn't tell, even though we were very close, which was the live dancer and which the video.

Lepage has taken all the experimentation and applied it to his story of the French-Canadian artist expat in Shanghai whose old friend visits him on her way to adopting a baby in China. The story of their two compromised careers, of the need for babies, of love, of disappointment, all of this was told almost movie like, but with live actors on stage before a live audience. Three very real actors and lots of brilliant stagecraft.

I was totally dazzled.

(There were two scenes that I might have cut. At least I didn't feel they were integrated into the whole as seemlessly as everything else. The Chinese KFC ad near the beginning generated laughs, but wasn't connected to anything else in the play. My friends suggested it helped show the contrast between the old and new China, but to me it seemed an intrusion. I also didn't quite understand the scene with the iconic Chinese revolutionary dancer. The CCTV (Chinese Central Television) going-off-the-air broadcast worked better because it emphasized the closing of a night and it ended in static which transferred onto the stage.

I'm still stoked and absolutely delighted G and H pulled me into this. Great night. Anyone in the Berkeley area who wants to see a great production has a few more days left. (Comparing the box office dates to the post card dates, I'm guessing they added a couple of performances.)

Here's a more professional review from the Bay Area Arts and Entertainment Blog.