A First! Well, a Second. A Second!

 People often tell me I should be a writer. This ought to shut them up:

 I used to write a lot, for my own entertainment, and occasionally for other, more serious purposes. College pretty much ruined writing for me. 

 Law school put the tombstone on the grave, though afterwards I would on rare occasions put together enough of a coherent thought for a law review article and, on one occasion, an editorial. But there was no real joy in it. It was nice to see my name in print, and even nicer to see my work referenced in a court opinion (that happened once or twice, no more), but by the time I retired from the practice of law -- or, more accurately, quit -- I was ready to go the rest of my life without putting words on a page. Comments on soccer websites we're about the extent of my public expression.

 And then I found blogging. By the time I started doing it, in 2009, it was already passé, but it has limped along as an alternative medium, one where anyone can have their say, confident that few people will ever see it. 

 And now, after 14 years, I have finally returned to the exciting world of journalism; meaning, writing that somebody else publishes. There's no money in it, but there's an undeniable ego boost. 

It's a thrill.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Epilogue

This is the last post of a series; you really should read them in order. You can get to Part I here, and then click on "newer post" at the bottom as you finish each part.

The pictures from this trip are all in this album. 

OK SO ONE LAST LITTLE BIT. The rest of the trip went pretty much as I anticipated. I spent Friday morning at the Petersen Automotive Museum, They have a parking garage, but there's also metered parking on all the nearby side streets, and it's much cheaper, a dollar an hour.

I had parked at a meter the other day, farther up towards town. The meters LA uses have LCD screens that, after a certain number of years in the Southern California sun, are pretty much unreadable. But on that occasion, I stuck in my credit card and kind of guessed at what the screen was saying, and ended up buying two hours' worth of parking when I only wanted about half an hour. This time, when I saw I couldn't read the screen, I checked the other five or six vacant meters in that block and couldn't read any of them. Then I noticed a phone number to call when there's a problem with the meter; so I called it, thinking maybe they could walk me through the steps. There were 26 calls ahead of mine. Their recording kept telling me I could report problems with a meter on their website, and after hearing it 2 or 3 times I could remember the URL well enough to plug it into my phone and see, while on hold, what it might tell me. After wandering around their poorly organized website for about ten minutes, I finally located a link that allowed me to report the meter. I put in the information, got a confirmation email from them, and went into the museum. When I came out two hours later, I had a $63 parking ticket which I expect to get dismissed when Monday comes. 

1924 Mercedes Targa Florio

Jaguar XKSS

Ferrari Barchetta

The Petersen is nearly completely rearranged since my last visit. The concept cars that were on the third floor, the ones I found so interesting last time, are all tucked away in the Vault (a separate storage area of the museum). The movie and TV cars are now down on the first floor. The top floor now hosts an exhibition that deals with the relationship between auto racing and production. It starts off with a 1924 Mercedes Targa Florio that was built to be both a racer and a road car; it ends with a line of "supercars" that ... well, you can figure out that relationship yourselves. I was particularly struck by the juxtaposition of a 1952 Ferrari Barchetta Superleggere (super-light), in gorgeous black, with a 1955 Mercedes-Benz SL (for SuperLeight, a designation they still use) gullwing coupe, also in gorgeous black. Each car influenced the designs of a number of later vehicles, but in two distinct lines. The Ferrari became the Ford Thunderbird and cars in that line, while the Mercedes, after a long interval, is the stylistic ancestor of a great many currently manufactured sporty vehicles, particularly from Audi, Volkswagen, Hyundai and, yes, Mercedes. 

After the museum I spent some time with a friend of mine, a lawyer formerly in banking but now doing non-profit work. I met him on an earlier visit to LA and have sort of kept in touch. Then I went back to my hotel and started writing my article for automotivemuseumguide.com. 

Saturday morning I checked out of my hotel and went down to Culver City, a suburb about half an hour south of LA, to watch the Norwich:Liverpool match with a couple hundred of my new best friends, the Los Angeles chapter of the Liverpool FC Fan Club. Wow! what an atmosphere! It's like being in the Anfield Road end of the stadium. They sing pretty much the whole time, and loudly, and every now and then I could even understand the words. (About half of them had British accents, but I don't know if that had anything to do with the trouble I had understanding their songs.) A really fun way to watch a match. I compare it to those occasions when we go watch a match at the Winchester in Alamo Heights, where the San Antonio chapter of the fan club meets. There, nobody sings; there are seldom more than fifteen or twenty people there and nobody talks to anybody not at their table. 

After the match I headed east, getting as far as a suburb of Phoenix before calling it a day. (I nearly killed myself shortly before that, falling asleep at the wheel. Thank God for those noisy ruts they carve on the edges of the freeway these days. Naturally I was wide awake after that.) Today I felt a little tired early in the day, but after taking a walk in Deming, New Mexico I felt fine the rest of the trip, and have now arrived in Fort Stockton, Texas for the night, about six hours from home.

The last picture of the trip.

Postscript: while reading one of my old blog posts, trying to fix dead links from years ago, I came across this in a post from September 2009:

Had I had the luxury of time, I could have made the trip from San Antonio to Phoenix, and presumably on to San Diego, much more interesting than it is when we just get on I-10 at Hildebrand and get off at the 202. I could drive west out of San Antonio to Camp Wood, and up the South Llano River, or over to Langtry and up through the Big Bend Country or the Davis Mountains; I could cut across the corner of New Mexico, through Cloudcroft and Alamogordo, and up through Silver City and into Globe. It'd take a long, long time, and it's all country I've covered before.

 Considering how this trip started, I find that almost eerie.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part V: What I Came For

 This is part five of a series; you really should read them all, and in order, starting with Part I. All the pictures for this trip are in a Google Photos album that you can see by clicking on this link.

I had planned to be at the museum at Forest Lawn, in Glendale, when it opened at ten o'clock this morning. I woke up right at 6AM, so I guess I must be used to Pacific time. Had breakfast at Noah's Bagels, a couple of miles east of my hotel. I had breakfast there a year and a half ago when I'd just bought the Sacramento Jag & was taking it to its new home, & I remembered that I really liked everything about the place. It's a little different now -- all the restaurants here are, because of all the restrictions about masks and indoor dining. But the food & coffee were still good, the employees were still helpful, and the prices were still reasonable (for Los Angeles).

Being up so early meant I had some time to kill. First I went for a walk down Beverly Boulevard for a few blocks. I seem to be in the Jewish District. I passed two synagogues, and there are several Kosher restaurants (including a Kosher French Bakery & Cafe), and some other businesses with signs in Hebrew or names that reflected their Jewishness; all this mixed in, of course, with Salvadoran and Thai and Italian and Greek and a few things I don't really recognise. 

There was a guy standing on the sidewalk, leaning against a doorway, and he had some kind of black box on a strap on his head. It looked at first glance kind of like a jeweler's loupe, pushed up onto his forehead. Overall, he looked like I imagine a diamond merchant would look during a break from work. We said hello as I passed by headed east. A few minutes later I'd turned back, and he was still there. He said hello again and commented on my having just passed not five minutes before. I said something about it being as far as I'd wanted to walk, and started to go by when I decided I was going to ask him about his loupe. So I said, "Are you a jeweler?" and he said yes. I asked him about the thing on his forehead, which he called by a word I couldn't catch (it was probably in Hebrew) and said it contains a scripture verse on a little roll of parchment. It's used when you pray in the morning. Kind of like a mezuzah, I guess; that little metal box you put on the front door frame. We talked about that for a while, and about judaism (like I know anything about it) and then I moved on, back to my hotel. It was only when I got back to the room that it occurred to me that he must have thought I had asked him, "Are you a Jew?", which even I would think a rude question, coming out of nowhere like that. Especially since, as I started to tell him I was curious about his loupe, I couldn't remember the word "loupe", so I just kind of waved at the thing on his head. 

Still a load of time to kill, so I got on the internet, where wasted time goes to live forever. Some of you may have gotten my morning blast of funny signs put up by the Indian Hills, Colorado, Community Center ("Welcome to the Assumption Club! I think we all know why we're here!"). Putting that together and sending it out took up even more time than I had to kill, mostly because I was laughing and not paying close attention to the time. But I got to Forest Lawn pretty soon after ten.

I thought Forest Lawn was where all the famous movie stars are buried. Maybe they are, but if so, it's an oddly understated cemetery. There are, actually, half a dozen or so Forest Lawn Cemeteries scattered around California, so maybe there's another one somewhere that features the kind of self-important carved marble tombs one expects the very vain -- and ordinary New Orleanians -- to be buried in. This one has a number of mausoleums scattered around, each with a name like you'd expect an unctuous sales committee to have given out in the 1950s. All the graves have flat headstones in the modern style, with just names and dates and maybe one short descriptive line ("beloved husband"; "together always now"; that sort of thing). And the place is huge; L-shaped, probably two miles front to back and side to side.

The attendant at the entrance helpfully gave me a map with the route to the museum highlighted, so I had no trouble finding it. Besides, there were signs at every intersection. (Temple of This to the right, Temple of That straight ahead, museum to the left.)

museum on the right, cathedral on the left

The museum looks like a small building. That's partly because it stands next to a large Gothic Revival building that looks like a medieval cathedral from some unspecified place in Western Europe. Inside it's a cross (get it? Cross?) between an underused convention hall and a government building. The main attraction in the place is a painting called The Crucifixion. The painting is enormous, nearly 200 feet from end to end and fifty from top to bottom. It was painted for a worlds' fair by an artist from Poland who couldn't afford to get it home with him. Now it hangs on a curtained wall behind a shallow stage and in front of seating for probably three hundred people. It is an impressive painting, and not just for its size.

But the museum. It's showing an exhibition called "Judson Studios: Stained Glass from Medieval to Street". This is why I'm in Los Angeles, to see this before it goes away.

St-Gaudens, Lincoln

When I stepped into the museum, I was taken by surprise. It never occurred to me that the Forest Lawn Museum might have its own permanent collection of art, real art to exhibit, but there it is. Not a lot of it, just one good-sized room; they may have more, of course, but there's just the one room on show: half a dozen exquisite bronzes by famous American sculptors like Remington and Borglum and St-Gaudens. Beautifully carved marbles. Copies of a few famous sculptures. (They used to have a full-sized copy of Michaelangelo's David, until an earthquake knocked it over. Now they exhibit the head, and so for the first time I could see, up close, just how monumentally big that statue is.)

It was truly an impressive little collection. 

In the room behind that is the museum's gift shop. And in the two rooms behind that is the glass exhibition I've come all this way to see. 

Can you feel tension building? If you're not really interested in the techniques of glass, I suggest you skip pretty much the rest of this post. I'm really only writing it for me anyway.

There are now three kinds of stained glass in the world. (Four, if you count dalle glass, which is big chunks of brightly-coloured glass stuck into cement; it was popular mainly in church architecture in the 1970s and '80s, but we got over it.) All three kinds are usually called "stained glass", but actual Stained Glass is the kind of thing you see in medieval churches: pieces of coloured glass, painted (or stained) with a dark layer of something like soot, most of which is then removed, leaving behind part of a picture. 

actual stained glass

Look at the face of Mary Magdalene in this photograph. The thick, heavy lines that go across her mouth, along her jaw, over her eye? Those are lead-lines, where pieces of "stained" glass are joined together. Her face consists of five or six pieces of flesh-coloured glass. Each of those pieces was painted with a soot layer, then an artist scraped away soot to leave behind her features -- eyes, nose, mouth, teeth -- like a drawing. The shadow on her neck is made by leaving behind some of the staining layer, sort of like an artist working with pencil will do crosshatching to make the appearance of a shadow. The glass, after the extra stain is scraped away, is then fired and the bits of the soot layer that were left merge into the glass, and these stained pieces are assembled into a whole with lead.

Then there's the kind of craft that I practice. It's called "stained glass," but it's more properly called "leaded glass," or "leaded-and-foiled glass." The technique I use takes pieces of coloured glass and assembles them into an image or design without using the staining process, which takes an artistic talent that I've never exhibited, like the ability to draw.

Torrey Pine

This is the kind of work I do. This panel is done by foiling, where the edge of each little coloured piece of glass is individually wrapped in a thin piece of copper, and the wrapped pieces are then soldered together to make the image. You can also join the pieces using long strips of lead, which is soft enough to bend around the edges of pieces of glass. Copper foil (now, thankfully, manufactured with adhesive backing) is much more flexible than lead, while lead produces a more even line. You can zoom in on this picture and see that the black lines where pieces are joined together vary in thickness; up close, they're irregular. (The lead lines on Mary Magdalen are a little bit irregular, but that's because lead calme -- the strips of lead that join the glass pieces together -- were made by hand back then; nowadays, they're just extruded from a machine like pasta.)

Then there's fused glass. This technique started to become popular back in the 1970s, but unlike dalle glass, which was just an architectural fad of the era that required no artisanal sensibility, fused glass has become more and more popular with wider availability of the needed equipment and supplies. I've never tried it myself; I don't have the equipment, and it's only recently that I've given some thought to getting it.

This is fused glass. Tiny pieces of coloured glass called frit are laid out in a design and slowly melted together to form an image. The ovens needed for this process are now cheap enough, a couple hundred dollars, that normal people can afford small ones; that's why, when you go down to the Sasquatch Hunt or the Boudin Festival, you see pop-up booths where people are selling jewelry made from glass beads they've made themselves. Commercial concerns, and serious artists, use ovens that have gotten bigger and bigger; they're similar to the room-sized ovens that ceramics companies use. 

Most of the works in this exhibition are a combination of fused and stained glass.  All of them show a level of artistry and technical expertise that blow me away. I'm tempted to put all the pictures I took of them into this post and describe each at length, but nobody I know is really that interested in any of it. If you wanna see some pretty glass art, look at the photos in the album that goes with this series of blog posts. I will, though, show you my favourite piece, a modern piece of actual stained glass:

 

 

 

Sangre Nueva, by Mike MacGregor

Now, then: plans for the rest of this trip consist of a visit to the Petersen Automobile Museum tomorrow morning; lunch with a lawyer I know out here, and watching the Liverpool match on Saturday morning at a bar in Culver City, half an hour south of my hotel, where the local LFC fan club hangs out. I had planned to drive the Palos Verde Peninsula scenic route, but now I think I'll wait until I can put the top down again. 

My point being, there probably won't be much to write about after this. Besides, I'll probably be starting on my article for automotivemuseumguide.com, and that'll likely take up all my computer time. So don't expect more of this weird prolix drivel. It may come, but no promises.

August '21: Stained Glass Trip, Part IV

This is Part IV of the posts for this trip. You really should read them in order, starting with Part I, here.  

And you can get to the picture gallery for this trip here.

When I arrived in Twentynine Palms last night I booked a room online at one of the motels along the main drag, but something went wrong. Maybe I selected the wrong dates -- it was late, I was tired and, to be honest, a little stressed out about all the sand and rain -- or maybe, as has happened before, the reservations website altered the dates I selected. Anyway, after I made the reservation, I got a message from the website saying my reservation for the next night was confirmed, and any changes or cancellations had to be taken up with the hotel. (No contact information given, though; "Figure it out your own damned self," seemed to be their attitude.)

Not a problem, I thought, I'm going there anyway, I'll just have them change it from tomorrow night to tonight. Simple.

Problem: the office was closed. No one was in there. There was a night window around the side, with a bell and a phone. Rang the bell; no answer. Tried the phone; I could hear the phone ringing inside the office, but nobody came to answer it. Tried the bell again; still no answer. Tried the phone again; still no answer. Repeated Steps 1 and 2 several more times, with no success. At that point I just said the hell with it, and went back up the highway to another motel. (I should add that I was already a little pissed at the reservations website because it had failed me on the reservation in Globe the night before. That worked out alright, since the motel gave me an even better rate when I showed up with, apparently, no reservation.)

That "other motel" was a Motel 6. It's a mark of how pissed off I was that I went there. I had a very bad night in a Motel 6 about 35 or 40 years ago and have studiously avoided them ever since. But now, as seems to happen too often these days (damn it), I have to revise that opinion. Except for the arrangement of the parking lot and the noise of the fan in the bathroom, the place was pretty good: clean, comfortable and cheap. 

I'm not proud about it, but my first instinct last night was to blow off the whole reservation thing and just claim that I'd shown up the next night -- tonight, that is -- and that there was nobody to check me in. Not my fault. (May actually be Not My Fault, but at this point it's academic.) This morning when I woke up I was still of that inclination. Checked out of my hotel, went for breakfast (Denny's again; nothing to report except the waitress looked remarkably like an aunt on my father's side, and she was upset that Denny's recently added prime rib omelettes to their menu but now they can't get prime rib) and then went questing for Arch Rock, which according to RoadTrippers was located about three blocks from the restaurant.

Actually, the location it led me to was the Visitors' Center for Joshua Tree National Park. The rock in question is located in the park, about eight miles down the road, and then 1.3 miles east, on foot. Having already seen a picture of what awaited me there, I decided that it could go on a-waiting, and I started for LA. Before I got out of Twentynine Palms, though, I had wrestled enough with my conscience about the hotel reservation, and so I pulled over at a parking lot, called the hotel, told them what had happened, and they cancelled my incorrect reservation. (The woman I spoke to wanted to know all about the night window non-response, so somebody might be in trouble there. Not my problem.)

The next place on my itinerary is an architecturally interesting house called the Desert Castle, and it appears that, when I was plugging in the next spot to Google Maps, my eye skipped over that one. A shame; the Desert Castle looks like something I'd actually want to see, as opposed to all these things that are just an excuse to pass a certain way. But it'll still be there next time I go through Twentynine Palms (which, since it lies on the route between Havasu and LA, will happen before too long). I've saved it to My Places on R/T, so maybe I'll remember to check next time I pass that way.

The point I actually put into the navigator was a scenic viewpoint. I'm going to take a shortcut here and just say this: I had a number of these scenic viewpoints set out on this section of the trip, mainly just to get the mapping app to take me along the route I wanted to drive, because I didn't want to just take the freeway to LA and the only way to make it guide me along the mountains was to plug in all these locations along the way. And they are all -- ALL -- closed. No reason given. Just a locked gate at the turn-off to each and a sign saying "Closed". Now, I didn't particularly care, but it would have been nice to know going in, since I passed up a number of good photo spots for Big Bear Lake in the expectation that the Lakeview Scenic Viewpoint would be the best spot available; and by the time I found out otherwise, I was past the lake.

I spent an hour and twenty minutes sitting in one spot, around noon today. Construction. One lane road. Pilot Car. I was getting a little miffed about it because, every now and then, a clump of traffic would come from up ahead; then, after a long pause, another; then another, and I'm thinking When do WE get a turn. Realised as I finally went through the construction zone that each clump represented people from a different subdivision that emptied into the road being resurfaced, and each of them had to get a turn. 

Google Maps chose this as the day for a work stoppage. It's not speaking to me today. I noticed this first thing, when it did not tell me to take a Slight Right in a quarter mile on the way to Joshua Tree, but I didn't think anything of it until I was driving along from point A to point B in the mountains and suddenly and unexpectedly found myself on a freeway that I had worked very hard to avoid when putting in the waypoints. It seems that, at some point, it decided I didn't know what the f*** I wanted, and re-routed me along that freeway, and of course said nothing about it. 

If you don't get the voice instructions you have to keep an eye on the screen, and, I'm sorry, that's really hard to do when you're driving in unfamiliar winding mountain roads with a lot of traffic. At one point I found myself in some really congested village, with my otherwise silent phone making a bonging tone over and over, and this little blue squiggle of a highway shifting around like every few feet it was rerouting me. (I finally realised that the bonging sound was a signal that the phone was charging; it kept going off because the mounting stalk doesn't seat tightly into the car's power socket, and every curve of the road was making it stop charging, then start again, and every time it'd start charging again, it'd make that noise to let me know. And as I'm writing this, I'm realising that it was rerouting me after every block because it wanted me to go back to the way point that I'd skipped and thought I'd deleted, because of yet another construction-related traffic jam.) At one point, I rebooted my phone, whereupon my Maps Lady said to me, "In a quarter mile, continue straight," and then fell silent again. (I have now uninstalled and reinstalled Google Maps; we'll see tomorrow if that fixed the problem.)

By coincidence, the audiobook I'm listening to now is about water in the West, and today's chapter was all about Los Angeles. I felt like I was taking a tour of places associated with the ruination of the Owens Valley. That cement plant I passed? That was built to provide materiel for the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

After a loooong drive along the San Gabriel Mountains, I got into LA around rush hour. Lucky for me, I was going in the opposite direction of 99% of the traffic, and other than a few slow blocks on Beverly Boulevard, had no trouble with the traffic. Saw some interesting parts of town coming in, too, particularly an area along Silver Lake Boulevard. Don't know what that part of town is called.

first sight of the city

Now, here's a couple of not-quite-random thoughts:

 (A) The middle-class-hotel business is increasingly operated by South Asian immigrants, so I'm coming into contact with them more and more often. How come so few of them ever smile? Is it a cultural thing for them, or is the business that stressful for them? And do they not understand the meaning their customers ascribe to their facial expressions? I'm thinking about this because of the stark contrast between the clerks, last night and this morning, at the Motel 6 in Twentynine Palms, and the Indian or Pakistani woman at my hotel in LA. Motel 6 made me feel welcome; the Beverly Inn would have preferred I stay somewhere else.

 (B) Los Angeles is a remarkably diverse city. I wonder how long it will be before somebody starts a campaign to make us all think that naming parts of town things like "Korea Town" and "Little Armenia" are racist, and we suddenly have to call these neighbourhoods something else in order to be politically correct? Will that happen before or after Trump is convicted?

Okay, that last part actually was random.

tonight's near-brush with celebrity