2021 Huntsman Trip, part one

All the pictures taken on this trip can be seen here.

Something went right to start out this trip. Actually, two things went unexpectedly right, but I can't remember the second one, so let's not dwell on it.

The thing I remember that went right is that Sherry noticed there was a yellow jacket inside the car before we had gone very far, and before it got warmed up enough to start flying around in the cabin. That would have been more excitement than either of us would care for. 

Against that one good thing, and the second good thing that I can't remember -- Oh, plus the fact that Carly didn't throw up all the way to Havasu, a first for her -- there's the fact that none of the electric window switches in the Subaru are working, for some reason. This means that we can't leave Carly unattended in the car when it's the least bit warm out. Which in turn means lunch is a take-away sandwich eaten at a city park -- once in Fort Stockton, Texas and once in Tucson, Arizona. Not really too bad, except that the Subway sandwich we bought in Fort Stockton cost like ten bucks, which is way more than it costs back home.

Also, the electric door locks on the driver's-side door don't work now. A minor inconvenience that probably has something to do with the window switch malfunctions.

And the rearview mirror came off in El Paso. That was more of a surprise than a problem, since it was easy enough to slip back onto the holder. Just a weird thing to have happen, and of course it happened where there was no place to pull over for a couple of miles

Other than these oddities, the trip over to the Lake was uneventful. We listened first to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, one of those books you're supposed to read in High School, so of course neither of us had ever read it. A short book, a novella really, and in audio form only about four hours long. So now we're familiar with it, and neither of us is entirely sure why it's considered such a classic and important piece of fiction. (I had chosen it because I've seen so very many references to it in the last few years.)

After that finished, we started the new murder mystery featuring the Thursday Murder Club: The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman. I actually thought to myself, in one of those moments where you reflect on Life In General and Your Place In It, that I was happy to have lived long enough to hear (or read) the first two of these amusing mystery stories. We're only about 2/3 of the way through the current story, so I won't talk more about it.

We got to the Lake in time for dinner yesterday, Saturday. Nancy and her son Bryan were already here, and Nancy had prepared dinner for us. My only function was to figure out where we'd be able to watch the Liverpool-Manchester City match at 8:30 this morning. Juicy's, a burger bar near downtown, opens at 7am on Sundays, so we thought we were set.

Headed out this morning to watch the match, only to find that Juicy's has only one full-sized TV, which  was tuned to an NFL Preview show, and they "couldn't" change the channel. So we started back to the house. (All the other places listed under "sports bars in Lake Havasu City" open at 10am or later on Sundays, by which time the match would be almost over.) Sherry noticed a little grey building with several cars outside that looked like an open bar or restaurant, so we circled back to check it out. They didn't open until 9, but they were perfectly happy to have us sit in there and watch their television; they put the game on, coffee was available, and we were as happy as Granny Clampett with a fresh batch of potion. They had a buffet that included all the Mimosas you can drink, so the price was a little steep but no more than we would have spent on food and drink at the bar back home for a match that isn't available on our TV at home. (There are a few.)

After a disappointing but not upsetting result (a 2:2 draw, leaving Liverpool in second place, a point behind Chelsea and a point ahead of both Manchester clubs), we went back to the house and planned an excursion out in the wild lands east of town. Bryan had driven his Jeep down from Colorado and wanted to take it out on the trails; and we took the rail, which is like a dune buggy without a body: it's basically a VW engine mounted on an open chassis. 

Made it! Bryan tops a rise

Something goes wrong with the rail every time we take it out. Last time it was the steering. This time it's the suspension. But it was functional, in a minimalist sort of way, and we had a great time. Nancy drove this time, and started out nervous and overly cautious (just like I do when I start driving it), but by the end of the afternoon she was slammin' over rocks and up and down steep hills like a pro. Which is a fortunate thing, because Bryan led the last segment in his Jeep (because he had some kind of satellite software on his phone that would enable him to figure out a way back to the part of town our house is in), and he was like a stately ship on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise, while we followed along like we were on the Runaway Mine Train at Six Flags. 

Bryan's planning to go out on the trails at night some time soon, and I said I'd like to go with him. He's used to much more challenging excursions in his Jeep Club back in Colorado, so none of the trails out here will be beyond his capacity, I don't think; probably nothing to require the use of a winch and a second vehicle, which seems to be par for the course from the stories he tells of his club trips.

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.