Bungalow Heaven

This post was formerly titled "My Opinion" but nobody was reading it. 

Since I'm in a snit, I think I'll make a list of things I don't like.  This painting is not among them.  I like this painting a lot, at least for now.  I did it in about a half an hour at McDonald Park in Bungalow Heaven last Saturday.  I won't mention illness, death, loneliness, intolerance, cruelty, and other really sad and dark things I dislike.  I'll stick to the lighter and more subjective side of negative.

I don't like the excessive misuse of reflexive pronouns.  I don't mean the pleasant colloquial Irish usage, but when people ignorantly opt for "myself" because they can't decide between "me" and "I."

I don't like hand soap and lotion that smells like fruit or vanilla.  Clean hands and skin should not smell like something sticky that you'd like to eat.

I don't like sexy stiletto heels, or really any shoes that even approach that.  I can't wear them because they are excruciating to my toes and metatarsus.  Also my ankles are a little weak and my balance a little poor.  And I'd rather no one else wore them either, because they make my shoes looks clunky in comparison.  They can't possibly be comfortable for anybody.   Look at men. Men know how to treat their feet.

I don't like foam-filled padded bras.  I don't really care if anybody else wears them, but I hate that they are so ubiquitous that it's hard to find a bra that isn't foam-filled and padded.  In the general scheme of attractiveness, I think real nipples are better than fake cleavage.  And I think your bra should not stand on its own.

I don't like those coffee makers that make one cup of custom beverage at a time from a single use plastic container of something.  They seem to create an appalling amount of waste.  And frankly I don't see how the resulting beverage is any better than instant coffee.  Where is the fresh roasting and grinding that goes into a real cup of coffee?  If you like other flavors, get yourself some Torani syrup.

I don't like noisy gardening equipment.  Sounds that come from gardens should be sounds of birds and bees, water drops, rustling leaves, falling fruit.  I'd like it if people could just keep their noise in their own yards, but the noise has no regard for my fence.

I don't like phone solicitations and sales calls.  Who does?  You would have to be awfully darned lonely.  Is there even really a "don't call" list?  If you wanted solar panels or a security system (for instance), wouldn't you search them out rather than just wait around for the phone to ring.

I don't like Las Vegas.  Everything there is extravagantly artificial.  Even the outside air is tinged with false climate and humidity and light.  Games are okay, but they are seriously stacked again you, and you have to drop a huge amount of money just to play.  Except slot machines, which are just completely awful, except for vintage ones which they don't use.  The shows, which are the only thing I might like, are ridiculously overpriced because nobody in Las Vegas thinks about money in the normal way.  People are either happily throwing it away, or randomly winning it.  I liked the swimming pools there when I was a little kid, but I don't have much interest anymore in sharing swimming space with the children of people who like Las Vegas.

I don't like televisions in elevators, buses, and gas stations.  I don't like televisions in bars, except possibly sports bars, and for the most part I don't like sports bars.  I don't like the television in the lobby of the building where I work, and I especially don't like that it shows FOX News all the time.

I don't like FOX News.

I don't like LA Live.  It's sort of like Las Vegas.  Just too much artificial everything.  There are some actual trees, but they are completely covered with lights.  I love Los Angeles, and I hate the fact that people will visit Los Angeles and think that LA Live is what Los Angeles is.

I don't like lime flavored potato chips.

I don't like being called ma'am, although I will forgive it from somebody who doesn't know my name and needs to tell me I dropped my keys.

I don't like reality television (except Mythbusters and Antique Roadshow, and Top Chef a little).  I don't like that it has made huge celebrities out of the Kardashians and people on American Idol.  While I know that there are beautiful brilliant people living in the world who will die as unrecognized as Nick Drake and John Kennedy Toole.

I don't like calling drinks martinis just because they are served in martini glasses.  A martini glass is a beautiful thing, but it doesn't make a candy-flavored cocktail into a martini any more than a tiara would make me queen.

Passage

I missed posting this previously, I think because I inadvertently stored it in a folder innocuously named new folder.  Although this painting has a few very severe drawing problems, I think there's some real strength to it.  This is a view from near the Arroyo Seco Stables looking up at the York Bridge.  I usually view the York  Bridge from the top or the other side.  

Some months ago my computer failed.  When it was restored, I got back most of my important files.  But my admirable FreeCell statistics were reset to zero.  So I know exactly how many games I've played since then. I used to share the computer and there was this pleasing element of doubt.  But now I'm certain the games are all mine.  Each game represents a few minutes out of my life.  If I add them all up, I'm getting into days.  For years, I've pondered the mystery of wasting time.  Not why I might waste time when I was supposed to be working or doing something dreadful.  But why I would fritter away my free time playing solitaire or watching reruns, when this same free time is an opportunity to do something I would love.  It recently came to me that the explanation is probably dopamine and comfort.  Apparently I crave that.    

I'm going to go walk my dog now.  He loves to walk.  It makes him so happy he practically jumps out of his skin.  He isn't able to play FreeCell, but he does chew on his paws a little compulsively sometimes.

Enchanted

This is a bit of Hahamongna Watershed Park - one of my favorite parts.  Hahamongna seems to me a slightly magical place that has been relatively untouched by time - but not without enormous effort and struggle.  In our modern world, entropy often leans toward progress.

If you leave the frisbee golf course, and walk out onto the big sand flats and south toward the damn, you'll likely walk through this spot.  A few eucalyptus trees left behind by who knows, past oaks and amid true natives.  It's like a gateway.  I lured my fellow painter out to this spot so I could paint in safety.

I was quite pleased with this painting when I did it, and I still like it, but it's starting to look a little busy to me.    Like I keep telling myself, simpler is better.  I'm mostly convinced of it.

I'm not mad for my last post.  But it's better I think than me writing to the editor of the L. A. Times.

Heights

This is a painting of a bit of Angelino Heights.  Although I did not find quite the right view of Bob's Market, which is one of my very favorite commercial buildings, it was still an entirely pleasing day of painting.  I was introduced to the Angelino Heights neighborhood in the 1980s, mostly because of its proximity to Matsu, a well-loved but now-gone Japanese restaurant.  The neighborhood is giant visual feast of residences from in and around the Victorian era.  Uncharacteristically, but not too badly, I included a person in the painting.  It isn't a fellow-painter or anybody else I know.   

I don't think about it very often, but I suppose this is my blog, and I'm free to write pretty much anything I want here.  There are probably bounds of good taste and decency, but I doubt that I will cross them.

I wanted to share some thoughts about education.  Disclosure: I'm not an education professional, although I did spend a year as a substitute for the Pasadena Unified School District. I went to school and my children went to school too.  So I have thoughts.  I'm puzzled that education and the work of teachers is such a big political issue.  In so many other fields - public health, criminal justice, air traffic control, nuclear regulation, to name a few - the politicians and citizens trust the trained professionals to understand the work and recommend the policies.  But it seems like everybody knows how teaching ought to be done.  Probably because, like me, they went to school.

Then there is this pervasive opinion that teacher's unions are the cause of  everything wrong with education - that teacher's unions want to protect the jobs of dangerously bad instructors.  Seriously?  How on earth is it in the best interests of the unions to protect the jobs of dangerously bad workers?  Doesn't that drag the stock of the other workers down?  And make their jobs much harder?  It's true that contracts give teachers a certain amount of job security, but isn't job security generally a good thing?  I wonder if the jobs of dangerously bad teachers aren't more likely to be protected by administrators who don't want to admit that they have dangerously bad teachers and deal with them.  Consider this: Boy Scout leaders don't have unions.

I easily grasp why teachers wouldn't want to be evaluated based on students test scores.  That would be like evaluating hair stylists on the basis of beauty pageant results.  To be sure, their work is relevant to the results, but nowhere near the biggest factor.  Yet I kind of like the idea of evaluating teachers somehow.  It seems like good teachers ought to be recognized, and struggling teachers ought to be helped and corrected.  Here's what I think.  I think there should be security cameras and monitors in all the classrooms.  Teachers might balk at first.  I would.  It would seem like an intrusion, but seriously, there aren't very many working people who spend 99 percent of their work day unsupervised.  Administrators could actually watch the teachers teach under all conditions; they could see if the class was engaged and under control.  The monitors would also lend some extra safety and security to schools.  Intruders and other dangerous situations could be detected immediately, and appropriate assistance could be dispatched to classrooms.

I also think there ought to be a lot more art education.  It has been shown that music and visual art education improves students' performance in all areas.  Are history and geometry more important  than than drawing and instrumental music?  What do you think?

Train Everyday

Although it isn't even in my top three wishes, I do wish I were blogging more.  The good news, or a tiny snippet of good news, is that at least I'm still painting.  So if and when I regain my blogging voice, I'll have some pictures.  

It isn't that I don't have anything to say.  I have far too much to say.  Without David as a sounding board for all the little things that popped into my head, my head has become a rather noisier place.  And I spend more time there inside my head, mulling over strange new sad feelings.  And wondering how, and whether, and to whom I might express them.  Mostly I think you're safe here.  I may cry now and then, but my giant filter is largely intact.  As if to prove that to myself, I just deleted a whole paragraph.

These are paintings done at Union Station in Los Angeles - two in the same morning.  I took a Los Angeles Conservancy evening tour of Union Station last summer, so I know a bit more about it.  I've taken long and short train rides to and from Union Station over the years.  It's a good place, coming and going.

Like Home

I painted at Alhambra Park yesterday.  This is the second painting in an incidental Palm Avenue series -- Moving Day and Trash Day.  The trash cans and the red curbs were factors in my choice to paint this scene, offering some immunity to big trucks parking and blocking my view.

I'm addressing two personal shortcomings I pointed out in the last post -- tardy blogging and bad car painting.  I've skipped ahead several paintings, and I'm giving you something fresh.  I'm pretty pleased with the SUV parked on the left-hand edge.  There's actually even more of it -- the entire rear wheels, but the photo of the painting wasn't well framed so I had to crop some.

I've said several times that I like houses, but I think probably what I really like is homes.  Houses that are lived in, and wear personal touches of quirky, exuberant and fragile lives.  Blue stairs, flags, potted plants and stuff.  I love interiors too - the infinite different ways people nest.  I thought about going on a house tour yesterday afternoon, but instead wound up visiting family members at their new home.

Memorial Park

This a view from Memorial Park in Pasadena, looking across Raymond at the former theater I know best as Perkins Palace and the Armory Center for the Arts.  I like the view because it's familiar without being obvious.  You know you've seen it, but you can't quite place it.  That seems like a good basis for a painting.

Like everyone else I know who actually looks at Facebook, I have a kind of love hate relationship with it.  Facebook finds your old friends you thought you had lost forever.  You can keep track of people and share people's lives without the risk or inconvenience of actually being with them.  It's also a pretty big time drain, if you check even rarely to see what's been going on in hundreds of lives.  But its hard not to check since you know it's there.  I like the like button.  I like to respond positively without having to explain why, or say something that doesn't add to the greater discourse.  I find myself reflexively looking for a like button in a whole number of circumstances.  Then I want my share of likes, my little bit of fame and positive attention, so I can't resist posting my paintings.  But then I feel like I've stolen the blog's thunder, and it takes me longer to show and tell the paintings here.  

My palm tree technique is coming along nicely, but always I struggle to express cars.

Singing Cowboy

If you're keeping track, you'll know I'm a few weeks behind on blogging my Saturday morning paintings.  I was going to say I didn't remember when I painted this, but I do.  It was the first weekend in February.  I know that because the first weekend of every month is free admission at the Autry Museum with a Bank of America card.  I sort of feel like I should apologize for having a Bank of America card.  I came to Bank of America late in life, having boycotted them for apartheid-era investments in South Africa.  I became disappointed with a long succession of other banks, and finally opened the B of A account for the convenience of transferring money to my son in college.  I haven't been really disappointed by Bank of America so far.  And the free museum admission is kind of a cool perk.  I also feel like I should apologize for visiting and even painting the Autry, since my Friends of the Southwest Museum are organizing a boycott of the Autry. But I didn't pay to get in.  But I did, come to think of it, buy a couple of thing in the gift shop.  I won't do it again for a while, but it is a super sweet gift shop.

It has even occurred to me to apologize for the painting, since I think it is disappointing in a number of technical ways.  I admit there is something I like about it anyway.  Must be the mountains.  There is a farmer's market here every Saturday, outside the museum, and pretty close to the LA Zoo.  I expected it to be a bigger market, but it's still pretty nice.  Delicious prepared food and lovely live music totally enhanced my painting experience.    

Vista Hermosa Park

This is Vista Hermosa Park in Los Angeles.  You should visit. There is plenty of space to park.  The park is very oasis-like.  Native trees and shrubs have drawn many birds to the park.  There are wonderful views, and many places to duck away and paint them. There is a surprisingly artful playground.  The vertically striped building is 333 S. Beaudry where I used to work years back.  .

Gold Line

I'm busy and tired and lazy.  At least to the extent that those things aren't mutually exclusive.  I would kind of like to write something about trains and how perfectly evocative they are.  But it's late, and you already know what you know about trains.  I painted this from a perch on top of the Oaklawn Bridge in South Pasadena.  These are the tracks of the Los Angeles Metro Gold Line light rail.  We're looking south, toward Los Angeles.  Amtrak tracks used to follow this same course.  Once many years ago I was in a student film walking along those tracks and under the Oaklawn Bridge.