720 evening

For some reason young lady riding the bus I don't believe that a certain r&b, model, producer of a show named after the neighborhood we are right now is going to wisk you away to exotic malibu when he is done laying track on the new Ginuwine album.

200

This is the 200th post of this blog. I am speaking to my new iPad. I guess it's a long way from writing it on paper with pencil.

It is nice to know that you are following my adventures in lala land. A friend of mine told me that she does use its name as her starbucks alias. Like me they always get her name wrong when she orders coffee. I got schooled one day by a very flirty coffee slinger and went back to my real name for a bit, but last week they called me Kristy Ann. I have had a coffee alias for years, i am keeping it as is. It is nice to know that my blog is running around ordering fancy espresso drinks.

A few months ago a started a facebook fan page. It is rather silly, but if you feel like "liking" me it is facebook.com/kittycattaraugus

In the next week or so i will be on this awesome blog, Style the Day. Which you should immediately start reading at styletheday.wordpress.com

That is if you were feeling like you needed more of me in your life.

200 whoo hoo!

still down

I am still computerless. I am posting on this ugly beautiful city as much as I can.

Blergh

My computer died. I may not be able to post for a bit.

bus blog-and then he passed me a mickey

The busses have been crowded lately.  I never knew why metro cuts their bus services in the summer in the height of tourist season with tourists who come from places that have much better public transportation than LA.  I have been riding lately standing up, arm being slowly pulled from its socket day by day, being spooned by my fellow community members just so we can all get to work at a somewhat reasonable time.

I guess we all have our different ways of coping, mine is to not have coffee until i get to work, so all that intimate closeness with other people is a deamlike blur. At 10:am when I am finally awake, I think to myself, why do I smell like cheap cologne?

The 20 something year old kid, he honestly looked 15,  next to me had a different take on how to deal with metro riding. That was sipping a big can of Tecate out of a Thank You, Thank You, Thank you bag, during his ride. When he picked up his phone to answer a call, his screen saver was two Mickey's tall boys nestled together on a counter.

Something tells me that more than metro riding has got him down.

in slightly less than an hour

I always loved the scene in Godard's Band of Outsiders where Anna Karina et al run through the Louvre as fast as they can looking at art. I want to do that one day. Run as fast as I can without getting caught. As I am sure many people have tried since 1964 with their berets, plaids and stripes. I got good practice a couple weeks ago, seeing 3 museums in less than an hour.

It wasn't purposeful these three museums. Our intention was to commune with butterflies, watch them flitter about and take lots of photos and call it a day, morning, whatever. Unfortunately, the butterflies can only see so many people at a time so we had to wait until they were ready to be seen. Oh Paparazzi.

So we ran around the Rose Garden, which was in a desperate need of a good trimming, for lavender roses because I hear those smell the best. We ran and we took photos of the toppling bushes.  I set my lens on the shade and took photos of giant hydrangea. I have so many photos of hydrangea, and their different colors due to soil. Pink, green, white, speckled pink and green.

Across the street was the California Science Center where I had never been and we took 20 minutes to see spaceships, satellites,  rocks, lobsters, tide pool simulations, all while wading through a vast sea of children in matching t-shirts who all wanted to touch live Sea Stars. We almost didn't make it for butterfly time, you cannot stop a train of children, because they all hold hands. The photos above is of the largest sea anemone I have ever seen, he is alone in a plexiglass case the size of an old television.

We joined the group of butterfly paparazzi at 12:30. I learned about them birth to death as I juggled my phone camera and digital camera. I think I have a problem. But in LA even the flora and fauna pose for the camera.

Here are photos from my time running around. (or perhaps a ploy to get you to look at my photo blog)

http://thisuglybeautiful.blogspot.com/2012/08/august-fifteen.html

http://thisuglybeautiful.blogspot.com/2012/08/august-twelve.html

http://thisuglybeautiful.blogspot.com/2012/08/august-four.html

Now all I need to do is learn that dance in a cafe.

btw:
Rose Garden =Free
Science Museum=Free
Butterflies=$3

Alphabet desert

I did not go to the desert. I am going in September. Where hopefully it will be cool enough to tour a 35 acre home and art space.

Memory is just a construct

The Museum of Jurrassic Technology is a maze.  I cannot tell if it is a museum based on farce or fact. Art or Science. It is dark and filled with 12pt text, it is impossible to read. So I really couldn't figure it out, but sometimes there is joy in coming to your own conclusions. Maybe that is the point.

I am a sucker for a good diorama, there are rooms filled with these. Painstaking miniscule environments. I got lost in the detail, wooden model trailers, fences and glued in trees and brown grasses. There was an exhibit of all the things left behind in our nations trailer parks. What I couldn't figure out was how all these things that were left behind, handmade dolls, drugstore dish sets were even remotely jurrasic or technological.

I watched part of a movie in German dubbed in English about the mapping of memory and how memories aren't real, but simply illusions. I hear that I missed the good part about an opera singer and a waterfall.

I saw an artist who inserted miniatures into the eyes of needles a play on the bible verse.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Mark 10:25

I walked past tempests, illustrations of sunspots, eclipses, old wives tales and old curatives and up to the tea room. I found a set of stairs that led me outside, a quiet garden courtyard, my new favorite place in LA. Worth the price of admission alone.

I apologize for the lack of photos, they won't let you take them in the museum.

Museum of Jurassic Technology
9431 Venice in Culver City
Admission: suggested $5

Next door is the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Their exhibits are free.

Riding the rails-expo line

Last friday I took the Expo line as far as it would take me. Past Venus Stationary, past the NHM and its butterfly pavilion, a garage sale where you could also get a hot dog and chips with soda and a chicken dinner, watching the neighborhood change. Wondering how this line would change it. I was on a mission to feed my soul after a hard week. I knew what I craved, the literal and figurative after a week of so much black and white. Culver City is a strange place for me, a place I worked for years, a job I hated, maybe I needed to go back to that space to remember how lucky I am. But it also holds a strange place in my heart.

I got off the train, for some reason the place wasn't familiar to me, I never realized that there was a park by the Actor's Gang, and I began to wonder where I was. There are so many things about this place that is different. No Beacon, new businesses, papered up windows. I walked west to Honey's Kettle to eat fried chicken and listen to soul music for a while and think.

I wanted to experience some parts of Culver City I hadn't experienced before, a Culver City that had nothing to do with boring client meetings and that snobby waiter at Le Dijonaise.  My visit to the Museum of Jurrasic Technology and the Center for Landuse Interpretation will be in another post, because I am afraid that this post will get too long.

Walking around Venice a boy came up to me holding a statue award saying he was the best video game player in the world. I am inclined to believe him.

Walking back to the train I befriended a couple of marketing men, who were coming back from a mad men style client lunch, they were giggly and smelled of alcohol. We joked about how the community center at the top of the Baldwin Hills overlook is always closed.  We were friends for 15 minutes. The time it took to walk from Trader Joes to the Expo Line Station and to their stop.  Sometimes it is nice to be nice to someone and never see them again.

At Pico, Sailor Moon and a couple of her friends I didn't recognize got on the train. I admired a girls jetpack made of two two liter coke bottles strapped together and painted gold.

Later I let someone who worked on the Expo buy me a drink.

brain block

Having a little writers block. There are posts swirling around my head, but I think they aren't cooked yet. The include, but are not limited to:

Riding the rails-Expo Line edition

Museums of Culver City & my new favorite place

Upcoming trip to the desert

I am still posting on this ugly beautiful city, mainly because there is no need to expound verbally.

I leave you with a song that has been on my soundtrack for this summer and I hope to be writing again soon:

RB

Ray Bradbury was my great-gradmother Kitty's cousin, which made him related to me somehow, 3rd cousin, cousin twice removed. We were both born in "Green Town" we both thought libraries were world openers. I also know that he missed his wife and I hope that they found each other in the whatever's next.

I know he knew I was a writer. The autograph pictured was to me for my first year of an arts based high school I was accepted to for writing. This autograph is in "Green Shadows, White Whale" which is the story of him writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, directed by John Huston.

Unfortunately, that is all we knew about each other, that we were both writers.

Here is a great letter from him, in the fantastic blog Letters of Note, about the importance of libraries.  It reveals something very interesting about writing Fahrenheit  451.

click here.

Perfect Dome of Sound

The desert is a mysterious place with a lot of arrows, filled with paradox, where New Age meets Good News in strange ways. It is lonely beautiful, alien, harsh, and surreal. This is why I love it so.


On Easter we headed to Integratron to celebrate a birthday six months late. An auspicious day to celebrate birth, re-birth and prolongation of life. 5 of us ventured out into the desert to see if we could live just a bit longer. The Integratron compound is a place with many lounging spaces and a colorful hammock village, and a mirror to reflect upon once your experience ends. We hammocked until it was time to get our sound bath, taking advantage of the bright desert light for photographs.

I had read a little about the story behind this place summarized in my last post. This exposition was told to us as we were laying face up on yoga mats interrupted by odd interjections of laughter by our host. I decided that if I continued to listen to him I would laugh too and no one else was laughing, they were listening intently excited for the healing properties that would enter us through the symphony of quartz bowls that would soon be played.

Our experience was through a pop up sound bath, which you share the experience with strangers, well those who are not in your group. They do not do pop up sound baths often because of two things and they said these rules as a warning, that if this happened, they would re-think ever doing a sound bath again and only do sound baths in group form.

1) Turn off your cell phone
2) no snoring, because it ruins other people's experiences by interrupting the pure sound of the quartz bowls.

My friend and I have differing views on whether or not you can help sleeping or snoring, but I feel like if it is going to ruin others experiences, I don't want to be that person. The ruiner. Not other people feel that way. Like the bear shaped man who fell into a similarly bear-like slumber during our session.

Determined to not be that person, hell, I don't even know that I snore, I found another way to experience integratron, with my eyes open. I stared up in the skylight and as those bowls rang out and filled my body that needed saving with sound it shook my right side. I watched the clouds drift by changing shape, turn into lines and dots, pull and compress.

I am not sure that I will live 50 more years, those things we can never tell, but I may remember at 130 what happened to me on Easter 2012. What I did leave with was a higher sensitivity to sound, voices, water trickling, shuffling of feet on the rocks of the parking lot louder. When we ate lunch at Pappy and Harriets and when a child lost their shit because they were leaving, it was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard and when I was at home listening to music as I fell asleep, it was one of the most beautiful things ever.

Forever Young

A long time ago, but within the last 50 years, a man who happened to be a tesla scientist was kidnapped and given a mathematical equation by the Venutians to help save the human race. This equation formed a blueprint, a blue print for a perfect dome of sound. The sound played in this space would fill the human body prolonging that human's life by 50 years.

I will now live until I am 130 years old.

To Be Continued......

Photos of this place I love

At first I was using google + as a place to store my memories a photo diary of sorts, an experiment a la Super Sad True Love Story, but what good is sharing if no one is there to see. So I have moved that part to a spin off blog called This Ugly Beautiful City. Which probably also takes care of my coffee table book, but also puts my photos up for me to see them better and pick from them.

Just indulge me while I fancy myself a visual historian of this place I love.

Somewhere between ornament and monument

Sometimes in life you need a reset. When a mood pervades that you don't want to be in and can't shake, life going in circles and circles, circling off to no where... I find it is best to do something just a bit ridiculous/campy/silly.

So I thought that I would find something to restart me, make me giggle for no reason and put me in touch with my fellow man and that something passed right through my neighborhood.

At first I scoffed at the LACMA Boulder, found it to be a monument to bureaucracy, a silly thing. That is what I love about LA its tendancy to make even the littlest things, major productions. A 340 ton rock and it's journey twittered away inch by inch, people proposing next to it, rock block parties, people following it like it were the Dead or Phish. Rock heads? Boulder heads?

But when its path was bringing it right through my neighborhood, I thought maybe this silly thing was what I needed to get out of my funk. So after a steak dinner, a quick stop at the Bounty, I picked up a neighbor on foot and we walked the few blocks to Western & 8th. We passed Rosens and joked about renting a room afterwards and sing Rock related songs..

Between a Rock and a Hard Place
I love Rock and Roll
I am a Rock, I am an Island
(please comment about the ones I forgot)

We were expecting to have to wait until 2:am, a whole hour, which was its target time to hit Wilshire and Western, but very un-LAlike it was ahead of schedule. We barely had time to make friends with nurse and her best friend who was a third grade teacher. Their class had been following the rocks path and she was very excited to share her photos with them.

As it approached people were cheering and clapping, it was rather infectious. The construction workers in their neon yellow, puffed out chest, proud of their work, posing for photos with the crowd. We followed it, snapping pictures, excited to see how it would survive the turn onto Wilshire. Hundreds of people were there waiting as it slowly turned. Someone jumped out of the crowd unfurled an American flag and did laps around it, the whole corner sharing a chuckle and a collective cheer.

A man came up behind us and asked what was going on and he misunderstood and excitedly called a friend and said:

"I am in my neighborhood and they are bringing a UFO rock through it. I am watching a UFO rock and it looks like everyone knows about it"

I thought about correcting him, but I didn't want to shatter his once in a lifetime opportunity to see a UFO rock.

We decided to follow it to Wilton, but after its successful turn it all of a sudden stopped. We waited while someone pumped "We Will Rock You" from a boombox attached to a bike and someone marched around with a sign that one one side stated, God Hates Rock, God Loves Scissors. I never found out about how God feels about paper. We waited 20 minutes and found out via twitter that the reason that the Rock stopped was because cars had to be towed out of the way. I would hate to be the person who found out their car was towed because of a 340 ton rock.

The Rock will finally be on view on June 24th. Mark it on your calendars.

Thank you LA for being silly, I really needed it.

Yucca Bloom Forest

Today I went to Redbox, no, not the kiosk to rent dvds, but the trail high up in the mountains of the Los Angeles National Forest. (insert bad joke sound here. wah wah or ba dum pump)

We were yearning for nature, not the nature that puts you in a car on the pch during a beach holiday in which your one arm gets sunburnt as you inch slowly towards your goal. We wanted the nature on the other side of LA the one that was the anti-thesis of the carlocked beaches, we wanted the mountains, we wanted the desert. So we drove 20 minutes to the forest, and we hardly passed another car on the way. The Angeles Crest Highway winds its way straight up into the sky, through rock formations and atmosphere. You pass people on bikes with strong calf muscles inching their way through mountain passes. Those people hardly enjoyed the view, they were determined to keep going and hopefully not look down because it was a long way down, my white knuckling the passenger side handle going unnoticed.  I always have these thoughts of speeding through windy mountain roads and the brakes failing, those are the things I think about as I am griping something hard and stationary. Morbid thoughts of my mortality that sometimes prevent me from enjoying the view. I tried concentrating on the Yucca Booms covering the mountain sides, many the sizes of pine trees and I had never been that close to one.

We intended to go to Switzer Falls, but it seemed like everyone else wanted to go there too so after a 10 to 15 minute wait for a parking spot that would probably never come we headed on to Redbox, where surprisingly there wasn't a lot of people. Redbox is a  great hike, a lot of straight down, but not steep, winding trails that go a little up a little down, eventually leading to a stream. We passed tons of Yucca in full bloom within feet and inches from me and I feel now that I can finally check this off my list.  They are that beautiful in person.

There were giant thistles, corpses of burnt out trees from fires, bearded tongue, birds singing, the smell of leaves and flowers. We hardly passed a single person, but when we did they were extremely friendly.

It was exactly what we were looking for and the anti-thesis of what we knew would be waiting for us up the pch.

But what goes down must come up and the hike retracing our steps was a bit hard on the legs and lungs. .

We heard many lizards racing through the woods, loudly, I got a picture of this one, who was probably frightened from T scaring it my way so one of us could get a photo.

All in all the hike was two hours, slightly stretched out for breath and a reluctance to go back to the land of sound and bustle.

I would like to say that we all made it out alive, but we actually lost a TGT buddy on our way home. After a gallant effort and safe distance from the mountain passes, we did indeed lose our breaks, at a slow speed a SUV slowing our trajectory finally putting the nail in the coffin of Ts car.

Everyone is ok.

I miss the ocean when I go to sleep-Broad/Lechuza

It had been a really long time since I had gone tide pooling, very close to a year and a half when I had visitors from Minneapolis visiting.  I have been tidepooling a handful of times, as you have seen on this blog, often visiting Malibu Lagoon. I like Malibu, but I was feeling a little been there done that and thought it would be nice to try some place different. I asked a friend who is a geologist/surfer for recommendations because who would know more about the ocean than that person. He recommended Broad Beach, a little further up the Malibu coast's 27 miles of coastline. 

Broad Beach is a little harder to find and a bit daunting, because although there are public access points to the beach they are hidden between rich people's houses and even though those access points are in fact public, the residents may try to dissuade you, but you have a right to be there, so they really can't do anything about it. We tried going through a few people's yards first before finding beach access, but where we found access was actually Lechuza Beach.

We made it there just as lowtide was happening. When the tide receeded, it didn't reveal pools like the other places we had been, but rather revealed tide boulders. Hidden in and around those black jaggedy rocks were all kinds of things I wasn't expecting. Attached to the lower parts of these boulders were dozens of sea stars having a sea star orgy (pictured above) I found something new (pictured right) which looked like some sort of alien armor in a sci-fy movie. It has a fancy Latin name I am sure, but it is more commonly called "Pork Sponge" I wanted to touch it, but didn't. I do want to re-name it though, something a lot cooler than Pork Sponge.

 

There are a few small caves and arches carved out of the rocks not a lot of room to walk around in. T spotted a few fossils and pre-historic tide creatures because she is good at stuff like that.

As we walked around the boulders we heard clicking clicking clicking and when we looked closer in the small canyons in the rocks we saw 10s of little crabs hiding clicking their claws, most likely hiding from the birds that hang out during low tide to see what they can come up with for an after lunch snack. The crabs would squinch up a bit more as our shadows passed them. I wish my camera could have caught the amazing reddish pink of its claws.

I paparazzied the heck out of them, but very few pictures turned out. This one is my favorite.

This was a great recommendation and I hope to find more new places, in hopes of finally seeing an octopus.

Bus Blog-When there isn't mace you can always use exclamation

I am spending more time east, taking the train up to Sunset and Vermont or to Pershing station. If I remember correctly I was on my way to see the Ukulele Orchestra of the Western Hemisphere (UOWH) play at El Cid.

Cast of characters:
You may remember a bus blog a year or so back on how LA welcomed me back into her crazy arms by a woman who speaks in tongues, but sometimes in Nahau, and told me to “never give up”  I want to let you know that she was there this evening that I can’t remember when I took place, but think it was to see some ukulele music. She will hence to be called Woman 1

Woman 2: Someone I hadn't seen before, a worse for wear lady of the night, with painted on red shiny jeans a tank top both on her frame and in her hair.

Scene:
I go down the down escalator, walk across the platform and land myself in the middle of a bum fight. I recognize speaking in tongues lady by the way she says devil. A long drawn out way like a Coupe DeVille.

"DeVille, you are the DeVille" She screams at the second woman.

I walked into the middle of it, I am sure it went on for a while, and Woman 2 was at her limited of being name called. Woman 1 moves to another bench where she can continue her rant at a cowardly distance. The distance isn't far enough because Woman 2 waltzes over as fast as her constrained legs will take her and releases an onslaught of cheap perfume at Woman 1almost completely missing her and landing square in the eye of a man innocently reading a book. He is calm, says nothing, but begins to pace, tears stream down his red and freckled face. Instead of Woman 1 apologizing to him for getting him in the middle of this altercation she follows his pacing going on and on about how the other woman was a DeVille and how he should now be on her side.

One should be able to ride the bus, without getting a shot of exclamation in the eye.

Co+nun+drum

I think the hardest part about not writing is knowing where to start.

I have been a lot of places, seen a lot of things, experienced a lot, but where do I start after an almost 2 month absence? Do I start with the sea and move my way to the desert and dip south for a weekend? Do I start with my check off list and let you know that it has, disappointingly gone nowhere, chronologically forwards or backwards, with vague notions of what I remember? How about with last night? 

No, where I am starting is bus blog.

But before I start there, to sum up my time in short, when I haven't been doing all the things that I am going to write about next, I have been dancing around my little tree house in k-town, in my f-it I don't have a roommate attire, to this song by a band I saw last night. 

Next up.... my re-encounter with the woman who told me never to give up

Swimsuit study 1

Anti-Valentines day party, in a hot tub in the Valley, I try not to memorize the full body Ukiyo tattoos covering the man across from me, the heat or the Japanese demon masks on his knees frighten me off to the pool where I float, steam rising off my body making the cloudless 50 degree night, cloudy.