*This entry is dated for April 22 to commemorate Earth Day 2009 but the photos and trip recounted below were taken on Saturday, April 25.
There’s a very special exhibit (www.coolglobes.com) that just opened at Exposition Park in LA in honor of Earth Day.
It runs through July 23 and will continue on to Houston, Texas.
I’d seen some PR about it from an inflight magazine and have been pretty excited to see these globes in person. And let me tell you, it takes a lot to get me to enter enemy territory also known as SC country (where Exposition Park is) given the long, rich rivalry between UCLA and USC. USC is affectionately known as the University of Spoiled Children, and while they do have a better football program and marching band, we Bruins happen to know the truth: the kids who attend SC are the ones who could not get into UCLA, no matter how rich. OK, OK, that’s a bit harsh. I happen to have a lot of friends who are closet, struggling, or recovering Trojans. What can I say, we all have skeletons in our closets.
So other than wanting to poke my eyeballs out every time I run across someone wearing a cardinal and gold tshirt (and as luck would have it, today just happens to be their big Spring Scrimmage weekend so the Trojans are everywhere!), I am soaking in the lush park grounds that overlap the campus as I make my way toward the first batch of cool globes, located just in front of the Science Center:
The second and larger group of globes is found in the Rose Garden:
These globes, as discussed further in the video below, weigh about 300 pounds a piece with an 1800 pound base. Can you imagine moving these suckers around the country? A lot of artists, children, adults and companies have contrituted countless hours into each globe so I feel it’s only right that I post as many pictures of the 50 globes as possible in today’s blog entry, especially since some of you are not able to see them in person. But before we get to the photos, here’s a video of my first on-the-spot interview with Deborah Talley (please forgive me if I misspelled your name), a volunteer with the exhibit:
Here’s a blurry shot of what the interior of the globe above looks like:
Here’s another video of the globes:
Actually it was Deborah’s husband Ronald, a photographer, who gave me such a wonderful introduction to the globes that I asked him to do it on camera, but he asked his wife to do the honors instead. I love putting photographers in front of my lens:
Enjoy the cool globes (remember you can click on any of my photos to see a larger version of it)…and if you are within driving distance, come out to the park with your family and do a little globin’ in LA. And see which one(s) you love the most; I saved my three favorites for the very end:
In tomorrow’s blog I’ll show you the rest of my Saturday in LA.
Tags: Cool Globes, Earth Day, Exposition Park, LA, UCLA, USC
A sweet email from a Scottish reader reminds me what a great photographic opportunity I have right here in Los Angeles. So while I anticipate my next trip to NY to visit my newest niece, I’ll just post pictures of my hometown as I find it here and there for a while. The photos in today’s entry were taken appropriately enough from the car as we seem to live in our cars in LA. I promise to actually get out of the car for future pics…but what better way to introduce LA to people than to show them our freeway system!
I took a trip out to LA to tour the UCLA law school many years ago, and while the campus was quite vibrant, it was in fact a random drive down the Pacific Coast Highway that set the course for what would become my life till now. I will never forget that moment. The Pacific Ocean rolled out beyond my periphery with the sun basking high in the blue, blue sky. There were people everywhere on the beach, living the great life, chasing the moment. And I was alone in my rental car trying to contain my runaway thoughts. Is it truly possible to have this kind of natural beauty mere steps away from all the glittery excitement of a big man-made city like LA? Is it really within reach to have absolute freedom in this mirage of a town? Could I handle this place on my own? I couldn’t wait to find out; I had just heard the siren’s song.
I must have called my mom every night during the second or third week of law school, bawling that I wanted out. Hated it. Hated LA, too. Well, loved it and hated it at the same time. Didn’t want to do it anymore. Each time she calmly told me to finish what I started and that I could do whatever I wanted after I graduated. So while law school sucked, I sucked it up and finished the first semester. Then the second, all the while getting lost all around the city just like any other hyper twenty-something who felt invicible out of both ignorance and fearlessness.
Days turned into years. Many things happened along the way, but before I knew it LA had wormed its way into my blood like any good parasite. My New Yorker friends tell me they have their city under their skin because of the uptown or downtown identity they’ve forged with their own neighborhoods. In sprawling LA we don’t have a brownstone stump we can call our own, but the identity we find here is from the very absence of any such attachment. I’ve said it before, but this town is the perfect place for people who belong everywhere and yet nowhere.
I won’t romanticize this city because it’s not postcard perfect. For every clear sunny day there is a smoggy, unbearable one. For every manicured lawn there is a run-down shack. It is a huge epicenter of the haves and have nots, of dreams made and nightmares realized…all coexisting under a beautiful blue sky. It is both a generous and an unforgiving town. But this is LA. My City of Angels.
Tags: California, law school, Los Angeles, New York, Pacific Coast Highway, UCLA
As I woke up this morning on my 25th birthday… yet again –yes, it gets harder and harder to say that joke every year with a straight face–I reached blindly for my blackberry (what, you don’t sleep with your blackberry?) and got the email I’d been anxiously waiting for all night. My little sister and her husband just welcomed their first child into the world this morning, all 5 pounds and 2 ounces of delicious pinkness. We’ve been referring to the baby as the Gao, which means rice in Vietnamese because of how she looked in the sonogram pictures early on. The verdict is still out as to the name that will make it on the birth certificate. I hope when she’s 13 she won’t kill me for posting this picture of her. And when she has a baby of her own this blog entry will get her ferklempt. Well, I suspect she will cry over just anything at that point from the hormones alone but I’d like to think otherwise! Besides my birthday and a love for Chanel (haha!), I hope she will share with me an impatient curiosity to see the world and an unconditional love for the people who gave her life. Happy BIRTHday little one!
I was driving, well, sitting in traffic this Easter weekend to get to an appointment in Santa Monica. It was one of those perfect LA spring days…not too chilly to roll the windows all the way up and not too warm to roll them completely down. So with the windows cracked half-way, I sat on the parking lot known as the I-10 along with the million other drivers who also had no choice but to idle in traffic with me. I looked at the random palm trees populating the horizon and mentally marked the distance to my destination upon passing the Hollywood sign. I heard the wind move, from the window on the driver’s side to the passenger’s side, gently rustling my hair in its traverse. And all of the sudden a feeling of deja vu rolled over me and I was transported back to one April afternoon in Barcelona where I experienced the identical perfect weather, and more importantly, the exact same sensation of being one with the world. Happy to be in my shoes. Happy to be very much alive, even while doing something so banal as commuting.
It’s easy to feel this way just walking around Barcelona. I’ve always been a fan of the Hispanic culture, language, heritage, and food, but Barcelona is a whole other world. Catalan pride is worn like skin, and everywhere you go, you understand that they are Catalan first and Spanish second. But for me, my love for Barcelona is wrapped up in the undulating balconies…
sinuous staircases…
and groovy rooftops…
that are characteristic of Antoni Gaudí’s biomorphic architecture, found all around Barcelona. It’s hard to fathom that these incredibly innovative structures were designed in the 1800s. From La Pedrera (aka Casa Milà) to Casa Batlló (whose pictures you see above) to the magnificent and still-under-construction-since-1882 Gothic cathedral Sagrada Família seen here…
you can appreciate the gifted imagination that went on inside this man’s head, even if you don’t immediately love his work.
So anyway, on this one Thursday afternoon in Barcelona, after sitting around on a shapely chair Gaudí had designed specifically for a hallway inside the Casa Milà, I made my way to his equally curvaceous serpentine bench found at his whimsically designed Parc Güell,
a once commercially unsuccessful project of luxury homes (it was meant to follow the English garden city movement) and now municipal park. Only two houses were actually built out of the 60 lots reserved for this enclave, and one was occupied by Count Güell and the other by Gaudí:
La Torre Rosa is now a museum showcasing furniture that Gaudí designed. The house has the most fantastic view of the gardens and park grounds stumbling below its hill. I’d read that he loved nature and hiking so this house must have provided him with immense pleasure during the few years that he lived there. I walked around the enormous park full of tourists and children on school field trips and took pictures of the mosaic found on ceilings and walls:
And then I thought about the small, cramped room he occupied in the last 15 years of his life on the grounds of the Sagrada Família (a photo of this room is found in the church) as its (literally) resident architect. He died at the age of 74 with the entire city mourning his passing. At that moment I thought how it must have been pure devotion to his work and spiritual belief that led to such a monastic existence after the luxury living in La Torre Rosa. But today in my car, I think regardless of his surroundings, he was just a man being one with the world. Happy to be in his shoes. Happy to be very much alive, except the work he was doing was anything but banal.
Tags: Antoni Gaudi, Barcelona, biomorphic, Cas Mila, Casa Batllo, Catalan, Hollywood sign, La Pedrera, la torre rosa, mosaic, Parc Guell, Sagrada Familia
I got schooled today at a local J Crew store by an overly attentive salesperson who told me the monochromatic way of dressing was sooo 2008. While it created a slimming silhouette (isn’t that what we’re all after?), that thinking was fashion backward and it was time to mix things up. It was time, she said breathlessly while grabbing things left and right to show me, to go Spring crazy and pair a “spicy olive” cardigan with a “sweet cantaloupe” tshirt. And if I had it in me, to top off the combination with a clutch in “sour lemon.” I indulged in her euphoria and got a giggle out of looking at the color names on the tags but all that exercise did was give me a sudden craving for a Jamba Juice. So I walked out of the store with a sweater (yes, you should know I cursed at myself as I thought about my last blog and the rainbow of cardigans waiting for me at home while they rang up my stuff) and matching tops, all in the “putty” color. 2008 and I: we’re tight. I’m sooo not 2009.
As much as I love looking at the display windows and magazine spreads where creative geniuses pull together wonderfully vibrant looks/colors that juxtapose in the most impossible harmony, in my world it’s all about the matchy match.
Finding things that were made to go together exactly, whether on purpose or by serendipity, is what makes me a happy girl. Sure, it’s easy enough to find shoes that match a bag made by the same designer, but when the shopping gods allow you to find alligator shoes and bags in the same tone and texture by two different brands, that’s cause for a happy dance:
So when I got home today, I went back inside my closet to take photographic evidence of some of the pairings that thrill me. It’s not just the tone-on-tone pairing necessarily, but I find matching patterns and textures to be just as satisfying.
It’s like finding a perfect mate. For your outfit. I think I’m going to stay 2008 for a while longer.
Tags: J Crew, Jamba Juice, monochromatic
