Archive for May, 2010
The Master Blister Beetle (Lytta Magister) secretes a chemical called Cantharidin in its joints. If you touch the beetle, the Cantharidin can cause painful blisters on your skin. No wonder this beetle didn’t seem bothered by us taking a closer look as it crawled along Death Valley – we’d be stupid to cop a feel and the beetle knew it.
Last night, the L.A. Conservancy’s 24th annual “Last Remaining Seats” film festival kicked off with a screening of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” (1967) at the Los Angeles Theatre. Time hasn’t dulled the edge of the satire: the film is based on a mock self-help management book by Shepherd Mead first published in 1952. Robert Morse played a window-washer who climbs the corporate ladder with the help of his “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” manual; Michele Lee played his Girl Friday. Morse and Lee took the stage with “Mad Men” creator and executive producer Matthew Weiner for a brief chat before the lights went down. As they watched the film with the audience, they must have been pleased to hear everyone laughing and applauding throughout the screening. After the show, I was taking photos of the Theatre when a man asked me to take a photo of him and his friends with my camera. One of his friends was Michele Lee; she was very gracious in accepting my compliments on her performance.
The beach along Abalone Cove in Palos Verdes is covered in large smooth stones. When the tide rolls out, the ocean rakes away the top layer of stones. The sound of the stones scraping against each other is very similar to ice cubes rattling in a cocktail shaker. During low tide before sunrise and around noon, starfish and sea anemones are visible in the tide pools that form along the coast. Abalones were once abundant in this area before over-fishing drove the population to extinction. It was late afternoon and the tide was rolling in as I took this photo of Portuguese Point.
In Central Australia lies Uluru / Ayers Rock, a massive sandstone formation surrounded by miles of desert. At 348 m (1,142 feet) high and 9.4 km (5.8 miles) in circumference Uluru is best seen from afar, where it’s easy to imagine that a giant once smashed his enemy’s skull into the stone’s eroded surface.
My mom and I hiked around the base of Uluru in July 2008. It was winter and our first time in the desert. For most of the day, we were the only two people on the trail. It was mind-blowing to stare at the horizon and see nothing but desert and sky in all directions. I remember the silence.
Tom, who owns The Barn Woodshop in Menlo Park, noticed me lurking in the bushes with my camera during my first visit to the Allied Arts Guild in March 2009. He invited me to look around the Barn once I was finished shooting flowers in the garden.
The Barn is 125 years old, and has housed a Woodshop for the past 81 years. In the Barn, Tom gave me a pin to mark my hometown on a world map he uses to track visitors. Tom traveled around the world before returning to his family’s business of building and restoring heirloom-quality furniture. He likes not knowing who will come through the door of his Woodshop each day. Once, he repaired some furniture for Shirley Temple; she still lives nearby in Woodside. These days, Tom works on a steady stream of commissions from Stanford faculty and Silicon Valley honchos who trust him to restore their treasures with sensitivity and integrity. When I told Tom about my hobby of re-finishing discarded tables and chairs, he offered to teach me how to cane chairs. I didn’t accept his offer right away, even though Scott encouraged me to give it a try. Now I’m really glad I did as Tom taught me how to weave cane and replace torn sheet cane. These skills may come in handy the next time I find a broken chair on the sidewalk! Before we moved to L.A. last fall, Tom fixed a pair of rosewood chairs that I had inherited from my grandfather. Now, I visit Tom every time I’m in town.
Last weekend, we visited friends in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and San Francisco. At the Guild, I renewed my contract with the Artisan Shop to consign prints of my photos and accepted Tom’s offer of display space for my photos in the Barn’s new showroom.
On Wednesday night, we had drinks in downtown L.A. at the Rooftop Bar above The Standard Hotel. Scott and his colleagues were mingling on the north side of the roof. I decided to slip away and enjoy the silence on the south side after a real estate developer / men’s self-improvement writer mistook me for a lawyer because of my “greedy eyes”. I took this photo of the pool as the sun set behind me.
Allied Arts Guild is an artists guild in Menlo Park where Ansel Adams once maintained a studio. Prints of my photos are sold at the Guild in the Artisan Shop and The Barn Woodshop. Since 1929, the Guild has provided an inspiring environment for working artists, beautiful gardens and shops for visitors, and support for critically-ill children at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.
When I first moved to the Bay Area, I booked a string of “blind dates” with people who had graduated from the same schools I did in Canada. I met Grace, a fellow alumna of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, over coffee in March 2009. We had such a nice time that we arranged to meet again at one of her favourite haunts: Allied Arts Guild. We had lunch at the Guild and stayed all afternoon to smell the roses.
In January 2010, I decided to start selling prints of my photos. Although we live along Gallery Row in L.A., I considered the Guild a better place to try my luck. I called the Artisan Shop and introduced myself to the manager to see if she would help me make good on my new years resolution. We arranged to meet the following weekend. She looked over my work with her assistant and chose several framed prints to display in the Shop. I sold my first print that week: a picture of the Berkeley Campanile which I had taken after meeting another Rotman alumna over lunch at UC Berkeley. In March, our friends Maricki and Castaña visited us in L.A.; I enlisted their help to deliver more of my prints to the Shop. Now, I deliver prints to the Guild whenever I’m in town.
When I first arrived in Vancouver last month, I was too tired to enjoy the beautiful Northwest Coast Aboriginal art on display throughout the airport. When I rode the Canada Line back to YVR a couple days later to rent a car, I noticed this wood carving of an owl hanging above the YVR Airport SkyTrain platform. I took a closer look at the totem poles, sculptures, and tapestries installed in each terminal. As Vancouver’s airport is the gateway to Canada for many international travelers, it’s wonderful that the YVR Art Foundation curates art that makes such a brilliant first impression on visitors to our country.
A couple of weeks ago, I was having lunch with my mom on the Tsawwassen – Swartz Bay ferry when we sailed past these clouds. I stopped eating and ran onto the deck with my camera. In L.A., the sun melts clouds away so I was very happy to see these “ice cream castles in the air / And feather canyons everywhere”. Joni Mitchell, I could drink a case of you!
We were on our way to visit old friends in Victoria, former Winnipeggers who now live on the Island. I was excited to see Terry and Bob, who were newlyweds when they first moved into the house across the street from my childhood home in Waverley Heights. My parents would occasionally send me across the street to visit Terry and Bob, who knew how to entertain me: the crawl space in their basement was filled with toys and books so that young visitors always felt welcome. As I enjoyed doing menial tasks, they would give me piles of receipts to sort before tax season. I amused their accountant by drawing cars on the envelope which held their car expenses. Each Christmas, we would dip cherries, nuts, and caramel in melted chocolate before placing them on cookie sheets to harden outside on the snow-covered deck in their backyard. Terry and Bob liked having a kid around enough to have Spencer, who is now fourteen. He is such a nice kid. Terry likes to tell the story of why she calls Spencer “the kid”: my dad used to refer to me as “the kid” whenever they talked, so once Spencer came along it seemed natural for her to call him “the kid” too.
I had renewed my friendship with Terry and Bob when I was first engaged to be married, but my mom had not seen them since my dad passed away ten years ago. Being kindred spirits, we picked up where we had left off and reminisced about my dad’s endearing eccentricities. He used to scour garage sales for tools he already owned so that he could lend tools to neighbours without worrying about them ever being returned. For fun, he cut a sunroof into a car once. He and Bob would disappear into our basement and listen to Mahler or Bruckner symphonies with the volume cranked so high that heavy furniture on the main floor would shake. My dad was an audiophile who built his own speakers: we owned the first CD player on our block in the mid 1980’s. It was a Philips.
Terry had given me and Scott “The Artist’s Way” and “The Joy of Cooking” as wedding presents. “The Artist’s Way” had influenced her career as an artist so I understood why she wanted me to have my own copy. Scott and I had assumed that she chose “The Joy of Cooking” as a handy reference guide for us newlyweds. It wasn’t until she showed me her hardcover edition of the cookbook in Victoria that I understood its significance: on the first page my dad had signed his name in Chinese and in English, and stamped his old address at St. John’s College. Terry had bought my parents’ copy of “The Joy of Cooking” at our garage sale years ago. As we sat in Terry’s kitchen, my mom confided that she had received the book as a wedding present, but had decided to sell it before we moved out of Waverley Heights when I was fourteen. Whenever we had guests for dinner, my dad would cook so my mom didn’t feel the need to hang onto the book. It looks well-used and I’m glad it has such a good home.
We had a lovely visit.
I was waiting for my friend Kathryn to meet me in Yaletown for dinner at Provence during my first night in Vancouver when I took this photo of condo balconies as reflected in False Creek. The cloudy day was fading fast without a sunset to light up the early night. As The Weakerthans played in my head, I watched people kayaking through the creek, walking their dogs, and running along the water: “Between the sunset and certified darkness / Dusk comes on and I follow the exhaust from memory up to the end / The civil twilight.”
Last week, I looked up as I walked past the Million Dollar Theater at 307 S. Broadway in downtown L.A. Although I was rushing towards the Bradbury Building, where my Austrian friends Eleonore and Monika were waiting for me, I slowed down long enough to shoot the Theater’s 3rd St. facade. It is absolutely stunning.
In 1918, Sid Grauman built his first movie house, which became known as the Million Dollar Theater due to its lavish construction budget. A century ago, Broadway was the center of L.A.’s nightlife, before subsequent Grauman properties such as the landmark Chinese Theater shifted the city’s entertainment district north to Hollywood. The once-glamorous movie palaces that still stand along Broadway resemble a chorus line of showgirls past their prime, their expressions vacant yet expectant. Efforts to revive the district are ongoing, yet the local arbiters of nostalgic fauxhemia seem stuck in the 1980’s: acid-washed denim is ripe for a revival if window displays in neighbourhood vintage clothing shops are bellwethers of the fashion industry (and they are).
Once a year, the L.A. Conservancy hosts “Last Remaining Seats“, a classic film festival that draws audiences into these neglected cinemas. It is an opportunity for us to appreciate downtown L.A.’s historical significance and support the conservation of these architectural gems.
HELSA CHOW: THE WORLD AS I SEE IT 
