Thematic Photographic - Summer

Every week Carmi at Written, Inc. poses a theme for photographic inspiration. This week's theme is SUMMER.

It must be summer if there's a brightly painted old school bus parked on the roadside in Topanga Canyon!

All up and down the West Coast, it seems, free spirits living in old school buses travel during the summer. There's always a bus or two, or a dilapidated camper, or a van parked along the wide shoulders of lower Topanga Canyon Boulevard, down by the beach.

When we lived in Seattle, our neighbors across the street served as a way-station for the Hippie Buses (as we called them). Every couple of weeks, another painted bus would park in front of their house, and the nights would be filled with the sounds of a drum circle.

One summer, we watched an amazing construction project where the owner of one bus cut a hole in the roof, and then welded the shell of a Volkwagen bus to it - as a kind of windowed cupola riding on top. I wonder how many overpasses it cleared.

My hippie days are long past, and truth be told, I was never quite as free a spirit as some of my friends. I never took the Grey Rabbit, never much liked smoking pot, and the smell of incense makes me sneeze.

But every summer, I enjoy seeing the Hippie Buses show up. Something about them makes me yearn to travel the open road. Even if I just drive past them on my way to work.

Thematic Photographic - Summer

Every week Carmi at Written, Inc. poses a theme for photographic inspiration. This week's theme is SUMMER.

What does summer mean to me? It means abundance, and the earth burgeoning with fruit and flowers.

Here are plums in abundance, ripening in June in our garden.

Santee Alley

In the 1920s, shortly after the founding of the Ladies' Garment Workers Union in New York City, garment manufacturers moved to Los Angeles, where the civic leaders were unsympathetic to unions, and cheap labor was available.

To be fair, Los Angeles had more than cheap labor - it had a unique niche in the national market. Its warm climate and casual life-style made it the perfect home for women's swimwear companies like Cole of California and Catalina, and other manufacturers of resort and warm-weather fashion.

By 1990, Los Angeles has more workers employed in the garment industry than any other city in the country.

The downtown Los Angeles Fashion District is an area bordered - roughly - by 7th Street to the north, the 10 Freeway to the south, Main Street to the west and San Pedro Street to the east. In this area are design showrooms, manufacturers, suppliers and sellers of fashion clothing, accessories, and textiles.

You can find high-end fashion at some of the big wholesale markets and sample sales if you really want to score some fancy threads, but one of my favorite experiences is to go shopping on the cheap, at the smaller stores and markets on the traffic-choked streets.

The streets north of Olympic are lined with wholesale fabric stores that also sell retail. Bolts of fabric are displayed right on the sidewalk, and the brilliant colors shine in the hot summer sun.


One of my favorite fabric stores is Ashanti Fabrics, an importer of African crafts and fabrics. Manikins wearing colorful agbadas and kaftans are displayed outside the narrow store, and inside bolts of fabric line the walls. You can buy kente cloth or Dutch cotton batik - also known as "wax". There are also bolts of elaborately cut and brightly colored lace, much prized for making clothes for celebrations and ceremonies.

I've bought "wax" here before - they sell it in pre-cut lengths of six yards, and display it in neatly folded packages on the floor. For $5.99 a yard, I made a curtain to screen an open closet, quick and easy.


There are also shops that sell trims, buttons, and millinery supplies. Here's a display of tassels.

And the most vibrant area to shop is Santee Alley.

This narrow alley runs between Maple Avenue and Santee Street, starting south of Olympic. It's a crowded and chaotic space, crammed with displays and people, where the vendors agressively hawk their wares. In addition to the storefronts, there are individual vendors on the street selling everything from DVDs to bottled water to ice cream to illegal pet turtles. Everything's for sale in Santee Alley.

The stores and stalls that open onto the alley hold the steepest discount items. There are displays of womens' shoes - everything from five-inch platform heels to flip-flops. I sat debating over some sandals, flat-soled and decorated with chrome studs and rhinestones - mine for only $15, all plastic and sure to make my feet sweat! The moment passed and I moved on.

If you're in the market for cheap sunglasses, you can find them here. Counterfeit bags, sexy lingerie, cast metal belt buckles, rolling luggage in fanciful print colors - you got it. This year the bright and intricate designs of Ed Hardy seem to be popular - whether counterfeit or real, you can see Ed Hardy-esque merchandise displayed all along the alley.

People are packed in here, and the flow of the crowd carries you along. You can hear multiple languages and accents. The vendors cry out prices - "Fi' dolla, fi' dolla, fi' dolla!" and there's always music playing somewhere - usually straining the ability of the cheap boom-box speakers. It's a great scene for people-watching. There are families with kids in strollers, and vendors display toys that quack or squeak or yip, adding to the din.

Here's a short video clip that gives you an idea of the scene.

Here a family has bought their little boy a toy gun that blows soap bubbles. They float in the air among the shoppers.

There are a lot of strolling vendors, too, but only those who can carry their wares with them can sell in the alley itself - it's far too narrow for push carts or display stands. We saw a woman selling videos, standing in the middle of the alley, letting the crowd flow around her like river water flowing around a rock. Another guy wore a bright jester's hat and sold pennants for a Mexican futbal team.

Vendors with pushcarts stake out the sidewalks on Maple Avenue, or on the cross streets. Here a well-equipped cart cooks the ubiquitous bacon dogs that downtown Los Angeles is famed - or notroius - for. No county health inspectors around today. There's nothing like a bacon dog after a long day of shopping.

The area is also notorious for other illegal sales, including unregulated pets. Although I've never seen them, there is apparently a flourishing trade in birds and live turtles that is illegal, and frequently these vendors get busted by the community safety officers that patrol this area.

I'm not sure how legal this vendor is. She had two puppies for sale. I asked if I could take their pictures, and she cheerfully agreed. They looked healthy enough, and I was charmed by how cute they were, but since I believe in adopting shelter dogs, I took a pass.

Like I said, you can buy anything here.

A common sight here are the paleteros, or ice-cream push-carts - you see at least three in every block. These hand-pushed coolers sell paletas, Mexican ice-cream bars made with fruit and milk, or frozen chopped fruit. Paletas come in a wonderful assortment of flavors, including more exotic flavors like coconut, mango, and mamey. Some are flavored with chiles and cinnamon, or have chunks of fruit or nuts and seeds frozen in them. The palateros in the garment district also stock some American-style treats like Drumsticks and Strawbery Shortcake bars.

The boxy carts are the size of camping coolers on wheels, and each cart is equipped with a set of bells mounted us under the push handle. They jingle when the cart is in motion, or when the paletero flicks it with his hand to make it sound. The bells are brass and have a bright, loud sound that adds to the music of the street.

Here's a clip showing two paleteros on the corner of Maple and Olympic - the seller to the left has a lot of customers, so the seller in the hat has decided to move on down Olympic to look for new territory.

There's just something about the sound of the bells I really like.

If you don't mind crowds, and you enjoy shopping in a different environment from a typical shopping mall, a trip to L.A.'s garment district is fun and interesting. Bring cash, and watch your belongings, but come to enjoy it.

PROMPTuesday

Every Tuesday, Sandiegomomma hosts PROMPTuesday, where she issues a creative writing prompt and hope that people take it and run. I have been terribly delinquent with PROMPTuesday, but this week I am going for it. This week's prompt is:

1. Who are you?

2. Where did you come from?
3. Where are you going?

Who am I? That's a difficult question. Having a defined identity is supposed to be a good thing, and we know many people who enjoy the certainty of knowing exactly who or "what" they are. My father was a Texan - that was his identity, despite the fact that he lived away from Texas for some 45 of his 78 years of life. Some people proudly claim their humble origins, being Just an Okie from Muskogee, or Jenny from the Block.

Others see themselves in terms of their job - a Mechanic, a Nurse, a Lawyer or Chef. Some jobs seem to be better suited for taking on as one's identity - you can even imagine the proper costume for a Professor, a Ballerina or a Rock Musician, but it's hard to embrace an identity if you're a Marketing Manager, for example.

For many women, their role in the family is their identity. A Mom. A Grandmother.

"Do you know who I am?" asks the affronted celebrity, CEO, or distinguished professor when treated with disrespect. But, somehow, it's worse when their identity isn't even acknowledged!

Some people run away from their identity. You think of figures like the Duchess of Windsor, who did everything she could to escape the stigma of being a poor relation raised in a Baltimore rooming house. Or P. Diddy, now an icon of mainstream fashion in the Hamptons - no longer a kid from the Harlem projects.

So who am I? Once I was an outsider. My family moved from town to town, and I was always the new kid in school, the one who didn't fit in, the tomboy in the girl's gym.

In my 20's I fell into the profession I practiced for over 20 years - a theatre stagehand - and it became my identity - I was a full-fledged member of an exclusive club. When I joined the union, this sense of exclusivity intensified. We had our own language and our own shared experiences. We worked at night when other people slept. We did dangerous work, and watched each others' backs. We took risks, and covered up for our own and our brothers' aberrant behavior. When I met stagehands from other cities, there was an immediate bond, because our club had many chapters.

It is not unlike the kind of bonding I hear about from fire-fighters or policemen. Or - to pick a less noble profession - prostitutes, who, in what might be the penultimate expression of identity, say they are "in the life."

I held my stagehand identity for a long time. For me, perhaps, it was so important because it was the opposite of what I was before. No longer the outsider, I was a dues-paying insider. I knew what lay behind the scenes. When I stopped doing that kind of work, I remember how wrenching a break it was for me to realize I would no longer "be" a stagehand. And yet now I can't connect with that emotion anymore.

So, what am I now? I don't know. I am not a "role" - I am a wife, but I am not a capital "W" Wife. I am a mom, but my son is now an adult. I can no longer claim that I am a "one-word-profession" - my current job is so bureaucratic and functionary it takes a whole paragraph to describe it. Having lived all over the U.S., I am not of any one region, and even my economic class has fluctuated up and down over the years, so that I move now in realms I'd never have dreamed of before.

And I'm not sure I really want to "be" something. I think it might be, for a while, more interesting to be an observer, a camera, as it were, to see things. Or a sponge, to soak in what the world has to give.

Where did I come from? I can only think back to where I started and how I traveled to where I am. I came from small to big. I came from a place that looked inward, and then one day I looked outward and I left. I came from narrow horizons, and now mine are wider. Yet they're still not as wide as they could - and should - be.

Where am I going? That's easy to answer. Everywhere I can go. Show me more.

Visiting Dijon with an old friend

In the fall of 1929, an American graduate student named Al Fisher enrolled at the University of Dijon in France to pursue an advanced degree. Accompanying him was his wife, a California girl named Mary Frances.

Mary Frances wrote her brother David a letter about the city that was to be their home for almost three years:

"I do wish you could see this town. I never did believe those illustrations in books like Grimm's fairy tales and so on, but I do now....All the houses are built right up to the edge of the sidewalks and are from two to five stories tall, and thin - perhaps only 2 rooms wide and a room thick. They are of stone and plaster, and in this town, date from 1400 A.D."

At the center of the town is a large palace, the home of the powerful Dukes of Burgundy, who ruled the region independently from 937 A.D. until annexed by France in 1477. Today the great, open, semi-circular Place de la Liberation faces the Palace. Modern cafes and fountains grace the renovated place.

Beyond the great open plaza are the narrow streets of the oldest quarter of the city

where the Palace of Justice, the library, and older university buildings are located. Late medieval townhouses present "a continuous blank face of high facades pierced by the big closed arches of the doorways," wrote Mary Frances.

Rue du Petit-Potet

One of these narrow streets was the tiny Rue du Petit-Potet. The Fishers found rooms to rent in this street. They boarded with the Ollangier family, and ate their meals at the family table.

When Mary Frances first saw the house where they would live for two years, she described it this way:

"It was a real Burgundian town house, in two parts, one on the street and the other at the back of a deep narrow courtyard. The entrance to the whole place was, of course, the little door cut in the great double door that once had let carriages into the courtyard."

When we visited Dijon this summer, we stayed in the Rue du Petit Potet at the home of a friend.. This is the entrance to her house - a large double-door opening onto an inner courtyard, with rooms in the surrounding structure. A smaller door within one of the large doors opens for pedestrians.

In our friend's courtyard, tiny wild strawberries grow between the cobbles.


and an apricot tree thrives in the sheltered, cobblestone paved courtyard. The wall of the old medieval house are golden, with lion-carvings around the windows. The room where we stayed is at the back, swathed in vines, with a terrace planted with oleander, roses, and calendula.

Sunday morning, the church bells of Dijon awoke us, tolling as Mary Frances describes in her book:

"All the streets of this old quarter off the place d'Armes were narrow and crooked and teeming with life behind their shuttered windows, and from our rooms on the Rue du Petit Potet we could hear fourteen or more bells ringing from the many small churches and convents."

The Ollangier's house was across the street from our friend's house, but it's unclear to a traveler today exactly which house it was. The Fishers boarded first with the Ollangier family, then with the Ribadout family, who bought the house during their stay. Mary Frances credits her talented landladies' contributions to her gastronomical education. While Al went to the University, Mary Frances took classes at the nearby Ecole des Beaux Artes.

Entryway of the Church of St. Michael

The couple went to cafes in the place de l'Opera, just down from the Church of St. Michael, near the theatre where their landlady, Mme. Ollangier played in the orchestra pit for traveling productions to make a little money. Al wrote while sipping coffee at cafe tables. The couple visited restaurants nearby, most notably Au Trois Faisans, or The Three Pheasants.

Mary Frances went walking in the town with her sister Norah who came to visit from the United States,

"Behind the Ducal Palace [where ] ran the oldest marketing street in town. It was very narrow and crowded and dirty, and it was the most picturesque part of the town, with gabled buildings showing the famous tiled roofs of Burgundy...green and yellow and black and red. And there was the beautiful small place Francois Rude and finally the place where people gathered to see the famous gargoyles and the great clock Jacquemart with its mechanized figures on the facade of the eglise Notre-Dame.

Looking at the facade of Notre Dame church on market day in Dijon

After two years living as boarders, the Fishers rented a flat in a different part of town, a neighborhood where workers and artisans lived, on the Rue Monge, by the Place Emile Zola, upstairs from a pastry shop.

The Rue Monge, near the Place Emile Zola

She wrote of waking in the morning to the sounds in the little place below the windows -

"noise, such energetic, lusty, bustling and stirring noise....First we heard the workers in their hard shoes, then the luckier ones with bicycles, and all the bells ringing; the shop shutters being unhooked and folded back by sleeping apprentices; a great beating of pillows and mattresses, so that now and then brown feathers floated past our windows; and always the clanging of the little trams going up into the center of things..."

In the Rue Monge, Mary Frances would have her own kitchen for the first time in her married life. She soon learned that to cook France, you must go to the market. The great, beautiful steel and glass market, les Halles, designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel himself before the turn of the century, was many blocks away, over by Notre-Dame. Wednesdays and Saturdays were market days, and she soon learned to shop like the other women.

"I learned that les Halles were literally the only place to get fresh vegetables and that two heads of cauliflower and a kilo of potatoes and some endives weighed about forty pounds after I'd spent half an hour walking to market....I learned, with the tiredest feet of my life, that feeding people in a town like Dijon meant walking endless cobbled miles from one little shop to another...butter here, sausage there, bananas someplace again, and rice and sugar and coffee in still other places."

Mary Frances and Al started entertaining friends in their small flat, cooking simple but hearty meals in a tiny kitchen, learning to enjoy food made from fresh, delicious ingredients yet un-hampered by the rigid customs of bourgeouis French domestic cuisine. She describes a dish made from baking cauliflower with cream and grated cheese in a casserole, with salad and bread and fruit to accompany it.

In the narrow Rue de Verrieres, the timbers of one house is decorated with carvings of grapes and snails.

Dijon has been a destination for gourmets seeking fine wine and fine cuisine since the 19th century, and in 1921 Mayor Gaston Gerard launched the Annual Foire Gastronomique - a November event promoting Burgundian foods and wines. By the time the Fishers arrived in Dijon, the fair was a huge success. As poor Americans, they didn't attend the fancy balls and dinners, but they enjoyed the displays, the crowds and the food and wine. On a later visit to the Fair, Mary Frances described the scene as:

"The town was jumping, quasi-hysterical, injected with a mysterious supercharge of medieval pomp and Madison-Avenue-via-Paris commercialism."

We stopped at the Place Francois Rude, where children still ride on a small carousel beside the fountain.

We marveled at the House of the Caryatids, a 16th century house with elaborate carvings.

These buildings, with the color tile roofs characteristic of Burgundian architecture, are in the Place des Cordeliers, a small square at the end of the Rue du Petit Potet.

You can see more of these tiles on the Church of St. Benigne, its soaring spires and steeples rising up from the low houses of the street.

As we walked around town, looking at the old half-timbered houses and sitting at sidewalk cafes, I felt as if Mary Frances were walking right along side me, showing me the sights. If you'd like to read more about M.F.K. Fisher's life in Dijon, read her book, "Long Ago in France."

Fishpond of the Damned

WARNING - this post contains potential gross out!!

It's a never-ending aggravation, this fish-pond. The raccoons are killing the fish. I have been reading about how to repel them, and also about how to provide stones and more plants for the fish to hide from predators.

With that in mind, I went to two local nurseries to buy some water plants. The state of plant nurseries in West Los Angeles is sorry. Since I moved here in1997, three that were close to my home have closed. I went to one huge place in Marina del Rey, only to find out they don't have water and pond plants.

I went to one tiny place in Ocean Park at my lunch break, and they had only a few things, but I bought a plant called Amenopsis californica - pretty white flowers and arrow-shaped leaves. While there, I asked if they knew any tricks for repelling raccoons from ponds.

Sprinkle the edge of your pond with cayenne pepper, said one guy.

I settled the plant in the water, thinking I would go this weekend and look for some more bricks and stones to build a platform for it, with lots of hiding places before I attempt to stock more fish. And I found yet another sign of the massacre.

I ran upstairs and grabbed a container of cayenne pepper.

Now all the goldfish are gone. There are still some tiny grey mosquito fish, nibbling bugs off the surface of the water.

This morning I was talking on the phone and stepped out on the deck, and glanced down at the pond. The cayenne pepper was still sprinkled on the pond's edge, but something in the water looked strange.....

What is that? Something....in the pond?

After I got off the phone, I went downstairs to investigate. Oh...no....

Picture shrunk to protect the squeamish. Click to enlarge at risk of total gross out.

It's a drowned rat. Lying next to my new plant. I did warn you.

Do you think it was the raccoons? Or the cayenne pepper? Or was it dropped by a hawk?

What am I going to do about this? I am extremely grossed out by dead rats. I think I am more grossed out by dead rats than I am about live ones. And this one is in the pond - GROSS! How am I going to fish it out? Yet if I selfishly leave it there, waiting for [The Man I Love] to rescue me when he returns on Tuesday, it will only get grosser.

Is there some brave neighborhood lad that will help me? Or should I just steel myself, get a tool with a really long handle, and give it a try??????

This is the Fishpond of the Damned.

UPDATE: 1:35 pm

I think I deserve a medal.

Pink Saturday - Shopping in my Closet

Pink Saturday - Beverly, at the blog "How Sweet the Sound" hosts Pink Saturday. Let the color pink inspire you!

The other day at work, my co-worker was wearing a really cute top I'd never seen before, and I complimented her on it. "Is it new?" I asked. "Did you go shopping this weekend?"

"Oh, no," she said. "This is something I've had for a while, and I just found it again. You might say I went shopping in my closet."

I think she's on to something! For all the clothes I own, it always seems like I only wear about a dozen pieces, rotating them regularly for work. So I got to thinking, in preparation for this Pink Saturday. What if I went shopping for pink things to share - in my own closet!

There's a rolling rack in the spare bedroom. It's supposed to be where we do the ironing, and there are baskets to put clothes that need mending, or the hamper to take to the dry cleaner. But the rolling rack is full of clothes I don't wear anymore.


And here's some pink things! A rose-print dress that needs altering -


A cute bandanna-print skirt I wore two summers ago (it's a little tight in the waist now.)


I have lots of bins in the spare room's closet. There's a bin full of fabric remnants - there's a lot of pink things in there.

Dare I wear this Betsey Johnson animal-print tank top? At my age? What do you think?

In another bin, I found a pretty magenta purse, and some silk scarves that belonged to my mother.

Here's a pretty one. I should really start wearing scarves again, don't you think?

This one [The Man I Love] bought me from a Nepali shop in New York's Little Italy. It is pink spotted with metallic gold.

There are shoes here I haven't worn in years - pretty as they are, I can hardly remember why I even have them. But - hey - it's like a shopping spree, only free! Should I wear these coral-pink d'orsay pumps to work next week, with their cute ruffled detailing of mauve metallic leather? Or the sensible rose pink t-straps?

Or maybe I should go casual, with these cute hearts-and-skull vans.

Shopping in your closet - A cost-effective approach in these tough economical times! And very lucrative - for Pink Saturday!