After randomly hearing about a wall built with car parts in Los Angeles, it took me five months to find Hermon’s Car Wall, and, well, it was partly worth it.      After five months of (very intermittent) searching, there were grandiose visions in my head of this wonderful wall stretching into infinity, with thousands [...]

Sometimes, when I am not stuck on the freeways fuming like my car, and can look down on them and see the flowing lines, interconnecting, and think, for a moment, that they are beautiful. Looking south over the 101 freeway, on the bridge at the base of Mulholland Drive. Cahuenga Blvd is on the right, [...]

Beth Israel is a packed cemetery. Full of concrete and stones. There is no grass, no open green land, this is a cemetery of a city. Where rows of concrete rectangles sit line after line after line. Like neat row houses standing next to each other up a crowded street. There were two things that [...]

Beth Israel is a tiny cemetery just east of Downtown Los Angeles. On the entrance gate was a small sign advertising headstone replacement photographs. There are a number of headstones that have photographs mounted near the top. They look like over-sized lockets. There is something beautiful and haunting about the faces looking out from the [...]

I thought that the Peterson was the only Los Angeles automotive museum. I was wrong. Hidden away in the San Fernando Valley, in a nondescript building, in a nondescript neighborhood, sits a free museum with some of the most beautiful cars I have ever seen. From Packards to Cadillacs. From a Minerva to a Diana. [...]

    I really don’t know why it is that I like cemeteries. Is it because I listened to too much of The Smiths as a teenager? or did I listen to The Smiths because I like cemeteries.      I really don’t know, and it’s not like I haven’t contemplated it. There is something wonderfully depressing and [...]

On New Year’s Day, Pasadena has the Tournament of Roses Parade. Which is as a rule, stuffy and formal. So a group created the anti-rose parade, and called it the Doo Dah Parade. Expect the unexpected, like a man in a motorized cupcake, Or red-caped-face-painted man with an accordion.

     After we found the cherry trees, I had a better understanding of how the map worked, so we decided to backtrack to the Polaroid house.     ”So the house was built by Mr. Polaroid?”     ”Yea Mr. Polaroid, the guy who made the film, I wonder if Mr. Kodachrome’s house is around here?”     We had no [...]

     I woke up Saturday morning with itchy feet. I wanted to get out and do something, something outside, in the sun with life around and about. But I was supposed to sit in front of my computer and edit stories.     My computer screen stared back at me, and I thought of the places I [...]

     Growing up in Southern California, there was always an intermittent thought hidden somewhere in the back of my mind, the realization that I needed to visit the Watts Towers. Those skeletal towers -with a backdrop of blue sky- I had seen in photographs for as long as I could remember.      Finally the pieces [...]