By proxy

I know that sometimes you use this blog to find pictures of the wee ones. I will not disappoint. Here is a collection of photos that do not fit into blog posts.

Including the states we live in drawing series, opening presents, looking cute, my need of a root job, and playing hockey. I was able to catch a quick hockey game of Evan's before I left town. He scored a goal which was awesome.

Daisy spectacular!!

I am a little bummed that the Great Gatsby isn't coming out this christmas. I was excited to see it with the Baz Luhrman fans in my family. I even read the book in preparation. Sadly it was moved suddenly to May. I blame the us association of garden party professionals.

I love learning about new things in Los Angeles. My second opportunity in costume was the annual Great Gatsby party.

If you play close attention to your shopping surroundings, gatsby has had an influence on current fashion. It wasn't hard this year to find party worthy clothing. The dress i found at tj max, the faux pearls at target. What i thought would be a day of scouring through costume shops and spending hundreds just renting a dress, was just two stops in culver city.

My date and i got ready in my apartment and went full costume for martini's and steaks at Taylor's. It didn't even phase the other people enjoying their dinner. I guess this is normal. We cabbed to the historic Park Plaza Hotel overlooking MacAurthur Park.

Unfortunately because they didn't have a coat check and my camera was so large, i couldn't bring the camera. Maybe next year i'll buy a cheap point and shoot. I wish though that i could have because Great Gatsby folks don't mess around. Everyone was dressed up, a vast sea of flowers, sequins, fingerwaves, cigarette holders and btw none of the cheap halloween store flapper packs.

There were four ballrooms playing different types of music. My favorite was a 19 piece New Orleans vaudville jazz band. My date tried to teach me to dance, but it was pretty hopeless. Not even the signature drink of st. Germain and champagne could correct my two left feet.

My life in costume

Halloween isn't as popular as i had hoped in los angeles. Holidays in general are more muted, less festive. I have always loved halloween, loved dressing up, being creative. I finally moved somewhere where i don't have to wear my costume over thermal underwear underneath a parka and no one really wants to play along. Although i probably would fit in in my holiday celebration of one say in Venice for example just add sandwich board with writings of the apocalypse yet to come. (So glad that didn't happen, aren't you?)

I did however get to dress up twice this year, but not for halloween. A couple years back i wrote a post about the Diade los Muertos celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I had hoped to bring you photos of me in 2011 dressed in calavera make up, i am only behind one year i guess.

There are surprisingly a lot of videos on youtube on how to do this makeup. I watched several before i came up with this look(pictured below somewhere i can't figure out how to place photos in ipad yet) this took about 45 minutes to do including hair. You'd think with how pale i am that i wouldn't have a hard time looking white, but that is about 3 coats of make up.

My friends T and my co-worker from my after school prgm days in minnesota and her husband joined me. Although both California natives, they had never been. See us all pictured below in he foyer of my apartment building.

By the time we got there it was too crowded to see the ofrendss. We grabbed some tacos and walked around and mainly people watched. People really went all out and gave me inspiration for next year. The night ended with a concert by headlining band Ozomatli.

It is amazing what $10 and a little halloween make up can get you in LA.

Here are more pictures from the night:

Oh the weather outside....

I end 2012 as I do every year up north reflecting on the past year. Happily the world did not end so i can share some of the last half of 2012 with you. I did start a few blog posts, but got distracted by my busy life. (All good things i assure you)

So here i am up north the day before christmas or super holiday time whatever persuasion you are, the day before all of the nieces and nephews descend upon us writing and catching up. Because you know once they come, it is a fury of cuddling, building forts, reading, coloring and more fun stuff i forgot that i liked. Like spinning in circles. Remember when that was fun? Now it just makes me want to take an aspirin.

I hope you all have a merry christmas. I will be sharing as many photos as i can.

Be merry, but be safe.

Xoxo-k

Filmic campus

One of the things I have wanted to check off my list for a few years is visiting USC. I know that that probably sounds like a very boring goal. I have dated a couple USC alums and whenever we watch movies they were quick to point out "that's at USC" or that is such and such building at USC. In fact a lot of movies and tv have been filmed there. It wasn't until I tagged along with some SoCal librarians that I had to see a behind the scenes tour of campus.

A list of buildings a films are here. Mainly what I saw were libraries and foundations, which have been in films, but I can't figure out which.

Photo tour (See photos below)

Mudd Hall and Hoose Library of Philosophy (photos 2&3)

Architectural library (photo 1) I learned something there. The term brutalism, which is an architectural term that has produced some of the world's ugliest buildings. This library included.

Photo 4 and 5 is a foundation on campus. The inside of this building was a mansion that used to stand a few blocks from me on Wilshire and Vermont donated to USC.

Photo 6 if you look closer you will see a couch and chair set intended for Emperor Maxmillian of Mexico, but then Cinco de Mayo happened and he was assassinated before receiving them.

November 23rd

The day after thanksgiving and I am still full after attending an orphan thanksgiving at a friends apartment. The food was amazing and so was the company. The second best thing to spending the holidays with your family is spending it with the family you have created for yourself in your new home.

One of the things i am thankful for is that you still read this blog after i have neglected it.

I am currently winding down my 10 day staycation. Which i really can't think of a better place to kill time in than los angeles. I will talk about what i have been up to in the next few posts. It is always hard to figure out where to start. I did finally get an adapter for my camera to ipad, so, i'll let my camera be my guide to where to start writing.

One thing i would like to mention is that while out with my cousin B before seeing a movie at the Arclight in Hollywood we saw Chris Cooper and David Walton

Next up: interesting antique find. (Or maybe i find it interesting because i am a nerd)

What THEY are wearing-what I am wearing

I happened to be featured on a friend's blog about style a few weeks ago as part of her "you style the day" series which you can read here:

http://styletheday.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/you-style-the-day-kristens-pop-of-pink/

Other than that LA ladies have really been rocking the Mullet dress, which is basically how it sounds, short in the front, long in the back. At least when this style dies, and it surely will, all that is needed is a little hemming.

LA fashion is strange and Urban Outfitters has a little too much say about it.

Updates 2

Today i was lucky enough to see the retired space shuttle Endeavor do a fly over in Pasadena. It was flying over the Jet Propulsion Lab who brought us the Mars Rover Curiosity last month. I thought that i would just be seeing the bottom of a 747 which i can see just about every day. I actually was able to see the shuttle riding piggy back followed by 2 fighter jets.

In other news they are naming the intersection by the Central Library after Ray Bradbury.

Just in case you wondered if living in LA is amazing, it is.

Updates

This is the first post on my ipad. The delay in posting was because i wasn't exactly sure how to post photos. I didn't want to restage photos with the ipad when i had so many great photos already.

It is still a work in progress since i am still figuring this out.

LA has been hot. Just when i am figuring out the seasons, i get surprised. Usually we have a week or 2 of 90 degree temperatures. This year it has been a month. I have been eating a lot of model dinners, which is what we call eating Pinkberry for dinner. I wish i could have said it helped my waistline.

I have spent a lot of the last month trying to figure out ways to keep cool. A neighbor and i discovered a korean movie theater a few blocks away. It has 3 screens and plays at least one hollywood blockbuster with korean subtitles. Somehow Bourne Legacy seemed more interesting. This place has some pretty interesting concession snacks.

I hope to post more often. It is nice to post in bed before i go to sleep. I can speak my blog to the ipad and it will type it out, i'll have to give it a try.

New tech

Dear all,

I am writing to you via my new iPad. I have had it for less than 24 hours and am having a lot of fun playing with it. Happily a lot of things have translated to this new gadget of mine, except for my photos which are safely on a hard drive I backed up the day before my computer died.  I did however lose my contacts. Could you please email me your mailing addresses and email addresses to my gmail account at eyemheer2@gmail.com

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technical difficulities

I am sneaking in this post because my computer, after 6 + years has died. Although I am still cooking up posts in my head, there will be a while before I post again until I can get my computer situation figured out.

Hold tight.

What I am reading

This year I decided that I wouldn't read as much as last year, but as I am almost done with my 12th book of the year, maybe I have the inability to keep that promise. Last year I read 24 books.

Book number 12 is the Great Gatsby, which I have never read before. I feel like everyone read this in high school as well as the Scarlet Letter and the Grapes of Wrath, which I have also never read. I am reading it now because I am excited to see the Baz Lurhmann 3D spectacular spectacular! that is coming out on x-mas. Hopefully my parents small town will be ready for it.

I also just finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell which is a book about intuition, thinking and snap judgments. Although the examples are super interesting in general I found it to be biased.

Before that was Galileo's Daughter which has been very popular in the book club circles. I found it to be more about him than her and thought it should have really been called "The Cursed Family Galilee", but no one asked me. I  think that this should be supplemental to the book click here which is her work and letters digitized.

If you are interested in what I am reading you can "friend" me on goodreads. Which is social networking for book nerds. It is an addiction. If you have a goodreads account send me your email address to eyemheer2@gmail.com. If not and you are an avid reader you should get an account.  It isn't as annoying or intrusive as facebook.

Also, I just learned about this new profession that started in England called bibliotherapy where a patient describes how they are feeling and the bibliotherapist prescribes books to them to improve their well being. I might give it a go.

blue print for the 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.

I had read a little about the story behind Integratron summarized in my last post. This was re-told to us as we were laying face up on yoga mats interrupted by odd interjections of laughter by our host. Which made it just a wee bit awkward. 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.  I played my own la la la track in my head as he told us the story behind the kind gift given to us by aliens.

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 years old 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 crap because they were leaving the in restaurant stage, it was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard.

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......

Case Study

(or a blog post in which I try to sound smart)

A couple friends and I set out on a Sunday afternoon to find the Eames House or Case Study #8.  I say find because one of the things that are annoying about this city is that on one side of the street the street has one name and on the other a totally different name. (In this case Vance vs. Corona Del Mar.) And once you run into the PCH you are completely screwed for a quick turnaround. So be alert if you want to find this hidden place.

The Eames house was part of the Case Study House program sponsored by Art and Architecture Magazine. The Case Study program houses were designed by major architects in the 40s-60s as experiments in residential architecture that used inexpensive and efficient materials. (See more information on wikipedia) There were quite a few of these in Southern California, the Eames House is neighbored by two or three. Very few are open to the public and even fewer are being lived in.

The Eameses were purveyors of the guest/host relationship. What you notice about #8 is that the house, separated between studio working space and living space, is that it has a flow and takes you from kitchen to dining to this spectacular view of the meadow and the Pacific. Perfect for dinner parties, cooking-dinner-after dinner drinks and sunset. This place really showcases nature, as is true with most glass houses. The Sunday I went the meadow was full of Monarch butterflies.

The day I went the living room was on display at LACMA as part of their California Mondern exhibit, so we were only able to peer in on an empty room.

In addition to being architects of this house, this husband and wife team designed furniture and other interior pieces. Their pieces are asthetic and functional. I am sure some of you have seen their furniture and the Eames Elephant Chair has seen a bit of a revival as of late.

For some reason you cannot take photos of the inside, which is very difficult when it is basically a glass house. So the photos are the best that I could do. I think actually I am not supposed to have these pictures up, but I guess when they ask me to delete this post I will.  My main reason though for this post, as is true with all of my art related posts is that I think you should go and support places like this.  Los Angeles is so keen on erasing its history. As I mentioned in the LA Conservancy post.

The cost to see the Eames House is only $10 and viewings are by appointment. Go to the Eames House Foundation for more information.

As a bonus, the one friend we were with happened to live in case study 18A designed by Rodney Walker. Which was also amazing and very true to its original state. The 1994 earthquake made some changes to the house and sent about 30 feet of meadow down the side of the hill, but still the view of the ocean is spectacular. This was great once in a lifetime opportunity because this house is not on view to the public.

There are very few Case Study houses available for public viewing. Stahl house being next on my list, if I can find a willing participant.

If you are interested in any of what I have written about there is a couple of great documentaries on netflix, which are currently streaming:

Eames: The Architect and the Painter
Julius Schulman: Visual Acoustics

In slightly over an hour: Butterfly Pavilion

in slightly over an hour: California Science Center

top 2 are from a video

Even in LA the nature likes to pose for the camera

in slightly over an hour: Rose Garden