More EmptyLA. This parking lot is a leftover from the construction of Disney Concert Hall, partially obscured by a street light and a palm tree on the left. The lot will probably become a building or a mall when the recession ends, but right now I’m happy with this little incongruous relic.
Check out Matt Logue’s Empty LA. It’s obvious there aren’t any cars, but it took me a moment to realize there weren’t any people either. I guess the implication is that LA is a brutal, post-human landscape of zombie infrastructure. The hulking building on the right is the Westin Bonaventure, a concrete and glass curtain perfect for film shoots but completely inhospitable to human habitation. Logue’s bio says he works in film effects, and his photos look like stills from the quiet moments of a disaster movie or the life after people documentary. However, Flower Street is rich and full in ways Empty LA would have you overlook. Make a left at the corner and you’ll see the LA public library, a glorious little human sized building dwarfed by skyscrapers but alive with kids, bums, parents, students, clerks, readers and a lunchtime farmer’s market on Wednesdays. I’m reading the 2009 reissued of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and I’m feeling optimistic about life in the chaos.
The frontispiece of a 1964 monograph on Swiss artist, designer, architect and typographer Max Bill. Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library. See more of his posters and handwriting here.
Behold the night blooming cereus, a desert flower that lasts a single summer night. This one belongs to my great-grandmother and lives at my aunts house.
Hello, ain’t got to worry about nothing. I am going home. I hope to see all of ya’ll one day. Lord have mercy on my soul.
For the Flake family, stay strong. It’s bad to see a man get murdered for something he didn’t do, but I am taking it like a man, like a warrior. I am going home to Jesus. I love ya’ll, peace. I am ready sir… Don’t forget to tell my daughter… I am ready, Warden.
"— A list of executed offenders and their last statements at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Claire Cameron presents some collected excerpts here.
It’s not difficult to see the spider, but if you look hard you can see the web. If you stay still, you can watch the small silver weave expand and contract in the breeze before sunset.
Jim Folsom, Democratic Governor of the great State of Alabama from 1947-1951 and 1955-1959. A search of the LIFE archive shows that he had a favorite pastime. It’s good to be the king.
“In actuality, it was like the homes of all people who are not really rich but who want to look rich, and therefore end up looking like one another: it had damasks, ebony, plants, carpets and bronzes, everything dark and gleaming—all the effects a certain class of people produce so as to look like people of a certain class. And his place looked so much like the others that it would never have been noticed, though it all seemed quite exceptional to him. When he met his family at the station and brought them back to their brightly lit furnished apartment, and a footman in a white tie opened the door to a flower-be-decked entrance hall, from which they proceeded to the drawing room and the study, gasping with delight, he was very happy, showed them everywhere, drank in their praises and beamed with satisfaction. ” From The Death of Ivan Ilyich, apparently a tale of murder by middlebrow taste in interior decoration.
