even*cleveland: the report from los angeles

the report from los angeles

My time in LA was sunny — I am pretty sure I got more vitamin D in three days than I've gotten in the last six months — but too short. A few highlights:

ordering a giant room service breakfast of eggs benedict and tomato juice, then going for a float in the hotel pool all by my lonesome
Trees right out of Dr. Seuss: short, shaggy, Muppety palms; great, tall squiggly trunks topped with lopsided leaf tufts; fluorescent purple jacarandas
the beaches (amazingly wide) and the big waves (and I wasn't even in the big wave places)
ocean as far as the eye could see
leather clutches in rainbow piles at Clare Vivier
buying a bag of fresh pineapple, watermelon, cucumbers and coconut pieces that were doused with lemon and lime juice, then dusted with chili powder
this blue dress (spotted at Mohawk General Store)
great old guitars
everything at Dream Collective, but especially the stained glass by David Scheid
a tiny exhibit of ancient glass objects
fringed silk scarves and a wonderful quilt at En Soie
a jar of cinnamon clove sugar from ReForm School
finding an incredible art and design bookstore completely by accident
watching games of paddle tennis (while eating the aforementioned chili fruits)
celebrating my sister's new masters degree (Dr. Dre was there, but I missed that part)

I only made it to a tiny fraction of the places I'd like to visit and didn't have any time to look up friends, so hopefully I'll find my way west again soon.

Photo from David Scheid's tumblr.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

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