Almost Saturday Photo

The red carpet at the Hammer Museum‘s annual Bike Night.

 

Filed under: camera, life in LA, Los Angeles, Non-Work, Off-Topic, Photos, art, bike, bike night, culture, hammer, hammer museum, museum, red carpet, UCLA

And then, the air cleared.

One of the things about Southern California is sudden wind shifts which would be cause for alarm anywhere else but are just par for the course around here.

A couple of days ago, the wind suddenly changed direction and started blowing from the west to the east, which helped in the firefighting efforts (by driving the fires back onto already-burned ground which obviously isn’t really good fuel), but has also cleared the air out considerably.

Since I dropped the ball on Friday and didn’t call around looking for work, I had today off , so I decided to enjoy the day and the clear air and went for a long bike ride.

Last week:

Today:

I rode out to Westwood and went to the camera store (I was looking for an extra battery and another memory card, but they only carry branded stuff and I had such a severe case of sticker shock that slunk out of the store and decided to get the stuff off Ebay), hung out for a while, and then headed back home. During the ride back home, I saw this:

Now, unless I’m mistaken that would appear to be an armadillo (although it’s not showing in the photo, it was kind of sparkly) attached to a streetlight.

Along Santa Monica Blvd in Century City there’s some sort of strange public art thing. In addition to our friend up there, hanging from various street lights are giant shoes, a really phallic cactus, busts of random people, stylized petroglyphs, pithy sayings and a strange, smiling disembodied head which disturbed me so much I was unable to photograph it.

Since Santa Monica Blvd is the old Route 66, I guess I can understand the southwestern-themed items, but the weird, seemingly random heads just confused me. I rode back and forth along the stretch of Santa Monica Bl. a few times, trying to make some sense of the progression of weird art things, and then came to the conclusion that there was probably some sort of contest that resulted in a completely random collection of stuff hanging from what would otherwise be tasteful (for Los Angeles) beaux-artsish streetlights.

I have a 7 am call tomorrow, so I’m going to bed. Hopefully I won’t have nightmares about giant bronze heads floating in the sky.

Filed under: camera, life in LA, Los Angeles, Non-Work, Photos, art, California, Century City, clouds, Fires, Los Angeles, Route 66, sky