one of the best things about l.a in the winter is/are the storms that come in off of the pacific (at least i assume that’s where they come from).

they come in, batter the city for a day or two, and then go away, leaving l.a scrubbed clean and clear.

here are 3 pictures i took yesterday, from right after the last storm left.

moby

ok, i’m not sure if this qualifies as architecture.
but i’m putting up here on the ye olde oddball architecture blog.
because it’s l.a and clouds are sort of architectural (yes, i’m a hippie, with long, beautiful hair bestrewn with flowers).

simply: i was going for a hike and i saw this gigantic phalanx of thunderclouds heading towards me and i broke out my camera and took a couple of pictures and now i’m posting them because i think they make the clouds look vaguely like an invading army and a run-on sentence thank you.

also i think these pictures are pretty cool. which is, most likely, biased and self-serving, as i’m the one who took them.
in college we decided that ‘titianesque’ was a really horrible pretentious way of describing anything cloud related or otherwise.
so, as i’m really horribly pretentious: i think these clouds are titianesque.
if titian had lived in los feliz.
which he didn’t.
well, as far as i know.
i mean, the mormons believe that jesus hung out in north america with native americans, so who knows what’s real.
maybe titian is currently skateboarding in echo park with armenian rappers.

thanks

moby

welcome home.
well, i’m saying that to myself.
for the last couple of weeks i’ve been in new york and colorado, and now i’m back in megalopoliptic los angeles.

i’ll put up some odd (and hopefully interesting) architecture photos tomorrow, but for today i wanted to put up a quadryptych (i’m inventing words, probably because i’m tired) of the american west from aspen to los angeles.
see, the east coast of america is nice. i grew up there. it’s small and cute and generally kind of charming in a small and cute way.
and the mid-west of america is big and flat and filled with corn. which is nice. i mean, who doesn’t like corn?
but the american west (rocky mountains and west) is just huge. and vast. and, for the most part, empty and otherworldly.
the east coast, where i grew up, is filled with people, pretty much from boston down to key west. there are some nice empty bits (like, say, maine). but for the most part it’s pretty crowded. pretty, but crowded.
and then you come out west and there’s just space and emptiness and more space and more emptiness (ok, there are crowded bits here, too. like, say, southern california, but generally it’s pretty empty).
and even the crowded bits are all about an inch away from vast stretches of emptiness (my house is a 30 minute drive from 2,000,000 acres of state park, for example. and then beyond that: desert for a few thousand miles).

so here are 4 pictures of: colorado, utah, california, and los angeles, all taken within a span of about 90 minutes (thanks to the modern miracle of air travel).
back to buildings tomorrow.

i hope you had a nice weekend.

-moby

the other night i was talking with a friend of mine about the ‘hidden in plain sight’ aspect of l.a architecture.
and, more specifically, what you see from the street isn’t always representative of the house/building and what it actually is.
here’s a case in point:
my friend ruttiger (name changed to protect the ostensibly innocent) lives near me in a house that from the street looks, well, a little bit dumpy.
when seen from the outside with it’s black metal door it kind of looks like a crystal meth dispensary with shrubbery. although that sounds very old timey, like ‘ye olde crystal meth dispensary’.
in any case, it looks sort of dumpy and kind of run down.
but then you walk in the front door and you see gigant-o (that’s a technical term in architecture circles) windows looking dramatically
out over the hills and mountains and griffith observatory and downtown.
to illustrate this i’ve taken 3 pictures.
picture 1 is from the outside, showing the crystal meth dealer facade. and pictures 2 and 3 are taken from the deck.
oh, i’m also going to include a picture of the living room, as it doesn’t really look anything like the black metal door fronted facade of the house (oh, and the cowskin on the floor isn’t a repudiation of my vegan principles, as i neither ate it nor rolled around on it naked).
but the person who lives in this house is from texas, and i think the cowskin is her childhood pet.
ok, thanks