i.e., a blog

Apr. 30, 2012 at 8:47am with 4 notes

fast divorce, slow car; life uphill.

Mar. 24, 2012 at 5:46pm with 3 notes

matthew brandt lake landscape photography places lakes and reservoirs series stone lagoon CA california pattern film a history of photography

Stone Lagoon, CA 3, 2008
From the series Lakes and Reservoirs
C-Print soaked in Stone Lagoon water
30” × 40”
Matthew Brandt

California’s Bay Area at Night (NASA, International Space Station, 12/26/10)

Sep. 23, 2011 at 10:38am with 4 notes

phoot phoot camp photography shoot narrative picture california malibu scene los angeles LA

Directed and shot by Lauren Randolph and Ryan Schude

Aug. 31, 2011 at 1:44am with 45 notes

herman miller herman miller office offices furniture design photo photography interior architecture minimalism light window california very pretty

photo of Herman Miller Offices for Monocle by Daniel Shea

Apr. 29, 2011 at 3:50pm with 7 notes

Boulevard Katy Grannan photo photography color street san francisco SF los angeles LA california street

from the series “Boulevard,” Katy Grannan

Dec. 10, 2010 at 10:45am

politics veritas truth echoes lies meg whitman has a plate face governator california governor campaign

veritas in res publica

Sep. 27, 2010 at 2:23pm with 2 notes

san francisco california de young photocomposites david hockney harry bowers brothers fog bay bridge falling in love places and other species of spaces yesense

Half the time I spend dumbfounded and in love with it has me asking myself whether or not it’s real, but San Francisco is still the easiest city in the world to have a crush on.

Waste your time falling in love in Venice or in Paris but fall in love with San Francisco. Do it for the Pacific sea breezes, the endless supply of succulent California-fat produce and dizzyingly good wine, the accidental panoramas scattered throughout the city, and, of course, the slow and sinuous afternoons where fog snakes over hills to swallows it to make you question whether it was all just a dream. READ MORE!

Sep. 19, 2010 at 9:10pm with 15 notes

san francisco california traffic signs traffic sign shop storehouse of signs

Traffic Sign Shop, San Francisco

Sep. 1, 2010 at 11:34am with 1 note

oil tanker refinement refineries pasadena california 2004 oil tubes and boats and rivers oh my!edward burtynsky

Oil Tanker and Refineries Pasadena, Texas, USA, 2004 by Edward Burtynsky

11:20am with 13 notes

edward burtynsky people who take big pictures with last names that end in '-sky'bakersfield what are they baking in the field?california oil extraction and refinement mostly extraction nothing so fine about it

Oil Fields #27 Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004 by Edward Burtynsky

This, taken to it’s [il?]logical extreme

Jul. 20, 2010 at 10:43am

after henry california emigrant narratives joan didion patricia hearst

“

This is one of the trying mornings for me, as I now have to leave my family, or back out. Suffice it to stay, we started.” Suffice it to say. Don’t examine your feelings, they’re no help at all. Never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can. We need a goddamn South American revolutionary mixed up in this thing like a hole in the head. This was a california girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why.

— “Girl of the Golden West” by Joan Didion from After Henry

Jul. 13, 2010 at 7:53pm with 1 note

Joan Didion after henry patricia hearst california the land kevin starr yosemite

“

The extent to which certain places dominate the California imagination is apprehended, even by Californians, only dimly. Deriving not only from the landscape but from the claiming of it, from the romance of emigration, the radical abandonment of established attachments, this imagination remains obdurately symbolic, tending to locate lessons in what the rest of the country perceives only as scenery. Yosemite, for example, remains what Kevin Starr has called “one of the primary California symbols, a fixed factor of identity for all those who sought a primarily Californian aesthetic”. Both the community of and the coastline at Carmel have a symbolic meaning lost to the contemporary visitor, a lingering allusion to art as freedom, freedom as craft, the “bohemian” pantheism of the early twentieth century. The Golden Gate Bridge, referring as it does to both the infinite and technology, suggests, to the Californian, a quite complex representations of land’s end, and also of its beginning.

— “Girl of the Golden West” by Joan Didion from After Henry

Jul. 12, 2010 at 8:13am

after henry cold war joan didion los angeles pools ronald regan soviet union text quote ussr usa california dream prose

“

And this is how it went: what he would like to do, he had told any number of people over the years (I recall first hearing it from George Will, who cautioned me not to tell it because conversations with presidents were privileged), was take the leader of the Soviet Union (who this leader would be was another of those details outside the frame) on a flight to Los Angeles. When the plane came in low over the middle-class subdivisions that stretch from the San Bernardino mountains to LAX, he would direct the leader of the Soviet Union to the window, and point out all the swimming pools below. ‘Those are the pools of the capitalists,’ the leader of the Soviet Union would say. ‘No,’ the leader of the free world would say. ‘Those are the pools of the workers.’

— “In the Realm of the Fisher King” by Joan Didion
originally appeared in The New York Review of Books.