500 Empty Bowls

 

bowl by Kenneth Chung

The best charity event I've ever been to was Saturday's 500 Empty Bowls, where one-of-a-kind, handmade ceramic bowls were going for $10 bucks each, with the money donated to feeding people in need. The metaphor serves the reality, which is nice, but that's not why I enjoyed it so much.

I planned to spend $10 but that was impossible because I had $20 in my pocket and it had to go. Every single bowl was beautiful, and they were all worth more than $10. (Don't need bowls? A handmade, one-of-a-kind ceramic bowl makes a great gift.) I bought two I loved, then ran into Pasadena Adjacent, who had alerted me to the event. She was practically forcing a bowl onto our mutual friend: "Take this one, this is a special glaze, it's really hard to do, this guy's so talented," etc.

bowl by ? Let me know if you know

Damn. I had already spent my $20. I wanted to keep the bowls I had and buy the special bowl. I told our friend I wanted the special bowl and I'd have to pay her later. No dice. She claimed it. Plus I didn't win the raffle. You'd think these setbacks would have ruined my fun, but I was in a souq of ceramics, ice cream, and people, with not a single pearl-bedraggled, evening-gowned matron in sight, and it was a blast.

Next year I'm going to bring a lot more money.

You can take classes in ceramics and other things at the Monrovia Community Adult School. Well worth a look.

Kitty Heaven

Nosy.

But a pretty kitty, poised on his matching pillow and posing behind a picket fence, is impossible to resist.

This post is dedicated to Pasadena Adjacent.

YWCA Week

I've seen some excellent postings about the Julia Morgan YWCA. Today I'd like to direct your attention to my favorite: Pasadena Adjacent's beautiful post and video. You will not be disappointed.

Thanks for joining me during Julia Morgan YWCA Week!

Envy Adjacent

Lately, Pasadena Adjacent has been posting some nice looking lawn furniture on her traditional and highly popular Trash Tuesday posts. Mmm, like like like like like.

These chairs at San Marino Pool and Patio are new--not free, not yet even on sale. For the likes of me there's a bonus in that they're perfect as they are, requiring no sanding or paint.

Does that take the fun out of it?

Theme Day: Public Transportation

(Tomorrow will be Zen Tuesday)

 

 

photo courtesy of Pasadena Adjacent

If you live in Pasadena you've seen this artfully decorated bus. Take a look at all the Pasadena icons: starting at left, you see the Thinker (one of Rodin's at the Norton Simon Museum), then the Colorado Street Bridge and the LA River. Next, City Hall in a bed of roses (we're the Rose City), the bell tower at St. Andrew, Pacific Asia Museum, a bunch of brands and...a bull.

Okay.

We are blessed at Pasadena Daily Photo today because, thanks to Pasadena Adjacent, we have scans of the original artwork that led to this design. How did she get hold of this work, you ask? Easy. Pasadena Adjacent, aka PA, created the art on this bus. Cool, huh? She was kind enough to take me through a little bit of the process.

Here's a scan of an early proposed design:

Left to right: PA started with the tile from the Royal Laundry on South Raymond. Next, parakeets. I didn't know this, but PA says there used to be parakeets (wholly different from our famous parrots) in the Arroyo Seco near where Busch Gardens used to be. (PA should know, she grew up here.) Then you have the bridge and the river.

The portrait of the two women refers to one of the more interesting stories from the Colorado Street Bridge's dark side, aka "Suicide Bridge." "...a despondent mother threw her baby girl over the railing on May 1, 1937. She then followed her into the depths of the canyon. Though the mother died, her child miraculously survived."

I was going to say "one of the more tragic stories," but they're all tragic.

Then we have the brands and the...bull.

You may be aware that some folks in Pasadena don't like calling our bridge "Suicide Bridge." The idea of commemorating a suicide attempt on the side of a bus didn't sit well with the bus art people. But they liked PA's work so they sent her back to the (literal) drawing board. I don't know why the tile and the parakeets were dropped--not iconic enough?

PA returned with this:

Now we're getting there! You see our Thinker on the left, and the bridge, City Hall in its bed of roses, St. Andrew's Tower and the Pacific Asia Museum. On the right we have a cut-out of a Rose Bowl Queen. Totally iconic Pasadena.

PA's idea was to include under the queen's crown a picture of Dr. Kate Hutton, aka "the earthquake lady." See the seismograph running along the length of the San Gabriel Mountains in the background? Dr. Hutton, a Caltech seismologist, is a local fixture on the news whenever there's earthquake activity. Queen Kate's scepter is a parking meter. PA says parking meters were new in town (it was 1994) and folks weren't too happy about them. I guess before then you could park pretty much anywhere in Pasadena for free.

The bus art people didn't want earthquakes or suicide or parking meter jokes.

Fine. PA threw the bull back in.

What's up with the brands and the bull?

PA had done her research. The brands are not about the bull, as I had assumed. They're the brands of of the different California missions. The bull represents the Indiana Colony, the first Anglos to settle Pasadena, some of whom were cattle ranchers.

And PA did manage to inject a bit of humor into the design: the Thinker is soaking his toes in the Los Angeles River.

This has been a fun post to put together, thanks to Pasadena Adjacent. Let's give her a big hand! She's an immensely talented artist and Pasadena is lucky to have her. Thank you, PA!

Update: I'm now at liberty to tell you that Pasadena Adjacent's name is Elizabeth Garrison. She and her partner Victor Henderson have created numerous works of public art around southern California. Tash did a great post about their work at Fire Station #5 in Westchester.

City Daily Photo is now 1299 blogs strong! Blogs all over the world are participating in today's theme day. Check them out.

Maybe Koi, Maybe Not

I have more to tell you about Hulett C. Merritt and the property we've been talking about this week at what's locally known as the Ambassador Campus. But as I write it's much too late for me to formulate more than one or two coherent sentences, so I'll have to keep it short for now.

We're looking north (and perhaps a tad west) toward the second mansion of three that remain on the grounds. Pasadena Adjacent asked me the other day if there were still koi in the ponds. I didn't see any but if there are, I think they'd be in this stream that flows through the gardens from uphill to down, west to east.

Normally today I'd post the April Last Day photo. But normally I'd have my regular computer and my regular software and--well, today's not a normal day!

More Water

The Pasadena blogging community was agog--nay, thrilled with a jealous pang--when, on January 19th, Pasadena Adjacent posted this revelatory tour (with her customary, fun-filled video) inside the workings of the Devil's Gate Dam tower. She and Mr. V. braved the rain to get a scoop and a coup. No one we knew had been inside that mysterious tower before.

When I took this photo on the 23rd, the skies were giving us a sunny reprieve and--what? Those dam workers were giving tours to moms, dads and cherubs.

I broke the news to PA. "You mean I’ve lost my V.I.P. status?" she said. "The carbon's off the lily!!!"

But she got there first, with video, photos, and a nice shot of those orange things.
Here you can see the orange things at work. (You may have another word for the orange things, but we like to use the technical term, Orange Things.) They appear to be an aid in corralling debris. "Debris" in this case is everything from uprooted trees to escaped socks.

This is the same pool of water I featured in my post on Sunday. I was standing sort of up on the left side of this picture to take that one. We were told by the dam engineers the water's 57 feet deep at it's deepest point (or it was when I took the pictures.)



I took this shot about a year ago. John is below the dam chatting with Becca, PDP's resident geologist. To give you an idea of the amount of rain we had last week, I cropped the photo below for comparison. On the right of that shot you see the cement slab beneath which John and Becca are standing in the "dry" photo. If you enlarge the "wet" photo you'll also see a cement outcropping jutting out below the dam on the left. I had crawled up next to it to take the "dry" picture above; it's on the right side of that photo.