California Dreaming

On Saturday, Cynthia and I flew to LA for a week long house exchange.   We are staying in an apartment in Santa Monica, about three blocks from the beach.   Shannon and Greg are staying in my house.

After an uneventful flight, we picked up a rental car and headed for the apartment.  We walked on the very windy beach, and then went to mass at Santa Monica church, prosperous and friendly, with a grade school and high school.  There was a reception after mass, so we went and had a small sandwich.

Note the Hollywood sign in the background

Sunday we went to the Farmer's Market to pick up a Legends of Hollywood tour.   We were the only Americans on the tour.   The tour was entertaining.  Our host was animated, with many stories to tell.  We stopped at the Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with hand prints and footprints in the concrete, and the Stars with famous names.

The Barnes and Noble bookstore had a table of books related to the film industry, such as "How to Manage Your Agent"

Monday we hiked in Griffith Park, and saw the view from the observatory.   We then headed to Venice, where we walked on the canals and the beach.   We hung out on the pier and watched the surfers, and then had a beer at a bar inland from the beach.  The houses were impressive and modern for the most part, and reeked of money.

Tuesday we went to the LA County Museum of Art, LACMA.  We arrived when it opened at 11, and left when it closed at 5 PM.   We saw art from ancient to modern, from Asia, Europe, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas.

Levitated mass - 340 tons - outside LACMA

Cynthia especially liked the special exhibit related to football (soccer), with artists from around the world.  Cynthia used to teach ceramics, and especially enjoyed the ceramics from Asia and the Americas and Europe. Richard liked some of the modern art, including a Clyfford Still; this was a bit of a joke, since we were both disappointed in the Clyfford Still museum in Denver.

Wednesday we went to Bergemot Station, an arts complex in Santa Monica. Cynthia found it disappointing, which is perhaps not surprising since we had seen world class art the day before at LACMA.   We did see a few interesting things; perhaps the most amusing were the cloth fish.

Wednesday afternoon we went to the beach.   Cynthia sat on the beach.  Richard went for a swim, in moderate waves.   The beach was relatively cool and uncrowded.

In the evening we took the bus to the Santa Monica Pier, which includes a Ferris wheel.  This has been an amusement park for about 100 years.

On Thursday we headed for the Getty Center museum, a massive complex of buildings on a hilltop, made from white Travertine stone. We took a tour of the garden, which was very interesting, including a kind of maze as part of the water feature.   We started with an exhibit of dazzling Byzantine illuminated manuscripts and a great Ansel Adams exhibit.  We finished our day at an eight by twenty foot  mural by Jackson Pollock, which was recently conserved.  We learned about how the mural was made, including splattering on paint with a brush.

We headed home after 6 hours; Cynthia cooked up some burritos for dinner.


On Friday, we decided to visit Olvera Street, where Los Angeles was founded, as a farming community to feed Spanish soldiers. The original settlement was 44 people, 11 families.  We visited the oldest church in LA, and took a walking tour of the plaza.   We walked on Olvera St, mostly souvenir shops, ate Mexican food.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that we saw was the Siquieros mural, painted by one of the great Mexican muralists in the 1930s.  It was whitewashed shortly after it was painted, as too radical. Siquieros was a communist, as were so many artists and intellectuals in those days.   Utopian ideas are always attractive, they just don't work.......

We then headed back to the apartment, picked up and finished packing, and then headed for the airport.  The flight home was uneventful.

We enjoyed our stay in LA and Santa Monica, lots to see and do.   On the down side, traffic was bad, no surprise; finding a parking space was a constant problem, which we did not expect.