I’ve begun writing for San Francisco-based culture site, The Bold Italic. I’ll be focusing on the odds and ends of Los Angeles happenings with the philosophy of, “why the fuck not?” My latest story is about a secret waiting atop of the highest hill of Forest Lawn Memorial Park, guarded, yet open to the public several days of the week.
Artist Dawn Scarfe’s Listening Glasses sculptural installation invites an invitation to set aside passive hearing for active listening. The sounds captured are hauntingly dreamlike.
Yesterday I found myself in a long debate/discussion at our back doorstep with a developer who plans to raze an older duplex next door to shoehorn in five luxury priced condos into a lot where the residence and a lush yard filled with fruit trees, blooming gigantic cacti, and animals have long called home. It’s such a beautiful space, our neighbors recently snuck into the vacated backyard to get quickly married in a secret ceremony amongst the bird, flowers, butterflies, and blue skies above. It’s where Emily regularly sneaks away into to observe the local birds, insects, and occasional wandering mammal, to simply enjoy the skies above. The impending loss is a tragic realization – a predicament outlining a problem – one which admittedly recognizes the social contract of living in a metropolis where the landscape is forever being changed and manipulated (even in one of its more suburban corners). This is a drama unfolding everywhere, including in our very own backyard.
When Morrissey copped Emerson and crooned , “Nature is a language…can’t you read?“, it was a desperate question of predicament presenting the diametric opposition of human nature to nature itself. It’s also a question I increasingly seem to want to ask companies like the lawn care in Maineville or those starting landscaping ventures.
“Oh, cutting down those trees won’t affect anything…the animals will find a home somewhere else!”, “Yeah, I like nature…that’s why we plan to put in a nice lawn and garden in the front of our development”, “We think we’re making life better in your neighborhood…we’re providing more housing” [note: these multi-unit residences without a yard will sell for $600K+ and are styled in a cookie-cutter architectural vocabulary completely out of place amongst both its immediate neighbors and within the parameters of the 90039].
One of the small neighbors set to be evicted from their home next door. Photo: Emily Ho
Development is going to happen, it’s a reality of life. Creating housing for more people to live happily and at a sustainable cost is at the heart of why I initially studied environmental architecture in college. People wants to get the best of every details on their dream house, when it comes in to roofs, hire the best roofing contractors in Lincoln NE. But despite PR attempts to put lipstick on the pig, the majority of developers – and even architects – aren’t guided by making life better for others. Property development is an opportunistic field [see: Donald Sterling], one serving a need for a profit always bordering the extremes, and one where most concessions related to the neighborhood, let alone nature, are minor at best. Market driven motivations have no room for the aretê, the recognition of the innate excellence and importance of all things around us. To be force fed, “No…you don’t realize it could have been worse…by law we’re allowed to build even higher and bigger!” isn’t just unpalatable, it’s a symptom of a society where every permissible boundary is where projects begin and end.
Developing a community can be done differently. Village Homes in Davis, CA is a 60 acre, 242-Unit Mixed Residential “Garden Village” incorporating ecological and social features, including a parks, recreational features, a day-care facility, community gardens, and landscaping which works in conjunction with the environment. 17 acres of community gardens and orchards create interaction between residents, establishing a lifestyle much different from the “heads down, leave me alone” lifestyle prevalent in cities where population density has pushed upward and outward at all expense.
Designing a landscape in not an easy job, right? As a homeowner, it can be difficult to discern if the landscape professional you’re hiring has all the right qualifications, licensing, insurance, etc. If you want the landscape design to be amazing, you need to be proficient in different fields of study like soil biology, engineering, horticulture, engineering, and art. If you got a landscaper, all you need to do is to trust a professional landscape designer.
In my hour long talk with this developer representative, I realized she manifested a complete ignorance of how uprooting old trees affects the lives built around it, where pushing out wildlife could be tallied as a minor casualty, and the belief population density is an end solution (rather than a myopic symptom). Our worlds and experiences, as tenant and developer, local and non-local, exist too far apart.
As presented the proposed development isn’t a necessary solution or a betterment of the community, yet repeatedly sold as an “exciting project” (unsurprisingly, those in the community are a bit underwhelmed). From her perspective an opportunity not taken is an opportunity lost, and it tends to be a rule rather than an exception today where urbanist idealism orbits anthro-centric visions of cities “yet to be” at the exchange of a “world disappearing now”. Even my concessionary recommendation of asking them to reconsider incorporating green space/gardens instead of trying to eke out every square inch of the property were met with an incredulous, “Why? That’s why we built rooftop decks for the residents!”. Yeah.
The predicament we find ourselves is one where we keep lying to ourselves: “if we build more/better, things will work out”. But Mies van der Rohe had it right in regard to every design, including urban development: less is more. Progress dictates that we must move forward full steam ahead, yet it seems the more built, the less we seem to gain in long term value, and in the process we unwittingly hurt our own interests until they’ve become irreversibly worsened [see: China]. We can’t design ourselves out of these problems of overpopulation, loss of wildlife, and an increasing scarcity of natural resources…it’s time to un-design this world and allow back some negative space into our existence.
(Also read: You do not have to fret over tree trimming since there are experts available easily in the market who would help you in this regard)
A microscopic video by Ruslan Khasanov of the intricate channels and basins mapped across our skin, rivulets of Martian topopgraphy revealed when liquid dyes contact hands. Music by Dmitry Evgrafov.
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What are those beautiful white flowers growing around the trails of Southern California?
If you’ve been hiking in the foothills, chaparrals, or even just around Griffith Park this spring, you’ve probably noted these femme fatale white blooms growing out in the open inviting curiosity and question. Datura stramonium – aka Jimson weed, the Devil’s Trumpet, thorn apple, or moon flower – has a fascinating history, earning an intertwined history and reputation as both a toxic killer
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As anyone who hikes regularly here in Southern California and elsewhere knows: Koreans love to hike. Middle-aged Koreans are often seen offloading from giant chartered busses in multitudes normally reserved for Sunday morning church services, donning satellite dish-sized visors and wearing Burberry/Dooney & Bourke pattern lined “banchan” vests (a nickname for the vests equipped with a multitude of little pockets), geared out for all-day hikes in the nearby Angeles Forest mountains. Many of hikers have discovered these older folks can keep a humbling pace, especially while climbing up to higher destination peaks, with the Korean genetic propensity for a low center of gravity (aka, short and squat), a hearty constitution, and their stubborn pugnacious attitudes making them the hiker-poled equivalent of a Jeep Rubicon.
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“Want to be a writer? A poet? A painter? Want to indulge in any of the fine arts? If so, go to Red Rock canyon.” – Bakersfield Californian/1920
Motivated by the previous adventure out to Saddleback Butte State Park – alongside the arrival of a new 27mm F2.8 lens for the Fujifilm X-E2 – I mapped out a course further north to Red Rock Canyon State Park for a solo expedition. Although I knew the wild flowers would be less spectacular than Saddleback Butte’s offerings, the photos I previewed of the park’s iron oxide tinted 300-feet sandstone-curtained cliffs was enough for me to fill the TDI’s tank, load up the backpack, and hit the road. Read More
I have Zach Behrens of KCET to thank for the heads up about the floral carpet bombing of yellow coreopsis blooming at Saddleback Butte State Park right now. It’s as if a giant can of yellow paint was thrown across the desert floor, the walk across the Joshua Tree dotted park an electrifying and surreal stimulation of the retina. Even on a perfect Saturday morning like today, the park was only visited by a handful of visitors…and I noticed even fewer hikers making their way up from Little Butte Trail up to 3,651 feet high Saddleback Butte Peak, where the eventual vantage point rewards you for the steep and sandy incline with a 360 degree view of the Antelope Valley, including a few snow capped mountains in the distance.
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“Think Globally, Act Locally”
I found myself face to face with the mantra stuck staring back at me from the bumper of a worn down pickup truck at a stoplight recently. I had seen the progressive slogan no less than a thousand times (no surprise, considering Silver Lake’s liberal+political populace). But it was only while stuck for a small eternity at a nearby intersection I realized the applicable philosophy on much more grounded terms, relatable in a way where the message clarified like butter heated on a stove. In other words, the idea of dissecting a larger imperative into actionable smaller decisions, seemed at the heart of what I was attempting as a personal trainer.
Since taking on the responsibility of personal training and helping friends transition from a state of “wanting” into the practice of “doing”, I’ve often been asked numerous variations of “…but how do you continue to ____?” These questions reflect a common dissociation between a person’s hopeful motivating idea(l) and the actual daily habit-testing practices. Impatience and inconsistency, the twin-headed combatant of accomplishment, are tied to an overemphasis on the first half of “think globally”.
