balboa park holiday lights

Sat­ur­day night John’s wind ensem­ble had a con­cert in San Diego’s sig­na­ture Bal­boa Park. The park was dec­o­rated up for the hol­i­days with strings of lights, a sec­u­lar Santa with sleigh and rein­deer, and a decid­edly un-secular row of nativ­ity scenes.

In the last cou­ple of years most of the incan­des­cent lights got replaced with LEDs–Rah, green! But the wattage on every­thing seemed a lit­tle low this year. There were even a few thou­sand feet of light strings that were left in the “off” posi­tion. Maybe the city (which has been on eco­nomic hard times for sev­eral years now) decided not to splurge on run­ning more lights. Or maybe they were try­ing to make a state­ment that you can dec­o­rate for the hol­i­days with­out drain­ing the power grid.

What­ever the case, the dis­plays still did a pretty good job of fight­ing off that human fear of the dark at the same time they let you know that Dorothy, you’re not in Novem­ber any­more. Here are some pic­tures I took with John’s lit­tle dig­i­tal instamatic.

Entering Balboa Park

Enter­ing the park…

bparkorganpav

Palms and Christ­mas trees in the fore­ground, the Organ Pavil­lion (with the “world’s largest out­door organ”) in the background…

Another take on the palm and Christmas trees...

Another take on the palm and Christ­mas trees…

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Acci­den­tal no-tripod hol­i­day light effects…

The park has a cou­ple of kid-scaled climbable sculp­tures by the late artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who used to live in town. These are extremely pop­u­lar with the lit­tle Gen Z’ers. Art that you can touch and climb all over–What a concept!

bparknicki

Here’s one of her fun, slob­ber­ing creatures…

bparkelcidvssanta

And finally: El Cid (left, on horse­back) vs Santa (right, in sleigh).

Looks like El Cid won this one.

December 22 2008 11:22 am | Categories: art • places | Tags: • •

6 Responses to “balboa park holiday lights”

  1. Helen aka patientgardener on 22 Dec 2008 at 11:45 am #

    Hi James — thanks for shar­ing these with us. It nice to see pub­lic Christ­mas lights from other parts of the world.

  2. Philip on 22 Dec 2008 at 2:27 pm #

    What a great place for a con­cert. What instru­ment does john play?
    I love the “acci­den­tal no-tripod hol­i­day light effects” !
    Merry Christ­mas!
    Philip

  3. lostlandscape on 22 Dec 2008 at 7:09 pm #

    Helen–The park has plenty of char­ac­ter on its own, so it’s nice they’ve kept things light to let the archi­tec­ture shine through.

    Philip–John was for­merly on tuba, but is try­ing his hand at per­cus­sion for a change. It was a great place for a hol­i­day con­cert, with the lights and what seemed like sub-arctic tem­per­a­tures to make it seem even more…what’s a word some­where between “fes­tive” and “mis­er­ably cold”?

  4. Greg on 23 Dec 2008 at 8:22 am #

    Ha ha ha!!

    I just love this: “Dorothy, you’re not in Novem­ber any­more”, not only your adap­ta­tion of the expres­sion, but that exact feel­ing of Oz-ness you get when you approach some of those most impres­sive light displays!

    Merry, merry Christ­mas, my friend!!

  5. Sue on 23 Dec 2008 at 4:39 pm #

    I always like those pics taken on the move. I need to apol­o­gize for being so scat­ter­brained. I thought the list of why I like to gar­den posts was in order of the win­ners, so now I have to go back to the oth­ers I con­grat­u­lated and explain what I was think­ing. I had not read the part where he drew num­bers. I was not allowed to post another com­ment after the one, so cut and pasted it here.

    Well, I liked your post, anyway.

  6. lostlandscape on 23 Dec 2008 at 5:09 pm #

    Greg, Sue, thanks to you both!

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