[ Lost in the Landscape ]

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 the park…

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…

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!

Here’s one of her fun, slob­ber­ing creatures…

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

Looks like El Cid won this one.

December 22 2008 | Categories: art • places | Tags: Balboa Park • christmas trees • holiday lights | 6 Comments »

a few fewer xmas trees

This one didn’t make it to the papers, but there were a lot of them over the holidays:

We were up at John’s aunt’s place in North­ridge for the hol­i­days. That area of Los Ange­les is in one of the wind tun­nel zones of the San Fer­nando Val­ley. When the Santa Ana winds are on the way, you know it.

We arrived on the 23rd, when it was some­where between breezy and blus­tery. By the next morn­ing things had died down, but the fore­cast was for more extreme winds. Around 3 they kicked up in earnest, and for two hours they pro­ceeded to shake the house and lay low the land­scap­ing out­side. And then they stopped.

The sound of chain­saws started up before long, and John went to inves­ti­gate. One of the tress that had been a fix­ture in the neigh­bor­hood had taken a hit, prob­a­bly a vic­tim of shal­low water­ing for a lawn that doesn’t encour­age deep rooting.

 

All the trees I read about in the papers–including one that just missed tak­ing out the old­est build­ing in Hollywood–were pines, many of them prob­a­bly pet christ­mas trees that got too large or too asym­met­ri­cal for the house. When we got home I took this pic­ture off the roof deck. My neigh­bor­hood, along with many oth­ers in town, has a num­ber of pines, includ­ing the very Christmas-tree look­ing Nor­folk Island pines.

These pines don’t seem to have the same prob­lem as the Mon­terey pines that get bark bee­tles and keel over, but then again San Diego doesn’t usu­ally get the same kinds of wind­storms as the Val­ley does. So what’s the future for these pines? Stately, sym­met­ri­cal ances­tral pines? Killer tree mon­sters? For­tu­nately there aren’t any of these next door…

January 04 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: christmas trees • pines • windstorms | No Comments »