De Longpre Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

The artist Paul de Longpre settled in Hollywood in 1889.  On arriving in Hollywood, he had traded three flower paintings for three acres of land near what is now the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga.

– so says Carey McWilliams in Southern California: An Island on the Land

Southern California Country

In Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, there’s a monument with this very long quote carved on it.  It’s from journalist Carey McWilliams’ 1946 book, Southern California Country (1946):

My feeling about this weirdly inflated village in which I had come to make my home (haunted by memories of a boyhood spent in the beautiful mountain parks, the timberline country, of northwestern Colorado), suddenly changed after I had lived in Los Angeles for seven long years of exile. I have never been able to discover any apparent reason for this swift and startling conversion, but I do associate it with a particular occasion.

I had spent an extremely active evening in Hollywood and had been deposited toward morning, by some kind soul, in a room at the Biltmore Hotel. Emerging next day from the hotel into the painfully bright sunlight, I started the rocky pilgrimage through Pershing Square to my office in a state of miserable decrepitude. In front of the hotel newsboys were shouting the headlines of the hour: an awful trunk-murder had just been committed; Aimee Semple McPherson had once again stood the town on its ear by some spectacular caper; a University of Southern California football star had been caught robbing a bank; a love-mart had been discovered in the Los Feliz Hills; a motion-picture producer had just wired the Egyptian government a fancy offer for permission to illuminate the pyramids to advertise a forthcoming production; and, in the intervals between these revelations, there was news about another prophet, fresh from the desert, who had predicted the doom of the city, a prediction for which I was morbidly grateful.

In the center of the park, a little self-conscious of my evening clothes, I stopped to watch a typical Pershing Square divertissement: an aged and frowsy blonde, skirts held high above her knees, cheered by a crowd of grimacing and leering old goats, was singing a gospel hymn as she danced gaily around the fountain.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that, in all the world, there neither was nor would ever be another place like this City of the Angels. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano; here, indeed, was the place for me – a ringside seat at the circus.

(Biltmore Hotel ballroom by SCH)

Steve Wozniak

Seen here with Joey Slotnick, he built the first computer where the letters you typed on a keyboard appeared on a screen. So far he is my favorite character in the Steve Jobs biography.  From Wikipedia:

His favorite video game is Tetris. In the 1990s he submitted so many high scores for the game to Nintendo Power that they would no longer print his scores, so he started sending them in under the alphabetically reversed “Evets Kainzow”

Wozniak is no longer dating Kathy Griffin.

Point Conception, California

(from wikipedia)

The North Court, UC Los Angeles (Ansel Adams, November 1966)

SFGate tells us:

In 1964, University of California President Clark Kerr hired Ansel Adams to photograph the UC system. What the visionary Kerr had in mind was an elegant and oversize table book to celebrate the centennial of the university, in ‘68.

 You can see them here, ht Sadie Stein and these guys. 

California Legless Lizard

The California Legless Lizard (Anniella pulchra) is a limbless, burrowing lizard often mistaken for a snake.

Says Wikipedia:

Young lizards resemble their parents except look like smaller versions of them.

I did not know

that there is a middle school in LA named after Johnnie Cochran:

(let me stress once again that if I don’t source a photo, it’s from Wikipedia or I took it myself.  This one’s from Wiki)