Southern California Photography by Alan Pavlik, editor and publisher of Just Above Sunset
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Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2006 - Alan M. Pavlik

If you use any of these photos for commercial purposes I assume you'll discuss that with me

These were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0

The original large-format raw files are available upon request.

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Visitors from February 28, 2006, 10:00 am Pacific Time to date -


Tuesday, 11 April 2006
Squirrel's Foot Fern (Davallia trichomanoides)
Topic: Color Studies

Squirrel's Foot Fern (Davallia trichomanoides)

Squirrel's Foot Fern (Davallia trichomanoides), new growth
A sign of spring Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - a frond developing on the balcony. Squirrel's Foot Fern (Davallia trichomanoides) should not be confused with Rabbit's Foot Fern (Davillia fejeensis). The later have gray-white rhizomes, those hairy growths that resemble and feel like a bit like a rabbit's foot. On Squirrel's Foot Fern the rhizomes are brown. On both they sort of crawl down the side of the pots. Some find them a bit creepy.

This specimen of Squirrel's Foot has been on the shady balcony here for the last fifteen years, cut back to the root each March. There are new fronds by mid-April, and an umbrella of wide full fronds by June. Harriet-the-Cat likes to lie under them on the cool concrete in the summer, with narrowed eyes, waiting for the real squirrels to drop by, as the sometimes do.



The Rabbit's Foot Fern (Davillia fejeensis) just below the other.

Rabbit's Foot Fern (Davillia fejeensis)







Rabbit's Foot Fern (Davillia fejeensis>



By June you'll see things like this, snapped June 19, 2005 in Carlsbad California. Mimosa - but Mimosa is a genus of about four hundred species of herbs and shrubs, in the subfamily Mimosoideae of the legume family Fabaceae, and all have evenly bipinnate leaves. So which is this?

Botanical Color Study - mixed textures and colors


Posted by Alan at 6:36 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Wednesday, 12 April 2006 6:15 PM PDT
Monday, 10 April 2006
Diversions: France
Topic: Travel

Diversions: France

Eiffel Tower from the Pont des Arts: Paris rooftops
A slow afternoon in Hollywood, and thinking it may be time for another visit to catch up with Ric Erickson, editor of MetropoleParis - haven't chatted with him face to face in a few years. But on the right is not April in Paris. It's a December day in 2001, from the Pont des Arts, walking back to the hotel in Saint Germain, glancing up to the southwest. Rooftops and that strange tower. It's not Hollywood, or even Paris Las Vegas.










Later, from the hotel window, light in the heart of the left bank - l'église St-Germain-des-Prés in the afternoon traffic, and in the second chapel of this church a stone marks the spot where philosopher Rene Descartes is buried. The abbey here was founded in 558. It was rebuilt between 990 and 1021, and restored again from 1819 to 1823, thanks to Victor Hugo (see a history here and the current website here). To the left is Les Deux Magots - Fréquenté par de nombreux artistes illustres parmi lesquels Elsa Triolet, André Gide, Jean Giraudoux, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Prévert, Hemingway, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, pour ne citer qu'eux, il accueillit les surréalistes sous l'égide d'André Breton, bien avant les existentialistes qui firent les belles nuits des caves du quartier. Jim Morrison of The Doors frequented this same café it's said - Morrison was buried in Paris of course. This intersection, Boulevard St-Germain at rue Bonaparte, is a good place to be. Drop a line for details - a good jazz club, odd shops, goodies in the Buci market a few blocks to the right.

Light in the heart of the left bank - l'église St-Germain-des-Prés in the afternoon traffic


























That's Paris. But a pleasant train ride north, just an hour or two, is Rouen, in the heart of Normandy. It's old in a different way. This was June afternoon, six years ago. Sip some calvados. Good place.

Rouen, in the heart of Normandy



Way south. Everyone associates Arles with Van Gogh, of course. But drive down from Avignon, through St-Remy (visit the asylum where Van Gogh spent some time after he cut off his ear), through Les Baux (a mountain fortress town that has an odd history having to do with Richelieu and the Huguenots, and metallurgy, as aluminum ore, bauxite, is named for the place), and you finally get to Arles. It's old in a different way - Roman. This is the old coliseum, the same summer. They use it now for French bullfights, the kind where the bull lives. You get good light and shadows there, and that means it's been in a few movies, as right here John Frankenheimer filmed that shoot-out in Ronin - so if you're not into art, or bullfighting, or Roman history, there's always the Hollywood angle, as Robert De Niro was here too.

The old Roman coliseum in Arles


Posted by Alan at 7:01 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Tuesday, 11 April 2006 7:27 AM PDT
Sunday, 9 April 2006
Easy on the Eyes
Topic: Light and Shadow

Easy on the Eyes

Thursday, April 6, 2006 - Hollywood Forever Memorial Park - just trying to get the ripples right -

Goose in lake, Hollywood Forever Memorial Park



Goose in lake, Hollywood Forever Memorial Park



Goose in lake, Hollywood Forever Memorial Park



Posted by Alan at 8:25 AM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Saturday, 8 April 2006
After They're Dead
Topic: Historic Hollywood

After They're Dead

 The Keeper of the Watch - Hollywood Forever Memorial Park, Los Angeles CaliforniaA few sites of interest out here, like this (right), "The Keeper of the Watch" at the Hollywood Forever cemetery down on Santa Monica Boulevard, just behind Paramount Studios. This is at the complex of monuments related to the Los Angeles Times - the first being the grave of Harrison Gray Otis. Otis started the paper. Next to that, the tomb of his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, who ran the paper until his death in 1944, and Otis' daughter Marion Otis Chandler, and next that a massive monument to the victims of "The Crime of the Century" - the twenty who died when the Times was bombed in October 1910.

Otis hated unions and ran an "open shop" - his workers would never band together and pressure him for anything. Unions were evil. And Otis made a lot of enemies scoffing at the "rights" of the working class. The price was the Times building leveled by a bomb, and the dead.

See this, drawn mainly from Graham Adams Jr., Age of Industrial Violence, 1910 York: Columbia University Press, 1966 -
On 1 October 1910 the Los Angeles Times building exploded under mysterious circumstances. The blast was felt throughout the area. One survivor said, "Frames and timbers flew in all directions. The force of the thing was indescribable." Employees of the Times tried to escape the flames, and some jumped from windows without safety nets below. A few hours later, nothing remained but smoldering debris. Twenty people died in the explosion.

Harrison Gray Otis, the antiunion publisher of the Times, blamed organized labor and dubbed it "The Crime of the Century."

Organized labor responded by blaming Otis, asking, "Are his own hands clean?" AFL president Samuel Gompers disavowed union participation in the tragedy, arguing that urban terrorism would actually hurt labor's cause.

Famous detective, William J. Burns was hired to investigate the blast. He played a hunch and was led to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers (BSIW), located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Burns suspected that the union's secretary, John J. McNamara, had directed the attack. The detective set up a trap in a Detroit hotel on 12 April 1912 and arrested McNamara, his brother James, and another accomplice named Ortie McManigal. In McNamara's suitcase Burns found guns and six lock mechanisms similar to those used in Los Angeles.

On 12 July both brothers pleaded not guilty and set off a chaotic atmosphere in the courtroom. Clarence Darrow, one of America's most famous lawyers, represented the McNamara brothers, although reluctantly, because he felt the prosecution's case was. solid. After the first month the attorneys had selected only eight jurors and showed no signs of hurrying the process. On 1 December 1912 the defendants dramatically reversed their pleas. James pleaded guilty to the Los Angeles explosion, while John answered to a lesser charge in a separate bombing. Darrow explained the decision: "It was our only chance... It was in an effort to save J. B. McNamara's life that we took the action."

Judge Bordwell, reacting to the public's outrage, sentenced James McNamara to life imprisonment and John to fifteen years of hard labor.

The McNamara case led to heavy financial losses and declines in membership for all Los Angeles unions. The public backlash hurt the AFL, and Samuel Gompers received criticism for supporting the brothers. Not only had the McNamara's blown up a building and taken lives, they also destroyed the labor movement in Los Angeles.
And it never really recovered out here. (Heck, the two had also blown up the Llewellyn Iron works in Los Angeles on Christmas day of the same year - they weren't nice men.)

The unions didn't really recover until Ronald Reagan started his anti-communist thing after World War II. In 1947 the Screen Actors Guild asked him to mediate between a few industry unions. He butted heads with Herb Sorrell, the head of the Conference of Studio Unions, who made no bones about his views on workers' rights, views that to some seemed communist. Reagan didn't like the guy. In 1947 the Screen Actors Guild elected Reagan their president, the first of his five consecutive terms, and then he testifies as a friendly witness before Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities - and then the "Hollywood Ten" are off to prison and quite a few writers and directors are blacklisted, not to work in Hollywood for many decades. Harrison Gray Otis no doubt smiled from the great beyond.

Below, the militant eagle on the top of the monument to the victims of "The Crime of the Century" -

Eagle on the top of the monument to the victims of 'The Crime of the Century,' Hollywood Forever Memorial Park, Los Angeles California



Directly across the alley from all this, a weeping figure.

Weeping figure, Hollywood Forever Memorial Park, Los Angeles California



Photographs - April 6, 2006


Posted by Alan at 3:02 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Saturday, 8 April 2006 3:07 PM PDT
Friday, 7 April 2006
The Industry in One Block: Melrose at Bronson
Topic: Historic Hollywood

The Industry in One Block: Melrose at Bronson

Raleigh Studios, Melrose Avenue and Bronson, Hollywood CaliforniaOn the right, light and shadow on the new façade of Raleigh Studios, at the corner of Melrose Avenue and Bronson in Hollywood, in the scruffy flats below Hollywood Boulevard, below Sunset Boulevard too, a long block south of even Santa Monica Boulevard. In a mixed industrial and residential area, Raleigh Studios isn't open to the public. There's work to do here, and this is the longest continuously operating studio in the country, having stared operations in 1915 with a Mary Pickford production. With the talkies Raleigh Studios had one of the world's first soundstages - with a glass top so light could enter without disrupting sound recording. It's changed ownership many times, and lots of people called it home at one time or another - Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Walt Disney and Bette Davis (the interiors for her creepy, second-rate Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? were filmed here).

These days it's mostly television, commercials and independent films at Raleigh Studios. This is the home of the old television series - Superman, Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. But here you see some famous films were made here - "In the Heat of the Night" (1967 Best Picture), "The Best Year of Our Lives" (1946 Best Picture), and "A Start is Born" (the first one, 1937, with Janet Gaynor).

It's a curious place, and, behind the streamlined new glass building in front, the old bungalows are still there, from the early days, with regular folks just going to work in a strange industry.

Raleigh Studios, bungalows on Bronson Avenue, Hollywood California align=
Across the street is the more famous Paramount Studios that started back in 1913 in a rented horse barn up the hill near Sunset and Vine. Paramount moved down here in 1926, into an existing studio built in 1917 - then just got bigger and bigger. They absorbed the old RKO studios next door and now the studio and lots cover many acres, and five thousand people work here. And they offer a two-hour walking tour, if you're into such things - "The Sheik" with Rudolph Valentino (1921) was filmed here, and the two major versions of "The Ten Commandments," and all the Star Trek shows and movies. You might find some of that interesting. Their website is here, and here you'll find a complete history of the studio and a list of the hundreds of famous films made here.

This, below, is the Bronson Gate, just across the street from the older Raleigh Studios, with regular folks just going to work. This is the gate they had to reinforce after a mob of overly enthusiastic female fans of Rudolph Valentino overwhelmed security and climbed over the original unfortified gate (nearby statues honoring that fellow here). Trivia? Many years ago a young actor, one Charles Buchinski, decided to take his stage name from this gate, and became the more marketable Charles Bronson. Amusing.

Paramount Studios, Bronson Gate, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood California






































Further up the block is the more frequently photographed Melrose gate. Yeah, yeah. A stock shot.

Paramount Studios, Melrose Gate, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood California






































These photographs are from Thursday, April 6, 2006, just before noon.


Posted by Alan at 5:55 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Friday, 7 April 2006 11:19 PM PDT

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