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, 4 April 2006
Laurel Canyon: Rock's Answer to Jazz Age Paris
Topic: Historic Hollywood

Laurel Canyon: Rock's Answer to Jazz Age Paris

Palm Tree in the fog and rain, Laurel Canyon, Hollywood side, Tuesday, April 4, 2006The Los Angeles Times, Tuesday, April 4, 2006 tells the tale -
An Alaska storm slammed into Southern California this morning, packing steady rains, knotting traffic and making for a dreadful morning commute. The rains are not expected to diminish until Wednesday, forecasters said.

... Despite the rain, Laurel Canyon Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills was reopened after being closed over the weekend when a rain-drenched hillside began to slide.

Crews installed concrete barriers Sunday to protect against mud and debris flows that could be brought on by the rain.

Bartling said other areas of concern would include the areas of last year's Topanga, Foothill and Harvard fires. Because the burn areas lack ground cover, they are more prone to breaking up and becoming mudslides when soaked.

Sam Padilla, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said all stations near the burn areas are equipped with sandbags if residents need them.
The Times also has a photo gallery here, but this is Laurel Canyon here, where the news copters were low overhead at dusk last night, taking shots of the hillside below, and back again at dawn for the same.

And at dawn on the television a sweet young thing was doing a remote from the corner. Best to watch her on television, as it was raining hard. No point in walking up to the corner to see her talk. You'd just get soaked. But she was explaining that the house below had been red-tagged a year ago when the hillside started to slide away (see a shot of that here from January 9, 2005). The owners moved out long ago. More rain and it may get buried, or slide down into the canyon and block the road. This is across the road from the little house where Jim Morrison of the doors lived for a time.

A bit of history -
Laurel Canyon gained its greatest fame in the 1960s as a countercultural enclave. When Joni Mitchell sang about "the ladies of the canyon," she was referring to Laurel Canyon. Jim Morrison lived behind the 1919 Canyon Country Store, whose Sister Mary Michael-style painted sign indicates that the area hasn't completely lost its Haight-on-the-Hill ways.

… During Hollywood's glory years, many notables, including Orson Welles and Errol Flynn, lived in the canyon. Urban legend has it that another former resident, Harry Houdini, still haunts the remains of his estate, visible on the right just before Lookout Mountain as you drive north.
And due for publication in May, Michael Walker's Laurel Canyon : The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, with this from Publishers Weekly -
Beginning in the mid-1960s, a string of successful rock bands emerged out of Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood of Los Angeles tucked away in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard. From the success of bands like the Byrds and the Mamas and the Papas, and singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Jimmy Webb, Walker proposes Laurel Canyon as rock's answer to Jazz Age Paris. It's a plausible concept, but one he stumbles to elaborate past the length of a magazine feature. The journalist, who lives in Laurel Canyon, delivers strong material on some of the musicians he cites, particularly in early chapters about Crosby, Stills & Nash and Frank Zappa, but offers little about other equally significant acts. Instead, he pads the story with lengthy sections on groupies and the music scene in other parts of the city, the Altamont concert (which was hundreds of miles away) and a digression on the history of cocaine. Furthermore, his enthusiasm for the Laurel Canyon legend leads to shaky critical pronouncements. If "the folk stars of the early 1960s were the first rock stars," for example, then what was Elvis?
Whatever. Rock's answer to Jazz Age Paris? What was the question?

It's an odd place to live.

The house in question.

House red-tagged in the fog and rain, Laurel Canyon, Hollywood side, Tuesday, April 4, 2006























The fog above, rolling in at dusk.

The fog and rain, Laurel Canyon, Hollywood side, Tuesday, April 4, 2006























Looking the other way, Los Angeles, low ceiling...

Los Angeles as seen Laurel Canyon, Hollywood side, Tuesday, April 4, 2006 (from the roof at Laurel Avenue at Selma)



Posted by Alan at 7:34 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Tuesday, 4 April 2006 7:40 PM PDT
Monday, 3 April 2006
Movie References: Life in Southern California
Topic: The Movies

Movie References: Life in Southern California

Superman replica on display, Beverly Hills, California (photo December 2005)
In a window just off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills this full-size replica seems to be for sale. See this - "Superman leaps tall buildings in a single bound, flies faster than a speeding bullet and, this summer, will land in audience laps in a 3-D version of 'Superman Returns,' set for Imax movie theaters. Imax and Warner Bros. film studio said they plan to feature 20 minutes of the big-budget Hollywood movie in three dimensions when it hits theaters in late June, marking the first live-action, 3-D movie on giant Imax screens."

Superman Returns is scheduled for 30 June, with Brandon Routh as the dude - "After the battle with General Zod and his gang of Kryptonian super-villains, Superman (Brandan Routh) mysteriously disappears for six years. After searching for more possible survivors from Krypton and finding none, Superman returns to Metropolis to re-assume the identity of Clark Kent. Once he returns, he discovers that Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) is in a relationship and also has a son. Superman also discovers that Metropolis has learned to live without him, causing him to lose his motivation to fight and protect. To make matters worse, Superman's old nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) has devised a plan to defeat the Man of Steel, for good. Superman must put his troubles behind him in order to protect his lost love, and the city who lost faith in him."

Whatever.

He's for sale, under glass, in Beverly Hills. Why wait for the movie?

Superman replica on display, Beverly Hills, California (photo December 2005)




































This weekend at a birthday party down in Orange County, for a young lad turning seven, the movie Village of the Damned came to mind.

Kids at Southern California birthday party


Posted by Alan at 6:53 PM PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Monday, 3 April 2006 6:56 PM PDT
Sunday, 2 April 2006
Film Notes
Topic: Insider Stuff

Film Notes

The Director's Guide of America, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood

Will be out of town this date. But here, a block down the street, next week there's a week of French films, the ten annual City of Lights, City of Angels Film Festival - eighteen premieres of French feature films (and eighteen shorts). The program is here - and here we see Film Noir Night is Friday the April 7. The thing is sponsored by our Channel 5, KTLA, and TV5 Monde, the French cable channel, and Air France and Los Angeles Magazine.

Maybe it's time, after missing it a few years, to walk down the street and see what's up.

Photos here, documenting Hollywood, will resume tomorrow.



























By the way, this is your photographer, with his tripod, looking out over Hollywood, from Mount Lee, a few feet below the Hollywood Sign.

The view from Mount Lee, Hollywood, at the Hollywood Sign


Posted by Alan at 9:00 AM PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Sunday, 2 April 2006 9:03 AM PST
Saturday, 1 April 2006
Zigzag Time
Topic: Historic Hollywood

Zigzag Time

Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag ModerneSometimes driving around Los Angeles one is suddenly reminded of the old Astaire-Rogers "white telephone" musicals, with their French farce plots and Manhattan-skyline sparkle, as James Wolcott once described them. That might happen if you drive past this.

Smith House
1929-30 J.C. Smale
191 South Hudson Avenue
Los Angeles

"One of the few Zigzag Moderne houses in the area in the Los Angeles area and probably one of the greatest. It is very elegant in an extremely elegant neighborhood. Paris would be proud of it." - David Gebhard and Robert Winter, A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles and Southern California, 1977, Peregrine-Smith

Paris? Maybe. Fred Aistaire could have danced here, but there's no record of that. But it feels right.

Zigzag Moderne - "Zigzag Moderne developed from the classical-inspired designs of Bertram B Goodhue, the vertical Gothic schemes of Eliel Saarinen, the forms of the Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratif of 1925, and the early twenties designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was also influenced by the developing International style. The principal characteristics of Zigzag Moderne are: smooth surfaced volumes; windows arranged in sunken vertical panels; frequent use of central tower, whose summit recedes in a stepped pattern; a flat roof; symmetry and balance for each elevation; tendency for buildings to be monumental, formal and heavy; ornamentation of zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts, spirals and stylized plant and animal motifs."

It's very strange.

Photos, Saturday, April 1, 2006.

Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag Moderne
























Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag Moderne







































Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag Moderne





































Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag Moderne

































Smith House, 1929-30, J.C. Smale, 191 South Hudson Avenue, Los Angeles - Zigzag Moderne


Posted by Alan at 4:12 PM PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Saturday, 1 April 2006 4:24 PM PST
Friday, 31 March 2006
Gaudy Beverly Hills
Topic: Technical Exercises

Gaudy Beverly Hills

These are botanical studies, and exercises in getting the color right, and working "close in" with various depth-of-field decisions.

These are from Thursday the 28th, the only sunny day this week. (It's the rainy season in Los Angeles, as February and March are pretty much it out here.)

The location is Beverly Gardens Park, created in 1911 - a narrow, two-mile-long strip of lawns and a few flowerbeds. It runs for fourteen blocks along the northwest side of Santa Monica Boulevard, the complete length of the city of Beverly Hills. It does have a rose garden, and a few stone park benches, a lily pond, fountains, tall trees, a cactus garden, and a gravel path for joggers. The Beverly Hills Police Station is across the street from the small rose garden at Maple Drive. The whole place is more foliage and shade than much in bloom. But there are these.

Blooms in the rose garden, Beverly Gardens Park, Santa Monica Boulevard at Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, California
































Bloom in the rose garden, Beverly Gardens Park, Santa Monica Boulevard at Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, California



























Bloom in the rose garden, Beverly Gardens Park, Santa Monica Boulevard at Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, California


Posted by Alan at 5:34 PM PST | Post Comment | Permalink
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Updated: Friday, 31 March 2006 5:36 PM PST

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