I read so many blogs with good stuff that I decided to share them on Fridays. Photography, travel, books, clothing, art journals, lectures, politics, whatever. I’ll be collecting throughout the week and posting for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy the post … and your weekend.

Katisse - I heard him 2 summers ago at the free Friday jazz concerts that the LA County Art Museum runs. Can't wait to go back there again. If you want to treat yourself on a Friday night, bring a picnic dinner and surround yourself with a jazz tribe. Must track him down again at a session in SoCal this summer.

Against the Grain - If you love bread, and I do, check out this New York Times article from Wednesday's Bread Issue. Smear with some full fat butter. Eat. Repeat.

Jewish Designers and Modernism - to indulge my newly found interest in design. I hope I get a chance to visit this exhibit, "Designing Home: Jews & Mid-century Modernism," at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco before it's up on Oct. 6th.

"The only people who see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame."
          ~ Salman Rushdie

I read so many blogs with good stuff that I decided to share them on Fridays. Photography, travel, books, clothing, art journals, lectures, politics, whatever. I’ll be collecting throughout the week and posting for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy the post … and your weekend.

Danny Gregory on creative beginnings and the monkey in your head.

I made quinoa with pine nuts, mushrooms and mint for Passover, because it's been deemed kosher for the holiday, and then went on the hunt to find out more about it.

John Durant and the paleo lifestyle on The Good Life Project.

Could I move to DTLA - Downtown Los Angeles? ~ New York Boomers on Hipster Turf.

Brene Brown shares an interview with Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils.

The First Time

Being first implies
that there 's a sequence, 
a dull parade of samenesses
that find distinction
only in their order.

But time reels past
in moments strung like laundry,
each one uniquely pinned
into its place along the line,
fanned by its private breeze,
immune to repetition.

Nothing happens twice,
not love, not breath, 
not waves that lap a shore.
Always it is the first time,
and the last.

~ Joyce La Mers

(from the Los Angeles Times:  a woman whose work has been likened 
to a marriage of Dorothy Park and Ogden Nash    

Not how I expected to post for Passover today. Really sad. The killing of 3 at a Jewish community center and retirement home in Kansas City. Neither of whom were even Jewish. Bitter irony.  I'm in tears.

I read so many blogs with good stuff that I decided to share them on Fridays. Photography, travel, books, clothing, art journals, lectures, politics, whatever. I’ll be collecting throughout the week and posting for your weekend reading pleasure. Enjoy the post … and your weekend.

Freedom to Marry Act with an ad by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson. 

10 Reasons to Keep a Travel Journal  because I need to start prepping a notebook for my next trip.

Craft as a spiritual practice with Dani Shapiro, Good Life Project interview because I just finished reading her book and her writing is such a treat.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers - 'Night & Day' because some human achievements need to be revisited just for the pure joy of it.

So I'm not the only one who's thought about Los Angeles and trees, or more specifically, palm trees. Here's a lucky find . From SoCal Focus on the KCET website, an interview by Nathan Masters with Jared Farmer, an environmental historian and the author of Trees in Paradise: A California History.

Here's the whole article How Did L. A. Become Become a City of Palm? And Other Questions About California Trees.

But here's the bit about my bête noire:

NM: How did palms become such a potent symbol of L.A.? And when you look into the future, do you see their iconic status eroding away, much as pepper trees lost theirs?

JF: You're right: A century ago, the iconic street tree of Los Angeles was not any kind of palm, but the pepper tree (Schinus molle), a species of sumac native to the arid zone of South America, with its distinctive feathery foliage and scarlet berries. This tree served as Southern California's answer to the weeping willow. On my book's Facebook page, I've posted vintage postcards and greeting cards that just show just how emblematic pepper trees used to be. Today, I bet most Angelenos wouldn't be able to pick one out from a line-up of trees. (If you want to get a sense of what the L.A. treescape once looked like, drive around Rancho Palos Verdes and Rolling Hills Estates, which still have splendid peppers.)

Palms replaced peppers in the built environment and the psychic landscape of L.A. for a few reasons. First, many of the pioneer pepper trees were torn out in the early twentieth century because they acted as a reservoir for black scale, an insect that damaged citrus groves. In 1930 Los Angeles followed the example of the citrus colonies and banned further street planting of the species.

Meanwhile, in the 1920s and 1930s, L.A. was busy building its modern grid of automobile boulevards, and the city's newly established Division of Forestry was looking for standardized street trees.

In advance of hosting the Tenth Olympiad in 1932, City Hall announced a 10-year plan -- a Depression-relief works project -- to set thousands of trees along major boulevards. Metropolitan foresters chose not to reproduce the familiar street trees from the pioneer era -- acacias, eucalypts, and peppers.

In the age of streetside parking, sidewalks, sewers, and utility poles, these leafy, rooty growers acquired bad reputations. In contrast, palms held out the promise of symbiotic infrastructure: they could provide beautification without dropping fruit, buckling concrete, or breaking pipes and wires.

The species planted most prevalently by city crews was Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta), native to Sonora and Baja. City officials probably had no inkling these seedlings would grow so tall. The species wasn't singled out for aesthetics. Rather, it was hardy and it was cheap.

Prior to the mid twentieth century, when these uniform rows of Mexican fan palms reached maturity, fronds were not a leading feature of the urban landscape, despite the fact that tourism boosters had incessantly advertised the palminess of Greater Los Angeles.

The most visible species was Canary Island date palm (Phoenix canariensis), which wealthy homeowners habitually planted in pairs along their front walkways. Although San Diego, Santa Barbara, Redlands -- and even Sacramento -- were decades ahead of Los Angeles in cultivating a palmy landscape, L.A. had better boosters.

"We used to go down to the Capitol Theater in Sioux City, Iowa, and sit there and watch Bing Crosby movies," recalled one transplant, "and I said, 'Man, is that what it's like out there? I got to get out there!' See how naive we were. Why, hey. They could paint those palm trees in the back of those movie sets as fast as you could leave."

Thanks to the entertainment industry, Mexican fan palms acquired associations with sex, glamour, and celebrity. As it happened, the city's roadside plantings achieved spectacular heights in the same era that Hollywood became a dominant force in global entertainment. All of those thousands of films and TV shows shot outdoors in postwar Los Angeles cemented an association in people's minds: tall, skinny palms = L.A. Mexican fan palms became the icon of verticality in the postwar metropolis, complementing the freeway, the icon of horizontality.

The city won't lack for palms any time soon. However, the era of the "skyduster" Mexican fan palm will end later this century as the even-age cohort of street trees passes away. Since fan palms don't provide adequate "ecosystem services" such as shade, city councilors approved a policy in 2006 not to replace them -- with exemptions given to Hollywood and Sunset boulevards. The city prefers queen palm (Syagrus romanzoffiana), a feather palm that grows more densely and compactly.

Over time, then, L.A's skyline will become less distinctive, with fewer and fewer bundles of fronds floating high above the freeways catching the last warm light of the setting sun. Fifty years from now, the tallest palms in Southern California will be in Orange County and the Inland Empire. Film crews may have to go there to get their "L.A." establishing shots. Or they may just digitally add some high-rise palms.