"Made in Los Angeles" - by Linda Anne Hoag

Los Angeles offers me back to myself
like a pupu platter at Don the Beachcomber,
enrobes me in succulent fat, rumaki style,
my spare rib Eve to her Adam.

Newly minted I prowl down Hollywood Boulevard
shop windows mirror me, decades loop and fold:
there, in Frederick's, a grave girl in a navy blue uniform
stares at garter belts and marabou mules,
in Larry Edmunds, cinematic synesthesia
sight of patchouli, smell of paisley.

Los Angeles is my family album
Cross Roads of the World slips photo corners
around my first kiss, at St. Thomas Episcopal,
a snapshot of an angel child with cardboard wings
tilts rakishly on an ink black page.

Los Angeles is my jewelry box
whose trays slip effortlessly over the drawers below.
At Crescent Heights, old Route 66, I open today's door
am deafened by the Starwood, shocked by risque puppets.
I slide into the Carmel movie theatre to sob at Old Yeller,
land at Vangie's Cafe, just in time
to fill the ketchup bottles at the end of my shift.

Los Angeles is my book of days
my pages so interleaved with hers
that we write over and over each other
a tale with a trick ending that fools us every time.

(For more on the Keep-a-Breast Silent Auction at the Acorn Gallery, see Edith Abeyta's blog, link at right.)

Jay took this picture of me --

I really like the photo -- especially the lighting -- yet I can read in my face how much had been going on in Pittsburgh the week before.

Jay is Jay Kevoian, a good friend of Linda's.

Taking down Intimate Geography

I just downloaded a couple of photos from the day we took down Intimate Geography. Here are Edith and Jennifer having a moment.


And here is a shot I took from the parking lot behind Avenue 50.

An interesting book and other distractions

Now that the show is down and the estate sale is over, I am finding other things to get involved with. An interesting book, to start with -- Landscape and Power edited by W.J.T. Mitchell, a collection of essays considering the relationship between landscape and its cultural/political context. I really enjoyed working on the shower curtain piece and I want to continue to consider related questions. On the home front, I interviewed a holistic gardener today to begin work on the yard. Driveway unfinished, front yard out of control, back yard a blank slate (the polite way of saying it). Still playing around with the storage unit and its contents, too. My goal is to sort things out a bit and get back to a bit of simplicity around here.

The Great Unbinding, or Deconstructing Nanny

It is now ten days since I returned from Pittsburgh and the estate sale. What a process. Rosemary Dingle, an English lady with a troop of assistants, took over the sale and did a marvelous job at managing the chaos. "Full to overflowing" were her words for the house and its contents to be sold, even after I had cleared out all of the drawers and closets upstairs! Even though the sale went very well, as estate sales go, and I had no real second-thoughts about what I kept and what I got rid of, the experience was excruciating. I sat in the neighbors' kitchen most of the time and watched items pour out of the house -- furniture into trucks, afghans over shoulders, bags and bags of who knows what going who knows where. People were lined up all the way down the driveway and into the street by 7:30 a.m., waiting to be let in. Cars came and went and were parked for blocks around the otherwise sleepy neighborhood. One of the neighbors estimated that five hundred people went through the house, just the first day of the sale. Then many people came back on Sunday for another round. There were still things (mostly knicknacks) left at the end of the sale. Two thoughts hit me: one, the strangeness of seeing things go away that I had known my whole life; and two, how unpredictable it was to discover which objects held associations or memories. Neither of these qualities were in any way related to usefulness or attractiveness. Because I had been so deliberate and so thorough in sorting and thinking about the deacquisition process, I wasn't emotionally bothered by the "letting go" of things until I walked in after the last day of the sale and saw what hadn't sold, and what a mess it had all become. But the process continued, and the next person on the great chain of deacquistion quickly arrived, and his assistants loaded the rest of the stuff either onto a truck to go to flea markets or charity, or into garbage bags to be picked up at the curb. Now the house is empty. My attention has shifted to Public Storage here in Pasadena (where the movers delivered the things we chose to keep), and to the stacks of papers, photos and miscellaneous stuff piling up all over the house that I still need to organize. Our own house has been neglected for a year and a half due to the magnitude of dealing with the Pittsburgh house and I am now hoping to get the focus back to the present, and our surroundings back to simplicity.