A Photo Blog of the San Fernando Valley. With comment.
Who were you? Where did you begin, that you would end so far from home, bearing detritus like water from the well? Did you find the magic dirt you were looking for? What wide-eyed, greedy baby replaces you come Sunday?
If only we could recycle years like plastic bottles.
This woman crossed Sepulveda Blvd…with great ceremony she removed a piece of paper from her purse…and began reading aloud….to the passing cars. She could have been reciting poetry, she could have been reading a suicide note. I couldn’t hear a word over the traffic and neither could anyone else.
Van Nuys, always more interesting than you think.
Sister Pincock, from North Carolina. Sister Madsen, from New Mexico. Proselytizing on Rayen St.
They were so nice and so far from home it was all I could do not to invite them over for dinner. I had to tell at least two white lies to make my escape.
Lying to Mormon girls! Behold the perfidy of Mr. UpintheValley.
I am pretty and barefoot and I’ll take your dollar bills, just like they do at Spearmint Rhino.
This freeway off-ramp was the first…difference…I noticed from Los Angeles.
I don’t understand why I like this picture so much. Maybe it’s because I took two others within an hour, one in which she looked ten years older, very poised, and another where she appeared ten years younger, child like. Her life could go in any one of four different directions from this moment, and we could look back and say, yeah, you can see it in her face. Vulnerable, yearning, secretive and self-possessed in different measure. To be seventeen is to be elastic.
We’d walked through the secret stairs of Whitley Heights, then we went to Birds for a nostalgic and very disappointing meal, and on the way back to the car I told her to stop in this doorway. She turned around, and for an increment of time wasn’t trying to look pretty. She was Mona Lisa. I suppose this means I like it for what she’s hiding from us.
