Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
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| A tear-down. A quarter-acre patch of dirt is worth a lot of money if it happens to be in the middle of silicon valley. This patch of Los Altos was developed in the early 1950s with modest 1200 square foot ranch homes. New owners always rennovate and sometimes demolish completely. The replacements are usually McMansion-styled with grand entrances, pastel colors and chandeliers or Craftsman revival with wood shingles, earth tone colors and long porches. In all cases they are much, much bigger than what they replace.
Border Volleyball. This is so cool. Absurdist satire is the only appropriate response to the current political environment re: immigration. |
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| Payphone in Grant Park, Los Altos. Pac Bell ceased to exist 8 years ago. Clearly rebranding public pay phones is not high on AT&T's agenda. Related: payphone project. |
Eichler Homes
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| Modernism meets suburbia. In the 50s and 60s developer Joe Eichler built about 11,000 so-called Eichler Homes in Northern California. They're sort of modernist riff on the classic suburban ranch house. According to this site, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale have the largest concentrations. These are on Clay Dr. in Los Altos.
Remainder link from yesterday's post: Malls of America, vintage photos of shopping malls from the 50s and 60s. |
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| Sunnyvale Town Center, a dead mall currently awaiting demolition. In the 1970s Sunnyvale foolishly tore up their old downtown and stuck a mall there. It never took off. Even as a kid in the 1980s I remember this place as a dreary cousin to Vallco and Valley Fair. After several changes of ownership, the mall finally shut down in 2003. Plans are to restore the street grid with a mixed use development.
Sunnyvale Ghost Mall is a flickr set taken of the mall in its dying days. I like this photo of the mall directory. Little swatches of black tape cover the vacant stores. RIP Sunnyvale Town Center is a blog post from 2003 which, thanks to a good Google rank, gets comments even to this day of people reminiscing about the mall and links to the current development plans. This Atlanta company called The Forum is in charge of the redev. The site page says the grand opening will be summer of 2006. Obviously plans are delayed. The parking structure has been demolished but the mall in all its 1970s beige brick & tile roof glory still stands in tact. |
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| Here's a view of the parking lot. I dialed down the saturation on these photos because, well, I felt like it. It was a hot afternoon with blinding sun—horrible light for photos. I wanted these pictures to reflect that. I'll have to come back on a cloudy day and risk the wrath of security goons and actually step on the property. |
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| Sunnyvale hasn't learned its urban design lessons. This is Plaza Del Sol, a few blocks from the mall and just across from the Caltrain station. It was deserted & sunbaked. A Quizno's Sub would be a better use for this space. |
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| Lovefest in San Francisco. It's this techno parade down Market Street with a big festival at the end. |
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| A lonely disco bunny. Seriously, bunny suits were everywhere.
Pieter Hugo is a South African photographer with some fascinating African photos on his website including Taxi Washers in Durban, Boyscouts in Monrovia, and the crazy, fierce Hyena Men in Nigeria (via The Mexican). Interview with director of Fall of Fujimori. A recent netflix pick and a good doc chiefly for her coup of getting Fujimori's participation (maybe "coup" is not the best word). |
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| A perfect day on Mt. Tam overlooing Stinson beach. I drove my convertible along Ridgecrest which is this road where lots of car commercials are filmed. It was gorgeous and fantastic. I'm sorry if the photo sucks. I think it sucks. Nature photography is hard. You're competing with photographers who wake up at 5am the day after a fierce storm has cleared every last bit of particulate matter from the atomosphere to capture the scene in perfect morning light with an 8x10 large format camera that has 100 times the resolution of my digital SLR. A warm, mildly hazy afternoon just can't compete. You had to be there.
Top 100 music videos, with embedded YouTube (!!!). Time to catch up on my not having MTV as a kid. 1491 PDF. Article from the Atlantic in 2002 by Charles Mann summarizing new research on pre-Colombian cultures. The article was excellent, as is the book by the same title, which I'm currently reading. |
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| Rodin's Prodigal Son, at the SF Legion of Honor. Again, cheating with statues.
Photo: Stuart Sandford, like Nan Goldin meets Myspace, NSFW. Interview (diacristic portraiture ?) This list of the 50 worst things to happen to [pop] music I found frivolous with the exception of #39 which struck me as profound: 39. AIDS I redid my blogs page and made it more craigslist-y. |
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| Walter in SF
On Sunday I had brunch with Walter and Courtney. It was the first non-foggy day in the city since I've been back. It really does seem to be the case that fall is summer in San Francisco. |
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| Detail of Old Woman, a painting by Georges de La Tour in San Francisco's Legion of Honor Museum. This painting was the subject of an interesting post by Modern Art Notes. He talks about how the paintings have a modern feel, resembing paintings by Manet done 240 years later [example from the Met]. I enjoyed visiting the museum so soon after reading the post and seeing the paintings up close. I don't expect much from museums on the West Coast, so I was pleasantly surprised. On my flickr page I uploaded verticle shots I took of the two paintings: Old Man, Old Woman.
According to wiki, La Tour, though popular at the time, fell into obscurity and only regained prominence in the 20th Century. It's a kind of aesthetic cherry-picking—the artists lifted from obscurity and given prominent places at museums are precisely those whose works reflect a modern sensibility. Trying something new: Technorati Profile |
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| At the San Francisco Legion of Honor; Sain James the Less, style of Hans Backoffen, active 1509-1519, German. Often at museums I'll take a picture of the object and then one of the wall text. I like taking pictures of statues. They don't give you dirty looks and question your motives as a photographer. |
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| I've taken to drinking my morning coffee in a small, glass tumbler.
Update: a Spanish reader informs me that I'm drinking my coffee al estilo Andaluz. In fact, I now recall sitting in the bus station in Malaga drinking an espresso in just such a glass cup. Some unconscious memory of that morning must have guided my actions while shoppng recently at IKEA and led me to buy their six pack of mini-tumblers. The mysteries of the mind... |
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| My first CD player, a gift for my 15th birthday in 1991. I remember the price was about $150, which would be $220 in today's dollars. My first CD, I'm embarrassed to say, was Enya's "Shepherd Moons". |
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| My sister-in-law Karen, Leroy, my brother Will. |
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| They were in town over the weekend and dressed up for a wedding.
Random Links: |
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| Mom and I went to Ridge Winery near the top of Montebello Road in Cupertino. It's not more than 20 minutes from her house but on a steep road that rises 2000 feet above Santa Clara Valley. Gorgeous views, warm sun, cool shade, picnic tables and open containers. It clicked and we asked ourselves why we don't come here every weekend. |
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Unrelated but topical: My 9-11 photos.
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| The greenhouse in Mom's backyard.
Cool Flickr: Western China, carnival rides at night, long exposures, Niemeyer in SP, Azteca in TJ. Raven Maps Mexico. Just published. Halloween in Harlem. Kids. Twilight. Alec Soth on what equipment he uses. Big 8x10 cameras. |
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| My profound cheapness and extreme whiteness found their perfect union while shopping at the 99 cent store: my brand of sunblock! for a buck! I said deme dos! ** The bottle in the middle I bought at Walmart for $7. ** During the late 1970s Argentina had a very strong currency relative to the dollar. It was known as la plata dulce or sweet money. Tourists would fly to Miami on shopping trips and upon seeing how cheap things were say, "deme dos" or "I'll take two". The phrase was resurrected in the 1990s when Argentina's currency was again very strong. Ironically, since their devaluation in 2001 it's the foreigners in Buenos Aires who've been using the phrase. I've also heard it refer to Venezuelans during the oil booms of the 1970s and today. Oddly I couldn't find any definition in English of "deme dos" on the first few pages of Google so maybe this'll be it. |
Sonoma Wine Tasting
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| Me after a few sips of wine. My friend Courtney invited me along for a day of wine tasting and took this photo. He'll make it on the blog at some point, if he allows it. I'm sorry if the pics have been a little so-so recently. A family member has been borrowing my SLR and has been lazy about returning it. |
San Jose City Hall
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| San Jose City Hall. Richard Meier designed. A mere $382 million. The design is supposed to represent openness and transparency of government. In other news, San Jose mayor arraigned on bribery, conspiracy charges. Ahh, the limits of architecture.
The second photo is of these mist fountains which cool the harsh, barren, desolate plaza leading into the city hall. I guess they didn't want trees messing up the view/transparency/openness. |
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 | Hi. I'm a 32 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |