Saturday, June 29, 2013

The Colours of Australia?

...or more precisely the colours of southern Australia?


But this is outside the School of Dentistry at UCLA, and I've also been told that it could be a Rainbow Gum (Eucalyptus deglupta), in which case it's the only eucalypt found naturally in the northern hemisphere - Mindanao (the Philippines) - and not in Australia, though close to home - New Guinea and New Britain. 

I had to come here to learn this...!




Friday, June 21, 2013

A mirror held up to its nature

I have some serious things to say about the influence of the movies on Los Angeles. I think, for starters, "the arts" (what Sir Les Patterson dismissively calls "the yartz") and, notably, contemporary classical music could learn a thing or two from the attitudes of film-makers, particularly their concern and sensitivity to the responses of audiences. This Hollywood film-makers have almost naturally without having to read The Poietic Fallacy, Richard Taruskin's critique of New Music's insistence on the importance of the artist's urge to speak regardless of the audience's ability to hear it.

But I'll come to that another time, suffice to say that I love the sense of film-making going on all around me, the fact you might overhear someone in Starbucks in Reseda say into his cellphone: "I'm just off to Burbank to meet the guy who produced my film," or (as I heard in Tampa Ave today) "The reason I used a long shot was....", or overhear people practising pitches. I've come across these Notices of Filming a few times now.


Apart from warning the passing pedestrian that there will be cables across the pavement, there's also a line here 'warning' the reader that there will be 'interior and exterior dialogue'. How much of LA's interior and exterior dialogue ends up in films too, I wonder?



Thursday, June 13, 2013

Enfolded in its vastness

I never knew there was a lake up here under the Hollywood sign. But this city's vast spaces clearly enfold many many secrets.


It wasn't until I turned around and looked at the dam wall that holds back this body of water that I realised that this was where they filmed the first scene of Seven Psychopaths.