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Taken in the subway in downtown Los Angeles, CA.

A weekend or two ago, I got Nathaniel and Dillon to go with me to Long Beach. We put the bicycles on a bike rack on our Toyota and drove over there, parked in a garage in downtown Long Beach, and rode around. We basically just rode down Long Beach Blvd for a ways. I have more film that needs to be developed from that day, so I may post more pictures later, but for now here’s a few.

One of the cameras I took is a little old camera that takes 127 film. 127 film is larger than 35mm but smaller than 120. I believe there’s only one company still making 127 film and you have to order it online, so I’ve never used any. But I managed to load some 35mm film into one of my 127 cameras and use it, which is cool because all of the 35mm film gets exposed, including the parts with the sprocket holes. Unfortunately, I didn’t tape up the frame number window well enough and had some major light leakage.

That’s Nathaniel and Dillon on their bikes. Here they are again:

Some mannequins outside a store:

An old empty brick building that I think is going to be rennovated (taken with a different camera):

Another cool old building:

After riding around Long Beach, I asked the boys if they wanted to go to Watts Towers. They were up for it, after I said it was a public park and if it seemed sketchy we’d just leave.

The Watts Towers are some sculptures that a man built during his spare time, starting in 1921. It took him 30 years or so to finish them. He built them out of scraps of stuff he found laying around.

Two of them are over 99 feet tall. There’s a community center there, but we didn’t check it out because I was nervous about leaving the bikes on the bike rack on the car, even though they were locked together.

There was a security guard at the park too. He told us they’d be giving a tour of the scuptures soon but we didn’t take it.

There’s plaques in the ground that layout a timeline of history of the area, going back to ancient native peoples. It covers the Watts Riots and we only read to that point. Here’s Dillon and Nathaniel checking out the timeline:

It’s a neat place.

Watts was a really sketchy area though. When we left the freeway the GPS told us to make these turns that took us right into what seemed like project apartment housing. It kept telling me to turn left and I kept thinking “I don’t want to turn down there! There either!” And then it’d get weird and actually have arrows pointing both ways. Dillon said, “It’s telling us to GET OUT! GET OUT!” But I ended up turning left and the towers were right there as we turned the corner.

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In other news, our Toyota might have a blown engine. Yes, our 4 year old car that we still owe thousands of dollars on, toast. Daniel’s going to try taking it apart and see if he can fix it, but I worried we’re pretty much screwed. It completely ran out of oil, and we had no indication until it was knocking. There’s been no oil leaks at all—the oil just all dried up and turned into sludge inside the engine. We would have caught it earlier, I think, but I let Dillon drive Nathaniel to a show (in Riverside) and the boys didn’t realize the noise the engine was making meant it was in serious trouble. I’m not sure I would have, either. It hasn’t lost power. Or it didn’t until Daniel started working on it yesterday—now it won’t run at all. Daniel’s hoping maybe something’s just came loose with the valves and he can fix it. Cross your fingers.

Yesterday I decided to try an experiment in my Holga camera. Here are the ingredients:

The two spools with the red paper is a used roll of 120 film, which is the size of film this camera takes. The camera’s in the photo too, with its back removed. 120 film doesn’t come in a light-tight canister, instead it comes on a spool with backing paper that protects it from light. So I took the used backing paper and taped two rolls of 35mm film onto it:

Then I stuck it in a changing bag, which is the black thing on the far right of the first pic. It’s light tight. There’s holes to stick your hands in and manipulate stuff without light getting in. I unwound the film from their cannisters and rolled it up onto the 120 spool. In the photo above, the edges of the film are sticking out of the paper, and I realized it wouldn’t fit on the spool like that, so I had to move it so it overlapped—all blind, while it was in the changing bag. A total pain.

Then I went on a bike ride with Nathaniel and shot the roll. I had to scan each negative and stitch them together in Photoshop.

Here’s Nathaniel on his bike:

I had trouble near the end of the roll with light leaks.

Nathaniel took this one of me on a freeway overpass:

It wasn’t until we got about a half mile away that I realized it was 91 degrees out. And I wasn’t feeling well to begin with! But nothing deters me when I have a camera in hand.

I need to do a post about last Saturday when we went bike riding in Long Beach and then went to Watts. Soon!

…played mini golf?

Nathaniel, Dillon and I rode over to Boomer’s, a little amusement park (emphasis on little). You know, one of those places with go karts, a ferris wheel, and mini golf. For some reason I’ve been craving mini golf. Fortunately Nathaniel loves mini golf.

Unfortunately he’s really good at it. He totally creamed us. Well, me anyway. I think Dillon was pretty close to winning.

But that’s ok. I mainly wanted to take pictures there.

It was getting dark so the pictures didn’t turn out as well as they could have. Some didn’t turn out at all. I took these with this camera, I flipped the lens on it for that blurry effect.

I do better at the long shots than I do the putting. I think if we owned a house with a yard I might want to make our own mini golf course. Then I could become the Tiger Woods of mini golf.

Hey. I can dream.

It was fun. I was actually in a bad mood that day, but generally, me in a bad mood isn’t any different than me in a good mood. I’m pretty even-keeled. And I don’t take my bad moods out on people around me. (Generally. I’m thinking of the other day when I was really grouchy and Daniel had Patch Adams on the TV. Nathaniel teased me because it was a chick flick, just assuming I had been the one to turn it on. I practically bit his head off. “I hate that stupid movie! It sucks! Your dad’s watching it!” That’s about as bad as I get when I’m grouchy. Stupid Patch Adams with the stupid butterfly on the hillside in the stupid sunshine.)

I remembered when we were riding our bikes home that I had to get Elijah to his guitar lessons, which started at 6. I raced home (Nathaniel would laugh, he and Dillon totally left me in the dust, even after I’d gotten a head start on them) and got there right at 6. Fortunately Daniel had gotten home in time to get Elijah to his lesson, so he wasn’t late. I think the cost of the lessons comes out to about $7 for 5 minutes. Every minute is precious. When it costs more than a dollar.

Now for some reason I’m craving a laser light show. Remember those?

On the heartless streets of Huntington Beach.

Some cower in fear, not knowing which way to turn.

They find themselves seeking out companionship in questionable places, turning their backs on their true friends, not realizing they’re headed only for sorrow and despair.

Until, lost amongst unfeeling strangers, they fall into a drunken stupor of spiraling shame and degradation.

Don’t let this be you.

I don’t really have any. MCQ, someone I know from blogging at KB, is in town this weekend, so I might try to meet up with him. Other than that I just want to go bike riding and photo-taking.

Yesterday I took Nathaniel and his friend Dillon into downtown L.A. We went to the Disney Concert Hall to take pictures. I don’t have any developed yet. It’s one of those crazy buildings designed by Frank Gehry, it looks like a piece of crumpled up garbage from the air. (We just saw Get Smart and there are scenes filmed there, which is what made me want to go take pictures there.) Here’s a picture Dillon took of it. It’s cool because you can actually walk up inside the structure, and you’re outside, but you’re hidden from view. This shows you what I mean.

After that we walked over to MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. There is a big sculpture there all made from industrial metal parts, like pipes and pieces of airplane wings and stuff. Basically a bunch of trash all wired together.

Then we went to Olvera Street, which is the oldest street in LA and seems like a little piece of Mexico right in the middle of the city. It’s pretty cool. There are these little shacks full of vendors selling shoes and Luche Libre masks and hand puppets. We got tacos and took pictures, hoping the light hadn’t faded too much for my film to turn out. The sun was going down.

So that was yesterday. Here’s a bike ride from the day before on the Santa Ana River Trail (again). About the ending: Well, I’ll just say Nathaniel doesn’t take direction very well. His understudy came to the rescue, though.

Soundtrack: Ladyhawk – “S.T.H.D.”

I just googled that song title to see if I could figure out what that abbreviation stands for. Some possible meanings:

Stored Heading
Sheikh Trust for Human Development
Southern Tier Harley-Davidson
Student Technology Help Desk
Strap Tie Holdown

Any other ideas? Shut The Hell Down?

And happy birthday to Dillon. (The only one of my kids who actually reads my blog.)

The secret? Ruin their habitat.

The concrete rivers all over southern California really trip me out. Everyone’s seen the LA River in movies, right? The Terminator most quickly springs to mind. I’ve always felt weird even calling it a river. It’s like, a giant ditch.

There’s a river closer to us called the Santa Ana River that is also made of concrete. I looked up what it’s called when they pave a riverbed: channelization. (Or river engineering.) I thought this was mostly unique to California, but apparently it’s been done heavily in other parts of the US, too.

The Santa Ana has a biking trail along it. Like, the whole way. You can ride from the beach to the mountains and back again. I took Nathaniel and Dillon over to it yesterday for a quick bike ride. I’m sure everyone’s getting sick of my videos by now but I’m still enjoying them, so you’re stuck with it.

Song: Pride Tiger – “The Lucky Ones”

Man, I love that song. If you pay attention, you can see Dillon taking pictures as he’s riding. When Nathaniel disappears for awhile, he’s actually down in the riverbed.

We ended up at a railroad bridge that is no longer in use. (Well, it’s in use by a homeless person—there was a mattress and some things down underneath it. That’s gotta be some prime real estate.) So we took some pictures and then headed back to the car.

Nathaniel’s smiling at me, Dillon’s taking a picture. Dillon was taking his in black and white so I thought I’d try converting some of mine.

That’s Dillon above, Nathaniel was already up around the bend. I kept stopping to take pictures and they’d get way ahead of me. Plus I couldn’t always make it back up the inclines and would have to walk my bike! The trail is slightly uphill on the way back, and that combined with the headwind did me in.

Nathaniel and Dillon waiting for me to catch up. I told them they didn’t have to wait for me, they just had to come back and find my dead body if I didn’t show up after awhile. Nathaniel said if they didn’t wait for me they’d already be back at the car waiting there.

There were some hawks down in the river bed, which is what they’re looking at. The birds looked weird to me. Had huge bunches of tail feathers—almost more like a vulture or something. But I didn’t stop to check them out.

Dillon brought along his new camera and got some excellent shots, which I’d link to if he’d set up a flickr account, but he hasn’t.

Been kinda crazy around here. I have a big review to post for the Opeth show but I think that’ll wait until tomorrow. I haven’t been doing much bike riding lately, been too busy working. But I went out today, even though it is quite literally 90 degrees out.

The first ride (video below) is from my apts to a closed down Levitz. I kept having to stop to adjust the camera because it wasn’t secured very tightly.

Song: Jose Gonzalez – “Down the Line”

The second ride starts at the abandoned Levitz and shows me (and my big butt) stopping to take some pictures and then heading towards home.

Song: The Mountain Goats – “Lovecraft in Brooklyn”

Yes. Daniel got a beach cruiser.

I tried videotaping our first bike ride together but it didn’t come out. The camera was zoomed in and kept bouncing around, believe me you don’t want to see it.

So Nathaniel tried out the bike and we went out at sundown. I wanted to see how the camera would do at twilight—came out pretty cool, I think:

Soundtrack: Ladyhawk – “I Don’t Always Know What You’re Saying”

That’s Daniel waving at the beginning. And me waving at the end.

I have, but only once or twice. The one dream I can remember having a lot of music in was one where my older brother and I went to see this band play. It was like back in the 60s, and everything was in black and white at first, like if you’d seen it on an old tv show.

The band was playing in a park. There were a few singers, sort of dressed like choir singers. Only they were all Satanists and were singing songs about evil things. The music didn’t sound evil, but I can’t really remember exactly what it sounded like. Probably 60s pop music.

I do remember the singer wanted to kill me. Like, really wanted to kill me. A recurring theme in my dreams—someone wanting to kill me.

And here’s today’s bike ride, this time featuring both Nathaniel and his friend Dillon on their way to Sam Ash (a guitar store). Dillon’s on the skateboard.

Soundtrack: Built to Spill – “Goin’ Against Your Mind”

Extra points if you can guess what band tshirt Dillon is wearing. Psychic points if you can guess what band tshirt Nathaniel is wearing.