Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

The past is just another word for something I ’ ve left behind, and while it ’ s filled with omissions—like the Instagram I meant to post yesterday—mistakes and missed connections, it ’ s also filled with an ever expanding array of amazing memories. So many memories we file away in our personal storage systems. Memories that fill up your headspace until that warning beep, better dump that stuff in the trash or archive that old data, transfer it to the iCloud where it can float freely, the barest whisp of a thought, until you decide to access it again. That ’ s how the days pass, we live in the now, or we try to, but the past is always there, getting larger and larger. It ’ s not all good. Some of that past should stay locked in that ancient old-timey journal you secretly keep hidden under last winter ’ s sweaters, to be taken out only on rare occasions, when the house is empty and no one ’ s around to see you looking at it. Unless you ’ re some weird inhuman humanoid you ’ v...

Lost in Thought, Jeremy Lipking It was just shy of ten years ago that I was doing a regular freelance writing gig for 805 Living magazine. A glossy regional, the magazine’s editor, Lynn Andujar kept me busy every month but our April 2006 edition had me whirling. I tracked down seven artsy types, local to our suburban hood, for our Arts Appreciation piece, and while a few of the subjects have stayed with me, none so much as the gifted painter Jeremy Lipking.  Already well-known for his figurative realist paintings, Lipking was fetching thousands for his art, but I was clueless. And enthralled. I’d never seen anything like it. Paintings that were at once both almost photographic in their exactness, yet lush and ethereal. I met him at the Calabasas home he shared with his wife and daughter, frequent muses for his work. The house with its immaculate white walls and rich, dark wooden floors, orderly, nothing out of place, was utterly unlike the artist’s atelier of my imagina...

The Elephant & Castle/Ross Ashmore I’m taking a virtual walking tour ‘above ground’ on the London Underground. Using  my Tube guide and my fitbit® device, my goal is to walk at least 10,000 steps a day roughly following along the Underground route, reporting back here on Fridays with my findings. This is Day 16 This week I’m going to cheat and actually get on the train and take the Underground from Dulwich back to where I first detoured off the Picadilly line. But first, where to catch the tube? At the Elephant & Castle, which has to be one of the most intriguing names for a London neighborhood that I ’ ll encounter as a virtual day-tripper. Not to be outdone by Piccadilly Circus which once upon a time conjured up red & blue striped big top tents and  circus  clowns before I learned this kind of  ‘ circus ’  had nothing to do with bearded ladies and  everything  to do with very busy intersections at roundabouts. While I learn...

I went to LACMA the other day to check out the exhibit by Diana Thater before it closes in late February. Thater works primarily in film, using motion & light with multiple screens. The piece above was inspired by, and filmed in, Monet’s Gardens of Giverny, filled with beautiful natural colors that transform when you step between the screen and projector. It’s an irresistible invitation to place yourself within the art piece, to become part of the show, as these millennials were to me. It got me thinking about art, and about museums, how much they they open us up to new ways of seeing. The first famous painting I ever saw in person was the Mona Lisa, DaVinci ’ s masterpiece  hanging  in the Louvre. I was four, maybe five years old and it meant nothing. A small dark picture of a lady. For my parents the Mona Lisa was on the must-see while in Paris list, for us kids the Louvre was little more than an escape  from the cold of a wintry Parisian day.  ...

I don’t suppose most people go to Paris looking for architecture by Canadian-born, LA-based Frank Gehry but the designer of eye-popping buildings like Los Angeles ’  Disney Concert Hall and Spain ’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has certainly made a mark on the city’s urban landscape. Gehry’s designs are always controversial but after seeing the model for the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris at the new Gehry exhibit at LACMA today, I can’t help wondering what the French make of the creation popping up out of the Bois de Bologne like a futuristic sailing ship, ready to take off into the sky? Model for the Louis Vuitton Foundation; credit: mois For the time being, the closest I’ll come to seeing the building is here in L.A. where the Gehry exhibit at LACMA has just opened and features a dizzying 200+sketches and over 65 models. Some built, some yet to be built and some that never will. And yes, one of those models is, as pictured above, the model for the Lu...

Camille Pissarro, Les chataigniers a Osny (The Chestnut Trees at Osny), 1873 I'm changing up the look of my blog again. I knew my old design, which  wasn't really old at all as I'd switched up the format just  a few months ago, wouldn't last. I know myself. I get itchy, restless. Some women  change  their  hair color. Others go shopping for a new pair of shoes. Me, when I get twitchy like this, I usually think about moving. Over the past month I've found myself looking in the windows of a vacant property I pass on my morning walk. I love the layout, the light that puddles across the hardwood floor, the glimpse of the stairway that disappears to who knows where. I go round back, peer in through the slats of the blinds at the patio door. The pull is nearly irresistible. But that fantasy won't fly. We can't move again. We simply can't. We've moved so many times, mostly when I get that itch. My husband would almost certainly—and rightfully—divorce ...

About a week ago, I promised you (and myself) that I was going to finish up the #AtoZChallenge, a blogarooni thingey designed for the month of April. Ugh, it's somehow June and I still haven't wrapped it up. My last #AtoZ post was   W and Walking in LA because some of us, yes, even in LA do. I embellished that post with David Hockney's Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio , one of my favorite Hockney pieces.  The piece lives here in LA, as Hockney has for years, on the third floor of LACMA's Art of the America's building. Although as far as I know, David Hockney never lived there; something about the lack of a bed and possibly a swimming pool. Yes, he left Los Angeles for awhile, went to Birmingham but he's been back at his Hollywood Hills studio since 2013. Part of Mulholland Drive's  POW! power is how massive the piece is, at 7 feet high by 20 feet long, it stops you in your tracks. There's no way to escape it and why would you want to? Livi...

Nobody walks in LA. Everybody knows that we leave the walking in LA to the weirdos, wackos and the homeless, sadly, all too often one and the same. They even write songs about it. 'Cept it ain't necessarily so. I live in a section of the city where people do walk. We sally forth, strut our stuff and occasionally sashay. That's because I live in a section of the city where it's often  easier to walk  than drive. Living close to major shopping and tourist destinations means that the streets round here are not only clogged with the usual dose of LA traffic—starving students and the permanently impoverished are the only people who partake of what passes for public transportation here in the City of the Angels, so our traffic problem is worse than most major cities—they're also filled with a steady stream of Starline's double decker Sightseeing buses, TMZ tour vans, taxis and Uber/Lyft drivers. Parking is at a premium so there's a world of stuff I j...