My solution? Stay in as much as possible during the wet season and work on stuff at home. Hey, the bathroom needed retiling anyway.
This hasn’t been the rainiest year I’ve ever seen, but the storms that did blow in tended to be atypically swift and brutal—as Southern California goes, anyway—and while the tents that were set up for the Academy Awards ended up not being all that necessary, there’d been enough rain in the days immediately preceding the Oscars that it sure seemed like they would be!
And speaking of Oscar preparations, here’s a peek at the infrastructure you don’t usually see. Those giant prop statues don’t go up and come down through CGI, after all. Better get a move on, guys!
Anyway, this season has been marked by some of the most seesaw weather in recent memory—one week, chilly rain, the next a mild heatwave, then back again. But cabin fever will out, so one day Rob and I braved the on-and-off rain to visit the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in the West Adams district—originally the residence of W.A. Clark, Jr., heir to his senator father’s mining fortune, it’s now one of UCLA’s off-campus facilities.
Almost looks as if we’re south of Tidewater rather than south of Pico, doesn’t it?
Thirty seconds after that shot was taken, it started coming down again, resulting in a rather undignified sprint across the lawn. Hey, fur takes forever to dry, I do what I have to to avoid getting it wet. First thing we saw after bolting inside? The foyer ceiling mural. Ooh, Sistine-y. I love these random eye-candy libraries we keep coming across.
Most of the modern working space at the Clark is in the basement, leaving the upstairs space largely the way it looked as a functioning 1920s home. The drawing room now serves as a lecture hall, while the Italian Renaissance-styled reading rooms remain open for display. They’re pretty magnificent, and it’s no surprise the library is occasionally used for filming. Now, where’s that recovered text on the Priory of Sion?
No, I kid about that. But as a working research library, the Clark genuinely does specialize in rare books and fine printing of all sorts, from medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare folios to Old West publications and early newspapers. The highlights, though, are its collections of 17th- and 18th-century British books as well as the world’s largest collection of Oscar Wilde materials—not just his published works, but his correspondence, photographs, and even his playbills and news clippings!
And the best part of this visit? Getting to leaf through Wilde’s very own journals, including this draft of An Ideal Husband. Turns out Wilde was a bit of a doodler. Who knew? But to think I touched the notebook touched by the hand that touched Bosie—I bet not every rabbit gets to do this.
For that matter, if our tour guide is to be believed, not a lot of rabbits see the Watts Towers firstpaw either! The Towers are one of those singular landmarks that are locally iconic just because they’re, well, weird—are they sculpture, architecture, naïve art, all or none of the above? That debate’s above my pay grade; I just came here on a sunny day to admire them!
The Towers’ story is as unique as they are: Essentially a backyard art project, they were constructed between 1921 and 1954 by one man, Simon (né Sabato) Rodia, a construction worker from Italy who settled in Watts and—for reasons known only to him, if then—began building the work he called Nuestro Pueblo out of steel piping and rebar, held together with nothing more than wire mesh and a special mortar Rodia devised.
And that’s just the beginning of the quirkiness...
As instantly recognizable as they are from a distance, appreciating the scale and detail of these things up close is a whole other experience. The two tallest towers are nearly 100’ in height, yet Rodia built them without scaffolding, using nothing more than a window washer’s belt to clamber up and down these massive things. And the man himself was only 4’11”!
Moreover, while the big towers are the most identifiable part of the entire complex, there are actually seventeen distinct structures, including this gazebo, where Rodia apparently allowed the neighbors to conduct baptisms despite being a lapsed Catholic himself. In fact, one theory behind the Towers’ inspiration is the Festa dei Gigli Rodia might’ve seen in his childhood, but really, everything is so abstract that I think you can see pretty much whatever you want in them. The big towers often draw comparisons to Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia (or gothic cathedrals or minarets), the gazebo kind of looks like the framework of a stupa, and some of the finer details are reminiscent of West African metalwork...the list goes on and on.
Then there are the mosaics, both the ones embedded in the metal structures and those in the outer walls. Rodia made them from whatever was available—ceramic tiles and fragments, volcanic rock, seashells, bits of colored glass. (Up close, you can see a lot of 7-Up bottles and the occasional Milk of Magnesia.) Rodia would even pay the neighborhood kids for materials, resulting in more than one set of broken wedding china!
This was a top-to-bottom project, too—check out the groundwork patterns in the multicolored concrete walkway. Easy to overlook at human heights, mesmerizing at mine.
But the craziest thing of all? Rodia did all of this with only the simplest hand tools, like those imprinted in the cement wall here. No machine equipment, no bolts or rivets, no welding, not even drawn designs. Mind-blowing.
The second craziest thing is that he then abandoned the property in 1955—handing it over to a neighbor for virtually nothing—and relocated up north to Martinez, where he died a decade later without ever setting eyes on his magnum opus again. Since then, Rodia was immortalized on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover, poking out from behind Bob Dylan, and the towers themselves survived the Watts Riots, threats of demolition, and multiple earthquakes until finally being designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. All of which culminated in this year, when it received visits from not only me but Homer and Marge as well. Not a bad legacy!
So having covered literature and art, how about a nature break? Descanso Gardens was holding a cherry blossom viewing, and far be it from me not to crash it! You may remember that we visited Descanso last summer, but early spring is clearly the best time to see it: Here’s the same spot during two separate visits (note the bridge) and you can see the difference is like night and...well, like July and March!
Wow. Look at the lily magnolias and crabtrees! I feel like I’ve photobombed an allegorical painting or something.
As for the cherry trees, this one just off the main lawn was the biggest attraction in the entire garden!
Up close, though? The flowers’ fragrance was much lighter and less sweet than I expected. Still, it was enough to put me in a haiku mood:
Spring cherry blossoms
Thought they’d smell more like Kool-Aid
DC trip: canceled
Also wildly popular: the lilac grove, which was pretty much inert back in July. Not so, this time—a rabbit could lose himself in clouds of flowers now!
And to cap it off, we swung by the promenade—nothing says the arrival of spring and the coming of Easter like fields of bulb flowers! Again, I won’t pretend that waiting out winter-to-spring ennui is harder here than most places, but that doesn’t make this any less welcome a sight. Especially with more rain in the forecast...
Well, I’m off to go hoard chocolate eggs and jellybeans. Hey, once Easter’s over, it’s another six months until the next major candy holiday!
