Bonnie Hawthorne

Poor old Station Fire. Why just a month ago you were the hottest thing in town. Everybody knew your name. You put fear into the hearts of women and children. Men envied your power. Fierce mountain lions and even bears ran from your fury. Now you’re just a puny little has-been, more of an annoyance than anything. What’s that? Yes, you’re right. You will go down in history as the worst fire in LA County. Sure, you destroyed one of the oldest National Forests in the country. Do you think anybody cares about that? To most LA residents, that place was just one big body dump. It’s where the snow sits in the winter so you can look at it from downtown. Nobody ever actually went up there. Nobody ever hiked those beautiful trails or saw those amazing waterfalls. Nobody ever drove up late at night with their friends to watch a meteor shower. So see, you and your asshole arsonist buddy have accomplished nothing. Now beat it.

Peter Figen photo used by permission http://www.peterfigen.com

P.S. Well, the dumb old Station Fire really showed me. I accidentally left my car’s moon room open over night. Today, after writing this,  I found a car full of ash. Really really tired of this fire. But not looking forward to the inevitable mudslides right behind it.

As I sit here at my desk, the sound drifting through my screen door is of this man (my neighbor) putting an old IBM Selectric through its paces. It’s so great to hear the sound of an actual typewriter. When I moved in six years ago, his wife told me that typewriter repair was a dying business. I was surprised that it wasn’t already dead. But there are enough Selectric fanboys (libraries, insurance offices that use triplicate forms, weirdo writers) to make it worthwhile to keep a garage full of parts. And of this I am glad.

Here, I’ll even quote my press release for you:

Gallery Apodaca presents new photographs by Los Angeles-based photographer Bonnie Hawthorne. The series, entitled “They Bloom in June Gloom: an Appreciation of the Mighty Jacaranda,” features 20 photographs of the stunning trees that brighten Southern California with their purple blossoms every spring.

Jacaranda trees were a horticultural trend in Southern California in the 1920s and ‘30s. Thriving despite little attention from humans, stately Jacarandas are now found in abandoned lots and in rundown, formerly fashionable neighborhoods. It is this contrast of beauty amid decay that inspired this series of photographs.

Though currently living in Los Angeles, Bonnie Hawthorne has ties to the Monterey Peninsula. Her last exhibit of photographs at the Pacific Grove Art Center in 1981 was entitled “ViewMasters: Portable Realities for a Perfect Vacation.” Since then she has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and is again in Los Angeles.

I lived in San Francisco during the dot.com boom of the mid ’90s. In those days, “blog” was a dirty word to the internet geeks I knew. Not sure why. But one of them actually said to me, “whatever you do, don’t start a blog,” in the way someone might say don’t have unprotected sex with a stranger in a truck stop. I have heeded that advice for no good reason (the blogging part) until today. Luckily, Twitter and its harsh 140 character discipline has broken me. I am no longer capable of writing long-winded blah blah blah prose. But feel free to write long-winded blah blah blah comments. I have approval control! muahahaha.