indicator species of Glendale Narrows

A series of weird activities has been afoot in the micro-climate of Atwater Village where I live. I live within spitting distance of both Griffith Park and the LA River, and often walk or bike around. The river bike path, the Glendale Narrows part, is especially pleasant at twilight–you see teenagers sitting eating potato chips riverside, yuppies on fast bikes with tons of gear zipping past, kids with training wheels, regular joes like me on their chop-shop bikes. I like it because you can zone and just ride, and observe the epic infrastructures of water treatment plant, huge warehouses, walls of graffitti.

I am not sure why I didn’t notice that major islands of the river have, apparently, been clear-cut of the thatches of Arundo and cottonwood trees in the last couple of weeks. (I’m not completely up on the Renaissance court intrigues of the Atwater Village Neighborhood Council, but people are pretty upset about it here.)

Saturday morning I had actually been pretty up-close-and-personal with those very trees, and stumps, since I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the riverbanks, with a bunch of other people, as part of the annual Friends of the LA River river-salvage event. I had hoped that the haul would yield at least a good toaster oven, if not the Jacuzzi that was harvested a couple years back, according to Blake Gumprecht.

There was lots of free stuff on Saturday, and I am pretty sure I worked off my worth in free t-shirts. Actually, I don’t even want to think how many years out-of-school it will be before the phrase “free stuff” stops warming the cockles of my heart. But I had no sightings of real “urban indicator species” such as the shopping cart. Much of my haul was actually junk food wrappers and, perhaps not surprisingly, toilet paper. Yikes. There were other species missing, like birds. But when I heard about the recent wave of avian botulism, I was a little weirded out. It seems like a pretty big deal in the bird world, and while I am not technically avian, I might have fished around that muck a little more cautiously, had I known. I was kind of puzzled that neither the tree-cutting nor the avian botulism topic was evident at the event itself, but maybe there was a word-of-mouth thing I didn’t tap into.

Actually, I think the cleanup could do with a little more implementage–something sophisticated like dowel rods with hooks on them. The image that comes to mind is that picture where Walt Whitman is sitting in overalls on a chair, in his incredibly messy study, with a big hooked stick, staring at a pile of papers, wondering what to stab next.

As you go upriver, the scene gets a bit more epic in its mix of Hoover-Dam-type modernism and human structures. And sometimes you can see the river…I wouldn’t say undulate, but it sometimes moves.

(They clear-cut windmills, don’t they! Oh Glendale!).

Blc ‘Hillary Rodham Clinton’

I have been wondering a couple of things about the Clinton campaign lately. One is why Hillary has conspicuously not flogged her, and my, alma mater, for either love or money. It may be merely that I am not tapped into the old-girl fundraising scene, so I do not get wind of these efforts, aside from the odd TV report. (I like that particular one because she brings in some college-girl raciness, alluding to some of the quainter rules of her courting days. She mentions the “two-foot on the floor” rule, while my favorite from back in the day was always the insouciant “no vertical motion” rule, which meant only that men were not allowed to travel between floors without a female escort.)

Or the disconnect could be that that I live on the east side. Even at various alum meetings and gatherings I have attended during the runoff, there has not been a noticeable murmur of support for the kind of pitch-in type solidarity that women’s college grads tend to be so good at. Maybe it brings up the spectre of her graduation thesis, on Saul Alinsky’s organisation of immigrant meat-packing workers in Chicago, under the banner of radicalism. Or the preciousness of élitism, which I guess claps more loudly to many ears through the ritualised glove and doilies aesthetic imagined to prevail at a single-sex college, than through rougher Bush-style plutocracy. Beats me. She’s not even my candidate of choice, but I’m slightly spellbound at all the easy-seeming resources she has just walked on by, in a cryptically self-destructive way.

For one, let’s start with the theme song. How can Céline, a singer who never even writes her own songs, hard-working siren of industry that she is, compete with the viral, spiral likes of this, that had me at X-ray eyes. That wretched song, in contrast, is just the id of NAFTA coming right back at her.

But the symbol that really intrigued me far more than the lame use of viral videos was the viral flora element–an orchid registered by a grower in Miami in 1993, just at the start of the first Clinton administration. The above photo and the info I mull over were taken from a really fascinating book on the science of plant color that I have been rifling through. Maybe it’s the photo caption, “the anatomy of Hillary” (see above) with the line diagrams recalling those eyeball posters or gynecological charts found in doctors’ offices, that encouraged me to read the flower as such a humanoid thing. But I found the whole breakdown fascinating. Especially with respect to where Hillary sits in terms of free trade and cultural piggy-backing, and where she is made to sit, with respect to the weird obsession with what many commentators see as her apparent “mannishness’ or lack of first-lady-type femininity.

The chapter uses the ‘Blc Hillary Rodham Clinton’ to explain color production in the genus of cattelyas, one small subset of orchids. Apparently there are untold numbers of species of orchids in the world, which variety constitutes of the most varied in species. Many of the “patterns and intensities of color are the consequences of the collection and cultivation of wild species from central and south America, going back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and their subsequent hybridization in a bewildering variety of combinations” (164). I guess bewildering means uncountable, but the debt to pre-US flora movement is worth noting. An admittedly schematic reading of the flower as chromatic allegory might bring out how, apparently, the light-scattering properties of the air spaces of the white petals contribute to the intensity of color in the bright parts, which in turn make the translucence of whiteness more striking, but all of which came from parts southern. The choice of colors in this invented flower, and in the rhetoric of explication, struck me as interesting and not at all toeing the line of straight-up Hillary policy doctrine, particularly vis-a-vis immigration.

The last flower feature that caught my eye was the somewhat frenemy-like choice of the orchid species itself for this particular public figure, given the flower’s skew to the masculine. Why not, say, the O’Keefe-ian iris? If the sky’s the limit in plant hybridization, why such an obvious intersex plant? Even if, as I said, she is not my candidate of choice, I think it’s hard to not think the strange intimacy of minute examination applied to orchid Hillary is a little intriguing. The “anatomy” here, for instance, looking very O’Keefe. And this is coupled, so to speak, with the fact that orchids evoke such “strong sexual undercurrents,” given that the name orchid comes from orchis, or testicles, “inspired by the shape of the underground tubers of the plant” (164). Actually, if she had jumped on the orchid bandwagon and flaunted the fact of being the first orchid for president, I might have been a bit more susceptible.