Re: corrupted files

For readers arriving from Boing Boing: please read this post, and this one. And think twice before sending a corrupted file to any instructor.

Watts House Project sign

[Art by Tina Villadolid, 2010. Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

When I saw this produce-crate-art-inspired sign, I had to take a picture.

The Watts House Project is “an artist-driven neighborhood redevelopment organization” that seeks to “promote and enhance the quality of residential life in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.” This sign by Tina Villadolid hangs outside the Platform, the WHP’s base of operations, across the street from the Watts Towers:

Tina visited the Platform back in the fall of 2009 and wanted to make a hand-painted sign that would speak to the artistic legacy of the Watts Towers neighborhood and WHP’s vision. She searched the grounds and found an old piece of slightly warped plywood, weathered by many seasons of the elements. She packed it in the back of her car and half a year later returned with a painting that marked the Platform as a site for neighborhood change.

“I chose the dahlia as the main image when I discovered that not only is it the national flower of Mexico, but that when Christopher Columbus brought the dahlia to Europe it became wildly popular in the Italian ornamental gardens of the renaissance. I thought it was a great link between Simon Rodia and the neighborhood he immigrated to. Also, the dahlia symbolizes dignity and splendor, which I thought was perfect.”

Related posts
Watts tiles
Watts Towers

[Nuestro Pueblo (our town) was Simon Rodia’s name for the Towers.]

Watts Towers

[Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

In a post about things to do in Los Angeles, I wrote, “Realize that photographs won’t capture the startling beauty of the Towers, which rise out of all proportion on a narrow dead-end street of one-story houses. Take photographs anyway.” Thus this post.

A related post
Watts tiles

Watts tiles

[Details of the Watts Towers, Los Angeles. Photographs by Michael Leddy. Click for much larger views.]

During working hours, Simon Rodia was a tile setter. And at home too. These photographs represent the tiniest fraction of the work that went into the making of the Watts Towers.

Related posts
Things to do in Los Angeles
Watts Towers

Paint samples

[“Laboratory worker at the research laboratory at the C & NW RR’s 40th Street yard, examining paint samples used on freight cars and coaches of the railroad, Chicago, Ill.” Photograph by Jack Delano. December 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

Looking at the pages of Robert Ridgway’s Color Standards and Color Nomenclature made me think of this beautiful Jack Delano photograph.

Related reading
All OCA Jack Delano posts
Color dictionaries
Condiment challenge

[C & NW: The Chicago and North Western Transportation Company, whose devotees maintain an impressive website.]

Orange tree art

[Chinotto oranges. Huntington Library, Los Angeles. Click for a larger view.]

According to the Wikipedia article Citrus myrtifolia, the fruit of the myrtle-leaved orange tree is an ingredient in amaro, Campari, and various sodas called chinotto. This tree is flourishing in the Huntington’s herb garden.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

Color dictionaries

[Robert Ridgway, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature (1912). Available from the Internet Archive.]

In Smithsonian Magazine, How Red Is Dragon’s Blood?, a piece by Daniel Lewis on color dictionaries, with emphasis on the work of Robert Ridgway. A sample:

Color dictionaries were designed to give people around the world a common vocabulary to describe the colors of everything from rocks and flowers to stars, birds, and postage stamps. . . .

These color dictionaries have a deep, personal and complicated history — even though they emerged from a strong desire to quantify the world, as taxonomic publications tried to do in the 19th and early 20th centuries. . . . We don’t use them anymore because in book form they would be impossibly unwieldy: There are now more named colors than you can shake a dragon at — far more than would fit into a single volume. But Ridgway’s legacy lives on — his book evolved into the Pantone color chart relied upon by graphic designers, house paint creators, interior designers, fashion mavens, flag makers, and anyone looking to identify colors.

How accurate the colors in the Internet Archive scan, I can’t say. But the colors are at least distinguishable. In the Google Books scan, Mikado Orange and Cadmium Orange are nearly identical.

A tenuously related post
Mug shot (Pantone Orange 021)

Freedom Summer

“For 10 weeks during the summer of 1964, over 700 students from the North joined activists on the ground for a massive effort that accomplished what had been impossible so far: force the media and the country to take notice of the shocking violence and massive injustice taking place in Mississippi.” Tonight, on the PBS series American Experience, Freedom Summer.

Los Angeles palimpsest

[November 2012, June 2014. Click for larger views.]

This sign caught my eye in 2012. It’s still being revised.

[Palimpsest: “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” (New Oxford American Dictionary).]

Recently updated

Persian salad Now with less salt. (And perfect for summer.)

Things to do in Los Angeles Now with more art.