Running in the rain. Smell the chaparral scents suspended in the droplets hanging from the laurel sumac bushes that brush against your thighs, cheeks and forehead as your feet dig into the softened dirt when you pass. Hear the pitter patter, the quenching chatter of upturned manzanita foliage gathering moisture, the excitement of slender sagebrush, the delight of minuscule chamise. Dried silvery tree trunks littered on the hillside, yesterday long dead, now like freely drawn charcoal marks that will rot and fuel the undergrowth of scrub oaks who’ve spread their precious acorns in hope of many futures, and today, because it rained, can imagine their progeny rising from the slope, or the canyon floor to shade a hot, sweaty jogger for just a brief second, on a warm sunny day.
Category: unedited
I had hard-to-beat views all day on this ramble through the Hacienda Heights/Puente Hills. Panoramic views of the San Gabriels to the north, San Gorgonio and San Jacinto peaks to the east, on the trek uphill, then of downtown LA to the west from the ridge, with a large buddhist temple in the foreground, and later the silhouettes of ships and cranes in the LA harbor to the south, as I descended into Turnbull canyon. The well-trodden trail cut a wide, packed-dirt swath in the hill that was easy to follow, and still soft and moist, especially in the shaded sections. A pack of crows circled overhead for a while, until distracted by a lone hawk they promptly chased away. Sumac and Toyon berries saturated the trailside with raucous red patches in an otherwise grey-green-brown palette. In short, I had little reason to look down, like I would on a Paris sidewalk, to skip around dog doodoo. My eyes, however, could not avoid the bright orange turd that lay in the middle of the path, less than a mile from the trailhead. Now, you see plenty of fecal matter on most trails in any kind of wilderness, it’s the wilderness. There are coyotes, bobcats, deer, squirrels, even the occasional bear or puma who may not follow the same trail etiquette as your average hiker who scoops before they poop, to bury the deed, usually a few yards off the trail. Depending on the offender’s diet, these piles of shit come in a variety of brownish hues, but orange, bright california poppy orange is not one of them. Red, sometimes, filled with hardly digested berries, or green, even white, when it’s been sun baked long enough. Was this the product of a giant rat feeding on nuclear waste? After all, the area was formally the site of a landfill. Might a dog have discovered and devoured their owner’s stash of turmeric root, only to reject it during their morning constitutional? Or a possum followed and ingested, obsessively, every scrap of orange and tangerine peel that inevitably litter heavily-used trails? I certainly don’t mean to make a meal out of this encounter, and will gladly return to admiring the views, if you don’t mind.
What you do as an editor is search for patterns, at both the superficial and ever deeper levels–as deep as you can go.
Walter Murch, in “The Conversations, Walter Murch and the Art of editing film”, by Michael Ondaatje.
Walter Murch along with Dede Allen, Thelma Schonmaker, David Lean, all great minds of the film editing craft have inspired me throughout my career, and beyond apparently.
I think it was in the LA TImes, a Steve Lopez column, that I read that Southern California has only two seasons, brown and green. The blistering record-breaking heatwaves that have hit us this past month have made this even more evident, and the weather patterns of these past few decades indicate that the brown season is extending. Trees, old growth pines, oaks, eucalyptus and sycamores are dying in record numbers–not to mention forest fires–and the chaparral is gradually favoring a thorny desert-friendly vegetation where evergreen manzanita and laurel sumac typically dominate. The upside is that, under a soft early morning light there is an abundance of rich earthy tones that contrast stubbornly with beds of grey dead matter, and the occasional splash of white, lemon or scarlet from brave flowers. Go high enough and silhouettes of defiant yuccas in full bloom line the ridges like the caravan of death in “The Seventh Seal”. They don’t seem to mind the rationing of rainwater, neither does the wild sage I like to pick and attach to my backpack. It smells a lot better than a sweat-soaked tee-shirt after a couple of hours of trail scrambling. This palette of life and death is both daunting and inspiring. For now at least, until the sun peaks out over the eastern shadow of Muir peak and Panorama point, it’s slightly cooler on the ruins of Echo Mountain than in the San Gabriel Valley below.
Walking Project 125_summer morning- unedited #04 from chris worland on Vimeo.
I had a book due at the library. It was an inter library loan that had to be returned at the branch where it was delivered, the Pasadena Central Library, four miles from home. By veering only slightly off the most direct pedestrian route, I could make stops at two of my favorite watering holes–coffee shops–one each way. The World Cup was over. And, although temperatures were threatening to climb into the high nineties, I could leave early to avoid the midday scorch. In short, I was out of excuses; after a long period of relative inertia, I left the house on foot.
This wouldn’t be worth noting if we didn’t live on the edge of a city known for its roadways not its pathways. A city, a collection of villages connected by massive six-lane freeways some would say, so vast in surface, so spread out, it makes walking it almost impossible. A city where you are what you drive and where riding public transportation is a lack-of-status symbol, where you can tread for an hour in residential areas without ever having to share the sidewalk with anyone. I know, I’ve been there, done that. The more affluent the barrio, the more deserted. I’ve greeted more gardeners, construction workers, maids and housekeepers in La Canada, East Altadena, or Brentwood than homeowners. If you’re into people watching and the social beehive activity levels of more compact urban landscapes–New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Rome, Tokyo, etc..–don’t walk in LA., or rather, drive to one of its hubs–downtown, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Westwood–park and then take in the scene. Of course then you’ll be surrounded by other people taking in the scene, in a carefully manicured, decorated and managed environment developed for that very purpose. People staking in the scene watching people taking in the scene. Fun. But I digress.
The very familiar round trip to the library also provided an opportunity to think about method. Since I started this series of videos the method has been simple: see something, film something. Just slap, throw or drip some paint on the canvas and see what works afterwards, you can always erase, or paint over. But what if you can’t? What if, like a jazz musician, you jump off the cliff in every tune, or like a stage actor, there is no turning back once the curtain’s lifted. Could I strip the process even more? The answer is this and other videos in the ‘unedited’ series, sequences of clips presented exactly as they were shot, and in the order they were shot. Like putting a foot in front of the other and seeing where it takes me, I walk and look, i notice, I film and have a good laugh when I play it back.
They say you learn from your mistakes right?
Walking Project 124_pasadena – up(hill) – unedited #03 from chris worland on Vimeo.
I see Things When I Walk (For Claude Nougaro)
The angel sat cross-legged on what remains of the ‘love seat’ when, after much sweating, I reached the ruins of the Echo Mountain Resort. He sat on the very spot where Thaddeus Lowe, father of the ill-fated Mt Lowe Railway that used to take visitors on an hair-raising ride from the resort to the Mt Lowe summit, twenty-four hundred feet higher, used to sit with his wife Leontine admiring sunsets over the Los Angeles basin. The ageless face turned slowly when I approached. He smiled with his deeply set dark eyes, shadowed by thick, abundant eyebrows that matched his bushy black hair. If I had to guess I would say he was from Toulouse, but who knows. Regardless, I was surprised; in twenty years of hiking to this spot regularly I’d never encountered anyone. The crowds that reach the resort tend not to drift this far over to the eastern edge of the ruins.
What do you see? Asked the angel.
What do you mean? I replied, and aware, for the first times that I’d identified this dark-haired buddha-like apparition as an angel.
When you walk…he explained.
When I walk? I see–things? I threw out. Why an angel?
What?
I see things when I walk. Why not an old man with an angel face?
Do you see what I see?
What?
What I see.
I see what I see. Why not an old man with an angel face twirling an angel feather over his head? I see things buzzing, blooming, flying, crawling, floating, shining, shimmering, I pointed at him, sitting, rotting, pollinating, scampering, scattering, cawing, chirping…
WAIT. The angel interrupted.
What?
Do you see this feather? He leaned forward and said, in an enthusiastic, overjoyed, almost ecstatic whisper, because if you do the world is saved! SAVED, You hear me? Love will prevail! Beauty and goodness will rule the earth!
I see.
Walking Project 119_early spring, unedited # 02 – altadena crest trail from chris worland on Vimeo.
A couple of fun koindinks today. First, I landed on the ruins of the Echo Mountain Resort early enough to avoid the crowds, so I was able to enjoy a cup of chai and a morning read, in the spot where, a century ago, travelers partied, danced, gambled, and frolicked, and I came across this Byron stanza, totally unplanned:
In Venice Tasso’s echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier;
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore,
And music meets not always now the ear:
Those days are gone–but Beauty still is here;
States fall, arts fade–but Nature doth not die,
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear,
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy!
from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, by Lord Byron
Second, I finished this early spring morning walk at Cafe de Leche, in Altadena. Now, any joint that’s going to have Joe Dassin’s “Champs Elysées” on their playlist is alright by me. I used to really dig this stuff as a kid, go figure. It’s really, really obscure, unless you’re a fifty-something francophone with questionable musical tastes.
Walking Project 118_unedited #01 – echo from chris worland on Vimeo.
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