Before this editor went to graduate school, she accomplished two things. She signed a lease on a downtown studio and entered the real world totally unprepared. Humiliation was a frequent guest, as the editor tried pathetically to hold court against a backdrop of French Theorist -Cal Arts/UCLA/Art Center/Claremont- graduates, and “Baldesari is God” worshippers. They could recite Foucault like Ramona can recite bible verses (which she doesn’t do well – but often).

The editor knew how to draw and paint naked people from old guys who had learned it on the GI bill. Which taught this editor how to please said “old guys” AND be a lazy painter. She had mastered the art of how to respond with stick and mud. Now she needed to catch up with the big kids. So she headed to the nearest Freeway off-ramp university and got herself an advanced degree. The editor learned to recite feminist doctrine, Witgenstein, the french guys, etc. And they taught her how to sell herself. The Editor attended openings, volunteered and sent out packages. One Canadian gallery never said a word about the Editors art; but complemented her on the professionalism of her artist’ statement. She never did get her slides back.

btw: Don’t skip the video, you’ll miss the point. It’s brilliant. Baldessari would approve

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Never on a Sunday when the church is full of people
And the bells are ringing in the steeple, la la….

Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday
A Monday, a Monday is very very good
Or you can kiss me on a Tuesday
A Tuesday, a Tuesday in fact I wish you would
Or you can kiss me on a Wednesday
A Thursday, a Friday, and Saturday is best
But never never on a Sunday
A Sunday, a Sunday ’cause that’s my day of rest

The Rose Parade never takes place on a Sunday. Our 2012 New Years gift to you? Our desire to ditch the rules. Pasadena Adjacent & Co present the Rose Parade, on a Sunday, without commercial interruption, OR Bob and Stephanie. They’re at church – kiss me.

Below you’ll find Pasadena Adjacent’s Collection of Rose Parade’s Past. Mostly from the 40′s. Thank you for visiting Pasadena Adjacent on this – our 400th post. Happy New Year one and all. Here’s to a pony in 2012. Bottoms up!

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two “EMPTY” metal bullet containers 

Border Field State Park

The television set was paid for. We at Pasadena Adjacent keep it in the company break room. It sits on a rather short children’s school desk (Trash Tuesday #20). We needed something that would increase the height of our make-shift TV stand. The two ”EMPTY” bullet containers were selected for that purpose. It’s finding (via a dumpster dive) is the lucky result of our recent visit to San Diego’s Border Field State Park. We passed on the tires.

On a (kind of) related note: The editor recently visited Banjo 52. The discussion was based on Richard Wilbur’s poem titled ” A Hole in the Floor: for Rene Magritte” A poem about the underside of one’s domicile  

“The buried strangeness Which nourishes the known”

Pasadena Adjacent left a relatable  anecdote about Japan in the comments segment.

In Japan there is a strange kind of love/fear regarding cats. The love produces “Hello Kitty.” The fear relates to the fact that cats go under one’s home. That “buried strangeness” for the Japanese, has to do with the interface between the spirits of the dead (clinging to the underside of a home) coming into contact with living creatures that pursue those spaces (cats) Then join you afterwards. (Preferably your lap) meow

At Pasadena Adjacent, we love our cats. We let them enter and exit at will. They intimately know the crawl space under our abode. We also love the surrealist artist Rene Magritte

Still following? – go back to the bullet container photo and enlarge it. Look carefully at the TV’s reflection. It shows a man in an overcoat, with a beard, wearing a bowler.

Coincidence?

The Editor would like to think Rene Magritte’s spirit (or maybe Walt Whitman) is living under her kitchen floor.

We here at Pasadena Adjacent love the Christmas crazies – St. Albans, Hastings Ranch, Christmas Tree Lane.  We never expected to be on their list. But with the help of gale force winds, coupled with an eye towards irony, we have become the house people slow down to look at.

We had hoped to make the news

Larry Wilson (Editor of the Pasadena Star News)  - You disappoint me

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We at Pasadena Adjacent live on a hillside with a view. It’s not because we enjoy parking with our wheels turned out towards the curb; it’s the view.

Editors Ankle

And it’s not because we enjoy tumbling downhill to a 20,000 dollar medical expense; it’s the view.

Views are worth going to war over. We have, we’d do it again.

Because you do not want to lose….

to an Afghani War Lord whose wandered too far west…

and found an architect to design his narco McMansion. And a city department; whose function is to “preserve, reflect and enhance it’s neighborhood” – only to willing to sign off on it.

then there’s the bank loan to pay for it. And shifty contractors to build it

Turns out, after a year or two of rain, this small hillside lot can’t support the weight of this plopped down concrete behemoth.

Because of shoddy construction – that resulted in code violations – that caused the drug lord to bail on the loan – that caused the bank to foreclose on the property.

This view stopper (ironic implication intended) has been sitting empty for two years. A monument to a city whose desire for economic vitality (code for greed) surpassed it”s responsibility for sustainable development.

All this kitchy shame is in the neighborhood of “Roseville.” A subdivision of Point Loma San Diego.

A bad year for poppies?

Sound familiar?

Enlarge the editors “view” and you will notice a graded hillside ridge. No longer so. Allow fellow Garvanzian and Highland Park preservationists, Tina Gulotta-Miller to explain:

“On the border of Pasadena’s Arroyo View Estates there is a development that they named “Garvanza Villas” that has become a nightmare for us in Garvanza. It sits directly across from the charming Arroyo View Estates enclave on the same street but these are McMansions. Most of the homes are incomplete and they have essentially abandoned the project to date. Many many legal challenges inside this project for sure. This was before the HPOZ was established for Garvanza in October of 2010.”

Editors Note: The first attempt to develop this piece of land occurred with the previous 1980′s real-estate boom. The photo is from the bust period when developers walked away from the site and left the infrastructure to disintegrate. They’ve done so again.

We at Pasadena Adjacent have joined the HPOZ

When Pasadena Adjacent’s Editor visited the city of Berlin, before Reagan admonished Gorbachev to tear down that wall; there were actually two walls. In between was a buffer zone that hosted guard towers, tragic memories and  a lot of rabbits.

If you go far enough south during low tide, you’ll discover  the buffer zone between Mexico and California. And this is it; a short pier. On the American side are acres of unmolested wet lands. No doubt undeveloped, so we can keep an eye out through our 16 foot high “Friendship” gate. A location where once a week, for a period of four hours, 25 lucky Americanos are allowed to enter the buffer zone and visit Mexicans. Remember Yassar Arafat insisting on Kissing Points for Palestinians? similar principle – longer wait.

The Mexican side is one big party;  a stadium, push cart vendors, beach front hotels, hillside condominiums, a lighthouse and lots of noise.

It looked kind of exciting upon approach. Oz like. Then we discovered something that caught us off guard – NO guards  - so we kept walking. Into Mexico. And Mr V took a hike. And I took his picture.

Now (pause) we TRY not to be the subject of an “International Incident” a description accorded us from an eye witness. But sometimes palm fronds blow downhill. Oz turned out to be on our side. And he looks like Big Brother. And he acts like Big Brother.

And he sent out the troops. And those troops demanded we return to the United States of America. And we were forced to make the treacherous river crossing back to the San Diego Museum of Modern Art.

Mr V says the crowd from the Mexican side was jeering the border patrol. I suspect they were cheering them on.

MVI_0118, originally uploaded by Access Palm 2009.

Senior Smily Face took advantage of our predicament and headed El Norte on a rental pony.

And it wasn’t snowing

True story

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I’m a true “Palm Axis.” Every Santa Ana, palm fronds come to me backlit by the light of exploding transformers. Flying projectiles of harm.

This time around they couldn’t be ignored. On the night of shattered nerves, I was out dodging fronds, in a panic to find cover for my curbside finds. At Pasadena Adjacent, object based esthetics rate higher than personal well-being.  And I was 99% successful protecting the wall of terracotta heads, ceramic parrots and capadoccias. My three faced baby was not so lucky.

After the dust had cleared (via dustpan, hose and rake) I discovered another three faced replacement. My long ago 99.9 cent store purchase. Completely unexpected; Laughing Buddha – Dumb luck

Being the middle child comes with a life-long assigned seating arrangement (or until you bury these people). Your neither celebrated as the awaited next generation or apt to show up much in the family photos. Those four years your sister got the parental units to herself have resulted in a dictorial nature and a fetish for tiaras. You, on the other hand, live in the land of default. All your “first times” are guaranteed to rate little more then an approving shrug. Invisibility becomes you; subterfuge amuses you. Your modus operandi? a camera set on video mode, anonymity and a “tell all” blog.