Tuesday, October 20, 2015

saturday in the park, overlooking hollyhock

growing up, my dad was a general contractor. every saturday and during summers, he was notorious for making my brother and i tag along to his construction sites, where he'd give us odd jobs like pushing the wheel barrel to collect all the trash his workers had left laying around. that, or he'd make us load his trailer full of whatever large piles of crap, (tiles, shingles, smashed up concrete, etc.), were piled in the yard. 

when i was seventeen, my dad introduced me to paul simon, and simon has a song called 'so long, frank lloyd wright'. so, on a whim, for one of my dads birthdays, i bought him the biography of frank lloyd wright. it had a cool cover and i had the faintest recollection that wright was an architect, so i connected the dots, and wha-lah! 

but i started to feel guilty about gifting a book i hadn't read, plus my dad is rather conservative, so i was petrified that the book would contain some expletive, or even worse some kind of sexual reference. so the day before his birthday, i read the book - cover to cover. it was the first time i'd ever considered construction - architecture - and the like from a creative perspective. before, it was only piles of broken concrete and empty arizona iced tea cans. 

today my brother is setting off on his own road in design and construction, and he builds some impressive shit. he's always sending me photos of the things he's working on, and it makes me smile to know that even if he calls by a different name, kaiser construction inc. lives on. 

i don't design or build things for a living, but at some point growing up - nature versus nurture sparked a fire big enough to call it all fascinating; and on a cloudy day in northeast los angeles, that's excuse enough to spend all saturday in the park, overlooking hollyhock.

through skid row on a bicycle

i've always thought to myself - poverty smells much worse than it looks. were it the other way around, i imagine we'd be much more compelled to find a resolution to it all. 

we are often content to live with problems we can see, but seldom will we live with a problem we can smell, (at least not quietly anyway). 

everyone has seen poverty on some level or another, and yet there is very little urgency to do something about it. but find someone who can tell you what it really smells like, and i imagine they have a few things to to say on the matter...