The first artist of international stature to emerge in California, he intended to photograph the 21 Franciscan missions of Alta California, built a century before when the state was a remote province of New Spain. He ended up shooting 17, most represented with multiple views.
Among them was Mission San Gabriel Arcángel, an imposing edifice in what is now Alhambra, just east of Cal State Los Angeles — towns whose names underscore the region’s Spanish ancestry.
But these aren’t Victory Gardens, any more than scattered individual refusals to pay rent constitute a general rent strike that challenges entrenched power. A true Victory Garden push would look like something else. It would channel the idled energy of mass unemployment away from despair and into something productive and hopeful, while also relieving stress and increasing access to high-quality fresh food. It would be unmistakably political, even radical. Scotts Miracle-Gro markets Victory Gardens as a self-affirming individual lifestyle choice. History offers a different model.
The current format won’t foster such accidental fusions. Nor will it foster much interaction between diners, which, to me, is an integral part of the buffet experience. I’ve learned a lot about Philippine, Brazilian, Indian and Pakistani fare while standing in a buffet line. Those days appear to be gone for now, which is why, aside from the sheer risk involved in dining out, I won’t be staking out a buffet anytime soon. Not until I can recognize it as one, and not until I can talk to my buffet neighbors freely without spreading anything more than information.
Abigail Willard meets herself coming and going.
Literally. The heroine of Debra Jo Immergut’s second novel, “You Again,” keeps colliding with her younger self in New York. At first Abigail, a married, middle-aged mother of two, assumes she’s seeing a freakishly similar look-alike. But the girl with her hairstyle is wearing her shoes and raincoat, and she is making out with Abigail’s dangerous addict ex-boyfriend on a street corner: It is, maybe, Abigail herself. And her younger self must be warned.
There are times when I remember
all of them fondly enough for them
to be here once more, all around