Public Eye

At the Kidspace benefit Saturday night in massive tents in the Parkway Grill parking lot, The Sky's the Limit was the theme, and the costumes -- most everyone in the crowd of many hundreds were good sports and wore them, many very complex -- were themed Cosmic Attire.

That meant a lot of Mr. Spocks, Captain Kirks and, yes, "Star Wars" stormtroopers.

Our host Bob O'Rourke got a clean suit from JPL's satellite rooms. Marketing guru Brad Ball wore his fancy baseball jacket from back when he oversaw the selling of, yikes, "Battleship Earth" for John Travolta and company. I strung around my neck the framed certificate our old family friend Eleanor Helin, the late JPL astronomer, gave me when she named a heavenly body "Larrywilson" as a very kind birthday present 11 years ago. Eleanor was the world's leading discoverer of asteroids, and she could dub them as she saw fit. I keep watching the skies for my little rock ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Gourmet Gulch on Shattuck in Berkeley is both getting too crowded and spinning off restaurants like crazy to more affordable storefronts in Oakland.

I get up to the East Bay five or six weekends a year on business for the nonprofit I chair. The best restaurant in the world, so far as I'm concerned, is Camino on Grand, owned and run by Allison and Russ, two Chez Panisse graduates. Absinthe, duck cracklings, big local sardines and more duck with a Beaujolais at a business dinner Friday night -- yikes. You won't find better food, or food served more down home and easy, either: long communal tables made of huge planks of found redwood.

Saturday night after the five-hour board meeting it was more seriously downtown, the Broadway-based neighborhood for which Jerry Brown when he was mayor set a goal of 10,000 new residents. My dinner companion, artist Keith Wilson, related the story: "And how many of those units would be 'affordable,' Mr. Mayor?" "None! so far as I am concerned. I want people who can spend and make the place safe!" He got it. The streets were bright and amazing, fancy but welcoming joints on every corner, and the restaurants and clubs were more truly integrated -- African Americans, whites, Asians and Latinos, with most tables actually not segregated in the least -- than any I've ever seen in the world.

After dinner Saturday night at a cool spot I'll remember the name of any minute owned by a Korean-American architect who showed us around -- the sign at the door, "No hats," was a leftover from the pimped-out days of the neighborhood -- we went back to the Grand Lake neighborhood for prosecco and cannoli at a spot, pictures above and below, called Boot and Shoe Service, same signage, same moniker as the business it took over -- why change the funky name? It's also run by a graduate of the Chez Panisse pizza oven.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes I think Caltrans and other government agencies get a little ... trigger-happy about closing the Angeles Crest Highway into our mountains after the various disasters that plague the forest-area roads. Fire. Floods. Motorcycles down.

But Lori Paul of Altadena forwards this photo, courtesy of Mike McIntyre, the district ranger, shot during the last big storm less than two weeks ago.

The highway is clearly without support and dangerous.

So be careful up there. It's just another reminder of how long-lasting will be the effects of the Station Fire.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Caltech's basketball team, above, just won its first conference road game, ever, against the Pomona Pitzer Sagehens, 76-61. See my Friday column for the details ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Not only are the 12 days of Christmas long past -- we're closing in on Valentine's Day. And yet the sidewalks and gutters of west Pasadena are still lined with browning yuletide trees that, in theory, the city's Public Works Department or its hired guns are going to pick up and mulch, as has been done for years.

So what gives? One neighborhood resident wrote to say that there are practically betting pools going on as to whether the pines are going to have to be taken back in by their hope-to-be-former owners and stuffed into the greeenwaste bins over the next few months.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

This past weekend was the last time to view Ingres's painting "Comtesse d'Hausonville" at the Norton Simon in Pasadena before it heads back to the Frick Collection in New York City.

The crowded parking lot -- I grabbed a spot across the street -- seemed to indicate that lots of people had come to Pasadena to do just that. I dropped in while running errands because I hadn't been to the Simon since the painting arrived in November and figured I better catch it. I don't know from Ingres, really, or any early-19th-century painters; it was more as a kind of duty.

But when I walked down the Old Masters corridor, where I usually don't tread in the museum, there were just a few people checking out the old girl, whose rendering has been described as a "rainbow of blues." Beautiful.

There was a nice little tribute to the late Jennifer Jones Simon in the front hall.

I feel on a weekend visit the way foreigners used to tourism must feel in their own museums -- in the minority. Most of the hundreds of people there were speaking a language other than English -- Japanese, French, Arabic among them.

Starving, so we got some soup from the stand near the garden, which food, bless her heart, wouldn't have been possible without Jennifer Jones -- though she had to wait for Norton to die. He had locked up the auditorium and banned the notion of food or other frivolities when he took over the late, lamented Pasadena Art Museum. She finally was able to provide some sustenance.

Though the rains were long gone, and a walk down the garden path designed by Nancy Goslee Power would have been nice, a stern guard prevented that -- as if the decomposed granite wasn't quite ready for our shoes after the storms. Norton would have liked that restriction of access.

But his art -- can't fault that.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christopher Nyerges forwards this photo from early this morning after the reopening of Canyon Crest, the only road into the farthest northwest neighborhood of Altadena, The Meadows. Monday afternoon and evening the road was closed down because those logs in the picture had blocked off the culverts that run under the road and black mud piled up on its surface, making it impassable to cars.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are other 11th commandments. Perhaps there are others memorialized in mock-Gaelic script. But there is none more worth following, or posted in a more endearing location, than this one on the corner of Mary's Market in Sierra Madre Canyon, where I did my Christmas shopping -- E. Waldo Ward preserved fruit products galore! -- and where I resisted the temptation to push the Cooper to zoom. It's too idyllic a glade.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At last week's Texas Exes party on Brookside Golf Course outside the Rose Bowl before the BCS game, amid a sea of burnt orange, this father-daughter team included the only person wearing anything resembling crimson within hundreds of yards.

And this fellow below, name of John "No Relation We Know Of" Wilson, told my Longhorn cousin Susie O'Brien, who pulled him over toward my lens, that he had found this Hook 'Em fabric and had these slacks custom-made:

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's a Metro bus on fire across the street from the Star-News right now -- that's 4.20 Wednesday afternoon. Talk about your easy pickings for the journalistas! Walt's better shots will be up soon.

One of those natural-gas buses -- so Janette Williams noted the irony, considering all the smoke, in its motto: "Nation's Largest Clean-Air Fleet."

It stinks of burning plastic around here.

As for me, since all the passengers had been evacuated and no one was in any danger in the surrounding stores over by Taste of Bangkok, I was mostly worried those leaping flames were gonna catch that huge and magnificent ficus tree on fire, giving the city's chainsaw-happy crew a chance to get rid of it, as they'd so like to ...

But the FD came and knocked it down to save all concerned, including the arboreal.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pasadena bon vivant, financial advisor, Rose Bowl Operating Company board member and wearer of fine Jack Purcell products Ross Selvidge sends over the world's most out-of-focus photo and this explainer:

One famous, one somewhat less famous... We are both pilots (with airplane and glider ratings) but I think he has more hours.

Taken at the Rose Bowl Kickoff Luncheon, 12-31-09. "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who safely landed the airliner in the Hudson River in January, is Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade for 2010.

While attending the luncheon more than a dozen groups of people asked me for my (Sully's) autograph and to have their photo taken with me. Lots of fun

By the end of the luncheon I was expecting people would be asking Sully for my autograph

So, when I finally meet the guy the camera moves and the exposure is wrong!

These "Sully sightings" have been going on since the beginning of the year. At Parkway Grill in Pasadena on Easter Sunday, the day an article on Sully appeared in Parade Magazine, a fellow came up and sheepishly asked "Are you a commercial pilot?" Last month in the Oakland airport a woman approached me and asked "Are you a famous pilot?" At the Kickoff Luncheon three former Tournament of Roses presidents in their red jackets (one of whom is a neighbor!) waved me over so they could have their picture taken with me. This weekend I may prowl Old Pasadena sporting my best Sully smile and see if I can score a couple of free meals at some of our fine restaurants.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I don't know if some intrepid Sierra Madreans went up to Baldy and got a truckload, or if this is the crushed leftover slush from a late night at the Buccaneer, but this old boy at Baldwin and the Boulevard is the sorriest snowman in the San Gabriel Valley, so far as I can tell. Of course, maybe he's the onliest snowman in the SGV, too. And it's true that the lime eyes are a nice touch. This morning he was melting away in the wind and picking up all kindsa grit from the air ... Merry Christmas anyway!

Posted by Larry Wilson at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

That's Alex Kritselis, left, dean of the arts at PCC, and his wife Joey at the Thursday night opening of his multi-media installation piece "Don't Blow It / A Rising Tide" at One Colorado. This part's in the windows of the now-shuttered Gordon Biersch inside the courtyard, but there are also crazy watery slide shows in the shop windows along Fair Oaks north of the J. Crew store and in the alleyway between Patagonia and Il Fornaio. In the consumerist frenzy that is December in Old Pasadena it's nice to see some art that makes people stop and go, "What's that?" People who weren't in on the party were checking it out, shopping bags in hand. Without being overly literal or bombastic, the images are all of oceanic waters coming into contact with higher ground, such as the cliffs in the former brewery windows, and of flotsam and jetsam floating through the rising tides in some future in which the oceans are quite a bit higher than they are today. On view through Jan. 3.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reading Partners, the nonprofit I wrote about last spring that has established a fine foothold at the PUSD's Washington Elementary -- motto, "one tutor. one child. infinite possibilities." -- held a pre-Christmas Reading Recital Tuesday night on campus.

Like a screachy-violin recital for the little ones, except easier to listen to. Most of the 52 students in the program, who are matched up a couple of times a week with volunteer adult tutors who help them one-on-one with reading skills, showed up to show off for their families how their reading skills have improved over the semester.

That's Carlton above, whose mom was beaming with pride to Erica and Jackie, the RP staffers. "You just can't believe what a difference it's made" in Carlton's reading prowess, she said.

There are still 38 open spots for students in the program, and always room for tutors. Like to get involved, either way? Write erica@readingpartners.org or call (323) 572-3877.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)