A California Yankee in King Cake's Court

...is where I spent my holidays. When Granny died in April, Mom decided she wanted to spend the first Christmas without her away from home. She and Phil have been going there for weekends for a few years now, but I've never been. Anyway, they rented a house that was like 3 minutes walk to the Gulf of Mexico, it was nice. It's not warm this time of year of course, but I don't mind the cold. And I like beach towns in the off season, although Mom says it's pretty quiet even in summer. It doesn't have any major touristy draws, it mostly attracts people who either have a boat or just want to spend time near the ocean. Mom and Phil closed on a condo while we were there, so maybe I'll see more of it. It's not too bad of a drive, we left at 10:30 and got there about 4:00.

I shot some film, but these are just digital shots.



I found this at one of the cemeteries on the island, propped against a tree.





I found this beach out at the end of the island, it had a lot of tree trunks with the roots exposed. I think Hurricane Ivan probably eroded that end of the island and pushed the beach up into what had been a stand of trees. Barrier islands are pretty unstable and really don't last any time at all, in geological terms.





There's an Audubon bird trail that leads to a little lake. Apparently Dauphin Island is the only place in Alabama that John James Audubon drew birds, although he drew them all over south Louisiana.



Driftwood macro.



New Year's Day was our last full day, we had incredible skies. You can see some of the natural gas platforms in the distance. At night they're lit up and actually look quite pretty. Anyway, as long as they're not oil--no tar balls washing up on the beach.

Read it and bask in my awesomeness.

Last weekend was the first of what I hope will be an annual road trip for my meetup group, to Mississippi. (It won't always be in MS, though. The plan is for north Louisiana, the Galveston/Beaumont area of Texas, and possibly Arkansas.) We spent Saturday in Canton and Sunday in McComb. I don't have any photos developed yet; I'm going to use the rest of the rolls at Laos New Year in Lanexang Village this weekend.

Canton is really beautiful. The downtown is arranged around a square containing the Madison County Courthouse, a very Classical white-columned building with a distinctive dome. Quite a few movies have been filmed in Canton, mostly because of the courthouse. It's like the go-to town in Mississippi for whenever producers want a really southern old-timey looking courthouse. It was the courthouse in A Time to Kill--or, as I think of it: You can Be a Racist or a Vigilante, Take Your Pick.

The buildings in the streets around the square are really old (at least to my California frame of reference), a lot of them painted bright colors and with original details like stamped ceilings or little petal-shaped windows. Canton has a ginormous antiques festival twice a year, so there are a lot of year-round antique stores. I bought a pair of opera glasses at one, which should look nifty next to my absinthe spoons. BELL EPOQUE YO.

We also went to the cemetery that was the original cemetery of the town, and it's next to the old Madison County Jail, which was being fixed up by the local historical society.

On the way to McComb, we stopped at a charming store called Dirt Cheap in Brookhaven. Hope goes there whenever she goes to The Dinner Bell (of which more later). It's like a Dollar General, but not QUITE as clean or charming. However, they did have Kodak film and disposable cameras for $3. Which for some reason rang up as "health & beauty items". I haven't done any disposable distortion in a while, so I stocked up. (In the same section we also found dirt cheap condoms, next to dirt cheap pregnancy tests. Probably if you use the former, you find yourself in need of the latter.)

McComb is near the Louisiana border, on the Bogue Chitto River. It's actually where my father was born, but his family moved to North Platte, Nebraska when he was very young and he and his siblings thought of themselves as midwesterners, not southerners. I'd never been to the town. We didn't get any photos of the town, but we drove through a fair bit of it. There's a lot of suburban sprawl around the edges--the town isn't big, but it's the only town of ANY size in Pike County (weird to be dealing with counties again, rather than parishes), so they have a lot of the businesses that serve the whole county. But looking at the old center of the town, I could imagine how it must have looked when my father was a child. It was pretty hilly, which I wasn't expecting. I guess whenever I think of MS, I think of the delta, which is as low and flat as south Louisiana. It was nice, I miss hills.

We spent the morning trying to find the damn river (Hope's GPS is easily confused), also stopping to photograph another cemetery we came across. But we mostly stopped in the town in the first place to eat lunch at The Dinner Bell. It's a round table restaurant in a converted private house: you sit at a table topped with a giant lazy susan with a dozen other people, the servers bring out dish after dish of southern home cooking, and everyone helps themselves. Fried chicken, ham, potato salad, turnip greens, butter beans, sweet potatoes, macaroni cheese, and the best fried eggplant I've had IN MY LIFE. Hope sometimes drives all the way from Baton Rouge just to eat lunch there.

This trip made me realize how truly awful Louisiana drivers are. I drove hundreds of miles in MS, and not once did I see someone hanging out in the passing lane mile after mile, going half the posted speed limit. I see that literally every day in LA.

I got back from Los Angeles on Tuesday, the day before my birthday. I had an amazing time. I didn't get to see the Pacific Ocean, because we'd planned to go on Sunday and it rained BUCKETS that day--don't ever let anyone tell you it never rains in SoCal. But I got to do a ton of other awesome things, and I had some AMAZING food. Saturday I had In-N-Out Burger, went on a helicopter tour of the city, and went to the Lomography store. It was like the mothership was calling me home! Although actually there aren't any cameras I particularly want right now, so I made it out with just some film and a keychain.

Monday was The Cure at the Pantages Theater, which was sort of the actual reason for my trip. Like, I can't even put into words what it meant to me to see them again. One of Jamie's friends that had dinner with us before the show and sat across the aisle from us was like, are you a big fan? And I blurted out I PROBABLY WOULD HAVE KILLED MYSELF AS A TEENAGER IF IT WEREN'T FOR THEIR MUSIC. So yeah, big fan.

But before that I drove Jamie to work in her Mini Cooper, then drove myself to Japantown. Driving in Los Angeles was a new experience for me, but it was mid-day and probably the time when traffic is the least hair-raising it gets in L.A. I have now been to all 3 officially recognized Japantowns in the country: San Francisco, San Jose, and Los Angeles. I had a White Peach Calpico and stocked up on stationery at the Kinokuniya Bookstore. Then Jamie and I had lunch, she went back to work and I went for a stroll through the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I wasn't looking for anyone famous, but I did stumble across the Fairbanks' mausoleum.

This is the view from Jamie and Greg's window. They live in Lincoln Heights, which I really liked. It seems like a real neighborhood, without the plasticness I tend to attribute to Los Angeles. You can see the Hollywood sign and Dodger Stadium from their house.

I took this in the helicopter.

Flying past the Hollywood sign.

I shot 2 more rolls, but one is 120 and will have to be sent out to Dwayne's, and one isn't quite finished. I'll finish it when I go to New Orleans next Saturday--it's supposed to storm like crazy tomorrow (the rain must have followed me), so I've re-scheduled the November Lomography meetup for the first weekend in December.