Later This Week
Sunday. To bed at a decent hour, up without the alarm at six-thirty, off to breakfast and back on an overcast morning, the weather people saying the sun will come out later and we will have another day under a California sun. Good. We do read the papers and read about the rains in England and Japan, the drought in our mid and southwest. We do. Every morning actually, followed by spending more time on the web surfing the news than a sane man should admit.
The salsa dancing starts by the lake at noon and I'm thinking of taking a bath. Pretty exciting stuff for a Sunday morning, I'd say, the day just undersay.
Later. A walk over to the white columns just before noon carrying a camera with a long lens to see if the salsa group was forming up, finding a small group of people playing horns and two or three signs nearby advertising the Treme Brass Band. Is this the Treme Brass Band? Sure didn't sound like salsa, sounded more New Orleans U.S.A. than Cuban. Had I misread the location earlier on the web site? Are we again demonstrating our long embarrassing slide into the darkness, life fizzling out in an ever longer never ending series of dumb moves?
Well, we've come this far packing a larger camera, we'll head off to the morning café for ice cream and coffee and then walk back under the assumption that whomever it was forming up earlier would be well underway by the time I returned.
Passing by Splash Pad Park across from the theater then I noticed a small group setting up a sound system and others sitting out on the grass on blankets who were following their progress. OK. A sound system. There'd been no sound system by the white columns on the lake, but this had a hint of salsa in it, enough for me to check and see in another hour.
Walking on by the white columns again, the brass band was now in full swing, New Orleans in their every note. OK. Back to the apartment to download the few pictures I'd taken and to check the web before again heading out again, this time with two cameras, one with the shorter 24-70mm lens and one with the longer 70-200mm lens. Whatever we might find we were going to photograph it. Hup! Let the day start!
The brass band in front of the white columns was going full blast. OK, not surprised. The salsa band had indeed, however, been setting up farther along in Splash Pad Park. Their web site had said between the lake and MacArthur Boulevard, “Salsa by the Lake” but also in smaller type: “at Splash Pad Park”. OK. An error on my part, but not a totally dumb error, reading the location instructions correctly, but not catching the name of the park. Such is (the current) life.
So good, more than an hour of walking up and down and around shooting pictures. Bright sun, lots of nasty contrasty light, maybe not the best of shots, but photographs enough for a section on ArtAndLife.
Evening. Another Italian police procedural I find difficult to stomach is playing at six, so we're making do with a local news commentary on PBS and continuing to practice the guitar. A very good set of guitar sessions yesterday, let's not blow it now and, if we have to blow it at all, we'll wait until later this week.
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