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Broad Beach Malibu, CA
Structure
The rocks are in the foreground with the cove behind. The house’s spray deck frames the right side of the photo with a protruding lookout seat the guides the out on to the headland. The headland is a finger lingering out into the sea. Then the eye rises up from the dark sea through the mutation of color in the sky because the spray deck and the side paneling of the spray deck leads the eye out of the picture. On the left side of the photo, the swell in the cove runs parallel to the rocks on the beach out the headland. The focus of the photo is the conjunction of four of the five elements in the photo. (Sky, ocean, headland, rocks, and the spray deck.) The rocks, ocean, headland, and spray deck all converge where the spray deck protrudes for the lookout seat.
Color
The white washed slide paneling on the spray-proof deck is of an off white color complimented by the steely gray rocks. The sky builds from a sweeping orange-brown color to a gray, light blue. Translucent white swaths show the clouds thickening and thinning in the sky. The ocean is darkest blue in the distance and becomes lighter as is moves towards the shore. The sea darkens where there is wind and lightens were there is limited wind in the shallows protected by the headland. The rocks have a rust colored alga growing on them, which is most likely dead. The headland is mostly various shades of an olive green (darkest in the treetops), which is broken up by the white houses with black windows. The sky is reflected in the glass paneling on the deck to be a soft blue-ish green.
Cultural Significance
The glass paneling on the deck means the house is build on the high tide mark and on stormy nights and days the spray from the waves wets the deck. The rocks are granite and out of place on the beach. The natural rocks are all volcanic in origin or sandstone. The rocks have been transported to the beach to prevent the waves from carrying all the sand out to sea and the house from losing its foundation. The small size of the swell and curvature of the land shows that this beach is a protected cove. The headland in the background receives the brunt of the north swell leaving only a diffracted, weaker swell to hit the beach. The beach is more or less private because the houses are right on the high tide line. Only the beach between the low and high tide marks is public land. It is a cloudy day and most likely early in the morning because there is still an orange tint in the north clouds from the rising sun. It is also a wealthy area, which can be gathered from the houses on the headland. They are all at least two stories and the modern style: white with large windows. They recede up with hill and have non-indigenous trees planted in their yards. The indigenous plants would be low, brown, shrub-like bushes of the chaparral, a dry, hot ecosystem.
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Below is a collection of the top five things that have irritated me the most in the last week or so.
Number 1, “txting”. Texting has entered the English language as a legitimate and accepted verb. It is more commonly seen in its truncated form, “txting”, because God only knows only much time is wasted by that pesky ‘e’. Pretty soon ‘lol’s and ‘brb’s and “btw’s will have replaced the actual words and our children won’t even know the words the letters represent. I don’t know what this phenomenon is, but get off your cell phone. I am not talking about just talking, but talking and driving. Texting and driving. Hell, texting and walking is just plain dangerous. I encountered this problem about a week ago on PCH (Pacific Coast Highway for those of you not in the know). As I nearly hit the car in front of me and was nearly slammed into from behind as I slowed to a 5 mile per hour crawl as the rest of traffic sped along at 65 (Clearly, everyone in LA has no idea how to read a speed limit sign), it occurred to me that texting was probably not the best idea. Not to mention the fact that texting, while standing in one place, is nearly impossible to begin with. I generally end up with mangled words because I don’t know how to properly use my predictive text. I guess I am not cool enough for you T-mobile. Or perhaps I am too cool for you with my indie sunglasses courtesy of Urban Outfitters, trendsetter of our generation.
Speaking of indie that leads me to number 2, Juno. Indie is becoming the new emo. However, instead of just defining a dress code, musically genre, and terrible teenage poetry, indie has infiltrated film (or cinema if you have a large stick up your ass). Wes Anderson has been creating “indie” movies since back when indie was independent and not an increasingly mainstream movement, which ironically defies the meaning of its title. Juno has moved with a killer soundtrack and mile a minute dialoged from seedy independent theaters accessed only from poorly lit alleys to brightly lit multi-screened cineplexes. Now the suburbs can see what cigarette smoking urban dwellers have hailed (movies are always hailed in reviews) as “the best picture of the year”, thank you Chicago Sun-Times. Funny, Juno is about the suburbs… but how can you be indie if you are just conforming to another style trend? There is nothing independent or individual about that. Indie has become the “man” it was rebelling against.
Continuing on my angry indie rage: number 3, film cameras. In an age of digitALL, holga, the ghetto-ist film camera has made a comeback. Now anyone with money to burn can buy this outrageously expensive fix lens, manual rolling paperweight for $70 at lomography.com. Having recently had my slim Casio Exilim digital 6.0 mega pixel beauty of a camera stolen in Mexico of all places, I have returned to my mother’s film canon rebel. At CVS I was developing the film and asked the attendant if my film would be done by tomorrow. He laughed and said it ought to be done in half an hour. He hadn’t had someone bring film in since last week. It struck me as odd and then I remembered that my mother, who still doesn’t know how to enter contacts into her cell phone, had switch to all digital almost five years ago.
Number four, (oh, the counting continues.) Photoshop filters. With the age of digital photography, Photoshop has become accessible to every Tom, Dick and Harry. I find it particularly irritating when I flip through a magazine and I can name every single Photoshop filter the designer used on a photo. It is just pure laziness. You are a professional. You may fool the CEO, who still remembers a time when floppy discs were a means of storage and not decoration, but any kid with moderate design experience can do it better than you. But it is not just the filters that get me. I am sure the average reader has seen tabloids in the market check-out line accusing this or that star (personally, I can’t keep up with them all) of having weight problems, anorexic or not. Over half of those photos are altered to show the star in question of ridiculously thin or outrageously obese. Thank you, Photoshop. What is with the public’s incessant need to put down those we idolize? It is worse than a mud slinging political campaign. The Los Angeles Times has a photo competition in its weekly Travel section, where readers can submit a photo and story from their worldly travels and every week the best one gets printed in the Sunday Times. In the description of the requirements for the competition is says “Submit unaltered photos to”. If the general public can not be trusted to submit “unaltered” photos to the LA Times, how can we expect the paparazzi to do the same?
But the thing that irritates me the most is number 5, the North Face Nation. Returning to the Midwest or colder regions reaffirmed my belief in the North Face Nation. Has anyone heard of a different brand? Land’s End, Eddie Bauer, Patagonia? Do any of theses brands ring a bell? I could settle for a variation in color. “See that guy in he black North Face?” WHICH BLACK NORTHFACE?! That statement is almost the same as asking if I see the guy with brown hair, however, the brown hair might be more unique attribute. Terrorists might have more luck in bringing down the government by infiltrating North Face Headquarters than the Pentagon. It is the Cultural Revolution for Americans.
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