most trees around here take their good old sweet time changing color, dropping their leaves, turning from an on-fire, bright, show-your-colors type wig to orangish, brownish, winter haze which doesn't truly set in until around the holidays. but in the meantime, it's a nice slow ride, rich in hues which of course can be exploited by pop-art technology and hue-manipulation.

but that's beside the point- there's one tree, the ginkgo, which is different that way. it has bright yellow leaves, which also have a different shape from most leaves; then, they all fall at the same time, and i'm sure it's not random, but it sure seems this way. this morning, on the way to work and school, we sat dumbfounded when the ginkgo outside our house (the yellow tree in the background, below) rained its leaves, dozens every second, even at a time when nearby trees were not especially prone to dropping. the wind was down. it was cold out, but not too bad. it was monday morning, yes, maybe that had something to do with it.

then, i went to look at some of my own pop art. as you know i've been somewhat obsessed with the japanese garden outside my building. this is partly because it's there; on the way from swimming to the office, i pass by it often; it changes color; i'm unfamiliar with all the plants, but they're very orderly and beautiful, and, its juxtaposition between some rowdy construction on one side, and a sculpture garden and my own building on the other, makes it a place of dubious meditative value, but interesting photographically if nothing else. so i've been bringing a digital camera to work, and, late at night, uploading some of the pictures and making them into pop-art, as a kind of escape from reams of dubious-grammar-type papers on endangered species. but, and here's the rub, went to open one that has the little plaque, and noticed that i've been pronouncing it kamakura when in reality it is the kumakura garden. and i'm sure it's significant. it's easy enough to change the labels on my pictures- half don't even have labels; but, we're talking urls here. some have double misspellings on their urls...

don't quite know how to take this, except that, as you can see below, i'm kind of into the place; i've grown a little attached. and i don't like misspellings....a certain amount of disorganization, i'll tolerate, and a little random placement...but, this shall not stand.

i sometimes go through cesl's massive website finding bad links and outdated pages. i'm on the lookout for entire pages i can turn into pop-art, or, at the very least, trim off the system in order to simplify. meanwhile i put pictures i've taken on there. it's my contribution to the the body of visual representation of such things as faner hall, the sculpture garden, and kumakura...lucky, for me, that in these dark times, 1) i'm employed by this place; 2) they have a grounds crew, which, though it may not have collectively voted for obama, will at least pull the weeds out of kumakura and keep the university side of the fence well-kept; 3) i get out and over to the pool almost every day, regardless of how far behind i am on my writing papers; 4) these massive caves, the cesl web, can sit there for days, my pop-art mislabeled, misspelled url's, and who will even notice? bad links, etc., and they don't even tell me; 5) it's a scene that quite easily could be put out of mind for as much as fourteen years, but when one finally opens one's eyes to it, there are very interesting patterns. the snakes in the weeds by the rock wall can attest to that. chou.