Around the third weekend in February, here in Southern California, from 2016 to 2021, from the archives –

At the Hidden Lagoon (28 images): There’s a hidden lagoon in Playa del Rey, at the end of a long stretch of protected wetlands south of Venice Beach, between the coast highway and the open ocean. Few know it’s there, but all the birds know it’s there. Even when it’s half-empty and the muck kind of stinks, the local ducks and egrets are happy with it. No one else is around. It’s a good place – no people. ~ Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Darker Hollywood (31 images): The clouds had been rolling in all morning. By noon it smelled like rain. And then it began, slow and steady. There’ll be a day of rain – February is like that out here – and just as it was beginning, Hollywood Boulevard turned all Film Noir – odd shadows and mysterious walls and mean streets. It’s kind of cool. Sunshine is boring. ~ Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Los Angeles Cool (32 images): Melrose Avenue between Crescent Heights and Harper – Fred Segal and Paul Smith and Yves Saint Laurent and so on – where young Hollywood actually shops – is an infinitely cool obscure block. But forget the hip shopping. The streets down there are infinitely cool too. ~ Friday, February 19, 2016

Rainy Day Peace (30 images): The world’s a mess. A massive storm rolled though Los Angeles over the weekend – it was mudslides and sinkholes and power outages. But that’s gone. Now it’s just quiet dark rainy days, and a good time to visit Echo Park Lake. It’s peaceful there. Watch the birds. That will do. ~ Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Hollywood Argyle (30 images): A walk around the block – Hollywood and Argyle – where there used to be a ratty old recording studio on the corner – where the Hollywood Argyles, a short-lived studio band, recorded their hit novelty-rock song “Alley-Oop” in 1960 – the one about the guy riding the dinosaur. Things have changed since then. ~ Friday, February 16, 2018

Designer Clouds (40 images): A winter storm blew in – not one of those winter storms they have back east – just cold wind off the Pacific and odd clouds. Hollywood looked different – the Pacific Design Center looked different. The blue and green and red glass walls like the clouds. They’re designer clouds – and there’s the Sunset Strip and the big white Emser Building in West Hollywood. They liked the clouds too. This doesn’t happen often. This is what it looked like. ~ Monday, February 19, 2018

Dangerous Walls (30 images): Los Angeles street art is harmless enough. But there’s a problem when the walls stare back – with warnings of sorts. This started with a menacing wall at a liquor store in Little Armenia, and then there was more, everywhere. ~ Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Special Event Ahead (40 images): It’s that time again – for the Academy Awards – the Oscars. They’ve started assembling the bleachers and media pavilions on Hollywood Boulevard at the El Capitan and the Dolby theaters. It’s a mess, but in a week or two it will be glorious. For now, it’s only a raw geometric wonderland. The Academy Awards aren’t all that remarkable. It’s just the movies. Hollywood geometry is remarkable. ~ Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Borne Back Ceaselessly (35 images): “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” That’s the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. And this is North Laurel Avenue here in Hollywood, where Fitzgerald spent the last few years of his life, looking much the same as it did in the late thirties, when Fitzgerald lived here and had his first heart attack in Schwab’s Drug Store up on the corner. The apartment building where Fitzgerald lived is long gone, but these remain – one Colonial and one an Italianate villa. This is Old Hollywood – and the Art Deco extravaganza is one block over on North Hayworth, where Fitzgerald ended up. The gossip columnist Sheilah Graham lived on North Hayworth. She took him in. Fitzgerald had two flights of stairs to climb to his apartment and hers was on the ground floor. It didn’t matter. He died there, and this is the scene of all of that – the past. ~ Friday, February 15, 2019

The Globe in the Clouds (31 images): Melrose and Gower – this is what’s left of the old RKO globe at what’s left of RKO Pictures, now part of the giant Paramount Pictures complex – on a winter’s day with mysterious skies. ~ Monday, February 18, 2019

At the Core (25 images): Los Angeles has its Historic Core District – the core of the city – where Los Angeles became a city, not just another dusty town way out west. This is Eighth Street at Spring Street. Los Angeles became a city in the first years of the twentieth century. This is what remains of that. ~ Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Establishing Darkness (35 images): There was a parking space in front of the Villa Madrid, the quite Spanish apartment building from the thirties, just above the Sunset Strip. But those days are long gone. Below, on the Strip itself, everything is now dramatically geometric and industrial and surreal. The Sunset Strip is now a dystopian science fiction movie. Here are the establishing shots. ~ Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Long Shots (30 images): There’s a dusting of snow in the distant mountains – the view looking east from Mulholland Drive, just above Hollywood. This is winter in Los Angeles. The rest of America is on the other side of those mountains. Further down Mulholland, at the overlook above the Hollywood Bowl, the view south is the city and on down to Long Beach – under curious winter skies. Long shots with the telephoto lens best capture winter here. ~ Thursday, February 21, 2019

Still Colorful (35 images): Santa Monica Boulevard at Cole Avenue in the flats south of Hollywood, old buildings built by the Technicolor Corporation long ago, to which someone added new pastel colors – but this is still a working neighborhood – television production now, at the edge of a small theater district. Technicolor is long gone, but the place is still beyond colorful. ~ Monday, February 17, 2020

Once Upon a Time (35 images): At the edge of the UCLA campus, the Fox Theater Westwood Village, designed by architect Percy Parke Lewis, opened on August 14, 1931, and has hosted movie premieres ever since. It has figured in a few movies too, because it’s so flamboyantly dramatic. And this day it was hosting another premiere, something Japanese, while across the street, the Bruin, by S. Charles Lee, with its Streamline Moderne marquee, was quiet. The Bruin opened in December 1937, but both theaters are famous, and the Bruin just popped up in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” – Sharon Tate stops by the Bruin to watch herself in “The Wrecking Crew” – the 1969 film starring Dean Martin. She had a minor part. The Bruin had a minor part. But that wasn’t always so, once upon a time, in Hollywood. ~ Wednesday, February 19, 2020

The Dramatic Arts (35 images): The loading docks at the old Charlie Chaplin Studios on La Brea haven’t changed much since 1919, and the studio offices are still the original English cottages. Chaplin was homesick, but this is where he filmed The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952) – but then had to leave the country in October 1952 when his liberal politics got too hot – Joe McCarthy and all that. And then the world moved on. In February 2000, Jim Henson’s children purchased the studio, as the new home of The Jim Henson Company. Kermit lives here now. But so do the ghosts of all the drama on this corner. In fact, the stunning mid-century modern American Academy of Dramatic Arts is just next door, so the drama will continue. ~ Thursday, February 20, 2020

Inspiration Point (40 images): The sky was unsettling in Hollywood just after dawn – time to get out of there – this time to where Santa Monica drops off into Rustic Canyon, on the way to Malibu. At the turn of the century, long ago, that was a lively place. Robert C. Gillis and Robert P. Sherman built an incline railway from Inspiration Point – 101 Ocean Avenue – down to the beach. Gillis had a family beach house directly on the waterfront and all the neighboring families up top were given a key to both the railway and the beach house, so everyone could enjoy the trip down Rustic Canyon without the exhausting walk or ride back up the hill. But the incline railway is long gone. The only thing left from the old days is a curious totem pole – and the views – and the amazing sky. The place is oddly inspiring. ~ Friday, February 21, 2020

The Dark Wood (35 images): Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I, The Dark Wood and the Hill – “I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.” And this is Griffith Park, the dark wood on the road up to the big white observatory, up on the hill. ~ Monday, February 15, 2021

Nightingale (35 images): The wind was howling. The skies were strange. La Cienega was deserted. Nightingale, the absurdly hip dance club, has been closed for almost a year now – the pandemic of course. But it still looked hip. That stretch of La Cienega always is. The camera loves the place. ~ Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Levitated (40 images): Levitated Mass, 2012, Michael Heizer, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a 340-ton boulder placed above a 456-foot viewing pathway, a concrete trench in the ground. This is art for these times. The museum has been closed for a year. The grounds are deserted. But there’s this rock. Now it’s a metaphor. A heavy weight weighs on the world. It may crush us all. And now everything looks surreal. Get used to it. ~ Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Dragons (35 images): Six days into the Chinese New Year – the Year of the Ox – diligence, dependability, strength and determination – the Dragon Gate where Los Angeles’ Chinatown begins. Forget the oxen. It’s all about the dragons. ~ Thursday, February 18, 2021

Long Gone (35 images): This corner of Hollywood isn’t what it used to be. ~ Friday, February 19, 2021