This dramatic three-part CanyonCam depicts an early-morning fog yesterday dissipating from the canyon proper—Laurel Canyon Boulevard sits at the bottom of that cut.

There’s no doubt some precise meteorological reason for the fog to form down there and then retreat on little cat feet: dew point, temperature, relative humidity, inversions etc. etc. But I’ll be damned if I know.

Drop a line to the atelier explaining it all and I’ll share your wisdom. What else have you got to do?

You see rainbows from this part of the canyon about once in a blue cliche, let alone at the end of July on the heels of L.A.’s driest year on record.

But yesterday the annual monsoonal flow kicked up a few thunderstorms in the deserts of Nevada, Arizona etc. which, per usual, counterintuitively drifted westward, and a few of them seeking agency representation barged into the L.A. basin.

Thus the rainbow, the end of which would appear to be have landed at the namesake club on the Sunset Strip where Led Zep liked to drown in Watney’s during the Carter Administration.

Weirdly, just before the beauty appeared, I’d been listening to a tribute to “Over the Rainbow” co-writer Howard Arlen on San Francisco jazz station KCSM and heard several renditions of the song (plus the inevitable retelling of MGM chieftan-buffoon Louis B. Mayer being talked out of cutting it from the movie—great instincts, L.B.!)

Rainbow song + actual rainbow = stupid coincidence or sublime synchronicity?

What the hell is this?

A detail from an undiscovered Hockney?

A gnarly fractal? (Actually, yeah, but read this first. Or watch this.)

Overchlorinated swimming pool water?

ERRRRRR! Time’s up!

You’re looking at the dome over Laurel Canyon one fine day not long ago when even here in the poisoned atmosphere of “the Southland” nature’s awesome beauty occasionally thrusts itself into our planet-wrecking faces and demands: What is wrong with you people? You think they have shit like this on Mars?

Answer: No, they don’t. Think about that the next time you hump the Expedition to Live Earth.

Some hot CanyonCam® action, as I haven’t posted the fabled view from the atelier’s deck lately.

Above, the sort of painterly sky you don’t see as much of hereabouts as one would like.

Next, a couple shots from this morning, when the canyon was buffeted by 40-mile-per-hour winds that blew the ravens around like shuttlecocks and resulted in severe turbulence postings from pilots.

Above, a gnarly storm cell that jetted through out of nowhere (well, from Burbank actually)—one minute it was never-rains-in-Southern-California, the next tempest-time with scary clouds, whirling tree limbs, the works.

An hour later…

We’re in the clear! Except the wind is howling through the stanchions on the deck like we’re aboard the U.S.S. Caine and Queeg is freaking out in the wheelhouse.

*And, yeah, I know it’s way past the 15th and April doesn’t even count but I couldn’t think of a better headline. Could you?

Living in the middle of what is essentially a mountain-range-in-miniature has its advantages—such as the view this morning from my tri-weekly hoof up to the peak of Briar Summit, one of the canyon’s beauty-spots-in-perpetuity made possible by the esteemed Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The conservancy buys up unbuilt lots and takes them off the development rolls forever—a good thing, since the remaining buildable lots that they haven’t earmarked are increasingly stuffed to the gunwales with ungainly trophy houses of the sort one sees in Midwestern developments with names like Fox Parc and The Withers.

Sometimes the neighbors hit their Schwab accounts and pitch in; the residents living around the vast swath of land that became the Briar Summit Open Space Preserve pitched in many Benjamins to help make the deal go down. Now the only noisy neighbors they have to worry about are hooting owls and the occasional coyote freakout.

As for the view above, we’re looking south; those matchsticks poking up over the peak, left, are the skyscrapers of downtown L.A.; to the right, under the smog, are Baldwin Hills and the approach to LAX.

As if the 5:15 daylight-saving-whatever sunsets weren’t disorienting enough, L.A. is in the midst of a hot streak that feels like July—or in other words what everyone who’s never lived here, including me, assumes it’s like every day.

Anyway, note the completely screwed up atmospheric soft focus of the above CanyonCam®, taken just minutes ago, live from the deck of the atelier.

Ominous altostratus over the canyon earlier this morning; we’re looking at rain this afternoon and tonight, maybe even thunderstorms which are scarce around here—the weather equivalent of “special guest stars” the sitcoms you haven’t been watching this fall bring in to spike ratings.

So, rain—BFD, right? Well, yeah, if you live in L.A. since it hasn’t really rained here pretty much since May.

Note that the century plant is hanging in there front and center—no more flowers, but green and budding even now. Still messes with the view, but I’m used to that…

Sunset in the Canyon—Oct. 4, 2006.

Been a while since I ran a CanyonCam, and yesterday morning’s fog burn-off was a beauty and so share it with you now.

The transition when the fog dissipates and the early morning sun takes charage creates the most delicate and compelling light; it made Southern California’s plein air painters want to paint and causes latter-day visual-arts cripples such as myself to grab a cheap digital camera and hope for the best.

An exclusive Day-Nite ™ CanyonCam for your enjoyment.

You’re looking at Laurel Canyon, Aug. 31 6:30 a.m. in the top photo; 6:30 p.m. in the one below.

The latter shows Southern California’s much-hyped late-afternoon light, the so-called Golden Hour gassed-on-about by L.A. filmmakers who nevertheless shoot in Toronto where the light may be less golden but they give you tax credits up the wazoo.

My feeling has always been, yeah, the late-afternoon light hereabouts is pretty spectacular, but I swear it doesn’t look that much more spectacular than the slanting rays hitting the limestone facade of the Empire State Building at the same time of day, same time of year, in New York.

The skyscraper canyons of Manhattan and real canyons of L.A. look pretty good bathed in the setting sun, as we all do. It’s all a matter of perspective.

Just got off the phone with rock-and-roll stalwart WCMF Rochester and “Brother Wease” and a few minutes of whoredom on behalf of LAUREL CANYON.

The gang at ‘CMF registered disbelief at my highly original quip that there was “a fog upon L.A.”—so here’s proof, rendered in sepia for maximum pretentiousness.

You can’t see it, but the blooms on the century plant (see previous post, below) are teeming with hummingbirds divebombing each other for position—fer Christ’s sake, there’s plenty to go around; learn to share, little brothers!

Alert CanyonCam devotees will note a new bit of flora in the foreground of our usual perspective.

This is a century plant (Agave americana) coveted for its battleship gray/blue-green color and heroic drought resistance. It is named for the tragic-romantic notion that it flowers only once every hundred years.

This, like trickle-down economics and WMD in Iraq, is a vicious lie, though not so vicious as the latter two, I suppose.

But when this baby flowers—and it does so only once in its life—it doesn’t just pop a few blooms. Instead, in a matter of weeks, it sends up a mutant-asparagus-like shoot that towers over the benign spiky mother plant—the one fouling the view from the atelier is easily 30 feet tall, and it wasn’t even there in July.

Soon, the stalk is garlanded with Christmas tree-shaped branches which sprout lemon yellow flowers. These have caused the local hummingbirds to go into a daily feeding frenzy—when things get dull I wander out to the deck to watch the little bastards go absolutely batshit competing for nectar-slurping space. Or maybe they’re looking for WMD and pissed off they can’t find any. I don’t know.

There’s of course a downside to this manic fecundity, which is that said century plant kicks the bucket soon after sending up its shoot. Which means this one—they live on average 25 or so years—is about to join “that stupid club,” in the words of Kurt Cobain’s mom.

The good news that it regenerates in the soil nearby; indeed, I checked and there are already three lil’ century plants percolating in the decomposed granite.

The indigeneous Americans heraebouts, having no use for valet parking or box-office handicapping, figured out long ago that the century plant was a reliable source for all sorts of civilized endeavors, including fibers, needles, food and, most important, a fermented drink called pulque which can in turn be fermented into mescal.

Salud…

As last night’s sunset was another stunner, an unprecedented second Perspective Deviation ™ from the usual CanyonCam aspect is indicated.

Note the turquoise coloration to the sky, which always reminds me of the windward and leeward islands in the Lesser Antilles where I was fortunate enough to spend some time as a goldbricking writer on assignment in places like St. Barts and Mustique—at the latter I resided for a week, alone, in a six-bedroom oceanside manse next door to Mick Jagger’s spread, “Stargroves” (he was actually listed in the local phone book under “JAGGER, M”).

A sunset like the one pictured above can turn one wistful; but it also serves as a reminder in these noxious times that beauty still can be found, as can hope.

Hope was what drove threadbare folksingers to Laurel Canyon in the mid-’60s, just as it has driven artists and generations of young people to the places where they know they will be what matters. Even the toxicly skeptical L.A. producer and promoter-legend Kim Fowley said as much in LAUREL CANYON:

“You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in ’60s. And you really wanted to be there because those places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there.”

Hunter Thompson, at the time going broke in San Francisco writing what would become his classic “Hell’s Angles,” said as much, too. Be it in Haight-Ashbury or Laurel Canyon, the members of a generation were discovering each other and with that discovery the narcotic power of knowing they were in the right place at the right time, the giddy realization, as Thompson recalled, that he could point his motorcycle in any direction and be…

“…absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was…you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.”

Could such a thing be said today? It’s hard to reconcile a generation’s hopes and dreams with the grim mood of the country and increasingly the world, to the universal viciousness, intolerance and cynicism that seems to inform every transaction and a social contract frayed beyond repair.

These are not hopeful times; neither was much of the Sixties or Seventies. But, briefly, in both decades, there were moments, discovered, nurtured and treasured by a new generation, that made all the bad times to come more bearable for everyone; and I hope that that happens again.

Last night’s sunset was a beauty and so warranted a rare Perspective Deviation ™ from the usual CanyonCam aspect.

We’ll return to the regular CanyonCam orientation tomorrow (unless we get another killer sunset tonight).

It’s freaking hot and humid here today, so I’m posting a CanyonCam Classic from a week or so ago for its cooling effect on my (and possibly yours, if you live around here) pysche.

That bank of clouds on the horizon is the so-called marine layer which hovers off the southern California coast in perpetual battle with the dry hot air over the desert above and to the east of the L.A. basin.

When the marine layer wins—as it usually does this time of year—L.A. can seem like San Francisco. When the “high desert” wins, we get very hot, very dry days and sometimes nights.

What’s going on today is a seasonal monsoonal flow that draws moist air from…ah, to hell with it. If you’re interested, just click here for everything you want to know about Southern California weather geekdom.

A fellow canyonite writes:

The CanyonCam blog rocks - please keep this section alive. It never ceases to amaze me how often the weather changes here in the canyon. I’m particularly fond of the early morning fog that accumulates in upper Lookout Canyon…”

Dude, you got it. Here’s an ultra-early morning shot, sans fog, probably 5:30 a.m. or so, from a couple days ago…

When the sky’s that pristine that early in the morning this time of year, you know you’re in for heat; indeed, the temps were into the nineties by early afternoon. This morning, the ye olde June Gloom has—and I never thought I’d characterize it thus—blessedly returned, cooling things down tremendously.

What the hell, if you’ve got a CanyonCam shot you’d like to share with the world, use the email in the CONTACT section at right and send it along. I’ll review and post at my discretion—or indiscretion, as is warranted.

Sunset in Laurel Canyon. May 31, approx. 8 p.m.

L.A. often lags behind the rest of the country, especially the East Coast and Midwest, in so far as extreme summer heat. Often, it’s not reliably warm enough to marinate here on the atelier’s deck until the end of July—at least at the end of the day.

But this week we’re getting August weather in May—highs in the upper 80s, no “marine layer” (an obnoxious blanket of clouds that blunders in from the ocean every morning from now until the end of June).

Today’s sublime sunshine is the sort of weather that one who’s never lived in L.A. assumes—as I did—prevails year round. Well, it doesn’t. Which is a good thing, because otherwise the passage of time—which by my clock absolutely flies by here—would become even more alarming.

It’s no accident that L.A. thrives in the interstices (for a word like that you should pay me) mediating hot and cold, shadow and light.

For years, the Southern Pacific Railroad ran a luxury train between Los Angeles and New Orleans called the Sunset Limited, and nobody was confused at all about which city the train was named after. It’s also no accident that the literary-cum-film genre noir is inexorably linked with L.A.

Then there’s that serpentine thoroughfare that runs from downtown all the way to the ocean which begat everything from Gloria Vanderbilt’s swan song to the clubs where so many of Laurel Canyon’s sons and daughters honed their folkie chops into a platinum sinecure.

What other city names its principal boulevard, its Champs Elysees, after the setting sun?

You may not be able to tell from this photo, but it is raining cats and dogs in the canyon this morning. Not unheard of this late in the season—the rains in L.A. usually end in April—but certainly unusual.

That ominous blotch of heavy precip over by Malibu (below) should hitting here any moment now. Which is bad news with bells on, as Hunter Thompson used to say, for Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which just reopened its southbound lanes barricaded for months after a huge chunk of canyon’s western flank partially collapsed during last year’s rains. The city hasn’t exactly done a bang-up job of dealing with the situation beyond re-routing traffic whenever the hillside starts to move again, which it very well might today. More on this later.

In the meantime, gape at the action in near real-time via the local ABC station’s heavily hyped Doppler 7000+ radar. Despite the preposterous name—7000+? Plus what?—it’s actually pretty cool, especially when you do the time-lapse loop thing.

For those of you in twilight time zones, a CanyonCam classic from the archives.

There used to be a faint blue light that appeared every night at sunset on that mountain in the background–like the green one on Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby.

In L.A., where traditions are paltry, there is tremendous sentiment attached to things that anywhere else would be tossed as ephemera; people here go to great lengths to landmark hot dog stands or petition oil companies not to change their signage.

In this unsparing urban landscape there is comfort in the familiar, however evanescent, and Laurel Canyon seems to never change at all. But I wish somebody would turn that damned light back on.

“…no buttons to push, didn’t even rain…” Jimi Hendrix