queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2006-03-06 12:13 am
queerbychoice) wrote2006-03-06 12:13 am
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More Photos of My Neighborhood
One of these days, I'm going to run out of things to photograph in my neighborhood. Not yet, though.
Let's start with Inner Space. I bet you thought inner space was by definition unphotographable, didn't you? But here it is. Inner Space: A Garage Cabinet Company. (And if you think the colors in this photograph look slightly odd somehow, that's because I adjusted them slightly to make them look odd. I mean, I think it would just be wrong for inner space to look totally ordinary, don't you?
Here is the very nicely gated, arched, and decorated pedestrian railroad crossing that leads into the neighborhood known politely as "White Rock Neighborhood" (as the sign says) but less politely as "the Croetto Ghetto." I like the fact that I live in a city that makes the effort to create attractive gated entrances into its ghettos. Granted, this is only a suburban "ghetto," so it's relatively lightweight. But certain run-down apartment complexes in the area do have a distinct tendency for people to get murdered there.
This is a closer view of the White Rock Neighborhood gate and arch.
From inside, you can see certain signs that the neighborhood is run down: Numerous layers of graffiti have been haphazardly painted over on both the brick wall and the wooden fences all around the arch.
This is a piece of standard corporate-commissioned sculptural "art" on White Rock Road (outside the ghetto area). Naturally, it looks utterly indistinguishable from every other piece of corporate-commissioned sculpture for miles around. Also, although you can see that it has lights carefully arranged all around it in the grass to light it up at night, you can tell by the fact that I chose to photograph it in the daytime that it does not look the least bit better at night.
Here's another sculpture. This one is a memorial to Charles Lindbergh, and is located on the former air force base nearby. To the best of my knowledge, Charles Lindbergh had no particular connection to this area, other than his having an obvious connection to flying and the air force base also having an obvious connection to flying. So do they put memorials to Charles Lindbergh on every U.S. air force base? That would be peculiar, not least because Charles Lindbergh vocally opposed the U.S. military's entrance into World War II. But here's the sculpture anyway!
This is an airplane, obviously. But unlike the other airplanes in my air force base gallery, this one does not actually fly anymore. It is permanently parked in front of the University of California at Davis Medical Center extension building on the air force base.
This is an amusingly tiny little Baptist church embedded in a strip mall on the former air force base. I find it sad that although my neighborhood contains both strip-mall strip clubs and strip-mall Baptist churches, the strip-mall strip club is unfortunately not in the same strip mall as the strip-mall Baptist church. From left to right, the stores in this picture are: Metropolitan Check Cashing & Services, Metropolitan Driving School, Headquarters Hair Design, and New Hearts Baptist Church. The next store to the right (not visible here) is a Subway Restaurant, which has a separate building.
This is a building that is under construction on the air force base.
More construction! This is part of a huge cluster of about twenty nearly identical large buildings that are all being built simultaneously in one around one of the freeway exits near me. Apparently they're going to be apartment buildings, but they, too, have been under construction for nearly a year already.
Here is the intersection of Disk Drive and Data Drive. Can you guess what industry the office buildings around here tend to belong to? (And yes, this is a picture I took last fall and didn't get around to posting until now. You can tell by the fall-colored leaves on the trees, and on the ground.)
This is the local headquarters of something called Granite Construction Company.
And another view.
And another.
And yet another.
This is the last of Granite Construction.
Here is where to go if you want gold teeth. Or alternatively, if you are under the impression that living in an urban area requires specialized clothes not worn in rural areas. Or alternatively, if you want to buy coffee or tea from a coffeeshop/teashop that shares its name with a slang term for heroin.
This is the Asia Food Market, whose name is given only in Korean and English, which seems to me to imply that it's more of a Korea Food Market than an Asia Food Market. It's in the same shopping center as the scary shops in the picture above.
Actually, the vast majority of stores in this shopping center have Korean names. This is more of the same shopping center. The signs read: Gift Clothing, Natural Foods Holistic Trade Center, and Angel Carpet & Beyond. The carpet store has recently taken over the former site of a frightening little jewelry store called "Mr. Bling Bling Jewelry."
Next to Angel Carpet & Beyond is the ultimate dog-grooming service for David Bowie fans: Diamond Dog! No Bowie fan should ever get a dog groomed anywhere else. After Diamond Dog come Tax & Financial Services and Metro Realty.
Here's Metro Realty again on the left, followed by MIGUN Medical Instrument (Yes, singular! They must only sell one!), Jin Mi Food, and Metro Financial Services.
And here's Metro Financial Services again, followed by Cho Dang Tofu House.
There are an awful lot of financial-related businesses in this shopping center. Here are Pacific Coast Funding, Sunset Cleaners/Alterations, and Bruddas Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
There's a giant church in the middle of the shopping center, which I avoided photographing, because I only photograph churches if they amuse me, and this one didn't. On the far side of the church is a Korean karaoke bar, which looks awfully staid and businesslike for a karaoke bar, if you ask me. Compare with this other local karaoke bar that I photographed before!
One thing I like about where I live is that wherever there's a bit of open space or a long road heading east, you can see the Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance. Here they are, as seen from over Stone Creek (yes, the "aviation-oriented community").
And here they are from just east of Sunrise Boulevard. (Sunrise Boulevard, in my neighborhood, pretty much marks the border between populated and unpopulated areas. Nobody lives east of Sunrise. Come to think of it, that's probably why it's named Sunrise - it's located in the same direction from everybody as the sunrise is.)
Here's a slightly more zoomed-in image of them.
And here are some cows taking no notice of them.
I photographed the next two pictures especially for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
prairiecity, who had no idea there was a California state "vehicular recreation area" named after him. The Prairie City "vehicular recreation area" is also located east of Sunrise.
The sign says, "Come out and play!" Above the words "State Vehicular Recreation Area" are a series of pictures representing, um, "vehicular recreation" - much the same as the symbols on the other sign in the picture above.
This is a fairly unexceptional picture of an intersection at night. I just liked the arrangement of colored lights.
This is a long exposure taken while approaching a stop sign at night. I assert that it is the best picture of nothing but an ordinary stop sign that anyone will ever take.
And last of all, here is what my neighborhood looks like at sunset when seen from the next suburb over to the east. The mountains in the distance in this picture are the coast range; the Sierra Nevadas were behind me while I was taking this picture.
Let's start with Inner Space. I bet you thought inner space was by definition unphotographable, didn't you? But here it is. Inner Space: A Garage Cabinet Company. (And if you think the colors in this photograph look slightly odd somehow, that's because I adjusted them slightly to make them look odd. I mean, I think it would just be wrong for inner space to look totally ordinary, don't you?
Here is the very nicely gated, arched, and decorated pedestrian railroad crossing that leads into the neighborhood known politely as "White Rock Neighborhood" (as the sign says) but less politely as "the Croetto Ghetto." I like the fact that I live in a city that makes the effort to create attractive gated entrances into its ghettos. Granted, this is only a suburban "ghetto," so it's relatively lightweight. But certain run-down apartment complexes in the area do have a distinct tendency for people to get murdered there.
This is a closer view of the White Rock Neighborhood gate and arch.
From inside, you can see certain signs that the neighborhood is run down: Numerous layers of graffiti have been haphazardly painted over on both the brick wall and the wooden fences all around the arch.
This is a piece of standard corporate-commissioned sculptural "art" on White Rock Road (outside the ghetto area). Naturally, it looks utterly indistinguishable from every other piece of corporate-commissioned sculpture for miles around. Also, although you can see that it has lights carefully arranged all around it in the grass to light it up at night, you can tell by the fact that I chose to photograph it in the daytime that it does not look the least bit better at night.
Here's another sculpture. This one is a memorial to Charles Lindbergh, and is located on the former air force base nearby. To the best of my knowledge, Charles Lindbergh had no particular connection to this area, other than his having an obvious connection to flying and the air force base also having an obvious connection to flying. So do they put memorials to Charles Lindbergh on every U.S. air force base? That would be peculiar, not least because Charles Lindbergh vocally opposed the U.S. military's entrance into World War II. But here's the sculpture anyway!
This is an airplane, obviously. But unlike the other airplanes in my air force base gallery, this one does not actually fly anymore. It is permanently parked in front of the University of California at Davis Medical Center extension building on the air force base.
This is an amusingly tiny little Baptist church embedded in a strip mall on the former air force base. I find it sad that although my neighborhood contains both strip-mall strip clubs and strip-mall Baptist churches, the strip-mall strip club is unfortunately not in the same strip mall as the strip-mall Baptist church. From left to right, the stores in this picture are: Metropolitan Check Cashing & Services, Metropolitan Driving School, Headquarters Hair Design, and New Hearts Baptist Church. The next store to the right (not visible here) is a Subway Restaurant, which has a separate building.
This is a building that is under construction on the air force base.
More construction! This is part of a huge cluster of about twenty nearly identical large buildings that are all being built simultaneously in one around one of the freeway exits near me. Apparently they're going to be apartment buildings, but they, too, have been under construction for nearly a year already.
Here is the intersection of Disk Drive and Data Drive. Can you guess what industry the office buildings around here tend to belong to? (And yes, this is a picture I took last fall and didn't get around to posting until now. You can tell by the fall-colored leaves on the trees, and on the ground.)
This is the local headquarters of something called Granite Construction Company.
And another view.
And another.
And yet another.
This is the last of Granite Construction.
Here is where to go if you want gold teeth. Or alternatively, if you are under the impression that living in an urban area requires specialized clothes not worn in rural areas. Or alternatively, if you want to buy coffee or tea from a coffeeshop/teashop that shares its name with a slang term for heroin.
This is the Asia Food Market, whose name is given only in Korean and English, which seems to me to imply that it's more of a Korea Food Market than an Asia Food Market. It's in the same shopping center as the scary shops in the picture above.
Actually, the vast majority of stores in this shopping center have Korean names. This is more of the same shopping center. The signs read: Gift Clothing, Natural Foods Holistic Trade Center, and Angel Carpet & Beyond. The carpet store has recently taken over the former site of a frightening little jewelry store called "Mr. Bling Bling Jewelry."
Next to Angel Carpet & Beyond is the ultimate dog-grooming service for David Bowie fans: Diamond Dog! No Bowie fan should ever get a dog groomed anywhere else. After Diamond Dog come Tax & Financial Services and Metro Realty.
Here's Metro Realty again on the left, followed by MIGUN Medical Instrument (Yes, singular! They must only sell one!), Jin Mi Food, and Metro Financial Services.
And here's Metro Financial Services again, followed by Cho Dang Tofu House.
There are an awful lot of financial-related businesses in this shopping center. Here are Pacific Coast Funding, Sunset Cleaners/Alterations, and Bruddas Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
There's a giant church in the middle of the shopping center, which I avoided photographing, because I only photograph churches if they amuse me, and this one didn't. On the far side of the church is a Korean karaoke bar, which looks awfully staid and businesslike for a karaoke bar, if you ask me. Compare with this other local karaoke bar that I photographed before!
One thing I like about where I live is that wherever there's a bit of open space or a long road heading east, you can see the Sierra Nevada mountains in the distance. Here they are, as seen from over Stone Creek (yes, the "aviation-oriented community").
And here they are from just east of Sunrise Boulevard. (Sunrise Boulevard, in my neighborhood, pretty much marks the border between populated and unpopulated areas. Nobody lives east of Sunrise. Come to think of it, that's probably why it's named Sunrise - it's located in the same direction from everybody as the sunrise is.)
Here's a slightly more zoomed-in image of them.
And here are some cows taking no notice of them.
I photographed the next two pictures especially for
prairiecity, who had no idea there was a California state "vehicular recreation area" named after him. The Prairie City "vehicular recreation area" is also located east of Sunrise.The sign says, "Come out and play!" Above the words "State Vehicular Recreation Area" are a series of pictures representing, um, "vehicular recreation" - much the same as the symbols on the other sign in the picture above.
This is a fairly unexceptional picture of an intersection at night. I just liked the arrangement of colored lights.
This is a long exposure taken while approaching a stop sign at night. I assert that it is the best picture of nothing but an ordinary stop sign that anyone will ever take.
And last of all, here is what my neighborhood looks like at sunset when seen from the next suburb over to the east. The mountains in the distance in this picture are the coast range; the Sierra Nevadas were behind me while I was taking this picture.
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(sighs)
Sculptures and memorials and paintings of Charles Lindbergh are seemingly everywhere. There's one in the Florida Everglades which is particularly odd since I can't think of a single genuine connection between Lindbergh and the Everglades. Were I still in anthropology, I'd be tempted to do a study of the various Lindbergh memorials and their meanings.
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go look.
Re: go look.
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On a completely related note, I like it when you post pictures of your neighborhood. I love it that you have mountains so close. I've never lived near the mountains, always near the beach (which you take for granted when it's so close). But I'm always kind of amazed at the sameness yet the differentness of the places where we live, and you always find aesthetically interesting things to photograph.
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See, I really love cats, but I also have a really deep horror of expenditures of effort and money. So there's this ongoing struggle, and the result is always to keep postponing it "just a little longer . . ."
Probably the most effective way to resolve the dilemma would be to buy a bunch of cat toys, and then justify getting a cat on the grounds that if I don't, all the money spent on the cat toys will be wasted.
I'm glad you like the pictures of my neighborhood. I really can't imagine how a beach could be nearly as much taken for granted as the mountains are - at least the ability to see the mountains in the distance from here. I hardly ever think at all baout being able to see them from here. I do think somewhat more about being able to drive to them from here, particularly because my parents live partway up them, so I drive partway up them on a regular basis. I don't drive way up them more than once every several years, though.
I am always interested to find out how other people's neighborhoods are the same as or different from my own. Having lived here all my life, I don't really have any other way of knowing!