Five Minute Friday :: Benefits

• Five Minute Friday :: Benefit Linkup

I've been in contexts where asking people if they receive benefits or bennies (not the drug) is common. Bene, benefits are about goodness, wellness, getting the good stuff and benefiting from it. Doing well by getting the goods.

Like EBT-Food Stamps, some unearned benefits are an essential, life-giving grace.

The Godspell version of Psalm 103 pretty much comes from hymn 293 in the Episcopal Church's Hymnal 1940 and celebrates a long list of benefits God gives us:

Oh bless the Lord my soul
His grace to thee proclaimed
And all that is within me join
To bless his holy name

Oh bless the Lord my soul
God's mercies bear in mind
Forget not all his benefits
The Lord to thee is kind

Oh bless the lord my soul!
He pardons all thy sins
Prolongs thy feeble breath
He heals thine infirmities
And ransoms thee from death

God clothes thee with his love
Upholds thee with his truth
And like an eagle he renews
The vigor of thy youth

And bless God's holy name
Whose grace hath made thee whole
Whose love and kindness crowns
Thy days

Oh bless the lord
Bless the lord, bless the lord
My soul!

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La Brea Tar Pits & Museum

In Spanish La Brea means "the tar." Brea is the word for tar or pitch. La Brea Avenue goes north-south for approximately twenty miles through Los Angeles. Did you know La Brea Avenue ends in Inglewood at Century Boulevard and then continues as Hawthorne Boulevard deep into the South Bay?

The famous La Brea Tar Pits and accompanying museum are next door to LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard with no break between campuses.

This past Tuesday I continued my museum series with my first ever visit to the Tar Pits grounds and museum. The exhibits and their narratives are mind-boggling! The museum inscribes a circular path, and there's a leafy green central atrium where guests can walk, sit, and relax.

My excursion to the Tar Pits was more than timely because they'll be closing on July 7th for two years while they update and renovate.

• Antique bison

• Extinct camel

• Americcan lion

• Tuna Tuesday at my nearby Subway

Five Minute Friday :: Sustain

• Five Minute Friday :: Sustain Linkup

What has sustained me all these bleak years?

Getting out of bed a half hour before first light and watching another new day gracefully make its way onto the world. Trying to relocate myself in better illuminated settings from my past. Can I replicate some form of those here and now? Admitting I've still been hitting a few balls out of the park over these many seasons. Despite everything.

Re-membering: bringing back together; again forming a whole from scattered parts. Dreaming. Can the future be an updated version of those parts when they still were whole, before they cracked and scattered?

This is earthquake country. Before I visited the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA last Tuesday, I read about the project. Probably related to moment skyscraper and high rise construction that bends in an earthquake or a storm so it doesn't crack and break, the entire new museum wing can bend and extend five feet.

I may have mentioned a friend's comment that a mutual acquaintance is "very establishment," without adding a negative or a positive interpretation. They simply are. I'm still "very Y2K." That means I've experienced 911, the Great Recession that my economics degree insists qualified as another Great Depression, the Covid pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, and a long series of shipwrecks and disappointments in my own life. Along with the rest of my population cohort, I've survived global and individual assaults, so a return of anything Y2K-ish will present itself differently from the original.

Have I learned to bend in the storms and earthquakes? Yes. More by necessity than by intention. Have I cracked and broken? Or have I bent?

At my church in Previous City, during the offerings of bread, wine, and tithes, as they set the Eucharistic Table we'd sing from Psalm 116:

What shall I render to the Lord
for all his benefits to me?
I will offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving
and will call on the name of the Lord.
I will take the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord
now in the presence of all his people,
in the courts of the Lord's house,
in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.

God invites everyone to the feast! "Jesus Christ, the bread of life; Jesus Christ, the cup of salvation!"

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David Geffen Galleries at LACMA

• My Tuesday day off this week was especially bloggable because I visited the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. Due to an afternoon private event, everyone had to leave LACMA at 2, so most likely I'll go back on the free second Tuesday in June. The Miracle Mile location features three museums; I recently read Los Angeles has the most museums per capita of any city in the world!!!

• Alexander Calder designed this poster when LACMA's Wilshire Boulevard location opened in 1965.

• Looking southwest at the Petersen Automotive Museum

• On the right you can see the dome of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. When I visited there not long after it opened, everyone had to show a vaccination card. Besides the museum, my January 2022 rundown includes Float Fest the day after the Rose Parade, and a small selection of the many pictures I got at the [LA River] Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Preserve the last Sunday of the month.

• Urban Light by Chris Burden

• At the Geffen Galleries

• Three favorite paintings in the Geffen Galleries:

• Lane Barden, [Los Angeles River] View from the 7th Street Bridge, 2018

• Granville Redmond, California Poppy Field [detail], circa 1926

• Henri Matisse, La Gerbe (The Sheaf), 1953

• At the Jack in the Box near LACMA I sprung for a favorite lunch combination—customized Chicken Sandwich, French Fries, and Diet Coke.

• Hazelnut Frappe at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that moved a few blocks west from the busy noisy Wilshire and Vermont location I used to visit when I first came to LA. Mature green trees surround and shade the store at Wilshire and Mariposa.

Artplex Gallery

• Artplex Gallery was my art-focused activity for Tuesday the 5th of May. it's a sort of commercial space because you can purchase any of the art works, and it nicely meets their "Discover Contemporary Art Beyond the Ordinary" tagline.

• Flower study 1 • Sally West

• Perched on the Tree of Life • Jennyfer Stratman

• A Design for Life • Jonjo Elliott

• Soft Daylight • Frederic Paul

• Flowers on Tuesday • Sally West

• One Day • Sally West

• Enchantment • Alessandro Casetti

• In the Above • Jeff Faust

• After the Storm • Jeff Faust

• Settling Into Dusk • Steven Nederveen

• Sooey • Kyle Paliotto

• Pale Green Dream • Taking Root II • Peter Kuttner

• The Frequency Of A Loving Heart • Amadou Opa Bathily

• Breaking News • Amadou Opa Bathily

• Sunny Beach Days • Elizabeth Lagreiters

• Mid-Hudson Inscape • Bruce Rubenstein

• Ultramarine • Kate Tova

• Tuesday was Cinco de Mayo but I opted for Tuna Tuesday at Subway. I'd planned to get a frappe afterwards, but Boba Time was closed again. Short staffed? Maybe, because they'd been advertising help wanted.