Welcome to the blog of writer and musician Andrew Martin. Here I'll post original photographs and observations as I encounter the history and culture of the San Fernando Valley, the City of the Angels, Alta California and the far-flung Pacific Rim… but mostly the Valley.
A couple of days of unexpected “free time”: The View was meant to be in the Lowcountry today, beautiful South Carolina; but my flight Tuesday was cancelled five minutes from boarding. In fact Southwest Airlines cancelled all flights due to total computer network system infarction (because Chaos Theory). By grace I was at Burbank, not LAX, so during the agonizing wait for information, I had air and light and quiet and freedom of movement, and was among civilized people, and when the news came, I could get home easily (because Damon).
Aldus: here is a wrap-up of recent random pictures of what, I think, used to be called “life” — good people enjoying happy times? Life, yes, that’s it. These are really the first social events with actual primates we’ve had (because all vaccinated)!
‘Primate? Them’s fightin’ words!’
Impromptu surprise birthday party for Adam Schenk!
Larry Freedman at Mendenhall Ridge, trying to comprehend that it isn’t grafitti on a pile of rocks, it’s recent copper mineralization around an old porphyry. By Jove, he’s got it!
Hiking with Sam Elias at Placerita Canyon. We had a Marlin Perkins Moment, when we witnessed one of the most harrowing events in Nature: a bobcat climbed up the tree to the ravens’ nest, and, to the shrieking horror of the corvids, made quick work of their precious hope for the future.
Mandy Schneider
Madame, I’m Adam
Newton, the Cute ‘Un.
“The Whole Megillah:”
“Say Ma, didja see that Old Costume Warehouse finally burnt down?” “Developers’ Lightning,” replied Ma, spitting out sunflower seed husks.
Totally Tubular no more: the famous Sherman Oaks Galleria, denatured
The fabulous Bobbi Block in her post-vax vagaries, found herself in LA and we had a stroll and dinner. She stayed in a Hostel tucked away on Second Street in Santa Monica — it seems hostels, like marijuana, flip-flops and sex, are Not Just For Youth Anymore. It’s an incredible location for visitors, and built around the oldest structure left in town:
Tomorrow, my own post-vax vagaries start again: I am re-booked with Southwest to try another shot for the East Coast. My already checked bags, and Mother with a smile, and an apple pie cooling on the window-sill, I hope, are waiting for me on the other end.
In 1927, at the apex of Hollywood’s Art-Deco silent movie Golden Age, sleepy Lankershim was upgraded to “North Hollywood.” And the Keystone Studios’ old keystone, Mack Sennett, led investors to buy the Laurelwood tract of the old Lankershim lands, adjacent to the newly-styled NoHo. Just where Laurel Canyon spills down the Hills onto the banks of the Mighty Los Angeles, he opened ‘Mack Sennett Studios.’ (Later, Republic; then MTM; now CBS.)
The dream factory was only the centerpiece of an entire planned community, the Valley’s first office-park/retail-strip/tract-home automobile suburb.Sennett chose his land well: this is one of the most temperate, healthful, convenient, and visually expansive bits of real estate in California.
Sennett gave his sylvan glens and lush riverbank house-lots a jazzy name that was catnip for Hollywood’s cultural-creative yuppies: ‘Studio City.” Dusty old Camino Real got its kick-line of Baja fan palms; Ventura Blvd. remains one of LA’s swankiest and most iconic strips.
The point is it’s a bizarre place to find a copper porphyry! (Don’t roll your eyes, P.R., you knew geology was coming.)
But as we’ve seen, the Santa Monicas are exactly the sort of place to expect to find a copper porphyry. Rather, call them IOCG Deposits, as the investors’ brochures do (Iron oxide, copper, gold, that is).
The ridges and pound-cake hills of Laurel Crest along Mulholland Drive near the Overlooks, contain old magma tubes, breccia-filled feeder pipes, conglomerate columns and various other intrusive sills and dikes. This is plumbing that has developed over the past 15 million years: residual intrusive volcanics from the forces of collision and compression, thrust and subduction, rotation, folding, fracking, and cracking.
The brown breccia is dense, nicely concentrated chalcopyrite. The most dense, the most cupric copper ore, is probably located in the three or four feet below Mulholland Drive.
Old volcanic tubes, as well as faults, of which there are many here, can be siphons for deep hot acid brine. Deep hot acid brine when pushed up near the surface, into the cool meteoric groundwater cycling zone, creates thermal and chemical reactions that create dispersed, and over time concentrated, copper, lead, nickel, gold, etc. deposits. Molybdenum. Zinc. But here…copper.
Winter. Nothing remarkable about the hill, except for the Student Prince’s house on top.
January 27, 2021. Only glimmers of gray outcropping through yellow Monterey shales.
Six months later, the turf is poisoned, the chaparral helps outline the slope’s groundwater chemistry, and distinct lobed mouths of porphyries have emerged, ringing the poundcake hill.
It seems that just a few months ago the hills started — or certainly, restarted, after a dormancy — mineralizing. My guess is the July, 2020 Pacoima thrust-fault 4.4 earthquake forced opened fault valves, or closed others, or both. Something in the plumbing changed. When the rains came after that — especially a gully-washer rain in December — it may have stripped the topsoil cap, reducing slightly the sealing — ceiling — layer of turf. With a water table now high enough to draw the brines up to the rocky roadside ridges, and these awesome structures are revealed. Though it had been weeks since there was any rain, note the porphyry hill is still trickling rivulets of acidified water:
The Overlook here features conglomerate boulders found on-site. It’s easy to dismiss their markings as grafitti: gooey white or powdery gray, blue or teal, red, magenta, and black streaks on surfaces. They aren’t defacement: they are minerals, copper relatives: bornite, malachite, chrysocolla, azurite, cuprite, chalcite.
CHRYSOCOLLA
AZURITE
White goo is quartz; it can frequently be found as splashes and spatters over rocks
Or as a binder matrix holding heavy minerals.
Gang tags?
A menacing pirate, spray-painted on the boulder?
No, it’s the black crystals of CHALCOCITE, emerging in the familiar crown or star patterns.
AZURITE
CUPRITE, which can be scarlet or magenta.
The View will mention, but not dwell upon, the ironies and implications of porphyries appearing in the Hollywood Hills. The rich get richer; but to own their wealth they’d have to destroy their Paradise. Also, are there potential toxicities to the Los Angeles river which drains the Hills? Are there bad-air dangers to homeowners above, or motorists cruising Mulholland, or Overlook Viewers from sudden off-gassing events? Are these re-emergent processes just a quick residual one-off event, a last hurrah, a blip from the recent temblor? Or have homeowners just loaded their yards in the Hills with so much piped-in sprinkler water since 1915, that we’ve re-set the water table and kickstarted a new age of copper formation? Is Studio City yesterday’s movie colony, or tomorrow’s burnt-over strip-mining district? Watch this space, and see!
The Valley Village View 