Halloween is slowly but surely being adopted by Swedes. Particularly families seem to embrace this holiday wholeheartedly. I have vivid memories of being dressed up as Batman and Spiderman as a child and as a twenty-something during a year living in Los Angeles, I went to a party in the Hollywood Hills dressed as a really old man with a hunchback.

In this day and age when being cognizant of cultural hypersensitivity is a real thing, costume choices are probably limited to superheroes and comic book villains.

Captured this surface on a wall along Hollywood Boulevard just a little over a week ago. The world-famous street is the same derelict cesspool as it’s always been. Which served my purpose for visiting again quite nicely as I discovered several new pieces for the resurfaced series before heading south and then west on Sunset Blvd.

As a kid, my friends and I would ride our bikes up to Hollywood (we used to call the street and area Hollyweird) to catch a double or a triple feature in one of the dozen or so movie theaters still around back then. I’m obviously dating myself now, but I want to remember paying $5 for a triple feature which included a bucket of popcorn. Refills were ¢50.

I think I would appreciate the winters in Malmö if they actually were real winters with snow that stayed, less fluctuating temperatures, and more stable air pressures. Arthritis is a nasty, unpredictable disease and despite taking serious medication to offset most symptoms, the winter weather in southern Sweden is detrimental to my physical and mental health.

With morning temperatures staying in the realm of single digits, there is no doubt that winter is upon us. Malmö in the late autumn is nothing short of spectacularly gorgeous. The vibrant, earthy, colors in the city’s two main parks are reason enough to visit Malmö this time of year.

In the north of Sweden, it’s already winter and it won’t be long before there’s a layer of snow on the ground.

A couple of years ago I produced a short autumn-themed film focused on change. View it here.

After a weeklong excursion that took me to the foothills of Mount Whitney, through steep roads leading up to the White Mountains, across a blisteringly hot Mojave desert and sleepy California City, and then several delightful coastal towns along the curvy, Pacific coast, I’ve now returned to the intense urban life of Los Angeles.

I am at home nowhere. I am at home everywhere. A nomad. A journeyman without a measurable quest other than to acquire and document visual and emotional experiences wherever the dust settles momentarily. It was here on the west side of this sprawling metropolis, so summarily abbreviated L.A., that the very first chapters of my life’s narrative were written, nearly six decades ago.

I’ve been fortunate to have walked within many of the world’s metropolises, none as seducing nor impenetrable as my hometown, Los Angeles. This is a complex, concrete maze chock full of people, prospects, and promises. A place brimming with hustlers and bustlers, demons, dealers, and deniers. So many draws. So many pitfalls. Yet the flow of those willing to roll the dice and pull the handle here seems endless. Los Angeles is more Vegas than Las Vegas.

Along the city’s broad, expansive boulevards, often lined with soaring, gently swaying palm trees, miles of deep crevasses in the warm, tire-worn asphalt, and gnarly, slithering cracks on the surface of the city’s mostly superfluous sidewalks.

I was born in this unrelentingly evolving city where disconcerted opulence is omnipresent and heart-wrenching impecuniousness is involentarily exhibited twenty-four-seven. I wonder what future archeologists will uncover in the bowels of L.A.’s gaping storm drains and reeking gutters.

I’ve loved and loathed Los Angeles throughout most of my life and cannot help my longing to return to this remarkably alluring place again and again. I am here to see family and friends, to work on the Resurfaced project, and, finally, to fearlessly process and rinse through deep, burdensome emotions carried way too long.

This piece, “Which Switch”, is possibly another subliminal precursor to the Resurfaced project. It’s one of my most popular compositions and I’ve had versions of it printed on paper, aluminum, and acrylic (plexiglass).

Life is about choices, turning on or off switches (or, leaving them alone), and then dealing with the results.

The backstory to the piece is that I was documenting a derelict, industrial factory in Malmö, Sweden, when quite serendipitously a bright turquoise wall appeared with a multitude of bakelite (lightweight plastic) switches fastened to it. As Robert Palmer so aptly phrased it back in the 1980s, the scene was Simply Irresistible.

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