Autumn harvesting

We went apple picking on a co-worker's farm, four huge bags worth barely making a dent in the trees.  The horses live up there, an hour north of the Twin Cities.  Cool but sunny day, good for fall harvest work. 

My garden was frosted this morning, so I picked the last peppers and squash.  The parsnips and kale are happy though.

I watched an interesting set of classic documentaries about L.A. yesterday while cooking lentils, kale, and curtido (in anticipation of trying my hand at pupusas tonight).  "The Exiles" followed a group of San Carlos Apaches around L.A. during a regular night, mostly the Bunker Hill neighborhood before it was razed in1969.  The other short docos showed Bunker Hill as the city was planning its demise and the elevated railcar that went up that hill, the Angel's Flight, before it was taken apart.

The wikidescription: "(The Exiles (1961) is a film by Kent MacKenzie (6 April 1930, Hampstead, England -16 May 1980, Marin County, California) chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California. Bunker Hill was then a blighted residential locality of decayed Victorian mansions, sometimes featured in the writings of Raymond Chandler, John Fante and Charles Bukowski. The structure of the film is that of a narrative feature, the script pieced together from interviews with the documentary subjects. The film features Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, and Tommy Reynolds. Filming was done in 1958."

More here.  The soundtrack, rock 'n' roll music from The Revels, keeps things moving despite the lack of strong structure and dramatic actions.  The daily normal sights from 50's L.A.  are truly fascinating, because so much has changed.

I've moved on to an audiobook of Phillip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which I have not gotten into enough to discuss.  I'm also reading Becoming Emily by local author Rachel Gold, a trans YA novel that has gotten good reviews.  I met Rachel at the Golden Crown Society convention and a reading and this made me want to check the book out...  To be reviewed...