Thursday, November 1, 2007 – November Woods

Arnold Bax wrote the tone poem November Woods in 1917 – one of those moody, vaguely melodic British pieces, a dramatic depiction of a stormy woodland and all that.  Here's a contemporary review and here we learn that this tone poem is really about his affair with one Harriet Cohen. The two of them would meet clandestinely in a small pub in Amersham, at the edge of the woods covering the nearby Chiltern Hills, where Bax had once sheltered from a November storm whilst sneaking about.  That's cool, and it is romantic in a sort of Emily Brontë way – but this is Los Angeles, and we don't have the mist-shrouded and mysterious English countryside, or the storms.

On the first day in November we do have Franklin Canyon and Heavenly Pond – they will have to do. Claudette Colbert's famous hitch-hiking scene in "It Happened One Night" was filmed here in 1935 – romantic enough, perhaps, or close enough.  And the woods are moody.  But there's no Harriet Cohen – just ducks.

Not a duck –

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Technical Note:

Most of these photographs were shot with a Nikon D70 - using lens (1) AF-S Nikkor 18-70 mm 1:35-4.5G ED, or (2) AF Nikkor 70-300mm telephoto, or after 5 June 2006, (3) AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor, 55-200 mm f/4-5.6G ED. They were modified for web posting using Adobe Photoshop 7.0.  Earlier photography was done with a Sony Mavica digital still camera (MVC-FD-88) with built-in digital zoom.

All text and photos, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 - Alan M. Pavlik