Majorette: PreSpring/PostWinter 1974

St. Paddy's Day • Holyoke, MA • 1974

Forty-seven years ago three boys climbed a tree. Today they're what? Late 50s? Forty-seven years ago a pretty red-head led her high-school band up the street beneath that tree. She was probably 17 then and they were maybe eleven? Did she notice them? Is this the only memory of that moment? 

Holyoke once boasted the country's longest St. Patrick's Day Parade. March in Western Massachusetts is brisk. St. Paddy's Day sits right in the crack between spring and winter. Temps that day were probably in the high forties with a medium breeze. Now those weren't ancient times. People had color TVs and there were games to watch warmly at home. And there were movies to see and malls to lurk. It wasn't a once-upon-a-time when parades monopolized BIG TIME mass entertainment. Even so, crowds still lined up to watch this majorette prance up Holyoke's main street behind a pick-up-truck float carting the High School's queen and court. 

A while ago I found a slide-filled Kodak Carousel. Most were Ektachrome or Agfachrome -  films that probably aren't made anymore. I grabbed this shot with my Nikon, a machine that did not focus itself. Uh-huh, I had to do that. And you can see how poorly. Plus I had to set the exposure for what I think was even in bright sun light a lazy-slow-cool-contrasty film. Nailed it, right?

Yeah, I wish this decisive moment was tack sharp, but what memories are? How well can you access mental memory cards? Better than that one up there? Congrats to you. This image was a doorway back to that moment. A bunch of us carted lawn chairs, babies,  blankets, and coolers of food and beer to a stretch of cracking sidewalk in a town that was old even then. Yeah, I remember clapping and hooting and dancing and singing and laughing. Then driving to someone's home to keep going into the brisk Western New England night.

Life is fine today. We're happy, my wife and I. We have new, if different friends. Those olden days of parade parties haven't happened in a long time. Like Ektachrome, their saturation's faded inside my head. But... while memories are soft as that image up there, the shapes are warm, and smile making. And for an instant, I can look at those boys, that young woman, and understand something about boys and girls and parades and friends. And realize that the hazy picture's not the only memory of that moment.

Nice.

 

A Shadow of the Ancient Ways: Paris 6

Brisk winter afternoon.

It was 1887 when the French erected this huge relic from the edge of the iron age. Maybe that will save it in this moment of statue and history smashing? Cultural churning's sparked a fashion for ripping stuff down. History's got veins of bad... so it's the 2020 fashion to rubble-ize all of it. 

But the Eiffel's neither a triumphal arch, nor a tyrannical warrior on horseback. Maybe the mob'll pass it by? Uh, well not so fast. The 19th century wasn't France's best. And it was ending after the Germans had smashed their armies leaving them with gaunt borders and, until 1871, the Prussian occupation of Paris. They needed what some called a tiara-of-accomplishment as 1800s sand tumbled to its hourglass's bottom. 

So a scant decade later, Gustave Eiffel built his tower as a Freudian-wand to re-engorge French pride. Which makes it the greatest historic monument to nationalism. Gustave himself called his tower a "300 meter flagpole." Uh-oh, will that ignite internationalists'-history-looting blowtorches? After all, they've declared that nationalism is definitionally about racism. Especially in Europe where - unlike the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand -  national borders were set to exclude diversity. 

Mobs are usually lazy with short attention spans. It'll probably take more determination than they've got to pull this gigantic gadget down: unless their backers can implant a correct load of explosives under each of its footings. Hmmmm... Can you imagine shadowy rooms of black-clad,  Guy Fawkes mask-muffled plotters? 

I've worried before about the future of the future, especially since tens of thousands are toppling history's past. 

"Why," the old man said, "If you can keep it."

Across The Street From Us • Late November • Lancaster, Pa.

Someone once wrote an essay about Derry, Ireland. It was after the fragile cease fire between Brits and Irish was holding and the bombs, gunsmoke, and carnage that littered the city had sunken into a recent memory place. He called that story, "Reveling In The Ordinary."

It's something we don't do enough. Media likes to find a man with his fangs into a dog. If it bleeds it leads. If anyone's destitute, then that's the lede line, or the headline. Media craves circ, audience, clicks. Many blame that on their source of revenue... advertisers voracious for messaging to the largest markets. And yet, when governments support media, it's still filled with fangs in dogs, bloody sidewalks, and those who cannot - or will not - do for themselves. 

And images like this one? Hey, not cool. Not edgy. Too... yesterday. They're reveling in the ordinary. Won't do... Nope, just not enough... grit. Eh? Sigh...

So we're living in a time of broiling politics, fueled by discontent and eager to smash the whole thing into a zillion chards of tribes to set upon one another and let blood spatter those walks. It's an atomization bomb that brings to mind an old man answering a group outside of Constitution Hall who  were asking what sort of government the framers inside had created. 

"Why," the old man said, "A republic, if you can keep it."

Maybe we can... if perhaps we may once again appreciate and revel in the ordinary?

GEEK STUFF:  Canon 7D MkII, 50mm, post in PSCC. It doesn't take much of a kit to grab a feeling of, well in this case: A merry Christmas time. But the only thing cool about it is... the late November air. Pity, this week I cannot find my edge. 

Spain Day 3 • Bits of Cordoba • 10/24/16

Of course you can click on any image to see it large...

I've been apologizing to myself for getting sick. OK, that's dumb, but both Rita and I were felled during this trip - she got bronchitis, and since I'm more manly, well I grew it into pneumonia... Cough, Wheez... So this was the worst job of photographing I've done in decades. Sorry... sorry... sorry. Grumble.

In the 10th century, Cordoba was among the world's greatest cities.

The old city's snuggled behind it's massive ancient curtain wall protecting the colossal Mezquita. This Great Mosque embodied the power of the Islam on the Iberian Peninsula. Starting in the late 700s it was constructed by the Moors for over 150 years with lavish additions in the 10th century by Hakam II. The city was the sultan's citadel with a towering minaret high above all. A minaret which was replaced six hundred years later with this Torre del Alminar bell tower when Catholics reclaimed the city. 

The enormous Mezquita, now the Cathedral of Cordoba, is itself wrapped in a thick wall. Can't help looking at it's secluded rear door without imagining how it allowed dignitaries furtive entrance and exit. 

Spain's fabulous wealth allowed first the Muslims then the Catholics cities to compete with increasingly grand mosques, churches and then cathedrals. For example, here in the heart of the Mezquita is the very busy Catholic cathedral's main altar. Overdone? Hmmmm... I'm thinking that if this were music, the best descriptive word could be, um... cacophony. Each succeeding Cardinal must have sought some undecorated niche to stuff still more into this reconsecrated basilica.

This place reminds me most of a freeway at rush hour... clogged with architect and artist traffic. Maybe it was my fever, but the silently elegant remaining fixtures of the caliphs spoke to me more than the frenetic snarl of the cathedral's decoration. 

Belfast Gunsmog

Belfast, Northern Ireland • Royal Avenue • April 2013

Royal Avenue • Belfast • Northern Ireland • April 2013
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It's said that the Europa is the most bombed hotel in history. Belfast was  once Ireland's money machine. Which is why the Brits held onto it and its neighboring counties when the Irish Republic seceded in 1946.
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Since the 1950s though– – like blooms in winter – shipbuilding, textiles, tobacco traders, and  the region's heavy manufacturing shriveled. Even without The Troubles world economics would have sucked them  away... Ahhh but The Troubles.
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From the early 1800s through the Good Friday Agreement of  April 10, 1998, violence between the occupiers and the occupied gashed the Ulster counties leaving Royal Avenue blood-spocked and gnarled by bullets and bombs.
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The Irish and British fight over this Northern hunk of the island terrified investors who fed the economics that vacuumed at the region's industries.
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Peering up above Royal Avenue in center-city Belfast the sky was smokey with what? A memory of gun-smoke steeped smog... And squinting into the yellow haze I muttered, "_Gunsmog!_" the stuff stained the Northern Irish heavens.
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Then I panned down to the rebuilt Greek columns on the Hotel Europa, and coughed.

Lost To Archeology

You know when you see those "artist reconstructions" of ancient cities how they know so much about street scenes? Someone gave me a book with pictures of Egyptian and Roman ruins. And there are plastic overlay pages that show "how it looked" before time rubble-zed the things.

The last time I was in Italy I noticed how the hills and mountains were bare, little growth beyond some bushes and grassy weeds. So I asked someone whether trees would not grow in the volcanic soil. "Well actually Ted, that sort of soil's usually quite rich for agriculture. The trees though, have been gone for millennia, harvested by the early Romans for fire and building."

So, if so  much of the various structures was actually wood, how now do the artists know what the majority of buildings looked like? Even the excavations in Pompeii fail to reveal much wood since the heated ashes burnt most away.

The thing is that archeologists don't really have much idea what wooden structures and decorations, much less their painted colors, looked like. Example, take this Moravian church in Lancaster County about six or seven miles into the country beyond my home. It's maybe a century or two old at the most. Already time's sanded away a lot of the detail and without significant restoration, this spire's days are numbered. How will anyone a couple thousand years from now guess at this wooden decoration? The glass oculus? Oh sure, this image will survive so they'll not have to guess, right?

What is the reasonable life expectancy of this picture? Given Moore's Law, does anyone expect that there will be reading devices that could reconstruct these pixels even a quarter century from now? Once, perhaps in Roman or Greek times, artists might have left low tech drawings and paintings behind on media which might have let some ideas hold on. Today, not so much, right?

How much of what you can see when you go out of your door into the wild... How much of that will be imaginable to anyone a couple centuries from now? A couple of millennia? Even when the archeologists dig up its ruins, how much will they puzzle back together... And how much, like this wooden spire, will be wiped from all memory?

OTH, what's it matter?

Hagia Sophia

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Constantine built it
Fifth century.
Muslim repurposed it.
Now it’s a museum.
Making history is
Making a future…
We are part of
The future’s past.

The Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
Canon 7D, PS4: custom brushes, filters, Topaz.

Very dim light… mysteriously pierced.

Nostalgic Or Historic Or Fabled?

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Does nostalgia belong only to the living? Are fables only as real as an imagination? And where does history fit between the two? I'm just sayin'....

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Geek stuff: Canon 7D, texture, Topaz, AlienSkin SnapArt Oil, Table Top Art.

Tyranny

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In his temple, President Jefferson is stood to stare at his motivation... at the concept which ignited him to explode through history with a republic answer to the arbitrary collection of power into few hands. And now as it's being recollected at the direction of the legislature and executive offices his pen imagined... recollected into the pens of nine court justices, one wonders at the irony of Jefferson's enforced gaze. Or how his legacy has come loose from his idea.

Societies are made up of people. People age and die. Why not their cultures? I wonder if Jefferson's temple will survive his ideas? By how long? In Rome I saw churches and buildings built from stone that was quarried from the marble of the ancients' buildings. How do you think they will repurpose Jefferson's stones after they realize that his image and that word are no longer joined, even in memory?

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In the 1960s I remember that black and white was considered to be the most faithful way to present reality. And that was accepted even though black and white is inherently abstract, stealing away as it does an entire dimension of reality. Then came the 90s and the color dams exploded allowing the deeply felt component of its hues to add an emotional dimension to photographed reality that b&W just couldn't tap.

And now the digital artist can drop away the reaity almost entirely to distill out the underlying layer of feeling itself. It is a wonderful time to have photographic skills.

She Writes In Color

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Quietly there perched on the column she wrote swirls of thoughts and feelings. Jefferson's monument does that. Or the classical grandeur of the building's sweep makes your thoughts swirl through your feelings mixing together toward conclusions that are personal as your dreams.

"Have you visited the Pantheon," I heard her ask her friend. And of course it was clear what she meant. This building was imagined a couple of millennia ago by a Roman who put his name across its arch ("Agrippa LF Costertium Fecit" Agrippa Costertium made this). Coming to the Jefferson is returning... to the Pantheon, or to an ancient idea of classical beauty. And you don't need to have seen the one to feel the power of the other. Or to feel the tug of instinctual delight that makes your thoughts and feelings swirl mystically together - and your writing to swirl out colorfully.

Sweet...

Town House

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Some people collect stamps. The Landis Valley Museum collects buildings. They pluck them from the past and set them off in their fields to capture the aura of centuries of mystery. It's one of Pennsylvania's least known museums... and it's just around the corner from my gym. Lancaster County's littered with intriguing feelings.

Arno

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It’s just a river
Filled with river-things
Tossed in every morning
By daybreak…
Ancient memories
That float.



Florence, Italy

Pretty... Very Pretty

Help, I'm under attack by my tools!

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Help, I'm under attack by my tools!
My dad used to say, "Ted, it's a poor worker who blames his tools." Sigh... But it's true. I'm living in a shoddy Steven King novel. I can't seem to tame my filters or techniques. Look at this image taken at Eleanor Rooselvelt's Hyde Park, NY home called Val-Kill.

Nowhere does it communicate my political feelings. Nor does it show something else. Hyde Park is the Land Time Forgot! There has been no change there since maybe 1947! i swear, right in the center of town there's a roller rink. Everyone who toured this place with us remembered the Roosevelts. Now you have to remember that they governed in the 1930s-40s. I felt as if I was suffocating in a musty pile of my parents clothes. And yet, instead of creating an image of moth balls, or reaction to a tour of the Democrat Party's Vatican... instead what came out was that image up here.

I have become an obsessive romantic! Look at this thing. It is .. charming. Charming is not how I felt. How I felt was like... MMMMMPH! I am quite happy to be a citizen of today. It is as if I was visiting the old country while holding daddy's hand. Much as I loved them, today is the world I watched and helped to get made. I like it.

You know what happens when anti matter hits matter? KABOOM! ... Right?

Somehow I KABOOMed! in Hyde Park. Nostalgia kicked me into a psychotic break. AAARGH! And did I get an image of it? Huh?? Huh? Nope... What I got was On Golden Pond up here. I gotta get control of my tools.

Viejo Si. Pero, Muy?

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“Muy viejo,” the man held it out to me, this black piece of clay-coated pottery. He plucked some of the earth away. “Mire, él es antiguo,” he insisted, hefting the thing mostly encased in an earthen ball. He wanted me to hold it.

BACKSTORY: Early June in 1966. We’d ridden out of Bogotá at 5 AM and by 9 the Land Rover brought us up into the Andes where, just above the tree line, we mounted ponies. By noon we passed through a place too small to be called a village… along a trail that was just a deep hoof-etched crack into the rich dark earth.

And there this man walked along beside us, showing me a piece of thing, hidden mostly within a ball of dried mud. “Ciento cincuenta pesos,” He wanted, about fifteen dollars.

“Offer him diez pesos,” a friend laughed from behind. I did, he took it, and I slid the thing into a saddle bag. Late that night as we drove back to the city, beneath the mud I found a black cup which might hold 16 ounces of liquid.

See, see the scar above the face where it probably cracked in cooling? There’s a chip out of the head where it meets that break. And there’s another chip on the base at the bottom-right just beyond where you can see in this image. Some mud still clings in there.

The crafting is primitive. Look there at the top where the handle meets the cup at how the surface is uneven. For a half century it’s held pens atop my desks. The thing’s a time capsule. I look at it and remember that day’s adventure and the things which happened within minutes of meeting the man.

None of that’s the point here. And it’s taken me a long while to get to it, eh?

What I recently began to wonder about was whether our images were art or something else. Suppose fifty or sixty years from now someone comes upon one of them. Will they pluck from it a capsule of ideas or feelings that we’d packed carefully inside? Will they find a message or will they find at most some piece of our culture? Some jagged chunk of this part of the century which echoes some of the things which we collected through our lives about what and where we are?

Will they find art or artifact in our work? A pencil holder that will get trashed with our stuff when it’s finally collected by whoever survives us, or something that contributes to a deeper reflection? Are we sending off answers to any questions?

I’m putting the pencils back now into that cup.

Quarry

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Susan Sontag gave me an idea. In her provocative book, "On Photography" she writes that some photographers and collectors consider that the world is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, and that we are in the pious work of salvage.

"Hmmmm...." I thought. "Let me go see if I can salvage something that soon won't be anyplace but in an image. And let me see if i can do an image that excavates some juicy fragment of a past that's just outside of the memories of most of us." That's when I saw this ghost up there on that wall. How long since John Henry Mills stopped selling drugs and Coca Cola? And how long until the morning sun finally sucks the last memory of John Henry Mills from those bricks?

Sontag is right, I think. If we really look we can show a new beauty in what is vanishing. And in not too long, this image may be the only record that John Henry Mills ever sold drugs and coke. It's a new thing and an old one simultaneously quarried out of a small piece of the fading world. Cool.

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If you'd like to study it, here's the original high up above West Orange street in Lancaster's center city.

Pennsylvania Primary #1

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Some 150 years ago on this corner they may have heard cannon fire rolling in from Gettysburg to the west. Or perhaps an odd calvary troop or supply train meandered along these streets. Four score and seven years before that the British were garrisoned all about keeping their horses in private homes just up that street to the left there. A year or so before that the Continental Congress of the United States declared this place the nation's capital and held session about two blocks off to the right of this spot.

History has a way of passing through the city of Lancaster, stopping for a chat and a meal, then swirling on its way.

It's garrisoned in store fronts today. Here's one just across North Queen Street. Fitting this one's on Queen Street, eh? I tried to walk my dog Rocco past the other as well this afternoon but couldn't find it. Maybe next weekend.

The thing is, Lancaster has a way of putting history into perspective... Calming it down. Then sending if off to do whatever it's going to do... Usually somewhere else.

Um, yeah I know that's the Clinton HQ and yes I know which way the sign is pointing. Y'godda problem widdat? :)

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Here for those of you who are interested, let me plunk the picture from my camera.

Something Unusual

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So many of you on different forums and in email have commented upon yesterday's image that I decided to do something unusual for me. i'm posting a raw, un-enhanced, right-outta-my-camera, photograph.... YIPES!

This is a slightly different angle of yesterday's image. I was somewhat wrong in my description yesterday. Apparently the water still flowed from left to right down to the pond. But the twin trenches seemed to fill a small lake around this structure. See how the kids could have sat on stones on either side. And see how four, not twin sets of steps led down to the water. I imagine children may have waded into the water around the pool as well.

Remember they had no pumps so this was fresh clean spring water. I do wonder what that projection is atop the structure. It appears to be metal. But someone told me that no metal objects survived the thousands of years that Pompeii was buried. Perhaps it was added in modern times (the uncovering of this city began in the 1700s).

You can also see the liberties I take with my images here. The lighting in this shot was identical to yesterday's. This is a tad like the magician showing how the lady was sawed in two. Oh well, what do you think?

Stairway To

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You'll find this stone structure in the garden behind a home that's been dug free of Vesuvius's wrath. It sits on a grassy island covered by a canopied strip of grass and vegetation that's about 40' long between two channels that are each about a foot deep (marble lined).

At one end up to the left there may have been a small waterfall filling the channels which ran down the length to flow into a fish pond at the right end. This toy marble structure of steps and patios sits halfway between the pond and the waterfall and the steps in the foreground apparently led down right into the water.

How big was it?

Take a look at the dead leaves on either side of the steps. They are not from some mutant giant tree, but normal oak leaves. I imagine children sat on the stones in the foreground, their feet in the water and played with soldiers or dolls on the steps probably loading them into toy boats which would be cast adrift to find their way into the fish pond. It mimics the action toy trains of today. Kids could start their boats on either side of this thing (the steps on the other side of this structure were identical, also leading into the water) or maybe farther up by the waterfall, and watch them flow and sail on the current down to the pond. Maybe they'd race them in the separate canals. They probably had toy furniture that sat on the patios, perhaps this was a wonderful outdoor dollhouse or boy's fort (accounting for some of the scrapes on the decks).

I'm guessing the structure's at least a couple of millennia old. A backyard play set on a lush garden strip under a canopy for the kids behind a warm, seaside mansion under an endless summer sky. You can sense the ghosts of the children who, thanks to Vesuvius, never became adults. Well, I could... kinda... especially in that light. And this garden strip was surrounded first with a grape-trellised patio and beyond that a tiny orchard filled with fruit trees.

It looked so new, as if made for children just yesterday... but it was a long time till that yesterday, huh?

There's a poem here, I wish someone would write it.

SOMEONE HAS...

Incase you missed this in the comments below, Michael McMurma created...

Blogger mcmurma said...

The stone here speaks in whispers
and echoes, full of laughter
of the waters revealing glances
and softened reflections
on the smiles of a hundred children
splashing by.

Drinking water from a common cup
we shared a bread
with the taste of honey
and strolled together
towards the twilight, dancing
in the company of fireflies.

No, they were not her children
or mine
but their smiles are ours forever.

Reasons

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Some say that everything comes from everything else. Which, they say, means that everything has a reason. Which leads me to conclude that while everything might have a reason, not everything is a reason.

Okay, let me unsnarl all of that with an example. These images come from The Roman Coliseum. The thing’s a weighty devil. Look at its intricacy. Over two thousand years ago this complex thing was erected with such precision that what you see here still stands as firm as a mountain. Heavy construction like this is common now. We see similar ruins of buildings all around that were built in the last couple of hundred years.

Those seem to come from ideas you can see up there in those images. The reason that we can build what we’ve got are the child of that Coliseum, right? Um, not so fast. We’re left with a couple of questions before we can make that leap.

First, where’s the proof that the information about construction and design was passed along over those thousands of years. Did our contractors look at the Coliseum and magically understand how to replicate something that massive, that complicated and huge? Which makes you wonder if the Coliseum’s creators somehow created our modern buildings or whether something else happened?

My second wonder’s not about the reason for our own buildings but the reason for the Coliseum in the first place? At least our designers were able to look at the ruins in my images. But what did the Coliseum’s contractors look at?

See, I agree that our modern buildings have a reason, and that the Coliseum has a reason. But did the things that caused the Coliseum cause what we build? Or was the line of communication savagely and irredeemably disrupted by the Dark Ages?

And what the heck caused people to build the Coliseum without ever seeing anything like it? While it’s easy to conclude that the reason we have our modern Coliseums was that big pile of attractive rubble in my pictures. After all they sure look similar, huh?

But… but… but… Did we have to relearn everything needed to do it? Where’s that learning come from? Where’d it come from originally?

Hmmmm… it seems to me that this Coliseum and ours might have a reason. And it might be the same one. But it’s not clear that Roman building was the reason for ours.

Is it?

Hope

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You’ve seen this Piazza Della Retunda before here last November 19th.
There’s a reason I aimed high for this image, which was the same reason I aimed low back then. Last time I wanted to capture the people who crammed the square around me as this sun set. This time it was the Pantheon which somehow spoke of its two millennia of almost continuous use.

Optimistic solidity… That’s what I felt from the ancient temple. Look at that architectural bridge. This design has one leg here among the classical buildings going up in every important world city… and the other among the Caesars. Even the type font along the arch seems formally and elegantly modern.

I wanted to get all of that into this moment between a Roman day and night – a moment which the Pantheon has shared about 730,000 times!

Put that into perspective: the average business computer lives about 1,100 days while each of us get about 27,000 sunsets. After seven hundred and thirty thousand sunsets, what’s astonishing isn’t that this place is so old, but that it still feels so hopeful.