Fwwwwup!

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Have you ever notice the way that sudden billiance can illuminate all that we think we know and understand? And how its luminescence can amplify, alter, or even degrade the best understood relationships? Have you ever noticed how an explosion of insight can punch a hole into your frame of reference: burning away everything around it?

Have you ever noticed how a particularly bright idea makes you shade your brain?

Here

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Just outside of Lancaster... I mean JUST outside... on every side - there's this sort of thing. I could walk my dog to this kind of place in say, twenty minutes, maybe fewer. Well, of course my wife and I took the Beetle, but that's beside the point, I coulda walked. And Rocco came with us. And it was 4:25 in the afternoon and everywhere there were images. In fact, they are so commonplace that they seem insignificant. It's so easy to overlook beauty when beauty is the norm. If we could see air, we'd be blind.
Just over the hill behind this farm is a freeway. Behind that is the biggest mall in the county. That's the thing about here: everything lives together. My home is in the epicenter of the city, smack in the historical district. And here's this farm, one of hundreds and hundreds that sparkle all around. There are places in the world that are grim, Lancaster is not one of them.
If I failed to wish it... I hope your new New Year makes you feel as furtunate as I do.

Time Door

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Now I'm not one to spread rumors, you know that, right? So I won't tell you what they say is really happening here -because it's so preposterous. Just today, I looked it up and I found this building on an 1812 map of Lancaster. But the doors in this image... no, they're not authentic. Some say they're so ordinary to throw you off. Huh? To fake you away. To, make you think that the agency hasn't carved their hole into this portal. I mean, it looks innocent enough, right? Except for that strange device up there on the upper right. One thing I hear, no one's ever seen anyone actually go into or come out of this place. Hmmm...
Peculiar, this seems to be the only entrance. And no windows overlook it. It faces a four story blank brick wall.And just last summer there were teams of men with very large equipment digging deeply into that alleyway... in the middle of the night!
So after dark, when those black town cars cruise this alleyway... and slow at this door. Then come back out. Are they empty? Smoked windows... don't let me peer inside. Yeah, there are only whispers that the corridor behind this door is a covered foot bridge back to the early 1800s. God knows why a secret program would want to go back to then. Hmmmm... 1812 or so? What was happening in that year? But of course, this is only rumor. No sane person would... Wait. What's that noise outside? Hold on, I'm going to the window with my laptop. Yeah, from up here on my third floor, I can see the opening of the alleyway across the street, and there goes another one of those dark cars. They're so quiet. I wonder why their lights are off? Hmmm......

Crushed Together

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Big times tonight (New Year's Eve), so wanna blog early. Saw this crushed plastic water bottle during Rocco's Great Train Adventure yesterday. They say that mid day lighting, particularly in winter, is the worst. Yet this seemed so gentle. How to explain it? Anybody got ideas? Anywayzzzzz...

Here were wonderful elements... trackbed stones, a metal wuzzit, and that capped bottle. Hmmm... I wonder which of these will have the longest half-life? Anywayzzzz.... It was a combination of the forms basked in glorious light and the color that sparked up at me and begged out for doucumentation. Nothing here is "natural"... every element was randomly distributed by some people. But slathered in that end-of-the-year-light... Whoa! They meld together in a perfect major chord, no?

Happy 2007 everyone...

Secret Forgotten Passageway

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Took a hike with my buddy today. In 1927, Lancaster finally threw the Pennsylvania Railroad out of its center city and opened a new "grand" station on what was the city's far border. From the 1850's at least, tracks and trains cut a wide swath across the town, creating intolerable noise, congestion, wild vibrations, and just plain danger to commerce and pedestrians alike. So, how did these tracks wander through neighborhoods, and what did the city's front door look like to those hundreds of thousands who arrived over the years by might Pennsylvania Rail Road train? Rocco and I followed the clues and discovered the hidden passageway into this colonial brick and shutter town.

Judgmental? Uh-Huh.

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Why not judge? So much of Pittsburgh is grim. Look at this street. The homes are maintained in the sense that they are generally clean, the siding is rugged, and the sidewalks are swept. The owners can afford reasonably new cars and satellite dishes. So why are they aggressively insensitive to the dingy, depressing discordancy of the way their residences look like so much architectural litter? Don't they get the Home & Garden channel on those ugly dishes? Here're private property rights gone carcinogenic. There's no way to make an uplifting image of this urban flotsam. I know... I know... I am being judgmental. But maybe judgments are what's needed to keep civilization from fraying around the edges. Like here in Pittsburgh.

Suite Moments

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Deadlines day is, like, synonymous with the last minutes of an NBA game. There's a blast of frenzy you can smell. My space at the magazines is NOT a paperless office. Note that you cannot even see the monitor on my desktop Apple. Fact is, should any of this cargo shift, limbs could snap. It takes me the best part of the morning-after-deadline, to file, clean and repack the stuff each month that gets flung around in those last moments. It is simultaneously a way hot job... and a way cool way to make a living.
Careful where you tread in here, you could splash through a puddle of adrenalin. And that's a suite thing.

Tractor Beam

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Pittsburgh has two Apple Stores! There is only one in the entire eastern part of Pennsylvania. Hmmmm.... And since we were visiting Pittsburgh, well, HEY! Unless they tie me to the mast and pour wax in my ears, I am going to throw myself up against the place. This one is in Shadyside, a chi-chi spot where medical people vie with Univeristy of Pittsburgh students to buy latté, Lord & Taylor, and posh art. I'm guessing the shells around the shops are remains of mid-nineteenth century brick and shutter buildings. Lancaster could look like Shadyside... and any twelve women off the street could look like Gwyneth Paltrow with a zillion bucks worth of fashion, cosmetic and surgical enhancement. Hell, it takes Gwyneth Paltrow a zillion bucks worth of cosmetic, fashion, and surgical enhancement to look like Gwyneth Paltrow.
But anyway... here's an image of the money-magnet store looking all sexy and alluring. Yeah, I went in. Yeah, I came out with a portable HD and a new graphic application. It was like shooting up... right into a vein. It rocks! Thank God there's no Apple Store in Lancaster.

Rotogravure

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Visited an antique dealer recently. She had a collection of newspapers from the 1950s. The society section was in a strange sort of color that was called Rotogravure, I think. Don't know much about the process, but the colors were peculiar. So when I stood atop Mount Troy overlooking Pittsburgh today, I had those slightly fading, slightly out of register, slightly off colors in mind. They seemed right to capture this aging city's vision of itself. Can you feel the mood?

Un-Happy - Finally

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Aren't you run down with all the happy happy happy stuff? I mean what if the New Year, ain't looking all that good? Suppose that you bumped into a realist? After all, there's a war of civilization's going on. The dollar is in the hopper. The American borders may be leaking terrorists. Another 9-11 could send the whole world spiralling into depression. And Iran is maybe the best new nation to join the nuclear club, and it's headed up by a theocratic fascist with apocaliptic pretensions! Hey.... What izzat breaking upon the beach?

Christmas Cow

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Forget your reindeer... Forget red noses. Here'ze a red cow. Hey! Y'godda' problem widdat?

Merry, happy, and blissful - Christmas everybody.

Ted

Strange Winter Moon

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Coming out of Gibralter's Restaurant this evening, my friend said that this global warming is tough on retailers. "They can't sell winter clothes!"
Tomorrow's Christmas Eve and we shall be finally going through those woods and across some rivers. So this probably really shall be my last musing until sometime next week (till Wednesday maybe). We're going to Pittsburg where the lake effects usually ramp up the cold and snow. Wonder if the people staying in our home will be warmer than us? It is strange, look at the green grass in front of Snyder's Funeral home here. Hmmm.... maybe if I buy some land just to the east in Blue Ball or Intercourse - you think it'll be shorefront property soon? That'd make it a cool investment, eh? Know what? Better strike that word, "cool".
Merry Christmas to all...

Ted

A Penitential Season

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Advent is a penitential season. Whiners who think that we start the Christmas season too early should have been around during the seventh and eighth centuries when fully 60 days were set aside to meditate upon the birth and Epiphany. Regardless of when Christ was born, choosing the winter solstice almost guaranties penitential weather. Interesting isn't it the the two greatest feasts of Christendom, Lent and Advent are synonymous with storms? It's no surprise that pop singers here in the northern hemisphere croon about April showers during the first and white Christmases during the second - of course the reverse happens down south.
Regardless, absent the snow - which really doesn't much fall here abouts until late January/early February, here's a stereotypical night in a Pennsylvania Advent. Actually while damp and chilled, it's kind of pretty, don't you think? And of course, penitential. Can you hear Crosby singing... "I'm dreamin' of a drizzling Christmas?" Tra-la.

Barnstormers Fleeing?

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From way back there, sometimes it's hard to figger out what's going on. Like suppose this lad thought that all the guys who made his team the league champs... Suppose it seemed that way off in the distance those giants were... were leaving. No... Hey! Suppose they left? Suppose the general manager, the coach, the marketing director, and the corporate sales directors all quit. Well, hey... that'd be some story, huh?

And suppose that none of the Lancaster newspapers, TV or radio stations reported why every important executive abruptly quit right after the new Barnstormer baseball team won its division and league titles! Well, that'd sure leave this little fella down, right? It'd seem as if there was some sort of astonishing cover-up going on. If only he could see better. If only the rest of us could, maybe we'd know what the hell was going on, eh? WHY THE HELL DID EVERY ONE OF THEM QUIT? At Christmas time, izzat the best present to give to little Bleacher Boy?

What's "Real" Here?

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A print of this image just sold for a reasonable amount of money. Now, I don't sell my images as a rule. But I do donate them to charitable organizations so they can raise money. This one was sold by the Lancaster Museum of Art. I enjoyed watching it hang... well I enjoyed standing around and listening to people comment, and question the thing.
"Is that a photograph?"
"No... no... look at the sky, it's painted."
"But the stores are so perfectly rendered."
"Yes, but look at the foreground. And Look at the buildings in the darkness behind."
"Wait... wait... those Christmas lights, are they real? What is real here?"
"Oh,it has to be a photograph."
"No! No it can't be. But, how did he do that?"
Of course I'd have preferred the debate to have involved standards of beauty... References to Albrecht Durer, or perhaps Whistler, Eakins, or, um, Winslow Homer. Okay... I can dream, huh?
Still, it does evoke another time when things were simpler here in the states. Or, I wonder, did they ever seem simpler when they were happening? Gosh... here I am patronizing the past... Jeeez.... Ah well, have a happy.
This may be my last post for a while. We are off to go over the river and through the woods. If I cannot get here until perhaps a week from now... my best for a holy and happy holiday - whatever flavor you prefer.

Allegory

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It's an annoyance that Lancaster County hates its county seat and only city. Whether they consider it God-less, heathen, criminal, spend-thrift, foreign, minority ridden, inefficient, inebriate, lazy, grim, or just plain dangerous - the consensus among county folks would agree with fencing the thing in. And yet, in order to serve the religious, political, civil, judicial, professional, and social service requirements of the county, some 30% of the city of Lancaster's land has been removed from the tax roles (including a couple of very large plots containing the county's only jails). Meantime surrounding municipalities erected thick zoning walls against high or even medium density residential construction - legally sealing into the city low and moderate income people.

All of that has resulted in a disproportionate number of city residents with special needs. But since only property taxes are allowed to support the city services, middle income people flee the Lancaster's consequently higher taxes.

And when the city attempts to create tax enhancing projects - like a convention center - the county people of both political parties - fearing competition - rebel, electing a team of viciously hostile county commissioners who are less than affectionately known as Manny, Moe, and Molly.

Can you see the fence built all along the tracks? Incidentally, residents of the county are deeply religious.

Top Of St. James

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Last night I looked down, tonight, lettuce go up, eh? That's the oldest Episcopal church in the city. The graveyard's stones are a who's-who of 18th & 19th century commercial and government leaders. The artists of the city earn their spurs by imaging the city's church spires. It's sort of a rule, you gotta do the Big Six. But how to find them in your own voice?
I tried to combine a touch of Charles Demuth with a lot of Ted Byrne here. I'm reasonably confident that no one has ever made this image before. That's something anyway. This is maybe the twentieth time I've worked on the belfry. It's the first time the result doesn't look, to me, like a cliché. Hope you agree and enjoy.

There Ought'a Be A Law

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Two and a half blocks from my house, all around E. King St. and N. Lime there's a gunk of these places. They take a piece of the check as a charge for cashing them. Banks don't do that. In fact, most local banks are now offering free checking, and are paying interest on accounts even without minimum balances! So, who needs so many of these places?
Banks demand verifiable identification to open an account. These businesses demand a part of the value of the check.
Apparently there are a lot of people who find it less expensive to pay for check cashing than to pay for phony documentation.
So, why doesn't the state simply regulate these services the way they do banks and require that they require at least the same documentation a banks. If it's possible that some employer is making out pay checks to illegal immigrants, then these spots, working under my proposed revised regulations, will discover them pretty quickly, eh? Are you listening state legislators?

Marquee Triptych

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Here are three approaches, each takes on some significant differences from bottom to top. Yet, like faces, at first glance they might seem almost identical. We're able to learn visual differences so quickly. And we can remember them, even though the differences might defy verbal explanation.
I wonder how it is that we can learn complex visual nuances, and respond to them on both intellectual and emotional levels, yet much simpler arguments elude us when they're explained to us in words or print?
Oh, this graphic is a triptych play upon the marquee of Lancaster's Fulton Opera House, one of the oldest theaters in continuing use here in America.

Before Planes And Television

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This hotel went up in the 1840s. Who knows, Lincoln may have slept here during his commute to Gettysburg for the address. It's a four story Lancaster building on N. Queen Street. And it occurred to me that once upon a time you could only get that high by packing a lot of stuff underneath you.
Now we can get so much higher with only air beneath us. There have been a lot of people who have soared with only air under them in recent years. But in their case it was broadcast air. An insubstantial support they discovered, when the media decided that they were yesterday's news. Old as it is, maybe there's more to be said for moving on up with something substantial undeneath, eh?