Spring means capital fun

God made two things inherently beautiful, and I think I know why: flowers, to be attractive to bees, and derelict buildings in rural settings, to be attractive to looters. These are probably the easiest things to photograph in the world. The degree of difficulty is very low, though. It's very hard to do something surprising in those settings.

Thus most flower and derelict building photographs are mediocre. Nothing wrong with that: mediocre art is pretty, and pleasing for being so. But good art succeeds in showing us something in a new way, in getting us to see the familiar as something strange. That's why I'm not a good photographer yet, just a mediocre one. That's OK - I'm still thinking about how to get better. And if photography is my medium--and it has to be, since I can't draw or paint my way out of a Cubist-themed dance party--it's not going to be an easy one. "Photorealism" is inherent to the genre and to the technology, so it makes it challenging to produce something good, at least using the definitions laid out above. (Think about it: some of the best photographs you've ever seen use blurring or double-imagery or some other camera trick, pushing aside photorealism in favor of something genuinely illuminating.) Some of Nicole's best pictures, using light or lines in an unexpected way, achieve this. I'm still working on it.

But hey, it's springtime and I'm in Washington DC for two weeks of research! The bees have sprung fully formed from the ether, the cherry blossoms are falling to the ground, and open windows allow us to be irritated by our neighbors' behavior in ways that we had forgotten we could be over the long winter. Few things I like more, at such a juncture, than a walk in the woods, in this case DC's Whitehaven Parkway, near Georgetown University. The result: mediocre photographs. Sorry.


PS: There's another way to take good photographs, namely, to take them of people. Human beings are often quite interesting when frozen in time. But I don't have the social fortitude to do that. So I'll have to think of something else.

PPS: I didn't mean it about God; I meant the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

PPPS: I did try to take "good" pictures. I found these mushrooms on a log. The result is maybe mediocre+.


PPPPS: I went out twice today, and got rained on twice. It's been sunny the rest of the day. What does this mean? God didn't like my Flying Spaghetti Monster joke? But I hadn't even made it yet...but it's God...maybe he knew I'd make it.

PPPPPS: Maybe the Flying Spaghetti Monster didn't like my God reference in line 1, and that's why I got rained on.

Indiana picture, part II

On the way back from Grandma's, we drove through Brown County in central Indiana. It's the...Napa Valley (?) of central Indiana, so it should be beautiful. It is also, however, the ugliest time of year. It was warm, though, and we stopped for a walk in a state park. I set myself the challenge of finding beautiful things in these moments that are post-snow but pre-wildflowers. I decided to seek out interesting textures, and to use close-ups as much as possible.

Vote for your favorite in comments.
No. 1:


No. 2:


And no. 3:

Indiana picture, part I

During Nicole's spring break, we went to my grandmother's in Indiana, where it has been raining and raining and raining. On the drive down, it was not raining, but it was cloudy. Spectacularly so, in fact. Nicole "demanded" that I take pictures. Some of the results were good. Thanks Nicole; thanks little camera.

Museum pictures

Recent comments clamor for more pictures of Nicole, and I can provide! Here are her feet on a crazy floor at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Nuts 4 Nuts

Nicole's here now and, as we walked through Central Park today, we found a Nuts 4 Nuts stand! Since this blog's primary contribution to world knowledge came in the form of explaining Chilean Nuts 5 Nuts vendors, we celebrated with a photo. And some sugary cashews.

Table for snow

Here's another one from that snowy day when I arrived in New York. This week I worked in the Yale special collections in New Haven and in the Rockefeller Foundation archives in Sleepy Hollow / Tarrytown. The Rockefeller Foundation archives are in the old mansion of Mr. Rockefeller's second wife. It's a huge house with some beautiful flooring and staircases, furniture, etc. At one point I was staring at three paintings on the wall that I liked a great deal before realizing that the signature in the corner said Marc Chagall. Go figure.

Saucers

So I've made it to New York City, my base of research operations for the next couple of weeks. Today I went to the public library's main humanities and social science branch (the famous one with the lions), to consult the special collections there. Research was good, but they didn't open until 11:00 and I stupidly arrived at 8:30. Fortunately it was snowing - heavy, wet flakes that built up quickly. I took some pictures in Bryant Park, just behind the library and a few blocks from Times Square if you know your way around Manhattan. (I don't, but I do know how to get to Bryant Park now.)

There's something about New York that looks good in black and white, so those are the tones for today's picture.

mithicallaneous

I think I'm done with my research here in Ithaca, so it's on to New York where there are five or six sites that I need to consult. I don't have any new photos from today, so I'll post another one from yesterday - one that shows the scale of the waterfalls shown below. I was standing on the bridge you see at the left, more or less showing what happens to the lake once it begins to fall away. Cornell University used to use this waterfall for hydraulic power, thus the deteriorating building on the right, which is almost my favorite part of the view.

After work today I walked down the hill about a mile to Ithaca's downtown, where I had dinner at the Moosewood Restaurant, surely the world's most famous vegetarian restaurant...although...actually...it's not a vegetarian restaurant. But they do serve the world's most famous vegetarian food! One of the restaurant ideas I like best is to offer only 4 entrees, but change the menu twice a day, every day. Tastes like the cookbook!

Two Gorges. Damn!

That's right, there are two gorges on either side of Cornell's campus. The one that I saw yesterday is much smaller than the one I saw today, so they are not to be considered equal.

The archives close for an hour at lunch, so I'm forced to go wandering about for 40 minutes after I've had something to eat. Not a bad find for the day.

Ithaca is Gorges

Perhaps you have seen the phrase "Ithaca is Gorges" on a bumper sticker or a t-shirt somewhere. My arrival in Ithaca has, unfortunately, coincided with the death of the man who coined that semi-famous phrase. But here I am, in Ithaca, at the beginning of a three-week dissertation research trip. I've never been here before, and in reminds me of home in Iowa, except somewhat more prosperous and somewhat prettier. For one thing, its woodsier: less of the land has been given over to agriculture. For another, it's less flat. Cornell University is situated at the top of the hill around here, and this administration building is more or less then top of campus. It's nothing too steep, but anyone mounting an attack on the campus with a bicycle brigade would certainly be slowed by its insistent verticality.


It hardly seems fair that glaciers should have left my corners of the Midwest with fewer undulations than a heart monitor hooked up to a pickle and this place with lakes, furrows, and waterfalls all around. But so it goes. Indeed, I learned today that the campus of Cornell University is more or less squinched between two gorges. I walked over one on my way to the library today, but it was impossible to get a really good photograph of it. I'll go to the other one tomorrow and see if I can get a better one. It also snowed tonight, so things should look a good deal more wintry. That's probably for the best.

New pantry shelving

So, after we did the floors in the pantry the shelves looked woeful. They were warped, wrapped in ugly faux-wood paper, and wedged into a crumbling wall. So they became the target of the latest condo modernization project, and perhaps the last one of any great significance: the previous owners did a lovely job with the kitchen and the bathroom, leaving only the pantry in a state of yuck. Here is the way things were, taken without flash to exaggerate the ugliness. The first picture shows in the inside of the pantry with from the kitchen. When you walk into the pantry and look to the left, you see the view in the second picture.














The old shelving had been attached with old wood nailed to the wall, and much of this wood was splintering, and much of the plaster was crumbling. I decided to remove the wood from the wall. Since it was in truly bad shape, chunks of wall came off with the planks. The next step was, then, to spackle and compound the wall back to health and even things out a bit, followed by coats of paint to make that side of the wall match its opposite, which we had painted when we replaced the floors. Because we didn't want the wall to support the new shelving, we bought a freestanding unit. It cost more, but seems much more stable. We're more organized, have a lot more storage space, and are finished with our pantry renovations!

A hard rain has a'gonna falled

I wasn't sure how to take a picture of a rainstorm in the dark, so I took a picture of a streetlight reflected in a giant puddle in the middle of the street. I don't think this experiment was a success, but you expect illustrations around here so you get it anyway. The amount of leafy detritus this time of year means that any heavy rain washes a great deal of it towards the drains...which then clog. There were 4-5" inches of standing water on my street until I went out with a neighbor and a shovel and unclogged the drain, removing at least 50 pounds of soggy leaves in the process (there were many many more pounds to be had, but the bag couldn't take any more.) The puddle began to shrink before our eyes, until we can the only dry corner for blocks.

P.S. I know I'm always on about how weather systems in these climes are chaotic, and there are natural random fluctuations that lead to unexpected and extreme weather events each year, and that, although these are "extreme", they are still normal. Similarly, if you flip a coin 1000 times, you expect to have some long runs of heads in a row in there...if you didn't get any sequences of 8 or 9 heads in a row over that amount of time it would surprise you and tip you off that perhaps the coin wasn't fair. So some apparently anomalous things are normal. All that said: it should not be 65 in January, there should not be tornadoes, and this rain should probably be a lot of snow. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and laughing it up, as a local weatherman did, is not endearing. It's sick.

Mom's travels

Mom's going to be in India for three weeks, and she's started a blog to tell you about it.

DQed

The sunlight came through the window and hit the little statue of Don Quixote that I keep on the bookshelf in what struck me as an interesting way today, so, for no particular reason:

Compost bin

I intend for this space to be non-political, but some of our environmental commitments are hard to avoid. And there shouldn't be anything controvertial about not taking risks with our future. So while I'm distressed by how little I can do, it does please me to take a few steps in the right direction whenever possible. In that spirit, Nicole and I recently purchased a compost bin for our condo association - pictured here under a pleasant pile of recent snow. Chicago, which has a long way to go before it deserves its green reputation, also seems to be taking little steps that make me feel better about living here as the months pass. For one, they offered these compost bins (and rainwater barrels, which we couldn't use) at highly subsidized prices at their Center for Green Technology. (See also this article about our alleys.) Composting our kitchen waste seems to reduce our personal trash by 40-50%. When spring arrives, the pile of leaves and scraps will decompose quickly, and we'll be able to use it to improve the soil in our common backyard.

Indiana Dunes

We went to the Indiana Dunes today to enjoy the sunny fall weather and the last days of seasonal color. Even the ferns were getting into the act:

The forest was mostly quiet; we saw very few birds. But for whatever reason there were ladybugs everywhere at the beach. I was looking poking around in the dune grasses and found these. The dark blue in the background is Lake Michigan.

Mexico, 1950

Here are some of the pictures that Simeon Leland (see posts below) took of Mexico in 1950:



I've showed some of the photos of more rural areas to people who have traveled throughout Mexico more than I have, and they suggest that, based on the clothing that people are wearing, they were probably taken in Oaxaca or Chiapas. This guy, judging by his pants, has been to Los Angeles or thereabouts.

The Zocalo, Mexico's main square:

Below you can see what the same space looks like in 2007. Fewer trees, no cars, more people, a metro stop that you can't see. Another thing that you can't see: the Templo Mayor of the Mexica / Aztecs, which was thought to be lost but in fact is right next to this cathedral. It wasn't found until the late 1970s, so although you can't see it in either photo, it wouldn't have been there at all in 1950.

Comparing Buenos Aires

Here's are comparison photos from me in 2006 and Simeon E. Leland in 1950 (see post below) of the "obelisk" in Buenos Aires.

1950:


2006:


And here's one that Nicole took that lets you see the considerable increase in the use of fluorescent signs:

Fifty-six years later

I think I've mentioned here in the past that my great grandfather, Simeon Leland, was once the chair of the department of economics here at the University of Chicago. He was also something of an amateur photographer. It turns out that he took some kind of official trip to Latin America in 1950, and Dad's visit here meant that I had the chance to digitalize some of the slides that he took at that time. He and I have been to some of the same places, and so you can compare rather directly how things have changes over fifty-odd years. I have slides from Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. I'm not going to post them all at once...but here's one from Chile's major port, Valparaiso, where we had almost the exact vantage.

As you can see, in 1950 it was already quite a busy port:

Here it is in 2006. If you look at the photos at full size it's easier to see how much more closely packed the hills are.

New Floor

I'm back in Chicago, and Dad has been visiting here the last week. Our major project has been to re-do the floor in the pantry. The previous owners of the condo had done a beautiful job doing the bathroom and the kitchen, but the pantry remained undone. When we were preparing the floor, we found two things: under the linoleum, a penny from 1953 and a scrap of newspapers from 1925. The 1925 paper probably dates the layer of tarpaper, directly above the wooden flooring; the penny probably dates the linoleum. At any rate, here is how it used to look:

Since we didn't want to pull up the old linoleum, but needed to even out the floor, we put down a layer of cementboard. The old baseboards seemed moldy, so we pulled those off as well:

On top of this layer, we put down the tile. When we went to the store to get new tiles, we didn't find a sufficient number of the red ones that we liked, so we put some white ones in the middle. I'm glad it worked out that way, since I think this looks even better that it would have with all of the light-red tiles. After putting down the cement mastic, we added the grout and the new and newly-stained baseboards. Now it looks like a real pantry! Thanks for all the help, Dad.