Friday, June 22, 2012
Porto Rico Soda Philadelphia - Orange Blossom
Porto Rico Pale Dry Company, Phila., 1950s
"Hey Chico, make mine Porto Rico"
It's "Soda-licious"
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Thursday, June 21, 2012
Iconic America – American Artist Cyrus E. Dallin 1861-1944
Cyrus Edwin Dallin
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| Appeal to the Great Spirit - Boston |
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| Statue in front of Museum of Fine Arts Boston |
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| Moroni - Salt Lake City - LDS Temple |
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| Moroni - replica |
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| Paul Revere - Boston |
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Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Ancient Biblical Philadelphia - Roman Column
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| Biblical Philadelphia - Roman Column - U. of Penn. Campus |
A gift to the modern city of Philadelphia in 1976, the Bicentennial, from the ancient Philadelphia, the present city of Amman Jordan.
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Saturday, June 16, 2012
President's House - Philadelphia - 6th and Market Sts
There were several residences of George Washington as first
president in New York and Philadelphia.
All except one, a summer residence in Philly, have been torn down and are nearly forgotten. These images are of a replica of
the President’s House during his tenure in Phila 1790-1797. It was built for
the Sesquicentennial (150 Years) Exposition in Philly in 1926. It too was torn down after that Exposition.
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Thursday, June 14, 2012
June 14 - Flag Day USA - Betsy Ross House
It
is June 14 – Flag Day in the United States, celebrating the day on June 14, 1777 when the Second Continental Congress authorized an official flag
for the new thirteen “United States of America”.
Part
of the local folklore of Philadelphia during the Centennial, 1876, became the national legend of a simple Quaker
seamstress named Betsy Ross making the first stars and stripes as pictured above.
I
can remember when Betsy Ross’ House in Philly was a simple local tourist thing.
You went in the front door where the tourist goodies were displayed. The gift
shop, if you could call it that, was manned by a female volunteer in colonial
dress and she seemed to be the only official person on site. Admission was free. The rest of your self guided tour was up and down winding
stairs from a strange to me concept of a kitchen hearth in the cellar to very tiny
rooms above and a really tiny bedroom in the attic.
The
building itself is a modified, with added on rooms, “trinity” type Philadelphia colonial building
which was basically three rooms, ground floor room, second floor room and attic
with dormer window all connected by winding stairs in the corner of the rooms
usually located next to the fireplace.
It
was perhaps strange for a boomer like me to understand all this stuff or that
yes people used to heat their houses with fireplaces. Where were the radiators?
Curious.
Along
came the Bicentennial in 1976 with a lot of Nanny Government cash and Betsy
Ross’ house has evolved into the giant gift store in back, bigger than the original house, and part of a new entrance way next to the admi$$on booth, and a crowd of Park Rangers to supervise your every body movement (“don’t touch
that!”), that this tourist trap is today.
Disneyesque.
For
those of you wanting directions, it is half a block or so up the street from
Ben Franklin’s grave. In fact the area is all
quite modern now. In my youth this part
of downtown was considered part of “the slums”.
When
we went into that local simple Betsy Ross house of say 1959, there was no air conditioning or
air filters. The house felt like a
standard Philly row house and it smelled like one, with a pine oil scent coming off
the washed worn down wooden floors and the curtains smelling a bit musty etc. from the
humidity in the building.
On
the exit then, the gifts bought on a child's budget in the first floor parlor were likely to be ten
cent pencils with the stars and stripes painted on the pencil shaft and a fifty
cent copy of the Declaration of Independence printed on yellow parchment
paper. These natural type products also
contributed to the smell, atmosphere of the organic whole of that old memory.
Happy
Flag Day.
Hope the flag you display
today is not “Made in China”.
Have
a nice day.
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Sunday, June 10, 2012
Solar Trees - Singapore
http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/08/world/asia/singapore-supertrees-gardens-bay/index.html?hpt=hp_c2
(CNN) -- Singapore's latest development will finally blossom later this month, with an imposing canopy of artificial trees up to 50 meters high towering over a vast urban oasis.
The colossal solar-powered supertrees are found in the Bay South garden, which opens to the public on June 29. It is part of a 250-acre landscaping project -- Gardens by the Bay -- that is an initiative from Singapore's National Parks Board that will see the cultivation of flora and fauna from foreign lands.
The man-made mechanical forest consists of 18 supertrees that act as vertical gardens, generating solar power, acting as air venting ducts for nearby conservatories, and collecting rainwater. To generate electricity, 11 of the supertrees are fitted with solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into energy, which provides lighting and aids water technology within the conservatories below.
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Catholic Bishops Fascist Agenda - When Pigs Fly - LOL
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| When pigs fly? |
USCCB - American Catholic Bishop's Secret Fascist Agenda - when pigs fly.
LOL
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Thursday, June 7, 2012
Cardinal Dolan is Famous for his Catholic Charity to Child Molesters
BTW
Charity indeed begins at home. And in Ireland too. Jesus' money well spent???
Cardinal Dolan is hiding out this week from the Press in Ireland to attend a €11.8 million (Euro) and or $14.8 million Eucharistic Congress.
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012
In This Graceless Age
All these times are so uncertain.
There's a yearning undefined
and people filled with rage.
We all need a little tenderness.
How can love survive
in such a graceless age ?
The trust and self-assurance
that lead to happiness,
they're the very things
we kill I guess.
Pride and competition
cannot fill these empty arms….
And the more I know,
the less I understand.
All the things I thought I'd figured out,
I have to learn again.
I've been trying to get down
to the heart of the matter.
But everything changes
and my friends seem to scatter.
But I think it's about
forgiveness,
forgiveness…
(Lyrics, The Heart of the Matter, Don Henley)
(Lyrics, The Heart of the Matter, Don Henley)
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Monday, June 4, 2012
Bicentennial Bell Headed for the Scrap Heap?
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The Queen's Bell and or the Bicentennial Bell. (above)
It's Jubilee time in Britain and I
recall a gift from their Monarch and the Brits to the Yanks for the Bicentennial
in 1976.
The Bicentennial Bell BTW is an
exact sized replica of the Liberty Bell and cast in the same foundry in London
as the Liberty Bell, Whitechapel Foundry http://www.whitechapelbellfoundry.co.uk/.
They still have some dirty industrial stuff
over there in Britain. Not everything in
the world is an abstract computer services industry thing like in America. People still get their hands dirty making a
living in other parts of the world unlike all our debt-ridden cookie cutter college grads etc.
The above three year old
newspaper article is all the news I could find of the fate of a bell that was supposed
to ring on special public occasions and the odd British Coronation.
Turns out, it is not functioning
with a broken automated bell clapper for the past seven years. The U.S. Parks Department does not have the
funds to fix it etc. The tower and
building it is housed in is obsolete and will likely be torn down and rebuilt
as yet another Revolution museum in the City of Brotherly Love.
It might be a good idea to send
the bell around the country as a gesture of good will to our only ally left in
Europe etc. I doubt it can be
anonymously sent back to Windsor Castle. They might notice. It has writing on it. I think that country can still read.
Raiders of the Lost Ark storage? Probably. And or the scrap heap? (They got the statue of Diana by St. Gaudens in the Philadelphia Museum of Art off a scrap heap BTW.) Hope the next owner of the bell appreciates it more than the present history slackdivists in Philly.
For a city like Philly that
claims to be so into history, its recent history is totally ignored. A grand gesture and a gift from a direct
descendent of King George III, out last king, and it gets a present day yawn.
Ho hum.
(Above) Queen Elizabeth II - Dedication of Bicentennial Bell - Philadelphia - July 6, 1976
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Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Julie Taymor – Across The Universe
American
film director Julie Taymor’s brilliant interpretation of the American 1960’s via
the Beatles sound with a fresh set of artistic eyes to look at our history.
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Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah Georgia, Founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA
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| Julliette Gordon Low - National Portrait Gallery |
Juliette Gordon Low
Founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA, 1912
2012 Recipient of the American Presidential Medal of Freedom
Well done Mrs. Low and Girl Scouts.
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Friday, May 25, 2012
Changing Face of America's Newspapers - Philadelphia Inquirer
By chance I ran into the fact that the Iconic Philadelphia Inquirer Building in downtown Philly has been sold and the newspaper itself and its entire staff are moving to one floor of another downtown structure.
It kind of visualizes how the age of computers and the Internet has shrunk the need for bodies and space to deliver a much smaller product - an American newspaper.
The white clad stone eighty year old landmark and space behind it for several blocks is planned to become a hotel and casino. Ain't that something?
The present American Town Square is perhaps no longer recognizable to an older generation.
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Thursday, May 24, 2012
Loren Eiseley - Quote
“While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my
work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless
stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish,
abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough
I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the
sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he
was foolish. there were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One
man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next
starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, "It makes a difference for
this one." I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing
starfish.”
― Loren Eiseley
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
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Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
FDR Memorial - Washington D.C.
There are two
FDR memorials in Washington DC, the official PC one and the one that FDR
himself requested.
“If they are
to put up any memorial to me, I should like it to be placed in the center of
that green plot in front of the Archives Building. I should like it to consist
of a block about the size [of this desk].”
- - Franklin Delano Roosevelt
I do not
believe anyone have ever given Franklin Roosevelt the benefit of the doubt in
the subtlety department regarding his much simpler, less expensive monument.
I believe FDR
being classically educated was do doubt familiar with the poetic license in the true meaning of Christopher Wren's famous epitaph at St. Paul’s Cathedral London.
Lector, si momumentum requires, circumspice.
Reader, if you seek his monument, look around
you.
Reader, if you seek his (FDR) monument, look around
you.
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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Pennies for Poor Richard - Ben Franklin's Grave - Philadelphia
Pennies on Ben Franklin's grave. A Philadelphia tradition. Pennies and nickels are for Poor Richard.
Grave located by a fence in a brick wall, 5th and Arch Sts. Philadelphia, of Christ Church cemetery.
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Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Graff House - Replica - 7th and Market - Philadelphia
Graff House, a modern replica of the house where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in rented rooms on the second floor.
Monday, May 14, 2012
God Hates No One
Posted: May 12, 2012 - 10:40pm
Nine-year-old Josef Miles felt the urge to make his own counter-protest sign upon encountering protestors from the Westboro Baptist Church during Graduation Day activities Saturday on the Washburn University campus. Securing a small sketchpad and pencil from his mother, he created his own sign that read simply, "God Hates No One."
The way Patty Akrouche tells the story, her Mother’s Day gift arrived a day early Saturday when her young son mounted a quiet counter-protest to the pickets of the Westboro Baptist Church.
Nine-year-old Josef Miles and his mother were walking around the Washburn University campus Saturday, which was Graduation Day on campus. As they returned to the area where they had parked their car, they couldn’t help but notice the WBC protesters picketing in an area where they had an audience.
After reading WBC signs proclaiming God’s hatred for homosexuals and other assorted groups, Josef asked Akrouche if he could create his own sign proclaiming his different view of God’s outlook.
more:
http://cjonline.com/news/2012-05-12/young-boy-stages-wbc-counter-protest
Sunday, May 13, 2012
A Prada Moment – Mother’s Day 2012
I guess I have
to begin at birth. I am not one to
remember pain but then again maybe nobody at birth knew how to identify
pain. Somehow it got stored in some
miscellaneous data base until it could be identified and archived.
Surely females,
when then give birth, feel the pain their mothers felt when they gave
birth. Not to say females understand
what the infant feels. Of course,
infants for the most part cry being thrown out of warm liquid comfort zone and
forced to change environments on a survive or die scale.
Perhaps for an
infant, ignorance is a blessing. That
absolute no going back, you’re here, live with it, do or die, birth moment is
best forgotten and left uncategorized and uncompared to any other.
Still I have
wondered through the years, that maybe that Yung thing in psychology is the
first two years of your life in data collecting still rumbling around
uncatalogued or not capable of being catalogued later in life. It is lost data. It was useful data as is, at the moment, in
the moment kind of way. It was perhaps
also strung together in memory, in hours or daily loops of learned behavior communication,
which did not make it to the final eye opening totally present, that each of us
marks our backward history by.
In a way it is
not like riding a bike now in the present.
It is, the past, all that compressed, forgotten attempts to ride the bike
fully. To put together desire, passion,
balance and perfect flight marks a multiple intersection of data rather than
any one or few strings of data or memory.
Who, on the moon
in a space suit and walking around a whole new environment remembers the first
few days of flight training as a cadet?
I started this
subject with birth and I guess I have to in this outer waiting room to the
afterlife have to reconcile the mother thing. Life begins with mom. Our earliest habits, tastes and behaviors
mimic the person we first saw after birth and the one we clung to both before
and after that birth.
With mom, it is
difficult to reconcile the thing. I am
looking back. I am using adult prejudice
and adult preferences in dealing with, dissecting and commented on past memory
data.
In a way there
always was a distance between myself and my mother.
I begin to see
her face in silhouette.
The scene is a seemingly
rare moment when she acted out of the normal. In fact I have probably played
this scene over in my mind through the years and seem to know all the facts
underlying that scene now.
I am four years
old. We are walking to a nearby
playground. In my mind I have always
known it was gray blustery March. The
impressive tall Schlichter clock tower over the old Schlichter rope factory
dominates its surroundings as it has done since before the Civil War. In fact, this building had supplied a very
large percentage of the rope and rigging that ran the U.S. Navy in their
blockade of the South during that war.
The playground
is quiet, empty on a school day. Seeding
will be done in another month or two to replace the grass on one baseball
diamond on the space. Years later my research would reveal that this playground
for factory workers’ children, had at one time been a black chimney belching
mill just like Schlichter’s.
The cyclone
fence surrounding the playground is rusting just like the batting cage surrounding
home plate of the baseball diamond.
One sole small
building housing the boys and girls bathrooms and the groundskeeper’s office
and supply closet sat sadly on the lot.
Nearby were two sliding boards, one small and the other large for bigger
bids. So too were a set of swings, one
junior and one senior.
One “Jack and
Jill” with stairs, platform, monkey bars and broad slide, with its gazebo like
roof over the platform completed this working class recreation scene in
Harrowgate, Philadelphia.
Next to the
playground as a boundary marker and artificial wall was the elevated embankment
of a factory feeder train track, the Trenton Avenue line. The embankment was beyond more rusting
cyclone fence and the large chunks of gravel on the embankment seemed to carry
the black accent of coal dust and train soot of over half a century.
Into this
cheerless, colorless, world, comes my mother with a four year old boy and a one
and half year old sister, trying to do something different in her life. Perhaps
her day trip was some kind of out of the box of a row house life experience,
that house only some three or four blocks over.
Was this trip
into the cold March day an escape from her depression? Got to mention the depression. She suffered from it and my father too.
Of course,
nobody in those days went to see a shrink to talk about depression. The thing was not called mental health. You were either crazy or not. Any problems, you talk to the priest. Salvation of the soul was more important than
any mental health issues. Right?
I am looking
back at my mother on this day. I have looked
back at this day as sort of a singular photo.
In a way all the millions of images available on TV, the internet, used
to only be available in books and or encyclopedias.
In a way I am
not framing this moment in a black and white photo thing in a photo album. This image in the wind of the day is my Prada
image, touchstone image on which all other images and memories have to go
through as a gateway in and out of my own personal archive of memory and
imprints on my soul.
Is this what it
is all about? Condensing? Compressing?
Memory? A life? One life. A soul.
Well, the Prada
image that should have been painted by a Goya both in normal tones and lights
as well as in the maddening images that only a Goya later in life, and crazy
from the lead in his paints, could paint.
Don’t I deserve
a Prada or a Louvre to store the treasures of my life? Am I not the king of my destiny? Was the king
of…
This
reconciliation with mom and her issues that overlapped with my own issues in
living never had a simple ending, a typical ending, a final closure….
More on Kindle:
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Friday, May 11, 2012
Dial Building Phoenix - Leaf Blower Subculture
Speaking of U.S.A. culture. I was awoken from a nap the other day by the sound of a leaf blower.
Which brought to mind an image and impression associated with a strange looking building in Phoenix.
This all happened some twenty years ago. We were living in Phoenix for a short time. I was walking around. Only a New Yorker would walk around Phoenix. I believe it was pre-furnace, pre the month of May.
The Dial building as it was called then was supposed to look like a bar of dial soap. Do they still sell Dial? The image above is taken from a back street with the building itself being on the main drag in town.
At the time Dial Corporation had bought Greyhound Bus Lines of all things. Before the big bust of the Savings and Loans in the late eighties, there were plans to build a duplicate twin Dial Tower next door to the existing Dial Tower as the headquarters for Greyhound etc. So much for architectural might and the flavor of the month corporate spreadsheet empires.
Anyway. Walking around, near this building off Central Avenue, I encountered an army of men with leaf blowers blowing leaves and grass clippings. It was my first encounter with the leaf blower device and its loud noise and it was also my first encounter with what looked like an army of migrant and or illegal labor.
Being from New York, the sight of so many Mexican looking individuals with baseball caps and bandannas over their mouths and noses as their only protections from the fumes, debris and noise of the blowers in the shadow of the big Corporate America office tower and being in the blazing Arizona sun was something to me like being part of some surreal science fiction movie.
I walked on.
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Sunday, May 6, 2012
IN SEARCH OF INNISFREE
IN SEARCH OF INNISFREE
In Innisfree upon the lake
Frosted in morning haze
There hides a shrine on magic isle
That misses the gaze of day.
In temple forgotten by time
An ancient secret abides
While slowly it sits
In calm and stately decay
Beneath faded gilt tiles of clay.
No lock bars the doors
Ready to open wide
No person but self
Can look inside to see
A secret true here reside
And touch a formless majesty.
Wherein doth lie
A sacred orb of light.
A center set firm and right.
By creator's quest
In search for inner sight.
Amid the threads
Of mortal tapestry.
-
(At a certain angle and with certain light and low lying clouds, I saw magic one day as I viewed the tops of three buildings in downtown Manhattan from a sixteenth story window, One Bankers Trust Plaza, mortally wounded on 911 and now torn down. The Golden Boy statue on top of the old ATT building mixed with the wedding cake architecture and gilt statues of the Municipal Services Building along with the temple looking top of the old Federal Court Building. They all seemed to be floating on an island cloud and I was reminded of some lines by Yeats. - 1978)
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Friday, May 4, 2012
Alma Mater – Columbia University (King’s College) – New York City
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| Alma Mater on the Steps of "Ole' Low" |
The statue of Alma Mater
by American sculptor Daniel Chester French is almost as famous as the statue
of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial also by French.
Columbia, originally King’s
College before the American Revolution, changed it’s name to the metaphoric nickname of America based on the name of Christopher Columbus.
Columbia is also a metaphoric name for the American goddess Liberty.
In the tradition
of ancient Rome, the statue of Alma Mater (dear mother) embodies many classic
and grand qualities in a place of higher learning.
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Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Monday, April 23, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Arts and Crafts - Sterling Silver Kalo Vase
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| Sterling Silver Kalo Vase (Chicago - Arts and Crafts Era) |
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