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. 

.

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. 

God Hates No One

Young boy stages WBC counter-protest 
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

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:

http://www.amazon.com/Fresh-Kills-ebook/dp/B0074BEBEY/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1336917498&sr=1-7

.

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.

.

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)




.

Alma Mater – Columbia University (King’s College) – New York City

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.

.

Traditional - Purple Bearded Iris

Classic.  Traditional.  Heritage.  A variety gone out of vogue.


.

Now We Are Free - Gladiator

.

Philly Accent

.

The Messenger - Lisa Gerrard

.

Eugenics - Election Year 2012

Mitt Romney - bred to win?

Porchulacs (Porchulaca) - Poor Man's Window Box Garden

Porchulacs


.

Four O'clocks

.

Arts and Crafts - Sterling Silver Kalo Vase

Sterling Silver Kalo Vase
(Chicago - Arts and Crafts Era)

.

Autodidactic – George Ashdown Audsley

Japanese Design

Ran into the term “autodidact” to describe the lifetime education, self-education of the late George Romney.  Never heard or read the term before.  I am aware of people in earlier times who educated themselves with books such as Franklin, Lincoln, Truman who had little formal education beyond the basics.

World Museum Liverpool

I know that many architects before the term and function got commoditized as a University only taught profession in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were self-taught.  One example is the British architect George Ashdown Audsley who designed the skyscraper 11 Broadway in 1896 in New York City as well as pursued a self-taught interest in the music of organs and designed the world famous Wanamaker Organ in Philadelphia. 

11 Broadway NYC

Perhaps there is too much official Ivy League type education these days that seems more like a product built in a factory than a pathway to individual pursuits, intellect and common sense design and function.

Autodidacticism

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-directed learning. In a sense, autodidacticism is "learning on your own" or "by yourself", and an autodidact is a self-teacher.

Autodidacticism is a contemplative, absorptive procession. Some autodidacts spend a great deal of time reviewing the resources of libraries and educational websites. One may become an autodidact at nearly any point in one's life. While some may have been informed in a conventional manner in a particular field, they may choose to inform themselves in other, often unrelated areas.

Autodidactism is only one facet of learning, and is usually complemented by learning in formal and informal spaces: from classrooms to other social settings. Many autodidacts seek instruction and guidance from experts, friends, teachers, parents, siblings, and community.

Joan of Arc School Harrowgate Philadelphia

.

Atwater Kent Radios - 1928

Philadelphia Street Scene - 1937

11th and Market Streets.

City Hall in background.

(Photo: George Mann)


.

Cup Sleeves - Aluminum Tumblers

                                                      Terry Cloth Cup Sleeves 

Aluminum Tumblers

They go together.  


Lost American (picnic) culture.


.

Aluminum Tumblers - So 1950's And Middle Class

.

Always on my mind - Brenda Lee

.

French and Saunders - Three Irish Nuns

Moose Downtown Anchorage Alaska

Alexander Pushkin - The Prophet

Alexander Pushkin - The Prophet

With fainting soul athirst for Grace,

I wandered in a desert place,

And at the crossing of the ways

I saw a sixfold Seraph blaze;

He touched mine eyes with fingers light

As sleep that cometh in the night:

And like a frightened eagle's eyes,

They opened wide with prophecies.

He touched mine ears, and they were drowned

With tumult and a roaring sound:

I heard convulsion in the sky,

And flight of angel hosts on high,

And beasts that move beneath the sea,

And the sap creeping in the tree.

And bending to my mouth he wrung

From out of it my sinful tongue,

And all its lies and idle rust,

And 'twixt my lips a-perishing

A subtle serpent's forkèd sting

With right hand wet with blood he thrust.

And with his sword my breast he cleft,

My quaking heart thereout he reft,

And in the yawning of my breast

A coal of living fire he pressed.

Then in the desert I lay dead,

And God called unto me and said:

"Arise, and let My voice be heard,

Charged with My will go forth and span

The land and sea, and let My word

Lay waste with fire the heart of man."

.

Nature Sounds - Rain

.

Saint Joan of Arc Church - Harrowgate - Philadelphia

photo: John Malloy

The man who baptized me or more accurately the man who was founder and pastor of my parish in Philly was a fanatic of sorts. He started out life as an Episcopalian, changed Christian registration to R.C. when in the seminary and went on to start a new R.C. parish. The parish was sort of in between a lot of other established parishes and the land in between those other churches began to be developed, houses built, and there was a need for a new church, school etc. in the first decades of the twentieth century in that part of Philly. 

Let me call this man Father Ed. He was of the old “God is to be feared” school of beliefs. He was an Old Testament kind of guy. 

He was dead by the time I reached first grade. I have heard stories about him. One from a home inspector who related the story about being an altar boy in my parish and being five minutes late for mass. Father Ed ranted into him at the end of service about how you can’t be late for God. The priest also made the boy serve everyday for a year at 6:00 a.m. mass as punishment. That priest made an impression on that guy but I don’t think that Father Ed made a friend.

Then, as it happens sometimes in life, a lady knocked on the door and said that she had been raised in our house and asked if she might get a quick nostalgic view inside. She then got into some stories about the neighborhood. The one story I remember most was about Father Ed. 

There was a Russian tailor in our neighborhood. He also did dry cleaning and his store was a block away from our house. We did business with the man. In the story of the visiting lady we finally understood why some of our neighbors took their dry cleaning three blocks away and not use the local guy. The Russian was also a Jew and a good tailor I might add. My parents, for working class, were flaming liberals. Being Jewish did not matter to them. That and my father liked to haggle. 

The lady went on to say that as a child, she and her friends used to taunt the man. Let me say anti-Semitism was rampant in America back then in the 1930's, at least in this neighborhood. Well Father Ed got wind of the fact that some of his parishioners and children were harassing the man and boycotting his business. Father Ed made it a point to visit the tailor and bring his dry cleaning four blocks from the rectory. In good weather, Father Ed sat on the store stoop and smoked a cigar together with the tailor as a means to make a statement of sorts to the neighborhood. Apparently Father Ed and the tailor became good friends as the result of this local anti-Semitism. - - Sabbath Tales

.

I can see clearly now - Jimmy Cliff

John Lennon - the luck of the Irish

.

The Highwaymen - Michael (Row Your Boat Ashore)

Decadence vs. Vitality - Allistair Cooke

59 Trolley Philadelphia

59 Trolley Philadelphia

The Poison Tree

Her grandfather, who had raised her, was exclaiming something loud in the back garden as we toured all the structures that now were built on the once empty patch of land.

The old man had been allotted this fairly large plot of land by the state. It had been sold to him very cheaply. I estimated the original lot to be about three quarters of an acre.

On that lush tropical landscape had once been many more trees than were now present and situated in between structures. Even so, the existing species of large trees and plants grew avocados, mangoes and bananas. These had helped feed a large family on a state road worker's salary.

The main house was plain. Large dormitory like rooms were where the boys and girls had slept. There was a common room or living room and a small kitchen. This structure had been built wall by wall, room by room, over the years. Extra savings went into concrete blocks on a regular basis.

The back of the property had once housed a large pig sty. Pork had been the cash crop that supplemented tropical fruits and the staple rice and beans diet. Pork had helped purchase the blocks. Piglets had been temporary play companions to poor children.

In fact, she had told me that as a child, the only dolls she played with were homemade things made of corn husks, the corn of which had fed the pigs. Corn silks adorned the corn husk dolls as hair.

The old man was quite animated.

The land now held five houses where at one time stood one.

As the nearby town grew outward, modest houses started to dot the countryside. Streets were paved. Second generations built a second story onto parents' houses.

Zoning laws changed in the expanded town. No pigs could be raised within the new city limits. Now only a few old hens pecked at the ground and made the occasional stew.

I asked for a translation. What was the old man shouting about?

Her cousin had inherited a one room house on the back of the property. He had recently married and his new bride had planted some shrubs to decorate this desolate corner of the original lot.

The literal translation of the bride's plantings came to words translated as "poison tree".

"It is a poison tree!" was what he repeated over and over again in Spanish.

The old man was upset. Everything on his property in terms of plants had been always been edible. Now, a stranger, the wife of a grandson was planting a decorative plant and not an edible one.

The old man's bubble had burst. The world outside his front porch could have changed in some measurable way over the years but it somehow had not touched a chord.

His sons had gone to college. One daughter was a registered nurse. The ones who had emigrated to the mainland had their own measure of material success in the post World War II boom in America.

He had at least thirty grandchildren and umpteen great grandchildren. All the changes over the last half a century registered in some proportion that matched the land that he stood on and owned.

Now, on this day, paradise seemed corrupted and lost. The people on the land now did not understand his vision for the land. The land must feed his family. A tree from the outside world had invaded.

The seeds of the destruction were planted. His vision, his temporary footprint in the scheme of things, was disappearing before his eyes. So he shouted in his own way.

His time had passed. Now he knew and recognized that fact.

This he expressed with great passion.

(excerpt from Fresh Kills on Kindle)


.

Age of Chronic Luxury

The visuals. The visuals. 
They all come quick. 
A life of Visuals, 
quick, quick, quick. 
Incomplete as memory fades. 
Always the taste and 
the draw for more. 
  
I suppose the 
Chev-Ro-Lay 
in Black and White, 
a commercial 
and Dina Saur - we 
called her that - tee hee hee, 
framed a magic moment, 
boomer kids seemed to have 
all the rag tag makings, 
potential glory of a new 
rich golden age. 
  
Instead as it all turned out 
it became a burb age, 
a bubble age, a mindless 
consuming age and 
compared to the rest 
of an unaware humanity - 
we, the many, lived the good life 
the high life - for a short time 
in the America of 
domestic tranquility. 
  
It was a coming age, full of 
promise, progress, a golden time, 
an age yet to be sorted out. 
Global awareness was only 
in books in college bookstores. 
And issues like race, sex, sexuality 
had yet to struggle, come of age. 
It was an age of chaos - the good 
parts are yet to survive and lead us 
elsewhere - but by and large and 
for most of us it was an unprecedented 
Age of Chronic Luxury. 
  
Nothing in history 
to compare with it - nothing 
to compare it to - 
the might of Detroit 
and a Maytag 
washing machine 
and "Queen for a Day" 
on the tube. 
The decades on from the fifties 
were sweet though in retrospect 
in-complete. Those years had glamour 
and simple sight - but little or 
no long lasting soul. 
  
The visuals in the beginning of 
that age had a few companions, 
radio, hi-fidelity, stereo 
and not one but many local 
daily hard copy news-papers. 
When the age ended 
with a crash so to speak, a muted thud, 
only the noise and chatter, 
cacophonic clatter dulled 
virtual, not real, reality 
- cable, i-pod, e-mail, mobile cell phones, 
PCs, the Internet, tweeter - 
as disinterested witness to it all. 
  
A Tower of Babel reborn? Retorn with 
a new dark age of chaos to follow? 
  
The great charade of the big war, 
Vietnam - some growing years, 
and the estimated body counts - 
we always won - we never lost a... 
Mission statement to keep the anthill 
threat of S.E. Asia over 
there - it boosted GM stock. 
  
"What's good for GM is (was) good 
for America" then. Or at least that 
is what the Wall Street mantra then spake. 
A national treasury of gold, ideas, youth 
 - a whole generation wasted, misled, 
misdirected - doped - spun - eventually 
onto a pagan altar of deregulation 
and temporary titanic paper profit? 
  
(That and a moon walk to represent that 
early decade or so.  Anybody lately drink the 
scientific wonder of that age? Tang!) 
  
Fast forward, those other years to 
the modern day - and in between (?) 
Work. Work. Work. 
Marriage, a mortgage, kids. 
401(K) - retirement? 
  
Where did all those golden 
Boomer days go? 
Who counts? 
Upon reflection in a glass 
or into a trash filled lake, 
why does the rest of the 
planet want beef 
plastic credit and 
power muscle cars? 
Silly question silly fool. 
  
And as the recent age of 
chronic luxury collapses (here) 
what is the legacy best? Left? 
Shouting - argumentum 
ad hominem - ad nasueum. 
Hate Radio. Hate News. 
Death to my domestic enemy! 
My bubble world is superior 
to yourrr bubble world!!! 
(on a dying planet) 
  
Whatever happened to God? 
Is he retired - living in Vegas? 
  
Where has the Republic gone? 
The upper half (10%) of an 
economy struggles to recover. 
The bottom 90% is lost forever 
in fifth world bliss 
amidst empty factories and 
empty office towers (for sale - cheap!). 
It's the new economics - 
Broken promises - unfulfilled dreams. 
Plastic card idols and 
the pursuit of fantasy 
-the illusion or was it delusion 
of a common man's world - 
could not last - a temporary 
half century long Camelot? 
  
Lost. So many things amidst 
the fading echo 
and fading visuals - of time gone- 
not properly managed   
an unsustainable age 
that no one questioned 
this passing age 
of chronic luxury. 
  
What next?


.