NEXT YEAR IN . . .

 

The last day of 2024. I understand that at the end of the Passover seder it is a tradition for the assembled to wish each other “next year in Jerusalem!” I’ve heard Jewish friends use the phrase as a fond farewell. On New Year’s Eve in our house, the toast is “next year in Ireland!” With good health and fortune, that will happen to us. My father’s family is from County Clare in the west. We will be in Dublin on Easter, which could be interesting. 

And we hope to be in some other places next year. Should end up in Costa Rica at some point. We always seem to. Who knows where else? We’re retired. We have time.

So Happy New Year from St. Louis to our friends around the U.S. and the world.                       

ANOTHER ELEGANT TOWNHOUSE

 

Imagine the life of a prosperous family at the end of the 19th Century. It looks so proper, so elegant. Roll forward a few years and you could hear a couple of cheerful young women singing Meet Me In St. Louis in the parlor. (Nobody ever wanted to meet you in Milwaukee.) Lafayette Square is surrounded by homes like this.                

INSIDE LAFAYETTE SQUARE

 

Lafayette Square is a couple of blocks on a side. It contains what may or may not be the first official city park in the U.S. west of the Mississippi, established in 1836. I don’t think I've been there in decades, despite having worked my whole career less than 10 minutes drive away, so I took a walk through yesterday. To say that it is charming is an understatement. More to come.              

LAFAYETTE SQUARE

Lafayette Square, not far from downtown, contained the homes of some of St. Louis’ wealthiest residents in the 19th Century. The grand homes are a mix of French and German styles. They are all built with brick to prevent spreading fire, easily done with the large supply of good clay in the area. All of them facing the park and for a couple of blocks around have been lovingly restored.                    

AN ANNIVERSARY

 

Today is the anniversary of the death of our daughter, Emily, at 47. I wanted to say something but was at a loss for words. Then I came across a column in yesterday’s New York Times about sentences of the year (the subject-verb-object kind), quoting Washington Post columnist David Frum:

The thought of my own death has never been a distressing subject. We live, we love, we yield the stage to our children. I hoped that when the time arrived, I would have the chance for farewells. If that wish were granted, I could with total content ride the train to my final destination. It never occurred to me that one of my children might board the train first, pulling away as her parents wept on the platform.         

           

FORGET THE FRUITCAKE

 

Not what it seems. This storefront had been vacant for some years, the fry vats cold and the sign in disrepair. A nice sandwich shop from up the street, Milque Toast (everything served on toast) moved in here to get more space. Not open when I cruised by yesterday, of course, but I’d rather have a donut than another stale slice of fruitcake.                 

PEACE

Peace from St. Louis to all who celebrate Christmas as well as those who do not. It can be a hard commodity to find in this sad old world. Since we have no family in the area except Ellie, who was with us yesterday, and it’s raining all day, it’s quiet in our home. That's okay.                    

EXCITEMENT IS BUILDING

Christmas Eve, and the excitement in a certain girl who spends some of her time in this house is about to bubble over. All four grandparents, her father and a church that sometimes helps her and her dad since her mother has been gone, have built piles of wrapped packages for her. Despite all that has happened to this child in the last couple of years, she is so happy, so cheerful (mostly), so grateful and so positively involved with her friends that she makes me glow. May it remain so.

Locals may recognize that this is looking east on Manchester at the beginning of The Grove neighborhood.            

MADELEINE MONDAY

 

Haven’t had the kid on for a while. That’s her on the left, with best friend Emma. I don’t remember the cat's name but it’s very used to strangers.            

WHO DISTURBED MY NAP?

 

The return of gratuitous cuteness. There is a delightful place in St. Louis called Mauhaus Cat Cafe and Lounge. For a small entry fee, you can get a beverage, a pastry and hang around with a bunch of friendly kitties. They are all adoptable. Our granddaughter, Ellie, just loves the place. We took her and her best friend yesterday.              

GAS STATIONS IN THE NIGHT, NUMBER 4

QuikTrip, Big Bend Boulevard and I 44, Kirkwood. The underside of these canopies at newer stations are all white, with very bright lights. And all very clean. Most of them are edged in vivid red (except BP, green, and Mobil, blue). The feel is high tech.

I’ll come back to this theme later. There is something very cutesy to shoot today.                      

GAS STATIONS IN THE NIGHT, NUMBER 3

 

Circle K, Elm Avenue and Watson Road, Crestwood, very close to where we live. Don’t know how much longer I’ll continue with this. It’s different.                  

GAS STATIONS IN THE NIGHT, NUMBER 2

South Broadway and Lombard Street, downtown St. Louis. This project is turning out to be harder than I thought. The photographer needs a lot of room to find an interesting angle. Traffic is a problem. I’m wondering when some security person will get suspicious about an old man in a black car taking pictures of the property through his car window. It might be easier if I went to the edges of the metro area where is lots of space, but that’s not convenient.                   

GAS STATIONS IN THE NIGHT, NUMBER 1

 

I’ve become fascinated with the look of contemporary American gas stations at night. The inspiration is a favorite painting by the artist Ed Ruscha. It’s tricky to make this work. It needs a dark location, preferably without adjacent structures.There has to be enough surrounding space to get a good angle. A bit more of this to come.

For locals, this at the northeast of Big Bend and Laclede Station in Webster Groves.                 

TRUMPET IN THE BASEMENT

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I attended a fundraiser for Artica at the William A. Kerr Foundation. There were to be performances but no schedule was published. It was wrapping up when I arrived. There was the sound of a trumpet coming from the basement. I went down and found one last musician.                    

ST. LOU NOIR

 

The corner of Lewis and O’Fallon Streets in the post-industrial wastelands north of downtown. Normally somewhere angels fear to tread, especially at night. However, off-frame to the right is the William A. Kerr Foundation, in its unusual building that hosts all sorts of arts events. On this particular night there was a party, fund raiser and silent auction for Artica.                         

FOREST PARK INFRARED IN COLOR

 

This old picture shows what you can get when you do an infrared conversion in color. The scene is one I showed recently in monochrome. Color is more technically difficult.  I will have to go back through the tutorials if I shoot more of these.                

BLUE ARCHES

 

A long-time reader of this blog complained politely that she was tired of gloomy, high contrast monochrome infrared images. The original IR images are very magenta. It’s not hard to manipulate them into dramatic B&Ws, but there is also a way to make otherworldly color pictures. I used to do it more often but it’s complicated and I don’t remember the process well. Maybe I’ll post one of the old ones tomorrow. For now, arches from the World’s Fair Pavilion in an icy blue.

I am so out of material. It’s cold and wet today and miserable for outdoor shooting. I’ll scramble.             

QUESTA ABAJO

 

Um, maybe some mixed metaphors or loose associations. Our trips to Argentina over the years have made me a big fan of Carlos Gardel, sort of the Elvis Presley of tango, the king of the genre.  One of my favorite songs, performed with such intensity, is Questa Abajo, or, roughly, down the hill. It works here. You could tumble roughly and dangerously down the stairs and terraces from the World’s Fair Pavilion. You could walk smoothly down the stairs.              

GLOWING BANDSTAND

 

More infrared. A small lake in Forest Park contains what is called a bandstand surrounded by a lovely garden, although I have no knowledge of any performance being held there. It would be hard to hear across the water, which makes me wonder about its purpose. Beauty is good enough.                      

SYSIPHUS

It’s not an arrogant mythical king but it is just as futile. Someone mentioned in a comment to Monday’s post that the missing sphere from the line could be seen at the upper right of the frame. But no, it is a separate sculpture by the locally famous Bob Cassilly, co-founder of the nothing-else-like-it -in the-world City Museum. The turtle may try to climb the sphere or push it forward but no amount of effort leads to progress.                      

THE OTHER SIDE

 

The other side of our World’s Fair Pavilion, down a long terraced hill. It’s December, but in warmer months an interesting fountain flows over these blocks. It looks more dramatic in IR.                  

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES

I guess you would call these things bollards. They are concrete and it’s hard  to imagine how they were made into such perfect spheres with no visible seam. What would be the second one is missing. Maybe it was damaged. Maybe some very strong prankster rolled it down the hill.                    

BACK TO 1904

St. Louis had a world’s fair in 1904. (And the second modern Olympics after Athens. We used to be somebody.) This is one of two structures from the fair that remain, the other being the core of the art museum. We call this one the World’s Fair Pavilion.  There is a sweeping view down a hill on the other side and a nice open-sided space within. I’ve been to a wedding and reception there. When I was in college, the day after a concert in a theater, the Grateful Dead showed up here and played for free. Infrared makes it more dramatic.                   

THE PARK IN LOW WAVELENGTHS

 

I had some time yesterday to get out to Forest Park with my infrared-converted camera. Working with these files in color is complicated. It depends on the band of IR wavelengths your camera sensor sees, making subtle adjustment in the channel mixer in Photoshop and other things I understand poorly. Monochrome is easier. The chlorophyll in leaves turns white and bright blue skies turn dark. Forest Park as you never see it.               

SOME IR

We are having trouble with our home Internet service, enough that we need to have a technician come over. In the meantime, we can only get access through our phones, which is really slow. I meant to go out yesterday with my infrared-converted camera but I spent much of the day troubleshooting. This is an older IR picture in Forest Park, looking across the Grand Lagoon toward the art museum.                  

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - HO HO HO

 

A Christmas tree farm outside of Midland, Michigan. The whole family went to pick out something for the kids to decorate. The outside displays were a bit over the top. Mrs. C and I don’t get worked up over the holidays. We’re not sentimental.                  

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - CHEMICALS

Parts of the Dow Chemical complex in Midland, Michigan. It may be a bit odd, but the city has a parkway running by here and built an overlook. Dow has a complex and sometimes controversial history (you could look at the Wikipedia article). It was a principal manufacturer of napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. It is a huge, worldwide business but keeps its corporate headquarters in Midland. Hard to imagine what rich people find to do there.                    

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - TRIDGE

 

Midland, Michigan, where my son and his family live. It has lots of amenities, much of it funded, one way or the other, by its economic anchor, Dow Chemical Company. One unusual feature is the Tridge - not bridge - connecting three points in city parks near downtown. The center spans the confluence of the Chippewa and Tittawabasee Rivers, which eventually empty into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. Mrs. C and son Andy check the view in the cold.

PYRAMID POWER

 

No new local material so I’m going with my best available. Who doesn’t want more pictures of their grandkids? Audrey, Josie and Ellie pile on and I couldn’t have gotten a better arrangement if I knew how to direct posing (which I don’t). Josie, on top, is the instigator. Irrepressible, and perhaps a prodigy. Not through the first semester of kindergarten, she sat by me watching Weird Al videos on TV and read me the captions.                 

CITY DAILY DECEMBER THEME - SLOW

Few things in St. Louis say slow as persistently as a barge struggling upstream against the torrent of the Mississippi River. Sunset on a cloudy day make it look almost motionless.    

City Daily Photo members around the world creep in their petty pace at https://citydailyphoto.org/category/theme-days/ .                

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - GENE POOL

 

Another marginal phone pic, but that what’s we got. All three grandchildren in our hotel room with wet hair after the pool. Ellie, 11, the one from St. Louis, with her cousins Josie, 5, below center, and Ellie’s bestie, Audrey, 9, upper right. These kids have so much fun together that Ellie doesn’t want to leave but we have to go home today.                    

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - TRADITIONAL THANKSGIVING CARVING OF THE...

 

…stick of butter. We’re up here in Michigan with our son, Andy, his wife, Claire, and all three of our grandchildren. St. Louisan Ellie and Michigander Audrey contribute what they can by cutting a stick of butter into pats. I didn’t shoot anything yesterday so this phone shot by Andy will suffice. 

                      

STL DPB IN THE AIR - HOLIDAYS AT O'HARE

 

A place we know all too well, O’Hare Airport in Chicago. We used to come here regularly when both of our children were at the University of Chicago. Now, being American Airlines customers since they took over St. Louis-based TWA, we change here on our way to lots of places. Today’s destination was Flint, Michigan, an hour’s drive from the home of our son and his family in Midland.

American went to a lot of expense to hang all the garlands. Humbug. I’d rather they spent it on a little more room in the torture cabin.

                  

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - AN ODD PLACE FOR DORIC COLUMNS

 

A decaying picnic shelter overlooking Lake Mattheissen, Illinois, that we saw yesterday. The structure has a beautiful view, particularly in fall, but was not built for the ages. How odd that the designers went to the trouble of including wooden Doric columns.

No idea what to post tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day in the US. We are flying to Michigan today to spend the weekend with our son and his family. Maybe I’ll shoot something banal when we change planes at O’Hare.                      

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - IN THE ILLINOIS RIVER VALLEY

 

We did a brief road trip the weekend before last to visit an old college friend and his wife. They live in Ottawa, Illinois, about a four hour drive north of here. The area contains the valley of the Illinois River, which, with a little engineering, flows south from Chicago and meets the Mississippi north of St. Louis. There are beautiful state parks in the area. This is Matthiessen Lake. It flows into a gentle waterfall over limestone strata, but I wasn’t up to going all the way down the hill and climbing back up.                     

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

 

Big wind-up to the walk through Garden Glow at our botanical garden. The view is looking back across the central axis reflecting pool toward the Climatron. I took many shots of this view as the light patterns and colors constantly changed. This was my favorite. 

We are in the air Wednesday, along with hoards of other Americans, for our Thanksgiving holiday. We were away on a road trip last weekend, so I may use some images from that as a bridge.                    

TENTACLES

Year after year, when I walk past this tree at Garden Glow, I feel as if long arms with sharp fingers could reach down and clutch me. It is an uneasy sensation but I have always made it out of the garden’s gate. Can I be confident that I will be so fortunate next year?                  

HOUSE PAINT

Another perennial feature at Garden Glow. Henry Shaw, a 19th Century rich businessman and amateur botanist, owned the land that became the Missouri Botanical Garden and adjacent Tower Grove Park. This is his well-preserved home. I don’t understand the technology but the changing light projections precisely fit the building.              

LINE AND PATTERN

 

Another year-after-year favorite at Garden Glow. The lines of small lanterns are perfectly straight. The light colors and patterns are in constant flux. This might be better represented by a video, but this is a photography blog.                        

ELECTRIC PRAIRIE

 

Not the riot of color found in most other displays at Garden Glow, but I like its simplicity and subtlety. And there is no way to find your way through it, only the long way around.       

WORMHOLE

 

A tunnel of changing colors in motion. Not quite the same effect as when the Starship Enterprise goes into warp drive, but still pretty cool. The path is one way, with the lights moving away from visitors. You could feel like you are being sucked through. What happens when you come out the other end?             

MOTHERSHIP

 

Another bauble in Garden Glow. The Climatron is a geodesic dome that contains four climatic zones, formed by complex internal shapes and air systems. As with lots of the other glow features, the colors change and pulse.                    

INTO THE WOODS

 

Just around the bend from the viewpoint in yesterday’s post, visitors to Garden Glow pass through curtains of pulsing light. A single exposure can only capture a moment. These lights were constantly changing color and pattern.                 

THE MOON GLOWS, TOO

The botanical garden calls this its central axis, a long reflecting pool, longer than it seems here. A large geodesic dome called the Climatron is behind me, and we’ll get to that. The photograph can’t capture the constant movement and color changes of the lights. Only the moon held steady.                     

THERE MUST BE SOME LIGHT

Life moves on, notwithstanding my view of national politics. Our wonderful botanical garden has a year-end event called Garden Glow, when the paths, buildings and plants are covered fantastical, computer-controlled colored lights. We went to the garden members’ opening night preview last night. I’ll stick with this for a bit, unless, of course, I am overcome with rage.

Road trip this weekend to see a very old friend. May be some good photo ops.                     

EVERYTHING IS BACKWARDS

 

One blow after another. The execrable Matt Gaetz as Attorney General? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary off Health and Human Services, someone who discourages using vaccines and thinks something in the water can make children transgender? Seriously? I’m drifting into a personal, unproven conspiracy theory that Trump, full of schadenfreude, really wants to wreck the country. So, another old photo, an infrared looking over Forest Park, where the trees are white and the sky is dark.                  

LOUIE LOUIE

 

Well, I thought I was doing better until I found out that the president-elect had nominated Satan’s stepson to be attorney general, our chief law enforcement official. I got the news while waiting at our major hospital for a steroid shot in my lower back. Maybe I should have asked for one in my head, too.

Anyway, another shot from my visit to Forest Park. The statue is called The Apotheosis of Saint Louis (Louis IX of France). His history is, let’s say, controversial but the statue is a local icon.                  

THERAPY SESSION

 

It was time to drag myself out of the house and do something. Give myself a mental health day, so I took my camera and went to Forest Park. Autumn has come late here. Sometimes we get no color at all; leaves turn brown and just drop. October was very warm and dry, not good for leaf color. November has been cooler and wetter, so we are getting something. The view here is the top of Art Hill, with the art museum and the heroic statue of St. Louis in the background.                      

I HOPE NOT, BUT...

 

I still don’t have the drive to get out with my camera, so I’m continuing to riffle through the archives, looking for images that express my feelings. This was a clothing shop for the young and hip on Cherokee Street in St. Louis. The store itself failed before too long. Monday was Veterans Day in the US and I was reminded of Trump's comment a few years ago that our military personnel who died in service to their country were suckers and losers.

Still, there is some light at the end of my tunnel. Mrs. C and I are taking a weekend trip to northern Illinois, to see the person who was once probably my best friend. We shared a cheap apartment when we were in grad school. We were out together on St. Patrick’s Day, 1973, when I met Carolyn in a bar. We’ve been in contact some online but haven’t been face to face in years, maybe decades. I’m looking forward to this.