Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican festival that celebrates our connections to the beloved who have left us. Despite the imagery we will see in coming days, it is not morbid. The Missouri History Museum (a lot more interesting than it sounds) has a weekend event observing the occasion.
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Breakfast isn’t a big deal in our house. Maybe some yoghurt and fruit, or just a bagel with cream cheese. The only time I get a full morning meal is at a hotel buffet, and they aren’t worth photographing. So, needing an image for today, I found this picture of a food stand in the rain under the south end of The Highline in Manhattan. Bacon and eggs might be hard to eat on the street, particularly if it’s wet.
Halloween itself. It has been so horribly commercialized and monetized, very much with the consent and participation of Americans. The day seems to allow people to let out something that is otherwise repressed, and that’s a good thing. The over-the-top home decorations, some more elaborate than Christmas, well, that’s something else. Mrs. C and I don’t get into holidays much.
One of the more creative costume ensembles at the Central West End Halloween party. Our temperatures have gotten much cooler and we’ve had some rain, so maybe we will get more natural versions of this. Note, though, what is in the hand pf the person on the left. Someone was selling cocktails in IV fluid bags, with the liquid tube to use as a straw. Medicinal purposes only.
Halloween isn’t until Friday but The Lou’s biggest party was last night. On the Saturday before the official date, our trendy Central West End neighborhood sponsors a huge street party. The costumes range from the mundane (who needs more Super Mario brothers?) to people like this. Not sure what’s going on with this couple, she dressed as Lady Liberty with wings and he, wearing a bishop’s mitre, symbolizing something more sinister.
The president and his sycophants claim that the people at the No Kings rallies in every state were left wing loonies [sic], Hamas agitators, Antifa operatives (as if such an organization exists, while we are reminded that every American soldier who fought in World War II was antifa) or cranky, out of touch geezers (like me). All lies, and yet more lies.
In general, I think that mixing religion and politics creates a volatile brew. Your reaction may depend on whether you support or oppose the point being made this way, but in either case rational analysis suffers. Using religion with satire is maybe not so bad.
And that was the universal tone at No Kings. No America haters, just people who want to preserve the values of our democracy. And it was the same all across the country.
St. Louis’ No Kings protest spilled out of Kiener Plaza to the edge of Market Street, downtown’s main east-west thoroughfare. Lots of passing motorists honked their approval, even a city fire truck.
As with everywhere across the country, many protestors at No Kings day wore absurd inflatable costumes. It’s known as tactical frivolity. As the writer Gary Shteyngart said in the New York Times,
it shows the absurdity of the charge that all the protesters are armed militants. In contravention of the Trump administration’s claims that the protesters were all Hamas agents or antifa interns, the protest [in Chicago] was wholesome, nonaggressive and almost shockingly middle-of-the-road. It’s hard to call an inflatable chicken dangerous.
By the way, axolotls are Mexican.
The two most striking works in Laumeier Sculpture Park are Tony Tasset’s Eye, seen in detail yesterday, and Alexander Lieberman’s The Way, https://www.laumeiersculpturepark.org/the-way-conservation . I’ve usually photographed it straight on (click the link), but there is much to see in the details with a wide angle lens. What does this make you think of? Telescopes? Artillery?
Millions of Americans will assemble in protest today for No Kings Day. We are expecting a lot of rain in STL. I hope it holds off until I can get some images.
It’s increasingly common here. Autumn has been very warm and dry. Officially, we are in moderate to severe drought. The leaves turn brown and just fall. The only way to get some color may be putting them right in front of the setting sun.
Unfortunately, there are strong storms predicted for Saturday, the day of our nationwide No Kings protests. I really want to document it. We’ll see.
Citygarden, our downtown sculpture park, usually adds pumpkins to the art objects at this time of year. I swung by yesterday and didn’t find anything so I pulled this out of the archives. Fun with f stops.
Out cruising for fall colors, an obvious stop is the Jewel Box in Forest Park, https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/parks/parks/Jewel-Box.cfm/. It is a large greenhouse in Art Deco style. The floral displays outside change with the season.
Again at the farmers market. I don’t know if these are edible or merely decorative. But a pumpkin ain’t nothing but a squash.
When I was of trick-or-treating age, ca. 1959-1962, it was just about sugar. No store-bought costumes, not even masks. We would wear crummy old clothes and color our faces with sidewalk chalk. And no plastic baskets, Pillow cases were more efficient. We would ring doorbell after doorbell in our Queens street of six-story, between the wars apartment buildings. No front door security ring-ins then. We made out pretty well.
Of course, it’s all different now. I don’t know what small children make of all these images of death and dismemberment, but I suspect they are completely desensitized. This was the scene at a Saturday farmers market a town or two over from the suburb where we live.
Traipsing along after my granddaughter and her friend at the zoo, I was surprised how interested they were in the residents of the reptile house. I think this is a boa constrictor but I wasn’t making notes. It looks indolent to me but with a very bad attitude. Ellie has no fear of picking up a well-fed boa. On the other hand, she told me recently that she was afraid of bananas but was unable to explain. Maybe she was pranking me.
Looking up from the field where Artica takes place, a viewer is confronted by one of the many freight trains crossing the Mississippi into St. Louis. Note the man in the yellow tee shirt riding in the front. Exciting or scary?
Rare missed day yesterday. I still can’t shake this bronchitis and haven’t been out much. Just a couple of pictures left from my brief Saturday visit to Artica. Here, executive director Nicolette begins to gather the marchers for the annual parade. People are encouraged to bring a biodegradable something to float out onto the Mighty Mississippi with their hopes and dreams.
For the first time in many years, I missed the burning of the Our Lady of Artica effigy last night. I haven’t said much about it but I’ve had nagging bronchitis for a week that really slowed me down. Although I went to the festival for a while Saturday, I lasted only an hour. This clever little monster was munching button flowers along the fence.
It’s Artica weekend again, St. Louis’ annual outdoor, out-there, visual, interactive and music festival. I went down for a while yesterday, still weighed down by some chronic bronchitis and back issues. There was an image at every turn. I gather this was supposed to be an eyeball head. Hard to see, but there were fine blood vessels painted on the sphere. Never saw her face.
Another from Tower Grove Pride. I suspect that there characters represent something specific but I have no idea what. (Suggestions?)
Artica starts today. Hope my spine holds up.
More Tower Grove Pride. Whenever I go to these events, I'm always running into the wonderfully named Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, all the more meaningful for my Catholic background. They wear these little plastic name tags, just like Mormon missionaries.
Artica is this weekend. Still listless but gotta pull it together.
Another late post. This bug has still got me down. And my creaky back is bad enough that I’m seeing pain management next week. The joys of getting old, but we must press on. So, another pic from Tower Grove Pride. Want to accept a dare?
I could have gone a few different ways with this theme. Got a couple of pictures of Philip Glass from times we have crossed paths. Lots from the Dale Chihuly Museum in Seattle. In the end, I decided something local was most appropriate. This is a curtain wall building in downtown STL. The colors reflect the sky but not at all the texture.
We are fortunate to have one of the best symphony orchestras in the country. Its home, Powell Hall, is 100 years old. While the acoustics are very good, the building is showing its age. It reopened this weekend after two years of restoration and redevelopment. A new building surrounds the old one on two sides, with a fresh lobby, rehearsal space, musicians locker rooms and a green room for visiting artists. The auditorium retains its cream and gold patina, with improved acoustics and much more comfortable seating. It’s a big deal to us.
Back home and a big change of scene. There is more to edit from Scotland but I’ll put those on Flickr.
There are two major Pride festivals in STL, a big parade downtown in June and a stationary event in Tower Grove Park in September. There were lots of folks who were out there. As happens often, it got so crowded it was hard to pick out individual people with my camera. This makes for a nice start, though.
The Old Town of Edinburgh sits on a ridge. It has a long central road, known as the Royal Mile, with meandering streets and alleys leading from it. Population and pestilence brought the city down the hill into the regular grid of New Town. We were grateful for our luck on the weather, given how wet it was when we arrived.
Statuary in Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, two of the great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. David Hume and Adam Smith. They were contemporaries and good friends, the eminent empiricist and the intellectual father of capitalism. (Wonderful book about the two of them, https://tinyurl.com/u48zhjkj.) My sympathies run more toward the former but their impact cannot be understated. Scotland is justifiably proud.
Didn’t get any editing done on the plane from London yesterday. Big meal, watched a movie, fell asleep. Flight from Chicago to St. Louis two hours late (bird strike on the inbound plane on landing!). Anyway, doing some fill-in today. This is the great hall of the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, a wacky collection of fine art, natural history and Scottish bric-a-brac. It has a huge organ and there was a recital starting when we entered. Hard to see here, but the organist is in a blue and white plaid shirt in the center. Quite a treat.
We are not from the left.We are not from the right.We are from the bottomAnd we are coming for the top.
