Little War

That's what guerrilla means in Spanish, but what does guerilla streetfood mean? Fidel, Che and Raoul noshing on the sidewalks of Havanna?

It's a food truck. We have quite a few of them around town, providing everything from Korean-Mexican fusion to cupcakes. In the one below a nice lady from Texas uses her raised pistol to draw our attention to her Tex-Mex tacos. Seems like there's been a lot of guns around The Lou lately.                

Dada Lives

You've probably heard of Dada, the absurdist art, or more properly anti-art, movement that flourished after World War I into the 1920s. They wrote bizarre texts, meaningless but fascinating, to challenge the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie. 

The spirit of Dada lives in contemporary restaurant advertising. I wonder what George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams would have thought of this sign (after you explained guacamole to them, of course).

Note the bit of  X ≠ X in the last line. At Qdoba, the water isn't wet, the prices on the menu are whatever you want them to be and the jalapeños are sweeter than honey.

What's He Doing Here?

Don't know who he was or where he came from. Never seen him before. But when I was photographing the gun rally as the shooters marched toward the Arch, I ran into, well, Jesus, or a Jesus impersonator. He was standing on the corner of 8th and Market, blessing whatever passed by. That included me and all the firearms. Didn't notice any difference afterward.

The letterblock necklace spells out  “I (heart) U” J E S U S #1 “I (heart) U”. Appropriate, I suppose.  

                   

A Death In The Family

It happened the weekend before last. A promising young outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, Oscar Taveras, was killed in a car accident in his native Dominican Republic. Just 22. Money, plenty of money, for the first time in his life. Driving a Camaro with his girlfriend after a heavy rain. One car accident running into a tree.

The Cardinals are the closest thing this mixed-up town has to a unifying element. When there is a death, we see an outpouring of emotion from the fans, with home-made memorials piled up beneath the statue of Stan Musial, the greatest Cardinal of them all, at Busch Stadium. It occurred when Musial himself died in January 2013 and pitcher Josh Hancock was killed in another car wreck in 2007. Maybe some kind of public catharsis.

Madeleine Monday: Halloween

We went to the home of our daughter, Emily, her husband, Brian, and Madeleine on Halloween night. There are lots of kids in their city neighborhood and few in ours in the suburbs. The weather had turned suddenly cold and there were not many callers. Father and daughter sat on the front steps, waiting to hand out the sugar.

Some people in this country go crazy at Halloween. I don't remember anything like this when I was growing up in New York. We put on some minimal disguise, then went from door to door in the local apartment buildings and demanded sweets. It's so elaborate now and so fixed on pretending terror is entertainment. I totally don't get it.                    

Pumpkins Need Police Protection

I turned around after I took yesterday's photo and got this one. The policemen in the background may have been left over from the gun rally, which happened earlier the same day. 

The pumpkins were gone when I drove by yesterday.                    

Vanishing Point

This it the kind of thing they tell you in all those photography tips emails you can subscribe to - draw the eye down a line toward a vanishing point. Works well with pumpkins on a wall in Citygarden. 

There were probably plenty of pumpkins carved, smashed or hurled around The Lou last night. Who knows, some people might have listened to Smashing Pumpkins tunes. We spent the evening at our daughter's house in the city where they usually get lots of trick-or-treaters. But it was cold and almost no one came by.