Saw this reflection of my building in a puddle from last night’s rain while leaving work this afternoon.
I liked the lines and decided to go with black and white because in color the brown door was a distraction from what I saw as the main point of the photo. Plus I kind of like how in black and white you’re not quite sure why a chunk seems to be missing from the top of the frame. The original picture is below. Do you agree?
Now that I took a photo of one tree’s bark, I’m looking more closely at bark everywhere. This older birch has a very craggy-textured outer bark, which then peels itself away in curled loops to reveal the smoother, cleaner-looking “new skin” underneath.
My equipment is no fancier than A) my older-model iPhone (a 5c, not even the 5s, which apparently had a better camera) and B) my Kodak Easyshare Z915 Digital Camera, which is no longer supported by the company and which I got on sale for $100 through Amazon about six years ago.
Despite the mediocre technology, I love taking pictures! One of these days I’ll feel flush enough to spring for better gear. Meanwhile, I’m going to make do and start setting myself up with “assignments”—sort of my own personal photography school 🙂 —and just see what I can learn . . . about the cameras I have and about taking better photographs, period.
So here is a photo from my first (self-imposed) assignment, “Texture.” It’s the bark of a honey locust tree on State Street in downtown Milwaukee, taken with my iPhone 5c.
This little critter was warbling away up on the power lines this morning.
Is this a robin? It has a reddish breast but also a fair amount of white lower down. A female? The bill is yellowish with a black tip like what robins have. But I’ve never heard this exact song before. Here is some video (low quality, sorry!) I shot to capture the sound. If you recognize the bird from its song, can you please let me know what it is?
So I was at my office on campus today and walked into our main department office to get something from the printer. Our administrative assistant always has the radio tuned to our school’s radio station, WMSE (91.7 on your FM dial, best station in the world; be sure to listen to my friend Sonia‘s “Blues Drive” show on Friday afternoons, 3-6pm Central).
The song playing caught my ear. I recognized it and wondered aloud what it was. Turns out WMSE livestreams both songs and titles online, so you can always see what’s playing. With a few quick keystrokes on her computer, Rose was able to tell me its name, which was “Sleep Walk.”
We agreed: Technology is awesome!
I had my phone with me (more technology; thank you, Apple), so I googled the title and found this video.
Great 1950s hair. Dick Clark is so young. And the one brother gets all the attention for his flashy playing of the melody while the other just strums away on supporting guitar, kind of like how John Oates gets stuck with all the background vocals while Daryl Hall grabs the limelight singing lead.
Anyway, I didn’t play the video (beyond checking to make sure it was the same song) until after dinner tonight. The steel guitar fascinated me—I’ve always thought of this kind of sound as “Hawaiian guitar” (my grandfather was Native Hawaiian) and wondered how that instrument somehow wound up in country music—so I watched carefully during closeups in this video to see how he played it.
Then I noticed the name on the front of his instrument: Fender.
Double take. Really? I know what a Fender is, but I thought they just made the typical rocker’s guitar, like Strats.
So I looked up Fender, and guess what I found? The very first Fender guitar ever was a lap steel guitar, produced in the 1940s. Below is the illustration for Leo Fender’s patent application.
And I learned some other interesting things, too. For example, a steel guitar can be played horizontally, lying across one’s lap; hence, “lap steel guitar.” Or it can be standing up, with pedals, in which case it might be called a “pedal guitar.” Or it can be played per usual, slung across the body, except you wear a metal tube around one finger and slide it along the strings.
I never knew why it was called a “steel” guitar. I thought maybe the strings were made of steel or something. Nope, it’s called a “steel” guitar because of that metal tube (aka the “steel”) worn on the player’s finger to slide up and down the strings. A steel is also called a “slide” because of the technique (used to play “Hawaiian” guitar).
Lots of different materials can be used to make the slides besides steel. There’s glass, which is apparently the most popular of the other materials. Blues musicians used to slice off the top of a wine bottle to make a “bottleneck” slide. Other materials include ceramic and wood. According to an article on the Gibson guitar website (here) about how to choose the right slide, W.C. Handy wrote down the first blues melody after he heard “an itinerant guitarist swiping a [knife] blade across his strings at a railroad stop in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in 1903.”
Cool to know. I love that everyday life provides such serendipitous learning adventures 🙂
I happened across this AP story by Frank Eltman in yesterday’s newspaper: “Solar projects can’t save the forests for the trees?”
According to the article, several projects are currently in the works to cut down hundreds of acres of forest in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Long Island and then build solar farms in their place. The executive director of an environmental advocacy group is quoted as saying that while it’s always preferable not install solar projects without removing trees, “of all the potential options, there is nothing less impactful on the environment than putting in a solar farm. That’s the real world we live in, and they have a right to develop it.”
Can this world get any stranger? Apparently, like the Vietnamese city of Bến Tre, the environment has to be destroyed in order to save it.
Here’s a thought: What if we installed solar farms in Arizona and other places not densely forested, where the sun shines all day, every day, for most of the year. And in places where the opposite is true, like Long Island, with its miles and miles of coastline, we could experiment with alternative energy sources tailored to fit their unique geography, like tidal power.
Surely this not a new idea, so what is going on? How could any responsible government official even look twice at a proposal to deforest hundreds of acres in favor of solar panels? Political expedience? Corruption? Misguided community pride? Or both, e.g., someone with an ownership stake in solar ventures looking to make money with a project long on eco-trendiness but short on viability?
Does no one in power think that common sense is smart? Or is willful ignorance just part of the human condition.
On a lighter note along those same lines, here’s Joni Mitchell singing the song of this post’s title. It seemed like an appropriate finale, and I love Joni Mitchell, so . . . 🙂
This is a tale of two tennis courts in Milwaukee’s Washington Park. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame (see a nice NY Times article about his Midwestern parks here), Washington Park was once home to the Milwaukee County Zoo. The zoo moved decades ago, and at some point early in the years since then, these tennis courts were installed and then abandoned as neighborhood demographics and recreational interests changed.
The tennis court on the left side of the panorama (a closer look at that court is shown in the photo above) is largely abandoned, covered with sparkling glass shards and branches and weeds, although at the far end, barricades have been erected to form a low wall creating an arena for “bike polo.” If you enlarge the photo, you can see the graffiti-looking sign saying “Milwaukee Bike Polo” painted onto the metal barricades. I’m not exactly sure what bike polo is, as I’ve never observed anyone actually playing it, but it involves tiny little soccer goal nets set at opposite ends. So apparently it really is polo, played from bikes instead of horses.
(Aside: Milwaukeeans may remember the days back in the 1980s when real polo matches were played on Sundays up on Good Hope Road between 60th and 76th.)
The group of tennis courts on the right side of the panorama have been redone to create a series of small basketball courts, mostly just hoops, I guess. You can tell by the bright morning sunshine that I was driving by really, really early on the day I shot these photos. By late morning and on through the afternoon and evening, these courts were packed with teens and young men.
So from abandoned, weedy artifact to a vibrant center of public recreation—someone in the parks department was paying attention to the needs of today’s community.
If you build it, and it’s the right thing in the right place at the right time, form and function transcend mere utility. “They” will not just come; they will embrace it and make it truly their own.
Today seems like a good day to link to two of my older (March 2014 and October 2015) posts about Turkey. Mostly I talk about Turkey within the context of wider regional conflicts and history, but these posts may get you thinking about why Turkey matters so much politically, militarily, economically, and culturally.
Katherine Wikoff 