Canajoharie New York and it's Dummy Light

So we drove to Canajoharie, N.Y.  today to see a photography exhibit at the Arkell Museum, a selection of about 35 photos on loan from an art museum in Syracuse, N.Y.  My main motivation for going was to see an original print of the photo of Edward Weston and Margarethe Mather taken by Imogene Cunningham and displayed on the cover of the book- A Passionate Collaboration, one of my favorite photographs and one of the best portraits ever taken.  The original was a sepia colored platinum/palladium print, however the one in the exhibit was a b&w silver print, obviously printed much later, which was a bit of a disappointment.

While there we enjoyed the small museum with its lovely collection and explored the town which may be at the beginning of a slow, inexorable decline, now that Beech Nut foods, it's main employer has left town, and left them with a large, sprawling, empty plant, an ever increasing number of empty store fronts and some sense of desperation about the future, a feeling that is not uncommon among a vast number of places across the country that have been abandoned by their primary employer.  Presently the town is in great physical shape, and as always, I am hoping they will find a way to repurpose themselves before the decay starts to set in.  Here are a few photos taken of the still lovely village...

A little research on the town informed me that this is called a "dummy light".  It is reported to be one of only 3 in NYS, and possibly the whole country.  It is unique and the best example of its type, but many people in the town find it to cause confusion and to be an overall nuisance to the orderly flow of traffic and want it removed.   They are fools.  With the loss of Beech-Nut, if they took the light away, what would be left?

Church Street looking north.

This last  one is a picture of the abandoned Beech Nut plant taken from the memorial garden at the Arkell Museum.  Mr. Arkell who founded the company and contributed most of what comprises the lovely collection in the museum seems like someone who cared alot about the well being of his town and its people, most of whom worked for him, would most certainly be quite unhappy about the sad state of affairs created by decisions made by the present owners of his creation.

                                                                  Pablo

Holbrook, Arizona

Even though I like to think of myself as a Highway 83 kind of guy, when you are criss crossing the country as much as we are, it is inevitable that you are going to find yourself on remnants of Route 66 now and then, and with Jackie's affinity for La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, we find ourselves on that segment of Route 66 every few years, so while I have no illusions about documenting this American dream in any particular manner,  you can't help but to take a few good photos along the way. I like Holbrook especially because of Joe and Aggie's, a Mexican American restaurant that's been around since the 40's and serves real good food in a friendly atmosphere to get you set to leave for the painted desert and petrified forest which are just down the road as the two large chunks by the sign of petrified wood portend.

When looking through various Route 66 travelogues and monographs, I often feel that Joe and Aggie's doesn't get proper attention and frequently no mention at all .

Maybe people just don't see it because it is across the street from such attention getters as the Wigwam Motel which is quite unique and hard to compete with as a true American roadside attraction.   We took this photo at the motel a few years ago using a disposable camera and got the most wonderful Kodachrome like postcard perfect effect without even trying.

                           

I marvel at the unintended perfection of the results.   When you are just passing through, as we so frequently are, sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, photo wise that is.  Otherwise that's all I wanted to say about Holbrook, but here are a few more photos.

So that's the general idea.  When you are just passing through its whatever happened to catch your eye. during the short time you are there.   Its hard to miss the Powwow trading post, now closed down. 

 If you enjoy your meal at Joe and Aggie's and want to make it your regular place to eat,  land in and around Holbrook is abundant as is the occasional vacant house.  If not, eat hearty anyway and head out to the painted desert.  Here's me trying to fit all of that indescribably vast beauty into a negative.  An exercise in futility and humility and the delusional grandiosity of the human mind.

Pablo

Anti-Fracking Rally Albany NY June 17...

Dateline Albany, NY,...June 17, 2013...

Sorry to say it, but today seemed to mark a somewhat uninspired beginning to the 2013 anti-fracking rally season up here in Albany, NY where the protesters seemed to show a real lack of imagination and energy in their effort to catch the attention of our governor/presidential hopeful Andrew (fortunate to be born son of Mario)  Cuomo who probably finds himself in a moral dilemma on this issue pitting him against people who vote (maybe, but who cares anyway)  and the corporate interests who he will be depending on to give big for a national run.  A tough choice on a tough problem.  God help us!!!

The numbers in attendance reported in the press appeared somewhat inflated at 2,000.  Looked more like about 1175 people to me.   The rally covered the same very important issues as the others last year (see 8/27/12 posting), and the arguments against fracking are well discussed all over the place if you are still uninformed.  Nothing new to report on that front from today's get together except that the graphics and presentation were tedious at best and not particularly attention grabbing (see 8/27 posting for comparison purposes).  Even the press presence was quite limited showing a lack of interest on their part.  One big change today, however, was that due to construction related issues, the rally was held on the east lawn in front of the building, which allowed some views of the city for those who haven't been here.

Don't know who's speaking, but he is looking out over a medium sized, not overly impressive turn out with the city in the distance.  The next one is the protesters marching around the capitol building.

 

If the pictures this time around are not that exciting, its just that the event itself was an understated rehashing of the same issues with a much diminished energy level from the crowd.  I always like to think that great revolutions produce great art.  Not so today.  The highlight of the day for me was a visit from a somewhat demented looking Lady Liberty who does appear worried about us.

Pablo

A rainy June afternoon in New York City...

and I am standing in the gutter soaked up to my knees and beyond in greasy, sludgy city runoff,  but it is worth it.  It has been an unusually rainy spring, like rain almost every day an inch or two, so it was touch and go on whether to go to NYC as planned today or wait a few weeks.  The forecasts were dire, but I didn't want to believe them so I dove in head first into that giant pot hole that is the lower east side.  Had done two or three laps and was ready to follow my appointed rounds, when I saw this poster...

and just as I was lining the photo up, this woman with a red umbrella walked into the frame, and click, once again serendipity provided me with opportunity.  Its interesting how many times things have coalesced in an instant and if you are lucky enough to be there and quick enough to push the shutter...

makes up for all the missed opportunities you end up regretting for weeks.  The digital era has opened up a new window of possibility, and just when I has begun to think that I had taken my last pictures of NYC, voila!!!

So there I was, standing in a puddle about two feet from the curb in a bus stop at the corner of Essex and Delancy Streets, battling the buses, the heavy rains, the aggressive drivers and an unruly wind driven umbrella, to take picture of people walking by this God given studio like backdrop plastered on the barricade of a construction site/soon to be condo, further obliterating my belovedly, no longer so shabby lower east side.  But at least for the moment on this wet June afternoon anyway, all is forgiven...

Took a bunch more, but you get the idea.  Will check the files later on to see if there are anymore that add interest to the story, but that's good for now.  Back to the Essex Street subway station and back uptown to meet up with Jackie.

On the way down, met up with Jack M. Murphy, a bright, philosophical fellow with a story to tell, no hard feelings against the system he feels has left him behind, and an apparent continued love for the country in spite of it all.  He grew up not far from where I did, and hoped to get back there soon, where he says he has a friend who has a room for him.  We talked for a while, I helped him out and hope that he will find his way home.

Pablo

Memorial Day 2013

On a related note, on this day as we remember with sadness and loss, those who fought and/or died in the name of human endeavor, it is a fitting time to reflect on the human condition,  the suffering and destruction we have wrought viciously,  needlessly and without long term meaningful purpose against each other, for millenia.  As a species we are a horrible contemptible species with no redeemable qualities.  We need to hire police to make us behave,  keep us from mayhem and double parking, and empower them to "neutralize" us if the need arises, like when you are the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While we are potentially capable of good, the evil we do far surpasses it.  We have developed the technology to destroy the earth and each other and are doing a first rate job of it.  But the earth will have its revenge and will cleanse itself of us soon enough with apocalyptic fury.  Good riddance to a social experiment gone horribly wrong.  When God expelled Adam and Eve from the state of cosmic consciousness that was Eden, the true curse He inflicted on mankind was self consciousness, a loss of oneness with the universe, leaving each of ourselves walled up inside of "fortress me"  locked and loaded with fear and paranoia, surrounded by the alien world of others about whom we need to be vigilant and against whom we need to protect ourselves.  And the epiphenomen of speech, the capacity to use language as a weapon against each other in the name of peace and understanding,   Today we mourn humanity and the infinite capacity for hate and suffering we are capable of.

James Falkner famously said (in referring to the postbellum south) that the past is not dead, in fact it is not even the past.  Jung could have told you that if you had listened.  But we don't listen, we just talk.   In driving through Mississippi and Alabama, I came to see that the spirit we Americans could not crush during and after the Civil War, is now being ethnically cleansed by proxy, by the bland, deformed face of corporate America that embodies the new gospel of nondescript commerce at all cost, hallaluya,  praise be the holy spirit, son of Sam (Walton) in case the allusion was somewhat vague!!!! .

Driving through Gulfport, Mississippi, the final home of Jefferson Davis, and the beginning of the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway which begins at the gulf and heads north,  I had the feeling that if he could have seen the anti-climatic future of shuttered downtowns and abandoned villages subsumed and crushed under weight of a corporate/industrial juggernaut landscape shaped by strip malls full of McDonald's, Walmart, Walgreens, Appleby's, Sonic, Waffle House and on and on and on, he would have either fought harder or given up sooner.  The south is not dead, it has just become the north, with grits and waffle houses.   So whether we agree with their cause or not, the confederacy fought for their beliefs and unknowingly in the defense of someone else's profit motives and died as senselessly as all the others that preceded them and followed.  But in the end,  but they too were Americans.

                                                                     Pablo

Richville, New York, Monument to the Unreturned Soldiers of the Civil War

Further along Highway 812/11 in upstate New York north of New Bremen...

is the town of Richville, which is on a small hill east of the road somewhat off the main drag so that it would not catch your attention if you weren't looking for it.  It is large for an upstate town and appears to have been quite prosperous and well populated at one time and they had the good fortune of being off the main road and basically bypassed by progress.  Now there is little left but the churches, the cemeteries, the fire department,  and houses and empty shops in disrepair.  No bar, no stores, just a quiet isolation from the world zipping by below which is probably just fine with them.  As you are driving north on the 812 you will see the Welsh Society Building at the beginning of the turn off to the right, up the hill.  You can't miss it, and you shouldn't.  

What made this town so interesting was a monument in the Wayside Cemetery..."In Memory of the Unreturned Soldiers of the war of 1861-1865", a war so recent that it did not yet have a name.  There are 36 names on the monument,  a great number for such a small and out of the way place that was so distant and detached from the conflict yet such a part of something that cannot conceivably have touched their lives except in the abstract at first and then the loss.

It is the word "Unreturned" that sets this monument apart.  A poignant  euphemism for the unspeakable.  What happened to those "Unreturned" as their mothers, fathers, wives, children, families waited forever for the return of the unreturned that would never happen.  Did some of the families is this isolated outpost of America received some sort of notice from the army one way or the other.  The empty years of waiting, living in hope, clinging to a prayer in a time when people often never traveled more than 20 or 30 miles from home and  lived never knowing and never wanting to believe.  36 young men, "Unreturned" from a war that was not theirs, not so different from the Viet Nam, the Missing in Action.  Men who marched off into oblivion.  I ache for those families who sent their sons off to never return.  For what?  

                                                                   Pablo