sisu

Branding "beauty in unexpected places"

"And when I looked, the salt had turned to gold," we blogged a couple of years back of this dazzling image of cargo being unloaded from Turkish bulk carrier "Ince Atlantic" in the early morning light across the street at Eastern Salt.

"I have to say — I really like the whole collection. They're beautiful. They will be a great addition to the whole exhibition," emails Dan Adams, co-curator of the evolving "Landing Salt" group show as we tie up loose ends in preparation for the incorporation of twelve of our working-waterfront blog images into the exhibit now showing at Chelsea's Pearl Street Gallery. As we blogged the other day, our pictures will be mounted between acrylic sheets and hung in the gallery windows. The "opening event" will be held a week from Tuesday, June 24, from 5 to 7 p.m. Please join us. Delicious doibs and potent potables will be served. Map.

"A mountain range of salt emerged from the hold of a gigantic self-unloader bulk carrier at Eastern Salt across the street yesterday," we captioned this daybreaking image last fall.

We had been going to go the snail route, printing out our own business cards — to have on hand at the gallery — on the Canon MultiPASS MP700 and trimming 'em by hand with the X-ACTO, the way we do with our Xmas cards. Fortunately we thought better of it, burned a disk with our image file and handed it over to the local Sir Speedy's, who made short work of it.

Update: Blogdaughter Pat of Pat's Pond links:

Just as I dearly love my Chemung River and the surrounding countryside, so Sissy grooves on Chelsea.

It's the spirit of the place.

O'er the ramparts we watched

   
"In June 1813, Major George Armistead arrived in Baltimore, Maryland, to take command of Fort McHenry, built to guard the water entrance to the city. Armistead commissioned Mary Pickersgill, a Baltimore flag maker, to sew two flags for the fort: a smaller storm flag (17 by 25 ft) and a larger garrison flag (30 by 42 ft). She was hired under a government contract and was assisted by her daughter, two nieces, and an indentured African-American girl. The larger of these two flags would become known as the “Star-Spangled Banner” [above]. Pickersgill stitched it from a combination of dyed English wool bunting (red and white stripes and blue union) and white cotton (stars)." From "Star-Spangled Banner and the War of 1812," Encyclopedia Smithsonian.

In honor of Old Glory's 231st birthday, a reprint of our June 14, 2005 post "By the dawn's early light":

It's Flag Day, June 14. We know 'cause when we three siblings were youngsters our mother used to make us keep journals during our idyllic summers by the sea. The school year had ended, and we had made the annual drive with bag and baggage from Exeter to Cedar Ledge, the rented summer cottage on Cape Ann. Desperately seeking topics -- then as now -- that June 14 long ago we were able to enter a drawing of the flag with a brief sentence or two on the meaning of it all. Unfortunately, our summer journals became infested with paper-eating insects and were eventually consigned to the dustbin of history. Happy 228th Birthday, Old Glory. You're a grand old flag:

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

                    --"The Star-Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key

We remember the first inklings of the emasculating Marx-lite mindset beginning to infiltrate our elementary and high school classrooms in the fifties and sixties, when reflexively p.c. teachers -- before anyone really knew what p.c. was -- told us there was no such thing as human nature and keened that we shouldn't have a battle hymn for a national anthem.  We should change it to "America the Beautiful," they told us. While we love the poetry and religious fervor of "Oh, beautiful for spacious skies," with its unspoken recognition of what used to be called "Manifest Destiny," as a national anthem it falls short, missing the point that came crashing into our consciousness on that awful 9/11:  Freedom isn't free.

"The Iranian election: Things are about to explode," captions Dr. Zin of Regime Change Iran over this captionless cartoon by Iranian Nikahang Kowsar blogging from Toronto. Elections are scheduled for this Friday, the day after tomorrow.

Speaking of freedom, "The blogosphere should stand with these brave people," writes Dr. Zin of Regime Change Iran in his "Monday's Daily Briefing in Iran" yesterday. Will the Spirit of '05 that blessed the world with a rainbow of bloodless revolutions sparked by events in Iraq and Afghanistan help make Iran the newest land of the free? We already know it's the home of the brave. Dr. Zin continues:

The Association of Writers in Iran has called for a protest and sit-in in front of the Evin Prison in Tehran tomorrow to show their solidarity with political prisoners. This happens on June 14, from 4–6 pm. The families of political prisoners and student associations are also joining in

Together, we can make sure the mainstream media takes notice. These are the 21st century version of the soviet dissidents. They are pleading for the world to take notice. Let not let them down again.

Iran has its cartoonists, and we have ours. If one picture is worth a thousand words, Chris Muir's Day by Day three-panel cartoons are priceless, especially today's, which touched our heart and made our spirit soar:

Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. So do the swingin' ladies of this week's Cotillion, now accepting dance-card signatures:  Darleen's Place, Who Tends the Fires and Right Girl.

Update:  Michelle has some interesting Flag-Day links and notes it's the U.S. Army's birthday -- 230th -- too.  Hooahh!

Update II:  We like The Glittering Eye's take:  "I never really got 'The Star Spangled Banner' until after 9/11."

Update III:  This is cool. Kevin Aylward of Wizbang! includes this post in a list of "Ten headlines that you can't help but click through to read more."

Working a working waterfront

"How do I look … snappy?" The Father of All Chelsea Salt Piles, patriarch and founder (?) of Eastern Salt Leo Mahoney as a Master of the Universe back in the day, photographed against the backdrop of an immense salt pile as attribute illuminating the character of the portrait "sitter." The image is featured in "Landing Salt," an exhibition currently on display at The Pearl Street Gallery in Chelsea.

"It seems we may have some great events coming up in a couple weeks at the gallery," emailed Eastern Salt Imaginator extraordinaire Dan Adams the other day, offering a showcase for some of our blog's "light fantastic" waterfront images. We're talking huge blow-ups that would be mounted between acrylic sheets and hung — together with quotations from sisu — front and center in the windows of Chelsea's Pearl Street Gallery as part of the "Landing Salt" exhibition, with back-to-back prints so they would be seen from both outside and inside.

"I have looked through the photographs more carefully now and have edited the collection down to twelve photographs, which I am envisioning presenting in six pairs," emailed Dan. "These would also be paired immediately next to quotes off your blog." Above left "Life imitates art" in a closeup of the superstructure of salt ship Storm Ranger (right) in the early morning light that "would have pleased the eye of Modernist/Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler," we blogged four years back.

Dan's the bright young Harvard Design School idea man behind Chelsea Projections, a visionary project — blogged here from time to time — begun three-plus years ago when he was still a student to "reveal the spirit of the place [the salt piles across the street] and generate an enlivening dialog between the city and its citizens." Right up our alley, as opposed to the good intentions of certain self-appointed community "activists" whose delicate sensibilities are offended by the "visual presence and unsightliness of the stored salt." The "Landing Salt" show — latest iteration of Dan's ongoing project — was originally curated and designed by Erin Urban and Ciro Galeno of the Noble Maritime Collection of Staten Island, NY, in collaboration with our man Dan, who is now working on a "new, improved" version of the show. Enter Sissy's "beauty in unexpected places," stage right.

"Always in search of 'beauty in unexpected places,' I've found [the working waterfront across the street] to be a motherlode of visually stunning and thought-provoking imagery through the seasons, grist for my photographic eye and politically philosophical tongue," we wrote members of the Chelsea Zoning Board of Appeals in support of Eastern Minerals' "proposal to redevelop the Coastal oil terminal" last year. Above left, salt-ship cranes and a lonely gull in the early morning light; right, Christmas card design based upon the view from our side yard at Christmastime.

"One immediate question I'm having is a resolution one," Dan wrote:

I'm returning to thinking about how to translate your blog-work into a medium that could be presented in the gallery context.

Is there a way to take your blog images and text and beef up the resolution so that if printed out in a large-ish poster format, we'd be able to avoid drastic pixelation?

Or do we accept the pixelation as a simple reality of the media?  Do you have the images saved from their original files in higher resolution?

Talk about beauty in unexpected places, feast your eyes on photographer and gallery director Joe Green's "Henza," where white swans, white depth marks and white ship's name become calligraphic flourishes scrawled across an abstract color-field painting of horizontal stripes created by a close cropping of weatherbeaten hull and water. Update from our imail correspondent: "'Yet, a secret life awakes … silent only sails a swan …' in the throb of salt-unloading. Great juxtaposition."

And here it gets technical, so feel free to skip this paragraph if you're not as determined as we were to beat the computer. We did, indeed, have the high-resolution originals somewhere in the nethermost parts of our iMac's C drive, but finding them wasn't going to be easy. One day last September, all of our thumbnails — going back to the summer of 2005 when we "Made the switch" from Dell/Microsoft XP to Apple/Tiger — had suddenly disappeared from our easy-view iPhoto digital contact sheets. Imagining the worst, we went through the various stages of grief before jumping back into the ring and wrestling this thing to the ground. Googling for help didn't help. Eventually we stumbled upon the originals, filed away obscurely in hundreds of individual folders — each presumably containing the images from one photo shoot — with no indication by title or date of what was in them. To find a specific photograph would be needle-in-haystack territory. And that's where we've been at during the last couple of days, trying to blog the issues of the day between bouts of tearing our hair and banging our head against the computer screen. But the blog's loss was the gallery exhibition's gain. Our brain addled, at one point we opened iPhoto, stared at the screen and robotically checked out the drop-down menus along the top. Under "File," we clicked on "Add to Library." Up popped an "Import Photos" window. We typed "originals" in the search box, and up came the list of those hundreds of files. We selected all and clicked on "Import." There were over 5,000 files to be imported, and it took perhaps an hour or so for the computer to complete the task, but when it was all done, the digital contact sheets were back where they belonged. Feeling our oats, we went back to our external hard drive, which stores our pre-iMac photographs, and imported those too. Now every one of our digital photographs is at our fingertips in full, glorious color. End of technical section.

"Moonscape" salt mines by Michael Falco from "Landing Salt" exhibition.

"Can you also start thinking of a 'title' for the eventual collection … as a whole," Dan had written after receiving our hard-won original image files yesterday:

I think it's really an interesting characteristic that most of the photos are taken from a relatively consistent vantage [the Willis porch or yard] … the consistent vantage subtly illuminates how much the salt pile landscape changes in time … which is one of the most interesting characteristics of an active port. I think we should emphasize that in the title.

We sent along some links and quotable quotes this morning, and back comes this:

More and more I like your theme/title "Beauty in Unexpected Places."

Not unexpected, but we found dozens of cute kitty pix we hadn't seen lately when we imported all those files into iPhoto. Above Tiny and Baby go eyeball to eyeball with things we don't see.

Our virtual images stepping out from behind the computer screen into the real world: Beauty in unexpected places isn't just about changing light effects anymore. The show opens to a Boston HarborWalk audience on Tuesday evening, June 24. Let us know if you'd like an invitation.

"It is no longer a fact but an opinion"

Found objects — in this case, local TV sports graphics and Tuck's model of "America" — become "attributes" illuminating the character of the portrait sitter. Being a cat, Baby doesn't pose, of course. Instead, among the series of quick shutter clicks in the course of a given photo shoot — if we're lucky — we capture Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment." Above, a portrait of Cakes embodying the Olympic ideal, as described at The Olympic Museum website:

Identification of the athlete by his nakedness, a sign of balance and harmony — Gymnasium and palaestra: the education of the body and mind — Hygiene and body care.

On the other hand/paw, "A portrait is not a likeness," portrait photographer extraordinaire Richard Avedon is said to have said:

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Pallywood enablers, take notice.

More found objects — this time of the "beauty in unexpected places" variety — a DayGlo® orange football appearing to rise, moonlike, atop Tuck's wall outside the kitchen window, the window's white molding suggesting the fluting of an ancient column, the daybreak glow of a light underneath the cabinet creating a halo effect behind Baby's head — become the surrealistic attributes of a cat of mystery [Is there any other kind?]. As regular readers know, Baby Cakes always plays his cards close to the chest.

Attributes? Who needs attributes? The silky peaches-and-cream Sweet Tiny Pea is mistress of her universe, always in control, mysterious and loving it. Here atop the compost box behind the house, she keeps an eye out for intruders. Neighborhood cats, skunks and raccoons have been known to pass this way, with varying results, not always to Tiny's advantage. Never one to cut and run, she, like her brother, is stalwart in her efforts to defend the home turf.

What was that? Body language itself becomes an attribute as Tiny shifts from "Guarded" to "Elevated" alert.

Then, at something cats see or hear that we don't, on to "High" alert.

When the people's dinners arrive — usually about an hour after the animals have had their fill of catfood — "High" alert turns to "Severe Risk." Above, Tiny (left) and Baby focus all of their resources on the threat — the danger of not getting Tuck to surrender some of the food on his plate.

The Think System never fails to deliver. Baby's tastes are cosmopolitan. The Pork Suzette would have to be first among equals, but he is not one to say no to Corny Cornbread Minis, Potato Meltdown, Sweet Potatoes Puree or even frozen peas!

Do tomatoes dream of electric bumblebees?

Outside in the yard poking around the plants for photo ops yesterday, we stumbled upon early indications of a burgeoning bumper crop of what cooks call vegetables but botanists call true berries, garden variety tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum*), AKA love apples. We'd picked up a couple of impressively large, robust-looking plants from Hannaford's in York Corner over Mem Day weekend, and Tuck had transplanted them into large terra cotta pots set out on the sunny eastern terrace, topdressing 'em with our homegrown compost mixture, Chelsea Gold. According to the ID tag, our tomatoes can be expected to grow to 3.5" across. The newborn above (x 4), still wet behind the ears, clings to the spent floral parts of its parents, sheltered by the pubescent sepals that once enclosed the perfect flower — male and female parts in the same blossom — from whose loins it sprung.

"Shake your plants gently once or twice each week for about 5 seconds once flowering begins," advises wikiHow in "How to Grow a Tomato Plant":

According to the National Gardening Association, shaking the tomato plant increases fruit production by more evenly distributing pollen.

The rationale behind shaking their booties to increase production has to do with anatomy. We hadn't noticed before, but the structure of the business end of a tomato flower is somewhat different from that of your typical flower, a four-part structure of whorls starting from the base and working upwards, including a calyx of sepals, a corolla of petals and then, as Wikipedia explains (click here for diagram):

Androecium (from Greek andros oikia: man's house): one or two whorls of stamens, each a filament topped by an anther where pollen is produced. Pollen contains the male gametes.

Gynoecium (from Greek gynaikos oikia: woman's house): one or more pistils.The female reproductive organ is the carpel: this contains an ovary with ovules (which contain female gametes) … The sticky tip of the pistil, the stigma, is the receptor of pollen. The supportive stalk, the style becomes the pathway for pollen tubes to grow from pollen grains adhering to the stigma, to the ovules, carrying the reproductive material.

This cross-section of a sedum from an earlier post illustrates the typical floral anatomy, with male parts whorled individually around the central female parts. Look inside a rose or a daylily blossom and you'll see a variation on the theme.

Anatomy of a tomato flower from "Insect Pollination Of Cultivated Crop Plants," self-described as "The First and Only Virtual Beekeeping Book Updated Continously." Unlike the separate stamens of the typical flower, the tomato flower's male parts are fused to form a tube embracing the female parts. "The construction of the anthers, delicately united with the filament, permits them to vibrate at the slightest touch and send a rain of pollen down the cone outlet and around the stigma."

"Various tests in greenhouses have proven that the tomato flower is not self-pollinating," according to "Insect Pollination Of Cultivated Crop Plants" and other online sources:

However, if the inflorescence is shaken, the pollen will fall from the anthers onto the stigma, and fertilization will result. One pollen grain is needed for each seed, so many grains are needed on each stigma. Incomplete pollination results in misshapen fruit. Cool or cloudy weather retards pollen shedding (Stoner 1971). Growers of tomatoes in greenhouses use various types of vibrators or other devices each few days to shake the flower clusters.

More from Wikipedia:

That tomatoes pollinate themselves poorly without outside aid is clearly shown in greenhouse situations where pollination must be aided by artificial wind, vibration of the plants (one brand of vibrator is a wand called an "electric bee" that is used manually), or more often today, by cultured bumblebees.

Potato-leaved tomato (above) is a German heirloom "of a rather primitive type as seen in the flowers," where the stigma extends beyond the anthers, writes the proprietor of the Danish blog In the toad's garden. "Mainstream tomato flowers have a shorter style [that] ends inside the anther barrel. As the pollen sheds from the anthers, it drops directly to the stigma at the end of the style, inside the barrel … Potato-leaved tomatoes with the longer style hold the stigma out of the barrel, out where pollinating insects rule, in the world of cross breeding." (In the toad's garden photo)

Checking out our own tomato flowers, pictured here with another of the babies, we noted they are of the "mainstream" type with stigma contained within the tube of fused anthers or "anther barrel," as described in the previous caption. 'Wonder whether a determined bumblebee could have its way with them anyway? "As tomatoes were moved from their native areas [in South America], their traditional pollinators (probably a species of halictid bee) did not move with them," says Wikipedia. "The trait of self-fertility (or self-pollenizing) became an advantage, and domestic ['mainstream'] cultivars of tomato have been selected to maximize this trait."

Don't want to shake your tomato plants? Let the  buzz-pollinating bees do it. Pollinator.com has an x-rated description of their technique:

Did you ever watch a bumblebee work a tomato blossom? When it does, it pulls the flower down into a vertical position, puts its fat belly against the stigma, and buzzes. The pollen that is released will fall by gravity (since the flower is now tilting down) directly to the bee's fuzzy (and statically charged) belly, which is rubbing against the sticky stigma as it vibrates. Tomatoes are self-fertile, but the pollen can come from any other tomato that the bee has visited, a bane for seed growers who want to keep varieties pure, but lovely for the gardener who wants fruit.

Do tomatoes dream of electric bumblebees?

Update: Do Maggie's cows dream of electric voluntary milking systems?

*Linnaeus was right: "The scientific name for the tomato in general use for over two hundred years was Lycopersicon esculentum. However, molecular studies in the past fifteen or so years have helped to shift the name back to the one originally assigned by Linnaeus, Solanum lycopersicon," according to the UBC Centre for Plant Research.

The three faces of Sissy

An actress's dream role went to Joanne Woodward, who played three different personalities in "The Three Faces of Eve" over a quarter of a century ago in 1976. 'Don't know what happened to her nose, stage right.

Have you ever woken to a feeling of dread that "she" or "he" had been there the night before? We're talking about the "The Three Faces of Eve" phenomenon of another personality who knows what you are thinking even as you don't know much of anything about what she/he is thinking.

We've had that feeling of remorse through the years from time to time after a night of excessive drinking. It became more obvious in recent times as our alcoholism moved front and center. Once we jumped on the Cold Turkey bandwagon a year ago, our occasional lapses became more obvious to us. Now we've asked Tuck to let us know when SHE is there, and we had an enlightening discussion about it all this evening. As we talked, she receded (a home-remedy version of Freud's "talking cure"?). We've asked him to intervene next time she is there. Folks who've enabled alcoholics may say "That wasn't you," but who was it, we ask? Inquiring minds want to know.

"The traditional diagnosis given the afflicted doctor is dual or multiple personality disorder," wrote Altschuler and Wright in a provocative letter to the editor of The American Journal of Psychiatry a few years back, proposing instead that Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella is "a useful primer for patients, their families, and physicians on substance dependence," noting that "Regardless of whether the drug can be identified, the DSM-IV criteria for dependence can be met interestingly and usefully in this case." Postcard image above shows Brit actor Richard Mansfield in a double exposure depicting the tortuous relationship between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, c. 1895. (Henry Van der Weyde photo)

Ms. Hyde, is that you?

Update: More food for thought from Goomp in the comments:

A most interesting discussion. Do we all have hidden faces that we do not see? Do we sometimes see them without recognition? Do others see what we ourselves cannot see?

Not to mention those other hidden selves, "The Me Nobody Knows" and "The Secret Sharer."

Peter Rabbit is sitting on top of the world

We're sittin' on top of the world. The New York Times's online "World" section, that is, where "Peter Rabbit's Soup," our latest "Cold Turkey Cookbook" post, has turned up at the top of "Headlines Around The Web" (highlighted, above right). According to the Times's own explanation, "Blogrunner automatically monitors news articles and blog posts and tracks news events as they develop across the Web [and] alerts you to topics that are frequently linked to and commented upon. The publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors."

"Someday they will invent a bot smart enough to sniff the context and distinguish a turkey from Turkey!  That's so funny! Good company, though, by any means necessary," emails blogfriend Annie of Ambivablog in response to our alerting her earlier this morning that her excellent Turkey-related post "Fatal Naïveté" and our own Cold Turkey Cookbook post "Peter Rabbit's Soup" were both linked on the front page of the NYT's online "World" section this morning, where a brief item headlined "Turkey" was the top story.

If it's true — as the NYT itself explains under "What's This?" in the "Headlines" box — that "the publications tracked by Blogrunner are chosen by New York Times editors," then one of two possibilities suggests itself. Either someone is asleep at the switch or someone has a sense of humor.

Our moment in the sun as Top Turkey Blogger at Blogrunner and the Times was soon eclipsed by a newer Turkey-related post (above), this time a Huffington Post offering about neither a bird nor a country but a place of the heart somewhere in these United States called Turkey Hollow.

We alerted Annie to the fact that the links to her post at both Blogrunner and the Times were not working properly. She emailed back to call our attention to the fact that the title of her post was also not working properly, her nuanced "Fatal Naïveté" having been misread by the Blogrunner bot as "Fatal Navet." We were delighted with her priorities:

Omigod . . . forget the rest: I'm making that recipe.

(By the way, they also title my post "Fatal Navet." Fatal Navel?)

"Too darned smart for your own good!" we emailed Annie back. "That's why you're so much fun to read. I don't blame you for wanting to try the [carrot soup] recipe. Peter Rabbit will be so pleased." Image is from Peter Rabbit™ "Official Online Store."

The "Fatal Navel" reference was to the content of her post itself:

Hitchhiking across Turkey in a wedding dress to symbolize peace and the marriage of cultures, Italian flower-child performance artist, vegetarian and environmentalist Pippa Bacca, 33 (old enough to know better?), was a lamb to the slaughter …

This could have, and probably would have, happened anywhere. These two are archetypes that have a way of finding each other: Pollyanna and the troll. Denial of evil, and evil. It's a sad story, but it's also a Darwin Award.  And perhaps a fable for our time.

"An Aesop's Navel for our times?" we emailed back.

Update: Checking back with the Times late afternoon, we notice the current post is listed there as #1, with "Peter Rabbit's Soup" having disappeared down the rabbit hole (but it's still listed at Blogrunner, suggesting there really is a NYT editor behind the screen).

Update II: Blogrunner is "a service from The New York Times." FAQ:

The site is automated. Headlines are selected based on a recipe that takes into account their popularity on the web, but editors can intervene at any time to showcase individual articles or blog posts.

I'll gaze at your navel if you'll gaze at mine?

Update III: Lots more madness at Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities.