A Berry Among the Thorns

The varied colors on this shrub adds to the depth in this image, with the older twigs providing the backdrop for the newer, darker twigs. The overall effect reminded me of a sisal rug but, given the thorns, I probably wouldn't be massaging it with my bare feet. Not for long, anyway.

A Grassy Nest

 The other day while walking towards the grocery, I couldn't help but notice the clumps of pampas grasses, all shorn to about six-to-eight inches height. They'll grow back, of course, but it seems that every year, everywhere, they are allowed to flourish, their grassy plumes back-lit by sunny days, then Poof! they are cut down, like a new Marine recruit's blond locks, reduced to a regimented burr.

As I looked at the mowed patches, I noticed matted swirls, and wondered what critter had made the grass its bed for the night. Was it a fox? A coyote, perhaps, that turned around three times then settled down, curled into a tight wad with its tail covering its nose? We tend not to think of wildlife in a place so urban as this overgrown strip mall, but the stretch of concrete and asphalt definitely has another life when the humans have mostly departed for their own burrows: One morning years ago, I was walking along the arcade when I noticed a scattered pile of flesh and feathers, where an owl had taken and eaten its prey. And here, in the bottom picture, is a question mark, showing me that something had been there, but not told me what. Another aspect of life that goes on out of our sight.   

Where "Gone With the Wind" Meets "Frozen"

When I saw these frosty cabbages hunkered down in rows inside long urns, they brought to mind any number of images, but mostly of  the dance scene in the old movie, "Gone With the Wind". It's not one of my favorite films: What with its racist caricature of  Black people and the reduction of women to simpering ninnies, the movie now seems like it is a very dated reminder of both how far we have come as a society, and how far we have yet to go.

I long ago became irritated with the character of Scarlett O'Hara until I chose to see her as an intelligent, shrewd woman forced to play a role in a society that seemed to regard females as little more than child-like baby machines; in fact, when Rhett Butler told her he wanted to pamper her as though she was a child, he immediately lost his charm for me. When I saw Scarlett as doing what she needed to protect her family, to put food in their bellies, and keep a roof over their heads, then her actions (and stupefying simpering!) made sense.

If like me, you think the movie is a bit fucked up, I recommend The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind, made in 1988. It seems almost a miracle that the entire production did not suffer a complete collapse.

 

Teen-Age Orchid Leaf: Two Red Edges

 When all else fails, drag out pictures of the kids.

Dreary days have left me wandering in the shallow end of my image pool. Now five and one-half inches long, the new leaf on my orchid plant continues to provide me with small pleasures during this covid down-time.

 

Brown IV: Placeholder for Spring

 When I saw this, I had just come from the grocery, one tote over my shoulder and another in hand. The day was overcast and had seemed to be a washout picture-wise, when I noticed a wee bit of sun, shining through leaves. "Aha!" says I, and another image, this time with all-l-l-l the browns, has entered my visual lexicon.

Cabbage Boutonniere

 Every fall, I can tell that winter is closing in when I see the city's landscape contractors replacing the more delicate flowers with what look like fookin' purple cabbages. Cabbages, daggonit! And there are white ones, too! In the winter, covered in snow, they take on a tired crystalline beauty, looking for all the world like a batch of over-the-hill debutantes, gathered for one last ball.

Alligators in the Snow

 Alligators in the snow.

Honestly, I've no idea what they are but these are the dominant plants in the giant pots outside the Federal Court Building in downtown Indy. As such, they probably provide some shelter for the pansies that crouch below these bumpy leaves. They remind me of some kind of kale, though. Bleck!

The White Plaster House

One morning, a bit over a year ago, I was on my way to an appointment on the east side of town. While the morning light was cold and bright, I was still not prepared to see a gleaming white cottage at the corner of East 10th Street and Arsenal Avenue. In fact, in a neighborhood made up primarily of wooden frame, vinyl-sided homes, the smooth white stucco walls were a surprise.

Later, I looked for information and found the home was built in 1886 by William T. Prosser, a plaster craftsman who immigrated to Indianapolis from England in 1870. He was employed as a plasterer and sculptor by the Indianapolis Terra Cotta Company, so it is not unusual that he used his home to display his skills. In fact, a description describing Prosser's home/studio stated "This house shows an interesting use of detail, especially in the decorated plaster ceilings, unusual in a house of this size."

These images, from the 1958 LOC Historic American Buildings
 Survey, show ceiling details from the home's interior.
Photos by E. Roger Frey 

From what I could find, the home has had few owners during its life. One of them was F. Max Howard, who fell in love with the house when he was a boy and vowed to own it one day. When he returned from fighting in WW II, he saw the house was for sale. Though in poor condition at the time, he and his partner, John P. Sieberling, a music teacher, bought the home and worked over the next fifty years to restore and maintain it. Its current owner is a former student at the Herron School of Art and Design, who has also done work to the home to both update and to retain its unique appearance. In fact, Prosser House now has its own Facebook page.

   

B-B-Bright and C-C-Colorful

 The day was gray, cold, and snowy. I didn't expect to see bright colors, yet there they were - a patch of frozen pansies, withered, as though their shoulders were hunched against the cold. But they seemed to provide their own warming glow, trying to provide a bit of sun for themselves and any passersby.

And today has dawned bright and sunny!

The first since January 6, and one of the best since January 20, 2017!

Brown III: Straight and Curvy

 

During my search for "brown" my eyes fell on this group of wintering trees against the granite wall of an IUPUI classroom building. Bathed as they were in the pale winter sun, the trees and the wall made me think of chic winter suiting - all gray tweed, beige, and taupe fabrics striking their poses on the runway.

 

Street Art: Dots and Dashes

I made a little safari for myself Saturday morning, with a bus trip planned for stops along the route to take pictures of some statues at the federal court building downtown, and of a white plaster house just east of the area. 

Just as I was going to the catch the bus for the second leg of my journey, I noticed these orange dots and hash marks at the intersection. They seemed to align with the traffic lights and, later, I found that orange is the color used by workers to mark the location of underground signals.

Happy with the results of the first leg, and the discovery of the orange marks, I caught the bus for the second part of the trip. The little adventure went well, indeed, almost as if I'd carefully allotted twenty minutes to take pictures of my subjects before I had to go on to the next location! Tah-dah!

A Season's Colors

 Every season has its colors and,

while I prefer the delicate hues of spring,

there are subtleties in winter's palette that

can be equally beautiful.

 

No Outside Air

 This is one of two locations for this business on the west side of Indy. The man who owns the business started from this location in 1985, then opened another ten years later. He became so successful that he donates ten percent of his profits to his food pantry. I have been past Dalton's Food Pantry on some mornings when the line of people has been a block long - and this was before the lockdown.

  

Zowey! Look at the Color!

Maybe it's because the past several days have been so gray that this fallow rose bush seemed to glow with all the colors of  a tapestry. A constellation of silvery stars is made of the sepals, while the flower's secret affair with bees is revealed in the rose hips containing the flower's pollinated seeds.

 

A Frosted Edge

 Another of the photos I took last week on my quest to find different browns. Although it is listed as the least favorite color in surveys, brown is everywhere.

From shoes, to eyes, to hair, to poop,

to Mother Earth - it is ubiquitous.

Men at Work

 Not far above the streets of Indy, but high enough that both were leashed to the scaffolding, two men were working to install some sort of steel framing into a newly poured cement wall. The building they were working on had been some sort of Mid-Century/Brutalist mishmash, concrete and gravel surface with no windows. While it wasn't exactly ugly, it was dated and nondescript. Over the past year or two, it has been gutted and re-shaped into a structure that will have more windows, at least, and a veranda on top where people can see the city

and get some air.

Looking for Brown II

 

The longer I looked at this picture, the more browns I saw. The dried hydrangeas seem to have more yellow in them than other areas, while leaves and bits of mulch have red, making the color seem more like burnt sienna. And the darkest bits are carrying more blue. Since brown is a tertiary color, one that is a mixture of red, yellow, and blue, how the balance of those colors are made determines the sort of brown the artist gets. One definition reads: "Tertiary colors are those that are made by either primary colors with secondary colors, or two secondary colors, or a full saturation of primary color and a half saturation of another primary color." WTF? Meh, I just mix blue with its opposite on the color wheel, which is orange. Since orange is a mixture of red and yellow, I just vary the mixture until I get what I want.

Fuzzy Buds

 We're just about three weeks into winter, yet the buds are here to remind us

that Spring is coming, there will be a brighter day.

The mob rioting in Washington yesterday were white people, primarily white men who, in the ordinary day-to-day scheme of things, can go where they like, can worship as they please, and have any job they qualify for without being judged solely by their skin color, religion, or gender. They are pissed off because the world is changing, is moving on without them. If these folks got/get left behind they mostly have no one but themselves and their own poor choices to blame.

Their "leader", tRump, is the ultimate enabler, a toxic criminal who has never been able to accept responsibility for his own actions. They see themselves in him - the prime example of always failing upward and always blaming others for their failures.

C'mon January 20th! C'mon Spring!  

Dimensional

 Dimensional lumber is wood that has been planed to a standardized width and height, yet comes in various lengths depending on what is to be made from it. These boards, which have been made into seating, had an additional, angled cut made, giving a bit of visual interest to the ends of the benches.

One might say dimension had been added.

Brown

 "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?"

-- George Gobel

Last night I decided to make a post for another website about brown, my least favorite color. So this morning, I ambled slowly from the bus stop to the Natatorium for swim practice, and then strolled my way back afterwards, all the while looking for "brown." I found a lot of it, and boy is it pretty! Well, the browns that Nature makes are interesting, but Man mixes some fairly ugly shades. I think my post will be a very boring article illustrated with a bunch of pretty pictures.

 

Gettin' A Buzz On

 There's a butterfly in there. And a bee, of course, both of them feasting on the goodness and probably getting a bit snockered on their good fortune.  When I was in college, I became enamored of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. In turn, he made me aware of Japanese art, work I've admired and wanted to emulate ever since. These grasses and flowers reminded me of those drawings - so simple in composition, yet so difficult to achieve.

The Flower That Wanted to Be Sputnik

 Whenever I see a flower like this, one that has long spikes growing from a central core, I think of Sputnik 1, the first of three artificial Earth satellites, launched by Russia in 1957. Sometime afterward, my school class made a field trip to Indianapolis that included a stop at the Allison Manufacturing plant. While there we saw an exhibit of items made by the company. I vaguely recall some engines, but I definitely remember seeing a bright, stainless steel globe hanging from the ceiling. One of the men told me it was a model of Sputnik. I don't know why Allison had it. I also remember thinking how small it was - about the size of an armor-clad grapefruit with long antennas sticking out. The real Sputnik, at 184 pounds, weighed about the same as a grown man, so the one I saw was definitely a mock-up of some sort. But of everything we saw that day, over sixty years ago, that little Sputnik is the thing I still recall. And since Sputnik's first appearance well over sixty years ago, it might be said that the satellites, now often launched in entire bouquets, have proliferated, well, like weeds.

Color on A Sunshiny Day

Another bright picture from an earlier visit to Newfields. While we are all happy to greet this New Year, the past two days of fog, rain, and ice seem somehow appropriate; perhaps to remind us of lessons learned, to view with a skeptic eye the promises of any politician, and to take a moment to mourn the, so far, nearly 400,000 victims of the pandemic on this country alone, many of whom might still be with us if the same politicians had taken their jobs as public servants seriously. Instead, we got serviced and so many folks are left to mourn.

 

New Year's Day: Picture of the Year

 Nuthin' special for this past year, except the pleasure in just being able to wander the grounds of Newfields, where I stood under giant banana leaves to check out their ribs and among the bees as I poked my nose into this agave-like plant. I was surprised to see tiny purple florets rising from the brightly-colored plant. And there was a little reservoir of water that served to quench the thirst

of both insects and the plant.