Fremont Alleys

Didn't get enough alley action in Everett, so I ventured closer to home.



"Nothing will hold us back"



The leisure of the workers



The framing of parts



A stack of spare skies

Everett Oldtown Alleys

A few more shots from my weekend foray through the unbeaten paths of Everett, Washington.


Here's mud in your eye



"It's truly amazing, how the flesh re-asserts itself."



No Barking



Light in Autumn

Sidewalk Art

Not a fancy 3-D anamorphic illusion, but I like it.


Between Bellevue Way and 108th

Wires in the Blue

Strolled around old town Everett, Washington today.


Ex liquour store



Wendy's Cafe



Body Building building



A jolly pleasing gathering of wires

A Day at the Fair

Dragged the kids to the annual Western Washington State Fair in Puyallup in a poignant attempt to re-enact my own childhood. The Fair has not changed a whit in the last half century, as far as I can tell. Despite overstimmed senses, a good time had by all -- except for boarding the wrong shuttle bus at the end of the day! The experience, as usual, included:


Tourists lugging giganto stuffed critters through the dairy barn.



Abundant rednecks with attendant redneck humor.



Gaudily decorated games of skill and chance. Mostly chance.



Prize-winning livestock (pictured) and obscenely large pumpkins.



Super-sweet colorful snacks made to your order.



Total exhaustion.

Let There Be Darkness

The husk of the once bustling Mervyn's department store (Factoria Mall branch) has been waiting six months for a new inhabitant.

Garage Doors: 1 Big X

Appetizer, a simple but tasty X ala Dixie flag.



Main course, bone-in X with chevron remoulade.




Dessert, gatemouth X topped by a succulent melange of squares and diamonds.

Yellow

Spotted this old storefront between performances of "Othello" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."


Ashland, Oregon

Red

Weathered wall, spotted on a college-scouting tour this spring


Davis, California

Blue

Slated for gentrification


15th and 65th

Garage Doors: Diamondocracy

Welcome to another riveting chapter in Northwest mid-mod architecture! Still more diamond patterns cropping up... often with flags!


The Overlap



The Quilt



The Leftovers



The Lurker at the Nucleus
(no flag, but a safety cone)

Crop

The day after 9/11 this year, Robin and I spent an autumn afternoon on this farm in Woodinville, which for the most part is no longer a rural hamlet but is now quite a suburban pork loin. Anyway, she plucked some produce for dinner and I watched.


The onion hangout




Still life with wheelbarrow




Tomato stakes, echoes of 9/11

Happy 30th Anniversary

I'm still using this cup given to me by Virginia Sybert in 1979. Here's a poem I wrote at the time based on its design.
(The weird thing is that when I visited my cousin Fred for the first time recently in Oakland, he served me coffee in the same cup.)


Still life with elephants adjacent to tomatoes

There a tomato illumined a room.
There stood an elephant, African,
enormous, dusty, enormous,
African, an elephant. Taut
vermilion fruits had taken up the slack
trunks which nuzzled, prickly hairs
of the nose, nostril-edges aquiver
at its near end. These elephants
were infatuated with tomatoes, with
the concept of tomato. The joy
was gigantic, of sensing
the blessedly silky, concise and efficient;
what luck, what providence,
that they should adore tomatoes so
and be placed on the same earth as they!

The elephants trudged far
into the congealing savannah
seeking one, one, field.
When they found it they lay
down among the bushes to touch and touch
the rare tomatoes, even after rain,
caterwauling, had fallen
on that inviolate sweet-tree,
on the veldt, even after
like greenish seeds it fell.

Every point on the spherical red
is unmarred as the unmarred one next
to it, even the imperfections perfectly
executed. Every tomato is a radiant,
quintessential tomato. Every elephant
is a dubious instance, except
for the nose. The flawed beasts,
each with his astounding nose, (flawed
because the rest of him is not so
astounding) hold a monstrous happiness
in being in the company—merely
in the vicinity—of the flawless.

Blog of Sand and Fog

Henry David Thoreau
My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean’s edge as I can go.


Pacific Beach, Washington

Spreading the Love

Breaking News: I'm humbly touched to have been awarded the "Honest Scrap" award for this photoblog!

Honest Weblog Award Rules:
1. You must brag about the award.
2. You must include the name of the blogger who
bestowed the award on you and link back to
that blogger.
3. You must choose a minimum of seven blogs
that you find brilliant in content or design.
4. Show their names and links and leave a comment
informing them that they were prized with the
Honest Scrap Award.
5. List at least ten honest things about yourself.
6. Pass it on with the instructions!

Here's the comment that accompanied the notice:
"...brilliant recordings of the ordinary and the everyday in a place not usually associated with artistic inspiration: Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle, and specifically the neighborhood of Newport Hills. Full disclosure here: he's my husband and partner in the crime of committing to posterity loving observations of our neighborhood. He's also very good at photographing the world outside our neighborhood, as his other blog Eff-Stop (International) proves. In both design and content, his blogs expand the idea of community involvement through the artistic process with understated humor and originality."

Yes, full disclosure, ahem, the bestower was my Robin, the skipper of Red-Apple Elegy; but hey, she's got great taste, so I'm happy to pass this along, though it may take me some time to amass seven recipients.

The first deserving awardee who comes to mind is Lora of Oh, the Urbanity!, which documents via surprisingly pleasing mobile-phone photos the spectacular everydayness of Philadelphia with mordant but honest commentary.

One of her recent postings had a link to some great (and some over-the-top) photos depicting The Beauty of Urban Decay from Smashing Magazine.

That got me started on an afternoon of surfing, resulting in this list of sites you might want to peruse (not to forget my standard list of links on the right):

Abandonia
Decay at JPGmag.com.
Marchand and Meffre Photography
Out of Ruins
Sick Britain
TalkUrbex
Urban Decay page at Digital Photography School
Urban-Travel.org
Xavier Nuez

Ten Honest Things About Myself

1. I think people should purr more and hiss less.
   
2. I notice the aesthetics of symmetry but prefer the glory of asymmetry.
   
3. I am easily distracted....uh, what?
   
4. Offhand I'd rather be reading.
   
5. I am constitionally doomed to not take seriously things that should be, and to take too seriously that which it would be better to let go.
   
6. I root for the underdogs.
   
7. I love the details.
   
8. I get tired of sentences that start with "I."
   
9. Pomposity bugs me.
   
10. I don't like making "ten" lists.
    

Oldies

Summer draws to a close and the hotrodders gather for a last fling.