Gone the Way of Columbia Wearing a Phrygian Cap

Posted on March 24, 2024 by admin

A few years ago, a meme about Presidents Day came to my attention. The text: Think you should have Presidents’ Day off work? Name this man.

The image was that of Warren Harding. For me, that was easy. Maybe not so much for a lot of people, though I suspect no survey about President Harding’s enduring fame has ever been done.

A better obscure president for the meme would have been, say, James Garfield or Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, since Gilded Age chief executives tend to merge into a single hazy gray-bearded visage, except of course for the moustachio’d rotundness of Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

Fame wears thin. That came to mind this time last year at the Harding library and museum in Marion, Ohio. Among a number of other interesting artifacts, the museum posted newspaper reactions to the president’s unexpected death on August 2, 1923.

Note that Columbia is wearing a Phrygian cap. Whatever happened to Phrygian caps? Whatever happened to Columbia in editorial cartoons? They just faded away. Something like the memory of Harding, so vivid once upon a time.

Newspaper editorial cartoons don’t necessarily capture public sentiment, but I understand Harding was a popular president in his lifetime. In terms of reputation, then, he got out while he still had a good one. Not long after, the scandals of his administration came to light, along with allegations of an illegitimate daughter (which were true). A hundred years later, he’s obscure enough to meme-ify, except among historians, who don’t like him.

First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Heart of Generative AI

Posted on February 18, 2024 by admin

The “Presidents Day” weekend has rolled around again, but it’s an ordinary weekend for some of us followed by an ordinary Monday. Including me. Still, I can’t let it pass without a mention. If it were up to me, it would still be widely known as Washington’s Birthday, as it was when I was young.

The state of Illinois, for its part, calls it Washington’s Birthday, and has separate holidays for Lincoln and MLK. It has not, as yet, changed Columbus Day to anything else, which surprises me a little, but I’ll chalk it up to legislative inertia and a still distinct Italian-American population.

With Washington on my mind, I went to the first free AI image generator I could find and had it spit out some images of the Father of Our Country in various art styles. Such as – and these are my exact prompts – “George Washington Manga.”

“George Washington Cubist”

“George Washington Dadaist”

That last one has a tinge of nightmare to it. Come to think of it, they all do. Still, while I’m not art expert, I don’t think these quite fit the bill.

WWOZ’s Shrove Tuesday

Posted on February 14, 2024 by admin

Woke up this morning and for a few moments thought it was Thursday. Went downstairs (my commute), fired up the laptop (odd phrasing, when you think about it) and soon realized it was Wednesday. Fridays are still the best workdays, naturally, but Thursdays aren’t bad either. You still have Friday to look forward to. So I must have wanted it to be Thursday.

Still, that’s odd, since I was fully aware of it being Shrove Tuesday the day before. As time allowed during the day, I listened online to WWOZ, nonprofit radio out of New Orleans that broadcasts New Orleans and Louisiana music. I’m sure it’s a local treasure. It should be a national treasure. It was one of the first online radio stations I ever encountered, by happy chance back in the early 2000s, when maintaining a connection consistently was no sure thing, especially if you used an iMac. I don’t listen to it enough.

But I did on Tuesday, for obvious reasons, and the celebration was on all day. The guys behind the mike got especially giddy as the evening wore on, maybe even rowdy, though I didn’t hear anything breaking. Just the kind of happy DJs – and those with some personality on display – that radio consolidation and rote programming have mostly banished from the airwaves.

Except maybe for morons in the morning? You know, drivetime voices, often a man and a woman, who yuk it up between songs and commercials and news snips, without regard to good sense or good taste. Is that still a thing? My commute, as you’d think, doesn’t involve radio.

Such duos were so much a part of radio programming 20 years ago that another of first radio stations I heard online, one from Sydney, as in Australia, was being hosted by a man and a woman – who yukked it up without regard to sense or taste. But with such fun Australian accents that I didn’t mind listening a while.

Now I seem to have further evidence that the algorithms are getting better. Better at drawing conclusions from their spying. Today those opaque entities suggested a version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” that I didn’t know.

Wow, that’s good. Tom Jones and the talented Rhiannon Giddens, once of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The song is associated with New Orleans jazzmen, of course, especially Louie Armstrong, and I spent a lot of yesterday with Carnival in the background. So was that the connection the machine made? Or is it that I’ve listened to many other versions of the song, or a clip from the same show, or all that other jazz (and I mean that literally and figuratively)? The bots ain’t telling.

Mega Cavern

Posted on January 18, 2024 by admin

A message we saw in Louisville recently.

Not something you see that much, not put quite that way. Maybe that’s an unconscious acknowledgment that nowhere in Scripture is Jesus’ exact birthday ever mentioned. It reminded me of a scene from Full Metal Jacket.

The message was in lights, and there was a good reason for that. It was part of Lights Under Louisville, an annual display of Christmas lights by Mega Cavern. A lot of lights: at 7 million, said to be the largest such light display in the world.

Mega Cavern is an attraction south of downtown Louisville, and a fairly recent one at that, opening for tourists only in 2009. In the mid-20th century, miners extracted limestone from under the area’s hills, eventually creating 4 million square feet of space. In comparison, the Sears Tower totals 4.4 million square feet, so nearly a Sears Tower worth of space was excavated under a section of I-264 and the Louisville Zoo and a major city park. By the early ’90s, mining had ceased, and the voids were developed into warehouse space.

In that, the place naturally reminded me of SubTropolis in Kansas City, Mo., which I visited in ’99. Unlike that man-made cave, which is still all business, Mega Cavern started adding activities for visitors, at first tours through the cave. There is still underground warehouse space, and tenants for it.

But now the facility also has underground zip lines, an aerial ropes course, and walking and tram tours most of the year. Mega Cavern used to have an enormous dirt bike course, at 320,000 square feet said to the the world’s largest underground off-road bike facility, but that didn’t last (I suspect insurance issues).

Around Christmas, you can either drive through Mega Cavern to see the millions of lights, or pay a little more and ride on a wagon pulled by a Jeep, which is what we did on December 30. It was the only activity on this trip that I had to book in advance.

The public entrance to the cave doesn’t even hint at what’s below.

At the end of a short hall is a large room used to turn vehicles around, and as a waiting area for those riding trams.

Beyond that is a room with the service desk, a small snack shop, a gift shop and a view of some climbing equipment.

We’d come for the Christmas Express.

Of we went, exactly as scheduled. I was expecting the lights to be arrayed in tree-oriented abstractions. Or just to be artful strings of lights.

There was a lot of that. At the risk of sounding churlish, since we enjoyed riding through the lights thoroughly, the ride could have used more displays like these. Most of the displays had themes. Such as local themes. They were artful, too, just not quite as spectacular.

Patriotic themes. Many more than this.

Christian themes.

Movie franchises. More than pictured here, but I don’t remember all of them now. Many geared to children. I’d heard of almost all of them.

I remember a few omissions. Star Wars – more than one display, I think. But no Star Trek. Also, Barbie. Were pink Christmas trees in vogue over the holidays? Experts say yes. But what, no Oppenheimer? C’mon, they were peas in the same summer blockbuster pod.

I’m pretty sure a Manhattan Project display would have harshed everyone’s holiday buzz, so no go. But can you imagine? The centerpiece of the Oppenheimer display would, of course, be a mushroom cloud in holiday lights.

Main Street, Louisville, But Not the World’s Largest Baseball Bat

Posted on January 16, 2024 by admin

Deep cold these last few days, so we passed the time, including the MLK holiday, in 21st-century central heated space, that is, home. Filed papers, hauled my boxes of postcards out of the closet for a look and a touch of reorganization – not to the point of being highly organized, though – and removed ornaments and lights from the Christmas tree and in one brief expedition into the frozen waste of our back yard, deposited the tree out there.

Should I burn it? Makes a glorious flame, if only for a few seconds. We shall see.

Wonder when the owner of this vehicle removed the Nativity.

Whenever that was, I have to say that I’d never seen that familiar display in this unusual location. For all I know, however, it could be the next big thing in honoring the First Christmas.

We spotted Bethlehem on wheels in east Louisville on the evening of December 29. The next morning we made our way to Main Street in downtown Louisville; and we returned to the area just before we left town on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Some blocks are exceptionally handsome.

The valuable facades of these pre-Great War vintage buildings look to be, in some cases, saved for later development behind them. Maybe mixed-use, largely residential but also specialty retail. I could imagine that outcome.

Not all of the street features refurbished leftovers from the late 19th century. Rising at W. Main and 5th Street is a behemoth occupied by a for-profit healthcare behemoth, the Humana Building. Designed by Michael Graves in 1985. Look up postmodern and I think you’d see an image of this building.

The structure is such a behemoth that it was impossible to get the building all within a shot, standing across the street from it. Still — something of a bird of prey vibe, seems like. Mecha-Owl?

It stands on the site of the Kenyon Building, pictured here in 1927.

The Kenyon itself no doubt replaced earlier, smaller structures. Louisville emerged as a city with rapidity in the early 19th century, with Main its first focus.

“West Main Street was the first street in the city,” Louisvilleky.gov notes. “The first businesses to line West Main Street included an attorney, grocer, boardinghouse, auctioneer, merchant, carpenter, tailor, shoemaker, tobacco inspector, blacksmith, engineer, physician, hatter, tallow chandler, barber, painter, upholsterer, insurance company, plasterer, druggist, and brewer.”

How many of those professions remain on Main Street? I’m not going to do anything like work to find out, but my guess would be attorneys and insurance companies, certainly, maybe an engineer or two, some physicians, and merchants, depending on how you define that. Very likely no blacksmiths, hatters or tallow chandlers.

In our time, Main is also a street of some curiosities. Such as Jane Fonda in microgravity.

Nightspot Barbarella apparently didn’t survive the pandemic. This is the entirety of the last note from Barbarella on Facebook (October 5, 2021): “Permanently closed bitches!!! Loved y’all. It was a wild ride. But the roller coaster has come to an end!”

That last image is the Metropolitan Sewer District 4th Street Flood Pump Station, since 2022 adorned with a mural called “Hope Springs – The Wishing Well” by local artist Whitney Olsen. The linked press release also makes mention of the recently completed, fully invisible tunnel under the city — the Waterway Protection Tunnel, four miles long and 18 stories below ground, to capture surges of storm water. I’m no engineer, but that sounds pretty impressive

A more-or-less empty plaza, formally called Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere, extends from Main to a view of the Ohio. Part of the plaza is built over I-64.

Off in the distance an outline of a statue is just barely visible from Main. I imagined that the statue honored Muhammad Ali. As long ago as 1978, the city renamed a major downtown street after him, though not without resistance that’s completely unimaginable now; and the sizable Muhammad Ali Center is also downtown.

But no: the 1973 work is much more traditional, honoring Louisville founder George Rogers Clark, who has, of course, a larger memorial elsewhere. (The Ali Center is in the distance behind him in my image.)

Felix de Weldon did the statue. He’s better known for the Marine Corps War Memorial (Iwo Jima Memorial) at Arlington National Cemetery and, interestingly, he also did the Malaysian National Monument (Tugu Negara) in Kuala Lumpur. I have a vague memory of seeing that, in wilting tropical heat. Weldon did much more over a long life. His partial listing of public sculpture on Wiki begins with King George V in 1935 and ends with another sort of king, Elvis Presley, in 1995.

The George Rogers Clark bronze dates from 1973, but there is another more recent statue on the plaza: York, the only black member of Lewis and Clark’s expedition and as such the first African-American known to cross the continent, in a 2003 work by Ed Hamilton.

Coming to the Corps of Discovery as Clark’s personal slave, York has quite a story, and an especially awful one after the expedition returned, only much recognized in recent decades (see 37:23 and after in this lecture). No doubt York would have preferred freedom after the trek to the Pacific and back was over, instead of honors 200 years later, but the former isn’t in anyone’s power these days, while the latter is.

The plaza also offers nice views of the Louisville skyline. The Galt House hotel is a whopper: at 1,310 rooms, reportedly the largest in Kentucky, plus 130,000 square feet of meeting space and six restaurants. Developed in the 1970s, the hotel bears a name that’s an homage to a series of earlier hotels called Galt, one with a particularly colorful history that was the site, in ’62, where one Union general offed another Union general with a pistol shot at close range.

THE MURDER OF GEN. NELSON. ON page 669 we publish an illustration of the ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL NELSON BY GENERAL J. C. DAVIS, which took place ten days since at Louisville. Our picture is from a sketch by our artist, Mr. Mosler, who visited the spot immediately after the affair.

Even more remarkably, the Galt is owned by a single family, not an transnational. A single, sometimes quarreling family, but there isn’t so much remarkable about that.

The 35-story 400 Market, with the domed top, is the tallest building in Louisville.

Look the other direction and spy the mighty Ohio.

Stairs lead from the plaza down to a riverfront park developed in the 1990s, but late December wasn’t a good time for such a stroll, even though the drizzle had abated by the last day of the year. Some other warmer time, perhaps. Whatever the merits of that park, I doubt that it can erase the fact that the Robert Moses gash that is I-64 largely cuts downtown Louisville off from the river – the very reason there is a city in the first place.

Main Street plaques, along with metal bats, honor baseball players along the way.

Roberto Clemente is one of 60 honorees in the Louisville Slugger Walk of Fame, which stretches on sidewalks from the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory on Main St. to Louisville Slugger Field a little more than a mile away. We decided not to visit the baseball bat factory itself, which includes the world’s largest baseball bat (bigger than “Batcolumn in Chicago? Yes, by 19 feet.). Still, we walked by a few other bronze bats and home plates embedded in the sidewalk.

Is Chico Escuela is among the honored? I have to wonder. He should be. Considering that he’s fictional, the plaque wouldn’t have to bother with tedious stats. All it would have to say (naturally) is, “Baseball been barra, barra good to me!”

Winter Solstice ’23

Posted on December 21, 2023 by admin

The winter solstice seems like a good time to knock off posting for the year. Will resume about January 2. Best regards for Christmas, New Year’s and all the festive days at the cold end of the calendar, at least here in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere.

“Solstice gets its shine from sol, the Latin word for ‘sun,’ ” Merriam Webster notes. “The ancients added sol to -stit– (a participial stem of sistere, which means ‘to stand still’) and came up with solstitium. Middle English speakers shortened solstitium to solstice in the 14th century.”

Seasonal decoration at our house has been an ongoing process this year, more robust than many years. Why? Why not? For instance, there are two Christmas trees in the living room.

The larger of the two is a Scotch pine from Wisconsin, acquired at the same lot I’ve visited for some years now. Usually we get a Douglas fir, but they were insanely expensive this year, over $100 for even the scrawniest example. Most years, even recent ones, I’ve paid about half that, so I got a Scotch pine for $60.

Scotch pines are good-looking enough trees, but its large needles make it harder to hang ornaments. Sometimes balls or figures only seemed to be in place, only to soon lose their purchase on the prickly branches and roll onto the carpet. No broken ones yet, however.

Still, hang them we did. Ann, mostly. But this one was mine: a near-exact duplicate of a plastic star I hung on our trees as a kid. A dash of midcentury for our tree.

שׁלום. Shalom.

Ann has a great fondness for Snoopy.

“Snoopy’s Christmas,” once you suspend your disbelief about a dog flying a warplane, is a pithy and touching ballad. “Snoopy’s Christmas Truce” would have been a better title.

Betty made her annual appearance.

The smaller tree is a cheap artificial that we occasionally put outside, but I never much liked its appearance. This year it’s inside, decked out much better, for something of a Charlie Brown transformation.

Handmade this year by Yuriko.

Kitchen-sink decoration practices applied to both trees, as in everything but. I wrote about them 20 years ago. As the surfers say, tempus fugit, dude.

… my first guideline on Christmas tree decoration: lights first, ornaments next, icicles after that (tinsel to some people, those who also call it “trimming” the tree). The last item is the Star of Bethlehem, which goes on top.

Other guidelines, if you happen to be me, and want to decorate your tree:

* Space the lights and ornaments evenly, but not uniformly or systematically. That is, unless you have a very young child, as we do; in that case, fewer and tougher ornaments go near the bottom, and fewer lights down there too.

* Decorate the back, the bottom and the interior of the branches, not only the front or visible sides.

* Be eclectic with ornaments, but no commercial logos or too-silly ornaments, unless your child made them.

These still hold. In fact, I’ve passed them along to the next generation. Also, I continue to make an exception for the Michelin Man, because the company makes such bloody good maps.

Poinsettias for the dining table.

A battery-powered orb. Looks like an infrared image of the Sun or the like.

Lights elsewhere in the house.

Every year, some strings light no more after 11 idle months, but even so we have extras. Easy come, easy go. Not like the durable light the strings of my youth, which lasted the entirety of my youth.

Best to keep gnome Stalin off the tree this year.

He still lurks among the front hallway plants, though.

Venn Santa

Posted on December 17, 2023 by admin

Today: tree decoration. I set up the tree (Friday), put on the lights (Saturday), and hung a few ornaments. Ann adjusted the lights and did most of the ornaments.

Out in the world there are plenty of images of Christmas ornaments as they hang on trees, but fewer pics of agglomerated ornaments, which is how they spend 11 months of the year in my household. Their boxes were opened for distribution to the branches of our Christmas trees on Sunday, one shortish natural tree and two stubby artificial trees, all green, none aluminum.

The decoration process also called for hot chocolate. Ann’s came in a Christmas-themed mug that had been in the house less than 48 hours and pretty much blended into its background tablecloth.

A trickle of cards arrived last week. On Friday I got Wendy and Ted’s annual holiday card, hand drawn on a plain white card, high in amusement value. Even better, idiosyncratic amusement value.

Somewhere in my poorly organized correspondence files, there are examples from earlier years. I ought to dig up a few.

E-Tannenbaum

Posted on December 11, 2023 by admin

When in doubt, spend a few minutes with an LED Christmas tree and its shifting color array.

Bright homages to Christmas trees might be more like it, but evoking the winter holiday all the same.

Chicago Christkindlmarket ’23

Posted on December 6, 2023 by admin

I made a point of watching the tribute to Norman Lear that was simulcast – now that’s a aging concept – on several networks this evening, at 8 Eastern/7 Central. Mostly, I was curious to see what they would do. Turned out to be about 15 seconds of a picture of him (maybe taken in the late 20th century), his name and birth and death year, indicating quite a lifespan. That was it. I wonder how many people who saw the spot knew who he was. Network audiences skew old, but even that demographic is more likely to remember his shows than him.

But he was well enough known to inspire a torrent of virtual print, so I won’t add to it, except to say too bad Hot L Baltimore didn’t last, while Good Times did. Nobody’s perfect. RIP, Mr. Lear.

Extremely crowded Chicago Christkindlmarkets of years past – mob city, as my mother used to say, not referring to gangsters – must have pushed any notion of visiting it on Monday right out of my head. But when I ambled over to the Thompson Center, I saw the market. Might as well drop in, see if the crowd was thinner. It was. A more manageable Monday in mob city. Just enough to be lively.

First, pass by the eternal flame on Daley Plaza. Dedicated since 1972 to all U.S. veterans of any kind.

Still there. Well, it is eternal. That’s not meant in a literal sense, of course, on past the heat death of the Universe, but as long as humanly possible. The upshot for the flame is that people will maintain it until its honorees have disappeared from common memory. I hope that’s some centuries at least, but who knows.

As I said, lively. It isn’t really crowded unless it’s tricky to navigate through people.

The stalls are more crowded.

Everything in that lower pic is eccentric shapes of chocolate, and pretty much the only place I was tempted to buy anything. The economic model at the market is the same as I described a few years ago: “priced in euros at a lousy exchange rate, with an extra 50 percent tacked on for good measure.”

Paper stars.

Locally themed ornaments, and pickles. Who doesn’t like Christmas pickles?

Eats.

And Paul.

His sign says, “Hi, everyone! I am Paul, the Hamburg sailor! Take a picture with me!’

Paul, huh? Are the Hamburgers having a spot of fun with that? St. Pauli is a red light district in Hamburg, after all, and while Paul here might look clean-cut, on leave I bet he’s out for beir and bumsen. Or maybe he’s a more modern sailor, and while visiting Chicago slips off to North Halsted Street sometimes.

Millennium Park ’23

Posted on November 27, 2023 by admin

On the day after Thanksgiving, we went downtown for the afternoon and into the evening. Michigan Avenue is coloring up for the season, such as at the magnificent Railway Exchange Building (224 S. Michigan Ave.).

But no seasonal colors at 150 N. Michigan, which because of the rows of lights on its roof rim, is a glowing rhombus in the sky. Still all white lights as of Friday. Maybe management decided to ax the expense of changing the lights.

The city of Chicago’s Christmas tree rises over Millennium Park, as it does every year. Chicago hasn’t shied away from calling it a Christmas tree.

We thought it looked a little unfinished, at least in the daylight. Lights, but no ornaments.

Then again, in previous years the tree has looked about as spare. But I’ve only seen a few of them. Bet their décor has changed across the decades since 1913, when the city put up the first one. For all I know, spare might be the current trend among municipal Christmas trees.

When we returned after dark, it was a different story. Lights up dandily at night, it does.

We didn’t spend a lot of time in Millennium Park that afternoon, but we did walk around the site of the Bean, a.k.a. Cloud Gate, which is surrounded by a sizable temporary fence and closed to the public. The plaza is being renovated, and the Bean stands aloof over the construction site, unable to attract visitors – multitudes of them – to its mirrored fascinations.

This fellow was celebrating something. Some accomplishment of his. Or possibly mocking George W. Bush some 20 years after the fact. If so, what would be the point of that? If it had been a summer day, I might have paused to ask him about it.

But no. The chilly air drove us on, even as he did a few different poses with the banner.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Holidays