This fire escape is on the back of the old Advance/Rumely building in the West Bottoms. The link above is to a photograph of this same alley in 1951, after the big flood.
And this is the same alley as of last year’s haunted house season.
I was poking around in the alley on Sunday and liked the look of the fire escape, therefore, you see it above.
This is a different fire escape, sort of in the Crossroads district, which was looking particularly golden and promising near sundown on Saturday afternoon.
I have a set on Flickr called “look up,” and if I haven’t added these two already, I will very, very soon.
I took Ruby running in a shipping container wareyard today. She enjoyed splashing through the puddles and searching for rats, and I enjoyed the disorienting scenery. It felt like I was cavorting in a giant’s LEGO village.
This looks like a tight fit, but I could easily ride my bicycle through this passageway.
Just got back from taking Joel out for his birthday dinner, and I’m going to go and enjoy the rest of our evening together.
I heard this monologue on Slacker radio today (I was listening to a medley of comics while doing some mind-numbing Adobe crap at work) and I completely thought of Joel and some of the silly voices he does. And the general attitude of sexytimes humor.
I was thinking about the Victorian & Albert Museum earlier, and especially about a particular section of the costume collection: the Heather Firbank dresses.
She was of a well-to-do family and was quite fashionable and chic in her day.
This gorgeous Redfern gown is also a mourning design – to be worn in a later stage of mourning, when deep colours could be integrated into one’s wardrobe.
This is an attractive summer dress from about five years before the mourning dress above. Constructed of a mid-weight blue-and-white striped cotton, it is liberally garnished with the fluffy frilly so typical of the first 5-7 years of the 20th Century.
Here’s an attractive tailleur from circa 1910. I love that broad, slightly droopy notched collar and the low-waisted blouson effect to the jacket. I feel like this silhouette portends the fashions of the early 1920s fairly strongly.
When the movie “Titanic” came out, I was highly impressed with the costuming, noting that they totally nailed a difficult transitional period in ladies’ fashions. This Lucille gown is typical of trendsetters of that time period and typical in silhouette to the dresses shown in Titanic. Lucy, Lady Duff Gordon, the brains behind the Lucille label, sailed on (and survived) the Titanic.
Another summer day dress, this one 7-8 years older than the blue stripe above. This one is cut with a nautical insinuation, of heathered blue linen, perhaps a nod to the owner’s name.
This smart golfing ensemble would make an attractive street costume today. The Norfolk jacket is a clever design which has become a classic.
Another Lucile ensemble seems to tell the future. A day would come, in the not-too-distant-future, when Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel would make tweedy cardigan suits the uniform of choice for well-heeled ladies everywhere.
Apropos of nothing to do with Heather Firbank at all, but pertinent to my interests take a look at these fantastic boots of a similar era to many of the dresses above. These boots are so fab, it just kind of defies words. If this was a boot for sale today, I would completely find a way to buy a pair. Those are SO cute.
I decided to go back and exposure-correct this picture from Joel’s and my coast-to-coast trip today. We are standing in the rigging of the Adventure, a replica coastal trader ship which is part of the Charles Towne Landing living history site.
This young fellow, whom I believe was named James, showed us around the ship and filled us in on the typical use of a ship of this type, and of the history of this replica ship in particular.
This guy was REALLY into the whole naval re-enactment scene, and I often wonder if he’s still into it, and how all that’s going for him. It’s always fun to meet someone who has a real passion for something completely esoteric, such as 17th century naval maneuvering or vacuum-tube radio restoration.
I got this phone in February of 2006. It was pretty awesome, so I stuck a couple of foil daisy stickers on it to make it awesomer. They didn’t stay very well, but they were cute while they lasted.
I got this phone from a shady discount-cellular-and-tobacco store on East Truman Road, about a block off Van Brunt. This store later burned down.
My cell phone is a Nokia 2115i on the Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go scheme, perfect for people unable or unwilling to commit to a cell phone contract. It’s ideal for your kids, so they can’t rack up a hugeaceous cell-phone bill – it’s all on top-ups. If you run out of money, you run out of calling. It’s also great for people like me, who don’t really use their cell phones except for once in a great long while. I spend $20 quarterly to keep the damn thing activated, and use it when and as needed. I can go for weeks without taking or making a call.
But after five years of being slugged around in my backpack, being used to laboriously peck out text messages, and being used as a combination alarm clock and phone book, my prized Nokia 2115i started to punk out on me. The 4 and 6 buttons no longer worked, neither did the right-hand select button or the “up” button.
So, I did what anyone would do.
I replaced it with another, identical, gently-used Nokia 2115i.
I really like this model of phone ’cause the battery stays charged for AGES and the whole thing is really simple, both in design and operation. Pretty durable, too. My original phone worked great for just a little over 5 years before shit started going south on it. This new one was apparently barely used, so I hope to get another 3-4 years out of it, at least. When the “new” phone starts to crap out on me, then I’ll think about upgrading, such as it is. I’ll probably stick with the same type of phone…an entry level, no-frills, “candybar” phone. Less shit to break, much less attractive for thievery.
Getting the phone was no problem. $10 on Amazon Marketplace, and that little beauty was in my mailbox in days. Getting my service switched over, however, was a pain in the ass.
I started out at Green Mobile down on Westport Road (warning, the link has automatic, annoying sound effects). They didn’t service phones of this type, but informed me that a nearby Verizon store should be able to help, that Verizon phones operated on the same software and that they probably had the cables and know-how to swap the info from the old phone to the new.
So, I pedaled over to Verizon, whereupon I was greeted as though I’d backed in through the front door with a big, dead rat clenched in my teeth. I was icily informed that they didn’t deal in Virgin Mobile phones, and I should betake my ghetto ass to a Best Buy or something. Begone, foul wretch and your shitty phone.
Disgruntled and hungry, I headed back to the office, muttering swears and despairing of regaining a fully functional phone. On my way back, I decided “fuck it, I’ll treat myself to a delicious sandwich,” so I detoured past Jimmy Johns. As I made my way to the sandwich shop, I passed a little, scruffy building I’d passed a hundred times…Broadway Cellular & Tobacco.
Yesss! Shady cellular/tobacco shop to the rescue. I went in, and the man at the counter didn’t seem even the tiniest bit taken aback that I wanted to activate a 5-year-old cell phone. I got no guff, he got my phone set up fast, and I paid all of $15 for the privilege.
I tell you, for my money, a shitty cellphone and a shady cellular/tobacco shop is the way to go.
As I mentioned yesterday, I had a grand night out on Saturday, and among the diverting and pleasant facets of the night, I met a lutenist (I restrained myself from making terrible puns along the lines of “luter/looter” because I can be mature/not-a-complete-asshole, with some amount of effort). Yon fellow is a great devotee of music, as well you might guess. He plays a lute, for gracious sakes and was volunteering at a chamber music concert. He’s way into that stuff.
So we got to talking, as you do, and he asked me what instrument I play.
I told him that I don’t play anything.
Do I sing?
Not any songs fit for public consumption.
“Well,” he asked me, “how do you express yourself.”
I should have answered, “swearing,” as that is one of my more fluent and vigorous means of self-expression. I’m good at it. I enjoy it. Swearing is fucking cathartic!
I won a cussing contest in college once. Basically, a group of us who lived on the north end of the second floor of Edna Work Hall were bored one afternoon, and were sitting around in Danielle’s room talking about our favored forms of inappropriate behavior, and I began to wax fervent on the topic of cussing. Danielle reckoned as how she was pretty good at cussing, and Jeannie claimed to be a dab hand at the craft herself, so we all sat down and began swapping strings of foul language.
Lo, these many years later, I’ll admit that I won with a bit of plagiarism – I wound up with one of my Dad’s own treasured strings of profanity, a string of blue pearls so glorious as to bring tears to your eye and a stain to your soul.
Goddamn cocksucking, motherfucking, son of a BITCH!
Say it to yourself a couple of times. Doesn’t it have rhythm? Doesn’t it roll beautifully. It’s some Iambic pentameter shit, isn’t it? Damn!
Over the years, I’ve come to really treasure the word “cock.” We don’t use it that much here in the Midwestern USA, so it carries a delightful frisson of taboo…people’s eyes widen a bit when you say “cock,” especially if it’s a female-type who’s speaking of the cock. It sounds good and properly dirty and therefore creates a satisfying stir. It sounds completely raunchier than dick, prick, wang, willy, todger, schlong, tool, wiener, or boring old penis.
There’s a percussiveness to it that makes it ideal to shout when something’s fucked up and you’re pissed off about it. Cock! It’s short, snappy, and to the point.
I feel that it has a sound a bit like those annoying wood-blocks they use in a lot of the oooh-baby type R&B songs.
You know how SNL cowbelled ruined the Blue Oyster Cult for everybody?
Well, I would love to ruin woodblocks the way SNL ruined cowbells, so that the next time you hear some “let’s get it on ’til the break of dawn” type of song, every time that wood block is struck, you hear not “tok,” but “cock.”
(Yes, I know Kanye was completely taking the piss out of the “ooh-baby” type of R&B – brilliant parody, in fact!)
Also: “cock!”
And speaking of my swearing (and also one of my favorite comedians on this planet), Billy Connolly on the philosophy and efficacy of swearing:
Other people who are quite good at swearing are Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie:
Or not swearing, as the case may have been.
Well, just a few more words – or at least one word, repeated repeatedly.
Um. Well that’s about it besides this: I can’t get over how fucking funny the epithet “cock-gobbler” is. I’ve been giggling like a schoolgirl over the phase “cock-gobbler” for about two days solid. It was a popular insult when I was in highschool, and for some reason, it re-infested my brain just recently, and good lord, I can’t hardly think of anything sillier. Cock is, as mentioned above, a gloriously obscene word, and “gobble” and all derivatives thereof are delightfully ludicrous, and when combined into a unified turn of phrase, it reaches a perfect pinnacle of absurdity.
It’s even slightly better than “turd-burglar.” (also, I just discovered, just now, that “turd-burglar” is in the spell-check.) So is “turd bungler,” in case you ever needed it. I can’t spell burglar worth a shit, in case you were wondering about that, too.
Man, yesterday was a study in contrasts. At one point in the day, two friends and I were splitting a cookie we’d found in a trash can (it was wrapped, and on top of everthing – absolutely no garbage juice was involved) then later that evening, I was listening to these guys in the new Kauffman Performing Arts Center.
(picture courtesy of Christi, AKA MissChief)
One goes from this sort of action, to hustling home, scrubbing down in the shower, throwing on a pretty dress, and preparing to smile and be helpful. I’d have loved to had a couple of more hours to maraud around with our ad hoc all-girl bike gang, but the volunteers were to be mustered by 5:30 p.m. sharp!
My swanky night out at the Performing Arts Center was part of a volunteer gig with the Friends of Chamber Music, an organization of which Joel’s mom is an enthusiastic member. Really all I needed to do was be friendly and show people where the ticket counter, elevators, coat-check, and restrooms were. In exchange for this small service, we were privileged to sit in on the concert. Nice work if you can get it, no?
The show really was fab, too. The first half of it was rather otherworldly – the theme of the concert was “love,” but seeing as the first half was in Old French, German, and Latin, they really could have been singing anything and I’d have had to take their word for it. But their voices are smooth and melodious, and listening to it was just very relaxing. After the intermission, however, they got more contemporary and up-tempo, and performed two Basie songs and a bring-the-house-down arrangement of Cream’s “Somebody To Love.”
If the second half had been more of the same as the first half, I’d have been like, “oh, it was nice and all,” but since they brought out the more lighthearted, “fun” stuff to wind up the concert, I walked out of there wholeheartedly proclaiming of what a good time I had.
It was fun to meet the other volunteers, too. I remembered a couple of them from the last time I got to help out at a Friends of Chamber Music show. Others were new faces. One gentleman is a Lutenist in his spare time. Another young lady (just turned 16) was volunteering with her Dad. Besides classical music, she’s into volunteering at a local vet clinic and reading fan fiction, but NOT Bella/Edward shipping.
On a completely off-track note, I think they’re making teenagers better these days than back in my day. I swear I have met so many delightful kids in the past few years. Really articulate, confident, and earnestly interesting. It seems like in my day, amongst my “peer group” we were kind of evil little shits, surly and sardonic, principally interested in watching Beavis & Butthead, holing up with our noisy Alice In Chains CDs, drawing obscene cartoons on each other’s jean jackets. If there was a smartass remark to be made, it would definitely not remain unspoken.
Now it could be that the various Millennials I’ve met had their best foot forward because they were talking to a grown-up, but sometimes I wonder… I cannot recall ever having my shit so together (or at least giving the appearance thereof) as so many of the kids I’ve come across in recent years. Is “being a snotty little shit-show” is no longer a requirement of adolescence?
While running the dog, I found a bunch of windfall juniper berries today, so I completely filled my jacket pockets and made several juniper-berry sachets. I put this one in my lingerie drawer, ’cause delicates that smell of G&T are never the wrong answer.
