I should have started this series of photos from Alabama with this image I guess. This is the marquee sign for the Alabama Theater. In the "old days," the Alabama Theater was a whites only theater (Blacks attended the Carver theater just a couple of blocks away.) Later, blacks where allowed in the balcony of the Alabama and eventually of course it was fully integrated. Originally a movie theater, it is now a fully restored theater for the performing arts. While the Alabama Theater seems to be doing well, it sits in an area of downtown Birmingham that is struggling to re-invent itself with mixed success. Gems like the Alabama Theater (and the Lyric Theater featured a couple of days ago) seem to be going one way while the neighboring structures go the other.

In a lot of European cities, employees in various shops, butchers, bakers, etc. wear distinctive types of clothing. Once you know the uniform code of such places, you can tell what kind of shop it is just by looking at what the employees are wearing. It used to be more like that in this country too. If it still were, the Uniform House of Dixie might be able to afford to upgrade their sign.

I took this photo because of the rather grand looking fire escape on the side of the building. It is on the back of the Lyric Theater, a former vaudeville theater in Birmingham. It turns out that this fire escape has not escaped previous attention. It was featured in the 1976 film Stay Hungry, which starred an unknown actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as Jeff Bridges, Sally Field, and Scatman Crothers. I saw that movie way back when, so maybe the seed of this photo has been rattling around in my head for decades. I remember liking the movie quite a bit at the time for its odd quirkiness. I may have to watch it again to see how it has stood the test of time compared to the Lyric Theatre.

It's raining here in Bozeman this morning, or what passes for rain here in the arid West. While I was in Birmingham, I got a reminder of what a real rainstorm can be like.

These trumpets look like they ought to be blasting out sound, but they are actually the air intakes on a McLaren race car--made to suck rather than blow air. It's hard to imagine how these big pipes make the car go that much faster, but I'm sure an air flow engineer could explain how it works to improve power. Maybe I should get one to breath through the next time go hiking in the mountains.

OSHA would approve of the fall protection this worker is using. I'm not sure what they'd think about him standing exposed on top of a railroad tank car with a thunderstorm approaching. I guess if he got struck by lightning at least his body wouldn't fall too far.

I'm on my way home from Birmingham after coming back for a wedding last weekend. I say coming back because I lived here for a year and a half while in graduate school a couple of decades ago. I wasn't shooting many photos back then so it's been interesting to come back and do so now.  

 

This is the Leer Building in downtown Birmingham. I had intended to park and walk around a while photographing but the heavy rain that followed these storm clouds kept me in my car. The most interesting thing about this building is the mast you can just make out sitting on the roof. When the building was built it was thought that blimps would be a major mode of transportation in the future so a mooring mast was included in the plans.

Another Seattle woman deep in her own literary world.

This where the girl reading a book from yesterday might have gotten the book. It's the ground floor of the Seattle Public Library viewed from a rather dizzying angle.

I haven't posted a photo from this series in quite a while. I actually took this a couple of years ago.

Whenever I see an old house like this one sitting alone on the bare prairie with no trees to speak of around it, I assume that was not always the case--that there used to be trees but they have been removed to make more room for crops or grazing pasture. You don't have to spend much time (just driving through is all it really takes) in places like western North Dakota to realize how hard and persistently the wind can blow there. Other than getting the house itself built, planting trees to block the wind would be one of the first things I would have done as a homesteader.

This photo is more about the dappled sunlight than it is about the building itself.

The Cathedral Basilica Saint Louis has one of the largest mosaic collections in the world. But, as luck would have it, when I went there to see them, mass was in session. Rather than converting to Catholicism just to get a chance to view them, I settled for photographing the outside of the cathedral. It's actually a quite nice for a relatively new building (new compared to those in Europe anyway).

The figures on the right and left are from the Late Classic and Early Postclassic periods in Mesoamerica. The ghostly one in the middle is from the Middle Boomer period in central North America.

If wishes were fast trains to Texas, oh I'd ride and I'd ride; how I'd ride. 

 

                                                                                     --Susanna Clark

The head of a Buddha statue from the 4th century at the St. Louis Art Museum.

This sculpture, Titan by Markus Lüpertz, seems to be trying (with little success) to direct the crowd at the entrance to the Saint Louis Art Museum.

This is the shadow of the sculpture from yesterday.

I looked at this Buddha figure from the 11th century for a long time trying to figure out how to best describe the calm and confident composure it expresses. I finally turned to the information about the work posted on the adjacent wall; it indicated the pose is (was) known as "the great royal ease." That works for me. Now I'm wondering if the great royal ease is part of the process or the product of enlightenment.

The other hand from the same statue as yesterday's photo. From this angle it looks like she is tickling her own foot. In reality, it was a much more elegant gesture than that.

This detail from Aristide Maillol's sculpture Homage á Debussy at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum probably was not meant to convey a beckoning gesture but that's what it looks like to me--at least when shown in isolation from the rest of the figure. 

 

The composer Debussy had a strong interest in the relation between visual art and music. His music is most often associated with the impressionist movement in painting, although he himself supposedly favored symbolist and post-impressionist art, with the exception of the works of Degas. This sculpture was Maillol's only work with a reference to music.  

 

All this comparison of art to music has me reconsidering an issue I raised in my blog the other day regarding the ability of photographs to convey sound. Perhaps there is more that can be done there than I originally thought.

Part of Rodin's sculpture The Shade at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. I'm not sure what meaning Rodin meant this sculpture to have, but it kind of illustrates how I felt after packing up and loading all my gear into my van after the art show yesterday.

I felt like I was interrupting some religious ceremony when I walked into this gallery at the St. Louis Art Museum the other day but it turned out to just be some students taking notes for their art class assignment.

These guys looked quite comfortable doing what they were doing considering there wasn't much except air separating them and the concrete several floors below.

Two ceiling corners in one of the galleries at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University. Unlike yesterday's photo, it's not likely this one has been done before.

Last year I took a photo of the Gateway arch from what I thought was a somewhat unusual angle, but recently I saw an almost identical photo on another photographer's web site. Like the Eiffel tower, I think every conceivable photo of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis has already been taken. But the think is hard to ignore, so I had to get at shot or two of it on this trip as well. I'm not saying this particular photo is the first of it's kind (although I've not seen one like it--yet), but I like it regardless. And if you are wondering what that white patch is in the upper left hand corner, it is the sun reflecting off of the inside of the arch near the top.

An impressive display. I'm hoping to see nothing else like it during the art show in St. Louis this weekend.

The in's and out's of a window in an old school house.

I'm out of snow country for a while (Sioux Falls, SD right now) but I'll post one more snow photo just to remind me how glad I am to see green instead of white for a change.

Another photo I took some time back but might as well have been today. We are getting sun mixed with snow squalls, with some thunder thrown in for sound effects. It's an interesting struggle for dominance between winter and spring.

I took this one night back in February, but it might as well have been last night-- except there's more snow on the ground now than in February. We often get snow in April and even May, but the extent of it this year seems unusual. It has been snowing for several days now and the forecast for the next week is just more of the same.  

 

The perception that this weather is unusual may just be my faulty memory or incomplete data though. Maybe I should ask John Ham about it. Not only are ranchers more attune to the weather but John Ham has more complete data, having seen well more than 80 winters around here. I know John's been around here for a while because on the wall of the Western Cafe where I eat breakfast with a friend once a week there is a poster advertising a rodeo on the Ham Ranch. The date of the rodeo was 1936. (He would have been young enough then that it was his father running the ranch at that time.) 

 

I'm on the road tomorrow for St. Louis and Wichita, so will be leaving this weather behind for a while. Hopefully there won't be even more snow on the ground when I get back.