Month: September 2021

Waves

Photos by Roman.

It’s only the sun against a window of glass bricks. And yes, I could not resist upping the contrast but only a little bit. Then turning it into grey scale removes color as a factor, increasing the contrast between the cartesian metric of the window and the wavy chaos baked into the brick. Am I being too obvious, then? Well, let’s return color to the image. This is good also, I think, but I have an itchy twitchy but resistible impulse to make it more of a metallic gold…

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glass bricks and sun Photo by Roman.

A Cat’s Hand

Photo / Graphic by Roman.

That’s the way my cats regarded me: their obedient hands… mostly… except when they were not… yet that was frequently okay too except cats disapprove of being surprised… but they could never understand why humans were blessed with hands, such clever hands, hands with distinct personalities when paws…

What I had set out to do was examine wrinkles, those rewards for having over-soaked in the bath of life. But I got to thinking of what hands mean to be human and my old cats and here I am, cataloguing memories instead.

City in a Garden

Photos by Roman.

Given my scattered and fragmentary knowledge of botany, I was wondering what to say about these photos.

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Photo by Roman.

Well, these are street decorations in my neighborhood, probably paid for by either a special service assessment of local businesses or a tax increment financing district. With perky optimism, one could regard it as a way of taking the city slogan (“urbs in horto“) seriously, even if it’s not quite as dramatic as being it being used as a justification for beating up protestors.

What? Oh, sorry. It’s an old grudge. Younger folks won’t remember that Mayor Richard Daley the Elder issued a report justifying the police riots at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention that was titled “What trees do they plant?”

Good question even if it was beside the point.

Marketing on behalf of local businesses, most especially FIRE (Finance Insurance Real Estate), is probably the gardens’ more germane intent.

Whatever. Even though these little gardens sometimes are ruinous and even though more than  a few of the trees they plant hardly survive the year, I’m glad someone makes the effort.