Photo Essay: Starved Rock in Spring

Starved Rock State Park - Illinois Canyon in Spring

This is the last day of May, and one could say spring is officially over, since in the U.S. we tend to think of summer as June, July and August, even though here in Chicago temperatures have dipped to the 50s today after hitting almost 100F last Sunday. In any case the last day of spring is high time for me to share pictures from one item on my spring list, which I actually did do: Hike Starved Rock State Park when there might be water falls from spring showers.

Starved Rock State Park - Illinois Canyon

We like to approach Starved Rock State Park from the east, where there tend to be fewer people and one can hike Illinois Canyon virtually undisturbed, especially on a weekday. Illinois Canyon does not feature waterfalls, but rather these shallow pools.

I was fascinated by the ripples in the water reflecting on the canyon walls.

These crossings in the Illinois Canyon can be treacherous. In fact, I didn't fare as well as my sons in this photo, which was taken right before one of those wobbly logs gave way and I fell in. My entire left side was sopping wet, but thankfully my camera had been in my right pocket, and the weather was warm enough, so that wringing out my jeans and then laying in the sun for an hour at the Lone Point Shelter dried me pretty well, and we could resume our hike.

Wildflowers in Illinois Canyon

Most of the wayside walking in and out of Illinois Canyon looked like this on that day in April. How very different from hiking Starved Rock in the fall!

 

Hiking into LaSalle Canyon - the promise of a waterfall.

Starved Rock - LaSalle Canyon Waterfall

It doesn't get any better than this.

 

 

Well, maybe it does. It's the coolest thing to be able to walk under a waterfall and not get wet.

You should recognize this picture; it's the full version of what currently appears in my banner.

LaSalle Canyon Pool

A Waterfall and a Vine

Hiking along a canyon wall. Not all trails in Starved Rock are like this, many meander along the Illinois river, or lead you through the forest until you happen upon another canyon.

Tonty Canyon

Tonty Canyon

Catching a Drop in Tonty Canyon

A Study in Rock Layers

Lots of water in LaSalle Canyon for Reflections

Final reflection - a tree by the Illinois River at Starved Rock State Park.

A Big Thank You to all my Commenters

Thank you notes by Man vs. George Design

I'm under a writing deadline today, so first I was going to post a poem, but then I saw in my summary blog statistics that, to date, I have had 1200 comments on this blog. Consequently, a round number like that is a great opportunity to thank all of you who have commented.

Please know your comments make all the difference in blogging for me. If it weren't for you, I probably would not be blogging anymore, because without comments, blogging is like giving a presentation without an audience. I had to do that a few times in my corporate life when I was asked to pre-record presentations for people who would not be able to attend a meeting. It was the oddest feeling, and very hard to do, sitting in a recording studio, and trying to talk to nobody in a halfway animated way.

While I know my blog's audience is wider than those who take the time to comment, and I do appreciate everyone who reads what I post, unless you do comment, I don't know how my writing resonates. I don't know what you like, what you think, and what you're most interested in.

Many of my commenters have shaped this blog, first and foremost probably Natalie Hartford, thanks to her enthusiasm for my early photo essays. My whole foray into photography is really thanks to all of you who cheered me on when I created photo essays to share my family's roadtrip to the Southwest last summer.

I try to return the favor of commenting on other blogs as much as possible, but I know I fall short, and that makes me appreciate all the comments I receive even more. This note would not be complete without an extra thank you to Anjuli, aka Connie, my most steadfast commenter ever. I don't know how you do it, but you comment on pretty much every post, even rather uninspired ones, and for that I love you!

A big, big thank you to all of you who have ever commented on my blog! I appreciate your time, your generosity and your thoughtfulness.

Photo Essay: Shanghai - The Bund

The Bund at night - the clock tower building is the former Customs House,

farther along you see the green steepled roof of the Peace Hotel.

Typical tourist pictures of Shanghai probably start with the Bund, i.e. views of the famed riverfront, preferably at night when it's not bathed in Shanghai's hazy bright light. That is probably why I haven't shared Bund pictures yet in my Shanghai photo essay series - it is where all tourists, including me, start. You have to see it, but then you move on. That's why I will also keep this short, and will share, in an upcoming post, more of what goes on right behind the Bund, where some stunning art deco architecture is to be found. But no series of Shanghai would be complete without the Bund, so here we go.

At night the skyline of Pudong, the financial district that's grown up during the past 20 years, commands the view across the Huangpu River, which is busy with boat traffic, even at night. The street lanterns of the Bund boardwalk dot the bottom of the picture.

Here a daytime (and thus rather gray) close up of river traffic, including a not so glamorous garbage boat, against the backdrop of the Pudong skyline with the pink sqhere of the Pearl Oriental Tower and the two globes of the Shanghai International Convention Center. I have not seen a river that busy with traffic, and I've seen my fair share of large rivers.

The most famous manifestation of Shanghai art deco is the Peace Hotel, formerly the Sassoon House, built by Victor Sasson in the 1920s. Here it is seen from the Bund boardwalk. It's the building to the left with the steepled green roof. A nice coincidence: I visited Shanghai at the end of March, which happened to be the beginning of an extended weekend due to one of the Chinese national holiday Qingming (the sweeping out of the tombs - a Chinese version of Day of the Dead). Therefore, a lot of tourists were in town, not Westerners like me, but Chinese visiting from all corners of the country. Here a group is taking a break on the boardwalk.

Here's another group enjoying their time off from work on the Bund boardwalk.

The boardwalk was crowded on that Thursday afternoon, but my friend told me it's pretty much always like that. This is looking south, the clock tower of the Customs House is in the background to the right.

Here, for a change, an inside view: the lobby of the Peace Hotel.

The Peace Hotel entrance as seen from Victor's Café - it reminded me very much of similar art deco passage ways in Prague, and as I was rather jet lagged by the time we sat in this café, I kept doing a mental double take on where I was.

Another evening we hung out at the Long Bar in the Astoria Hotel on the Bund, where I was utterly charmed by these art decoey nut bowls.

The Bund at night, looking south.

After touring a good deal of the city, I appreciated even more why the Bund is famous. There is, of course, all the history, and the grand turn-of-the-century architecture, but mainly, it is Shanghai's only great vista, the only place where you can see far and wide. Well, maybe not that far, but at least you can look out on water and boats, something besides never-ending clusters of buildings. (One caveat: The Shanghai World Financial Center in Pudong does offer an observation deck, but I was warned, by one of my friends who works there, that the trip is seldom worth it: The air is too hazy to see much.)

Wordle

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S., one of the few federal holidays, and thus Michelle of the Blogathon has given us participants an easy theme day: Create a Wordle of your blog, post it, and take the rest of the day off from blogging. I'm taking her up on that offer.

PS: I survived Bike the Drive, and hope to have some official pictures soon, in addition to the wobbly ones I took while riding. Stay tuned.

Bike the Drive

Catching my own shadow biking earlier this year, when I
was still wearing a heavy jacket.

This morning, as this post is going up, I am biking the Drive. Bike the Drive is an annual Chicago event for which Lake Shore Drive is closed to cars from 5:30 to 11:00 a.m., and bikers get to enjoy it.

Although I love to bike, I have never done this before because crowds are not my idea of fun, and biking in a crowd is even less my idea of fun. But my daughter talked me into it - "It will be so cool, Mom!"

Not sure it will be cool as it's supposed to be 90F by late morning, but we will start early, and as we live at the Southern tip of the bike route, we might avoid the super crowded ride, at least going north. Our goal is to make it to downtown and back, which amounts to about 15 miles. Tomorrow I'll know the exact mileage from my bike's speedometer.

It might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but even if so, I'll be able to say: I biked the Drive. The things my kids make me do...

Roy Lichtenstein at the Art Institute of Chicago

Photo of Roy Lichtenstein's "Compositions"
via Museo Madre

I think I've gotten into the habit of featuring art on Saturdays, so today I'm sharing the one painting that I really liked from the current Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a writer I guess it makes sense that I love that rendering of a composition notebook.

One thing to note about this inventor of Pop Art is that all his paintings are actually paintings, created with brush and paint (unlike Andy Warhol's which were mainly prints). It looked to me like in this one the off-white squiggles were painstakingly painted onto black canvas.

Another thing to note is that Lichtenstein was doing this kind of super-representational work in the early 1960s when the art world was still in Jackson Pollock mode, namely art was all about the artist expressing his inner world, rather than the artist capturing, reflecting or commenting on the society he found around himself, which is what Lichtenstein started doing.

His "Look Mickey" painting, a distilled rendering of a Golden Book Mickey Mouse/Donald Duck comic book page caused a sensation in 1961. Could what seemed to be an overly simplistic "copy" of a comic strip in primary colors be art? The jury might still be out on that but it was certainly new.

I had high expectations of the Roy Lichtenstein Retrospective, and I left disappointed. Not in his work, but in feeling that the exhibit didn't teach me much. I want to walk away from a retrospective, which, after all, should be comprehensive exhibit of an artist's body of work, with a strong sense of who this artists was, what his goals were and how he pursued them in his work. This retrospective certainly gathered many of Lichtenstein's works, and in that it is successful. But coming out of this exhibit, I had no clearer sense of who he was than when I entered, although I do have some appreciation now of what his work might mean, and how it fits in the continuum of Modern Art. Perhaps the wish to get to "know" an artist is a peculiar desire of mine, typical maybe for my interest in people's personal stories that comes from my own work.

Poem: Miracles by Walt Whitman

I've been meaning to feature more poetry on my blog, so, since I'm awfully busy today, here's a favorite:

Miracles
by Walt Whitman
Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of
   the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night
   with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer
   forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so
   quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with
   the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
   the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

Reading: The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waals' memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes was my favorite memoir of 2011, and yet I am still trying to figure out why because it defies so many of the principles of good storytelling. There is very little scene, as the book is almost entirely told in summary. Sometimes the descriptions get pedantic, and few of the characters are fully developed.

Nevertheless, I found this family saga captivating. The narrator's quest to figure out where the Japanese netsuke figurines he inherited came from becomes the story. Quite often, however, I forgot about him and the netsuke. I got into the lives of the ancestors he was investigating, this Jewish family originally from Odessa, who built up a bank and so desperately tried to be accepted into society. De Waal manages to hold together a saga that sweeps across centuries and countries, conjuring fin-de-siècle Paris, Vienna from before World War I all the way to 1945, and then moves on to a devastated post-war Japan, with brief stops in present day Odessa and the author's home in London.

I know the book fascinated me because I have gone on a similar quest myself, reconstructing the lives of my grandparents, great-aunt and great-uncle in 1930s and 1940s Czechoslovakia. So of course I am going to be interested in a story like this, and yet I have read many equally promising ones that bored me. Perhaps the magic of this book lies in the powerful poignancy of certain episodes, certain junctures in these people's lives that de Waal tells masterfully and that made me gloss over the book's other possible shortcomings.

Never before, for instance, have I read such an utterly devastating rendering of what it must have felt like to have one's life taken away in Vienna in 1938, simply because one was a Jew, even if a wealthy and supposedly well respected one like his great-grandfather Viktor. This passage is from chapter 26, right after Viktor's bank has been "Aryanised" and he and his wife moved to servants' quarters in their very own palais on Vienna's parade street Ringstrasse:

"Viktor goes down the unaccustomed steps to the courtyard, passes the statue of Apollo, avoids the looks of the new officials, and the looks of his old tenants, out of the gateway, past the SA guard on duty, onto the Ring. And where can he go?
He cannot go to his café, to his office, to his club, to his cousins. He has no café, no office, no club, no cousins. He cannot sit on a public bench any more: the benches in the park outside the Votivkirche have Juden verboten [Jews prohibited] stencilled on them. He cannot go into the Sacher, he cannot go into the Café Griensteidl, he cannot go into the Central, or the Prater, or to his bookshop, cannot go to the barber, cannot walk through the park. He cannot go on a tram: Jews and those who look Jewish have been thrown off. He cannot go to the cinema. And he cannot go to the Opera. Even if he could, he would not hear music written by Jews, played by Jews or sung by Jews. No Mahler and no Mendelssohn. Opera has been Aryanised. There are SA men stationed at the end of the tram line at Neuwaldegg to prevent Jews from strolling in the Vienna Woods.
Where can he go?"

I must say I am eagerly awaiting de Waal's next book, which is supposed to be called "The Story of White" and will tell the story of porcelain. Never mind that the man is first and foremost a world renown ceramicist, he can tell stories.

“If I started blogging today I would….”

"...customize my blog's design right away."

Completing this sentence is today's Blogathon topic, asking participants to reflect on what we would do differently if we were starting out blogging, given what we've learned.

I started blogging in January last year, and used the Blogger template Travel. I loved the background picture, the Mylar-style overlay of text, and the white font. Pretty soon I heard the white font was hard to read. But I liked it, so I stuck with it. Then, last summer, I took a blogging class for writers run by Kristen Lamb, and white font was one of her no-no's because it's hard to read on mobile devices. I still ignored that advice, because I liked that template's look.

But by the fall I had grown tired of it, and worse, I'd come across a few other blogs that were running on the same template. That's like going to a party and finding another woman wearing the same dress. I had also visited enough other blogs to start feeling like they all looked the same, as they were running on one of the Wordpress or Blogger templates. I also met some bloggers whose blogs looked individual, whose design impressed me, and whose blogs were thus memorable. I realized those people had put time into their blogs' design. They had thought about what kind of look they wanted. Some were classmates from Kristen's class, and so I asked them how they did it. No secrets there: They looked at lots of other blogs, noted a few they liked, and hired a graphic designer to help them come up with a look.

So finally, last fall, I did the same. I took the time to figure out what look would be most "me." I found a few blogs whose design I wanted to emulate, although not quite. I sat down with a designer friend, and we came up with my banner, and my look, customizing a Blogger template with a banner that can be updated periodically by switching out the pictures.

My blog banner Nov 2011 until today

According to my blog statistics, page views increased by about 50% after I customized my blog. Is that a direct consequence? Of course I don't know, but since I wasn't doing any other special blog activities like a blogathon or a class in November or December, evidence probably supports the idea that a more individualized blog draws in more readers. Improved readability helps, too.

To go with today's theme, I've updated my banner, so that all you faithful readers don't get bored over time. Let me know how you like it.

New banner

The pictures are, left to right:

Photo of my daughter and me, Summer 1996
LaSalle Canyon, Starved Rock State Park, Illinois, April 2012
Laundry in Hongkou, Shanghai, March 2012

Photo Essay: Bikes in Shanghai

Just as the laundry hung out to dry on eletrical cables, parking signs and telephone booths, the prevalence of bikes in the streets of Shanghai struck me as so very different from what you see in an American city. This is an unusually contemplative and peaceful shot of two bikes parked in the market area of Nanshi, the Old City.

Bike riders are usually solitary apparitions in American cities, so I often felt as if an army of bikes was coming at me, as in this scene in the Bund area where a bunch of biking commuters are waiting for the light to change, like a platoon ready to charge. By the way, I loved these smart stop lights they have in Shanghai, that show how long it's going to take for the light to change. Pedestrian lights do that in Chicago, so as a driver I tend to watch those to see if I can still make it across the intersection or not.

Here the army of bikes is on the move, also in the Bund area. You can see the social strata displayed as well: Those who can afford it have a motor scooter, if not that, then a bicycle with a motor, and lastly, someone who actually pedals.

On wider streets, bikes will have their own lane, separated from the other traffic. Here a street scene in Suzhou, a "smaller" city about 1.5 hours from Shanghai. I put "smaller" in quotation marks, because in China, a small city like Suzhou has 8 million inhabitants, as opposed to Shanghai's roughly 20 million.

Bikes are everywhere. The "drrt drrt" sputter of a motor scooter even follows you through "pedestrian" areas like this walkway at Tiger Hill in Suzhou.

Parked bikes in front of an old garden wall in Suzhou make for a more contemplative shot.

A contemplative sight can also be this - a tricycle made for cargo where you feel the owner has just left. Hongkou District, Shanghai

Or here, a lone schlepper in the Bund area, in front of one of those amazing art deco buildings in Shanghai that seem so familiar and so Western, and yet there is something foreign about them as well.

Waiting for customers in the former Jewish ghetto. Hongkou District, Shanghai

A sidewalk is taken over by bikes in Hongkou.

Every kind of bike, parked a little more orderly, on a side walk in the former French Concession.

Here, another army, wet and disorderly, but at rest.

Still wet, but orderly - a bike parking lot, with greenery.

Bikers in formation, all equipped for the rain. Typical here also the stubby plane trees that line the streets of Shanghai, still naked at the end of March.

A peek into an alleyway in the Old Market area in Nashi.

Finally, a shot you already know from my A Market in Shanghai essay, but I just love this bike.