Trompe L'Oeil In New Town

It must have something to recommend it as an art form if the French have bothered to name a style after it, but I like these kinds of eye fooling paintings for themselves, more generally murals of some sort but in this case just a tree, and very nicely done.

That one was good for a laugh somewhere as I recall in mid town, possibly on Seminary Street. I can't remember where I saw the tile shown below but it brought back memories for me of my first and only visit to the Roman city of Pompeii in southern Italy.

Cave Canem means beware of the dog in Latin so we can only assume the home where the mosaic was originally placed was in the habit of having dogs in it all the time, or perhaps they liked t use the rude to keep people away. Above the modern tile, below the original I photographed in the villa in Pompeii, unhappily partly obscured by a puddle.

These are the perfect days of winter when Key West comes into it's own. Sunny blue skies light breezes low humidity and in short: perfect shirt sleeve weather. Perfect weather also to lounge on your porch if you have the time and the inclination:

It's also the right time of year for me to notice the odd detail thrown out roadside. "Area 51” indeed. And perhaps they even believe the world will end in a week. Or perhaps they just have a really good sense of humor and like to cheer up their letter carrier.

And here is the classic conch cottage though not in the typical old town setting. A white picket fence, a useful scooter ready to go; classic Key West.

In Britain they call eighteen wheelers Heavy Goods Vehicles which ponderous term put me in mind of this Harley.

This mirror-free scooter rat bike with a taped up seat and a fair bit of rust is more typical of the useful two wheeled transport on this small island.

It was hot and muggy for Lbradors in heavy fur coats and the walk was thus shortened as herself was overheating, even as i enjoyed the weather. That's how hot the sun gets even in winter in frost free Key West.

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Sculpture Key West

 

Key West is home to the civil war fort called Zachary Taylor, named for the eponymous president, and every year it hosts a shrinking art exhibit that is called Sculpture Key West which exhibits here and at the West Martello Tower where the garden club usually shows off plants.

Ursula Clark of Brooklyn calls these nests of twigs and leaves Ancient Vessels. Which exhibit is the one closest to the fort and was my first hint that Sculpture Key West was back unannounced.

It took me two visits to get my pictures as the first time I innocently went for a walk at the fort clouds closed in all round and everything became gloomy and dark. Some bagged it and went back last weekend for a picnic with my wife and dog and that was when two dudes on unicycles floated by to some loud clapping and cheering in the parking lot. I had seen them peddling along the highway and now here they were, and my wife had even heard a story about some money raising thing they were doing. It was all a bit vague so naturally I went to check their website where I found this picture and not much information.

http://unicyclenycbridgetour.blogspot.com/

These brightly dressed dudes apparently ride to bridges around New York City, take a picture of their wheels and record a few statistics and take off again. According to the interview my wife heard the unicycles are a bitch to ride as they have no free wheels and no brakes and require particular balancing skills. You could just walk.

Anyway we watched them pedal in and ate pedal out and I suppose more than a hundred miles on one wheel is some sort of achievement and it is in some obscure way connected to the sculptures. Which, I have to say seem t be rather reduced in number and I thought, imagination this year, which is year four of the endless economic recession.

From a distance this display looked like a miniature telescopic array from Virginia, but the blue disks up close turned out not to be blue in color at all.

The just reflected whatever they saw, frequently blue sky, sometimes not.

The not-actually-blue discs were next to another odd installation, called Down The Drain by Bonnie Rychlak of New York.

They are hot wax person hole covers apparently and visitors are sternly warned not to touch them. Which presumably means they aren't as tough as the real thing!

The great thing about Sculpture Key West is that it is in a lovely setting at the park. I wish all the exhibits were in one place especially now that there are far fewer than there used to be. It alsmotbseeme as though there were too many for Fort Zachary with sculptures spilling over rather attractively among the pine trees.

No more. We had a picnic among the pines but there were no sculptures there. There was one among the new native plants the park is growing. It's called Starfish by New York artist Thea Lanzisero.

She has had stuff shown here previously, thought provoking sculptures including bamboo structures. Seen here working on one such from pictures in her blog.

 

From the landward side of the exhibits we went seaward led by my Labrador.

Noah's Dad built Truman Annex and it is the author of this wooden wavy structure after who, Noah Lane in the Annex is named. The wooden slats had the compound curves of something ship-like.

Below we see a flotilla of scrap water bottles planks and sticks aptly named Flotilla which seemed rather pretentious as in the a ground there was a flotilla of ships and boats of true dimensions that were in fact sailing around.

And in the old style of Sculpture Key West recycled iron made pretty.

Heading back to the parking lot and a picnic dinner we passed one more sculpture, sheets of alumin bolted together painted yellow and bolted to the ground.

The greenery here was planted by the park in an effort to show what a wooded grove of native plants might look like in place of the non native invasive Australian pines currently flourishing on the point, in the background. People who have long enjoyed the shade of the pines protested so vehemently the state park service backed off from plans to destroy the pines, so while they remain, the blasted heath next door gets a much needed makeover to show what can be done with native plants. It seemed absurd to me to remove the shade giving pines even while the park has acres of useless ugly graveled open space. I'm glad to see their plantings are coming along. They will be lovely when they are giving proper shade, so I hope the parks service plants lots more.

I think with Cheyenne leading the walk we may have missed one sculpture in a far off corner but we caught most of them and while she paused to catch her breath we pondered what we had seen.

I miss the good old days of the credit fueled boom, when not just the field of finance was powered by cheap money, but artists got a chance to be funded and seen and argued over. I fear the future ay have us looking back at this period as The Good Old Days, so I left the field of sculptures determined to enjoy myself as much and as often as possible at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park.

 

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No Name Deer

They were fearless these little fawns, standing by the side of the road as we drove past, Cheyenne and I.

It's difficult to tell how small they are lacking any perspective, but let me say they stood probably less than three feet at the shoulder.

It must be the time of year, I saw another tiny fawn near No Name Pub after I crossed the bridge back to Big Pine Key.

It was a rainy day and with the dog walked I spent my afternoon on the couch with tea and a book. The fawns? I have no idea how their day went, grazing probably as deer do.

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Colombian Grace

I have long wanted to try this place on petronia Street in Bahama Village and I finally got to go.

 

My wife and I shared a  starter which was a sort of soup of calamari in a tomato sauce with a pile of white rice in the middle of the bowl. It was excellent.

 

 

After that the meal took a pause got to work on our two main dishes. The sangria was good too, a decent quality red wine, not too sweet with finely ground fruit made it unusual and easy to sip. We did a lot of that as the main course took it's  sweet time showing up.  It was fine we were in no hurry.

 

 

 My wife and I visited the Colombian Island of San Andres when we were sailing the Western Caribbean and we reminisced about it as we waited for our main course. I didn't remember but my wife reminded me that in Colobia we always got soup with our meals. True enough, unlike other Central American countries Colombia was the land of the soup. We used to eat out a lot as meals ashore cost less than two dollars each usually, and even my wife, an avid cook agreed it was cheaper to eat ashore when we were near a town.   

 

The picture above shows  my wife's  main course a fish stew Colombian style. I had never seen anything like it in Latin American cuisine, a milky cream chowder with molten bubbling cheese on top. It was delicious and rich and filling.

 

My  main course was what I called "breakfast-for-dinner" and consisted of a series of different items beautifullyund the plate: rice, beans, eggs, plantains sweet and savory, avocado, sausage and steak, d cheese. It was perfect and quite filling.

 

 

It was a delightful meal, leisurely with a cheerfukl competent waiter and a pleasant atmosphere in the restaurant which filled as the evening progressed.

 

 

The bill came to $110 with tax and tip and was well worth the money. Dinner was an extravagance but as far as value for money goes it was all there. I look forward to retuom for dessert which is bound to be spectacular.

 Then we rounded out the evening with a visit to the Tropic. Excellent stuff all round.

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Truman Annex Trespasser

I was astonished to see this guy snoring on a bench outside the sales offices in the sacred grounds of the Truman Annex. He smelled pretty ripe, a mixture of ancient sweat, fermented urine and well worn cerements.

I strode by on a short cut between the parking garage and the Tropic Cinema, and imagine my surprise when, two hours later I walked back this way and took this picture of him still on the bench and still unconscious.

I confess, this image wrecks my stereotype of the sacred grounds of the gated Truman Annex community where I would never have imagined there would be tolerance of the bum. Mea culpa. Now they too have proper Key West color on their antiseptic grounds.

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Night

What animates me and by extension my blog is my innate curiosity, a quality I have had since birth. My late mother used to tell the story, as proud mothers often do, of the time she turned her back on me and I, squatting on the floor stuck a bone handled knife into the light socket, an action that plunged our home into darkness and left a burnt indentation in the blade of the knife which we continued to use daily into my adulthood until my stepmother made a clean sweep of the former wife's household. In retrospect I feel as though much of my life has been an attempt to change the outcome every time I plunge a blade into a live electrical socket. Had the handle been made of metal my little heart most likely would have stopped, which is why modern parents frantically make their homes "child proof" in an attempt to preserve the little tykes from any and all possible dangers.

I have great difficulty accepting that there are places too unsafe for me to visit. I have traveled a great deal and can count the places on the fingers of one hand of places that have intimidated me, and they may be seen as mild as milquetoast by other travelers. Conversely places that I saw in times of peace may be viewed as highly dangerous now. Colón in Panama worried me, driving through villages in the mountains of Jamaica creeped me out but riding a motorcycle through Africa worried me not a bit, I camped freely anywhere I felt like it and never suffered an injury. I have slept on the streets of Mexican cities when I was a callow youth but certain neighborhoods of Los Angeles and New Orleans give me the creeps. So often it is at home in civilized places that I feel my intuition telling me strongly to move on. I always listen too.

While it is true that from time to time sober people wandering home through the streets of Key West do get beaten up or robbed in the hours of darkness it is not very common at all. Indeed such incident's make headlines and the suspects are soon arrested ending their "sprees." Yet for anyone used to living in a big city Key West is absurdly safe, anyone can walk anywhere at any time in perfect safety. I find fearfulness to be widespread and it astonishes me. For a country that prattles on and on about self reliance we seem to live in a sea of fearfulness and reliance on bluff and bluster. Much of it I attribute to television, a medium that delights in scaring viewers with stories of abnormal violence and community destruction. I never watch television news and I abhor the streaming of stories where "...if it bleeds it leads." These selected incidents portray daily life as a torrent of unrelenting violence between strangers. That violent crime is diminishing according to FBI statistics means nothing. That Key West is an oasis of peace is not reflected in Miami's local news streamed into Key West homes and hotels.

I love walking Key West at night and much of the city is as quiet as a country village, far from Lower Duval a walker will have the streets to himself. There are no aircraft overhead and only the occasional car or scooter buzzes by. Squeaking bicycle chains are a more common night time sounds. The further you get from the bars of Duval the quieter the city gets. You can walk and wander and take pictures and think out loud and find yourself utterly unmolested. It's the other Key West that not many people take the time to get to know.

After the walk I get to drive home and find myself in the mangroves, among the salt water, connected to the world by electricity which I can turn off at will and thus open up the star filled night to my eyes. At his late stage in my life I enjoy exercising my curiosity to travel and see things, but I am no longer moved to stick knives into electrical sockets.

The best of it all is that even at night, most nights at least, the weather is mild enough for shirt sleeves. Who needs snow? Not me!

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