The way I take pictures for this blog is pretty simple. I walk or ride around with my Android HTC 4G telephone to hand and I snap what I see. I am very fond of the phone as a camera and most of the time I think of it as a picture taking device not as a means of communication. It has built in filters and I enjoy playing with them so you will see color saturated pictures or because key west is so full of colors sometimes on a whim I scale the saturation level back. I try not to do the black and white artistic thing too often as the point of my diary is to show things as they are, warts, telephone lines, outrageous colors and all.
I mention this by way of introduction because when I was on a lunch break with nothing in particular to do I scanned some of the author addresses in Key West that I wanted to photograph and I selected Baker's Lane as the next in my vague series about authors' forgotten homes in this literary town.
So when I pulled up near 709 Baker's Lane and discovered that it was the scene of much activity that blocked my photographic view I was left with a couple of pictures and no coherent story. I got a couple I liked and ran out of time and went home wondering what to do. Add old pictures of the lane in my files? Make do with the few I got? So Instead I went back, with Cheyenne in tow this time. Different day, different pictures, same place.
I was checking out the new West Marine store at the corner of Grinnell and Caroline and it seemed to me that West Marine is much less a marine hardware store than it is a lifestyle boutique. Founder Randy Repass started out selling rope from his garage and now with stores all over the country fashion and name brands seem to be a bigger part of the sales routine.
For real marine hardware I would go to Cuban Joe's, that's the local name for Key West Marine Hardware just up the street. They sell boat stuff, a lot to commercial fishermen and they haven't franchised or all that expansion that tends to water down the fundamental drive of the business. Shop local! But then some local store bites the dust, like the old music store on Caroline which has been replaced by a dust catcher shop.
The first Sunday in November the time falls back but for now it's still dark at half past six, so Harpoon Harry's looked warm and intimate, like a winter diner should look. Never mind it was 79 degrees outside...
Montana Bob is down to be a parrot after Fantasy Fest and he's promised me a fish sandwich special for lunch at BOs wagon. Which in the early hours looks like this:
I like the dark mornings and longer evenings. I shall miss them for the next four months, when it gets dark at 6pm. My work schedule has changed again and I'll be on a special training schedule with a new trainee working with her during the day for the rest of the year, after a Fantasy Fest.
"A Fair Trade Shop" sounds like a good idea, my wife insists on fair trade coffee, but I sort of wonder why the concept of paying producers a decent cut isn't just the way things should be done, and the concept is a selling point instead. Call me a dreamer but I like the idea of paying people an honest wage.
Plus I like sending Key Lime pies through the mail. Kermit's does that.
They run this endless loop video in a window at the store and as Cheyenne and I walked by a Japanese or Chinese (I can't tell the difference) script was playing. At one point I heard the voice announce something about Kermit's "key rime pie" which sounded like such a bad stereotype it made me smile, despite my better nature.
More dust catchers for sale behind the wooden barn door. I'm not sure whose the female face is supposed to be, but flowers in the hair direct one's mind towards the Carmen Miranda hot Latin stereotype. Actually the flat rather featureless face put me in mind of the Elena Hoyos death mask. Check the link for details, if you dare.
The Gallery on Greene street is a repository of local lore so I suppose the big rooster in the window is appropriate enough for a town that has taken recently to celebrating its wild fowl population as a tourist attraction.
Arguably the best time of day, bars are closed and commuters haven't arrived yet to start the new day.
Divers Direct is a big dive shop on Simonton Street and they too sell a lifestyle like West Marine. I tried diving when I lived in California but I discovered it takes a lot of equipment for mammals to breathe underwater (as it should) and you have to measure your time and decompress and on and on and on. Besides all that while you are down there it's cold and dark, in California at any rate, and your breathing sounds like a bad sound track from a monster movie. It wasn't quite the liberating freedom ride I had hoped for so I let the whole business go. I figured seals and otters and kelp are welcome to Neptune's Kingdom, I'd rather ride a motorbike.
Willy Original Clothing they call this place. It didn't look much like a clothing store or at all original but I did like the wine into water label on the window. Which put me in mind of the New Testament as odd as that may sound, wine into water, the wedding a Cana kind of thing which would make Willy's original enough.
On the other hand it is Fantasy Fest week so we have the opposite end of the scale represented at Fairvilla.
Then we came to the Rum Barrel restaurant which offers a Big Ass burger on the principle I suppose that more is automatically better. It won't just make you fat, it will impoverish you too. Te owner f this place made a fortune repairing broken athletes in the world of sports medicine where pro bono is an unfamiliar concept. Now the tireless doctor opens restaurants presumably to support a new cardiology practice? Businessmen exhaust me
Rum Barrel has these pirate overtones that lend the place a Disneyesque air to it, and I find that a bit off putting. I really must try to get over it and taste the rums.
And here we have, captured in one window The marketing drive for modern Key West, all the innuendo, naughtiness and faux rebellion of a town selling itself as eccentric in a country where conformity is king, and the myth of individuality has long since been buried under an avalanche of consumerism.
But it works, it's amazing how well it works. Thank God for the myth that is Key West, for without it the city would be broke like Detroit. This is much better.
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