ELF Power

Walk Cheyenne on Big Pine Key and you might find an egg.

And if you found a large plastic egg on wheels might be surrounded by nerdy people trying to make the electronics talk to each other.

I knew what it was: I had just seen it on the front page of the paper as I left the house that Saturday morning. It's an ELF built in Durham, North Carolina and it now costs five grand complete with pedals electric motor. And solar panel, which they say doesn't work while the recumbent bicycle is in motion.

The owner Kim Gabel lives on Big Pine according to the paper and commutes thirty miles to her job in Key West. Apparently the trike has a computer widget and it wasn't doing its job properly so there was some fiddling underway. I didn't want to intrude.

Wired had a rather patronizing review of the technology: Three-Wheeled ELF Can Be Plugged In, Pedaled or Solar-Powered | Autopia | Wired.com. It pisses me off when snotty magazine writers mock this kind of stuff with the "locavore vegan co-op" line. I grant you the ELF won't replace the hordes of trucks and SUVs cluttering Highway One but this gadget that apparently maxes out at 20 mph will be able to ride the bike path that is in the final phase of construction.

I remarked to Gabel that it is a shame how slow theKeys are on this front and she agreed. However she is miles ahead of me when it comes to commuting. I'll IDE a scooter in the rain, but a two hour ride in an egg is outside my comfort zone. Is gas still bad at 70 mpg?

Cheyenne had had a pretty satisfying walk so she was content to lay down and accept tributes.

Seen close up this ride was nicely put together and with a 350 pound payload and a locking trunk it is quite practical. The issue really is whether or not city dwellers can see themselves using practical wheels instead of status symbols...besides pioneers are not universally admired.

The city of Key West recently rejected a proposal to equip parking control with electric cars. No charging infrastructure the city commission said tossing that radical notion to the curb. I'm not saying the ELF is suitable for daily parking control but there are plenty of electric cars already in private and rental use in Key West the city could have used.

Electric technology is riddled with problems especially if you are looking for a replacement for a gasoline engined car. The Chevy Volt looked promising but like the Boeing 787 the Volt has been having trouble with lithium ion batteries. They were supposed to power the new electric revolution but unfortunately larger li-ion batteries seem able to produce combustible gases and the chemical means of ignition leading to the fires that have made the headlines. Electric motors are relatively easy to build and stick in motorcycle frames and car chassis but the battery needed to power the motor is still in development. One day scientists hope to build batteries that will take a charge in seconds, hold it, and power an electric motor for a serious range. The other issue for those considering electricity as a substitute for gasoline is that it takes energy to build electrical components. It takes oil to make plastics. If we are looking for a way out of Peak Oil electrical propulsion raises questions, not answers just yet.

However, unless we start to look at ways to make changes changes won't come looking for us. There's a guy driving a Tesla electric car around Big Pine in the winter but at a cost of a hundred and thirty grand grand and a range of 250 miles I don't see that as a substitute for my 30mpg Ford Fusion. Tesla Motors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

My strategy to deal with a 50 mile round trip commute is to go simple. Having to commute at all isn't the smartest choice I know but here we are. So my idea of using an old tech Vespa may or may not be smart. It is two stoke but it uses very little gas, and at 34 years of age it is in line with the re-use principle. Automotive technology is constantly driving us toward greater complexity and electronics support that push with gadgets and increasing reliance on electrons. Call me an iconoclast but I beleive less is more not least because I am trying to deal with today while hoping tomorrow brings us some pleasant surprises. An ELF in every garage?

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Employment

I saw this rather startling graph on zero hedge not exactly a limp wristed left wing site. Happy Monday to you too, if like me you wonder why no one questions corporate America's hold on our country. Corporations aren't people.





 

614 Dey Street

From the Key West Citizen July 16,2011. Suzie dePoo: An angel among artists passes | KeysNews.com

 

Suzie dePoo, one of Key West's most venerated artists, died peacefully on Wednesday morning at her home on Dey Street. She was 90.

 

Famous for her art made from found objects, she sculpted fish and mermaids out of wire and painted flowers and damsels on flotsam and jetsam. In the 1950s and '60s, she scavenged glass from what was then called Bottle Beach near the White Street Pier, transforming it into art. Her unicorns and cherubs and sea scenes also appeared on tiles; her large ceramic tile work can still be seen at the Monroe County Library.
"I can't paint on canvas," she said at a retrospective of her work at the Key West Museum of Art and History at the Custom House in 2001. "I like a piece of wood that has its own voice. And I don't like to add too much color. I like to let the wood talk." Of her sculpture she once said, "I think architecture is beautiful -- and I had all this chicken wire lying around."
She was born Agnes Zuzek on Dec. 5, 1920, on a farm in Gowanda, N.Y., near Buffalo. The daughter of Yugoslav immigrants, she picked up the name "Suzie" from those who had trouble pronouncing her surname. She and her sister, Rose, served in the Women's Army Corps during World War II.
The name dePoo came from her husband, John, stepson of the eminent Dr. Julio dePoo who founded the first dePoo Hospital on Southard Street. She and John separated 25 years ago but were only recently divorced.
On the G.I. Bill after the war, she attended Pratt Institute, the school of art and design in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she studied illustration and design. She later took classes at the Art Students League in New York City and her first civilian job was creating floral patterns for a designer of clothing and drapery fabrics.It was in New York that she met her husband and where their first daughter, Katherine, was born. In the early 1950s they moved to Key West and she went to work for the Hand Print Factory, designing landscape, seascape and floral patterns. During the quarter-century that she worked at the factory, she had two more daughters, Amy, who died in England in 2010, and Martha, who also is a Key West artist.
The home and studio that Suzie dePoo maintained at 614 Dey St. became emblematic of the rambling Key West artist compound so often dreamed of by the artistically inclined. Shared by a population of at least 20 cats, it was a hideaway for someone who simply liked to live in her own world. It was there that she created ever more idiosyncratic work, quite a lot of it featuring Adam and Eve. "It's one way I can paint nudes," she said.Known for the gentlest smile and smallest voice, dePoo never ceased in her creativity. That faded a little about a year or so ago, but only in the past two months did she became obviously unwell. "I just want to go home," she began to tell her closest friends.
A funeral Mass will be celebrated at noon Thursday at St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church on Truman Avenue, with a reception to follow at the nearby grotto.mhowell@keysnews.com

 

From The Gallery On Greene, SuzieDPoo.

 

Most venerated and highly reclusive of the famed women artists of Key West, Suzie DePoo’s career has spanned many decades. At 85 she is one of the most mature and refined artisans. Although she is best celebrated for her watercolors and ceramic tile creations, she also works in ancient, reclaimed drift wood, centuries old glass from Bottle Beach collected in the fifties, wire and just about anything that can be shaped or painted on. In a word Suzie DePoo is a classicist.

 

She graduated from Pratt Institute on the GI Bill after serving in the second world war. Her work is monochromatic or vivid in color, the expressive distortions remind one of what it takes to make fine art. She incorporates classic literary influences; mermaids, unicorns and Biblical references. She is ruminating in her later eremite life, taking immense pleasure exploring variations on themes. Well into her eighth decade the work becomes more lustrous and valuable. Much of Suzie’s sum and substance was displayed at The Customs House Museum one woman show “A Remarkable Retrospective”.

 

Many of Key West’s most prestigious collections include Suzie DePoo’s work. Her large ceramic tile work graces the Monroe County Library, two exquisite examples of art in public places. She created originals for the Pier House when it first opened and also painted the piano for the bar. Other examples of her work include the entire ceiling, walls and doors of a near shore island, elegantly treated with color on wood. Her classical training at Pratt prepared her for thirty years of textile design at Key West Handprints.

 

During the years when the Handprint factory produced fabulous serigraphic works with natural dyes on Sea Island Cotton, Suzie was selected to design intricate representational floral, landscape and seascape patterns reflecting the natural beauty of the Keys.

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This is where she lived, a ramshackle collection of buildings now in a state of sad disrepair and yet for sale for a fortune. Zillow says its going for $2.2 Million, 614 Dey St, Key West, FL 33040 - Zillow, but the listing no longer shows it on realtor sites I checked. Who knows, perhaps the complex has sold?

The thing that surprises me is that this venerated local artist has come and gone and essentially no trace is left. I am not sure how much we should venerate those places that once upon a time housed artists and leaders but it is common practice to mark their former homes. God knows Hemingway's house has become a treasure trove to the private family that owns the place. They treasure Lincoln's home in Illinois, they even mark the birthplace of people who managed to rise above the common herd by virtue of wealth or power.

Key West has been a winter home to quite a few notable writers and none of them as far as I can see are marked, and give me a little time and you shall see as well. Odd that, no historic markers for wielders of the pen. Unless they were macho big game hunters, deep sea fishermen and bull runners, or best of all, all in one. The pansies, women, poets and children's authors are not marked let alone do you get charged money to see where they lived. Odd that.

So much cultural wealth so little noticed. Maybe dePoo would have done better among hoi polloi had she had a Twitter account. This video was sent to me by a reader, a tour of her former home. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNWkLHJRQz0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

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Hemingway's Birthday

It is a good and necessary thing when you live in a tourist town to find ways to bring people into said community in those times of the year which could reasonably be described as low season. This is the time of year Key West momentarily resembles Pamplona and bearded men dress in white with red neckerchiefs to honor the late great San Fermin. Why? Because it's Hemingway Days of course!

This year this day would have marked Ernest Hemingway's 114th birthday and so it is that today wraps up the annual Hemingway Days festivities in Key West, a week of silliness that as one winner of the lookalike contest was rumored to have remarked, is the only way left for an old guy to get a girl's attention. Personally I prefer beareded anonimity to being seen pushing a papier mache bull round the block but I'm just a spoilsport when  it comes to dressing up... perhaps the remark had basis in reality:

                                                                

I have not fully plumbed the reason for Key West's fascination with the writer who spent a more or less unhappy decade in Key West with a wife he was apparently not suited to and in the midst of a tourist  turmoil he attempted to keep at bay with the famous brick wall he had built around his home which is the city's major attraction to this day:

                                                                      

                                                                 

The fact is Hemingway loved fishing off Key west and the pictures we have of him from that time in the 1930s he did not look one bit like a fat onld man with a beard. Quite the opposite in fact.

Hemingway left Key West just as the old railroad was converted into a highway in 1938 bringing the promise of an end to the island's isolation. He went to Cuba and settled into his favorite residence of all Finca Vigia (Overlook Farm in English) on a hill above Havana. It is kept in apparently identical condition to when he left the last time though the Cuban government ha snot spent the money needed to keep the museum in perfect condition according to friends who have visited the place. Kathy went to Cuba on some authorized cultural exchange and brought me back a treasure trove of pictures  from  Finca Vigia.

That was where he apparently started to get "the look:"

None of which is intended to diminsh Hemingway's connection with Key West but sometimes I do feel it is rather overplayed. Consider how many other writers have made their temporary winter homes in Key West, none of them perhaps as butch and manly as "Papa"  Hemingway but valued writers nonetheless. I find it hard to imagine Key west celebrating Elizabeth Bishop Days or Tennessee Williams Days with the same ferocity that the old man from the sea seems to require...His writing room on Whitehead Street:

Yet what we do have is some real history, an arrival, a forced stay, a building appreciation for the city, stories, writing and the puchase of a house thanks to his father-in-law's help. A few years ago the city had a community reading event where everyone was supposed to get into the novel that was written in and of Key West, and though I am not a great fan of his urgent abbreviated style I joined the effort. And indeed the novel does carry a peculiar disjointed plot but that nevertheless offers some portraits of life in key West during the Depression that resonate today. The more things change, the book says, the more they stay the same. The public read went off like a damp squib but reading seems to play second or third place to drinking and fishing in the Southernmost City.

All of which may go a long way to explaining why Hemingway is Key West's Big Kahuna of the Arts. Mario Sanchez, Key West's nationally recognized folk artist paid tribute to Papa in his renderings of life as it was in key West, seen here in his striped matelot shirt giving away surplus catch to his neighbors, before he put up the brick wall around his home:

And so nowadays we live in a town where bars argue over which one really represents Hemingway's favorite, as though that matters. Apparently it does evemn though I cannot imagine Hemingway choosing to drink in either one that claims a connection to him.

All that aside Hemingway Days is a chance for some silly fun, Hemingway has long since gone to his reward so I doubt he very much cares about what happened in his wake and his grandchildren can often be found in town expounding on their connections to the Nobel Prize winner. Mind you, if you asked me much about my late lamented grandfather I have very little idea what I could say that would be of much use. esepcially if my grandfather were as studied analyzed and written about as was Ernest Hemingway.  Happy birthday I guess is all that's left to say.

And I hope everyone that needed to made the necessary buck.

Blue Ridge Arts And Crafts

It was not a day of glorious sunshine on the top of the Blue Ridge Parkway, though I with that annoying masculine self assurance that drives women to distraction, assured my anxious wife it was just wind blown clouds scudding over the mountains, not real rain. In point of fact it was the precursor to the sort of biblical rains that they talk about with awe for generations to come. It's not yet August but I dare say already that this will go down in the record books as the wettest of wet summers in northern Appalachia.

Which made it a perfectly splendid day to stop in at the Parkway Craft Center

The center at Mile Post 294 is part of the Southern Highland Craft Guild which has five stores in the mountains and I have no idea about the others but this place is fantastic and well worth a stop in their huge parking area for a look.

I say that and I have no great fondness for dust catchers but the artwork here spans the range of disciplines and yet maintains a closeness to the source of the inspiration.

I am no judge of Art but I really enjoyed walking through what is in effect a gallery devoted to interpretations of woodlands, mountains and the lives of those who have lived in these

The art comes in all media including stained glass representing the four seasons.

I was entranced by all of it but this next piece made of poplar wood had me standing there taking in the details for what seemed like forever.

I remember sleds like these towed by oxen in central Italy when I was a child. And I also remember the back breaking labor of phycically remving stones ploughed up in fields that had to be loaded by hand and removed. This was evocative stuff for me.

You think of Appalachia before World war two (and afterwards too maybe) and making money on a loom is part of the folklore of this civilisation lost in the woods.

The history of the Blue Ridge Parkway which was officially completed only in 1987 was shown for all to see. It came home to me that the huge financial impact of this Works Progress Administration project started by the Government which hired contractors to build the roadway to plans specified by Government surveyors and architects would never happen today. They claim 16 million visitors a year come to this place, worth billions to the local economy.

Our leaders today could never bring themselves to undertake such public works to benefit the people of these United States. Furthermore these same people would arise in revulsion if such a public good were suggested by the leader of the Free World.

And notice the segregation of the facilities in these plans drawn up in the 1930s- and notice how separate and unequal is clearly drawn into the facilities for white people versus the toilets of Negroes.

Numbers three and four are for whites, while smaller five and six are for blacks. And it seems race still matters in the land of the free where "all men are created equal." I have come to understand over the years that one major stumbling block to health care reform is the fear that "those people" will benefit, where "those" people are which ever group is the despised race, sect, or minority of the day. Fate spared me from growing up in a culture where government segregated the races so I tend to be slow when it comes to recognizing those unstated cultural indicators. I see "whites only" signs in museums and they appear to me as alien as "No Jews" signs in photos from the Holocaust.

Happily the architecture of the Parkway is less toxic and is actually fascinating to see how beauty was combined with longevity. I am struck by how public works from a hundred years ago looked good, and worked well.

Further down the page I have a picture of these arches that are as functional and apparently strong today as they were when built.

On the Art front I approached this apple from the other side and was enchanted when I saw the slice cut and the seeds in the middle looked like cherries. How does an artist imagine such a thing?

The art is for sale but three grand? They need some one percenters to come through here.

Great stuff but a three foot tall pear half covered in flowers needs a space larger than than my 750 square foot home to accommodate it. If the pear comes the Labrador goes; ie: no contest!

Quilting is a great Appalachian tradition Quilting The Appalachian Way, Article - BellaOnline Forums and there were a few examples on view.

Let's face it, you're on the Blue Ridge Parkway enjoying the road, even if you are stuck in a cage, and you don't want to stop for anything so you slide past the folk thing hoping your spouse doesn't notice. That would be a mistake.

They have tons of shady parking to keep your Cheyenne happy and if you are riding none of your hard core, bad ass biking buddies need know you had a good time looking at pansy folk arts. this is the America you need to think about when politics and day time TV are driving you crazy.

This wouldn't be my blog if Cheyenne didn't have a corner of the page. This blog is about life in the Keys but failing that my fall back position is a reminder that dogs like life as much as we do and travel broadens a labrador's mind. Sixty degrees in July! Cheyenne's heaven!

Rhododendrons come for the mountains in Northern India where temperatures are not at all tropical so you know a furry fat Labrador is happy here. Wandering on the ridge of the Blue Ridge was her reward for being as patient as ever at the Folk Art place.

I could not fail to show at least one panoramic view of this gorgeous place. My great disappointment of 2013 is no plans for a motorcycle ride in the mountains this summer.

And here is a picture I shot on the fly of that archway architecture dreamed up in the 1930s.

How cool is this tunnel stuff in this jungly place?

And some lucky bastard was cruising the Parkway on two wheels....

...mind you this has been the wettest summer ever in the mountains so perhaps a Ford Fusion was exactly the right vehicle to visit the mountains this year! We had fun in any event and that's all that matters.

 

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