Midnight in Paris

It was a quick visit to the Dalí Museum in St Petersburg, a stop on the way home. Rusty spent three hours with a sitter, (rover.com) and I am trying to learn not to leave him behind with a lump in my throat. This time he got away and came haring after the car as we drove away which made it harder but I got through those three hours and so did he. I fear I enjoyed myself even more than he did walking with a lovely young university student and taking treats from her. 

We are member of the Dalí so we get to skip the lines at the entrance which is nice but our cards were messed up so leaving my wife to deal with the bureaucracy (it was her fault, she threw away the valid replacements and kept the outdated cards it turned out...) I tried once again to capture the essential Dalí surrealism in the wet Rolls Royce parked in the gift shop. They call it the Rainy Taxi frequently reproduced with a Cadillac and the driver with a shark's head. Not here:

Water streaming down inside the windows makes  a photograph as I like it, crisp and clear, impossible so I allowed myself some latitude and contented myself with the Countess' hand appearing through the mist. The other name for this piece is Mannequin Rotting In A Taxi Cab but I couldn't figure out how to spot snails crawling on her body....

The other creepy thing I've seen here previously is a holograph recreation of the artist himself, walking and talking on screens around the museum. My wife enjoyed the interaction, I shuddered and moved on. I do enjoy the innovations and the exhibits they are bringing to the museum which used to be a rather stuffy mausoleum but some of the surreal experiences are beyond me. I think Dalí would have loved them.

We were at the museum for one specific thing, the display of early 20th entry art focussed on 1929 in Paris when the Surrealists were coalescing around two distinct movements.  Dali landed in Paris and joined the "wrong" group quickly switching his allegiance to the more prominent Andre Breton group and the exhibit shows a short film recreating a clash between the poet and Gala, Dalí's wife (and by her estimation his muse) when Breton and Dalí were falling apart. 

The exhibit wasn't huge but it was full of images of the surrealists and their thoughts plastered all over the walls. Thus using the museum app you can listen to an audio tour of the artwork. The app audio is brilliant, you just hold the phone to your ear like a conversation with no need for headphones but the tours are a total headache to follow. I had to keep asking my wife where to go as she who is quipped with her infallible sense of direction was way ahead of me. I circled hopelessly lost for fifteen minutes staring at the incorrect pieces while ruminating on a totally irrelevant critique in my ear about something across the room.

Despite it being a holiday Monday and us being a bit later than usual owing to dog sitting detour it wasn't overly crowded.

I got to watch clips of several Surrealist movies including of course the infamous eye slitting by Bunuel in Un Chien Andalou which I hadn't seen for years. It seemed less horrifying than when I watched it in an art theater 40 years ago and of course much less horrifying than when it came out to audiences not quite used to trains driving toward them onscreen.

Giorgio de Chirico was among those with a picture on the wall and as usual they managed to put up a picture you don't associate with the more famous artist he became.

What I liked too was the fact that we got to see the faces behind the art which so rarely happens. What struck me about these avant guards creators was how bland they appeared in real life. They look like bankers and accountants in jackets and ties with neatly parted hair styles and even Dalí who cultivated public eccentricity later looked the part of an eager young salesman early on.

Then there was The Lighthouse by Tanguy whose story captured my imagination. Here was a Surrealist who started out as a sailor on a freighter and on a whim decided (as you do) to become an artist. he was inspired by what he saw so he left behind the workaday world of shipping as a deckhand and started expressing himself. He blamed Jacques Prévert the poet and de Chirico for his decision and  apparently they embraced him.  

Yves Tanguy:

Another of these bourgeois-turned-artist types shows up in the form of Pierre Roy of Nantes who became an architect and went on to forget that and take up painting instead. They had a couple of his works on display illustrating his roots combined with still life and open landscapes and a piece of surrealist tape (!) which really caught my fancy. 

It's one of the features of Dalí that I enjoy inasmuch as he displays his draughtsmanship at the same time as showing off his surrealist message through perfectly drawn works.  

Then there was Max Ernst and Loplop  is best explained by the Museum of Modern Art but was a birdlike representation of his alter ego in art. Remember these people called themselves surrealists so anything goes here...

I had never heard of Jean Arp, not even when he is known as Hans Arp. He was born in Alsace when France and Germany were arguing and fighting for possession of the border land so he grew up bilingual and used one name in French and the other when speaking German. Europe can be a messy place so we shouldn't be surprised when reality goes off the rails and surrealism takes its place. Please don't ask me to explain why I like this piece and it captured my attention. Mustache and bottles by Jean (Hans) Arp. There:

You wander through a decade of time, a period of intense living by survivors of intense warfare, facing the certain destruction of their world in a few years more and yet they hungered after meaning and explanation and description of life and they fought each other and the establishment to prove they were right. It must have been an extraordinary time and I knew nothing of it as I had to wait anther thirty years to be born. And now I'm old the whole proposition of scrambling to be heard and to be right seems nonsensical. What they left behind justifies it all.

Even if it can be hard to understand and sometimes even to enjoy. I saw some early street photos taken around Paris and I was struck by how banal many of them were, fuzzy black and white prints of streets and trees and fog, stuff you could expect to find on Instagram by people barely able to hold a phone camera steady. Yet photography was break through art form for surrealists, its immediacy and documentary qualities exposed them to new ideas of how to create art. The funny thing is, then as now Photography as Art is a tough concept to sell to the mass of people used to photography as phone snaps, or billboards, TV advertising. In 1929 the idea that a photographic print could be Art was laughable except to these people.

Alexander Calder is known as the Sculptor of Air. Considering he died in 1976 he offered a revolutionary view of sculpture by creating hanging pieces and as you can see artwork that is as ethereal as cobwebs:

There is still plenty of time to make a trek to St Petersburg, a city worth a visit anyway to check out for yourself the surrealist ferment ofParis between the wars. Well worth it.

As much as I wanted to get back to Rusty and then get home I like to stop and look out through the hurricane proof armored glass.

It gives a view of the gardens around the museum and Tampa Bay in the distance. 

And as this was the MLK holiday the parade that was to make leaving the city slightly awkward was getting underway for the long walk to the stadium near downtown St Petersburg. 

Rusty is an excellent traveling companion as he rides the back seat silently and uncomplaining, sleeping, sitting from time to time and looking out the window at scenery. He is as always no trouble at all.

Housing For Almost All

I walk the mangrove trails when I can on my days off to shake off the accumulated stress of work and people and traffic and getting things done. I never take the peace and quiet of the woods for granted even if this may not look like much to someone used to mountains and valleys and views and rivers and things. For to take a mile or even a half mile walk along trail that was to have been a development, happily abandoned decades ago, allows me to reset my stress levels. Camera and dog and I am set.

When my wife and  were looking for somewhere to live in the Lower keys about five years ago we had no idea what we might find but my wife was determined to get a shot at a decent rental as soon as it came up. She haunted Craigslist so she could pounce as soon as anew ad appeared. We were in fact first on scene the very night the advertisement appeared and our landlord was encouraged by our references and our reliable jobs. We got the house and it has been amazing. Our landlord is wonderful, our rent is reasonable beyond anything one could expect in the Keys. We are lucky.  

I mention this to put in perspective some of the discussions reported this week in the papers about proposals, vague enough one must acknowledge to deal with the shortage of decent affordable housing. The city commission in Key West got a view of a new homeless shelter to be built on the location of the current decrepit facilities on Stock Island. The Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter at the Sheriff's headquarters has been a refuge not only for homeless people but also for working poor residents of the city. Consider a room could cost $1200 a month say. Add a first month, last month and a security deposit and you are looking with utility hookups as well, at $4,000 to move into a place at the lower end of the rental scale in the city. Failing that you get a shower a locker and a mattress at KOTS in the company of anyone else in the same boat.

KOTS is a hastily created facility with air conditioned huts and no great sense of permanence. It was built to by pass the Pottinger decision in Miami where a Federal judge ruled that to arrest a "vagrant" the local jurisdiction had to offer a safe place for the homeless to sleep. Without KOTS people could legally sleep anywhere in public in Key West. Pottinger has been overturned but the benefit of housing the residentially challenged has been made obvious in a  city where residents complain all the time about public "sleepers." So now the city has the opportunity to create a better permanent facility and the commissioners looked at some plans.

The new shelter would be raised on stilts, good to avoid flooding, but the ground floor area would also be where the residents would stage as they waited for the shelter to open. Architects also offered a landscaped path to get the homeless from College Road  to the shelter itself. From the Citizen page:

The idea is to avoid clusters of homeless residents gathering as they currently do on College Road. They are unfortunately considered unsightly and provoke complaints...So in the future they will walk from College Road largely unseen to the underside of the new shelter and wait patiently to receive their bed assignments. That's the theory at any rate.

Homelessness like everything else in the Southernmost City waxes and wanes with the seasons. The population increases in winter when sleeping with the mosquitoes is I imagine an improvement over sleeping on a steam grate in a  snowdrift. The shelter was a brilliant innovation designed to cope with a vast population of people sleeping in parks and on city streets and when  it opened it was a twenty four hour facility until the housed population cried foul at the thought of bums lounging around in a  city and so the hours were reduced and the homeless found themselves wandering the city again by day. Personally I thought out of sight even with a  publicly funded TV was better for all concerned but I am by nature out of step with the majority.

The other part of the KOTS population is the working poor as mentioned above and the new shelter will be one hopes a step up for people trying to do the right thing and keep their heads above water. Then there are the many among the destitute who have mental health problems including of course disproportionate numbers of vets who get lip service for their sacrifices and are left to wander the streets mumbling to themselves. Thus we live with an intractable problem without any of the special circumstances in the Lower Keys. KOTS is critically important to everyone's quality of life who shares a small island with the destitute the mad and the professional bums of whom there are not a few.

The issue of housing has been around forever and still our leaders chunter on as though there were a  way to fix the shortages. The only way to house people is to build housing and sell or rent it at an affordable price. The Meridian complex on Stock Island is a sterling example of affordable units with all proper facilities at reasonable prices, by local standards. However it has not yet been replicated.

There is a housing complex with hundreds of units available now on Big Coppitt Key, half a dozen miles from North Roosevelt Boulevard and that is going to help some people. The plans are apparently also in place for a sweeping construction project replacing several trailer parks in the process. The fact is this project has been on the back burner for years amid calls for sub standard trailers to be removed. I wrote an essay in 2015 on the subject of Housing On Stock Island.

The thing is the trailers really are affordable, if decrepit and when there is a public conversation about "affordable housing" no one actually stands up in the room and says we will rent (or sell) for a definite price. The newspaper reported four categories of affordable housing for the proposed 280 unit Wreckers Cay on Stock island. Which sounded a bit too precise for the real world but maybe ultimately they will produce comparable numbers to ultra low income, low income, median income and moderate income which last  category amounts to $90,000 for a "family" whatever that is and whatever rental rate that will come to in the end.

The Upper keys have developed a system, if you can call it that, of housing employees on the mainland and busing them to their jobs in Key Largo and Islamorada. They use Greyhound equivalents services that run through the Keys and you will see clumps of people every afternoon waiting to be transported home. It's an option not available a hundred miles to the south though some people commute from Homestead to Key West and spend only weekends at home. Some few businesses offer employee housing to try to help ease the shortage.

Housing costs and shortages are  a fact of life and I have nothing new or sensible to offer on the subject. The only reason I bring it up now is thanks to the developments coming into existence over the inevitable objections of people who fear living with the poor for neighbors.

I have tried to make the most of my privilege, having a job that pays a living wage, a landlord who is a decent human being beyond any expectations, of having the time to escape the stresses of daily living and see the beauty in the Keys that appeals to me and hardly anyone else apparently. 

Every time climate change shows up in the public consciousness there is an expectation that house prices will plummet and everyone in the low lying Keys will get the flooding and destruction of wealth that they deserve. One day that prediction seems bound to come true but for now we live as we ever did, with heavier traffic, still inexpensive carbon produced electricity and absolutely no awareness of sustainability among the majority of the population. 

I look for beauty and I find it. Everything else is noise. IF you have somewhere to live. And a job. Etc...

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither

do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly

Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

Downtown Under Gray Skies

I saw a burst of sunlight as Rusty and I passed but all too soon it was gone.

 The day was one of gray overcast skies, heavy cloud and intermittent rain.

It's unfortunate for visitors who usually put a brave face on it describing snowdrifts and limited hours of daylight and no sunshine Up North. Then they come here and are greeted by something less than tropical weather. 

For me it's a pretty good deal as the clouds bring cooler weather and rain isn't that bothersome in Key West as it tends to come and go and is never too terribly cold (unless you are on a motorcycle).

 A child's shoe. Just one. No idea why it was left on Whitehead Street:

I took refuge under the awnings on my side of Front Street near Clinton Square just like the stranger in the picture below. I watched the rain come down for a while with Rusty sitting at my feet enjoying the scenery. He loves to people watch. 

We walked through Mallory Square in the gray half light, shade from the momentary appearance of the sun through the clouds. It's an automatic reaction when you've lived in Florida: see shade, walk in it.  A few days later a violent moment swept through the homeless denizens of Mallory Square and one guy reportedly beat the other guy not with a bat or a knife or a gun butt or something more conventional. Apparently the offensive weapon was a glass tip jar shaped like a fish, and  one man ended up in the hospital. The other was arrested.

That sort of news will force some sort of reaction by the city. You can't have bums fighting at a major tourist attraction and not have consequences. 

The La Concha Hotel above and the old Kress Building below on other side of the Fleming Street intersection at Duval. La Concha's claim to fame is this is where Ernest Hemingway lived when he first came to Key West and got struck here for a few weeks with his wife..

The Kress building used to be the eccentric department store called Fast Buck Freddie's. Now its a chain pharmacy and so Key West keeps evolving.