Recycling is good for the Earth and prevents global warming, or not, as the case may be.

In the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, which you can enter for a modest fee; I don’t remember how modest the fee was, only that she was modesty personified, a jewel of modesty and Christian virtue, whereas I can remember every detail of her very immodest sister, including the shots afterwards; you can see the cream of Palermitano society hanging on the walls. I do not know why 18th and 19th century Sicilian swells thought that being stuffed and mounted in a church basement was such a good idea, but they did, and who are we, the enthusiasts of the Hula-Hoop, the Pet Rock, and Pamela Anderson to point the finger of absurdity at anyone?

The catacombs form a natural refrigerator of sorts and the galleries feature separate areas for priests, nuns, including the mortal remains of one mother superior hanging from the ceiling doing her impression of the Flying Nun, and one archbishop in full episcopal regalia, with scintillating hints of Congregationalism around the pockets, looking as though someone put him together from cigarette ashes and Elmer’s Glue. There were several galleries of the rich and locally famous, the upper crust in their Sunday best, all of them moldering away along with their social pretensions. Here you have the society swain of 1830 hanging across the way from the rich girl he got in trouble in back in the early summer of 1829. The girl’s parents hang next to her, as if to make sure there’ll be no more of this monkey business here, thank you very much, and the swain hangs between the girl’s two brothers, whose heads are turned slightly towards their sister’s seducer and whose skeletal grins seem to say, “What? Twenty- seven stab wounds weren’t enough? You want more?” And so there they are, the rich in their full if more than slightly moldy glory, awaiting the Resurrection so they can get a change of clothes. Nowhere in the lot is there a poor person, nowhere in the lot is there someone having any connection with the advertising business. Life and death were both unfair in those days. Hanging on the wall after you died just wasn’t good enough for the poor and outcast way back then, although just hanging by the neck until you were dead was.

Nowadays, of course, we live in a much more democratic world and the poor may choose to be interred where they will, and today the same freeze dry technology gives you a great cup of coffee every morning is now available to stiffs, living and dead, of every income level. Why go through the trauma of a wake and funeral when it is possible to have Grandma freeze dried and left in her favorite chair in the corner? Why try to explain the concept of death to your children when you can keep Grandma as part of the family forever? Freeze drying lets you keep those near and dear to you exactly where they were the last time you saw them. You can even buy special attachments for your vacuum cleaner that will let you clean Grandma off before the neighbors notice she’s getting a bit dusty for her age. There’s even a line of clothes for the hip but deceased Grandma so she will never feel out of it, and no, I don’t know how they’ll get those clothes on her, but where there’s a will and you’re in it, there’s always a way. 

Apologies

I realize that I spend an inordinate amount of time here apologizing for not writing more and I would not want to bother you with more excuses about why I haven't written for here in quite a long time (if, on the other hand, you want excuses, I have them in abundance and I will be more than happy to share them if you want me to do so.)  Having said that, the long, and by long I do mean very long, summer hiatus is coming to a close and I will be putting something up here shortly. I also realize that I make that promise a lot without ever following through with it, but this time I really mean it. Yes I do.

VACATIONS, OR HOW NOT TO ENJOY YOURSELF IN ONE EASY LESSON: Here’s the thing: I don’t do vacation well. This is a terrible thing to have to admit about yourself, and I realize that most people might find this particular form of anhedonia a bit mystifying. To the vast majority of people, vacation, especially paid vacation, is something one cherishes, plans for, and enjoys for every second it’s worth before the inevitable return to the quotidian world of work that makes those few precious weeks of vacation possible. Everyone loves vacations; people write books about where to go on vacation and what to do when you get there, the Go-Go’s sang a really catchy tune about vacations, there are entire countries, in fact, dedicated to getting you to spend your precious vacation dollars in their particular neck of the woods. And then there’s me.

I am not sure when my antipathy towards vacations began. I never liked summer vacations when I was a kid, a fact I kept to myself lest some vacation-worshipping bully decided to beat the crap out of me for being such a damn weirdo. Summer vacations meant the annual migration out of the mean streets of the city for the bucolic lanes of our happy little burg. In those days our happy little burg was much more bucolic than it is these days, when the prevailing mood is one of a small corner of the Rust Belt giving way to creeping suburbia. Back then you could still catch the occasional deer wandering up and down Main Street in the middle of the night like some nocturnal country cousin, stopping every so often to take a wide-eyed yokel’s look in some store window. That doesn’t happen much anymore. But I wasn’t thinking about that as I sat in the back seat of the car wishing I was dead; I was thinking about all the fun my friends were going to have pulling false alarms, shoplifting, and setting the winos in the park on fire, whereas I would spend my summer playing baseball, riding my bike, and being bored completely out of my mind. It was enough to make anyone wish that summer vacation only lasted a week and I often did. I even wished it upon a star once, just like in the Disney song, but the star must have been in his dressing room not taking calls or on strike for shorter light years or fighting with his agent because nothing ever came of the wish—summer was still two stultifying months long, whether I wanted it or not.

After I left school and entered the poison ivy clad halls of the civil service things were pretty much the same. I don’t see the point of taking a vacation when the whole point of having a civil service job is to do as little as possible most of the time for as long as possible; there does seem something counterintuitive, at least to me, about doing nothing on my own time. Some years I just skip vacation altogether, not, as I tell my colleagues, because I don’t have the money to go anywhere, but rather because I don’t want to be bothered thinking about vacationing; it’s just easier to go to work. This attitude invariably raises the hackles of the people I work with. They find the idea that anyone would willingly skip vacations more than a little disquieting and the annual end of the year recounting of just how much vacation time I am losing and my general indifference to the loss causes a general increase in hypertension, frustration, and personal aggravation amongst the confreres. They try to reason my dislike of vacations away, but, as I’ve mentioned above, I don’t see the point of going somewhere to do nothing when I can go to work and do nothing.

And so we come, at long last and after much literary preambling, to paraphrase Kerouac, to the point of the exercise, which is that for most of the past month and a half I have been on vacation whether I want to be or not, and, as you might imagine, I am definitely in the not category. The leadership of the egregious mold pit decided—I am not sure when, but then no one tells me anything—in its collective and near divine wisdom—yes, near divine, people; these clowns pay my salary and in return they expect a certain amount of doglike devotion from us drones—to renovate this mycological breeding pit from the floor on up. In order to implement this miraculous metamorphosis, the powers that be told the staff to get lost and stay lost until we got the call to come back. In a gaggle of carpenters, painters, carpet layers, and other technically competent people all rushing back and forth in the midst of their renovatory labors, the real employees are redundant, if not actually obstacles to that labor, and so we are now on a strange sort of vacation. The vacation does not count as a vacation in the strange calculus of our happy little burg’s civil service department, and yet here I am, on vacation and slowly going out of my mind.

The first few days were not so bad; they were sort of like a very long long weekend, but after the fourth or fifth day of this apparently endless weekend, I began to experience withdrawal symptoms. Since the beginning of this nightmare, I have gone to the great metropolis twice, there to document, in digital color and on black and white film, the strange customs of the indigenous inhabitants in their colorful native costumes, and I’ve driven up to the county seat on a similar mission, but left when I realized that most of the county seat’s inhabitants are lawyers and congenital idiots, who live near each other so that they can support each other’s campaigns for the county legislature, and therefore we should not, simply as a matter of good manners, exploit these poor wretches photographically. Trips to the great metropolis also give me an opportunity to indulge my love of dirty water dogs and huge pretzels with way too much salt on them, and to do so in a spirit of rebellion against the depredations of the nanny state. That’s right, Mr. Mayor, I read the obligatory health information on the hot dog stands, I can see how bad all of this stuff is for me, and guess what, I don’t give a rat’s ass! Take that, smart guy!

But man does not live by pretzels alone, and it is a good thing too, given the thirty or so bucks it takes to get from here to there, or else man would die of starvation or scurvy or something equally loathsome. So, with my finances barring a constant back and forth to Mencken’s second rate Babylon, I resolved to photograph nature in all of its splendor. This was vaulting ambition at its most revaulting, to be sure, especially since I do not vault nor do I have any ambition to do so; I was never a track and field kind of guy, and I don’t have much patience with nature, anyway. In my experience, nature is one of those phenomena that looks better on television than it does in real life, and is, therefore, something one should pass through as quickly as possible on one’s way to anyplace with central heating. But at the time I did not take counsel of my fears, however well thought out they were; instead, I invoked the words of that great American, Horace Greeley, to go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

With these stirring words in mind, I packed up my cameras and set forth for the wide open spaces of the American West. Just as an aside here, I did not grow up with the country and no, I am not young anymore—such, after all, is life—and after a right turn off the interstate, I wasn’t heading west anymore, either; I was heading north, north to Canada, north towards Alaska, the last frontier, north towards the Pole Star.

I did not reach Alaska, Canada, or the North Star, in that or any other order. I did reach, through traffic permutations too numerous and Byzantine to recount here, the Catskills, or a reasonably decent facsimile thereof. The Catskills are a mountain chain, for those of you who do not know, although I have heard that the Catskills are not really mountains at all, but rather a gigantic eroded plateau pretending to be a mountain chain in order to hide from an ex-wife and her process servers. Whatever the geological truth of the matter might be, the Catskills are sufficiently high to cause the empty Diet Pepsi bottles that carpet the back seat of my car to pop and crack like a nervous DWI suspect's knuckles as the dope sits pulling his fingers in the county jail’s drunk tank awaiting his turn before the judge.

I stopped at various places to admire the view and to listen to the truck drivers scream obscenities at me for stopping on such a narrow road. Ordinarily I would have agreed with them, but I was there to capture nature in the raw, which would make manipulating the images later on my computer that much easier, and so had no time for such petty concerns. Fortified by my belief in my photographic mission, I advanced to the guardrail, cameras around my neck, there to view the valley below from this commanding height and to document its beauty, and then promptly began to scream, sweat, feel my throat constrict as my gorge rose, and needed to perform an excretory function, all at the same time. Yes, there I stood, either on a mountain or the side of an incredibly eroded ancient plateau, take your pick, looking down on the verdant and sun-dappled valley below, with my morbid fear of heights more or less (more, actually) intact and completely oblivious to the geological category this particular Catskill belonged to. Now terrified out of my mind, I slunk away from the guardrail and crossed the road to get to the other side, there to relieve nature’s sudden summons and to wait for breakfast to return to my stomach.

Now completely aware that I WAS VERY HIGH UP, I made way down the mountain/plateau/whatever you want to call it as swiftly as the circumstances allowed, which, in retrospect, was not very swiftly at all. I did not want to destroy my brakes or pull the steering wheel off its column, despite the best efforts of that guy in the Wal-Mart truck to get me to do those things and hurry the hell up. Once I got down to the valley floor, I accommodated the lousy bum, after giving him the finger, but I must admit it was touch and go there for a while. Still, I was down at sea level where I belonged, needing gasoline in the quiet town of Kunisha Lake, a town whose existence I was completely unaware the day before. I was so unaware of the town’s existence that if you’d asked me about it the day before, I would have told you that Kanisha Lake was the name of a retro porn star. In Kunisha Lake, I am happy to report, people from the Indian subcontinent own all the gas stations, just as they do everywhere else in this our Great Republic, and that the Mexicans are perplexed most of the time; nothing in their much-thumbed copies of Ingles para dummies prepared them for the large numbers of signs in Yiddish.

So, having arrived in Kunisha Lake, I took in the local sights, or, to be truthful, the local sight: the eponymous lake. The town does, in fact, border a large body of fresh water completely surrounded by land. You have, I should point out here, just read everything of interest about Kunisha Lake. I stood on the shore of this not vast nor not terribly interesting body of water, my arms set akimbo, like mighty Caesar surveying Gaul, thrice divided into plain, sausage, and anchovy, and like mighty Caesar I proclaimed so that all of Rome could hear me, I came, I saw, I said what the hell am I doing here, for chrissakes, and promptly left. I am at home now, where I belong, wondering what am I going to do with myself until the mold pit reopens. The one thing I am sure of is this: Horace Greeley was a putz, no two ways about it. Go west, my ass, and tell Tchaikovsky the news. Vacations suck, no two ways about it, but you can go have one, if you want to. I’m not close-minded about other people’s enjoying them, you know.

GETTYSBURG: PART 1—LEAVING HOME: My many apologies to one and all for my enforced absence, but I was, as I’ve previously mentioned, engaged in a prolonged sociological study of the long-term effects of large-scale political violence on a small American community. While it is difficult to draw meaningful or even very accurate conclusions from a visit lasting only a few days, no one else in the blogosphere seems hampered by a lack of available evidence for their pet conclusions and so I see no reason why I should be bound by this unreasonable convention.

The test community for this study is a small town in south central Pennsylvania named Gettysburg. I am not sure who Mr. Getty was, although I am certain that you don’t much care who he was one way or the other. He may have been a man of some importance, or this may be just a way of sucking up to a rich guy. This sort of thing is not unheard of, naturally; it happened here in our happy little burg. The wise council of solons that governed our civic existence then induced the owner of a paper mill to move here, offering all the usual bribes, tax concessions, and the untouched bodies of their virgin daughters that came with such an exercise in the 19th century. The paper mill owner went along with the deal, but only if the city council renamed the city after his company, thereby cementing the relationship between the private and public sectors into a harmonious whole. The city council, who were running out of bribes, tax concessions, and suitable daughters at that point, agreed to the terms and, after a long fight with the county, the state, and the United States Post Office, changed the name of our happy little burg from its previous, somewhat poetic Indian name, to its current dull and prosaic one. What’s worse, of course, is that the paper mill owner, having taken the bribes, spent the tax money, and rendered all the suitable daughters in the neighborhood unsuitable for marriage in polite society, promptly took off for parts unknown with all of his hard-earned swag and the mayor’s wife, leaving his own wife and three children and several more on the way, although this did not become obvious until a few months later, as well as a raft of unpaid hotel bills, to add insult to injury. Having gone through the trouble of changing the name, the city council decided that the new name was the least of their troubles and decided to leave the name as it was; changing the name back was just too much trouble for these men to contemplate at the time.

Now, to study any test population in its native habitat, one must get there; I did this using Korean ground transportation, i.e., my brother’s Hyundai Sonata, complete with the brother to drive said vehicle. This leads, inevitably, I think, to New Jersey, a place critics malign as a matter of course, and often without much justification. The Garden State is a beautiful place, filled with small traffic signs that the unsuspecting out of state motorist couldn’t possibly read while doing the speed limit without screwing binoculars into his eyeballs all the way from the Delaware to the Hudson, and pols who think that because they don’t have to obey the laws they inflict on everyone else in the state they don’t have to obey the laws of physics, either. Still, New Jersey, Benjamin Franklin liked to remind people, was a valley of moderation between two mountains of arrogance, and is (or was) the home of Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, Thomas Edison, Bruce Springsteen, the United States Equestrian Team, and the Shakespeare Company of New Jersey, a troupe renowned for its vigorous avant-garde interpretations of the Bard’s works:

“To be, or not to fucking be,
That is the fucking question.
Whether ‘tis fucking nobler in the fucking mind to suffer the fucking slings and arrows of outrageous fucking fortune
Or to take fortune’s fucking arms
And fucking twist them around his fucking back until this lousy fuck’s fucking eyeballs fucking bust out of his fucking head
Like overdone fucking ravioli…”

Clearly, the text gains in pithiness what it loses in poetic and philosophical intensity. However, as there was no time for this sort of foray into postmodernist Shakespeare, we did not stay to catch the matinee; Pennsylvania awaited us.

My mother was not sanguine about our going to such a strange and far-off place. Mom is one of those Irish people who got off the boat in the Vampire State back in the 1950’s and never really moved any farther inland than our happy little burg. For her, New York is America and any portion of this our Great Republic where you cannot see the Hudson River on a daily basis is a suspect place awash in lions, tigers, savage Indians, and equally savage Protestants. She knows that Pennsyltucky exists; the Mets have to play the Phillies and the Pirates during baseball season, after all, but baseball players are millionaires paid to take ungodly risks and her sons are not, so before we went Mom doused us with holy water and we recited an Our Father, a Hail Mary, and an Act of Contrition so as to ask for the blessings and protection of the Almighty on our hazardous journey.

Our hazardous journey would not be so hazardous if Gettysburg was located somewhere convenient, as, for example, the town of Matamoros is. I could drive back and forth to Matamoros every day to conduct research if I ever felt the need to, and with gas back at $3.00 a gallon I would almost never feed the need to do something like this. Unfortunately, Gettysburg does not border New York; it borders Maryland, necessitating a much longer drive than I ordinarily like to make. Sociology, however, is a hard science, and those of us who labor in its vineyards must constantly provide our master with the raw data that sociologists, pundits, and bloggers need to prognosticate about the future of modern American society. Almost all of these prognostications will be too wrong for words, given, as they will be, overtaken by events that none of us could have predicted in a million years, despite the tons of data we’ve got stashed in our computers. You just can’t predict a guy like Bucky Dent, you know.

And then we came to Gettysburg, of which more anon.

GETTYSBURG:








HUZZAH, HUZZAH HUZZAH, I HAVE RETURNED!: Yes, I
am back from the great adventure with my investigations nearly
completed. I just need a little time in which to digest all of the
sociological data I have gathered while I was away and then I will
report here just as soon as possible. In the meantime, look at the
pictures.

UPDATE: I have been asked to explain just what it is
you folks are looking at here. I'm not sure why I didn't put captions
in before; captions have been around for quite a while now, so I guess
I have no real excuse except laziness.

In descending order:

1.) A view of the Codori farm on Cemetery Ridge, taken from the positions held by the Vermont Brigade on the third day of the battle.

2.) A monument to the 143rd Pennsylvania Infantry on McPherson Ridge. The white farmhouse in the background belonged to the McPhersons and was used as a field hospital on the first day of the battle.

3.)The monument to Major General John Reynolds, taken at sunset. Reynolds
brought his infantry corps up to this line on the first day of the
battle and was killed in the fighting for the woods a few hundred yards
to the left of where this statue is now.

4.) A monument to the 84th New York Infantry, although absolutely no one in that regiment would ever concede that title for a moment. As far as the men in that
regiment were concerned they were the 14th Brooklyn and dont you ever
forget it, smart guy. This was taken at the railway cut, an unfinished
(at that time) pass through a hill that large numbers of Mississippi
infantry got caught in and were forced by the 14th and the 95th New York to surrender.

5.) Union artillery on Cemetery Ridge.

6.) Detail, 143rd Pennsylvania monument.

7.) Silhouette of the monument to Major General John Buford, commanding officer of the 1st Cavalry Division, at sunset. Buford was the one who saw the potential of fighting on this ground and almost sacrificed his division holding the line on the first day of the fighting so that Reynolds and the infantry could come up and take up positions. Buford is, in my opinion, the unsung hero of Gettysburg, as his decision to take and hold ground so favorable to the defensive was the key one in the
Union's ultimate success. In a bit of trivia you may or may not care to
know, there are a great many statues of generals mounted on horses at
Gettysburg: Reynolds is mounted, as are George Gordon Meade, Robert E.
Lee, Oliver O. Howard, and James Longstreet. John Buford is not
mounted, which is strange, really, because of all the generals I have
just cited Buford was the only career cavalryman. The others were
engineers, artillerymen, or in the infantry. There is something odd, I
think, about a man who spent most of his army career on horseback and
who commanded a cavalry division on the battlefield where his service
is so just commemorated not rating a damn horse. Who makes these
decisions, that's what I want to know. Just as a sidelight, I will be
adding more Gettysburg pics to thephotoblog as they become available.