The FIG team discusses the composition of the shoot, while the Puffer
Morris team discusses another beautiful evening to be in Lancaster.
FIG Lancaster, this city's beautifully designed, high-concept, hyper-local quarterly from the folks at Moxie House, had their camera lenses out the other evening for a photo shoot of the Puffer Morris team.
We caught up with them with our I-pad doing camera duty outside the Lancaster Public Library's central branch on Duke Street, so it seemed only right to do a meta-shoot of the FIG shoot. For the real deal, you'll have to check out the next edition of FIG to see what their camera saw.
FIG at work: (from left) Style Director Marie Kojitani, photographer Mike Miville
and Deborah Brandt, the creative director and maestro of all things FIG.
The action moves to the west side of Duke Street, while Puffer Morris
partner Scott Haverstick contemplates a deep blue twilight sky.
A shot of the shoot.
Team Puffer Morris: (from left) Nelson Keener, Janelle Ellis, Bill Puffer,
Scott Haverstick, Ric Tribble and Mary Tribble.
One of The New Yorker's signature cartoons from its early, Roaring Twenties period was Ralph Barton's "The Sort of Thing That Brings Joy To The Ashman's Black Heart."
There, in the pre-dawn hours of an apartment building courtyard, a bug-eyed, sadistic hell-hound of an ash collector (this, from the day when garbage was incinerated down in the cellar) is hurling the parade of sooty, emptied cans -- bang, clatter and boom -- deep into the courtyard, simply ecstatic to wake up the entire block.
Barton, who was afflicted by depression and later died by suicide, was making a bleak statement concerning one of the enduring realities of big-city life: dealing with garbage is foul business. Not for nothing that Tony Soprano's day job was "waste management consultant."
With the world urbanizing at a rapid pace, one need not be a Manhattanite to know the misery of waking up prematurely to the roar of the collection truck, the spume of its exhaust as it rumbles through the neighborhood, and the banging of tossed emptied cans (now, at least, thankfully no longer metal).
So it's with a small measure of optimism that one reads help is perhaps on the way, in the form of a new generation of waste collection vehicle using quieter and much cleaner hybrid engines fueled by compressed natural gas rather than the diesel beasts currently plying our neighborhoods in the morning.
Miami has been leading the way in the transition, and, while the transition costs are substantial, the operational and maintenance savings make for a reasonably quick payback. And there are immediate environmental benefits of CNG over diesel, not just locally, but in terms of carbon emissions, globally too.
Lancaster leadership take note: we should be pressing our trash haulers to bring the dirty business of collection into the 21st Century.
Of course, it's still up to each of us to consume less, waste less, compost and recycle more, and otherwise clean-up after ourselves. But a cleaner and quieter truck wouldn't hurt either.
It is said that during the Civil War, Pequea Valley farmers hid their money high up in the rocky ledges of Welsh Mountain in eastern Lancaster County to safeguard it from the approaching rebel forces. After the threat passed, they climbed back up the steep hills only to find the money gone.
Today, you can drive 20 miles east of Penn Square to Narvon and clamber up those same imposing cliffs, now preserved in Lancaster County's Money Rocks Park. You may cross paths with a few rambling couples or families on the trail near the parking lot, but for most of the time, you'll have the 3-plus miles of moderately difficult hiking trails and spectacular vistas all to yourself -- just you and the ruffed grouse, wood thrush and wild turkey.
Thinking of moving somewhere new? You may have heard
that this town was nice, but snobby; another one's shabby and maybe not so safe,
but possibly on the rise; a third one is cool and youthful.
So how do you sort out the buzz from the
beef?For many folks looking to relocate
to a new community, the factors are pretty basic: the reputation of the
schools, property taxes, convenience to the workplace, and how much house you can
get for your money.
For a deeper, more personalized method of
evaluating a community and whether it's right for you and your family, The New
York Times proposed in a recent article taking what they termed a "values
audit.”While the term may be nothing
more than a bit of marketing jargon for doing your due diligence, the underlying
notion is a sound one.
To really get a sense of whether or not a place
fits, you have try to understand the values that a community and its people
reflect and then see how they align with your own.If that sounds amorphous or subjective, try
structuring the exercise into a series of key questions, such as these below:
What are the
public priorities of the place? Is the
major concern for keeping taxes low, or economic development and job growth, or
quality public services and amenities?
What is the
tone of public discourse? Do issues get
debated in a respectful and harmonious way, while allowing for disagreement and
dissenting points of view?
Is there a
healthy mix of long-time families and newcomers?
What can you
learn about the community from the on-line comments and letters-to-the-editor
of the local paper or from the postings on social media groups devoted to the
life of the community?
Are public
officials accessible and responsive when you call their office? How about police, fire and other emergency
services?
Who is
dropping off and picking up the kids at school – a lot of nannies and
caregivers, grandparents or stay-at-home dads and moms?
Does the
local shopping district feel like its populated by a diversity of people, or is
it very homogenous, and if so, are they folks you feel comfortable being with?
Is there a
wide availability of programs and activities that you and your family will want
or need as the years go by?
Are there
decent accessible medical care, social services, and transportation to meet
your needs?
Here in Lancaster, we
are endowed with a vibrant community, full of diversity, a high quality of life
and rich in opportunity for a wide range of cultural, social, professional,
educational and leisure pursuits.
But even a stellar
community profile does not make Lancaster – or anywhere else, for
that matter– right for everyone.So go
ahead and ask some questions of your own that occur to you. Put a place to the test against the things
that matter in your life.
Once you start, you soon
see that taking the measure of a community and how well you and your loved ones
would flourish in it is a rich exploration that tells you as much about yourself
and your personal values as that of the place where you are thinking about
putting down roots.
Yes, we know that San Francisco is probably the hottest real estate market in America -- some would say that the City by the Bay isn't America at all, but some otherworldly Avalon of mythic origin.
Certainly the steamed-up housing market is reaching mythic proportions, nowhere more so than the Bernal Heights neighborhood, the hilly residential community south of the Mission District.
Just look at some of these outlandish prices being fetched for cottages on postage stamp lots. The average sales price in April was over $ 1-million for these tiny charmers -- and no one doubts that they are charming. But 78 percent appreciation in two years on a place that didn't get a stick of renovation in the interim?
As one dizzied resident put it on the Bernal community blog, "WTF?"
No, we don't get real estate vertigo like that here in Lancaster -- but maybe that's a good thing.
The Freer-Sackler Galleries, side-by-side
repositories of the Smithsonian's Asian art collection, also house one of the
finest and largest gatherings of work by James McNeill Whistler, the
American-born painter who decamped for London where he advanced the radical
vision of JMW Turner toward the
flowering of 20th Century abstraction.
James McNeill Whistler
1834-1903
Now through Aug. 17 in the Sackler is the
landmark Whistler exhibition, "An American in London: Whistler and the
Thames."Brought together for the
first time US and UK collections are some 80 of Whistler's London scenes --
many centered on the great city's great arterial waterway.
This exhibition is the most significant showing
of Whistler in more than two decades.For Lancastrians, it is a privileged opportunity for a day trip to
Washington to experience one of the masters in full.
Arriving as a young man in London in 1859,
having left West Point to study etching at the US Geodetic Survey and painting
in Paris, Whistler was very much a contemporary of Dickens: steeped in the
novelist’s remorseless portrayal of London's squalor, inequalities and virile
industrial tumult.But no Victorian moralist
was he -- rather, Whistler's concern was all form, light and color, the very
elements that soon would come to define the modernist revolution he prefigures.
Nocturne -- Blue and Silver
Like Turner -- as well as Monet -- he explores
the misty, indistinct and impermanent vistas of the riverscape with restrained emotion.He also brings to life the seedy and roguish
characters of the waterfront, as in “Wapping”, a Renoir-like pub scene of two
sailors and a lady weighing her options, with the daily commotion of the docks
and river spread out behind them.
Wapping
By contrast, a corner of the gallery space is given to work displaying Whistler's fascination (as with the West,
generally) with all things Japanese.He
sets pastel-colored proper English women in geisha poses -- complete with
kimono and chrysanthemum -- on a balcony overlooking the grey river and the looming
charcoal tones of Battersea on the opposite shore. He even signs the work with a butterfly icon.
Balcony
To complete the contrast, the gallery offers
through July 27 a companion exhibition, much smaller in scale, of Kobayashi
Kiyochika woodblock prints of Tokyo scenes from the same period.
Whistler’s great London works
challenged the Victorian establishment, and he ultimately fled England for the
continent in disgust at the negative critical reception he received. As
this stunning display of virtuosity confirms, Whistler’s detractors were
shortsighted: his work endures for the ages.
Battersea Reach
Get up and go:
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050
Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art, located at
12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in
Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (closed Dec. 25), and
admission is free. The galleries are located near the Smithsonian Metrorail
station on the Blue and Orange lines. For more information about the Freer and
Sackler galleries and their exhibitions, programs and other public events,
visit www.asia.si.edu. For general Smithsonian
information, call (202) 633-1000
This is the final venue
of a three-stop tour for this exhibition.Don’t miss it.
