New Blog Address

Change of plans. Since all three of my sisters have looked (and commented!) on this blog at least once, it is clear to me that it is going to become a pretty big deal. 

Thinking ahead, it will be easier for me to make major changes to this blog before, rather than after, I have established it as a celebrated internet brand. I'm going to be just like those cats!

Because of this, I am changing the name and address of the blog to:

http://pluckandlights.blogspot.com/ 

The change is effective immediately.

For the time being, the intent is to keep it a daily photoblog focusing on St. Louis. The name change, however, will allow me more freedom to evolve it into something more if I choose to later.

Come join me!

By the way, 'pluck' and 'lights' are cooking terms that refer to different types of offal. 

Memorial Plaza

To be frank, Memorial Plaza on Market Street is not the nicest place to be in downtown St. Louis. The park is littered with empty beer cans and there are frequently groups of people there publicly emptying them. If you are unaccustomed it can feel unsafe in broad daylight. 

There are these walls in Memorial Plaza that I'm absolutely enamored with though. They are concrete structures of open-holed circles and squares with discs of stained glass randomly inserted into the circles. It's that stain glass that I like so much. Both the distribution and the colors of the glass pieces make the walls visually appealing and how light interacts with the glass over the course of the day makes them visually interesting. 

I found getting a decent photo of these walls technically challenging. I wanted to photograph the walls with the sun behind them, to get the most color out of the glass, and with very shallow depth of field, to blur the uninteresting backgrounds. To get that blurred effect though you need to have the aperture wide open which is difficult to do if you are facing the sun. I'm sure there is a magic combination of shutter speed, aperture and body position to get the image I wanted but, as I said, it can be a nasty little park I was in the middle of it in my dorkiest cycling gear holding an expensive camera.  In the end I punted and used cheap Photoshop tricks to draw focus to the glass. I'll return at some point at a different time of day to try my luck again. 

Sherwin's Sheraton

Before moving to St. Louis in August of 2012 I knew very little about the city. I had driven through it many times but I didn't have any contacts here so never stopped. My total experience in St. Louis was the sum of two weekend trips. One trip was taken when I was too young to remember, and the other when I was a teenager and was too distracted to pay attention. 

Of all the fantastic architecture in St. Louis the only building I could ever recall was the painted one. I am referring to what is now the Sheraton Hotel in downtown St. Louis. This 13-story building is covered on three sides with a colossal 110,000 square-foot mural. The work, created by Richard Haas in 1984, isn't my favorite but it adds an unexpected richness to an otherwise dull exterior. Because I get curious about such things, I used the Sherwin-Williams paint calculator to get an estimate of the amount of paint it would take to create the mural. The answer is 315 gallons per coat. Somehow that feels like a low-ball of an estimate. [shrug] Regardless, upkeep on all that paint must be expensive, I would have gone with vinyl siding.    

A Little Chocolate Never Hurt

I love Mexican food, and when I say that I mean the spectrum. I love chips-and-salsa Tex Mex, I love taquerias and Taco Bells, I love chicharrónes, tripa, birreria and menudo, and from the little bit that I've had, I love the traditional regional dishes. 

I did a home stay once in Oaxaca  Mexico when I was in high school. The first night we were there our host mother prepared us a soup complete with a gigantic fish head per person. It was fantastic and not something you will find at any Mexican restaurant I know of in the States. The next night we had pizza, not exactly a traditional Mexican dish, but my host family introduced me to putting Tabasco on it. I won't eat pizza now without hot sauce. 

A specialty of Oaxaca are their savory moles, those intricate sauces that often and famously contain chocolate.  I am a decent home cook but I've only tried making a mole from scratch once. They are complicated affairs, with a rather long grocery list and take hours to make. Since I don't commonly have all day to spend in the kitchen, every variation I have tried since has been short cutted, and I should say, been an abject failure. Some things cannot be rushed. 

So what do Mexican moles have to do with fire escapes? Does it matter? It's my blog and so far no else is reading it.  The reason I've discussed this though is to bring up corrections. After making my one batch of proper mole I would frequently add a bit of chocolate to a savory dish that needed something. That something was never ever chocolate so inevitable I made a number of not-great dishes into legitimately bad dishes by including it. Sadly, the only acceptable remedy for a dinner ruined by chocolate is to break out the Tabasco and order a pizza. Since most of my food turns out well, however, it took me several months to figure out if I was reaching for the chocolate I should just stop.  Live and Learn. 

Similarly, I often feel my black and white photos need something. That something is almost always more contrast and you can add as much as you want in Photoshop. The approach has its limits though.  It's much easier to ruin an OK photo than to elevate it to greatness by manipulating it on the computer. In this case I pushed the contrast laughably high, in a move akin to adding a dash of chocolate in a last ditch effort to elevate dinner. I think it worked though, this is pretty close to what my initial vision for the photograph was. 

Craft Store on a Corner

I grew up in a household with my mom and three sisters and am now married to a crafty woman. Despite my best efforts I've been inside a few craft stores. Craft stores have a unique smell that I couldn't identify until Katie brought home some eucalyptus branches and put a few in simmering water. Bingo, craft stores smell like eucalyptus. It is a pleasant smell but its a smell associated with memories of me staring at a wall of buttons while the women in my life poured over sumtinorother that I had zero interest in. If your bored enough you can count buttons to pass the time.

This urn at the corner of Truman and Park reeks of eucalyptus and craft stores. It's, uh, an interesting photo that begs me to study it if not appreciate it for its beauty. 

Equal Justice and a Mustang

Shown here is the front of the United States Court House and Customs House on the corner of Tucker and Market Streets. The building was a New Deal project constructed between 1933-35 and the statue was added in 1939. The Mustang was added bit later but it makes a nice bright counterpoint to the beige Egyptian columns and the dark green tint of the windows. 

Totem Animal

If my family had a totem animal surely it would be a chicken. My mother, who wasn't particularly fond of chickens, was given chicken-related gifts every Christmas and on most birthdays. I don't know why or when the practice began but there was an impressive amount of chicken-themed paraphernalia in the house when we were growing up. 

The most infamous piece of chicken junk in the collection is a plastic rooster named Bart. Bart was given to my mother by an uncle with an accompanying scrapbook detailing Bart's travels. Twenty years later this chintzy lawn ornament still makes it on vacations and into family wedding photos. Sadly, Bart is better traveled than me. 

The photo above is graffiti from the flood wall. I chose it for it's chicken-ness and bright colors.