In a very black thunder storm

Taking pictures in stormy weather
On Thursday, June 25, in the early afternoon, the sky became so dark (and noisy) that it could have been dusk or some fearsome dust storm; there was barely enough light for the little Nikon 1 V2.  But by now carefree (an SD card is cheap, and the battery recharges very well) and remembering what Robert Doisneau said about the attractions of wet Paris streets, I thought it would be more fun than washing dishes, for example.  So here are some in order taken.  The +Google album in which I'll store them all is called EndJune2015 (but I found them at the end of "June 2015" in Picasa, and have not discovered how to do as I intended).  I provided them all with Info right in Photoshop.
  

25 June 2015 Outdoor to left, corner of shower to right.  Cat food that can be shared with outdoor creatures, mostly crows and bluejays right now.

From back door through laundry room, kitchen, and all the way to the front wall, though four rooms, the back porch being closed (evidently in the 1950s) to provide kitchen WC and shower and hot water heater (at left)

25Jun2015  What cat does not like to stop  in the doorway?

25Jun2015 The exterior SW corner; the only exterior tap; its wall enclosing WC; with wild fern gone wilder on the chainlink fence (there was once a dog back here); Taken in rain during thunder storm.

25Jun2015 Back to the utilities alley: the rain brings overnight tangle of elder vine, air potato, confederate jasmine, all hanging on fig tree (the figs will begin to turn pale purple next week).

25Jun2015 Back from back stoop and the decaying deck, across concrete pad with an inch of sudden puddling, the thunderstorm allows photographs impossible ordinarily. 

25Jun2015 Back from back stoop an oak twig from a couple of days ago fallen on the steps of the back stoop, showing water that will drain away in ten minutes but for the moment needs rubber clogs.

25Jun2015 Back from back stoop an oak twig from a couple of days ago fallen on the steps of the back stoop, showing water that will drain away in ten minutes but for the moment needs rubber clogs.  I like this zoomed detail best of all.  Luckily, the yard man had not yet come to clean things up.

I really have nothing to say that the images don't say better.

Zooming, I took them all without getting wet myself.

They were cropped in the taking.

Bluebirds, etc.(even Twitter?)

My neighbor's late and well loved cat, one blue eye

For many years I was puzzled by the musical, Carrousel.  It seemed out of place in Maine, especially in its spirituality, neither acadien nor Protestant.  Not that the music wasn't wonderful.  Eventually Louisiana's Public Radio station, in service to the French part of our heritage, broadcast the 1934 film, Liliom, starring the young Charles Boyer, and there it was: an unforgettable mixture of French and Hungarian symbolism, involving very striking primitive special effects, too.  Also, I had seen schoolchildren performing a version of the Maeterlinck play and later the very awkward Shirley Temple film (she was too large and too old, in 1940, to do it credibly).  The Maeterlinck, though, is a Bluebird of Happiness, just not the Hungarian-American one that Jan Peerce made famous.  The symbol of a blue bird for happiness is evidently as old and as universal as the black bird of doom.  It is, however, the popular symbolism and cultural mood of Frederic Molnar's play, faithfully rendered in Liliom in 1934, so Franco-Hungarian, that Oscar Hammerstein (more than a decade later), transposed for Carrousel, but not quite.  Oklahoma is not puzzling in the same way; its original play was itself of the midwest; its score is as middle American as Aaron Copeland's Rodeo.  It is not simply that Hammerstein was New York and Jewish that Carrousel embodies so much of the central European sentiment.  I wonder whether it wasn't that Hammerstein had a deep personal feeling for Molnar, and Jan Peerce, too.  After all, neither the poem (least of all its spoken soliloquy) nor the music by Sandor Harmati, composed explicitly for Peerce's song, was up to the standards that both his popular and his operatic repertory represented.  We do find, I think, something of the same feeling in early Kertesz photographs, both the country and the traveling circus  subjects.  It has made me wonder just how "French" his bistro pictures are.  These are rather subtle and subjective questions, of course.  Sometimes, though, not in the figures but in the compositions, especially in Pinocchio, I think that I see things that the immigrant artists brought from Europe to Hollywood.  No matter, of course, except that it may help us to understand the complexity and wealth of the fabric of New World culture.  Of course, I am of a generation that is wary of the notion of purity.  I am sorry that immigrants to Hollywood felt that they had to change their names or baptize their children (not that they were the first or the only ones to feel that they needed to do so, and, of course, persons who actually embrace Christianity—or ethical humanism, for that matter—are quite right to choose).

The most striking fact, I think, is one I found in Wikipedia: the only recording to outsell Jan Peerce's Bluebird of Happiness of 1945 (and my own well worn copy is here, in the next room, my own choice to purchase in my early 'teens) was Enrico Caruso's Over There.  Nothing, perhaps, is exotic or alien in America.
That is why, I think, I was so comfortable with Susana Clarke's writing of pre-modern thought and feeling in terms of witches and fairies.  No, I won't venture an analysis!
But what about the choice of a blue bird for Twitter?

The heart of a Dutch amaryllis

The Skeletons of Dutch Amaryllis Blossoms

June 4, 2015.  Reduced photos of two stems of amaryllis blossoms.  See other photos in my  new +Google album for June 2015.  This repeatedly dividing bulb, now (like my cat, Buster) 15 years old, this year actually bloomed twice, then endured two weeks of nearly incessant rain followed by hot, true summer.  So I made haste to record the structure which I'd never seen before.

This is what, inside. every glorious hippeastrum (Dutch amaryllis) contains to produce and to support the blossoms more than four inches across for more than a week (barring serious storms).  In Louisiana we don't even take up the bulbs for the winter, and we plant the new bulbs directly in our soil a few months ahead.  The pretty curly tendril belongs to the wild climbing fern on a nearby crepe myrtle.  The sturdy tan husk cradles the black seeds (?).

I happen to be very fond of the inner, supporting parts of flowering plants, and I know where I got it. I first saw the photography of Karl Blossfeldt nearly a half century ago (see also the excellent pages in his Google Images) and responded to them even without thinking of why.  Blossfeldt in fact saw the fundamentals of beauty in the arts in the forms of plants, a generation earlier than German modernism as such.  Every aspect of his work and his teaching was original in his case.  I cannot see something like these hippeastrum pods without seeing them in his terms.

Of course, handheld, in color, notwithstanding the brilliant intricacies of the Nikon 1 v.2 that I have only half mastered (though here I did use the close-up lens), especially with regard to metering, I cannot do anything like Blossfeldt's work. but I had to do what I could as soon as the sun was high enough. 

Someone may see this Post and the June 15 album and go to the Blossfeldt article (from the Museum of Modern Art) and the excellent Google Images site for him.