No music too familiar...

I'd like to make a brief post while it is still on my mind.
Some music is played so often that one thinks one can never hear it as new. Young Bizet's Suites Arlésiennes surely are among these. Some of Handel's Water Music, too, especially if one is old enough to have heard the Hamilton Harty arrangements on 78rpm. Since the introduction of LP, the Brandenburg concertos of J. S. Bach, in innumerable performances.
I happened to have heard today, having the radio on, the first L'Arlésienne suite (but unfortunately did not get the announcement) played as if it was new. All it takes is for a gifted conductor to have studied it afresh, to learn how Bizet composed it and perhaps divine why. Such a pleasure. Such a pity that he died so young.
This morning, on "Performance Today", they played the BBC's broadcast recording from a week ago at the Promenade concerts of John Eliot Gardiner's interpretation of the First Brandenburg Concerto, giving free rein to the pair of unvalved French horns. There was also a bit of interview. Gardiner likes to teach, and he is a very good teacher. In any case, he is my favorite conductor, and, since he is only nine years my junior, if I hear nothing by him or about him for a while, I may hope that he is well and all.
All those concertos tend to puzzle scholars and performers: some don't like clarino trumpets, others dislike recorders, but the unruly horns (and the English Baroque Soloists manage them uncommonly well) even played perfectly are certainly obtrusive. Gardiner is not worried (there are dozens of performances both live and recorded that allow the engineers to keep the horns in the background), and it was interesting and, yes, for the aspects of the structure of the composition that they emphasized, very pleasurable to hear him lead them in this way. As I listened I thought that it made that concerto sound rather more akin to Handel's Water Music than it usually does. Though Bach surely was experimenting with scoring, I wondered whether he wasn't providing the margrave with proofs of his ability to provide music especially for festive performance outdoors. If he knew the Handel, it would have been the Water Music, since the Royal Fireworks is much later. Of course, it is not as if no one else composed such music, including brass, in the early 18th century.
Here we only get bits of Proms, but I wonder if the concert included all six of them.

"South Pacific", "Bound for Glory", and Kodachrome

In 1949 I would turn 15 and was just old enough to read, and begin to understand, Michener’s “Tales of the South Pacific”. I had been listening to the Texaco (of beloved memory) broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera since 1945, the same year as we also had broadcasts of the San Francisco Opera. Besides the tenor Ferruccio Tagliavini, I had a terrific crush on the voice of Ezio Pinza. That is to say, the first post-WW II decade was the time when I began to grow up, when I saw that a wartime mentality was not the only kind, when I listened on the radio to broadcasts about the founding of the United Nations, and read about it in Life and Time, when we could even order European recordings direct from overseas if we wanted them enough.
And then the musical “South Pacific” opened.
Of course, I didn’t actually see it, but between war movies and the Movietone News and Life I could imagine the Pacific Theater of War perfectly well. We knew, among our friends and neighbors, ex-sailors and ex-nurses. We still venerated our still-living Admiral Nimitz, too, where I lived. We had had as a childhood treat going down to the Naval Air Station to watch the pontoon planes landing on the Bay.
For more than sixty years I’ve known all the words to all the songs in “South Pacific” (and those in “Kiss Me Kate” for nearly as long). I didn’t like the movie, which I didn’t even see until AMC broadcast it. Too much real landscape.
How could I like it without Pinza and Martin? The semi-staged version from Carnegie Hall broadcast on PBS, settled the problem so far as Mary Martin was concerned; Reba McEntire was perfect. The rest were merely all right (well, Alec Baldwin was excellent), and it wasn’t complete. It had been years since I’d read Michener, too.
The great thing about being retired and having PBS HD is that I can, if I wish, stay up almost all night and watch Live from Lincoln Center as much as four times over. It took me most of the initial viewing to accept Kelli O’Hara as Nellie Forbush, though she really can sing and she sang just right. And Paulo Szot is wonderful. Not Pinza, but just the right kind of voice, and a great Emile. The second and third time, concentrating also on details, I noticed the costuming: Bloody Mary dressed like New Caledonia and looking like a real Tonkinoise. The chorus of nurses coiffed just right and dancing what didn’t even look like choreography (viz, was really good choreography), a casual-seeming mixture of jitterbug and movie-version Rockettes and bits of half learned Charleston and simple tap dance from when they would have been about ten years old. The Seabees basically doing ordinary guys’ jitterbug. And the clothes! Nellie’s are just what a nice young woman in middle America would wear (with a girdle!) even overseas, stationed in New Caledonia or perhaps the New Hebrides: those are the islands where French is spoken, and Lieut. Cable has been flown in from Guadacanal, where it isn’t. Clothes that had to be starched and ironed (linen, or for the stage a linen-look-alike). And everybody walking and moving “period”, too. Szot even can sing “This Nearly Was Mine”, a killer song written for a unique lyric bass, all in the part of the voice hardest to support and control.
I am sure that, though the audience evidently loved it, too, this musical has special comfort and special importance for persons just my age, for whom Petty girls (see the opening of Act II) were current pin-up types.
And then, something that at first seems different, yesterday I received in the mail a picture book I had ordered, hardly daring to hope that Abrams and the Library of Congress would have succeeded in getting the color right. But they did. Kodachrome I, ASA 10, and of the first generation, was quite different from not only digital color (which I admit is the truest, now) but from the direct positive color films both from Kodak and from competitors that almost any shop could process. Kodachrome I was extremely dense. In very strong light, it was intense and produced what we used to deplore as Mexican-blue skies. Its shadows ranged from dark to utterly opaque. I have one taken in late afternoon in 1959 on Mykonos and another near Sparta, and I processed them very carefully after scanning the slides with the special Kodachrome setting on a Nikon 4000 scanner. Since old Kodachrome has excellent drawer life, but rather poor life with exposure to ultraviolet light (or to heat in projectors), these are among my best preserved ones; even so they are 17 years younger than the latest ones (1943) in my beautiful new book, Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939–1943, FSA/OWI Collection, Library of Congress. Fully 20 years ago, as I recall, LOC on its web page with FSA photography, had included some by Marion Post Wolcott Kodachrome up by Lake Providence, LA, and elsewhere in the south. Although the on-line images at that time were rather sad, I downloaded several just because they were taken in Louisiana, where I was teaching. That is why, when someone in an interview mentioned the book, I made haste to order it. I rejoice to report to anyone that loves this photography that the book is revelatory. Fully half of the government agency photographers, including some of the all-round best, such as Lee and Delano, accepted the new film and mastered it, and the LOC has kept splendid care of these 35mm slides from an era that probably has lost most of them (Autochrome, for all its relative difficulties—no good in a Leica, for example—was fairly permanent).
Now, here is why “South Pacific” and Bound for Glory are complementary for me; they both record the America that is still, for me, the normal America, the normal children’s clothes, the normal roads and streets and downtowns, the normal barns, even after 1941 the normal war. They both record a life that looks quite poor nowadays. Of course, early FSA did record appalling poverty, but it is worth remembering that by 1939 even Dorothea Lange had to hunt for subjects that really needed both compassion and attention: I know; I remember; I knew Nipomo as well as she did, though I was never taken out into the fields; my fellow kindergartners of 1939 and I had hand-me-downs which were still good, but we weren’t hungry or without shelter, not any of us. Ordinary cotton-wash dresses most often sewn from Simplicity patterns were the norm, and why not?
Also, the editor who wrote the introduction to this book, Paul Hendrickson, assumes (just as my students of 1989–2005 did in History of Photography) that the Depression was a world of grayscale, of black-and-white. Because it is important to understand what is inherently black-and-white photography, and not all of the FSA is, I tried to tell them what the colors were like, the colors that I remembered perfectly well, but I don’t think most of them could manage ‘mental colorization’ (perhaps knowing how bad the colorization of movies was, how obscenely unreal and unjust to the photographers in Hollywood), and I know, too, that I am one of those persons who remember colors quite exactly, and remember subtle differences of hue. In any case, to me the world of FSA photography, fond of the art of gelatin-silver photography as I am, was not a grayscale world, only my world rendered permanent in grayscale. And in his interview with Alan Alda, Bartlett Sher (born 1959) said that he had never seen “South Pacific” on stage, that he started with the printed play (or was it with Michener himself?), and worked from there. Think of that! Someone who hasn’t had “South Pacific” all his life. He and his colleagues certainly have made a very good new job of it, faithful to everything that wants fidelity, and without any bleeping of Seabee talk, and without any fussing about its point of view.
They have made me very, very happy these last two days, and so has my new book. Perhaps after all people born after I was grown up can see their way into my world. Sometimes I stop and think: today and the end of the War between the States, in 1865, is 145 years, and at the end of World War II, in 1945, was 80 years since 1865, which seemed very long ago to me then. Yet from 1949 to 2009 is 60 years. I think: perhaps photography and sound recording and radio/television and now the machines that permit blogs and all make all the difference. They do, provided that my juniors avail themselves of it all, and fully, but youth is a time (as “South Pacific” keeps saying) when living takes precedence over remembering. I must use my imagination to see this world as they live it, for my part.

Ancient Wonders, New Media

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
When a fortnight ago I mentioned Sir Harry Lauder in relation to the Beatles I had in my mind that my oldest Lauder recordings not only are 78rpm 12-inch disks that play for about 5 minutes but that several of them are acoustical and one-sided and pressed in hard rubber: pre-shellac. Those would be his very oldest recordings. My 78rpm turntable needs a new belt, and I need to get a converter to digitize them, besides. But I have many of his later electrically recorded ones in LPs.
My first experience with computers was with sorters and punchers that recorded letters and numerals in plain binary on the latest thing: IBM cards. I could 'program' a steel 'board' by connecting from hole to hole on it with small RCA-like cables. When we demonstrated to preserve, as an historical and architectural monument, the Old Mint in San Francisco, one of the main arguments was that, built to sustain minting machinery, its floors were strong enough even to hold computers.
But we accustom ourselves to new wonders very easily, and so quickly that the question is whether we have truly assessed the importance of each novelty before it is superseded.
My first 33 1/3 rpm turntable was made to play through our 1929 Electrola radio-phonograph; a clever electrician must have replaced some capacitors in it, I suppose. Its cartridge and the Electrola's amplifier were not really compatible.
And so on.
Now, my first personal computer in 1987 or 1988 was an IBM PS-2 running DOS 4.0. Though some friends were on line, I never saw anything when I visited them of any interest to me: I mean, a hand-held stereoscope with an albumen-print card gave me a better image of the Moon, or the Alps or Pyramids, or three small children in a bathtub than anything in 72 dpi at that date did. But as an extra attraction the PS-2 came with a fully colorized fractals program. This blew my mind, you could say. It would be a decade before I had Graphic Calculator, and the utter miracle of Google Earth (and just click to go to street level and look around) was still undreamed of. Why, we didn't yet have Mosaic or the first Netscape, though in a couple of years some terminals in the university library's Reference Room were running them. My first computer that was on line was the Mac in my office at the university which had Gopher and let me blissfully peruse every library card catalogue in the world. Research was altered forever.
But it is the programs that ran fractals that interest me here, though they are perhaps less interesting than the fibonacci sequence, which a substitute teacher one day at Oakland High School had mesmerized us 11th graders with on the chalkboard. Yet this was our grandparents' math and even older than that in Indian mathematics. It was a revelation.
So when I first read Sir Thomas Browne and a few months ago recalled him in a Post here, and so came to know the blog Aquarium of Vulcan, though Browne cited minds like Paracelsus's that were still recent when he wrote, when I read The Garden of Cyrus I thought how much Sir Thomas Browne would have loved the fractal patterns and their prevalence in nature and how he would have loved to muse on fibonacci numbers and their Pythagorean-like analogues and on and on: wouldn't he like to think about quantum physics, too? Surely his mind was more apt for quantum physics than mine is. My mind, of course, is perfectly geared to his interest in archaeological evidence in the Hydriotaphia: what kind of coins, of which reigns, were found where, what kind of burial rites could be observed? For all his studies in the best Schools abroad, he seems to me, as a doctor and an Englishman of Norwich, at his very best in such diagnostics! What a lovable observer, what an honest thinker he was, with a good physicist's theoretical imagination and a sober doctor's careful considerations.
Because I believe that just as in my three-quarters of a century I have easily accepted and come to take for granted the iPad (and the nanopod touch, for goodness sake!), and just as People of the Yellow Leaves (if I recall that name correctly) from Laos are now regular Americans in Minnesota, a brilliant and open-minded man like Sir Thomas Browne might, if alive today, be trying to decide about string theory (for example).

Watching the Disney Channel

You wouldn't guess how I spent the last two hours: watching the Disney Channel, which was broadcasting their 2005 Johnny Depp version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A long time ago I read a short story in the Atlantic Monthly, I think, about a woman who had come to hate her husband and murdered him with a frozen leg of lamb when he came home, then offered the local police supper when they came to investigate... When I was teaching at St. Hilda's my Grade 8 (age ± 13) students introduced me to Dahl again, and the story had to do with pygmies (we had been reading The Forest People), or what I took for pygmies. Considering what liberties Tim Burton and Disney studios mighe take, it may have been the original Willy Wonka. I don't mind Dahl's apparent point of view, a price to be paid for his imagination. Even the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka was good (I had never seen a Johnny Depp movie before). Grade 8 in 1970 adored Dahl. Since then even Maurice Sendak has been put on the Index of Forbidden Children's Books. But my Grade 8 was as varied as the United Nations, and none of them made the elementary literary error of confusing a cautionary tale with a documentary!

Liverpool, how far to Glasgow?

Actually, for all practical purposes, Liverpool is about halfway between London and Glasgow. But the question occurred to me incidentally.
I had listened to something both flashier and noisier than I usually watch on TV. It was the White House performance honoring Paul McCartney, with lots of guest stars. I love the Beatles, and it makes me sad today that only two are left. It makes me feel really old that our First Family is too young to remember the Beatles when the latter were young.
Anyhow, not for the first time did I wonder why I like them so much. I first saw it clearly when the White Album was issued. The Beatles wrap up a whole complex of genuinely popular music, from music hall (or American vaudeville), to Salvation Army bands and protestant hymns, to the American pop of the 50s that they themselves liked, and more. And gradually it dawned on me, the distinctive thing: Liverpool is not London. Wasn't it closer to Scotland? Actually, no it isn't. But Liverpudlian is not Londinian, either. In fact the young Beatles re-awakened in me one of the greatest pleasures of my childhood: my grandfather's collection of Harry Lauder. When we were little he'd lead us dancing around the dining room table to Wee doch an doris or I love a lassie. Musically, there is no great difference between Keep right on to the end of the road and Hey, Jude. Of course, the few people (and I think that Americans of Scotch-Irish extraction may be fonder of him than either Scottish or English people are today) who know his songs probably only know I love a lassie and Roamin' in the gloamin'. There are dozens and dozens more. Not that the Beatles' songs, even Paul McCartney's, are really like Lauder, but the pleasure they arouse in someone with a Harry Lauder childhood is the same. And that genuine music hall link (so much merrier than With her head tucked underneath her arm, which tries too hard) goes far to explain why I never liked the Rolling Stones or almost any others as I did the Beatles.
So that is why, this evening, I sat through 90 minutes, 60 minutes of which was arrangements that I did not like at all, for the pleasure of hearing Paul himself sing Eleanor Rigby and Yesterday.
The reason it needs explaining is that I was already "over thirty" (as the hippie children said derisively) when their greatest songs came out, and they kept rewarding me with things like a French horn solo or For the benefit of Mr. Kite..., or—but I no longer have the albums handy.
Just a note in passing.

Today it's a quarter century since I followed popular music at all.

Athens 1999-2004 (continued)-Monasteraki etc.

From the mosque (Ceramics Museum) and the Library of Hadrian and all the rest, everything was carefully excavated. This was no time or place for just barging through. That is why a selection of finds is exhibited at all the major stations. It's not just P.R., it's very instructive. Building the Metro revealed the water distribution system of Athens, beginning in the Peisistratid period.

When you Google, or otherwise search for "monasteraki", you will find nothing like what you see here. Of course, much of what they photograph is at the foot of Pandrosos or Metropoleos or one of the other streets that come into Monasteraki, but increasingly the show takes over the Plateia. The last time I was there, in Summer 2000, the whole area was constructively torn up so as to complete the Metro station where the two new lines join the old line, formerly simply the Piraeus railway station. But Hadrian's library and some other antiquities were properly studied in the process.

I have emphasized the transalpine 19th century character of Athena Street. So we need to do a thumbnail-level history.

In the plan, from John Travlos's Poleodomiki Exelixis ton Athenon (Urban Development of Athens), 1960, his doctoral dissertation, we see the neighborhoods of Athens on the eve of the War of Independence. The familiar European city plan is nowhere in evidence. Pazari, in the center, is the Greek for bazaar.

When the familiar mosque (though it was the tiny monastic church of the Pantanassa that gave the plateia its name) was built in 1759, it was this small, traditional town of ethnic neighborhoods that it was built in. All of the Athens that looks quite old nowadays, especially after earthquake damage in 1999 (not to mention earlier ones, and unrest through a century and a half), replaced an unplanned town governed by property rights and pre-existing paths. The newest buildings were Turkish, a medresa, some mosques, some ruling-class houses.

The 1759 mosque, 'Kato Sintrivani', with the Piraeus railway station at far right and, just as today, the Acropolis in the background

By the time that it occurred to me to photograph the Monasteraki mosque, on a cold February afternoon in 1960, the plateia was well established, but the tourist trade was largely confined to the tributary narrow streets. There were even shops that made nothing but turned wooden eggs, having learned that ladies would buy and collect them, just as men would buy plastic "worry beads" (not ill named; a very good alternative to fingernail biting). One street, Pandrosos, had many fake painted vases and even a few genuine ones (which had to be registered and taken to an office over by the Byzantine Museum to obtain an exit permit). But one could also buy miniature tsarouchia, properly made, for one's infant nephews. Still, Monasteraki looked very much as it did in photos taken before one's own birth.

The von Klenze proposal of 1834, in which, for the first time we see Athena Street running due NS crossed by Hermes Street due EW.

It was with the Bavarian king, Otto, in 1833, that modern Athens, Athens as we know it was born. Already in von Klenze's 1834 proposed plan we see the streets that still today are our compass. And compass is well mentioned, since strict compasss points may be part of the explanation for the Kapnikarea church and the Panaghia Gorgoepêkoös (Little Metropolis) churches being in the middle of the streets. If we look at the Kaupert Atlas (1875) plan, we see pretty much all of walkable Athens surviving today. We even can find the Grande Bretagne Hotel if we know where to look.

By the 1875 edition of Kaupert's atlas, the published street plan is even clearer; the Etoile charaacter of Omonia is plain, and the Panathenaic stadium, though not yet fully restored for the first modern Olympic Games, as well as Stadium, Panepistemiou, and Academy Streets, tying the Syntagma zone to that of Omonia, are present.

Probably the opening of a MacDonalds on the west side of Monasteraki (I wasn't there when it opened) also contributed to its becoming a mecca for Youth, the Youth who do not hang out at Kolonaki, peppering their small talk with bits of French for all the world like the Chinese tennis-playing court in Das Land des Lächelns by Franz Lehar. Well, in Sakellaridhis Greece had already had her operettas, just as the USA and Argentina and Spain (and doubtless everyone else) had had. But the Youth that crowd Monasteraki today (or yesterday?) are cosmopolitan in a quite different sense.

The aforementioned MacDonald's is on the upper floor of a building opposite the mosque, a previously unremarkable commercial site. This photo and the next were taken from its windows. Shooting through glass is not ideal, but gaining height can be critical, and the excavation crane makes a good repoussoir.

As for the little monastic church, and its somewhat later bell tower, I could almost swear that I never saw it before the semi-permanent stalls alongside the Kato Sintrivani mosque were demolished to dig for the Metro. In any case, we can see it in some old prints and it is there today.

Finally, leaving the other views to the Picasa album made for this post, and the close views of the Kapnikarea Church to the album on Byzantine Greece, here, two blocks east of Monasteraki in a view characteristic both of an early afternoon on a Sunday and of central Athens only ten months after the 1999 earthquake, is my favorite photograph of Hermes Street, with the Kapnikarea right across it.

All of the above images can be zoomed by clicking on them

Central Athens at a Critical Time: 1999-204

July, 2000. Athena Street, looking south towards Monasteraki.

These images have nothing to do with the playful recollection of Matisse in the last post, though it was taken from inside this hotel. You can see those windows on the exterior of the hotel's own website.

It may seem that I went to Athens to do everything but art and archaeology, but in fact I spent all day in relevant museums and libraries. I have chosen to write this blog about the rest.

In the summer of 2000, Athens had done wonders in cleaning up after the earthquake ten months before and had opened the larger part of the Metro that has been so effective in reducing bus and private auto traffic. The old plateia Monasteraki, where three metro lines would cross and share a station, was on schedule for the Olympic Games of 2004. It was nearly unrecognizable in 2000 to those who had known it a generation earlier, being deep and complex in an archaeological zone of great density. Greece did not just ignore remains of any period, from Neolithic through Turkokrateia. And of course everything had to be earthquake-proof; it was like running the Bay Area Rapid Transit train from San Francisco under the Bay to the East Bay counties. It was not the first time that I had stayed at the Hotel Cecil, one of those valuable secrets that the English shared with Americans who could appreciate it. When I would be in Athens for only a winter holiday season or a summer, the Cecil was perfect. I suspect that the feature advertised as a roof garden is still, as it was then, a place to hang laundry to dry high above any soil from traffic. Also, it afforded the best view of the Acropolis that I know.

These photos are to share what surely will have changed, with Athena Street being made pedestrian and its south end at Monasteraki repaired and restored. What will they have done, saying that it is to be a Green Zone? This is reportorial photography. I only wish I'd already been working digitally, so that I could shoot prodigally. As it is, I'll ask a friend or two in Greece, who do their shopping by choice in Athena Street, to post their photographs, if they have any. There's a whole streetful of herb shops, for example.

Saturday morning 8 July 2000, just around the corner from the entrance to the Hotel Cecil. The man is shopping for knives (machairia) or suchlike tools (ergaleia).

One thing you notice, at street level, at eye level everything looks different from those web sites. Also, however (and who hasn't seen this in hotels everywhere), the view out of rear windows is different. Not that Greek construction before rebar and concrete was bad, but the second floor of the building next to the Cecil, which I photographed from my room window, would not, I think, ever be reoccupied, though in 2000 the shop on the street was perfectly functional. The worst damage from the 1999 earthquake had been, as in Istambul, to residential structures built half a century later, with rebars (but also with poor concrete?).

From my upper floor window of the Cecil, the upper floor of the next building north, 10 months after the earthquake, is abandoned, though the ground floor still had shops. This is 19c or early 20c construction.

Though such rear-window pictures are informative as well as picturesque, my love of Athena Street is for its commercial system of small, specialized craftsmen and merchants selling products that all but the very richest Greeks in common use in their homes. If only, knowing what to look for, I had been a real working photographer and had given the work a higher priority.

A nice display of bulk manufactured plastic sprinklers, blacksmith forged mattock blades, small-mill turned handles, etc.

Imagine what the owner of a suburban Mall in the USA would say to a daily exhibit of rakes and mattocks and (from some plastics factory) sprinkers on the sidewalk in front of the shop. But everyone knows where to go to get such garden tools and the whole range of choices is set out for your inspection.

George Triantophyllos (that means Rose). On site manufacture is becoming very rare. I think it says that they've been there since 1947. Yes, I know, it's pronounced Triandófilos, but it's easier to read as in Greek.

A little more mysterious is the Triandaphyllou shop just around the corner. It sells knicknacks with beads, but not plastic koumbologia and not big blue glass eyes such as purely touristic shops sell. Behind the transom (or mezzanine) window are huge spools of colored cord that may have been there for a very long time. I have never succeeded in relating them to the things suspended at the door jambs. The copper bells are pure touristic wares. Perhaps, however, what they sell at the doorway is not closely related to some small manufacture carried out for wholesale to others. It doesn't matter: I like the spools of colored cord behind that mezzanine (I suppose, thinking of the shops in the Mercati Traiani in Rome) window.

Athens 2000. Newly restored Demotikê Agorá Athenôn, looking up Athena Street towards Monasteraki. After the earthquake, they fixed it, and also, seeing its architectural distinction, put it on the Registry. This is on a Sunday morning. The separately photographed Xeroi Karpoi store is on the corner, at the right.

A block up Athena Street towards Homonoia is the Public Market, restored after the 1999 earthquake and put on the registry of significant buildings. Unfortunately it is not at its best without being open and frequented. On the corner, however, is one of the best xeroi karpoi shops in Athens. I hope it is still there.

Athens 2000. Xeroi Karpoi store on corner by the Demotike Agora Athenon on Athena Street. Xeroi karpoi are all sorts of dry produce, grains and nuts and dried fruits. The shops are fragrant. Near sunset the lamps are lit. I'm awfully afraid that making the street 'green' might also make is pseudo-sanitary, which is bad for nuts and things, especially Aegina pistachios (phystikia--in Greek, peanuts are called arab pistachios).

And opposite the Public Market are the fish and seafood stalls as well as merchants with cages of chicks and bunnies and sometimes kittens and puppies, as well as bags of kibble to feed them. I promised an octopus embracing an ouzo bottle, and here it is.

I promised a picture of ouzo-loving chtapodhia, and here it is. The fish and other seafood, as well as living bunnies and gamecocks and easter chicks in season, are on the opposite side of the street from the Public Market. Demotic Greek does not like to say oktopodhes, so it does just what German would do: make it neuter gender. The third declension and the dative case were among the first casualties of modernizing in speech (well, and -mi verbs, certainly)

There are more market pictures in the Picasa album, all captioned, and I'll devote another post to the Plateia Monasterakiou, to Homonoia, to Hermes Street (for what little I have; I didn't anticipate that an earthquake would alter Hermes Street so radically).

http://picasaweb.google.com/slokind/