Adieu Marquee

If you read La France Profonde -- and if you're reading this, you probably do -- you know about my fascination for the underside of old-ish places.

I emphasize "old-ish" because prehistoric sites, Roman ruins and vestiges of medieval structures don't do it for me. Give me traces of the 20th century -- like this movie theater marquee in my home town, Olympia, Washington. It went up in 1940; it came down last week.

While plenty of Olympians apparently felt nostalgic about the loss of this downtown landmark, the local paper's photo gallery on the dismantling reveals that the marquee masked treasures: stained glass and sculptures that had been hidden from the public for almost 70 years.

"Removal of Capitol Theater marquee brings sadness but uncovers beauty," reads the headline of the article about the change. Would that all architectural changes were that way...

(Photo courtesy of Ken McIntyre. I couldn't find how to contact Ken to ask if I could use his photo, but given all of the html links he has provided on his Photobucket site, I assume he won't mind.

If like me, you are fascinated by old movie theaters, check out the theater section of cinematreasures.org.)

Fountain of Sorrow

In high school and college, no singer spoke to me more than Jackson Browne. He was one of those artists that kind of dropped out of my listening habits with the years, mainly because I had all his music on (legal) cassettes.

A while back, my daughter introduced me to Deezer and I set up a Jackson Browne playlist. It's almost too painful for me to listen to, yet I keep coming back to it.

Fountain of sorrow, fountain of light...

Change I Believe In

I haven't posted much to ASF lately, and few people have noticed since this is my least-frequented blog.

I guess one of the problems of a "catch-all" blog is what to catch!

In the meantime, you will notice from the side logo that I have made up my mind about an important issue.

I was having trouble making a commitment on this primary race, and was also feeling a strange fear of being hurt. Let's face it - -some of us have been through a lot since w's election.

But partly thanks to my college friend Daniel Spiro, author of The Creed Room and blogger at Empathic Rationalist, I managed to take a stand.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be back rambling about something here one of these days.

In the meantime, I've been posting quite a bit to Cuisine Quotidienne and La France Profonde if you want to take a look.

Can you blame them?

Considering the strong chances that Virgilio Cintron's death was preventable, can you really blame his friends for trying to cash in on one last Social Security check?