Filed under: Ohio, Pennsylvania | Tags: 127 film, abandoned, bell & howell, east liverpool, hot dogs, new brighton, nuclear power, Ohio, Pennsylvania, pottery
Thanksgiving weekend took Jeff, Bill and me to Pottery Valley, the Ohio/West Virginia/ Pennsylvania pocket of towns that once served as the china capital of the world. We traveled Route 65 to 68, passing through Rochester, Beaver and Industry along the Ohio River.
We know this route pretty well since we go trash-hunting along it quite often. Jeff has taken some more ominous shots of the nuclear plant in Shippingport, but it was surreal to see the plant puffing out clouds in the background of this quiet rural town on such a beautiful sunny Saturday. Nobody was around and you couldn’t hear anything except for a low hum coming from the plant and our footsteps echoing in the church parking lot where we took these photos.
Our main reason for going this route was to shop at our favorite antique mall in East Liverpool. I love exploring this city full of ghosts and history and I’m trying to talk Jeff and Bill into going on one of the ghost hunting tours, mainly because we’d gain access to places we normally wouldn’t be allowed to enter, as well as satisfy my curiosity in the supernatural (they’ll give in eventually).
I didn’t buy much on this trip except for a Bell & Howell Electric Eyewww 127 camera for $5.00, still in its original leather case. Now I have to buy 127 film so I can use this little beauty (it’s sitting on the desk here as I type so I can keep looking at it).
But the treasures I found on this trip were more about photo-taking. Bill programmed his trusty GPS navigator to take us the ’shortest’ route, which took us on Ohio county back roads instead of Route 65. This view from inside the car made me beg Bill to pull over so I could capture it:
I’m disappointed that this turned out so blurry — the sun was going down, I left my tripod at home and the boys were hungry, so I felt rushed to take pictures. The factory is an abandoned chemical plant. Jeff and Bill went exploring the old offices, paint peeling from the floor in hundreds of delicate flakes. It was in disarray as if the men who worked there were called away for only a moment, not years.
While they explored, I set the timer on my camera and placed it in the middle of the road to get this self portrait. I was afraid of a car coming around the bend, which is why it caught me about to stand up. I originally wanted to lie on my stomach and look directly at the lens. The shit I do for photography!
I promised the boys we’d eat at Brighton Hot Dogs for dinner. I ate a hamburger and a dog loaded with chili, cheese and onions. I have a vegetarian friend who breaks anti-meat law once a year just to eat one of those dogs, so yes, they are that good – a perfect way to cap off the Thanksgiving weekend.
Filed under: Culinary Adventures | Tags: cookie table, new york times, pittsburgh, wedding
“Cookies are comforting in the time of cholera.” S. Lynch
When Pittsburgh hits the national media, the email forwards from resident family and friends start rolling. And since the city has been under the country’s watchful eye since the G20, as well as a curious object of wonder across the States over our perceived immunity to the current recession, it seems only natural to examine such weird-ass Steel City customs as the wedding cookie table in today’s New York Times article.
The drawback of living in one place for most of your life is that you sometimes don’t know what is native and what is not. I thought every wedding in the country had a freaking cookie table. I knew it was a bit tacky to take home a doggie-bagful of cookies and stash it in my purse, but what the hell? The bags are usually provided for you by the wedding hosts; it gives guests the go-ahead to put etiquette aside and take home a souvenir that is much tastier than pastel mints nestled in plastic martini glasses.
When Jeff and I got married, my Italian grandmother, who is 80 this year, was too fragile to bake dozens of cookies. My sister had just gone back to work full-time and I don’t bake. That left my mother, who is a gifted baker, but hasn’t really touched an oven since 1984. But bake she did, 4 dozen wedding knots coated in orange and white frosting for our Halloween wedding.
I am sad because Carrie Pierson and I had talked about researching the history of the Pittsburgh cookie table for a future article in Table, but the NYT and Gourmet beat us to it. Maybe now the cookie table will catch on at out-of-state weddings I attend because a reception isn’t complete without lady locks, thumbprints and pizzelles crumbling at the bottom of my purse.
photograph by Stephanie Foley
Filed under: Art Gallery | Tags: dioramas, erin tyner, macro photgraphy, sarah wojdylak, terrariums, thomas doyle
photo by Happy Via
Dioramas are 3D photographs or short stories. I’ve been obsessed with them ever since I was a kid. My favorite room at the Carnegie Museum was the taxidermy hall. The tableux of an Arab man riding a camel while being attacked by a lion scared the shit out of me, but I loved picking apart the details of this moment. How did the artists recreate the deep claw marks on the camel’s legs? Or the terror in its face? A diorama is one way for an audience to see or experience a story without words, however terrifying.
My friend Sarah’s latest terrariums at Mendelson Gallery, whose work explores the ‘voyeurism into empty spaces.”
The artwork of Thomas Doyle, who creates stories in miniature under glass domes:
Solitude in the diorama-esque macro photography of Erin Tyner:
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: abandoned, allegheny river, bowler hat, ephemera, flea markets, industrial towns, new kensington, opera glasses, Pennsylvania
“One man’s crap is another man’s treasure.” Elston
Jeff and I are always on the search for trash, so one very early morning in mid-October, the two of us and Bill braved the damp chill to scour the Tour Ed Mine’s outdoor Flea-tique (that word is so awesome). There were a good number of vendors despite the frosty weather, but a die-hard trash hunter will brave all conditions to find that perfect object she didn’t know she even needed.
We found a bowler hat in the Alle-Kiski Historical Society booth, along with this creepy framed guilded text. Is it some sort of funeral home memorial? We aren’t sure, but it now resides in our cabinet of curiosities.
He also bought me these beautiful little opera glasses that I’ve been carrying around in my work bag for the past two months. Just in case I end up at the opera, you never know.
The morning was so sunny and beautiful, I wanted us to drive around and see what was in the area. As we drove along Route 28 through Tarentum, I asked Bill to take a right over the New Kensington bridge.
New Ken, as the locals call it, is only 20 minutes from Pittsburgh, but as most small towns in the area, it feels worlds away. There used to be radio towers there for local Pittsburgh stations. It’s the supposed birthplace of aluminum and various other industries – enameling works, glass factories, rolled steel and a brewery.
It’s a ghost town now, especially on a Sunday morning, but Habitat for Humanity has managed to station their Pittsburgh headquarters here. We mostly took pictures from inside the car, until Jeff yelled, ”Stop, now!” Holy shit, the thrift store sign was too perfect. It’s as if the whole city got up and walked away in the 80s as the industries drifted out of the region.
We walked around for a bit taking pictures, stopping to chat with a heavy metal dude who told us New Kensington wasn’t safe to be in at night. I think it was his way of telling us to get back in our car and mosey on home. I felt like such a cliche, standing there with my camera taking pictures of broken things. I wanted to record what I saw before it wasn’t there anymore.
Filed under: Art Gallery | Tags: conceptual photography, creative process, duane michals, fiction photography
“When you look at my photographs, you are looking into my mind.” Duane Michals
Most of my photography explores how I can tell a fictional story with pictures instead of words. I went to school for writing and now I find that I take more photos than write fiction. I read a great deal, but writing doesn’t fulfill me in the ways that it once did. There is something about combining the physical, mental, and technical acts of photography that allows me to lose myself creatively rather than searching for the ‘right’ words.
I’m drawn to the fantastic and surreal in fiction, which I can’t seem to do in my own writing, but I can with photography. My writing is more autobiographical, and I don’t feel ready to go to those dark places right now in my life, which writing will demand of me. But the idea that my photographs are reflections of the world in my head makes me feel less protected by my camera, more vulnerable when I share them in public.
Since I started photography a few years ago, I’ve struggled with trying to make the two mediums work together. In a habit that I borrowed from journaling while writing stories, I keep photo notes. I sketch out ideas that I have for shoots, write down places and props that I want to use. I keep track of exposure times, aperatures, shutter speeds. Once I record the ideas, I have a starting point for a project that ends up surprising me in other ways. That’s what I love so much about photography – the unexpected that you can capture in just a click, the illusion of simplicity.
I am so in love with how Duane Michals achieves this in his work. He scribbles text in the white border spaces of his photos, superimposes images on top of images, and uses long exposures that create dreamlike, sometimes frightening moments. He is not afraid to enter the dark places in his photography. I can only hope to be so brave in my own work.
“The Bogeyman” by Duane Michals
Filed under: Armchair Travel, Art Gallery | Tags: autonauts of the cosmoroute, carol dunlop, female photographer, travel literature
Jeff and I will be driving soon to Florida to visit family for the holiday break, which will have its moments of fun, amazement, frustration and daily life. Our car will be our house on wheels (which I’ve always wanted), complete with Christmas tree on the dashboard.
In the 1982 travel book Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, writer Julio Cortazar and his wife, photographer Carol Dunlop, vowed to make stops at each of the 70 rest areas along the French autoroute from Paris to Marseilles. It’s the ultimate adventure in experimental travel – how can a traveling couple make this ordinary, busy highway road a lot more like the roads less traveled?
The book is peppered with logs of camping provisions and daily menus, as well as Dunlop’s snapshot-like photography. I had never heard of her work until I found Autonauts in the Archipelago Books catalog. And while most of the book is light-hearted and whimsical, the ending is almost too sad to bear when you know that Cortazar had to finish the book alone because Carol died before she saw it to completion at the age of 36.
Her life and death are a mystery to me, as well as her work. She was born in Boston, but became a Canadian citizen during the Vietnam war. She met Cortazar in 1977, then moved with him to France. I found a blog about her written a few years ago, but it’s in Spanish, which I don’t speak. I can only read her life through these few photographs of the last journey of her life.
Filed under: Culinary Adventures, Pennsylvania, Vintage Photo Album | Tags: baked rice pudding, comfort foods, food memoir, recipe
As a child, there were a few dishes I could never order in a restaurant or eat at other people’s homes because the only one I trusted to make them was my mother.
I couldn’t eat pasta if it wasn’t made by my Italian mother. It wasn’t ‘real’ pasta unless it was covered in a bolognese sauce slow-simmered for hours over a hot stove (I’ve since gotten over my phobia of non-Italian cooks, or else I’d be missing out on a lot of goodness in the world).
Tuna salad was out of the question because almost everyone used mayonnaise. Except my mother, who used Miracle Whip. She mixed just enough of the salad dressing to keep the tuna bound and moist, adding finely chopped onions and celery for crunch, served neatly packed between two slices of white toast and sliced in half-triangles.
And there was her Southern baked rice pudding, which is not a Southern specialty, but a recipe my mother adapted from the back of an Uncle Ben’s rice package from the early 1970s. It is one of the recipes she collected in the early years of my parents’ short-lived marriage, a dish that permitted even my father to say one nice thing about my mother.
When she actually cooked, she was a damn good cook, and this pudding was one of my favorites. I can still see it cooling on the stove in the long glass Pyrex baking dish, the top a pale rust color from the cinnamon, slightly burnt along the edges. It is more cake-like than pudding, a really rich custard, making me wonder why it’s called ‘pudding’ at all.
Years later in college, I was eating with a group of friends in a diner and one of the vegan girls at the table asked the waitress, “What is in your rice pudding?” The waitress rolled her eyes and said, “Pudding with rice in it.” And indeed it was, a glistening, soupy vanilla mixture with rice tossed in it as an afterthought. Definitely not my mother’s.
The following recipe was printed in a 1980 cookbook put out by Allegheny Valley School, where my mother used to work.
1 cup uncooked rice
2 cups milk
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Grated rind of 1 lemon
Dash of nutmeg or mace
Cinnamon
Soak uncooked rice in 2 cups of milk, 2 hours. Add remaining milk to rice and cook over low heat, 20 to 30 minutes or until tender. Set aside to cool. Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter 2-quart casserole. Work 2 tablespoons of butter until soft, then work the sugar thoroughly.
Beat eggs until frothy, add sugar mixture and rice. Flavor with lemon rind, cinnamon, and nutmeg or mace. Pour into casserole and bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm or cold, plain or with cream and sugar.
Serves 6 to 8 people.
