A Walk Into the Stadium Historic District

Apricots, carrots, potatoes, and zucchini at the market this morning.  All of this is to be commented on as Subareas.  For some time it has been MLK Subarea.  

Yesterday's walk from Listen Live At Lunch at First Lutheran, in the MLK Subarea, brought me along a frequent bike ride, then just across "I" Street to the Stadium Historical District, which is at one end of the North Downtown Area which reaches as far south as the Foss Waterway.  All of this probably has to be commented on.   At a bus stop it was only a moment before the bus stopped and headed just a block ahead into yet another area, the North Slope.

As a Public Library User, Once Again I Started Doing Book Reports for the Summer Reading Club - Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life And Times of Janis Joplin

It is 45 years since 1967 and the Haight-Ashbery Summer of Love. In June the Monterey Pop Festival featured Janis Joplin, it might have been the festival cd liner notes that describe her as sometimes singing two notes at one time. I read the book by Alice Echols, an historican specializing in the 1960s and Feminism, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin (1999). Echols theme resonates that Janis Joplin did not enjoy her life as a rock and roll star, but suffered as a heroin addict and died of a heroin overdose. Of Haight-Ashbery, Echols writes on page 157: "From the outset thought, it was evident that this paradise was going to leave some wicked scars." Echols lists many interviews and sources. I looked through two of Echols' sources: Janis Joplin, Buried Alive, by Myra Friedman (1973), and Love Janis, by Janis Joplin's younger sister Laura Joplin (1992). These list the same facts but with other emphases. Myra Friedman's evocative descriptions use imagery to carry the reader to sights Janis experienced, for example, the dark Texas highway. Janis Joplin's sister Laura Joplin opens the family album generously, she earned a masters in psychology and a doctorate in education, and writes about the family life Janis Joplin tried for over a year to regain as she tried to leave Haight-Ashbery behind. According to Laura Joplin, it was the place (page 241) where "being cool meant being high". The performances one can view and hear are remarkable. However, the talent of Janis Joplin might have taken some other direction. (I may have begun slightly before June 2)  

In MLK Subarea Until The Mid-Sixties, There Was A Synagogue

My sister and I rode with our mother in the Chevy, the green Chevy or after 1961 the Chevy Biscayne.  One ride brought us from the church parking lot, gravel, later asphault, three left turns then past the front of the church, past the park on the way back home.  Over weeks during 2012 so far I have participated in some events about Martin Luther King Way as a Subarea slated for density.  In the area is First Lutheran Church. 

While I listened at Listen Live At Lunch I thought I could explain by linking to Ernest Bloch's On Jewish Life that we passed a synagogue on this trip.  The synagogue had a star of David in the brickwork.  It was late in the 1960s that the synagogue moved to 12th Street near Tacoma Community College.  The building on I Street was called Temple Sinai, according to Temple Beth El, and was built in 1925.

Ernest Bloch wrote Jewish Life in 1925 in Cleveland.

Photographs At The Gig Harbor History Museum

Photographs At The Gig Harbor History Museum

Photograph 1

It is not the dress at all.  It is her.  We already know the strapless bra with set-in wire structure, the permanent wave, the painful heels were going to be folded into a box.  Maybe the lens is seeing the camera's enemy, it is the photographer's chance encounter with a woman making an effort to become a fashion model.  Maybe she has no professional clockwork glow to summon.  Maybe from other experiences, like anxiety, she is constrained.  The title of the portrait is a Scandinavian name, maybe the staid Lutheran church continues as a mortification in so much nakedness.  It cannot reach her, the soft material, no sleeves, no straps, the structured top and the full skirt cannot move her face express anything but her in already work-worn early twenties.  In the portrait I see no happiness, no self-confidence, no pleasure. 

Photograph 2

In another photograph of a Northwest Rock Band in Canada, a girl's shoulders appear to wear a knit shift dress, which suggests - go-go-boots?  There is a package of cigarettes. 

Photograph 3

There is - Corning Ware.  It is tiny in the very large square photograph, the two casseroles stacked unmistakeable beyond the living room in the distant kitchen.  There are two stories, all windows, with all the lights on and the dog's home on the bedroom deck.   The photographer's home in Gig Harbor, photographed in Northwest Modern - Eastern Religion and Nature.  It is the size and the theme of art downtown when I was in Junior High School and could find that location of the museum and go in there.  (This is a list from a postcard of the public library's Random. Modern. in early 2008 - Inez Hill Bailey, Virginia Banks, Dorothy Chase, Bill Colby, Polly Crane, Louise Gilbert, Thomas Cooper Harmer, Yvonne Twinning Humber, B.J. Hyde, Julia MacFarland, Viola Patterson, Ruth Pennington, Lola Wheeler.  Selected from the collection of Hagen / Waer.)  Emotionally, to spend time with that point of view once again was warm.  This photograph in this size repeats that warmth.  That is about my background.

The museum is now seven dollars instead of six.  I had brought the card about the exhibit along.  The address was quite a ride along the waterfront in downtown Gig Harbor's strange traffic jam.  Not a lot of crosswalks and these are necessary.  The card has been a beautiful thing to view on the refrigerator door for some time, I am happy that I did go out to see this gallery of Jini Dellacio photographs. 

History Tour Emphasis and Density

I remain interested in the discussion ongoing about the Martin Luther King Boulevard Subarea Planning.  (An earlier post about the planning did not include this paragraph completely because of a technical error.)  It is so interesting to me that this building is a hundred years old this year.

History Tour emphasis and density - History tours focus on separate single family housing.  Their usual emphasis leaves them not flexing to include apartments.  Off Sixth Avenue at Wright Park is a sign that identifies a building as a hundred years old.  This hundred-year-old density can be an example for planned density.  History tours can also do walking tours as well as drive-yourself tours. 

Proctor Market

Apples, Asparagus, Lettuce, Peas, and Spinach at the market today.  Also sunshine.  Singers:  Jim and Kristy Nebel.