Thanksgiving, literature and music. What a busy week! There is always a smorgasbord of arts and entertainment events in the Baltimore region. Catch a glimpse of what we chose to experience...it was all excellent. (Sorry...the sound on my snapshooter doesn't do justice to the music.)
Wednesday night in Baltimore I read some poetry but the main event was Rafael Alvarez reading from his new book, The Wire: Truth Be Told:
Before the Alvarez reading, we attended a special event at the gallery of mural artist, Michael Owen in Baltimore.
Friday night was jazz with Kevin Robinson at Bobby's Jazz Club in Baltimore.
Saturday night was a house concert at Georgie Jessup's house. Among other numbers, Georgie sang Paradise.
The resistance in the U.S. to a national health care plan makes no sense. And it doesn’t make sense to our European friends we talked with when we recently traveled to Europe. Germany, where we spent most of our time, is considered to have one of the best health care systems in Europe.
Medical News Today wrote that, "France and Germany, which are widely viewed as having among the best health care systems in Europe, with few complaints about rationing of services and queuing, spend 11% and 10.4% of their economic output, respectively, on health care. The U.S., by comparison, expends 16% of its gross domestic product in this area, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.” (Based on a Forbes September article)
October 6 of this year, the PBS published an international health care systems comparison for Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico and the U.S.
Health care is a right and not a privilege. The quality of health care should not be based on where you work or how much money you make. Although our country is advanced in some ways, we are way behind our counterparts in attitudes and practice concerning health care and capital punishment.
Since I’ve retired from reaching in 2003, my income has diminished. However, even with a reduced income, I’m willing to pay more in taxes to ensure that those who have no health care can.I am not one for statistics, however, if all tax payers paid $100 to $200 more a year in taxes, I’ll bet it would put a big dent in a viable health care fund.
Look at it this way. More than $100-$200 is coming out of our annual taxes to support war. Most people appear to accept their tax money going toward killing people but when it comes to health care for our country, they are unwilling to accept it. They complain about big government.
I’ll bet these same people accept their social security checks though.
Bobby's Jazz Club in Baltimore, Maryland, November 20, 2009
Kevin and his crew captured the crowd at Bobby's Friday night. The sound on my little pocket camera doesn't do the performance justice. Just gotta hear him in person!
My friend, Vladimir, suggested that I read The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban. I think we may have been having a discussion about The Little Prince which is one of my favorite books. Anything that Vladimir suggests always has merit so I went to my local library and checked the book out.
There are debates about whether this is really a children's book. It definitely has some dark moments. Regardless, it's interesting to look at the world through a toy's point-of-view as happens sometimes in children's books. Of course, the toy is more than merely a wind-up toy, otherwise it would hold little interest for an adult...or even a child.
I remember the fascination my youngest daughter, Lauren, had for her huge collection of stuffed animals. She used to play for hours, talking to them. As a child, they were more than toys for her. They blurred the boundary of animate and inanimate, real and pretend, human and toy. Often when these boundaries are blurred, that's where we will find real truth.
The Mouse and His Child offers truth to those who are open to finding it:
“I don’t suppose anyone is ever completely self-winding. That’s what friends are for.” Frog
“The enemy we fled at the beginning waited for us at the end...but he’s not an enemy any more.” Child
“Infinity. There’s no end to it. There comes a time when each of us must contemplate it.” Serpentina
“Each of us, sunk in the mud however deep, must rise on the propulsion of his own thought.” Serpentina
“Each of us must journey through the dogs, beyond the dots, and to the truth, alone.” Serpentina
A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes
Chris Jordan is no ordinary photographer. He has a vision of how he can graphically communicate statistics about the way we live. With digital photography, he illustrates our culture of waste in “Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.”
For me, as with many people, statistics are abstract. I find it difficult to wrap my mind around big numbers. Chris helps bend my mind in such a way that it will never go back to its original shape.
Do you know these statistics?
How many breast augmentations are performed each year? How many plastic cups are used each day on airplane flights? How many sheets of office paper are used in five minutes? How many aluminum cans are used in thirty seconds?
Using a digital camera and digital manipulation, he looks at our nation’s consumerism and turns it into works of art that compel us to look more closely at how we live. Chris Jordan says, “Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible and overwhelming.”
Here are some examples. Visit his Web site to see and learn more.
Depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the US in 2006. Photo by Chris Jordan
Partial zoom.Photo by Chris Jordan
Detail of actual print size.Photo by Chris Jordan
Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.Photo by Chris Jordan
Detail at actual print size. Photo by Chris Jordan
Last day in London. David and I took the Underground to Picadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Rain made for poor lighting for photography. Knee pain made for limited mobility. We looked for stations that had lifts and maybe 30% have lifts or escalators. The U.S. is really ahead of Europe with accessibility issues.
We had sushi in a Japanese restaurant at Picadilly Circus and watched outside activity in the rain.
Several streets in China Town had one Chinese restaurant after another.
At Trafalgar Square we saw two young men being thoroughly searched for a long time. Soon after that, there was a helicoptor overhead. I don't know if there was a high security alert or not.
The Trafalgar Square fountains have been cleaned up since the last time we were there and saw winos peeing in the fountains.
This is a sign we saw on the way to Westminster, an addition since our last visit.
Finally, we saw Big Ben in the rain. The bell foundry we visited yesterday made the bell for Big Ben.
London, our last destination before flying home...
Yesterday we spent time with friends in East Ham and got a short tour of the area.
Rob showed us an old building that has been turned into a bar but what most fascinated him was that the figures with nipples. He didn't seem to notice that they also had belly buttons. I also shot a busy spider who didn't seem to notice the human with a camera.
We took the underground to Camden Locks area, quite abuzz with activity and hoardes of people, mostly young. This area is fantastic for people watchers.
Have you ever wanted an out-of-body experience? There's a workshop for you!
The end of the world has come to Camden Locks area.
We watched a young woman crank the mechanism to lower the water level and then push against a beam to open the gate.
Finally, we wandered about the crowded area that offered food from every part of the world and unusual seating for people lucky enough to find a place to sit and eat.
A little while back on this trip, we visited what was once the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I mentioned this in a former blog but did not go into the detail that David goes into in his blog on Sachsenhausen. His blog is worth reading.
I’ve been traveling by plane for the past forty years and quite a bit of that travel has been since the rise of terrorism. I remember years ago driving to Friendship Airport (now BWI) merely to go out on the observation deck to watch planes, close up, landing and taking off. Now I have to take my shoes off and go through a security check.
I understand the reason for this and am glad that airports have my safety in mind. I want to arrive at my destination in one piece. However, sometimes I think reason has flown away (pun intended).
Today we experienced the Hamburg Airport as we were preparing to fly to London. After all these years, we went through the most intensive security check we’ve experienced so far.
I’ve never been questioned about lipstick before. Today they examined every minute quantity of liquid, powder or paste. These items of ours combined fit into one regulation sized plastic bag and we were allowed two. I’m not going to bore you with the long list of regulations of the Hamburg Airport. You can read all four pages here if you’d like.
Under what items may be carried on, their regulations state that one small camera or set of binoculars can be carried on. Those who know me know that I carry expensive Nikon equipment in a backpack. I am NOT going to put $5,000 work of camera equipment in my check-in luggage. I did, however, put an expensive tripod and reflectors into my suitcase. They are not so much at risk with rough baggage handling or thieving baggage handlers.
Today I had to take all my lenses and camera out of my tightly packed camera backpack and put them in a separate tray to go back through X-ray. My pack was also resent through X-ray but I didn’t have to remove my flash.
So today I was questioned about my lipstick but not my electronic flash. I did not have to take off my shoes and I’d worn easy-to-slip-off shoes instead of the tennis shoes I prefered because of the long walk from the London Underground to our destination through East Ham streets.
By the way, I’d forgotten about two nail files in my purse and camera bag. Apparently they weren’t detected.
During the past several weeks we've visited friends in Germany, Denmark and now London. A couple days ago, David received an e-mail from a friend back in Baltimore that led to a discovery...
David finally found out how one of my images of him was used...on a Republican gubernatorial candidate's Web site. It goes without saying that David is a Democrat. When he found out how his picture was used, he said, "I'm an equal opportunity face. Democrats can buy me, too."
For the last two nights, we stayed with Peter and Janice in Tornby (pop. 1000), Denmark where the wind blew cold and hard but the hospitality was warm. Janice, clay artist, and husband Peter, fisherman, live in an old two-room schoolhouse.
They showed us the North Sea where the wind was so strong that it was difficult to hold the camera still to take pictures--and where we saw an elderly woman strip and run into the sea for a refreshing (?) dip! Really!
We saw thousands of mackeral being loaded into trucks for the market and we also saw Peter's boat. He's been ill lately but is beginning to feel better so he can return to his fishing.
They showed us the remains of a church that dates back to 1200 or earlier. The sea is reclaiming the land that it is built on. We wandered about the remains and cemetery in the rain.
Janice also introduced us to their meals for the next year...half of a Calloway. Cute...furry...food.
Meanwhile for our food Wednesday night, we ate mackeral...fixed so well that David even ate it and went back for seconds!
Looks like a black and white and gray picture day.
Danes ride bicycles, rain or shine.
We're hoping for sun tomorrow as we drive north, up along the coast to our next stop with a Servas traveler, Janice, who stayed with us several years ago.
While checking out the temperature of the Baltic Sea today (too cold for swimming!), I found something interesting in the water. Is it an eyeball? Or an egg sunny side up? Or maybe it's Baltie, the sea monster, second cousin of Baltimore's Chessie?
Jeremy and Maja took us to see Maja's family's old homestead, Lankow, a town that was bulldozed flat because it was too close to the East German border.
Maja's uncles took it upon themselves to put up this sign along the country road into town so that Lankow, and what happened there, would not be forgotten.
Before we left the site where Lankow used to exist, another car appeared and Maja talked with a man who had been part of the border police who were responsible for keeping East Germans contained. He came to the spot to remember. Even though his job was to police the area, he grew to care about the people who lived there. Before the village was destroyed, he left his post to continue advancing his career.
It is interesting to me that, years ago, these were times I read about in the news... events far away from my life. My high school history teacher talked about the politics of this time and I day-dreamed about my weekend date. These were places far away and people I didn't know. It was remote history.
But it is remote no more. I've walked on these places and met people who are part of this history.
Bonnie J. Schupp (1944-2021) was raised in Baltimore and graduated from old Eastern High School in Feb. 1963. She earned a bachelor's degree from Frostburg State College, her master's from Johns Hopkins University, and, at age 60, a doctorate in communications design from the University of Baltimore. She was over the years a public school teacher, camera store owner, writer and award-winning photographer, and mother of two daughters,. She self-published half a dozen books combining her writing and photographs, notable among them "Dog Tag Poetry" (2012, Blurb Books), "365 Gifts on Turning 70" (2016, Amazon), and, posthumously, her memoir "Curious Possibilities" (2021, Amazon) edited by her husband, David M. Ettlin.
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Rain! Again!
Maja's uncles took it upon themselves to put up this sign along the country road into town so that Lankow, and what happened there, would not be forgotten. 
