Photos from the Frederik Meijer Gardens Butterfly Exhibit.

The above photo was taken with my new camera , from a distance of 7 feet.

The building in which my place of employment is located was, at one time, a brassworks. Blocks of brass went in, and pipe fitting went out. The brassworks was built next to a pre-existing foundry. Both have been standing, in one form or another, for the better part of a hundred years.

Last week a demolition crew began work on the old foundry in order to make room for a new hotel.Their tools range in size from “crowbar” to “tyrannosaurus”. They make a hell of a racket.

When the brassworks was built it shared a wall with the foundry. Or rather, an additional layer of wall was built onto the foundry to serve as a wall for the brassworks. The inside of that wall is now the south wall of the studio in which I work.

The process for removing the foundry wall from the brassworks wall is much like removing old dried-on chewing gum from the bottom of a desk, except that instead of a knife the workers are using a sledge, a crowbar, and a pneumatic jackhammer.

On a related note, we around the office have been joking about seeing if we can get a new window out of the deal.

You can probably see where this is going.

Personally, I was hoping for something a little bigger.

Seems like we went and got ourselves a whole ‘nother day, which happened this year to land on a beautiful, lazy Sunday. In that spirit this is Trouble:

Trouble lives at Argos Books in Eastown. She is in the running for the coveted title of BEST_CAT_EVAR. That is all.

My place of employment is located in the Wolverine Brassworks building which, once upon a time, was a brassworks. Next to it is a foundry. They share an adjoining wall.

The foundry was still in operation when we moved our offices into the brassworks building three years ago. Sometime since then, it closed down. I imagine it had been in operation for some decades. And, being a foundry, I imagine most of it ha dnot had a thorough cleaning in that time.

This morning, a crew began demolishing the old foundry to make way for one half of a two-building, 20-story-tall hotel.

There were two pieces of machinery slowly crushing the building, looking much like dinosaurs foraging in a blue stone swamp. The smaller of the two machines had a thing like an enormous pair of bolt-cutters which it was using to tear apart the interior walls of the building.

The larger of the two had an attachment like the claws of an eagle or owl, and it was using this appendage to grab huge chunks of building and pile them for (supposedly) some other machine to load into a dump truck.

They started when we were in our Monday morning meeting. The first thing we saw was a sudden scattering of bricks, then a dinosaur-like head with a mouth-full of bricks looking for a place to spit them out.

Over the course of the day I began to notice a funny taste in the air, like standing on a road which has too much road-salt. And things around the office began to feel decidedly gritty. Given that the destruction caused huge plumes of black soot to cover the area, I can only assume that I have in me right now an assortment of chemicals which would make Union Carbide file for mining rights to my lungs.

And so it goes.

The sides of the river below the dam are mostly lined with ice, except where turbulence keeps the water too angry to freeze. In some places the ice stands out more than ten feet from the bank (or wall, where development encroaches too closely). And in the midst of some of these sheets of ice are areas of open water. Some are caused by oddities in the bed of the river. Some by being insulated by heavy snowfall. Some are broken open by enterprising-yet-bored programmers. And some are caused by chemical-laden runoff from the nearby parking lots.

It was in one of the latter type that Scott and I found a carp. Nothing unusual in and of itself; the river is silty and slimy and therefore ideal for carp. But the ice surrounding the pool in question extends to the bed of the river, so the carp could not have swum here, and if it had been here before, we would certainly have noticed.

Then we noticed an odd track along the wall next to the river, as if something had been…dragged. No footprints, however; just the drag marks, extending from fifty feet or more down-river. And little clumps of snow which could have been kicked down from the walkway ten feet over our heads. Having been raised on the Hardy Boys, we immediately solved the mystery: someone, fishing from the walkway, had hooked the carp and, being unable to reel the carp up through twenty feet or more of open air, had brought the thing to land and walked it up to where the river bank was accessable from above. Then this brave sportsman had un-hooked the carp and thrown it in this pool.

Could have been worse, I suppose. He could have left it on the ice to form another carp-cicle for Scott and I to throw at one another.

For a few minutes, we contemplated this carp:

“What do you think”

“Dunno. Looks like a great place to be a carp.”

“Yeah, but it might freeze. Water isn’t deep enough to cover it.”

“Won’t freeze. The salt in the run-off will stop it.”

“Probably kill it too.”

“Takes a lot to kill a carp.”

“Yeah, but that road salt’s some nasty shit.”

“Yup.”

“Yup.”

So we decided to rescue the thing. I got the honors and Scott got the camera.

First I poked the carp with my finger. It didn’t do anything. Probably worn out from being dragged through the snow, and most certainly stoned out of its head from the parking-lot effluvium. Reassured, I very gently grabbed it around the middle, avoiding the dorsal spines, and lifted it out of the water. At that moment Scott’s foot broke through the ice and startled the carp, which immediately panicked (to the extent that a carp can panic) and flipped out of my hand and raced back and forth in the meter-square pool which was its toxic little world.

Perhaps it was having flash-backs.

After it calmed down I got it in a better grip, lifted it, and [And here I want to throw in an interjection: I do not recommend ever handling a carp bare-handed. Fish keep themselves aquadynamic, insulated and vermin-free by producing slime which coats them, and carp produce more than most fish. Coupled with the fact that a carp is basically an aquatic rat or seagull, and that the Grand River is not the freshest body of water in the Northern hemisphere, and I had a handful of “ecch yuck bleargh gack phew O God my hands!” -jw] carried it the ten feet to open water and gently set it down.

Apparently it had forgotten that it had ever lived anywhere else, so it wasn’t until my own foot broke through some ice that it panicked and swam away.

I would like to think that I have burned off some bad karma, and that I will not now return in some future incarnation as a carp which gets dragged through the snow, pickled by road salt, and rudely manhandled before I am returned to my hearth and home.

So that, O my readers, is the story behind todays photo in the River Project.

Yesterday as I was leaving work I noticed this thing:

Normally halos signify holy things, but the building in the center of the photo is full of lawyers.

I am approaching the end of Evan Connell’s wonderful book on Goya (link in the books section). My only complaint is that, other than the cover, there is none of Goya’s work in the book. Not so surprising; the book is about Goya in history, rather than Goya the artist. So I went to the best collection of art on the internet and found all the Goya one could reasonably hope for, assembled in chronological order.