View allAll Photos Tagged foreshadowing
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
PS: Former EMC LBS 2.
Coachbuilder: Zhengzhou Yutong Bus
Coach Model: Yutong ZK6122HD9
Fare Class: First Class 1x2 with CR
Franchise Route: Balintawak - Tuguegarao
Authorized Route: Tuguegarao - PITX (Express)
Location: Robinsons Place Tuguegarao, Leonarda, Tuguegarao City
Date Taken: July 10, 2024
German postcard by Ufa/Film-Foto, Berlin-Tempelhof, no. FK 3055. Photo: dpa. Publicity still for Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955).
American actor James Dean (1931-1955) was the quintessential 1950s teenager, brooding and romantic. An air of androgyny attributed to his iconic appeal to both men and women. The three roles that defined his stardom are as troubled teenager Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and surly ranch hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956). After his death in a car crash, the only 24-yers-old Dean became the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
James Byron Dean was born in 1931, in Marion, Indiana, the only child of Winton Dean and Mildred Marie Wilson. Six years after his father had left farming to become a dental technician, Dean and his family moved to Santa Monica, California. In 1938, his mother was suddenly struck with acute stomach pain and quickly began to lose weight. She died of uterine cancer when Dean was nine years old. Unable to care for his son, Dean's father sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, on their farm in Fairmount, Indiana, where he was raised in their Quaker household. Dean's overall performance in school was exceptional and he was a popular student. He played on the baseball and varsity basketball teams, studied drama, and competed in public speaking through the Indiana High School Forensic Association. After graduating from Fairmount High School in May 1949, he moved back to California with his dog, Max, to live with his father and stepmother. He enrolled in Santa Monica College (SMC) and majored in pre-law. He transferred to UCLA for one semester and changed his major to drama, which resulted in estrangement from his father. While at UCLA, Dean was picked from a group of 350 actors to portray Malcolm in Macbeth. At that time, he also began acting in James Whitmore's workshop. In January 1951, he dropped out of UCLA to pursue a full-time career as an actor. Dean's first television appearance was in a Pepsi Cola commercial His first speaking part was as John the Beloved Disciple, in Hill Number One (1951), an Easter television special dramatizing the Resurrection of Jesus. Dean subsequently obtained three walk-on roles in films: as a soldier in Samuel Fuller’s moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets! (Samuel Fuller, 1951), a boxing cornerman in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (Hal Walker, 1952), and a youth in the comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (Douglas Sirk, 1952) with Rock Hudson. While struggling to get jobs in Hollywood, Dean also worked as a parking lot attendant at CBS Studios, during which time he met Rogers Brackett, a radio director for an advertising agency, who offered him professional help and guidance in his chosen career, as well as a place to stay. In July 1951, Dean appeared on Alias Jane Doe, which was produced by Brackett. In October 1951, Dean moved to New York City. There, he worked as a stunt tester for the game show Beat the Clock, but was subsequently fired for allegedly performing the tasks too quickly. He also appeared in episodes of several CBS television series The Web, Studio One, and Lux Video Theatre, before gaining admission to the Actors Studio to study method acting under Lee Strasberg. There, he was classmates and close friends with Carroll Baker, alongside whom he would eventually star in Giant (George Stevens, 1956). Dean's career picked up and he performed in further episodes of several early 1950s television. One early role, for the CBS series Omnibus in the episode Glory in the Flower (1953), saw Dean portraying the type of disaffected youth he would later portray in Rebel Without a Cause. Positive reviews for Dean's 1954 theatrical role as Bachir, the blackmailing Arab house boy, in an adaptation of André Gide's book The Immoralist, led to calls from Hollywood.
In 1954, James Dean was cast in the emotionally complex role of 'Cal Trask' in East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel East of Eden. The lengthy novel deals with the story of the Trask and Hamilton families over the course of three generations, focusing especially on the lives of the latter two generations in Salinas Valley, California, from the mid-19th century through the 1910s. In contrast to the book, the film script focused on the last portion of the story, predominantly with the character of Cal. Though he initially seems more aloof and emotionally troubled than his twin brother Aron (Richard Davalos), Cal is soon seen to be more worldly, business savvy, and even sagacious than their pious and constantly disapproving father (Raymond Massey) who seeks to invent a vegetable refrigeration process. Cal is bothered by the mystery of their supposedly dead mother, and discovers she is still alive and a brothel-keeping 'madam'; the part was played by actress Jo Van Fleet. Much of Dean's performance in the film was unscripted, including his dance in the bean field and his fetal-like posturing while riding on top of a train boxcar (after searching out his mother in nearby Monterey). The most famous improvisation of the film occurs when Cal's father rejects his gift of $5,000, money Cal earned by speculating in beans before the US became involved in World War I. Instead of running away from his father as the script called for, Dean instinctively turned to Massey and in a gesture of extreme emotion, lunged forward and grabbed him in a full embrace, crying. Kazan kept this and Massey's shocked reaction in the film. Wikipedia: “Dean's performance in the film foreshadowed his role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause. Both characters are angst-ridden protagonists and misunderstood outcasts, desperately craving approval from their fathers.” In recognition of his performance in East of Eden, Dean was nominated posthumously for the 1956 Academy Awards as Best Actor in a Leading Role of 1955, the first official posthumous acting nomination in Academy Awards history. East of Eden was the only film starring Dean that he would see released in his lifetime.
James Dean quickly followed up his role in Eden with a starring role as the brooding red-jacketed teenager Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. The film depicts the dilemma of a typical teenager of the time, who feels that no one, not even his peers, can understand him. The film scrupulously follows the classic theatrical disciplines, telling all within a 24-hour period. Jim Stark was Dean’s true starring role, and Rebel Without a Cause proved to be hugely popular among teenagers. The landmark juvenile-delinquent drama fixed James Dean’s image forever in American culture. In his next film, Giant (George Stevens, 1956), Dean played a supporting role to Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. This was due to his desire to avoid being typecast as a rebellious teenager like Cal Trask or Jim Stark. In the film, he plays Jett Rink, a Texan ranch hand who strikes oil and becomes wealthy. His role was notable in that, in order to portray an older version of his character in the film's later scenes, Dean dyed his hair gray and shaved some of it off to give himself a receding hairline. Giant would prove to be Dean's last film. At the end of the film, Dean was supposed to make a drunken speech at a banquet; this is nicknamed the 'Last Supper' because it was the last scene before his sudden death. Due to his desire to make the scene more realistic by actually being inebriated for the take, Dean mumbled so much that director George Stevens decided the scene had to be overdubbed by Nick Adams, who had a small role in the film, because Dean had died before the film was edited. Dean received his second posthumous Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role in Giant at the 29th Academy Awards in 1957 for films released in 1956.
Today, James Dean is often considered an icon because of his perceived experimental take on life, which included his ambivalent sexuality. Most of his so-called affairs with various starlets were made up by the Warner Brothers public relations. Dean's best-remembered relationship was with young Italian actress Pier Angeli, whom he met while Angeli was shooting The Silver Chalice (1955) on an adjoining Warner lot, and with whom he exchanged items of jewelry as love tokens. Angeli's mother disapproved of Dean. After finishing his role for East of Eden, he took a brief trip to New York in October 1954. While he was away, Angeli unexpectedly announced her engagement to Italian-American singer Vic Damone. The press was shocked and Dean expressed his irritation. Angeli married Damone the following month. Dean also dated Swiss actress Ursula Andress. She was seen with Dean in his sports cars, and was with him on the day he bought the car that he died in. The Gay Times Readers' Awards cited him as the greatest male gay icon of all time. Dean’s ambiguous relationship with Sal Mineo in the angst-ridden Rebel Without A Cause has led many to speculate and view this golden age film as years ahead of its time. When questioned about his sexual orientation, Dean is reported to have said, "No, I am not a homosexual. But I'm also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back." Dean, with time on his side during down times of filming, often frequented gay bars in mornings, afternoons and evenings in both Hollywood, Studio City and North Hollywood. He and screenwriter and theatre student from UCLA, William Bast lived together as roommates for a number of years. Bast later became Dean's first biographer and told he and Dean ‘experimented’ sexually. Journalist Joe Hyams suggests that any gay activity Dean might have been involved in appears to have been strictly "for trade", as a means of advancing his career. However, the ‘trade only’ notion is contradicted by Bast and other Dean biographers. Biographer Val Holley: “There's been quite an evolution in the thinking since Dean's death in 1955, moving from ‘James Dean was straight’ to ‘Dean had sex with men but only to advance his career’ to ‘Dean had sex with women but only to advance his career.’ In 2016, a new gossipy biography was published, James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes, by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. The authors claim Dean was in love with Marlon Brando and the two would had a long affair with S&M overtones. We may never know for certain if Dean identified as gay, straight, bisexual, but, regardless, what he’s come to represent still resonates with many LGBT audiences.
In 1954, James Dean had become interested in developing an auto racing career. He purchased various vehicles after filming for East of Eden had concluded, including a Triumph Tiger T110 and a Porsche 356. Just before filming began on Rebel Without a Cause, he competed in his first professional event at the Palm Springs Road Races, which was held in Palm Springs, California on March 26–27, 1955. Dean achieved first place in the novice class, and second place at the main event. His racing continued in Bakersfield a month later, where he finished first in his class and third overall. Dean hoped to compete in the Indianapolis 500, but his busy schedule made it impossible. Dean's final race occurred in Santa Barbara on Memorial Day, 30 May 1955. He was unable to finish the competition due to a blown piston. His brief career was put on hold when Warner Brothers barred him from all racing during the production of Giant. Dean had finished shooting his scenes and the movie was in post-production when he decided to race again. Dean was scheduled to compete at a racing event in Salinas, California on 30 September 1955. Accompanying the actor to the occasion was stunt coordinator Bill Hickman, Collier's photographer Sanford Roth, and Rolf Wütherich, the German mechanic from the Porsche factory who maintained Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder "Little Bastard" car. Wütherich, who had encouraged Dean to drive the car from Los Angeles to Salinas to break it in, accompanied Dean in the Porsche. At 3:30 p.m. Dean was ticketed for speeding, as was Hickman who was following behind in another car. As the group traveled to the event via U.S. Route 466, (currently SR 46) at approximately 5:15 p.m. a 1950 Ford Tudor was passing through an intersection while turning, ahead of the Porsche. Dean, unable to stop in time, slammed into the driver's side of the Ford resulting in Dean's car bouncing across the pavement onto the side of the highway. Dean's passenger, Wütherich, was thrown from the Porsche, while Dean was trapped in the car and sustained numerous fatal injuries, including a broken neck. The driver of the Ford, Donald Turnupseed, exited his damaged vehicle with minor injuries. Dean was pronounced dead on arrival shortly after he arrived by ambulance at the Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital at 6:20 p.m. The Failure Analysis Associates later reconstructed and recreated all details of the accident and have concluded that James Dean was travelling 55 to 56 mph when the fateful accident occurred, thereby proving he had not been speeding, as rumor had it. Ed Stephan at IMDb: “At age 24, James Dean was killed almost immediately from the impact from a broken neck. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.”
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Ed Stephan (IMDb), Daniel Bates (Daily Mail), Towleroad, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
This was the first Christian modification of the Mezquita, foreshadowing the later cathedral (see below). It dates from soon after the Reconquista in 1236. Like the cathedral, it involved cutting through the roof perpendicular to the arcades of the mosque and erecting a vaulted ceiling, with windows in the side walls to admit light. But it was on a much more modest scale. Though unadorned now, originally it was richly decorated. The space visible beyond the nave, below a pre-existing Moorish skylight, served as a chancel.
After the Reconquista, the Catholics converted La Mezquita into a church and modified it to fit their needs. At first they just installed chapels within the existing hypostyle hall, mostly around the edges; the Antigua Capilla Mayor was their one major renovation. But by the 16th century they were feeling their oats: they ERECTED A GOTHIC CATHEDRAL right smack in the middle of the thing, slicing through the roof to let the structure soar above. As sad as it was to see the magnificent original building violated, the cathedral was architecturally interesting in the way it blurred indoors and outdoors. Being already indoors, it didn't need doors and walls to keep out the weather. Instead, the red-and-white hypostyle arcades of the mosque gave directly onto the nave of the cathedral. It reminded me in that respect of the sort of open-air structure that you see a tropical climate.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Civic Center, Downtown Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Summary
The Temple Court Building and Annex consists of two connected structures on the designated Landmark Site. The nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) Temple Court Building was commissioned by Eugene Kelly, an Irish-American multi-millionaire-merchant-banker, and built in 1881-83 to the design of architects Silliman & Farnsworth. Executed in red Philadelphia brick, tan Dorchester stone, and terra cotta above a two-story granite base, the handsome vertically-expressed design employs Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs. Today, Temple Court is the earliest surviving, essentially unaltered, tall "fireproof" New York office building of the period prior to the full development of the skyscraper.
Furthermore, it is an early example of the use of brick and terra cotta for the exterior cladding of tall office buildings in the 1870s and 80s, as well as a rare surviving office building of its era constructed around a full-height interior skylighted atrium. Its two towers foreshadow the pyramidal form that later became popular for skyscrapers.
The Annex to the building, clad in Irish limestone on its principal, Nassau Street facade, was constructed for Kelly in 1889-90 to the design of James Farnsworth, in an arcaded Romanesque Revival style that complements the original building. Temple Court's significance is enhanced by its visibility as it rises above the low buildings of Park Row facing City Hall Park, its prominent towers, and its articulated facades on three sides.
Eugene Kelly
The Temple Court Building was commissioned by Eugene Kelly in 1881. Born in Ireland and apprenticed to a draper, Kelly (1808-1894) immigrated to New York City around 1835 to work as a clerk for Donnelly & Co., one of New York's foremost dry goods importers.
With the Donnelly s' assistance, he established a successful drygoods business on his own in Maysville, Ky., and later opened a branch of the Donnelly firm in St. Louis, Mo. Kelly had married Sarah Donnelly, sister of his former employer. After her death, he retired a wealthy man but, swept up in the "gold fever" of 1849, moved to San Francisco in 1850 and helped to found Donohoe, Murphy, Grant & Co., another drygoods firm.
In 1857 he married Margaret Hughes, niece of New York's first archbishop, John J. Hughes. By 1861 Kelly had also helped found two banking houses, Donohoe, Ralston & Co. (known as Donohoe, Kelly & Co. after 1864)4 in San Francisco, and Eugene Kelly & Co. in New York City, the latter the main focus of Kelly's professional attention upon his return to New York.
After the Civil War, Kelly invested in the reconstruction of Southern railroads and was a founder of the Southern Bank of Georgia, in Savannah. His various financial endeavors made him a multimillionaire, and Kelly served as a director of the Bank of New York, Emigrant Savings Bank, National Park Bank, Lloyd's, and Equitable Life Assurance Society. Active in Democratic and Irish-American politics, as well as numerous civic causes, he was chairman of the state's Electoral Committee (1884); member of the Board of Education for thirteen years; member of the Washington Arch and Statue of Liberty committees; trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; president of the National Federation of America; and treasurer of the Irish Parliamentary Fund.
He was also a major philanthropist of Catholic institutions, serving on the committee for the building of St. Patrick's Cathedral5 (begun by archbishop Hughes), and as a trustee of Seton Hall College, and a founder and trustee of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. After separating from his San Francisco firm in 1890, Kelly retired with an estate estimated at between ten and fifteen million dollars in 1892. Eugene Kelly & Co. was dissolved in 1894, several months prior to his death.
The Lady Chapel of St. Patrick's Cathedral (1901-06, Charles T. Matthews), constructed through a memorial donation of his wife and sons, contains the burial vault of Eugene Kelly and other members of the Kelly family.
The Architects
The firm of Silliman & Farnsworth, architects of the Temple Court Building, practiced from 1876 to 1882. James Mace Farnsworth (dates undetermined) apparently began his career around 1872 and worked as a draftsman with Calvert Vaux by 1873. Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1848-1901) was the third generation in his direct family line with the same name; his grandfather, considered "the most prominent and influential scientific man in America during the first half of the nineteenth century, " had been a professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale (1802-53), while his father was also a noted professor of chemistry at Yale.
Silliman, Jr., graduated from Yale University in 1870, studied architecture for three years in Charlottenburg [Berlin], Germany, and upon his return to the U.S. worked for the firm of Vaux, Withers & Co., where he met Farnsworth. Silliman & Farnsworth obtained a number of prominent office and institutional building commissions, for which they produced designs influenced by the Rundbogenstil and the neo-Grec and Queen Anne styles, most executed in red brick and terra cotta.
Their widely-praised Morse Building (1878-80), 140 Nassau Street, was an early tall "fireproof" office building (and the location of their office). The firm also designed the Vassar Brothers Laboratory (1879-80, demolished), Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., with a central tower capped by a pyramidal roof; the Orange Music Hall (1880, demolished), Orange, N.J.; a hospital (1880, demolished) at Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street; two commercial buildings at Nos. 19 and 21 East 17th Street (1881-82);8 and Temple Court (1881-83).
Farnsworth practiced independently from 1883 to 1897, producing numerous designs for commercial and office buildings and warehouses for prominent builder-developer John Pettit, including additions to the cast-iron Bennett Building9 in 1890-94. He was responsible for the Singer Building (1886), Pittsburgh, Pa. Farnsworth also designed the Temple Court Annex, built in 1889-90, and maintained his office in Temple Court in 1890-92. Associated with a number of other architects over the years, he worked with Charles E. Miller from 1897 to 1900, then with [J.A. Henry] Flemer & [V. Hugo] Koehler in 1900-01, and as part of Koehler & Farnsworth in 1907-10; he practiced alone until around 1923.
Little is known of Silliman's subsequent practice, though he remained listed in New York City directories until around 1900. He moved to Yonkers around 1883, and former colleague George
Martin Huss reminisced after Silliman's death that "I believe [he] built largely in Yonkers."
The Tall Office Building in New York City in the Early 1880s
During the nineteenth century, commercial buildings in New York City developed from four-story structures modeled on Italian Renaissance palazzi to much taller skyscrapers. Made possible by technological advances, tall buildings challenged designers to fashion an appropriate architectural expression. Between 1870 and 1890, nine- and ten-story buildings transformed the streetscapes of lower Manhattan between Bowling Green and City Hall.
During the building boom following the Civil War, building envelopes continued to be articulated largely according to traditional palazzo compositions, with mansarded and towered roof profiles. The period of the late 1870s and 1880s was one of stylistic experimentation in which commercial and office buildings in New York incorporated diverse influences, such as the Queen Anne, Victorian Gothic, Romanesque, and neo-Grec styles, French rationalism, and the German Rundbogenstil under the leadership of such architects as Richard M. Hunt and George B. Post. New York's tallest buildings — including the seven-and-one-half-story Equitable Life Assurance Co. Building (1868-70, Gilman & Kendall and George B. Post) at Broadway and Cedar Street, the ten-story Western Union Building (1872-75, George B. Post) at Broadway and Liberty Street, and the ten-story Tribune Building (1873-75, Richard M. Hunt), at 154 Nassau Street, all now demolished — incorporated passenger elevators, iron floor beams, and fireproof building materials.
Fireproofing was of paramount concern as office buildings grew taller, and by 1881-82 systems had been devised to "completely fireproof" them.
An additional consideration in office building design was to provide maximum light and ventilation, for which contemporary architects devised several solutions. While some tall buildings in New York had open interior light wells or courts, George B. Post is credited as one of the first architects to introduce and popularize major light courts that faced the street.
Another variant was the interior court or atrium covered by a skylight. The Temple Court Building utilized the successful design, construction, fireproofing, and planning techniques of these earlier buildings.
"Newspaper Row": Park Row and Nassau Street
The vicinity of Park Row, Nassau Street, and Printing House Square, roughly from the Brooklyn Bridge to Ann Street, was the center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1840s through the 1920s, while Beekman Street became the center of the downtown printing industry.
Beginning in the 1870s, this area was redeveloped with tall office buildings, most associated with the newspapers, and Park Row (with its advantageous frontage across from City Hall Park and the U.S. Post Office) and adjacent Nassau Street acquired a group of important late-nineteenth-cenrury structures: Tribune Building (1873-75, demoUshed); Morse Building (1878-80; 1900-02); Temple Court Building and Annex (1881-83; 1889-90); Potter Building (1883-86, N.G. Starkweather), 35-38 Park Row;15 New York Times Building (1888-89, George B. Post; 1904-05, Robert Maynicke), 40 Park Row; World (Pulitzer) Building (1889-90, George B. Post, demolished), 53-63 Park Row: American Tract Society Building (1894-95, R.H. Robertson), 150 Nassau Street; and Park Row Building (1896-99, R.H. Robertson), 15 Park Row.
Construction and Design of the Temple Court
In April 1881, Silliman & Farnsworth filed for the construction of a nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) office building for Eugene Kelly, to be located at the southwest corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets on the lot that Kelly had acquired in 1868 from the National Park Bank, of which he was a director.18 Both the New York Times and the Real Estate Record & Guide carried lengthy and detailed descriptions of the proposed $400,000 structure, to be known as the Kelly Building.
According to the Times, "it will be one of the finest in the lower part of the City" and was to be "constructed of granite to the third story, above which it will be Philadelphia brick, lad in red mortar, with Dorchester stone trimmings, and terra cotta panels between the windows."
Construction began in May under builder Richard Deeves; completion was originally anticipated on May 1, 1882, although a bricklayers strike in 1881 was undoubtedly one factor that contributed to a different outcome.
The Kelly Building was among the first of the major downtown office buildings to be erected after 1879, when recovery began from the financial Panic of 1873. Several notices in the Record & Guide during construction of the building indicated the shrewdness of Kelly's investment, as the nature of office buildings and the demand for space downtown changed. In December 1881 the weekly commented that the demand for offices is no longer confined to the neighborhood of the Stock, Mining, Cotton and Produce Exchanges. All the great industries which are represented in New York are using offices instead of stores, and these last are very profitable. Eugene Kelly paid $230,000for the lots on the corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. The building he erected is a very costly one, yet it is said it will net him a profit of 20 per cent, per annum.
This was followed in February 1882 by the statement that
in no part of the city has there been so great an increase in rents as in the great business centres, especially in the lower part of the island. . . The demand for well-located offices in Broad, Pine, Cedar, Wall and New streets, Exchange place and Broadway below Fulton street, is not only keeping pace, but fast outrunning the accommodations which have been provided, or which are nearing completion. Already many of the offices in the Marquand, Kelly, Mills, and Tribune structures are engaged, and at very fair figures.
An item in March 1882 indicated that a new name for the Kelly Building had been chosen: "Temple Court is the name of the splendid building just erected. . . by Mr. Eugene Kelly. Persons who wish offices in this splendid building should see Messrs. Ruland & Whiting. . . without delay, as the offices are being rented rapidly. The building is fire-proof, and has all the modern office improvements.1,24 And in May 1882 was the further comment that "the Tribune, Times, Morse buildings and Temple Court are nearer the law courts, and better for lawyers and public offices."
The Temple Court Building was completed in May 1883. Its design reflects the shift from the palazzo model for office buildings begun in the 1870s by Richard M. Hunt with the Tribune Building, among others. Temple Court was also one of the early tall office buildings that employed brick and terra-cotta cladding. The location on Beekman and Nassau Streets and Theatre Alley allows for three facades, each of which has a tripartite arrangement with end pavilions.
The vertically-expressed design is organized by continuous piers, and the building is arranged horizontally into a base, midsection, and upper section. Articulation of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets (and the corner return on Theatre Alley), employing Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs, is similar, the walls elaborated by ornamental stone capitals, cornices, bandcourses, corbelling, arches, and terra-cotta panels. (The remainder of the Theatre Alley facade below the roof is more simply articulated.) The building is capped by a two-story slate mansard roof with dormers and has two prominent corner towers with octagonal pinnacled roofs, intended "to obtain a striking and satisfactory effect making the building appear less high than it really is."
The towers foreshadow the pyramidal form that later came to dominate skyscrapers. Temple Court provides an interesting contrast with the slightly earlier Morse Building, by the same architects, and the slightly later Potter Building, all three executed in red brick and terra cotta, at the same intersection of streets.
As built, the interior of Temple Court featured an impressive polychrome atrium entered through the main entrance and adjoining entrance hall on Beekman Street; an open ironwork staircase surrounds the central of three elevators on the south side.
More than two hundred feet square, rising nine stories, and covered by a large pyramidal skylight, the atrium has galleries supported by elaborate ornamental iron brackets and lined with iron railings surrounding it on each floor. Gallery floors are laid in encaustic tiles and gallery ceilings are formed by unusual ornamental cast-iron plates. The building's 212 offices were arranged so that they opened onto both the atrium and the exterior.
An exterior light well to the south of the staircase provided further light to the interior. Construction of the building was considered "solidly fireproof," with iron floor beams, and exterior brick walls that varied in thickness from 52 inches in the foundations to 32 inches in the upper walls.
As with most prominent tall buildings of the late nineteenth century in New York, contemporary comment on Temple Court was mixed. While Cornelius Mathews of The Manhattan. An Illustrated Literary Magazine, an early tenant, thought the building "stalwart and sumptuous," the British publication The Building News found "its architecture is nondescript, and it is surmounted by two towers, like donkey's ears, on its northern side, which give it a very unfortunate appearance." (Critic Montgomery Schuyler, however, had praised the design, prior to construction, for "that animation in the sky line.")
King's Handbook in 1892 called it "one of the finest office-buildings in New York. . . an edifice that is creditable in architecture and pleasing in nomenclature. . . a modern building in every sense. . . the quaint towers of Temple Court, with their high pyramidal roofs, are unmistakable land-marks in the heart of New York, and point the way to the scenes of vast and momentous transactions in business and finance."
New York 1895. Illustrated considered Temple Court "the pioneer among the great office buildings and the beginning of the revolution in these structures," and American Architect & Building News in 1901 called it "a popular and profitable structure.
Today, the Temple Court Building is the earliest surviving (as well as one of the very few surviving), essentially unaltered, tall "fireproof New York office building of the mid-1870s to mid-1880s, the period prior to the full development of the skyscraper.35 Its significance is enhanced by the visibility of its location near City Hall Park, its prominent towers, and its three articulated facades. (For discussion of the Annex, see below.)
Temple Court. Brick, and Architectural Terra Cotta in New York City
The Temple Court Building is an early example of the use of brick and terra cotta for the exterior cladding of tall office buildings in the 1870s and 80s, a trend seen in such brick structures as the Boreel, Western Union, and Tribune Buildings/' As observed in 1881 by Montgomery Schuyler: the architects of the present generation found commercial New York an imitation of marble, either in cast-iron or in an actual veneer of white limestone. They are likely to leave it in brick. . . Whatever of interest has since been done in business buildings has been done in baked clay, more and more including the use of terra-cotta as well as of brick. The first of the noteworthy attempts to build in brick alone . . . was Messrs. Silliman and Farnsworth's Morse Building. . .
While there had been several attempts in the 1850s to employ architectural ornament of terra cotta in New York, it was after the Chicago and Boston fires of 1871 and 1872 that terra cotta began to be used as a significant interior and exterior building material in the United States. Walter Geer noted that "by these fires it was conclusively demonstrated that fire-proof buildings could not be made of unprotected stone or iron, and that only brick and terra-cotta walls were practically fire-proof.
This increased use of brick work, and of terra-cotta as a constructive and decorative material in connection with brick work, revived the demand for the manufacture of this material in or near New York."40 In the 1870s and early 1880s architectural terra cotta was often a color that matched stone (commonly brownstone, buff or red) that could be employed in pleasant juxtaposition with brick, or as a substitute for brownstone. The Record & Guide remarked that during this period "terra cotta is most generally used for the trimming and ornamentation of buildings, taking the form of panels, courses, friezes, small tiles, roofing tiles and paving blocks. "
George B. Post was the leader in New York City in the use of exterior terra cotta, in his designs for the Braem House (1878-80), Long Island Historical Society (1878-81), New York Produce Exchange (1881-84), and Mills Building (1881-83). Among the other contemporary architects who employed terra cotta were Kimball & Wisedell, designers of the Casino Theater (1881-82), an early New York building having highly intricate, exotic terra-cotta ornament, and Silliman & Farnsworth.
The Morse Building, with terra cotta by the Boston Terra Cotta Co., was then considered the first prominent New York office building to employ exterior terra cotta (though it was used sparingly for architectural details, in conjunction with molded red and black brick).
Temple Court was an early and significant building to employ exterior architectural terra cotta, and is today a rare surviving example of a tall New York office building of its era employing exterior brick and terra cotta.
The Skylighted_Atrium in Nineteenth-Century
The nineteenth-century interior court or atrium covered by a skylight, a form that evolved in the United States for a variety of building types, allowed for both natural lighting and an enclosed, usually grand and highly decorative, volume of space. Carl Condit, in American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century, discussed the American use of the "skylighted interior court, or arcade," which he traced first to the three-story Arcade Building (1827-28, James C. Bucklin & Russell Warren), Providence, R.I. The concept was later "adapted to iron construction in New York in the 1850s in the five-story uptown A.T. Stewart Store (1859-62, John Kellum, demolished), Broadway and 10th Street.
The skylighted atrium became a popular feature for arcades, hotels, libraries, exhibition halls, department stores, and office buildings, often in association with cast-iron framing and decoration. Two significant libraries that featured cast-iron galleries around skylighted courts were the four-story State Department Library (1871-75) in Alfred B. Mullett's State, War and Navy Building, Washington, and the seven-story Peabody Institute Library (1876-78, Edmund G. Lind), Baltimore.
The Shillito Store (1878, James W. McLaughlin; altered and court filled in), Cincinnati, had a six-story interior court, while the Model Hall (c. 1878-80, Adolf Cluss & Paul Schulze) of the U.S. Patent Office Building, Washington, consisted of a long two-story skylighted gallery, and the Pension Building (1882-85, Montgomery C. Meigs), Washington, was constructed around a colossal three-and-one-half-stoiy court. In New York City, the New York Produce Exchange (1881-84, George B. Post, demolished), 2 Broadway, and the downtown A.T.
Stewart Store (after its conversion to offices in 1883-84), among other buildings, had skylighted atriums that did not rise the full height of the structure (the courts were open above), a variant exemplified by the Rookery Building (1885-86, Burnham & Root), Chicago. Schuyler mentioned of the eight-story Boreel Building (1878-79, Stephen Decatur Hatch, demolished), 115 Broadway, its "interesting plan, which is a large glazed court upon which the inner offices open."
The use of the full-height interior skylighted atrium culminated in the late nineteenth century in such prominent office and commercial buildings as the ten-story Society for Savings Building (1887-90, Burnham & Root; atrium filled in), Cleveland: the thirteen-story Chamber of Commerce Building (1888-89, Edward Baumann & Harris W. Huehl, demolished), Chicago; the twelve-story Guaranty Loan Building (1888-90, Edward T. Mix, demolished), Minneapolis; the five-story Cleveland Arcade (1888-90, John M. Eisenmann & George H. Smith), Cleveland; the nine-story Brown Palace Hotel (1889-92, Frank E. Edbrooke), Denver; the twenty-story Masonic Temple Building (1890-92, Burnham & Root, demolished), Chicago; the eight-story court of the U.S. Post Office (1892-99, Willoughby J. Edbrooke), Washington; and the five-story Bradbury Building (1893, George H. Wyman), Los Angeles.
Temple Court is an early and rare surviving example of an office building of its era constructed around an interior skylighted atrium.
Construction of the Temple Court Annex
The success of the Temple Court Building led Eugene Kelly to plan an expansion. James Farnsworth filed in January 1889 for the construction of an Annex, on the adjacent lot to the south (at 119-121 Nassau Street) that Kelly had acquired in 1886. Expected to cost $150,000, the ten-story Annex was originally to be clad in granite, brick, and Dorchester stone, the materials of the original building.
An amendment, however, was filed by Farnsworth on March 1, "substituting a new design for front, to be constructed of 'Irish limestone' as per new plans and elevations" and resulting in an estimated cost of about $200,000.
In May, the Record & Guide clarified that "the front will be a limestone from Balinasloe, Ireland, and the design will have a tendency toward the Romanesque."
Construction by September 1889 was "nearly up to the top floor" and was considered by the Record & Guide "a remarkable example of quick work."
In February 1890, the Record & Guide noted that "the handsome addition to Temple Court. . . is now being rented in single rooms and suites for office purposes.. . The building is certainly one of the best of the down-town structures." Labor issues, threatening to delay completion, were satisfactorily resolved in the spring of 1890; after a strike was called on the Temple Court Annex due to the contractor's use of non-union masonry workers, Kelly strongly urged the contractor to come to terms with the union, and the building was completed by the target date of May 1.
King's Handbook in 1892 thought that the front (Nassau Street) Annex facade "presents an attractive and imposing appearance."
Running through the block from Nassau Street to Theatre Alley, the Temple Court Annex was framed with iron. The original Buildings Department application indicated that the front and rear walls were to be "carried on girders and columns." Plans were amended to include some plate girders, as well as the notation that "all iron construction will be fireproofed with terra cotta blocks, to make same entirely fireproof.
The Annex suffered a fire, of unknown origin, in April 1893 that destroyed offices on the top four floors. This fire was of great interest to those in construction, due to the fact that it was "the most serious fire which has ever occurred, so far as we recall, in a thoroughly fireproof office building," according to Engineering News, and that "there have been so few practical tests of the modern system of fireproof construction that there is much doubt and dispute as to the actual behavior of fireproofing materials when placed in actual use and subjected to the ordeal of a conflagration. "
The fire was also covered in a front-page article in the New York Times The structure of the Annex and most of the fireproofing remained intact; furthermore, the original building was not damaged.
Later History
Throughout its history, Temple Court has housed a wide variety of office and commercial tenants. Among the original tenants were Ruland & Whiting, real estate agents (established in 1867), the Nassau Bank, and The Manhattan. An Illustrated Literary Magazine. Other tenants have included lawyers, accountants, publishers, press agents, insurance and advertising agents, architects, business representatives, detectives, unions, organizations, and employment agencies.
The trustees of Eugene Kelly's estate in 1907 transferred the Temple Court Building and Annex (located on separate lots until 1961-62) to the Temple Court Co. (Thomas Hughes Kelly, president). Thomas H. Kelly (1865-1933), son of the original owner, was trained as a lawyer but concentrated on the management of the various properties he had inherited, as well as on official corporate and institutional duties.
He was considered "one of the most important lay dignitaries of the Catholic Church in the United States," according to the New York Times, serving as Papal Chamberlain for thirty years. Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which held the mortgage, took over the properties in 1942.
Conveyed in 1945 to the Wakefield Realty Corp., they were acquired by the Region Holding Corp. (Rubin Shulsky, president) in 1946. The properties were transferred in 1953 to the Larsan Holding Corp./Satmar Realty Corp., another Shulsky interest and still the current owners.
Description
TEMPLE COURT BUILDING (For description of the Annex, see below.)
The nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) building has facades on Beekman Street, Nassau Street, and Theatre Alley. Of fireproofed construction with iron floor beams, it was built around an interior skylighted atrium (now enclosed), with an additional exterior light well on the south side. It is clad in granite on the two-story base, and red Philadelphia brick (originally laid with red mortar), tan Dorchester stone trim, and terra-cotta panels on the upper stories.
Much of the building, other than pans of the Theatre Alley facade, has been painted. Articulation on the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets, as well as part of that on Theatre Alley, is similar, employing Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs and ornamental details. The design is arranged horizontally into a base, midsection, and upper section (with mansard roof and towers), and in addition, it has a tripartite arrangement with end pavilions on each facade.
The building is vertically expressed with continuous piers. Windows originally had one-over-one double-hung wood sash (some were double windows with a central mullion); most have been replaced by anodized aluminum windows with a variety of configurations.
Base
The two-story base is clad in granite, that on the piers rockfaced. Each story is capped by a cornice. Second-story windows in the center of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets are segmentally arched. All of the ground-story bays of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets (except the main entrance) have been converted to shopfronts over the years, and have been altered so that little historic fabric survives. Shopfronts are currently framed in metal, with rolldown gates.
Base: Beekman Street
The main entrance, located in the central bay, originally had polished red granite columns supporting an entablature bearing the name of the building, capped by an iron balustrade flanked by pinnacles; in 1949-50 the main entrance was altered with a polished marble surround, metal and glass doors, a transom, and the letters "5 Beekman." The bays flanking the entrance were originally windows; surviving below the cornice in each bay are a paneled band and decorative metal band.
The end pavilions were originally tripartite, having a central door flanked by columns and windows with bulkheads and transoms; they were later altered to single bays with a bulkhead, display window, door, and broad sign band (since altered). The easternmost storefront is still framed by original fluted stone pilasters with stylized floral capitals.
Base: Nassau Street
End pavilion bays were originally tripartite, divided by piers. These bays, as well as those of the central section, had paired windows with bulkheads and transoms (the south end undoubtedly had an entrance door to the elevator hall); these bays were later altered in a manner similar to the pavilion bays of the Beekman Street facade (since altered).
Surviving below the cornice in the south pavilion bay are a paneled band and decorative metal band.
Base: Theatre Alley
The northern section has articulation similar to that on Beekman Street. The ground and second stories of the center and southern sections are capped by stone bandcourses. The ground-story bays of these sections are divided by cast-iron piers and have transoms and ornamental iron bulkhead bands. All bays have been filled with cinderblock.
The second-story bays of the center and southern sections are divided by cast-iron piers. Midsection The brick midsection consists of the third through the sixth stories. Articulation on the principal facades (and north pavilion of Theatre Alley) is similar, with terra-cotta spandrel panels above the third, fourth, and fifth stories; bandcourses, and stone capitals with a stylized floral design on the piers, on the third, fourth, and fifth stories; windows capped by round arches (with decorative tympana) in the center sections of the fifth story; and a stone cornice capping the sixth story.
Most of the Theatre Alley facade is unadorned " Croton-faced" brick, with simple bluestone lintels and sills.
Upper Section
The upper section consists of the seventh through the tenth stories. The north section of the Theatre Alley facade has articulation similar to that on Beekman and Nassau Streets. The center portion of the two principal facades has paired windows with entablatures on the seventh story (the Theatre Alley facade is capped by a corbelled cornice on the seventh story), surmounted by, on each of the three facades, a two-story slate mansard roof with pedimented dormers (the upper dormers on Nassau Street, all dormers on
Theatre Alley, and the flanking dormers on Beekman Street, are iron). The sections of roof on Beekman and Nassau Streets appear covered with asphalt.
The end pavilions have bandcourses and terra-cotta spandrel panels above the seventh and eighth stories; round-arched windows, a subcornice, and cornice on the ninth story; a central pedimented window, and cornice with flared corner projections, on the tenth story of the northern pavilions; and a pediment on the tenth story of the southern pavilions (with a rondel on Nassau Street and corbelling on Theatre Alley).
Roof
Surviving decorative iron railings cap the mansard roof of the center section of each facade. Two prominent corner towers above the Beekman Street pavilions have octagonal pinnacled roofs, covered with slate and capped by metal finials. The corners of the pavilions are ornamented with pinnacles, and the inner side of each pavilion (except Theatre Alley) is flanked by a chimney.
The southern pavilions have gable roofs. The center portion of the building is covered by a large pyramidal skylight with a monitor.
- From the 1998 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
German postcard by Kolibri-Verlag G.m.b.H., no. 1983. Photo: Warner Bros.
American actor James Dean (1931-1955) was the quintessential 1950s teenager, brooding and romantic. An air of androgyny attributed to his iconic appeal to both men and women. The three roles that defined his stardom are as troubled teenager Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), loner Cal Trask in East of Eden (1955) and surly ranch hand Jett Rink in Giant (1956). After his death in a car crash, the only 24-yers-old Dean became the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.
James Byron Dean was born in 1931, in Marion, Indiana, the only child of Winton Dean and Mildred Marie Wilson. Six years after his father had left farming to become a dental technician, Dean and his family moved to Santa Monica, California. In 1938, his mother was suddenly struck with acute stomach pain and quickly began to lose weight. She died of uterine cancer when Dean was nine years old. Unable to care for his son, Dean's father sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow, on their farm in Fairmount, Indiana, where he was raised in their Quaker household. Dean's overall performance in school was exceptional and he was a popular student. He played on the baseball and varsity basketball teams, studied drama, and competed in public speaking through the Indiana High School Forensic Association. After graduating from Fairmount High School in May 1949, he moved back to California with his dog, Max, to live with his father and stepmother. He enrolled in Santa Monica College (SMC) and majored in pre-law. He transferred to UCLA for one semester and changed his major to drama, which resulted in estrangement from his father. While at UCLA, Dean was picked from a group of 350 actors to portray Malcolm in Macbeth. At that time, he also began acting in James Whitmore's workshop. In January 1951, he dropped out of UCLA to pursue a full-time career as an actor. Dean's first television appearance was in a Pepsi Cola commercial His first speaking part was as John the Beloved Disciple, in Hill Number One (1951), an Easter television special dramatizing the Resurrection of Jesus. Dean subsequently obtained three walk-on roles in films: as a soldier in Samuel Fuller’s moody study of a platoon in the Korean War, Fixed Bayonets! (Samuel Fuller, 1951), a boxing cornerman in the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedy Sailor Beware (Hal Walker, 1952), and a youth in the comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (Douglas Sirk, 1952) with Rock Hudson. While struggling to get jobs in Hollywood, Dean also worked as a parking lot attendant at CBS Studios, during which time he met Rogers Brackett, a radio director for an advertising agency, who offered him professional help and guidance in his chosen career, as well as a place to stay. In July 1951, Dean appeared on Alias Jane Doe, which was produced by Brackett. In October 1951, Dean moved to New York City. There, he worked as a stunt tester for the game show Beat the Clock, but was subsequently fired for allegedly performing the tasks too quickly. He also appeared in episodes of several CBS television series The Web, Studio One, and Lux Video Theatre, before gaining admission to the Actors Studio to study method acting under Lee Strasberg. There, he was classmates and close friends with Carroll Baker, alongside whom he would eventually star in Giant (George Stevens, 1956). Dean's career picked up and he performed in further episodes of several early 1950s television. One early role, for the CBS series Omnibus in the episode Glory in the Flower (1953), saw Dean portraying the type of disaffected youth he would later portray in Rebel Without a Cause. Positive reviews for Dean's 1954 theatrical role as Bachir, the blackmailing Arab house boy, in an adaptation of André Gide's book The Immoralist, led to calls from Hollywood.
In 1954, James Dean was cast in the emotionally complex role of 'Cal Trask' in East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), an adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1952 novel East of Eden. The lengthy novel deals with the story of the Trask and Hamilton families over the course of three generations, focusing especially on the lives of the latter two generations in Salinas Valley, California, from the mid-19th century through the 1910s. In contrast to the book, the film script focused on the last portion of the story, predominantly with the character of Cal. Though he initially seems more aloof and emotionally troubled than his twin brother Aron (Richard Davalos), Cal is soon seen to be more worldly, business savvy, and even sagacious than their pious and constantly disapproving father (Raymond Massey) who seeks to invent a vegetable refrigeration process. Cal is bothered by the mystery of their supposedly dead mother, and discovers she is still alive and a brothel-keeping 'madam'; the part was played by actress Jo Van Fleet. Much of Dean's performance in the film was unscripted, including his dance in the bean field and his fetal-like posturing while riding on top of a train boxcar (after searching out his mother in nearby Monterey). The most famous improvisation of the film occurs when Cal's father rejects his gift of $5,000, money Cal earned by speculating in beans before the US became involved in World War I. Instead of running away from his father as the script called for, Dean instinctively turned to Massey and in a gesture of extreme emotion, lunged forward and grabbed him in a full embrace, crying. Kazan kept this and Massey's shocked reaction in the film. Wikipedia: “Dean's performance in the film foreshadowed his role as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause. Both characters are angst-ridden protagonists and misunderstood outcasts, desperately craving approval from their fathers.” In recognition of his performance in East of Eden, Dean was nominated posthumously for the 1956 Academy Awards as Best Actor in a Leading Role of 1955, the first official posthumous acting nomination in Academy Awards history. East of Eden was the only film starring Dean that he would see released in his lifetime.
James Dean quickly followed up his role in Eden with a starring role as the brooding red-jacketed teenager Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) with Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood. The film depicts the dilemma of a typical teenager of the time, who feels that no one, not even his peers, can understand him. The film scrupulously follows the classic theatrical disciplines, telling all within a 24-hour period. Jim Stark was Dean’s true starring role, and Rebel Without a Cause proved to be hugely popular among teenagers. The landmark juvenile-delinquent drama fixed James Dean’s image forever in American culture. In his next film, Giant (George Stevens, 1956), Dean played a supporting role to Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. This was due to his desire to avoid being typecast as a rebellious teenager like Cal Trask or Jim Stark. In the film, he plays Jett Rink, a Texan ranch hand who strikes oil and becomes wealthy. His role was notable in that, in order to portray an older version of his character in the film's later scenes, Dean dyed his hair gray and shaved some of it off to give himself a receding hairline. Giant would prove to be Dean's last film. At the end of the film, Dean was supposed to make a drunken speech at a banquet; this is nicknamed the 'Last Supper' because it was the last scene before his sudden death. Due to his desire to make the scene more realistic by actually being inebriated for the take, Dean mumbled so much that director George Stevens decided the scene had to be overdubbed by Nick Adams, who had a small role in the film, because Dean had died before the film was edited. Dean received his second posthumous Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his role in Giant at the 29th Academy Awards in 1957 for films released in 1956.
Today, James Dean is often considered an icon because of his perceived experimental take on life, which included his ambivalent sexuality. Most of his so-called affairs with various starlets were made up by the Warner Brothers public relations. Dean's best-remembered relationship was with young Italian actress Pier Angeli, whom he met while Angeli was shooting The Silver Chalice (1955) on an adjoining Warner lot, and with whom he exchanged items of jewelry as love tokens. Angeli's mother disapproved of Dean. After finishing his role for East of Eden, he took a brief trip to New York in October 1954. While he was away, Angeli unexpectedly announced her engagement to Italian-American singer Vic Damone. The press was shocked and Dean expressed his irritation. Angeli married Damone the following month. Dean also dated Swiss actress Ursula Andress. She was seen with Dean in his sports cars, and was with him on the day he bought the car that he died in. The Gay Times Readers' Awards cited him as the greatest male gay icon of all time. Dean’s ambiguous relationship with Sal Mineo in the angst-ridden Rebel Without A Cause has led many to speculate and view this golden age film as years ahead of its time. When questioned about his sexual orientation, Dean is reported to have said, "No, I am not a homosexual. But I'm also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back." Dean, with time on his side during down times of filming, often frequented gay bars in mornings, afternoons and evenings in both Hollywood, Studio City and North Hollywood. He and screenwriter and theatre student from UCLA, William Bast lived together as roommates for a number of years. Bast later became Dean's first biographer and told he and Dean ‘experimented’ sexually. Journalist Joe Hyams suggests that any gay activity Dean might have been involved in appears to have been strictly "for trade", as a means of advancing his career. However, the ‘trade only’ notion is contradicted by Bast and other Dean biographers. Biographer Val Holley: “There's been quite an evolution in the thinking since Dean's death in 1955, moving from ‘James Dean was straight’ to ‘Dean had sex with men but only to advance his career’ to ‘Dean had sex with women but only to advance his career.’ In 2016, a new gossipy biography was published, James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes, by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince. The authors claim Dean was in love with Marlon Brando and the two would had a long affair with S&M overtones. We may never know for certain if Dean identified as gay, straight, bisexual, but, regardless, what he’s come to represent still resonates with many LGBT audiences.
In 1954, James Dean had become interested in developing an auto racing career. He purchased various vehicles after filming for East of Eden had concluded, including a Triumph Tiger T110 and a Porsche 356. Just before filming began on Rebel Without a Cause, he competed in his first professional event at the Palm Springs Road Races, which was held in Palm Springs, California on March 26–27, 1955. Dean achieved first place in the novice class, and second place at the main event. His racing continued in Bakersfield a month later, where he finished first in his class and third overall. Dean hoped to compete in the Indianapolis 500, but his busy schedule made it impossible. Dean's final race occurred in Santa Barbara on Memorial Day, 30 May 1955. He was unable to finish the competition due to a blown piston. His brief career was put on hold when Warner Brothers barred him from all racing during the production of Giant. Dean had finished shooting his scenes and the movie was in post-production when he decided to race again. Dean was scheduled to compete at a racing event in Salinas, California on 30 September 1955. Accompanying the actor to the occasion was stunt coordinator Bill Hickman, Collier's photographer Sanford Roth, and Rolf Wütherich, the German mechanic from the Porsche factory who maintained Dean's Porsche 550 Spyder "Little Bastard" car. Wütherich, who had encouraged Dean to drive the car from Los Angeles to Salinas to break it in, accompanied Dean in the Porsche. At 3:30 p.m. Dean was ticketed for speeding, as was Hickman who was following behind in another car. As the group traveled to the event via U.S. Route 466, (currently SR 46) at approximately 5:15 p.m. a 1950 Ford Tudor was passing through an intersection while turning, ahead of the Porsche. Dean, unable to stop in time, slammed into the driver's side of the Ford resulting in Dean's car bouncing across the pavement onto the side of the highway. Dean's passenger, Wütherich, was thrown from the Porsche, while Dean was trapped in the car and sustained numerous fatal injuries, including a broken neck. The driver of the Ford, Donald Turnupseed, exited his damaged vehicle with minor injuries. Dean was pronounced dead on arrival shortly after he arrived by ambulance at the Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital at 6:20 p.m. The Failure Analysis Associates later reconstructed and recreated all details of the accident and have concluded that James Dean was travelling 55 to 56 mph when the fateful accident occurred, thereby proving he had not been speeding, as rumor had it. Ed Stephan at IMDb: “At age 24, James Dean was killed almost immediately from the impact from a broken neck. His very brief career, violent death and highly publicized funeral transformed him into a cult object of apparently timeless fascination.”
Sources: Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Ed Stephan (IMDb), Daniel Bates (Daily Mail), Towleroad, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Civic Center, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Summary
The Temple Court Building and Annex consists of two connected structures on the designated Landmark Site. The nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) Temple Court Building was commissioned by Eugene Kelly, an Irish-American multi-millionaire-merchant-banker, and built in 1881-83 to the design of architects Silliman & Farnsworth. Executed in red Philadelphia brick, tan Dorchester stone, and terra cotta above a two-story granite base, the handsome vertically-expressed design employs Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs. Today, Temple Court is the earliest surviving, essentially unaltered, tall "fireproof" New York office building of the period prior to the full development of the skyscraper.
Furthermore, it is an early example of the use of brick and terra cotta for the exterior cladding of tall office buildings in the 1870s and 80s, as well as a rare surviving office building of its era constructed around a full-height interior skylighted atrium. Its two towers foreshadow the pyramidal form that later became popular for skyscrapers.
The Annex to the building, clad in Irish limestone on its principal, Nassau Street facade, was constructed for Kelly in 1889-90 to the design of James Farnsworth, in an arcaded Romanesque Revival style that complements the original building. Temple Court's significance is enhanced by its visibility as it rises above the low buildings of Park Row facing City Hall Park, its prominent towers, and its articulated facades on three sides.
Eugene Kelly
The Temple Court Building was commissioned by Eugene Kelly in 1881. Born in Ireland and apprenticed to a draper, Kelly (1808-1894) immigrated to New York City around 1835 to work as a clerk for Donnelly & Co., one of New York's foremost dry goods importers.
With the Donnelly s' assistance, he established a successful drygoods business on his own in Maysville, Ky., and later opened a branch of the Donnelly firm in St. Louis, Mo. Kelly had married Sarah Donnelly, sister of his former employer. After her death, he retired a wealthy man but, swept up in the "gold fever" of 1849, moved to San Francisco in 1850 and helped to found Donohoe, Murphy, Grant & Co., another drygoods firm.
In 1857 he married Margaret Hughes, niece of New York's first archbishop, John J. Hughes. By 1861 Kelly had also helped found two banking houses, Donohoe, Ralston & Co. (known as Donohoe, Kelly & Co. after 1864)4 in San Francisco, and Eugene Kelly & Co. in New York City, the latter the main focus of Kelly's professional attention upon his return to New York.
After the Civil War, Kelly invested in the reconstruction of Southern railroads and was a founder of the Southern Bank of Georgia, in Savannah. His various financial endeavors made him a multimillionaire, and Kelly served as a director of the Bank of New York, Emigrant Savings Bank, National Park Bank, Lloyd's, and Equitable Life Assurance Society. Active in Democratic and Irish-American politics, as well as numerous civic causes, he was chairman of the state's Electoral Committee (1884); member of the Board of Education for thirteen years; member of the Washington Arch and Statue of Liberty committees; trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; president of the National Federation of America; and treasurer of the Irish Parliamentary Fund.
He was also a major philanthropist of Catholic institutions, serving on the committee for the building of St. Patrick's Cathedral5 (begun by archbishop Hughes), and as a trustee of Seton Hall College, and a founder and trustee of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. After separating from his San Francisco firm in 1890, Kelly retired with an estate estimated at between ten and fifteen million dollars in 1892. Eugene Kelly & Co. was dissolved in 1894, several months prior to his death.
The Lady Chapel of St. Patrick's Cathedral (1901-06, Charles T. Matthews), constructed through a memorial donation of his wife and sons, contains the burial vault of Eugene Kelly and other members of the Kelly family.
The Architects
The firm of Silliman & Farnsworth, architects of the Temple Court Building, practiced from 1876 to 1882. James Mace Farnsworth (dates undetermined) apparently began his career around 1872 and worked as a draftsman with Calvert Vaux by 1873. Benjamin Silliman, Jr. (1848-1901) was the third generation in his direct family line with the same name; his grandfather, considered "the most prominent and influential scientific man in America during the first half of the nineteenth century, " had been a professor of chemistry and natural history at Yale (1802-53), while his father was also a noted professor of chemistry at Yale.
Silliman, Jr., graduated from Yale University in 1870, studied architecture for three years in Charlottenburg [Berlin], Germany, and upon his return to the U.S. worked for the firm of Vaux, Withers & Co., where he met Farnsworth. Silliman & Farnsworth obtained a number of prominent office and institutional building commissions, for which they produced designs influenced by the Rundbogenstil and the neo-Grec and Queen Anne styles, most executed in red brick and terra cotta.
Their widely-praised Morse Building (1878-80), 140 Nassau Street, was an early tall "fireproof" office building (and the location of their office). The firm also designed the Vassar Brothers Laboratory (1879-80, demolished), Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N.Y., with a central tower capped by a pyramidal roof; the Orange Music Hall (1880, demolished), Orange, N.J.; a hospital (1880, demolished) at Lexington Avenue and East 52nd Street; two commercial buildings at Nos. 19 and 21 East 17th Street (1881-82);8 and Temple Court (1881-83).
Farnsworth practiced independently from 1883 to 1897, producing numerous designs for commercial and office buildings and warehouses for prominent builder-developer John Pettit, including additions to the cast-iron Bennett Building9 in 1890-94. He was responsible for the Singer Building (1886), Pittsburgh, Pa. Farnsworth also designed the Temple Court Annex, built in 1889-90, and maintained his office in Temple Court in 1890-92. Associated with a number of other architects over the years, he worked with Charles E. Miller from 1897 to 1900, then with [J.A. Henry] Flemer & [V. Hugo] Koehler in 1900-01, and as part of Koehler & Farnsworth in 1907-10; he practiced alone until around 1923.
Little is known of Silliman's subsequent practice, though he remained listed in New York City directories until around 1900. He moved to Yonkers around 1883, and former colleague George
Martin Huss reminisced after Silliman's death that "I believe [he] built largely in Yonkers."
The Tall Office Building in New York City in the Early 1880s
During the nineteenth century, commercial buildings in New York City developed from four-story structures modeled on Italian Renaissance palazzi to much taller skyscrapers. Made possible by technological advances, tall buildings challenged designers to fashion an appropriate architectural expression. Between 1870 and 1890, nine- and ten-story buildings transformed the streetscapes of lower Manhattan between Bowling Green and City Hall.
During the building boom following the Civil War, building envelopes continued to be articulated largely according to traditional palazzo compositions, with mansarded and towered roof profiles. The period of the late 1870s and 1880s was one of stylistic experimentation in which commercial and office buildings in New York incorporated diverse influences, such as the Queen Anne, Victorian Gothic, Romanesque, and neo-Grec styles, French rationalism, and the German Rundbogenstil under the leadership of such architects as Richard M. Hunt and George B. Post. New York's tallest buildings — including the seven-and-one-half-story Equitable Life Assurance Co. Building (1868-70, Gilman & Kendall and George B. Post) at Broadway and Cedar Street, the ten-story Western Union Building (1872-75, George B. Post) at Broadway and Liberty Street, and the ten-story Tribune Building (1873-75, Richard M. Hunt), at 154 Nassau Street, all now demolished — incorporated passenger elevators, iron floor beams, and fireproof building materials.
Fireproofing was of paramount concern as office buildings grew taller, and by 1881-82 systems had been devised to "completely fireproof" them.
An additional consideration in office building design was to provide maximum light and ventilation, for which contemporary architects devised several solutions. While some tall buildings in New York had open interior light wells or courts, George B. Post is credited as one of the first architects to introduce and popularize major light courts that faced the street.
Another variant was the interior court or atrium covered by a skylight. The Temple Court Building utilized the successful design, construction, fireproofing, and planning techniques of these earlier buildings.
"Newspaper Row": Park Row and Nassau Street
The vicinity of Park Row, Nassau Street, and Printing House Square, roughly from the Brooklyn Bridge to Ann Street, was the center of newspaper publishing in New York City from the 1840s through the 1920s, while Beekman Street became the center of the downtown printing industry.
Beginning in the 1870s, this area was redeveloped with tall office buildings, most associated with the newspapers, and Park Row (with its advantageous frontage across from City Hall Park and the U.S. Post Office) and adjacent Nassau Street acquired a group of important late-nineteenth-cenrury structures: Tribune Building (1873-75, demoUshed); Morse Building (1878-80; 1900-02); Temple Court Building and Annex (1881-83; 1889-90); Potter Building (1883-86, N.G. Starkweather), 35-38 Park Row;15 New York Times Building (1888-89, George B. Post; 1904-05, Robert Maynicke), 40 Park Row; World (Pulitzer) Building (1889-90, George B. Post, demolished), 53-63 Park Row: American Tract Society Building (1894-95, R.H. Robertson), 150 Nassau Street; and Park Row Building (1896-99, R.H. Robertson), 15 Park Row.
Construction and Design of the Temple Court
In April 1881, Silliman & Farnsworth filed for the construction of a nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) office building for Eugene Kelly, to be located at the southwest corner of Beekman and Nassau Streets on the lot that Kelly had acquired in 1868 from the National Park Bank, of which he was a director.18 Both the New York Times and the Real Estate Record & Guide carried lengthy and detailed descriptions of the proposed $400,000 structure, to be known as the Kelly Building.
According to the Times, "it will be one of the finest in the lower part of the City" and was to be "constructed of granite to the third story, above which it will be Philadelphia brick, lad in red mortar, with Dorchester stone trimmings, and terra cotta panels between the windows."
Construction began in May under builder Richard Deeves; completion was originally anticipated on May 1, 1882, although a bricklayers strike in 1881 was undoubtedly one factor that contributed to a different outcome.
The Kelly Building was among the first of the major downtown office buildings to be erected after 1879, when recovery began from the financial Panic of 1873. Several notices in the Record & Guide during construction of the building indicated the shrewdness of Kelly's investment, as the nature of office buildings and the demand for space downtown changed. In December 1881 the weekly commented that the demand for offices is no longer confined to the neighborhood of the Stock, Mining, Cotton and Produce Exchanges. All the great industries which are represented in New York are using offices instead of stores, and these last are very profitable. Eugene Kelly paid $230,000for the lots on the corner of Nassau and Beekman streets. The building he erected is a very costly one, yet it is said it will net him a profit of 20 per cent, per annum.
This was followed in February 1882 by the statement that
in no part of the city has there been so great an increase in rents as in the great business centres, especially in the lower part of the island. . . The demand for well-located offices in Broad, Pine, Cedar, Wall and New streets, Exchange place and Broadway below Fulton street, is not only keeping pace, but fast outrunning the accommodations which have been provided, or which are nearing completion. Already many of the offices in the Marquand, Kelly, Mills, and Tribune structures are engaged, and at very fair figures.
An item in March 1882 indicated that a new name for the Kelly Building had been chosen: "Temple Court is the name of the splendid building just erected. . . by Mr. Eugene Kelly. Persons who wish offices in this splendid building should see Messrs. Ruland & Whiting. . . without delay, as the offices are being rented rapidly. The building is fire-proof, and has all the modern office improvements.1,24 And in May 1882 was the further comment that "the Tribune, Times, Morse buildings and Temple Court are nearer the law courts, and better for lawyers and public offices."
The Temple Court Building was completed in May 1883. Its design reflects the shift from the palazzo model for office buildings begun in the 1870s by Richard M. Hunt with the Tribune Building, among others. Temple Court was also one of the early tall office buildings that employed brick and terra-cotta cladding. The location on Beekman and Nassau Streets and Theatre Alley allows for three facades, each of which has a tripartite arrangement with end pavilions.
The vertically-expressed design is organized by continuous piers, and the building is arranged horizontally into a base, midsection, and upper section. Articulation of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets (and the corner return on Theatre Alley), employing Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs, is similar, the walls elaborated by ornamental stone capitals, cornices, bandcourses, corbelling, arches, and terra-cotta panels. (The remainder of the Theatre Alley facade below the roof is more simply articulated.) The building is capped by a two-story slate mansard roof with dormers and has two prominent corner towers with octagonal pinnacled roofs, intended "to obtain a striking and satisfactory effect making the building appear less high than it really is."
The towers foreshadow the pyramidal form that later came to dominate skyscrapers. Temple Court provides an interesting contrast with the slightly earlier Morse Building, by the same architects, and the slightly later Potter Building, all three executed in red brick and terra cotta, at the same intersection of streets.
As built, the interior of Temple Court featured an impressive polychrome atrium entered through the main entrance and adjoining entrance hall on Beekman Street; an open ironwork staircase surrounds the central of three elevators on the south side.
More than two hundred feet square, rising nine stories, and covered by a large pyramidal skylight, the atrium has galleries supported by elaborate ornamental iron brackets and lined with iron railings surrounding it on each floor. Gallery floors are laid in encaustic tiles and gallery ceilings are formed by unusual ornamental cast-iron plates. The building's 212 offices were arranged so that they opened onto both the atrium and the exterior.
An exterior light well to the south of the staircase provided further light to the interior. Construction of the building was considered "solidly fireproof," with iron floor beams, and exterior brick walls that varied in thickness from 52 inches in the foundations to 32 inches in the upper walls.
As with most prominent tall buildings of the late nineteenth century in New York, contemporary comment on Temple Court was mixed. While Cornelius Mathews of The Manhattan. An Illustrated Literary Magazine, an early tenant, thought the building "stalwart and sumptuous," the British publication The Building News found "its architecture is nondescript, and it is surmounted by two towers, like donkey's ears, on its northern side, which give it a very unfortunate appearance." (Critic Montgomery Schuyler, however, had praised the design, prior to construction, for "that animation in the sky line.")
King's Handbook in 1892 called it "one of the finest office-buildings in New York. . . an edifice that is creditable in architecture and pleasing in nomenclature. . . a modern building in every sense. . . the quaint towers of Temple Court, with their high pyramidal roofs, are unmistakable land-marks in the heart of New York, and point the way to the scenes of vast and momentous transactions in business and finance."
New York 1895. Illustrated considered Temple Court "the pioneer among the great office buildings and the beginning of the revolution in these structures," and American Architect & Building News in 1901 called it "a popular and profitable structure.
Today, the Temple Court Building is the earliest surviving (as well as one of the very few surviving), essentially unaltered, tall "fireproof New York office building of the mid-1870s to mid-1880s, the period prior to the full development of the skyscraper.35 Its significance is enhanced by the visibility of its location near City Hall Park, its prominent towers, and its three articulated facades. (For discussion of the Annex, see below.)
Temple Court. Brick, and Architectural Terra Cotta in New York City
The Temple Court Building is an early example of the use of brick and terra cotta for the exterior cladding of tall office buildings in the 1870s and 80s, a trend seen in such brick structures as the Boreel, Western Union, and Tribune Buildings/' As observed in 1881 by Montgomery Schuyler: the architects of the present generation found commercial New York an imitation of marble, either in cast-iron or in an actual veneer of white limestone. They are likely to leave it in brick. . . Whatever of interest has since been done in business buildings has been done in baked clay, more and more including the use of terra-cotta as well as of brick. The first of the noteworthy attempts to build in brick alone . . . was Messrs. Silliman and Farnsworth's Morse Building. . .
While there had been several attempts in the 1850s to employ architectural ornament of terra cotta in New York, it was after the Chicago and Boston fires of 1871 and 1872 that terra cotta began to be used as a significant interior and exterior building material in the United States. Walter Geer noted that "by these fires it was conclusively demonstrated that fire-proof buildings could not be made of unprotected stone or iron, and that only brick and terra-cotta walls were practically fire-proof.
This increased use of brick work, and of terra-cotta as a constructive and decorative material in connection with brick work, revived the demand for the manufacture of this material in or near New York."40 In the 1870s and early 1880s architectural terra cotta was often a color that matched stone (commonly brownstone, buff or red) that could be employed in pleasant juxtaposition with brick, or as a substitute for brownstone. The Record & Guide remarked that during this period "terra cotta is most generally used for the trimming and ornamentation of buildings, taking the form of panels, courses, friezes, small tiles, roofing tiles and paving blocks. "
George B. Post was the leader in New York City in the use of exterior terra cotta, in his designs for the Braem House (1878-80), Long Island Historical Society (1878-81), New York Produce Exchange (1881-84), and Mills Building (1881-83). Among the other contemporary architects who employed terra cotta were Kimball & Wisedell, designers of the Casino Theater (1881-82), an early New York building having highly intricate, exotic terra-cotta ornament, and Silliman & Farnsworth.
The Morse Building, with terra cotta by the Boston Terra Cotta Co., was then considered the first prominent New York office building to employ exterior terra cotta (though it was used sparingly for architectural details, in conjunction with molded red and black brick).
Temple Court was an early and significant building to employ exterior architectural terra cotta, and is today a rare surviving example of a tall New York office building of its era employing exterior brick and terra cotta.
The Skylighted_Atrium in Nineteenth-Century
The nineteenth-century interior court or atrium covered by a skylight, a form that evolved in the United States for a variety of building types, allowed for both natural lighting and an enclosed, usually grand and highly decorative, volume of space. Carl Condit, in American Building Art: The Nineteenth Century, discussed the American use of the "skylighted interior court, or arcade," which he traced first to the three-story Arcade Building (1827-28, James C. Bucklin & Russell Warren), Providence, R.I. The concept was later "adapted to iron construction in New York in the 1850s in the five-story uptown A.T. Stewart Store (1859-62, John Kellum, demolished), Broadway and 10th Street.
The skylighted atrium became a popular feature for arcades, hotels, libraries, exhibition halls, department stores, and office buildings, often in association with cast-iron framing and decoration. Two significant libraries that featured cast-iron galleries around skylighted courts were the four-story State Department Library (1871-75) in Alfred B. Mullett's State, War and Navy Building, Washington, and the seven-story Peabody Institute Library (1876-78, Edmund G. Lind), Baltimore.
The Shillito Store (1878, James W. McLaughlin; altered and court filled in), Cincinnati, had a six-story interior court, while the Model Hall (c. 1878-80, Adolf Cluss & Paul Schulze) of the U.S. Patent Office Building, Washington, consisted of a long two-story skylighted gallery, and the Pension Building (1882-85, Montgomery C. Meigs), Washington, was constructed around a colossal three-and-one-half-stoiy court. In New York City, the New York Produce Exchange (1881-84, George B. Post, demolished), 2 Broadway, and the downtown A.T.
Stewart Store (after its conversion to offices in 1883-84), among other buildings, had skylighted atriums that did not rise the full height of the structure (the courts were open above), a variant exemplified by the Rookery Building (1885-86, Burnham & Root), Chicago. Schuyler mentioned of the eight-story Boreel Building (1878-79, Stephen Decatur Hatch, demolished), 115 Broadway, its "interesting plan, which is a large glazed court upon which the inner offices open."
The use of the full-height interior skylighted atrium culminated in the late nineteenth century in such prominent office and commercial buildings as the ten-story Society for Savings Building (1887-90, Burnham & Root; atrium filled in), Cleveland: the thirteen-story Chamber of Commerce Building (1888-89, Edward Baumann & Harris W. Huehl, demolished), Chicago; the twelve-story Guaranty Loan Building (1888-90, Edward T. Mix, demolished), Minneapolis; the five-story Cleveland Arcade (1888-90, John M. Eisenmann & George H. Smith), Cleveland; the nine-story Brown Palace Hotel (1889-92, Frank E. Edbrooke), Denver; the twenty-story Masonic Temple Building (1890-92, Burnham & Root, demolished), Chicago; the eight-story court of the U.S. Post Office (1892-99, Willoughby J. Edbrooke), Washington; and the five-story Bradbury Building (1893, George H. Wyman), Los Angeles.
Temple Court is an early and rare surviving example of an office building of its era constructed around an interior skylighted atrium.
Construction of the Temple Court Annex
The success of the Temple Court Building led Eugene Kelly to plan an expansion. James Farnsworth filed in January 1889 for the construction of an Annex, on the adjacent lot to the south (at 119-121 Nassau Street) that Kelly had acquired in 1886. Expected to cost $150,000, the ten-story Annex was originally to be clad in granite, brick, and Dorchester stone, the materials of the original building.
An amendment, however, was filed by Farnsworth on March 1, "substituting a new design for front, to be constructed of 'Irish limestone' as per new plans and elevations" and resulting in an estimated cost of about $200,000.
In May, the Record & Guide clarified that "the front will be a limestone from Balinasloe, Ireland, and the design will have a tendency toward the Romanesque."
Construction by September 1889 was "nearly up to the top floor" and was considered by the Record & Guide "a remarkable example of quick work."
In February 1890, the Record & Guide noted that "the handsome addition to Temple Court. . . is now being rented in single rooms and suites for office purposes.. . The building is certainly one of the best of the down-town structures." Labor issues, threatening to delay completion, were satisfactorily resolved in the spring of 1890; after a strike was called on the Temple Court Annex due to the contractor's use of non-union masonry workers, Kelly strongly urged the contractor to come to terms with the union, and the building was completed by the target date of May 1.
King's Handbook in 1892 thought that the front (Nassau Street) Annex facade "presents an attractive and imposing appearance."
Running through the block from Nassau Street to Theatre Alley, the Temple Court Annex was framed with iron. The original Buildings Department application indicated that the front and rear walls were to be "carried on girders and columns." Plans were amended to include some plate girders, as well as the notation that "all iron construction will be fireproofed with terra cotta blocks, to make same entirely fireproof.
The Annex suffered a fire, of unknown origin, in April 1893 that destroyed offices on the top four floors. This fire was of great interest to those in construction, due to the fact that it was "the most serious fire which has ever occurred, so far as we recall, in a thoroughly fireproof office building," according to Engineering News, and that "there have been so few practical tests of the modern system of fireproof construction that there is much doubt and dispute as to the actual behavior of fireproofing materials when placed in actual use and subjected to the ordeal of a conflagration. "
The fire was also covered in a front-page article in the New York Times The structure of the Annex and most of the fireproofing remained intact; furthermore, the original building was not damaged.
Later History
Throughout its history, Temple Court has housed a wide variety of office and commercial tenants. Among the original tenants were Ruland & Whiting, real estate agents (established in 1867), the Nassau Bank, and The Manhattan. An Illustrated Literary Magazine. Other tenants have included lawyers, accountants, publishers, press agents, insurance and advertising agents, architects, business representatives, detectives, unions, organizations, and employment agencies.
The trustees of Eugene Kelly's estate in 1907 transferred the Temple Court Building and Annex (located on separate lots until 1961-62) to the Temple Court Co. (Thomas Hughes Kelly, president). Thomas H. Kelly (1865-1933), son of the original owner, was trained as a lawyer but concentrated on the management of the various properties he had inherited, as well as on official corporate and institutional duties.
He was considered "one of the most important lay dignitaries of the Catholic Church in the United States," according to the New York Times, serving as Papal Chamberlain for thirty years. Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, which held the mortgage, took over the properties in 1942.
Conveyed in 1945 to the Wakefield Realty Corp., they were acquired by the Region Holding Corp. (Rubin Shulsky, president) in 1946. The properties were transferred in 1953 to the Larsan Holding Corp./Satmar Realty Corp., another Shulsky interest and still the current owners.
Description
TEMPLE COURT BUILDING (For description of the Annex, see below.)
The nine-story (ten stories in certain portions) building has facades on Beekman Street, Nassau Street, and Theatre Alley. Of fireproofed construction with iron floor beams, it was built around an interior skylighted atrium (now enclosed), with an additional exterior light well on the south side. It is clad in granite on the two-story base, and red Philadelphia brick (originally laid with red mortar), tan Dorchester stone trim, and terra-cotta panels on the upper stories.
Much of the building, other than pans of the Theatre Alley facade, has been painted. Articulation on the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets, as well as part of that on Theatre Alley, is similar, employing Queen Anne, neo-Grec, and Renaissance Revival motifs and ornamental details. The design is arranged horizontally into a base, midsection, and upper section (with mansard roof and towers), and in addition, it has a tripartite arrangement with end pavilions on each facade.
The building is vertically expressed with continuous piers. Windows originally had one-over-one double-hung wood sash (some were double windows with a central mullion); most have been replaced by anodized aluminum windows with a variety of configurations.
Base
The two-story base is clad in granite, that on the piers rockfaced. Each story is capped by a cornice. Second-story windows in the center of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets are segmentally arched. All of the ground-story bays of the facades on Beekman and Nassau Streets (except the main entrance) have been converted to shopfronts over the years, and have been altered so that little historic fabric survives. Shopfronts are currently framed in metal, with rolldown gates.
Base: Beekman Street
The main entrance, located in the central bay, originally had polished red granite columns supporting an entablature bearing the name of the building, capped by an iron balustrade flanked by pinnacles; in 1949-50 the main entrance was altered with a polished marble surround, metal and glass doors, a transom, and the letters "5 Beekman." The bays flanking the entrance were originally windows; surviving below the cornice in each bay are a paneled band and decorative metal band.
The end pavilions were originally tripartite, having a central door flanked by columns and windows with bulkheads and transoms; they were later altered to single bays with a bulkhead, display window, door, and broad sign band (since altered). The easternmost storefront is still framed by original fluted stone pilasters with stylized floral capitals.
Base: Nassau Street
End pavilion bays were originally tripartite, divided by piers. These bays, as well as those of the central section, had paired windows with bulkheads and transoms (the south end undoubtedly had an entrance door to the elevator hall); these bays were later altered in a manner similar to the pavilion bays of the Beekman Street facade (since altered).
Surviving below the cornice in the south pavilion bay are a paneled band and decorative metal band.
Base: Theatre Alley
The northern section has articulation similar to that on Beekman Street. The ground and second stories of the center and southern sections are capped by stone bandcourses. The ground-story bays of these sections are divided by cast-iron piers and have transoms and ornamental iron bulkhead bands. All bays have been filled with cinderblock.
The second-story bays of the center and southern sections are divided by cast-iron piers. Midsection The brick midsection consists of the third through the sixth stories. Articulation on the principal facades (and north pavilion of Theatre Alley) is similar, with terra-cotta spandrel panels above the third, fourth, and fifth stories; bandcourses, and stone capitals with a stylized floral design on the piers, on the third, fourth, and fifth stories; windows capped by round arches (with decorative tympana) in the center sections of the fifth story; and a stone cornice capping the sixth story.
Most of the Theatre Alley facade is unadorned " Croton-faced" brick, with simple bluestone lintels and sills.
Upper Section
The upper section consists of the seventh through the tenth stories. The north section of the Theatre Alley facade has articulation similar to that on Beekman and Nassau Streets. The center portion of the two principal facades has paired windows with entablatures on the seventh story (the Theatre Alley facade is capped by a corbelled cornice on the seventh story), surmounted by, on each of the three facades, a two-story slate mansard roof with pedimented dormers (the upper dormers on Nassau Street, all dormers on
Theatre Alley, and the flanking dormers on Beekman Street, are iron). The sections of roof on Beekman and Nassau Streets appear covered with asphalt.
The end pavilions have bandcourses and terra-cotta spandrel panels above the seventh and eighth stories; round-arched windows, a subcornice, and cornice on the ninth story; a central pedimented window, and cornice with flared corner projections, on the tenth story of the northern pavilions; and a pediment on the tenth story of the southern pavilions (with a rondel on Nassau Street and corbelling on Theatre Alley).
Roof
Surviving decorative iron railings cap the mansard roof of the center section of each facade. Two prominent corner towers above the Beekman Street pavilions have octagonal pinnacled roofs, covered with slate and capped by metal finials. The corners of the pavilions are ornamented with pinnacles, and the inner side of each pavilion (except Theatre Alley) is flanked by a chimney.
The southern pavilions have gable roofs. The center portion of the building is covered by a large pyramidal skylight with a monitor.
- From the 1998 NYCLPC Landmark Designation Report
you all knew it was coming , & it was MORE than obvious . as of october 31 , i`m not longer a jonas brothers fan , & i have my reasons . it`s hard to describe them , but i was browsing oceanup & found this comment under a nick jonas post . it pretty much sums up EVERYTHING , & i agree with EVERY SINGLE WORLD ;
Something told me this would happen...
1st, crappy single. Like really, Paranoid, video sucked balls.
2nd, Nick Jonas album, not Jonas Brothers album. he lack of Joe on LVATT REALLY should have foreshadowed what was to come. They were trying to ease us into this Nick solo trnsition...fuck it.
3rd. Album sales pffft. Last year, half a million sold ALBL. This year, only 255 thousand. Now, iin that 255 thousand, at least half complained about it only being a Nick album "where the fuck is Joe!?"
4th world tour. IT'S A FUCKING WORLD TOUR. Who does that in the beginning of their careers?! Ypu do a world tour when your going away, not "oh, well after we tour the wold, we'll go back to playing just arena in America!" makes. no. sense.
5th 1st rumors about Nick solo after engagement. When the Jobros FINALLY released a statement, it was from their FATHER. He didn't even ADDRESS the damn rumor. All he sadi was "we are still enjoying the tour THIS YEAR & expect more songs from the boys THIS YEAR! We are focusing on having a great year!" o_O...
6th they FINALLY say Nick IS going solo, but they say the CAN'T break up because they are brothers. WHat kind of ass-crack excuse is that? You can break up as a band, dumbfucks.
UGH..these boys have dissapointed me. I would have understood if they wanted R& R next year, i mean after 4 tour & non-stop action, they deserve it.
I KNEW Nick would go solo, but I thought later on in life, not RIGHT when JB reached their fucking peak in stardom.
I am so mad t these guys, it's ridiculous. Sore fan, whatever, I'm just highly upset that they say they NEVER lie to fans, bt look at what the fuck they are doing.
so , there you go . i didn`t just wanna ditch the photostream without giving you a reason of why i was leaving or what happened to me . but i`m not looking back . i`m only gonna look forward & just have memories of the past . it was nice , don`t get me wrong , but . . . it`s inevitable . the whole nick joe & kevin thing going separate ways thing . . . if you`re not delusional or ignorant , you know what i mean . you`re only lying to yourself if you don`t admit that they`re breaking up pretty soon . so yeah :\ & also , i totally get why people stop being jonas brothers fans , trust me , but i don`t get how they can hate them afterwards . it puzzles me . but i`ve also realized that the past year of me being a fan was me living a lie . i didn`t love them anymore , & i couldn`t accept the fact that everything people were telling me about them was true . but now i realize , they were right . maybe you guys will realize it one day ? idk , but then again , i never thought i`d ever stop being a jb fan , but look where we are . anyway , i`ll repost all my past jonas secrets for you guys soon as a little memory . i enjoyed alwayssss talking with you guys on flickr (: this has been one of the most productive & funnest things i`ve ever done with my free time . but "people change & promises are broken" (haha , no kidding , right ?) & it`s time to move on . thanks for 3 1/2 years , nick joe & kevin , but i`m done <3
you guys can still stay in touch with me on twitter if you`d like , but for now , this photostream is done .
twitter.com/watchyourbody
Final shot of 4204 prior to repaint. The next train would foreshadow its fate
USSC Sugar Road Job 3 w/ USSC 4204
Foreshadowing of an era gone by.
Oil has been depleted and replaced by other forms of energy that are more environmentally sound.
Nature's reclaiming of the Earth is visible everywhere. Ancient structures and relics of abandoned gas stations and vehicles are still littering the soon to be pristine countryside. Humans hiding from view are awaiting clean-up operations, which have been too busy since the Great War.
The Fiat Coupé (type 175, officially titled the Coupé Fiat) was a coupé produced by the Italian manufacturer Fiat between 1993 and 2000. The car was introduced at Brussels Motor Show in 1993.
It is most remembered for its distinctive, angular design, with unique scalloped side panels. The body was designed by Chris Bangle from Centro Stile Fiat, while the interior was designed by Pininfarina. The exterior design would foreshadow much of late 1990s and early 2000s car design, acting as a precedent to both Bangle's somewhat notorious work at BMW, as well as futuristic angular designs by other marques, such as Ford and Renault.
History:
The Fiat Coupe made media headlines in auto magazines during 1992 after several spy shots were taken revealing the car on test. On its launch in 1993, the Coupé was available with a four-cylinder, 2.0 L 16V engine, in both turbo (190 PS) and normally aspirated (139 PS) versions. Both engines were later versions of Fiat's twin-cam design and inherited from the Lancia Delta Integrale, winner of the World Rally Championship a record six times. 1996 brought in a 1.8 L 16V engine (not available in the UK, 131 PS), along with a 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V (147 PS), and a 5-cylinder 2.0-litre 20V turbo (220 PS).
Fiat Coupé 20v Turbo Model
The turbocharged 16 and 20 valve versions were equipped with a very efficient Viscodrive limited-slip differential to counter the understeer that plagues most powerful front wheel drive cars. Additionally, the coupe featured independent suspension all round: at the front MacPherson struts and lower wishbones anchored to an auxiliary crossbeam, offset coil springs and anti-roll bar; at the rear, trailing arms mounted on an auxiliary subframe, coil springs and an anti-roll bar.
1998 saw the release of the Limited Edition which featured red Brembo brake calipers at the front and standard red calipers at the back, a body kit, push-button start, six-speed gearbox, strut brace to make the chassis more rigid and Recaro seats with red leather inserts which offered better support than the standard 20VT seats. The LE was produced in Black (flat), Red (flat), Vinci Grey (metallic), Crono Grey (flat) and Steel Grey (metallic). The bodywork of the LE also benefited from titanium coloured insert around the light bezels and the wing mirrors. Each Limited Edition ('LE') Coupé was manufactured with a badge located by the rear-view mirror which contained that car's unique number (it is rumored that Michael Schumacher was the original owner of LE No. 0001, however when the question was raised to him personally he confirmed he had owned one, but a red one, while LE No. 0001 is a Crono Grey one). Originally a spokesman from Fiat stated only approximately 300 Limited Editions would be built. The final amount was much higher, with numbers as high as 1400 touted by some. This angered many of the owners of the original 300 cars and almost certainly impacted residual values. The original number however was quoted by a Fiat UK spokesman, so probably that number only applied to the UK market. The numbered plaque on every Coupe features enough space for 4 numbers.
In 1998 the 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V got a Variable Inlet System which brought the power to 154 PS (113 kW). The 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V Turbo received a 6-speed gearbox and a large, satin gloss push starter button. In addition, the sills of the Turbo version were colour matched with the body paintwork. Fiat also released the 2.0 L 5 cylinder Turbo 'Plus'. This model came with an option kit that made it virtually identical to the LE, except for minor interior design changes and without the unique identification badge of the LE.
In 2000 Fiat released another special version of the Fiat Coupé. Featuring the 1.8-litre engine, it was only available throughout mainland Europe and marketed as an elegant and affordable edition. Fiat also made changes throughout the rest of the range: new seats, side skirts and wheels for the 2.0-litre 20V model, 'Plus' edition wheels on turbo models and Fiat manufactured seats on the 'Plus' that were virtually identical to the original Plus Recaro seats with the addition of extra airbags. The 2.0-litre 20V Turbo model is capable of accelerating from 0–100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in 6.5 seconds, with a top speed of 240 km/h (149 mph) or 250 km/h (155 mph) with later 6-speed gearbox. When production finally stopped in September 2000, a total number of 72,762 units had been produced.
[Text from Wikipedia]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Coup%C3%A9
This miniland-scale Lego FIAT Coupe (Type 175 - 1993 - Bangle) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 92nd Build Challenge, - "Stuck in the 90's", - all about vehicles from the decade of the 1990s.
This is a variation of the previous post, as seen here: www.flickr.com/photos/walford/6562538243/in/photostream
"Father,
at the Transfiguration in glory of your Only-Begotten Son,
you confirmed the mysteries of faith
by the witness to Jesus of the prophets Moses and Elijah.
You foreshadowed there what we shall be
when you bring our sonship to its perfection.
Grant that by listening to the voice of Jesus
we may become heirs with him,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God for ever and ever.
Amen."
Today, 6 August, is the feast of the Transfiguration, and this stained glass detail is from Ampleforth Abbey.
For the most part, the ferry journey was fairly pleasant, if a bit cold but as we passed Eilean Musdile, a small islet on the edge of Lismore, the winds really picked up, charging up some waves and nearly blowing me off deck. This meant that I had to battle strong winds to take a photo that was both straight and not full of motion blur.
This dramatic scene was the best I could do. The sun shone brightly on the foreground but the distant mountains of the mainland are hiding under thick cloud and deep shadows. This hopefully shows just how dramatic a crossing we had to Mull and how much it foreshadowed the trip.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
The sunset at Beavertail State Park seems to foreshadow the end of summer, but it's a heck of a way to go.
This series will be the last of my uploads for the trip I took to southern Burgundy in September 2023.
Listed as a Historic landmark in 1900, the Romanesque church in the out-of-the-way village of Gourdon is one of the secret wonders of Burgundy. Not particularly outstanding from the outside, its large silhouette nevertheless foreshadows an impressive interior, and indeed it is, with its combination of a whooping three-level, Cluny-inspired elevation, its three naves and its generalized system of groin vaulting. Its collection of sculpted capitals is also famous, as are the alfresco paintings that were discovered in the 1940s as the plastering that was applied to hide them in the 19th century began to peel away. More such discoveries were made in the 1970s and restoration lasted until the early 1990s.
Located on a hilltop in the département of Saône-et-Loire, Gourdon has been inhabited since time immemorial. Valuable traces of Roman presence were found in 1845 and promptly shipped to a museum in Paris (the Cabinet des Médailles) where the are still being exhibited to this day. A monastery was founded here very early on, as there is a written trace of a dependency of the Le Puy cathedral chapter in 534, but claims that it was “a Benedictine priory” seem to me a bit overambitious, in spite of my sympathies for that order: let’s not forget that Saint Benedict died only in 547 in Monte Cassino, and I doubt that his Rule was so well-known in Gaul in his own lifetime that it could have been adopted by a small religious establishment in Burgundy... The monastery did certainly exist, though, as Saint Gregory of Tours visited it in 570 and there met with Didier (or Desideratus). About this last figure, History hesitates between the quality of abbot (that would indeed rather be prior if Gourdon were a priory back then) and that of hermit. In any case, by 1104, when the completed parish church is mentioned (there remains no trace of the in-between period), there is no further mention of that monastery, which must have disappeared in the meantime; it was probably little more than a hermitage, as by Year 1000 the rule had been largely propagated by Saint Benedict of Aniane († 821) and Benedictine houses were flourishing all over the Western world. An already existing priory would most likely never have been so abandoned and shut down. No physical traces of that establishment were ever found by archæologists.
Since around 1100, the church has been left almost intact, except for the bell tower which collapsed in 1881 and was rebuilt in 1889, exactly as it was before.
Equally ancient (and, in my opinion, probably re-used from an earlier church completed before Year 1000) is this capital to be seen in the choir. Its motif is very classical and shows, among leaves large and small, two telamons (“atlantes”) supporting the top of the column, hence the church, in an allegoric depiction of those legendary creatures’ role, which was to support the vault of the Heavens itself.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
14:17
We checked all of the doors and windows again. Everything still seems to be locked tight.
Something occurred to me, and when I mentioned it to Ramirez, he told me he'd had the same thought; when the singers were pounding on the door then suddenly stopped and vanished, it was very much like those instances of the sound of someone hammering against the door -- only to find that no one was there.
That gave me a strange feeling. It was like what the singers did had been -- foreshadowed.
We fully expect that more state patrol officers will arrive when the murdered officers fail to call in, or return. We can only hope that they send more than one or two the next time. I'll have to stand watch for them, so that I can immediately shout a warning.
15:00
No sign of more state patrol officers. The lights of the car have gone out and I can't hear its engine idling anymore. It's possible that it ran out of gas, and the battery might have been drained by running all of the lights, or the singers might have shut it all off when they realized we weren't going to make a try for the car.
I don't know why, but I don't think any more state patrol officers are coming.
16:02
We're not going to wait to see what happens. It's obvious that the only way we're getting out of here is if we get out on our own. Our biggest obstacle is Ramirez' injury, and he knows that leaving him behind is NOT an option, for me. So, we have to figure out a way to get him more mobile.
It's possible that we can cobble together a pair of crutches for him. I'm going to have a quick look upstairs for anything useful, while Ramirez sits on the stairs, keeping watch.
17:00
Found some stuff we might be able to put to use, and Ramirez is working on it right now.
I needed him distracted so that I could jot down this entry alone. He has a habit of reading over my shoulder at the exact moment that will cause me the most embarrassment.
Anyway, the thing is, I'm worried that I've lost my mind. It's either that or -- this house is actually haunted, by REAL ghosts.
As I've said before; I'm logical, reasonable, and not prone to hysterics. So, given the choice of ghosts or madness, well, as awful as it is to admit it -- insanity is the sane choice.
Maybe everything that's happened caused me to have a psychotic break or something? I'm not a shrink so I don't know how those things work.
I might as well write down what I saw and heard, just in case I go crazier and can't tell the shrinks what happened.
I went upstairs to find something to fashion into crutches for Ramirez, when I thought I heard whispering again.
This time, I was worried it might be a couple of the singers. So, I grabbed a heavy candle stick holder and crept over to the collectibles room, slipping inside. I made my way between the dust cloth-covered stacks, closing in on the source of the voices.
I stopped as soon as I could make out what was being said. There were two voices, a woman's and a man's. The woman was in a terrible panic and the man was trying to calm her. The woman had a refined voice, mature, and the man had some kind of accent I couldn't identify.
She was terrified, certain of awful deeds being done on the estate. She said her husband and the doctor were evil, that they were practitioners of black magic and that they, and their followers, were using human sacrifices to feed and empower the demon they'd made her give birth to, and raise as her child.
The man tried to rationalize, telling her the child was only deformed and not a real demon, but the woman wouldn't be comforted or swayed from her assertion. The man finally agreed to look into the matter and suddenly -- a third voice was there.
This voice was shrill, high-pitched, accusatory, and clearly French. I felt dizzy, steadying myself against one of the covered pieces of furniture.
The French maid, the lady of the house and -- who was the man? Then I realized he MUST be the Native American man in the painting! The maid accused the pair of unseemly conduct, and the man of using her. Not only that, she accused them of being responsible for the evil going on in the house. These accusations were denied, but the maid wouldn't listen. She said that she was taking her accusations to the minister and his flock, and letting them mete out God's judgment.
I HAD to peek around the corner.
I HAD to peek around the corner. I saw the three of them.
Not shadows, misty forms, see-through wraiths, or glowing specters. I saw three people just as clearly as I might see Ramirez, if he was the one standing there rather than what ... well, what I saw.
I was riveted to the spot, and at first I thought they WERE real; actors dressed in period costumes, and I stepped out to challenge them, demand answers.
They turned toward me, seeming startled, and I was about to threaten them with the candle stick when -- they weren't there anymore.
No fading out, no blowing away, no crumbling to dust. They simply stopped being there, in the blink of an eye.
So, I must be crazy ... right?
I forced myself to finish searching for items that could help Ramirez because now more than ever, I want to get out of this house. Not because I believe it's haunted, but because I believe I'm losing my mind and could pose and additional danger to Ramirez.
it looks like he's ready to try the crutches he's cobbled together. Hopefully, we'll get out of this damn place, and my next entry will be all about how we got home, sent the National Guard out here, and all the crazy singers were rounded up.
Fingers crossed.
20:16
Shit. That's what we're in, and it's deep.
We went out one of the lower room windows, suspicious again, because it opened. We left a couple candles burning in the study so that it would look like we were still in there. Climbing out was hard for Ramirez, and the effort opened his wound again, but i added to the dressing with the supplies we'd taken from the ambulance, and we continued on our way.
Heading for the front gate was not an option. If they were watching the house, that would be the obvious direction we'd take, and we'd be seen. Instead, we too the least used, most abandoned seeming path that led into the overgrown back acreage of the estate. It was rough going for Ramirez, but he didn't complain. We moved as stealthily as possible, pausing often to listen for signs that we might have followed, but we seemed to have gotten away, unnoticed.
Getting over the wall wasn't going to be easy, but we thought we had that figured out; we brought along the rope we'd planned to use to climb out through the nursery window. The plane was that I'd scale the wall then drop the rope for Ramirez, and help him climb up. He was pretty sure he could manage the height of the wall using just his arms.
Maybe it would have worked, maybe it wouldn't have, but we'll never know.
We didn't get that far.
When we got out back, we heard the singers again, but they weren't singing this time -- they were chanting. We made our way toward the sound, realizing that we were coming up on the far side of the stone "sculpture" or altar. Torches burned everywhere, and the singers knelt before the stones, where a man robed in black stood.
Bound and gagged, the missing ambulance guy lay at the robed man's feet, right atop the ominous dark stains we'd observed, earlier.
I was about to dash in there and probably get myself killed, when Ramirez stopped me. He told me that he understood the words they were chanting, and it was a spell. It was the same spell mentioned in the husband's and the doctor's journals. Ramirez said there was a pattern to it, that they wouldn't kill they guy until a particular part of the spell was reached -- and he'd be able to tell when they got close.
So, we circled around until we were in a position where Ramirez was sure he'd have a clear shot at the minister. His hope was that if he wounded the minister, disrupting the spell, that there'd be enough chaos and panic that they wouldn't kill the ambulance guy, and maybe we'd be able to sneak in and hustle the guy into the cave behind the altar stone.
At the peak of the chanting, a hooded shape walked toward the altar stone, passing between the singers, who parted like dark grass in a predator's wake. There was something -- odd about the figure, about the size and shape of the cloak covering the thing. (I say "thing" now, but I thought it was a man, then.) The bulk of it, the odd shape -- it was as if the enormous hood was actually required to cover something just as large, under it.
I got a queasy feeling, looking at the hooded figure. There was something "wrong" with the way the cloak hung about the form beneath. I thought the person under the covering might have been wearing armor, as strange as that seemed, but the bulges and the protrusions...
Ramirez indicated it was nearly time, in the spell, for the sacrifice. He took aim at the minister who was apparently preparing to perform the ritual murder as he held up a dagger in one hand.
I have no idea why
That was almost a lie. I'm not going to start down that road. This is MY journal, meant for ME, and I won't lie to myself.
I looked toward the sky just then.
I looked at the sky because I was suddenly reminded of one of the maid's paintings. Except for the singers, the tableau was strikingly similar and, I admit it, I gave a gasp, maybe a small cry of alarm -- but if you'd seen what I saw...
The sky was cloudless. I could clearly see the stars and the moon, but there was this, this "bulge" in the air. I don't know exactly how to describe what I saw, what my involuntary gasp of wonder and revulsion caused Ramirez to also look up and see, dragging a non-English curse, or prayer, from him.
Imagine an enormous, clear balloon was suspended over the scene, clear enough to be able to see through it, but by virtue of it being there, you could make out the odd "curve" of it. That was what we saw, or it's as accurately as I can describe it in visual terms. There was also a sort of -- dread it seemed to radiate. Considering how loud was their chanting and wailing, I can't imagine how my startled gasp was heard, but it was.
The chanting suddenly stopped.
(This story originally appeared on my main page. Archived here. The rest of the original story, with new images, will follow.
Original comments are below.)
Alberto Cervantes Casquete, Azazel Azalee and 53 more people faved this
Thierry Musette
9y
excellente capture
Teddi Beres
9y
Thierry Musette Thank you so much! (hugs)
Cheri @PulpFictionStudio
9y
great story/emotion in your shot
Teddi Beres
9y
Cheri @PulpFictionStudio Thank you bunches! It's super nice of you to say. (huggles)
Chatwick Harpax
9y
Still hangin in there, that I am, with baited breath me thinks. Waiting for those devilish singers lurking about to begin the swan song mebe;)
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax (giggles) You never know! Thank you for hanging in there.
Alberto Cervantes Casquete, Azazel Azalee and 40 more people faved this
Sturdy Mice (deleted)
9y
True Art
Teddi Beres
9y
Sturdy Mice This is so nice of you! Thank you! (huggles)
Chatwick Harpax
9y
Excellent story Teddi, Makes me want to run ahead an peek around the corner first;)
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax Are you sure you want to? Could be something scary! (giggles) Thank you. (hugs)
Azazel Azalee, delisha A and 44 more people faved this
Chatwick Harpax
9y
Interestin turn of events, ghosts or not, that appears to be the question, or perhaps appears not? lol.. Still following the adventure, and curious as to its final gripping end...
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax I'm glad you're still wondering how this will all end. It's galloping toward the finish line. I promise, there will be blood. (giggles)
Azazel Azalee, Hinata Shady - William Pessini and 35 more people faved this
Chatwick Harpax
9y
Lucky guy Erebus, getting a chance to creep around with a pretty lass.. Lol. Story is still coming along swimmingly Teddi, still on seats edge that I am
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax Thank you, Chatwick! I hope to keep you on the edge as the story spirals out of control. (giggles)
Pomme Pancake / KUROMORI, Luna Rayvin and 35 more people faved this
Chatwick Harpax
9y
Nice effect, goes well with the drama unfoldin in your journal
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax Thank you! When I can't create what I want to picture, I search throughout Second Life and it's amazing, what I find. :-)
Alberto Cervantes Casquete, Azazel Azalee and 32 more people faved this
Chatwick Harpax
9y
There you go, a visually striking description, a brilliant build-up coming from a quite talented writer.
Kudos Teddi
Teddi Beres
9y
Chatwick Harpax You make me blush. Thank you bunches. (hugs)
Sturdy Mice (deleted)
9y
True Art
Teddi Beres
9y
Sturdy Mice You're so nice, thank you! (huggles)
Musée du Louvre,
Paris, France
Leonardo Da Vinci
La Vierge, l'Enfant Jésus et sainte Anne, 1502
oil on poplar wood
Denon wing, 1st floor, Grande Galerie, Room 710
Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus – three generations, two the fruit of immaculate conception – are portrayed in a landscape. The picture was very probably commissioned as an ex-voto to Saint Anne in gratitude for the birth of Louis XII’s daughter, but Leonardo worked too long on the picture to deliver it. The composition is a fine example of his experimentation with figure composition and greatly inspired artists of the following generation.
The picture is thought to have been commissioned by Louis XII of France to celebrate the birth of his only daughter, Claude, in 1499 – Anne was the name of his wife and of the patron saint of infertile and pregnant women. But the picture was never delivered to Louis XII since an observer noted its presence in Leonardo’s workshop in 1517 – the artist was then lodged by François I at Cloux, near Amboise. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’s reported presence in the Palais Cardinal (the present-day Palais Royal) in 1651 has fuelled the hypothesis that the picture entered the royal collection via Richelieu’s ministrations. But in all likelihood it was François I who acquired it from Leonardo’s assistant, Salai, for a considerable sum recorded in archives. However, prior to Le Brun’s 1683 inventory, no record of such a picture at the Château de Fontainebleau confirms this.
Several preparatory works – the cartoon in the National Gallery in London and several drawings including the one in the Louvre (RF 460) – retrace the work’s gradual development. Leonardo replaced the young Saint John the Baptist in the first sketch by a symbol, the Lamb of God, and slid the Infant Jesus off his mother’s knees towards the ground. He gave more importance to Saint Anne, who becomes the axis of a triangular composition. The figures’ natural gestures interlock with one another: Anne’s right arm blends with Mary’s, whose head conceals her mother’s shoulder, and Mary’s left arm is prolonged by Christ’s. This interplay conveys meaning: the idea of lineage and the Incarnation of Christ, whose destiny, the Passion, is foreshadowed by the Lamb at the precipice’s edge. Leonardo’s originality here lies in his iconography (the addition of the Lamb) and his geometric yet dynamic composition.
As he did in The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo set a religious scene in a fantastic landscape and placed an abyss between viewer and figures. The mountainous distance is conveyed by atmospheric perspective with bluish and crystalline highlights and reflects his interest in geology and meteorological phenomena.
The sfumato, Leonardo’s trademark painterly effect, unifies the composition by enveloping the figures and landscape in a diffuse, evanescent and poetic haze. This imbues the highly expressive faces with great gentleness. The work exudes an aura of strangeness which, combined with the subtle expressions and the picture’s unfinished state has given rise to a number of psychoanalytical interpretations since Freud.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Foreshadowing of an era gone by.
Oil has been depleted and replaced by other forms of energy that are more environmentally sound.
Nature's reclaiming of the Earth is visible everywhere. Ancient structures and relics of abandoned gas stations and vehicles are still littering the soon to be pristine countryside. Humans hiding from view are awaiting clean-up operations, which have been too busy since the Great War.
Foreshadowing of an era gone by.
Oil has been depleted and replaced by other forms of energy that are more environmentally sound.
Nature's reclaiming of the Earth is visible everywhere. Ancient structures and relics of abandoned gas stations and vehicles are still littering the soon to be pristine countryside. Humans hiding from view are awaiting clean-up operations, which have been too busy since the Great War.
Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus – three generations, two the fruit of immaculate conception – are portrayed in a landscape. The picture was very probably commissioned as an ex-voto to Saint Anne in gratitude for the birth of Louis XII’s daughter, but Leonardo worked too long on the picture to deliver it. The composition is a fine example of his experimentation with figure composition and greatly inspired artists of the following generation.
The little-known circumstances of a prestigious acquisition
The picture is thought to have been commissioned by Louis XII of France to celebrate the birth of his only daughter, Claude, in 1499 – Anne was the name of his wife and of the patron saint of infertile and pregnant women. But the picture was never delivered to Louis XII since an observer noted its presence in Leonardo’s workshop in 1517 – the artist was then lodged by François I at Cloux, near Amboise. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’s reported presence in the Palais Cardinal (the present-day Palais Royal) in 1651 has fuelled the hypothesis that the picture entered the royal collection via Richelieu’s ministrations. But in all likelihood it was François I who acquired it from Leonardo’s assistant, Salai, for a considerable sum recorded in archives. However, prior to Le Brun’s 1683 inventory, no record of such a picture at the Château de Fontainebleau confirms this.
The symbiosis of form and meaning
Several preparatory works – the cartoon in the National Gallery in London and several drawings including the one in the Louvre (RF 460) – retrace the work’s gradual development. Leonardo replaced the young Saint John the Baptist in the first sketch by a symbol, the Lamb of God, and slid the Infant Jesus off his mother’s knees towards the ground. He gave more importance to Saint Anne, who becomes the axis of a triangular composition. The figures’ natural gestures interlock with one another: Anne’s right arm blends with Mary’s, whose head conceals her mother’s shoulder, and Mary’s left arm is prolonged by Christ’s. This interplay conveys meaning: the idea of lineage and the Incarnation of Christ, whose destiny, the Passion, is foreshadowed by the Lamb at the precipice’s edge. Leonardo’s originality here lies in his iconography (the addition of the Lamb) and his geometric yet dynamic composition.
A fascinating and typically “Leonardesque” composition
As he did in The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo set a religious scene in a fantastic landscape and placed an abyss between viewer and figures. The mountainous distance is conveyed by atmospheric perspective with bluish and crystalline highlights and reflects his interest in geology and meteorological phenomena.
The sfumato, Leonardo’s trademark painterly effect, unifies the composition by enveloping the figures and landscape in a diffuse, evanescent and poetic haze. This imbues the highly expressive faces with great gentleness. The work exudes an aura of strangeness which, combined with the subtle expressions and the picture’s unfinished state has given rise to a number of psychoanalytical interpretations since Freud.
The picture decisively influenced subsequent generations of artists, both classically-inspired painters such as Raphael and Solario, and Mannerists such as Andrea del Sarto.
Source: www.louvre.fr/en
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
The Fiat Coupé (type 175, officially titled the Coupé Fiat) was a coupé produced by the Italian manufacturer Fiat between 1993 and 2000. The car was introduced at Brussels Motor Show in 1993.
It is most remembered for its distinctive, angular design, with unique scalloped side panels. The body was designed by Chris Bangle from Centro Stile Fiat, while the interior was designed by Pininfarina. The exterior design would foreshadow much of late 1990s and early 2000s car design, acting as a precedent to both Bangle's somewhat notorious work at BMW, as well as futuristic angular designs by other marques, such as Ford and Renault.
History:
The Fiat Coupe made media headlines in auto magazines during 1992 after several spy shots were taken revealing the car on test. On its launch in 1993, the Coupé was available with a four-cylinder, 2.0 L 16V engine, in both turbo (190 PS) and normally aspirated (139 PS) versions. Both engines were later versions of Fiat's twin-cam design and inherited from the Lancia Delta Integrale, winner of the World Rally Championship a record six times. 1996 brought in a 1.8 L 16V engine (not available in the UK, 131 PS), along with a 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V (147 PS), and a 5-cylinder 2.0-litre 20V turbo (220 PS).
Fiat Coupé 20v Turbo Model
The turbocharged 16 and 20 valve versions were equipped with a very efficient Viscodrive limited-slip differential to counter the understeer that plagues most powerful front wheel drive cars. Additionally, the coupe featured independent suspension all round: at the front MacPherson struts and lower wishbones anchored to an auxiliary crossbeam, offset coil springs and anti-roll bar; at the rear, trailing arms mounted on an auxiliary subframe, coil springs and an anti-roll bar.
1998 saw the release of the Limited Edition which featured red Brembo brake calipers at the front and standard red calipers at the back, a body kit, push-button start, six-speed gearbox, strut brace to make the chassis more rigid and Recaro seats with red leather inserts which offered better support than the standard 20VT seats. The LE was produced in Black (flat), Red (flat), Vinci Grey (metallic), Crono Grey (flat) and Steel Grey (metallic). The bodywork of the LE also benefited from titanium coloured insert around the light bezels and the wing mirrors. Each Limited Edition ('LE') Coupé was manufactured with a badge located by the rear-view mirror which contained that car's unique number (it is rumored that Michael Schumacher was the original owner of LE No. 0001, however when the question was raised to him personally he confirmed he had owned one, but a red one, while LE No. 0001 is a Crono Grey one). Originally a spokesman from Fiat stated only approximately 300 Limited Editions would be built. The final amount was much higher, with numbers as high as 1400 touted by some. This angered many of the owners of the original 300 cars and almost certainly impacted residual values. The original number however was quoted by a Fiat UK spokesman, so probably that number only applied to the UK market. The numbered plaque on every Coupe features enough space for 4 numbers.
In 1998 the 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V got a Variable Inlet System which brought the power to 154 PS (113 kW). The 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V Turbo received a 6-speed gearbox and a large, satin gloss push starter button. In addition, the sills of the Turbo version were colour matched with the body paintwork. Fiat also released the 2.0 L 5 cylinder Turbo 'Plus'. This model came with an option kit that made it virtually identical to the LE, except for minor interior design changes and without the unique identification badge of the LE.
In 2000 Fiat released another special version of the Fiat Coupé. Featuring the 1.8-litre engine, it was only available throughout mainland Europe and marketed as an elegant and affordable edition. Fiat also made changes throughout the rest of the range: new seats, side skirts and wheels for the 2.0-litre 20V model, 'Plus' edition wheels on turbo models and Fiat manufactured seats on the 'Plus' that were virtually identical to the original Plus Recaro seats with the addition of extra airbags. The 2.0-litre 20V Turbo model is capable of accelerating from 0–100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in 6.5 seconds, with a top speed of 240 km/h (149 mph) or 250 km/h (155 mph) with later 6-speed gearbox. When production finally stopped in September 2000, a total number of 72,762 units had been produced.
[Text from Wikipedia]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Coup%C3%A9
This miniland-scale Lego FIAT Coupe (Type 175 - 1993 - Bangle) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 92nd Build Challenge, - "Stuck in the 90's", - all about vehicles from the decade of the 1990s.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
Foreshadowing of an era gone by.
Oil has been depleted and replaced by other forms of energy that are more environmentally sound.
Nature's reclaiming of the Earth is visible everywhere. Ancient structures and relics of abandoned gas stations and vehicles are still littering the soon to be pristine countryside. Humans hiding from view are awaiting clean-up operations, which have been too busy since the Great War.
Fritz Lang's futuristic sci-fi classic was adapted from a novel written by his wife, Thea Von Harbou. In "Metropolis," two worlds coexist: the subterranean one, where human beings are slaves and must toil endlessly to survive, and the above-ground paradise, reserved only for the elite. This movie was produced not long after the industrial revolution, and may have been Lang's attempt to foreshadow what the world would be like if the "age of the machine" went unchecked. Material from this silent masterpiece is incredibly rare. This black and white still is from the first American release in 1927.
The Fiat Coupé (type 175, officially titled the Coupé Fiat) was a coupé produced by the Italian manufacturer Fiat between 1993 and 2000. The car was introduced at Brussels Motor Show in 1993.
It is most remembered for its distinctive, angular design, with unique scalloped side panels. The body was designed by Chris Bangle from Centro Stile Fiat, while the interior was designed by Pininfarina. The exterior design would foreshadow much of late 1990s and early 2000s car design, acting as a precedent to both Bangle's somewhat notorious work at BMW, as well as futuristic angular designs by other marques, such as Ford and Renault.
History:
The Fiat Coupe made media headlines in auto magazines during 1992 after several spy shots were taken revealing the car on test. On its launch in 1993, the Coupé was available with a four-cylinder, 2.0 L 16V engine, in both turbo (190 PS) and normally aspirated (139 PS) versions. Both engines were later versions of Fiat's twin-cam design and inherited from the Lancia Delta Integrale, winner of the World Rally Championship a record six times. 1996 brought in a 1.8 L 16V engine (not available in the UK, 131 PS), along with a 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V (147 PS), and a 5-cylinder 2.0-litre 20V turbo (220 PS).
Fiat Coupé 20v Turbo Model
The turbocharged 16 and 20 valve versions were equipped with a very efficient Viscodrive limited-slip differential to counter the understeer that plagues most powerful front wheel drive cars. Additionally, the coupe featured independent suspension all round: at the front MacPherson struts and lower wishbones anchored to an auxiliary crossbeam, offset coil springs and anti-roll bar; at the rear, trailing arms mounted on an auxiliary subframe, coil springs and an anti-roll bar.
1998 saw the release of the Limited Edition which featured red Brembo brake calipers at the front and standard red calipers at the back, a body kit, push-button start, six-speed gearbox, strut brace to make the chassis more rigid and Recaro seats with red leather inserts which offered better support than the standard 20VT seats. The LE was produced in Black (flat), Red (flat), Vinci Grey (metallic), Crono Grey (flat) and Steel Grey (metallic). The bodywork of the LE also benefited from titanium coloured insert around the light bezels and the wing mirrors. Each Limited Edition ('LE') Coupé was manufactured with a badge located by the rear-view mirror which contained that car's unique number (it is rumored that Michael Schumacher was the original owner of LE No. 0001, however when the question was raised to him personally he confirmed he had owned one, but a red one, while LE No. 0001 is a Crono Grey one). Originally a spokesman from Fiat stated only approximately 300 Limited Editions would be built. The final amount was much higher, with numbers as high as 1400 touted by some. This angered many of the owners of the original 300 cars and almost certainly impacted residual values. The original number however was quoted by a Fiat UK spokesman, so probably that number only applied to the UK market. The numbered plaque on every Coupe features enough space for 4 numbers.
In 1998 the 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V got a Variable Inlet System which brought the power to 154 PS (113 kW). The 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V Turbo received a 6-speed gearbox and a large, satin gloss push starter button. In addition, the sills of the Turbo version were colour matched with the body paintwork. Fiat also released the 2.0 L 5 cylinder Turbo 'Plus'. This model came with an option kit that made it virtually identical to the LE, except for minor interior design changes and without the unique identification badge of the LE.
In 2000 Fiat released another special version of the Fiat Coupé. Featuring the 1.8-litre engine, it was only available throughout mainland Europe and marketed as an elegant and affordable edition. Fiat also made changes throughout the rest of the range: new seats, side skirts and wheels for the 2.0-litre 20V model, 'Plus' edition wheels on turbo models and Fiat manufactured seats on the 'Plus' that were virtually identical to the original Plus Recaro seats with the addition of extra airbags. The 2.0-litre 20V Turbo model is capable of accelerating from 0–100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in 6.5 seconds, with a top speed of 240 km/h (149 mph) or 250 km/h (155 mph) with later 6-speed gearbox. When production finally stopped in September 2000, a total number of 72,762 units had been produced.
[Text from Wikipedia]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Coup%C3%A9
This miniland-scale Lego FIAT Coupe (Type 175 - 1993 - Bangle) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 92nd Build Challenge, - "Stuck in the 90's", - all about vehicles from the decade of the 1990s.
Sunflower Fields Dix Park Raleigh, NC
Under a tormented sky that foreshadows an impending tempest. This lone sunflower beams it’s bright radiant yellow back in the absence of the suns rays as if it’s an understudy for the cosmos.
The Fiat Coupé (type 175, officially titled the Coupé Fiat) was a coupé produced by the Italian manufacturer Fiat between 1993 and 2000. The car was introduced at Brussels Motor Show in 1993.
It is most remembered for its distinctive, angular design, with unique scalloped side panels. The body was designed by Chris Bangle from Centro Stile Fiat, while the interior was designed by Pininfarina. The exterior design would foreshadow much of late 1990s and early 2000s car design, acting as a precedent to both Bangle's somewhat notorious work at BMW, as well as futuristic angular designs by other marques, such as Ford and Renault.
History:
The Fiat Coupe made media headlines in auto magazines during 1992 after several spy shots were taken revealing the car on test. On its launch in 1993, the Coupé was available with a four-cylinder, 2.0 L 16V engine, in both turbo (190 PS) and normally aspirated (139 PS) versions. Both engines were later versions of Fiat's twin-cam design and inherited from the Lancia Delta Integrale, winner of the World Rally Championship a record six times. 1996 brought in a 1.8 L 16V engine (not available in the UK, 131 PS), along with a 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V (147 PS), and a 5-cylinder 2.0-litre 20V turbo (220 PS).
Fiat Coupé 20v Turbo Model
The turbocharged 16 and 20 valve versions were equipped with a very efficient Viscodrive limited-slip differential to counter the understeer that plagues most powerful front wheel drive cars. Additionally, the coupe featured independent suspension all round: at the front MacPherson struts and lower wishbones anchored to an auxiliary crossbeam, offset coil springs and anti-roll bar; at the rear, trailing arms mounted on an auxiliary subframe, coil springs and an anti-roll bar.
1998 saw the release of the Limited Edition which featured red Brembo brake calipers at the front and standard red calipers at the back, a body kit, push-button start, six-speed gearbox, strut brace to make the chassis more rigid and Recaro seats with red leather inserts which offered better support than the standard 20VT seats. The LE was produced in Black (flat), Red (flat), Vinci Grey (metallic), Crono Grey (flat) and Steel Grey (metallic). The bodywork of the LE also benefited from titanium coloured insert around the light bezels and the wing mirrors. Each Limited Edition ('LE') Coupé was manufactured with a badge located by the rear-view mirror which contained that car's unique number (it is rumored that Michael Schumacher was the original owner of LE No. 0001, however when the question was raised to him personally he confirmed he had owned one, but a red one, while LE No. 0001 is a Crono Grey one). Originally a spokesman from Fiat stated only approximately 300 Limited Editions would be built. The final amount was much higher, with numbers as high as 1400 touted by some. This angered many of the owners of the original 300 cars and almost certainly impacted residual values. The original number however was quoted by a Fiat UK spokesman, so probably that number only applied to the UK market. The numbered plaque on every Coupe features enough space for 4 numbers.
In 1998 the 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V got a Variable Inlet System which brought the power to 154 PS (113 kW). The 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V Turbo received a 6-speed gearbox and a large, satin gloss push starter button. In addition, the sills of the Turbo version were colour matched with the body paintwork. Fiat also released the 2.0 L 5 cylinder Turbo 'Plus'. This model came with an option kit that made it virtually identical to the LE, except for minor interior design changes and without the unique identification badge of the LE.
In 2000 Fiat released another special version of the Fiat Coupé. Featuring the 1.8-litre engine, it was only available throughout mainland Europe and marketed as an elegant and affordable edition. Fiat also made changes throughout the rest of the range: new seats, side skirts and wheels for the 2.0-litre 20V model, 'Plus' edition wheels on turbo models and Fiat manufactured seats on the 'Plus' that were virtually identical to the original Plus Recaro seats with the addition of extra airbags. The 2.0-litre 20V Turbo model is capable of accelerating from 0–100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in 6.5 seconds, with a top speed of 240 km/h (149 mph) or 250 km/h (155 mph) with later 6-speed gearbox. When production finally stopped in September 2000, a total number of 72,762 units had been produced.
[Text from Wikipedia]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Coup%C3%A9
This miniland-scale Lego FIAT Coupe (Type 175 - 1993 - Bangle) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 92nd Build Challenge, - "Stuck in the 90's", - all about vehicles from the decade of the 1990s.
The Fiat Coupé (type 175, officially titled the Coupé Fiat) was a coupé produced by the Italian manufacturer Fiat between 1993 and 2000. The car was introduced at Brussels Motor Show in 1993.
It is most remembered for its distinctive, angular design, with unique scalloped side panels. The body was designed by Chris Bangle from Centro Stile Fiat, while the interior was designed by Pininfarina. The exterior design would foreshadow much of late 1990s and early 2000s car design, acting as a precedent to both Bangle's somewhat notorious work at BMW, as well as futuristic angular designs by other marques, such as Ford and Renault.
History:
The Fiat Coupe made media headlines in auto magazines during 1992 after several spy shots were taken revealing the car on test. On its launch in 1993, the Coupé was available with a four-cylinder, 2.0 L 16V engine, in both turbo (190 PS) and normally aspirated (139 PS) versions. Both engines were later versions of Fiat's twin-cam design and inherited from the Lancia Delta Integrale, winner of the World Rally Championship a record six times. 1996 brought in a 1.8 L 16V engine (not available in the UK, 131 PS), along with a 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V (147 PS), and a 5-cylinder 2.0-litre 20V turbo (220 PS).
Fiat Coupé 20v Turbo Model
The turbocharged 16 and 20 valve versions were equipped with a very efficient Viscodrive limited-slip differential to counter the understeer that plagues most powerful front wheel drive cars. Additionally, the coupe featured independent suspension all round: at the front MacPherson struts and lower wishbones anchored to an auxiliary crossbeam, offset coil springs and anti-roll bar; at the rear, trailing arms mounted on an auxiliary subframe, coil springs and an anti-roll bar.
1998 saw the release of the Limited Edition which featured red Brembo brake calipers at the front and standard red calipers at the back, a body kit, push-button start, six-speed gearbox, strut brace to make the chassis more rigid and Recaro seats with red leather inserts which offered better support than the standard 20VT seats. The LE was produced in Black (flat), Red (flat), Vinci Grey (metallic), Crono Grey (flat) and Steel Grey (metallic). The bodywork of the LE also benefited from titanium coloured insert around the light bezels and the wing mirrors. Each Limited Edition ('LE') Coupé was manufactured with a badge located by the rear-view mirror which contained that car's unique number (it is rumored that Michael Schumacher was the original owner of LE No. 0001, however when the question was raised to him personally he confirmed he had owned one, but a red one, while LE No. 0001 is a Crono Grey one). Originally a spokesman from Fiat stated only approximately 300 Limited Editions would be built. The final amount was much higher, with numbers as high as 1400 touted by some. This angered many of the owners of the original 300 cars and almost certainly impacted residual values. The original number however was quoted by a Fiat UK spokesman, so probably that number only applied to the UK market. The numbered plaque on every Coupe features enough space for 4 numbers.
In 1998 the 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V got a Variable Inlet System which brought the power to 154 PS (113 kW). The 2.0-litre 5-cylinder 20V Turbo received a 6-speed gearbox and a large, satin gloss push starter button. In addition, the sills of the Turbo version were colour matched with the body paintwork. Fiat also released the 2.0 L 5 cylinder Turbo 'Plus'. This model came with an option kit that made it virtually identical to the LE, except for minor interior design changes and without the unique identification badge of the LE.
In 2000 Fiat released another special version of the Fiat Coupé. Featuring the 1.8-litre engine, it was only available throughout mainland Europe and marketed as an elegant and affordable edition. Fiat also made changes throughout the rest of the range: new seats, side skirts and wheels for the 2.0-litre 20V model, 'Plus' edition wheels on turbo models and Fiat manufactured seats on the 'Plus' that were virtually identical to the original Plus Recaro seats with the addition of extra airbags. The 2.0-litre 20V Turbo model is capable of accelerating from 0–100 km/h (0 to 62 mph) in 6.5 seconds, with a top speed of 240 km/h (149 mph) or 250 km/h (155 mph) with later 6-speed gearbox. When production finally stopped in September 2000, a total number of 72,762 units had been produced.
[Text from Wikipedia]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Coup%C3%A9
This miniland-scale Lego FIAT Coupe (Type 175 - 1993 - Bangle) has been created for Flickr LUGNuts' 92nd Build Challenge, - "Stuck in the 90's", - all about vehicles from the decade of the 1990s.
Ordering S.H. Figuarts is generally a major pain in the ass, particular for super hot properties. At least with Figma, there's a dedicated online store and a preorder time. With Figuarts, they're never announced and as such I generally run into them by surprise.
As such, I blinked and I missed EVERY-SINGLE-JAPANESE-SITE with regards to a figure from a little movie you may be familiar with - Captain Marvel. Who knew that a figure that pretty much nobody cared for would be so hard to actually find, and this was before the "controversy".
As I've said before, I liked the overall film. There were some questionable choices, as always, but as the father of two little girls I'm quite approving of the overall tone of the movie. Not because of the whole perceived SJW angle (and I say perceived because quite frankly, the movie would be the same to me regardless of gender), but because it speaks true of one thing - people will always talk shit about anything and everything you do, whether it be constructively or destructively. The point is to make a conscious choice to tell them all to go to hell if you're going to do things anyway. On a more personal note, I'm hoping to never be the Dad in that movie.
This Figuarts release comes with a somewhat sparse smattering of extras. There's the standard unhelmeted figure, two additional set of hands (open palm and spread palm), a Kree helmeted head, and two Photon energy effects for her closed fists.
And yes... again... no stand. Broken record, I know, but maybe if I whine enough one day it'll become a standard feature.
The base body of Carol appears to have the same as that of Infinity War Black Widow. Same articulation points (Black Widow hides her mid torso swivel better than Carol, but at the expense of limiting her ability to bend backwards).
As with Widow, I'm not overly enthusiastic about the hip design and really would have preferred either something like the Dragon Ball figures or the Fighting Body uses for Street Fighter as her ability to do any cool crouching poses is highly restricted.
I have no idea Scarlet Johansson and Brie Larson are the same height, but that's what the Figuarts are suggesting. What I DO know is that based on photos and some measurements, Carol appears to be way too much leg, though I do appreciate the bulkier appearance of the character due to the armoured nature of the battlesuit.
The unhelmeted sculpt of course uses that fancy new photo printing technology that Bandai has been employing as of late. Again, much like Widow, the end result is pretty good especially from a far enough away not to notice the specks from the printing process. Of the two, I feel the Widow face came out cleaner, but Marvel is no slouch. The accuracy of this printing technology is further bolstered by the fact that Bandai actually got the shape of her face right.
This is also an opportune time to point out that the final product face, thankfully, is much, much, much better than that really generic looking prototype picture that is floating around the Internet and even the back of the box. Sculpting of her hair is also pretty impressive, particularly given the small size. The hair, while nice looking, restricts the ability of the unhelmeted sculpt to look up.
Of course, Carol is sporting the facial expression which has made her an international sensation.
The helmeted sculpt is servicable. That's not meant to be taken in a negative way. It clean, well sculpted, and looks good. But, it's also got the same neutral expression as her normal sculpt. It would have been nice to see some emotion in this particular sculpt, especially seeing how she basically truly embraces her power by this point in the movie.
FYI, the head is attached to the neck post, a necessary step given that the head and neck get covered by the helmeted mode. Unfortunately, the peg on the body itself is not quite big enough for a completely firm connection, and as such the head is prone to falling out, with a greater occurrence with the unhelmeted sculpt.
While the figure is a bit sparse in the accessory department, it does make up for it in the paint and detailing areas. Yes, you are getting Tamashi Nations quality paint apps and paint masking, but more specifically it feels to me that this figure has a higher density of paint applications than any of the other female figures at the very least, and overall probably rivaled by characters such as Iron Man which have metal suits.
The body is literally covered all over with metallic paint, whether that be the primary red and blue, or the various gold and silver accents. There are some details sculpted into the suit itself, such as various grooves, buckles, pockets, and of course, actual fabric details, all of which are painted appropriately and cleanly.
I guess this is as good a time as any to point out that the hair is definitely more blonde than in the movie, where the brown comes out more. This colour here is actually more reminiscent of her colouring in the tidbit of Endgame that we see. Maybe this is foreshadowing of an Endgame Captain Marvel Figuarts at some point in time?
Did I mention that the figure really doesn't come with much in the way of accessories? This is an area that, admittedly, that the One:12 version destroys this figure, regardless of how things turn out. I believe that it comes with as much stuff as the Deluxe Hot Toys version does, instead of just the V-Trigger fists of Guile from Street Fighter V.
In conclusion, another solid, albeit somewhat limited, Figuarts entry into the Marvel world. I have to say that Figuarts really has come a far way from their laughable Avengers line, though strangely I don't think Steve Rogers has ever gotten, or will be receiving, the same photo printing tech that the ladies and Paul Rudd will be getting.
I now eagerly await the arrival of my Endgame Figuarts Black Widow.
Lindi Ortega
OCA Spazio Ansaldo (MI)
19 Marzo 2013
© Mairo Cinquetti
© All rights reserved. Do not use my photos without my written permission. If you would like to buy or use this photo PLEASE message me or email me at mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Immagine protetta da copyright © Mairo Cinquetti.
Tutti i diritti sono riservati.
L'immagine non può essere usata in nessun caso senza autorizzazione scritta dell'autore.
Per contatti: mairo.cinquetti@gmail.com
Nashville beckoned, and Lindi Ortega answered the call.
Armed with an inimitable, irresistible singing voice The Independent hails as “a truly magnificent instrument,” and a heart bursting with creative ambition, the Canadian songstress whom American Songwriter calls “the love child of Johnny Cash and Nancy Sinatra” decided to relocate to Music City from her
native Toronto to birth her brand new musical offspring, Cigarettes & Truckstops.
A logical follow-up to her 2011 critically acclaimed alt-country masterpiece Little Red Boots, the 10-song Cigarettes & Truckstops further flaunts Ortega’s distinctive vision; one that embraces the oft-neglected, politically incorrect realism of traditional country and frames it in a charmingly, and sometimes darkly humourous contemporary context.
Bookended by a couple of romantic road ballads in the title track and the reflective “Every Mile Of The Ride,” Cigarettes & Truckstops further evolves the promise foreshadowed by the JUNO-Award nominated-and-Polaris-Music-Prize-long-listed Little Red Boots.
The writing is stellar, her musical discipline undoubtedly galvanized by a fearless 2010-2012 tour schedule that saw Lindi open for a variety of acts, from punk vets Social Distortion; pop icon Burton Cummings; country fave Dierks Bentley; folk outfit Noah & The Whale and Academy Award winner Kevin Costner with attention-grabbing finesse, making serious inroads with North American and European audiences, and prompting Exclaim! to declare Ortega an “electrifying” performer.
Whether it’s the plucky shuffle of the hilarious “The Day You Die;” the angry harrumph of “Don’t Wanna Hear It;” the high lonesome feel of “Heaven Has No Vacancy” or the haunting twang of guilt that is “Murder of Crows,” Ortega continues to deliver a refreshing twist that walks vintage and contemporary lines in imaginative and inventive manners.
But in order to realize this next step of her artistic fruition, the two-time JUNO Award nominee (Canada’s equivalent to the Grammy Awards) had to pull up her Canadian stakes and come to the well.
“I was really inspired by being here in Nashville,” explains Ortega, the daughter of a Northern Irish mother and Mexican father who has been performing since she picked up a guitar at age 16.
“I wanted the authenticity of my influences to shine through on this record. I knew I liked country and I think moving here, I wanted to delve into those influences more genuinely.
“To be able to read a Hank Williams biography and then go to where his house was, or the places that they talk about, and absorb that was invaluable.”
As Ortega is the first to admit, she’s anything but a “straight-up country artist,” so other elements played into the equation.
“I found that I was really inspired by going to New Orleans, after I shot that music video for (Little Red Boots’) “Black Fly” – and the Deep South.
“After Little Red Boots I read the Hank Williams biography and I learned that he was very highly influenced by a man named “Tee-Tot.” (Rufus Payne). Tee-Tot was a blues guy, and I discovered that a lot of early country drew influence from early blues. So I really started getting into listening to blues.”
She recruited a sympathetic visionary to produce the album in fellow Canadian Colin Linden, (O Brother Where Art Thou, Blackie & The Rodeo Kings, Bruce Cockburn, The Band), who also happens to reside in Nashville.
“When it was time to start working with producers, Colin’s name was thrown in the hat,” recalls Ortega. “I looked him up on YouTube,and the first thing I saw him perform was this crazy awesome Dobro solo.
“I realized that I loved that instrument, and I needed to have it all over my record,” she laughs.
“There was something about the sound of it that resonated so much with me. Colin was very influenced by the blues and had a lot of knowledge about its background and history, and I thought it would be cool to bring that into the record.”
The blues touch is a subtle one, a seasoning of sorts on this album of longing and vulnerability; travel and romance; of anger and passion; of fact and fiction.
A big breakthrough was Ortega’s topical candour.
“I was sort of delving into the darker corners of my mind with some things, which was interesting for me, and not being afraid to put some other things out there,” she reveals. “The song from my first record, “All My Friends,” alludes to certain things in a metaphorical way, where on this album, I’m a little more straight up about it. I’m not trying to hide.
“I guess that I’m just willing to take that risk. I’m just being honest and talking about my experiences, and by doing that, I’m not advocating anything and I’m not telling anybody they need to do anything: I’m just writing about my life and the experiences that I go through.”
But it’s not all autobiographical: “Murder of Crows,’ co-authored by Matt Nolan and one of three co-writes on Cigarettes & Truckstops, is pure Man In Black-inspired fiction.
“I was actually thinking of Johnny Cash’s Murder album when I wrote that,” Ortega chuckles. “I just wanted to delve into fictitious territory, and not write from experience – sort of make up stories.
“In a lot of old Cash songs, there’s a lot that didn’t come from his experience: he made them up. It’s cool to be able to make up crazy stories like that.”
One of the album’s real kickers is the Bruce Wallace co-write “The Day You Die,” a humorous look at love’s clichés, a future classic that begins with the opening stanza,
“You said you’d love me ‘til the cows comes home/Well I’m hoping that they all go blind.”
“That’s why I love writing with Bruce, because we never set out to write,” Ortega admits. “We just get together as friends and pick up guitars and it just happens naturally. He’s a quirky guy, because he totally gets where I’m coming from in that respect.
“We pick up the guitar and make up joke songs. We thought it would be cool if all these cliché things that people say to people, things like ‘Love you ‘til this, love you ‘til that’,” were taken literally, what would they have to do to keep the love going?”
There are more gems on Cigarettes & Truckstops that are ripe for personal discovery, a riveting tour-de-force of an album that will open up more ears and hearts to the scintillating sounds of Lindi Ortega and an appreciation of the unique perspective she brings to her craft.
Two trademarks impel her artistry: sincerity and honesty.
“I’m not going to deny it because I can’t,” Ortega admits. “It just comes out. I owe it to the song and to myself to expel that expression, put it into music and be very honest and forthright about the good, the bad and the ugly of Lindi Ortega.”
This series will be the last of my uploads for the trip I took to southern Burgundy in September 2023.
Listed as a Historic landmark in 1900, the Romanesque church in the out-of-the-way village of Gourdon is one of the secret wonders of Burgundy. Not particularly outstanding from the outside, its large silhouette nevertheless foreshadows an impressive interior, and indeed it is, with its combination of a whooping three-level, Cluny-inspired elevation, its three naves and its generalized system of groin vaulting. Its collection of sculpted capitals is also famous, as are the alfresco paintings that were discovered in the 1940s as the plastering that was applied to hide them in the 19th century began to peel away. More such discoveries were made in the 1970s and restoration lasted until the early 1990s.
Located on a hilltop in the département of Saône-et-Loire, Gourdon has been inhabited since time immemorial. Valuable traces of Roman presence were found in 1845 and promptly shipped to a museum in Paris (the Cabinet des Médailles) where the are still being exhibited to this day. A monastery was founded here very early on, as there is a written trace of a dependency of the Le Puy cathedral chapter in 534, but claims that it was “a Benedictine priory” seem to me a bit overambitious, in spite of my sympathies for that order: let’s not forget that Saint Benedict died only in 547 in Monte Cassino, and I doubt that his Rule was so well-known in Gaul in his own lifetime that it could have been adopted by a small religious establishment in Burgundy... The monastery did certainly exist, though, as Saint Gregory of Tours visited it in 570 and there met with Didier (or Desideratus). About this last figure, History hesitates between the quality of abbot (that would indeed rather be prior if Gourdon were a priory back then) and that of hermit. In any case, by 1104, when the completed parish church is mentioned (there remains no trace of the in-between period), there is no further mention of that monastery, which must have disappeared in the meantime; it was probably little more than a hermitage, as by Year 1000 the rule had been largely propagated by Saint Benedict of Aniane († 821) and Benedictine houses were flourishing all over the Western world. An already existing priory would most likely never have been so abandoned and shut down. No physical traces of that establishment were ever found by archæologists.
Since around 1100, the church has been left almost intact, except for the bell tower which collapsed in 1881 and was rebuilt in 1889, exactly as it was before.
One of the short columns I mention in the caption under the previous photo. I fail to reconcile the sophistication of the shaft with the rather crude, archaic manner of the capital... The base obviously belongs with the capital, but the shaft looks like it was designed and fashioned with the concepts and the tools of 100 years later! Maybe the old shaft became worn or somehow fragile, and had to be replaced?