AC FILTER GRILLE

In 2013, mother nature seismically devastated the Midwest, with tremors and liquefied river soil - sinking and disfiguring buildings, bridges, silos, floodwalls, levees, and piers. Just days later, she inundated the liberated river with a multi-day rainstorm on top of a snow melt from the blanketed upper watersheds. With waters surpassing the ferocity and volume of 1993, the floodplain was again a floodplain - after generations of hydrological deprivation and exploitation for the sake of agri-business, trucking, barge freight, and rail connectivity. Upstream debris of all sorts drifted and collected over the flat and ravaged river valley, and further damaged the already shaken , sunken, and disfigured human structures that crisscross it. With the river's course rearranged by the earthquake, a new path of least resistance leads it through an East St Louis whose biodiversity has reached a renewed breadth and depth. Flora and fauna have begun reclaiming, remediating, and revitalizing the restless landscape. Up on the Missouri bluffs, West St Louis' was spared by the flood, but the quakes left thousands of the ever-present brick buildings – homes, old mills, factories, banks, schools, and even Budweiser, in piles. The occasional overbuilt holdout of reinforced concrete or steel survived and remained trustworthy. After the call for evacuation, those who hid and refused to leave, and those who sneaked in from outside began a mythical American chapter of recovery together - a necessarily communal process.

Huddled around small fires in the chill of early spring, the reluctant St Louisian survivors and the inspired newcomers found kinship with one another, the landscape of ruin, and the wildlife now given free reign of the leveled city – now more vacuous and porous than ever before. The tremors made way for the many parks and cemeteries to spread their wealth of flora, and collapses and cave-ins revealed long-forgotten creeks and streams once covered over by streets and buildings. Under the pavement, gravity and water had conspired to carve valleys and canyons over the ages, which now vein and drain the city on the bluffs. With those waterways surfaced, and reforestation begun, the already sparse and sprawling city was overcome and reincarnated by the reestablishment of ecosystems – in a disorienting yet gratifying reversal of human domination.

The earthquake's disintegration of formerly impermeable surfaces and buildings was only the beginning. With cooperative partnership with nature, rather than perpetuation of willful ignorance, abuse, and plundering, a guided restoration of local wildlife and hydrology continues to foster an increasingly balanced, democratic, and biophilic ecotropolis whose citizens bolster environmental resiliency, and take on the slow but righteous task of transforming the St Louis flood plain into a giant kidney filtering the upper Mississippi. This is made possible by the parallel evolution of new infrastructural networks for the transfer of electricity, information, education, necessities, people, goods, and raw materials.

Based on a communal village unit, the city is shaped by socially, ecologically, and topographically dynamic neighborhoods and towns composed of a mixture of transients, the seasonally migratory, those who live and sleep where their work takes them, and those whose work and workplace is more predictable. It is an emergent and consensus-guided phenomenon made possible by egalitarian representation - and reinforced by putting the health of nature above all things, with faith in knowing that with time, all other things will be improved by the benefit of nature. The ecotropolis enables the patient and persistent integration, cultivation, re-conceiving, and restructuring of human and ecological value within the landscape, cityscape, and riverscape here - which for too long has been alarmingly devoid.

An army of horticulture and ecology-steeped denizens sustains a social movement that reconciles and harmonizes with the natural world in the aftermath of human devastation. It is a collective process that slowly but surely breeds a multivalent 'best' of the rural with the 'best' of the urban. As the ecotropolis matures, it continues to further enmesh east and west St Louis, and grows from a modest yet immense foundational economy of building materials wed with the fruits of agroforestry, permaculture, and ecosystem restoration.

With cues from Quakerism, Buddhism, elves, and the mound builders of Cahokia, the neo-native sylvans are unified and empowered by cooperative devotion to reducing and eradicating harmful human impact. They rally under a campaign of ecological remediation, restoration, and reinvention.
The new human presence here initiates, catalyzes, and accelerates the return of diverse ecosystems. Renewing biological 'infrastructure' for it's own sake in the presence of human communities demands not only a evolution of built form, but evolution of human behavio

Venus has been predominant the last couple of months along with Jupiter in the Night sky..This is looking toward the sunset..Venus chases the sun in the sky it is so close..This is looking south on St Augustine Beach from the pier down towards Crescent Beach and a little further to Daytona. Loving the HDR..the trick seems to be to use some restraint....I may not be able to handle it......On this picture..the original was a little more contrasty..but the shadows were completely black and the overall picture was not as warm...it was probably just a slight bit sharper though this one sharpened up pretty good.

The Evening News (James Watkins) hdr

Catalytic confrontations
Calculated crawl,
Embryonic isolations,
Future free-for-all.

Energetic exhortation,
Apoplexied brawl,
Catatonic saturation,
Isometric ball.

Egocentric salutation,
Fatalistic fall,
Megalithic mumbo jumbo,
Paganistic pall.

Pugilistic palpitation,
Excavated sprawl,
Perspiration aggravation,
Aspirated wall.

Ammunition malnutrition,
Superstition stall,
California concentrated,
Captivated thrall.

Bound and ground,
Then taken down,
By the very best-
With one more show
Worth watching,
And then we’re headed west.

Recreation generation,
By the book denomination,
Families filled with hesitation,
RVs racked for roaming.

Picking up the pieces,
Layed down on the land,
With wasted wealth and watersheds,
And regions raped by man.

Calibration castigations,
Asymmetric aberrations,
Guided tours with revelations,
Ratted out and ruined.

Catastrophic congregations,
Commutated castings,
Calvinistic computations,
Debonair and prancing.

Altruistic aspirations,
Stoned, bemoaned abbreviations,
Terrified with trepidations,
Gnomes long gone and gassed!

Honed and cloned then overthrown,
Granted one last wish-
Celebrated, then negated-
Dangling near the dish!

Partisan unprinciples,
In petrifying packs-
With news and views
And loop-de-loos,
And stab-‘em-in-the-backs.

Ready for the ruckus,
Sitting at the shrine,
Thought they really
Had the goods,
Now listen to the whine.

Thought they had it marketed,
Cornered and refined,
Around the town
The teaching wound,
Until they lost their mind.

Settling to the bottom,
They slid to lower ground,
Between the lines and valentines,
Some lost their Royal Crowns.

Terroristic tinkering,
Tumbling and tinkling,
Fundamental farkles,
Helpful and home grown.

Patriotic particles,
Hidden in the articles,
Compact and post partial,
Buried to the bone.

Vacuumed packed
And gunny-sacked,
Pre-segmented squalls,
Appalachian apparitions,
Headed to the malls.

Fevered and fantastic men,
Marching to the moon,
With masticating matriarchs,
In subcutaneous swoon.

Breasts blown up beautiful,
Complicated castings,
Fallen faces on the floor,
Mesmerized for masking.

Sacrificial sublimations,
Surrogates sublime,
Tetrahedral, analgesic,
Sentimental crimes.

Pawing, pungent prisoners,
Soothing, sexy swine-
Sows and cows and sinning sons,
Tasting tempting wines.

Navigation nuances,
Nuptials by Nair,
Feudalistic fragrances,
Held up with heavy hair.

Practical imbalances,
Factory unrepairs,
New wave cold and chemical friends,
Facts blown up with air.

Salivating swindlers,
Solo Simon says,
High-falutin prostitution,
Fixed up with the Feds.

Sports and courts and teasing torts,
Women going wild-
Dow Jones Average hemorrhage,
Help the homeless child.

Down the daunting highway,
Less than overnight,
Covering ground without a sound,
Filtered by first light.

Lazy lit up lethargy,
Loosed by lying lips,
Bought the farm in triplicate,
Then sailed a sinking ship.

Galvanizing garrisons,
Gathering at the line,
Pushed ahead though nearly dead,
They won it one more time.

Tested in the tumult,
On solid ground they stand,
Groping with the changer,
Positioned close at hand.

Nightly, brightly flickering,
Turn the clicker off-
Before you go,
Don’t miss the show,
An evening totally lost!

James Watkins (03-06)