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It happens once in a blue moon while out roaming about, that one sees a place that one would just love to learn more about, especially in terms of cultural enrichment and enlightenment. I had such an experience in a small central Pennsylvania city recently. The sign which caught my eye because of the colorful parrot on it announced a "Party In Paradise". What could there be not to love about a place proclaiming in colorful terms that a party in paradise can be found there ??? Yes indeed, Club Coconuts sounded dandy to me ! And I swear that parrot looks exactly like the one on the cover of Tom Robbins' excellent book "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates".
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Another sign outside Club Coconuts boldly declared that this was a No Work Zone ! Yes ! My kind of place ! And I just adore the little bi-plane pulling the Club Coconuts banner sign in this one.
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Club Coconuts even apparently had people standing by to dance with me. I would have enjoyed a bit of square dancing, you know, swing your partner round and round, do-ci-do, and all that, with sawdust on the floor, but I just couldn't, unfortunately, wait around until 8 o'clock to see what that was all about. Life is cruel sometimes, I'm sure it would have been good healthy fun. Maybe next time. (Cue the Tom Waits music as he drives away wistfully.)
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Now I can't say for sure, but this establishment was just up the street from Coconuts, so I can only imagine that some of Coconuts customers must work in here, after a tough day slinging rusty scrap steel, Coconuts is probably a good place to go for a beer and to unwind dancing.
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Some Fall colors were just starting to come out in this next landscape . . .
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36 comments:
Étrange rencontre colorée!!!!!
Bon Reverso, c'est nul!!!!! Enfin pas complètement.... Héhé
But ask yourself, dear Owen, could ANYPLACE live up to such claims. I mean, really, square dancers! Presumably all dressed up in Country and Western g-strings, no less!
Club coconuts? I'm imagining some kind of tiki decor and lots of Hawaian dancers... but in Pennsylvania?!?!
Very nice reverberations of the colors among the great photos!
"There's no place like home. There's no place home."
Club Coconuts has the greatest signs. I'm sure the establishment would be honored to know of this post.
And the image in your last "landscape" ... oh, Owen, that is absolutely beautiful! You take what would commonly be seen as eyesores and turn them into feasts for the eyes.
The story you wove around the club was great...and the 'works' photographs were as good as that of the old coal plant you showed us earlier.
Thank you.
Cue the Tom Waits..tee hee...
I love the last image...all that rust!
Quelques morceaux de joli passé , comme d'habitude, mais aussi, des témoignages du présent....
these rusty colours have nestled into my soul, like seeds of melancholy and quiet contemplation, and now they are blooming they are blooming...
Cher Owen, un petit mot après un assez long silence.
De la lecture en retard, je vais prendre mon temps...
J'aime beaucoup ta nouvelle bannière, is that your dream car ?
Amitiés et bises
I can only imagine what kind of dancing and my mind races with the possibilities of what kind of get ups the dancers might wear; coconut shells perhaps?
I just love your signs and the motto of No Work Zone with the drunken bird is hilarious.
Love the factory shots with their "fall colors." One can get lost in all those marvelous textures and tones.
Bonjour Chrys...
Ah, héhé, j'ai mis un petit moment à piger que Reverso c'est un outil de traduction en ligne... j'imagine que cela devrait donner des résultats bien curieux si l'on injecte des phrases qui sont bourrées d'ironie et autres remarques légèrement caustiques, bien que dit avec un sourire... toujours. On vit dans un drole de monde, il faut chercher la beauté là où l'on peut, là où l'on la trouve... bon, l'enseigne qui annonce des "dancers", ou plutôt des danseuses, je ne voulais pas croire au pire, au plus vulgaire, du coup j'imaginais à la places des danseuses comme Degas avait peintes... gracieuses... sublimes... mais pour une boite de nuit en face des espèces des usines dégliguées qu'il y avait par là, je craignais le pire... courage, fuyons ! Voilà, tu sais tout maintenant... vive les danseuses de Degas. (Qui me fait penser, j'ai vu le tombeau de Degas au cimetière de Montmartre, marqué "de Gas", et non pas "Degas".)
Snowbrush,
I guess various people have various ideas of what Paradise is... different strokes for different folks, as they say...
:-)
No doubt you are right about the dress standards.
Ah Steve, but of course, once within the confines of four walls, a good set designer could make you believe your were almost anywhere... so why not Hawaii in Pennsylvania... and I could go for some Hawaii about now, it was minus 3 here last night, and we are still in October... not good...
Hey Pliers ! Yeah, no place like home, even if one hardly knows it any more... greetings to both of you, hope all is ok in Whiteville...
:-)
Lydia, that is so sweet of you... yes, absolutely, one of the few things that really brings me great pleasure these days is looking for beauty in hidden places, finding the art in eyesores, and feasting on it. There is almost always something hidden waiting to be revealed, often it is right under our noses, but seeing it, being receptive to it, finally cherishing it, is another story entirely. It is certainly not easy. One can only hope one is learning, and growing with each experience, with each vision...
Hi Fly !
There will be more about the coal plant coming, just a question of time, and I'm not sure anyone would keep coming if I posted too often or too much at a time, so a much as I want to put alot of the work out into the public eye, it needs to be dosed... but I'll get there. There was some truly frightening machinery in that place!
Art... perhaps one of my very favorite Tom Waits tunes which could have gone with the diner in the previous post and this one is : Invitation to the Blues....
:-)
Bonjour Karine,
Un grand merci pour tous ces petits mots que je viens de voir, cela me fait très plaisir que tu passes, et s'il y a qqchse ici que te plaît, encore mieux. Je reve un jour de voir tes tableaux de plus près, en vrai, peut-être même en jour de devenire proprietaire d'une toile signée Karine A. Tes zebres, je suis loin de les avoir oublié. En esperant, en attendant, de voir d'autres sur ton blog...
Roxana,
May your inner garden bloom and bear the richest flowers and fruits, I wish you all of that and more...
Heiwa...
K'line ! K'line !
Te voilà... je me demandais où tu t'étais passée, car pas d'accès à la porte de la petite fée verte, j'esperais que cela allait quand même...
En fait, je pensais à toi, car pendant le voyage aux USA en septembre, j'ai trouvé une image que je voudrais bien t'envoyer... pourrais-tu m'envoyer un e-mail à owenmart333 at gmail.com ? et je répondrais avec la photo en question... c'était vraiment fait pour K'line... tu comprendras quand tu là vois...
En esperant que tout va bien...
Stickup... ! Honestly !
I really didn't even get as far as trying to imagine their attire, but you may well be right, perhaps they are wearing grass skirts and a couple of strategically placed hibiscus flowers??? Or coconut shells, indeed... But as I said to Chrys above, maybe they were Degas dancers ? In tutus and pastels, or maybe even dancers from the Bolshoi ballet troupe ??? Why do we often tend to believe the worst about information the world puts before our eyes ??? Is becoming cynical and jaded inevitable ??? Ah, cue the Tom Waits, like I said...
:-) TGIF and have a great weekend !
Your posts are part real photos and part imagination and part suggestion, getting the rest of us to open up our minds to possibilities too. Love it.
Owen, aurais-tu croisé des containers K-Line sur la route ? ;)
Je t'ai envoyé un message comme prévu.
Bises
Club CocoNUT certainly sounds like a squirrel friendly establishment - just the sort of place to unwind after a long shift in the nut mines. I love any place that is declared a no work zone.
I'm sure our mutual friend, Switters, would have ventured into the paradise of Club Coconuts for a square dance or two. He might not have fully appreciated those gorgeously bleeding autumnal colours you pointed out, though. Or perhaps, depending on what sort of elixir they were seving up in Club Coconuts, he would have found an appropriate show tune to belt out about them, if no one was looking.
Another feather in your cap with this post, BrOwen.
Dear TechnoB... I guess that's due to the fact that I've always been a bit of a dreamer, making up stories rather than accepting the world around me at face value... Anyway, if you are enjoying, then I am HAPPY ! Have a great great weekend !
Hi K'line... non, pas vu un seul conteneur maritime du K-Line, non, c'est autre chose, qui vient du genre d'endroit que j'aime bien visiter quand l'occasion se présente ... tu verras... quand je rentre à la maison cette nuit, j'essayerai de retrouver l'image et te l'envoyer... :-)
Hey LGS,
It was definitely a squirrelly sort of establishment ! Err, I mean, a good place for squirrels. For bushy tails ! I'm sure you would have been right at home !!!
:-)
Sister Lynne !
There you are... perhaps just waking up after that drinking bout with a certain kiwi we know and admire ?
I'm sure you are right, Switters would have been right at home here, partying in Paradise at Coconuts, with his parrot, belting out show tunes. And I'm sure he would have found a way to surreptitiously explore the inside of those corrugated metal warehouses, suspecting, as well he might, that they were actually fronts in disguise, used by the Catholic church to store in the utmost secrecy relics from past antics that the church could not possibly store in Rome. And in fact all the rusty steel structures around the buildings are actually a state of the art security system which make mincemeat out of any intruders. Which explains why I went no closer. But Switters would surely have found a way to get in, perhaps on a tall pair of stilts ?
~:-)
Wishing you the finest of weekends...
What a beautiful front the church hath put up, Brother.
Seriously, about the last picture-- I love love love the colours and lines, the textures, the big rectangular shapes delineated with those vertical stripes, and the gorgeous blood tones moving from quiet rusts to eye-popping tomato reds, underlined by a goldenrod yellow hue, with just that hint of emerald green at the bottom. Nothing stilted about this photo, bro. And I'm very happy that you decided to save your hide rather than risk being turned into mincemeat.
Are we all not much more than relics of past antics? Here's to future antics! Put the lime in the coconut and drink up now. The weekend is lurching into view.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wg_L0wGTyA
Not sure about that Coconut Club - someone will definitely be working there!! but love all the autumnal rusty hues on the corrugated iron..Greetings from mexico
Merci Owen!!!!
And the hula maiden said, "I'll give you everything..." (American Music Club)
Love the industrial factory shots. There were a number of old factories along the Cumberland River in Nashville, about 40 square blocks of such. But, they were flattened a number of years back since we needed a football stadium. (Tsk...tsk...) A slap in the face to industrial archeologists. I was part of an effort to salvage key elements of these buildings. Unfortunately, we couldn't save much, since wholesale demolition is so much cheaper and faster than painstaking deconstruction. What we did save, was made available to artists to use in sculptural work reflecting a lost heritage.
This looks like just the sort of perfect place to find while exploring in the US. And seeing the outside is just enough for me - the signs say it all.
Club Coconuts? Almost sounds like a perverse party game!!
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