Worlds in worlds, North Philly cowboys

Funny, I was working on my book, and for some reason it hit me that my last few posts have kinda been downers. But I guess things are pretty down. But the down part isn’t everything, is it?

Procrastinating, I came across this beautiful and amazing picture, which Jenny Davidson posted on Light Reading.

The picture below comes from a book on black cowboys in Philadelphia. Mike Newell wrote a profile on them a few years ago for the Philadelphia Weekly:

Black inner-city cowboys have been racing their horses at the Speedway since before even the old-timers can remember.

“Some things just always been around,” says one Speedway regular, gray and stooped, moving through the crowd. “It’s what we do.”

Davidson writes:

If you know Philadelphia at all, or even if you’ve just looked out of the windows on the train as you pass through the bleak North Philadelphia station en route to 30th Street Station, you will be familiar with that intriguing but deeply depressed cityscape of low-rise row-houses and urban blight; but there is a magical alternate life there of urban cowboys, chronicled in Fletcher Street, a rather lovely book of photographs by Martha Camarillo.

Everywhere is amazing.

I think I need such a book in my life right now, and will add the book, Fletcher Street, to the Cypher&Syllable store.

Light Reading also has some links, for learning more about these black cowboys in Philadelphia.