Montana: an apt name and really skookum, eh. I visit a power plant (carbon neutral, so there) in Montana occaisionally and so have a chance to see the sights. Here are pics from the last trip. 
Along state Hwy. 200, Bambi and his brother- no quarter. 
A line of slash piles. 
They have guns in Montana, lots of guns. 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art-Probably my favorite, most likely since my brother lives at Redondo Beach and I’m in the area periodically, so get to experience this top flight museum on a repeated basis. A really good museum is a continuing source of amusement and illumination. For example, I’d never been into the Americana style much, until I saw a full size Thomas Hart Benton and immediately...false distinctions disappeared and a sense of wonder filtered through.
Slowly Turing Narrative, description from the web site: A large screen mounted on a floor-to-ceiling shaft is constantly rotating at the center of the room. An image of the artist's face in black-and-white is projected from one side, accompanied by a voice reciting a long list of individual states of being and actions in a repetitive, rhythmic chant. Color images of childhood memories, accidents, and medical operations are projected from the other side, with accompanying sounds. One side of the screen is mirrored, and it reflects the viewer's own image as well as the projected images which travel across the walls of the room as the screen turns, creating a swirling vortex of images in the space
Brendan and Kerry: in the garden on the way to the Japanese pavilion. On this visit they were showing Japanese ‘imaginings’ of the tiger. This collection of yamato-e (scroll style) paintings were done in the mid 1800s. What made this showing remarkable was that at the time, the Japanese had never seen one of these creatures live, they only knew them through their skins. They knew tigers were large, ferocious creatures but had to fill in the rest. So, all of the depictions are unique, capturing on the one hand an essence of the tiger and on the other this mythic imagining of what the tiger is…fascinating.
Hello!...now that is a horn…looks like an eardrum destructifier to me. No really, an over the top but beautiful piece of audio technology and I’ll bet it sounds great.
What planet are we on now? Check out the speaker cables-you could run about 230kV through those.
Many audiophiles have specially designed ‘listening rooms’…cool…if only I’d gone to med school.
Lourdes-those Catholics really know how to build a pretty church. I'm not catholic, much less religious but I still attend mass here occasionally as it pleaseth my soul.
Nordstrom: You want a sweet little $500 sweater for the fall season-get it here.
The ever popular ode to greasy carnival food and the myth of abundance: The Pig Out in the Park. I don’t eat much meat so the whole thing struck me as a bit repulsive (I occasionally eat chicken or fish when feeling especially saucy or when someone else is paying, but fish etc. don’t have feelings, so it’s OK, sort of). My biggest impression from the whole affair was the stench of about 20 separate flavors of spent fry oil mingling through the air...pretty vile and ironic considering that the smell of food cooking is usually delightful.
I had to escape from that unpleasant fried oil smell, so I here am with my son’s friend in the beer garden trying, rather successfully, to act like an idiot. I thought the hand signal was ‘cool’, something I must have seen in ‘Wayne’s World’ or something…little did I know, I was actually invoking Satan…check it out here.
Here is the son-Brendan. He’s standing in front of some public art on the border of Riverfront Park. Like most art specified by bureaucrats, pretty lame stuff, but someone had the brilliant idea of putting tags on the runners with names of local area kids killed in the Iraq war-now it all means something. I'm thankful that he's here and not on one of those tags.
I always thought this guy made guitars or something…well, big surprise, I was a little off. He not only collaborated with Gibson on the most popular solid-body electric guitar design ever, a design that hasn’t changed much since 1952, he also sold over 20 million records in the early 50s with his wife, Mary Ford, and invented multi-track recording (for overdubbing and so on).
1956: In the fields near my hometown of Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley of California, a farm worker is forced to stand naked while being sprayed with DDT. The photographer was later arrested for 'documenting' such treatment.
Where else do we obsessively stay the course…thumb our collective noses at global warming, etc?
The juxtaposition of KYRS and an outhouse is in no way meant to demean a very fine community radio station. It’s just that I will do anything to receive the signal during weekends in the country. Note the antenna attached to the outhouse; in order to receive the weak 50 watt KYRS signal at Newman Lake in hi-fi, drastic measures must be taken...finally...the outhouse is good for something.
craigslist, just a bulletin board…simple, direct, and utterly brilliant. You need to move to Amsterdam for six months-find an apartment here. You have a junk fetish-satisfy it here. My favorite section is the best of craigslist. Ranging from the hilarious to rants (…from a UPS driver), mawkish, I’ve so been there stories (The Perfect Craigslist Girl, Or So I Thought), oddities, lots of oddities (My Turtle Needs A Booty Call), and instruction guides (Advice to Young Men from an Old Man), all written by people far more clever than myself. The only downside is that it takes so long to update the best of list that I run out of things to read.
“…all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be…” Pink Floyd ‘Talk to Me’
KYRS-the best radio station in the world or what? Well OK-how about the best radio station in Spokane. KYRS IS the best thing to happen to radio in this area since public radio was invented. Talk about eclectic-you never know what you’re going to hear. The music is all over the board, most of it, I guarantee, you’ve never heard before. That alone is reason to change channels and give it a try. It’s also a ‘community’ radio station, meaning you can have your very own show--most are quite good (understandably, there are a few exceptions). One of my favorites is "Around the World," hosted by Michael Moon Bear on Wednesdays at 2:30 p.m.(world music show) The talk portions are pretty lefty (while probably closer to the truth, kind of like the opposite of Fox News), but that’s OK as the 'mainstream media' has become pretty nauseating, so KYRS is a welcome antidote.
