Snoqualmie Summit

Lots of snow at Snoqualmie this year and it's May!

Ten Canoes

Great movie about an ancient aboriginal tale that even little ones will enjoy, if only for the mesmerizing visual beauty of this film.

Floors and Ceiling (and Walls) of LA

As I was walking about the public buildings of LA with Paulette last May, my first thought was to take photos of the fabulous floors and celings and then create a coffe table materpeice showing off these same floors and ceilings. In the meantime, life intervened and I ended up spending a lot of time fixing a water pump and all I have left are the photos.

LA Public Library

Griffin Observatory Rotunda

Union Station, Lobby

The Bonaventure, Lobby Ceiling

LA Public Library, Childrens Reading Room Ceiling

LA Public Library, Teen Reading Room

LA Public Library, Lobby

Union Station, Lobby Ceiling

Newman Lake Cabin Porch

Another photo by Tom that captures the essence of a place.

If I made movies...

...I would make exactly the same movies as the (sort of) famous Kevin Booth. With a name like that and talent, he must be soooo cool.

Guess where...

the coolest public library (that I've been to lately) is. The Moorish themed art deco tower is a hint.

Scenes from last winter

Thank you, Paulette…

…you are so sweet. The light in your eyes compels you to rent the veil and uncover meaning in the most unlikely places.

Too much snow...

...it hasn’t snowed this much for about 10 years. On the way out to shovel cabin roofs had to navigate through the deer and moose (can’t see the moose) milling about on the road. The snow is so deep these animals have nowhere else to go…

Got up on the roof and shoveled & shoveled till I was all tuckered out…and never even saw the roof. At some the point the shovel ‘slipped’ out off my hands and fell to the ground-a Freudian slip, as it were.

I was able to dig my way in to one of the cabins and find some snow gear-yea!

...doo, doo, doo looking out my back door.

A walk in the desert

Back to southern Arizona for an enviromental conference during the week, a nice change from the 3-4' of snowfall in Spokane. This years environmental buzz word is additionality-you heard it here first (all two of you). Anyway, got a chance to take a walk in the desert-here are a few pics.

Cactus, cacti?

A copper based mineral-I forgot the name.

A skookum view from a nice hotel. Typically though, all the food groups available here start with beef. I met some helpful Indian guys who provided tips on how to navigate an overly carnivorous world. My conceit it that I'm reducing my carbon footprint by eating in a third-worldish fashion...uh yea and okie dokie.

World's largest asparagus shoot or a flowering spike from an agave (the tequila plant)? The agave waits for the right time to create this lone 20' spike, produces fruit, and then dies.

C’est formidable!

One of the latest in a series by Tom the Artist. He's working on some new stuff for a showing at the Cafe Artisan in Tekoa WA (Tekoa?) in mid February. Seems like he must have read 'Moby Dick' or something recently since the whale motif is prevalent.

When I walk through what passes for a gallery in downtown Spokane, most of the items on display are merely decorative, mostly crap, and overpriced. Compared to that dreck, Tom prices his work very reasonably (too reasonably if you ask me). I'm not much of a critic, but spend time in every gallery I happen upon and so have some feel for the whole affair. My gut reaction-his stuff is quite good. So, if you want some original art, come to Tekoa around the 15th and check it out.

Artic sea ice gone in 5 years!

Credit: NASA image created by Jesse Allen

Incredible-the data keep rolling in and it all points in the same direction-we're ******! It turns out that reality is much worse than climate model predictions. Just two years ago the projection for an ice-free artic was 2040. At the current rate, all ice could be gone by 2012. Chicken Little is finally right-with a vengeance, the sky apparently is falling. I’ll say it here-anyone who (still) doesn’t get that something momentous is happening is an idiot (and a dupe and watches Fox News)--read about it here.

Montana

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.

LACMA

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.

I think it is that type of experience that helps us to maintain an open-eyed, child-like view of the world and keeps things interesting. I'm reminded of the first time my kids saw a work (in the LACMA again) that really shocked and impressed them. After being herded through every museum I could find on our travels and them more or less trying to appreciate (in a slack-jawed , glassy eyed kind of way) what they were seeing, their reaction to Bill Viola’s ‘Slowly Turning Narrative’ was deeply satisfying as I could see that all the time and effort had not been wasted. They spoke about the piece for days afterwards and have gladly gone without complaint on every museum jaunt since.

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.

old pals

Me and The Gav (left).

Windstorm

Newman Lake: Another tree bites the dust-damn! This one had been dead for some time but I thought to leave it in place as habitat-oh well.

Tamarack

In the forests around Newman Lake there aren’t many broadleaf trees so you don’t see a lot of leaves swirling around, but you do get this, a conifer (tamarack or western larch) that loses it ‘needles’ and creates this fantastic golden brown carpet on the forest floor. This effect is only around for a few weeks and then it’s gone…

Baby you can drive my car…

Yeah, yeah, yeah…this is the best Beatles compilation, ever…EVER! I should know, I’ve tried and my amateurish foray into a decent Beatles song cycle has finally been put to rest by this…yes…masterpiece. Access to the master tapes and original producer (the producers’ dad, George Martin) plus two years of labor probably helped a bit.

Some people don’t like it as it represents a significant remix or revision of the Beatles work and so is seen as sacrilegious, kind of like trying to improve upon the Koran. I think that's silly-what I know is that the last listen I had of Help! via CD sounded like crap, like it was recorded in 1965 or something. I don’t know how Mr. Giles Martin did it, but everything on this CD sounds as if were recorded yesterday--a huge achievement, highly recommended.

P.S. OK-so I've listened to this hear and there and while it has all the notable tunes it's missing my personal favorite 'Everbody's Got Something to Hide (Except Me and My Monkey), even so I still give it very hgh marks.

Mexico

I love this place-it’s at once so familiar and so exotic. I would live here if I had the time. I grew up in Cali, so had to take California state history in high school, which was mostly about Mexico! So, it’s like I sort of grew up here-sort of. Anyway, the people are very friendly, the climate is perfect….living here would enable me to learn Spanish well enough so that I could begin to think in Spanish, after all….

“To have another language is to possess a second soul.” Charlemagne

And who doesn’t want a second soul?

As a child, my parents would take me to the Jai Alai games in Tijuana. At the games, my fondest memory is of the tacos! Only 1 or 2 pesos apiece and they were fantastic-I’ve never been a big eater but I would gorge on those amazing tacos.

About ten years ago-the kids in a place called Tomatlan, wondering where in the world they are. I could live here...

On the boardwalk in Bucerias.

Too much sun & fun & food &etc. I think this was the first time in about 20 years I took a holiday without children. Notice the fake tattoo on the arm-poor choice eh?-it’s why tattoos are generally a bad idea. So, at this point in the holiday, I’m like the walking dead. I was cogent enough to realize that the meal here (River Café, Puerto Vallarta) was very good-better than anything in Spokane. I also thought Barcelona superb as it was served up simple, fresh, and excellent tapas. Both these places are as good as the Café des Artistes at a fraction of the price.

A real tough guy…and fully functional.

A small schoolhouse in the middle of a jungle with no electricity available. They beam in the lessons via satellite and use solar panels to power everything-pretty cool.

Zell

A few years back we were supposed to go to Istanbul, but two weeks before departure a couple of British banks in Istanbul were bombed, prompting the State Dept. to issue travel warnings for Turkey. I thought that perhaps the war in Iraq was expanding and so didn’t dare take my, at the time, minor children and ended up on a European vacation instead. One of the places we dropped in to was Zell Germany, on the Mosel River-a great place and area that I would return to in a second.

Zell: Brendan is next to our car, a Skoda that we scratched up when I drove through the very narrow streets of a medieval town (Brodenbach) when I shouldn’t have-next time I'll learn how to read the traffic signs.

Cochem, down the road from Zell: There was a flea market and meeting hall here and the people were super friendly. The meeting hall was serving gluwein (a kind of mulled wine), cause that’s all they really have around here (wine that is). There was so much wine bottles were stacked on pallets along the highway. Notice the onion shaped dome on top of the church-kind of like Russian churches.

Zell: The little old pensioner driving this tiny car came into the restaurant where we were eating, had a beer and left. We then saw the car later on that night at the local winestube, the place was rocking and I thought it the place to be, but the daughter vetoed the idea, so we didn’t go in.

The Iron Artichoke

I worked for a subsidiary of the gas and electric utility in San Francisco that for some reason had to move away from the mother ship and so decided on a move to Portland OR. In due time a beautiful building was designed and built on the Willamette River. To commemorate this move and a recent pipeline project, a sculpture was commissioned at apparently great expense. As soon as the conceptual renderings for the piece were passed around this thing was dubbed the ‘Iron Artichoke’. After the Iron Artichoke was completed but before it could be sited in front of he new building in downtown Portland, the local planning commission found out that this would be the ‘art’ adorning the building and quickly decided it didn’t meet zoning requirements…or so the story goes. The Iron Artichoke was relegated to the hinterlands and ended up in front of the Spokane office building where it really did look like crap; eventually kind of fell apart, and finally disappeared.

One day we sort of got lost in the basement of the Portland building and walked into a room with hundreds of Iron Artichoke facsimiles (they look far better than the original) in rotting boxes that had never been handed out to those worthy enough. We all grabbed one and I’ve still got mine…why…I don’t know.

The dock

I went out on Saturday to work on the dock and was right on time...except I got the wrong Saturday and no one was there-beautiful day though.

The kids on the dock at about 5 and 6. I'd almost forgotten how blond they were.