Music Videos @ Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Another visit in Cincinnati was to the Contemporary Arts Center, which for a while was the only building in the U.S. designed by Pritzker-prize-winning, Rem Koolhaus-protege, Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. From wiki: “A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid’s winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak [...]

Nick Cave Soundsuits @ Cincinnati Museum of Art

We made a little Spring Break visit to Cincinnati this week, and one highlight was the show of Nick Cave “soundsuits” at the Cincinnati Museum of Art.  This is not the Australian musician Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds but the African-American, Missouri-born artist.  (At first I thought, geez, if you have the same name [...]

Brilliance/ Craziness of the St Louis City Museum

We had a great visit with friends to St Louis this weekend.  The zoo was fantastic… the Botanical Gardens amazing: we especially enjoyed a temporary exhibit up at the moment on “Extreeme Tree-houses” — at least a dozen “tree houses” made by artists, these not up in trees but around the bases.  All enchanting/engaging in [...]

100 Acres, Goose the Market

Indianapolis has always seemed like a surprisingly unexciting city for its size (pushing a million), even if I’m glad we live an hour away from the airport and a big-city mall, Trader Joe’s, etc.  (We’re sort of sick of the Children’s Museum, but it is very good.)  But lately the city has seemed to be [...]

Fauna in and around the Cabin

Some interesting animal sightings & experiences in and around the cabin in the last few days. Yesterday I thought I saw what looked like a snout poking out of the water around the dock.  I ran down to check it out — couldn’t see anything, then noticed movement coming up the dock ladder.  It was [...]

Uncreative Destruction of Harvard Square

Creative destruction = Joseph Schumpeter’s account of capitalism’s dynamism based on innovation and the destruction and abandonment of the old. I’m just the 10,001st person to complain about it in print, but Harvard Square has become an outdoor mall.  What’s distressing is not just the loss of all the old book stores, record stores, cafes [...]

Renys Disappearing Wife mystery

R.H. Reny, the founder of Maine department store chain Renys, died last week. We got really into the Ellsworth Renys a couple years ago.  My favorite items (this was the year the girls were three) were coloring books marked down to 99 cents.  They have a little of everything, clothes, food, drug store stuff, all [...]

Mount Desert Island Consumerism

A visit to Mt Desert Island is obviously all about Acadia National Park, the ocean, lakes, hiking trails, etc.   But I thought it would be fun, as we near the conclusion of a long stay, to comment on some of the consumer options available here. Terrible crap in Bar Harbor.  Needless to say, you have [...]

Visit to Louisville

We took an economical, two day one night spring break trip to Louisville.  Stayed in the historic Galt Hotel on the riverfront which in the 19th century hosted such guests as “Jefferson Davis, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Booth, Charles Dickens, P.T. Barnum, Tom Thumb, and presidents Lincoln, Grant, Taylor, Hayes and Buchanan.”  And now us.  We [...]

Freddy/ Mexico City

We were going to depart San Miguel the way we’d come: some combination of buses and cabs.  San Miguel de Allende is about a 3 1/2 hour drive from Mexico City and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get there.  In retrospect, given how tiring the trip was overall, it probably would’ve [...]