Mint's in Montana

So it has been nearly a year since I have moved to Montana, and I have made a few observations since coming to this state. One thing I have noticed is that if there is a hillside in a respective town, the town's folk will instinctively place a letter of their respective high school or college upon that hillside. Sometimes there will be multiple letters. Bozeman, for example has a giant "M" as does Missoula, which also has another letter for their Catholic school.

Another interesting trend number of bar/restaurants named "The Mint." It seems like you can't really call yourself a real town unless  you have a bar named The Mint*.

The picture above is of The Mint in Livingston, a classic sign, bellow is the Mint in White Hall, a little less classic, but still awesome. 

If anyone is familiar with the story of Ray's Pizza, or Famous Ray's, or Ray's Famous Pizza, or any of the infinite permutations of this name found in New York City, I can only imagine that this is Montana's version of the same thing. There was probably one original "The Mint" bar located somewhere in Montana. And it was probably the coolest saloon in all of history in this state. But it is now gone, replaced by video keno machines, Bud Light, and dreams of Ron Paul presidency. Who knows.

*Bozeman is not a real town because it doesn't have a Mint. HA!!!

Repeating Images: The Mayors of Portland

Combing through old photographs as I prepared to pack up my current abode, I came across this old picture of me and one of Portland's greatest mayors, Bud Clark. Mayor Clark, Whoop Whoop, was the mayor of my youth, from 1985 until 1992, shaping how I viewed this city.

While being photographed with a local politician/celebrity as a kid was pretty cool, something about this picture stood out. It was the book I held under my arm. 

Did anyone else notice this at the time? Certainly someone had to have made a comment, but of course, that is probably lost to the ages. Put a tall red cone on Mayor Clark's head and he looks just like David the Gnome! And to this day, I bet he could outfox any troll out there. 

But after Bud Clark, we hit the dark ages of Portland politics. The age of Vera Katz. 

Why she got a statue, and Bud Clark didn't, I will never know. I think Vera Katz can best be summed up by this piece of poster art that popped up around the city in the early part of her reign. An accompanying graffiti stencil soon followed.

As a side note, while I often like to crawl upon bronze statues, the Vera Katz statue creeps me out so much that I have a firm belief scares away herons from the Esplanade. It's that disturbing looking. 

If given the choice between gnomes and jokers, I would take a gnome any time. 

Repeating Images: Two Views of Extinction

My love of taxidermy finds me in conflict with a belief in conversation. While hunting for food is fine with me, hunting for trophy is something I find somewhat troubling. Especially when the beasts that are killed are exceptionally rare.

Take, for instance, this trophy of a black rhino. As a work of art, I greatly appreciate the craftsmanship that went into preparing this mount. But I find it highly unreasonable as an object of sport. Without getting into the politics of it all, the numbers of this species dwindle down to a mere handful and soon it will vanish from the earth.

This imagined mount contrasts as my repeated image as a replica that could fool the untrained eye. While we have never laid eyes on an actual triceratops in real life, we can recreate the musculature of the body from the bare bones and create a reasonable facsimile. The model created, although composed of fiberglass, plastics, and steel and other material evokes the same feel of the rhino mount. 

Do we need a real hide to make a mount? Or can we fabricate the real thing in such a manner to deceive the untrained viewer? While the great white hunter and egoist will always pursue the rare and exploit what will be exploitable, can we placate what them with models? 

If you think about it, good taxidermy is a model of real life--nature preserved in a moment to look still alive. It isn't a dis-articulated skeleton and we know when it looks fake. Perhaps we need life-model-decoys in death.

Repeating Images: Bear Skulls and Triceratops Skulls

On my trip to recent trip to Bozeman, I had a few simple goals beyond the one for which I had ventured to the town: see taxidermy, find a comic book store, play some pinball. Of course The comic scene was kind of sad and there was no pinball to be found for miles. Go fig. But I did manage to find some interesting taxidermy mounts. And I saw dinosaurs.

But it was only when I was reviewing my pictures of my venture did I find this odd piece for my occasionally updated theme of "Repeating Images."

The first picture is of various bear skulls from the local hunters of the region. They are neatly displayed mounted in a polite row along a wall in an outdoors store in downtown Bozeman. While it is hard to see, each skull has a number and date on the top written into the skull with dark ink. As far as I can tell, it represents the date of the kill and the statistics of the animal.

The second image is from the Museum of the Rockies and it shows the morphology of triceratops' skulls from adolescence to adulthood. While writing on these fossils is would be forbidden, the paster casts used to preserve these specimen while they are in transport from field to museum or university for study are often scribbled upon with various stats and labels to identify the bones. 

Repeating Images: Evolution Proved

Bare with me a minute. I know I have posted this first image before of me standing in front of the T-Rex at The Prehistoric Gardens in Port Orford on the Oregon Coast. But this is a repeating image...and a chance to prove theories of development over time. Ergo...

I present me standing next to the same dinosaur, twenty-five years later and about two-feet taller. 

During this period of time, the tyrannosaurus has evolved as well. The basic frame has been untouched, but the skin texture and color is definitely different. We now have scales that were absent from the beast so long ago. And now, the glorious green eye stares at you before the tyrant king decides to eat you in one swift gulp.

Repeating Images: Prisons within Prisons

Today's repeating image is of the jail within the Amache Internment camp. This concrete structure is one of the only remaining intact buildings from the internment era. It actually served as a dual purpose structure as a cold storage locker for the general store and a small time lock-up for odd incidents when residents of the camp became unruly, typically of evenings when men would become intoxicated on contraband sake or other alcohol.

At the site of the Tule Lake internment camp, one lone, concrete structure still stands in the barren land. This too was a jail for the camp. However, it held more serious "criminals;" dissidents who eventually were taken to the county jail in Alturas, California, before facing more serious charges for being unwilling to pledge allegiance to America and fight in its military and to disavow any loyalty to Japan.

Imprisonment within imprisonment. Kind of funny to think about. 

Repeating Images...The Mt. St. Helens Fountain in St. Helens

Have you ever looked at a picture with a picture of itself embedded into it? And inside that embedded picture there is another picture of the same picture...repeating ad infinitum.

Well, if you visit the town of St. Helens, Oregon, you can have your own metaphysical, meta-textual experience as you stand looking at the fountain of St. Helens, in the Town of St. Helens, which is in the shadow of the actual Mt. St. Helens.

I often wonder, how many people have decided to drop a bottle of dish soap into this fountain to recreate their own pyroclastic flow in this public piece of art. Personally, I would love to make the forty minute drive just to do it. But here, the rushing water keeps our local small scale volcano active on a much more peaceful scale. The rushing water often lulling people to sleep at night. 

As for the kids in the final photo, I believe they are stealing money from the fountain. I hung out just long enough to take these pictures. And these boys were quite enamored with Mt. St. Helens Fountain. Probably just as much as I was, but I believe these malcontents had nefarious intentions.