In observance of World Listening Day 2014 (July 18th), I guided a lunchtime soundwalk around parts of downtown Portland, OR.  I decided to organize only at the last minute, and there were 5 of us who showed up for the nearly hour long sound walk.

We started with short discussion about active listening and purposeful sound observation and some of the philosophy/ideas behind it.  We walked and listened for about 20 minutes, then had a short chat about what we had noticed so far and what we thought was interesting in the act of observing.  We continued on for another 35 minutes or so and completed a wide loop. The small group of participants seemed to have a really good time (and it turned out to be some decent exercise too).

I recorded the walk on my binaural in-ear microphones with a Zoom H2.  The raw recording is available on archive.org:  Portland, OR World Listening Day Soundwalk.

Embedded here:

See you next year for World Listening Day!

I know what I'm doing when the next economic downturn slices our faces in half!  I'm going to the pawn shop with all of my Hargadons!

For historical record:  First observed yesterday morning, around Broadway and 3rd (??). This is not a common morning route for me, but the sign was there and appeared fairly new.  I considered going back last night to pick it up but decided to give it a day or more to cook(?).  Tonight it's mine mine mine mine mine mine mine...

I want the g-voice number response team to be moar responsive, though I respect that my calls are hopefully just noise in the matrix.  From the support perspective, we should be OUTRAGED that it's this difficult to get actual cash money for your actual Banksy (original artwork).  Actually.

Please call the above sales line and let them know how upset you are that you can't actually sell your actually original Banksy.

RIP H.R. Giger. 

 A true goth and cyberpunk LEGEND.  

You have changed the world forever and you will be missed.

Really?  This is a thing?

What is this strange future we live in?  How would I describe this to somebody I didn't know?

"It's like a kind of pop-star Westworld slutbot C3PO reality show pepper-spray that you can pay $33 for the privilege of owning?".  I'm clearly too old to grok this...and I'm very happy this was behind glass.  I'm pretty sure it winked at me and threatened to bite us in the face and genitals.  We ran from the building, tripped over the homeless and apologized and encouraged them to run for their lives.  Once they finished swearing and laughing at us in guttertalk it became clear that the sentient head of our dim future fembot overlord spy camera pain nightmare had already manifested.  Her name was Pink or Nicki or something and she had  a tight bright fluorescent wig on her gold replica head and blue vector boobs.

Can we save ourselves?  Can we ruin those allowing it to manifest?  Can we hurt it through mutation and error?

I can't speak to the authenticity, but the Pad Kee Mao today from the "I Like Thai Food" cart (10th and Alder) was perfection.  Ingredients were amazing and fresh, flavors were balanced, and the heat was thru the roof!   Bonus points for no mushrooms (default!).  

I especially love their spice scale:

At the chef's recommendation I went with OMG.

I know I've had their food a few other times...but I can't ever remember it being this good.  Wow.

I finally watched Treevenge in its whopping 15-ish minute entirety tonight.  It's been on my list for a while, but at work some of us are on a horror recommendation frenzy and it kinda semi prompted me to revisit some stuff hanging off the old to-watch list.

I loved Hobo.  Treevenge is awesome...but that music....it bothered me.  No wait, it disturbed me in a grusome and deeply familiar way...but I searched for maybe 10 or 30 minutes and the lazyweb didn't yield.  Then it came to me.

It's the Cannibal Holocaust theme (by Riz Ortolani).

Hi.

The view from the max station is probably just as iconic as the view from the front...but maybe 1000x worse.

Sadly, it seems that the bowling alley will be closing in May.

Long, drawn out, simple in its execution.  By the 5-minute mark I had my head bobbing, and by 11 minutes...I had my soul dissected and impounded by the UFO cult.

And that was just the first track from the A side!  Solid, inspiring stuff from the early 80s.

Need to investigate more.

I'm working on a workshop build out in the garage of my new house.  There are a few things to deal with first.