Luna’s 3rd Gotcha Day!

June 10 is Luna’s Gotcha Day, or the anniversary of her adoption.

Here is her official adoption photo from Santa Cruz County Animal Services, back in 2005:

This photo had not yet been posted when I went to the shelter on June 9, 2005. I was browsing the kennels and this charming little black kitty came up and greeted me. It was perfect, I knew I really wanted a black cat. It turned out she had just come up for adoption after being surrendered to the shelter by her previous family. I played with her for a bit, and said I would think about it overnight, even though that wasn’t really necessary. The next morning, June 10, I called the shelter to hold her for adoption, and I picked her up and brought her to her new home that afternoon.

She has been such a joy for the last three years. I get verkempt thinking about how I found the ketzela and brought her into my life.

We have since left behind that first home. But she has truly shined in her new life as an elegant and sophisticated city cat:

Please join me in wishing Luna a happy 3rd Gotcha Day!



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Weekend Cat Blogging: Sunshine

A very busy weekend, in the midst of a very busy and tumultuous couple of weeks. But we take a few minutes to relax in the sunshine that comes in the studio window:

And what is even better than relaxing in the sun? Getting pets and scritches at the same time!

Weekend Cat Blogging #157 is being hosted by sher the adorable black kitten Laura at What Did You Eat?.

The Bad Kitty Cats Festival of Chaos will be hosted by The Cheezits: Colby & Cheddar (mmm, thats making all of us here at CatSynth hungry).

The Carnival of the Cats will be hosted at Pets Garden Blog. And of course the Friday Ark #194 is at the modulator.

We say goodbye to Lilly this week. She was loved very much, and her family misses her.

And Luna’s Gotcha Day is coming up this Tuesday, June 10.



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My kitten plays better keyboards than me

YouTube via hamsterdunce, posted at matrixsynth:

An outtake of a recent video interview I made for SonicState.com when my Himalayan kitten (Dusty) steals the show and starts playing synth music behind me that actually sounds pretty friggin’ good. That jerk. It’s bad enough that he’s better looking, but I figured I at least had all the talent up in here’s.”

And this YouTube response from stretta:

And it’s Tuesday, so check out more Cats on Tuesday.



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Primary Highways: Montana and South Dakota

Well, this long process is nearly at it’s end. And this time, we really mean it, there are only two states left, Montana and South Dakota. I had an opportunity to visit both as a kid in 1988. It was only as I prepared to write this article that I realized this was twenty years ago!

We came into Montana at night on I-94, which we previously mentioned in this series when we visited Indiana and Detroit. The night sky in Montana is an amazing experience, as is the complete darkness if one stops the car and turns out the lights. A little eerie, actually. I grew up the suburbs north of New York City, so such clear and dark nights were a new experience.

I-94 ends quietly at junction with I-90 near Billings, the largest city in Montana. I don’t remember much about it.

We did visit Yellowstone National park, which is mostly in Wyoming. But the northern entrance, featuring the Roosevelt Arch, is in Montana:

We discussed Yellowstone in more detail when we wrote about Wyoming. But I didn’t mention the fact that I was there during the massive fires of 1988, that burned about one third of the park. The smoke and the various closures certainly colored my visit. I do need to go back again and experience Yellowstone as an adult and without the fires.

From Yellowstone, we traveled north and east, stopping in the town of Butte. Though quite small, I recall it looking rather large as one approached from the east at night on I-90. We at CatSynth would not deign to make jokes about the town’s name.

Ultimately, we headed north on US 93 to reach Glacier National Park. This was an altogether different experience from Yellowstone. Not only were the skies clear, but landscape was more the standard forests and lakes and mountains one associates with Rockies:

Among the striking features of Glacier Park are its lakes, such as St. Mary Lake (pictured here) and Lake McDonald. Lake McDonald in particular is quite deep, as it is formed from a valley between mountains, though not as deep as Crater Lake in Oregon. The park does of course have Glaciers, but they have been retreating quite dramatically, victims of climate change.

Our trip back from Montana took us through South Dakota on I-90. The main feature of I-90 in South Dakota were the frequent billboards advertising Wall Drug, which we of course did have to stop at, after having fun with the concept for the preceding hours. We did of course visit the more monumental attractions, including the dueling carved mountains of Crazy Horse and Mount Rushmore.

We ultimately continued east on I-90 to Chicago, the hometown of the likely winner at the end of this long contest.


Gilbert and George, and the End of the Heatwave

Two weekends ago, I had the opportunity to the Gilbert and George retrospective at the de Young Museum here in San Francisco. They started out as performance artists, including themselves in their work as “living sculptures,” usually well groomed and well dressed in business suits. In addition to their live performances, they also made films such as Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk (basically, the pair getting drunk on Gordon’s gin).

Their most well-known works are their photo-montages, and these made up most of the exhibition. These are large scale works (measured in meters), with photos and graphics. It seems they always include themselves somewhere within the piece, along with both Christian and sexual symbolism. Some more basic, with black-and-white photos or subtle colors, such as England, 1980, while others, such as Death, from Death Hope Life Fear, are quite garish in their colors and graphics. You can see some examples here.

Although in most of the photo-montages it is easy to pick out the pair, in a couple it was more subtle, and one can play a kind of “Where’s Waldo” game. Indeed, one of my favorites was a wall of London street names, I could not find them anywhere in it, but I know they must be there somewhere.

I actually heard about Gilbert and George first in 2004. I had begun a collaborative art project and my partner gave be a book to read about artistic collaborations, focusing on conceptual art and performance art in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was an era and style of art I often overlooked, and since then I’ve been more open to conceptual art, especially those based on words and text, but also in those that focus on the body. Needless to say, that collaborative art project never came to fruition.

The building in which the de Young Museum resides is itself a work of art. I have several pictures from past visits that will be subject of future “Wordless Wednesdays.” The architecture is characterized by grids of holes in the walls, some of which one can see through. There is also a tower with an observation deck, offering views of Golden Gate Park and the city. On this particular visit, one could see the fog rolling in from the west over the park and the outer districts:

The fog represented the end to the heatwave we experienced two weeks ago in San Francisco.