What's next for the Mushroom House?

I found out that the owner and architect of the infamous Cincinnati "Mushroom House" passed away this year, and the house has gone on the market. I know neighbors have complained about it in the past, and even threatened to buy it to tear it down. I do hope this odd little landmark survives, though. It's right across the street from a great coffee place I sometimes go to, and it's fun to look across at its quirkiness.

You little whippersnapper, you!

Fair warning: those who are squeamish about bugs should turn back now.

I was warned by neighbors and friends a couple weeks ago that this season would be the year the cicada emerge. Sure enough, not a week later, abandoned cicada shells began appearing stuck to everything, along with their sluggish former inhabitants, crowding onto trees and bushes.

Anyone who's seen Neon Genesis Evangelion knows the sounds of summer in Tokyo 3: the never-ending drone of cicadas. It makes the air feel heavy and muggy, even if it's a fairly nice day out. I'm not sure if the cicadas depicted in the anime are of the seventeen year variety, but the ones we have here in Cincinnati apparently are.

Cicada deposit their eggs into the bark of trees and such places, and when they hatch, the larvae burrow into the ground, where they percolate for seventeen years (some varieties for 3-5 years) before emerging, molting, mating, and singing frantically before dying. What a life: Laze around for most of it, then have a huge party before you croak.

Since they're relatively cute (as bugs go), and don't bite or sting, the neighborhood kids have been having a heyday collecting them. I see little herds of kids wandering the neighborhood with jars.



The most interesting thing about this whole event is the constant sound of them. It's been cool this season, so they didn't begin chirping until one particularly warm day. From inside the house, I thought someone must be running a whippersnapper outside, but when the apparent yard work went on for hours, I stepped out on the patio to realize it was actually the cicadas. Most of them are higher up in the trees, so it's not as if there are massive drifts of bugs everywhere, but man--judging by the noise they make, there are millions of them out there.

The sound of it just rolls and swells, coming from everywhere at once. It's really something.

But in a couple weeks, they will all have done their procreative duties, and will die, leaving the task of deafening the neighborhood in the very capable hands (or wings) of the next generation.

Add one to the pile...

Having folk from out of town visiting got me in the frame of mind to explore Cincinnati once again. It was a busy winter, and we'd stopped going on adventures as often as we were. It was downright lovely to explore with some of my sisters and their tiny ones this week. (Thanks so much for the visit, you guys!)

Here's a nifty blog someone did that not only gives some fun ideas of interesting things and places in Cincinnati, it has beautiful photography as well. It just recently stopped updating, but the archives are well worth sifting through.

Something to look forward to

I think I posted about the Music Now Festival previously, specifically about the most excellent Take Away Show with Sufjan Stevens filmed at it. Well, planning is underway for the third incarnation of the festival in 2008, and I'm twitchy and excited about it already.

I haven't yet been to Memorial Hall, where the last festival was held, but it looks like a pretty stunning place. It's about 15 minutes from where we live, which makes it all the more excellent.

We found out recently that The National are from Cincinnati, which would explain their involvement in the project.

Recent Adventures #3

More exploration this weekend: It was a day of various mounts - Mount Lookout, Mount Washington, and Mount Adams.

Sunday was gorgeous, so we finally went to Ault Park, which is supposed to have one of the best views in Cincinnati. I can't really argue with that assertion. I think Mount Lookout is the hill the park is on, and you can see across the valley to Kentucky pretty much. The trees have finally burst into color, so seeing them from above was really neat.

After that, we checked out a comic shop in Mount Washington. It had that classic dusty smell, and was full of old school issues in long-boxes and plastic. The clerk/owner looked kind of defeated, and it made me a bit sad. It can't be a very profitable business to be in these days. The store had mostly the big name Marvel/DC/Dark Horse fare that's easy to find anywhere, though there was a hardcover Firefly/Serenity book I would have liked. I wish there were a store in the area to find smaller independent comics, and printings of webcomics. I suppose if you're going to be cutting edge in the comic business these days, you have to first of all be doing business online, and also with print-on-demand places like Lulu and such for special orders and small online comics. Even then, I imagine there's not an awful lot of money to be made in the business these days.

After Mount Washington, we made our way back up to Mount Adams, which we finally discovered on Friday. I'm still kind of giddily excited about that neighborhood. It reminds me so much of a small east coast town--maybe old-school Vermont or Maine, with narrow hilly streets, and pretty, ivy-covered old buildings all nestled together. We ate at the place that used to be the Rookwood Pottery Factory. It still has the giant brick kilns and chimneys in place. In fact, there are tables within each of the three huge kilns--they're pretty much private rooms now.

It's blurry, but it was a nice view!

I was glad to get the chance to take some pictures, since I've been wanting to try my hand at putting together some HDR photos. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and I guess the simplest description is that it's a compilation of several identical photos of different exposures, which uses the best exposed bits of the image to create one more like what the human eye sees. At the same time as being more like what we actually see, they're also a bit bizarre because they can be ultra vivid, and crisp in ways we don't often see photos. HDR photos can also be tweaked into utterly surreal, gorgeous images. Er... I'm still getting the hang of the whole "gorgeous" part here. Here are a a couple attempts at HDR images. I'm not using RAW files like I should be for these, so they're pretty grainy and "noisy" at times. Ah well. Fun all the same. This one is from out front of the uber art deco Union Terminal Museum Center. It's a bit on the surreal side, but I think it's interesting to look at, and it's not so boring a photo as it was.


Here's the pavilion at the top of Ault Park. A little more realistic. The sky was actually that blue.


These are a couple from a bridge up on Mount Adams. The city view was pretty fantastic. We could see all the way to Union Terminal on the other side of town.


Anyway, after a bunch of rain last week, we're being rewarded with some days of gorgeousness. It's Halloween today, and although we don't bother celebrating it, it's fun to see how excited the kids walking home from school are. It was chilly yesterday, but today I stepped out onto the patio to find it was sunny, in the high sixties, and our entire neighborhood smelled of freshly made waffle cones. Huh? I have no idea. I did hear the school marching band in the distance not too long ago, so perhaps there's a festival-type function happening? Anyway, I've opened all the windows (mmmm....wafflecones....) and I'm expecting small people in costumes to come seeking sugar any minute now, so I'd better go.

Still Alive.

*yawn* Just barely. Happy Fourth of July, fiends and families!

We made it down to Cinci and have had internet for a few days, though I've been too pooped after the move and such to do much of anything but sloooowly unpacking boxes, like an old, rusty robot.

We're actually pretty settled for having been here less than a week. The neighborhood is lovely, the people are friendly, and we're having great fun getting to know the area and finding neat places to eat and hang out.

The cats are slowly recovering from an uber-traumatic 5 hour drive, and I expect that by next week they'll be back to normal. They're already pretty comfortable here, though there's been some hissing and spitting as Nihao is a little uncertain about her territory. Boo could care less, but she growls and roars at him, unless they're both preoccupied by something, in which case, they'll distractedly groom each other until Nihao remembers she's supposed to be hissy. It's noticably better already, thankfully.

Last night we spent some time out on the patio in the dark. There was a fireworks display happening nearby in downtown, and the carillon in the nearby church was playing songs along with it. The fireflies were out in force, trying to match the flashes in the sky.

A City Like Cincinnati

The most recent Take Away Show from La Blogothèque is their fiftieth, and they determined to make it something special. My, but they've suceeded.

It was filmed in Memorial Hall--one of Cincinnati's old concert venues--a meandering walk behind the scenes, beginning on the roof, and wandering down through dusty storage rooms filled with antique chairs to find the Czech duo, Havlovi quietly making music amongst forgotten set pieces. As their song fades out, the watcher is slowly drawn down the hall to find Sufjan Stevens plucking a delicate and solomn song next to a window, and so on and on, we stumble onto one gorgeous, quiet performance after another, as if we were walking on a lazy afternoon through a beautiful, rambling building with people who just happened to be performing in every stairwell and nook.

Also included on the page is a lovely film of Sufjan Stevens up on the roof of the building singing The Lakes of Canada by Innocence Mission.

All the Take Away Shows are special (see The Arcade Fire, and Alan Sparhawk particularly), but this 50th one just swept me along with it.