good piece on David Simon's terrific/exasperating Treme

A main message from this sultry pageant of a show is that New Orleans is an occult matter that you can never truly “get” unless you’re a native or pretty close to it. The perky, hopelessly “white” tourists from Wisconsin with their nasal voices, the ones who get schooled by the street musician, can be taken as stand-ins for the viewer. Which makes the whole enterprise strangely unwelcoming...

ACL Kodachromes

sedimentary rock ceiling from Nanaimo's Old Mine Shafts

We are trying to establish some kind of visual record of how the remaining mines look in and around the 2010 era. We can't say how much red tape or the funding one would have to endure in order to do this 'properly', so we have decided to locate a number of abandoned coal mines in Nanaimo on our own and obtain our so called visual record by ourselves. We will take the necessary precautions to ensure we have enough oxygen and that no harmful gas may be present, we will ensure that the walls and ceilings of the mine are sound and will only continue if we feel it is safe enough to do so, and we will seal the mines back up the best we can afterwards to prevent the public from getting hurt...