Water Tower Fountain at Iron Horse Park, Haymarket District

The fountain at Iron Horse Park in Haymarket District in downtown Lincoln seemed to be a very popular Kodak-movement & canoodling hotspot in hot summer nights. I readied my field-recording gears, patiently browsing through Gabriel García Márquez’s short story “El Avión de la Bella Durmiente” (Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane) in Doce cuentos peregrines (Strange Pilgrims) while waiting for my turn to get near the fountain. The chance of being accidently tackled by happy-visitors or vaporized by the power-of-love seemed greater than usual, so I waited. A safe spot finally presented itself when I was halfway through Márquez’s “Me Alquilo para Soñar” (I Sell My Dreams). Phew. I waved goodbye to Márquez’s magical world and started to make some field-recordings of subtle watery harmony.

Fountain at Iron Horse Park | Haymarket | Lincoln, NE| 2010 | Field-recording by Jen-Kuang Chang

No Comments / Jun 11.10 / Found Sound, Travel / by Jen-Kuang Chang

The Crown Fountain | Millennium Park

Spanish artist Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, a $17 million interactive public art located in the Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, was completed in 2004. Plensa stated that “A fountain is the memory of nature. . . For me, a fountain doesn’t mean a big jet of water. It means humidity, the origin of life.” Two 50-feet glass brick towers and a pool are the main structures of this project. Video footages of 1,000 Chicagoans, produced at the downtown campus of the SAIC School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a HDW-F900 video camera, were projected on towers’ LED screens. The entire project was made possible through private donations with $10 million from the Crown family.

No Comments / Jun 10.10 / Travel / by Jen-Kuang Chang

Las Cabanas Mexican Restaurant | Marysville, Kansas

Charles F. Koester, the treasurer of Marshall County at the time, built a house that later became the Koester House Museum back in 1860. In 1906, Koester commissioned a new house adjacent to his own for his son. This structure is currently functioning as Las Cabanas Mexican Restaurant, formerly Koester House Restaurant, and is located at 908 Elm St. in Marysville, Kansas.

No Comments / Jun 06.10 / Travel / by Jen-Kuang Chang

Ewing & Muriel Kauffman Memorial Garden

After archiving photos taken in the Ewing & Muriel Kauffman Memorial Garden, I picked up Haruki Murakami’s “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”, a collection of twenty-four short stories, to gobble up more lines while feeling like a poor slice of Wonder bread in a broken toaster stuffed in a giant 800-degree brick oven. It was that hot. I had to read the concluding line in “The Year of Spaghetti” out loud, three times, before the meaning of it vaporizing into the sizzling air.

Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness?

The Ewing & Muriel Kauffman Memorial Garden, located near Country Plaza in Kansas City, is a part of Kauffman Legacy Park associated with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The garden, featuring fountains, well-maintained flower beds with annual plantings, and bronze sculptures by Tom Corbin, is also the grave-site of Ewing and Muriel Kauffman.

 

No Comments / Jun 06.10 / Photo, Travel / by Jen-Kuang Chang

UNO University of Nebraska-Omaha

My dear BFFs commemorate everything-and-anything with overeating. “Sweetie, it’s a tradition,” they declared. But after three hours of kebabs, lemonades, sunshine, 91-degree, buy-one-get-one-free sweaty body & soul, and seemingly infinite Foreigner’s guilty-pleasure music that magically molded everything together, my stomach was as big as Titanic and I started to feel slightly stoned with Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” on endless repeat.

“Oopsy-daisy-snoopy,” I said and sneaked out of the party-zone with my camera, which oddly felt more like a concealed weapon of sort at that particular moment, and took refuge in the soundlessness of the University of Nebraska-Omaha campus.

 

The University of Nebraska-Omaha, established in 1908 as Omaha University and became Municipal University of Omaha in 1931, joined the University of Nebraska system in 1968 as the third-largest higher education institute in Nebraska. The current main campus, located at 60th and Dodge Street near Memorial Park and Elmwood Park, houses Peter Kiewit Institute, Strauss Performing Arts Center, Weber Fine Arts Building, Arts and Sciences Hall, Caniglia Field, Durham Science, Eppley Administration Building, Henningson Memorial Campanile, Maverick Village, Milo Bail Student Center, and other structures.

No Comments / Jun 03.10 / Photo, Travel / by Jen-Kuang Chang