With a day off and sunny skies, I decided to take a little ride yesterday and drove down to Idaho Falls, about two hours south of Dillon. If you're as familiar with Niagara Falls as I am, you may be inclined to dismiss the Idaho version as little more than some rapids (see above), but nevermind. I had a really good time-- did some shopping, saw a movie, went to a museum, and even spent a little time sitting by the Snake River and reading for awhile. I like Idaho Falls, mainly because it seems like kind of a throw-back place, but not so far back as places like Bozeman or Butte (which celebrate their frontier and early industrial roots, respectively). Idaho Falls instead seems firmly rooted in the 1950s/60s, at least in terms of the dominant architectural styles for both commercial buildings (lots of modernistic touches attached to functional spaces) and in the residential neighborhoods (dominated by suburban ranch style houses). One of the places that I find endlessly fascinating, because it seems so resonant of that period when I was a kid, is the KIDK Broadcast Park, which is a fifties era TV station plopped down in the middle of a bunch of baseball diamonds. I can practically picture the advertisement for the station that must've appeared in
Broadcasting magazine fifty years ago (I did a lot of my dissertation research in that periodical, and it reflected a particular design style I'll always associate with that era). Anyway, I didn't get a picture of the Broadcast Park, but hereis another of the falls:
While there, I also lucked into a treasure trove of used classic DVDs (mostly James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson flicks from the 1930s, but also a Criterion Edition of Luchiano Visconti's
The Leopard and Lindsay Anderson's
O Happy Man-- for about four bucks apiece) so it looks like I'm set for any free time that pops up over the coming weeks.
With a day off and sunny skies, I decided to take a little ride yesterday and drove down to Idaho Falls, about two hours south of Dillon. If you're as familiar with Niagara Falls as I am, you may be inclined to dismiss the Idaho version as little more than some rapids (see above), but nevermind. I had a really good time-- did some shopping, saw a movie, went to a museum, and even spent a little time sitting by the Snake River and reading for awhile. I like Idaho Falls, mainly because it seems like kind of a throw-back place, but not so far back as places like Bozeman or Butte (which celebrate their frontier and early industrial roots, respectively). Idaho Falls instead seems firmly rooted in the 1950s/60s, at least in terms of the dominant architectural styles for both commercial buildings (lots of modernistic touches attached to functional spaces) and in the residential neighborhoods (dominated by suburban ranch style houses). One of the places that I find endlessly fascinating, because it seems so resonant of that period when I was a kid, is the KIDK Broadcast Park, which is a fifties era TV station plopped down in the middle of a bunch of baseball diamonds. I can practically picture the advertisement for the station that must've appeared in Broadcasting magazine fifty years ago (I did a lot of my dissertation research in that periodical, and it reflected a particular design style I'll always associate with that era). Anyway, I didn't get a picture of the Broadcast Park, but hereis another of the falls:
While there, I also lucked into a treasure trove of used classic DVDs (mostly James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson flicks from the 1930s, but also a Criterion Edition of Luchiano Visconti's The Leopard and Lindsay Anderson's O Happy Man-- for about four bucks apiece) so it looks like I'm set for any free time that pops up over the coming weeks.
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