in the way certain of the pictures reach beyond to strike some chord of archetypal resonance... The cool and controlled art behind the photographs draws upon the deep and abiding power of dreams -- not simply those of sleep but also those of our deepest longings. -- from the Foreword by William Least Heat-MoonIn 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her eight-year odyssey took her over ninety thousand miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand house portraits, Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in Fifty Houses. Shot with black-and-white infrared film, the homes captured through Sorlien's lens range from the grand to the humble, from the historic to the commonplace. Included here are a classic saltbox in Newtown, Connecticut; the House on the Rocks in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; a mobile home in Bushnell, Florida; a Stick-style folk Victorian in Biloxi, Mississippi; a limestone cottage in Fredericksburg, Texas; a false-front house in Rollins, Montana; a log cabin in Dubois, Wyoming; an adobe dwelling in Sante Fe, New Mexico; and a platform tent in Healy, Alaska. Each image is accompanied by avignette from Sorlien's road journal, offering details of the house depicted, its owners and history, other houses in the region, or her travel experiences in the state.At a time when America's architectural landscape is being homogenized by suburban sprawl, when the outskirts of Anchorage and Oklahoma City look no different from those of Tucson, Jacksonville, and Salt Lake City, Fifty Houses provides a remarkable visual record of regional domestic architecture and an elegiac meditation on the changing American landscape.  (less)

banks, churches, stores, and theaters. They represent every kind of architecture to be found in Nebraska--folk, high-style, commercial, residential, pioneer, and modern; the unexpected and the familiar, the poetic and the prosaic, good and bad. Caught by Roger Bruhn's camera, these structures always suggest the spiritual resources of their builders and inhabitants, who struggled for a livelihood on the Great Plains.PIDreams in Dry Places/Ihas an architecture of its own, beginning and ending with images of the natural landscape and in between revealing unexpected continuities among disparate structures and settings, juxtapositions of forms, and the vanities and vagaries of architectural style. Exterior and interior shots are combined to show how a sense of openness pervades design. The 118 photographs are in black and white--the color of dreams. In his introduction Bruhn writes, With images alone, I hope to make you feel something about striving, about aspirations, about dreams./P/DIVIn the long sweep of time, all buildings, it seems, are follies--foolish attempts at permanence, set up as backdrops against which we live out our lives. . . . Roger Bruhn draws his wisdom and his understanding of dreams from closely observing buildings. . . . In this book you can see those dreams, indefatigable in their poor clothing of frail wood, or cake-soft brick, or concrete made from little more than fickle, shifting sand. Some of those dreams are simple ones, dreams of shelter and warmth. Others are more complex, more abstract: the dreams of worship, the dreams of government, the dreams of commerce.-Ted KooserDIVRoger Bruhn is a self-employed photographer and graphic designer who l@U@  (less)

former Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia). Each piece includes a wealth of photo documentation (paintings, landscape photographs, portraits of famous composers, and authors of the works) featuring the Yugoslav Guitar Society collection. Also, this recital displays Dojcinovic s exceptional and refined technique and supreme interpretation. Most of the pieces include a variety of special new sound effects created by the master-himself to enrich the ethnic colors of the pieces inspired by traditional folk sounds.  (less)

the singer. Tacks such as Mustard or 21st Century Man rock with sarcastic tongue in cheek jabs at the soul. Making the listener almost laugh at the simplicity with which even the worst of situations can be spun into dark humor. While songs like Urban Folk Song and festival of Saint Peter paint a starker landscape of fear and regret. Even with the serious nature of the subject matter on 340 lbs, Kilgore Trout wears their most upbeat musical face never allowing the roller coaster stop.  (less)