Our friend Nell invited us to a really neat art installation the other day in downtown Oakland (before the riots). There’s a parking garage right in the middle of some of the taller buildings with a lush garden on top of it: the Kaiser Rooftop Garden. For this event, a bunch of sound artists had stashed speakers in various places around the garden playing everything from bird sounds to instruments imitating bird sounds to clocks to cellos.

They handed out "sound enhancing" parasols too. (I don’t know if they worked, but they did seem very appropriate for the occasion… particularly when it turned out they had free cucumber sandwiches as well!)