Yesterday, while local law enforcement did their “training” at the former Missoulian building, I was sifting through an “urban camp” visible from the Higgins bridge when I found the image of a young girl in a towel, which I turned in to a policeman who couldn’t have cared less.
The encampment with the concerning material is located on the property of the former Missoulian building where “retired” CIA man, John Talbot, used to work, controlling the narratives that shaped the thinking of this town. Now that a massive condo project is being once again planned for this piece of prime real estate, let’s enter the mind of a “news” reporter as he fondly recalls working at this building and peeping on unsuspecting citizens enjoying physical intimacy on the grass.
The little park between the trail and an irrigation canal had a series of humps for visual relief. MRA imagined they might have been used for BMX bikers. Instead they were popular with daycare children, and college kids who came to make out in the summer. Missoulian staff would watch from the windows when especially horny couples would get going. We often considered getting big score cards so we could rate performance from the upstairs windows like Olympics judges.
Even though he looks like a stereotypical pedophile, Rob Chaney isn’t the “monster” who I was thinking of when I put “monster” in the title of this post. No, the person I consider to be a monster is a musician who died two years ago and, because he spent time growing up in Missoula, The Pulp was quick to fawn over the “exhilarating freedom” of this musical celebrity who helped engineer Nirvana’s In Utero.
Broadly speaking, Steve Albini did not give a shit. He did not care what you, a random person, might think. He often said that explicitly and implied it in many other ways.
He did care, though. He was fanatical about music, specifically the nexus of music, art, aesthetics and ethics. He cared about details: about how to properly mic a kick drum, for example. But also about big ideas, like how communities support art and how commercialization stifles art. And he cared, despite his reputation as a misanthrope, about people—particularly other musicians, artists and outsiders, but he also cared about humans more broadly.
What I’m going to do now is annihilate this dangerously false impression Leif Fredrickson has created with his white-washed depiction of a VERY disturbed individual, and the screenshot I’m going to use comes from a blog post by Chris Knowles accurately calling Albini the “Alt-Rock Epstein”. Here’s why (trigger warning):
When I write blog posts about culture, like this one about the cultural context of a Missoula-based double homicide, it’s usually because I know MORE than what I’m choosing to publicly write about, like ongoing criminal charges involving minors against someone once pedestaled by the University of Montana’s “Design Team“.
Who could it be?
The first and only time I had the pleasure of being in the presence of a real FBI agent, it was because they were looking for a producer of child porn who was potentially traveling with the Rainbow Family, so that’s why they came to the Poverello Center, where I had just started working as an Americorps VISTA. Maybe it was early peeks like this that allowed me to figuratively kill my heroes when I learn new things about them. Here’s a good example to conclude this post.
My 2026 impression of the poet, Allen Ginsberg, is that he was a sexual predator and serial rapist who possibly molested the son of a well-known University of Montana professor. One source with direct knowledge of this time period in Missoula said it was his understanding that this kid, who grew up to have mental health issues, was possibly doing drugs, like LSD, as early as the age of 9 years old.
I’ve documented my case for this assertion in unpublished research I’m still trying to figure out what to do with, so I won’t include the name of the professor and his son (both now dead) in this post, but the possibilities of what was happening in Missoula over the past half-century is why I am now VERY critical of how we got to this point of total insanity.
So stay tuned, more to come…
