Category Archives: Art and Culture

Family Time

August 21, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Superior Wolf Moon

Gabe and Ruth were up here yesterday, bringing their peculiar brand of energy and enthusiasms. Gabe tried to go fishing for dogs again with a stick tied to twine. He found the pruners, wanting to cut a stick for a reason I couldn’t understand, but it was important to him. After laying the pruners down, and watching Rigel walk around him, this hemophiliac said, “Rigel’s really clever. She knows how to walk past sharp things.”

Ruth came up to the loft and ate a sandwich she made, “Two cheeses, four meats and dijonnaise!” When grandma asked her if she wanted to help make peach pickles, Ruth said, “Well, I know how to make pickles, but I don’t know how to peel peaches.” So she helped. She is a sponge, soaking up Kate’s sewing skills and cooking skills. Reading books from my library and ones she gets on her own. Learning printmaking techniques from her dad as she prepares her portfolio for DSA, Denver School of the Arts. 10.

Apres le grandkids Jon and Kate and I went into Dazzle Jazz in downtown Denver to hear Roberta Gambarini. She’s very skilled. This was the next to last event in Kate’s birthday month. She has a present coming on Monday from Jon.

Aging, Art and Culture, Family, Friends, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths, Writing

Acts of Creation

August 17, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Superior Wolf Moon

Just to let you know that the Superior Wolf Moon daily reminder has been working. I’m over 17,000 words into this new novel. It feels like some of the best work I’ve done. Of course, I always think that at the beginning of a project.

Kate’s birthday is tomorrow. 72. She works as hard now as she did when I first met her though she may not be able to sustain the work as long as she could. Neither can I. She’s remarkable and I’ll have a birthday post for her later today.

On Friday, buddy Mark Odegard has his “Bridges of the Mississippi” opening. He’s been working for the last year or so on this wonderful print series. It’s a contemporary, jazzy look at these important connectors. We think of crossing the Mississippi every day as a non-event, usually. And that’s because of these bridges that he has memorialized. They’re the often ignored civil engineering projects that make the Twin Cities possible. He’s made a unique contribution to our seeing them, an artist’s true task, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.

On a similar note, Jon Olson, step-son and art teacher, has developed a unique print making style that utilizes found, crushed metal objects. He picks them up from the sides of highways and streets, brings them here or to his art classroom in Aurora, inks them up and runs them through a press. In this way he’s printing directly from the object, like Mark, sharpening and nuancing our perceptions of the world around us.

Art and Culture, Family, Writing

Art

August 13, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Lugnasa Superior Wolf Moon

Ruth’s paint your own elephant arrived on Wednesday. In this new world Ruth and I sat talking about the parade of elephants in Singapore several years ago. She looked at the peace and love elephant my sister Mary bought for me.

She clearly wanted one, so I looked them up on the internet. No longer sold in Singapore at the Botanical Garden gift shop, I found them at the company that makes them for elephants parades held around the world, a place in Denmark. A couple of clicks later the folks in Denmark had my order for a blank elephant, one Ruth could decorate in her own way. An elephant from Singapore, seen on Shadow Mountain, inspired a ten year old, so her grandpop ordered one from Denmark. And it got here 5 days later. She’ll be working on it today, I imagine. Amazing.

Superior Wolf has begun to emerge from the many notes, stops and starts I’ve had on this novel. I began writing it in 1999. Now the whole feels available to me for the first time in 17 years. No idea why. Just enjoying the ride.

That work plus the to do list that sits by my computer has gotten the cotton out of my life and replaced it with energy. The Latin will return one of these days, too, I’m sure of it.

Most of the issue seems to be with rhythm. I need unobstructed morning time to work and I’ve been giving that away for the last several months. The work I do requires everday labor, requires attentiveness and the accretion of small tasks into a larger whole. In my psyche peace is most important and peace comes in part from having large blocks of time without additional pressure.

Art continues to nag at me, but I’ve still not figured out how to include it in my life as well as I did when I was a docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Perhaps Jon and Ruth, both active artists, will help in some way.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Family, Humanities, Literature, Our Land and Home

Indolence in Horse Country

July 18, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Park County Fair Moon

An indolent day yesterday. Kate, Jon and the grandkids left for Fairplay, about an hour west of here in South Park, headed to the Park County Fair. Neither Jon nor us has a vehicle that comfortably seats 5, so somebody had to stay behind. Me.

Did a little binge watching, read the Sport of Kings. This book, Sport of Kings, is a major American novel. It catches American aristocracy (that strange self-inflected club), slavery, westward expansion, effectively compares the breeding of blue-blood humans and blue-blood horses-thoroughbreds, the respective dynamics of working class, upper class and poor black families, all seen through the prism of Kentucky bluegrass horse culture. It’s one I may read twice.

Jon’s into Denver today to work on his and Jen’s house, getting it ready for sale in the red-hot Denver market. I’m following in just a bit to pick up some portion of his stuff: tools, clothes, walnut boards for the loft, machines for ski-making. This whole process has been icky so far, but I’m entertaining a hope (maybe, really, a fantasy) that this week marks a modest turning point in the acrimony.

Ladders rattle over the roof of the garage as the final masking is underway. The staining will commence on the whole very soon, perhaps today. The preparation for a good painting/staining job is painstaking, time-consuming.

Art and Culture, Cooking, Family

Burgers and art

May 21, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Into Denver last night for a burger with Jon at Park Burger on Holly. Park Burger is fancy, in a high modernist way. Lots of angles, metal, television screens. It sits in the middle of an upscale Jewish community near Cherry Creek, one of the tonier neighborhoods in the Denver metro.

Its menu reflects its setting. Not just cheeseburgers and cheeseburgers with bacon. You can get a third pound lamb burger, an ahi tuna burger, and, among many others, a Scarpone burger. This has pancetta, giardiniera, olives and a wonderful flavored mayonnaise. A stick to your veins sort of meal.

Even with its polyurethane covered pine table tops, hip waiters and list of interesting milkshakes, Park Burger does not match Matt’s on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis. The Juicy Lucy, often imitated but never well, may be Matt’s sole claim to burger fame, but it’s a solid one. Matt’s also has the distinctive patina only neighborhood bars and cafes get, the Velveteen Rabbit affect. It’s a real place, a place to have a beer and a burger with friends. Park Burger is too shiny and bright and new. It’s a place just recently brought home from the toy store, button eyes, cloth covering and all limbs still intact. It’s not real. Not yet.

Jon showed me photographs of his students’ art work. Some of it is sophisticated. An example was a print of two spoons, what Jon calls object printing. He’s developing this technique right now in his art and has some of his students doing it, too. He uses found objects, like crushed soda cans, parts fallen off cars, a guitar, a crushed metal folding chair. These get cleaned off, then covered with ink and run through his press. The result is a monoprint with unusual depth, contours, shapes.

His student took two spoons, covered one lightly with brown ink and another with a light blue. As he printed them, the light brown ink created a ghostly impression of its spoon, while the other slipped a bit in the press and created a tail, a swoosh of light blue ink behind the even fainter impression of the spoon. The result is dynamic. Maybe beautiful. A fifth grader if I recall right.

He loves his job, loves the kids and art.

Art and Culture, GeekWorld, Humanities, Photography, Writing

Works of Art in an Age of Digital Reproduction

May 18, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

It’s taken me a week and a half, but I’ve cleaned up Ancientrails. All images are either mine or ones from sources without copyright issues. The time it took was penance for not being attentive to this issue for over ten years. There is, too, a financial penalty, negotiated between a lawyer and myself for using a copyrighted photograph.

I feel like a raven whose stash of pretty things has been stolen. But, ravens are thieves and I was, too, though not in a possessive way. Both Richard Prince, an artist who reuses the photographs of others, and Walter Benjamin, who wrote a famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” have been on my mind during this time.

Once I’ve taken a break from the computer, today I’m going to do a lot of straightening up and rearranging up here in the loft, I’m going to give the whole issue of copyrights, attributions and fair use a concentrated look. Included in that will be a rereading of Benjamin and some of the follow on scholarship plus material about Richard Prince and others like him.

Art and Culture, Writing

Iconoclast

May 15, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Running Creeks Moon

Due to a modest legal dispute I have decided to take down all images from Ancientrails that are not my own or NASA’s. That work has occupied the daytime for the last week and a half. And I’m not done yet. When I’ve figured out how to use images appropriately (something I should have paid more attention to all along), I’ll gradually add some other sorts of images back in.

The work, which involves pulling up each post, going into edit mode and either deleting all the images or making the post private, then saving that work before going on to the next, has left me almost speechless. Deleting images tamps down my voice. Interesting. Or, the work is so repetitive and dull, plus so forehead slappingly self-inflicted, that it drains that energy away. There are, btw, over 8,000 posts on Ancientrails at this point.

My immersion in the art world has left me hungry for images of all kinds. I’ve developed an eye and enjoy finding and deploying them. My enthusiasm though has intersected with the reality that this blog is in fact publishing and that its reach is global. That means I have responsibilities just like magazines and newspapers even though I feel like this is a letter from me to whomever chooses to read it.

The rendering of some posts as private may mean that if you use the search functions on this blog you may be unable to read certain entries. I apologize. If you find entries in the past that you want to access and cannot, please e-mail me and I can send you a copy. Not hard, but clumsy, I know.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Too Much Salt?

April 30, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

The snow has been less than predicted, a good thing. Still, it’s the wet, heavy, slushy stuff that makes snowblowers clog up.

Jon, Ruth and Gabe are coming up tonight. Jon and Ruth will go skiing tomorrow and Gabe will stay with us. Ruth and I plan to take in a Fiske Planetarium (Boulder) show on black holes this evening. Kate’s making Mississippi Pot Roast. This is the sort of thing that, no matter how much we might have wanted to do it, was impossible when we lived in Minnesota.

Got rid of 4 bookcases bought long ago at Dayton’s warehouse in Minneapolis. They’d seen me through the house on Edgcumbe and in Andover. Most of these got sold off in Minnesota, but the remaining four held some books while the built-ins were under construction. That opens up space in the garage. It’s a priority as soon as the weather warms up. Would’ve been last year if it hadn’t been cancer season over the summer.

OK. I have a confession to make. I’ve been putting too much salt on my food for years. Big surprise, I’m sure, to all of you who have witnessed it. In fact, I was following an approach suggested by my internist, Charlie Petersen. His opinion was that once you passed a point where a problem, blood pressure in this instance, required treatment, you didn’t need to modify your behavior if the treatment worked. And it did. For many years. But, not now.

Over the course of the trip to Asia I stopped adding salt to my food. My blood pressure, which had been labile before the trip, suddenly fell into line. Damn it. Empiricism is such a bitch. And, not so small side benefit. It’s easier to sleep through the night since my fluid retention has significantly decreased.

There is no doubt that I have a self-destructive homunculus in residence. Smoking and drinking took me several unpleasant years to put into the past. Just why this little guy is so interested in my demise, I don’t know. Maybe he’s the death wish that Freud believed we all have. He doesn’t give up. If I start one of these activities again, I quickly go back to the maximum use. I learned this while quitting smoking, several times.

It’s tough getting him to just sit still. You would think that, having visited Yamantaka (the slayer of death) many times over the years, he would calm down. Yamantaka is the Tibetan God of death itself. To worship him one thing you can do is look your own death straight in the face, imagine yourself dead, meditate on your own corpse. In this way Yamantaka helps us to accept death for what it is, a natural and not to be feared part of human existence.

Seems like that would get this homunculus to quiet down. Oh, it’s going to happen anyway and it’s ok, so why do I have to speed things up? But, no. Doesn’t appear to work that way.

Art and Culture, Asia, Family, Travel

Singapore, the last day

April 19, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Wedding Moon

Yesterday, our last day in Singapore, was the usual packing, settling of accounts and the taxi ride to the airport. It also included a visit to the sky deck, the third of the three things I wanted to see. Nirvana exceeded my expectations, Skygreens fell far below them and the sky deck was in between. It was in between only because the park like aspect of it, which really interested me, was off limits to all but guests of the Sands Resort Hotel.

The views the sky deck provided of this island nation were, however, stunning. And, again, it was hot.

The night before we ate at the Singapore Cricket Club’s Padang Restaurant. Here is a photograph of the Cricket Club taken from the sky deck.

The merlion is a primary symbol of Singapore.

The lotus shaped Artscience Museum is in the foreground here. The Esplanade where we listened to the Sikh music is the hedgehog shapes in the upper right and the Cricket Club is to the upper left.

Finally, the sky deck park and the port beyond it.

Art and Culture, The West

Whispering Wind Designs

March 31, 2016 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Maiden Moon

Drove to Golden today to meet Jerry of Whispering Wind Designs. He had my birthday present finished and we agreed to meet at the Golden Diner for breakfast. Jerry has the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen on a guy. Movie star twinkly. With his weathered face from years as an airplane mechanic and his long gray hair swept back into a ponytail the teeth and his direct gaze gave him an intensity I had not expected.

His work shows a craftsman’s attention to detail. The legs on the table, for example, are made from four pieces of knotless beetle killed pine, then fitted together with tongue and groove joinery. The surface, coated with an industrial quality sealant, retains the slightly wavy grain of the bluish wood, a color given by the progress of the beetle as it kills the tree, and the ends have a curved piece of pine joined to the main body of the table.

Supporting craftspersons and artists means there will be a next generation of makers. When I can, I prefer to buy this kind of product. He’s going to give us a bid on benches and a table plus four chairs for our dining area.

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