The beauty of a mountain morning. The rising sun catches the peaks of Conifer and Black Mountains, the lodgepole and aspen still punctuated by a web of snowy lanes.
Someone has cut five long ski runs down the face of Black Mountain. The land is private, employees of the Arapaho National Forest confirmed this in an e-mail. These ski runs, all beginning at around 10,000 feet, still have snow cover.
Using Jefferson County property maps the name of the owner of much of the land seems to be Jeffery Lysol, a vice-president for Armstrong Oil and Gas, based in Littleton. He is a skier, biker and runner according to his facebook page. Private ski-runs, Jon says, are not unusual in Colorado.
Business meeting this morning, then back to limbing. This will be a chainsaw week since I want to finish our fire mitigation before Memorial Day.
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.
Got out this morning early to begin limbing. Still cool. Finished the front and went on to the back. Using my Gransfors’ limbing ax. Conifer Mountain and Black Mountain were in the distance, a breeze blew up Black Mountain Drive and through the Lodgepole pines. On it the scent of cut pine floated up as first dead limbs then limbs with green needles fell to the side. The thunk of an ax cutting wood, the vibration of the oak handle, the release as the ax head sails on beyond the cut. Primal. Direct. No internal combustion engines. Just wood and steel and muscle.
Rigel and Gertie are the go-go girls. Whenever we leave the house, together or singly, they get big grins, bump us, start moving toward the back door, then back to us, repeat. Into the truck they go, bounding up and into the back. Only to lie down and often go to sleep. They don’t seem to care how long the trip. On the way home Rigel always gets up, starts looking around. They’re having fun, so we enjoy taking them with us.
Dr. Repine sweeps into the room with her white-gold hair. Her examinations are thorough, practiced. She sweeps the various magnifiers over my eyes, the ones that allow her to see the inner parts of my eye directly, dons a headlamp that would not look like out of place on a miner and picks up a thick magnifier. Look up. Look down. Look to the right. To the left. Good. Everything’s looking fine.
Gertie
Eyeball pressures are 14. Which is in the normal range. Glaucoma held at bay by Latanoprost. Cataracts, however, are advancing, changing my reading prescriptions. She says if they get much worse we’ll just take them out. Oh. Just? The good news is that cataract surgery often helps glaucoma by lowering the pressure in the eye. Something to look forward to?
Kate went with me. We went over to Whistling Duck, a furniture maker, to discuss beetle kill pine dining room tables. Kate had her measurements. She talked tables while I wandered around looking at the displays. We’re still in the early stages, getting quotes.
And, the sun. The sun. Blue skies. Winter to summer. Down the hill, that is. It was 78 in Littleton yesterday, but as we drove back up into the mountains the temperatures dropped, 54 when we got home. Ah.
This last round of snow, ice and colder weather got a lot of grumbles. Fortunately, we didn’t get the 5 inches predicted and the roadways were warm enough to melt what fell, but the part of our bodies that wants blue skies and somewhat warmer temperatures felt cheated. Not rational, I know. And the snow was pretty as always. But still.
Today Dr. Repine gets a look at my eyeballs, a glaucoma check, and a refraction. Might produce new reading lenses. After that we’re going to Whistling Duck, a carpentry shop specializing in beetle kill/blue pine. Our upstairs dining is still on the round bar table we bought as a temporary measure the month we moved in.
Life’s been eventful since our return from Asia with Vega’s death, the legal wrassling and the reluctant iconoclast moment. There’s another major event swirling in our lives right now, too, one I can’t write about openly yet. Not a health issue, not about Shadow Mountain or any of its residents.
Last night I got glimpses into the way forward on both Jennie’s Dead and Superior Wolf. That means my creative mind has emerged from the fog of image expunging. The Superior Wolf concept pushed me back to the origin idea, made me see that the way forward lay in the mythos, starting the story at the beginning. Solving a way for a magician to pull off a remarkable trick pushes the storyline of Jennie’s Dead past a road block. Feels good.
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.
Trying to get some printing done, photographs on fabric. Having a hard time. Our H.P. refuses to recognize its own ink cartridges. A friend of Kate’s who lives outside Bailey had an inkjet that refused to perform, too. Looking for other options in Denver and I’ve found some.
Puerto Mont, Chile tapedero
When we visited Judy Young, Kate’s friend, on Tapedero Drive, getting there gave us that odd insight street names give to an area’s early shapers. We turned off Cty. 43 onto Hangman Road. Off Hangman onto Vigilante Avenue. Hitchrack Road and Desperado Street intersected. Tapedero is a covering for the front of the stirrup so the boot won’t slip through.
An old west fantasy was on the mind of whomever platted this area.
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.
Wildfire mitigation. Still at it, today by proxy. Always Chipper, a small company run by Kevin Breeden, husband of our former housecleaner, came over today. I had asked him last fall to come and chip the slash from my fire mitigation work then. But. The day he was to come we got two feet of snow. And the piles remained covered all winter. As I blew the snow off our 200 inches or so of snow (one of the five biggest since the 1990’s), I covered the slash. Over and over again. It wasn’t until this last Sunday that the snow melted and Kevin could come.
As Kevin said, he widened our driveway. He and his partner Mike also took down several trees I felt surpassed my skill level, either too close to the house, the fence or the powerline. I only had him fell them. I’ll limb them and cut them up along with the remaining blue ribbon trees, then have Always Chipper come back and eliminate that slash, too.
My goal is to have all this done before Memorial Day, before the El Nino inspired precipitation leaves us and we’re barenaked again to a normal wildfire season.
At the same time our neighbors, Holly and Eduardo, decided to move a shed from one side of their property to the other. This is the Han Motogear shed, the one that contains their side business making women’s apparel for motorcyclists. It took a lot of jacking up, positioning on cement blocks, then setting it down on a trailer, moving the shed about a hundred feet and reversing the process. By late this afternoon our properties looked significantly different than they had in the morning. Big fun on Shadow Mountain.
The things life splices together. Yesterday Kate had an appointment with her cardiologist. I went with her. She showed me the report of her echocardiogram, we discussed the cardiologist’s finding. All very clinical. Yes, the heart is a muscle and one which can be graded and observed at many levels. It has ejection fractions. leaflets, diffusions and profusions, valves and chambers. The fine tuning of the heart’s care is a substantial branch of medicine.
On the bus to Gwangju
The heart is also, and perhaps more importantly, a metaphor. For love. For feeling. For courage and persistence. For essence. For intimacy. The metaphor can, too, be graded and observed at many levels. Heartless bastard. In my heart. I heart NYC, you, my dog, my honor school student, my rifle, my concealed carry handgun. That gets right to the heart of things. My heart is heavy. You have heart. My heart belongs to you.
Why might the metaphor be more important than the muscle? Because love lives on past the stilling of the muscle. Kate and I spliced together the cardiologist appointment with a visit to DazzleJazz, hearing the Keith Oxman quartet and Dr. Diva, a singing professor from Nebraska. We sat next to each other, she rested her head on my shoulder. We whispered and touched. My heart belongs to her. And that muscle so closely examined a few hours before? No match for her true heart, the one that belongs to me.
BTW: usual aging heart stuff for Kate. Blood pressure meds now. Attention to diet, keep up with the tai chi. Some upper body resistance work. We can push back against the dying of the light, but it goes out anyhow. Something, sometime. Yet love remains.
The beauty of a mountain morning. The rising sun catches the peaks of Conifer and Black Mountains, the lodgepole and aspen still punctuated by a web of snowy lanes.
