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.
