stuffed animal body snatchers

Today I went downtown to the Denver Art Museum's Material World exhibit. The exhibit is part of a whole series called Spun, which uses both pieces from the museum's permanent collection as well as loaned works.

The series, from what I understand from a recent New York Times article I read about the whole thing, is an attempt to get people more interested in the museum's permanent collection, not just the special exhibits. The theme of all the Spun exhibits is the use of textiles.

But the exhibits of Material World don't seem, to me, to be completely focused textiles. For instance, one of the pieces is just an arrangement of colorful erasers, while another is an arrangement of things like colorful rolls of tape and cans and balls, all arranged on a small pedestal to look like a city. And one very large work, which seems to be a gigantic tree trunk, with roots, chopped into pieces to look like some three-dimensional, comic-book-like version of a big city, all splayed out atop scattered papers, which also have fixed to them squares and slots of wood that look like miniature versions of big cities.

Nevertheless, the theme of weaving and textiles resonates throughout the exhibit. The most interesting use of textile work is in two knit works by an artist named Oliver Herring. These works use mylar ribbons, knitted together in some kind of double pattern or crossed-over pattern.

One of the works, made out of transparent mylar, is a thick rectangle with a hole in the center, inside of which is a replica of a coat, also made out of transparent mylar. The other work, which I liked a lot, is knitted out of silver mylar. It shows a double image of a man getting out of a rocking chair. The man is double, and the rocking chair is double, to illustrate, I guess, the duplicity of motion in a frozen moment.

Another work which made interesting use of string is called "Initiator," by an artist named Lin Tianmiao. This work has a female mannequin, the white paint covering her grey body chipping away, facing a knee-high frog. The frog is pulling the woman's hair -- made out of strands of white silk and as long as a bridal train -- into his mouth. This all takes place before a curved, pink wall.

I think this piece is a very interesting combination of fairy tales: the story of the frog prince and, of course, Rapunzel. But the white hair also reminds me of the white-haired demons and witches in Asian legends -- or, at least, I should say, in Japanese anime and Chinese and Japanese horror movies. But it's a strange spin on it all. After all, the frog is pulling the woman's hair out. As he does, the woman's body is chipping away, the white paint revealing the grey material underneath. The transformation about to occur doesn't seem like a happy ending.

Another collection of works I liked in the exhibit was by an artist named Lucas Samaras. One of the works is very textile-based: it's kind of a crazy-quilt, with bars of different colored textiles spanning across the work to create a star pattern or fragmented mandala.

Another work by Samaras is some sort of small chest, painted black with white spots, and then encrusted on the inside with small colorful beads and on the outside with pebble-sized, colorful, plastic "jewels." On the top half of the interior are three heads, which I suppose are portraits of Samaras. The bottom half of the interior is lined with pencils, which have a kind of psychedelic pattern printed on them. Before that is a miniature stage, heaped up with a hefty, scattered pile of pins, atop which stands a lacquered praying mantis, being ridden by a miniature Greek bust of a woman.

Also by Samaras is a standing work that looks like a mobile, or maybe even a mobile within a mobile. The framing of the mobile is mostly made out of metal netting and -- I think! -- twisted clothes hangers. But there are also some copper wires and painted-over, metallic kitchen tools. A couple of the legs of the figure are, I think, made out of a knife and a fork. And hanging through the figure are broken pieces of colorful wine glasses. A mannequin's face is masked by some of the metal mesh on one side of the figure.

Near the work by Samaras is an interesting work by Agustina Woodgate. This work is a large quilt, of sorts, made out of the "hides" of stuffed animals. The works is very colorful and bright. But there is a strange sense of morbidity about it, seeing that it is made out of the hides of toys that, one would assume, children have once loved. The name of this work is, appropriately enough, "No Rain, No Rainbow."

Another set of works I liked was by Annette Messager. Three of her works were along one wall. Two works were clusters of small, framed pieces hung from the wall by long strings of twine fixed to ragged nails. One of the works was something like a globe made out of small, black and white photos framed in thin, black frames. The photos were all of segments of male and female bodies, mostly mouths, nipples, arms, legs, and vaginas. I'm pretty sure I didn't see any penises.

The other strung work was a tiered series of small pieces: the top row having one work, the second row having two works, the third and fourth, three, and the bottom, four. Each work was a small drawing, hung in a black frame, before a framed page of diary-style writing, in colored pencil, of one word, repeated over and over.

The drawings were lovely, like children's drawings. The top object was a set of headphones. In the second row were a drawing of an empty bed (I think); and a drawing of two scantily clad girls bumping their bottoms together while another, naked, girl looks on.

In the third row were a strange animal that looked like a rabbit, except that its ears were like a jester's hat; a little girl nursing a doll that looked like a clown or jester; and a bird flying into the sky, except that its back looked like a naked woman's body.

In the fourth row were something like a group of men floating through the sea in a giant saucepan; a group of acrobats standing atop each other; and a witch's face. And in the bottom row were a naked, demon-winged woman; a stopwatch; a folded-paper boat; and a stone being flung at a stack of cans.

The other work by Messager was also interesting: a charred-black-looking span of paper (?) in the shape of a cobra, with colorful imagery illuminating the hood and chest of the "cobra" like stained glass. The colorful imagery was, in fact, two mouths with tongues sticking out, and a nose.

I wandered around in a couple more floors of the museum, but I won't go into detail on the stuff I saw. Two interesting works by David Schnell, and "Fox Games," which, I think, is a pretty legendary work, at least in Denver.

Also, the special exhibit "Chamber," by Charles Sandison: a huge, empty room with colored words and thin lines projected onto the slanted walls. Words exploding out of invisible sources, spreading and growing like germs or DNA or star systems, and always changing color. Very lovely and quiet.

I then came home and watched the film El Amor Brujo, a Spanish film based on a Flamenco ballet, about an arranged marriage that seems to end in murder, until the ghost of the murdered husband shows up every night to dance with the widowed wife. The widow has a paramour who'd loved her since childhood. The paramour and the widow work together to get the husband's ghost to stop following the widow.

It's all very romantic and sad and very, very colorful. The people all have a garish, 1980s style. But the dancing is superb. I also like a pop song called "Azucar Moreno," which takes place near the beginning of the film.

Last night I also watched the Japanese film Goke, the Body Snatcher from Hell. That was also a wonderful movie. It's about a plane that crashes in a desert portion of island. The survivors end up being attacked by a blob-like alien that lands in a fire-glowing flying saucer. The blob-like alien cracks open people's heads and then glops up into their bodies through their foreheads. The host body then acts as a vampire, sucking people's blood. The plot is pretty straightforward. But the action is fun, and the bleak atmosphere of everything is pretty powerful.

spaceships and hot air balloons

Hello, everybody.

Yesterday I took the day off work. I was depressed for a number of reasons. Things with my family have been kind of sad lately. My boss could tell last week that I was feeling down. He wanted me to take some time off last week. But I didn't want to. Then I found out that the Colorado Aerospace Day was taking place yesterday. So I asked my boss at the end of last week if I could take yesterday off, though I didn't tell him why. My boss said that was fine.

So yesterday I attended the Colorado Aerospace Day at the State Capitol in Denver. The day was put on by the Colorado Space Business Roundtable, which is kind of a networking organization for members of the space industry in Colorado.

Colorado is actually the second biggest space-industry state in the United States, as measured, I believe, by the number of people employed. I think this is largely because of two really big space companies operating out of Colorado: Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Martin's United Launch Alliance.

But there are also a number of other really interesting companies operating out of Colorado, such as DigitalGlobe and Sierra Nevada Corp, which manufactures the Dream Chaser manned space vehicle.

There are actually a lot of other satellite, component, engineering, and software companies in Colorado dedicated to space. Colorado is also the world headquarters of the Space Foundation.

I only attended the event in the morning. After the morning session there was a lunch and then an afternoon networking session. The morning networking session was set up in the two central rooms of the Capitol. About twenty different organizations had booths up. I spoke with a few different organizations.

I spoke with the Denver Office of Economic Development, a Commission within Denver that supports business growth by bringing new companies into Denver, by supporting companies that already operate in Denver, and by encouraging startup businesses within Denver. This doesn't just include space businesses. But since space is such a big industry in Denver, space is one of the Commission's focuses.

I didn't ever actually see a live person at the Ball Aerospace booth, although there were some interesting mockups of satellites, as well as some literature on some of Ball's new satellite programs.

But I did manage to speak with a representative from the United Launch Alliance for a little while. I think one thing I've been trying and trying to figure out about the space industry is, what really would be the reality of commercializing space? What are the real commercial applications of space? And in what way would people be able to demonstrate the potential of return on any commercial investments in space?

I asked this question to the ULA rep. It seems to me that a lot of ULA's money is coming from NASA right now, and I wanted to see what strategies ULA might have for making money outside of NASA. But the answer I basically got was that a lot of the work ULA currently does with NASA could be seen as commercial.

The ULA person and I spoke a little bit more about the commercial applications of space. But it didn't sound like there were any out there. The goals of NASA seem to be focused on research and exploration, knowledge for the sake of science, so to speak, without any other aims. The ULA person said that, even with the commercial space programs that are going on right now, namely SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, those aren't really commercial programs as much as they are the dreamchildren of two very imaginative entrepreneurs.

I spoke with the people from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Space Foundation as well, trying to get an idea of whether and how space is really put forward, in any spheres outside of the space industry itself, as a commercial opportunity.

The person from the AIAA made a good point that space has always provided good commercial opportunities in terms of technology transfer -- the use of technologies that have been developed for space for more mundane purposes. One of the main examples of this has always been, I think, Corning Ware.

But I think the main fact really remains that there is a whole field, wide open, for the commercialization of space. I don't feel like I'm alone in having thought that there must have been a whole bunch of people out there, working on ways to create commercial applications for space travel and habitation. But there really don't seem to be. It's kind of exciting. There really is a whole field, wide open.

After that I wandered around Downtown for a little while. I went to the Tattered Cover bookstore for about an hour. Then I went to the library. I finished reading The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes. The book is basically about the Romantic Age of British Science.

The Age of Wonder starts with the story of Joseph Banks, a scientist who traveled with an astronomy mission to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, I believe, across the sun. Joe Banks eventually formed a strong relationship with the Tahitians and began to observe them closely and in a scientific way, establishing, in a sense, the science of Anthropology. Joe Banks later became the head of the Royal Society in England.

Joe Banks remains an influential figure throughout the rest of the book. The book moves on to tell the story of William Herschel, a man of German origin, I believe, who started his career as a musician, but moved more and more into the observation of the heavens with telescopes. Herschel became obsessed with creating  his own telescopes, creating better and better telescopes, and minutely observing the heavens, eventually discovering a new planet -- Uranus.

Herschel's story is also the story of his sister, Caroline Herschel, who helped Herschel with basically all of his astronomical observations. Caroline also made discoveries of her own, mainly of new comets. These discoveries came as the result of observations Caroline made on her own, while she was conducting what she called "sweeps" of the sky.

There is a kind of break in the story which I, honestly, didn't quite get -- even though I enjoyed it -- which narrates a sort of "arms race" between Britain and France. The object of contention: hot air and hydrogen balloons. The story of the invention of hot air and hydrogen balloons, the first flights, and the flights between Britain and France are told in all their glorious eccentricity.

The story also includes a section on Mungo Park, who kind of served as Joe Banks' protege in travel. Mungo Park made two journeys deep into Africa. On his first journey he nearly died -- was, in fact, left for dead on more than one occasion. And on his second journey he actually was killed.

The most interesting part of the story, in my opinion, however, concerns the great chemist Humphry Davy. Davy's story is most interesting to me because it includes the circle of Romantic poets -- Coleridge, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley are the ones most mentioned, I believe, with Coleridge actually befriending Davy, attending Davy's lectures, and even contributing to some of the Royal Society's scientific lectures, if I understand Richard Rhodes' narration correctly.

Erasmus Darwin plays a poetic role in some of the passages relating to William Herschel. But his works, though, I believe, influenced by Herschel's work, seem more to back up what Herschel is saying. The works of Coleridge, Byron, and the Shelley siblings, however, seem intimately linked with Davy's science and philosophy.

Davy himself is also somewhat of a poet. And I think one very good point Rhodes raises in his book is that some of the scientific documents left behind by people like Humphry Davy are, in themselves, good examples of Romantic literature.

What's also interesting about Davy is that he is seen as a scientist and an engineer. One of the pivotal moments in Davy's story is his creation of a safety lamp, a lamp which prevented flames from igniting the methane gases down in mine shafts. Before Davy's invention, scores of people at a time would die horrendous deaths due to the ignition of methane gases by lamp flames. But Davy, through careful observations and labors, used his understanding of chemistry to create a lamp that would not explode the methane gases.

shepherds of the modern empire

After spending a few months in a kind of emotional limbo, and not doing anything with this blog, I joined Twitter. On my Twitter account I made mini-essays that kind of substituted for this blog. But after a few months worth of writing mini-essays about stuff I read or art I saw on Twitter, I decided I'd better at least try to get this blog started back up.

One limiting factor, at least, to this blog has been that I kind of restricted myself to explaining whatever my dreams were in the directly previous night with whatever experiences I'd been having through the course of the recent days or months. I think I'd like to break free of that restriction a bit. If I feel like I have the ability to analyze my dreams within the context of this blog, I will, and I'll make sure I provide links to the dreams, like I have in the past.

But I think that what this blog will mainly become is something of a dreamer's journal. I'm not really an artist. And even as far as dreamers go, I'm rather pedestrian. But I seem to have the ability to keep track of my dreams -- I've done so somewhat well since 2004. And I might as well keep notes of my creative (rather than personal, insofar as I can avoid it) experiences, so that the few people who are interested in my dreams can also see what some might think of as the raw material of my art, the art of dreaming.

And one thing I keep trying to force myself to remember is that a blog is basically like a journal, except that, instead of gathering dust in a drawer or closet or who knows where, until I need to recall it for the sake of research or emotional support, it will be in a rather open space -- however open the internet is. Sometimes it feels like the internet is even more isolated than a drawer or a closet. But I think I've always had a few eyes on my blog posts, here and there. And so that's much better than never having any eyes on my ideas.

Today I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, one of my favorite haunts. I recently became a member there, so I'm pretty sure I'm going to haunt the place a lot more frequently. The MCAD is one of the many, many sites taking part in Denver's Month of Photography, which takes place through March and even through a little bit of April.

The Month of Photography exhibit MCAD has going on right now is by an artist named Lucas Foglia. Foglia's exhibit is called "A Natural Order." It is curated by Mark Sink, the person who founded Denver's Month of Photography. If I'm not mistaken, Mark Sink also curated the Month of Photography exhibit going on at the RedLine Gallery.

Foglia's exhibit shows photographs taken between 2006 and 2010, of people living off the grid and, in a lot of ways, close to nature, in the southeastern United States. A lot of these people, apparently, live in communities. Some of them dress in an old-fashioned style. Others dress in more of a hippie-style. Others dress in a militia style. Others, apparently, don't dress at all.

There are some really interesting photos. There's a nice one of a little baby dancing on its mother's (?) shoulders as the mother plays a banjo. The little baby and mother are blonde and tan. The mother has her hair done in dreads. She has a bracelet-like tattoo on her right wrist, showing the phases of the moon. On her left forearm is a tattoo of some kind of creeping plant, maybe a morning glory. Another parent and child (?) photo I like is of a man floating on his back in a river while a baby stand-crawls on his chest.

There's another photo of a little girl that I like. The girl is lying on her back on a colorful blanket. The girl is dressed in a green fairy-costume with a vine decoration running up the front of the blouse. She has a daydreamy look on her face, and she appears to be holding the bone of some just-eaten animal in her left hand.

Another interesting photo shows a girl in her early teens, or maybe younger, being taught how to shoot a rifle by an older woman. The girl is wearing a prim, blue dress, and the older woman is wearing a prim, pink dress. Something about the posing of this photo, while rather violent in a lot of ways, also has a feeling one might get from a Jock Sturges photograph.

This feeling is accentuated in another photo, showing the back view of a fat man in swimming trunks on a dock, I believe, wrestling with a naked child, who is skinny and has long hair, but whose gender I, personally, couldn't discern.

But the violence of the photo carries over into a couple other photos. It's hard to tell if shooting a gun should be equated with violence. Obviously these people aren't learning to shoot a gun to hurt people. They're learning to shoot because they need to know how to shoot in order to hunt for their food. But in one photo, the rifle on a young man's headboard compliments his militia-style outfit and skull-and-crossbones/Confederate flag to make one feel that he has learned to use his gun to do more than hunt for food.

Another photo shows a little girl in a prim, pink dress scrawling away on a chalkboard. From a distance, one might simply assume that the little girl is writing math or spelling formulas. But a closer glance at the chalkboard reveals that the little girl is writing out conspiracy theories, modern "who controls the oil" theories and older George Orwell theories.

Some other photos show a frightful state of nature in decay. One photo is of a bear that had been killed by poison. I think it's implied, by the title of the photo, that the bear had been poisoned by a neighbor of the off-the-grid community. But I'm not sure. What's frightening about the photo, though, is how, where the bear's fur has fallen off its body, the bear kind of resembles a fat human being. In fact, at first seeing the bear at a distance, I thought I was looking at a human being playing some kind of weird game.

Another unsettling photo is of a patch of watermelons -- all decayed. I'm not sure how an entire patch of watermelons could have undergone decay like that. Some of the watermelons even appeared to be split right in half, as if they'd purposely been split open, so that they would decay. The field of watermelon vines also seems to be in a state of decay: half the vines have rotted into a rusty color against the brown soil.

One photo that I, in my insulated, little, suburban world, would think of also as a photo of decay, is of a man in something he called a wigwam (not sure how like a genuine wigwam it was). The structure doesn't seem much bigger than a sleeping bag, and it's mostly shadow. At the front of this structure are all kinds of dirt, ash, jars, and so forth. The man in the wigwam appears to be sleeping. But he doesn't seem restful. He seems miserable. Again, I may be investing something of my own feelings into my perception of the man.

One photo that I liked was of a writing desk in some kind of wood cabin. At the writing desk are a non-electric typewriter, an ash tray, and, I think, two hunks of stone. The writing desk seems to have been made out of an old door, or an old piece of wall. On the walls behind and beside the writing desk are a painting of two cheetahs in the darkness and a framed (!!!) deer's head.

After looking at the Lucas Foglia exhibit, I went to the William Lamson exhibit, which was a room with a video. The video showed a man in a wide river balancing himself on some sort of do-it-yourself, motorized flotation device. The device didn't -- I think -- move forward. I think it just kept the man floating. It was basically a circle, maybe a meter in diameter, with a mesh-metal platform on top of it. Whatever the motorized piece was was below the circle, under the water.

Whenever the river waves got too rough, or, perhaps, whenever the motor clunked out, the man was thrown off the device. He'd have to fix the motor and re-balance himself on the platform. He was wearing rubber boots. And each time he'd re-balance himself on the platform, he'd use a strange device made out of an old bike tire pump to suction the water out of his boots.

I then went upstairs, to the Karen Kilimnik exhibit, which I'd gone to before. But the first time I'd gone, I'd spent so much time in the first half that I didn't have any time to spend looking at the second half. The second half has some interesting paintings of scenery from ballets and ballet and opera halls.

It also has a little installation of a ballerina's tutu and dance shoes, sprinkled over with blue glitter and lying atop a fake cinder block, over which are crawling little mice. The installation draws attention to the fact that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ballerinas were thought of as rats. Ballerinas were thought of as generally having had low origins, maybe of having grown up on the streets or in very poor neighborhoods. It's not too different from the way people thought of actors and playwrights in the same time period.

But what's interesting is that another of Kilimnik's drawings shows the opera house Marie Antoinette built for her Villa Trianon. The description of the drawing mentions that Marie Antoinette, while at the Villa Trianon, used to dress very simply, in a white, muslin gown, and go out into the fields, playing at being a shepherdess.

There's a strange juxtaposition here: on one side, there are the ballerinas, stigmatized as having low origins, but acting as some of the most sublime personages in the universe of human archetypes; and on the other side, there are Queens of Empires, dressing and acting as shepherdesses.

I can't help but feel that, in some way, this kind of strange juxtaposition also fits in with the photos of Lucas Foglia. The United States grew, the old Europeans might have said, out of low origins. But it soared upward to become the greatest power in the world. But now, as the greatest power in the world, we, maybe not as a whole, but in part, choose to dress simply and go back to the fields.

One last interesting thing from Kilimnik's exhibit is a little, white structure, kind of like a child's playhouse. Inside the structure are curtains with floral designs on them. And on the back wall is a screen playing some kind of fairy's ballet.

The video shows a pretend forest -- really, an artificial forest landscape inside a studio or some other small room. As the camera moves through the lush canopy of this artifical forest, it pauses, to allow superimposed images of little ballerinas to dance on the limbs and leafs of the trees and other vegetation. The whole thing is very charming.