traditions of consistent heresy

Yesterday I went to the Intendence Film Festival, a little film festival that helps support emerging Colorado filmmakers and international filmmakers. Some of the films were made by professional filmmakers. Others, apparently, were made by amateur filmmakers, while others were made by college, or even high school, students. I'm not sure whether this was the festival's first year. I couldn't even tell from looking at the website. But I'm assuming it was the first year.

The festival took place in a few different locations in a part of the Denver suburb of Arvada known as Olde Town. Olde Town is one of those lovely little districts that's kind of like a small-town Main Street nestled within a modern city or suburbia. It has some lovely cafes and bars and shops and a nice, new library. The sidewalks are often paved with red bricks. The store fronts all have an olde feel. And there are even some old buildings, like an old flour mill, scattered throughout the district.

I only attended the first couple screening sessions on Saturday, the final showing day of the festival. The shows were in a big community room in the library. But throughout the length ofnthe festival, there were also screenings in the Arvada Tavern, which had been transformed into a nice, big, screening room, and the Festival Playhouse, which I didn't see.

In the library, at least, the screening quality was problematic. The films (videos, actually) played on a small screen in front of a much larger screen. There were problems with getting the films to start one after the other, and there were sound problems. The attendance was about in line with what you'd expect it to be after, apparently, only having been advertised in the windows of one shopping district in town. But this was all, as one of the audience members put it, a part of the excitement of a new (was it new?) film festival. I don't think I would have changed any of it.

The only thing I seriously would change, I think, is the name of the festival. If it's staying in Olde Town, then I'd call it the Olde Town Film Festival. It's much clearer, and people are familiar with the concept of Olde Town as a place where events are held.

The first screening I attended was all short films. The second was one short film and one feature-length film. The films in the first screening mainly seemed to involve themes of loss and regaining. The first film was a neat, little story called "Beyond Primary." It was made by a Colorado high school student named Stephan Chaikovsky. I thought it was pretty clever. It's about an old man, maybe a homeless man, who seems to be obsessed with figuring out a Rubik's Cube puzzle. The man figures out the puzzle, but then loses it in an accident. Then, in a state of desperation, he thinks he finds it again.

This film was followed up by another short film called "Color Fade," which was made by Matthew Krekeler and his classmates at the film school at -- I think -- the Santa Fe School of Art and Design. The film is about a young man in some oppressive school/society in an apparently monochrome world. The kid has has troubles with his printer one day while he is trying to print out a homework assignment. The kid hits the printer, and the printer starts printing out red sheets of paper. The kid is inspired by the color of the paper and tapes the paper all over the walls of his dormitory building. But the police, who enforce conformity, beat the kid and take all the red papers away.

The next film was called "Confessions of a Child Talent Agent." It was about three women running a children's talent agency in Denver. The main story kind of involved the first round of auditions for a cereal commercials, the agonizing wait for callbacks, and then all the frantic back and forth activity surrounding the logistics of actually getting the kids to callbacks. The film had a kind of reality show style. And there were some funny moments, like when of the agents, stressing out over the callbacks, stuffs her face more than full of York Peppermint Patties.

After that was a very short, one-gag (though the line after the gag was funnier than the gag itself) cartoon called "Killer App."

Then came an interesting film called "Edge of Destruction," by a Hong Kong artist named Fei Xiang. The film is about a young man who works as a tour guide and security guard, of sorts, at a traditional temple called the Small Goose Pagoda. The Small Goose Pagoda is legendary for twice having been wrecked and then having somehow healed itself.

One day the young man finds two people inside the Pagoda after hours. When he pursues them, they shoot at him with futuristic guns. A pretty girl protects the young man with a futuristic gun of her own. The young man and woman run out into the town to escape the thieves, but they end up cornered. Right when they are about to be killed, the young man mysteriously teleports himself and the young woman to a different part of town.

The young woman then reveals that she and the people in pursuit are actually from an alternate dimension. The Small Goose Pagoda is like a portal between the dimensions. It basically breaks and heals whenever there are collisions -- I think -- between the two dimensions. But the next time there is a collision, it could destroy this dimension.

The young man, it turns out, is an Alpha, a being who can travel freely between the dimensions... or something like that. The people pursuing the young man want to kill him because he also has the ability to stop some process involved in the collision of the dimensions. So the young man and woman have to evade and fight and evade the pursuants until the young man can perform his magic ritual to stop the collision of the dimensions.

The story was pretty straightforward. And I liked the special effects. I thought the style was kind of like the style of some of the semi-satirical Japanese action shows, like the live versions of Cutey Honey.

This film was followed by a film called "Worth," by an Australian filmmaker named Nic Barker. The story is about a man and woman who kidnao the daughter of a bitter, wealthy man. The man and woman demand a ransom of $50,000 from the father. They then hole themselves up in a hotel and wait until the man is scheduled to meet the father and exchange the ransom money for the daughter. In the meantime, the man does a number of things to reveal what an abusive jerk he is.

The man goes to meet the father, but he never comes back. It turns out that before the daughter was kidnapped, she was actually lovers with the woman. The father got angry at the daughter for being a lesbian, and the daughter ran away. But now the woman and the daughter are on their own, lovers again, and on the run.

The next film was "Isabella's," by a New York filmmaker named Daniel Vallancourt. The film is about the last day of business in the hair salon owned by a woman named Isabella. The woman has some final encounters with customers who have come to be like family to her. Then, just as she is about to close up for the night, a young man comes in and asks for a haircut. The two talk for a while about the history of the shop.

The final film in the screening was "Hecate," by Colorado filmmaker Kascha Fauscett. It was kind of a horror story about a group of girls at a slumber party who find a book of spells the magical agent of which is the ancient Greek goddess Hecate. One of the spells draws one of the girls into a parallel dimension, where horror awaits her.

The opening film of the second screening was called "Mosyö," and was made by a Turkish director named Kagan Olgunturk. The film is a documentary about a man in who has an antique and curiosity shop in the Turkish shopping district of Hergele. The man took up the profession of antique dealer after having retired. Now he collects more than he sells -- on purpose: he can't bear to part with any of his goods!

The man is called "Mosyö," a kind of Turkish corruption of the French "Monsieur," because he's known as being a bit of an intellectual, and because he dresses in what his friends think of as a French style: kind of long hair, a tweed jacket and maroon sweater, and round-brimmed hat. He's also a bit of a renegade in his community: unabashedly atheist and unafraid to speak his mind.

The film has two parts. The first part is in the antique shop, where the man repairs and plays with his antiques and curiosities. The second part takes place in a bar, where Mosyö eats and drinks with his old friends. I like the second part of the film a lot.

The second film of the screening was a feature-length documentary called The Keymaker, by a Colorado-based filmmaker named Jem Moore. The documentary is about Patrick Olwell, the legendary maker of Irish flutes. Olwell's flutes are played by Seamus Egan, Michael Molloy, and other famous Irish flautists throughout the world. Some of the best Irish flautists argue that Olwell's flutes are the best flutes in the world.

The film has three interweaving stories: how Olwell's career as a flute maker developed; how Olwell actually makes his flutes; and the opinions of the people who play Olwell's flutes.

Olwell began making flutes in the 1960s when he saw another young man at his university selling bamboo flutes at the student union. Olwell saw that that seemed to be a pretty easy way to make money. So he had the young man teach him how to make bamboo flutes. He then began selling bamboo flutes in the student union as well.

After college, Olwell moved down to a small town in Virginia and took out out an ad as a maker of bamboo flutes. The demand for bamboo flutes was great. But somehow Olwell also got involved in making Irish flutes. He became intensely involved in all the intricacies of making a good flute. He learned the good points and bad points of flutes. He replicated the construction of flutes. He mastered old techniques for makinf certain kinds of flutes. And he eventually learned to use all of these lessons to make flutes with all of the good points of the old flutes, but none of what he perceived were the bad points.

There are a lot of really interesting themes in the film. One of the biggest seems to be the difference between an artist and a craftsman. Olwell says at one point that the difference between an artist and a craftsman is that a craftsman is an artist with children. In other words, a craftsman is an artist who uses his skills to make a living. But the real question underlying this joke is, what should be considered a work of art? Flute-playing is art. But is a flute a work of art? And is flute-making artistry? Or is it crafstmanship? One person seems to compromise when he calls Olwell an artisan.

Another interesting statement made in the film is that Olwell is a genius -- has to be a genius -- because he creates such consistent, and consistently good, instruments. I don't think I've ever heard consistency listed as a criterion of genius.

When flautists speak of why they love Olwell and his flutes, they generally give threefold reasons: first, the responsiveness of the flutes, which is better than that of any other Irish flute; second, the range of the flutes, which is apparently incredible; and, third, the fact that Olwell strives to give his clients flutes that match them individually, so that their flutes really are, in a sense, extensions of their bodies.

There is also an element of dumb luck in Olwell's story. Not once, but twice, did Olwell make commercial inroads with world-famous flautists by giving the flautists his own flute after their flutes had been stolen. And I think that in both cases, the flutes were stolen from cars. Both times Olwell gave the flautists his personal flutes, the flautists fell in love the flutes and never wanted to play in anything else ever again.

Olwell has a lot of interesting catch phrases. But his most interesting one is "actually plays." When applied to flutes, it means a flute of high quality. A flute that "actually plays" isn't a flute that makes noise and pretty much is in tune. It's a world-class flute. And the term applies equally well to performers. A musician who "actually plays" isn't competent: he's of an elite level of talent.

Olwell also sees himself as capable of having been good at other professions. He likens his profession to engineering and waxes on aboutnhow he might have been good as an engineer or an R&D guy. He talks about the precision required for drilling holes in flutes, and he winders whether he might have been a good dentist. One of his good, old friends wonders the same thing, which is a little strange.

But Olwell, despite being seen as the Stradivari of flute makers by some, is also seen as a bit of an outsider and a renegade. He even calls himself a heretic. He doesn't make classical, baroque flutes: he only makes Irish flutes. And he doesn't charge high prices for his flutes. He doesn't advertise himself, doesn't (or didn't?) have a website. And he lives far from Ireland, down in a small town in Virginia. But he's an endearing person, loved by his family, friends, and clients.

Today I headed down to the McNichol's Civic Center Building to see the Zhang Xi exhibit DNA of the 21st Century. The McNichol's Civic Center Building is run by Denver Arts and Venues. It is basically a free museum, with three floors of changing exhibits. I've been to McNichols one time before, and I loved it then, too. The space is really wide and open. The buiding is massive! And the artwork is new, edgy, and captivating.

Zhang Xi is a Chinese artist who now lives in Denver. He was born in 1984, so he's pretty young. But his art is terrific. The art in this exhibit has three main styles. One style is kind of saturated in images and iconography of technology, with a foreground of humanoid characters whose flesh seems to be melting off, often in searing oranges, yellows, and reds, as if they are burning in the fires of passion. Another style is like traditional Asian ink and paint drawings, like scroll drawings and paintings. A lot of these are done on gold leaf. And the final major style is a faded, washy style of oil painting depicting ritual and community scenes of various kinds.

There are a few other styles employed. The painting right by the title and exhibit notes is a relatively realistic painting of a woman's head and shoulders -- except that superimposed over the right side (the woman's right) of her face is a skull with an eye in the hole corresponding to the woman's right eye.

On the wall near the wall with this painting are two interesting paintings of pairs of women. The women are painted before backgrounds of color. In one painting, two women wearing black head coverings stand shoulder to shoulder. They stand before a background of yellow which blends into a vivid green toward the center. In the other painting, two women are holding hands and running. It's like the two women are lovers on the run. But in both of these paintings, the women's forms sort of have holes torn in them, like Swiss cheese. Through these holes can be seen the backgriund of blended colors.

The technology-themed paintings use and expand upon this idea of mottled, disintegrating bodies. One painting shows a woman surrounded by three men. The woman definitely seems to be fighting with the man directly in front of her, as if she and he are lovers. It's hard to tell if the other two men are the first man's friends, ganging up on the woman or goading the man on, or if they are something like phantoms and demons, lending to the violence of the man against the woman.

But the woman and the men all have faces dissolving into bright yellow and orange flickers, like flames. The men and women are surrounded in something like blue curls of smoke or electricity. And the bodies are coated in blue and red scales, like lizard scales.

Behind the woman and the men is some dark cityscape, partly like a modern city and partly like a traditional city of pagodas. But the city is actually made up of what appears to be electronic messages. There are images that look like statistical information off of dating websites. And in the very foreground are video game images, such as energy indicators and a sign at the bottom prompting a "player" to press "OK" to start the next game.

A painting next to this painting uses the same video game start-screen theme, only this one is prompting the "player" of a lonely man walking in the street to begin the next hour of his life. Bleak! The lonely man, a completely mottled body, appears to be a veteran soldier. A floating image from a news show implies that war has ended. But a computer-like menu of options at the bottom of the screen gives the man the option of returning to war.

Next to this painting is a painting with a deep black background, against which is splattered layers of red, orange, and yellow paint which eventually separates itself into three or four different heads. The heads all seem to be in pain, as if each head has been shot, and all the other heads have been formed from the splattered blood and brains of the shot head.

Another painting against a dark backrground is of a beautiful woman, her face and hair a fiery swirl of bright colors. Behind the woman, etched into the deep black background, is a cityscape in dim, but vividly colored outline.

Beside this painting is a painting called "The Unborn Tears." The background is, again, deep black. In the foreground is a mass of people who look like a mix between soldiers, rioters, babies, and zombies. The figures are outlines, with mottled faces and bodies filled with paint like out of a Jackson Pollock painting. The painting is extremely sad and frightening.

The exhibit is bookended, in a sense, by a four-panel painting called "No One's Wonderland/Form Is Emptiness." The first two panels are on one side of the exhibit, and the second two are on the other side. I'm not sure why they were separated. They would have looked better together.

But the first two panels by themselves are probably the best part of the show. On the far left side is some kind of street scene, or else a depiction of the walls of an Egyptian pyramid. Three Egyptian figures are walking across the wall. But the clothing of the figures is made to look sk ehow electronic. And the bases of the walls are made out of stone patterns from the videogame Super Mario Brothers. In addition, there is a drawing of a Super Mario Koopa turtle on the wall, as well as a realistic-looking image of Super Mario himself.

This imagery is suddenly disrupted by a room of walls which seem to have color schemes similar to that of the mazes in the arcade game of Pac-Man. But the maze on the left wall seems to be more like an Islamic geometric design, while the maze on the floor seems to be a map of city streets.

At the very bottom is a soldier character from the videogame Contra. He's shooting a spray of red bullets out of his gun.The bullets turn into drops of blood, hearts, and little babies. The babies all float up into what apparently is a ghostly, orange sea superimposed over the map of city streets. And there they swim around with Hindu-like women, or, perhaps, various emanations of Radha herself.

After this painting, the paintings change into the scroll-like paintings. Most of these paintings depict women, singly, or in groups, taking pictures of themselves on their cellphones. The way the pictures are done, you feel like you are watching from behind a mirror in a bathroom. But the backgrounds are often decorated like the interiors if traditional Asian dwellings. The backgrounds are also often taken up by traditional Asian, watercolor-esque paintings. But the wildlife in those paintings often look like the birds from the videogame Angry Birds.

The women in these paintings are often making sexual poses. Some of the women are average, maybe a little dumpy. Other women are quite fat, posing with quite lascivious looks in their faces. And some of the women are sexy women, posing in bikinis, in sexy poses, with their bottoms sticking back and their breasts sticking forward, and flashing peace signs for the camera. One woman is tattooed with corporate logos. Another is tattooed with the symbols of superheroes.

The oil paintings of the rituals aren't as ostensibly complex, but they're fiery with emotion and very lovely. One shows a rain dance, a group of blur-bodied dancers in brightly colored clothes dancing in a dark landscape of grass, apparently at the edge of a body of water. Next to this painting is a group of people preparing for something like a trapeze act or a ballet. Some people seem to be stretching. Others seem to be dancing. But some are hanging from strings from the ceiling.

Another lovely painting in this style shows a rock band playing and singing. The faces of the rock band are so washed out that they look lime masks. It reminds me a little of Pussy Riot. The guitars are also washed out, creating a really lovely, fuzzy look.

Next to this painting is a painting of a protest. There is also a painting in this style of rebels soldiers marching down a narrow street or alley, which is quite striking and frightening. There is also a painting of what appears to be young boys jumping onto a train as the train is departing. But the action of this painting is a little confusing. The young boys look modern. But the people in the trains look like they're from the 1800s.

There are also two paintings which take on the theme if Millet's Peasants. In a washy-style painting, the peasants standin something lime a covered boardwalk. The concrete railing of the boardwalk is sprayed over with graffiti. Some boys stand on the railing. They're looking past the railing, to a beach, apparently, on which some girls are running.

The other Millet-style painting is done in a blockier, Asian-scroll-like style. But in the background are some Mondrian-like paint squares, as well as comic-like frames, one showing a couple holding hands and walking through an Eden-esque garden, and another showing a couple embracing each other in a brightly colored, mystical sea. Behind the couple is an adertisement for an internet dating site, boasting how most of the one in five people who find dates online find them from this website.

regressing toward enlightenment

Yesterday I went down to the Denver Art Museum to see Figure to Field: Mark Rothko in the 1940s. As the title implies, the exhibit traces Rothko's work from his figurative work of the 1940s through the non-objective color fields, the rectangles of plain color for which Rothko is famous.

Yesterday was a sneak preview day for museum members. As part of the sneak preview, the show's curator, Gwen Chiznit, was there to walk around and answer questions. She was there from 11 AM to 1 PM. But we all got timed tickets, and my ticket didn't let me in until 12:30 PM. As I walked in, Chiznit was standing in the middle of a huge crowd of people, giving a lecture about Rothko. I later heard Chiznit say that she hadn't really known what to do when she started walking around at 11 AM, so she'd decided to give a little tour and then occasionally talk to the new groups of people who would walk in.

I caught Chiznit as she spoke about the "automatist" style of painting. From what I understand of what Chiznit was saying, there were a few different styles of modern art. One style, the most famous, maybe, was Cubism, which was very measured. Another was Surrealism, which also aimed to make a very precise statement, but about the unconscious rather than the sense of vision. But automatism was based more in letting the unconscious speak for itself by letting the hand paint freely, allowing the hand to bring forth whatever forms it would from the unconscious.

However, Rothko was very much influenced by archetypal imagery, especially Judeo-Christian imagery and Greco-Roman mythology. This imagery often showed up in Rothko's figurative work. And where it didn't show up explicitly, it provided a very conscious ground for the work.

Chiznit said that Rothko's work in the 1940s was also very influenced by his work with the otber great artists around him. These artists, Chiznit, argues, all worked together toward something like the same artistic ideal during the 1940s. So, during the 1940s, the styles of some of the artists might be indistinguishable from the styles of other artists. Or the style of one artist might be completely different from the style for which that artist is now well known. For instance, a Pollock painting might be much neater and more figurative than one would imagine, while a Mark Tobey might be in a style much like that for which Pollock is now famous.

But in the 1950s, the artists all kind of went their separate ways, so to speak, and developed their own distinctive styles. Rothko's distinctive style was the color fields.

After Chiznit finished her lecture and the crowd dispersed, I read a little bit about a couple paintings that intrigued me. One of the paintings depicted two eagles and a hare, symbolic of the prophetic vision of Troy's defeat. The caption also mentioned something about Rothko's efforts to use mythology to try and get at a sense of truth in his artwork. If the ancient Greeks, for instance, used their mythology to express their understanding of the universe, could Rothko adapt the deeper meanings of those mythologies to express modern man's understanding of the universe?

The problem, however, seems to have come as a result of World War II. It seems that that war made Rothko question whether there was a real truth at all.

Suddenly, I thought of the Jungian development of personality. In the archetypal sense, the journey towards personal integration starts -- I think -- with a massa confusa, a kind of indiscriminate, jumbled mess. That separates itself into problems which are stated in kind of personal archetypes, like mythological figures. When the problems are resolved, sometimes in the mystical wedding or mysterium coniunctionis, the archetypal figures are replaced by a mandala figure, something more like a geometric diagram, which is a whole statement of the psyche.

But it seemed to me that the color fields of Rothko, rather than being mandalas, were more like the massa confusa. I wondered if Rothko had become, perhaps, too perplexed over the question of truth for modern man, in a modern world which seemed to be plunged into chaos. Did Rothko regress into the chaotic massa confusa? Or are his color fields actually a kind of mandala?

I wanted to ask Chiznit this question. But Chiznit was busy answering a question which must have been very like my own. Chiznit was talking about the difference between abstract art and Rothko's color fields. Chiznit said that abstract art is based on the external, on breaking down the components of the external world into their purest elements. But Rothko's non-objective color fields were about finding an inner world, an inner truth. Rothko distilled and distilled his style until he found, in pure color, a pure statement of his inner self.

With this in mind, I walked through the show. The show begins with a painting in something like a Gaugin style with Pisarro colors. It then moves tk a series of figurative paintings based very much on Greek mythology. These paintings all depict human figures. But the figures are all broken up, and they all have multiple heads and torsos and way more than two arms and legs. The warms are all piled up, like shelves full of spare arms in a store. And the legs seem to be stepping all over each other. If I were to guess by the heads, which are delineated in a mock-Greek style, I'd say the biggest influence on these paintings would be Picasso. But the style isn't Cubist. It isn't deconstructivist, either. It's dismembered, fragmented, and multiplied.

The pinnacle of this style is a kind of crucifixion scene. But the crucified body is dismembered, its limbs packed into compartments set into a brown block, like drawers in a chest.

After this dismemberment of the body, the paintings take on a much less human, slightly less figurative, appearance. One painting shows two (or one?) birds before a triple-layered background of grey, blue, and purple. In the top layer, which looks like a purple sky, are floating a figure like an eye and a couple of blue butterfly or hourglass shapes.

The next shape is based on the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac. Before a layered background of maroon and pink-red is a peach-orange shape like a lamp or an urn. On the left side of the lamp is a figure that kind of looks like shears or a sacrifical knife. On the right is some hanging shape that looks, to me, like a brain with a spine hanging down from it.

Near this painting is another painting that looks like a brain and spine, with a curtain of nerves, or maybe gore, hanging down from it. The figure is a cloudy, almost inky, black mass of paint. But its floatiing before a hazy background of pink and green. The pinks and greens alternate in a blur, almost like some checkerboard that has been run through a time warp.

This painting is surrounded by some interesting ink works, which also have traces of Picasso, as well as, perhaps, Kandinsky, about them. One scene, including some green paint, is like swallows floating and flitting up and down in a mystical sky. Another is a scene of boats and ship-sized angels. Another scene, with a lovely, all-pink background, seems to be of a jazz club.

But the paintings seem to take on a more and more gruesome appearance. The dismembered body parts of the human-figure paintings seem to be further fragmented, until the paintings themselves seem to be of chunks of flesh and bone, floating before color-layered backgrounds which give the vanishing perspective sense of an ocean or a Dali-desert landscape.

The figurative paintings finish with a Kandinsky-esque ink-and-paint picture of a universe full of worlds split in half and black, sputtering vortices.

In between the figurative paintings and the non-figurative paintings is a room of paintings by some of Rothko's contemporaries. If I were to guess the theme of this room, I wouldn't guess that it was that all these artists were working toward the same goal: I would say that they were working under, and working to break free of, the influence of the same person: Picasso.

The next room begins with a beautiful painting which takes the background style of the figurative paintings, but adds nothing to the foreground. It is a wonderful blending of grey, white, and purple patches, sprayed here and there with highlights of yellow-green.

Next to this painting is a pinting with a color scheme like the clouds or sky in a Velasquez or Zurburan painting of the Assumption of Mary. But there is no Mary. There really aren't any clouds or sky, either: just the color schemes of those things.

Then there is a painting of a lovely red background of orange-red with rectangles of color scattered about, almost like people -- or phantoms -- or, really, like the broad-shouldered, triangular men of the ancient petroglyphs. These characters seem to be more whole than the actual "men" of the first paintings; but they have sunk into, almost dissolved into, the background.

Another painting seems to be plainly figurative, with characters almost like limbless stick figures, with obvious black heads and black bodies, floating, it seems, in sockets of color, although a couple are also outlined with a red-orange of a brightness worthy of Crayola.

Next to this painting is a painting which seems to me very plainly to be a portrait, almost like Pollock's self-portrait during his black-and-white phase. This painting has a green background, and then a figure very much in the center and foreground, of a head and shoulders -- all together, in one piece, not fragmented, not multiplied! But the figure is all square, all black scribble, with no discernible features at all, and with a drab yellow shining through from behind the scribbles.

Across from this painting is my favorite painting of the exhibit. The center of the painting is a square of bright orange squiggles, all surrounded by a pale sky blue. All around the blue run rectangles and swatches of purples, pinks, and peaches. Some of the purples develop into blotches of a deep pink-purple the color of orchids, or of passionfruit sorbet. I just wanted to lick it!

Finally is a room of beautiful color fields. The painting that is the cover-painting for the exhibitis probably my least favorite. It is a yellow and white rectangle atop a big, red square. It like the red square: something about it seems industrial to me. But I hate the yellow and white rectangle: it reminds me of a sunnyside-up egg.

But there are some really nice ones. There is one with an orange-red rectangle and a pink rectangle surrounded by a hazy, orange field of color. There's a beautiful one of, I think, a big, orange square, a bright, pink band, and a cobalt blue rectangle. It's so vivid. I love it. And there's one of a yellow background with stacks of color built up before it: black, purple, and a green wit glimmers of orange shining up from beneath it.

Then today I went to the Sakura festival in downtown Denver. The traditional Japanese festival is held at Sakura Square, which is a Japanese shopping and community center that also includes the Denver Buddhist Temple. I had gone to the festival last year. But there weren't very many people. This year there were a lot more people. There also seemed to be a lot more booths than there were last year. And the booths seemed to be more interesting than the ones from last year. For all I know, they were actually the same exact booths. But something about this year seemed a lot livelier.

One booth I really liked was a booth called Pomegranate Designs, which showcased the washi paper art kf Michele Yamaguma. Imagine scroll-format works of art that mix together origami, collage, nature pressings, and painting, to depict fantastic landscapes or traditional Japanese figures like koi or cranes.

Another booth I liked showcased the paintings of an artist named Joe Molina. His paintings are very colorful and vivid, showing branches of cherry blossoms before almost rainbow-like skies -- blue skies, but rainbow-like, somehow. He also has sime cherry branches before deep red skies, which are very dramatic. And he has some gigantic close-up blossom paintings, which are great: a pink blossom before a white background, and a white blossom before a pink background.

I went inside for a while and listened to one of the temple priests talk for a while about the Denver Temple. The Temple is part of a sanga, or community, which has been in Denver since 1909. The Denver Temple observes a Mahayana denomination of Buddhism called Jodo-Shinshu, which means something like "The One Pure Land." This denomination was founded by a monk who believed that not all men can take the purely meditative path of the stricter forms of Buddhism.

Jodo-Shinshu Buddhism empathizes with normal human beings and posits the existence of the tear-eyed intercessors for man, which also, apparently happen to be 84,000 aspects or avatars of the Buddha himself. These spirits, or sambogha-kaya -- I think -- are also creators of the "Pure Land," which doesn't quite seem to be a heaven, but something more like a spiritual realm of forgiveness or tolerance, created to offset the waywardness or foolishness of man and his actions.

The priest gave a story of the Buddha which is a little different from the (likely distorted) one I have in my head. The priest said that Buddha had been born as Prince Siddhartha. A priest told Siddhartha's father the king that Siddhartha would grow up either to become a great king or a great spiritual leader. So the king, hoping to influence Siddhartha to become a great king, kept Siddhartha sheltered in the castle allowing him to see only good things, so he would want to stay in the castle forever and become king.

But when Siddhartha was twenty-nine years old, he got bored and had a charioteer ride him out of the castle. On his way out of the castle, Siddhartha saw a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a monk. Siddhartha had never seen any of these things. He asked the charioteer what they meant. The charioteer said that the sick, old, and dead men showed the inevitable suffering of all men. The monk, said the charioteer, was a person making an attempt to transcend that suffering.

Siddhartha decided to take the monk as a teacher. And Siddhartha went on to live a very ascetic life. But -- I'm not sure how -- Siddhartha decided that the ascetic path was wayward, just as the indulgent path of royalty was. The best path, Siddartha concluded, was the middle path.

So, at the age of thirty-five, Siddhartha was near enlightenment. To get closer to enlightenment, he sat down and meditated beneath the boddhi tree. After a while of meditation he attained the highest enlightenment the Buddha can attain in a human body, and he began to be called Buddha.

Buddha realized all suffering is inevitable; that all suffering is based on the fact that existence is impermanent and that there is an endless chain of causes creating the world, while men insist that there must be some permanence and ultimate being somewhere; that man can transcend suffering and attain nirvana; and that this can be done through right moral action, right livelihood, mindfulness, and meditation.

As I remember the story of Buddha, the Buddha went off to find enlightenment. But no teacher he worked with could ever give him enlightenment. So, in frustration and despair, he sat down beneath the boddhi tree and resolved to sit there and, basically, go on a hunger strike against the universe. But, right as he was about to die, he attained enlightenment.

I thought the contrast between the story from my memory and the priest's (correct) story had an interesting parallel with my conception of Rothko's artistic development and Gwen Chiznit's description of Rothko's artistic development. It's interesting how I invest both the story of the Buddha and the story of Rothko with a sense of universal frustration and nihilism. It obviously says more about me than it does about the Buddha or Rothko.

The priest herself is a very interesting person. She is a blonde, white, young woman with short hair and black-rimmed eyeglasses. She told me that she grew up coming to this temple. She said it's very strange nowadays to have the same women who shooed her out of the kitchen in the mischievous moments of her childhood now calling her sensei, or teacher. She said she just finished with seminary a year ago and was assigned to the Denver Temple. She said it was strange that she'd been assigned to her home temple. People are usually not assigned to their home temple for their first assignment. But she was happy she was assigned here, since the people here were so dear to her.

I had been really interested to hear that the community had been in Denver since 1909. I asked the priest if there were any good books about the Japanese community in Denver. The priest to, d me that the Temple bookstore was selling some books just outside, and that there should be a couple good books on the history of the Japanese people in Denver. I went outside and found and bought a good-looking book called Colorado's Japanese Americans from 1886 to the Present, by Bill Hosokawa.

I then sat down for a little while at the performance area at the far end of all the booths and listened to a band called The Arlene Hattori Project. The band consisted of Arlene and two men. Arlene sang and played guitar and keyboards on some songs. One of the guys sang backup and played guitar and keyboards. The second guy played drums. Almost all the songs were originals. The music was good, polished, relaxed, kind of soulful. Arlene's voice was kind of like Stevie Nicks. I really liked the band.

I wanted to spend some time talking about all the people I saw while I was at the festival, too. But I'm going to have to cut myself off for the night.

shapeless shapes and invisible bodies

I don't know what it was -- both yesterday and today I went to see some art exhibits, and on both days I spent a whole lot of time looking at only a little bit of what I wanted to see.

Yesterday I went to the Arvada Center, where there are three interesting exhibits going on. But I only saw one: the work Perception: Color | Line | Pattern, which is down in the main floor gallery of the center. The exhibit basically explores abstract work from the last few decades.

The argument of the exhibit seems to be that the artists of these works were trying to create works without any visual direction. Art leading up to the modern phase was based on a cultured sense of vision that had the ability to read, say, a landscape painting the same way a literate person could read a novel. Modern art, the exhibit argues, if I understand it correctly, is an art without the visual cues that previous art had been informed with. It's art that doesn't have a visual narrative, or even a visual direction.

I'm not sure I agree with that idea. But I love the art at the exhibit. The selection and arrangement of the art is wonderful. Some of the pieces have a style like weaving or sewing or embroidery, like the works of Charlie DiJulio, in which ribbons or threads of color are painted across a wide canvas, or some wonderful yarn staircases done by Andrew Higgins.

Another set of works I like are by Jen Pack. These works use rectangular cushions arranged in wide, shallow v-shapes. The cushions are sewn over with wide strips of chiffon. These strips feel like mosaic tiles, in a way. In this sense, the work is kind of complemented by the work of Adam Holloway, which utilizes imagery like mosaic rectangles and pixelation.

Some of the work employs basic shapes. One interesting painting by Charles Richert is of colorful circles arranged in tight patterns before a white background. The patterns could be cell patterns or molecular or atomic organizations. The color schemes almost reminded me of the color schemes in the paintings of Lee Krasner.

There is a whole corner of the exhibit devoted almost entirely to the work of Marty Jaquis. His work is devoted to painting and making sculptures using brightly colored squares and cubes. The cubes, even in the sculptures, are often only two-dimensional. But they feel three-dimensional, often giving an interesting sense of space-distortion.

Another set of works I really liked are by the artist Vance Kirkland. These works place paint dots, of various sizes and densities of spacing, against fading backgrounds. The variations in density and size of the paint dots create an illusion of bubbles swelling up on the canvas. But something about the dots and colors also looks like it would belong on an ocean fish or a sea anemone.

There is also a lovely interactive work, but I can't remember who it's by. It's on an LED screen. It looks like a cubist/abstract painting. But it's in motion. Cameras nearby track nearby movement and color and allow those movements and colors to affect the patterns on the screen. I had a few different colors on me, so I could play around a lot to see the colors change and patterns shift. It was a lot of fun.

But I spent so much time in this gallery that I didn't have time to check out the other two exhibits. I did the same thing at the Denver Art Museum this morning. I went to see the exhibit of Sojourn, a collection of work by the Chicago artist Nick Cave. I had been planning to see some of the exhibits of the DAM's Spun program as well, but I spent so much time in the Nick Cave exhibit that I couldn't go see anything else.

The Nick Cave exhibit is really interesting. It's divided into two selections of work, basically: his "soundsuits" and his garden-like bead sculptures. The bead sculptures are dense pilings of chains of beads, all gathered onto metal frameworks of branches. Then, inside of these dense branches of beads, there are placed scluptures of things like birds and fruit, leafs and flowers. The feeling of density reminds me, not of abundance, but of overgrowth, like a tree that has been overgrown by vines. Some of these masses of branches and bead-vines grow over couches or chairs or stools. Sometimes life-size sculptures of dogs are sitting on the furniture. In one case the bead structure is gathered over the head of a mannequin in something like a knit or crocheted bodysuit.

The soundsuits are kind of similar to the crocheted mannequin. Apparently Cave came up with the idea of soundsuits after having watched television footage of the beating of Rodney King in the early 1990s. Cave felt a desire for some kind of protection against the violence and hatred of the world. He ca e up with the idea of soundsuits.

This makes sense. The soundsuits are kind of like gaudy shells made to go over the body. Some of the soudsuits have tall, thin, steeply arched spikes going up over the head, like the scabbard for a sword. These "scabbards" can extend downward over the body like a skirt or dress. Other soundsuits may bemade of brightly colored "fur," like something on a Sesame Street character. Other soundsuits might simply be of crocheted bodysuits, but with things spiking our of the suits, like steel branches with tin noisemaker toys, or globes, at the ends of them. One room is full of soudsuits in all different varieties, but with a constant of being made almost entirely of shiny, white buttons.

The soundsuits all have a cconstant style of being reminiscent of traditional dress -- like traditional Latin American or Caucasian or Asian or African dress. But there is also a feeling of the suits being a kind of astral body or an aura-egg. This wouldnt be so surprising. A soundsuit could be thought of as an "aural" suit. So an "aural" suit and an aura-egg wouldn't be too different.

One last room of the exhibit is devoted to videos of people actually performing in the soundsuits. The performances of the people dancing in the furry soundsuits are my favorite.

old taos looking for the new taos

I let myself lose track with my blogging again. Mainly it was because the Blogger platform was really not working well on my computer. I think I have that problem solved for the time being, though. We'll see.

I think this blog will be short, though, even though it should be really long, given the subject.

Last week I went to Taos, New Mexico. It's not too far from Denver. It's a really beautiful city. I had mainly gone there to see the Millicent Rogers Museum. Inhad also hoped to see Cherie Burns, the author of Searching for Beauty, a really good biography of Millicent Rogers. But Burns ended up being outnof town at the time.

I got into Taos on Thursday afternoon and left early on Sunday morning, so I could celebrate Mother's Day with my mom. It was definitely not enough time for someone slow like me to see everything. I am already thinking of going back to see the things I missed.

On Thursday I went to the Taos Pueblo. That's probably the best way to start your trip to Taos. The Taos Pueblo is a series of adobe dwellings that have been occupied for about a thousand years. The history of Taos basically starts with that Pueblo. There is also a really lovely church in the Pueblo that kids named after the Archangel Gabriel.

The Millicent Rogers Museum is located outside of Taos, on the north side. The main attraction, for me, was the jewelry that had been designed by Millicent. It has a kind of modern and abstract style. One can almost see traces of Picasso in some of the work, such as the "Running Star" pieces. I also love some of her big, silver necklaces, which somehow remind me of the collar pieces for Egyptian Queens.

But Millicent had quite an extensive collection of Southwestern art. And even since Millicent's death, the museum has collected more art. There are all kinds of silver work, tin work, weavings, wood carvings, pottery, and basket work.

There were also some lovely photos and drawings done by middle school and high school students from aroubd Taos. The drawings were like sketches and studies, some copies of Da Vinci's work, some original works. I actually liked seeing some of that work.

I went to a few different galleries. The first gallery I went to was the Hulse Warman Gallery. There were a few interesting works there. One set of works I really liked was the sculptures of Petro Hul. The sculptures had a raw, abstract kind of feel. One sculpture looked like some sort of mixture between coral and a sea cucumber that was about to explode with spores. Another was pure black marble stuffed full of cylinders of white marble.

Another artist whose work I liked was August Muth. He had some holograms with circular images. Some of the circles were broken. Others were whole. As you moved past the works, the circles would also move, so that they would intersect or blend together, changing color allthe time.

The big exhibit at the Hulse Warman was a collection of works by Murtuza Boxwalla. Boxwalla was an architect in India, but he decided to move to Taos to become an artist. His work has a style very reminiscent of scaffolding, or the skeleton of a building, blended with a kind of Cubist style, and employing the color palette of Taos -- the tans and pale turquoise blues.

I spoke for a while with Clint Hulse, the owner of the gallery. One thing in particular that Clint mentioned to me was that he would like to see more new, young artists come down to Taos.

Another gallery I liked was the David Anthony Fine Art Gallery. There is some interesting work there by a few people. John Farnsworth's current work is devoted to painting horses in a style reminiscent of Georgia O'Keefe. But some of his other work is more interesting to me, such as his Zuni woman holding an olla mask, and his father and sons on horseback, as well as a really gorgeous kachina standing before a purple and gold sunset.

There are also sone interesting photos by a person named Bill Davis. Some of his earlier photos aren't too interesting to me. But over the past few decades, Davis has, it seems, become a master of photo manipulation. And he has some wonderful works along those lines: a cluster of trees over a river, done so that the trees are yellow and the river and sky are maroon and purple, and then put into a mirror image; and the surface of a flaking-away surface of sandstone, manipulated into a color scheme of blues, purples, and creams, to look like one of Monet's paintingsnof water lilies.

There are also some lovely pieces if furniture by David Mapes. Mapes also, I think, has some neat photos of white fireworks shooting off amid flowers and other figures, such as a woman shrouded under a huge, white sheet. There are also some lovely etchings by a wo an named Jennifer Lynch. And some good paintings by a man named Jack Smith. In particular, I like his painting of the Slator Daughters.

I also stopped by the Intersecting Parallels gallery, which is owned by and showcases the work of Brandon Maldonado. Brandon's paintings are nice, a kind of blend of old-style Latin-American Catholic imagery and dark sexuality, mixed with a Magritte-like surrealism and tattoo and graffiti-art delineation. There is also an edge to the style that reminds me of the manga of Mizuno Junko and the Bratz dolls.

Brandon, oddly enough, had only recently moved down to Taos. He'd lived up in Denver and had had a gallery here. I knew his work, in fact, from having seen it here. Brandon told me he'd moved to Taos from Denver because he felt like Taos was a bit more if a buyer's town than Denver. People, after all, make trips to Taos expressly for the purpose ofe buying art.

I also went to the Parsons Fine Art Gallery, the one near the plaza and the John Dunn House center. There were a lot of interesting earlyworks there. Among my favorites were the works of Robert Daughters and Nikolai Fechin. But I also liked the works of Jerry Jordan, especially his paintings of the Taos cemeteries.

The only other museum I went to was the Taos Museum, which is housed in the house belonging to the great Russian painter Nikolai Fechin. Fechin designed the house and frunished it with an immense amount of wood carvings. The wood carvings, in a definitively European, rather than Southwestern, style, are by far my favorite part of the museum.

I also like the exhibit of works by Duane Van Vechten, which take up the entire second floor of the house. Van Vechten employs so many different styles! Even her still lifes of flowers are done in many different styles!

I went to the Moby Dickens bookstore, which is like a cultural center for Taos authors. I saw a lecture there by Bonnie Lee Black, who has just published a book called How to Make an African Quilt. The book is about the time Black spent in Mali, teaching women how to make patchwork quilts.

Apparently, while Black was in Mali, one of her friends published a book about how, in antebellum America, symbols on quilts were used to indicate key directions for the Underground Railroad, the secret path the African American slaves took to freedom.

Bkack also began to get the impression that in a former life she had been an African woman. She began to imagine the story of this woman, named Jenebel, who was a slave in America and who helped on the Underground Railroad. So this story is also interwoven into Black's novel.

The owner of the Moby Dickens bookshop, Jay Moore, is also a really cool guy. He's pretty young. He bought the store, I think, from the family of Art Bachrach, the man who, I think, owned the shop until his death in 2010. Jay has a lot of stories to tell -- from his own experiences in Taos, from what people have told him, and from what he's read about Taos. He also seems to be really excited about the fact that Mumford and Sons are coming to Taos in July.

Another good bookshop is the Brodsky Bookstore. While there, I bought a book by self-published author Bill Rakocy. The book is about the founders of the Taos art scene, but it eventually becomes an all-purpose history and philosophy of Southwestern art and world art.

I went to the Adobe Bar at the Taos Inn one night and watched the TV Killers while I had a chicken burrito smothered in green chile. The TV Killers were pretty good. They're based in Santa Fe. They have a sound kind of like Tom Petty.

I also went to the World Cup Cafe one morning. It was a really nice cafe, though it was kind of small. I got there as soon as they opened, though, so it wasn't crowded. Another cafe I went to was the Caffe Tazza. It was a much bigger,  much quieter cafe. I sat there for two hours, reading the paper and some books I'd bought from the Millicent Rogers Museum.

My overall impression of Taos is that it is a city of culture that thrives on infusions from outside cultures. That's why I think that right now there's such a call from the older generation of artists to bring in a new generation. Where will that new generation come from? One thing I didn't see much of while in Taos was installation art. Another thing I didn't see much of was digital art. So many artists have painted the desert landscapes. Why not make an installation art and a digital art based in the desert mountain landscapes of Taos? That might be what the new generation will bring in.

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.

plague vessels

Good morning, everybody.

This post is related to this entry in my dream journal.

There are a lot of references in this dream to broken fluid vessels. I'm pretty sure that this relates to my mother, who is having some bad trouble with her arteries. The part in my dream where I imagine the red hose hanging from the roof of the building is obviously very indicative of an artery.

Just as a quick aside -- I find it odd that I "imagine" so much in my dreams. I'm always seeing things "in my mind's eye." I mean, I daydream all the time in waking life. So I suppose it's natural that I daydream in dreaming life as well. But it still strikes me as funny.

So, on the one hand, it seems like the broken vessels stand for my worries that my mom's blood vessels are going to burst. It's a scary thought, and one I hope is far from actuality.

To reinforce this idea -- I just remembered the fragments of another dream I had last night, where someone was putting plastic blood vessels in my body. But we had to go to a blood vessel store to get all the vessels we needed. The vessels all hung on display racks on the walls.

The vessels got smaller and smaller, down to capillary size. Each vessel size had a different product name. Some of the smallest vessels would be extremely tricky to put in, and putting them in the wrong way could cause me a great deal of pain or even death. I woke up considering this death.

So I can see from that dream that I was thinking of blood vessels all night long. But the strange thing about the vessels in the "black hair" dream is that they all seemed to leak gunk -- muddy gunk or maybe even fecal gunk. I think this has to do with my bad eating habits lately. I've eaten basically the same meal day after day for days now. I'm not sure why. It's pretty disgusting, though. And I'm sure my stomach hates me for it. So I think my own plumbing, so to speak, is coming back to haunt me in my dreams.

But I also think the image of the cabin, the fainting man and woman, and the congealing of the mess into the humanoid and then into a man has something to do with the Hantavirus.

I'm sure everybody has heard about the Hantavirus issues at Yosemite Park by now. Over the summer, a few different campgrounds, including some high-end campgrounds with cabin-like tents, were infested by mice carrying the Hantavirus. One of the main effects of the Hantavirus is that is causes severe congestion of the lungs, which leads to severe pain, constrained breathing, and even death. News reports have said that about one-third of all people who contract Hantavirus die, and that there is no known cure for Hantavirus.

Hantavirus can be passed from mice to people, news reports say. Contraction of the virus usually occurs through contact with the urine or feces of an animal carrying the virus. But in dry places like Yosemite Park, where soil is as dry and potentially airborne as dust, when an animal urinates in the soil and that urine dries, the virus itself stays in the soil and is just as potentially airborne. In enclosed spaces, chances of breathing and contracting this airborne virus are even greater.

So Yosemite, to be on the safe side, has assumed that everybody who has stayed at the campgrounds infested by the infected mice is at risk of having contracted Hantavirus. The good thing about being on the safe side is that, even though there's no known cure for Hantavirus, being able to start therapy processes at the initial stages of contraction gives people a much greater chance of surviving through the illness.

So Yosemite has issued warnings to anybody who stayed in the infected areas. The unfortunate thing is, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 (based on some reports I've read) people who had been in the infected areas.

Hantavirus, odd as it may seem, has a connection with my life. About ten years ago, I worked in a National Park in the Southwestern United States. Hantavirus was a pretty normal thing around there. People didn't catch it because they were careful. It was pretty much assumed that all mice had Hantavirus. But it wasn't a huge worry.

But Hantavirus was big news in the region when I first arrived. A few people in the region, but not in the park I'd worked at, had caught the virus. Some died. Some lived to tell the stories of their agony. But after a month or so, the incidences and news flurry seemed to vanish.

The thing is, it's pretty easy to avoid getting Hantavirus. You keep your space clean and dust-free. To remove dust from a space, you wet it down, maybe even with a cleaning solution, and wipe it away. Most of the stuff people do in everyday housecleaning is enough to keep the virus at bay. And you stay away from abandoned houses and places where you see a lot of evidence of mouse activity.

But, of course, my mind ran a couple of doom scenarios. The first was that humans, acting as carriers of the virus, would pass the virus all over the world through their own urine and feces. This is kind of silly, I'd think. In most cases in the United States, human urine and feces goes through a treatment process that would kill the Hantavirus pretty easily. The virus is pretty nasty when it gets into a body. But it's pretty weak outside the body.

The second doom scenario my mind played out was that mice would travel home with people, hitching a ride in luggage, on cars, and so forth, and spread Hantavirus to other mice in other locales, thus spreading the disease beyond those initial sites. But, again, there have been Hantavirus outbreaks in the past. And the mice could just as easily have caught rides to other places in the past. They didn't. And the outbreaks have passed away. Just like this one will.

The doom scenarios, however, were in my dream a factor, I believe, in creating the Swamp Thing figure, who then became the annoying man. The Swamp Thing would in one sense be the embodiment of a pestilence.

I believe that in medieval times the Plague was often embodied as a figure. And I might have taken my understanding of that idea as inspiration for the Swamp Thing character in my dream as well. The fact that this body is walking among a huge crowd only underscores the idea of this Swamp Thing character being the embodiment of a pestilence of large-scale effect.

But I'm not sure why the dream is connecting a Plague of Hantavirus -- which obviously will not occur in waking life -- with my mom's artery problems. Both things have a risk of death associated with them. And so maybe I'm trying to keep the Plague of Death, in the figure of the annoying man, away from my mom, who doesn't look at all like the leader woman of my dream but could be related to her anyway, by telling the annoying man that the leader woman doesn't exist.

Again, I seem to end by not knowing how to make any connections. All I ever seem to come up with are starting points.

les derniers galans

Good morning, everybody.

This post is going to be related to a number of dream journal entries.

Regarding today's dream journal entry, in the last dream a little girl (who is also a young woman) mentions a movie entitled Les Galans. I wasn't even sure, upon waking, whether there was a French word "galans." I looked it up quickly, of course, after having written my dream journal entry. I didn't find a film called Les Galans, but I did find a couple interesting things.

First of all, there is a set of ice falls in the French Alps that's called Les Galans. It is, I believe, along a specific series of ice fall climbs known as La Grave, which is near the Haute-Alps commune of the same name. This photo is from the Camp to Camp page for the La Grave climb.

"Les galans" means "the gallants" in English. There is a play by Jean Chevalier entitled Les Galans Ridicule. Doing a quick scan, I didn't find out anything about the play. It seems to have been written before the year 1800, and to be rather obscure. I couldn't find out anything about the Jean Chevalier who'd written the play, either. There's a modern Jean Chevalier, who passed away in 1993, and who wrote works of philosophy. But I'm not sure about this 18th century Jean Chevalier.

Anyhow, the foreign language word struck me because only the night before I had a dream where I'd heard the foreign name "Nemirovna." I looked this name up and found that it was not a widely used name. In fact, the only place where I'd found the name used was in a book by the French author Corinne Vallienne, entitled Le Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna.

The author of this book seems pretty interesting. She's a French instructor, actually, at the University of Tokyo. Le Dernier Voyage seems to be about an old man who lives in St. Petersburg and looks back on his life in Russia. The book, from what I've read of it, mixes memory and fantasy in a kind of magical way. It sounds like a good book. But I've never heard of it before.

What I also found interesting was that in Slovenian, the word "nemirov" means "unrest." So I found a few news articles which mentions "nemirov na" or "unrest in" certain areas. This was intriguing to me. But I'm still not certain what the whole thing means.

However, the other thing that was interesting to me about Le Dernier Voyage was that it connected the word "Nemirovna" with another phrase that I'd had in a dream from the previous night. In this dream I went to a movie theater, but I didn't know what I was going to watch. I ended up going into a theater playing a move called La Derniere 3.

It's an interesting coincidence, that one night I dream of La Derniere, and the next night I dream of "Nemirovna," and then it connects for me in La Dernier Voyage de Lena Nemirovna. But I really don't know why it happened that way.

I personally think that La Derniere 3 is a distortion of the title of the Francois Truffaut film Le Dernier Metro, a movie which has been consistently at the back of my mind lately.

One would simply take out the "me" from the "metro" and change the "o" sound to a "ois" sound to get "Le Dernier Trois." I'm not sure why the gender change was made in the title or why the "metro" would change to a "three." But I think that at least the mechanics of the distortion seem pretty obvious.

One reason the "metro" might be changed to "trois" is that "trois" sounds a little like "voyage." But I think that's stretching things a whole lot.