Isle Royale

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"Overman would be proud," I mumbled to myself after hearing the second Elvis song in a row at 8:05 yesterday morning.

Yup, he would be ecstatic that if there was one thing carried over from my high school education, that I could recall Elvis Presley’s birthday with minimal prompting would be it. So I thought about Elvis, quite a bit, in fact. He was hard to escape yesterday, his music on the agency’s sound system all day. I think I may have been growing a bouffant hairdo during this barrage on my sanity.

I also found myself considering Michael Jackson and the similarities between the two. The wealth, the development of alternative realities, the loss of their essence, before dying, in unforeseen, unrespectable drug-induced manners. Ah, the drugs, a symptom I think of the whole loss of reality bit. A way to be in outer space, isolated, and not have to come back down.

I saw a really great PBS program this week- 6 hours of "This Emotional Life", with the net result being: Human Relationships Are THE Most Important variable in mental health and well-being. Elvis and MJ lost this. Their wealth and fame separated themselves out. They became obsessed with themselves, building their realities, suspicious of the intentions of others, partially out of real concerns. Other people want what wealthy people have.

Then a chilling thought occurred to me. Elvis and MJ are a pair of the most recognizable symbols of America to the world. Nay, it is worse, they are icons because they represent America to the world. America is the wealthy, build our own reality rock star whose fame keeps us from being truly aware of the rest of the worlds problems. this has partially been fed by the world’s grandiose view of us.

But now, I really hope at some point soon we develop a grounding, a reconnection, before we end up dried up and deceased of our own over-consumption. The analogy really goes deeper, because there are so many countries/companies willing to continue to to give us our prescription and illicit drugs as long as they can be hangers-on. These were my thoughts on Elvis Presley’s Birthday.

I heard someone say he would have been seventy-five this week.

Good 2010 to all of my fellow Hollow Souls.

I’ve been in a particularly reflective mood in this New Year, and I want to explore some of those reflective moments with the rest of you, if possible.  It’s been a decade since the calendar flipped over to the year 2000, a lot of fears never materialized in flipping over and a lot of fears we never realized we should have materialized in the haze of the past ten years.  The more I ponder it, the more I realize we’ve seen a lot.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to post some conversation starters in the articles and have people contribute to the main idea with thoughts of their own.

For this one…I’d like to hear from you all about the things that have happened in the last ten years that have been memorable.  They can be significant or trivial, just something worth noting. 

Ten years ago, I felt like I had been in Kansas City for ages.  Nursing a broken heart made things go unbearably slow, even though I had only been here about ten months.  I actually remember wondering on New Year’s Day of 2000 where I would be in 2010, if I’d even be alive to be cognizant of it.  Happy to say, I am.

What happened for you in this decade in the making?

Here’s the link…

This is from a series I am doing on animal/human territory collisions. Somewhat related to my painting Apex. This is a parking lot near the Eau Claire mall where I saw a fox darting between two SUVs that inspired this painting of a trio of foxes. There should be two more to come, but right now I am very busy painting muslims.

This portable lamp has a polarized plug (one blade is wider than the other.) Ok, I am following this so far, and I really want to be safe and teach safe practices in the peoper operation of our lamp, whichever one it may be. As a safety feature this plug will fit in a polarized outlet only one way, if the plug does not fit fully into the outlet, reverse the plug, if it still does not fit, contact a qualified electrician. Wow! How will that phone call go?! Sir, I can’t get my plug to plug in. Um, is it a polarized plug, did you try it the other way?
But wait this gets better: Never use with an extension cord unless the plug can be fully inserted, Do not attempt to defeat this safety feature. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO DEFEAT THIS SAFETY FEATURE?! I love the wording on this. It makes it sound as though this the shape of the plug has become a mortal enemy on par with Galactus or Darth Vader- clearly a villian to dangerous to attempt to defeat. Leave that up to the Justice League or perhaps a qualified electrician. There’s more to the note following this, but I suddenly found myself hatching plots to defeat my new enemy. All I need to do now is figure out from which lamp this came and contact the A-Team. Happy NewYear! jp

This painting is, of course, about some of the reading on wolves I’ve done. They have studied them for about thirteen years with regards to their return to Yellowstone and their impact on the Ecosystem there. I could go on about this, but long story short, they’re very healthy for the ecosystem. So one Sunday night I was getting ready to read with Eliot, and Sara was checking the Internet to see if there was a mystery on PBS. She called me over to show me there was a program called “The Wolf that Saved America” starting in a few minutes. Of course, I ran downstairs with Eliot, and we watched it. It was fun to see how much Eliot enjoyed it.

It was a mix of history, science, and myth, as they retold the story of an outdoorsman named Ernest Thompson Seton, who was well-known for a time as a professional exterminator of wolves. He boasted that he could rid ranches of marauding wolves in three days. A wolf in New Mexico, that he called Lobo, evaded him for three months. One incident tells of the wolf collecting four chunks of meat Seton had carefully poisoned in a pile and defecating on them. Anyway, Seton was filled with such sadness when he finally killed the wolf that he had a bit of a conversion. He began to promote conservation of the west and influenced T. Roosevelt to protect Yellowstone. One incident about Lobo tells of their ploy to catch him by trapping his mate first. Supposedly, he cried all night, howling strangely. Doug Smith, the head of the Yellowstone project, was interviewed and related a similar incident in Yellowstone. He said, “You’ll forgive the expression, but he sounded as if he was mourning.” I brought this up in my book discussion, questioning why biologists aren’t allowed to anthropomorphize animals, but they must stress the links we share with animals biologically.

When I spoke to my dad, the only person who wanted to listen to my excited rant about the program and wolves, he told me that after Seton became a conservationist, he went camping with my grandfather Clell a couple of times in the Badlands and once down south. I guess Grael has several of Seton’s books dedicated to Clell.
Thanks for listening. If you’re curious about some of the articles that influenced this painting, I’ll be happy to post more.

Ned, thanks for telling me about your thoughts on Persepolis and Sweetland.  I had heard about Persepolis (and have been meaning to check out the graphic novel it’s based on), but hadn’t heard anything about Sweetland.  It’s amazing to me the sheer amount of great movies that fly under the radar nowadays.  Quantity of Hollywood drowns the quality?

Speaking of quality, Steph and I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a week ago.  In Steph’s words, we “couldn’t look away” from Julian Schnabel’s direction, along with Janusz Kaminski’s gorgeous cinematography.  A gorgeous movie that is wonderfully sad, effecting, and surprisingly human…surprising in the fact that I’ve gotten used to the lack of human-”ness” in FX-laden movies. It takes the all of the glory and the shame in human existence and creates a portrait that lacks the usual Hollywood gloss, but has more character packed into it than all the summer blockbuster movies combined.

Maybe my surprise has to do with my tendency towards escapism in my movie choice.   It’s a little embarrassing to admit … but I feel as if I’ve gone soft and taken an easy route post-college.  I’ve only recently started to feel as if I need some more meat in my diet of cultural intake.  I just don’t find myself thinking critically as much anymore.  I think once I finished college, I was weary of the over-analytical stance I took towards most art and literature and abandoned it for the most part.  I think I’m ready for a homecoming.

One of the most amazing components about this film, (Steph and I spoke about this afterwards, in length) it allows the viewer to assume Jean-Dominique Bauby’s persepctive in the first third of the movie.  It’s almost as if we were sharing the same Diving Bell with Bauby, and later too, the Butterfly.  I think we’re still carrying a bit of the butterfly with us. 

Has anyone else seen the film?  I’d be curious as to thoughts and reactions from the rest of our group….

There isn’t too much new there, but it offers a good overview of some of the ideas of Moral Psychology and relates them to issues of the environment at the end.

I’m glad that he brings up Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of reciprocal trust and action. He once again dismisses religion by saying that Plato did away with it 2,400 years ago, which again, seems a bit odd, but the article has a lot of good info.

It does seem funny that these guys keep insisting that “love thy neighbor as thy self” is the ultimate moral concept, but keep dismissing religion. Oh well.

Here’s the link if you guys get a chance. It’s about eight pages; so probably takes about fifteen minutes to read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

I just finished The Dream Life of Shukhanov by Olga Grushin. It was a terribly engaging book that takes place in real time over three or four days, but covers in flashbacks much of the life of a Soviet artist/critic. There are several narrative techniques that are interesting, such as the way the book flows from third person narration to first. But I guess the most valuable part of the book to me was what it said about living with the choices we make, the life we live, and the art we do and don’t make. It reminded me a bit of Ishiguro’s novels in that it begins to blur the main character Sukhanov’s past with his present in an effort to reconcile the two lives he has led in a manner that is almost surreal.

So since I took twenty minutes of my time I ask you to take twenty minutes of your time to review this TED talk on A Brief History of Violence by Harvard linguist, Steven Pinker. Shotts if you are looking for an “popularized” science book, you can’t go wrong with anything by Pinker though I have only read The Language Instinct.

Anyway, this is sort of an evidenced based “feel good” story about how the chances of human being killed by another human have consistently dropped throughout history. Pinker talks about why we may believe that the opposite is true and what we may have done right in the last 400 years or so to make this possible. Please take time to view this. I think it’s really important.

What does the Jesus Year hold for you, and what do you make of this idea generally, and in terms of your own lives?

For me, I’m interested in finding larger struggles beyond myself, and maybe that’s ultimately what one can do that lives up to, in part, the example of Jesus. And yet. Here, this year, I’ve been given everything–a good life, companionship, good work, and even a more flexible schedule so that I can teach this fall (something I’ve wanted for a long time) and so that I can write (something I’ve always wanted). Why does this still seem like it falls short? Why are my struggles still primarily with myself? Is this part of the experience of being 33, as a sort of crossroads year? A year in which I know many of my peers are far more successful in terms of what the culture says is successful? Why is it that I still can’t eat right, exercise right, balance my life? Maybe the Jesus Year is the year we are supposed to compare ourselves to Jesus, yes, but really what we do is compare ourselves to everyone else?

But more generally, does this stage of life have any common or universal traits among the culture at large? Are most people already married? already married and divorced? having children? getting higher promotions? running for office? changing jobs? moving? taking up some cause?

I thought you would all be interested in this, seeing as, for a little while longer, at least, we’re all 33, our high school and college classmates are, most of them, 33, and I suspect several of our friends, cousins, and others around us are 33. And we haven’t had a larger question posed lately, so it seems like a good time. Any thoughts?

From the Moral Animal by Robert Wright.

Pretty funny stuff.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuA3iee4-c[/youtube]

I attended the funeral service yesterday for Bob Hapgood, Sr.  He was of course a neighbor of mine and the father to Tony and Bobby, childhood friends.

His death was sudden and unexpected, but the result ultimately of a food habit. Bob had heart surgery several years ago and had a recent heart attack. As his wife, Jeanne, said, “he went in for the surgery and never came home from the hospital.”

I admit it was a tougher loss than I thought it might be, to see the effects on the kids, my friends, eyes welling, but holding back the floods, bravely soldiering on. Bob was a local celebrity and apparently everyone’s friend; what seemed like the entire town reportedly showed for the viewing of the body the night before.  The wait was over two hours for the entire two hours the viewing was open. I saw the Shotts’ at the funeral service, which was a pleasant surprise.

I have been doing a lot of reflection as we are prone to do in these instances. Bob was 65 — just a couple of years older than my father. The boys are a year older and a year younger than myself. I wonder if I am putting enough into living for the moment, and putting enough of myself into all of the important relationships in my life.

I have also been thinking about the lyrics of the song on Deathcab’s CD, “What Sara Said” and what a powerful piece that is.

Human Beauty

If you write a poem about love …
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death …

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

George Kennan, Former Head of the U.S. Department Policy Planning Staff, 1950.

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