:::this is the way the world ends:::
I was reading Atlas Obscura this afternoon, and they talked about a beautiful clock in Glastonbury. A deeply embedded memory of this surfaced:
It was 25 years ago, around this time that I first saw that clock. 25 years ago, exactly, I was in Norwich packing up to start my Navy Dumb training. Now to get some Toasted Tea biscuits for Jerod.
Hilarious and nostalgic at the same time…a couple of these are mildly NSFW.
As I’ve been sharing things on the blog, I’ve wondered why I’ve kept things unserious after all the pressures, concerns, and nightmares of the past week. Perhaps I need a place for respite from the typical news flow across the internet. I felt I’ve needed evocation, rather than provocation.
Here’s a series of photos that evokes something inextricably Kansas out of me, and thought I’d share.
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
I have a folder of links I collected to share with the blog over the past half year, with the hopes of making a triumphant return to posting. I’m not sure it’s triumphant but it’s a return.
Hopefully I can keep pace for a little while and release these to you all over time. When the odometer rolled over to 2013 in this A.D. world, I was thinking about lists and found the following: List of Top 100 Lists.
Another link I found in early 2013, was a series of videos an auteur named Matt Shapiro has put together for the last seven years called The Cinescape. It’s pretty amazing craftsmanship, and even though none of the films he spliced together are original works, the way he did it is. It’s masterful and brings to mind how movies, even in their most mundane form, can be filled with wonderful images and themes. Sometimes I feel as if there’s a boredom of abundance. There’s just so much high-quality filmmaking these days, that even the worst of the Hollywood dreck can be filled with amazing facets.
The Cinescape above also reminds me of how movies feature variations on a theme, and that the tropes can get tedious after a while. So, there’s a sense of wonder and disappointment as I flip through all seven of these and start to see some of the tricks filmmakers use to emotionally and visually connect.
This summer, after being awarded a residency, I am going to be spending 19 days on Isle Royale National Park, on lake Superior. It is the location of the longest running study of a predatory mammal and its prey in the U.S. I will be on foot with no technology and likely will not be able to see the entire 46 mile island, but I hope to do some serious walking. Of course, I’m supposed to be making art as well.
"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.
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?
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.
A piece of Walt Whitman on this historic day:
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From 1884
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If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
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‘Twould not be you, Niagara – nor you, ye limitless prairies – nor your huge
rifts of canyons, Colorado,
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Nor you, Yosemite – nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops
ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
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Nor Oregon’s white cones – nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes – nor
Mississippi’s stream:
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This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name – the still small
voice vibrating – America’s choosing day…
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