Photo by Lizzy Early
Photo by Lizzy Early
All other photos by yours truly!
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Just saying,
I played a lot this weekend. Gardening with Paige. Washed the poopy compost off me and the truck (reminding me of the time when my brother Ben called me while we both lived in Fairbanks – SAM!!! Get the truck over to such and such address right now. They have some free compost samples. Get all that you can! So I drove over and loaded the whole back of the truck and composted the crap out of their new garden beds), ran down to UVU to catch a couple innings of the UVU baseball team with my boy Blake H. Thomas who gave me all the ins and outs of college baseball, ran over to Hangtime to jump tramps with Nate and Ellie and Maren, and sprinted up to Salt Lake to catch dinner and the Real Salt Lake game with Brandon and the boys. And the best part of it all? I did it all blindfolded because I’m working for this new nonprofit organization that spreads face-blindness awareness and we were doing an organization-wide demonstration. TOTALLY fulfilled people. Life is good.
Just kidding about the blindfold. Nonprofits are for those who hate making money. And I love makin money. LOVE it.
A recent trip to CO with some good good buds.
Brother Tom classying up the subway
We sit here Sunday night after a feast of pork chops, chicken thighs and pie (in no particular order) and I’m happy. Dishes done, floors swept, songs sung and children whipped and put to bed. Nothing like a good old-fashioned Orem city Sunday. Family city USA strikes again. Paige reads about the creation of the earth from her geology book while her dad reads about the creation of the earth in the scriptures and I look through photos on my laptop computer. Faith vs. Fact vs. Photos. Or belief vs. belief vs. photos. Or Fact vs. Fact vs. Fact. All truth is relative right? Or maybe not. I once read a fake article that got me all excited about the Pope’s new ideas about truth, only to get my excitement handed back to me swiftly by a smarter friend than I who showed me it was a hoax. Such a good hoax though.
So, tonight the earth, round and rough, floats along through the sky like a racquetball in a rec center with no walls. No one around but random chunks of space-rock to knock it out of place and potentially kill a bunch of little species. Neil deGrasse Tyson told me about a space-chunk that passed closely and might come back around in twenty years to kill us all. Wikipedia says once every 80,000 years we can expect a big asteroid to get us. I’m not sure where we are on that countdown but I sleep easy and the stars are my friends, not my worries.
The crust is only 1 percent of the earth’s mass – a little plastic wrap on the outside of a balled-up bunch of corn bread. I’d never thought until tonight how the earth has never cooled down since it was formed. Fires from below burn deeply and will continue to burn like the testimony of a small Jehovah Witness woman until hell freezes over. And if hell is in the outer core those two things are going to occur at approximately the same time. But, no one wants to invite the outer core to the party – the poor kid is made up of iron, oxygen and sulfur. Just your basic rotten egg of the core world.
Uncle Marion caught by Google
Uncle Marion on the other hand, caught here by the Google car, one sunny day on Lamplighter Lane in Logan, Utah, is always invited to the parties. I was sad to see my high school car, which had been featured on google maps prominently on the side of my mother’s house until just recently, get replaced by a more up-to-date photo of my Volkswagen van. The quality of vehicle hasn’t diminished at all, but the last living record of old Chester has fallen prey to progress and updating.
Kate and Blake in technicolor
One of the most important things ever formed on this earth has got to be 80s dancing. No matter how much molten rock was smashed together and wrenched around in the first 30,000 birthdays of the earth, there was a little dancing gnome hidden in the works whose only job was to make sure to plant the technicolored seed of 80s dancing in the hearts of one or two well-placed kids. The same heat that burns in the outer core, the same nuclear heat that had to be jumpstarted in the 21st century’s greatest film the Core, that heat burns in the feet of every kid who has ever been lucky enough to stumble upon Area 51 in Salt Lake on a Thursday night.
Where fun is
And a truer representation of the creation than the picture above couldn’t be found. So, to start a new week, to create our own little worlds with burning cores and tiny crusts, let’s cruise along with this cool thought from Neil himself:
Exploration of the unknown might not strike everyone as a priority. Yet audacious visions have the power to alter mind-states—to change assumptions of what is possible.
– Neil deGrasse Mike Tyson
Cheers dude.
Little gets at the human spirit like a rousing game of ghost in the graveyard. The suspense, the intensity, the heavy breathing and the pounding heart are things that are replicated but not often replicated well. When you pound out a game or two in the midst of hoodoos and youdoos and do-whats and babes with power you get a whole nother level of intensity. Without toppling what god the great gave to us and instead toppling our own fears and anxieties, we did good, worked hard, and gave Goblin valley the crew of loud-mouthed Utah County-bred energy that it has been missing for years.
I’ve been thinkin.
Art comes in many forms, many different mediums that impact the world from different angles and with different weights. Some break records and have authors who become rich and famous and written about in history books. Others fulfill the owner and creator, bringing peace to their life and giving them something to post to Facebook or show friends while giving a tour of the new apartment. Albert the Einstein said, according to a brainyquotes website, that “true art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” So the act of art-ing and the impact it has or has not on the world are separate beasts. One fulfills the irresistible inner urge of the human singular, while the other, the world’s reaction, fulfills the pocketbooks and status of that human.
I am sitting here at the Cafe on First in the Avenues of Salt Lake city looking up at a painting of a pirate ship flipped upside down in an ocean somewhere with sharks swimming around it and palm trees growing up out of the exposed bottom of the ship. A well-done pen and colored pencil piece, this painting does no screaming for attention, in fact, does quite the opposite. It is encased in a plastic sleeve and hanging by one of those bomber black plastic triangle-shaped paper holders with the two metal finger levers to spread apart the stiff metal. This artwork accurately portrays a fine likeness to what it is, a pirate ship, has some interesting color choices (the ship is gold like the Pixie dusted pirate ship that Peter Pan flies home from Neverlandkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
Woops, fell asleep during mid-writing. Hahaha. Woke up a little embarrassed.
So, back to this painting, looks good, interesting choice of content and a fine piece of skilled creation. And a reasonable number of people will look at it. A hundred people are in and out of here every day and a couple for sure look over at it. Let’s say 15-30 a week see this beauty. The author of this piece may have intended it for a small audience, putting it out in the cafe in order to expose it to a potential customer to drop 75 dollars off at the cash register and take it home to order a frame off Amazon and hang it in the bedroom closet. And that could be the life of this art. That 75 dollar bill would buy beers and brats for the author.
In contrast, I went to Gravity at the Jordan Commons IMAX theater Wednesday night. It was in 3D, cost $13.75 and the speakers were so loud that the bass beat my heart for me and pumped blood three percent faster through my body. The theater was fairly full, impressive for a school/work night, and the popcorn barrels were overflowing. In its first weekend, debuting in a non-holiday season, it pulled in a gigantic $55.6 million dollars. Already being heralded by critics as a foot-in for awards and a much-needed boost to the declining 3D market, this thing is viral to say the least. Some simplified math, excluding any kind of additional revenue paying into that 55.6 million other than ticket prices, at 10 dollars a ticket that means that 5.5 million people saw this thing in its first weekend. Surely a million shed tears, another 500,000 screamed out of fear, 2 million cuddled with a loved one and left feeling closer to them and 5.5 million had some damage to their hearing. The names Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are huger than ever and their bank accounts are overflowing with intergalactic space coins.
The upside down pirate ship, on the other hand, sits quietly next to me at the cafe, unknown, unfamous, unbought. I can’t see the name of the author and I’m not about to get up to walk over and read it. Its statistics: one dude looking at it and blogging about art on a lazy Friday afternoon when he should be working on grad school applications.
ART. A Real Treat. Actual Factual Truth. Any Free Triumph. Or maybe just fart without the F.
Robonaut My Man 