Les Cheneaux Community Library

When I am up north, most days I can be found at the library in the early afternoon. It is a great place for me to hook up (they have WIFI) and spend two or three hours doing the part of my work that needs to be done online. Working this way helps me to organize the things I don't do online.... I always make a list before I leave the house - because you don't just "run to the store" up here. So my daily sojourn may also include the grocery store, post office, hardware or pharmacy. I know at least once a week I will probably have to drive to the Soo or to St. Ignace - which is a longer trip. If I need something exotic, like, say - looseleaf binder dividers - or page protectors.....

The plumber told me that the early spring has been dry - but they have made up for it since I arrived. Solid days of rain, lots of wind. The barn next door has partially blown over. The road is flooded going towards Hessel - and lots of trees down. Walking through the wind is exhilarating. I am so grateful to my family that they give me this time up here - it is a real gift.

Last night I finished Joan Didion's book, The Year of Magical Thinking. She wrote it the year after her husband of forty years had passed. I had heard about this book through a family member after John's dad died. Someone had sent her a quote from the book that she then passed on to all of us about mourning, "...the death of a parent [..] despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free our memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."

She then differentiates between this and grief - which she defines as having no distance - and having the obility to obliterate the dailiness of life. The book is a powerful read.

Trout Lilies

Trout Lilies
Originally uploaded by SpringChick.

Pixagogo - Blue Note: Over 1000 great jazz album covers

I wonder how many of my sibs could go to this site and pick out the records that sat on the bookshelves in the family room of our house. My dad was a lover of the cool school - and there were plenty of those guys represented in his collection. In the fifties - long before it was popular or even thought of by most folks - he had a small record player installed under the dashboard of his Plymouth Fury. His in-home system included a big stereo in the basement (on his workbench) and wires to speakers all over the house. He wasn't a handy sort of guy. This was a labor of love - and a mess. But it worked. Even though he could only play one record at a time, and my mother would yell for him to "turn it down" constantly, we knew what the cool school was.....

The "COOL SCHOOL"
by Ed Enright

The heat and urgency of bebop began to relax with the development of Cool Jazz. Starting in the late 1940s and early '50s, musicians began to develop a less frantic, smoother approach toward improvising modeled after the light, dry playing of swing-era tenorist Lester Young. The result was a laid-back and even-keeled sound bearing a facade of emotionally detached "coolness."

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the first bebop players to "cool it," emerged as the greatest innovator of the genre. His Birth Of The Cool nonet recordings of 1949-'50 are the epitome of Cool Jazz lyricism and understatement. Other notable instrumentalists of the Cool school include trumpeter Chet Baker, pianists George Shearing, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonists Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Paul Desmond.

Arrangers, too, contributed significantly to the Cool Jazz movement, most notably Tadd Dameron, Claude Thornihill, Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Their compositions focused on instrumental colors and slower-moving, more suspended harmony, which created an illusion of spaciousness. Dissonance played some part in the music as well, but in a softened, muted way. Cool Jazz allowed room for slightly larger ensembles; nonets and tentets were more common than during the lean-and-mean bebop years. Some arrangers experimented with altered instrumentation, including conical brass like french horn and tuba.

Jazz players making their livings in the recording studios of Los Angeles picked up on the Cool Jazz movement in the 1950s. Largely influenced by the Miles Davis nonet, these L.A.-based players developed what's now known as West Coast Jazz.

Like Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz was much more subdued than the frantic bebop that preceded it. Most West Coast Jazz was scored out in great detail, and it often sounded a bit European with its use of contrapuntal lines. However, the music left wide-open spaces for long, linear solo improvisations.

While West Coast Jazz was played mostly in recording studios, clubs like the Lighthouse on Hermosa Beach and the Haig in Los Angeles often presented top players of the genre, which included trumpeter Shorty Rogers, saxophonists Art Pepper and Bud Shank, drummer Shelly Manne and clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre.

Thank You Stephen Colbert

White House Correspondents Dinner:

Colbert attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. "This administration is soaring, not sinking," he said. "If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg"

Click the link and watch the entire thing.

Sign of the Times

Sign of the Times
Originally uploaded by 2 b danny.

LIVING WITH WAR

NEIL YOUNG'S 'LIVING WITH WAR' SHOWS HE DOESN'T LIKE IT
The New York Times

By JON PARELES

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.

Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

TV in Japan: Real Life Bear Ranch Dancers

TV in Japan: Real Life Bear Ranch Dancers

Dooga dooga: Grandpa Fitz

So well said by Jim that there is nothing to add.




For a wonderful look at JRF's legacy:
http://www.ironwoodglobe.com/0427fitz.htm

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H'mong School Kids

H'mong School Kids
Originally uploaded by fotobot.

United Children of the World

Check out this wonderful blog - images of children from all over the world. Beauty.

Really - who doesn't love Brian Jungen...this Emily Carr graduate who is all the rage now...when I saw these images of his sculpture made out of nike parts after spending a week looking at Northwest Native totem poles and masks, I just wanted to holler - YES.

New Public as a news source is interesting - check out what they are doing with their site - well worth spending some time there.

“Justice is Beautiful: Expanding the Paradigm of the Artists Book”

From an essay by Kurt Allerslev...

“What happens in a book when you're not reading it? A closed book is a treasure trove of wild possibility. The insides of a book when it sits closed on the shelf is not like the light in the refrigerator when you close the door -- you know that light goes out every time. It's designed to do that. Even if you don't see the light go out, you know it has.

The bookmaker, however, creates something that is meant to endure. The insides -- text and/or images -- stay lit up forever. But perhaps they wonder if you have gone out. The inside of the book doesn't know about the continuance of our existence when it's closed. What do we become to the closed book? What does the pollution, the cat, the car alarms and moldy ham sandwiches matter to a closed book? In closing, they are protected from that chaos that seeks to diminish and extinguish the beauty within.

I don't believe that the insides of books have a secret life that takes off when closed, the way we have a secret life when we close our eyes and dream. We are able to escape our everyday reality, exchange it for fleeting moments of other. The book, however is also not statically waiting for us to indulge it, but it grows and matures. The pages yellow, the text grows more meaningful and wise, or more dated and doddering. Every second, it changes as the world around it changes it's context. It is fed by every pair of eyes that fall on it, and it pays homage to the creators by providing a passage to a secret life that can be accessed by us as if dreaming.

You can't open the same book twice. Perhaps you can't even open the same book once. Like a river, it's changing as you open it. As the pages turn. And it changes as it sits on the shelf. A library full of books is a whirlpool of persistent change. We want text to solidify language, but language is too fluid. We are too fluid.”

Touching Base

Home this morning after almost a month of travel - and not done yet...flying back out to Seattle in a week. This time with family to visit the Redwoods in northern CA.

I am sneaking up on the final months of this sabbatical year - and full of gratitude to have had the time to travel, research, reconnect and reflect. Most of all the reflection has been a powerful gift - and one that I realize more and more I have to have in order to really do anything else well. We have pretty much written it out of our daily lives - and I believe it numbs us to all kinds of evils. Speaking of reflection....

The Cloister Walk a favorite book - recounting (amoung other things) the time that writer Kathleen Norris spent at St. John's Abbey. She writes,

"Monastic people seek to weave ceremony through every mundane part of life: how one eats, how one dresses, how one treats tools, or enters a church are not left to whim. Ceremony is so large a part of what Benedictines do that it becomes second nature to many of them. The monastic life has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind."

Earlier this year I spent some time in northern Minnesota at St. John's Abbey. I was there to talk to the folks at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library about the St. John's Bible. This is the first bible that has been commissioned in the monastic tradition in 500 years. Those talks were extremely fruitful. Seven facsimile pages of the bible (stunning in their own right) will be coming to Milwaukee in January of 2007 as part of the exhibit that I am pulling (and this is exactly the right word some days!!) together this year.

More about this in the coming months - "Sacred Texts/Contemporary Forms: Spiritual Traditions in the Digital Age"

Yesterday I was able to stop by and introduce myself to Robin Kinney at the Bay View Book Arts Gallery. How wonderful to see this little jewel of a gallery within blocks of where I live and work. The work she is showing is worth stopping by to look at. I hope to have some images here soon as well.

George

George
Originally uploaded by lesliefedorchuk.

Talking with George on the first of April.

"Heaven is a state of MINE, not yours..."

"Hey, you gota black window up your nose....APPLE FOOLS!!!!!"

I love this guy.

The Mission near Santa Ynez

Originally uploaded by lesliefedorchuk.

One of the most incredible things about getting off of the plane in California is the way the flora and fauna hits you in the head....especially if you are coming from the middle coasts where things are still grey and cold. I was so amazed to see palm trees and orange trees that the freeways were almost tolerable.....

Blind Date

Bill T. Jones is blogging on the Company's website (link on title) and is worth checking out. I originally saw Blind Date on March 4th at Alverno College. It was performed to an enthusiastic, packed house - who literally sat in stunned silence at the end of it before breaking into frantic applause. My dear 78 year old Mother-in-Law said it was the "best live performance she had ever seen in her life." This is high praise from a woman who has see a lot.

The evening before there was a panel discussion at Alverno, "Patriot Acts: Patriotism in the Era of the Patriot Act." Moderaterd by Amy Shapiro (Prof. of Philosophy, Alverno) it included Bill, along with Lt. Colonel Clark Backus (Prof. of Military Science, Marquette), Karine Mareno-Taxman (Asst. U.S. Attorney in WI), Sandra Graham (Prof. of Psychology, Alverno and Minister, United Church of Christ) and Roger Quindel (Milw. County Supervisor).

It was an interesting group...but I felt it never got off the ground because the audience (and perhaps the panelists) were confused by the title....taking the idea of the Patriot Act - literally the document itself - and tripping up on the fact that they didn't understand it enough to talk about it.

I wished that the discussion could have gone more in the direction of what one does in an age of undue restrictions - how might one retain her patriotism (or define it) during a time of avid disagreement with a government that seems to demand that patriotism be defined in terms of the corporate, the powerful, and the political....

The good thing was that all of these ideas about framing patriotism and leadership and difference were in the forefront of my brain as I sat watching the performance. The company contains these ideas - using movement, music and text together in a way that is powerful. It is a visual unfolding of the questions. It will stay with me for awhile.

These are confusing times.

The image below is a book that I made almost twenty years ago. Hand-made paper, hand-cast pulp - letterpress and the pictograph-like images are made using xerox toner and fusing it in my oven....

I was thinking about it today - John and I coming up on thirty some years of marriage this year. The text in the book is this poem by Margaret Atwood. It is still true today.

Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: The edge of the forest, the edge of the desert the unpainted stairs at the back where we squat outside, eating popcorn where painfully and with wonder at having survived even this far we are learning to make fire Margaret Atwood

OH GEEEEZ.....

Sorry people. I haven't been a regular blogger of late. Lots of projects going on, lots of ruminating - gearing up for a big trip to the west coast - LA / Portland / Seattle and points in between. I am starting to feel the pressure....the sabbatical year is half over. There are two major projects in process - but with HUGE amounts of research and work yet to be done.

In the last seven days I have given three lectures about the work I am doing - which is the first time I've talked these projects to large groups of people. More on a regular basis - I promise.