My first hike of the new year was the familiar 2.25 easternmost miles of the Elk River Trail an hour’s drive north from Bartlesville along the north shore of Elk City Reservoir. The weather was in the 40s, but the forecast claimed the sun would come out in the afternoon, and that was good enough for me.
After lunch I drove north to the reservoir west of Independence, KS and parked at the trailhead just west of the dam. I crossed the field and clambered up the slope to the bluff, finding the slope particularly treacherous and muddy with melting frost. I reached the stone corridor, where you walk along a huge deep crack in the bluff top where a portion sheared off and ended up several feet downslope.
Two Lycra-clad fellows were running out of the corridor as I entered. I posed for distance and nearer shots in the corridor using my new Joby Gorillapod, interrupted by another Lycra man jogging past from the end of the corridor. This pattern would continue for my entire hike out to the turnaround point: I would spot Lycra-clad joggers headed my way and stand off trail, greeting them as they ran by. They came in dribs and drabbles of 1 to 3 joggers, the total approaching two dozen it seemed. I’ve never worn Lycra myself, preferring jeans and a knit shirt. At my slower pace I had to keep warm with a knit cap, earpops, and cotton gloves.
I walked along until the trail opened up with a sweeping view of the hillside where an intermittent side stream enters the lake. The last of the Lycra lads and lasses had passed, and I would have the trail to myself along the return.
I was glad to be out on a trail again. I expect my hiking mileage to continue to drop this year, but I certainly won’t give up the rejuvenating pastime.
A dear friend now living in Tulsa, Carrie Fleharty, asked for a day trip out of town with me to cool her cabin fever over Winter Break. She didn’t care if we went hiking or what, just so long as we were well out of town for the day. The weather called for a chance of freezing rain all morning, but I drove from Bartlesville to Tulsa to pick her up and we then drove a few hours east to Bentonville, Arkansas. The inhospitable weather meant no hiking, but I had an alternate plan ready.
Downtown Bentonville
We had a delicious lunch at Tavola Trattoria, which TripAdvisor ranked as the #2 restaurant in Bentonville. (#1 was a sushi place, and I refuse to eat raw fish.) Carrie and I both ordered the Four Cheese Ravioli with Bolognese Sauce, and we quickly cleaned our plates of the delicious food. We then walked around the town square and looked through the WalMart Visitor Center. Then we headed to the real destination for the day: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
I’d visited there a couple of times before, last April to hike the trails and in June to tour the galleries. We hopped out under cold gray skies, neither of us carrying our better cameras, just cell phones with cameras, to stay light on this “fun day out”.
Crystal Bridges
North Gallery Windows
The museum was new to Carrie, but we didn’t tarry long in most of the galleries. We did take a long pause in the North Gallery to enjoy both of the panoramic views from its sweeping window walls. To the south across the pond was the Eleven Cafe, in a building designed like the North Gallery. To the north was a view of the grounds, including the ho-hum Lowell’s Ocean sculpture and the beds where last June a hungry groundhog was so entertaining.
On my previous visit I focused more on the sculptures than the paintings. But this time Carrie and I had the most fun in the final galleries of modern and contemporary art. While there were the expected works of abstract expressionism and color field, which hold little interest for either of us, there were several pieces both Carrie and I found intriguing and fun.
Deciphering Synchromy
Au Cafe (Synchromy)
Stanton MacDonald-Wright‘s Au Café (Synchromy) from 1918 was a pleasure to decipher. It might at first seem abstract, but a woman’s right shoulder and arm were immediately apparent to me. Then I could make out her other arm, holding a gliss. That allowed me to see her prismatic face. More subtle, and requiring Carrie’s help for me to see better, were the color wedges below her which form a seated man with his back to the viewer, holding a glass in his left hand. Look for his ear, eyes, nose, and beard just below the middle of the painting; his glass is in the bottom left corner of the oil.
I have often found cubism off-putting, but this colorful example, in which the artist associated colors with musical scales in what he termed Synchromism, was quite nice. I would like a print of it, since the original is valued at about half a million dollars!
Old Selves
Evan Penny today and tomorrow?
A work which captured many patrons’ interest was Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be, Variation #2 by Evan Penny in 2010. This larger-than-life bust made of silicone, pigment, hair, fabric, and aluminum, is incredibly lifelike. You can go right up to it and view the ear and chest hairs, wrinkled skin, etc. and it looks just like a real, although gigantic, person. I had fun capturing shots of elderly men gazing at and posing by this piece. Later I found out what Evan Penny looks like, posing with his later self. I’d love to see more of his incredibly realistic, albeit sometimes deliberately distorted, works.
Me and my future self?
This comparison of now and a possible future reminded me of using an online photo aging app to transform myself. However, I think Evan Penny could do a far more accurate prediction.
We were careful not to read the placard, first studying the spools of thread. I knew the image we would see in the crystal sphere would be like that of an object placed beyond the center of curvature of a concave mirror: a reduced, inverted, real image forming somewhere between the focal point and twice that far out from the sphere. So I knew the bottom spools must represent sky, and it was quite fun to see an image of Grant Wood’s famous painting through the tiny sphere. The photograph I took illustrates how our mind, familiar with the base image, fills in details not actually present in the spooled thread.
Soundsuits
Carrie also had fun locating the type of jack-in-the-box she owned from childhood which formed part of Nick Cave’s 2010 work Soundsuit, with a mannequin covered in a knitted and crocheted fabric covering bursting forth with toys. It would be fun to see him in a live performance.
Photorealistic Paintings
Orca Bates
I always enjoy photorealistic paintings, and there were two stunners at Crystal Bridges. First was Jamie Wyeth‘s 1990 painting Orca Bates, part of a series of paintings he did to chronicle the Orca’s journey from childhood into adolescence. In this work Orca’s wet, glistening, and vulnerable body is seated on an old sea chest with a massive whale jawbone in the background. Orca’s elongating but still lithe and hairless body, and his boyish torso, speak to how puberty is just beginning, while Wyeth has portrayed him with massive feet, an artistic foretelling of the larger man he will soon become.
A painting which stopped me in my tracks, and then had me pacing back and forth, tilting my head in wonderment, was Antarctica by Richard Estes in 2007. I’ve seen his precise paintings of New York City building and streetscapes before, but was unaware he had branched into natural subjects. The view he gives of the ice-laden land from the deck of a cruise vessel is like a portal into another reality. I noticed from adjacent works that Estes excels when dealing with specular, versus diffuse, reflections. So an icecap is a perfect subject for his art.
We then made our way to the temporary exhibits, with models of other designs by Crystal Bridges’ architect, Moshe Safdie. We also viewed GE’s See the Light, but we were both very disappointed in it. The few pieces seemed decades out of date and quite unimpressive. I liked Karen LaMonte‘s 2007 glass sculpture Dress Impression with Wrinkled Cowl, displayed in the corridor outside of the See the Light exhibit, far more than anything GE brought to light.
We arrived at the parking lot and Carrie posed one last time by a snow-covered tree with my snow-covered car in the distant background. The trip back to Tulsa was beautiful with the snow and we finished our evening at TGI Friday’s and the requisite trip to the bookstore. I’m so glad Carrie asked to go on this escape; it was one of the highlights of Winter Break.
I am indebted to Kate Strycker for some fresh music, since these days I don’t listen to music radio, internet music services like Pandora, nor watch hardly any television. She took my physics course back in 2004-05, and back then we began trading music mix CDs. Kate is one of those alums who has kept in regular contact with me over the years. Although she now lives in Illinois, she was in town for Christmas and suggested we trade mix CDs again after a long hiatus. So I burned off an assortment of my most-listened-to songs of the past few years. Of much greater importance is what Kate brought to the dinner get-together I had with her and her sister Kristen, who is also one of my physics alums. (Need I even mention that Kate is now a Physician’s Assistant and Kristen is wrapping up a degree in Civil Engineering at Notre Dame? Physics kids are the best!)
Musically, Kate is now into Nate Reuss, singer for The Format and now fun. By that I mean the group “FUN.” She provided an extensive sampling of his work, and I won’t be surprised if one of his efforts is a Song of the Month for me next year. But Kate also provided a general mix CD, and a standout song on it for me relates to another long-term interest of hers: Joss Whedon and his talented clan. Stay with me here as I weave the web links to my December Song of the Month:
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Kate loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other Whedon projects. General readers might associate him most readily as the director of the summer 2012 blockbuster movie The Avengers. During the Writers Guild strike of 2007-08, he teamed up with his brothers Zack Whedon (a television writer) and Jed Whedon (a composer and screenwriter), along with writer/singer/dancer/actress Maurissa Tancharoen, to create the wonderful musical tragicomedy web miniseries Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
I loved that mini musical, which introduced me to Felicia Day, which in turn led me to her hilariously nerdy web series The Guild, which I adore even though I am not a gamer. Day wrote the great song (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar with Jed Whedon, who married Maurissa Tancharoen in 2009. Tancharoen was a writer for and also acted in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse TV show, and she and Jed co-wrote Remains, my Song of the Month, which see sang as part of the final first season episode they scripted for Dollhouse. And wrapping this nest of links up with a final twist, Felicia Day acted in that episode.
Remains is sad and haunting, with lyrics constructed to have general meaning as well as fit the TV episode in question. It also fits well with the official video, with Tancharoen-Whedon playing an android love bot ordered by Fran Kranz, who also acted in Dollhouse. The video was directed by Anton King.
The video is not just a science fiction trope about androids and love dolls, with echoes of Lars and the Real Girl. It is an interesting portrayal of the objectification of women as well as our tendency to discard damaged goods, including people. Notice how the damaged, discarded android was rescued and appreciated by a homeless war veteran. The gorgeous chord progressions, piano, and guitar in Remains capture my heart, and the lyrics are shattering:
REMAINS
Burn down my home
My memories hardened and are bright as chrome
Good times escape
While every mistake seems to be caught on tape
I will go rolling fast
Arms out in the rain
Feel momentum building ’til
I lift off ground like an airplane
Love ties you down to the pains
A billion eyes are watching, fossilized
They see what remains
Remains
Gave up this town
What waste are we left with when it’s boiled down
Shine light on me
Your image reflected is all you’ll ever see
I will go rolling fast
Arms out in the rain
Feel momentum building ’til
I lift off ground like an airplane
Love ties you down to the pains
A billion eyes are watching, fossilized
They see what remains
Remains
Rocky bed of Sand Creek (click image for slideshow)
Yesterday I went to see the first installment of the latest Middle Earth film trilogy: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I have not yet read the book, but the familiar mood, settings, and some characters from the earlier The Lord of the Rings trilogy of films lent the journey a familiar air. (And yes, I did see a film at the AMC 20 in Tulsa. The reel change markers in the two-dimensional version I viewed were quite evident, along with the juddering of actual film sliding past a lens. However, soon that will be an experience relegated to the past. Will digital projection lead to a shift to higher frame rates? Director Peter Jackson hopes it will.)
Similarly, the day before I made what, for regular readers, should be an expected journey: driving 30 minutes west from home to hike at Osage Hills State Park. Since my day hiking frenzy began in mid-2009, I’ve hiked various trails there almost two dozen times: three times in 2009, eight in 2010, seven in 2011, and now five in 2012. I’ve thoroughly exhausted the novelties of its trails and any appealing bushwhacks.
But I still enjoyed taking a few shots along my 5.25 mile journey roughly following the Bugle Trail loop. The shelter in the picnic area was a nice spot despite the tepid afternoon sun, which also illuminated the no-longer-leafy bluff across Sand Creek, affording a good look at the cave across the way, along with the large fading KEEP OUT sign adorning the bluff below it, which I managed to exclude from my shots.
Sand Creek was stilled by the drought, the rocky creekbed mostly dry, as were the waterfall ledges separating pools of water. The rope swing hung forlornly in the winter air. But the soft, calming walk around the Creek Loop was restorative, followed by the rougher and invigorating tower/lake trail.
I’ve made no grand hiking plans for this winter break, and my declining number of hiking days and mileage for 2012 represents how I’m running out of novel trails which don’t require an overnight stay.
My day hiking has declined in 2012 as I ran out of novel trails.
But I still enjoy day hikes and, unless weather and ennui intervenes, I might add a few more miles to my total for 2012 during the final week of the year.
Years ago I met the son of an English greengrocer: a corpulent, droll fellow known for murder and mayhem. I was probably vaguely aware of him through television, although his long-running show was not in reruns in the limited broadcast television markets of my youth. But I first really knew of him because he lent his name (for a fee, naturally) to a monthly mystery magazine and he had bookending cameos in The Three Investigators mysteries. But then, late one night on the television, I saw Psycho. After that I became fascinated, perhaps morbidly so, by Alfred Hitchcock.
So I was delighted to go see the new movie Hitchcock with Sir Anthony Hopkins playing Sir Alfred. While it was modestly entertaining, it was anything but suspenseful. I wouldn’t recommend the movie to folks who are not already fans of Hitch. It would be far more entertaining to see Psycho, or almost any Hitchcock film, on the big screen. I’ve seen all of his films, most of them multiple times, but Psycho does stand out for one reason in particular. I was young enough to approximate the reaction of cinema audiences in 1960 to first seeing Psycho: it shocked me. The slow, mundane, somewhat dreadful pace let me know something was coming, but I was still quite unprepared for what could happen when a truly great director, who was always a masterful manipulator, made a horror film.
Psycho (1960)
Is Psycho my favorite Hitchcock film? Hardly. That honor goes to Vertigo, underappreciated at the time but now ranking at the top of Sight & Sound’s top movies of all time. So allow me to urge you to go rent something great from the Master of Suspense. Here’s my top ten Hitchcock films in reverse chronological order, but I caution you that some linked clips are SPOILERS for the films in question. If you don’t want to spoil some major plot points, watch the entire movies from start to finish!
Frenzy (1972)
Frenzy (1972)
The most graphically violent Hitchcock film, leavened with British humor. I love the British inspector, tortured by his wife’s cooking. It is a far more modern film than Psycho, although only made a dozen years later.
A marvelous script by Ernest Lehman pairs up with Cary Grant to make this the best of Hitchcock’s “innocent man on the run” movies. The later James Bond films were heavily influenced by sequences from North by Northwest. The cropduster sequence is also one of the most famous in all of cinema. What could possibly threaten you in broad daylight on a bleak flat prairie?
This film was unavailable for a decade. I first saw it on a big screen at OU’s film series when it became available again in the 1980s. The students stood up and applauded after it ended; something I had never seen them do before for any film.
To Catch a Thief (1955)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
This is a gorgeous film with gorgeous people. Light fluff for Hitchcock, but wonderfully romantic. Grace Kelly was never more beautiful or flirtatious, and you simply can’t go wrong pairing her with Cary Grant. The fireworks kiss scene is quite wonderful and Grace’s outfits are almost as stunning as she is.
Rear Window (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
Grace Kelly is stunning once again in this much more serious tale; her entrance is amazing. Jimmy Stewart allows us to sympathize with a voyeur, the world outside his window drawing us in. This one has a prime example of why Hitchcock was the Master of Suspense. We are led to adore Grace’s character, and the scene where she is bravely and recklessly searching an apartment across the courtyard is incredibly intense at that point in the movie. I’ve repeatedly seen fellow viewers tense up, yell at the screen, and even stand up in anguish, their hands at their mouth, during this sequence.
This one features beautiful work by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in their prime, along with a surprisingly sympathetic villain in Claude Rains. The kissing scenes are well known, but (SPOILER) my favorite segment is when the spies are discovered and Claude and his evil mother plot a slow murder; the abandonment by Grant in Bergman’s greatest hour of need is devastating.
Spellbound (1945)
Spellbound (1945)
This is a very dated and uneven film, but it has some stunning visuals and Bergman once again pours on the love as she did in Notorious and, of course, Casablanca. Gregory Peck is stiff, but that fits his amnesiac character, and character actor Michael Chekhov is simply lovable. The dream sequence by Salvador Dali is fascinating, and the (SPOILER) final confrontation is both suspenseful and, with its massive point-of-view gun and two red frames of film, visually impressive.
Meador Manor 