This morning we trekked to New Haven through a hellacious rain to visit the Yale Art Museum and view the huge photography exhibit of Robert Adams.
Here are some links: Yale Art Gallery
Robert Adams exhibits at Yale
Robert Adams photographs from "Google" search
Adams took many photographs of the "Californication" of Colorado, my home state. Heartbreaking to see the ugly sprawl and the smog around Denver, Longmont and Colorado Springs. I've received multiple shocks from various visits to Denver, the first being that downtown shopping had disappeared. Yup! The stores were gone, moved out to the burbs. When I was a kid, Denver was where you went for serious shopping, downtown Denver. Well, at least they didn't tear down the Daniels & Fisher Tower.
The second shock was East Denver, which looked positively awful with houses in need of TLC and unmowed lawns. Used to be so lovely. And then there was Aurora, where my Dad once had an auto parts store. Totally unrecognizable. The smog hung so heavy over Denver that the Rockies disappeared. The worst was driving north out of Denver and seeing the like ugly-on-an-ape housing developments, miles from anywhere, cheap houses all cheek by jowl in a barren landscape. Horrible.
The exhibit had a photo of (I swear) the house that we lived in (or one like it) on the corner of Jefferson and Holly. This was the outskirts once upon a time, but now the trees have matured and for some reason the bank has ATM instructions in Russian. Go figure.
Denver does have a great art museum now, and we enjoyed that, and also good places to eat. It's just always a shock to realize that you can't go home again, ever.
Robert Adams loves trees and surf and nature and old timey stuff like ancient gas stations and grain elevators, and he hates what man has done to the Western landscape, but you can see a profound sympathy for people, especially children, in some of his photographs. The photos do what a writer should do, show, don't tell.
We recently viewed the Ansel Adams exhibit at the PEM in Salem, where the West was pristine and nature hadn't been trashed. Such a difference in 50 years. Both photographers had gorgeous photos of seashores. Adams' were so textured and vibrant you felt like you could stick your hand into the surf.
I'm also an admirer of the photos of Stephen Shore, and he and Adams have some things in common, namely photos of homely restaurants and cafes. They both photograph scenes so ordinary that viewing them brings a shock of recognition. "I've seen that!" Hundreds of times. The difference is that these artists recognized something memorable in the ordinary and captured it on film.
What's the most ordinary thing you've seen lately?
We ate out-of-this-world pizza across the street at Est Est Est. Significant other went for a veggie pizza and I opted for fresh tomato and pesto. Great crisp crust. Yum! Our first experience with New Haven's reputed pizza. Est Est Est is a modest storefront, like you've seen a million times. Maybe we should have snapped a photo of the ordinary that was extraordinary.
A drive home in the rain and a book party tonight.
Grapeshot
Showing posts with label Denver Art Museum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Denver Art Museum. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Musings about Denver with restuarant reco
The convention in Denver is in full swing. Wasn’t Ted Kennedy inspiring last night? The Wall Street Journal had a comparison of St. Paul/Minneapolis and Denver restaurants last week. The only Denver place I recognized was the Buckhorn Exchange, a place I ate with my father, many, many moons ago. He undoubtedly had a medium well T-bone, and I just remember the excellent bean soup. Unlike me not to recall the meat dish.
I’ve been a denizen of Denver off and on since childhood, long enough, in fact, to recall when Larimer was the street where the bums hung out, and the Daniels and Fishers tower was the tallest in town. As kids, we used to spit from the top of the tower, well-bred young ladies that we were, but that’s a different story.
I attended 5th grade in Denver, in Lakewood, and for the first, last and only time, I was the teacher’s pet. Never knew why, but it was a heady feeling and everyone should experience that once in a lifetime. We did fractions and long division and the last 20 minutes of every day the class got to show off the talents of the various members. I played the piano with major stage fright. I still recall how a classmate, Jacqueline Emerson played so beautifully and without trembly fingers.
At the teacher’s behest, I ran for some class office, and did not realize that you were supposed to vote for yourself. It still goes against the grain. I wasn’t raised to have high self-esteem. That was for boys and girls who were “too forward.”
Back to Denver. The day after I graduated from high school, we moved back to Denver, way the hell in Southeast Denver by the new Valley Highway. A nice little two-bedroom house with a fireplace in the living room that my mom would never use because it would become “dirty.”
For some reason, the day after I was married, my parents moved again, eventually ending up in Aurora, where my dad had an auto parts store. Summers from from college, I went to the main library, hung out a bit at D.U., patronized art films somewhere, maybe Englewood, and ate at the Palace Arms, actually drank at the Palace Arms. I took trig one summer at East High and there was a Coors kid in the class. Harry Belafonte sang Island In The Sun every day on the car radio as I drove home from class to Southeast Denver. Cherry Hills was always "The" neighborhood.
Returning with kids, we stayed at the Brown Palace in a suite, and you would faint if I told you how cheap it was then. I remember drying diapers on the radiators. This was obviously in a different life.
Denver was cool, and the Colorado School of Mines sign that lights up the mountain in Golden was my beacon.
Last summer we returned to Colorado for a class reunion, flew into DIA, and the city was smoggy and you couldn’t even see the mountains, which just about killed me. My town and it’s been ruined. I feel that way about Montana, too. Excessive Californication and all the big shots moving in, building these god-awful ugly mansions, and then selling them, blighting the land. Their punishment should be to have to live there in the wide-open spaces forever.
Last year before the reunion, we spent a most pleasant evening at Las Margaritas, an excellent and casual Mexican restaurant where they understand the drink as well as the cuisine, and I couldn’t have liked it more.
The art museum also rocks. Denver is so cool.
I hope the smog is gone for the convention. God knows, there’s always enough hot air.
I will lift my eyes until the hills, from whence cometh my help. Thought for the day in Denver.
I’ve been a denizen of Denver off and on since childhood, long enough, in fact, to recall when Larimer was the street where the bums hung out, and the Daniels and Fishers tower was the tallest in town. As kids, we used to spit from the top of the tower, well-bred young ladies that we were, but that’s a different story.
I attended 5th grade in Denver, in Lakewood, and for the first, last and only time, I was the teacher’s pet. Never knew why, but it was a heady feeling and everyone should experience that once in a lifetime. We did fractions and long division and the last 20 minutes of every day the class got to show off the talents of the various members. I played the piano with major stage fright. I still recall how a classmate, Jacqueline Emerson played so beautifully and without trembly fingers.
At the teacher’s behest, I ran for some class office, and did not realize that you were supposed to vote for yourself. It still goes against the grain. I wasn’t raised to have high self-esteem. That was for boys and girls who were “too forward.”
Back to Denver. The day after I graduated from high school, we moved back to Denver, way the hell in Southeast Denver by the new Valley Highway. A nice little two-bedroom house with a fireplace in the living room that my mom would never use because it would become “dirty.”
For some reason, the day after I was married, my parents moved again, eventually ending up in Aurora, where my dad had an auto parts store. Summers from from college, I went to the main library, hung out a bit at D.U., patronized art films somewhere, maybe Englewood, and ate at the Palace Arms, actually drank at the Palace Arms. I took trig one summer at East High and there was a Coors kid in the class. Harry Belafonte sang Island In The Sun every day on the car radio as I drove home from class to Southeast Denver. Cherry Hills was always "The" neighborhood.
Returning with kids, we stayed at the Brown Palace in a suite, and you would faint if I told you how cheap it was then. I remember drying diapers on the radiators. This was obviously in a different life.
Denver was cool, and the Colorado School of Mines sign that lights up the mountain in Golden was my beacon.
Last summer we returned to Colorado for a class reunion, flew into DIA, and the city was smoggy and you couldn’t even see the mountains, which just about killed me. My town and it’s been ruined. I feel that way about Montana, too. Excessive Californication and all the big shots moving in, building these god-awful ugly mansions, and then selling them, blighting the land. Their punishment should be to have to live there in the wide-open spaces forever.
Last year before the reunion, we spent a most pleasant evening at Las Margaritas, an excellent and casual Mexican restaurant where they understand the drink as well as the cuisine, and I couldn’t have liked it more.
The art museum also rocks. Denver is so cool.
I hope the smog is gone for the convention. God knows, there’s always enough hot air.
I will lift my eyes until the hills, from whence cometh my help. Thought for the day in Denver.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
I went to a really weird party
Ooops, forgot that Friday (yesterday) was Cat Blog Day. This morning Thisbe told me that a good nap trumps everything except eating and that cleanliness is better than godliness. Feline wisdom from Friday.
Yesterday I pulled a party out of my memory, triggered by a commercial, the rum commercial--looks like South Beach-- where the bartender is making mojitos and pounding the mint and lime into the glass and the dancers are swinging their butts. He stops. They stop. He starts mulling the lime and the mint again. They dance again. I mentioned to S.O. that the first time I had seen sexy dancing like that had been at a beach party down in Ft. Lauderdale and we speculated whether the sinuous swing-your-butt and other parts dancing had come up from South Beach by way of some tropical island.
Thought processes wandered to Boston parties, esp. Boston business parties. I have yet to be present when the ladies didn't all get up to dance, usually to the Electric Slide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Slide
When we first moved here from Chicago I found this odd party custom outre, but now I get up and dance with the girls. Sometimes.
There are a few songs I can't sit still to, YMCA being one, and remembering how I drove to college everyday thru the worst Chicago winter ever jiving to the Village People.
That memory, of the women dancing together triggered a more distant one, of the night the men got up and danced but not together. I won't even say how long ago it was, but I was in college for the first time, home for the summer in Denver, working for my Dad, bored out of my mind and looking for adventure which I never found but came close a couple times.
I had a friend who had dropped out of college. We share the same first name and were both sort of blond and didn't have much in common except that we liked boys and also the business about being bored and wanting adventure. All that jazz. So, we hung out, and doubled dated sometimes, a quaint custom from the Dark Ages of dating.
I can't remember how we met the people where the party was. Obviously her connection, not mine. The host was a neer-do-well salesman who received stolen goods on the side (found that out later) and the hostess, his wife, was 18 and had just had her 4th child. Having so many kids so young and so close together and done a number on her reproductive system and she had also had a hysterectomy at 18. I don't think I had a date. We were just hanging out. The only other guy I actually remember was a big man, looked kind of like John Goodman and he sold shoes at the shopping center down the down from where my folks lived.
The college I was attending at the time, known sometimes as the Harvard of the Southwest, was an intellectual place--I was ready Ulysses that summer--and obviously I knew I was slumming, but yanno, adventure and boredom and all that.
So about 8 people were sitting at the end of the evening in an 8 x 8 living room--(8 is a lucky number in Chinese cultures but don't think it applies here). There wasn't room enough for everyone to sit, but my friend and I, being the ladies present, sat on the sofa. The host's wife had been dancing by herself to Honeybee (?). Think that was the name of the song. Anyway, all the guys agreed to get up and dance, one at a time, quite a novelty. There was a dim floor lamp and an even dimmer overhead light, and a record player, or maybe a radio, and each guy danced to a song. The one I remember was the shoe salesman, such a large guy and so light on his feet and with a serious look of concentration--not quite a frown on his face--and there was something moving about him and his concentration and his dancing and even his pride, such that I remember it to this day, the man sliding and gliding over the small middle of the living room floor. An epiphany.
I don't think I ever saw these people again, except once I went into a shoe store and saw the salesman/dancer and did an about face. My friend had a shotgun marriage the following summer to an extremely unsuitable man, had three boys, got divorced, married another man in Montana, who "showered her with diamonds" as my mother never tired of telling me. I graduated.
What could be crazier than life?
Grapeshot
Yesterday I pulled a party out of my memory, triggered by a commercial, the rum commercial--looks like South Beach-- where the bartender is making mojitos and pounding the mint and lime into the glass and the dancers are swinging their butts. He stops. They stop. He starts mulling the lime and the mint again. They dance again. I mentioned to S.O. that the first time I had seen sexy dancing like that had been at a beach party down in Ft. Lauderdale and we speculated whether the sinuous swing-your-butt and other parts dancing had come up from South Beach by way of some tropical island.
Thought processes wandered to Boston parties, esp. Boston business parties. I have yet to be present when the ladies didn't all get up to dance, usually to the Electric Slide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Slide
When we first moved here from Chicago I found this odd party custom outre, but now I get up and dance with the girls. Sometimes.
There are a few songs I can't sit still to, YMCA being one, and remembering how I drove to college everyday thru the worst Chicago winter ever jiving to the Village People.
That memory, of the women dancing together triggered a more distant one, of the night the men got up and danced but not together. I won't even say how long ago it was, but I was in college for the first time, home for the summer in Denver, working for my Dad, bored out of my mind and looking for adventure which I never found but came close a couple times.
I had a friend who had dropped out of college. We share the same first name and were both sort of blond and didn't have much in common except that we liked boys and also the business about being bored and wanting adventure. All that jazz. So, we hung out, and doubled dated sometimes, a quaint custom from the Dark Ages of dating.
I can't remember how we met the people where the party was. Obviously her connection, not mine. The host was a neer-do-well salesman who received stolen goods on the side (found that out later) and the hostess, his wife, was 18 and had just had her 4th child. Having so many kids so young and so close together and done a number on her reproductive system and she had also had a hysterectomy at 18. I don't think I had a date. We were just hanging out. The only other guy I actually remember was a big man, looked kind of like John Goodman and he sold shoes at the shopping center down the down from where my folks lived.
The college I was attending at the time, known sometimes as the Harvard of the Southwest, was an intellectual place--I was ready Ulysses that summer--and obviously I knew I was slumming, but yanno, adventure and boredom and all that.
So about 8 people were sitting at the end of the evening in an 8 x 8 living room--(8 is a lucky number in Chinese cultures but don't think it applies here). There wasn't room enough for everyone to sit, but my friend and I, being the ladies present, sat on the sofa. The host's wife had been dancing by herself to Honeybee (?). Think that was the name of the song. Anyway, all the guys agreed to get up and dance, one at a time, quite a novelty. There was a dim floor lamp and an even dimmer overhead light, and a record player, or maybe a radio, and each guy danced to a song. The one I remember was the shoe salesman, such a large guy and so light on his feet and with a serious look of concentration--not quite a frown on his face--and there was something moving about him and his concentration and his dancing and even his pride, such that I remember it to this day, the man sliding and gliding over the small middle of the living room floor. An epiphany.
I don't think I ever saw these people again, except once I went into a shoe store and saw the salesman/dancer and did an about face. My friend had a shotgun marriage the following summer to an extremely unsuitable man, had three boys, got divorced, married another man in Montana, who "showered her with diamonds" as my mother never tired of telling me. I graduated.
What could be crazier than life?
Grapeshot
Monday, August 06, 2007
You Can Go Home Again
But it won't be the same. Who the hell are all these old people? What happened? The years roll by. The odd thing is, you put this group back together and pretty soon they all revert to being sixteen again. Sixteen candles.
Denver Art Museum, esp. the new wing by Liebeskind did not disappoint. The locals seemed surprised that it had such a big play in the Eastern Press.
Good Mexican food in Colorado, from Magaritas to well, we never made it to the flan, the main course being so copious, but I know the flan was good.
Denver used to end on the north around Commerce City. Now there are various ugly, gawd, I can't tell you how ugly, subdivisions out in the middle of nowhere--major ticky-tacky. Sucking up all the farmers water. Major interesting sight: the coal trains from Gilette, Wyoming tooling along on the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe tracks heading west. Hugh trains with nothing but coal, 35 per day. Long trains. Get out of the house. Way out of the house. You will see amazing sights.
On the first leg of our flight there was an old man who had sort of lost it. Travelling with his wife who was not up to being his caretaker. After we reached our cruising altitude, as they say, he got up and tried to find the restroom. I kid you not, he was looking to open the aircraft door to go to the john. An alert passenger told the flight attendant. Later, I scrutinized the door and determined that he would not have been able to open, even if he had the strength, which is doubtful. Then he tried to claim S.O.'s suitcase in the aisle. I say when you can't recognize your own suitcase (not even black) maybe it's time to stay home. The Old Folks At Home. Where they belong.
So we saw unexpected sights and ate some amazing food, including lemon pie with (I am not making this up) marshmellow cream instead of meringue as a topping. Well, whatever floats your boat.
In the mail this morning was a "thanks but no thanks" letter from an agent I queried over a year ago. Somehow that "no" is never so painful. Already written off and do you really want an agent who takes a year to get back.
Big exciting idea for new book. I donated a copy of The Shadow Warriors to my old Carnegie Library, where I must have read half their books. Everything from Two Weeks to Guadalcanal Diary. An education to be sure.
I read Furst's The Foreign Correspondent while travelling. Very good. Interesting how he just used the threat of violence to create suspense. Not the usual gory mayhen that one finds in many thrillers.
More, much more, anon.
Grapeshot
Denver Art Museum, esp. the new wing by Liebeskind did not disappoint. The locals seemed surprised that it had such a big play in the Eastern Press.
Good Mexican food in Colorado, from Magaritas to well, we never made it to the flan, the main course being so copious, but I know the flan was good.
Denver used to end on the north around Commerce City. Now there are various ugly, gawd, I can't tell you how ugly, subdivisions out in the middle of nowhere--major ticky-tacky. Sucking up all the farmers water. Major interesting sight: the coal trains from Gilette, Wyoming tooling along on the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe tracks heading west. Hugh trains with nothing but coal, 35 per day. Long trains. Get out of the house. Way out of the house. You will see amazing sights.
On the first leg of our flight there was an old man who had sort of lost it. Travelling with his wife who was not up to being his caretaker. After we reached our cruising altitude, as they say, he got up and tried to find the restroom. I kid you not, he was looking to open the aircraft door to go to the john. An alert passenger told the flight attendant. Later, I scrutinized the door and determined that he would not have been able to open, even if he had the strength, which is doubtful. Then he tried to claim S.O.'s suitcase in the aisle. I say when you can't recognize your own suitcase (not even black) maybe it's time to stay home. The Old Folks At Home. Where they belong.
So we saw unexpected sights and ate some amazing food, including lemon pie with (I am not making this up) marshmellow cream instead of meringue as a topping. Well, whatever floats your boat.
In the mail this morning was a "thanks but no thanks" letter from an agent I queried over a year ago. Somehow that "no" is never so painful. Already written off and do you really want an agent who takes a year to get back.
Big exciting idea for new book. I donated a copy of The Shadow Warriors to my old Carnegie Library, where I must have read half their books. Everything from Two Weeks to Guadalcanal Diary. An education to be sure.
I read Furst's The Foreign Correspondent while travelling. Very good. Interesting how he just used the threat of violence to create suspense. Not the usual gory mayhen that one finds in many thrillers.
More, much more, anon.
Grapeshot
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