Boston by Boat

House Sitting

Stopped in to pick up the key to do a little house-sitting while Zach and Tripp's latest band, Bongo Fury, takes off on a whirlwind tour through Arizona and Los Angeles this weekend.  If you kids are reading this from the road, rest assured that the mobile meth lab will be moved out by the time you all get home.  And it really surprised me how well bleach works on blood stains.    

It's plastic.

Laundry, 7-11, and the most righteous sunglasses ever produced.

Tripp putting decorative inserts into CD jewel boxes.

Bye guys.  I left the oven burners on so nothing would freeze while you're away.

Coming to New York City, July 28-31, 2008

Just beginning the process of setting up meetings, but the flights are booked and the couch is arranged (thanks, Krisanne).  

Fourth of July: Fireworks

Each year Denver musician Zach Spencer has a small party at his parent's house up in the mountain town of Idaho Springs.  It's the second year that I've attended and, hopefully, not the last.  The party kind of divides itself into two natural pieces: the BBQ at the house and then the fireworks that follow.  And the fireworks are something spectacular.  While most of the town watches the fireworks from across the valley, a few dozen people in the know take the dirt road leading right behind where the local fire department is setting them off.  

This year, however, the department was ready, stopping people who came up the road and turning them around.

No worries, though.  Double back, park at the bottom of the hill and walk up a hidden little trail to a vacant church that sits on the hillside just yards from the action.  Hands down the best way to see a fireworks show and, after the chunks of spent pyrotechnics came crashing down onto us, the most interactive way to see one as well.

Fourth of July: Food

This is not the first time I've done this, just the first time I've shown my food infatuation in public.  Bratwurst and  brownies (which, according to His Holiness The Dali Michael Rubenstein, apparently looks like a slab of steak), ice cream with all the toppings, beer through a straw, and a Purple Pomeranian-eater.  Could there be a more visual expression of Independence Day? 

Fourth of July: The Ghost of Fourth Past

Polaroids of Zach Spencer's Fourth of July Party, 2007.

Nonsensical

Sorry for the break in posts.  After all the cat craziness, Blogger locked the blog up.  Apparently their crack team of rocket surgeons flagged it as a spam blog.  The pertinent description of this type of blog being none other than one which can be "recognised [sic] by their irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical text."

How flattering.

Thursday Night, Denver.

The Fourth of July pushed the Friday art openings to Thursday. Stopped by Tripp's house before heading off to Rhinoceropolis to catch musician and photographer Sean Chisholm's opening. Tripp, another Denver musician with an interesting and diverse musical background, stands under a photograph of an ICBM lecturing on wisdom and age, pushing his coffee cup forward to accentuate each point for rhetorical staccato.

Sean at his opening. Complete with sod laid in the middle of the gallery space.

Look out, L.A. Rumor has it he's headed your way.

Seriously.

Almost Timberline, Roadside Memorial.

[Notes driving home from a wonderful alpine assignment for The Wall Street Journal over the weekend]

Somewhere midway up the pass, it's pretty obvious that someone has died.  The colorful, plastic flowers and hanging cloth butterflies pop like fireworks in the dark, dark eve below the forest canopy that is below the greater canopy of summer clouds touching the mountain at timberline.  A worn bench sits next to the flowers and the fantastic power of nature is nowhere more clearly present than at these high points where her patient hand grinds the peaks to flat one grain at a time.  The wide, mountain valley that opens up below tells that tale, the unhurried river is always a skillful and slow surgeon cutting in painless increments imperceptible to the mountain as it is to the people that call it home.  The order of her work somehow only obvious at a distance, the cuts of the valley, the oxbow run straight leaving the elbow of the flow aside, nothing but stagnant water until it also fills in.  These are the places where the concept of winning and losing are a foreign language, everything in it's own way part of a greater.  The rocks wear smooth quietly in the stream in which I have rolled up my pants to fish and the mosquitos remind me in their tiny sorties that the big battles are nothing but a sum of smaller motions.