Touchstones - Nelson
Take the daughter to the local museum. Nelson. Touchstones. Most of the other museums aren't open yet, we've been to Creston (closed), to The Meadows (closed), to Salmo (closed), in the off season nobody wants to open.
The closed galleries, looking through the windows, our breath fogging the glass, everything we (I) want to know is inside...
We go to Touchstones, Nelson. They're always (I think) open. The gift shop, amusing, for a minute.
The History museum, upstairs, always the same, always interesting...
Some Native artifacts, pestle, fishing weights, baskets...
More native artifacts, arrowheads, spearheads, flints, an Iron hammer...
A pair of Antique women's skates. I rather like the fashion, women's skates now are all painted white, these are infinitely cooler...
And, without a doubt my favorite item, an old icon found in the Slocan Valley when they were felling trees, it was hammered to a tree by some well meaning missionaries for the Natives to worship, estimated around 1830 or 1840...
The daughter feigns interest.
Then into the main exhibit. Edge of the Light, Tanya Pixie Johnson.
It's completely my thing. Mixed media, found objects, artifacts...and everywhere the "no photography" icon. There's no one patrolling, nobody would probably care, I doubt even the artist would care, but out of respect (abiding laws I disagree with) - I'll refrain from sharing pictures and instead describe some of the art:
Antique photographs, Victorian, with spring eyes and buttons protruding, drawn and etched upon, altered, statues - abstract, combinations of antique handles, knobs, taps, cameras, horns, square nails, the miscellany of garbage finds while out metal detecting arranged into - well, more ornate abstractions that somehow engage you, old jars filled with ... (I don't remember, moss? Lichen?), all bound together with twigs, stones, nails...
Dolls, old and creepy, paint peeling and flaking off their faces, filled with clockwork gears, the Brother's Quay comes to mind (and hers, I'm sure), halo's and auras of twigs, bodies of cheap plastic, the limbs amputated and used repurposed in other sculptures, the Virgin Mary, carved out of wood, old postcards replace the face, in simple frames that somehow lend a spirituality to her ideas...
Old books, opened, elaborated upon, drawn, annotated, doodled, shadow boxes of carefully cut out papers, it continues...
...fur dolls, coyote, dogs, other skulls for the head, stitched fur bodies, other found objects...
The daughter pays attention. She knows this, knows my apartment, jeep, house, the hundreds of places I've lived overflowing with junk, guesses now at my intentions...
Nothing I'd buy, I have all of this, can find all of this, will find - the rest of this, and my assemblages, while tangent, would not be precisely the same. But I'm impressed nonetheless, she's definitely on my page...
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Killed By Police
It came to mind that I hadn't read of or seen anything about police shootings of unarmed black men recently in the paper. And I grew curious, I mean, in 2016 you couldn't go a week without hearing something, "Black Lives Matter", there were the disturbing videos live-streamed to Facebook, the US was at war.
But 2017 was different. There were no killings, that I could recollect, in the past few months, and I tried to fix a date upon when this sea-change happened...
Micah Xavier Johnson. The 2016 Dallas Police Shootings. The Wikipedia, Ambush - Fair enough, but they were armed, which is more than you can say about the 102 unarmed black people shot in 2015.
For a moment I thought that maybe he'd effected a difference, that somehow his pushing back made the police realize they couldn't continue this without the expectation of reasonable repercussions. For a moment. But a little further digging and I was disappointed...
Links:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2017/
- http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2015.html
Sea-Change, See-Change, and I'm wondering if the under-reportage now is to protect the police, or because Dumbo has all the press...
Key Findings:
Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week. (See which police departments were responsible for these deaths)
Nearly 1 in 3 black people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though the actual number is likely higher due to under-reporting
37% of unarmed people killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only 13% of the U.S. population
Unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015
Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in officer(s) being charged with a crime, and only 2 of these deaths (Matthew Ajibade and Eric Harris) resulted in convictions of officers involved. Only 1 of 2 officers convicted for their involvement in Matthew Ajibade's death received jail time. He was sentenced to 1 year in jail and allowed to serve this time exclusively on weekends. Deputy Bates, who killed Eric Harris, will be sentenced May 31.
(from: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/)
In any event, there will come a time when he's seen as a hero, the one who pushed back and was the first to fight for justice and change, and his statue - with a rifle, will adorn the police station. Which is as it should be, only that time should be now...
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Deep Dreaming Bob Ross
"This artwork represents what it would be like for an AI to watch Bob Ross on LSD (once someone invents digital drugs). It shows some of the unreasonable effectiveness and strange inner workings of deep learning systems. The unique characteristics of the human voice is learned and generated as well as hallucinations of a system trying to find images which are not there."
{embed:vimeo:211758157}
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Google Maps
Recently Google Maps updated it's maps with new imagery, removing all those areas obfuscated by cloud cover. Presumably they didn't map Skull Island because it's perpetually shrouded by clouds, but wherever a clear image existed it replaced one with clouds, allowing you to view a (presumably) sunnier world.
Which explains the curious patchwork of winter and clouds I found in this image:
The couldn't get all the clouds (Maybe THAT's where King Kong is living), but they got some. Note the curious squares of winter...
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