Friday's weather: in Denver, dry and warm around 87; clear skies a little sooty in the morning but mountains clearly visible at sunset, going down to 60 tonight. Open windows night.
Friday's drink: Big Horn Blonde, 25 oz.
Friday's artist: video artist Bjorn Melhus. His website is crappy, and you have to really hunt for coverage of him. Check him out.
Friday night, 8:30pm Mountain Time. I'm in the Overlook Hotel.
OK, not really. I'm in the Savannah Suites hotel in Westminster, Colorado: a long strip mall that calls itself a town. With perfect green grass. We're right across the street from Avaya headquarters, in a building that could easily substitute for SkyNet headquarters.
This hotel, ahem, is but four months old say the staff. I think that's even pushing it. The entire place smells of fake Orange disinfectant. Yet, strangely, that's not what disturbs me tonight. You see, I'm the last one. The only one left.
Seriously: several members of the staff, seeing me bundle my dirty clothes to and from the wash area today, commented along the lines of: "Wow, I didn't know anyone was left! I thought the place was completely empty!"
Turns out it is. The hotel is completely empty, save for me. I could go naked bowling down the big hallway and no-one would be the wiser. Save the creepy hotel ghosts that hang out in the hallways.
Tomorrow I, like most of my colleagues today, head to Minneapolis. It's been a full week in Denver. Today was my first break in about 2 weeks. (boo-hoo.) I spent much of the day in downtown Denver - a significant chunk of that at the Denver Art Museum. A sidenote on Denver: it seems a town that gets the idea of civic space, planning and investment. I can't really say much having been here a week - and not even in the town for most of that - but I'm impressed.
The DAM features a slick and menacing new Libeskind gallery that every up-and-coming city wants:
a slick, weird, assault of a building that commands attention to itself above any sense of it's place. A building so out of human sense (standing on the fourth floor balcony and looking out over the cacophonous atrium is enough to induce serious vertigo) that being inside or anywhere near it diverts all attention from anything except the massive polished steel cuckoo-house that calls itself post-modern.
I went through a preview of the newly acquired Clyfford Still collection, which was intriguing, and the modern collection, which was provocative, as much modern art is. It was refreshing, but not nearly as much as the brief but encompassing exhibit of native Northwest Kwakwaka'wakw creations such as masks, house posts, massive story poles and more. The fragrance of old wood and fur and leather, mingling with the appropriate lighting and sounds of the Pacific Northwest were enough to transport me to a place I've never been to.
But I've been to Minneapolis, which is where my mind's eye is fixed now. Half way through a two week roadtrip, doing my thing all by myself, alone, on the road. I feel like I should go have some rough trucker sex.
No, I don't. But I do feel alone. Alone at work - where people either don't get what I'm doing, resent me for doing it, or feel they need to muck about and change it to their, i.e., 1973, tastes. Look at me now: I produce, shoot, host, edit and post-produce the whole shebang. It's too much. Or I'm not enough.
For those of you asking: my father has apparently returned home. I'm not inquiring more than that, as I am mostly unconnected other than that. C is well and I miss him, and I'm missing my close friends lately, also. Therapy has succeeded in what I set at it: melting the ice I stand on so I can access my past. Unfortunately, when ice melts it does so unevenly, and occasionally a foot pokes through the ice into the lake beneath at the wrong moment (work, gym, etc.) I'm hunting for a temporary shelter - a sanctuary where I can go to fall through the ice in safety.
I suppose I should put something in here about the week in Denver. What can I say? I'm immune to sweeping spectacle. More accurately: I distrust it in the realm of politics. I remember 1991 when EVERYONE supported the Gulf War (no they didn't.) I remember October 2001 when EVERYONE supported the Afghan War (not really.) And 2003? Forget it: it was show and stage and prodding the public in obvious but effective ways that before we knew it, we were at war.
I guess my take-away is that things can change for the better, and the government run by people who believe in its uses is much preferable to government run by people who hate it. But tempering that: a sense that many of us, again, are being swept up in something not of our making. Something that plays on our better angels, but that seeks merely it's own victory. All of us who were swept up in 1991, in 2001, and on: we bear some responsibility, also. In the end we always know we're being swept away by something: we go with it when it comports with our ideals and fight against it when it doesn't, but we go with it. But 'it' is not us. 'It' is not our ideals or aspirations: it is only a path to power.
So my thought as I sit, alone, in an empty hotel, ready to leave for another week of this is: we owe it to our nation to always examine, critically, those big things we feel to be right. After all, there is no harm that can come of it. Goodness welcomes good thinking.
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