thoughts on art and the death of my cousin

by: Norman J. Olson

on April 2, 2017, which was a Sunday, Mary and I caught a flight from MSP to LAX… we arrived at about 3:30 p.m. I had a rental car reserved, so we picked up the car and headed out on the 105… the car was a brand new Hyundai accent with like 1600 miles on it… it is always fun to get a brand new car when renting… and I have always liked Hyundai cars… we owned one about ten years ago and it was a very nice car… the counter guy tried like they always do to convince me that I needed a bigger car, but, I love small cars… I find them easier to drive and park and they use less gas, which on a driving road trip is sort of a big deal to me…

so, we headed east on the 105, north on the 605 and then east again on the 210 until we picked up the 15 north at Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana… then this lovely little car breezed up the mountain, through the Cajon Pass and into Victorville, where we picked up In and Out burgers for the drive… with a quick pit stop at State Line, we made it into Vegas and checked into the California Hotel… I love the drive across the desert and even though we have made it many times, I still love the colors as evening descends and the mountains go from blue to purple and gold… and this time of year, the creosote bush is green so the desert looks very lush in the sunlight with rich black shadows…

we spent two nights at the California and then two more nights at the Orleans Hotel on Tropicana near the strip… we spent a couple of afternoons wandering around some of the big casinos on the Strip first, Mandalay Bay and the next day, the Tropicana and MGM… at the MGM, an audience rating company solicits the gamblers to sit in on cuts from new tv shows and rate what they see… they offer various coupons and in some cases cash for this… we tried to go to one that was offering $50 but we missed that one by a few minutes, but we did sign up for the next one… the way it worked was, we were led by a woman into a room with about twenty small monitors and we each sat in front of one of the monitors… in our hands we had a rating device where we could continuously rate the show we were watching… it was a pretty lame sit-com, so I rated it as pretty crappy all the way… the woman said that the company was just a rating company and had nothing to do with making the actual programs but sent the rating information in statistical form to the production companies that made the shows…

also, while we were at the hotel California, a film crew set up across the street from the hotel in a parking lot where they were filming some kind of night scene… they had a big limo set up with all kinds of lights, reflection screens and cameras and sound equipment… there were a few dozen people busy setting up the equipment, checking the sound and lights etc… next to the set, inside the roped off area, they had tables set up with snacks and people who were not busy were grazing at the snack table… somebody asked one of the guards what they were filming and he said they were filming an Izod commercial and we should be careful not to step on the lizard… so, I have no idea what they were actually filming…

these two events got me thinking about art and how it exists in modern America… like, there are three players in the art game…   1) the talent – writers, directors, artists, actors, etc… who actually create the art… 2) production staff – in the case of film or tv, people like we saw on the set of the filming event or the people who we interacted with at the tv rating service… these are the people who bring the art to the audience… and 3) of course, the audience… the consumer of the art…

in film arts, where there is lots of money passed around and earned, there are lots of people and organizations in the second role, helping the talent make the film and then when the film is made, bringing it to an audience… in fact, there are lots of great stories in rock music about how the talent made a recording that was a hit but the record company got all the money because the band had signed a bad deal… the money comes from the audience but usually goes to the production people who pay the talent more or less depending on “the deal…”

so, as a literary press artist and poet, this paradigm applies differently… first there is no money to attract the promoters and fixers who in the case of Hollywood, put the work in a consumable format and present it to the audience in a palatable and profitable way… so, the poet and literary artist are left with the question of how do they get their work to an audience… now that we have the internet, the internet poetry journals are the vehicle of choice for me… the production people are usually poets and artists who are interested enough in their art to put in the hard work of editing and presenting these on line journals, usually at little pecuniary advance to themselves and often enough with the added annoyance of having to deal with poets and artists who think they are god’s gift to the world and are only poor working class shits because their great genius has not yet been discovered… I want to say, “you have been discovered, dude, but you are a poet not a rock star… there is no fame or fortune here, get used to it!!!!”

in the case of the fine arts which is to say the visual arts, we get production people who run museums of modern art who seem to feel that their job is not to bring art to the people that the people want and need but rather to give art to the people that will in the opinion of the arts people be good for the audience… fine arts artists are educated to take their place in this conceptual art paradigm and so you get all of the silly shit you see at a place like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis… which has a small but very rich and influential audience and brings us crap like Damien Hirst’s pickled cows…

so, the production people are very important as long as their role is to bring art to the audience because it is that interaction between artist and audience that makes true art possible and valuable in the first place… without that interaction, we have artists sitting in their mother’s basement making art that nobody will ever see or we have the puerile intellectual elitism of Damien Hirst and a public aesthetically bereft to the degree that instead of art, they will attempt to get their aesthetic needs met by stupid sit coms… and the antidote to either situation is an audience that demands quality art, artists who make quality art and production people sensitive both to the needs of the audience and the abilities of the artists…

well, on Thursday, we left Las Vegas in the morning and drove again across the beautiful desert… coming across the high desert it was magnificent to see the snow covered peaks of Mt. Baldy to the right and Mt. San Gorgonio in the distance on the left… after all of the dry, desert mountains from Las Vegas to Riverside… we spent four days in Riverside with our amazing grandkids….

then Sunday night, took the red eye from LAX to MSP… arriving in MSP at about 7 a.m… on March 29, one of my many cousins had died and I had hoped to make it home to attend his funeral at 11:00 a.m. on Monday, April 10, which I was able to do… my cousin’s name was Kurt Youngdahl and he died of a massive heart attack at age 60… his funeral was very sad and moving… my older brother, who has been dead for many years now, and I used to babysit for Kurt and his older brother when we were in our early teens… I remember him as a cheerful kid… I know that he had a troubled life, dealing as so many in our family have, with addiction but that he had been sober for the last 6 years of his life…   and had been able to reconnect with his family in his sobriety… I had seen Kurt at a family gathering last summer and had spoken with him at length… so was sad to hear that he had died… on a personal level, this is certainly a reminder to me that we are all living on borrowed time and that we really have to make the most of these few days and hours that are given to us… so, I am recommitted to be thankful every single day for all of the many blessings I have received and continue to receive… I am unbelievably lucky to have my amazing and wonderful wife, children and grandchildren… and to still at age 69 be making art and living what is hopefully a thoughtful and engaged life…

thoughts about art and Las Vegas August 2015

by:  Norman J. Olson

I just got back last night from three days in Las Vegas…  this is our last trip before Mary retires…  and so, we wanted to do something cheap and easy…    we had two free nights at the Orleans Hotel and so Sunday afternoon, we caught a flight to LAS from MSP…   we got to Vegas about 7 p.m. and since cars were pretty cheap, we got a car for the trip…  we stopped in the LAS terminal to book a room that I had found in our favorite downtown hotel, Main Street Station, for $67 that included a ten dollar buffet voucher…

I have written many times about how beautiful Main Street Station is to one like myself who enjoys the eclectic conglomeration of antiques and just plain old stuff, reassembled and repurposed to make this lovely building which is seriously, the most interesting, authentic and beautiful casino in Vegas…   from the Victorian wrought iron and stained glass to the bronze boar on the bar (that was once a piece of public art in Nice, France)  to the bronze doors from the old Royal Bank of Kuwait, this place is just plain a treat for the eyes…  and the buffet is good…  it is not gourmet, but then, neither am I, and the food is very good and plentiful with a most entertaining omelet maker named Manny…  who jokes with the customers, calls everybody “movie star” and deftly flips the omelets ten feet in the air with his frying pan…

so, after the buffet on Monday morning, we decided to see how the other half live and drove over to Cesare’s Palace, still one of the more expensive and fancy places on the strip…  frankly, the casino was not nearly as interesting to see as the one downtown at Main Street Station…  and I had to laugh at the mixture of poorly rendered copies of Greek, Roman and Renaissance statues that they have scattered around to try and create the ambiance of Imperial Rome…  or sort of a Disneyesque cartoon of Imperial Rome…  we toured the casinos in that area and then for the afternoon went to the Orleans and checked in…  it was a bit over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celcius)…  and the pool was still open so I spent some cool refreshing time dipping into the pool and then sitting in the shade reading…  I had two very good books along and I finished one and got a good start on the other over this visit…  I will write more about the books in a bit…

the next day, we had breakfast at the Orleans…  they make a really really good chicken gumbo that they serve for about five bucks for a huge bowl… so, I had gumbo for breakfast…  no wonder my digestion is somewhat ruined!!  then for lunch we visited the buffet at a nice Casino out on Rancho Drive called Texas Station…  Mary likes to play blackjack and the machines there…  as we were leaving, I stopped to watch a crap table where a very entertaining dealer was jawing with one of the customers, and everybody was laughing and having a good time…  a woman next to where I was standing took the dice and started making passes, so I put a few dollars into the game and eventually came out about $8 ahead…  while this woman was shooting, a big heavyset guy with a beard and a shirt that said “thug” came up to the table and started tossing $100 chips on the hard ways and making other long shot bets with hundred dollar (black) chips…   he did not say much but was raking in the stacks of hundreds as he hit his hard ways (pay 8 to 1 or 10 to 1) with hundred dollar bets…  I left the table to go cash in my $8 and was just walking back from the cashier’s cage when I saw this big guy jump up in the air pumping his fist shouting “that’s what I’m talking about”…  this from a guy who had hardly said a word since walking up to the crap table except instructions for his bets…  I walked over to the table and the woman who had been shooting told me that the guy had just made something like $7000 on one roll of the dice on one of his one roll long shot bets…  it was fun to watch the dealers count up the stacks of black chips and hand them over…  too often, the money is going the other way!!!  so, the guy walked away from the table nearly ten thousand dollars up…  for about 15 minutes of playing the game…  a time when I won $8!!!   lol

so, we had another nice night at the Orleans and after another day sitting by the pool, we caught the late afternoon flight back to MSP and got back to Maplewood about one this morning…

really, I spent a lot of time sitting by the pool in the shade reading…  my first book was called Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling…  I have read this before and it is a lovely entertaining bit of history and biography that is so so well written that I am sure that even those only marginally interested in Renaissance art would enjoy it…  the second was a biography of Marcel Duchamp…  an erratic genius and brilliant painter who quit painting for good in 1918 when he was in his late 20s…  his King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes is one of my very favorite paintings and one of the finest works of art from the twentieth or any other century…

doing all this reading about great, brilliant and successful artists got me thinking about my own art, what it is and why I keep doing it…  Michelangelo was a busy professional artist who earned a living, indeed supported his father and several brothers painting and sculpting masterworks for the Catholic church and a few other patrons…  Duchamp gave away his few paintings, or sold them for a pittance…  and made his living doing other things than making art…  finally, he threw a monkey wrench in the whole mechanism of making art in any traditional way by basically inventing conceptional art where art is whatever the aristocratic artist deems art to be…

I do not sell art although, unlike Michelangelo, this is a decision that is as much imposed upon me as chosen by me due to the fact that nobody is calling my art important or clambering to buy it or hire me for a fat purse of gold to make more…   if the pope was calling me up to paint a church ceiling for the kind of money Michelangelo was paid, I would probably take a shot at it…  where, I am confident that Duchamp would not have…  in fact, he turned down many requests for him to make art works…  and as a famous art insider and confidant of the wealthy and powerful art elite, (not to mention as a painter with a rare and wonderful gift) he certainly could have made a lot of money at it…  instead, he spent his time playing chess…  so, he was more of a noncommercial artist than I am…

I have been working all summer on two small paintings…  I am still not satisfied completely with either of them…  and mostly making art that seems to satisfy me is such a struggle that I think that most of what I do with paintings is splash paint around and hope something interesting happens…  back when I could hardly draw at all, I thought I was an immensely talented person, destined to make amazing magical art…  now that I can actually (through years and years of practice) draw pretty well, I think I am a person with no talent whatsoever and that what is of interest in my art is mostly a result of accidents and the only thing I have a talent for is messing up canvasses and finding dead ends…  so, if I were hired to paint a church ceiling, it would probably take me years and wind up a miserable mess that I would have to chisel off the ceiling after all…

but I do admire those creators of immense natural gift, like Michelangelo and Duchamp, and they certainly have set a high bar for any of us who dares to pick up a paint brush and attempt to make art…  I guess I do not know much about art, about why I make it, or about what any of this means…

Las Vegas August 2015

I saw the desert spread out

beneath the wings

of a 737…  vast and golden,

red in the sun…

then stuck in traffic on the North I-15…

later a fat old man

in flowered shorts, I was reading

about Michelangelo and Marcel

Duchamp…  sitting by the pool…

watching the sledge hammer desert sunlight

being deftly flicked away

from the curve of tiny waves on the

tiptoeing surface of aqua-green chlorinated

crystal

water…

a visit to Memphis

By:  norman j. olson

“fame don’t take away the pain / it just pays the bills / and you wind up / on alcohol and pills…”  Todd Snyder

last Friday, we were looking for someplace to go…  it is summer so weekend flights to lots of places are full but we found some open flights from MSP to Memphis…  so, Friday afternoon, we caught a flight to Memphis…  and rented a car… found a cheap hotel…

Saturday morning, we decided to drive to Graceland Mansion, Elvis Presley’s former home which is the main tourist attraction in the area…  so, after driving around the city on the I-40, we found ourselves on Elvis Presley Blvd…  a ramshackle street of used tire shops, closed storefronts and weed grown lots…  across Elvis Presley Blvd. from Graceland Mansion, is a visitor center which consists of several large gift shops, a museum of cars that belonged to Elvis and two large airplanes that also belonged to Elvis…  the actual house across the road is hidden by trees and a curving driveway that goes up a hill…  there are three prices of tours and we opted for the cheapest one ($29 for seniors) which did not include a close up of the cars or the airplanes… but did include an unguided tour of Graceland Mansion and the grounds…

today is Thursday, August 16, 2012, so 35 years ago today, I was driving my 1976 Dodge station wagon on I-494, when I heard a radio news bulletin that Elvis Presely had died…  funny, I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing during most of the big media events of the 20^th Century, but I do remember hearing about Elvis…  so, last Saturday, we arrived at Graceland at the start of what is called among aficionados, “Elvis Week” and which has various concerts and celebrity appearances in a tent set up near the entrance to the visitor center which one could attend for payment of a fee…  events, I think, at which Elvis’s old cronies sit in front of a microphone and reminisce about their days with “The King…”  which seemed to me just a bit beyond morbid curiosity…

anyway, with Elvis Week in full effect, the crowds at the visitor center were still not really large and the parking lot was about 1/2 empty when we got there a bit before noon…  so we waited in line for the shuttle bus that would take us through the famous music note gates across the street and up to Graceland…  the mansion itself is not really imposing but more a big 1960’s style house than a real mansion…  later we learned that Elvis also had a real Mansion in the Los Angeles area someplace…  the tour through the house only takes a few minutes and thankfully includes only the downstairs and not the upstairs bathroom where the poor guy breathed his last, evidently overcome by a pill induced heart attack while trying to take a shit…

still, the cameras were clicking around us nonstop…  it was fun to see the living room with its 50s fancy dancy furniture…  I can remember when the big Magnovox “color” tv was a luxury undreamed of by my proletarian peers… and a 15 foot long white couch…  oh la la…  the kitchen is larger than in the ordinary house of my youth, but not huge and with two refrigerators, one almond and one avocado…  and Formica counter…  with a black and white tv, what we used to call a “portable tv” at the end of the room…  well, it was not opulent by any standards…  at the back of the house is a large rec room that Elvis added in the 1970s full of green shag carpet and that clunky wood furniture that we all had in those days…  well, for me, the house was a time machine…  I remember that furniture and style…  the basement was “professionally decorated” with a yellow and black design painted on the block walls…  in the 1960s, I lived in my parents basement and painting the block walls seemed to us the height of sophisticated city living…  back home on the farm, a basement was a dirt cellar for storing vegetables and canned goods…

so, it was kind of funny in the sense of unexpected, as I had expected not to be moved at all by visiting this shrine to Elvis, I found it very moving to see the things a poor boy got rich would have spent his money on in those days…  namely a 15 foot white couch and later a room full of shag carpet…  behind the house were horse pastures and outbuildings with white painted fences…  inside and out, though nice, the house was in every way modest…  but, two of the buildings behind the house were designated as trophy rooms, an old pool house (there was a small kidney shaped pool) and racquetball court that Elvis built…  and a walk through these rooms was not only a ride on a time machine for me, seeing all the old album covers and vinyl records…  but it was impressive…  really impressive to see what this man had accomplished in his short 42 years on earth…  how many musicians have one “gold record??”  Elvis had dozens…  the walls of a long room are lined with them and many many other awards, just about any award a musician of his era could have earned for record sales…  in his lifetime he sold a hell of a lot of recordings and the young men and women who were boogying to Elvis back in the 50s and 60s, and who were growing old while he wasted his time on idiotic movies and growing fat while Elvis grew fat in Las Vegas put their money on the line and bought the music…

well, at the side of the house beyond the little swimming pool is the place where Elvis is buried…  due to it being Elvis week, I suppose, there were piles of garish home made wreaths and memorials…  around the oblong brass plaque under which he presumably lies…  kind of sad and pathetic, I guess…  like the whole place…  I sat and made some drawings of the visitors and then left to go eat barbeque on Beale street and visit the Gibson guitar factory…  I played a three thousand dollar guitar that sounded almost as good as my old 1966 Gibson LG 1 (that I bought from a coworker in 1969)…  then in the late afternoon, listening to a very good blues band in a small outdoor market, I made a few more drawings…  then back to the hotel…

I am not sure what to make of Elvis…  I have always sort of liked his music in spite of myself…  and thought he had a very beautiful singing voice…  early and late in his career…  his charisma must be unquestioned as his singing and dancing certainly gave everyone, especially screaming hordes of females, a thrill…  back when I was a kid, I had the old pre-Beatle duck bill pompadour haircut, so I can relate to his style in those days, and I can remember the excitement of hearing a song like King Creole, back in 1957 when I was used to Perry Como or some lame ass crooner…  on the old radio in the barn…  at age 9…  still, the music was pretty shallow, compared to where pop music went later with ragged hard edged poetry of a Kurt Cobain, for example…  and his acting career, after a promising start with Love Me Tender, is a farcical footnote in cinematic history…  will he still be remembered when the last of his old time fans dies off, when there are no good old boys left to reminisce during Elvis Week???  well, who knows…

his rags to riches story, born in a shotgun house in Tupelo, is certainly the American dream… who after all does not crave a 15 foot white couch??  and his addiction to drugs (mostly speed and other prescription pills) and early death from that addiction as well as from, perhaps eating a pound of bacon a day…  well, his life certainly was quintessentially American…  as we are a fat, unhealthy, wealth and drug obsessed people…  American men are like Elvis, the boy child who never grows up…  dreams of eating pounds of bacon and has all the fantasies that Elvis lived out, a horse with a fancy saddle to ride, success and fame, 14 year old girls named Priscilla to fall in love with, three tvs and a fancy record player, a pool table to hang around with your friends, pills to make everything seem nice and fuzzy and, and a 15 foot white couch!!!  as I said, I am not sure quite what to make of Elvis but, I like the fact that Graceland is a shrine to an artist and not to some general or politician and I find it sort of interesting that in the past year, I have visited the homes of arguably the two most famous artists of the 20^th Century, Elvis Presley and Picasso…  hmmmm

Sunday morning, on the way to the airport, we stopped at the hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered…  the area now includes a large civil rights museum and preserves the very site where Dr. King was assassinated…  I found this just overwhelmingly sad…  and this unhappy display shows, I guess what happens if an American starts talking about peace, equality and human rights and promotes peaceful non violent solutions to personal, national, international and political problems…  in our gun totin’ race hating country them’s fightin words and whether your name is John Lennon or Martin Luther King some idiot with a gun will find a way to shut you up…

well, we flew back to MSP on Sunday arriving in time for Mary’s book club meeting…  I bought a delicious barbeque sandwich to eat on the plane which turned me into one sticky human being, but it was very delicious…  and to my surprise and delight, I did not spill the barbeque sauce on myself or my fellow passengers…  I had forgotten to get a spoon so, wound up scooping the coleslaw out with the cover of the plastic bowl it came in…  yum…  I found the trip very moving and thought provoking…  and I am not sure why…

incident in Memphis

sitting outside

in a warm shady breeze

on the patio of McDonalds,

sipping a diet coke, I asked the

server about her tattoos…

she was very young, maybe twenty, and

looked hard and sad with

pretty gray eyes…  I saw

the green wall

of brush along Thresher Creek…  sparrows

darting in and out…

and cars coming by

like giant turbo charged insects…

milky sunlight fell to the ground

like old vinyl records and the

breeze whispered

that music, peace and nonviolence may

still be possible in this nation in

spite of

or maybe because of,

the skinny tattooed arms

of a young server girl

with pretty sad

old eyes…