being in banff...

Pictures: Roadside view from on the way to the Columbia Ice fields; 3 images from Castle Mtn., Rockbound Lake Hike with Scott Dorman, Susan Bowman and Charles Tucker; 2 images of My Studio at the Banff Centre

At the halfway point. The clock is ticking.

How do I explain this place to you? A brilliant idea I must admit. Whoever thought to put so many creative people into a single place and then to fund it, brilliant. It allows for a focusing on work that other places and spaces don’t quite. No worries about food. A forced separation from the concerns of real life. A complete freedom from stress. No need to think really except about work. Jazz in the evenings and places to walk, hike, think, be alive.

First one must find a rhythm. Get up. Get coffee. To the studio. Decide what must be done today. Set goals. Make plans. Mid-afternoon, a break please. The only danger, too much time to think. Affairs blossom like mushroom spores here. The waiters will tell you, “Don’t you know what this place is known for?” A bit of drama, a thrill to push the blood and make sure we remember we’re the passionate ones. I’m in luck. I brought mine with me. (A smile here).

In my studio, a fairly square room with white walls. In our room, beige. One big bed and maid service. Meals in the Dinning Hall remind me of the assisted living place my mother spent her last months. Dinner is too early. Meals at set times. The food, well above average, never-the-less becomes routine.

The jazz and the players. All young, earnest, sweaty palms and false bravado. I know their names. They don’t know mine. Beautiful, talented. I long for my youth and the possibilities of naïveté.

The land takes your breath away. It is almost, on the edge of, sublime. The sun is like Miami but the wind is its own thing. Yesterday we climbed a mountain.

driving...

Driving. I’ve done a lot of it over my life. As a small child my mother would take my sister and me every summer to visit her family in North Carolina. With the roads as they were at the time… all crooked and twisting… it was nine hours one way there. I would lay in one of the back wells of the floorboard, curled against the warm machine… or even dangerously in the back window or more mundanely asleep on the back sit and I would fantasize about traveling someplace that would present me with a new life filled with people like me.

When I first moved away from home at 17 to go to college, I would drive the hour and fifteen minutes almost every weekend to see my parents. At the time it seemed long and somewhat daunting to travel so far alone. My solitary expeditions have, however, over the years increased in their duration and they’ve come to perform a function; enforced solitude, more than a moment alone with my thoughts. Providing in a way that laying in bed or being alone in a room isn’t able to fulfill. To be a car, or on train, or even in an airport and there’s no turning back and no easy means of contact with those I know, forces me into deep thought, to consider with an awake mind those topics I imagine getting around to but never quite making it. It becomes thinking for the sake of thinking, unrecorded, maybe to inform later, maybe not. It is solitary and meditative in a way that one doesn’t often have the luxury of. There is no guilt for this self-indulgent activity – it is driving, taking me somewhere.

My most recent venture was traveling between Cleveland, Ohio, USA to Banff, Alberta, Canada. 32 hours total drive time. I always wanted to drive cross-country just to see what was there. Two nights on a road where the pattern of all my travels becomes apparent – the substance of transitive space - a litany of non-descript restrooms and hotel beds, gas stations, quick stops, rest areas … this one preferable to others, this one less so… but all quickly forgotten. I am the driver moving from one neutral zone to the next. In the in-between I stare out the windows and construct narratives about the land and homes; narratives almost as fugitive as the alizarin sky of the setting sun.

Random thoughts while driving:

There is a division in the world between the educated (in a true sense of the word) and the uneducated; between the rural and the cosmopolitan; between the interior and the exterior. Politicians become their own separate class of personal compromise. The ends justify the means – whatever those ends may be.

Training vs. education

The nature of community and responsibility – often those – artists and politicians alike, who speak most emphatically about these topics, practice the most self-indulgence and will not claim the consequences which resonant from their actions. The ends of greatest commitment seem to be those of the self.

The land… how does one talk about the land? Through farms it is apparent… here too as much human as nature. Through the plains vastness and expansive skies, rain falling a distant massive wet billowing curtain arching in the wind.

Alone – one is never alone – the interior witness is always there and speakin

worth a thousand words...

Pictured, but not necessarily in this order: Roadside walk (trees); a hotel room in Wisconsin; Car steering wheel; Waking up in Minot, ND (Iphone self-port.); Roadside restroom in ND; Storm coming across Canadian Plains; Canada, Salt? or is it sand from car window (two pictures); Me driving; Canadian Plains; Road Heading West; Tunnel Mountain path; Scott Dorman (Scientist and Chuck's childhood friend); View from Tunnel Mountain; Mountain view from Banff.

We're all working on our work but since I've arrived we (Amanda Almon, Charles Tucker, Scott Dorman and me - lane cooper) took time out to see a stage production, jazz, and hike up Tunnel Mountain.

a new blog...

It occurred to me that I live a very different life than I once imagined, or maybe it's very like I imagined... At any rate, I go places and hope to go more. I find myself documenting these travels and in the course of them ruminating on various and sundry topics. I like the ether. It gives me a place to put things and I don't mind if you look over my shoulder.

My most recent travels include a last minute trip to New York and a drive across the continent from Cleveland, OH to Banff, Alberta, Canada, where I'm participating in an artist's residency. Also on location are three of my colleagues who also happen to be my friends and in one case my partner: Charles Tucker; Saul Ostrow and Amanda Almon. I will spend the next couple of days writing about that drive west and my impressions of the place I am in right now.

The images on this post are of my last trip to New York. I've been going there a lot over the past year. I'm trying to conquer my own demons and claim a place for myself. It's a source of great pride for me that I'm comfortable traveling alone. That's not to say I don't very much enjoy traveling with companions but there is a certain freedom and sense of accomplishment when one gets there alone. I become my own companion and I end up photographing my travels as if I were a tourist in my own life.