My kid could carve that

Thanks, Barbara, for telling me to watch “My Kid Could Paint That”. The emphasis in saying it outloud is on Kid, as if in mocking modern art. I don’t like getting involved in things that don’t have a clear ending. This one certainly didn’t have a clear ending. After the film I had to watch a special feature made a few months after the finishing of the film which further muddled things for me. I need to have an opinion. My only firm opinion is that the filmmaker did and honest and painful job of making the documentary and suffered emotionally for it. The indecision I feel about attributing Marla’s art to her alone makes me want to watch the film again with running commentary by an artist but I’m afraid I still won’t know truth. The question and answer period toward the end of the special feature had one person asking the question I had. This was :Why does the picture Marla was filmed creating looks different in style and composition from many of the others? One artist said artists just have different moods and intentions. This didn’t satisfy me. The whole experience reminded me a little of reading Into The Wild by Krakauer. We feel a need to judge firmly and finally in that book whether Alexander Supertramp was stupid, suicidal or a tragic hero. The real story was in identifying with his experience without judging. I can’t quite identify with Marla’s art but I think I’ll go out and buy a bunch of tubes of paint and get started. Maybe not just my kids but I, myself, could paint that.

Saturday night was the full moon, a big one.  The sky was clear at sunset and as I drove to the grocery store I saw it coming up over Towhead peak.  It startled me when I realized what it was.  I thought it was a street light or a car sitting in the trees with its headlights pointing at me or a jetliner coming in for a landing on Main Street only it was bigger and brighter than any of those.  The ski club’s moonlight party was scheduled for 10 pm but I doubted more than a couple of people would show up.  It was 17 degrees and falling.  I got my yogurt and frozen dinners and bundled up for the outing and went to the parking lot.  I was early because I thought I might as well get it over and go to bed since no one was coming.  The lot was empty at the driving range where we begin grooming the 4 1/2 mile track but before I got my skis on a couple showed up in a jeep with their skating skis.  There can’t be more than half a dozen pairs of skating skis in this town and now half of them were here.  I brought a headlamp and turned it on but it wasn’t to see anything, it was so people could see me from a few hundred yards away, maybe so they could see how fast I was going, zipping along in the night that was bright enough to see all the shadows of the marks left by skis but not bright enough to tell if a person an eighth of a mile away was me or just a bush.  I did a half mile warm up and came back to find cars starting to arrive.  At ten o’clock we had more than a dozen people tramping around the golf course.  Some had scarves covering their faces but most of them have lived here long enough that they don’t feel the cold the way I do.  My month long growth of beard was worth the itching.  We all went up to the higher part of the track on the hill and scattered according to our abilities.  After an hour I went to the truck where I’d left a gallon thermos of hot water and some powdered hot chocolate.  As the others came down they had a cup and some cookies brought by another club member.  The moon had done its part and now the clouds did theirs by coming in just thick enough to warm the night about 5 degrees but thin enough to leave the ground bright.  It was a thoroughly distracting evening.  What I was distracted from was a lesson I should have prepared for the 9 am teachers quorum.  In the morning, after too little sleep, all I could come up with besides reading the manual was a picture I found in a box of pictures from my father’s house.  It was of my parents, my brother, and me as a baby, sitting in deck chairs on the Queen Mary in June of 1949, coming to America from England.  I passed it around to the 14 and 15 year olds and got nearly no reaction to something I thought was the coolest picture around.  It had no relevance, of course, to the lesson.  I was just stalling.  On another occasion, during a lesson on obedience, I passed around a picture of me lying on the ground as a nearly 10 year old, covered with blood and surrounded by paramedics, police, parents, and horrified onlookers.  It was after I broke my leg.  That picture got a much more satisfying reaction from the group.  “This is what happens when you disobey your father when he tells you to stay on the trail.”   I still need ideas for next week’s lesson