JANUSZCZAK SHOWS US HOW WE ROLL

Whatever "The Bone Chalice" has turned into lately, it's still alive.  Originally it was meant to be how a worship service can truly become a sacred event: what happens in the human embodiment and how to call it out.  It's still that, but also responds to the recovery of the whole human as a thinking entity, the cutting edge research on neurology, our new understanding of deep space and infinite history, and a lot of other things.  It reduces humans to flecks on the eternal windshield, and does not promise eternal life but rather immortal participation as each of us bridges the past to the future.

So here's my latest discovery, of all things a Polish art historian who works in video and is on You Tube.  Nothing to read.  A name as hard to pronounce as to spell.  Waldemar Januszczak.  Nothing like the prissy English nuns with bad teeth we've seen before.  This link is an excellent introduction to him as well as why I think he's a good thinking and looking guide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Me-FawcHrG4

Turkmenistan was a new country when the USSR disintegrated.  (-istan means country, not what kids say.)  In it is "The Darvaza gas crater, known locally as the Door to Hell or Gates of Hell, is a natural gas field collapsed into an underground cavern located in Derweze, Turkmenistan. Geologists intentionally set it on fire to prevent the spread of methane gas, and it is thought to have been burning continuously since 1971."  It's impressively spectacular and a nice metaphor for our current feeling that we are standing on the lip of the apocalypse.  Waldemar is not intimidated.  Just fascinated.

I found Waldemar through Acorn.com, which is a streaming service that offers BBC movies.  I'd run out of murder mysteries and they were pushing two 3-part art series, which turned out to be about much more than just art, particularly in terms of how major cultural movements form and what impact they express through art, architecture, and other forms of creation, all European and tracking through the newly developing "nations" that developed out of kingdoms.

Here's the trailer:  https://acorn.tv/baroque/trailer/

Holding up two pearls, one the smooth sphere so admired and the other a misshapen, bulgy, deformed baroque pearl some of us love.  The latter is the source of our art term, which is meant to grab our attention after the smooth circles of the previous art aesthetic, the Greek perfectionist versions called Mannerist.

"Art critic Waldemar Januszczak follows the trajectory of baroque from its beginnings as a Vatican-sanctioned religious art style to its ascendance as the first global art movement in this fascinating documentary about an often-misunderstood artistic movement."  He sees much as push-back from the effort to reform rotten Catholocism.  Protestant, if you like.  His title for the three baroque films is "From St. Peters to St. Paul", one cathedral in Rome and the other in England.  Travel/pilgrimage is a theme and our stocky guide with his peculiar buzzcut and homemade pilgrim's staff leads his plucky cameraman swiftly along the path, stumping along in his nearly bow-legged determination.

"In Rococo before Bedtime, art critic Waldemar Januszczak pulls back the gilded facade of rococo to reveal the deep imprint it left on politics, culture, religion, and even America's Declaration of Independence."   Now travel persists, but pleasure becomes luxury, and eventually all the excess leads to madness.  Now we're looking at Trump's demented faces.

Below some quick review from whoever it was who wrote these entries on Wikipedia.  (There are no Wikileaks in these vids.)

"The Baroque is a highly ornate and often extravagant style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century. It followed Renaissance art and Mannerism and preceded the Rococo and Neoclassical styles." 

"This notion of "bella maniera" suggests that artists who were thus inspired looked to copying and bettering their predecessors, rather than confronting nature directly. In essence, "bella maniera" utilized the best from a number of source materials, synthesizing it into something new."  Boring.

"By the end of the High Renaissance, young artists experienced a crisis: it seemed that everything that could be achieved was already achieved. No more difficulties, technical or otherwise, remained to be solved. The detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, the innovative use of the human form in figurative composition, the use of the subtle gradation of tone, all had reached near perfection."   

We know this attitude.  Did you read "The End of History?"

"The later Michelangelo was one of the great role models of Mannerism.  Young artists broke in to his house and stole drawings from him. In his book Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari noted that Michelangelo stated once: "Those who are followers can never pass by whom they follow". But it was time to punk all that grandiosity and domination.  

"In past analyses, it has been noted that mannerism arose in the early 16th century contemporaneously with a number of other social, scientific, religious and political movements such as the Copernican model, the Sack of Rome, and the Protestant Reformation's increasing challenge to the power of the Catholic Church." 

So the social sea changes in the English-speaking Empire-based world go back and forth between frozen status quo based on domination -- if necessary by force, -- and an almost manic freedom of re-ordering and challenge.  Corruption is often the symptom of the first and driver of the second.  We are on the cusp right now.  Sublime scenery of Bierstadt on the one hand and the wild graffiti of Basquiat on the other.  (He died of a heroin overdose in 1988.)

This time the change is bigger than the Aquarian Age, maybe bigger than the Independence of Nations, the abandoning of Empire.  The life of the planet and everything on it is at stake.  Someone is painting, someone is building, someone is composing, everyone is watching.  Someone is going mad, like George III.

YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW

Paying for groceries at the little Mom and Pop store, I saw two young men walk by. They were not from here. They seemed to answer the description of two murderers who made a getaway from Edmonton and were said to be anywhere.  The young clerk said they seemed odd.  

At the post office was a car, packed to the gills with clothes and household goods, with a bad license, dark green with a teal front right fender.  Inside the post office the postmaster was on the phone with some supervisor trying to figure out what the vehicle meant and what to do about it.  The post office parking lot is on technically federal land, but the FBI is busy. The sheriff stiffed her.  We seem to have gone from a vulgarian who talked tough and did little to a nice man who talks nice and does little.

At home the cat had lost her newborn kittens and searched and grieved all night, so I got little sleep.  Up at 6:00 AM anyway, I've been glued to the Mueller hearings all day.  I've been following the Rachel Maddow reports all these months.  A resourceful personality from New Hampshire who likes to fish and research history wouldn't seem likely to have for a fan a cranky old Montana writer, but there you go.  I follow Twitter quite a lot.

Today Epstein was found curled on the floor of his cell with red marks on his neck.  Three theories: he attempted suicide, he made the marks to invite sympathy and possibly bail, a murderer attacked him.  The name and history of the murderer was in the story.  I thought Epstein was in solitary confinement.  Now he's on suicide watch.  I assume that includes murder watch.

The man on Twitter who is following Trump's dementia points out new symptoms: protruding tongue, uncontrolled rage, and what most people are interpreting as lying, though they are really psychotic ideas about an imaginary world where he is the King.  Several possibly related overseas arrests have  been made.  The Trump business, Trump himself, and his two older children had sued to prevent a civil lawsuit against them for deceptive business practices.  The judge announced today he will allow the case to proceed.  Eight minutes after the end of the hearings, Trump's lawyers sued to prevent the release of his NY income taxes.  Haven't heard a date for the hearing yet.

Two big patterns have seized the imaginations of the media, who must write fast and are too young mostly to have many other ways of coping.  One is the idea that this is a fight to the finish in the binary way of literature and cage fights between the Dems and the Repubs,.  This entirely blocks out the idea of a body of people who are Independent and could even be interpreted as a third party, one that may be crucial to any election.  Unorganized. Unpredictable. Uncontrollable.  Invisible to the media.

Another group everyone refrains from mentioning is the Mafia, which we are now assured (briefly, by those who dare) is mainly Russian.  Mueller barely mentioned the criminal money stuff, laundering and deception, failure to report and so on.  He concentrated on the issues relevant to impeachment, mostly collusion with Russia and the invasion of our election by several countries.  

The sex trafficking is not the usual distraction at the moment.  I fear that Americans just don't consider sex to be a bad thing, even if it's forced.  They pretend, and use the stigma, but have fantasies about the Mar-a-Lago parties even though their horizon is basically a reclining armchair in front of a very big TV screen.  I mean, if someone dropped them into one of those glittering shin-digs, they wouldn't know what to do -- and neither would I.  

Morality, rather likewise, is just a bother.  "Law" is only another game.  But decades of heroic men, now frankly right out of the comic books and with the occasional token heroic woman, have taught us to expect -- even demand -- that leaders be larger than life.  Everyone had fantasies about Mueller swirling in with a cape thrown over his shoulders, waxing eloquent with facts that would nail Trump once and for all.  He would know more than God about the truth.  He would be more terse than Gary Cooper.  We didn't expect a silent sidekick.  We didn't want fixing this to be up to us. 

There was nothing wrong with Mueller's mind, but his ears weren't dependable.  The Repubs picked up on it and talked to him faster, like the barely-past-adolescence scramblers they still seemed to be.  Jim Shirtsleeves sat directly behind a Dem, dangling his eyeglasses, swilling pop, twisting in his chair, distracting.  Then there was the man who brought props, big law books.

Schiff was the hero of the day.  He was clear, sensible, brisk and inclusive. Mueller could hear him clearly.  Schiff's list at the beginning was invaluable and his summary at the end restored our sanity after some of the addled theatrics.  A few of the Repubs seemed to wish they were on the other side of the issue.

At the end of the day I called up on the computer the story about the murderers up north.  The two by the story in Valier didn't quite fit the description.  If it was accurate.  Life is a little ambiguous these days.  The murderers not caught yet.  But I learned that the governor of Puerto Rico has quit.

IT'S THE SYSTEM

"But organizations exist within systems. And our organizations operate within the context — the confines — of broken systems. Systems that are more broken by the day. Those organizations, as well-meaning as they are, are trapped by the system. Their managers and leaders and just the average person within them might well want to do more positive things — but how can they? . . .

"We need institutions that are capable of transforming the systems in which they operate. I want you to really think about that. Because so far in human history, we have never had anything of the sort. We have had institutions which are beholden to the systems in which they operate. But not ones capable of genuine transformative change to those systems."

https://eand.co/can-we-still-change-the-world-for-the-better-6f3cc14935bc

Umairh (link above) has been writing for a long time about the symptoms of disaster in our world, listing them powerfully and terrifyingly.  This post is more positive.  He introduces a new term, "the system", which is how the economics and power connections are arranged, the broken and paralyzing forces in our countries, mostly through who pays and who "does."  This means he is free to speak of the rottenness of the "system" but release the institutions to find new ways to operate.  He -- and we -- can think of new ways to free up the people we know are doing what is good and valid, because there ARE people who are doing this, much as the system tries to control and oppress them.  

I can think of three "systems" that are ripe to be reformed.  They are cross-state or within-state, and based on practical necessity, even ecological demand, like irrigation.  One is infrastructure organizations, like systems of communication, irrigation, highway maintenance, and so on.  They are already overlapping and exceeding state boundaries, which are arbitrary parts of the dysfunctional system.  These institutions must do what works, what is expected, and what is possible.  Some, like my phone company, are even co-ops, at least pretending to be run by the people. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJI3puBeuDE&utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_711217

These are regional.  Institutions and systems often translate to regions, which is a start on eliminating the false and corruption-producing fiefdoms of states with historical happenstance borders, particularly the in the states where simple daily life is so time-consuming that self-governance is pushed to the side. Cities contribute to that.  A problem is the individualist belief that cars are not beholden to highways or electricity is not dependent on transmission grids.

Another arrangement is the basic goods distribution system, like grocery stores or hardware stores.  At the bottom level they are often locally owned, so they know their customers.  If there is something no one wants, it falls out of the system, and vice versa.  Our wealth and power has addled this, so that many people have cell phones, big laundry machines, and powerful cars that can easily travel long distances.  Therefore, we lose the communal pay phones, laundromats, bus systems -- we drive to the Big Box stores.

I was intrigued to learn that where I am, on the east slope of the Rockies nearly in Canada, that I'm served by three distribution systems: one from Seattle, one from Minneapolis, and one from Salt Lake City.  None can come down from Canada, though that would be geologically sensible.  The three sources guess that "we" here want different things, but they also duplicate.  The contrast was in Saskatoon where the stores shelve only a few options of toothpaste, detergent and so on.  In the equivalent US supermarkets, there are dozens of options, with hardly any difference among them.

The third is not just national, because it is about religion.  We have gotten locked into old denominations and assumptions that date back centuries to the Euro Christian binary of Catholic v. Protestant and all its spin-offs.  In the US, definition by education/economic/racial likeness and difference has created enclaves of people who think they are making themselves safe.  The truth is that our knowledge of the world has grown and transformed so much since the industrial revolution that powered this state of affairs, it is no longer relevant, particularly for Christians, which makes them a bit crazy.  

Seminaries are not helping clergy show how to work through from a three-layered world dependent on a big king in the sky to a near-Buddhist grasp of a world full of wonder but not entirely controllable.  Ministers soon find that congregations want the story to stay the same and will dismiss anyone who has a new angle.  Christian and Jewish congregations (probably also Muslim) are reservoirs of immense wealth, but there are suggestions that their leadership takes this to mean entitlement to relationships of power.  Whether or not this is true, they have no intention of giving it up, or even to pay taxes.

The system that privileges some religious positions because they were once sources of morality, dependability, and plans for a good life is now broken.  Money, as it often is, was the source of breaking it.  When I sat in on committee meetings planning pledge drives, it became clear that as we set goals for each pledging person, we were taking license with what we knew of their lives.  We were humane -- taking into consideration expensive health issues, children in college, businesses challenged to grow -- but we wanted the church to have money, to maintain the building, to afford programs.

Some will say that social media and the enabling internet are systems that are crucial for immediate attention.  They think in terms of their own private use, but overlook how much the country's infrastructure is at risk, from huge dams and electrical systems to local village water systems and direct electing.  The assumptions of the industrial revolution -- grids, power, control -- need to be challenged.  Such high technology creates a double society as much as wealth does.  Not even the president can use his telephone without tech help.  Many managers refuse to touch a computer.

Someone remarked on popular talk about Artificial Intelligence a day or so ago, and I had to flatly oppose them.  The dependence on data and algorithms has gutted what we are just beginning to recover, which is total body involvement in thoughtful life.  The idea that a brain is all that is necessary to constitute a person -- what I call the "brain in a bucket" syndrome -- is part of the reason our lives are so mechanical, so flat, so at the mercy of corrupt, uncaring systems that enforce institutional meanness.  We need new ways of thinking, new terminology.

IN PLAIN SIGHT

The important thing to know about at-risk boys who do sex work is that it's NOT about being gay, being maladjusted, having diseases, being singled out for a special fate, or any of the other theories that rove around out there.  Also, it is confined to a few specific years when a male has special qualities that are appealing.  Then it becomes something else.

We are at a point in political commentary when we have passed up the idea that trafficking in young girls is exceptional or even special.  It's accepted and sometimes celebrated, but often confined to the Playboy model:  the barely pubertal, very blonde, taught to please, female youngster who can be skin-painted and clothed in a theatrical way that refers back to medieval depictions of virgins with unicorns in their laps.

What we are getting hints of is boy-lovers.  There is a toxic miasma of violence.  Boy sex-workers are the puffer-fish of forbidden and theoretically pleasurable power exercise.  Those men powerful enough (not those far below any hint of success)  put themselves in danger of death by revelation.  Like members of Congress.

And yet, in my five years as an Animal Control officer ('73-'78), which is often a sheriff's subdivision in a loose relationship with the standard police, I once went with someone to sit in a parked car in Portland, Oregon, watching the  parking structure where the boys waited for circling "chicken hawks" to choose someone.  Should they look like Elvis, look like a preppy, a cowboy, or just wear a Speedo (if weather allowed)? Best was to look like a neighborhood boy, a son.  One of the clients in expensive cars was a county attorney.  I don't know why we didn't raise hell or even contact a journalist.  It just seemed like the "normal" order of things.

In this little village I could point out and name meth cookers, sexual predators on lists, and felons the FBI flushed out with stings.  I could not tell you who is an active sex worker.  One person suggested it's because no one pays for sex around here.  In the same spirit, many people don't bother to marry.

Much more recently I went to Fort Benton, where the Bob Scriver collection of bronzes depicting Blackfeet are kept in an excellent gallery, part of a recreation of an early trading post.  Along the river is an heroic monument to Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea (and her baby).  I was promoting my bio of Scriver, "Bronze Inside and Out," thinking the bookstore there would be a natural place to sell it.  (They still don't.)  

The ladies I spoke to were very enthusiastic about the whole subject, rather thinking of me as a manifestation of history who had walked in.  They insisted on calling their patriarch historian, who had just published his last book.  He seemed to think I had come to honor him, and explained that his most recent book was about the last prostitute in Fort Benton.  He liked to write about "soiled doves", assuming he had access to privileged information about them.  

I said, "How do you know these women were the last?  How do you know there are not still successful prostitutes in Fort Benton?"  He pretended he didn't hear me, but the women knew what I meant.  It's just that population is thin in Fort Benton and much more aged than when the town was a fort.  Anyway, prostitution is much changed.  No longer is it even a matter of leaving calling cards in phone booths, as in the movies, because there are no more phone booths.  Everyone carries a cell phone, though they are a little undependable out here.  Arrangements are all on the Internet.

Once someone who wished me to be harmed listed me and my address on the internet as being a brothel.  I said to a friend, "What a shock clients will get when the door is answered by the only female, an old fat former English teacher and clergywoman, backed by a tribe of cats."  No one came.  

The real reason for boy sexworkers now is the breakdown of the family.  Women marry or pair up because they are pregnant but the man doesn't stay, so she settles for a sequence of step-fathers who will not tolerate any other male in the household who is not a child.  The rules are those of herd animals like horses or elk, so that the male young are violently driven away.  Sometimes they form separate groups until they are old enough to challenge for their own females or at least pair bonds.  I do not know whether they have the biological genetic capacity to be seen as technical "homosexuals" but horses do form affinities to same sex buddies and try to stay with them, even defend them, break fences to be with them.

STD's and even HIV can be controlled by knowledge and medical help, but both require contacts and the latter is formidably expensive.  Even the clinics that Trump is currently trying to remove are so grim and punishing that it takes grit to use them.

Lately, some prominent far-right women have said that their most favorite movie is "Pretty Woman."  They seem oblivious to the fact that the heroine is a prostitute and the premise of the story is that she is so charming that a very rich and handsome man lifts her out of her trap.  This is similar to the plot of however many "shades of gray" it was in another popular movie where the "prince" turned out to be a sadist.  No doubt there are equivalent boy versions.  Some say the desperate hope is that some client will take them into a family, assuming he has one.

The breakdown of the family is due to the biological and social forces that have previously kept them together.  First, all women were vulnerable to conception, which was hard to evade or abort, and triggered the attachment and devotion to shared children, even love for the father.  Second, early economics sometimes depended on a couple, esp. in the case of agriculture.  One person had the muscle and connections to do the labor and the other one was a "homemaker" who prepared food and maintained the shelter.  The pill broke that.  But so did economics.

Another force that broke even the ability to hold a step-husband, was DNA.  Anonymity of illicit sex now requires great care and access to things like condoms.  A pregnancy is now traceable to a father, who can be billed since presumably he has a job.

What I'm saying is that boy sex-workers are created and maintained by a convergence of forces and ideas, some of them ridiculous, like the idea that dominating and abusing a boy is a more sophisticated thing to do that having a man-on-man relationship.  In fact, dominating children is a pursuit of weak craven men.  Some forces are social, men still have more money.  And then there is the biological reason like the pill or DNA identification.  There are unintended consequences, unrecognized collateral damage, personal devastation, and probably the occasional prince who comes along and pulls a boy into a family.  Nah. Only a fantasy.

TWO VIEWS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

Prizes are useful for getting people to read what they ought to and also for encouraging good writers to do their best.  But the work itself must be published.  Montana, The Magazine of Western History, published by the Montana Historical Society, had two award winning essays in the Spring, 2018 issue.  One was by Peter H. Hassrich, a traditional writer about Western art, discussing the classic artist Albert Bierstadt.  The other was by Rodger C. Henderson, Associate Professor of History Emeritus at Penn State University, about what we used to call the Baker Massacre of a Blackfeet band in 1870.  I'm not entirely sure what the politically correct name of it is now.

When I came to Browning in 1961, I was walking into decades of centennial anniversaries of Blackfeet tragedies.  1884-1885 was the Starvation Winter.  In those years I was back in Montana as a Unitarian minister, but not on the Blackfeet Rez only in touch as a Unitarian Universalist graduate of seminary confronting morality.  In the Sixties people were barely beginning to speak of the massacre -- by the Eighties people could talk about the 600 people who starved to death at the hands of the Agency.  It was like reliving everything that happened in waves of sorrow and rage. and I was only white.  People remembered their elders talking about what they had witnessed.  We had known people who were born in 1870 and 1880.  Henderson's essay about the massacre does an efficient job of describing the circumstances, so far as they can be known, despite confused accounts and deliberate lies to save careers.

Bob Scriver was born in Brownng in 1914 and raised there, an early part of the Western art cowboys and Indians period.  He grew up accepting as natural the white man's supremacy.  "We killed the Indians," he said wryly, "But they refused to fall down."  His friends were all "Indians." (Jimmy Welch's father was his best childhood friend.)  Gradually and emotionally he moved over to the Blackfeet side, in spite of having friends who belonged to the ultra-right John Birch Society. I shared this shift with him as well as watching my students gradually realize that no longer did they need to feel either powerless victims or guilty of letting tragedies happen.  By now they began to see a future.  The work is not finished. Even in the apocalpyse much survived.

I'm interested in Hassrick's essay, which is also a book with the same name and other presentations using the same material.  https://gilcrease.org/exhibitions/bierstadt/ and a series of Youtube Lectures, exhibits and lectures.  

Hassrick's VITA:  

Now at "Lone Star Ranch".  

Summers, 1960-63:  Elizabeth, CO, rancher and assistant foreman,

1963-67:  high school teacher of history, Spanish, and art history, Steamboat Springs, CO

1969-75: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX, curator of collections, 

1976-96: Whitney Gallery of Western Art, Cody, WY, curator and director of Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 

1996-97:  Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, NM, director, 

1998—.    University of Oklahoma, Norman, Charles Marion Russell Professor of Art History and director of Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West,(This last is a sinecure funded by the estate of the widow of Charlie Russell.)

Consider the sources of these opinions.  Born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Hassrick is clearly an authentic member of the academic/museum community that circulates around the nation from one major establishment to another.  These institutions rely on population density in cities.  For comparison, consider Scriver was 27 years older than Hassrick and even I am two years older.  Scriver was a man of the West, a white "rez boy", as close to the bone as it's possible to get unless genetically indigenous.  What qualifies me to comment on this essay is my education at the U of Chicago Div School and years as clergy in the West, reflecting on the sacrality of the land.

Bierstadt (1830-1903) was born in Prussia and brought to the US aged one.  He studied painting in Germany in 1853.  His view of life is much influenced by the German  Romantic school of nature philosophy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Romanticism . His works of art are physically large, theatrical in their vistas, and religious in their claims for what is grand and adventurous.  He lived the life that Charlie Russell (1864 - 1936) and James Willard Schultz (1859 - 1947) wished they had lived, pretended they had, but really only imagined, arriving in Montana too late. 

The usefulness of these two essays is that they stake out the miserable and still undigested treatment of the original people of this land at one end, while at the other end Hassrick uses his essay to help Bierstadt mythologize and elevate the land itself.  Both are popular points of view -- neither is the whole truth nor entirely honorable.  Rich white men loom over both points of view, the kind of men who found major museums memorializing the looting of natural resources that made their fortunes.

The aspect of the natural world, as found by whites, is illustrated in their treatment of Indians.  The governmental military pictured them as devils, inhuman, to be eliminated.  But Bierstadt took the romantic German view.  Hassrick says that "in the painting called "Wolf River, Kansas" Bierstadt pictured a Kansa encampment enveloped in glorious suffused light, with the grand cottonwoods serving as the divine sanctuary of nature's fondest embrace."

I was disconcerted recently to read somewhere that Joe Campbell (1904-1987), revered author of "Hero with a Thousand Faces", was now outdated.  The idea of the superior and mystical adventure of climbing a mountain is no longer a valid metaphor.  Certainly the tourists in the national parks still consider them God's natural cathedrals and proof of national grandeur.  They stand on the cement path, leaning on the railing protecting them, gazing at the vistas and muttering, "Oh, how beautiful!"  They have become interested in Bierstadt and his cohort with their aesthetic position and still support, even recover, the art.  

But the locus of the mysterium tremendum outlook has moved to outer space.  The consequence has been the death of God and a moral sense of the consequences of the rich moguls who made their money by looting the planet and now try to redeem themselves with art institutions.  What we share most with Bierstadt is the sense of loss of the 19th century, verging on despair.  We can take a little refuge in his vision.

THEY WALK BESIDE US

When I found the article linked below, I thought it was about the Birch Creek that separates the Blackfeet reservation from the state of Montana,  But this "Birch Creek" was in Idaho.  It turns out that there are hundreds of "Birch Creeks," "Willow Creeks," "Deer Creeks," and the like, all named for what was found there.  In this case, the Birch Creek that I know is the southern boundary of the rez.  It turns out that the Birch Creek in the title is from the "Intermountain West," which is the area on the west side of the Rockies as far as the Cascades, but some of the study is in the Dakotas and Nebraska.  The study is not based on living dogs but on fossils.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/birch-creek-canids-and-dogs-as-transport-labor-in-the-intermountain-west/48A53AA5293475692DDBF79BB0862936

The study merely refers to the whole canid family.  "The biological family Canidae /ˈkænɪdiː/ (from Latin, canis, “dog”) is a lineage of carnivorans that includes domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, dingoes, and many other extant and extinct dog-like mammals."  (wiki)  Most of us easily think of dogs, wolves, coyotes and foxes, the best known canids of our continent, but don't know as well the jackals, dingoes, and various canids evolved to fit their location, like fennecs or singing dogs.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canis_species_and_subspecies

The scientists who studied these fossils were looking to find out how much weight they could carry.  Pulling a travois seemed to max out at about the dog's weight (approaching a hundred pounds) while the weight of carried paniers, backpacks, were about thirty pounds if much distance was involved.  Their assumption was that dogs come from wolves, which has been challenged in recent times.

No one, so far as I know, has identified the characteristic of plastic genes in domestic dogs that allows them to look so different in size, kind of coat, and even temperament.  If one defines "species" as the ability to interbreed, all domestic dogs seem to be fertile with each other in spite of attempts at control by humans, and also with related animals like coyotes, wolves, and foxes.  Coy-dogs and wolf-dogs exist.  Fox dogs may be possible but sometimes fertility is prevented by things like size or habits.  That is, a fox may have such different habits, ranges and diurnal timing that mating is impossible or unlikely.  A wolf cannot fall in love with a fox and follow it down its hole.  (Good material for a mythic story.)

Controversy about what happened to make dogs domestic and from which basic canids is unresolved.  It appears that some genomic change is powered by the discovery of a new means of subsistence -- attaching to humans and living their lives with them.  This may have happened repeatedly to several sub-species in paleo-times.  Wolves are popular candidates.  Domesticity is somehow linked to the plastic genes.  Some domestic dogs revert to being wild, feral, and that behavior is always present just under the surface, potentially a danger or perhaps attached to other dogs rather than humans.  They seem naturally to be group animals, which are the only kind I know of that become domesticated like horses, cows or sheep, including humans.

Scientists were startled to realize that domestic dogs actually share molecular genes with humans.  We hadn't known that genes could cross from one entity to another.  The Blackfeet, who knew nothing about genes, thought of dogs as a separate tribe that chose to join the human tribe, not as dependents but as separately cooperating beings who chose to share the fates of people, becoming attached, intimately involved, and empathic.  

Robert Hall's seminal video essay about rez dogs evokes this conviction from the idlers hanging around an alley next to a source of alcohol and drugs, which they wait for the same way a dog watches for a dropped hot dog.  The drunks go so far as to say that the dogs were once vulnerable disreputables like themselves, but after dying these guys missed the group so much that they came back as dogs and now hang around with them in that form.  Mishaps and suffering are so common among the these people that it forms a solidarity with the dogs' bad luck.  https://vimeo.com/21163086

The video shows how the dogs have plans for their dog-lives as they travel among homes, and sometimes form packs to kill livestock or breed.  Of course, if they are a danger to livestock, they are shot.  Dogs that are bred to guard homes and are therefore inclined to bite are more tolerated in a place where human law and order must cover too wide an area to be effective.  Humans on the rez learn to be respectful of this.  Arriving at an unknown household by car, it is wise to stay in the vehicle and honk the horn until the owner comes out.

Many of these dogs seem to have genes like those of "molosser" dogs  "Molosser is a category of solidly built, large dog breeds that all descend from the same common ancestor. The name derives from Molossia, an area of ancient Epirus, where the large shepherd dog was known as a Molossus."  These big sturdy dogs don't hesitate to bite, but can be trained to pull or carry loads.  Pit bulls, bred to fight, are in this category.  Also, in rez dogs there seem to be genes of shepherd dogs, like collies or Australian heelers.  The biggest versions are those white dogs who are raised with sheep as one of them capable of fighting off predators.  However different from each other domestic dogs seem to be -- poodles, retrievers, Boston Bull -- when they escape from attachment to humans and join the rez dogs, it only takes a few generations for them to look like generic rez dogs: big to medium-sized, shaggy, alert, and always busy when awake.

Stories about beloved dogs becoming human, the way beloved toys can do, show how little appearance counts when an attachment forms.  Other stories are about guardian dogs who fight off bears and murderers.  But the wild dog underneath can lead to attacks and even murder by dogs.  As an animal control officer I took many reports of damage usually, in the case of toddlers, mutilation to the face and in that of infants, death.  Dogs have been used by criminals to hurt their victims, so that the courts classify them as "dangerous weapons."  Others have become support to police by finding lost people or even bringing down escaping lawbreakers.  Some dogs are purported to write stories!

When I write a story about indigenous people on the rez, I always try to get a dog into it somehow, partly because that's just realistic and partly because it always enriches the dimensions of the tale.  There are good reasons for keeping dogs in fenced yards, but I always sort of regret the fences and leashes of "civilization."

DONKEY SKIN AND SELKIES

If I wrote a biography today, no matter who it was about, it would be entirely different from what I wrote about Bob Scriver.  At that time I structured the book by using the steps of the creation of a bronze sculpture, not what to do so much as how the materials feel, what they can become.  I included a lot of local anecdotes and the history of the Scrivers, how they got to the Blackfeet reservation at the beginning of the 19th century.  I didn't talk much about being a racial minority in an autochthonous place, but he would be a good example of wearing another creature's skin, since he tried to be tribal.  Bob didn't make it to the 20th century, dying in 1999.  In short, his life story fit the century, various as it was.  But place held him.  Dusty little Browning with Willow Creek running through it, the village was an anchor point on the vast East Slope Ecotone created by the Rockies.

In mythology there are stories about trying to capture someone but ending up only holding their skin.  Selkies, the marine people who sometimes take human form, are a good example.  Bob's mom and Selkies were Scots.  Of course, the stories are metaphors for human beings who are captured but finally must escape to exist, because they don't belong to the world of the capturer, no matter how much love is involved on either side.  

In a world this various and mobile, in times so confusing and places so changed, the "donkey skins" are still in existence.  This is a clip from the old fairy tale, as captured in a 1970 French film.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HysasPjF84I

Here's an American version --TRULY American, not European.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nXsCGyFuz8  This is Laura Grizzly Paws.

When a writer takes on a persona through whom to tell a story, they are wearing the skin of that being, which may not be human, but be inhabited by a human.  For instance, here's Chewbacca and the actor who wore his skin.  I don't know how a wookie dances, but Peter Mayhew (the actor who wore his skin) would.  He's part of an invented world that seems very real to us, particularly now that we're trying to capture more than the skin of the Empire that has been striking back at us.

Most of us who live a long time are still wearing the skin of the times and places where we grew up, whether France or Browning, and we think we know what the world is like, but as these stories attest, there are always stories within stories, some of them quite unknown.  Some are more "grim" than any fairy tale.  Yet we cling to our notion of what we thought they were like.  

For instance, Bob Scriver was a portrayer of worlds that he thought he knew in his youth, the cowboy and Indian mythology that overlay what was really a raw struggle to survive in a world where the land-fitting way of life was being destroyed by an empire from across the sea, not even just a Brit empire, but one dominated by a department store called Hudson's Bay, a pattern much diminished into the Browning Mercantile.  Scriver Studio and the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were Bob's own expression of the 19th century anthropology, collecting, and labeling Brit way of understanding.  As soon as he died, it was dismantled, reduced to more mercantilism.

Then the bronzes of the even more imaginary world portrayed in bronzes was housed in a recreation of Fort Benton, because now that time has become myth and is admired, considered real.  It was only a few generations in the past.  The tribal people still dance, but the costumes are a flurry of modern flourescent colors mixed with echoes of deer tails and eagle feathers.  The tribes are PanIndians.  The dancing is as authentic a portrait of first contact dancing as bull-riding is an authentic version of moving cattle.

Above is just local observation.  Looked at world-wide, new phenomena have appeared, like crime-based systems that stash "money" or records of money on islands that have never been pulled into the Empire and therefore can stay hidden.  They have very little idea of what to do with that money, except hide its origin in swindles, predation, death, and competing families.  Not just a phenomenon of Sicily, it is a fungus that blooms wherever the conditions are right.  A corporation LLC is the hide they wear.

Some of the most interesting developments in the deteriorating Empire world are triggered by sex and gender, because the basic function of reproduction and nurturing have been badly damaged by war and poverty.  Examples of what modern technology has made possible include birth control, the empowerment of women (which is related), fluid sexual identity from enforced binary to situational, the relaxation of protecting children (esp, those stigmatized), and the reorganization of men in society according to their sexual gender preference.

Once suppressed by social criminalization and driven underground in various ways, this is not the same as modern medical intervention to change one gender into another.  But gender roles and morality have shaped a phenomenon that was once secret into a Empire-outlook. a hierarchical demographic that was once unified but now becomes many chambered and sometimes in opposition to itself.  Ostentation gets into it.  What was once disguised in the skin of the conventional is now wearing everything from tuxedos to speedos.

At first the permission to relate sexually in any way was the central key and the nature and expression of sexuality, freed from obligatory reproduction in the same way that birth control freed women.  It was a joyous celebration of sex-positive as an unalloyed good.  Of course, the same unlikeable nerds went without partners.  Soon AIDS brought death and crippling dependence on drugs.  Real life was again forced into performance, passing. 

We have not quite grasped that HIV affects every kind of person and is not connected to same-sex preference at all.  We have not quite grasped that jungle-born HIV, Chinese swine flu, and prairie herbivore wasting disease are, like ebola, merely waiting for a chance to strip our skins.  Whatever social category is vulnerable this time -- whether insulated by the religious belief that one should not eat pork or in danger because of subsistence hunting -- the gradual realization may or may not change us before the climate eliminates us as we know ourselves.  Maybe climate change will kill the cities rather than individuals, who already live on the sidewalks and may now die there, before they have a chance to dance.  What skin will they wear?  Or does death flay us all.

A BEGINNING LIST FOR AFTER THIS HORROR IS OVER

1.  Over incarceration.

"In a 2016 report, the Brennan Center found that nearly 40 percent of the U.S. prison population is incarcerated without a compelling public safety rationale. Over-incarceration harms incarcerated people and their communities and also imposes enormous financial costs to the general public. One solution is to consider alternatives to prison, such as probation, treatment, or community service."  https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/heres-how-2020-candidates-can-tackle-mass-incarceration

2.  Gaming the rule of law. How do we persuade a generation that grew up on cyber-gaming that the point of being a lawyer is not finding loopholes, but maintaining the original goal?

3.  Planetary monitoring of "money" in any form, uber-bookkeeping.  Include the management of alternatives to money like precious substances, art, real estate, sex, and "owning" people through devices.

4.  Mandatory high school level courses, year long, one on citizenship and the other on money management.  Certification required for teaching these courses.

5.  International strategies for managing massive demographic change and movement compelled by politics, climate, famine, and disease.  

6.  Universal enrolment for voting when graduating from high school, getting a driver's license. 

7.  Rethinking the strategies of copyright and trademarks, intellectual property in general, particularly in regard to technology and esp. medicines.

8.  Mental competence tests for all those seeking office, particularly at the national level.

9.  Ethical rules tightened in regard to lawyers, including the laws regarding their handling of estates.  These laws should be written by experts who are NOT lawyers to keep them from creating more self-serving laws.

10.  The United States divided into ecological regions with laws and economics related to the resources and climate of that area.  If necessary, state boundaries should be altered to fit and state law should give the region priority.

11.  Rethink election security.  Ideas at:  https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2019_07_EACFunding%20Report_1Pager_V2%5B2%5D.pdf.  Do not let it rest on technology requiring wealth, like voting by computer.

12.  Encourage the reading of sci-fi that bases speculation on various ways of organizing society instead of old Brit empire books or New England grim scolding.  Do some serious and public thinking about the plethora of crime and frontier media tales that feed an appetite for ever more extreme violence.   https://www.natcult.net/journal/issue-5/

13.  Inquiry into food production, distribution, and consumption as an element of the economy.  Goals should be stability and minimum maintenance for individuals, but esp families, not necessarily genetically related to each other.  Stakeholders must include farmers, the poor, and those who monitor foods that are harmful for some people, like peanuts or gluten.

14.  Support and protect those who organize into small (less than a hundred people?) groups modeled on monasticism, not necessarily religious, who wish to attach to each other and help others.  Some may organize around tasks, like the protection of children or cooking or various gardening techniques.

15. Health insurance for all.  Rethinking the medical provisions we have now, which are often profit-based, and depend upon a secondary layer of people called "physician assistant"  and the like, often insufficiently educated and over-utilized for the convenience of doctors.

This is an open list.  Add more at will. 

7-19:  https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/trump-hidden-powers
Trump and his "lawyers" have already found many "land mines" that damage whole categories of people.