50 YEARS OF CM RUSSELL AUCTIONS

In the past I’ve gone on my annual cruise through the Great Falls Auction scene in March on the busy days.  This time I hit it on Thursday morning, found parking places and found time and space to talk to people, which is why I went.  The shows were familiar.  In fact, some of them featured the same artworks that were there last year and the year before and . . . who can tell them apart anyway?  

As one woman remarked, and several older men echoed,  this show is about the New West, not the original Western art scene fifty years ago when the auction began.  In the early Sixties when big shot New York art folks came through (they were artists looking for inspiration and recreation -- not even the fly-fishing craze had happened yet) they would stop in at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, which was meant to be a resource for them.  They sketched the full-mounts of game animals and then Bob would draw a little map of where they might see some in the wild.  Or maybe he’d hire a model or guide for them.  Then he’d ask them,  “Is anyone else doing sculpture like this?”

George Phippen, one of the earliest recognized Cowboy Artists of America, was one of those people.  He and the few dealers (aside from Dick Flood, who was often underfoot) would say,  “Only Ernie Burke and Harry Jackson.”  Today there are hundreds and hundreds, all pretty good artists, some living in the rural West, and all with their laser sights on success, which they define as money.  In terms of art philosophy, they are in the camp of Mamie Russell, not Charlie, which is appropriate since her estate supports the Center for the Study of Western Art, a bastion of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel whose circled wagons include the University of Oklahoma Press and a host of client galleries and museums.  Charlie wanted to paint pictures.  Mamie wanted to make money.

As someone remarked, Western art today is all about the dealers.  To the uninitiated, they are so interchangeable that a number of people told me that so-and-so had died, never figuring out that the person they meant was Paul Masa.  The deceased was “whoever had that big center room when the Ad Club was managing things.”  

I didn’t go by the CM Russell Museum, since the art was about the same everywhere.  In fact, some of the nicer things (and more varied) were at the A. Hooker cafe and art gallery on Central Avenue   http://www.a-hookers-gallery.com/    From the website:  “Since her passing, many in the art world have reflected on the motivation of Arlene Hooker Fay, the person and the artist.  Most agree, that Arlene was strongly inspired by family in particular and humanity in general.  Indeed, she was also recognized for her unabashed sense of humor.  A. Hooker’s Gallery, 925 Central Avenue West, is intended as a tribute not only to her life’s work and her serious side but to the memory of Arlene’s many “hookerisms”, her trademark humor among friends, both new and old.” 

Arlene was a strikingly beautiful woman who had been confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio.  Its recurrence killed her.  It’s ironic that she had more of Charlie Russell’s spirit than most of the males wandering the scene.  Her maiden name was Hooker, her husband’s name is Tom Fay, and in the Sixties I taught school with him in Browning where the family made many friends and Arlene made many portraits.

The original Ad Club Auction has probably been changed in the fifty years of its run as much by the aging of the participants as by the shift in the whole society: especially an inflow of people who could afford to live in the West.  The responding “New West Lifestyle” hit art hard, emphasizing appearance and luxury, the Ralph Lauren West, the fabulous corten-sheet-metal, log-and-plate-glass homes that are inhabited only part of the year and thus can be situated in places inaccessible in winter.  One buys the hides of buffalo raised for meat.  One commissions a gallery to choose some proper art since one doesn’t have time to learn what it’s all about.  But that boom has about crashed now.  Or maybe it’s gone offshore.

The next impact that changed everything was, of course, the internet.  As soon as auctions go online there is no question that the serious bidders who know their stuff won’t bother to trek to Great Falls in March for an auction.  Look at the merchandise online or get your surrogate gallery to do it for you.  None of the rather boozy bonhomie and maybe trips to the surrounding legendary places.  (Scenery and ghost towns and where’s a really good place to eat?)  Today there is no dealer room that didn’t have an open laptop.  Though quite a few of those people could not bring up this blog because all they do is Google the websites that give you the auction ticker tape prices.  No more depending on the guys who roamed the country with a trunk full of art, trading on their info, and maybe cutting a few sharp deals.  They taught as they went, educating a generation of roadside operators about what was important and why.

I’ve long held -- usually in the face of protests -- that there is a strong connection between political style and Western art.  When the Repubs are in power, the grandiose, bellicose and triumphalist works sell like flapjacks so they can hang behind the desks of the powerful.  When the Dems are in power, the landscape, the animal, minorities and maybe even a little abstraction become the rage.  Watch the White House Oval Office.  Reagan’s Remington bronzes linger on.  I have yet to spot an abstract.

Art as markers are a bourgeois thing.  What I own shows who I am, and I want you to know I’m not just an ordinary person but someone with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, in this case Cowboy Artists of America, the CA mark.  Which is fine.  That’s about buyers and the dealers around them.

But I don’t belong to that tribe.  I’m still part of the untamed, roving, wild and raving sort of artists that don’t care who buys what.  They just want to push their obsessed hearts up against the world in a search for image.  They crave to be imprinted, branded, with passion.  These days the word “passion” is used by “mommie bloggers” who say they have a passion for cupcakes or crochet.  The truly passionate are not often recognized, dead or alive.  You probably won’t find them in an auction.

SPENSER'S GOOD -- JESSE STONE IS BETTER

Spenser (with an “s” like the poet) was always a fav of mine -- what English teacher wouldn’t like him?  (Actually, it was really Hawk I watched for.)  But then I asked Netflix for a list of Ridley Scott movies and here was Jesse Stone, a Tom Selleck incarnation of  a Parker hero and a big success.  So I ordered all the Jesse Stone movies they had and they were great.  By this time I realize I’m really watching for Robert B. Parker.  And that means his books.  So I went over to the Valier library and found a whole shelf.  At least.

I checked out an armload and got to work.  What is it that so captures people about Robert Parker books?  He had a Boston University Ph.D. and taught college for a while, so he was attumed to young people, but he said (and why would I quibble?) that his secret was his long marriage.  Constancy and faithfulness to family (however defined) were key.  Something like that was his practice of writing five pages every day except Sunday, very much like my blogging the same amount every day, including Sunday.  Doesn’t make me better, but it’s a good thing to do.  That practice (I don’t really like to call it a discipline because after you’ve been doing it a while, it becomes a need, an itch, even a craving) increases one’s skill.  One’s writing becomes tighter, more spare, maybe more vivid.  He didn’t really seem to mind a few cliches and neither do I.  He uses a lot of street talk.  Sometimes he sounds like Tim.  Of course, 1986 street talk is a little dated.

By now I’ve read “Taming a Sea-horse” which is 1986 Spenser in which he goes looking for a girl who’s been sucked into prostitution (wrong verb, probably, since she wasn’t very passive -- more of a sucker than a sea horse, certainly no duchess but pretty indiscriminate.), gets threatened, and succeeds -- for what it’s worth.  The five pages a day become short chapters, 35 of them, straightforward, just about ready for a movie shoot as scenes.  “Susan” is there and contributes theory.  I can’t remember what was the cutting edge stuff in 1986.  She thinks hookers and their pimps fall in love.  AIDS doesn’t cross anyone’s mind.

Since Spenser is looking for a prostitute, he ends up where they are.  Here’s one whoremonger’s “sophisticated” outfit:   “. . . if Walt Disney had been obsessed with sex and dominance, and was uncertain of his manhood and had grown up reading the novels of H. Rider Haggard and had the sensibility of a dung beetle, he’d have founded a chain of clubs just like this.”  There’s a complex of stuff in this statement.  On the one hand we all have the satisfaction of what seems like a thorough put-down.  It’s a pretty good “take-down” on childish values, uneducated romance, and hopelessly low motives.  On the other hand, it’s a snob’s opinion.  Isn’t Parker making fun of us, who are reading all this made-up nonsense?  How the heck does HE know what an expensive mob scene is like?  What the movies show?  (How would we know any different?)  We hear a LOT about clothes, nail polish colors, what the characters are eating and drinking, the shops along the sidewalks where Spenser goes.  This seems to be persuasive: a lot of the “New Journalists” seem to think such “factoids” are important.  Product placement.

Jesse Stone is supposed to be darker and more damaged than Spenser.  Tom Selleck plays him as older, which Selleck is, but Parker thought it worked.  Here are the first two paragraphs of the beginning of the first Jesse Stone book, “Night Passage.”

“At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan.

“There was no traffic on Ocean Avenue.  There was the comfortless light of the streetlamps, but they were behind him.  Before him was the uninterrupted darkness above the repetitive murmur of the disdainful sea.”  

Almost sounds as though we might be headed into post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s not Mishima, but it’s poetic and existential.  Parker made Selleck promise that none of the scripts (which were considerably changed) would ever drop two premises:  Jesse Stone can NOT quit drinking and he can NOT quit loving his former wife.  The meshing of those two factors is what makes the character tick and keeps him appealing.  He’s actually Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke.”  He will never turn away from Miss Kitty and he will never sully his badge.

Comparing “Night Passage” the book with the movie is very useful.  Both are fairly straightforward plots with the emphasis on character.  There are passages of lyrical writing.  The movie is beautiful throughout.  (The director was a cameraman in his early years.)  The setting is more-or-less Marblehead, which is picturesque anyway.  In Jesse’s world there are two kinds of women besides his selfish and fickle ex-wife.  One kind is stick-thin but glamorous women who fall into bed before even going on  their first date, and the other is the inappropriate (black, married, too old, too young, too ugly, a nun) but brave and smart helping woman.  The black one does the repartee.  Jesse says, “I know you’re married but if you decide to have an affair, will you let me know?”  She says as her exit line, “I’ll put you on the list.”  (She’s not in the book.) Jesse Stone is his own Hawk.  In the movie he is accompanied everywhere by a dog and lives in a house accessed along a gangway over the water.  Gorgeous moons and sunrises.  

This book has 77 five-page units.  The book version is a lot meaner and dirtier, since the movie was meant for television and needed a more, let’s say, “family” tone.  More bad guys in the movie are just foolish.  The racist posse comitatus is gone.  Tom Selleck is such a big humorous lunk of a guy, he never really gets into dark stuff.  Compare the BBC “Mystery Theatre” series like “Cracker” or “Wire in the Blood.”  Robson Green has very much the same sort of humorous, tolerant, but irremediably damaged sort of persona.  The scripts are mostly taken from the novels of Val McDermid, truly perverse and twisted stuff, but intensely elaborate descriptions of psychosis.  I bought one of her novels, finished it -- gritting my teeth -- and slipped it into the garbage.  By the time Green and his producer work things over, they are slightly improved but Brits have an appetite for ghastly tortures that’s far beyond that of we Disneyfied yanks.

Towards the end Parker was writing Westerns.  Some would say he was writing them all along.  “Appaloosa” strongly echoes “Gunsmoke” on the screen.  I’ll have to round up the book.  In summary, Parker is clearly a genre writer -- never going over the heads of his readers and supplying enough detail for them to fantasize being able to walk into wicked places and “handle themselves.”  But they should not imagine that it is any less imaginary than Greek drama with masks.  The Big Man with the lovable flaw.  We can’t resist.  Shakespeare, after all, was also a genre writer.

NOTES ON THE "MARCH IN MONTANA" AUCTION, 2011

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A LIST OF THE SCRIVER BRONZES INCLUDED IN THE CATALOG FOR THE MARCH IN MONTANA AUCTION IN GREAT FALLS, 2011, PLUS COMMENTS.

General comments:  Bob Scriver’s sculpture can be grouped into periods.  The earliest pieces (beginning in the Fifties) were in a smooth, detailed style.  He generally worked on the scale of an inch to a foot.  The animals from this time period were portraits of the game animals he shot to mount for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife.   I see none of them here.  “Winter King” and “Herd Bull” often show up at auctions.  This early period, up to and including the Sixties, includes many of his finest Blackfeet portraits because a series was projected with the cooperation of the Blackfeet Tribal Council.  It never went through.  “No More Buffalo” was made for this group.  

He was often under pressure to be “looser” because it was thought to be more like Russell.  The rodeo pieces, large and rough and the most celebrated, came out of the commission to make an heroic portrait of Bill Linderman for the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.  

Late in life, Montana entrepreneurs would suggest subjects to Bob which they would buy with the rights to reproduce.  These were generally small and often animals, meant to be collectible.  They move through auctions constantly.

Much of the value of bronzes comes from tracing their provenance, which means who owned them from the time they were cast.  This is a safeguard against illegal copies, which are always a danger when dealing with objects that can replicated with a mold.  These bronzes are mostly from two estates.  Scriver bronzes tend not to move around very much except for a few that were cast in large numbers later in his career.  The bad side of this is that people don’t see the really fine ones.  The Montana Historical Society has the entire estate but has not been able to develop it.

Paul Masa was a Kalispell art wheeler-dealer who commissioned Bob to make small sculptures intended for resale.  High numbers of them were cast.  (The most elite people limit to ten or twenty copies -- at least in theory.)  They were not intended to be high end art.  They were cast by using the ceramic shell method which is much more inexpensive but not quite so high quality as Roman block casting which is what Bob Scriver’s own Bighorn Foundry used.

Marquita Maytag was a world-class explorer and an important patron of Bob’s.  She was a beautiful divorced redhead who traveled in and out of the reservation.  She was at one time the US Ambassador to Nepal.  Googling will give you interesting information.  She was living in Sun Valley, ID.  I’m sorry to realize she must be gone.

1. 36. “To Ride a Bronc”  1 of 100,  Masa estate.

This is a smaller version of the large spectacular event bronzes.

1. 36.  “Rodeo’s Classic Event”  28 of 100, Arrowhead Foundry,  Maytag estate.

The same is true of this one.

1. 38.  “Price of a Scalp”  Powell Foundry, Maytag estate

This sculpture was originally commissioned by George Montgomery but was released for sale because of his divorce from Dinah Shore.

1. 59.  Set of four game animals:  “Down the Ridge,” “High Country Buck,”  “On the Move,”  “September Whitetail.”  Masa estate

These are charming collectables.

1. 59.  (Paired with an Ace Powell bronze of a child) “Ranch Fillies”  32/55,  Masa estate
2. 59.  Lot of three:  “Steer #1 Special”  1974, “Colt” #12, “Enne Kaukee”,  Masa estate

“Enne Kaukee” means Buffalo Woman in Blackfeet.  She is meant to stand for the source and protection of life itself.  (“aukee” added to the end of a word means woman.  Enne is Buffalo.)

1. 59.  Pair of reclining animals:  “Paul’s Bull” (Buffalo) 1/1000 and “Rex’s Ram” 1/100.

Paul is Paul Masa.  Rex would be Rex Brenneman, who is recently deceased.  Masa estate.

1. 64.  “Good Boy, Bart” (The Bear and Doug Seus)  1992, Arrowhead Foundry, Maytag estate.

This is a portrait for which Seus and his tame Kodiak bear posed.  Bart became a big star because he made so many rousing adventure scenes possible.

1. 81.  “Spring Storm”  1976,  33/35, Maytag estate

Cowboy with a newborn calf in front of him on horseback.

1. 88.  “No More Buffalo”  1957, Maytag estate

This is a real coup for someone who’s paying attention.  There are many knockoff illegal copies of this intensely popular bronze, but the provenance here proves that it is original, probably cast at the Bighorn Foundry (I think I remember helping to cast it.) and bound to hold and increase in value.  See the small Proctor busts at the end of this post. 

1. 88.  “Rangeland Kiss”  (colt and mare)  24/35, Masa estate
2. 88.  “On the Trapline” 1977, Maytag estate

A trapper on snowshoes.

1. 88.  “Buddies” (two horses)  13/50,  1977
2. 94.  “Ace” 19/35  From Duane and Ivy Curtis in Bigfork, MT.  Direct from the artist to them and then to this auction.

This is another piece that is often illegally copies, sometimes garishly patined.  This provenance adds value.

1. 97.  “Self-Portrait”  1977,  Maytag estate

Bob himself.  

1. 97.  “Bust of CM Russell”  1966,  Maytag estate

This is taken from an intermediate full-length portrait of CMR in which he stands with his thumbs in his sash.  It was meant to be a better version than the portrait that Bob submitted to the contest for a statue in the Hall of Bronze in Washington, DC, but it was not the definitive statue that stands on the grounds of the CMRussell Museum.

1. 98.  “Captain Lewis & Our  Dog Scannon”  18/150, 1976, Arrowhead Foundry

This was a subset of the cluster of sculpts that came out of the heroic Lewis & Clark and Sacajawea bronze in Fort Benton and then the similar statue that drops Sacajawea but adds York and the Newfoundland, both belonging to Clark.  The dog’s name was thought at the time to be “Scannon,” but later was decided to be “Seaman.”  You might want to spell it carefully.

1. 135.  “Prairie Buck,”  1957,  Maytag estate

A woman writer showed up in the shop in 1957 and asked Bob to make a portrait of a pronghorn antelope to be photographed for the cover of her book.  She never came   back.  This is the first of Scriver’s sculptures to be cast into bronze and always sold well.

1. 135.  “The Protector of the Vital Ground” (grizz family group) 27/150, 1993, Maytag estate   “Vital Ground” is the name of Doug Seus’ project to save habitat for grizzlies.
2. 154.  THESE TWO BRONZE BUSTS ARE STUDIES OR CUT-DOWNS OF LARGER PORTRAITS  BY PHIMISTER PROCTOR.

 “Big Beaver”, 1917 #AP   This is Eddie Big Beaver, who also posed for Bob Scriver’s “No More Buffalo.”  There is entertaining material about him in Proctor’s autobiography, “Sculptor in Buckskin.”   #AP means that the casting was the artist’s proof and therefore excused from being numbered.  The notion comes more from print-making than bronze casting.

“Jackson Sundown”  1916  #AP

DREAM OF THE PAST

This morning I woke up early but unsure of the time.  Some of the clocks are reset and some aren’t.  It was pretty dark but I had heard the paper come, so I got up and read the section dedicated to the Western Art auctions in Great Falls at the end of the week.  It’s all about new artists -- the old stalwarts swept away.  Charlie Russell is there, of course, but no one is alive who knew him.  Les Peters, who set up Charlie's studio for display after his death is dead himself now and never mentioned.  

I went back to bed and dreamt about the Sixties when the auction commotion began.  In those days a studio was often wood-heated and pretty rough.  Charlie’s telephone pole cabin was mighty fancy by our standards.  Our stuff was just “there” for reference or because the place might have been a back storage room in the first place.  Ace Powell and Nancy McLaughlin, his wife, had a pretty nice studio with big windows in Hungry Horse, but that was because it was an old store and they ran a kind of trading post in the front while living in the back with their kids.  That’s the one that burned down.   Al Racine was in an old log cabin in St. Marys but you couldn’t live there in the winter: the wind whistled through it.  John Clarke was in the bottom of his house in East Glacier because the top had burned out.  He just walled off that part.  

Nowadays artists’ studios are real layouts featured in magazines, but nowadays they make real money so they can afford spacious, furnished, properly decorated, architect-designed places.  It’s the New West, a lifestyle based on money and fantasy.  They have glossy bear rugs on the wall.  We had real bears on the floor, waiting to be skinned.  The first New West artist to show up was on the Flathead side of the mountains, naturally.  It was Fred Fellows, who had been a city advertising art guy.  He came over to Browning to buy some objects to arrange around here and there.  He’s gone to the Southwest now.

Since I turned out to be a writer instead of an artist and since writers these days use computers and since you can’t have a computer in a cabin that goes from freezing to roasting with a wood stove throwing particulate into the air, my house is not nearly as cabin-like as I would prefer.  Jack Smith, down the street at the Medicine River Gallery  www.medicineriver.com/  is closer because, like Ace, he’s about as much a trader as an artist.  But he’s online with a computer, so he has to use gas heat.  He DOES keep it roaring and sits right next to it, so it’s a good place to sit to gab while you warm up.  Not that you’d get a word in edgewise with Jack, but there’s a lot of art and artifact to look at.

I don’t have bear rugs and Ralph Lauren Hudson’s Bay blankets and pole-made beds, etc.  Nor do I have any Indian artifacts except for my Bundle-transfer dress and moccs, which I keep put away in case the Bundle is found and can be properly transferred again.  They don’t look like much, which is often the way it is with the real stuff.  What people like is parade regalia.  A full set of white buckskin, beaded and painted, with ermine and falconry bells -- maybe some “scalps” -- sells for as much as a cowboy artist’s painting. I do smudge.  And I do have a woodstove in the garage where there is a concrete floor.  When there’s no wind and the weather is not too dry, I burn my windfall limbs and am happy.

So I went back to sleep and dreamt that a Jimmy-load of guys and their women had stopped by.  I had a woodstove and a pot of cowboy coffee simmering and we all settled to spin yarns and whittle.  Then the guys asked if they could take a bath and one-by-one they did.  (I don’t have a bathtub anymore either -- well, I do, but it’s out in the backyard where I grow tomatoes in it.)  It was like those obligatory scenes in old Westerns where the hero, modestly arranged in the soapsuds, smokes a cigar or a pipe and sticks his foot up to scrub it with a brush.

I wish I could remember what we said in the dream conversation.  Some of it was olden days and a little of it was “Doomer” talk like that from Paul, who still lives with a wood stove and a spring out in the boonies.  It’s just that he talks on the computer.  (I don't know how he compensates for smoke.)  We sorta have a suspicion that things are going to circle back to the basics here pretty soon.

Nassim Taleb has been talking about “fragility” (things that easily crash) versus “robustness” (things that become consolidated and stronger under adversity).  It looks pretty clear to me and others that our infrastructure of all kinds is becoming increasingly complex and out of control.  Do I have to say “Japan”?  So are our political systems, which are rapidly converting into interlocking international corporations.  The most fragile systems are monocultures, like our food crops.  The assumptions that may save the Doomers is that being prepared for the worst is never a mistake and the closer one stays to the basics, the better.  

Of course, I consider art and friendship basics.  What sticks with me from the dream, which wasn’t realistic but rather morphed among a number of places with an assortment of characters, was the atmosphere of inquiry and trust.  You can’t buy it from Ralph Lauren.  (I did once buy some Ralph Lauren sheets.  Not sorry.)  Neither can you buy it from an auction or find it in a studio with a hardwood floor and a high-end sound system where a nice guy paints nostalgic stuff.  It’s not bad -- it’s just not the same thing.  The same as the Old West, which was pretty hard on people and animals, is not the same as the New West, which is just pretty . . . and fragile.

HAS CHARLIE RUSSELL'S TIME COME AND GONE?

http://fineart.ha.com/c/video.zx?src=2ndtuesday/Second_Tuesday_051110

Doodling around in search of information about the auctions in Great Falls this weekend, the ones that used to cluster around the annual auction celebrating the birthday of Charles Marion Russell, I stumbled across this video.  It only mentions Russell at the beginning and is really focused on Texas rather than Montana, but it’s a VERY good job of tracing the development of the genre.  The quality of the video is not the best and it doesn’t occur to the cameraman that we’re more interested in seeing the art work than looking at the speaker until partway into the lecture, but it’s worth using up some patience to struggle along.  Here’s the formal description.

Lecture: Cattle Drives to Cadilacs: Visions of the West by Contemporary Artists

Lecture Date: Tue, May 11th, 2010

Speaker: Michael Duty

Speaker Bio: Michael Duty is a noted author that has spent three decades in the museum community in various Director capacities, including at the National Western Art Foundation in San Antonio, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis. He is a co-founder of MuseumsWest consortium and a former Executive Director of the California Historical Society in San Francisco. Michael has organized more than 60 museum exhibitions, is a frequent lecturer, and has won multiple awards.

Evidently Heritage Auction Galleries handles just about every kind of valuable object except livestock.  Given the times, this is not surprising as wealth is rearranged to better match fortunes.  But other posts lead me to believe that Duty has left Heritage.  This is not surprising either, since he is of retirement age and writes books, so it would be reasonable to move to a more free-lance sort of arrangement, maybe writing or visiting institutions for one-time curating jobs.  

The CM Russell Museum in Great Falls is a member of the “MuseumsWest” consortium which Duty helped found.  The entire list is: Amon Carter Museum, Autry National Center, Booth Western Art Museum, Buffalo Bill Historical Center, C.M. Russell, Museum, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Gilcrease Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, national Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, National Mueum of Wildlife Art, Petrie Institute of Western American Art at Denver Art Museum, Rockwell Museum of Western Art, and the Stark Museum of Art.  Duty is the founding director of the Eiteljorg Museum, which has quickly moved to the top rank of these institutions.

I have been frank -- indeed a bit rabid -- about what I call the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel.  Bob Scriver was coming to prominence just about the same time that the major institutions and most qualified directors were also developing in the Sixties.  The Ad Club’s CMR Auction also formed about this time. Artists and markets sort of grew up together, not always watching carefully about which were public venues with nonprofit status and which were wildcat operations for personal profit.  That is, this week’s road shuttler became next week’s gallery owner became the third week’s institutional director.  Some of them were educated in a scholarly way (Duty clearly was) and others simply keyed off auction results, like the information on www.askart.com which runs a sort of “ticker tape” of results.  

The result of this pattern was that it followed the money.  The big free-standing museums were generally created by natural resource and engineering money, the state historical societies varied widely in holdings and expertise, and the line between cowboys and Indians was often split into two tracks.  

There was also a major regional dynamic, so that the SW developed quite a long time before the northern plains where lesser wealth, sparse population, and long distances made life harder.  The fact that Charlie Russell became such a “marker” artist was an anomaly, as was Frederick Remington, who was essentially an Easterner.  Perhaps they stand out because of clever marketing, though they are both skillful and valuable artists and the times were right.

On the northern prairie in the Sixties, Dick Flood and Ace Powell were the voices of cowboy art.  Flood was a definitive shuttler and gallery founder.  Ace was more sophisticated because of a Russian wife who knew things.  That was fifty years ago.  They were operating by the seats of their pants, not through sophisticated knowledge about art.  Some of the artists that Duty talks about in this lecture did not exist yet -- literally had not been born.  As the genre has matured, it has acquired “middle-age spread” and now includes many paintings -- you’ll see them in this presentation -- that we would never have imagined, much less called “cowboy art.”  (Mainly crossing into abstraction or landscape.)  Cowboy Artists of America was an effort to define the category, maintain friendships among artists, and introduce value-based marketing -- a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  Through the efforts of Dean Krakel in Oklahoma City and Harold McCracken in Cody, institutional holdings became more justified, curated, and carefully managed.

That’s where my complaints about the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel begin.  Where there is carrion, there will be coyotes.  I suspect that at first the “de-accessioning” -- that’s museum talk for disposing of art and objects -- was simply a matter of clearing the shelves of things that were clearly not worth saving.  You won’t hear many museum people admit that.  In the Sixties the director of the Montana Historical Society lost the line between his job and himself and simply gave away what he considered lesser art to friends and important people.  He was caught and paid the price.

But the biggest de-accessioner is time.  Especially in terms of “hard economic times.”  So across the nation boards of directors have bowed to the idea that certain commercially valuable holdings are not “within the goal and mission of this organization.”  When the “holding” is a giant Jackson Pollock mural worth millions (even though there are still people who consider it just dribbling), the story goes ballistic.  Probably there have been smaller items quietly shifted out the back door everywhere.  A big “name” can protect some things.  I doubt that the Charlie Russell mural in the Montana state legislature will be peeled off the wall and sold tomorrow.  But given major aesthetic shifts and maybe politically correct rhetoric from Indians who don’t care for their depiction and never liked Lewis & Clark anyway . . .  ideas could change.  The most potent persuasion, of course, would be money.  I wonder what the mural would look like in Dubai.

“Cowboy art” is most meaningful when connected to its roots, but the roots don’t go back more than a couple of centuries.  Unless it is more than just subject matter, it might not last that long into the future.  But Michael Duty can reassure you about that.  He has a dry sense of humor, which is a necessity and a pleasure.  At least for me.

SPLENDID ON A LARGE SCALE: The Writings of Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch

“Splendid on a Large Scale: The Writings of Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch, Montana Territory, 1869 - 1874,” edited by Kim Allen Scott, joins two other first hand and in-the-moment accounts of early Montana life, each of them unique.  “Montana, 1911: A Professor and his Wife among the Blackfeet,” edited by Mary Eggermont- Molenaar, and “Letters from the Rocky Mountain Indian Missions,” edited by Robert Bigart, required translation as well as editing.  The 1870’s letters of Father Philip Rappagliosi’s were originally in Italian or German and the diary of Wilhelmina Maria Uhlenbek-Melchior was translated from the Dutch.  Koch, of Danish descent, was writing in English.

These were early white/Euro contact accounts rather than American Easterners coming West.  Professor Uhlenbeck and Father Rappagliosi were on the scene specifically to explore or convert the indigenous peoples.  Koch, raised in Denmark, had followed the Mississippi River north to make his fortune so as to bring his bride up from the fever-ridden marshes of southern Mississippi.  Believing at first that with determination and applied talents he could accomplish this goal in a few years, it turned out to require six years of struggle and setbacks before he could bring her to him.  Their hardship turns out to be our gift as he pours his heart out in letter after letter to her.  Tenacious planning, huge physical effort, and a clear goal finally developed into a key role in the development of Bozeman, Montana, and the eventual university there.

Serendipituosly, I’ve just begun reading Simon Schama’s book, “Landscape and Memory,” which is an excellent lens for understanding what drives Peter Koch.  He begins with a discussion of a concept that arose in Europe under several names:  landschaft (German) -- landschap (Dutch) -- landskip (English) -- parerga (Italian).    It translates to something like homestead or home place, the place that a family has made its own with a comfortable house, a charming yard, a productive garden, an orchard, a wood lot, pastures and -- on the prairie -- a wind break.  My grandparents established such places over and over.  It is at the heart of what this village of Valier wants to be -- maybe without the barns for livestock.  Koch often describes this ideal home.

C. S. Lewis spoke of the enormous power of this figure (Schama offers examples from art) when juxtaposed against mighty nature, saying that one of the intense moments of sensing the “sublime” for him was when the train on which he traveled came around a bend just at evening and he saw a small farmstead nestled at the bottom of a majestic mountain.  It is a figure at the heart of my own life partly because of displacement: my welcoming and sheltering farm was that of my aunt.  My parents left the rural life to make their fortunes just as Peter Koch did, though their migration was much shorter.  The pull of rural home memories stayed with them throughout their lives in Portland, OR, and guided me to reservation small town Montana.

Another aspect of my sympathy with Peter Koch is books, which traveled with him until he had his homeplace and then settled onto his shelves to become a major library, even as he helped create and support a community library in Bozeman.  Comfort, guidance, strength and know-how all had their roots in books for Peter Koch.  Though he complained bitterly if work kept him indoors in his early years and he excelled at the arduous task of frontier surveying, carrying the rod up and down coulees and through brush, in his later years he was much content to stay in his own library, studying and writing.

Since he had lost his mother in childhood, he adopted Laurentze’s mother as his own.  Laurentze, his patient betrothed, exchanged ideas, papers, and flowers in their letters.  Peter was a friend to women, sharing interests and extending protection to them in a place where there were few comforts and many losses, especially children.  This in return brought him sympathy, insights and help with local matters.

But his real focus was the constant effort to get ahead, to make a fortune, to establish a reputation as a skilled and dependable worker.  He taught himself law, passed the bar, and finally began to achieve a little prosperity as a banker.  Things happened fast and loose in those days and were always full of risk.  People were hasty and cut corners, for instance when two alleged murderers were not tried in a timely manner, so vigilantes simply broke into the jail and lynched them.  Then those sympathetic to the murderers lynched the chief witness against them, a “chinawoman.”  Peter had a not-entirely-comfortable relationship with the powerful Nelson Story who redeemed himself after Peter’s death by providing for Laurie’s comfort.  Peter died in 1917, aged 73, in Pasadena, CA.

Blackfeet reading this material will be interested in Koch’s view of Major Baker, the drunken perpetrator of the so-called “Baker Massacre.”  Koch was working for the man at the time and scorned him as a resentful and incompetent fool.  Later near Billings Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull caught Baker and company hung-over after a night of drinking and gambling, and administered a rebuke.  Koch expected Baker to be cashiered.  He was hardly disinterested.  Baker had intended to fire Koch earlier, which would have been disastrous for the hard-working Dane.  Somehow Baker lost his intention.  Koch had influential friends.

Though it might be more romantic to consider the open range of the American prairie frontier, in fact the establishment of towns and the creation of transportation among them is the real essence of development.  Though the mighty empires of prominent men are normally the subjects of books, it is the quiet families that ultimately support economic systems and educational development.  Though the massacres and battles preoccupy some, it is the conscientious recording of transactions and the careful surveying of boundaries that are the foundation of whatever happens in the end.

Somehow Peter Koch knew this as he alternated cutting logs for stockades with pursuing botanical knowledge in his library.  It’s the tension and interchange between the physical and the mental that made him so vital.  As for the emotional, one should consult his fond letters to Laurie, or perhaps the opinion of the present Peter Koch, his great-grandson and curator of the family heritage.  Today’s Peter has reverse-migrated to Berkeley where he is the owner of a distinguished letter press business, but the book of Peter’s letters was published from Montana through the cooperation of the Drumlummon Institute and Bedrock Editions.

THE NOSTALGIA OF SMOKESTINK

Once in a while I will unexpected catch the sharp stink of hot metal: molten bronze, welded iron, a blacksmithy.  It sweeps me back to the high alert of our foundry in the Sixties, the Bighorn Foundry because it had a row of full-curl bighorn skulls along the eaves.  We were always aware that what we were doing, melting bronze and pouring it into a baked mold,  came from the beginning of the Bronze Age when humans squatted by a small hot fire doing the same thing.  Therefore, a recent remarkable  post on 1000fragrances.blogspot.com  struck me.  After all, I have the scents of ferric nitrate, copper nitrate, liver of sulphur, and nitric acid literally deep within me from the days when I stood all day patining and inhaling molecules from heating sculptures and steaming those chemicals into chemical reactions with the bronze surfaces and my alveolar lungs.

I am in the habit of smudging when I make my morning coffee.  I grow a bed of sweetgrass in order to throw a pinch of it on the hot stove burner after I make my morning coffee,  the brief smoke a sort of fragrant prayer.  

So this particular post from 1000fragrances.blogspot.com went to my heart, startling though it is.  Octavian Coifan usually talks about historical perfumes and complains about the degeneration of once memorable and intense scents into baby smells: pretty, fruity, and even tinted pink.  This time he went into the future and found there -- the past.  I quote:

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“A long time ago I "predicted" the appearance of a new direction - smoke, burnt things, caramelized resins, and all the spectrum of notes that share this empyreumatic facet in an oriental or woody context. Metaphorically this will be a return to the first experiences of man with scents, thousands of years ago, when he discovered how some things are smelling pleasant when they are burnt.

Today in Paris I am surrounded by (exotic) fruits, flowers from all around the globe, spices, beautiful perfumes and like any consumer space and time (the seasons) are no more a impediment to enjoy the natural beauty. But this is quite unique in the history of our race.

About 15 000 years ago the climate and the landscape was rather different in Europe. Forget oranges, bananas, vanilla, even rose and jasmine and try to figure out the scents of the "Ice Age". It is said that we cannot mourn what we've never had or knew. All these scents were theoretically unknown here, even if a "glimpse" could be found in some European wild herbs. But we started our journey on this planet in a much different landscape, before the earliest migrations out of Africa, 50,000 years ago, witnessed by the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb. Do we carry an "olfactory souvenir" in our genes and the discovery and use of aromatic plants is our conquest of "the lost paradise"?

In the post about "singularity and living memory" with the reflection about the scent in the world of androids / replicants, there was something suggesting the mood of the 1982 masterpiece, Bladerunner. This movie is set in 2019 and let us imagine that in the future some catastrophic event might hit this planet. What is shocking inside all these apocalyptic visions is the destruction of the natural environment. What would disappear are also the scents as we know them today - not exactly the perfumes, but the scents of living things, the fruits, the flowers, the trees. What you could enjoy today in every public park would become the sinister metropolis with a scent of fire and smoke, so beautifully depicted in the opening scene from Bladerunner, or the pure white "virtual" universe from Matrix. In both cases lose contact with the "real thing" and our food will become a "pill". . .

In this universe a new place will appear, much similar to the opium smoking rooms in China, and here you can experience the real thing - the scent of an apple, a blooming rose, a juicy grapefruit or the scent of somebody you loved and lost before the Event.

About 10 years ago, The Demeter Fragrance Library did something unique, capturing those basic scents of life, not exactly perfumes, but more a fraction or a quote from our environment. The core exhibition of the UK pavilion for the "Expo 2010 Shanghai" presented a "Seed Cathedral" where visitors were surrounded by the seeds in a 20-meter-high hollow cube with 60,000-plus transparent acrylic rods. If the seeds of plants are preserved by botanic institutes around the globe, the scents of our world are not "preserved", analyzed, they are not even known and classified. We consider scent either futile or commercial, we are focused on how we smell (biology, psychology, etc) and less on what we smell. Libraries, as a collection of humankind knowledge, have started thousands of years ago. Libraries of scent (from the specific scent of a flower, an exotic wood to a perfume) are utopian even in 2011. Who would invest in something that captures the "air"? There are only 3-4 places in the world where this information has been gathered, but not really available even for the perfumers working for these companies. If tomorrow the 2019 scene from Bladerunner takes place, we'll understand the crucial role of the perfumer in our society, the only one who is able to understand and master a sense that was considered too futile. 

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When I was a child, my parents went to some event in Pendleton,  OR, probably the roundup, and brought me back a little doll, a kind that has a name I forget.  It’s really just a head with a body like a beanbag, wrapped in a bit of flannel to look like a sitting Indian in a blanket.  It smelled of smoke.  I loved it.  

I love the smell of smoke-tanned buckskin.  The smell of Indian Days was for me cottonwood fires (Bob used to smudge cottonwood bark in the evenings), now replaced by propane or electricity.  The smell of the Bundle Openings was old bird skins and rope tobacco, the big leaves simply twisted and dried, looking almost like dry meat.  You can have your delicate madeleines dipped in elderflower tea.  I crave those old funky alerting smells.  

Empyreumatic.  I never had a word for it before.  Not the smells of holocaust and death-dealing disaster like Japan right now, but rather a daily, homely, human smell.  Sometimes on chilly evenings the scent of neighbors’ woodfires slip under my doors.  It’s reassuring. I do not expect a smellsample of it to turn up as an insert in Vanity Fair.  So I came back here.

READING VANITY FAIR

When my copy of Vanity Fair comes, I push everything else aside and go through page by page, tearing out the perfume samples and tucking them into my pocket, stopping to read the editor’s page and Christopher Hitchens (his hair is growing back), looking at all the photos and following the captions to see what the photos are of.  All that is about the consumer upper class that controls or at least marks out so much of public life.

I might do this process twice.  I also pull out all the extra thick paper and blown-in cards.  Then I tear off the whole front half with the ads in it.  They are hardly for me.  Mostly they are meant for young people or old people with enough money to pretend they are young.  Or who are looking to buy their own young person.   After that I have a much lighter mag so I can -- as they used to say about Playboy -- read it for the essays.  The funny thing is that you COULD do that with Playboy.  There often WAS good content.  (I had two brothers.  I read anything I come across.)

Now I start from the beginning and read the articles, skipping all the ones about starlets and singers.  I can’t tell them apart anyway, so why read about them?  

I usually don’t understand the stories about the movie biz or deep corporate politics but I read them slowly and try to get it.  Mostly it improves my vocabulary and once in a while I get the big picture.  This is considered men’s stuff, I suppose.  It’s about “game” -- as are most of the articles, really.  I appreciate the “smack” lingo and tone.

I read the ones about computer stuff, which are becoming more crucial and complex as time goes on.  This recent issue has me understanding a little better the whole Stuxnet crisis and the potential to bring civilization to its knees.  I’m wondering about malware affecting satellites and rocket launches.  I’m paying attention to the theory of origins and objects of attacks.  No one is pointing any of this at me or even at Valier -- wait, there’s a intercontinental ballistic missile site just over the hill from me.  Might be decommissioned.  No one tells. 

And then there’s a huge wind farm within eyeshot to the north that will soon (whether we like it or not) be connected to Canada, computer controlled.  It’s not necessarily about the objects of destruction but about points of entry to the bigger system.  Stuxnet was originally inserted into the system, they think, by using a flash drive or “thumb” stuck into a laptop.  This week at the library I noticed a scruffy guy in a dirty ball cap that said LAPD on it.  He had a gray ponytail and I didn’t know him.  He seemed to be looking at dating sites and chances are he was unemployed and looking for a friendly woman.  But maybe not.  Our library is a hotspot and tourists park just outside to use the access.  This makes some people nervous.

In line with the idea of particle-izing and then commodifying everything, there was an article about the guy who developed Twitter (where are you, what are you doing, meet up in the town square for a revolution) and the new program he’s working on, which is called “Square.”  It’s a way of by-passing banks for direct pay through, say, American Express, by using a merchant’s swipe attached to the side of a smart phone.  (Not in Valier.  I don’t think our system supports smart phones.)  I read Vanity Fair articles like this alongside the articles in the big time reflective websites like Edge.org.  They often mesh rather well, esp. when the topic is something like medical issues.  DNA research is very much like and enabled by computer developments.  And money.  There’s no use in being nervous -- full speed ahead.

I had a long love affair with Outside magazine a couple of decades ago and perhaps that’s why I’m less in love with the adventure articles now.  I mean I started with Richard Halliburton when I was in grade school and still have “Romance of the Road.”  One of these days I’ll get to Bruce Chatwin.  Still, if someone like William Langweische is writing, that transcends mere adventure and begins to reach for the meaning of life.  The first article I consciously read by him was about the World Trade Towers and it remains the account I trust the most.  (I don’t trust the majority of stories about that event but I’m not one who thinks it was a conspiracy -- I think it was more a perfect storm of incompetencies, including the building inspection.)

Of course I appreciate the articles about authors and artists, though it’s all very much about Manhattan with maybe a little dash of LA or Europe.  Not surprising.  The mag is missing the whole elaborate scene of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel.  I suppose they think it’s unsophisticated, but the dynamics are about the same.  And the money, although it’s old-fashioned resource development money.

There is a certain class of people who have one foot in the megacities with their glamour and danger, their politics and technicalities, and the other foot in a local scene somewhere undeveloped, practical, simple.  In an underachieving way (I don’t have enough money for the city) this has been my strategy.  To participate in ordinary local life full of weather and history is to stabilize one’s identity in a way that’s not really possible in a shifting scene of high theatricality and deception.  Cities are places of culture-mix which can be creative or just confusing, even damaging.  It’s hard to tell the predators from the prey.  On the other hand in a rural setting one must behave as the locals do -- unless you have a lot of money.  

I’m perfectly comfortable in this village.  In fact, I can survive here but I can’t survive in the urban “fast lane.”  Strange food, late hours, too much booze, unknown people underfoot as guests and hired help, and I’m destroyed.  Anyway you have to fly to get there and I’m through flying.  But it’s amazing how much of that life one can access through the web, UPS and Netflix.  In fact, the main luxury in a small town is time.  Lots of lovely time.  So I have time to sit on a sunny spring afternoon, reading and tearing out  the fragrant pages of a slick mag while the town backloaders scurry around out there, rearranging the snow, and Performance Today swells and ripples on the radio.

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR TIME

I’m being nibbled to death by ducks.   I get the mail and the first thing is a notice:  Your Extra Help with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs Notice of Termination. (It’s not much money, but still . . .)

The second thing is another notice:  “You owe $50 on your account with the GF Clinic and we are sending it in for collection.”  AFTER the “extra help” my co-pay was $100, which I was paying in pieces.  They want me to use a credit card.   The doc spent about three seconds max with me and never told me the results, though he discussed his diagnosis with the assistant.  When I asked, he left.  I hounded the office for months before I got a printed diagnosis.  I’m right on the dividing line for glaucoma treatment.  My advice was not asked.  HIS time is valuable.

There are other nibbles, too similar and boring to recount.  Takes too much time.

I call my pharmacist for more glucose diagnostic strips.  She tells me what the price is in her computer -- some mystery app that is a collaboration between Big Pharm and Medicare -- and she says the strips are free.  But when they come, the bill is $35 for fifty strips.  No explanation.  Already deducted from my bank account.  I’ve had refunds as big as $75 and debits as much as $50, all totally mysterious.  The pharmacist never knows why either.  It’s just bookkeeping.

Then I go by the only grocery store in town.  My order has come in.  The cat food cases are 25% more expensive than if I’d bought them in the county seat thirty miles away.  I ordered them when the road was perilous.  When I unpack them, one case is the wrong kind.  The rest of my order was canceled.  The peanut butter I want cannot be had unless I buy twelve jars at once because no one else in town buys it.  (Adams: half as much sugar in it.)   

As directed in order to sort out the first problem with that termination, I get on the phone.  I sit through all the usual advice to push this and that, to use a computer, to leave a phone message, to fill out a form I don’t have, etc.  Then I find another more local phone number with all the same information about stuff I don’t need to know.  I get a person, who is very nice and looks everything up and says I didn’t send in something I was supposed to and I was asked to call them weeks ago but I didn’t.   I did, but got put on hold, left a voice message that was not returned, etc.  Until I just gave up.  

She is sending me a form.  She asks if I’d like to come in in person:  she’s eighty miles away over icy roads and my pickiup is undependable, aside from the cost of gas.  There is no bus.  I’m fairly polite until she asks for time while she looks something up and I say,  “Oh, sure, go ahead.   I’m reading an article on left-handedness on the computer.”  Two things: immediately she wants me to do everything online and then she remarks lightly,  “Oh, the things we do to fill up our time.”  (ie.  I’m a little old lady who is wasting her time.)  Click.   As we used to say in Ms. Mag about feminist moments.

I’m nudged to think of Cass Sunstein and Clay Shirkey, two on my list of heavyduty thinkers.  I google Sunstein and the U of Chicago Law School says they’ve reorganized -- the Sunstein page is gone.  So I google “Nudge.”  This is what Wikipoopia says:

“The book received mixed reviews. The Guardian described it as "never intimidating, always amusing and elucidating: a jolly economic romp but with serious lessons within." But The Sunday Times called it a "very, very dull read" and others contended that the many policy proposals it contained became "a bit wearisome". It was named a "Best Book of the Year" by The Economist.”

And Shirkey?  “Cognitive Surplus” proposes that computers have released so much unused time that used to be sunk in watching stupid TV that we are in a veritable renaissance of creativity on the Internet.  Like starting Middle Eastern revolutions, I suppose, until they shut off the Internet.

Here’s another book to think about (I never buy them -- I just bounce off reviews):   “The Googilization of Everything” by Siva Vaidhyanathan.  It’s about (in part) the secret algorithym by which Google decides what to put on their lists and in what order and this new deal about the “quality” of what’s there.  Evidently, good website design will get you higher on the list which can make a big monetary difference if you’re using Google to sell.  Of course,  you can pay Google to be at the head of the list.   Most people never google past the first page.  


I’m fascinated watching my own name go up and down.  Sometimes someone will pick out a “hook” sentence from the body of the day’s post and put it at the beginning of the entry about my blog.  I try to write a good enough one of my own.  When I tell people this happens, they are shocked.  They think that the stuff that runs like water through a pipe across the Internet is never seen by anyone.  They’ve evidently never been in a tech room with a screen somewhere showing what’s flowing.   


In the early days of blogging, they used to post on the blogger website the titles of blogs as they posted online.  I was always surprised by how many were not in English.  Now, of course, thanks to Homeland Security and Pediapanic, there are filters that can pick out individual bloggers on the basis of their views and vocabulary.  Even their faces.


Evidently some people have just realized that they are being manipulated by their computers, even though Shirkey thinks it’s an active pursuit that lets us be creative.  And Sunstein/Thaler have pointed out that simple small percentages in the way we make decisions can change elections, start waves of popularity, determine your income tax, etc. etc.  (But then along comes the Big Dog of the U of Chicago School of Law and erases your carefully designed website so that Google can’t find it.)  


I see a pattern where banks and retailers (and other bureaucracies) deliberately overcharge or underprovide, knowing that the consumer will probably not have time to check closely and -- if the error is perceived -- will find it too small to spend time correcting.  On the other hand, there are women in this town who spend an hour or two on the phone every single day correcting small errors and injustices.


Getting back to my original experience, which is only a sample of miniature ongoing struggle, minor as it may be when compared with my real work of writing and thinking, it is clear that our world has been particle-ized in the service of commodification.  A million little rules and decisions are guiding things so simple as buying a jar of peanut butter.  I don’t grudge the money so much as I do the time.  I retired early, meaning poor, in order to have the TIME, and I resent that being drained away by trivia in the name of profit.  I keep thinking about the guy who programmed a lot of ATM’s to round off all deposits downward to the nearest dollar and deposit the extra cents to his account.  He picked up millions.  I forget what finally happened to him.  Too bad we can’t reprogram time.