SNOW JOBS, REAL AND FIGURATIVE

Dmitri Rybolovlev and Elena, now divorced, at least trying to.

National news, much less international news, has never been a focus of mine, but things are so crazy now that I’m checking the news hourly, even though it contradicts itself all the time, and revelations go deeper and deeper, layer after layer.  The more I chase explanations, the more I get suspicious and resistant.  I’m torn between thinking I have insight and just getting stuck.

On a psychiatrist’s newsletter, the doctor says that if Trump were his patient, he would hospitalize him at this point.  Blow, a NYTimes writer, suggests that Trump needs to be “paused.”  That is, no more flourishes of the pen or dawn Tweets until he stabilizes.  

At bedtime, in search of reassurance, I stumbled upon Rachel Maddow, a program I’d never watched before and I began to at least see the strings on the puppet.  It’s about money, it is Russia-focused but involves global finance, and it is not Trump’s program at all.  In fact, Trump is a victim.  One must be very careful where one borrows money, because the “bank” can call it in and the interest may be very high.  More than knee-capping.

Now that Trump has become so obvious a nut case, he’s of no use to his financers.  He should not let anyone approach him waving a cloth or carrying an umbrella.  He’s now expendable.  But it is much more clever to push him over into madness then to assassinate him.  If he were not crazy, he might be in danger of something like suicide or just resignation or blowing the whistle because of realizing his situation.  It would call for scrutiny.  But I think he’s truly an Alzheimer’s victim or someone is slipping him crazy-juice.  Probably Bannon, who partakes to the point of wanting only destruction and saying so.

For days and weeks various people have been hinting that something big was coming, something far beyond disliking a cheesy guy who got into office by a structural glitch and clever use of Big Data and gerrymandering.  It may be that Trump has been an ATM for Russian oligarchs, which is not the same as the nation of Russia.  The oligarchs now own what was previously the wealth of their nation.  They need to park the money somewhere.

One of Maddow’s convincing notions (to me) was about the incredibly wealthy man (see heading) who was trying to hide his own wealth from his divorcing wife by purchasing very expensive things (like art) and stashing them in big trucks that can be moved around (the way we once proposed moving nuclear weapons to keep them from being targeted).  

If you’re at the Russell Auction, take a look around.  It used to be a major selling point that Western art was a great place to invest in a commodity that would increase in value.  It was true and not true.  Scriver art is not selling at auctions for high prices, but most of the pieces on the market are late works commissioned by entrepreneurs.  Of the thousands of bronzes and hydrocals Bob created and sold, there is only one at the Russell Auction.  I’m saying, investing in art means that a lot of it goes off the market.

But Maddow’s real meat was about the economic connectedness of the world “1%” and their need to keep wealth hidden.  Trump was the money pimp.  Most of this is bookkeeping.  Bob used to joke about the ranchers who both had thousand-dollar stud horses, because they each sold the other their horses for a thousand dollars.  It was factual once the purchases were recorded.  She began her program by noting that big money is not bales and suitcases of paper bundles, but rather book-keeping.  No one can pack around a trillion dollars in bills or even gold.

So it seems clear to me that money, BECAUSE it is book-keeping done on computers now, is money that is interceptible by hackers, and also that wealthy people above a certain level are no longer individuals and MUST have an organization and a relationship with nations.  Money is national.  The units of measurement are national and their relationships among each other are negotiable.  Therefore money is political.  Everything political has a secrecy dimension because no polity is monolithic and sub-groups are playing poker.

So what does it have to do with Valier?  Ranchers are dependent on loans from banks which will be affected by any international banking systems.  The food in our stores comes from merchandizing systems that reach out across the continent.  What we have here to send back is beef, pork, wheat and barley.  This system network is always dependent on “bookkeeping” and credit with interest.  That’s not even mentioning our health care systems, our pension plans, or our social subsidy money.  If my Social Security check doesn’t hit the bank once a month, how do I survive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX8dgbr5EI8  This link is to Maddow at 9AM on Monday, which is what I saw last night.  I had never watched her before, but I find her more clear and intelligible than most commentators.  She names names, which is necessary because no formal systems have much to do with the dynamics.  It’s all handshakes, no paper, “friendship” (meaning people who can’t risk ratting each other out), and a big facade of sex, glamour, prestige, doing good for others, and the arts.  Patriotism has very little to do with it.  Pre-existing marital and inheritance law has little to do with it.  The Trumplets haven’t really figured that out yet.

Access to info can be a wealth, something valuable a person can “sell.”  With the Internet, teenagers in their basement bedrooms can download the equivalent of secret nuclear plans as well as messing with the neighbors’ refrigerator.  Except that there’s no necessity for them to be in the kind of neighborhoods that have cyber-home systems.  They could be squatting in an abandoned warehouse or warming a chair in the local library.  VERY few old white golfers with big collar sizes can even understand computers, much less operate one.  Trump’s Oval Office, when the desk has anything on it besides a phone, holds piles of newspaper clippings, probably articles about Trump.  You can see them there, next to the Diet Cola on its coaster.

One COULD argue that this puts society back into the hands of individuals and that is the ultimate democracy.  Is that a good thing?  Considering the performance of schools preparing kids to be citizens?  AAAAEEEUUUGH.  I don’t really care who pees on whom.  In fact, I’ve given up on the idea that “who” is the subject form and “whom” is the object form, though that was once a signal of education.  So was voting, but these days a near majority of people now fail to vote.

TOO TOO SOLID FLESH

"Bones"

Work, recreation and research have a tendency to merge in my days.  For instance, last night I watched an episode of “Bones”  (Season 4, Episode 6), the gruesomely explicit CSI series.  The most bizaare body so far was a basketball player who was behind the bleachers when they hydraulically folded into the wall.  People love these imitation corpses and make lists of the "best."  The “shock” bits disguise what is actually a discussion of what it is to be human, made of vulnerable suffering flesh.  "Bones" also explores the morality of sex quite a bit, as the Asperger-types question the voluptuous and emotional folks.

This particular episode was about an office romance that aroused jealousy enough for someone to throw a stapler at the victim’s head which triggered an aneurism.  (Okay, so they were reaching.) The payoff was throwing the body down the elevator shaft so that the car “mulched” (their word) the body into gobbets, one of which wore a high-heeled shoe. 

Villain, Hero, Woman

Then I watched a new addition to Netflix:  “The Salvation”, a Danish film, a “Western” filmed in South Africa in frank imitation of a spaghetti Western, except this was, as one reviewer remarked, “ink-soaked denim,” the usual pattern of one vengeful and powerful man confronting villains oppressing a town.  The town is half-burned, a jagged, shattered, charred background for urban shooting war.  Mads Mikkelson specializes in these roles, a righteous family man confronting a totally evil greedy-man (the handsome but menacing Michael Raymond-James.)  Everyone already knows the plot, just as we all know that the CSI show will end in solving the mystery.  

We recognize the steps and the characters, so the skill of the film is in the style, which is surprisingly restrained, almost barren.  I didn’t know there was dry terrain with buttes like that in South Africa, but maybe they were CGI.  Most of the victims are shot neatly in the middle of the forehead and drop in place.  

The restraint is more menacing than the episodes of fire.  A bad guy shoots a good kid on the roof of the hotel by sending bullets up through the ceiling.  This breaks the bottle of kerosene the boy was carrying, which drips through the ceiling and — since the bad guy is smoking a cigar, sets him on fire.  There are the traditional pair of women, a blonde heroine who is killed early and a dark heroine who at this point is tied to a bed, about to be immolated.  We don’t see how she got loose — the editing cuts to the villain using her as a shield on the balcony of the hotel.  I shouldn’t spoil the rest.  But note that she’s not Indian (there are no Indians — everyone is a “settler”) but she was captured and tortured by Indians, which made her a savage victim.

Twitter, as I follow it, includes a lot of indigenous people in both Canada and the US.  An on-going thread is about a book, “The Orenda” by Joseph Boyden, which has become the focus of outrage and political sword-waving about its perceived message: “the emergence of Canada: Indian savages, do-good Jesuits and the inevitability (even desirability) of colonization.”  It’s an apologia for the destructive “settlers” of the Empire.  (No reference to contemporary Palestinians with the same problem.)  The setting is the last years of the Huron Confederacy (1600's) in what became central Ontario.  If you want more, I’m quoting Hayden King, a professor at Ryerson in Toronto.  He’s Pottawotami and Ojibwe from that same area.  http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/the-orenda-faces-tough-criticism-from-first-nations-scholar-1.2562786

A friend had sent me a copy of “The Orenda” months ago, but I didn’t read very far into it because it was so “witchy” as Blackfeet would say.  Indeed, most of the doin’s in brush-and-stream country is usually dark and grotesque, the country of the starvation people who eat what Blackfeet call “nothing food.”  (Bison are real food.)

Until this review I hadn’t known that the tribal torturer (equivalent to a Spanish inquisitor) was named “Tekakwitia”, but I immediately recognized the name as similar to that of the first Native American saint, who is particularly celebrated by the Blackfeet here.  The Browning Catholic Church put a statue of her in the yard.  In fact, a young woman of this community was named for her, familiarly called “Tekkie.”  She had Down Syndrome which meant she was cheerful and generous, much loved.

The villain Tekakwitia is the father of this woman with the similar name who recently was deemed a saint.  The point of Tekakwitia the Torturer in this novel is that he converts to Christianity — he is REdeemed.  Then the suffering of the Jesuits become worthy.  Hayden King sees the whole book as “the marginalization of the perspective of the Haudenosaunee, the centering of the Jesuit point of view and the cultivation of old tropes, specifically the savage Indian — amounting to a tale about the inevitability of colonization.”  

From a purely historical point of view, like the CSI scientists, that’s the fact of the matter.  From the warmer moral relationship point of view, the fault of the book, according to King, is that it makes it seem that the victims triggered their own destruction and deserved it because they were such vicious sadistic savages.  I won’t venture to guess what that California private school teacher — the one who wanted to come learn all about the rez so she could inspire her upscale students — would made of this book.  I daresay she will be careful to not know it exists.

Adrian Jawort is a contemporary NA writer in Montana who honchoed “Off the Path,” a unique anthology of writing by and for NA’s because he saw that NA’s must read and publish for themselves, about their own lives today.  He’s in Billings and writes for “Indian Country.”.  I reviewed the anthology with admiration.  It is full of suffering honestly told.   https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/steven-bearcrane-cole-case-hits-close-home/  The piece linked is about the death of Adrian’s brother.

This is not Sherman Alexie joking around.  Jawort is reality-based and not from the 1600’s.  It is not Algerian/French theorizing, nor are there any Jesuits or saints.  Jawort told me his second book, “Moonrise Falling” and third book, “Off the Path II” were gothic in that intense genre that is often expressed in film as horror.  I challenge you to read them.  I’m not up to it right now.  I wonder what Hayden King said about them if he reviewed them.  Surely he knows they exist.  You can buy them on Amazon.

Academic and urban indigenous people immediately see this Goth/horror approach as insulting to their identity and some react by attacking the character of the writer.  These folks want to be seen as blameless, maybe even a bit romanticized, certainly middle-class and prosperous. They feel being indigenous is an entitlement even if they have never lived in Indian Country and have very low blood quantums.  To them being “Indian” is innate rather than survival-based from interacting with the land itself.  And they want revenge.

One can’t fault the reality that point of view.  It’s what also creates the monomania of Jesuits and settlers, that feeling that they are part of a privileged, admirable community.  But I wish they’d get over attacking the writer, trying to force him to eat his own legs.  It didn’t work for the Iroquois.  Attacks on Joseph Boyden come from the same vicious attitude they want to claim is “unIndian.”  

But the publicity must be great for sales.  Maybe even motivation to wade through this elegantly written and very long book, somewhat based on the life of Jean de Brébeuf.  King said it was the bloodiest book he’s read since “Blood Meridian.”  Some will consider that an attractive feature.  If you want authenticity, buy Jawort.  If you want to be an activist, how about getting involved in the neglect of NA murders?

ATTACHMENT IS BIOLOGICAL

From a play based on the lover who leaves.

In this feral cat colony of eight or so, there are three cats, a mother named Bunny and her two “kittens” named Tuxie and Douxie.  Bunny is blue, Tuxie is black and white, and Douxie is a marbled sort of gray.  Bunny is pregnant again, probably by the same tomcat as before, Finnegan.  He’s a come-and-go feral who simply showed up one day as a weird sort of dot-and-dash long-legged kitten with extra big eyes, rather like the original genetic stock of wild cats in Africa.

At that point the Blue Bunny was a tiny isolate whose mother, Smudge, had raised her under a pile of windfall sticks in the back building.  She didn’t tend the kitten very consistently but Bunny survived in spite of extreme cold and long periods of isolation.  Kittens, like other mammals, are supposed to grow up in a nest of siblings who supply body warmth and proximity.

Kitten Bunny fell madly in love with kitten Weirdo.  They had sex.  She gave birth to her own kittens in my bed with me.  Then she took them under the floor of the house, the “crawl-space,” to a sequestered small space under the bumpout window where I grow geraniums in winter.  She gave them as minimal care as she had had, with the extra dimension of total darkness.  I couldn’t get to them until one day I heard mewing, went under the floor and Douxie, the gray kitten which is male and a little larger, came staggering out of the dark.  A couple of days later it was Tuxie who found her way towards the light.  Bunny paid no attention, so I did.

The Weirdo grew up to be a huge tom and left.  Bunny became a milk-bar with her two kittens constantly, obsessively, nursing, no matter how much cat food I furnished, until they are now as big as their mother.  They still want to nurse. They have included the arm against which they were born as part of their nursery and search it for nipples.  When I get into bed, they come to gather against my arm, buzzing like bees.

To me, this is about attachment, both to place and to birth family.  Finnegan (his adult name) comes back now and then and causes a great bouncing, racing furor as all the cats present try to figure out what he wants.  If there are screams, I put him back out.  Otherwise, he gets fed with the others.  This is very much like some families, because it is biological.  We make sentimental stories or maybe cautionary tales about such families, but the truth is that there is not enough cultural “dressing” to cover or alter the biology.

It’s a temptation to project human standards onto these cats.  Finnegan, the tom, is the “good old boy” who lives off women.  Bunny is the irresponsible mother and Tuxie and Douxie simply refuse to grow up because life, as they understand it, is too grim to live as a loner.  They have been domesticated, dependent on a human.

There have always been “Danceaway Lovers”, which is an oxymoron — that is, a two-word contradiction.  But it does describe people who are unable to bond with another person because of early trauma or families that were only good enough to keep a child alive but not loved; or maybe even some physiological quirk that meant their brains would not “do” empathy.  But it was never an active moral principle before.   Now love 'em and leave 'em is supposed to be the right thing to do, even if it is not very nice from the point of view of the persons left behind.  Marriage was an attempt to oppose it but it wasn’t very effective.  Walking off prevents fights.

But the formation of families depends upon the capacity to bond, to attach for the good of the children.  If children are actively prevented, there is really no reason to form intimate bonds with a partner.  This moral stream of thought was much strengthened by same-sex pair bonds, more in men than in women, that one should NOT become emotionally attached to someone one shares sex with and one should prevent children.  Refusing to end an intimate relationship is seen as a social mistake, messing up groups and preventing new relationships.  It’s considered childish, a failure to grow up.

Tantalus

Tantalus was another of those Greek characters.

“Tantalus' fate was to become one of the  favorites and most intimates of Zeus. It seems that the rest of Gods were favorable towards Tantalus too, since he was frequently invited to the Olympus to dine with them.

However, the hero Tantalus did not prove worthy of all these favors and honors, since he committed several crimes and injustices against the Gods.

One of Tantalus’ crimes was that he stole ambrosia from the Mt Olympus, although he was invited as a guest to one of the rich dinners of the gods. Later on, he took ambrosia and nectar and took them to his friends trying to impress them.

Tantalus also revealed some very important secrets that Zeus himself had confided in him, betraying the hospitality and trust of the Gods. He was present in some conversations between the Gods and overheard some divine secrets, which he told to the mortals. . .

Although all the above mentioned crimes were pretty insulting to the Gods, showing that Tantalus was on the wrong track, the Gods did not punish him at first, thinking that he would understand from his mistakes. . . .

Tantalus invited all the Gods of the Olympus to a feast and dinner. But either because he wanted to test their genius or because he did not have enough food, he decided to do one of the most disgusting acts in Greek mythology.

He killed his son Pelops, cooked him, roasting the pieces of his body. and served him to the Gods. However, the Gods understood what was going on and refused to eat.

The only one who decided to eat the food provided by Tantalus was Demeter, who ate the shoulder of Pelops. According to the myth, Zeus decided to restore Pelops’ life, and Demeter gave him an arm made of ivory, to replace the shoulder she had eaten during the dinner.”

The punishment of Tantalus was to be in water that rose and fell so that food was just out of his reach, but he could not keep from trying.  If you think of food as standing for prosperity, it makes a pretty good account of the situation of some people today, always trying for enough money to achieve security but never quite getting it.

Anything economic is about children.  The point of attachment is for people to feed their children, which are the result of sex with or without love.  Love is part of attachment.  When people are free of the burden of children, the price can be chaos and unhappiness.  At first this causes yearning in the children, but if they never attach to their parents, there will come a time when it is the parents who need to be fed, but are not.  

THUNDER MEDICINE PIPE

Scriver Thunder Medicine Pipe

Part of the appeal of indigenous prairie cultures to “outsiders” is that from a bit of distance the whole category of “Indians” in people’s minds is frozen in time and homogenous — there’s very little, if any, awareness of what ecology did to basic survival, like for instance causing fish-based systems to be quite different from bison-based systems, though both will allow for considerable prosperity as did the Midwest corn/squash/bean communities of the Mandan/Hidatsa/

Arikara communities.  Because the latter were sedentary to tend their fields, they naturally evolved into traders, especially since they were at the “top” of the Mississippi River complex so that there was a “road” to their villages.

Because the bison-eaters had to go where the animals went, the people were nomadic, but there wasn’t a lot they needed from traders until metal and glass arrived.  Knives for skinning, pots for simmering, and bright mirrors and beads as markers of extra-prosperous families.  The whites valued skins that had limited usefulness, but their value was accepted if one were a trader, so the effort of carrying them along was worthwhile.

In this time a new religious object developed, a long-stemmed pipe decorated with both local objects like ermine skins and eagle tail feathers and with exotic things like satin ribbons and falconry bells.  They were associated with collections of small animal skins that had symbolic resonance.  So they were complexes of material objects plus memes of song and dance to express their meaning.  This became what we call a “pipe bundle”, emerging from the conflation of cultures and managing to survive because white people didn’t see what they were.

In the mid-Sixties, a time when the last of the buffalo people were aging out and whites were suddenly interested in indigenous spirituality, Bob Scriver (to whom I was married at the time) had dreams meaningful to some people (Richard Little Dog, Tom Many Guns, George and Molly Kicking Woman, Mary Ground, and others.)  They said it meant Bob should acquire a Medicine Pipe Bundle.  Besides, they needed the money.  They had the endorsement and supplementary guidance of John Hellson, an immersion anthropologist — that is, one who had married into the Canadian branches of the Blackfoot Nation and lived there.

Becoming a Bundle Keeper was a two-level process.  On the one hand was the this-world phenomenon of the historical composite object itself, which had persistently and quietly stayed with the People because avaricious whites wanted the flashy war-related beaded buckskin and painted lodge skins.  

On the other hand was the invisible component, the practices, stories and protocols of the Bundle objects.  So there was one price for the “thing” and another price for the power to operate it.  The second part was achieved by a “Transfer,” a ceremony of community-witnessed gifts.  Entitlement was authorized by the dreams, not by written words on paper.

The importance of this second part was that if the actual Bundle were seized by enemies (like fundamentalist converts within a family, who might try to burn it as an act of their Christian conversion), it could be re-created with new materials according to the prototype.  

This was also a necessary idea when a lodgeskin wore out, which was more frequent with canvas, but which — like everything else in their lives — was dream-authorized (indicated by that Maltese cross at the top of the back, which might have a tail attached in the middle) and painted accordingly.

After a few years of being a Bundle Keeper, Bob had another set of dreams that were about a lodgeskin, one that was specific to badgers which he had kept for pets so that he knew their ways beyond sightings on the prairie.  The same old-timers accepted this, but guardedly.  Nevertheless, we paid them to interpret, paint, and devise the ceremony for the lodge.  

When Bob died, the lodgeskin disappeared.  Because I had been Bob’s wife and active in the development of the lodge, the power of it and the entitlement to make a new one of the same design has moved to me.  The problem of Bob’s next wife is solved, since she’s dead.  Bob’s grandkids participated to some degree and therefore are also empowered.  We could transfer this power and ask for money for the “title” to the design.

Part of the ceremony was an exchange of clothing, the previous keepers putting on the new keeper’s clothes, the reasoning being that then the personified power would “follow” the new people, deceived by their clothes.  This was as much practical as ceremonial so that Bob’s new clothes was just a new set of Dickies khaki workclothes from the Browning Merc.  

But I had to have something to put on that came from Margaret Many Guns, who was standing in for Richard Little Dog’s wife who was dead.  Tom had physical custody of the Bundle which he kept in the rafters of his house on Moccasin Flats.  But he was drinking and couldn’t always resist the temptation to sell bits and pieces from it.  So the necessity of transfer was based partly on Richard’s missing wife, since it took a wife to maintain the protocols of its care, and partly to save it from being whittled down to nothing.

But Margaret Many Guns didn’t like any of this.  Her first husband had been a powerful ceremonialist in Canada so she understood the prestige of the Bundle even being in the house, and she did not like white people.  She barely knew me, though everyone knew Bob.  The next problem was that she was shaped like Queen Victoria — four by four — and I (in those days) was more of Queen Elizabeth II’s size.  What she ended up producing was an orange cotton “Mother Hubbard” with some strips of purple ribbon, and a set of high-top moccasins with minimal beading and a rubbing of red ochre.  

We all accepted this.  The idea was not fancy stuff but the reality of the situation.  I kept the dress and moccasins, and after the divorce I took them with me.  I have them now and I believe the power is with them.  When Bob died, the Bundle and the Badger Lodge disappeared.  The right to reproduce them remains partly with me.  What should I do about it?

I could just “secularize” the dress and mocs and sell them or give them to the grandchildren.  They’re pretty humble and might not be valued.  I could destroy them — set them free -- like putting them up in a tree in a remote place and letting them disintegrate.  I could just put it all off until after my death when it would be someone else’s problem.  Few would recognize such plain things.

I talked to Darnell Doore about it, since she is an historian and ceremonialist.  She and her husband, Smoky, sponsor Sun Lodges.  She offered to put the clothing into the top as a formal offering to the Sun.  This is an attractive offer.

There’s another dimension.  For a while I considered attending Thunder Pipe openings as a singleton though none of the original participants I knew are still living.  As a way of extending my plain cotton dress, I thought of creating a fancy “cape” to wear over it.  I’ve nearly finished that now and told Darnell about it.  In her mind she pictured elk-teeth, bugle beads, and other embellishments like the ones on the women in this photo. 

McClintock photo of Blackfeet Women

But mine is mostly star-shaped buttons and a polka dot ribbon on a square of purple cloth with a hole for the wearer’s head and some floating ribbons.  I haven’t figured out how to finish the head-hole yet.  To a naive person, this might make the plain cotton dress from a resentful Margaret Many Guns into something marketable because of the story as much as the appearance.

The value to me is one of participation in the “meme” dimension, but it is not authentic in the sense of being old and produced by indigenous people.  Their materials always have a fringy, earthy, hard-to-see quality because they had to be seen — as though they were 3D movies — through the experiences of prairie people who moved through the land, always dusted and scented.  I never completed that, but have a sense of it.  My cape is too bright, too clean, almost Disney-cartoon.  Nevertheless, it is an object-marker of something more.

CMR AUCTION IS A SIGN OF SPRING

"Robe for his Bride" by Bob Scriver

Technically March 1 is the first day of spring.  A glance out the window shows snow and the thermometer says somewhere below twenty degrees, in spite of a vigorous blow-through by a Chinook wind yesterday.  But the annual CMR Museum auction is in about two weeks (Charlie Russell’s birthday) and it is reassuring to remember that in previous years, one could usually drive there on bare roads while wearing a jacket instead of a winter coat.  A handful of times there has been a blizzard.  And the most dangerous trip I ever made was delivering a load of bronzes to Cody just before May 1 in the Sixties.  The plowed snow was higher than the van.

The CMR auction catalogue has been posted for a while, a way to browse without any risk and at leisure so as to reflect.  http://cmrussell.org/2017-catalog/2017_The_Russell_Catalogue.html#p=1  The mechanics of the online catalogue get a little smoother every year.  One can buy a hard copy to keep for reference.

There is only one Scriver bronze in this auction.  I hadn’t seen it before.  Page 127.  No year is given.  The high limit on castings and the subject matter suggest to me that it was part of the group he made late in life according to some entrepreneur’s idea for a piece that might sell, which the entrepreneur bought as a prototype for ceramic-shell casting.  The idea was that the buyer also acquired the copyright, issued a certificate of provenance authentication, and managed the whole project through his or her own choice of foundries and so on.  It was an old man's strategy.  The anonymous private collector would most likely simply have bought the casting from the entrepreneur.

“ROBE FOR  HIS BRIDE”  3 OR 175 NUMBERED CASTS

14x22x10 inches

$8,000 - 12,000  

Provenance:  private collection in Massachusetts

Hunter by his horse approaching animal on the ground  (bear?)

I was surprised by p. 211, which is composed around Scriver stationary on which I typed many a letter in the Sixties.  It’s a page of praise from Scriver to Charlie Fritz, giving the advice to get a room at the Russell Auction, and includes a good photo of the two men together.  The letter dates to 1991.  (Bob divorced me in 1970.)  It’s absolutely sincere.  Bob yearned to be able to paint like Fritz and Fritz admired Bob the artist as much as his work.  

Such a relationship is rather rare in “cowboy” art, which tends to be competitive.  Fritz never knew Ace Powell, who was Bob’s close friend and good influence since grade school and a man who believed in community and sharing.  Especially in a bar.  Many of Bob’s best impulses came from Ace, including this kind of admiration and friendship.

I rarely travel even as far as Great Falls, but this year it’s a temptation because the seminars include Brian Dippie (p 68), who in a similarly generous gesture, wrote the introduction to my biographical memoir of Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” published by the University of Calgary Press.  (Available on Amazon.)  

It is a book that attempts to be a comprehensive guide to the history of Western bronzes, including French bronze casting of Beaux Arts memorial statues in the 19th century, the shift from selling through galleries to auctions, and the beginnings of the Cowboy Artists of America in the pattern of the Society of Animal Artists.  I explained the method of lost wax casting, the building of our own Bighorn Foundry which did Roman block casting, and the benefit of being included in the New York City exhibits of classical sculpture (Audubon Artists, National Sculpture Society), which certified to early buyers that Western subjects were “real art.”

Nothing is very shocking in this year’s show.  Since there’s no more Van Kirke Nelson, there’s no more Ace Powell.  The prismatic/chromatic bear heads and horses persist.  “Fauvism” (wild color) is popular.  Ledger art is welcome but I’m not sure whites “get it.”  Landscapes and wildlife for the liberal Democrats co-exist with the cowboys and Indians for Republicans.  I enjoy vignettes like Nelson Boren’s “Bushed” (p 181) — I don’t think he intended a pun, but it would be a lovely piece to live with.

Ned Jacob has several pieces.  p. 189 and 190.  He has a more beautiful drawing “hand” than any other contemporary artist, but though he spent early years with Ace and Bob and went on to be a noted teacher, he’s always kept a low profile.  (website at nedjacob.com)  P. 191 some classic Roland Reed photos, like the ones Bob always displayed with his Blackfeet series of bronzes.

P. 178 shows two items familiar to we old-timers.  One is a huge Fery mural of Glacier Park that used to hang in the East Glacier “Big Hotel” as it was commissioned for.  The other is a trademark Earl Heikka pack train, originally made in a sort of paper maché that only he had the patience to handle, but now recast in bronze.  P. 152 is also a bronze casting which was probably made from the wood carving original by John Clarke.  I used to always rendezvous with Joyce Clarke Turvey at the auction, but she’s gone now.  Her granddaughter runs the gallery, but this “Fighting Bulls” is coming from a customer.  The work was done in 1924, the high achievement part of Clarke’s career.

Bob Scriver’s niece called me from Bozeman a few days ago to say she’d bought one of Bob’s bronzes at an auction there.  Evidently there is an on-going series of auctions there, sometimes associated with good causes.  She and Bob got along like two cats in a bucket of ice water, so she had lots of questions.  Bronzes are problematic for someone without much experience because it’s easy enough to make a mold of anything.  Training an “eye” takes years of careful looking for clues to workmanship.  Composition alone is three-dimensional, which isn’t simple.  Most people just go by subject matter, which has nothing to do with the execution of the idea.  Their awareness of an artist's style is limited.

It’s been fifty years since all this started.  The Bob Scriver award, originally tied to people who knew Charlie Russell, has timed out and been replaced by the Heritage Award.  Today I hardly know any of these people and don’t understand them.  They’re good business people, not the colorful and often troublesome characters I used to know, who were a lot more like Charlie Russell.

ATHEISM IS NOT A NEW RELIGION

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Daniel Dennett

On Martin Marty’s “Sightings” Sightings@uchicago.edu;  was a discussion of the phrase the “Church Militant,” that connects the historical phrase to the contemporary and IMHO demonic bargain between neoatheists and anti-Islamists.  I had not understood this before.

The same story was also blogged here:

http://religiondispatches.org/atheisms-dark-side-aiding-the-trump-agenda/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c06b342515-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-c06b342515-42405913

“Freedman [a NYTimes reporter] quotes White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who in a speech at the Vatican in 2014 “called on the ‘church militant’ to fight a global war against… ‘Islamic fascism’ and international financial elites,” etc. Freedman condenses the “Church Militant” agenda to stances against—surprise, surprise!—“globalism, immigration, social-welfare programs and abortion,” and for “an existential war against radical Islam.”

The media, with their usual obtuse need for headlines, created a category for certain social thinkers.  According to Wikipedia, always avid to “know better,” says “New Atheism is a term coined by journalists to describe the positions promoted by atheists of the twenty-first century. This modern-day atheism and secularism is advanced by critics of religion,^[1] a group of modern atheist thinkers and writers who advocate the view that superstition, religion and irrationalism should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever their influence arises in government, education and politics.”

The names usually waved around are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.  All of them could be demolished by French-Algerian deconstructionists, who specialize in revealing the assumptions behind assertions.  The New Atheists are easily revealed as merely decapitated Christians, who wish to have all the attributions of the system but without that inconvenient Father/Boss personified by a Monotheistic God.  THEY want to be the ultmate authority themselves.  Dennett’s long white beard gives him away.  Hitchens was the most attractive figure, partly because he was funny.  Partly because he was the least overbearing about the conflation of “reason” with their own opinions based on the standing order, which has been good to them..  None of these guys were feminists, but Hitchens probably would at least admit it was reasonable.

When I was working for Multnomah County Animal Control, a “new budgeting strategy” arrived that called for a “zero base” accounting.  Before that, we just took the old one, added what we knew we needed — plus additional percentages for what we knew would be removed again by the politicians who wanted to look thrifty and called it good, though it was always a little more every year.  The idea of “zero base” was that there had to be evidence proving the amount needed.  No gauzy assumptions.  

The New Atheists were doing old-fashioned conventional thinking, accepting what had been the status quo as the context, knocking out what they didn’t like, adding in what made them look good.  “Zero-based” theology would first of all have to remove the prefix of “theo” since there are systems that have no god at all, thus no theology.  Conflating the idea of monotheism with the only definition of religion, meant that there was nothing truly new about it.  By using the term “New Atheists” the relationship of dependence on the old system remains.  

Theism is derived, the deconstructionists would point out, from the father/chieftain tribes of the Middle East, which is why their headquarters are piled up there on top of each other.  It is more properly called a “three brothers” system, since each of the big Theisms is derived from the sons of Abraham.  Therefore, it is about who is the rightful heir of the father, which persists into modern times both in military adventures and in the Roman Catholic Church, which treats the Pope as the inheritor of Peter’s Church.  (Jesus had no institution.)  Each of the three “brothers” is also prone to inheritance schisms within their movements and those wars are often the more vicious and bitter.

Bannon is quoted as calling for war against ‘Islamic fascism’ and international financial elites,” this last being transparently Anti-Semitism.  It’s still family war, in Abraham’s house where the Game of Thrones gets played out again and again, this time with predator drones and predatory governments shuttling money.  Evidently it doesn’t help to be Asian, since Kim Jung-Un and family demonstrate the same tendencies:  the young males kill the old male and ascend to his throne.  One source of democracy is the cost and pain of this rivalry making the system miserable for everyone, including the aspiring tyrants.  But democracy is a lot of work and it becomes much easier to let “Dad” do it.

Instead of pointing out all this obviousness, which no one seems able to resolve, perhaps it is time to describe the TRUE new religions, which really are “zero-based,” that is, proved out in benefit to people and the world and not anthropocentric.  Some people like to call them “spiritual.”  Others say environmental or earth-based.

The “three-brothers” Theism of Abraham is worn out.  Or maybe it’s just co-opted by greed.  Or maybe the central illusion of “family” has crashed.  I’ve been thinking about “writing” (Sacred Books) and “bookkeeping” (Venture capitalism yielding interest) and the extent to which they describe the Middle East troika, even enable it.  What if both written laws and banking practices were at least de-emphasized, replaced by new thinking that is image-based and non-scoring.  Esp. images of natural processes that are cyclical, self-sustaining, because they are as self-correcting as the cycles in the human bodies controlling homeostasis: hunger and thirst, waking and sleep.

As an example of what I mean, who could have guessed that George W. Bush would have followed Carter into a post-presidency that has stature and meaning far beyond the desk job of the president?  Who knew that this inarticulate man, dependent on his father, could create images of heroes — not just one, but a series.  And not depicted as violent superheroes but as surviving wounded, standing with comrades. 

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/george-w-bush-says-we-need-answers-about-trump-and-russia-vgtrn?utm_source=vicetwitterus

Bush’s portraits invoke the values of Jesus.  They really ARE Christian, New Testament, accepting of suffering, and entirely egalitarian.  Not about God but about humans.

George W. Bush