Blahg

12 October 2014

"What I want is an art of purity and tranquility... so that all those who work with their brains... will look on it as something soothing, a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its way as a comfortable armchair." That quote, from Henri Matisse, greets visitors of the Denver Art Museum's new Matisse and Friends exhibit.

Good luck with relaxing and being comfortable in this cramped — and short — exhibit. Yeah. The room has nice arm chairs and sofas for studying the 14 paintings on display, but even on the members preview day, silence and tranquility were hard to find. It's depressing how some people can't appreciate the notion that silence is golden. That includes putting down the cell phone - just for a few minutes, guys; it's not going to kill you.

Throw in some oddly incongruous classical selections playing softly in the background and piece-specific guidebooks, in neat notebook folders, sloppily pasted together — some pages upside down, and only sometimes because the pages have already been pulled apart on Day One — and the overall impression is one of disappointment. This is nowhere near on par with the exquisite Van Gogh exhibit a while back and the highly entertaining Wesselmann exhibit during the summer.

No doubt this general admission exhibition wasn't intended to be on that scale, but the execution of this one is simply off in virtually all respects.

At least there are these bits of insight from the artists:

"Fauvism was our ordeal by fire... It was the era of photography. This may have influenced us and played a part in our reaction against anything resembling a snapshot of life. No matter how far we moved way from things, it was never far enough. Colors became charges of dynamite to be exploded through contact with light," Andre Derain

"I heightened all my tonal values and transposed into an orchestration of pure color every single thing I felt. I was a tender barbarian, filled with violence. I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method, and conveyed truth, not so much artistically as humanely," Maurice de Vlaminck

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2 August 2014

Denver's Union Station has reopened and it's a pretty hip, happening place. There are restaurants, shops, bars... What used to be the waiting lounge is now more like a social hub with the well-dressed mingling with those of us more stylishly attired in Fender T-shirts and such.

It's a welcome revival to the area just south of Coors Field.

I still distinctly remember September 2001.

A friend was making her way from California back to New Jersey. Because of the catastrophic inhumanity of 9/11, rail was the only way to go at the time. The train was late and Union Station was a depressing, vacant shell of a train station, but I waited with some candy and soul food (U2 bootlegs; we met during the Elevation tour - the Meadowlands and Dublin).

As a lover of trains and train stations, I thoroughly welcome this newly revitalized Union Station. Denver needs it. And it needs Amtrak.

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26 July 2014

"Ice is civilization!"
- Allie Fox
The Mosquito Coast, Paul Theroux

Since I had to dust off my fridge magnets anyway, I decided to get a new fridge.

Just kidding. I really got the new fridge 'cause my frozen treats were no longer staying frozen. The fridge was an ancient Magic Chef. The ice maker never worked; the former owner said when she had it installed it leaked all over and she had to replace the entire kitchen floor.

And so it is, for the past 10 years, there was no working ice maker in Matt Manor. For a while, I used the ol' plastic tray method, but at some point I stopped. The ice seemed to shrink; there was weirdness going on in that freezer for quite some time.

While preparing for the delivery of the magical new Whirlpool, I did the customary clearing out of the old fridge and found some interesting stuff:

• Several 7-year-old cans of Berries 'n' Cream Dr. Pepper
• A 6-year-old jar of jam
• Undated bottled tea that must've been in there for untold ages
• A ham steak had literally fallen between the cracks - stuck between the fridge wall and the fridge's sole crisper drawer; it was looking pretty nasty and the "sell by" date on the label was actually blank - out of an abundance of caution, I made the executive decision to cook it right away. Just kidding. I threw it out.
• As I already mentioned, there was only one crisper drawer; I have no idea where the other one went. So there was an empty space where a drawer should've been that became an overflow spot in which to stuff stuff.
• After the old fridge was moved out, there was a dust bunny genocide; a moment of silence was held for the lost bunnies after the new fridge was installed.

Gosh. Writing this down is kinda therapeutic, borderline cathartic. Pretty disgusting stuff, I must admit, by even my own bachelor standards.

But civilization has entered stately Matt Manor. The new ice maker works like a charm. The guy who installed it spotted the reason for the previous leak right away: the installer used the wrong size fitting to the water line. And my installer actually made a quick trip over to the local Lowe's to get the proper parts. Very cool. (No pun intended.)

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20 June 2014

Sunset over the PRM.

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