before summer ends to-do list

provo experimental music night.  

i just started planning classes for fall, which made me realize i have only about a month of summer break left.  we've done some fun things this year.  nothing major, but lots of little things and lots of festivities with family and friends.

lalage at an experimental music night in slc last saturday.  ingrid called my outfit "miss vampisham."  i said yes to this gig though i really wanted to stay home.  i'm practicing "yes" more.

because of doing the artist's way, i've been trying to live more. . . festively.  to not limit what i do so much, so i've been saying yes to a lot of things, and trying to get out of my natural introverted state and out of the house more.

anna's new shoes right after a summer rain storm at provo bicycle collective.

here's what i want to do before summer ends and ingrid returns to college:

1.  hike mt. timpanogas.

2. go tubing on the provo river.

3.  road trip to southern utah.

4. fancy back yard italian dinner with candles.

5.  grill more corn and peaches.

6. buy a new pioneer bonnet.

Fieldtrip to Haring

When I haven't been working this week, I've been entertaining the kid who is not in camp and who hasn't any friends in town right now, and no plans.

Today I took her, not to Chico's Kiss mural, but to the Brooklyn Museum to see the work of another New York/East Village-based street artist, Keith Haring.  The Brooklyn Museum is hosting a show of work he made between 1978 and 1982, from when he was 20 to 24, just a wee lad, but already genius.  I was in high school during these years. 

Keith Haring died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31.  I remember the moment I found out.  I was in a divey restaurant near the University of Utah where I was attending graduate school.  An undergraduate poet broke the news, and I burst into tears.

So I've been mourning the loss of Haring for 22 years. 

Today, I wondered how Haring's life and/or career would have been different if he'd grown up--not in Pennsylvania and close to NYC--but where I did:  within a low-desert located bubble in Arizona.  Would he have gone to the NYC's School of Visual Arts after high school?  Would that have seemed within reach for him?  Would it have seemed as far away in every sense as it did for me?  Just as imaginary?  Or would Haring have found his language and vision if he'd been in Tempe in the art department at Arizona State?  Would he have made graffiti art up and down Mill Avenue--an alternate, parallel version of his subway chalk art?  What about if he'd been in Provo, attended BYU like I did?

Anyway, just some things I was thinking about as we made out way through the exhibit.  It was fantastic, heartening and inspiring.  Haring's work was the opposite of tightness, it was about freedom, love, imagination, exuberance and joy, and I felt happy to be experiencing that with my unscheduled kid. 

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Blogging as a Guest on a Borrowed Computer

1.  I am a guest in someone's home upstate and am using their computer a little nervously.

2.  My finger is still bleeding.

3.  There was a little library at the city pool.  The only book in the racks I could remotely relate to was the collected plays of Joe Orton.  I read them poolside.  Joe Orton is a pretty amazing dead person.   Sad about Joe.

4.  Speaking of death, tonight we stayed up late to watch The Descendants on a very large tv screen.