HAWAI'IAN HOLIDAY... [ENDING ELEVEN]

The real holiday of this season, for me, is Solstice... the day on which we flew from the mainland to visit friends on The Big Island. from our own Island's chill & damp overcast we landed into tropical air & clear starry night skies. A good-enough celebration of the longest night, in spite of unnatural price in dollars & carbon credits!

We are now on our way home for New Years... wishing that FEK did not have to change plans to join us. Her brother in law died just before Christmas so she went to Texas & would be too frayed to make the originally planned travel to Vashon, sigh... we had been looking forward to spending time with her at Soundcliff, but we accept the her situation.

Our time here has been quite wonderful. We are visiting & staying with our friends John & Glen, who used to live on Vashon but now have a wonderful home & garden here in Kona coffee country. They are active at the Donkey Mill, the local art center where an old friend, Kate Jacobson, is the director... so they know these friends from my Sedona era, Kate & her husband Will are well known potters... & teachers of a technique known as "Naked Raku"... It is indeed a small world!

We'd reacquainted ourselves & they'd met Stephen on our last visit over lunch at their home/studio, before she took this position. When she heard we were returning, Kate invited me to give an small, rather impromptu presentation at the Center... making the trip nicely more advantageous for me!

They were living in Olympia, Washington when I first moved from California & visited me in "The Cabinet", my first downtown Seattle studio, so we've been tagging each other for these 30+ years. No... I doubt we will be moving to Hawai'i in turn, even as it is a wonderful place for a holiday!. When she introduced me she mentioned that she was 21 when we met in 1976 & was kind to explain that I had been an inspiration all these years.

I was nicely received even though technical difficulties between my laptop & the projector disordered the images so that I had to surf & dance lively to improvise with whatever image popped onto the screen next! Happily it was an informal gathering of about twenty interested & interesting folk who asked good questions & appreciated the work... mostly bells, but a few pieces of jewelry plus some drawings & images of my inspirations. We sold a few bells afterward & made some future contacts, so I was pleased, in spite that several days work of planning had been lost! sigh...

Stephen & John have been friends for decades as well... He & Glenn included us in a fulsome round of parties with their friends, many whom we'd met on our previous Holiday trip four years ago. Several gatherings are traditional enough that we had been to earlier incarnations in the same wonderfully interesting homes. So many here are built to be open-air pavilions most of the time, with big sliding doors & folding shutters or simply open screens... I'm loving this kind of holiday weather!

Our hosts nicely entertained a fine dinner at the house the next evening, giving more time with Kate & Willi as well as two other friends: Lorraine, who who has lived a rather fabulous story over her many years, as well as Gerald, a younger Island-born artist we'd met on our last visit. 

Christmas dinner was a picnic on the beach near with yet another group of friends with whom we've gathered before on the same occasion. I love the informal ways here. While it's a bit odd to see [thankfully few enough] of the usual Christmas ornaments alongside tropical blooms... poinsettias do grow wild here!

We enjoyed educating ourselves a bit about Kona's coffee production, visiting a co-operative mill one afternoon, where I photographed one worker raking the berries at an almost monk-like meditative pace to dry in the sun. There was a self guided tour showing the complicated, multi-stage process of removing several layers of husk & skin. At this point they had been soaked to look like & were called, "parchment"... which will then be polished off, revealing the bean ready to be sorted as green beans ready to roast. 

I've made many photographs of the botanical effulgence & we've snorkled to add richly decorated fish & coral to our memory banks of imagery. My favorite discovery was the bloom of the Blue Jade Vine, which is a fascinating sculpture in an highly improbable color.

While it forms exuberant, long loose clusters, eventually making only a couple large pendulous seed pods hanging from the seemingly too-thin stem... it is the form of a single blossom that is quintessential to my eye. I have no firm idea yet how I might use it, except possibly to first pencil a study in my round drawing book. Perhaps it could evolve into a bell design, but I don't perceive just yet how...

the painted drapes in our room which that friend, Roz Marshall, painted...

VANCOUVER INTENTIONALLY...

We have been planning around a quick trip up to Vancouver, BC... 170 miles north of us, just over the Canadian border.

Conspiring with us is our long & deep friend & god-buddy, Malcolm, who lives in Port Townsend, which is closer, but requires a ferry. It became a complicated dance of four guys living in numerous places on lively schedules! 

We intend to visit another soul mate named Sequoia, who has been creating & reinventing his life due to health. He has just published his autobiography, titled DIVINING DESIRE.

This will be be the virgin crossing using my new passport... renewed after lapsing during Covid-19. It feels good to be traveling wider again! 

We left our condo Friday mid-morning driving I-5 after its very busy rush hour,  to arrive at an acquaintance of Stephen, who allowed us to park our car & meet Malcolm, who'd offered to drive us up in his Tesla. 

Not being a driver anymore, I was happy to retire into the back seat, having a driver... plus a spare! 

Checking into EXchange, our LEED-certified hotel began an interesting experience on many levels. First, because LEED is acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, we felt we were honoring our many efforts to be good environmental citizens.  

Next because the building...the old Stock Exchange... hence it's name... is only one of many older buildings in the long bustling urban core of a historic city which preserves its earlier historic street-scape by requiring such buildings to retain at least part of the the original facades. 

We'd been given rather complicated instruction how to park... first for finding the entrance well down a one-way alley with an obviously temporary plywood structure hovering 'round the view as we began descending several steep tight loops, passing ample charging outlets for EV, like the one we are in... comforting & later useful. Then up to the modern building's dizzily wavy-tiled lobby before finding a turn into the original interior elevator lobby with its colorful terracotta-tiled  ceiling, which served only the few floors of the hotel. Finally we found welcome at the reception desk. 'Twas already a minor adventure, clothed as potential predicament.

Malcolm is a builder, so he & I were fascinated with all this mixed architecture. He later discovered a model in the new lobby which helped us understand the project better.

 Our room was fine, except for the wallpaper, printed to mimic or imply something like an detail from a stock certificate[?], but at a scale conjuring mostly sloppy stucco.

I cannot resist sharing Oscar Wilde's quote, often reputably from on his deathbed, as "Either this wallpaper goes or I do.” but what he actually said was, “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.

We dressed to meet Sequoia at his apartment, well located 5 floors up from a hillside cul-de-sac above Stanley Park, where he's lived for 20 years. We had fresh vegetable rolls which Malcolm brought from the Chimacum farmer's market he helped create some years ago. I especially appreciated that they'd been garnished from the inside with toasted sesame seeds before being rolled around the filling. Malcolm is entrepreneurial as well as a true farm-foodie!

Sequoia invited us to one of his favorite nearby restaurants & we were seated in a room open to the sky. Our delightful server's name was Miriam... with sparkling Egyptian eyes. 

A lovely reunion in deep camaraderie. We all have long history of sharing many of Soundcliff's fabled Thanksgiving feasts. 

We had packed with the forecast of probable rain, planning to spend the day retreating in the UBC Museum of Anthropology, but easily rejoiced in a glorious Saturday. 

Additionally, it happened to be the re-opening day of the museum's renovation of its renowned architecture, by Arthur Erickson.  Much of its famed glass facade had not been originally built to the architect's design & was found to be vulnerable to seismic failure. That lofty transparent space perfectly housed the collection of tall totem poles originally sited in the First Nations' coastal fishing villages. 

It was explained that the youngsters were learning the traditions in situ...

Canada has wrestled with its indigenous population with more remedial attention, if still too-late, than have we in the US, where they are still usually called "Indians"... The new signage acknowledges a series of navigational, geographic & linguistic errors.  Ah, the hubris of white men, living on in ever-destructive delusions of superiority! "Sad," as one currently visible adherent pretense to great superiority that might say. 

 Stephen & I joined a short tourof the new space, being given by the director of the museum... an erudite well spoken woman who explained the care with which these poles were ceremonially "put to sleep" by members of the First Nations' people to be stored horizontally before the building's glass facade was reconstructed. It was a monumental reworking, including deep rethinking of how the artifacts were re-installed... with new , more properly & precisely written signage all with consultation... plus First Nations ceremony. 

 Watching the dances commemorating the opening, we realized that our timing in this case was not nearly so intentional as quite lucky! 

 I was particularly pleased to be revisiting this art because I had studied its influences I honored when I designed THE NORTHWEST COLLECTION linked here:

 DUCK: https://www.grbbells.com/products/northwest-duck?_pos=1&_psq=duck&_ss=e&_v=1.0   FROG: https://www.grbbells.com/products/nwfro?_pos=1&_psq=frog&_ss=e&_v=1.0                   ORCA; https://www.grbbells.com/search?q=northwest+orca&_pos=3&_psq=orca&_ss=e&_v=1.0

[Somehow, I left our hotel that day without bringing my phone/camera, so I'm pleased that Stephen is allowing me to use his photos to enliven this post.]

This image made by a handy bystander of the four of us in front of a favorite Bill Reid sculpture, portraying the story of the discovery of mankind in a clam shell by Raven. I remember being impressed by this huge cedar wood carving from my first visit to this museum 20+ years agoI still find it magnificent..  The Raven and the First Men can be studied here: https://moa.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Sourcebooks-Raven_and_the_First_Men.pdf ;

  

Stephen caught this fine casual portrait of our compadres Malcolm left, Sequoia right... both rapt & wrapped inside the intensity of learning in this treasure trove of history.

I met first met Sequoia at one of his Men In Touch retreats at the Bodhi Manda Zen monastery in New Mexico, in 1999. Stephen & I made plans to meet after separate visits to our families... he in Minnesota, me in Kansas. Both of our fathers were dying.

Sequoia has actively evolved a career from Air Force pilot to massage therapist ever deeper into the nexus of spirituality & sexuality. I have been introduced numerous times & ways into dancing with these concepts in my own life & can vouch for value added, while not feeling much need or capability to expound more here. I can happily refer to his newly published book Divining Desire... Exploring Sacred Eros by Sequoia Thom... I can invite you to read it with me if you are curious.

Sequoia has been diagnosed with stage four cancer but has been living in a remarkable state of health for more than a year, eliciting further appreciation. The reason for our visit to his home in Vancouver was to celebrate another time with him.

The weather returned toward the prediction on Sunday, when we had a brunch at the old hotel in which Stephen had first hoped to find our lodging. The Sylvia Hotel had more of our style, but the kitchen lacked some of the basic skills...like how to properly poach eggs!

As we returned, I appreciated the rather ephemerally embracing sculpture... quickly dissolving,... evaporating visually... all in the few minutes we spent driving through the pleasant woman examining our passports at the border.

Because we had such important time inside friendship, we returned home deeply satisfied. I am grateful that Stephen accepts & loves being ''my driver"!

Summer Solstice Story... 2024

 

Emerging again from the burning roots of Solstice

MAKER RENEWS 

Feeling accumulated warmth...

  Tasting fecundity in deep rich seasonal air...

 

 

Testing possibilities... 

A new surge of life...

Contemplating a maturation in creativity!

Photo Essay by Mark Milroy & Gordon R Barnett

A friend & neighbor on Vashon Island, Mark Milroy, is a fine photographer. In 2021 he proposed making a shoot of me in the old Big-Leaf Maple which had quite a history hanging-out over our Soundcliff's parking-pad -- offering both dangers and protections inside her delicate cavernous core. He envisioned posing me nude in this tree. 

 

I accepted what was a bit of a challenge. I am not particularly shy... loving hot tubs & bath houses; having a lifetime's history of nude beaches, Faerie Gatherings & skinny tripping with friends in the waters of Oak Creek. I've known innumerable life-drawing sessions with nude models of all genders & I've even modeled in several groups where we exchanged roles as artist & model.

Even-so, this is another sort of "coming out" for me... publishing myself here!

BLOG DANCE...

I am coming back to my long-familiar history on Blogspot, which I hope will restore a certain richness which I have long appreciated.

While I have become disenchanted with my stint of trying to blog on Shopify, I continue to celebrate Shopify for many other functions. When my computer guru introduced me to Shopify, he put it simply: 

Shopify is about numbers, while 

Blogspot is about words.

I need both!

My business has been happily busy recently, mostly because my faithful associate, Momo, has been regularly active on the various social media platforms we try to keep up with: Facebook,  Instagram, & TikTok. The last one is especially lively... in numerous ways... most of them ever puzzling.  We've had some posts which have gone viral (up to 47,000 hits), but that has not always resulted in sales. We are trying to tease answers about the algorithms, as are many others. 

We were astounded by a run of sales of the Chocolate Lily Earrings, of which Momo had made-up several dozen pairs last year from an abundance of stock when our foundry mistakenly filled an order twice.  We don't often sell earrings, but something mysteriously "clicked" on TikTok & we've been frequently shipping them out...  sometime 4-5 orders a day! We don't know why, but we're not complaining!

The capabilities of Shopify to keep the sales, mailing & inventory functioning in real time are a boon to me; I do not love numbers & the details of bookkeeping. The program keeps track & analyzes sales & information about customers which will be useful to study how the business is faring in various ways. It can do more than I can easily fathom, much less use at present. I'm happy to keep exploring & learning its capabilities.

But Shopify is not so capable of reflecting the style of my communication. I have long taken pride in my blog. It is more than a tool for the business, which is the way Shopify is programed. I suspect I could keep working to finesse it better, but it simply doesn't seem worth it to try to reinvent what Blogspot already does.

I have often quipped that my blog is "the book I will never write." It is a collection of essays about several decades of my history... with photos. It is wildly variable as to quality. I obviously have found myself posting in many moods and manners. It is very personal. That is, I believe, much of its value.

So this flipping of venues is more of my experimental exploration. I say"venueS" because at this point I will probably post & repost back & forth, in order to educate myself more about how they contrast in use.

You may continue to read my blog on both plstforms: https://www.grbbells.com/blogs/blog &/OR: GRBBELLS.COM...

Biz & Personal, Mixed... as usual. Obviously clarity is not my easy path. 

FINE! 

I bumble well.

TAKING a DEEP SOUNDING on SOUNDCLIFF...

 

When we returned from India several years ago, we began dreaming of more such richly lengthy travels. That realization began our planning more seriously about some version of “retirement”… knowing that neither of us would ever do that in any sort of usual way. But we both know our energies are slower & the math pointed to the fact that five years later I would be 80, so the time to travel is soon… is now.

Whether we return to the subcontinent which we have come to love, or return to our explorations in Europe… or to venture further, perhaps into Africa & South America, remains to be determined, but we have taken the challenge seriously.

Multitudes of poignant, poetic moments lace throughout these months spent inside the hard work; first, of contemplation, then the process, the actual laborious processes, of preparing to leave Soundcliff… our home – his of 33 years & mine for most of 26. The home we’ve worked on together so deeply to contain us, to entertain us & to explain us.

We also worked here, as two completely individual creative lives: One a writer, filmmaker & facilitator, working in an office off the living area or up the slope in a specially built lovely separate “writer’s cabin” close to the drive. The other a visual artist, jeweler & bell designer, who has occupied a generous studio space at garden level… with immediate access to the garden which is also his passion.

We had shopped condos a couple of years ago year & followed an impulse to imagine living in an imaginary eighth floor home on the east side of the last building possible in the new village named Point Ruston. The building – now called Rainier Condominiums – was a foundational hole on a generous lot. We viewed drawings & film projections of a dream which brought us back later. We hiked up the steel fire stairs with Brandon, our realtor, in the raw hull of a building without yet an elevator. Without yet solid walls, but filled with bare steel studs which only barely began to sketch the space which we ultimately decided to buy.

We began to take the notion of moving more seriously, especially after my declaration that I was not going to plant a garden next year. I had fallen several times with enough minor injury to suggest I pay better attention to my fables as well as my foibles. It felt good to admit that I was no longer having fun in the soil, albeit with a bit of embarrassing disappointment.

Stephen had a connection with a young Vashon realtor, whom I also liked & we began learning what selling a special property involves. Sophia DeGroen Stendahl soon had us grooming & staging the house for the photographer, requiring the moving of all sorts of extraneous paraphernalia to present the space well. After all, we were selling the house, not our collections… even though we needed to move much of it back in soon afterwards so that we could continue to live in it again. That was good practice for the eventual serious editing to come. We both have way too many possessions!

Success in these processes has become our current achievement. All has changed very quickly & happily, rather more smoothly than expected as our work shifted into higher gear. You see, there was a couple who had leased a house on the Island while they searched for the right home for themselves… That home turned out to be Soundcliff, which was never actually listed & shown only twice… the market is still very active because of the rare bucolic qualities of Vashon and urban pandemic jitters. 

We cleared from this…

& this…

To this…

The bedroom sported a custom bed platform which allowed us to sit up into the view to read or write while observing the magical views of water, mountain & weather… Ultimately, we salvaged the big drawers to use in the dressing room of the condo.

As the “bones” of the house were revealed, some bits of its “skin” became more evident… like the painted “sky” ceiling of the kitchen, the patina on the old fir floor of the living room & the painted mosaic kitchen floor by Galen Garwood.

The well-worn couch, which held memories of many conversations over cocktails, cuddles & naps, was one of the last pieces of furniture to find a new home… leaking down feathers all the way.

There is no way to describe the months of wild emotional processes & simply difficult labor which it took to get us through it all & out the door the last time. Whew!

We do, however, look forward to being invited back for a visit when Elizabeth & Keith have put their new notions on Soundcliff .

Our life continues as “adventure, not predicament” in a new venue…which we’re calling Huitieme Ciel. More to come.

 

Smoke Tree... Autumnal Wet Smoldering

 

Our season is even more indeterminate than usual. Weather!

We’ve recently found ourselves caught in a stream of atmospheric rivers. To be so saturated, so early, raises concern for our stability, perching, on a cliff on an island of alluvial fill.

So our garden takes its own rhythm. Some parts have expired with the simple lack of sun, while much has “hung on”, if not exactly “thriving” toward some protested ending. I can only cerebrate nature’s wisdom… however many times I prove myself not wise enough to observe her learn-teaching/teach-learning. She dances smack in the middle of climate change. Adaptivity & survival inside maelstrom.

Autumnal energy holds forth beauty of unreliable promise.

The City Museum in Saint Louis - Revisited

 

Another classmate & friend, who lives in St Louis, generously returned to Elsah to bring us back into the city, where we had a reservation for our last evening’s hotel…’just across the street from our favorite museum, which we’d planned to visit after making an exploration of the city’s famous Botanic Gardens. Because it was a hot day we happily found shady benches near the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domed tropical greenhouse… the Climatron. There Stephen could comfortably check into a scheduled weekly Zoom call & I could catch-up with my mail after the busy time at the reunion.

Nearby was a Jacques Lipchitz sculpture, which interests us for another connection…

We have a Lipchitz drawing from Helen & Otto’s collection hanging in our stairwell. He’s not a particular favorite, but we enjoy holding it for many reasons.

There is a Carl Milles (I would much rather own a drawing of his!) fountain not unlike the one we know on the Plaza in Kansas City… with those huge lily pads one wants to float on!

After spending a satisfying hour or so inside the tropical spaces of the dome, we discovered we’d lost the time to have lunch at the cafe… but we certainly wanted to see the Japanese garden, having visited so many of such when we were there. This one is still relatively quite young, so we could only imagine how it might evolve after such time as the centuries the ones we saw in Kyoto had been tended. We must come back… this unexpected botanical treasure deserves much more time & attention!

Still, we both were happily anxious to find a Lyft driver who was a lively & fun woman to drive us to the Last Hotel, which, knowing its location in the old shoe manufacturing district, close to the City Museum we were to see next, clued me to understand that this was named for a “shoe last”, instead of an act of desperation! It is a very nice boutique hotel with a timeless lobby spanning spaces defined by handsome 12 foot columns.

Since we are beginning to shop for new furniture for the condo I took note of the distressed leather banquets.

The capitals on these street-level columns were more detailed than those more utilitarian ones on the floors above.

The guest rooms are carved out of the industrial space of a shoe factory under the scarred concrete ceilings telling stories inside a lot of drapery to shade the hyper abundance of large industrial windows. We took a morning swim next day before we finished packing for the flight home. All in all it was a good “do”!

ONE UNIQUE MUSEUM…

However, The City Museum is quite another sort of architectural wonder. We would not miss returning here on any visit to the city! We walked almost immediately around the corner to this fabulously quirky & unique museum. This was our third visit. We were introduced to this venue by our cousin Anjana when we visited to attend a Bell Convention. “It is a jungle gym for adults” was her description while acknowledging that this is an all family adventure.

It, too, was a historic shoe factory of 8 stories, now filled with an eclectic variety of collections from any & all possible interests or “tastes”. Much of which might be considered junque… old signage & side-show art. Rooms full of activities for all ages: a gallery filled with innumerable large sponges inviting youngsters to play or build with. There are nooks housing small cafés or ice cream shops. There is an old pipe organ installed in an air shaft. Cases full of oddities like antique porcelain doll parts, for instance.

However, some of these earlier “filler” exhibits seem to be evolving over these years. New consideration & work is constantly being incorporated to finesse this raw mélange since our first visit. Many tubular structures of steel or newly handsome welded iron allow brave souls to pursue clambering adventures, sometimes up or down into other floors. A grander excitement experience is a conveyor/slide, originally designed for sending the shoes down toward other finishing processe, but now rebuilt for allowing humans to slide, on rollers with smooth & swift action all the way several floors to the lobby. This place is certainly a wild adventure!

My strong favorite, from the first visit, is a collection of stone & terracotta details salvaged from demolished buildings in Chicago & St Louis. Originally decorating corners & cornices high above street level… too far out of sight for easy study, these were at first simply rather haphazardly piled in a raw room, but now becoming featured in an evolving state, gradually being imaginably “reinstalled” as exhibits noting the history or becoming parts of venues being readied for weddings or social events.

A peek over a mild barrier reveals a mason at work, creating a new collage of architectural fragments.

What had been more random piles of salvaged artifacts which I saw on our first visit several years ago are becoming more properly displayed. In some cases being instructive as to their manufacture, technical structure, & installation.

This open window of reused tile work… demonstrates several ideas:

The rear of the window reveals the technical struts of the terracotta building blocks of such architectural work.

What style buildings used to have!

 This well studied re-composition of an old relief frieze backed by theatrical painting sits on a new floor shown further below…

 

The romance of that classical terracotta reconstruction takes a stance surrounded by a painted sky while siting atop a stone mosaic patterned in an evolution of Escher-like transition of butterflies. A further example of the design team… which we understand is a collection of students.

 

This ceramic tile floor becomes almost jewel-like.

 The traffic flow of guests becomes controlled by gates of various style & material… allowing the vast spaces to be divided for creative use.

 

 

A huge old bank vault door is installed next to a wall of safety deposit boxes & an impromptu service bar of corrugated metal, which will no doubt become replaced by some older, finer piece. I’m sure there must be entire warehouses of such stuff in the waiting…

 

Another such vault door caps the other ent of a dramatic tubular space.

A second passage nearby mimics that effect with reflective drama!

Industrial iron & steel become transparently supportive as antique castings marry new welding… often quite clever as technique must meet playful function.

An almost crude, newly welded-up bit of balustrade describes the casual finesse of this project…

 

Yet the entire building has remnants of having been a shoe factory... like the long slide of rollers left to become, with snaking welded tunnels, encouraging playful climbing...

The upper parts evolve into an amusement park in the sky, with even more adventurous climbing, several plane fuselages & a Ferris wheel!

 

 

The playful lobby leaves a happy taste, like an after dinner mint to this full meal of fun.

Such a generously exploratory… & still evolving… public facility.

We certainly look forward to yet another visit.