Skip to main content

LD12: The Necessary Bumper


In this rendition of the gifting montage for Lucy's Dance, I have added a bumper to my dogsled. Mushing advisors have sternly admonished me that a dogsled is naked without a rounded bumper of some kind. Though my Yup'ik source photo of a dogsled lacked a bumper, my sources assured me that the photo was probably an exception caused by lack of timely repair after one of the photographed musher's dogs attempted to follow a squirrel up a birch tree. How easy it is to forget that labeled, archived, black-and-white photos may contain factual idiosyncrasies. And how difficult to tell when they do.

Also: I have included an image of a gift, Lucy's gift in specific, floating above the Curukaq festivities. Does the gift confuse anyone with its location or its loose relation to the text?

With those two points, I'm off to the park to watch dogs find and eat colored eggs that were hidden a little too cleverly. Enjoy your extended weekend, Easter, fertility festival, or March Madness recovery day, according to your belief system.

Comments

  1. I like the floater, and the bumper. Hope the dogs had fun feasting on eggs!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glad you like! There were not nearly as many dogs or eggs as I would have preferred, but it was still a lovely day.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Artifact Studies and Random Notes

In junior high school I collaborated on a project with a small, mostly-female group of students. We were to design a unique, fictional culture and build illustrative cultural artifacts. We would bury said artifacts in a cardboard box filled with soil. Another team would then excavate our artifacts and guess about our culture. After several days of creative deliberation, we designed a pyramid-based matriarchy wherein men were kept underground as slaves, brought out occasionally to build more pyramids. Elvis was God. According to the artifact of my memory, middle school was a confused and hostile culture. I began this week's illustrations, again, with visual research. I still don't know everything about these artifacts, but my Stebbins Dance Festival book has some interesting statements about them. Part of what I do know I impart below. According to their cultural artifacts, the Yup'ik people practice artful dancing to drums while waving furred objects. They also spend time ...

LD3: Neutral Coloration

My third illustration for Lucy's Dance treats the delicate topic of the missionaries who visited Stebbins in the late 1920's and stopped the Curukaq festival . . . or rather, tamed it into hiatus. A Jesuit missionary, Fr. Martin Lonneaux, overlooking the support-system of the Yup'ik community, perceived that the gift-giving portion of the festival was costly enough that it left several Yup'ik families destitute. Lonneaux concocted a watered-down version of the potlatch that would involve smaller, church-supplied gifts, but in the process amputated the festive spirit of the festival such that his "pretend kassiyuq " never caught on. For further details, see Stebbins Dance Festival (xxiv). The wording in Lucy's Dance focuses neutrally on the cultural misunderstanding. It would have been easy to use powerfully-charged language when summarizing this cultural loss. From what little I can find about him, Fr. Lonneaux, SJ seems to have been a relatively toler...

Work from Home

  The reference for this piece is a known work of fine art: a photograph by Peter Mitchell, a lorry driver who traversed West Yorkshire and occasionally snapped photos. The piece is titled Eric Massheder, Leeds, (1975) . Eric is the man in the doorway, a drippings refinery worker who posed in his home, adjacent (really, attached) to the refinery where he worked for 12 years. Eric woke up in his home in the morning, walked one room (or so) over, and began his shift. I have changed and omitted a few details for the sake of composition as usual. I've now been working from home for about four years, and I make a similar commute without stepping outdoors. My house even resembles Eric's a bit, though there's no factory nearby. I enter my workplace by transferring a USB cable, which joins all of my input and output devices from my personal computer to my work laptop. I stoop under my desk to make the transfer, so possibly a similar amount of exercise is involved—the digital equiva...