There Is Mourning In Kandor: Artist Mike Kelley Passes Away

LOS ANGELES (AP).- Artist Mike Kelley, described by colleagues as an "irresistible force" in contemporary art, has died, police said Wednesday. He was 57.

Kelley was found at his home Tuesday and it appeared he had committed suicide, South Pasadena Police Sgt. Robert Bartl said, without providing further information on the artist's death. An autopsy was pending.

"Kelley's work in the 1980s was part of how one defined the Los Angeles arts scene. He had a remarkable ability to fuse distinction between fine and popular art in ways that managed to perturb our sense of decorum," said Stephanie Barron, senior curator of modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

A family friend who was concerned about Kelley went to his home and called 911, Bartl said.

The friend told investigators that Kelley had been depressed because he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, but no note was found, Bartl said.

"Mike was an irresistible force in contemporary art. ... We cannot believe he is gone. But we know his legacy will continue to touch and challenge anyone who crosses its path. We will miss him. We will keep him with us," Kelley's studio said in a statement that the Los Angeles Times published on its website.

Kelley's work was included in the upcoming 2012 Whitney Biennial out of New York.

Kelley used many mediums and source materials. "He was always breaking boundaries and challenging convention," Barron said.

Some of his greatest works were large scale installations, she said. "Some of his room-sized, full-gallery sized extravaganzas are truly impressive."

Kelley was a student of John Baldessari. His 1994 retrospective organized by the Whitney, which came to LACMA in 1995, established him as a major figure in the art world, Barron said.

"His work was widely collected and exhibited internationally. He had a voracious appetite for all kinds of art. He was enormously curious and worked incredibly at his craft. He was never afraid to thing really big. Artists like that don't come around very often," she said.

Born in Detroit, Kelley founded the band Destroy All Monsters with three others in 1974.

He left the band in 1978 to attend California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, near Los Angeles.

"He was extremely intense, very serious, phenomenally well read. He would go very deep into his subjects, a real artist scholar but with a real passion for whatever he was investigating," Barron said.

After encounters with him, Barron said, "I always came away learning something new, thinking about things differently and in awe of his curiosity."

Although she corresponded with him in the last couple of weeks, the last time she saw him was a month ago.

"It's incredibly sad. It's hard to imagine somebody with the life force and intensity that Mike brought to bear is no longer with us. His impact will be seen with distance as all the more powerful and we'll have to begin to process this," Barron said.

Glacier Thief Arrested In Chile -- Believed To Be Selling Jorge Montt Ice For Designer Cocktails (from The Guardian, Feb. 1)

A chunk of the 5,200kg of ice, believed stolen from the Jorge Montt glacier, which was discovered by police in a refrigerated truck. Photo: Fiscalia Regional de Aysen/EPA

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 February 2012 18.25 EST

     Climate change sceptics have acquired a new explanation for why glaciers are retreating: it's not global warming, it's theft.

 

The Chilean General Prosecutor's Office displays bags of ice allegedly stolen from the Jorge Montt Glacier, more than 1,200 miles south of Santiago, Chile. 

     Police in Chile have arrested a man on suspicion of stealing five tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region to sell as designer ice cubes in bars and restaurants.

     Local media reported that last Friday police intercepted a refrigerated truck with an estimated £3,900 worth of illicit ice allegedly bound for whiskies, rums and cocktails in the capital Santiago.

Jorge Montt glacier site seen from space

     Authorities have accused the driver of theft and are considering adding violation of national monuments to the charge sheet.

     Scientists say Jorge Montt, part of the Bernardo O'Higgins national park, is retreating by half a mile a year, making it one of the world's fastest shrinking glaciers.

 

Elevated view of Jorge Montt mooring, Bernardo O'Higgins State Park, Chile

     Environmentalists have cited it as evidence that man-made climate change is warming the planet. Sceptics have cited other explanations for retreating glaciers, but theft – until now – was not one of them. It may be the only case in which both sides agree human activity was to blame.

 

Beautiful photograph of Jorge Montt glacier

NOTE:    When Jane was in 4th grade, she created a rather sophisticated (for her age) audio-visual research project about Chile, which first made me aware of the Jorge Montt glacier.  Coincidentally, around the same time we also saw a terrific show on the Discovery Channel about Chile and the country became high on the list of places we would like to visit.  Santiago looked incredibly beautiful and sophisticated and Chile's collision of sea, sky,  ocean, deserts, mountains, and vineyards, not to mention the world's largest swimming pool (link), was astonishing to behold.  Friends and relatives who have spent time there have all returned with great reports and marvelous stories. 

This story, of course, is both a weird and pedestrian at the same time.  It's essentially petty theft of a lot of ice for small commercial gain.  

I'm not sure whether, if offered a glacier ice drink, I would trust the establishment making the claim to be telling the truth, but perhaps I'd be intrigued enough to want my Pisco Sour made that way. 

Anyway, I think I would be remiss in not offering here a recipe for Chile's signature cocktail.  This one emanates from  Ryan McGrale of No. 9 Park in Boston, a superb restaurant worth logging significant travel time to visit.  I have occasionally thought that I would be happy living at its bar.

Pisco Sour

 
1 egg white

2 1/2 ounces Pisco Capel (see note)

1/2 ounce simple syrup

3/4 ounce fresh lemon juice

Angostura Bitters (see note, below)

In cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine egg white, Pisco, simple syrup, and lemon juice.

Cover, shake vigorously for 15 seconds, and strain into six-ounce cocktail glass. Top with a few drops of bitters.

Bartenders Note:

In this recipe, any Chilean Pisco will do, but be aware that Chilean and Peruvian Piscos are not interchangeable. Chilean Pisco is sweeter and has a slightly lower proof. So if you use the Peruvian stuff, adjust the amount of lemon juice and simple syrup accordingly. Both kinds are available at many good liquor stores.

Chilean Amargo bitters are virtually impossible to buy in the U.S., but easy-to-find Angostura Bitters make an acceptable substitute. Yet since, as Ryan McGrale says, they are "sharper and spicier, go a little lighter on the bitters if you're using Angostura."

 


Music Cue: Ice Fishing At Night -- John Paul Jones (wr. Jones-Blegvad), from The Thunder Thief

The world’s largest swimming pool, Algarrobo, Chile

New Year's Day Diaries (Pen, Pencil, Plectrum)

    We have decided (it was Caroline's suggestion) to consider and celebrate February 1^st  as New Year’s Day.

    Traditional Gregorian calendar January 1^st follows Christmas much too closely, and invariably the Holiday Season  (which we all hope to find enjoyable, but the measure of joy actually achieved is often in direct proportion to the exhausting efforts made in its pursuit) and Year both end and begin in a confused and spent state.   


       January is usually a mental and emotional struggle, regathering and regrouping, and February’s arrival seems like a twilight respite from a dark, dreamed battle.

    Therefore, around here at least, we’re henceforth assigning to January last-month-of-the-year/ring out the old duties (and thanking its thirty-one days for allowing one extra moment for clean-up and organization) and Starting Over Today. 

   We believe this system will work much better than the previous one. If last night's New Year's Eve dinner with Jane offers any indication, things augur well for our family and the world. 

 

 

    On Monday (an otherwise rotten day), The Assassin’s Cloak, An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists (editors Irene and Alan Taylor, Edinburgh, Canongate Books, 2000), arrived n the mail.   

    Two really fine New Year’s Day selections follow.

  

William Allingham (1824-89)

    The first is from William Allingham, an Irish poet best known for his poem The Fairies ("Up the airy mountain/Down the rushy glen/We daren't go a-hunting/For fear of little men..."), his literary friendships, and his posthumously published Diaries (1905).   

    February 1, 1867  [London]

        "Tennyson is unhappy from his uncertainty regarding the condition and destiny of man.  Is it is dispiriting to find a great poet with no better grounds of comfort than a common person?  At first it is.  But how should the case be otherwise?  The poet has only the same materials of sensation and thought as ordinary mortals; he uses them better; but to step outside the human limitations is not granted even to him.  The secret is kept from one and all of us. We must turn eyes and thoughts to the finer and nobler aspects of things, and never let the scalpel of Science overbear pen, pencil and plectrum.   A Poet’s doubts and anxieties are more comforting than a scientist’s certainties and equanimities."

  

George Templeton Strong (1820-75)

    The second, dated ten years earlier, is from George Templeton Strong’s famous Diaries, which were discovered in the 1930s and offer a vivid, charged, and highly personal account of 19^th century life.  They are especially valued for their information and observations regarding Civil War-related events, as seen from a Union perspective.  

    Strong was a New York City lawyer (he was associated with the predecessor firm of the venerable Cadawalader Wickersham and Taft) and diarist, and his voluminous (2,250 pages) diary has been compared by the historian Paula Baker to Mary Boykin Chesnut’s parallel southern account of this period, “A Diary From Dixie”.  

    Strong’s pre-Civil War description of life in Manhattan excerpted here paints what seems (from this former prosecutor's perspective) like a contemporary picture of New York City or, especially lately, Philadelphia life.

   February 1, 1857 [New York]

        'An epidemic of crime this winter.  ‘Garrotting ‘ stories abound, some true, some no doubt fictitious, devised to explain the absence of one’s watch and pocketbook after a secret visit to some disreputable place, or to put a good face on some tipsy street fracas.  But a tradesman was attacked the other afternoon in broad daylight at his own shop door in the Third Avenue near Thirteenth Street by a couple of men, one of whom was caught, and will probably get his deserts in the State prison, for life – the doom of two of the fraternity already tried and sentenced.  Most of my friends are investing in revolvers and carry them about at night, and if I expect to have to do a great deal of late street-walking off Broadway, I think I should make the like provision; though it’s a very bad practice carrying concealed weapons.  Moreover, there was an uncommonly shocking murder in Bond Street (No. 31) Friday night; one Burdell, a dentist, strangled and riddled with stabs in his own room by some person unknown who must have been concealed in the room.  Motive unknown, evidently not plunder."

Happy New Year!