Seeing Columbia County

Email conversation between Mr. North Fifth Street and Belle, 11 July 2008

Just catching up... nice article... do you have any images of the show that you could email me by any chance?

No, I don't have any images relating to the show, unfortunately. It's funny - perhaps that's one reason I wrote up the essay in such careful detail - so that I could conjure mental images of it, for my own purposes. But that doesn't help for now, does it. I wonder what other kind of "imaginal" image might work.

Just catching up and posted the essay. I really like it. Thanks.

That is the perfect image! I love it. Sorry I haven't been commenting recently - very busy with other pressing correspondence of late. But enjoying your blog, as always, and thanks for posting my essay. I'm very glad you liked it.

I didn't like it, I just reread it - it's so evocative about place and quality of life and values and all the things that are good about Hudson and Columbia County. I love it. It really pinpoints the importance of reality and real history vs. all that is fake and valueless. Thanks.

PS: where can I buy that quilt - the one with the heartfelt sentiment embroidered in the center? Woodbury Commons? QVC? Century 21? After all I am an American - I want to buy the sense of being loved, not earn it.

I know. There were so many homemade and handmade objects in that exhibition, many made by ordinary folk, not necessarily "artists." That sense of making things with love, with love being the very impetus for the making of an object, seems to be dying out. We feel (many of us) spiritually bereft and wonder why.

I get strange visceral reactions to many objects that were made in China. I actually think they were made with hate - and it comes through in the object. For example, I ordered some outdoor chair cushions online last year. When they arrived, I instantly hated them. The cushions are red but not a nice red, a SCREAMING red, and the tufts in the cushions suggested a nasty leering face. I lived with them for a while out of simple frugality, but they worked my every nerve. Finally, I had enough and tossed them over the porch railing in a pique, to be trashed. Very liberating.