THE SUN IS A BRILLIANT ERROR

Mom and Dad came for a visit. It was such a rainy (and snowy) May, but during a break in the rain we went to Red Butte Gardens and posed with the moose sculpture.



With the added incentive of visitors and rain, I finally made it to the UMFA Robert Smithson exhibit, where, besides seeing all kinds of interesting and less interesting Smithson inspired work, I read this:

The camera is an entropic machine for recording the gradual loss of light. No matter how dazzling the sun, there is always something to hide it, therefore to cause it to be desired. One tends to forget this, when firing the flashbulb in the shadows. As Paul Valéry pointed out, "the sun is a brilliant error.” And I should like to add that the camera records the results of that “error.” (Robert Smithson)

And then the rain stopped for a day. We went to the Bingham Canyon Mine, which is the deepest open pit mine in the world, as deep as four Sears' Towers stacked on top of each other, and they are still digging.







And then, after a lunch stop, during which my folks ate their first Funeral Potatoes (an absolutely delicious Utah culinary specialty--I'm not being sarcastic here), we drove across the causeway to Antelope Island, which sits in the middle of the Great Salty Lake and is infested with brine shrimp, bison, and biting gnats.




The gnats bit us. And bit us and bit us.

And then (yes, such a full day) we went to see the Bees play. There were a lot of babies and kids at the game. A lot. And the Bees lost, but we had fun anyway.


The next day it rained again, but the rain seemed to make the flowers in the square even prettier. Everything looked suspiciously Northwestern, although we're missing all those giant, dark green conifers.






(Thanks for visiting, Mom and Dad. Come back soon!)