Back in mid-June I had to change meds, which radically changed my life. I couldn’t drive a car or ride my bike for three months. Holy crap. You don’t realize how important this is until it’s gone. I asked my doctor, “What about hopping, can I hop? Can I use a pogo stick to work? What about dogsled? Canoe?” Nope, nope, and nope. Hopping was ok, but none of the others. Dang.

I could relate to Curious George and his health issues.

But the Gods of Wheels were smiling down on me. My son, who was about to turn 16, just finished Driver’s Ed and he became my chauffeur for the summer. He did a fabulous job by the way, taking me wherever I needed to go all summer long. Thank you T’naa, you did a most excellent job! Well done, my boy, you are a true McNeil team member.

Teenager Rite of Passage: Today was our son's first day of driving a car... I really liked the facebook feedback from friends by the way.

At any rate, we both did exceptionally well, and yesterday marked the three month freedom date, and I’m now free to bicycle commute again! I thought a good way to celebrate was to have my favorite cycle shop “George’s Cycles” do a pro tune-up on my wheels. I named my bike “My Private Jet,” by the way. When people ask whether I can make it to their art openings, I tell them, “I’ll just have to see whether My Private Jet is up to it.”

Man, there's nothing like a professional tune-up; it means the universe is spinning with attitude.

This is a true thing of beauty, almost like a new lens or laptop right out of the box. The gears are beautiful. I'm so easy to please.

My first bike ride in 3 months was awesome. Ok, so it was a bit slow & I got winded, but it felt good. I have a feeling it'll take a few weeks to get back into bike shape. This is the front of our house. Let's ride, man.

This bike is cool because it’s an all-weather machine. I pack my laptop in the canvas saddlebags along with a change of clothes for when I get to school. In my opinion, it’s worth investing in a cool commuter bike because of all the money you save on gas. I noticed that it costed $63.00 to fill up my gas tank in my little Forester this summer. Dang!

Want to know the coolest part of being a bicycle commuter? I get to spend the money I save on gas on fun stuff! Yeah man.

Today I’m a bit sore from my first ride in three months, but am ready to hit the road again, it feels good. Get a bicycle and spin. For the good of the land, for the good of the air and for the just plain good. This is part of my Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellowship by the way, because it has to do with helping to minimize the carbon dioxide emissions belched into the atmosphere from our automobiles.

Sometimes you've just got to stop and ask about the meaning of life.

Have fun and be safe.

Story Copyright Larry McNeil, 2011, All Rights Reserved.

X’áant xwaanúk Tléil yee ushk’é, I’m angry you are bad is from my body of work about the global climate crisis.

Artists try and make sense of the world. It doesn’t always work because sometimes the world simply doesn’t make sense. So we end up capturing the lunacy.

I assembled this collage around two core images. Raven was first. I was looking for an authoritative, stately posture that would be an iconic black silhouette with a rich, pure charcoal feel. This raven went through the heat and was slightly carbonized, so he was perfect for a cheerful black day at the power plant. Our creation story involves raven and carbon emissions.

I'm Angry you are bad.

I’m Tlingit and we take shit from nobody. If it weren’t for us, Siberia would extend into North America. Either that or Canada would extend west into what is now Alaska. We drove both groups of colonists out of our homeland at the loss of many lives and I mention this only because it is this warrior philosophy that drives nearly everything I do, especially as an artist. The triangles on the right are stylized Killer Whale teeth and there is a faded Chilkat robe pattern in the decayed wall.

Stylized killer whale teeth. I am from the Tlingit Killer Whale Fin House, and the teeth have their origins in some of our ancient spruce root basket designs.

Chilkat robe pattern chipped into an eroded wall with a white raven peering into the empty head of a human.

I felt filthy from photographing coal-fired power plants around the country and actually got a nasty nasal infection from being around them. I feel bad for the people who have to live on the same planet as these thousands of massive coal-fired power plants scattered all over Earth. I also feel bad for the home planet and how badly humans have brutalized her. It makes me rethink the definition of humans and whether it is natural for us to ruin our environment because we do it so well. In that sense, it also has me rethinking the definition of the term “nature,” especially when describing humans and what we make, how we treat our environment and each other. It may mean that a Styrofoam cup is as natural as a buffalo, which kind of scares me.

Earthscape #31 is from the Rocketship Chronicles series. When the Apollo astronauts viewed Earth from the moon, they had a profound revelation. Earth was magical. It also had no borders. They knew from a glance that humanity, all the life there, and the planet were one. This is precisely what every Native tribe has been saying since long before they first met White Man. We are all one; you cannot separate just one element and treat it differently. If you pollute the land and the air, you pollute yourself and all other life, we are all connected. It almost seems gratuitous to say this until you look around and realize that most people don’t get it, especially political leaders and industrialists who only care about their most recent earnings statements.

My Earhscapes are about strengthening the notion that our home planet is indeed all we’ve got to live on and we’ve got to start treating it like it’s a home planet and not a colossal waste heap. It’s a little playful in that there is a quasi- yearning for finding another planet where we can find refuge. Then we come to our senses and think, “Wait a minute. This is OUR home planet. It’s the polluters whose damn asses should be on rocket ships out of here, not ours…

Earthscape #31. I made this photo last year from my rocketship, over the coast of southern California after assisting MFA Photography students at Brooks Institute.

Hasselblad Moon film back from a NASA camera. For real. This is so perfect for my Rocketship Chronicles photos.

I have a portfolio of photos regarding my Rocketship Chronicles on facebook. What’s really cool about it is the feedback I get from friends.

My Rocketship Chronicles portfolio on facebook.

Kimowan’s Journey

One of the most profoundly beautiful, sad and mysterious experiences I’ve had this year was when our sister Hulleah and I went to say farewell to our brother in art Kimowan Metchewais up in Alberta late this summer. I’m reminded that we meet many gentle spirits on this journey of life and the journey is so short, painfully beautiful, and so damn hard sometimes. We ease the journey with each other, at least this much is clear.

After Kimowan started his journey into the spirit world that morning, a series of peculiar events started to unfold. Hulleah and I tried to be unobtrusive as Kimowan’s family went about taking care of Kimowan’s passing in the hospital that morning. Antje was beside herself with grief, as was everyone else. Kimowan’s mom was so gracious and offered to ride with Hulleah and I up to Cold Lake later that morning.

In a moment of silence, Kimowan’s hospital room was vacant, even as people gathered in the guest suite next door sipping coffee and talking quietly, giving each other hugs and tender assurances. There was a feeling of peace and calm amongst the sorrow. Someone laughed gently and gave us the Cree translation for “strong coffee.” I wish I could remember those Cree words. I stood at the window looking out at the view as his family went about taking care of business. I noticed a few young ravens playing right outside his window. One in particular was hopping on the roof, doing what was obviously a shadow dance. He was very taken with his shadow and was clearly enjoying it’s presence. It’s shadow looked like a rocketship. Without even thinking about it I pulled out my camera phone and shot off a bunch of photos, smiling at raven’s oblivious playfulness. It made me wonder if perhaps Kimowan was having a bit of fun on his way, and nature couldn’t help but play along. Kimowan would’ve smiled at the camera phone too, I’m sure. We don’t need no stinkin’ fancy pants cameras, we wing it quite well, thank you.

"Raven Rocket from Kimowan's Window." It's stylized a bit, but is essentially what the scene looked like outside Kimowan's window. Raven loves rocketships even more than me I think.

I have a portfolio of photos that I made on that journey, including many other instances of nature living it up that day. Way more than usual. Here’s to you Kimowan, we miss you.

These are the three prints that I have in our 2011 Biennial Art Department Faculty Exhibition today at the Visual Arts Center. Come and check it out, I’m in some most excellent company.

Story Copyright Larry McNeil 2011, All Rights Reserved

The world is going to hell, but stop, get out of your car and ride with me. On a bike . Or if you can afford it, something with green power.

I’m a glass half-full kind ‘a guy who’s kind of scrappy, but also tries to offer solutions to current challenges. This is a story about how energy efficient cars are essentially for the wealthy and the CO2 bomb of a car is relegated to us middle class bums. Fight back, become a bicycle commuter (if you can, that is)!

We Love our Big Cars

In my opinion, one of the epic challenges of our times has to do with simply driving our cars. How can anything so innocent be so awful for the planet? If you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing about it, and just want to get in a big 1950’s convertible and go away somewhere fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love cars, and my all-time favorite is the 1959 Cadillac, the one with the huge fins.

Yep, I lust after this car, knowing full well how awful it is for the planet. If I were a millionaire, I'd buy it and convert it to green power like Neil Young did with his big old hog of a 1959 Lincoln car. It was parked at a local school, where the young man who owns it uses it as his everyday car.

I think it’s cool what Neil Young did with his team of engineers to make this Linc-Volt one of the greenest 1950’s cars on the planet. Part of what drove him (besides the cool wheels that is) is the notion that there had to be a guilt-free energy efficient way of driving his favorite car. Well, they pulled it off. It demonstrates to the car manufacturers that the technology exists to make a dramatically greener car than exists today.

Anyway, one of the realities about the Linc-Volt was that it’s currently cost-prohibitive to convert your car to go green. You have to be a millionaire in order to drive responsibly. How stupid is that? Anyway, it’s at times like these that I just want to go to Detroit and kick some auto-executive’s dumb asses back to the 1950’s. Dang.

Auto manufacturers need to build an affordable car like Neil’s. There is a void where a car like this should be dominant. If I were Obama, I’d make it mandatory that all cars have a carbon footprint smaller than Neil’s Linc-Volt; it’s not something that should be voted or debated, we’re pretty much out of time for niceties like that.

Becoming a Bicycle Commuter

If you’re a poor boy like me, you have fewer options of going green. I sure can’t afford to convert my existing car to green fuel consumption. It seems that the only people driving green powered cars are the wealthy. February marked my third year of bicycle commuting. I like avoiding the vultures at the gas station. I always get the feeling that the oil companies are the worst drug dealers of all time and I’m there to score my fix. Shut up and do me up, man. Don’t mess with that low octane stuff, gimme the real goods.

It’s pretty clear that not everyone can bicycle commute either, especially if you live somewhere only accessible via the freeway, or in a state where winter makes it oppressively hard to get around. Or if you have kids who need rides across town nearly every day. I had to give my son a ride nearly 20 miles across town for him to play sports, and I definitely drive my car when we have bad blizzards or if I’m sick. I’m clearly not a purist when it comes to bicycle commuting, but do pedal to work most of the year.

I decided that since I was going to become a bicycle commuter, I deserved to buy myself a high-quality commuter bike that was up for the task. You can buy a good used commuter bike for the price of two tanks of gasoline. Or if bicycle commuting is going to be serious for you, there are some really cool high-tech electric versions out there that can speed up your trip dramatically, or assist with pulling a load (bike trailers). I notice that some of these are over $1,000.00, but this is dirt cheap compared to the expense of a car and the rising cost of gasoline. I’d say that these are bargains that are also good for the planet with reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere, not to mention getting you healthier with the daily workouts.

I’d emphasize getting a helmet for the chance encounter with any of those idiot drivers out there. Cars still pull right in front of me when I have the right-of way all the time, many times missing me by mere inches. Get the helmet, even if it messes up your purty hair. I’m still surprised at how many people I see bicycling without a helmet.

This is what my wheels looked like in late March on my bicycle route here in Boise. It was still chilly, but the snow was all melted and it felt great to ride. I have panniers that are great saddle bags to carry my laptop, lunch and fresh clothes for when I arrive at work.

It does feel pretty sweet to be clean. No track marks, I’m off the Bozo gasoline. Well, almost.

Pointers for getting the stuff to bicycle commute

1. Whichever bike you get or use should be checked out by a bike mechanic or yourself if you’re good at it. You want something efficient and there’s nothing as self-defeating as a crummy bike that breaks down or is hard to pedal. Do your research for finding the best bike for yourself, including making sure it’s a good physical fit. Mountain bikes are sometimes a literal drag for road commutes, but the main thing is to just get moving with it and find something that fits your budget and works well.
2. Be safe, know the rules of the road and follow them. Some bike riders are a bit on the rude side and make a bad name for all of us. As mentioned above, wear a helmet.
3. Get a bike with all the gizmos you need to make the commute practical, like saddle bags, extra inner tubes, tools to change a flat tire, compact tire pump, water bottle, headlight, bike clothing for the weather where you live, etc.
4. Have fun.

The perfect lightweight jacket for wet and stormy weather. It's waterproof and designed for extreme activities like kayaking in the Arctic Ocean in a blizzard. By Maria Abraham; it's likely the most expensive extreme activity jacket out there, but also the best, leaving modern clothing light years behind.

If you're going to bicycle commute, you've got to splurge on a good seat like this leather Brooks version from the UK. It's still one of the best ones out there, way better than any of the contemporary high tech seats. It eventually conforms to your behind and will literally fit the contours and become a the most customized part of your bike, which is just plain too cool.

From the bike trail on my commute. Hey, isn't that a pot of gold down there on the bike trail?

Get a bike and have fun with it! Ride with me…

PS: Part of my Arts and Humanities Fellowship has to do with Bicycle Commuters and I’ll post more information about it soon.

Story by Larry McNeil, Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved

Work-in progress, Earthscapes. Inspired by Marcus Amerman’s comment about sharing new work with our artist friends on facebook. View from my rocket ship window. Sorry for the low quality, but the window got a few smudges on it from liftoff.

I love our home planet.

I included the photo file info so you could see it was taken with my Canon G9 infrared camera. It has the settings I used & date, & as you can see, this was 10-10-10, a very auspicious date indeed, my friends.

Story and photos Copyright Larry McNeil, 2011, All Rights Reserved

The past couple months have been occupied mostly with production work. I’m always a bit surprised at how labor intensive digital photography can be; I timed my Fellowship work so that a first wave of shooting could be done by early winter and I could spend the cold months holed up in my studio office doing the editing work on my computer. I kind of feel like the proverbial reclusive monk and am only missing the shaved head and robes.

One of the reasons I shot a few of these scenes with Kodachrome is that if you shot this with a digital camera, you'd get a lot of noise from the fog and the nuances of the feel of the winter fog would be minimized. Part of the global climate change project includes what could be perceived as mundane scenes of power lines. It's these seemingly ordinary scenes that we take for granted that is having a dramatic impact with changing our global climate.

From the Power Line series, which has to do with CO2 emissions and the global climate crisis. The other photos I'm working on right now are of coal fired power plants and the largest coal mine in North America in Wyoming. It's a sight to behold.

My biggest reality check with working on this Fellowship project is simply not teaching this semester. This is the first time that I haven’t taught for two consecutive semesters since 1991. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching  and even miss some of my students, but having the opportunity to work full-time on this Arts & Humanities Fellowship is pretty nice too.

This is the film from the Fuji TX Panoramic camera. It makes a photo that is twice as wide as a regular field of view.

I did a lot of the shooting in late fall and early winter. My most recent journey was to California to photograph power plants and wind farms in East Bay. I'd do the research on the power plants prior to my trips and map it out on Google Earth and plug all the coordinates into my GPS.

This GPS has been one of my best tools for this Fellowship project. Many of the sites I've visited were in obscure places that were challenging to find, and this GPS unit always took me directly to where I needed to go. I'm totally amazed at their accuracy.

I got this GPS in Aotearoa (New Zealand) two years ago when I was traveling the country via automobile. It did a splendid job of getting me around the country so I could concentrate on driving on the opposite side of the road and not have to navigate. It’s cool that these GPS units talk to you and tell you where to go so you don’t have to take your attention from the road. It has a most peculiar woman’s Australian accent and became a “She.” One of my stops in Aotearoa was at Massey University, where I spent a couple of days as a visiting artist. While having dinner with Robert Jahnke, the Head of the Maori Visual Arts Program, he suggested that perhaps it should be named “Matilda,” which is the name she now goes by.

At any rate, Matilda has been my guide on these Fellowship journeys, some of which were quite stormy and gloomy, which ironically enough, made for some excellent photographs.

This was my journey to Eastern Wyoming, where the largest coal mine in North America resides. It's run by the Peabody Company and it runs trainloads of coal around the clock, 24-7 to coal powered power plants all over America. It's quite the iconic place for the start of the 21st Century and the global climate crisis.

It was pouring rain most of the time, but I liked the look of the photos and appreciated tough cameras. This is one of my favorite digital cameras, the mighty Canon 5D MKII. It has a full-sized image sensor and shoots as fast as my pro film cameras. It kept right on shooting even though it got instantly drenched in just the few moments I was in the driving rain.

This has got to be my favorite camera ever. It's a Hasselblad medium format camera and I've used versions of it for over 30 years. It's still relevant in the digital age because of the impeccable negatives that are in turn scanned into the computer, so it's really a hybrid tool that crosses over to digital photography.

The cool part of the Hasselblad system is that it's likely the most modular camera system out there. I found this film back that is the "Moon Version" that was released to celebrate Hasselblad's contribution to the NASA Apollo missions. From a practical standpoint, I can tell at a glance that this is my film back that is loaded with infrared film.

Film processing is still fun; I'm splitting my work between digital photos and film. Each has its own distinct look and I like both for different feels conveyed. I don't have to pick one over the other and can take the best of what each has to offer. I really love the tactile nature of film and processing it by hand. In my opinion, it is important to turn off the computer and get away from the constant online buzz & image processing programs, and to give yourself quiet time to contemplate what's going on with not only your project, but with life in general.

Scanning negatives is definitely a high art, and I offer my thanks to the photo gods often... usually with coffee. This is a custom-made negative holder that holds the film flatter than the one that came with the scanner, which is so critical for sharply defined images.

Darth Scanner (play ominous soundtrack here). It's a workhorse of a scanner and does a fabulous job, especially with medium format negatives.

Part of the digital editing has to do with applying various filters to the photos. It's necessary because photos straight out of digital cameras are generally a bit soft and need to be sharpened, among other things.

Coal Fired Power Plant in MIchigan; the late afternoon light was surreal because the emissions put a thick haze in the atmosphere and the smokestack took on a gritty appearance. In my opinion, light is still what makes a photograph with an emotive punch; you don't have to intellectualize about a significant part of the meaning.

Over the winter I’ve been keeping busy with the production work involved with the project. Back in late December, the last rolls of Kodachrome were processed at the lab in Kansas, so I made sure I shot the last 21 rolls of Kodachrome as part of this project. I’ve got a fairly substantial backlog of work to do at the Research Park, where I have a very nice office with an awesome view of the mountains. I was just talking to a friend online about having an assistant. I told her that I actually need three; a minion, a henchman and a yes-man. But in reality, I like all of the aspects of the work, even the more mundane aspects like archiving the work, which can put you in a Zen-like state if done properly. Ommm. It can be very meditative, which is definitely a part of the creative process.

We can't talk about photography projects without mentioning coffee, now can we? I've got a new coffee maker, but it deserves it's own blog entry. I like coffee emissions much better than the CO2 ones on my journeys...

A sincere note of gratitude goes out to the Boise State University Arts and Humanities Institute and the Boise State University Division of Research for the Boise State University Arts and Humanities Fellowship, which grants faculty the opportunity to work on a fellowship project for a year (I am a Research Fellow for the 2010-2011 academic year).

Story & Photos Copyright Larry McNeil, All Rights Reserved, 2011

Ax dayéen áa yax haan, Face me

I only have one question for all you billionaire industrialists of the world who own the coal fired power plants. How are you going to enjoy your wealth when the world is too ravaged for you to spend it?

Isn't it kind of idiotic to live in a digital age where our so-called intelligent devices are run by coal? Hey Apple Computer and Microsoft, coal is a 19th century technology, right?

Larry McNeil’s Global Climate Crisis Photography