Fashion is everywhere, from network television’s Fashion Star to cable television’s Project Runway and in Denver, where Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective, will compete this spring with Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: On Fashion which opens May 10 at the Met. YSL in Denver runs through July 8.

Yet Pierre Berge, Yves Saint Laurent’s business and life partner and the director of the Fondation Pierre Berge Yves Saint Laurent, co-sponsor of the Denver exhibition, and the first foundation organized to keep an archive of haute couture, said:

“I think fashion is not an art. I should not say that maybe, but I’m convinced fashion is not an art, but fashion needs an artist to exist. To be. And Saint Laurent was an artist–a great artist.”

The YSL Retrospective is beautiful. And skinny. And angular. Such radical dimensions are what the Hamilton Building may have been designed for: sweeping, grand exhibitions of objects that move and don’t need to hang plumb on the walls. Denver is the only U.S. venue for this show, which chief curator Florence Muller called “the most important retrospective ever done” on Yves Saint Laurent’s fashion.

Remember when women didn’t wear trousers? It was St. Laurent who introduced in 1966 the idea of a woman going to a party dressed in a tuxedo. The retrospective also solidified that Saint Laurent in a sense instigated a sea change in gender rules by this introduction of menswear to women’s fashion. he also saw another kind of revolution: street leathers taken to the runway for made-to-order garments.  Without YSL there could very well have been no J Lo.

Culled from 5,000 works held in the Fondation archive and curated by Muller, a fashion historian, the exhibition features 200 original works of haute couture  spanning 40 years from 1958, the first year that Saint Laurent was the head designer at Christian Dior, through his last fashion show in 2002.

The exhibition is organized thematically. Gowns and ensembles on display include those designed for his muses and favorite clients from Catherine Deneuve (who is featured in her own small section of the exhibition) to Nan Kempner, Princess Grace of Monaco, Loulou de la Falaise, Lauren Bacall and Paloma Picasso.

The exhibition opens with the famous photos of Saint Laurent by Irving Penn but also later features a portrait by Andy Warhol that usually hangs in Pierre Berge’s office and, for the first time ever, the controversial nude photos of Saint Laurent by Jeanloup Sieff taken for an ad campaign.

His studio has been recreated and my favorite section of the exhibition features 750 pieces of paper with colored fabric swatches, which the designer actually used. Tucked amid the exploded rainbow are six muslin dresses from his last show. Fashion may not be art, but this hallway represented the artist Saint Laurent’s palette.

Other sections of the exhibition feature his dialogue with art and artists and his imaginary travels.

“Warhol took things from the supermarket and put them into art. YSL did the same with art and put it into fashion,” Muller summed up.

According to the press release: “As people increase their mobility, they identify less with one place (a “hometown”) and may be attracted towards a sense of sameness wherever their modern nomadic life leads them. As a concept, SUBURBIA offers rich fodder for artistic interpretation.”

The interpretations in this exhibition range from metal sculpture to found object installation, video framed in laser-cut vinyl and repetition of collected items. Industrial nature meets similar sameness.

Suburbia runs through April 13, 2012, however the gallery is only open Tuesday-Friday, 12 – 7 p.m., or by appointment.

Time: A crisp winter’s evening the end of February 2012. It isn’t snowing, the air is dry, cool, as I walk around the plaza, and up on Canyon Road wearing a coat–no hat or gloves are needed. It’s pleasant. I’m with my cousins from Texas and a friend from New York. We’ve wandered through about six galleries when our friend from New York proclaims with her German accent: “The whole frickin’ town is a piece of art!”

And in many ways, she is right.

For us, it wouldn’t be February without a trip to Santa Fe to attend Art Feast and “do whatever we want.”

The whatever we want is wandering in and out of galleries and boutiques, sipping wine in the living room of our cozy rental house in front of a Piñon fire, talking about our lives, our challenges, our loves, and everything in between. It means a day getting pampered at Ten Thousand Waves and driving around looking at houses imagining that someday we might have our own place to gather, while taking home ideas we can adapt for own spaces. It means walking around sculpture gardens in Tesuque and trying the newest culinary creations from world-class chefs, or divulging in our favorite green chile at Tia Sophia’s.

We’ve been doing this for ten years in a row, traveling from San Antonio, Texas, New York City and Colorado, coming together in Santa Fe, stocking our rental kitchen with treats from Trader Joes and embarking on a grown-up slumber party. We have rituals, a visit to the Plaza and the “door store” (Serets), participating in the Friday evening Edible Art Tour, sampling nibbles from restaurants while viewing art. Over the years our group has purchased two paintings, a rug, numerous items of clothing and we have dined at the finest restaurant’s Santa Fe has to offer: Geronimo, The Compound, Ristra, Santacafe, La Boca, Galisteo Bistro, Osteria d’Assisi, and more. When we first visited, we stayed in hotels and B&Bs: Las Palomas, The Hotel St. Francis, The Hotel Santa Fe, Eldorado Hotel and The Sage Inn. But we prefer a house where we can all gather together in one living room. Our favorite house rentals have been from Casas de Santa Fe.

This year, some highlights from the Edible Art Tour were Blue Rain Gallery, featuring the Palace Restaurant and Saloon and their delectable fried kale with ginger, thin-sliced marlin, and orange soy appetizer. Windsor Betts Art Brokerage paired with The Cowgirl BBQ, and while the pulled pork slider was delicious, it was the simple side dish of butternut squash casserole that we fell in love with for it’s simplicity of flavor. At Pippin Contemporary colorful abstractions were complemented by lime pistachio white chocolate and a red chile pecan dark chocolate truffle from Chocolatesmith. The Singleton-Biss Museum of Fine Art is a hidden treasure in a shopping mall on San Francisco Street and we sampled Chicken Korma and Chana Masala from Raaga Fine Indian Dining, which tickled our taste buds so well that we ordered take out on Sunday night to enjoy while watching the Oscars in our rented living room. And of course, one of our very favorite partnerships happens each year at Wiford Gallery with Luminaria, featuring more delectable chocolate creations and a sampling of a 2005 Shiraz by George Wyndham, and Pippin Meikle Fine Art who pairs with Maria’s Mexican Kitchen for must have margaritas and fresh, chunky guacamole.

Forty-one galleries and restaurants participated, but the crowds seemed smaller this year, the lines shorter. We made it to about a dozen of the locations, retiring to our rental house on Aqua Fria to sip wine in front of a fire having gazed and grazed. However, director of ARTsmart, Diane Deane said numbers this year were comparable to 2011 when they sold 2,200 tickets to one or more of the seven ticketed events they host. Participants came from 32 states.

“Income (and hence donations to the schools) is up over last year too!  We continue to do better and better every year,” Deane wrote in an email to me.

ART Feast programs benefit art programs for Santa Fe’s youth. ARTsmart has distributed just under $1 million to ARTsmart projects, public school programs, art related organization and endowment funds. Hahn Ross Gallery was open during the edible art tour, though not an official gallery of Art Feast. They featured students from Pojoaque Valley Schools and the Imagine Forward program with art instructor Karen Turner. Students were showing their original artwork which was for sale with half of the proceeds going direct to the individual student artist. I purchased a painting of a polar bear by 11-year-old Estefania. During the Art of Home Tour, another member of our group was able to bid in the silent auction on a work of metal sculpture by a Santa Fe High School student.

All money raised goes to a great cause–art education. We are already planning our trip next year. The last week of February 2013 and I’ll be in Santa Fe with my cousins and our friend from New York.

He began making his “Anemotive Kinetics” while still at Indiana University. A paper model from 1957-58 is part of this show. He made Anemotive Kinetics for decades, but in 1970 Mangold created the “I-Beam” series for an exhibition at Friends of Contemporary Art Gallery. These evolved into the “Tetrahedralhyperspheres” of the late 70s and early 80s, more rounded forms with natural finishes. His most recent works are called “PTTSAAES” which stands for “Points Traveling Through Space at an Erratic Speed.”

Chronological retrospectives bring to bear a full body of work and allow viewers a glimpse of understanding into the mind and process of the artist. This one features works both inside and outside, smaller gallery pieces and monumental sculptures. While Artyard, the gallery founded by Mangold’s wife Peggy features his work, the open galleries and surrounding spaces at The Arvada Center offer a breadth and depth to the viewing experience.

Tim, Space and Motion: Robert Mangold Retrospective is on view at the Arvada Center through April 1, 2012.

Trine Bumiller’s background in printmaking is evident in her paintings: wood panels combined together like building blocks to create a composite form of square and rectangular shapes. On each panel, a different organic, flat, geometric element suggests nature or botany. The artist often plays with color, preferring unnatural combinations, such as hot pink and yellow, orange with acid green or lilac contrasted with earth tones. The lines, shapes and layers of her painting technique hearken back to her training as a printmaker. Using a method known as glazing, each work is created by building up as many as fifty layers of thin oil paint. Bumiller works on tables, with the panels lying flat, allowing the liquid pigment to pool and coalesce. It’s a slow process. One layer a day. And as the layers of glaze are building, so are the cognitive connections. She begins to interpret her designs, formed during an earlier intuitive drawing process.

Bumiller begins by photographing natural elements. Recently it was grasses and yucca on a trip to Arizona. She then combines those images with others taken from magazines and the Internet. Up until a few years ago she would mock up concepts for paintings using a light box, or flatten a photograph by hand with paint, marking out certain details, leaving only the strongest elements. Today, the artist works on a computer. It’s intuitive. She looks for shapes, forms and lines that she likes together. The most difficult part of the process for Bumiller is creating the watercolor sketches of each work. It is here that she plays with color, shape and form, designing in essence what will be the final painting. She often creates the watercolors at her vacation home near the Continental Divide high in the Colorado Rockies, where it is quieter and more peaceful than her painting studio in Denver.

It was 2001 when Bumiller created her first multi-panel painting. “I was laying branches on stripes and painting those divisions. I thought, why not make it more literal and conceptual at the same time,” Bumiller recounts. Influenced by the altar paintings and predellas she viewed during a year in Italy, and how they combined imagery in rectangular shapes to tell a story, she implemented a similar structure for a public art commission at the University of Colorado. The work was created for a long hallway in the engineering building outside the water lab; she decided to make the 37-foot long painting meander like a river, and was installing it when 9/11 happened. “Instead of symmetrical, predictable rectangles I was doing paintings that were more random, kind of like the world felt at the time,” she recalls. “I went back to try the traditional panels, but they didn’t work for me anymore.”

Her upcoming solo exhibition at Zg Gallery in Chicago is titled “In Medias Res,” Latin for “into the middle of things.” “I like that in-between period, that in-between region whether it’s literal or philosophical. I’ve been working with the organic and inorganic and finding that combination in the middle of things that is representational and abstract,” she explains.

Viewing Bumiller’s paintings, her interest in science is evident. She explores imagery that is similar yet diverse: spiraling stems developing on a plant could represent the Milky Way, a rippled pool of water might be a recent galaxy discovered by the Hubble telescope. Less evident is her exploration of memory and the environment as repository. “Our memories are part of the landscape and yet we don’t see it,” she says. In this way, her paintings are a bit like Ross Bleckner’s memento mori. And with her use of organic and abstract it’s easy to think of Bumiller as a more restrained Judy Pfaff.

Symmetrical yet random, ordered but disordered, microscopic and macroscopic, Bumiller’s works employ the concrete medium of paint in such a way as to address the mysteries of the universe, and to find the edge where the individual meets the universal.

“Trine Bumiller: In Media Res, New Paintings” will be on view from March 2 — April 14, 2012. At Zg Gallery, in Chicago. www.zggallery.com

Trine Bumiller is also represented by Robischon Gallery in Denver www.robischongallery.com; and Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in New York, www.markelfinearts.com

About the cover: Clyfford Still PH-129, 1949 Oil on canvas, 44 1/2 x 53″ Clyfford Still Museum Collection Photo: Peter Harholdt

In 1944, Clyfford Still did something that no known painter appears to have done before him. Using thick, black pigment he troweled a large canvas (105 x 92 1/2 inches) with a palette knife, then cut that textured black field with a deep red wound forming the outline of an almost organic shape. Vivid yellow appears to be shining through from beneath a tear, while a drip of white appears to ooze atop the blackness. In the lower right corner, a crevasse of emerald green fights for attention. There is no place for the eye to rest and the red wound appears to extend beyond the edge of the canvas. It’s an impending work that stops viewers in their tracks at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver where one views the artist’s work chronologically.

Months before, Still was creating normal-sized paintings that merged together human figures and machines. He was getting less and less literal about the human form, moving to capture the essence and spirit of life itself and then — bam — here is this larger than life painting, thick, textural and richly black with bits of bare canvas peaking through like stars in the darkest part of a night sky. It is different than anything Still painted before and is the first of many works he would create exploring the ideas he fused together for the first time in 1944-N-No.1.

In our post-modern world, filled with endless repetitions of abstraction, the sight of a non representational work of art continues to elicit commentary ranging from “I spilled paint on the garage floor that looked like that,” to “my two-three-four-or five year old could paint that.” Yet, to the discerning eye, 1944-N No. 1 is more than fields of color and a few lines. The artist is playing with figure, ground, color and texture to create something more than just paint on canvas. In 1944, in the midst of WWII, a group of American artists who came to be known as the Abstract Expressionists were deadly serious about their art. Clyfford Still, perhaps the most serious, committed to preserving the purity of his work by withdrawing from the New York art world and rarely exhibiting or selling his paintings. He believed the color, texture, shapes and forms “all fuse[d] together into a living spirit.”

While splitting his time between the East and West Coasts, Still established the basis for his original style — attributable to his Western roots. The red, vertical line in 1944-N No. 1 (and all Clyfford Still paintings) has significant meaning. Born in Gandin, North Dakota, he grew up on the prairie of Alberta, Canada. “When there were snowstorms, you either stood up and lived or laid down and died,” Still said. Another time he stated: “My paintings have the rising forms of the vertical necessity of life dominating the horizon. For in such a land a man must stand upright, if he would live. And so born and became intrinsic this elemental characteristic of my life and work.” To Clyfford Still, his paintings merged life and death.

His peers spoke of his inventiveness. Robert Motherwell said that Still’s show at Art of This Century Gallery in 1946 “was the most original. A bolt out of the blue. Most of us were still working through images … Still had none.” The same year that Still created 1944-N No.1, Rothko produced his surrealist painting Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea, Jackson Pollock painted his cubist Gothic. Willem De Kooning didn’t create his first abstraction until 1945, when he painted Pink Angels, merging his Cubist and Surrealist tendencies. Mark Rothko, who wrote the introduction for Still’s exhibition, said that Still, working out West and alone had arrived at a completely new way of painting, incorporating forms and highly personal methods. Still came to abstraction not through European influence, but through Regionalism and Western aesthetics. Jackson Pollock said that Still made “the rest of us look academic.”

Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea

Jackson Pollock, Gothic

Willem DeKooning, Pink Angels

“As he [Still] himself has expressed it, his paintings are, ‘of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated.’ Every shape becomes an organic entity, inviting the multiplicity of associations inherent in all living things. To me they form a theogony of the most elementary consciousness, hardly aware of itself beyond the will to live — a profound and moving experience,” Rothko wrote the same year he would break through to creating the spiritually infused, multiform abstractions he is known for, influenced by Clyfford Still.

Critics and historians also recognized Still’s originality. Irving Sandler said: “Jackson Pollock may have been the more important artist, but Still was, in my opinion, the greater innovator.” Sam Hunter called him “a remarkable and ultimately highly influential maverick” and “an independent genius.” While Clement Greenberg claimed that when he first saw a Clyfford Still painting he “was impressed as never before by how estranging and upsetting genuine originality in art can be.” Even as late as 1976, Robert Hughes said Still was “a singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime.”

Clyfford Still has been called a megalomaniac, egotistical, difficult, but really he was a man passionate and dedicated to his art. A purist. He wrote to Greenberg in 1956, acknowledging that he had set himself the seemingly impossible “task of taking painting out of academicism and all the collective traps laid down for it by the need for security in the name of rationalism, culture, aesthetics and other conventional alibis. Inevitably, I had to violate the expectations or demands of others in painting. It was done concsiously [sic] and with high purpose. And the results? — I fought for freedom to build an unlimited and ennobling instrument.”

Primal and elemental Still’s paintings seem to animate matter and invoke a life force held within an infinite space. The purpose of his art was aimed at uplifting and liberating the human soul from the limitations of the modern age — science, mechanism, power and death. “I want the spectator to be reassured that something he values within himself has been touched and found a kind of correspondence. That being alive…is worth the labor.” And in our cynical contemporary world we forget that this idea was at one time the most imaginatively original concept an artist could convey.

Ed Stasium said this nearly an hour into our interview when it was clear he was not just any Ed, but Ed the award-winning music producer, engineer, mixer. Our conversation had wandered tangentially down a few pathways of his life and work. The walls along the stairs that lead down to his music studio are lined with platinum and gold records, Grammy Awards, photographs and priceless mementos of rock ‘n’ roll history.

We are sitting in the music studio of Stasium’s modest log home overlooking a lake in Southwest Colorado. The wind is whipping the chimes into such
a frenzy that he closes the door, blocking out the scent of summer’s first raindrops, teasing the parched, dry land. I suddenly realize the Smithereens might not be the Smithereens without Ed.

He described his work as akin to a film director’s: guiding the creative process. A producer listens to demos and rehearsals, helping a band decide which songs to record. Ed isn’t a songwriter, but he knows what sounds good. He’s not a member of a band, although he’s played guitar with some of the finest. And he’s most famously known as the “Henry Kissinger of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” for helping reach a peace accord between Phil Spector and Johnny Ramone at Hollywood’s
infamous Tropicana Hotel in 1979. Spector, during an all night recording session at Gold Star Studios, had forced Johnny to play the opening chord to “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” dozens of times and Johnny threatened to quit work on the album End of the Century. Seymour Stein of Sire Records, upon hearing of this dilemma asked Stasium to solve the problem. Ed set up a meeting with the Ramones and Spector in Joey’s freezing cold, darkened hotel room on a hot Spring day and brokered a deal between the mad genius producer and the band.

Stasium is credited as Musical Director on the album.

Stasium is not a producer like Phil Spector – who considered himself equally star maker and musical genius. Stasium is not about Stasium. He’s about the music and making it the best that it can be. He doesn’t have a signature sound or style. Yes, he’s a musician, but he considers himself more craftsman than artist or visionary.

He’s a collaborator, a member of the team.

“Frank Zappa said that art is making something out of nothing and selling it,” Stasium said. “I don’t make something out of nothing. I use an existing entity and build this vision.”

That vision has included everything from Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia,” to the local Durango group, “Fuzzy Killing Machine.” Stasium was the founding chief engineer of Power Station, the legendary studio on 53rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City. He then went on to pursue an independent career recording and producing such diverse artists as Talking Heads, Julian Cope, Peter Wolf, Mick Jagger, Jeff Healey, Joan Jett, Marshall Crenshaw, Living Colour, Soul Asylum, Motorhead and The Hoodoo Gurus. Just to name a few.

Stasium has been making music and playing guitar since he was a young boy growing up in New Jersey. He recorded and mixed music on tape recorders, experimenting with multitracking in his parent’s basement. He played with various bands in New Jersey and had his first music deal in 1971 with the band Brandywine. Their album was released the same week as the The Who’s Who’s Next.

“We were the only white group recording at Brunswick Records, which was more well-known for Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Jackie Wilson and Lavern Baker. And we had terrible songs,” Stasium said. Yet their album was engineered by Bruce Swedien who went on to record, mix and assistant produce Michael Jackson’s Thriller with Quincy Jones.

But it was Stasium’s experience recording at Brunswick and his work with Tony Camillo and Tony Bongiovi, owners of Venture Sound Studios, where he received his first hands-on experience in professional recording and earned his first Gold Record. Today, he is waiting for his download award for the number of Ramones’ hits that fill iPods around the world.

After meeting with Stasium and listening to just a few of the stories he can share about his life in music, it’s clear that he very well may be the Kevin Bacon of the music world; the music business could have six degrees of Ed Stasium. Name almost any well-known musician, and he’s worked with them, or worked with someone who worked with them, producing, mixing and engineering music, whether analog or digital.

Today, Stasium does it all from his computer in his home studio in Southwest Colorado, and he’s available for hire. Perhaps the next song or album he produces will provide the newest Grammy for his collection.

Guest judges for this year’s contest include: Pop Music Sensation Katy Perry; American Idol winner Jordin Sparks; Jeff “Swampy” Marsh creator of Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb; Caldecott winner Mo Willems; Spiderwick Chronicles creators Holly Black and Tony DiTerLizzi; Brian Nemeckay, Caryola’s Digital Design Creative Director; and Jack Martin from the New York Public Library.

Not in Wyoming? No problem. Parents, teachers and art centers can download submission instructions for students at Doodle 4 Google. March 23, 2012 is the final deadline for students to submit their drawings for the contest.

The Nicolaysen Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe will host exhibitions of state finalists and runners up.

Not familiar with Google doodles? Well, Google creates special doodle versions of their logos. All are available on one website at Google Doodles.

Here are some of my favorite “Google Doodles” from 2011 and into 2012. The featured “Splashing Google” is by Gabriel Kitzman from Elbert School Dist. #200, Kiowa, Colorado. Gabriel was a finalist in 2008 for Doodle 4 Google.

“[On The Road] is about a group of crazy young people who just travel back and forth across the United States. Sometimes they hitch-hike and sometimes they drive cars. They steal cars and just want to be on the road the whole time. I’ve always liked that notion,” Ruscha said.

So it’s not unexpected that Ruscha would try to elucidate Jack Kerouac by lifting phrases from the novel and painting them in his signature-style: block print over nearly colorless, textured backgrounds, or vibrant hues with photorealistic images of mountain peaks along the bottom of the canvas.

Other common objects of Western culture also play a significant role in the art of Ed Ruscha. These are evident in the limited edition artist’s book version of On The Road created by Ruscha in 2009. The book is 222-pages printed on Hahnemühle paper and illustrated with photographs taken by the artist, commissioned or found. The photo plates are all blind embossed and tipped in by hand. An unbound version of the book, double-pages framed for display, is on view at the Denver Art Museum in Ed Ruscha: On The Road. Installed in an elegant grid at one end of the gallery, the rest of the space features 15 related paintings.

“If you weren’t familiar with the lines from Kerouac, you wouldn’t just know the source,” Thomas Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western Art said as we toured the exhibition. “You would think it was just Ruscha pulling literary verse out of context. At the heart of what Ruscha is, he’s a pop artist. In sort of the Andy Warhol sense of grabbing soup cans and images that are in popular culture, Ruscha is grabbing language that’s part of, and has become central to, popular culture, and the American story.”

Ruscha uses an all-caps typeface he invented, of curved letter forms squared-off, named “Boy Scout Utility Modern.” It’s his re-creation of the aesthetic of old-fashioned billboards and handmade commercial signs. And he knows something about this since he started his artistic career as a commercial artist. But it was his interest in words and typography that provides the primary subject matter for his paintings, prints and photographs.

A brilliant blue Western sky is the background for Mañana a large painting that is near the center of the gallery. “Sure, Baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard—mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.” The words “probably means” nearly disappear into a rugged, snow-capped mountain peak that juts up into the bottom of the painting. Ice-capped peaks protrude into an emerald green background on another painting across the room. “Greatest seventy-yard passer in the history of New Mexico State Reformatory,” written on the canvas. And in this one “reformatory” dematerializes into the peak.

The photo realistic mountains began appearing in Ruscha’s work in 1998, a few years after he created a mural for the Great Hall at the Denver Public Library. And an early example from the DAM collection is on view in a nearby gallery.

But even if one is unfamiliar with Ruscha’s background, his affinity for artist’s books, his inspiration found in language, one will find a link between his version of On The Road and his paintings in photography, which has played a crucial role throughout his career. His photographs typically feature deadpan depictions of subjects not thought of as having aesthetic qualities. This is evident in the imagery selected to illustrate On The Road the book. Like his paintings, most of his photographs are devoid of human presence, emphasizing the structure and its placement in a built environment. The same could be said of the phraseology in his paintings. His choice of words are straightforward while also being inscrutable. “The Holy Con-Man Began to Eat.” “Brakemen eat surly meals in diners by the tracks.” “Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself.”

And they are Western. Contemporary Western. Pop Western. Deadpan Western.