mitchellcliftonbarton
Mitchell Clifton Barton
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 6 years ago
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November 4, 2018
The last couple weeks have been so so busy. And Maude is now 3 months old!! It’s insane. She is so much more aware now than the last time I wrote, and she is even starting to grab stuff hahaha! Eleanor and I feel so dumb that that is what we are so proud of her for doing. She loves to stand up, and she is holding her head up so cute! She loves baths, being naked when we change her diaper, and being outside. I really feel like we are getting a hang of being parents ha. At least in this stage of Maude’s life. Who knows what will happen when she gets older. 
The last three weekends we have been out of town, first we went to Arizona to visit Stu and Jess, second we went to St. George with Taylor and Christian Brown etc., and this past weekend we went to Denver to visit Lucy and Andrew Lamprecht with Hilary and Ryan Schade. Its been a fun few weeks, but we are exhausted now. Things have been so crazy, and we are done with traveling for a while. Denver was especially fun, it was fun to see Ryan and Andrew, see Denver, and just chill. We stayed in a house that Danny and Laura Jones are housesitting, and we got locked out one night and had to break in by getting on the roof and cutting a window screen open. 
Things at work have been going well also, I’ve been doing freelance for Actual Source which has been awesome, and Washer / Dryer Projects is going well also. Although Eleanor and I are both tired, we are so happy!
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 6 years ago
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September 1, 2018
Its been so long since I wrote in here! Too long. 
So much has happened since December 11, 2017. The most exciting thing is that we welcomed a tiny little human bean into the world on July 30, 2018. We named her Maude Leonora Barton. She was born at 7 pounds 5 oz, 19.5 inches long, and we are so grateful to have her in our lives!
The birth experience was amazing. On the 30th, Eleanor woke up early, and her water had broke. She wasnt sure if it had actually broke, and she wasnt having many contractions, so we decided to wait a few hours before we went into the hospital. We weren’t expecting it at all. It was so fun and exciting to wake up to Eleanor telling me that the baby was on her way! 
In the meantime, we took a walk, Eleanor showered, and we eventually headed to the hospital with all of our stuff in hopes that they wouldnt turn us away and send us home. At first it seemed like we maybe were going to head back home, but they did a little test and the water had for sure broken! Labor was slow progressing, Eleanor went from being dilated to a 1, to a 5 in probably around 10 or 12 hours. During that time, we watched Netflix, Eleanor survived her contractions, got an Epidural, at food, all with Corinne and me by her side. 
Eventually, progress sped up quickly, all at the same time that Quinn had arrived at the hospital to give us our dinner! All the sudden, the doctor said it was time to push, so Quinn went out to the hall, and Eleanor prepped for the pushing. Once the pushing started, it was only about 15 or 20 minutes until Maude was out of there! She came so fast. Watching the birth, cutting the umbilical cord, holding Eleanor’s leg, was all such an amazing experience. I honestly can say the most amazing thing I have ever been a part of. It was spectacular to see Maude’s little head poking out, to find out the gender (which i almost screwed up because I thought the umbilical cord was a penis) and to have Eleanor and I hold her as she came out. She immediately did skin to skin, and started feeing almost immediately as well. We were so overflowing with love and joy, and as I held her for the first time, it really hit me, and I felt so much gratitude and peace. We are so happy!
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 7 years ago
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December 11, 2017
The last week and a half has been amazing. But before I continue, one thought. 
Was just reading in Alma 30, and I realized and came to this conclusion after thinking and working over an idea in my head. I really believe a god exists. I suppose the main question that sprung this up in my mind was that of opposites—if we believe in moral values (right and wrong), do we not believe in God? Is God not the source of this right and wrong, or the manifestation of our moral beliefs? Does it make sense to have these moral beliefs and not believe in a God? I don’t pretend to know the exact answers for all these questions, but it seems to me that right and wrong do no exist without a God. Of course our sense of right and wrong is also developed based off of ideologies we are raised with or environments we choose to live in, but when we talk about the big stuff—life and death, love and hate, etc—I feel that these have a necessary and deep connection to the existence of a God. 
As far as what happened this week, I don’t remember much other than the fact that we found out Eleanor is pregnant!! It was incredible. Truly one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had and a testimony that God loves us. It was the greatest miracle I have ever seen. We went to the fertility clinic on Monday morning, with absolutely no expectations of pregnancy or ovulation. The doctor was extremely kind, gentle, and informative, which helped us feel positive and uplifted as we finished. But before we left, the doctor wanted to do a routine trans-vaginal check on Eleanor. We entered the room, Eleanor undressed and got in the stirrups, and the doctor was in shortly. We followed along on the ultrasound screen as the doctor explained what was going on. She saw a thicker uterus, which is normal when you haven’t had your period for an extended period of time, and then paused for 3 seconds, with no change of emotion. No blinking or face movement. She moved on, and then explained she thought Eleanor had ovulated on her own! And that there was a small chance of pregnancy. We didn’t really believe that last part, but she wanted to double check with a pregnancy test. Eleanor peed quickly, and then went to get her blood drawn. We were both feeling on edge and probably getting our hopes up, when the doctor ran in with 3 other nurses, thumbs up, and announced that we were pregnant!!! I couldn’t stop laughing, and Eleanor couldn’t stop bawling. We are so happy! We hope that the baby will be healthy, and we are just so excited!
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 7 years ago
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December 3, 2017
Once again starting to write here.
We signed for an apartment this week in East Millcreek, Salt Lake City. We headed up there on tuesday morning to sign, along with my mom to help us scout out the option of painting the apartment to cover up the horrible aqua blue on the walls of our future bedroom. 
Yesterday, saturday, we petitioned the help of Maura and my Mom, and went to paint the apartment. Kath and Max Pond dropped by, as well as Taylor Brown. They were so kind to help and participate. We’re excited to get to hang out with them more!!!!!
I also took down my final show this week and had my final review. I felt so dumb because I had been trying to set up the meeting forever and it was so extremely difficult to find a time given my schedule and theirs being so conflicting. We settled on wednesday night, but of course the TRAX in salt lake was LATE and I missed the frontrunner by 2 minutes, so I got to the gallery late. The actual review was good, Collin, Peter, and Daniel didn’t hold back at all and really dug into me, but it was needed and that is of course what I wanted and expected from the review. Overall I feel good about the work I made, and feel excited to try new things with it now. I came out feeling once again a bit humbled, and thinking, will I ever make anything good??? Ha, but of course that is a ridiculous thought and not what I think art is about. The questioning and digging in is what is needed for growth, and maybe part of the purpose of making the work, and a vehicle for learning and understanding. I feel so grateful for my teachers, Daniel and Peter have both been very influential in my art, as well as my life and I’ll miss them. I’ll miss talking to Daniel in his office about art and life in general, they have been amazing faculty to be around. 
I’ve also been working a lot on the Department of Art website, a fun challenge, and obviously something I feel passionate about unlike the Ebook I am helping design for Kyle Collinsworth. 
We are sad to be moving to Salt Lake, to leave our ward and BYU behind. But of course we are still so close and we are so excited for a new chapter. 
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 7 years ago
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February 24, 2017
Martin Heidegger - The Origin of the Work of Art
- Art is the source of Artists and their work
- is a definition of art, just a justification for artists and work? Artists are maybe only a real thing inside a definition of art.
- did the idea of art come because we were already making art?
- we already know that something is art before we look at it to judge what it is doing
- art has a thingly nature, but transcends a thing by carrying meaning. It ‘makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other, it is an allegory. In the work of art something other is brought together with the thing that is made. To bring together in greek is sumballein. The work is a symbol’
- to be a thing you just need to exist, it could even be a concept. Is a person a thing? No, things that have life are not things? so is art when something human is added to a thing? Probably not.
- thing as bearer of characteristics
- things have to have matter?
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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November 12, 2016
As ‘Black Sand White Sand Grey Sand’ slowly continues to get more and more users, the amount of images that are created is increased. This puts more and more pressure on me to continue posting/keep up as more content is being generated. Entropy is also increased, as more and more of the same images are created -- flattening out to a grey sandbox.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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November 1, 2016
Section 4.3 from “Satin Island” by Tom McCarthy.
“Le Pli. While my supposed business, my ‘official’ function, as a corporate ethnographer, was to garner meaning from all types of situation--to extract it, like a physicist distilling some pure, unadulterated essence out of common-mongrel compounds, or a miner drawing gold ore from deep within the earth’s bowels--I sometimes allowed myself to think that, in fact, things were precisely the other way round: that my job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it. Divining, for the benefit of a breakfast-cereal manufacturer, the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it); establishing for them some of the primary axes shaping the way in which the practice of living is, or might be, carried out; and watching the manufacturer then feed that information back into their product and its packaging as they upgraded and refined these, I understood the end-result to be not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents. Helping a city council who were thinking of creating parks and plazas but had yet to understand the ethnographic logic driving such an act; laying out for them the history of public (as opposed to private) space, making them grasp what these zones fundamentally embody, what’s at play in them from a political and structural and sacred point of view; and doing this in such a way that this whole history is injected back into the squares, sports-fields and playgrounds millions of citizens will then inhabit--same thing. Down in my office, stirred and lulled by ventilation, I would picture myself as some kind of nocturnal worker, like those men who go out and repair the roads, or check the points and switches on the railway tracks, or carry out a range of covert tasks that go unnoticed by the populace-at-large, but on which the latter’s well-being, even survival, is dependent. While the city sleeps, bakers are baking bread in night-kitchens, milkmen are loading crates onto their floats; and river-men are dredging riverbeds or checking water-levels, while other men in buildings with nondescript exteriors track storm surges and spring- and neap-tides on their screens, and activate the flood defences when this becomes necessary. When the populace-at-large wakes up, they just see the milk there on their doorstep, and the fresh bread in the shop down the street, and the street itself still there, unflooded, un-tsunamied from existence; and they take it all for granted, where in fact these men have put the milk and bread there, and have even, in deploying the flood defences, put the city there as well, put it back there every time they deploy them. That’s what I was doing, too, I told myself. The world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it.”
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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October 26, 2016
If the old monuments make us remember the past, and the new monuments make us forget the future, where do the monuments I’m interested in reside?
A monument is normally a designated area that is chosen by an authority figure. The monuments that reside on the web are the opposite of this -- anybody can stake out their space and start from there. It is infinitely reproducible. Anybody can decide how their monument lives.
While there are these personal monuments such as personal websites, there are also monuments that are more widely viewed such as social media sites, news sites, or blogs. The repeated visits to these types of sites becomes a ritual, where pilgramage is made every day, or every hour to check on changing content. Social media sites such as facebook, twitter, or instagram are particularly interesting in this aspect because the users are the ones constantly updating and adding content. Through these updates, websites become monuments to themselves every day. 
What happens if I show different models of monuments?
It emphasizes the customizability/uniqueness of the monuments. The availability of different models to choose from in a marketplace. This could also be beneficial because the monuments are often shown in similar settings, e.g. on trees, wood boards; So switching up the forms of the monuments could be more engaging for a variety of videos. By limiting the number of models, and increasing the amount of videos, it also can emphasize reproducibility.
What happens if there is only one?
It really emphasizes the reproducibility of the same thing over and over. The copying and copying that happens. It feels more direct and maybe quick to move through.
What happens if they are different colors?
Once again, it makes them more unique. It also talks more about the customizability of a template, where any color could be chosen as a background. Can they still feel like plastic through video if they are painted?
What happens if they are are just the plastic?
It emphasizes the plastic quality of the pieces.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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October 16, 2016
Living in London in 2007 was awesome. My family went with the Ringers and a group of students and Hansen and I just roamed the streets. We were supposed to take classes from our moms, doing homeschooling, but we hardly ever did, and always stayed up late to watch Monday Night Football and eat frosted shreddies.
I remember one time when Hansen and I went to early morning seminary. I believe it was the only time we went. We got up super early, probably like 5, and Jeff Ringer walked us down to a bus stop. We got on, went up to the top, and immediately fell asleep. We woke up later in a part of town that we didn’t recognize at all. We soon realized we had totally missed our bus stop. So we got off, and rode back. 
We got to seminary late, but I remember they still let us have some coffee cake.
We went home, and I slept in for a couple hours.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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October 4, 2016
Pages 60-80 of Camera Lucida.
Reading about Barthes desire to ‘find’ his mother through photography was really interesting to me. At first I wondered if this is actual even possible, or to what extent we are able to remember or feel the presence or memory of somebody through a photograph, and I’m still not sure I believe that you can. I’m not sure I have ever had an experience like Barthes has with the photo of his mother as a child. I think that I feel a presence of being through photographs of a person when that person is still alive and with me, but if it is someone that I am not currently spending very much time with, it starts to become ghostly, and I forget what the person actually was like. 
I like the idea that this is effected by history, that we are distracted or divided from the being of a person because of its surrounding context and the history of that context. I think this is probably partly true. 
The other idea that particularly interested me in this section was about the ‘has-been’ quality of photography, and how Barthes names this the essence of photography. I wonder how this differs now with digital manipulation being so commonplace -- but I think it still has an effect no matter what. If we are confronted with an image that has clearly been manipulated, we still look for the ‘has-been’ of the image solely because of its existence as a photograph. I’m not sure if I like the idea of trying to break this, confuse this, or to embrace it completely. But I like the idea. 
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 27, 2016
Responding to Rosalind Krauss’ essay on photography “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View”, I wonder how things shift contextually over time. 
Do we deem something as art simply because it is nostalgic or historical? Why do we project meaning onto certain things of the past? I think it is interesting to try to justify the many choices that Atget made with his huge archive of photographs, when actually it might be true that many choices were not specifically intentional, but were made because of a system that Atget could have been a subject to. I think this contrast between choices of intention and choices of reaction are interesting. 
I also am interested in the idea that Atget was serving an idea that was much larger than him. I don’t think I like the idea that an artist is a slave, or subject to an idea, or the opposite idea that the artist is a genius. But I like the idea of being right in the middle, where the artist is collaborating with an idea. I think that maybe feels more productive. This in regards to authorship is also interesting to me. The way you interact with an idea, utilize a system, or appropriate other content creates a joint authorship with something other than yourself, or possibly, blurs and removes authorship completely. 
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 20, 2016
In response to pages 40-60 of “Camera Lucida”, I was interested by the difference between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ photographs. I like this wording. The punctum activates a photograph, animates it, and extends it outside of the photograph. While a passive photograph lives inside the studium, without anything to spark it. 
The idea of a blind field goes along with this as well. Barthes compares photographs to cinema, and talks about film creating a blind field where the story or film continues to live on in the mind of the viewer somehow. Certain photographs, or punctum, also have this effect. They are expandable, and stretch out into other areas. I thought this was another interesting idea. 
I also was wondering more about the intentionality of punctum. I think it is probably true that an intentional effort to make a specific element of a photograph work as punctum, most likely would have the reverse effect. But maybe in a more general sense, by intentionally taking risks in making photographs, an unintentional punctum can be created. But does that still make it intentional? Because even though the punctum might not be in the artists awareness, it was still made through an intentional risk? It probably doesn’t matter. The viewer wouldn’t read it as intentional, or possibly be aware of any of the artists intentions.
I also liked the thought that punctum might not be able to be defined, it creates a sharp sting, but is also vague and hard to pinpoint for some reason. I can identify with this, most photographs I really love, I’m not exactly sure what it is about them that I love. Does a punctum identified then become studium? Does the effect of punctum lose its efficacy? I think that the punctum must not be identifiable, because if it can be, then the image dies. Or starts to die. I think the description of pricking, being specific, but also being vague at the same time is a more accurate description of punctum.
I really like all these ideas. 
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 19, 2016
I recently have thought a lot about the quickness of images in the world today. Advertisments, social media photos, etc. They swiftly display a message and are moved on from. Art should be different than this, but I think that I have been thinking that to counter this, images should be confusing. Confusing and a dead end. But I now am thinking thats not true -- instead, the confusedness should still point somewhere. How can you spend important time in an image that is a dead end?
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 18, 2016
Powerboxing was a classic default high school activity for my friends and I. I honestly never really enjoyed it, but whenever my friends and I felt like getting into some trouble, we often did it. 
Powerboxing is a prank where you drive to a house, someone gets out of the car and runs to find the house’s powerbox, opens it, and then flips off all the switches to turn off all power in the house. Its pretty harmless, and basically just confuses the victim. Its also just plain annoying. 
One night, a couple of my friends and I were sleeping over at Hansen Ringer’s. At what must have been around 3 a.m. my friends decided they wanted to go powerbox. I wasn’t very down, but I was the only one with a car and I felt like if I did maybe I would get brownie points or something, so I drove. We had five guys in the car. I don’t remember who exactly it all was except for Michael Taylor, Pancho Bellazetin, and Mikey Orellana. We drove over to an area by Timpview and found a ginormous house with all its lights still on. We parked maybe a block away, and someone ran out and did the deed. When they got back in the car, I drove away pretty calmly. 
Soon, we saw a car following us. We got scared, so we took a turn into another neighborhood. It still followed us. So I drove faster. It followed us faster. I started to try and lose them and we parked. We noticed the car wasn’t following us anymore, so we waited a few minutes before leaving. 
As we started the car up again and drove away, on the exit onto Timpview Drive, the car that was following us pulled right in front of us, blocking our path. I went around him and started zooming down Timpview Drive being egged on by my friends. The whole time, I was not happy with what was happening, I was a pretty sensitive kid when it came to stuff like this. I also realized my Hyundai Sonata was not going to beat this car behind us and I wasn’t about to get all fast and furious. So i stopped. 
The following car pulled up next to us and rolled down his window. It was a young guy. He said he knew what we did, and that he was gonna call the police on us. So of course, all my friends start lying. Pancho and Michael came up with something. Eventually, I was fed up, so I came out and said “Imma be honest” and told him exactly what we did. 
He seemed happy that I admitted it and said never to do it again. Then he drove away. 
I think my honesty paid off. 
I never really liked powerboxing anyway.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 16, 2016
From the 1967 text “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” by Robert Smithson - 
“I should now like to prove the irreversibility of eternity by using a jejune experiment for proving entropy. Picture in your mind’s eye the sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.
Of course, if we filmed such an experiment we could prove the reversibility of eternity by showing the film backwards, but then sooner or later the film itself would crumble or get lost and enter the state of irreversibility.”
Smithson uses this as his conclusion for the text. It does a nice job of summing up the basic idea - that as time goes on, entropy only increases and we rise into ruins even though we think there is progression.
This idea could relate to this quote from Gene McHugh’s “Post-Internet” - 
“This principal is, through one lens, how capitalism operates: it depends on the endless impossibility of satisfying desire to keep selling ways to satisfy desire.”
I’m not sure I agree completely, but I’m very interested.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 13, 2016
Pages 20-40 of Camera Lucida.
Continuing his ideas, Barthes remembers a group of photos taken in Nicaragua. These photographs possessed something that he deems important, and that he later goes on to identify and define. He finds importance in a duality that existed in them. Two elements that opposed or were discontinuous to each other. 
The first element he calls ‘studium’. This is a sort of general field that all photographs exist in. They spark a kind of general interest, but without any ‘special acuity’. 
The second element he calls ‘punctum’. This element punctuates and breaks the studium. He provides a list of words to describe it, but it basically is something to disrupt the field, something to bring that ‘special acuity’. 
He goes on to discuss these elements in more detail, explaining the way that studium creates a general like or dislike in the viewer without asking anything of them or pushing them in any way. It is always understood and never asks questions. It simply describes something.
Barthes then departs onto other thoughts - Photography taking after Theatre because of its reenactment of the dead or association with death, the way photographs make anything that is photographed seem important, and the subversiveness of ‘pensive’ photographs. 
In response, I find most of his ideas extremely interesting. I love the definition of studium and punctum, although I think maybe what is punctum for one person can vary greatly based on taste or interests. Also, I wonder if punctum is primarily a visual element, or if its more conceptual, or maybe both. Can punctum exist in a photo with not very many visual elements or that has little to no visual content? 
But ultimately think it’s a great way to think not only about photography, but art in general. The idea of a piece of art asking something of the viewer, stinging them, punctuating an idea, feels very important to me rather than just creating a general feeling of like or dislike. 
I also especially like the idea of photography making notable whatever its subject is. It’s interesting to me how a photograph can take something and turn it into a monument or a memory, making it feel important and noteworthy. It asks the question of “why was this photographed?” I’m not sure this has the same effect now with photographs because of the huge volume of photographs that exist today, but I’m interested in this idea.
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mitchellcliftonbarton · 8 years ago
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September 11, 2016
The Chevy Venture. 
Many road trips were taken in that light gray piece of beauty. I still remember the first time we saw it (pretty sure it was at Grandma and Grandpa Barton’s house), and it was so shiny with its built-in car seats, and the automatic door being so awesome. I always tried to take up the whole back seat, but Liz came back there with me too sometimes, and once she supposedly witnessed me smear peanut butter on the ceiling of the car (I don’t remember smearing it, but I definitely remember it being there). 
Not very many other memories are coming to me now of specific times in the van, but I definitely remember listening to Bob Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” in there many times. 
In high school, we basically stopped using the van. It was dying, and I just remember how futile it was and how terrible it was in the snow. During one winter, I built a couple rails for skiing out of pvc pipes and found pieces of crappy wood, and Hansen Ringer and I would load all the rails into the back of the van and take them somewhere to ski on. This was about the only use I found in the van at this point of it’s lifetime, it had a lot of space in it with the seats down, and I didn’t care about getting it dirty. I remember one particularly snowy day when Hansen and I got home from school and we couldn’t not ski. So we loaded it up with the rails, and drove up to Christian Santiago’s house. I remember listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album and the van barely being able to make it up the hill as giant flakes were surrounding us which was actually such a peaceful and good feeling. We parked on 820 N by that field above the churches and hauled our rails into the mountains in like two feet of snow to an area above the Santiago’s. We didn’t actually get to ski that day, we were pooped from transporting our rails, but at least we were able to set it up for future ski days at the Santi’s. 
Eventually, my parents sold the van for a very small sum of money and finally part of the driveway was open again. 
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