Bøger af Greg Olson

The history of Indigenous people in present-day Missouri is far more nuanced, complex, and vibrant than the often-told tragic stories of conflict with white settlers and forced Indian removal would lead us to believe. In this path-breaking narrative, Greg Olson presents the Show Me State's Indigenous past as one span­ning twelve millennia of Native presence, resilience, and evolu­tion. While previous Missouri histories have tended to include Indigenous people only during periods when they constituted a threat to the state's white settlement, Olson shows us the con­tinuous presence of Native people that includes the present day. Beginning thousands of years before the state of Missouri exist­ed, Olson recounts how centuries of inventiveness and adapt­ability enabled Native people to create innovations in pottery, agriculture, architecture, weaponry, and intertribal diplomacy. Olson also shows how the resilience of Indigenous people like the Osages allowed them to thrive as fur traders, even as settler colonialists waged an all-out policy of cultural genocide against them. Though the state of Missouri claimed to have forced Indigenous people from its borders after the 1830s, Olson uses U.S. Census records and government rolls from the allotment period to show that thousands remained. In the end, he argues that, with a cur­rent population of 27,000 Indigenous people, Missouri remains very much a part of Indian Country, and that Indigenous history is Missouri history.

Greg Olson (author of David Lynch: Beautiful Dark and former film curator at the Seattle Art Museum) deconstructs Twin Peaks's widely acclaimed return to TV in 2017 through a unique lens encompassing William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jean Cocteau, Philip K. Dick, the color pink, the Bible, Vedic literature, and Marvel superheroes.David Lynch is an international icon of visionary artistic innovation, humanistic thought and philanthropy, and spiritual exploration, and Twin Peaks: The Returnis his magnum opus, a mythopoetic summation of his deepest beliefs and concerns. In Black Coffee Lightning: David Lynch Returns to Twin Peaks, Greg Olson (David Lynch: Beautiful Dark), in his characteristically intimate and personal way, traces the Twin Peakscurrents of Lynch’s emotional-visceral storytelling, themes, imagery, and sound: the way the artist and viewer share an electrified circuit of mystery and understanding. Olson details Lynch’s kinship with transcendence-seeking artists like William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jean Cocteau, Philip K. Dick, and the post-World War II mystical Northwest painters. Small-town values, coffee culture, the color pink, the Bible, Vedic literature, Marvel Comics superheroes, and a Parisian camera crew wanting Olson to guide them through Twin Peaks territory all make appearances.   Over a thirty-year span, Lynch and Mark Frost created forty-eight hours of Twin Peaks TV and film, hypnotic cinematic music immersed in the depths and divine heights of human nature, a soulful song of the forest, America, the world, the cosmos. Olson, Lynch, and Twin Peaks have been on parallel tracks for decades. Olson’s longtime love, Linda Bowers, died shortly before Twin Peaks: The Return aired, and his lived experience with Lynch’s art speaks to the healing power of artistic engagement. Here his chronicle includes personal interaction with Lynch and Frost and their colleagues, as well as Olson’s perception of Lynch's inner world of karmic balancing, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and veneration of women.

Offers a complex and nuanced picture of the Ioways' efforts to retain their tribal identity within the constrictive boundaries of the Great Nemaha Agency. Drawing on diaries, newspapers, and correspondence from the agency's files and Presbyterian archives, Olson offers a compelling case study in US colonialism and Indigenous resistance.

For nearly 40 years, David Lynchs works have enthralled, mystified, and provoked viewers. Lynchs films delve into the subjective consciousness of his characters to reveal both the depraved darkness and luminous spirituality of human nature. From his experimental shorts of the 1960s to feature films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and INLAND EMPIRE, Lynch has pushed the boundaries of cinematic storytelling. In David Lynch: Beautiful Dark, author Greg Olson explores the surreal intricacies of the directors unique visual and visceral style not only in his full-length films but also his early forays into painting and short films, as well as his television landmark, Twin Peaks. This in-depth exploration is the first full-length work to analyze the intimate symbiosis between Lynchs life experience and artistic expressions: from the small-town child to the teenage painter to the 60-year-old Internet and digital media experimenter.To fully delineate the directors life and art, Olson received unprecedented participation from Lynch, his parents, siblings, old school friends, romantic partners, children, and decades of professional colleagues, as well as on-set access to the director during the production of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. Throughout this study, Olson provides thorough analyses of the filmmakers works as Lynch conceived, crafted, and completed them. Consequently, David Lynch: Beautiful Dark is the definitive study of one of the most influential and idiosyncratic directors of the last four decades.