hey, why not?

a peek.

Project comprehension.

I’ve just sent forth an application to an artists residency I’ve been coveting for a few years.  As part of my work samples, I submitted a 3 minute mock-up of the Concentric Trench piece.

I confess, I’m at a bit of a loss on how to proceed with this project.

I read/heard something recently which relates well to my understanding of this project.  The rate at which one reads helps to determine one’s overall comprehension of the material and its context.  For example, a new reader who struggles with each and every word will not understand what he read by the time he comes to the end of the sentence.  ∴ , the context falls away and the overall meaning is lost/displaced/forgotten.  The longer it takes to read the sentence, the harder it will become for the brain to link the words together to form a complete thought.

In grad school, I was dismayed that the class structure and fast-paced schedule did not allow for me to make things by hand and anything I needed, I had to purchase in the interest of time.  Admittedly, though, I did enjoy the volume of work I was creating.  Upon quitting grad school for many, many other reasons, I responded to this longing for an integration of craft by applying for grants in support of creating elaborate, multi-layered, interdisciplinary projects.  Being a newbie in applying for funding at the time, I figured at the very least I’d be applying just to get my name “out there.”  Imagine my astonishment when my work was selected in 2 out of the 3 grants I applied for!  In theory, I was psyched and ready to get some good work done; in practice, I was horribly swamped, and my 2 glorious opportunities were at odds with one another for my attention outside of teaching.  So it seems that in artmaking as well, the longer it takes to complete the work, the easier it is for the concept or the meaning to dissolve.

The moral:  As for my application to the artist’s residency I won’t mention by name just yet… I created 3 thoughtful, contained, to-the-point, arguably minimal (for me) projects which can (and I’m sure will) expand whilst I build them.  My goal is to get back to a place of feeling prolific by accomplishing my work bite by bite and relishing the morsels as they come, lest I should choke.  Less is less.  And that is more.

Everything is Temporary.

Yes, I’ve got a lot on my plate beginning today.  Back from Ragdale, shoving myself directly into the swirl of the city, a veritable hurricane’s eye:  hello to the pets, a kiss for my beloved, then off to receive multiple hugs from the kids in my favorite afterschool program ever.  Finding a new home and moving within 15 days is my lot now and, truthfully, I am not looking forward to it.  Especially since I was really getting into a remarkable groove at Ragdale.  Alas, the city calls now and I must fall into it.

Ragdale’s big idea is to provide artists and writers time + space (and delicious food and fabulous company!) to do their work in.  I found myself studying how I used that massive space in Sylvia’s Studio.  It is especially helpful to understand my art habits as I look for potential new home spaces in which to finally focus on putting my art work first and, yes, teaching second.  Really, I only used two large walls for the act of drawing and a large 36×48 table for my smaller drawings and all my other experiments.

So what now?  I’m in an unfortunate position in which I am overwhelmingly consumed with the ups and downs of false hope apartment hunting.  Re-homing myself and my family will mean less artmaking for the time being.  There is much to be said for keeping a healthy momentum toward building an active and thriving arts practice, so I eagerly look forward to the instant when I can make a happy mess in my own new space with my own time.  Much later, I concede, but I’ll get there.

I got so much work done at Ragdale that, looking back, I am actually dumbfounded by my ability to produce, thanks to such incredibly ideal conditions.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had such an ideal situation outside of my space at the warehouse in undergrad.  Expectedly, I was exhausted in the evenings (food coma), but pressed myself to keep creating anyway.  Early morning’s rise came at 630 or 7 am, then an hour of movement across the golden oak floorboards, remembering what it feels like to really embody the kinetic, to sweat from effort, to propel any sleepy images forward to work from.  My time at Ragdale became unusually/uneasily precious, knowing what hell was waiting for me back in Chicago.

So everything is temporary, then.  How reassuring.  I can’t wait for these upcoming challenges to be as temporary as possible, while I begin on my rocky path of understanding  more about why all this is happening, why it is happening now and how I can rise above, through and beyond it, surpassing both strife and artlessness.  I hope I may become a better being for the experience.

Feeling happy/sad and definitely grateful for the fleeting nature of excess through simplicity with which Ragdale has gifted me.

Progress.

Today I woke up at 630am like it was nothing, made coffee for the gang (9 scoops, y’all!) and got down to business.  I started generating ideas for drawn images by projecting the Super8 film onto my 6×8 postcards, loosely tracing to form a composition.  I got all fancy with it and started layering images from the film, curious to see which images would compete with one another and, ultimately, which would survive my post-projection experiments in drawing.  I made three or four 6x8s and started on a new large drawing (44″x 53″) based on a memory of a film still.  Naturally, not only have I lost my hands, as in my first big drawing, but now I have become a snake woman.  Excellent.

Lots of talk with my pals Beatrice and Lorena about the circus and all things freak and carnival.  I brought my beloved copy of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn as inspiration, just in case I get a chance to read it again.  I don’t think it is going to happen, but just the same, I love remembering the story, how grandly and dirtily it was written.  Mostly, I just love having that book nearby.

I totally forgot what the bottom/underneath of a pelvis looks like, then I realized I didn’t have to draw it by book, I could draw it by heart.  Does anyone know what the obturator furamen holes are for?

We had studio visits and readings again this evening.  Great to see what everybody is working on, what they are questioning, how they are staying far away from their comfort zones.  There are some major risks being taken in the midst of many different levels of artistic empowerment and sentiments of success.  I’ve tried to project my peepshows to give my new work some context for these fine folks, but due to one thing or another, I haven’t enjoyed good fortune with that yet.  Tuesday it will have to be.  Then leaving for the city on Wednesday, with a class to teach soon after I get home.  Ah, yes.  Back to the grind.  But not yet!

Decompression Sickness!

I burn up on re-entry into the city from the vast lands I traverse, it’s true.  But I never expected that the same would happen when entering into an artmaking expedition.  When I was in Texas, it took my eardrums 3 whole days to stop knocking around inside my head in the middle of all that quiet.  Yesterday at Ragdale, I felt just plain barfy.  It unfortunately threw my whole zone of intensive productivity off, but it taught me that fiercely harpooning myself headlong into my work after such a prolonged mental and physical distance from it requires a slight bit of ease in order to accomplish sustained results.  So I went ahead, felt perfectly disgusting and, after putting in about three days’ work into a span of 6 hours, I took the night off.

A good reminder that my will can be easily trumped by something bigger than myself.  It is all a process.  And that’s not too shabby.

Redemption and Receiving.

My second and last whole-day attempt at finding a new home in the city, interrupting the goodness and possibility of this residency, failed miserably.  So I gave up.  Happily.  I cuddled with our resident feral cat Mungo as I slept over at my house instead of Ragdale and for the first time, saw beyond the alley-cat discomfort he shoves forth with growls and barely raised eyelids.  What a great cat!  I’m sad it took me this long to discover his grand potential:  his kittenish curiosities, his sweetness and calm, his hoot-owl purrs, his drooling hair-fetish.  I just never gave him the opportunity to become un-territorial with our own cat roaming the house.  Mungo, sir, you are truly a force to be reckoned with and as well you are a gentleman.  Thank you.

I left Chicago (again), wanting a reset, a chance to start over with Ragdale.  Feeling that the first week had been lost to a messy uncontainment of “life stuff,” including finishing up my overly-complicated self-employed taxes and fighting a frustrating, fruitless hope/despair struggle for a suitable space in the city for 2 artists, 2 cats and a beautiful, perfect pooch, I got back in my truck desiring to redeem myself of my disenchantedness and unfun burdens.  So that is what I did.

Not being they type to want to ask for help (ever), but understanding fully that 1) help had already been offered to me by a kind painter at Ragdale and 2) I’d better take it lest I should feel any semblance of sadness or regret concerning an otherwise delightful time here.  All signs point to the fact that something really major is going on in my universe and I just can’t do it all on my own.  I am in the midst of an important moment in my own path of discovery, both in my work and in my self, and how those energies collide to determine my future as an artmaker.

Back at Ragdale, I asked my new friend Lorena if her offer to share her abundant space still stood.  She said yes, absolutely! and we strategized how to best utilize the space so as to give each other enough time spent independently as well as how to use our time together for gathering feedback from one another.  With the first day of our experiment under our belts (of our pajamas– why bother with zippers on jeans when you’re just working in your studio?), I am pleased to announce that we have struck up a brave and major success!

Hurrah! I am churning out work like the end of this residency on the 15th is all the time I have left in the world to make art.  I am making and sending 6×8 postcards to myself, as I have off and on since 1999, to see how the US Postal Service marks them or MIAs them.  I opened up a delicious and lengthy roll of hot/cold press Arches/Rives paper I first bought when I lived in Seattle in 2000.  I am beside myself with absolute joy–  I am drawing again!!!!  Huge vine and kneaded eraser images my mind has captured from my Super8 film, which I hand developed and transferred quick and dirty to video.  I want to see how my memory alters the movie stills in my brain.  I am projecting the movie atop the drawing and seeing how they match up or don’t.  Tracing, layering, erasing, redrawing. What is that tension that exists between what we remember and what is actual?  And how the hell do my artmaker’s hands represent it?  Whatever the case, the drawing just gets better and better, even in its dark moments… In the drawing, I don’t even have hands anymore!  What happened to my hands? Aaaahhhhhh!

I have definitely needed this experience and freedom for so long.  It is opening up so many untamed spaces of energy and big thought which were getting pushed to the side, covered up by life crap and attention away from my work.  I don’t blame these spaces for getting bored waiting around for me to discover them!  I am absolutely blessed to be here, first week of extreme burden/distraction or not.  I have come back to myself.  I am re-learning me as creator.  I am open to receiving all as it happens to grace my art-filled day.

Lorena, dear, you have saved this residency for me.  With all my heart and art, thank you!

Let’s put it this way…

Look, you and I both know I’m a human lightning rod: I  channel the damage from the masses because my threshold for adversity is elastically gigantic.  Today, it has become quite clear, though, that I am actually a lightning rod hooked up to a gas line.  Even in the middle of an idyllic, bird-filled prairie.  What gives?

The only way out is up!!!  Soon, soon.

Fireside Queries

Last night, after a dizzying day back in Chicago blindly scouring the streets for a decent place to live and work, a group of us went for sushi and the requisite booze.  We returned to Ragdale and sat full and energized by the fire, talking about life experiences and art.  Our conversation raised many questions for me, especially since I was amid folks of disciplines I don’t pursue as headlong as other directions or just plain don’t understand as part of my own practice:  two writers and two painters, one of whom also happens to be a teaching artist like myself.   Thoughts taken from my notes, which were necessary to jot down due to the wiiiiiine and the roaring fire that was helping to melt my face.

Who do we ART for?  Who is our audience?  Do we consider our audience when we ART?  If not, then are we ARTing for ourselves?  Yes, we all agreed that we do it because we are compelled; because we must in order to exist, though…  If we are not doing this for us first and foremost, then what is it that we do for ourselves as artists?

The Greek concept of the Muse and the Responsibility of the Artist:  If we make good work, it is because of the grace of the Muse.  If we fail, it is interestingly the Muse’s fault.  If we believe this, then what becomes of the heavy weight of the artistic responsibility to perform well?

Failure is the ragged path to Truth.  My big epiphany of the evening.

How do we create work that is bigger than we are (not in scale, but in aliveness)?  How do we give it life?

A surprise?:  We are able to channel and create community through our solitary artwork!

More to come… In the meantime, here are some pictures of what I’ve been working on and what I’ve seen…

Welcome to Ragdale!

My first “official” artist residency.  A well-loved and tended family tract in Openland Prairie 30 miles north of Chicago.  With many things falling to pieces around me, I urged myself to “just get there.”  Things have a way of coming around like marriage vows:  better or poorer, in richness and in health, sickness and wealth.  I know how it goes.  It always does.

So here I place myself, amid shale-roofed semblances of castles, in order to make a mark on my little hand-processed film.  I originally wanted to create this film in its entirety here in my generous two weeks at Ragdale, but currently, my life’s multiple surprise complications have been in major competition with attention toward my work.  So, I will do what I can, for I must, and will treat myself with compassion by letting my artwork lead so my brain can follow.  I hope to do more listening than speaking, more questioning than answering, more envisioning  than figuring.  We shall see.

The Concentric Trench Tour 2008 Stats!

31 Days Gone
6652.7 Miles Traveled
8 States (IL, MO, OK, TX, NM, AZ, CO, KS)
4 Motels (Austin, Marfa, Flagstaff, Winslow)
13 Rest Stops
5 Ghost Towns (Terlingua, Cuchillo, Chloride, Two Guns, Canyon Diablo)
Ø Hot Springs
6 Subway Footlongs
1 Camping (Grand Canyon)
Ø Major Injuries Sustained
3 Minor Injuries Sustained (bruises, cactus bites, blistered hands)
4 Tumbleweeds Achieved
1 Roadkill Created (long red snake: I’m sorry!)
7 Friends Visited
9 Good Conversations with Fellow RoadHounds
2 Pals Made (Ara & Spirit)

1 Happy Birthday to You sung by none other than Howe Gelb. Thanks, Darlin!)
0.02 Times I thought about Chicago
3 Varieties of Desert Sage Collected
Ø Giant Sand shows
Ø Sunburns
Ø Death/Fatal Wounds
Ø Animal Bites
228 Insect Bites
1742 Photos Taken
3 New Project Ideas to Follow

The Bends.

Whoa.  I am in Chicago and I am sad.  Home in one piece and grateful, but sad. I was relieved that the streets seemed quiet at 1230 am on a cool early autumn night.  Then some explosive sounds akin to fireworks (but certainly not) echoed flatly to the south of me and I just couldn’t reconcile the heavy actuality of the city with the lightness of my travels.  I’ll remember what city life is like in a few days.  And when winter clears the streets of neighbors and monsters, I’ll be much more at peace.

My house seems vacuous (because it is clean, probably) and full of stuff I don’t really remember being mine. All those books are mine? A stove?  But why? Indoor plumbing!  Holy crap!  My plants are enormous and beautiful, popping out of their planters (thanks Chrissie!), the cotton grew higher and higher still and the stray kittens are less grizzled, goopy and starved looking.  What a difference a month can make in a cat’s life.  Haven’t seen Mungo the Destroyer cat yet. Not sure what I am hoping happened to him, to be honest, as he has had a relatively miserable life thus far– I just want him to be happy and if that means {shudder} kitty heaven and relief for him, then I hope it happened in the swiftest, most painless manner possible.  Though I wonder if I will hear him howling for me in the morning…

And so here it is.  In the city, you just can’t get too attached to things.  Cats get run over, people come and go, trucks get repeatedly damaged by careless people, work is there or its not… I think that is what smarts right now- “moving out” of my truck which kept me and my best girl Maisy safe and swift and warm(ish) for the past month… I got attached.  I’d forgotten I ever knew about detachment as a function of living in the city until I found myself hoping that no one hurts my truck home overnight as it rests on my narrow street.  It is full of tumbleweeds and looks unwelcoming, so I don’t think anyone will bother. Plus, the cops are circling fiercely, practically running right into me on their wild goose chase as I tried to park.

I only cleaned out the “valuables” from my truck tonite –anything pawnable– and will finish tomorrow, take my time doing it and try to figure out what it means to be still again.  It was fun not having to worry about if my stuff or my dog was going to get robbed out of my truck (except for when I was at the Tucson Motel 6). I prepared myself for the crash and burn, though I tried my best not to manifest it.  Chicago is definitely it for me of all the midwest for however long it takes.  Of all the metropolitan areas in the US, I do truly enjoy me some Windy City… I just realize that I like the Road better.

Reentry and the bends. Ouch.  Like the trench, treading full circle on this southwestern adventure is made of inimitable and rare interactions and experiences. I hope I can carry that spirit forth when I make my next circles here in Chicago.

Pictures I wish I’d taken.

New Mexico. On a two-lane highway from Santa Fe to Taos, a red sign among a sea of blue beseeching us to “Vote Republican!” because it is important to “Play It Safe” and don’t forget to “In God We Trust.”

Eastern Colorado, parts of Kansas along I-70.  Fields of enormous sunflowers, spaced equally apart like gravestones at Arlington, all heads mortally bowed in the same direction.

Kansas along I-70. A quarter mile stretch of wire fence along farmland overgrown with tossed-up tumbleweeds reminiscent of the way Chicago chain link fences hold layers of litter on our windiest days.

Almost home…?

And I don’t mean the cookies.  Woke up not freezing this morning on the (intended) last day of my adventures at a rest stop an hour or so west of St. Louis and got on the road, semi-looking forward to being back to civilization and, truthfully, mostly not.  Well, guess what?  Ironically, ever since I started heading home yesterday, all kinds of stuff has been breaking with my means of transportation.  My power steering fluid disappeared again (after being “fixed” by 2 different mechanics on three separate occasions), my oil dried up again, even though I was diligently checking every morning and all seemed well and finally, my right front tire went completely flat on I-70 and is floppily ruined.

So here I am at a Sears, where I get my tires because they have a great warranty and the mechanics always flub said warranty in my favor when it expires. Apparently, there is a recall on the valves, which is exactly how my tire went flat here and how one went flat in Chicago last winter.  It looks like someone just sliced the valve with a knife.  All four of those are being replaced right now, a new front tire put on and my scary spare returned to the underbelly from whence it came.  So I have two or more hours to kill.

I am sitting at the sliding door entrance to Mid-Rivers Mall (which has its very own exit off I-70), sucking the wi-fi energy of the Borders and electricity of the mall itself and I am reminded of how women doll themselves up to go shopping.  And how men, in their best slob clothes and backwards baseball caps, don’t get dolled up except for that disgusting Axe stuff.  Or Joop!  Pee yew.  The clicket-clack of heels and bored flip flops of mallrats disturbs my puppy as she is trying to get some well-earned rest from a pretty strange day.

The jack that came with my truck is a minuscule piece of crap which requires a clockwise turning motion to raise the truck.  After messing around with that for a half hour, I decided to put aside my sticktuitiveness and wave to (not flag down– no,  never!) a passerby on the frontage road.  Two fellers actually stopped after they caught my halfhearted wave.  Boy, they were characters!  Definitely like two of the bad guys in the Rescuers book I had as a kid.  One was a large man, with a warm personality; the other was a skittish, skinny gentleman compleat with that nervous Disney yodel in his throat who behaved like there was a venomous, on-fire snakepit set to explode under my truck.   He was seriously spooked by all the highway traffic which did not move over to make room for calamities like mine like you are supposed to.  Mr. Skinny was working fast, the other, James, I think, working with a bit of bravado, asking me between spoken suppositions of where to put the bottle jack, “Honey, what are you doin’ so far from home?” and “You married?” Somehow, I am charmed by questions like these, mostly because they are so ridiculous and unrelated to the work at hand.  It’s funny to me how some old-tymey/Southern men can’t understand why a woman wouldn’t want to just stay put! I felt grateful for their help and they made a point to watch me get back into the unforgiving stream of 85 mph traffic.

So now I have some hours to burn over all this mess of land I’ve worked my way through.  I was worried I would not make time to sit and think, having gotten back to the city too soon.  Funny how the world works.

On the Vertigo of Trains…

At Canyon Diablo, I stood alongside an eastbound engine as it shot past me a mortal 10 feet away and in those moments reconciled my whole life with the certainty that if that train should happen to fall, the hereafter would be seeing me soon enough.  Somewhere I heard that vertigo is not dizziness from heights or fear of falling, but the desire to propel oneself into that space. I suppose like the desire one may feel to fall into the air when at the top of a building just to see, the way we see ourselves flying in our minds from where we stand, the vertigo of that train made me want to lay pennies down on the track.  Just to see.

Ye Olde Canyon Diablo Bridge!

There were BNSF Railroad workers doing maintenance construction all along the tracks.  I thought they might toss me off their property if they saw me, so I stayed out of sight as much as possible, though I was happy that real live people were nearby, should anything happen to befall me.

I learned from the resting trains I first came upon here that each one took turns crossing that which I presumed was the Canyon Diablo Bridge. It took about a 20-minute hike from the trading post to find what I’d been searching for.

Isn’t she a beaut?

In the Canyon to the south of the bridge, I saw these historic blocks carved from red sandstone which supported the first Canyon Diablo train bridge. I sat a while, hoping to see a train pass over, and realized that I’d witnessed the rush hour of trains when I’d first gotten there a couple hours earlier.  We rested under the sun for awhile and a foot away, a bird as bold as a panhandler peeped its head up from the edge of the canyon.  I wanted to stay there forever, but the Petrified Forest was calling me for sundown.

It was rumored that there were unmarked graves here and I didn’t want to run across them, neither literally nor figuratively.  I’m not into desecration of the dead by treading on their personal space.  As my tired pup and I followed the tracks over a mile back to my truck, I saw an area in which rocks were lined up in labyrinthine design.  It was located in a wash, so it looked as though the design had been half erased on the west end.   I’ve read that there is only one actual gravestone and I’ve poured over my pictures of this particular site just in case it happened to be an obscured part of my composition.  I’ve come up with nothing but an unsettling mystery.  And that is how it shall stay.

Dirty ol’ Diablo.

A little history, a little legend. Canyon Diablo is said to have been the meanest and most violent collection of outlaws in one place outside of Tombstone.  Street justice was king, as were horse thieves, bank robbers and murderers.  14 saloons, 10 poker flats and 4 houses of ill repute on the main thoroughfare aptly named Hell Street. There are unmarked gravesites scattered about (though the one marked grave is said to be of the only man who died peacefully there), and though I do just enough research on ghost towns to get me where I need to be, I make sure not to do too much so I won’t freak myself out.

I took myself and my essentials (puppy, cameras, water) over the three sets of tracks and moved closer to the ruins, sweeping my glance in front of me for snakes, broken glass, rusted metal cans, cow patties, barbed wire and other nasties that might hurt canine paws.

The feeling I got walking through the ghost town of Canyon Diablo was surprisingly not the excited adventure that I felt at Two Guns, where every second is a new discovery and the spirit of adventure and study of historic ruins is shining bright upon me. I felt dirty and uneasy, as if there were predatory beings watching me.  As I approached the old car remains first, I felt a little off-balance looking at what remained, not from day-to-day living, but from a series of debaucherous steel can and gun-filled nights on the ghost town.   Everything I saw was overrun with bullet holes.  I was uneasy walking through piles of metal ruins, equally decrepit, yet  mismatched in time, and prepared myself to be approached, possibly by a living person.  The cars were stripped and rusted, overturned in hurricane fashion, seemingly all Chevy or Buick and still recognizable as Mercury, Nova, station wagon Special.

I got to the trading post, where only one stone wall stood tall against the Arizona wind.  I walked through a large hole in the false front of the trading post and passed easily through the structure and out the backside, as if I were the ghost, traversing where walls once stood, but are now piles of biscuit-colored stone.  The place stank of yellowed air.

Soon enough, I found the source at a long cast-concrete cistern that I deduced was their open-air system of catching rainwater.  Natural sulfur deposits were scattered around this trench and at one end was what looked like a tomb with the lid removed.  A little creeped out, I kept walking.

Just behind the trading post is a long cylindrical structure that is nearly fully intact and stands at approximately 4 or so feet tall.  I’m not even sure what to liken this to, but I definitely kept my distance.  The insides were colored by soot and I thought sure that a coyote might emerge to eat me if I disturbed his noontime nap.  What is it?  A smokehouse?

We walked on from here down Hell Street, my puppy panting and in obvious discomfort/boredom, myself feeling stupid for not having brought extra water for us both.  I was on a mission to find my first prize of the day, the Canyon Diablo Bridge, and we had already gone too far to turn back now.

Toward Canyon Diablo!

I was fortunate to find another decent Motel 6 in Winslow, AZ (though I did not go stand on The Corner) with an indoor pool AND hot tub.  I was totally psyched to sink into those fancy jets of chlorinated water until I saw….

…these signs taped on the doors of the pool area.  I turned right around, went upstairs and ate my cheeseless pizza in peace, wrote a bit and got some shuteye for the second installment of Arizona ghost towns the next morning.  Canyon Diablo, here I come!

The road to Canyon Diablo is a 4-mile dirt-gravel-small-boulder road that took me about 40 minutes to maneuver at a pace of 5 mph.  I was slightly apprehensive about popping a tire over those protruding rocks, but I am happy to report that nothing of the sort happened.  Potentially more treacherous was the knowledge that there was absolutely no one who would find me on that road.  Canyon Diablo is not the sort of oft-visited curiosity that Two Guns is.   In fact, I wondered where it even was as soon as I got to the end of the dirt road, being careful not to trespass on the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad property. There was a 50-car long BNSF train parked westward, presumably waiting to pass over the Canyon Diablo bridge and blocking my view of the horizon when I stopped my truck. I looked around, having read all kinds of different ghost town internet directions to Canyon Diablo and, much to my confusion, could not find anything resembling what I ought to be seeing.

So, until I figured it out, I played. I made some incredible recordings of a handful of squawking ravens who were circling me, many various recordings of trains passing and the one parked in front of me creaking to life.  Absolutely incredible textural sounds– the tracks singe your earhairs hissing as they cool down after the train has passed over them! I went walking on the BNSF property (whoopsies!) alongside the tracks and found some weird green glass-and-ceramic-like rocks amid the uncountable chunks of gravel.   Just as I had excitedly found some pitted, corroded railroad ties, I spied something even more abrupt in the rocks, glittering and shaped unlike the rest… an obviously antique, battered, deformed clear glass shooter marble!  Stretching my glance all the way eastward and westward along the rubble, I took a moment to consider the odds… how, in all these umpteen miles of rail and rock, did I happen to find this marble?  I started inventing stories about the child who lost it and how it came to be found on top of the pile by myself, fifty or a hundred years later.  It was too enchanting a charm to leave it where it was, so I took it with me.  Hope it and its stone pals don’t mind.

Still, where was the dang ghost town?

The train spread out in front of me began to wake, its springs and mighty iron letting forth some dry reports and groans in between spaces of rest, just this side of stillness.  It was amusing to me how alike humans and trains can be upon arising.  And how long it takes for us both to get up and running.

Behold!  The ghost town I was seeking had been hidden neatly behind the train and was now revealed by the passing of the behemoth. Time to get started.  Gather my puppy and various recording devices. Don’t remember to bring water. Cross two widths of track, carry puppy over the broad cattle guard, watch for glass and snakes and cow poop, approach the shot-up car cemetery and awkward ruins of a jumbled modernity.  Ultimately, find the trading post, but really, admittedly romantically, find the Canyon Diablo train bridge.

Recharging…

Literally.  All my electronics are recharging right now at this really nice Motel 6 at Woodlands Village in Arizona, including my electronic robot brain and aching skin.  There are hummingbird and normal bird feeders by the front office and tasty Indian food across the street.  Clean non-tub shower, a big fat TV right in front of my face and my beautiful pooped puppy having intense puppy dreams since we got here.  I wonder what she saw/smelled at the Grand Canyon, where we were a mere 8 hours ago for our final sunset at the South Rim.

So, it being 2 am, here is the brief rundown of where I’ve been with more in-depth posts when I have more time…  I hope I have time in the city…

Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico.  Nice.  I’ve never heard as many species of marsh-loving bird communicating at the same time.  It was definitely a treat for the ZOOM mic.

Cuchillo & Chloride Ghost Towns, New Mexico.  Tiny.  The 40-minute ride out was twisty and turny and full of big mountainy things and bright red soil.  Not orange like in Georgia, but a deep brick red that glows when the late day sun hits it.  Cuchillo was another example of people living among/on top of the ruins. Chloride is a non-profit, privately owned ghost town, managed and lovingly preserved by a woman named Linda and her family.   Not the ruins I could run around in like I’d hoped, but it was great learning all the stories about the town and its people from such a wonderful storyteller as she.  Because I’d spent “too long” at Chloride, I decided to forgo the hot springs resort where I could get a cabin for $35/night, hang out in some mineral-rich hot water and see the Gila Cliff Dwellings the next day.   Onto Tucson from there….. but that is quite another story involving the cruddiest, scariest Motel 6 I’ve ever encountered. I never even went inside my room!

Junction of Hwy 17 & 69, AZ.  Man, sometimes it just feels really great to wash your face.  Had my second conversation about politics (what are those?) with Flying J gas truck driver whose brand new truck had broken down.  Much nicer than the old man at Chloride who accosted me with the demand: “You tell me three good things that Obama has done!”  Sheesh.  Politics survives even at the ghost town.  Bo-ring!  But hey, I guess when you’ve been hanging out at a tiny ghost town (pop. 20) for two weeks with your enormo-RV and trailer on the back filled with bikes, expensive equipment and a motorcycle, the illusion of politicks might still spin around in your head.  Jeez, get a job already.  And, please, come visit Chicago to have a sit-down chat with all the welfare moms you have such a problem with.  Might change your views some, mister, when the reality of your politicks and her kids are staring you right in the face.

Flagstaff, AZ.   Went for some non-Subway grub at a vegan joint called Hip, whose owner, Mike, and I had a lovely conversation about traveling, Chicago and vegetarianism. He came out to my truck for a quick belly rub for Maisy. Also a stop at Target for some long-sleeved shirts which I’d neglected to pack.  Feels like a mountain town with REI-type people and things to do. Reminds me of Seattle a little, not sure how.  Tomorrow, I am going to Macy’s coffeehouse and vegan food place.  I hear it is awesome, and as long as it fills my belly for the road today, I will feel good about it.

Grand Canyon.  Go.  It is truly grand and deep. I woke this morning at the Desert View campground to enormous Poe-sized ravens after my dirty camp cookset and then, sounding uncomfortably close, two coyotes warbling at one another.  That made Maisy growl.  Good girl.  Oh, she’s still got it, the Ferocious, inside her.  She protects me/her truck very well.  Last night at Grand Canyon, it was 34º, which might explain this bent throat I’ve got.  I put Maisy in my pink sweater to save her from freezing.  Super cute, I can’t stand it. I also may have perfected my wheat gluten campfire roast, which is quite an accomplishment!  Camp coffee this morning on my homemade-from-an-altoids-tin alcohol stove and we were off on a meandering hike.

Why do Grand Canyon Pictures always look so lame?  Just get there and be still.

Tomorrow is what I’ve truly been waiting for:  I-40 ghost town adventure!  Some of I-40 was Rte 66, so I am extra psyched to see whatever it is I will see.  The Meteor Crater, Canyon Diablo and Two Guns!!! But for now, bedtime. My eyes feel like I opened them in saltwater and they are truly road weary and bloodshot. The heat in my truck seemed to die today just in time for the Chicago tundra. Or the desert at night. Awesome.

After/during/in between the ghost towns, there will be me and Maisy’s second visit to the Petrified Forest in AZ (it is that amazing), a gorgeous ride through Arizona’s painted desert, a second try for New Mexico hot springs and some undetermined fun stuff in Colorado, as I am really not sure what to see there.  After that, it is all midwest on the way to Chicago.  Please forgive me corn tortillas and midwestern lifers, but flat acres of corn fields just don’t compare to all I’ve seen already and all the stuff I’ve missed.  Though I could seriously drive around and live in my truck with my dog forever and ever and ever and ever, I expect I will be happy to get back to my house and all my beloveds.  That’s you, Chicago.

Good night!

The Worst Motel 6 Ever.

Tucson, Arizona.  I-10, exit 262.  9 pm.

I roll into the parking lot after no contact is made with a friend-of-a-friend as a  sleepover possibility.  My truck is inhaling quarts of oil and belching grease all over the underbelly of itself since, well, probably Chicago. I’d hoped to get her fixed at friend-of-a-friend’s mechanic, but that no longer made much sense.  Why fix my truck on the road and waste a day or more when instead I could be driving and wasting tons of oil?

Inside the Motel 6 lobby, I wait in a busy Saturday night line with families with small children, older road-weary folks and a seemingly friendly Native American guy.  I hear him joke with the clerk about motel security {warning flag #1}, we talk dogs and life on the Rez, and I engage him in some other harmless conversation.  It is obvious that he is a regular here.  I get my key card for my room and pull around to the side of the building, making sure my truck is well lit and in plain view.  I am confused by how crowded it is here.  Loud.  Unhappy. {warning flag #2}

I walk to the door of my room and swipe the card.  Nothing happens.  {warning flag #3}

My puppy hasn’t pooped in a day or so because she doesn’t understand rocks, which is all there is for landscaping in Arizona and New Mexico.  That and sandspurs, which we found out the hard way numerous times.  So since I can’t get in my room,  I’m walking her over the smells of other dogs on these rocks, hoping for that elusive turd, when a young frattish dude leaning against a palm tree asks me about my dog.  Here we go, defenses up, though speaking guarded-friendly as my first protection.  I tell him the basics, she’s a mix, the end.  Then he starts getting more personal, asking what are you doing in this dump?, where are you from?, where are you headed?, what’s your name?, do you smoke weed?, how old are you?  At this point, I’m getting edgy about all the questions and he apologizes.  I’m really curious as to why he’s just hanging around outside at the Motel 6.  He keeps looking at his now-dead phone, then back at me. {warning flag #4}

Keeping my distance but maintaining my semi-friendly demeanor, I tell him that I’m going back to the lobby to get a new key card and I decline his offer to “hang out and get a bite.”  Twenty minutes into my Tucson Motel 6 experience,  I’ve already decided to get the hell out of there, but there’s no way I’m telling him that.  He follows alongside me like desperate frat boy halfway to the lobby and, after trying to bum a nonexistent smoke from me, warns me that the Native American guy who was chatting me up in the lobby is a rapist.  {warning flag #5} He says this guy just takes girls up to his motel room and rapes them and for some reason, no one does a thing about it.  He rattles off the descriptions and ages of the women, like he’s said it plenty of times before.  I thank him for his concern and he asks to use my phone so he can call his buddy to pick him up from the Motel 6 (does he work here?).  Grudgingly, I let him.  During his conversation, I’m watching him closely and wondering what the hell is going on at this particular Motel 6.  Have I stepped into the Twilight Zone? Or am I in Bradenton?

In the lobby, I tell the clerk that I am concerned for my safety and I’d like a refund, please.  He says he completely understands and it is no problem to cancel my room.  In and out of the Motel 6 in half an hour.  Rounding the corner on my way back to my truck, I am relieved that my frat boy shadow is nowhere to be seen.  I’m in my truck in a heartbeat, thankful that the keycard didn’t work and on my way to anywhere but there.

I credit my adrenaline for the many hours’ drive I accomplished after this creepy half hour.  In bone-black night, I drove straight past all glimpses of saguaro cactus I was really looking forward to seeing and, after much trial and error, found a nice spot to take my sweet repose on the side of the road at Cordes Junction, AZ.

And though I was less than 2 miles from this sustainable community, I never did see Arcosanti, because I didn’t yet know it existed.

New Rules for the Road

In no particular order, here is what I want to remember for next time I am on the Road…

1. No matter where you are, always be still for sunset.
2. Wake up in a new place every day.
3. All the mistakes and “shouldas” will still lead you somewhere. Nothing is ever really a waste.
4. Always have small bills to give as tip in case someone gives you your morning coffee for free.
5. Not everyone will be as willing to shake hands as you; do it anyway, often and with a smile.
6. Learn how to keep your peace as you return to the city.
7. Find a really, really great mechanic. Do not settle for used or refurbished parts, no matter what.

650 miles of notes from the Road…

I am in Marfa, TX at a little cafe named Squeeze where everyone is just lovely and sweet, especially after they watched me get pulled over (second time this trip!  yeah!) for not having my front license plate on.  For the past 8 years, I have had a piece of scrap steel on the front of my truck with the painted word HOME on it and there it will stay, multitudes of warnings from the cops or not.  What I told the locals at the cafe, who, in the spirit of my defense quickly remarked on my getting pulled over, was that I wouldn’t be doing my civic duty if I didn’t give the police any work to do.

This town of Marfa, which (minimalist/site-specific) artist Donald Judd made famous, is just a blip on Highway 90, with a population of 2121 relaxed individuals.  Perhaps I was expecting some kind of little artistic oasis {she trails off} … the James Dean movie Giant was shot here and I am told that the Dairy Queen has wireless internet, but other than that, it feels a bit like a ghost town.  Lots of sleepy houses, in various states of kempt-ness, with backyards large enough for me to drool over.  The worst part (aside from the overpriced, dirty motel [and I don't expect much with motels], run in part by the young girl whose “boyfriend got her pregnant”) is the sandspurs which prohibit my sweet puppy from her ones and twos.  Also, that I couldn’t get any supper last night, not even from the Subway inside the gas station, because they’d closed at 9 pm.  How dare you not feed me food, said the Frogs.

Last night, I went to see the Marfa mystery lights at the observatory (designed by gifted students!  woohoo!  go Nerds!) and saw probably nothing.  Except the whole entire solar system.  From now on, I intend to look skyward while there is still unlimited atmosphere within my view.  After the cafe, I’m about to go see some art and walk around with Maisy, then head toward Truth or Consequences, New Mexico to see about a hot spring (the flooding from teh Rio Grande poo-poohed my visit to Chinati Hot Springs yesterday.  We shall see…

A brief update on the last 3.5 days and 650 miles…

Big Bend National Park is unimaginably gorgeous and dream like.  That area of Texas has huge peaks, mountains and plateaus which, in the summer haze, look as though they are blue volcanic islands immersed in thick fog.  Totally uncapturable by photo, though some images follow…

I followed a guy on a motorbike with his dog in a sidecar for 20 miles through the park, then I lost him.  He found me coming back the opposite way and slowed down to tell me that the road by the Rio Grande was blocked off due to the enormous flooding they had over the summer.  We got to talking, told me his name was Ara and his pit bull was Spirit and that they have been living off the land for 2 years now.  What a beautiful thing to be able to say and an even more honorable thing to do.  I told him why I was out here and what I’d been working on and he said, professional digital camera in hand, “A trench, huh?  What makes that art?”

There is a distinct and very real danger of attracting mountain lions (and black bears and javelinas) by having my dog in Big Bend, so that is why they don’t allow dogs anywhere except on the curvy, mountainous main road (dangerous and stupid idea!!!!) and in the campgrounds.

We didn’t stay in Big Bend. Instead, we drove to Terlingua (pop. 295?) and parked just off the road to Terlingua Ghost Town (pop. 20).  Man, what a cool place–  real live people living and (some) working in a ghost town.  The first thing I saw over the hill leading up to the ghost town was the cemetery.  Very dramatic entrance to a place where the dead sleep among the living.  People have taken old adobe ruins and have constructed their dwellings right on top of them.  Brilliant.  I was also told by a sunburn people named Greg that I look just like his friend Antonia.  All my life, I’ve been told I look like someone else… Apparently, I have many doppelgangers.  I’d like to meet them all one day.  Images follow…

My truck started acting funny so I checked the oil to find it was bone dry.  Went to the mechanic who said it would be $500 and 5 hours labor to fix it.  You know, once they got the part in 3 days later on Friday.  Hell no.  I asked them to fill me up with oil and I’d just check it every morning. They were very nice fellows, Archie and Tom.  They even showed me what they were talking about when my truck was on the lift. As a woman in need of truck repairs, I appreciate any time someone explains something about my truck to me.  Words of advice from Archie, who was probably in his 60s: don’t wait to retire until you are old. Hm.

That was the brief update.  Now pictures.  Love!

On the Road again…

When I was a kid, my mother would sing this every time we had to get back in the van to make our long, artful, gypsy journey.  Today I am driving west out I-10 to see about Big Bend National Park and Terlingua, a ghost town I’ve never seen before.  I am pretty exhausted from all this fun and art, but I am definitely ready for new adventures. After I get my Protein 2000 from Veggie Heaven and buy some new music for the road at Waterloo, that is.

Super thanks to everyone who put me up and put up with me.  I am already filled with an ache I can’t explain in preparing to leave Austin.  It is absolutely head-shakingly tragic how much I love it here. Thank you to my second home for showing me a beautiful time.

End of the trench.

I am happy to be getting on from here, with this big project under my belt.  It went like this (cue Godspeed You Black Emperor’s “The Dead Flag Blues” from F#A#∞…), “the buildings toppled in on themselves, mothers clutching babies…”

After all that digging, I never thought to fill it back in as a part of the process.  Thanks to Benné’s innocent query, I finally had my resolution.  And it is beautiful and I am satisfied. Just a peek… I don’t want to ruin Christmas with too many images.

“You grabbed my hand and we fell into it, like a daydream.  Or a fever.”

We drank toilet paper today.

Leave it to me to somehow get a couple of squares inside of a gallon of water.  At least Maisy and I are getting our fiber.

You can never go back, Jack.

Sure, I like to expend all possible options in order to find a solution, but I am generally successful after a second try. This visit to the ranch is that second try and I am finding that my proposed idea would not have come to fruition exactly as planned even if I’d spent a month here.  I am finally realizing my limitations, which sucks, since I am part robot on overdrive, and that really fries my circuits. What is the cause of my limitation?  Is it my 97.3 year-old body?  Absolutely not, although my back feels like it is burning right now.  Surprisingly…

I got bored. Holy crap, I got bored with my own artwork! Ha ha!  Or maybe, I just made the most successful piece I’ve ever done, since a majority of the piece was the repetition…  Wow, maybe I just can’t handle several thousand of the same repetitive movement.  Very interesting.

Anyway, I’m going to cease beating myself up and crying over spilled art.  You know, its been fun thinking I failed and all, but there’s plenty more art where that came from so… what?

Must the trench begin and end here at this site? How much digging is really necessary to facilitate trench?  Is it less about the structure and more about the movement? What is the metaphor vs. actuality of the structure? Couldn’t I dig elsewhere?  After all, I am heading more southwest from here, out old Route 66, hitting some ghost towns (for research), with a final goal of seeing the Grand Canyon, the Ultimate Trench, because I’d like to add it to my list of amazing things I’ve seen.

Many questions, no answers just yet.  Goodnight.

Last Chance.

I am heading back to the ranch tomorrow bright and early so that I may get the trench complete.  And by that I mean as complete as two days’ work will allow me.  I am mildly concerned about pressing my luck in the rattlesnake and wild pig department, but I got some rubber boots and some field boots which might just double as snow boots for Chicago tundrae to help out with that.

Last weekend, Jim was my only witness (aside from my dog) to my work.  He was the audience.  This weekend, I will have no audience, no witness but myself.  I wonder if I will get more work done if I am not being watched.

With only 6 minutes of film left, off I go to complete this thing so I can be just plain satisfied with my work.

If you are still alongside me, thanks for hanging in there, kitties.

Manny, meet Peddy.

The other night, I suggested that Benné and I do something really decadent and rare for my birthday everlasting, like a massage or some kind of weird spa thing or…

“A Mani and Pedi.”    Hoo ha!  I have never gotten this done because I guess I just don’t get it.

Benné and I met today at 2 pm after a lovely Bouldin Creek Café brunch with my pal Sturge at the Baldwin Beauty School on South Lamar at Manchaca to get our fingers and toenails “done.”  There were five young girls who worked on us, giving a foot soak (mine with suds and thank goodness for that!– remember I have dirt in every crevasse), lotiony massage, scraping away our cuticles (I don’t seem to have any to scrape) and the like.  They listened intently, with much curiosity and many questions, to me and Benné describing the trench.  It was good to have a willing audience of smart, down-to-earth Texas girls full of aspiration who are in the process of creating themselves to describe the whole thing to.  Plus, I got wished “Good luck with your trench!” publicly several times on the way out.  Good luck to you too, girls and keep it up!

I got clear polish and one big fat piece of silver glitter, like the kind I use when I am teaching (yes, I teach with glitter) at the base of each nail (I was hoping they’d have rhinestones, but they didn’t).

And then there was shiny!

Caroliner Rainbow Somethingorother.

How did this music crawl out of my head and make many records without me knowing anything about it?

This 8-minute bit from their tour DVD… the double LP of theirs I listened to at Jim’s is much more sublime, sounding like found sound meets creaky brain with a little old-tyme melody thrown in.  Like when I am concocting a new project in my head, the turning of rusty gears and releasing of cobwebs is actually this loud.  Hott dawg!!!

New Birthdays.

Since my real birthday was so disappointing, I’ve decided to start over today, the day after my real birthday.  Mostly, I spent today getting my truck inspected at a lady-run garage and pondering the age-old assumption that we fierce women inhabit “a man’s world” (no way!)… then me and Rebecca and Jim had supper at Mother’s, a vegetarian joint I used to frequent for their salad, of all things, and their heavenly cashew-tamari salad dressing.  We crossed the street and had prickly pear-lime and coconut gelato.  Ohhhh, man! (but why the plastic cups and spoons???)

I decree that until I have a moment’s peace to do my birthday up right, I will take it in bits and pieces and/or postpone it completely.

So happy second birthday to me!

Untitled longest nonfiction most storylike post about the worst birthday I’ve ever had.

(Disclaimer: This does not include all the wonderful birthday greetings from those I love.  In fact, these lovely sentiments were some of the only things that helped me crack a smile on my face for most of the day.  Thank you to my sweets, Benné and Jim and Rebecca, for turning my birthday evening around with sturdy embraces, a much needed shower, princess pictures, whiskey drinks, rubber bubba teeth, a fun rock show and a comfortable place for me to lay my tortured head.  O dear ones, thank you all so so much for your birthday songs and well wishes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

In the previous post, I mentioned how I don’t do obligations of any kind on my birthday, I just do whatever I want (which usually involves walking around aimlessly taking pictures, doing something special with my puppy or the like)… well, today, for the first time in 10 years, that did not happen.

I woke up at 730am from a deeply perplexing bad dream of historic proportions and tried to shake it by getting to work on cleaning up the cabin, packing, visiting the site of the trench again and tying up any loose ends or shots, gathering mistletoe, returning the GPS machine I borrowed from one of the neighbors, making sure my puppy doesn’t get caught by a snake, you know, basically everything, and it still took 8 hours even at high efficiency.  I could not believe it when I realized I was leaving the cabin at 4 pm.  How did the day go by and I missed it with no calm space for me to just be born in?!?!?!?!  I was also rushing myself to make it to Austin by suppertime because Jim and his now fiancée Rebecca were cooking a birthday dinner for me and now, as usual, I was going to be late.  Not the kinds of pressures I like to put myself under on my birthday, the one day I am able to do stuff for me without feeling selfish about it.  Everything I love about celebrating another year passed was not happening and I was bearing the brunt of the situation.

So 8 pm rolls around and I stupidly get lost in the town I used to live in for 5 years.  Deep South Austin is a maze to me, no matter how many times I go there.  Is William Cannon north or south of Slaughter?  Oh crap, I forgot all about Stassney!  Grrrrrrrrrr…  Then, once I finally sorted myself out directionally, I promptly got confused in the labyrinth of Benné’s neighborhood, which has a street named “Pectoral,” but even that funny did not relieve me. The sun is going down, admittedly leaving a lovely pink and purple sunset as a backdrop for the scores of black grackles along the phone lines, but I am feeling panicked and guilty for being late for my own birthday dinner, made out of the kindness of Jim and Rebecca’s own four hands.

An hour later, I am at Benné’s, feeling tired, sticky and frustrated to the point of anger for getting myself lost twice in the same hour.  As usual with this kind of bottomless frustration, my eyes start watering and my throat closes.  Oh man, it is all over now.

Benné greets me on the front porch with her dog, Red, and Johnny, who is visiting the city for a day.  I am truly helpless now, accepting her understanding embrace and trying to explain something, anything.  “I {f-bomb} hate getting lost,” I choke out.

But that’s not really all of it.  To be truthful, that’s not even really any of it.

This is about the trench.  This is about me driving away from an unfinished piece, knowing full well in my gut that it needs more work.  This is about once again not listening to my gut when it says definitively, stay and finish, even though I do not have complete freedom of my comings and goings out at the ranch {risk}.  This is about my fear of laziness, of sloth.  I was out of my mind, trying to form complete sentences to describe how I felt I did not work hard enough.

Ultimately, this is about me caring enough about my work to tearfully, sweatily, angrily, fearfully break down right in front of people.  That was one hell of a critique I gave myself!

Now.  You and I both already know I am crazy.  I must be at least a little bit so to think up the work I make.  Further, I know that it probably sounds unbelievable to think that all the sweat and effort I put into making that trench wasn’t enough for me.  Well, it wasn’t enough and its not because I have unattainable goals.  I know for a fact, by sheer will if not muscles, that I can make the structure which I envisioned.  So.

As Jack from LOST would say, in his gurgly, painkiller-addled way,

“We have to go back.”

Birthday.

Mine is tomorrow.  I am planning how to spend my birthday as alone as possible, doing whatever the hell I want til partytime, as I have been doing since undergrad.  For this one day, no work, no school, no obligations, I don’t care, see you when its time to eat.   While giving my freckles and tick freckles a once over in the cabin after my delightfully warm and relatively mosquito-less shower in the yard, I happened to really give myself a good look in the mirror for a minute (which is about as long as I can stand to examine myself this way).  For a girl who is about to enter into her early-mid-thirties tomorrow, I don’t reckon I look or feel too shabby.  The echoes of the OilofOlay commercial (not to be confused with MutualofOmaha) in which we women are invited to “grow old gracefully” always felt a little weird to me.  Like, hey, you’re beautiful just as you are, but here, purchase this moisturizer anyway.  We all need a little moisture in our lives, don’t we?

So in honor of the world’s most useless generalized opinion of how women ought to look every step of the way without unabashedly rejoicing in our scars, lines and wrinkles which are absolute evidence of who we really are, I have hereby decided to grow old artfully.  Ha ha, who’s going to try to sell me something for that?

Failure: a hopeful lament

There is a certain amount of failure intrinsic to and allowed for in making this piece.

∴, to fail is really to succeed.  Right?

In its inception, in the vacuous space which is my imagination, I envisioned a target shape dug into the ground.  Really large.  I mean absolute and humongous.  Probably actually perhaps really possibly maybe unaccomplishable in the time I had here, though I do not generally bow to possibility of impossibility.  Anything can always be done.  I pictured myself holing up in there and that is where the story begins, just like in one of those old depressing WWI movies, but without the rain, vermin and soldiers. How romantic am I!  But to think that I can do this monstrous task actually is not romantic to me.  It is and was fact and I do not doubt myself and my skinny self for a second.

The reality of that is this: I never got to the story part because in the given filming time of two days, only one circle could be done and sadly, not trench-deep. Am I redefining trench somehow without knowing it?  (Bullhonky!  Dig the damn thing!) Due to practical applications of physics or something, trying to use a pickaxe to dig straight down to make a hole did not work, so no hole was built either. Two strikes. Ouch.

Stepping away from self-disenchantment, I will note some things which surprised me. Though the earth was truly divine in that space and smelled fertile and happy, it was still compacted soil which required some serious disturbance from a pickaxe to move as the shovel was not enough this time. So my characters have changed as well:  less/no shovel except for cutting cedar and mesquite roots, most pickaxe and pail (more cowbell?). Lots of me in the monitors.

Feeling relieved and accomplished that I got as far as I did in just two days, but preparing myself for the worst critique come time to leave the ranch tomorrow… my own.

It is done!

And by done, I mean I don’t want to dig anymore. I never in a million years expected that!  No, for really. I thought I would just keep on digging.  Plus, Jim is gone and there is little I can shoot without him, though I am doing my part.  We had a great 2 days of filming the actual digging portion and some other ideas I had.  I went to bed last night feeling mildly sore and woke up for the second day feeling amazing!  Now I feel more sore, but mostly just tired.  I am still concentrating on tying up any loose ends… like any final shots I may not end up needing, but it is better to have more than less in this case, I have to return the GPS machine some country neighbors let me borrow, I need to swipe some mistletoe from an oak tree to take home, pack, clean, shower, blah blah blah…

I have yet to look over any video footage… yes, that is unwise.  I’ll get to it. Lots more business to get to  now…

Risk: a list

…there are multiple risks and actual dangers to this piece and all these are reasons why I am doing this.

(with updates!)

•    Texas is 1200 miles from Chicago (nothing blew up or broke down except my tape deck squeals louder than the music it plays.  Oh, the humanity!)
•    Rattlesnakes and other animals of doom (of which, to date, I have seen none).
•    Heatstroke (the weather was absolutely perfect- mid-80s and thankfully cloudy)
•    The earth will be unfun or nearly “impossible” to dig (yes, I think hard work is fun, in particular difficult manual labor. The more excruciating the better.  Nods to Jawbreaker for the coined term here.)
•    Flooding from the big rain– the dry creek had 3 ft of water and was unable to be crossed by the time I reached Austin.  (Two days later, the earth had drunk it up and it was passable.)
•    Hurricane Ike.  Wow, what happened?  (I still don’t really even know, but I hear it is devastating.)
•    Seriously hurting myself digging… here’s where my imagination really flies, so welcome to my mind!  Pickaxe through foot, other side of pickaxe through forehead, both pickaxe problems at once, broken limbs, bent neck, spine replacement surgery, paralysis from allergic reaction to age-old spores from excavation (aka the Curse of King Tut), immobility of any kind, blisters or hand difficulties…. I could go on. (Mild blistering, but much thanks to my generic “nuskin” paint on plastic barrier stuff.  And my welding gloves.)
•    (scary) That I might not be able to do it on my own.  Which is worse: needing help or having to ask for help?  Jeez, what’s my problem? (no update. Maybe there never will be.)

My biggest fear is that something or someone (myself?) will prevent me from getting this piece done.  Or not doing it in a manner in which I can walk away really truly happy.  Sore, tired, but happy.  I want to fall in love with this piece and tend it and be proud of the work I’ve done and not feel like I could have or should have done more.  (update later…?)

The Dig

is on!   Judging from the other practice hole I dug, I feel incredibly fortunate that the earth in this site is as lovely, clean, easy to work with (relatively speaking, of course) and the site is just plain handsome.

Jim (my pal who is the spitting image of the lanky Ric Ocasek and who is also my cameraman) and I grilled some frozen tofu (yes, while it was still frozen, what? ), green peppers, tomatoes, zucchini and potatoes (which will not cook) and put it all atop some white rice with what I thought was cumin seeds, but they were caraway.  Now it all tastes like rye bread, mmm, sauerkraut.  Jim also made some grilled desiccated apples which have somehow retained their crispness.  Still good, nice treat, though we forgot to grill the strawberries, dad gum it.

Well, my arms hurt from the first day’s work and I want to go to bed.  Up at 6 am to be at the site at 7.  Good luck to me in digging alllllll day long til 4 pm.  To top off the night, I am showing Jim the Scary Movie Party 4 dvd I brought.  Always a crowd pleaser… I predict my sides will hurt too.

Last Night of Solitude

before an insanely busy weekend of digging and packing stuff up to head on out of this wonderful place.  All week there has been surprisingly little sound, even at night.  Not tonight, though– there is an unknown  something stirring in the walls of the cabin and some creature(s) outside who sound like a cross between a large bird, a human in distress and some kind of monster.  It must be Metallica!  Nooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Today I did another practice dig/dress rehearsal at the site and was relieved and overjoyed to discover that the soil let me pass.  It is a lovely dark earth with plenty of sister of limestone (rats, I can’t remember the word– oh yeah, caliche–this stuff is softer than limestone, easily breakable, which for my purposes is good) and few roots and tangles underground.  That is just at the surface, though.  We shall see what lies beneath…  Speaking of which, what lies beneath my skin on my left ankle is a bruise-like pain courtesy of my own stupidity in backing into a prickly pear cactus while digging.  Not only are there huge spikes, but there are little frustrating clusters of tiny brittle splinters which hurt and itch. Now I know how Maisy feels when she has a big tine sticking out of her lovely paw.

So, naturally,  I broke the pickaxe already.  Well, for a minute I did, then I fixed it.  The blade came away from the handle after a nice heave and the whole project flashed before my eyes.  That said, I am expecting this to not come exactly full circle (how punny!) and am okay with that… I think.  But I have to be careful not to put any “un-expectations” on this thing in addition to expectations…

Wow.  Maybe its all the bug spray that is going to my head, but I am miraging that I have ticks crawling all over me.  Awesome.  Good night!

Texting in the Country

I spent some of today trying to get a signal so that I may send and receive text messages from my beloved on our potential intersection in Austin on both of our month-long journeys away from Chicago.  This involved standing on top of my truck and waiting for the clouds to dissipate and the wind to blow and pressing “resend” a hundred million times in a row.  Well, it worked and my thumb is consequently more brawny.  And each text only took me 20 minutes or less to send!  Never more will I take modern day technology for granted…  or will I?

Happy Birthday, Featherweight!

My Singer Featherweight 221-1 was born on this day in 1945 in Elizabeth, NJ.  On this momentous occasion of turning 63, I have given her the day off.  She is a powerful machine who has put up with my artful “great ideas” for many years (you know, like sewing tarpaper, sugar paste and grapefruit peels, oh, and fabric occasionally) Thanks for sharing her with me, maw.

The Natives are Restless…

Out here, we are hundreds of miles from the border, but still, with all the low-flying yet somehow invisible small aircraft and oversized Vietnam-era twin-propeller helicopter (!) hubbub lately, you’d think ole King Bush was out here for a photo op, I mean a concerned visit, and the Feds were doing some light housekeeping to show him and the rest of the universe that they truly care about the safety of US citizens.  Only.

I recorded the helicopter and I am pretty sure that will be juxtaposed  with the buzzards circling in the film.  Thank you, fearful and fearsome American government for watching over us, I mean surveilling, I mean just checking in to make sure everything is okay…  Whew, I do feel safe! How about that!

I wonder what they will think of my target?…

I need a shower.

Badly.

My Tools

Here they are.  Including my hands.

Until after the dig and the filming is done… Besames muchos und Au revoir!

Rules of the Hill Country

A running list of things I’ve learned about how to get along out here in the past 5 days…

1.   Never go anywhere without your gun.  “Because you never know…”
2.   Watch for rattlesnakes. They appear out of nowhere, there is no pattern to their behaviour.  They appear to look like sticks or coiled up like big cow patties.  Pay attention to these formations and sweep your glance three feet on either side of you as you are walking. If they are coiled, they can only jump as much as their coil will allow.  If you get bitten, get in the truck and drive to a hospital (though I have heard other stories about the lifesaving Sawyer Extractor to remove the poisonous venom.  Still, get to the hospital).
3.   An open fence is an invitation for anyone to come on in.  Close it for privacy.
4.   Pull to the right on the narrow shoulder to let vehicles pass you on the left.  They’d better wave, but some jerks are still jerks even when they drive.
5.   If a deer looks your way, be still until it goes on about its business.  Then you can move again without it running off.
6.   Always check for ticks.  Always.  Strip on the porch before you come in the house.
7.   Get septic service as soon as you can.  A chamber pot is nothing to fool with.  400 billion times worse than a 10-cat litterbox.  Poop in a hole, cover it up and never look back.  I’m pretty sure it’s how the Smurves did it.  Look how they turned out.
8.   Be respectful of nature, especially when you intend to kill it for your supper.
9.   Cops are power-abusive assholes in the middle of nowhere, too.
10. Buzzards will mess up your vehicle and cause accidents if you drive past them too closely when they are feeding on some roadkill.  Proceed with caution when passing.
11. There are good, kind people here who do things much differently than I do and their ways must be respected, even if I don’t agree.  Things I don’t agree with to my core can be addressed, just don’t expect a miracle.
12. Taking a shower under a water barrel suspended from a branch of a live oak tree in front of God and everyone is fun and educational.  I highly recommend it.
13. You will hear gunshots in this hunting land from time to time.  Really, more often than you do in Chicago.  I expect the targets are different here, though.  Hunting season opens October 1st.  Get out by then.
14. Share what you’ve got openly, even if you feel like you do not have enough to give.
15. Wear field boots or suffer a bent up ankle.
16. Loose dogs get shot when crossing into other people’s property for disturbing the hunter’s deer killing prospects.  If you love her, train your dog impeccably well to stay by your side or keep your darling puppy on a leash.
17. That large, thick, stiff, squareish thing that old Pete the dog was chewing on is not a cute piece of tree bark, but a dried up pig skin jerky with coarse black hairs all over the surprising side of it.
18. Dead weight will hurt your back.
19. Conserve water like a maniac because you do not have water to spare for wasting.  A good habit to get in for the city, regardless of whether or not I am paying for water services.
20. Cedars begin to bloom when the weather cools down.  Take your antihistamine and do not suffer.
21. Dogs who eat freshly killed animal and chew on their bones will have unbelievably white teeth.  !!!!
22. In the middle of nowhere, planes still fly overhead.
23. Deliberately experience things which change you.
24. There are no grackles here.
25. Do not be fearful, learn your surroundings and proceed with care.
26. Everything actually is bigger in Texas.
27. The politicks of country life is not much different than what goes on in the city.
28. The silence will make your eardrums go insane for 3 days, then it won’t sound like someone is beating a drum in your ear anymore.
29. Lock up your vehicle at night “just in case”…”because you never know.”
30. Having a radio which gets the NOAA weather station is a boon.  Having it be a wind-up radio makes it funner.
31. Make sure you have more than enough gas in your vehicle!!!!!!!!!!  Though if you do get stuck, people will stop to assist you  in a heartbeat.

Digging Practice!

Well, shucks.  The spot I chose to do a dig practice was full of limestone.  It doesn’t mean that I didn’t barrel through it with my trusty pickaxe (of Rob’s– thou art lifesaver!) and shovel and later my bucket.  Though I realize now that I will not be able to make a hole only as wide as I am in that mess because I will not be able to get the pickaxe through.  That means this:  I may have to go for broadness and not deepness though in my artmaker’s mind, depth is key, but! but! but!…  But if the ground does not want to be dug that way, then so be it.  Wide it is.

I am hoping to get some GPS coordinates of the exact site so that I can find it again on one of them fancy satellite spy websites, er, I mean a satellite mapping service,  courtesy of some private company and our government.  Hey man, as long as I am footing part of the bill to be spied on, I’m totally okay with it.  Aren’t you?

The soil varies lots around here.  Where we found arrowheads was like a tawny (kitaen) sandy lime.  Where there are cedars, there is dark clayish soil.  Around the live oaks, there is this amazing soft loam made mostly from decomposing oak leaves, much like sphagnum moss.

As I expected and desired, digging is hard work.  I predict it will take me 3 times as long to dig anything substantial, so now I have to decide how I will begin filming on my own.  I bet I can rig the Super8 cameras to stay filming while I dig… it will be tricky, but I.. can… do.. it!  Whee!

Cattle Call.

Whoa, I lurve Marty Robbins.  This song runs through my head a lot, no matter where I am.  Since I am not listening to much outside of lady cows in heat, random birds I can’t locate, refrigerator hum, various dog sounds from an assortment of dogs (oh, there will be a separate post!), the wind, buzzard and crow wings and me stomping around all over the place in these borrowed size 10 men’s boots, I find myself listening to songs I know in my head.  Truthfully, that is a rather large catalog of songs.  The juxtaposition of city pop tunes which run through my head out here where there is barely a sound is truly ridiculous.

Confluence

is not just a truly great Howe Gelb album {sigh…}, but it is showing itself as a tenet of this piece.  Dualities all over the place.  Earth meets sky, sun meets moon, above meets below. Not opposing forces, but forces which choose to either align or unfasten from one another… or both.

This morning, I woke up for my morning constitutional in the yard, scanned the space for rattlesnakes before heading out and promptly dislodged a buzzard from the live oak grove with my presence.  I was dismayed to see him go before I was able to record his old buzzard wings whooshing him off to patrol the living elsewhere.  Buzzards are enormous birds and cast eagle-sized shadows on the earth.  That shadow I will get on film, crossing over me as I dig.

Last night, maybe the night before (I have no sense of time out here, nor do I care to) was a full moon and as I walked to the X-pattern ranch fence, I gasped when I saw it still full and silver-dollar-in-my-hand-sized to the west, in a pool of blue sky.  To the east was the sun rising and setting fire to a cold blue dawn.  Confluence.  Convergence.  Intersection. My dig is set at the junction of the moon and sun.  And that is as site specific as it gets.

The site!

I think I have finally found a good site in which to dig.  The one which was offered me was great and beautiful and practical but seemed more fertile (grassy, much plant life) and less barren (limestone sandy and forgotten) than I’d been hoping for.  Since I wanted to be able to film from high up and there is a deer stand (you know, for hiding from deer across from where the deer feeder is and then killing them) which I can get in and/or on top of, the offered spot is perfect.  I got lost trying to go get a picture of it just now, so you will have to wait for that photo.

There is prickly pear cactus everywhere out here as well as at that first site and, although I am heavy into site-specificity, all that prickly pear cactus is a little too site-specific to the southwest.  What I am trying to name is lack and isolation.  A woman, her task, the effort and that is all that exists.  The other site is a wash and is  full of iridescent broken glass, splintered nubs of weathered fenceposts like misplaced teeth and is vignetted by creaky cedars.  Ah, beauty!

Incidentally, there is a video here at the cabin that I watched part of last night– David Byrne’s True Stories – set in Virgil, Texas (though I cannot consult the oracle to confirm its actual setting due to lack of internet service here… its probably true).  Seriously, that movie is pure genius in all its awkward narration and creeped-out style.  Very fantastic.  Now, I don’t know where Virgil is from here or anywhere else, but it was the exact landscape I’d envisioned: flat, lonesome, to the point, minimal.  Like a two-color Rothko colorfield painting– earth and sky– divided in half at the horizon line but also intersecting there in certain harmony.

But I am not in Virgil.  I am in some beautiful, scorched, jumbled, semi-nameless place and I gratefully accept it.  I acknowledge that it is truly not up to me, though.  It is up to the land: if it wants to be worked, it will let me pass.  If not, well, there you have it: the constant struggle of the artist and her materials.  Relinquishing my tiny human control and letting the materials speak.  I will say it now:  the earth and its animals will always be smarter than people.

Tick or chocolate chip?

The seed ticks out here are no larger than the head of a pin, are completely painless and are naturally masquerading as tiny spots of melanin on this freckled girl.  Much to my disappointment, they just love the crotchal region. (It’s right next to the lower dorsemus.)  So, tick checks are routine here, once when you come in from outside and then an hour later, just in case.  Also, before one turns in for the night and as soon as one wakes up. Trust me, I’m on top of it.  I don’t have that much else to do just yet.

I made some tick haikus with lots of bad words in them.  Too foul to post, though I do take email requests.  Let’s just say that ticks are not included in my “I love all animals unconditionally” way of living.

Relatedly, I saw my first scorpion last night… and freaked out a little bit.  Those critters are fast!  Make no mistake, scorpions are not as the movies or the band would have us believe.  They do not have claymation armor nor are they Germans lamenting about Gorky Park.  They are pink and brown and they are absolutely insects, as fragile as spiders, practically see-through.  I always thought they were more like crabs.  Silly saltwater girl.  Still, no thanks.  (It ran away before I could get a picture of it and is still on the loose.  Maybe I’ll make a mini WANTED poster for it and hang it up where I saw it last.  Yes, I have plenty of time to amuse myself with myself.)

Arrowheads and Shark’s teeth.

Yesterday, Johnny (Benné’s manly friend) and I found all these flint arrowheads lying about in a series of washes.  Really finely made, none completely intact, lots of surprising shapes.  Searching for arrowheads was a lot like finding shark’s teeth– that elusive, petrified treasure– combing the sand for evidence and remnants of steel grey serrated teeth of sharks unknown.  Today, we went for a long, winding search (or hunt, as it were) for more, but interestingly, we only found “works in progress”-type evidence.  I found tons of iron ore and am fast forming a new collection of the shiny, rusty bits for my windowsill.  There is an arrowhead ID book here, which gives us some idea of who, where and when.  As far as we know, some of these points could be from Native Americans in late BC to early AD times and some could even be really prehistoric. I think we even found a drill, which reminds me of the shape of a sawfish’s nose.  Woohoo! At any rate, they are striking works of art and craftsmanship and are made from really pretty colors of flint that, of course, can’t really be duplicated in photographic image.  Makes me smile bemusedly to think of people who walked here before me as being litterbugs just like the rest of us.

The dress…

For the dig, I have tried to augment a red shiny prom dress into a curtain-like apparatus compleat with golden fringe and tassels for a while now, but I just doesn’t seem to be happening.  This dress matches the curtain of “As Deep as She is Tall” unbelievably well.  I think I’ll save that red dress for a separate performance somewhere down the road. The dress I’d originally envisioned wearing is now way too flashy for digging in this landscape. I think creating a spectacle is no longer a part of this piece, as the work itself is spectacle enough and requires simplicity in image.  Simple task, simple dress.

Here is the bedsheet I found in a second-hand shop in Kerrville (also the town where I found my tin cups and 1920s bucket!) right before closing time.  Benné (whose ranch this is) helped me make a sundress of it for the dig, which I have to add straps to still.  I’m going to handwash it (the only way to do it out here) and dry it in a live oak tree.  After looking at all the different types and colors of soil out here, I can’t wait to see how that pretty dress gets dirty and falls apart.

Relatedly unrelatedly, here is a bonus picture of myself in a getup I never thought I’d wear.  I’m sitting in a deer blind (like a 10’ tall tower that sits across from the automatic deer feeder so as to get a straight shot at killing a deer, though for my purposes, I only want to watch the deer…) wearing borrowed camouflage everything and oversized boots.  I hate camouflage with a passion.  And for all my camo fashion, I saw no deer this evening.

Lacking description.

Damn.  I am a little frustrated because, as amazing a machine as my little camera is, I cannot seem to capture in a snapshot the beguiling vastness and deliberate line of the landscape here.  This is mostly what I love and miss about Texas:  the pale limestone, the deep green Seuss-like polka dots of cedar trees along the hillside, the weightless and mighty sky whom I have seen turn bone black at the onset of a tornado-filled storm which ripped the doors off our shed and flooded our kitchen straight through the ceiling fan. These photos are front- and back-of-truck pictures at the same location. I even stood on top of my truck to try to get some pictures which might be  a little more descriptive.  Alas, I suppose what I am trying to convey is a feeling, a mood, which I can easily connect to here in the midst of such monstrous splendor. I think you’d just have to see it for yourself.  Come on over!

I am here!

Well, I made it through a 20-hour journey in 100 degree weather (poor uncomfortable puppy!), listened to plenty of Marty Robbins, Wanda Jackson and Iron Maiden, ate some complete crap for food (Sonic! blech!) and slept in my truck at a rest stop, just like I was looking forward to.  How comfortable with the good air mattress and my camper top insulation/wood paneling!

Here are some images from the journey thus far with captions/remembrances beneath.  Enjoy!

Just before me and my puppy got some well-deserved shuteye.  Somewhere in, um, south of Illinois.

Puppy solidarity!!!!

The end is nigh?

The road to and from the cabin.  Texas Hill country is gorgeous.  Better pictures to come…

Cool beetle.

First night at the cabin.  And in the morning (see below!)….

The front porch of the under-construction cabin at the ranch.  Watch out for rattlesnakes!  I haven’t seen one yet, but I’m not sure if that is a good or bad thing.  My sweet puppy is happy here with the other two puppies.  The air conditioner rules… I woke up this morning because the room was 58º.  Outdoor shower (not pictured) and plenty of beautifulness.

I am very excited to start my project.  I got some old patterned bedsheets with which to make a dress to dig in and a tin cup and an old 1920s bucket (no! pail!).  I’m pretty much all set.  I will look at the dig site today, eat and sew.

Love to all, hope you are well!

Begin.

Tomorrow I am leaving bright and early with my trusty pooch, my trusty truck and a whole lot of aspiration.  I am completely excited to start the 1200 mile drive to Austin, then to some unmarked place 40 miles from Junction, TX.

After the dig, fun in Austin and a very long bath, I will head out to Arizona to see about a standalone bridge and visit some ghost towns along the way.

I won’t have cell phone service nor will I have internet when I am not near the city.  I will have people, though, and a fine runnin’ truck to take me where I need to go.  I’ll also have my pea-brain to lead me.  I’ll be just fine.

Check back for sporadic updates.