How to waste a weekend

First light. Sunlight hitting Guadelupe Mesa, yesterday, Saturday. If you click on this, you will be deeply moved:

Off to Santa Fe with Lizzie. Art poppin' out all over. It's not real, she says. Santa Fe is not real:

Indians look all set for swarms of tourists. Not a good day actually. Strangely warm for this end of November, calm, sunny, but the town was empty:

We are focused on our destination --->  Church!  No apparent separation from State here:

 

It wasn't even Sunday. Chess Tournament that day, they used the Santa Fe Episcopalian Church hall for that venue. Lizzie's team triumphed. She plays board #2 (six in each team), only girl in the championship section, drew one game, won the other ones. Below the younger kids (Reserve section). Here fawning parents crawl all over with cameras, the older players sneer and sigh deeply if I try to photograph in their room:

 

Today Albuquerque. 

Lizzie reckons Albuquerque is more real than Santa Fe. I agree:

Commerce thrives everywhere you look:

Gotta shop, it will help keep America great:

Sometimes I glance up. Spent all day in church yesterday, got some new twitches growing.

Under construction 2 (Still wet)

Same pieces; I'm kind of poking, probing for a "process". Nothing here yet. I'll take these a few stages further, but this is not quite what I had in mind. next thing to do is to find some other materials. Big fat wads of latex, skin crinkly-like, would be nice. Colors here are not too deeply considered -- just wanted to see how this paint would behave -- everything's such a rush...

Under construction

This group, starting in the same kind of process as "Icy" below, different stuff, great stuff, stopped at this stage, except for the last one.

 Close-up on stuff:

Most developed, one more step in the process, who knows what awaits me:

The thing in my mind is, strangely, representational. All the above are self-portraits (obviously, right?) The matter around the pressed down rectangles is my external surface. I need to adapt some of the process to include different materials. "Great Stuff" is great fun, but not entirely satisfactory. Still, something happened, then perhaps something else will happen, so I'll see what happens.


I think the first one works the best, so far. A few others work well too, but were too minimal to photograph well. The last one points in a direction which I'll follow and develop.


For more self-portrait action, visit Next Blog.

Iceland

Virtual, so to speak.
I was looking for something to happen, which did not happen, but then something else happened, which will do for now, and then it went into the twitches of photoshop, and here it is, poor thing, passing in time and form, caught in a moment of its passage... back to the chamber of alterations.
It's really a rectangular piece of plastic pressed onto stiff paper with a generous squeeze of dated sealant on the edges. I hear that Iceland is composed of the same materials as the ocean floor all around it; volcanic action pushed up this little segment of it; now we have liberal, tolerant Norse (men/women!) sanctioning alternative lifestyles in a haze of geothermal steam surrounded by blobs of ice.


That sounds like a process I can live with. Now here, the plastic rectangle came from the Black Hole in Atomic City; the paper lay on my table, anxious; the tube of sealant came from the shed, dated from the last millennium, the process did not need much rehearsal: squeeze the stuff onto the edges of the plastic, press the plastic onto the paper...photoshop.


In both instances the elements are obvious enough to anticipate and explain their behavior in a process. Occurrences cause them to enact predictable drama (you might be kind enough to click upon this, even magnify, once you're there):

Dull post about the weather

Blue skies rule. Tee-shirt weather, dry enough to make your nose bleed, lips crack, eye-balls crunch, and climate change deniers furrow their brows. I look back with fondness to an alarming moisture event from somewhere in the middle of last month. Great blobs of ice came teeming down, scattering down over my South facing patio, even making my windows all wet (smudges non-photoshop). Yuk!:

The system was finite, blue skies soon to resume...:

...but painful to the head, if you overlook wearing a hat (BTW the shiny object on the left below the juniper is my Amiga 2000 having a mouse nest washed out by the elements. I expect it to resume normal service when the process is over. You know how tough those machines are; need to click on pic. to see the greatest computer of all time getting fixed):

It was enough to stop me gathering the remains of my laundry...:

...and view the dampening effect on my yet to be cut wood with gentle sadness (this one is also faintly amusing to click on):

Thrilling stuff, eh?
Well, we're back to gracious outdoor living again:

Forward to the past

So, I end the merry month of October with a last minute post. A short story, which took up most of my writing energy this month is sitting here, in Further Issues. Just finished, now I'm going to bed.

Another dawn looming

I enjoy my morning coffee. Always. But I must admit, often I hesitate before my first gulp. Perhaps I should start the day with a gulp of refreshing, seemingly healthy orange juice, or some such nutritious, awakening elixir? Nahhhh...! First I make the triple strength potion, tip it into my cup, then I dissolve the rest with hot water (but not too much, please!) to make it bearable for the refined pallets of other family members.




The problem is this: at which point can I safely say that I am no longer drinking. Drinking involves the intake of a liquid. There is a thin line between liquid and post-liquid on its way to being somewhat more like a solid.


First, please join me in close observation of the bottom of my mug of the transition moment in proper coffee:

And now look. Pathetic, isn't it. The thin veneer of very faint and feeble (hardly dare call it) sub-sludge:

Fully functioning human brains

The occurrence of fully functioning human brains (FFHBs) must be of great fascination to Science. It is an area of investigation that needs to be treated with caution, and I do not understand what all the fuss is about with developing them in mice initially, instead of messing with peoples heads. I imagine that Scientists represent a wide range of political opinion and that all can see the disadvantages to the popularity of their (and, importantly, their paymasters) chosen factions if voters with FFHBs went to the polls. These people would be a pain to identify. Mice, on the other hand, are easy to profile. Any mouse seen driving an expensive car or a large vehicle with lots of other mice inside it would immediately be taken off the streets. The Law might have difficulty with classifying them as "immigrants", but just "illegals" would do nicely. An exception might be the border area where they would probably dig tunnels.

I know this sounds like I am being partisan, but there is a fair chance that many of these mice might turn out to be way left of center. They would hate our freedom, look for handouts, breed like crazy, and not be able to handle guns properly. Of course I do realize that Mickey, Mini, Jerry, et all represent personas settled with traditional American values, but bear in mind that are unburdened by FFHB, and so entitled to remain token members (BTW none of the above mentioned are white mice) of the America Pantheon. Anyone worried that this experiment might become extended to the human population can, therefore, relax. American Democracy will survive this challenge, war on FFHB ("Operation DUH") will be a cakewalk, a slam dunk.

Smoke (anyone)?

Here, at our elevated altitude, we are accustomed to sparkling, crystal-clear views. An outbreak of humidity, rain, snow, or mist is a rare event, and provides a curious experience, where the landscape is altered, becomes dimensional, reveals unexpected depth.
But smoke?
Same effect in terms of revealing the depth of various layers of different land forms, but somehow less convincing as a healthy and beneficial, even if controlled and managed, event. This, below, is allegedly that.

A controlled and managed "burn".
Some of the biggest and most devastating fires in our area resulted from controlled and managed burns.

Renewable recources

This is about a quater of my fuel supply for this winter.

I do feel a tinge of guilt plundering the forest like this. A small tree, that has grown for decades is barely enough to keep us warm for a couple of evenings. The disproportion is staggering. How come is it that I deserve to benefit from the energy which this creature has gathered by some miraculous process, which I do not understand, do not have a close connection with, do not aid or support*. I don't actually commit the cruel murderous act of selecting and bringing down the poor little living things. The forest management agencies, whoever they might be in various locations, have a program of thinning the forests to allow for healthier growth of more widely separated individual trees and to prevent horrendous and destructive forest fires which occur when the growth is too dense.

Still, I do feel undeserving.
I really should live in a city where unseen, barely smelt substances travel in pipes under sidewalks and don't even glow within sight as you crank up the thermostat on a chilly evening. It must surely be comforting to realize that you are abusing non-renewable resources since this gives being, and being comfortable, a bracket in time, a defined schedule for this civilization with a calculable deadline for decline and fall.

*I remember now: its the Judeo/Christian ethic -- "man's" dominion over all. Just say no! to chilly evenings...

Cañon, New Mexico, USA.

Cañon sits at the Southern end of the Jemez Valley (San Diego Canyon, as it appears on maps), just North of the Jemez Reservation. The United States soft Third World underbelly.

I drive through Cañon with a heavy "filter" duck-taped to my senses, so I felt it to be appropriate to heavily apply Photoshop to these images.

The heavy application of Photoshop only becomes apparent if you click on the images.

Bomb! Terror!

 Yesterday I made a furtive trip to WalMart. I have to be furtive. What if someone sees me? I did drive a little classic (well, mid-70s) convertible Italian sports car to the venue, though I otherwise kept a low profile. But, what a surprise. I had one more isle to go when a harried looking WalMart guy shouted over to me: "Sorry sir, you have to leave everything! We're evacuating the store!" I whined a little, put some more nuts in my basket, but eventually obeyed and followed the throng. Once outside we were shuffled across the parking lot eventually ending up against the walls of MacDonalds. Suspicious package. Terror. Bomb. Muslims, they hate us for our parking lots, no doubt.

We milled anxiously in the restaurant parking lot -- some went inside to get even fatter and perhaps loose even more mobility.

"Hey mom! Guess what! I'm in a bomb scare!


The cops begin to swarm:

They quickly secured the area: giant traffic jam spreading across Rio Rancho and Bernalillo and a miserable group of would-be shoppers corralled in a fast food restaurant and its parking lot.

Other crews arrive (this group looks a little uneasy) :

The media:

And finally, the white trailer!
(Someone near me hissed: they're bringing in the robots. here come the robots)

Once parked it draws a group of odd looking individuals...:

...who appoint one of their kind with the the gruesome task of opening the side door of the trailer:

Only to reveal: ahhh...look at that. Sooo cute! That is just the cutest little robot guy you have ever, ever seen!

This turns out to be the "good" robot after all. The seeing-eye robot, the self-sacrificing little guy (a mere camera on caterpillar tracks who clears the path and makes sure that all is safe for the big "bad" robot.
Big bad robot emerges down a ramp at the back of the trailer:

 

 Meanwhile the little one is boldly trekking down the emptiness in front of the store (see the little dot on the road on the left?):

 

What? Where? (This might be one not to click on):

There! Bad robot following in the trail of his brother:

I guess he (this one has to be male) blew up whatever it was that seemed so threatening in the parking lot and trundled back to his masters. Big cheers from all that gathered, no obvious signs of a mushroom cloud, interviews are given...:

  

You may resume your shopping!

We happily waddle back to our interrupted task (Three hours in the blazing New Mexico sun. Nonetheless, our oppressors were merciful. The fire crew brought out canopies for those needing shade, shop employees kept appearing with shopping carts filled with cold water and Gatorade. There was a definite WWII London in the blitz kind of feel in the crowd).

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, let me see....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

a difficult moment this
blog?
might have to rethink the whole premise here.
"reflections on the process of making art" That can stay.
Perhaps.
The "process" has changed though.
The mechanical routine of attending for regular sessions in the studio is not the same as as making art.

Metaphor:

Climbed up the side of the Mesa looking for the cat (named Cat) at dusk tonight. Sun set suddenly. Wine, Bourbon, Beer, dope itself, set in just as I heard from down below: "oh, here she is....!" Almost all the way up the steep slope I stop, linger. The light is fading fast, but I feel safe here, amidst the crags, with the drop below me. I lie down. The slope is so steep that I feel as if I am standing up, almost. I fall asleep. When I wake up, it is completely dark. A fragment of the moon is shining in a corner of the sky; a few distant houses in the landscape have light, or reflection or refraction of a distant source looming faintly -- perhaps a microwave door open, a monitor with the the desperate appeal of Active Desktop Recovery blazing in the darkness. I crawl through the murk on all fours, grasping at Bear Grass, at Juniper and Pinon branches, edging North and up somewhat, proud to remember that ahead lies a path that will take me down safely. But, when I reach it, I notice that standing up is not quite a normal condition for me. I stagger down, sitting and groping when the slope becomes too steep 'till I reach the house...
The computer is still on.
I make this entry.
Goodnight.