bbd's Open Salon Blog

Brief history of time, truncated fore and aft

Tue, 6 Mar 2012 18:03:31 -0500

Stitched pano from Loghill Mesa looking down on the town of Ridgway. Larger view is here.

1952 circumstantial evidence points to birth.

1959 discovers, intellectually, that there is evil in the world.

discovers, again intellectually and by using a string and a globe, that an airplane will fly a much shorter distance by using the polar route from US to Japan.

wonders wtf is up with Mercator re the size of Greenland.

figures out has to live with evil in the world though there will be satisfyingly serendipitous discoveries.

1960-

1973 ups and downs, mostly pretty good though.

1974 a serendipitous decision to transfer to Wheaton College from NAU Flagstaff, mostly about getting closer to a girlfriend.

1976 a serendipitous decision (which we will now assume describes nearly every choice) to get engaged.

decide to spend the summer in London/Oxford studying literature and doing research at the Bodleian Library on the Celtic cognates of the much later Arthurian Romance. Write two monographs one of which gets published.

meet lifelong friends—the future bride (not the engagee) and Baf who are also in the same program. considers, during a visit to Ambleside in the Lake District, that the future bride ought to be kissed, but refrains because of the prior engagement.

return, get married, the future bride and Baf attending. Move to Oak Park near Chicago, work nights since the degree in medieval european history is so marketable.

1977 move back to San Diego, work for master cabinetmaker Charles Davis, learn how to actually hold a hammer the correct way.

marriage dissolves, lives alone with cat; surf and work and feed cat.

1980 the future bride has business meeting in LA, agrees to take train down to SD and visits for a weekend. She kisses me first.

pack up everything and move to Dallas. Friends and family advise against. Get work at architectural millwork firm, eventually, years later, become vp of company.

1981 marry the no longer future bride. She is one of only three (including me and Baf) who attends both of my weddings, though she has a starring role in second one.

1988 First child

1989 Second child

1991 Third child; vasectomy

2000 (circa) accept invitation to use home of friend in Ridgway, Colorado. Discover the bride's college roommate lives ¼ mile away.

2004 in what has become an annual visit to Loghill Village home of friend in Ridgway, takes other friends Lisa and Steve along. Twilightish Zone encounter when local friend, the bride's former college roommate, comes for dinner and brings another couple.

mouths stay open in wonder for a while when Lisa and husband of other couple discover they were prom dates in Dallas many years previous.

looks around for Kevin Bacon.

2006 we, the bride and I, buy lot in Loghill Village. 8,000 feet above sea level means an eventual escape from hades/Dallas.

2008 joins Open Salon in April

2011 finally decide to do something about building a home on our lot in Loghill Village.

2012 contact the husband of that other couple/prom date for recommendations for a local architect.

we connect with Sundra of Hines Designs, an architect of magna cum laude abilities and artistry and understands when I say we're looking for a synthesis of Bauhaus, Arts and Craft, Greene and Greene, Japanese aesthetic, Philip Johnson and Olson Kundig.

east elevation, which will show the Cimarrons with evening alpine glow

south elevation, entrance

The view from the east elevation of our home showing The Cimarrons, peaks from left include Tower, Courthouse, Precipice. Larger view is here.

Coda: Yes, I've been absent of late, life has consumed our days, things need to be done, care needs to be given and the triage of time insists on changes. Best to all, and for those that stop by, thanks for the affection and friendship these past four years.

I have another post I'll put up in a week or so. It will show some images of a couple of projects recently completed—a jewelry holder made for a friend using a design inspired by a Japanese Shinto Torii gate, and a Mid-century low console made for the hipster artist son in Austin.

used with permission

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My Favorite Photos of 2011

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 23:12:18 -0500

Here are a few of my favorite photos from 2011. There are many more than these, but the ones shown here have a little more meaning for me, though I like a lot of the others too. (I took more than 8,000 photos in 2011—there are going to be some likable orphans.)

I present these without context or commentary, please enjoy the thoughts they engender. Some of the images can be clicked through to Flickr where a larger version can be found. They are pretty much in chronological order.

Many thanks to friends and visitors during this past year, I hope your 2012 is what you wish or need it to be for you and your loved ones.

Barry

Caveat lector This is a lengthy post, but once the images load you can zoom through them.

Well, this one's painful

Thanks for visiting...and thanks for everything else. Have a great year.

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The Christmas Rat

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 13:12:02 -0500

Preface

This is a repost collected via the way-back machine in a nearly hidden digital archaeological strata from the beta days of Open Salon. It was my fifth post, put up in May of 2008, but it's really a Christmas story of sorts which is why I'm posting it again. We all know that OS is pretty much of the moment, that not much digging goes on, but that's ok—in a way it keeps the content and ourselves vibrant. I'll be approaching my 4th OS anniversary before too long—not many member numbers below mine of 198 still haunting the halls here.

This is a family Christmas story, when the kids were still quite young and we all lived vicariously through them to experience the wonder and beauty of the holiday. They're grown now, but home for a more subdued celebration. It's a time for love and reflection. I hope you enjoy this story from our and OS's past.

Happy Krismahkwanzahanukah to all, with much affection.

Christmas 2011

Prologue

This has been an oral story—a wannabe story-teller’s tale. I’ve told it several times and tried as best I could to get into that role while doing so. I’ve prefaced the remarks by warning those relatives present who had witnessed the activities to hold their tongue and not shout out interrupting “that’s not the way it happened!” as I was semi-serious about being the story-teller in a traditional mode.

I’ve also usually started out by talking about another story altogether, one told by a favorite author as a way of emphasizing the importance and responsibility placed upon the one passing on the oral history of the family.

Sherman Alexie is a Native American, from one of the tribes up near Spokane. He’s successful, having many books published and one series of short stories turned into an award winning film. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven, was crafted into the movie Smoke Signals, which garnered some acclaim as a distinguished winner at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s a favorite movie of mine, and features a string of small epiphanies for me every time I watch it.

An important character in a supporting role is Thomas-Builds-The-Fire. He had taken it upon himself to be the tribe’s story-teller, a mantle of considerable responsibility that has the additional burdens of providing a connective fabric for the community to maintain the continuity of history in linear time from past to present to the future. It was his job to create a social matrix that anyone willing to listen could tap into and thus reinforce the bond of communion. It also got him cool or needed stuff as he could barter for things in exchange for telling a story.

The Story

This is the way it happened.

At the time our youngest was four years old, and mostly good, but that night he had been a stinker. He was sent to his room for time out, with the hope that he’d settle down on his own. The banishment was due in part to the maelstrom of activity in the house that day, so it was natural that he’d be keyed up. He was normally one of the centers of attention, being the youngest and therefore considered the family pet. The focus that evening was elsewhere and perhaps he felt a little frustrated that the spotlight was diffused.

My bride’s family was in town for the Christmas holidays. My brother-in-law, his wife and their three kids were staying with my father-in-law, not far away, and they’d come over in the afternoon for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. We all got along, it was hectic, but nice. That night was for the extended family and all the hubbub. The following morning, by comparison, was more quiet and subdued.

They arrived in late afternoon after spending the day out in “the country,” my wife’s ancestors’ homestead. The family pioneers had settled the land while Texas was its own country still, before statehood. The community out there was comprised of a church, a former one-room schoolhouse now a community center, the homestead and family cemetery and farmland. On one of the farms the old white-colonnaded homestead is still standing, and was featured as the location film set in the movie State Fair—the one with Pat Boone, AnnMargaret and Pam Tillis. (There’s no reason to watch this movie other than your knowledge that it was filmed at the family ranch.)

The traditional feast for Christmas Eve is lobster tails and filet mignon—it required a bit of work but was well worth the effort. It’s nice when the challenge is met of having everything come out on time and done as close to perfection as is possible. A port wine sauce for the meat, warm clear butter for the lobster, mashed potatoes, asparagus and dinner rolls complimented the main courses.

It was during dinner that our youngest started acting up. He accepted the finger pointed to his room as inevitable, and trundled off to his solitary confinement.

Dinner was done, conversations still ebbed and flowed, and the dishes, pots and pans were being worked on amid contented and sated smiles. After things were restored to some order, my bride and partner realized that the little banished one had been quiet for some time. She went to check.

As one would expect, with all that expended energy, he had fallen fast asleep. And based on prior experience, it was deemed expedient to get him up and stand him in front of the commode before putting him back in bed and under the covers. He was frog-marched, still fast asleep, to the bathroom and placed in the strategic position. In a combined motion, the pants went down and the toilet lid and seat went up.

We all heard the blood-curdling scream. We heard the noises from the dash down the hallway. The door flung open and now panic stricken bride sprinted into the den, arms pumping, eyes wild.

Yes, of course she had abandoned her youngest flesh and blood child. We then realized there had been a secondary scream. After a second of paralyzed inaction we all dashed for the bedroom narrowly avoiding the Laurel and Hardy congestion at the doorway.

The forlorn child was trembling in fear.

It was quickly ascertained the mother’s bond was broken by a rat. One that had apparently crawled though a roof vent stack, down the pipe, through the sewer pea trap and into the toilet bowl—confused and waiting to be released. And released it was, only to be met with a large two headed monster screaming into its drenched and pinched little face.

The rat had vanished. It was then left to me to deal with it—not because of any prior experience or expectation, nor because I was the master of the house—but because no one else wanted to.

I quickly formed a plan. There were no firearms in the household, and I did not wish to blast holes in the home or anyone in it. But as the relatives had spent the day at the country, the brother-in-law had, as a rite of passage for the children, purchased several pump action Daisy BB rifles. I figured one would do minimal damage, and perhaps none if the plan worked.

Of course the children from the two families wanted to be witnesses, and were allowed to stay in the room. Even our little one was excited about what might happen next, his terror just moments before quickly forgotten.

I got some towels from the connected bathroom and stuffed them under the doorways to prevent an escape into the other parts of the house. It was crowded in the small bedroom, but simple enough to guess what had happened. The rat had gone to ground under the bed. A quick kick lifted the mattress and the guess was confirmed. As rats will do, it ran the perimeter of the room, scuttling along the baseboard and directly over the bare feet of the previously terrified child, who screamed again at three octaves above high C and jumped.

All the kids decided that was enough and left me alone as the rat’s only nemesis. It was a big rat, a honking big Norway rat, the mother of all Norway rats. And it had gone to safety again under the mattress so it was time to modify the plan. I moved a chest of drawers to angle away from the wall, to create a dead end. I pumped the BB rifle to its maximum pressure, and kicked the mattress up again to spook the rat. True to form it sped around the walls, only to find itself confused and hesitant for an instant in the trap. But I had taken my station and was ready for that moment and fired. The beast somersaulted and began to run back the way it came. It took two more shots to put it down, but not before it sprayed some blood on the wall and on some of our son's picture books.

It was done, it was dead. I picked the rat up by the end of its tail, put the butt end of the BB rifle on my hip and walked out of the room. Well, I had to put the rat down to remove the towel from under the doorway first, but then proceeded down the hallway to the waiting families. At the time I thought I should have torn my t-shirt for a more dramatic Rambo-like effect, as it turned out that was not necessary.

The first thing out of my bride’s mouth was a surprise. “Oh, honey…I didn’t know you had that in you,” she said with a hint of what may come later. It was better than being Fabio on the cover of a bodice ripper. The aphrodisia of manly manliness is a powerful drug.

I intended to nurse my advantage.

Now here follows a few of the other illustrations for the book, these done by the youngest, the third of three. I should also mention that the story in the book is not the way it happened—exactly—they took liberties. Mine is the only true story—the one spoken aloud in the tradition of storytellers.

Perhaps Evan felt that the cuisine wasn't up to his standards, which added fuel to his fussiness fire.

Going to time-out

The third of three battling the dread toilet monster

The children considering whom to sacrifice

Image at the top by my oldest son that was part of a collaborative book that was published in 2009. The other images are by Evan, the third of three. The black and white depictions of the family are from the Ron and Joe graphics collection that I've used for years—purchased and used with permission.

The book was the second in the series that our youngest and the bride wrote together. He also illustrated most of the images in the book. It's called Evan Brain's Christmas List and Other Shenanigans: The Boy Warrior Fights Evil. It's still available on Amazon.

Thanks for revisiting and my best wishes for you that your 2012 is your best year ever, the Mayans notwithstanding.

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A Personal Hajj to Beauty

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:12:45 -0500

Pinky Troll and me on a personal quest

Happy holidays to friends and visitors. If you've noticed the date of my last post you'll have figured out I've been absent for a while. There were some things I needed to take care of and they all seem to have worked out, at least for now. This coming year will be one that will present many transitions and it might be interesting to document some of those—we'll see how things develop. At any rate, I might have to spend less time here. Life intrudes, but it's nothing more than what happens to all of us—I still treasure my friends.

It's not that I haven't been busy, quite the opposite, but the right side of the brain has had to take a back seat lately. That changed when I tried to figure out if I was going to do anything about making a Christmas card and/or project for friends. I plunged in during the Thanksgiving weekend, though it took more time and effort that I had planned—which always seems to be the case.

Here's the card, featuring our dear Popper. The quote on the left is a riff on The Holstee Manifesto and refers to Popper's delight in attacking a catnip-laden mouse—hence her drug-enhanced eyes. Of course there's no need for additives to follow the abridged or original manifesto.

It shows the cover, inside and back. On the back I've explained the source of the colophon I designed back when I was considering publishing my own book. Luckily, I got picked up by a real live publishing house, but that meant they had their own publisher's mark so mine was set aside.

It's a bit hard to read here, so I'll transcribe.

Pangur Bán

The poem to the right was found in the margins of a manuscript in the Monastery of St. Paul in Corinth, Austria. It was written in Irish, probably by an Irish monk sometime during the ninth century. Pangur Bán means "white cat."

I and Pangur Bán, my cat,

‘Tis a like task we are at;

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men

‘Tis to sit with book and pen;

Pangur bears me no ill will;

He, too, plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see

At our task how glad are we,

When at home we sit and find

Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray

Into the hero Pangur’s way;

Oftentimes my keen thought set

Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye

Full and fierce and sharp and sly;

‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I

All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den.

O how glad is Pangur then!

O what gladness do I prove

When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,

Pangur Bán, my cat and I;

In our arts we find our bliss,

I have mine, and he has his.

Practice every day has made

Pangur perfect in his trade;

I get wisdom day and night,

Turning Darkness into light.

Making a card has been enough for me in years past. It represents more work than purchasing a bunch of pre-made cards or duplicating the dreaded Christmas letter, but there had been something percolating in my brain for a while and I decided to do something more.

I wrote a book—I made a book. Actually, it's a 20-page booklet. And unfortunately, since the production and distribution costs were coming out of my own pocket, it's a limited run. Quite limited. In fact, there are only 60 in the world.

The books were a little under a sawbuck each, but that wasn't the only costs associated. In order to protect it in mailing I purchased a box of stay flat cardboard mailers (wholesale) that guaranteed that it would not bend or fold and damage the contents—about $0.50 each. Then, because the sturdy envelope wouldn't bend, the law of unintended consequences took hold. It had to be mailed as a package instead of an envelope, which added an additional $0.40 or so to each to make the postage a what-was-I-thinking-of $2.22 each just for stamps. And yes, the USPS didn't have to foresight to make a $2.22 stamp just for me. So, not counting my labor (of love) that run of 60 turned out to be north of $12 or so each, which is a lot to spend on a vanity production. No matter, I can be vain.

Which led to a painful process. Triage. Who gets a book? I'm sorry that everyone I know and like and love couldn't get one, but it just wasn't feasible. I did send out twice as many Holstee Popper cards, but I quickly ran out of the booklets. And they weren't just sent to my non mutual spousal friends, there were some bridal business associates that had to be included on the list.

I don't think we had this much of a problem when we constructed our wedding invitation list 30 years ago.

So as a poor substitute, I'm recreating the booklet here with a link at the end for a PDF download, that is, if anyone's interested.

So here commences A Personal Hajj to Beauty, a limited edition vanity press production. It was actually produced and printed by Apple—or its assigned third-party printer—via Aperture, the photo management application I use to store and manage my photos. It was easy enough to do, but since I'm a page layout artist from way back in the Aldus PageMaker days, I lamented the fine tuning and lack of feature set that a real page layout program provides. I had to invent a workaround, for example, to get the Drop Cap on the first page. The quality of what you see here is less than what you would see with the booklet in hand or in the PDF since they are exported from the application as a PDF then converted to jpegs.

Many of the images will be familiar to frequent visitors to this blog, but it's the first time they've been collated in such a fashion.

Front Cover

Title Page

Page 2, verso or the left hand of the spread that includes the next image

Page 3, recto or the right hand of the spread that includes the former image. Typical for the following separated pairs.

Page 4

Page 5—There is an additional nearly subliminal enjoyment of this photograph for me. First, I owned a 1964 356C Porsche for a while, and I loved it. I was very sad to see it go. Second, as noted in the text, the film Giant, starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, was filmed in and around Marfa in 1956. James Dean later died in his own Porsche, a Spyder, the precursor to the one that I later owned. That I happened upon this Porsche parked on the main street of Marfa seemed just too serendipitous to me at the time and even now.

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Page 9

Page 10

Page 11

Page 12

Page 13

Page 14

Page 15

Page 16

Page 17

Page 18

Page 19

Page 20

Back Cover

You can download a high quality full sized (8" x 6") resolution PDF of the booklet here: http://tinyurl.com/7883gzk since the copy on the uploaded image is difficult to read. (You should see the cover as a stand alone page on the PDF, with subsequent pages showing a two page spread until you get to the final single back cover page.)

You're welcome to download the PDF and even convert it and upload it to your eReader of choice for your own personal use. You may not distribute it in any way, including, but not limited to, e-mailing it to any third party or uploading onto any storage/retrieval service or onto any web page. Thanks in advance for observing the requested restrictions.

Previous Marfa Posts

Previous Holiday Cards

Festivus for the rest of us

Christmas cards—now and then

Thanks for visiting, and my apologies for being away for so long.

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Beaten with a hammer

Sun, 9 Oct 2011 20:10:40 -0400

Spider Lilies, Lycoris radiata, in our back yard—volunteers that appear every year and last just a few days—a startling metaphor for lives cut short and all too brief.

I sat out on the back deck this morning. I was finally able to sit out on the deck for a few moments in this too slow to go dread Dallas summer delivered from the bowels of Hades.

We had rain last night that meant more than our cat Popper being pissed she was getting squishy mud between her delicate pink pads as she checked the peepholes in our fence for near trespassers. What it really meant was that many of the horde of firefighters across much of Texas could get a break from trying to put out the hell-spawned infernos that have been incinerating desiccated prairies, crops, trees, homes and people. It's been a hell of a year indeed.

Fuel for the fires—no rain and no money for irrigation water. West of Hondo, Texas on State Highway 90

It also meant I had a few quiet moments for thought. I'm haunted, still, by something recently seen.

It's humid from the rain. I try to decide whether to switch off the AC in the house. I hear it click on as the outside compressor fan comes to life. I hate humidity too, as much as her evil twin the heat so I let it run knowing it won't stay on long. I see our neighbors roof above the top of our tall fence. Squirrels are having fun finally, chasing each other before they get down to business planting acorns and somehow imprinting the locations in their little memories. Maybe they can smell those fermented nuts months from now, or maybe it's like a photograph triangulating micro benchmarks for later retrieval.

It's all beautiful for a change, and I'm still haunted.

What is it drives men to violence and hatred? It's more than big pickups and tiny dicks, though those are common enough indicators. Men have been on a killing spree from either Cain or some unnamed missing link—take your pick. I wish "someone else's turn" would really happen.

Three women, Ellen Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman, shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize. I read some of the celebratory comments in different online fora and a common thread spanned all the ones I saw—that maybe it's time for the women to be in charge of everything on the planet. Oh, to be sure, there will always be Margaret Thatchers, Phyllis Schlaflys and Sarah Palins aplenty. But for every one of those there will be a multitude more who are peaceful and progressive, sheltering and nurturing and true to the essence. I think the odds are in favor of a better job being done.

My friends Joe and Julie Delio were off on a short trip to see the Albuquerque Ballon Festival. On their way back they would take a long southern detour to stop at the Davis Mountains State Park to spend a couple of nights at the Civilian Conservation Corps 1930s-built Indian Lodge, so named for its imitative design of the Pueblo communities of the Southwest. I decided to drive down and join them in the interruption of their journey home.

A progression of dawn shots. It is an achingly beautiful place to spend some time. That Joe and Julie shared it made it all the more wonderful.

Beauty abounds in the spare, sere reaches of the west Texas high country. I love the big sky and big geology of it. What meager talents I have in the transcription of photography, I feel my best work is often done in open spaces such as found in the Big Bend area.

(I say "meager" deliberately, without a need for any contradiction, knowing my place on the spectrum of ability + artistry and always seeing the beauty in what others produce. I'm rarely envious and usually take such beauty as instructive and illuminating which I think is a sustaining approach both to life and photography.)

I love lonely roads—there's never a worry in going slow or stopping to get out and think on the very nature of beauty. Highway 118 west of Fort Davis. A larger version is here.

Lonely roads are for bikes too.

And I returned, of course, to a favorite personal icon of beauty. It encompasses the paradox and dialectic of the beauty and profane for me. The artists of this non-commercial-functioning art installation intended (I think—I don't really know) for it to be a social commentary pitting two elements against each other: the things we need versus the things we want.

It was a beautiful day, the clouds were amazing and a gift for composition. Larger version is here.

A larger version is here.

Of course I don't own the Prada Marfa store—its art or presence. It's a personal hajj for me to view it again and again because of my affection for it. I only claim the images I've made of it as my own, which are really only a veneer of its substance, and yet I'm happy to place myself inside the store for a moment, if only by reflection, and transform the space it occupies showing clouds within and without. (If you click on the image itself to take you to the Flickr hosting page, you'll see a comment left by my photographer son—a false contretemps comment as he knows what it means to me.)

And yet we see that profane dialectic I referenced above in the following image. Whether it's mere vandalism or a contributive statement is for you to decide. I know what it means for me, and I know there are other ways as well.

I focused on the recent bullet embedded in the bullet-proof Lexan of the storefront—an attempt on my part in composing some semblance of beauty in spite of the efforts of others. I imagine the assault as a drive by shooting betraying some physical or emotional impotence. Again, I choose the words carefully—"assault" for what it portends in the rest of this story, though there is no real comparison.

Come sit a spell with me and grab a Nehi beverage from the cooler—before we get to the bad part of this story. We'll grab a seat near the barber shop and think and talk, maybe solve some minor problems and decide what we ought to do. I don't really think either of us will have any answer to what we're about to see though, but it might help to take our time getting there.

I returned to this beautiful sparsely populated corner of Texas even though I had recently visited. I don't mind that it takes 11 or 12 hours or more to get there in my choice of how I travel—staying off the Interstates and opting instead for the beauty of blue highways. I'm not really sure how long it takes to get from Dallas to Big Bend, I've never kept track. It's a long drive. Except for the freeways of Los Angeles, and not counting Alaska, Texas is the only state where you can drive for more than 15 hours and still be in the same state. One benefit of these long photo road trips is the modern hermitage—a solo driver encased in metal and glass—contemplating the fittingness once again of the song Hejira at about 85 decibels and 58 miles an hour and no one caring or even hearing when I miss the high notes. Joni Mitchell's 1976 album is still beautiful and apt today moving forward to me and backward in time to Muhammad's hijira from Mecca to Medina in the 7th century. I don't know how this song gets so outside of time.

However, it was another of her songs that turned out to be prescient for me on this trip. Her Magdalene Laundries has often struck me hard over the years. It's not just that my connections to Ireland are so recent, my parents immigrating from that beautiful and troubled island, the song speaks of the corruption of power that one gender holds, one that was evident in ways in our own family. Here it is again, with the addition of her explaining before the song what it was that inspired it.

I think it's amazing, unconscionable, that the last Magdelene laundry only closed in 1996.

Joe wanted to stop by the Marfa Lights Viewing Center on the off chance that some aliens might happen by. We stopped in Marfa for an unremarkable dinner and headed out in the gathering darkness to the viewing center east on Highway 90. As expected, we didn't see anything that couldn't be terrestrially explained, but at least we could say we were there just in case. There were quite a few people gathered and a couple of them were cowboys.

It's a bit dark, I know, but this is shot with my Nikon D3S at ISO 16,000 (normal ISO is usually in the range of 100-200). I couldn't see the cowboy with my naked eyes and had to manually focus since the cam doesn't have a light assist focus. It's a bit grainy, but hell—ISO 16,000? Also, it was shot at 1/13 sec at f/1.4 handheld—so, not too bad.

It was blowing hard and cold at the viewing area, so we decided to pack it in and cap the evening off by counterbalancing the blasé dinner with a trip to the local Dairy Queen on the other side of Marfa for dessert.

We drove by the haunting place, Julie was the first to see it, but we were eager for ice cream so we vowed to come back and look at what caught our attention.

In what looked like an old fashioned service station, but was now according to the signs the Big Bend Coffee Roaster, we saw an enigma. It might just have been a simple art installation and it took a little while to figure out the horror stories it represented.

Random bits of white things floating in an otherwise empty and lit place.

The shapes of the suspended forms, hung by a single red thread, were beginning to make sense.

Red hand-written script on anatomical shaped plaster hearts.

In the larger version, here, you see this inscription: Carmen Patricia Ramirez Sanchez 34, 2005, Shot To Death

Every heart, every heart suspended by a single red thread, represents the death or trauma of a woman from domestic violence. Every heart had the words written out: the name, age, date and method of death or damage.

What we saw was an installation by Marfa artist Bettina Landgrebe.

The following is from Bettina's website, and describes the installation in much better and starker terms than I could ever present.

A constellation of objects suspended in mid-air creates an impression of a gathering cloud. Approaching the work more closely, what appears as a cloud dissolves into individual human hearts; a common denominator of our humanity: a symbol of love, hope, and life. On further inspection, each heart is inscribed with answers to the following questions: Name, Age, Date and Method of Death.

While reading/listening to the systemic tone of a female voice reciting the fate of these human hearts, a terrifying emotion shutters through the room.

The body of these hearts is absent. The corporal silhouette that housed these vital organs is invisible; this body, we find out, was prematurely and unnaturally taken from these hearts.

But it is not only the body that was violated. The body of their relationships with their family, their community, and their culture was also disrupted. These hearts belonged to females of varying ages and backgrounds: to a girl, a daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a sister, a wife, a cousin, a niece, a godmother, a friend, a lover.

However, we must remember that the death of these women will not be primarily remembered by the heinous transgressions that took their life. The life of these females goes well beyond this exhibition. They were and remain richer and more colorful than this installation or anyone could ever try to capture. But what this exhibition strives to do is to cast a stark and unflinching eye at a common red thread that is shared by these human hearts; that is, collected in this room, a system of violence emerges.

A war is being waged on the culture of women and civil society along the border city of Juarez, Mexico. 476 hearts are testimony to this war. A war that is waged against empathy, civility, love, hope, family, community, and towards the “softer”, fragile side of life, which the war of terror and totalitarian domination views as a threat to the complete command and control of society.

It is not a war contained amongst warriors, but it is a war that devours life and replaces it with human greed and the vanity of power. The physical and psychological warfare perpetrated against women is a testament to this naked disregard for life after war. There will be no life.

The installation runs through November 19.

The name of the installation, Beaten with a Hammer, is from one of the hearts, one of the invisible silhouettes—Tomasa Chavarria Rangel, aged 54—and the method used in her murder in 2005.

I can't really do this justice, but I can bring it to you and let you think about it. Maybe it will haunt you too.

Update: I want to personally thank Bettina Landgrebe, with whom I've corresponded via email, for her kind permission to allow me to use the text from her website. It's my hope that bringing some attention to the installation will also bring attention to the horrific plight of the victims—that with more attention that there will be changes. I know what I've done here is just a small measure of what needs to happen. I hope also, that with this blog and with others writing about Bettina's art in all it's terrible beauty, that the installation will find a home at other venues across the Southwest. It just takes a spark for that to happen. If I helped in that spark, then I'm gratified to have that small part.

You can also hear Bettina with host Tom Michael of Marfa Public Radio 93.5 talk about the installation at this link. It's an enormously interesting interview.

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