29Palms - Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Couple of slow days, today and yesterday.

I’m settling in, finding my stride, and routines are self-assembling.

Sunday evening, just before sunset, Cathy invited me to walk out into the creosote and get some shots of some of the abandoned homesteader cabins which there is a surprising number of within an easy walk’s distance.

These things are photographer’s catnip, but they’re deceptively hard to capture. The images want to devolve into the banal, the too-easy, the postcard, and the trivial. “Authentic wild-west abandoned ghost-town! See it here!”

The television is already spewing more than enough of this sort of shit around, and I really did not want to add my own two cents to what’s already out there.

So I gave it a go, but I’m not sure how well I did.

Probably not too well at all.

Sigh.

I think maybe the light was a little too good or something.

Right at sunset.

Superb air clarity.

It was all maybe just a little too pat, I dunno.

Anyhoo, I took a raft of shots, for good, for bad, or for indifferent, and that’s that.

Maybe it was a letdown following the visit to Leonard Knight’s.

Yeah, might be a little bit of that going on, too.

Maybe the cabin shots are ok, after all.

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Yesterday’s walk in the heat was interesting, and I got some neato pictures out there inside of god’s broiler oven, and a few of them even came out fairly well. Here's my quote, following the walk:

"I have recently come in from another centerline heat walkabout, snapping pictures here and there, of the Hell Trailer, of the studio and its contents, and of the property surrounding, shirtless, stepping easy and slow, and perhaps finding myself already acclimating, just a teency weency bit, to this…..hmm, heat really isn’t even the word for it, ‘cause everybody’s been hot, and everybody’s experienced heat, but those things aren’t what’s shimmering around out there right now, but it’s the only word I’ve got."

Half way through the walk, I entered the studio, not knowing that Newt was in there working. He endured a pretty short portion of me and my camera and then departed, leaving me alone to blast away at it, which I thought was very kind, as he could just as easily have asked me to depart and let him work in peace. Cameras come between people. No doubt about it. But I got a lot of shots. Behind the scenes. Artistic creation in-progress. Newt has the north end, and Cathy has the south end. Their work speaks for itself. Thanks Newt.

Photos below, as almost every last one of the shots in this thing, are culled, and then what's left is placed here in the order in which it was taken. Up to this point, and for the foreseeable balance of this whole series of essays, I have doctored up exactly two pictures, and that was only so as you could glimpse a particular detail, well worth taking note of, that would have otherwise been obscure or unseeable. This stuff comes off the camera, gets reduced, and goes up here without further embellishment, enhancement, cutting, cropping, or anything. Just so you know, ok?

And, now that I think about it, I can only hope that whoever it is that’s looking at these pictures isn’t expecting them to simply delineate the salient features out here, travel brochure style. ‘Cause that’s not what I’m looking to do with these shots at all. I’m staying with a couple of professional artists, I’m surrounded by fantastic world-class art, and these two things are having a bit of an effect on me, and I’m trying for a little something off to the side somewhere, not quite standard fare. Dunno if it’s working or not, but Cathy and Newt both have had an encouraging word or two for some of my shots, and that’s plenty enough for me to run with, rightly or wrongly.

So if you’re looking for a travel brochure, and I’m not giving it to you, please accept my apologies but not my regrets.

I have no regrets to offer you.

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Today’s been another slow one, for the most part.

Earlier on, me and Newt went in to Twentynine Palms, and washed Cathy’s Honda, which is what we drove across country in.

It was dirty.

We seem to have gotten most of the road successfully washed off of it, but maybe there’s still a little bit of Louisiana or Texas on it in a couple of places, that just wouldn’t come clean.

Sitting around the house, and I remembered that somewhere along the line, last week sometime, Newt had mentioned something about maybe having me write him a little “artist’s statement” for something or other.

I mentioned this to him, and he remembered saying it, and since we weren’t really doing anything much at the time, I told him that I may as well do it now.

He thought that was a good idea, and then promptly wandered off without any further word, input, or go-to-hell as to how or what I might oughtta be doing.

Well……..ok.

So I asked Cathy what the deal was, and she was her usual Class ‘A’ self, and filled me in on all the particulars of the thing, including taking a walk out into the studio, and having a look at what we thought might wind up in Newt’s part of the show.

And that was plenty.

I had enough to go to work on, and after staring at a blank page for perhaps a little longer than I should have, a statement began to take form before my very eyes.

As luck would have it, Newt wandered back in, and for inscrutable reasons, he off-handedly flipped me the keystone sentence for the whole statement, not even knowing he was doing it. Me, being me, I instantly recognized the thing for what it really was, snagged it on the fly, and committed it to the document straightaway.

It fit like a pre-cut puzzle piece.

Perfectly.

Funny how stuff like that works sometimes.

Finish off one more paragraph, and ask Newt to see if there’s anything at all worthwhile in there, maybe only the germ of an idea, and let me know.

He read it, liked it as-is, and so by golly that’s the way it goes. No further work required.

To lend it an air of “authority,” he asked me to append some bogusness or other, by way of credentials on my part, qualifying me for such lofty work.

So I did.

Whatever.

Enter Cathy, who peruses the thing, and gimlet-eyed, she spots the one unnecessary sentence in the whole document, and remarks that it should be excised.

Done and done.

So, for your reading pleasure, and maybe a small grain of insight into how Newt’s art works, I give you the artist’s statement below:

Tra la la.

Once that was done, we then rummaged through some of the zillions of images I’ve taken up to now, and found a nice one of Newt himself, to go with the statement. He’s a piss poor subject for taking pictures, but I’ve discovered that if you only go at it long enough with reluctant subjects, you can either wear them down or distract them, or sometimes both, and eventually, if only for one fiftieth of a second, you’ll find what you’re looking for.

A bit of a crop to clean things up some, and it was done deal daddy-o.

All in all, a wonderfully interesting and diverting way to spend some of my time.

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Earlier this morning I went out and had another go at the abandoned shacks. Took Bonzo, Newt and Cathy’s crazed dog, with me, and out into the creosote we went, while the sun was still low coming up, and the air was coolish and invigorating.

Went over to one that Cathy had pointed out to me Sunday afternoon, but that we didn’t get a chance to visit. Yes indeed, the things are all over the place out here. Gob’s of ‘em. Cathy’s instincts are unerring, and this one had a treasure trove of interesting stuff to try and capture. Came back to the house and shot a few more while the light was still good.

One or two seem to have come out ok.

I suppose you either like this kind of stuff or you don’t.

I like it.

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Dust devils.

Ubiquitous.

Outside just a little while ago, and they were coming and going, all over the place. Some lasting seconds, and others lasting minutes. Some barely discernable, mere puffs of yellowish dust. Others, much more substantial, opaque white-khaki-yellow at their bases, and even a couple with multiple vortexes, all dancing and evanescing together. I have a vague recollection from Meteorology 101 of a thing called “autoconvection” and I suppose that’s more or less what’s going on out here today.

The breeze is fitful from the west and southwest, and alternates between periods of near calm, and periods where it’s whistling through the tamarisk trees, just short of starting to pick up dust, sand, and light debris. Which is what’s happening at the base of those dust devils playing around in the heat waves out there.

Funny how the heat works sometimes. Walk out of the Hell Trailer, all nice and air-conditioned up, and if the breeze isn’t blowing, it feels downright pleasant, before your body starts absorbing the heat in earnest. Not a degree over one hundred. But then the hot breath of the desert rises, and with it, the temperature. And in very short order your hair is being blown around and the temperature seems to have jumped ten degrees or more. This, I suppose, is the engine of the dust devils, trying to sputter to life, and not quite making it. The hot wind can only blow for so long before running out of energy somehow, and subsiding back to the almost-pleasant background state it had left only a few minutes previously. Once in a while the engine catches, and when it does, a newly-born dust devil swirls to life from nothing, lives for a bit, and then dies, never to return.

A haze rises as the day wears on, and I have just realized that some of that haze has to be the direct product of all the dust devils, which live and die with the main heat of the day, taking microscopic bits of the desert floor, in their trillions and quadrillions, and sending them up into the sky where they will take a significant amount of time to work their way back to the ground, diffusing sunlight as they slowly fall. The dust in this desert never stops moving.

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Creosote has figured out how to deprive things around it of water, I think. Creosote bushes have a noticeable spacing, a pattern, and in the spaces between them, not much of anything grows. They carpet the desert floor, and hold sway over all other plants across vast tracts of level desert ground.

Tamarisk trees seem to do something similar, but they need extra water. You don’t see them out in the open desert like you do creosote. They need a little something extra to get going, it would appear, but once established, they surround themselves with a zone of no growth, no plants. Their root systems are out there all around them sucking every last bit of water from the parched dirt before anything else can get to it, I’ll bet.

People in the desert don’t have to mow their lawns.

There’s a Marine Corp Air Station just outside of the town of Twentynine Palms, and when you go into town you see young, scrubbed Marines everywhere you go. This is one of those places where the American War Machine makes ready to go half way around the planet, and blow the living hell out of things.

Somebody in the civic innards of Twentynine Palms, somewhere along the line, decided that it would be a good idea to have historical and culturally relevant murals painted on the sides of a lot of the buildings in the town. Large illustrations look back at you from all over the place. The overall effect is a pleasant one, and one of the nicest parts about it is that the idiots with cans of spray paint seem to have either not found the place, or have all been dealt with harshly to the point of convincing them to go ply their trade elsewhere. Nice.

Twentynine Palms is a one-story town, for the most part.

I’m beginning to think this place isn’t quite as hot as I did when I first got here. I’m either acclimating or learning, or maybe a little bit of both.

My watch battery died the first day I got here, and I haven’t put the watch on since. I think it was trying to tell me something.

Mornings are nicest.

The desert is very quiet for the most part. Sometimes very very quiet. It’s a nice sound.

Coyotes do not look anything at all like what your television experience might lead you to believe they look like. Their heads don’t quite look right. Funny-looking muzzle on ‘em. I’ve seen ‘em skulking around a few times. Newt tells me they’ll leave people alone, but I’m not fully convinced. I’m guessing if one of ‘em got hungry enough, he might take a go at it. I don’t trust the fuckers. Newt also says that if you’re out walking your dog, a coyote will try to separate the dog from you. Dogs, they will take a go at, unhesitatingly. I’m guessing small children might qualify too, but that’s somewhere I don’t want to go right now.

For a place that’s so dry, the desert has an awful lot of signs of flowing water all over the place. I guess it’s because there’s no cover of vegetation to hide any of it. Everything is right out in the open, where you can see all of it. I like that.

No saguaro cactus out here. Not one little bit of it.

The marine base occasionally emits the sounds of war, despite how far away it is. Once in a while whumps, crumps, and rumbles will carry loud and clear across the intervening distance and let you know that there’s stuff going on out here that you would not want to be on the receiving end of.

There’s no mosquitoes out here, but there’s flies. Different kinds of flies, and they’re all annoying.

Newt and Cathy have really got it going on out here. I was going to describe their place, but have decided not to. Nobody needs to know that stuff. Not required. It would only be used by some asshole, to try and find a way to fuck some damn thing or other up, in the name of selfish stupidity. Suffice it to say that the house and the property are pretty damn fine-tuned, and constitute a major step up from most of the other places I see out here.

Out here, driving fifty miles isn’t considered any kind of drive at all. People drive far greater distances than that, and seem to think nothing of it. And I think I’ve figured out how that works. It works because out here, you just get on the road and go. You don’t stop. You don’t slow down. You just go. And you can easily cover fifty miles out here in less time than it can take to go twenty-five, back home. Florida is going to feel very cramped, verging on the claustrophobic, when I get back.

I am really going to miss this place when I’m gone.