October 15-17 - Odessa, Deming, Tucson

Odessa is the hometown of my cousin Hazel Doris.  The last time I visited her there, she, her bridge partner Phillis, and I road-tripped (in Doris' off-white Cadillac coupe) to Marfa to see the Donald Judd (what Phillis called 'the big tin boxes').  This time, I didn't take any pictures, but here is one from Marfa -- Doris is in white, Phillis in orange.

This time, Phillis was out of town. I was there just to see Doris, and was also in need of down-time.  Our itinerary: I slept way in.  We read the newspaper and watched TV news.  Although Doris may be the most liberal member of her immediate family because she believes in drinking and dancing, she and I have very different politics.  She is open to discussing politics with me, and I enjoy the extreme sport of trying to find common ground (e.g., that George Bush is a little bit corny).  This time, we talked about the separation of church and state.  


Then we went for a drive and went to see a matinee.  Doris suggested I chose, so we went to see Whip It, the Drew Barrimore roller derby movie with Ellen Page and Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis.  We were the only two people in the theatre.  


Afterwards, I asked Doris if it was the worse film she had ever seen and she said cheerfully, "Well, maybe I've seen two or three worse."  I enjoyed the film but couldn't help but see it through Doris' eyes. There was one line in particular that was incredibly rude, after which Doris leaned over and said, "I can't really hear everything they are saying."  I don't know if that was true or if she was being gracious since you could see me blush to the ears even in the darkened cinema.


We ventured on for dinner out at Doris' favorite fancy Italian.  I had delicious scallops and we watched a procession of people out for date night.  Then we went to the grocery store (me driving Doris' new Cadillac).  She opts for a motorized cart, really because I think it is zippy way to get around.  Periodically, I would not know something like what kind of tomatoes she wanted, and she would hop up out of the cart, more spry than anyone else in the produce section.  On the way out, she confided that that particular cart didn't have as much 'get up and go' as usual.


We saw no museums in Odessa, though I had been to one on the prior visit where they had a captivating garden designed for blind people.  We hung out more then next day and then got on the road to start the drive to Tucson, where my publisher lives.  

Odessa was mostly about seeing Doris and being off the grid, which is nice because 'off the grid' is how the landscape feels as you get further west.  I dipped down so close to Mexico near El Paso, I literally went through border patrol.  I asked the border officer to make sure I wasn't driving into Mexico, and he gave me a look before shaking his head.  Border control is a bracing reminder of the authority of countries.  And I was close to Juarez, which hadn't exactly been getting good press with regard to the drug trade lately.  One does not have to be overly imaginative or paranoid or xenophobic to find it unsettling.


In North Carolina, my aunt Beverly had given me a book on tape called The Rain Gods, about a "host" of killers (as Beverly said, "oh, there are a lot more than that!") that takes places in exactly the terrain I was driving through.  I had resolved to finish the book before I got there, creeping down Doris' street at about five miles an hour while the last few pages played.  Even still, I was in a frame of mind that the spareness of the landscape supports.

I stopped for the night in Deming, New Mexico. 

Deming happens to be the name of my friend Jen's mom, and I emailed Jen who replied straightaway (with the timing of someone breastfeeding twins in the middle of the night) to say someone had once sense her mom a mug from the town.  I spent the next morning doing three things: 

1. Getting a Deming souvenir -- the fire department gave me a patch that looks very much like the close-up on their truck:

2. Goin to WalMart -- I was standing in line behind a guy buying Ghirardelli white chocolate and the full BBC set of Pride and Prejudice.  I saw him in the parking lot, getting onto a hulking motorcycle.  I was buying San Pelligrino.


I did not take a photograph of the Wal Mart, but I do have an unfortunately near photographic memory of the souvenirs section of the store -- a case study in people in China having to stamp "Deming, New Mexico" onto a purple, glittery calculator that is both a clip and a refrigerator magnet -- all alongside a maddening array of things almost tasteful, but that just said New Mexico.


I did love this sign:

3. I became obsessed with these sorts of 'unfussed with' architectural structures:

How great is this gas station?  It looks like a painting -- both a particular painting that I think is by Ed Ruscha,

and in general, like you would want to paint it.

This gas station is to other gas stations what a dive bar is to a "Dive Theme Bar."


It was Sunday morning, in New Mexico, listening to Stax Records compilation.  Big, big sky.  There is nothing more magnificent than driving through the expansive Western landscape listening to early blues rock n roll coming out of Memphis.  Recorded with pre-famous verve by people talented enough to later be famous, into big blue skies, really loud.  If an activity can be inherently happy-making. . . 


You pass flat, flat land, mountains you get near enough after driving toward them for an hour to see are really jagged piles of individual rocks.  Exactly the same road sign saying next exit museum and next exit rodeo, and then I'd passed a sign for “museum” plastered onto the side of a roadside attraction called The Thing.  


I arrived in Tucson mid-afternoon, and my publisher Greg and his wife Kate threw a party that night -- both for Museum Legs and for Hol Art Books, the press.  I got to meet another Hol writer, Frank Gohlke, who was traveling with an old friend and fellow photographer named John.  The two of them together were such a stand-up comedy show, without at all trying, that Kate, Greg, and I stood for a couple of hours after the party listening to them, before we all realized we could get chairs.  Frank was in a show called New Topographies in the 1970s, when landscape photography was redefined to include much more than Ansel-Adams-style nature against a horizon line -- more of the built environment, like parking lots or trailers.


The LA County Museum of Art reprised the New Topographies show, and Frank's Hol book -- a collection of his thoughts on landscape photography was published by Hol around the time of the opening.  (Frank is a beautifully spare writer -- was an English major at Yale.)  


Frank's friend John, a well-known photographer in his own right, is also an old friend of William Eggleston's.  I heard some stories that are, I am sure, entirely true, and not for me to tell.  


Frank and John also told stories on themselves -- Frank had been trying to photograph the front of this woman's home and she had not been pleased.  Frank is incredibly gracious and you can imagine that many people would not notice or mind if he were doing this, but that once he noticed that they minded he might find a bit of humor in being a little unforthcoming.  We suggested he go back either with a whole group of his students to all photograph her house, or that he go alone and photograph every other house in the neighborhood.  (I relate to these problems as an artist, wanting to document people, which is a negotiation of when you are telling someone else's story or your own.  I don't creep people out though -- I have that look that says 'please ask me for directions' which helps me look unsociopathic when caught taking pictures.)


Here is me, Greg, and Frank, the other Hol author:

At the party, I also met the press' publicist, Laura Adams, who was funny and smart and laughed easily and had major experience, and covetable shoes.  She said she would take on by book in conjuction with her work on the press.  Museum Legs had a publicist again, at last.


The next day, Greg and I sat at the table and had a long and fruitful debrief, considering how it had been putting Museum Legs through its paces as the inaugural book of the press.  Then I went to be a guest spaker in Greg's wife Kate's class at the university.  

Kate is a photography expert who happened to be teaching a museum studies class.  The topic for the day was the Sensation controversy -- the Saatchi collection show at the Brooklyn Museum.  I talked about "The Insulated Judiciary," which accounts for the group portrait of the US Supreme Court on screen under "These People?".  

It was interesting, having gone to art school in England, how much I knew about the Sensation artists that I didn't realize I knew, or didn't realize other people didn't know, just by sheer virtue of familiarity (and time spent early in art school wondering who people were talking about.)

Driving around the country speaking about museums sounds, to me, a bit like a vacation.  But actually doing it proved very busy.  So from Tucson, I stopped for a few days to catch my breath, in a strange and beautiful land between Tucson and LA, where heavily watered grass backs up to craggy mountains, where the roads are named for Bob Hope, where a woman at Starbucks is a lawyer and reads your horoscope, unsolicitedly, and where, truly, the man behind me in the drive through at the other Starbucks was in a convertible Rolls Royce: Palm Springs.