Friday Homestead Dispatch

Bellows To Mend

1.
Here is my favorite Christmas photo from 1958 wherein I first express the now familiar ‘what-the-fuck’ look on my face. First cousins abound with a glimpse of my grandmother Clara’s apron to the right. In those days, the Aunts and Uncles, cousins and others would gather on holidays in Riley, Kansas in the home where my father and his siblings were raised, a pretty tiny house to raise seven children. And you can see where I got my eye for groovy floor and wall patterns…

First cousins (L-R) Bo (Steve), Jan, Marla (Dixon), Greg, me, Cindy (Henderson), and Roger (Dixon)

Hope your holidays are filled with good health, family, friends, and good food and drink!

2.
Between Biden pardoning Michael Conahan, the ‘kids-for-cash’ judge, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez losing an internal contest to lead her party on the Oversight Committee in the next Congress to Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia, 74, an eight-term Democrat suffering from cancer of the esophagus, I’m taking a break from all that this week.

Oh, except I’m embarrassed to say that, according to Fuckle’s day one in office, I’m looking forward to the end of both the Ukraine war and the conflict in and surrounding Israel, no more taxes on my social security check, much lower grocery prices, gas under $2, and my 50% car insurance reduction. Yeah! Easy to get done since he controls the House, Senate, and Supreme Court, right?

But in the interest of hammering the point to death, and in the words of Jim Wright, Republicans cannot govern. This is true no matter how many times we are dumb enough to run this experiment. Republicans, or MAGAs since that's what they are nowadays, destroy, they burn, they rape and pillage, they liquidate divisions to momentarily maximize shareholder value and then they cash out. They have no interest beyond profit. They no longer build. They do not create. They cannot govern because good government is utterly at odds with their miserable ideology of greed, fear, and destruction. It's just that simple.

OK, one more…Rebecca Solnit posted the richest man who ever lived used that wealth to shove an idiot-criminal into power and is using his demonstrated power to herd the spineless Republicans into obedience to his mandate they reject the budget deal and shut down the government. (They're afraid he'll use his money to primary them, meaning that they are more concerned for their own future than that of our country)

Autocracy, broligarchy, kakacracy. And Musk isn't just a rich guy: he's a racist, transphobic, misogynist, drug-addled, vicious and stupid rich guy. We're not defeated entirely--there are lots of ways to resist, beginning with being loud and clear about the situation--but we're in trouble. It's going to take a lot to withstand this stuff....

And, as God has spoken, Elon Musk bought himself a US presidency and all it cost him was $277 million. The investment was well worth it, he now controls pathetic, incontinent Don-old Trump like a marionette puppet.

3.
I posted recently on Facebook that this year, as I turned 70 in March, I’ve lived half my life in Tucson, Arizona. I lived in Lawrence, Kansas from 1975 until I moved here 35 years ago, on Halloween of 1989.

I lived on the 2nd floor at 910 Louisiana for several years in LFK

On a crisp fall day I drove my little Toyota pickup out of LFK, along with a borrowed van and trailer, and the help of my brother Greg and my brudda-frum-anudder-mudder Al Berman. I can’t remember how I talked those two into the adventure but I’m still in their debt. Unfortunately I have no pictures from the drive or the move. I DO have these Polaroids I shot of all the guests that came to my 31st birthday party in 1985, four years before my departure to the great Southwest.

I had pre-rented a small apartment, that my brother dubbed The Hut, on Simpson Street, just south of the Cushing Street Bar. I was renting from the Rollings family who also owned the bar along with many other properties in Barrio Viejo. I outgrew that apartment in about three minutes so I moved into a bit larger place on South Meyer, which lasted for a year. Then in April of 1991 I moved around the corner (same attached structure) to 168 W Kennedy, where I resided throughout the rest of the 90s.

Relaxing in the courtyard of 168 W. Kennedy, Barrio Viejo, Tucson, AZ

I cannot recall the exact date but for a brief period I had an art gallery on the corner of Broadway and 5th Avenue in downtown Tucson. Pretty sure it was around 1992-93, and downtown Tucson looked QUITE different in those days. My friend Dave Chandler, who now has property outside of Silver City which I wrote about in late November, had a silkscreening business on that corner called Bannerman Graphics (with his sister Cindy). I rented out a somewhat small space in the corner of the building and called my gallery Art That Barks. It was somewhat short lived as a businessman I am not. But I enjoyed my time there as I got to hang out with Dave, Cindy, and Mitzi Cowell, who also worked for Dave silkscreening T’s.

I still have a couple of those T’s

Front and back mockup of a promo postcard I made with the help of Dave’s tiny Apple computer

4.
MythBust du jour: In the 1958 documentary film White Wilderness, we all learned about lemmings diving en masse into the sea. Thus we boomers like to think of thoughtless mobs following the pack as ‘lemmings.’ IMDB (and others) busts this myth: This picture was filmed in Alberta, Canada, which is not a native habitat for lemmings. They were imported from Manitoba for use in the film, and were purchased from Inuit children by the filmmakers. The Arctic rodents were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence; afterwords, the helpless creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was faked using a handful of lemmings deceptively photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures. It was this film that perpetuated the myth in popular culture of lemming suicide, something that's never been reported to have occurred in real life.

John Green, in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed, writes about White Wilderness; But none of this is a realistic depiction of the lemmings’ natural behavior. For one thing, the subspecies of lemming depicted in the film do not typically migrate. Also, this section of the movie wasn’t even filmed in the wild; the lemmings in question were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, where much of the lemming footage was shot. And the lemmings did not hurl themselves bodily out into space. Instead, the filmmakers dumped lemmings over the cliff from a truck and filmed them as they fell, and then eventually drowned. Günter, give them a shove.

Today, White Wilderness is remembered not as a documentary about lemmings, but as a documentary about us, and the lengths we will go to hold on to a lie. My father is a documentary filmmaker (I learned the White Wilderness story from him), and that’s no doubt part of why I love that opening sequence of Penguins of Madagascar.

But I also love it because it captures, and makes the gentlest possible fun of, something about myself I find deeply troubling. Like the adult penguin who stays in line and announces, “I question nothing,” I mostly follow rules. I mostly try to act like everyone else is acting, even as we all approach the precipice. We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in the construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals.

5.
Just a heads up that I will be one of the artists included in an upcoming show at the Stevens Gallery at Salpointe Catholic High School. The show is titled People and Places: The Art of the Figure and the opening reception is Saturday, February 1 from 6-8pm at 1545 E. Copper St. here in Tucson. My dear friend Betina Fink, Stevens Gallery Director and Fine Arts Instructor at Salpointe, is curating the show.

These, among several others, will be in the show

I also entered a few pieces for another upcoming show in a neighboring community but received my 375th rejection letter last week. So these pieces are now free to live in your home…My motto: My art costs less than a refrigerator, twice as pleasurable, and lasts thrice as long! Payment plans accepted…call before midnight tonight.

Gina, 25” x 14” x 14”, 2024 | Villa Vanilla Panties, 16” x 17” x 1.5”, 2024 | Of Corset’s A Cabaret, 23” x 17” x 4”, 2024 | Calvinist Cavalcade Camp, 12” x 12” x 2.5”, 2024

And now…