Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Your timing was bad. The light was run out of the hills . . . So against this injustice you plunge south to the California desert, as the radio goes on about local drought, but what is "drought" here? Turn it off. You want those desperate visions of Negev. Bible suffering and miracles. But the California desert is unique-- you can't go more than ten miles without hitting some graffiti-laced artifice of 1950s America in all its squalid glory, from a time when Space Age pioneers came out to build resorts and suburbs in the heat. A desert that forgot it was a desert. Anything was possible then, and the ruins are crazy. Like the mesquite at Rice station out on 62 where they hang all those shoes.

You can trace decline out in the California desert, from victory to Charles Manson within a couple decades, and gang taggings on freight cars out of LA. And it fits the terrain too, ages into its own decline. But the main thing is: you need light . . . And your ribbon descends lower; the gray gives chase but falls back. And you when you reach Negev a dead sea appears-- a forty mile sheet of brine called Salton Sea, made by some irrigation disaster in 1905. The hundred year mirage . . . Hollywood found it in 1951 and built a yacht club on the shore, as the fish began to die. No other stretch of naked earth has so many aborted suburbs, gas stations and roadhouses-- due to building stuff where there is no water, only heat . . . And that damned gray. Creeping over the over the bluffs already.

By the seventies the luster was gone. A freak storm blew in and flooded the Salton Sea shore. And then, sudden exodus. Things left to rot in the salt-muck heat. Trailers down to pale wooden ribs. A delivery van half-submerged for decades, half eaten away. Water tanks leaning in brown salt-streak fissures. Utility poles leaning in the nowhere sheen. Salt-encrusted docks from desert to the same. A shot-out sign beside a fallen motel-- "OTE." The dead, headless palms and stink of mass fish kills. And they say pesticides from the date groves are lifted on dry tempests from the sea bed as the shore recedes-- still, it's hard to imagine a little poison driving out the last eccentric fools casting lines into a dying pond.

Don't write off the dead sea yet, the fall-back . . . You heard of a "city" on the south shore, where the dispossessed live in their cars. Even entire families, ousted by the ravenous banking buzzards. Off-grid. Learn to love your exile . . . Reverend Bob used to pray for the Sea on Salvation Mountain-- not so much a mountain as a jumble of religious symbols in a land starved for them, cobbled and painted in loud colors on the side of a low bit of dirt in the light of Negev; the coming miracles. Wish you could have met him.

"Ned, is that you?"
"Where are you?"
"I turned the desert gray."
"What have you done?"

If it rains in the desert it will cease the next day. If not the next day, the day after. If not the day after, then next week. If not next week then it's personal. No drought over your head, only a cloud cult. You command them to multiply over the nearest reservoir . . . You turn east. "Father forgive me, for I take the interstate." And still you can't outrun rain-- in a drought. Gray descends . . . And you think of Ned-- how we roamed the Rio Grande and shot old rail stations in black and white. with a long exposure to get the grooves of dark gray chaos-- "I like things that are fucked up" . . . Last time you saw Ned he looked like Charles Bronson with narrow glasses and a fu manchu, not the evil kind. He runs a subconscious dredge in his bunker under El Paso, and paints in a jagged stream like fine ragged smoke. He'll smack you in the head, say things like, "we owe trillions-- to ourselves." The koan master.

There is yet hope. It never rains in Arizona. Maybe it beats the coastal ranges, but drys out in the long run. And Arizona has the devil road, El Camino del Diablo. Two hundred lunar-like miles on the border . . . But you need permits, from the bombing range and the wildlife refuge-- not so much "permits" as dire warnings, no charge. Sign below to confirm poor judgment. Pioneers braved the trail in 120 degree heat when Indians left for higher ground. Hundreds never made water and perished. And perils still abound besides heat-- mine shafts, sink holes, venomous reptiles, illegal alien and drug traffic to name a few. Survive all that and you might catch a bomb for your trouble. You miss free-roaming Nevada already. Despite Vegas . . . Permits? Bombs? You took a wrong turn.

Lordsburg, New Mexico; dull light through howling dust. This is the place. A lousy room by the tracks. The owner bangs on ancient plumbing next door and curses . . . By Las Cruces the pall settles in-- the kind that built dismal sea ports. The locals thank you, and buy you drinks. It must be a trick, but you take the offer. It will take a mighty effort to break this drought . . . The desert is clearly annoyed by this deluge, shed in brown torrents at the bottom of nameless arroyos. When you get to Ned's bunker he is painting a tall canvas-- a stream of interwoven shape and being.

"What is it?"
"A totem."
"Didn't see it."
"It's upside-down."
"Why so much rain?"
"Don't begrudge us a little rain . . ."
"First rain in almost a year; I should buy you a drink."
"You owe me."

Smudges of gray and warm beer seep in . . . One more Pacifico, water-logged beer on the border. None of that stout fatherland stuff . . . One more, but don't slide over the bell-curve. No need to turn drought into a flood. But thoughts are swirling like radar blotches on the weather channel-- a Pollock throwdown harmless at a distance, except when that war special came on and a sandstorm pounded a mighty tank column with winds in excess of blind faith. Desert rain followed. You will bring this drought to its knees.

"What is drought in a desert?"
"The fabric, between bursts."
"Why do I make rain?"
"Do your little dance?"
"It just follows me."

sorry to post without commenting again. kinda busy. i'll try to get to it soon. looks like some interesting stuff here lately . . .

Mnaz, this piece & one other piece reminds me of the spirit of Edward Abbey...
However, outside of "Nature", "Cactus Ed" wouldn't claim "a Spirit". He was quite a curmudgeon about modern technology & the spoiling of natural beauty.

The grim, yet stark beauty of a natural disaster area is something I recall from
seeing the stripmined & topped hills of eastern Kentucky during some of my travels, & the hills of Copperhill, TN. I remember seeing Salton Sea during
the last part of its "heyday" in the early 1950s. I also saw a special about
Salton Sea on TV a few years back...Wow, has it gone downhill...

Mnaz, I imagine you have plenty of notes from your travels out west & I surely
would like to see more of your essays, etc. There is also an element of
Dr. Hunter Thompson in your writings...The last time I was out West was
in 1972. So, plenty has changed! "Fear & Loathing", indeeed!

thanks much, steve . . . it's confounding how long it has taken these writings to "coalesce" . . . i was so focused on on just "getting down the quiet road" for a few years. and seeing things . . . so i've had all these sights and thoughts "in the back of my mind," and coaxed them out slowly. and then they had to be combined and re-combined in some way that made me give a damn. which i do ...

here's the latest...

Your timing was bad. The light was run out of the hills . . . So against this injustice you plunge south to the California desert, as the radio goes on about local drought, but what is "drought" here? Turn it off. You want those desperate visions of Negev. Bible suffering and miracles. But the California desert is unique-- you can't go more than ten miles without hitting some graffiti-laced artifice of 1950s America in all its squalid glory, from a time when Space Age pioneers came out to build resorts and suburbs in the heat. A desert that forgot it was a desert. Anything was possible then, and the ruins are crazy. Like that mesquite tree at Rice station out on 62 where they hang all those shoes.

You can trace decline out in the California desert, from victory to Charles Manson within a couple decades, and gang taggings on freight cars out of LA. And it fits the terrain too, ages into its own decline. But the main thing is: you need light . . . And your ribbon descends lower; the gray gives chase but falls back. And you when you reach Negev a dead sea appears-- a forty mile sheet of brine called Salton Sea, made by some irrigation disaster in 1905. The hundred year mirage . . . Hollywood found it in 1951 and built a yacht club on the shore, as the fish began to die. No other stretch of naked earth has so many aborted suburbs, gas stations and roadhouses-- due to building stuff where there is no water, only heat . . . And that damned gray again. Creeping over the over the bluffs.

By the seventies the luster was gone. A freak storm blew in and flooded the Salton Sea shore. And then, sudden exodus. Things left to rot in the salt-muck heat. Trailers down to pale wooden ribs. A delivery van half-submerged for decades, half eaten away. Water tanks leaning in brown salt-streak fissures. Utility poles leaning in the nowhere sheen. Salt-encrusted docks from desert to the same. A shot-out sign beside a fallen motel-- "OTE." The dead, headless palms and stink of mass fish kills. And they say pesticides from the date groves are lifted on dry tempests from the sea bed as the shore recedes-- still, it's hard to imagine a little poison driving out the last eccentric fools casting lines into a dying pond.

Don't write off the dead sea yet, the fall-back . . . You heard of a "city" on the south shore, where the dispossessed live in their cars. Even entire families, ousted by the ravenous banking buzzards. Off-grid. Learn to love your exile . . . Reverend Bob used to pray for the Sea on Salvation Mountain-- not so much a mountain as a jumble of religious symbols in a land starved for them, cobbled and painted in loud colors on the side of a low bit of dirt in the light of Negev; the coming miracles. Wish you could have met him.

"Ned, is that you?"
"Are you in the desert?"
"I turned it gray."
"You what?"

If it rains in the desert it will cease the next day. If not the next day, the day after. If not the day after, then next week. If not next week then it's personal. No drought over your head, only a cloud cult. You command them to multiply over the nearest reservoir . . . And gray descends again. You think of Ned-- how we roamed the Rio Grande and shot old rail stations in black and white with a long exposure to get the grooves of dark gray chaos right-- "I like things that are fucked up" . . . Last time you saw Ned he looked like Charles Bronson with narrow glasses and a fu manchu, not the evil kind. He runs a subconscious dredge in his bunker under Las Cruces, and paints in a jagged stream like fine ragged smoke. He'll smack you in the head, say things like, "we owe trillions-- to ourselves." The koan master.

There is yet hope. It never rains in Arizona. Murk may beat the coastal ranges, but not the interior. "Father forgive me, for I resort to the interstate" . . . And still you can't outrun rain-- in a drought. But Arizona has the devil road, El Camino del Diablo. Two hundred lunar-like miles on the border-- except you need permits, from the wildlife refuge and the bombing range. Not so much "permits" as dire warnings, no charge. Sign below to confirm poor judgment. Pioneers braved it in 120 degree heat when Indians left for higher ground. Hundreds never made water and perished. And perils still abound aside from heat-- venomous reptiles, mine shafts and sink holes, illegal alien and drug traffic to name a few. Survive all that and you might catch a bomb for your trouble. Already you miss free-roaming Nevada. Despite Vegas . . . Permits? Bombs? You took a wrong turn.

At Benson, Arizona-- dull light through howling dust. By Lordsburg, New Mexico damp gloom settles in. This is the place. A lousy room by the tracks. The owner bangs on ancient plumbing next door and curses . . . South to Las Cruces, and the gloom intensifies-- the kind that built dismal sea ports up north. The locals thank you, buy you drinks. It must be a trick, but you take the offer. It will take a mighty effort to break this drought . . . The desert is clearly annoyed by this deluge, gouged by its foaming, dirty torrents in nameless arroyos, culverts overflowing. Annoyed? No, it's gone entirely . . . When you get to Ned's bunker he is painting a tall canvas-- a stream of interwoven shape and being.

"What is it?"
"A totem."
"Didn't see it."
"It's upside-down."
"Why so much rain?"
"Don't begrudge us a little rain, tree dweller . . ."
"First rain in almost a year; I should buy you a drink."
"Why didn't you mention the totem, and all this?"
"The groove hit today; there's still time . . ."
"Besides, we owe you."

Smudges of gray and warm beer seep in . . . One more Pacifico. Water-logged beer on the border. None of that stout stuff from the fatherland . . . One more, but don't slide over the bell-curve. No need to turn drought into a flood. But thoughts swirl like radar blotches on the weather channel-- harmless Pollock throwdowns, except when they showed that war special, and a sandstorm pounded a tank column of undeniable might with winds in excess of blind faith. Desert rain followed. You will bring this drought to its knees.

"What's this about drought?"
"Haven't had rain since . . ."
"But drought, in a desert?"
"Damned good point."
"I make rain now . . ."
"They love me here."
"Do a little dance?"
"No, it follows me."

Ned and his woman, Diane, put you up for the night, but it won't be long. Ned is on a mission, and you'll leave him to it. Their place is one of those cool artist digs, with windows looking out to tacked-on studios. And the bunker of course-- chamber of creation. And the wall of literature. Literally-- a whole wall, top to bottom. And Ned hands you a tattered copy of "Fear and Loathing" . . .

"You read this?"
"Always meant to . . ."
"The way you trash Vegas."
"I heard the movie sucked."
"They always do, usually."

A short stay, but time enough to drink tequila above the Juarez lights and dance palm to paw with Harpo the family retriever. Solve world crises and forget to write it down. The usual . . . And Diane talks about cosmos. Says the lay of things in the sky when you arrive sets your course, and you never got that. Too many roads out there. Maybe to predestination . . . You leave Ned to his creative flood next morning. Hasn't come down like that in years. Back into New Mexico with your new powers of rain. You could drench unquenchable unrest-- the lava flows and sheer sandstone walls, though humbler than Utah's red madness. The God hubris of conquistadors. The pale canyons, cliff abodes and sacred kivas of the Anasazi, who fled mysteriously eight hundred years ago-- maybe drought. But you'll fix that now.

When you first saw New Mexico a great solitary peak pulled you off the road from Cuba to Bernalillo-- Cabezon, the big head, a massive volcanic plug. And toward Rio Puerco other such peaks. Charcoal gloves thrust over skeletal scrub . . . You recall the scene: no motion except thin fossil strings of snow to carve up the dark gloves and undercut a pale cliff, set it adrift. Mesa Chivato's basalt flows rose in the south-- the congealed blood of a giant slain atop Mount Taylor in Navajo myth. New Mexico is a land of chocolate chips-- familiar scattering of juniper and pinon on saffron dough in a painter's light. But why here in particular? Junipers abound in the high desert. It must be in the contrast. A thin, reflective surface too close to hellfire-- of a kind that blasted through the shelf at Cabezon. But few junipers near the volcanic peaks-- only brittle sagebrush on crumble-dry frost-gold.

The scene was stunning in a low sunbeam freeze a mile past the winter solstice, so you wandered south among the frost-gold and charcoal, where you spotted cowboys upstream splashing the herd across rio peqeno, beneath stately tan sandstone walls. They named one of these walls "Courthouse" in Utah . . . Back at Cabezon the sun is a cool yellow ball over dark basaltic blood. Pure, dry cold. You were certain of promise on the horizon, since you can't give up your faith, and horizon made no move. You had immovable ground, which gave its word . . . Then a stretching shadow, a finger of pink, and it gave out. You suffered earth's rotation, the tenuous tether that keeps the poles from rolling, and moon crept up from behind while you were distracted by sienna sunfire. Moon is a pale excuse, never the same face nor place, but she raised adobe ruins from sage tombs, and pure cold ran in and out, biting and inviting. Bless the cold. Let it take on remorseless fire.

At Gallup you forget to lock the door to your room, and at ten-thirty it opens, and Navajo woman walks in and sits beside you on the bed like she's known you forever, and runs a check. You ask her why she stopped, and she rails against white injustice. Her eyes are darkly righteous, but you're in no mood to defend nor indict any race within a race, so you agree in principle, which throws her off. The track record is damn sketchy. Not sure what she is after, a fight or a trick, or both, and she leaves quickly. The road is still dismal in the morning.

You spend time on Pinta Road, on the edge of the Reservation, where murk breaks and the painted desert briefly appears. But by Exit 286 it goes gray in a fog and you run low, just when the cliffs had melted into a brick stream. So you take a cue from that pitiless flat and find a deluxe motel on old 66 by the tracks with a king-size bed and singing pipes for $18 cash. Where American cruisers with large tail fins stayed. You should gather the road-weary and storm the nearest steeple, tell of missed exits. The flock is home; they have what you gave up. You live in cheap rooms and your truck, yet the money goes. And even if bankrolled to roll indefinitely, indefinite roll might roll you, but it was the only way here, and you needed to be here.

You miss the great, beaten Mojave arcs . . . Westward, through Arizona's high pine forest ruined by retired cops, toward the arcs, to the land of a million shades of tan, but your cloud cult got there first . . . And you note a few changes when they break. Like butterflies and their tandem power dives. Flutter has surprising velocity. And you never imagined burnt slopes transformed to alpine meadows in loud wildflower grooves-- orange, blue, paintbrush and rue. Only the farthest dim hills resemble the hard desert you returned to. The slopes blush unhealthy green, under the weather, and threaten to break up a marriage of bleached tan and casino odds-- two altered states made for each other. Too much scale in green, and that was the point, lack of scale. It was about crude peaks like a bad sketch.

But you still have an ocean-- one that bends baselines upward on a two-thousand-foot arc before you catch the ruse. And the coming heat will fry color anyway-- you have to look fast. And then, you are the color, distinct on the empty sweep as you vanish into the same, but an empty never literal-- the hawk aeries hidden up high, the foolish squawk of spadefoot toads after blessed rain amid circling danger, the rattler twisting away from your tires. Thermals twisting in alleys of oblivion. The desert ocean can give you a hundred mile view, and the blue ocean a twelve-mile horizon. You'll take a two thousand foot arc over a forty foot swell, but the oceans share a degree of wonder or despair, the only known substances to fill so much wide open space.

The blue ocean can stack miles over itself, livable to minions at the bottom with mighty pressure plates, reliant on sinister fiery fissures. If you had a camera down there, the feed might resemble your first desert dawn, shaded differently-- rock, and spiky shapes, and intensity . . . And where to now? There is no point to this wander, though you had one when you left-- now lost in a golden sweep swept past to get to another one. The map promised more, but you're always halfway up a desert road, more or less, and Zen is a lesser road to ruin. Need to pick one eventually. And you caught the forecast today: Cloudy. Between thoughts. You miss that drought.

Mnaz, all I can say, right now, is this piece, & additions, are outstanding...
Keep on chooglin" !