¡Verde Terlingua! part three

¡Verde Terlingua!
Life off the grid in a wild West Texas border town
Words and photos by Daniel Chamberlin

In April of 2009, Arthur contributing editor Daniel Chamberlin got down with the DIY homesteaders and off-the-grid outsiders of Far West Texas at the first annual Terlingua Green Scene. Find part one “No Winners, Only Survivors” by clicking here.

Part Three: The Warmth of the Sun

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Now go out and get yourself some thick black frames / With the glass so dark they won’t even know your name

John Wells is a sixtysomething contractor, photographer and sculptor from New York, and a self-described press whore. He’s got a blog, The Field Lab, chronicling the last year and a half of his life, building a compound north of Terlingua on a plot of land surrounded by mountains and canyons. He’s been profiled by Make Magazine and his website’s been BoingBoinged, so he’s a celebrity by Terlingua standards. It doesn’t hurt that he’s remarkably photogenic with an epic beard, and reflective sunglasses under a sun-bleached straw cowboy hat.

He smokes cigarettes while standing around jawing with some portly good ol’ boy-types who are bitching about Obama and what they fear will be an increase in property taxes. Wells’ primary reason for leaving his giant house in upstate New York was an aversion to such expenses. Out here he pays about $100 in property taxes per year for his 128-square-foot hut and 40 acres of pristine Chihuahuan desert.

They’re gathered around Wells’ solar cooker, a giant wooden contraption lined with reflective panels that amplifies solar rays, directing them today onto a chicken sitting in a glass dish. It’ll be ready for sampling in two or three hours at about 210 degrees, though some heavy clouds may delay dinnertime. “Clouds are not your friend when you’re solar cooking,” he says.

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John Wells’ solar-heated chicken shack.

Wells uses the cooker out on his compound—it’s officially known as The Southwest Texas Alternative Energy and Sustainable Living Field Laboratory—for baking most of his meals, which range from heated up cans of vegetables to home-baked bread and lasagna. He invites me to swing by and check it out tomorrow afternoon, and then rejoins the conversation with his buddies, which has turned to aquaponics, or the use of fish tanks to fertilize and irrigate the greenhouse he’s building right now. For the fish in the tanks he’s considering catfish or tilapia, as they’d also make for good eating.

“There’s full systems you can buy for $5000,” he says, “but of course I found a YouTube video, some guy who built one with $20 in materials and his fish are there and his plants are growing. And so I’m gonna try one little setup of that, see how it works.”

He plans to live in the greenhouse once it’s set up. I ask him what he wants to grow and he talks about marijuana and meth. He’s kidding, but I’m also curious about what seems like a lack of meth-heads out here. They’re a staple in the California deserts, half-toothless burnouts in torn-up sleeveless T-shirts, often seen riding to and fro from their toxic trailer labs on ATVs and dirt bikes.

“It’s mostly just drunks down here,” he says. ” I haven’t seen anybody with any really rotten teeth—except for if they’ve never been to a dentist.”

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Thurs April 8 NYC: KIM GORDON "The Noise Paintings" opening

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http://www.johnmcwhinnie.com/index.php/gallery/details/kim_gordon_the_noise_paintings/

April 8th – May 8th, 2010.
Kim Gordon: The Noise Paintings

At

John McWhinnie
@ Glenn Horowitz
Bookseller & Art Gallery
50 1/2 East 64th Street
New York City, New York 10065
P: 212.754.5626

“Featuring a series of works on canvas and on paper the show presents Kim Gordon’s recent explorations using paint, lyrics, and personal catch phrases to create a collision of the verbal and the visual, and the discovery of something quite other…

“In partnership with Ecstatic Peace Library, JMc & GHB Editions will introduce a special edition of a new artist’s unbound, signed and numbered portfolio, Kim Gordon, The Noise Paintings. Drawn from a full edition of just 200, the special edition will comprise 26 lettered copies enclosed in a custom cloth box with an original painting and recording laid in.”

Wed, Soho: DAVE TOMPKINS vocoder 7p book talk at McNally Jackson, 930p party at Trophy Bar

FROM THE COMPUTER OF DAVE TOMPKINS — CLICK FLYERS TO ENLARGE

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I’ll be doing a vocoder book [How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop—The Machine Speaks] reading Wednesday April 7th, 7 p.m., at McNally Jackson on 52 Prince Street in Soho.

It will be hosted by New York Times critic Jon Caramanica. Jon is a big fan of “Nasty Rock,” the only vocoder hit out of Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. So we’re in luck!

The legendary EMS-3000 Vocoder will also be in the house, still coherent after running around with the Cylons, Pink Floyd and ELO.

The reading will be followed by a party at Trophy Bar, at 351 Broadway, btwn 9th and Keap Streets, with classy boogie-disco-electro-hip-hop-assorted-hyphenated-whatnot provided by some of my favorite New York DJs.

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Duane Harriott (Other Music/Negroclash/Bim Marx) did my favorite gospel disco edit from last summer. Veronica Vasicka runs the excellent Minimal Wave label and radio show. East Village Radio. Chairman Mao (ego trip) recently made it possible for me to hear about how Schoolly D’s wife once kicked the 2 Live Crew out of Schoolly D’s house. I’ve been collaborating with Monk-One (Wax Poetics) on the book mix which will be up next week and will include a special edit of Gary Numan’s “Telekon.”

Sponsored by the ghosts of those two Signal Corps officers presiding over the turntables in the photo. (SIGSALY Vocoder Terminal codenamed SAMPLE, Paris, 1945)

Be sure to say hi to the stop smiling/runner folks who worked so incredibly hard to make this book. Ask James Hughes why “Biters In The City” made him freak out.

The book can be pre-ordered through Amazon and stopsmilingbooks.com.

Thanks to Kevin at AnalogLifestyle for the McNally Flyer and the unstoppable Tina Ibanez for the party flyer.

Hope to see you there!

Dave

A poem from Richard Hugo

RichardHugo
The Freaks at Spurgin Road Field
by Richard Hugo

The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

One whole day I sit, contrite, dirt, L.A.
Union Station, ’46, sweating through last night.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

Score, 5 to 3. Pitcher fading badly in the heat.
Isn’t it wrong to be or not be spastic?
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

I’m laughing at a neighbor girl beaten to scream
by a savage father and I’m ashamed to look.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

The score is always close, the rally always short.
I’ve left more wreckage than a quake.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back.

The afflicted never cheer in unison.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back
to stammering pastures where the picnic should have worked.
The dim boy claps because the others clap.

¡Verde Terlingua! part two

¡Verde Terlingua!
Life off the grid in a wild West Texas border town
Words and photos by Daniel Chamberlin

In April of 2009, Arthur contributing editor Daniel Chamberlin got down with the DIY homesteaders and off-the-grid outsiders of Far West Texas at the first annual Terlingua Green Scene. Find part one “No Winners, Only Survivors” by clicking here.

Part Two: Hot Tubs and Poop Buckets

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Shannon Carter and her sunflower hat.

Green Scene organizers Shannon Carter and Mark Kneeskern—both somewhere in their 30s—met in Terlingua seven years ago. Carter grew up in Baytown, a city located on the humid coastal plains east of Houston, home to several massive petrochemical industrial complexes. She recalls the year that the river behind her house caught on fire and their family had to be evacuated. In high school she got involved with Future Farmers of America, where she worked with calves, pigs, chickens, turkeys and lambs.

After two years at the community college in Baytown, Shannon moved to Alpine, one of the two small towns north of Terlingua—Marathon being the other one—that offer the last chance for ranchers, hunters and hikers to patronize anything resembling fast-food franchises or fully-stocked grocery stores before heading out into the West Texas wilderness. She tells me she wanted to get as far from Houston as she could while still paying in-state tuition, and Alpine’s Sul Ross University satisfied those requirements. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Animal Health Management and Wildlife Biology. She tried grad school for a minute, but soon dropped out and moved to Terlingua in the spring of 1999.

“I’ve lived lots of beautiful places,” Shannon says, and happily recounts an adventure-job-circuit C.V. that includes six seasons of sea kayaking in the Virgin Islands, four seasons as a river guide in Colorado and a year in Moab.

“But none of those places compare to the solitude and vastness of this desert,” she says.

Mark Kneeskern hails from Audubon, Iowa where he had what sounds like a fairly idyllic childhood, adventuring on the East Nishnabotna River and roaming the pastures around his parent’s farm. He got a BFA from a state university that he decries as “worthless.”

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Mark Kneeskern handles Green Scene traffic control.

Mark first came to Terlingua to visit a friend who was working in the Chisos Mountains, the high country of Big Bend National Park. They hiked and camped and Mark got to see a bear. His friend took him on a tour of the local drinking holes and they had what he describes as “crazy times” that left him “shook up.” He moved to Terlingua three years later to become a river guide.

“Terlingua is a hard place to live,” says Mark. “No running water or electricity on most properties. Flush toilets are rare. At first, these factors seem like obstacles, but when you get used to things, you realize that ‘simple’ is the best and happiest way to live. You learn to make it work if you have the will. When it’s nice, it’s paradise. When it’s not nice, it really is a living hell.”

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DOES IT HURT?

1. From the April 1, 2010 New York Times…

In the past year, Mr. Scanlon, 49, has laid off two workers and canceled the health insurance of a third, whose hours also were cut. He has scaled back his own family’s health plan, deputized his wife, Sherry M. Speirs Scanlon, 51, as an ambassador to scare up more business and enlisted their 27-year-old daughter, Tashel, to work as the office manager. When he can get a decent price for his four-bedroom colonial in Westchester County, he expects to sell it.

All that, and yet the family-run store he opened on Westchester Avenue in 1991 — a mainstay of this working- and middle-class neighborhood — still teeters on the edge, propped up by signs and sidewalk showcases. Sales have fallen by more than half in the last two years. The economy may be turning around in some parts, but not here, not now.

“We saved $100,000 to start up our business, with three kids and a mortgage,” Mr. Scanlon said with a sigh after a long day of tepid sales. “Sherry worked two jobs, as a bookkeeper and waiting on tables. I worked two jobs — plumbing supply by day, handyman by night. You know how hard it is to save $100,000? And now I find myself apologizing to my family.”

The Scanlons’ struggles at the Pelham Bay Home Center echo through the neighborhood, and the nation. Within one block of the Scanlons’ store, seven small businesses — among them a Chinese restaurant, a fruit and vegetable market, a nail salon and a real estate office — have closed in the last year. Many more, like Pete’s Car Care across the street, are scraping by, hoping to outmaneuver the recession by reducing orders, firing employees and delaying payments. Banks have offered little help; most will not lend to businesses short on cash, although after months of reproach, this is beginning to change…

2. Matty from The Soft Pack, in a recent LARecord interview: “Everyone’s going into the red. It’s almost like charity to put out records.”

3. Many people in the creative arts, and many small autonomous businesses, are watching their dreams wither and die right now due to the economic contraction and/or digital imprecation.

We all speak in private all the time about How Bad Things Really Are—about what we see happening to us and to others—but have you noticed how few of us will talk about it publicly? Nobody wants to appear as the whiner, the complainer, the embittered loser, the pessimist. It can makes us look small, self-obsessed. Some of us fear, with reason, that speaking openly about our view—our experience—of the state of play can cost us future work. Who wants to work with a depressed whiner? etc.

But: if nobody speaks, then no one outside of the circle knows. And when things aren’t spoken of, they fester. The scale and depth of our troubles remain unknown, which makes even beginning to address the problem—this implosion—difficult, if not impossible.

I’m going to write more about this soon, but in the meantime: please feel free to use the “Comments” section here. Be like a dissident. If you can’t speak openly about what’s happening, for whatever reason, then try the pseudonym option.

John Pham 'Living Space' exhibit at GR2

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April 10, 2010 – May 5, 2010
Reception: Saturday, April 10, 6:30 -10:00

GR2
2062 Sawtelle Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90025
gr2.net
310.445.9276

Giant Robot is proud to host Living Space, an art show featuring new work by John Pham.

John Pham is a Los Angeles-based, Xeric Grant-winning artist and creator of the ongoing graphic novel series Sublife, published by Fantagraphics, in addition to making work for various galleries and clients.

The work in Living Space portrays a cartoon world with its own set of laws and internal pop-inspired logic. The flat, vibrant colors and abstract lines clash with caricatures of urban, Los Angeles streetscapes and the people who live there. Rules of perspective and representation are willfully ignored in the gouache paintings on panel; the familiar figures, faces and places are distilled into contorted, colorful versions of themselves. Everything becomes, in effect, a cartoon. At first glance, the fluorescent-skinned, fractured people and pop candy-colored buildings may seem alien and off-putting. Upon further inspection, and with some familiarity, they prove inviting, friendly and, most importantly, human. The pieces will be mostly gouache paintings on panel with a few sculptures.

¡VERDE TERLINGUA! part one by DANIEL CHAMBERLIN

¡Verde Terlingua!
Life off the grid in a wild West Texas border town
Words and photos by Daniel Chamberlin

In April of 2009, Arthur contributing editor Daniel Chamberlin got down with the DIY homesteaders and off-the-grid outsiders of Far West Texas at the first annual Terlingua Green Scene.

Part One: No Winners, Only Survivors

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The entrance to Terlingua’s community garden.

The tiny settlement of Terlingua lays in the Big Bend country of Far West Texas, just north of the Rio Grande, a place that remains one of the most remote areas of the continental United States. In the interest of continuing to lessen the town’s ecological impact, in April of 2009 a group of local homesteaders and off-the-grid-types organized the first Terlingua Green Scene, a conference of sustainable living strategies, including demonstrations of cob house construction, solar cooking and desert farming. The events took place in and around the town’s thriving community garden, a refuge for vegetables, sunflowers and other plants that would otherwise quickly expire in the arid Chihuahuan desert climate. A sculpture of St. Francis of Assisi, created by a Vietnam vet named Spider and painted by local folk music icon Collie Ryan, looks on from a small ridge just to the west.

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The beneficent gaze of Spider and Collie Ryan’s St. Francis.

The Green Scene organizers’ aim — at least in part — is to strengthen community ties as well as to establish Terlingua as a hub of homesteading and DIY sustainability, and to give the town’s other legacies a run for their money: Terlingua has been a footnoted way-station in tales of smugglers heading from Mexico into the United States from the days of candellaria wax and sotol cactus moonshine up to the modern era of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and migrant workers. It’s also known for an annual chili cook-off that attracts thousands of Budweiser-swilling “chiliheads;” as a retreat for the Texas country and folk music scene; and of course there’s the world-class river rafting, mountain biking, birding and hiking of Big Bend National Park — over 800,000 acres of mountains, deserts, bears, antelope and alpine forests whose boundary is 10 miles to the east.

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