The Dream Dies Hard.

The El Camino. The shameful lust object of my early fifties is an unattainable bitch goddess.  I have seen many of the surviving specimen, and in aggregate they are decaying and literally withering unto dust. I drove a 1979 GMC Caballero (the GMC clone of the el Camino) today and while it was most immpressive mechanically, all the 1970's plastic ( of which there is much) was dissolving into a fine cornmeal and the styrofoam  in a fine powder: I was quite explicitly breathing the car as I drove it. It was also beige, a color so non committal as to surrender only thoughts of viral infection and condominium bathroom wall colors.  It was sorrowful. The glacier has moved and these vehicles have been left behind. I shall not.

My Looming Mid-Life Crisis and the Automotive Minotaur

I did not purchase this shambling wreck. This isn't even the vehicle I was tempted by. For some unnameable reason I have been haunted by the overwhelming desire to buy an El Camino ( a mythical Car-Truck that I was fascinated by in my childhood, a half man, half beast like a minotaur). My car, the "Barbie Jeep"- a loyal 1997 Honda CRV, frustrating in it's gutless dependability and suburban blandness seems to laugh at my diminishing testosterone, forcing me, like a drowning man to seek out the magwheeled  life preservers of my teenaged self. Against all good judgement and any degree of common sense I drug poor Tom out to check out a craigslist special yesterday in the rain and dull gray of October. The texts that I had exchanged with the owner lead me to believe that the car was some sort of prized legacy project shared by a father and son and that the owner himself was a freshly scrubbed high school senior. Some kind of magical bonding ritual, only understood by Americans: bondo and fender replacement with deep subtext of male initiation  rites. The car turned out to be a nasty piece of scrap, jettisoned into and retrieved from the the edge. The high school senior turned into a mid twenties unshaven white man smoking the very nub and filter of a cigarette without ever removing it from his mouth. I was shown the sad deficiencies of the whole class of car, no longer made and aging badly. The scent of mold, old upholstery, shame and starter fluid combine with the last puff's of the owner's cigarette and his flat brimmed Seahawks  camouflage hat (with sticker still on the visor) pushed me into a depression. I am sure there are vehicles that can bring joy to someone, maybe even this one did or could again. It can't make me nineteen again however.

(photo borrowed from craigslist of another car)

Grown Men Play Huge Saw- But is it art?

I worked at the Frye Art museum last week, on a video piece for Buster Simpson, a well known Northwest abstract artist. Buster was great, a fine person with a good sense of humor. He claimed to have been shocked that a conservative museum such as the Frye would do a retrospective on him, a sort of provocateur of the 1970's until now. We shot two musicians playing the giant industrial saw blade, bent into a mobius strip and painted with the phrase "Carbon andEarth builds to decay back into ..." repeating endlessly. The music, was very abstract, not jarring or noise but in the end it was like all saw music sort of just a novelty. Once again proving, like my day recently where in we recorded Bill Gates reading the Gettysburg Address, that my job is strange and surreal.

Kicking the tires

42" x 42" on plywood. Not quite finished, but it's a local call from here to there. This is rear cover art for my forthcoming novel "The Chronic Yard Sale", should it ever be finished. The book is in it's final act, which is proving to be very complicated, especially for as clunky a writer as I am.

I thought a lot about buying a Studebaker recently but instead the universe caused my freezer to die, thus changing my dreams, hopes and desires.

Mad Men

This day I mounted the art work from a recently purchased 1951 "Uttica Club Beer" billboard artwork  to a strange wall hanging made from a split hollow core door. It is the distilled best bits of a 9' x 16' out door billboard that i found on ebay. I like it and it will hang over the stairs in  my domicile

My beloved wife is patient but grows ever wearier of my need to cover all wall surfaces with weird crap.

               

Ten Years Old

My youngest has passed a milestone: ten years old. It makes me feel old but also very thankful for what I have. It was a day spent on the beach at Lincoln Park in West Seattle, with a small, eclectic group of boys, with Tom as the very rare center of attention. He had fun. It was one of those moments that you realize that the big pay off to life is happening right in front of you. For all the logistical planning that life consists of (or avoidance of planning in my case) it is really all camouflage to the real beauty and and joy that is happening all around.

I can't help remembering that ten is the age I was when my dad died, and how that shaped most of my view on everything, and how really little you still are when you are ten. Naturally my superstitious side sees portentous omens in seeing my young son at ten and me at 52, seeing parallels and ghosts in the shadows. Generally I think such thoughts are complete crap, but there is a willful desire to connect the dots into recognizable patterns. I firmly resolve to break that pattern and live to be old enough to be a total burden to my kids.

Sending the first born to the middle kingdom.

Ned goes to China for two weeks.

Update: He had a good time. He is a man of few words.