MotherPie

Our World of Agribusiness...

This abandoned farmhouse house on the High Texas Plains touches a sad cord and I share this memento from my trip through the area this spring. I want to paint Andrew Wyeth's yearning girl in the foreground to give it deeper meaning, an idea that speaks of what we face, what we've done with our present, what hopes we have for our future. There is more here than just emptiness and neglect. It represents our monoculture, our separation from land and connectedness.  Every bit of land is plowed for... corn? Probably.  Now I've posted below my surreal parody of Wyeth's Christina's World.  I'll call it Christina's (PostModern) World.  There.  I feel better already. Not. 

What was once there, really?  A circle of intertwined life in co-existence.  Not now.

We've lost our total connection to the land and in doing so, we're losing our knowledge of life, growth and sustenance and in the process, we're losing ourselves and our future.

Now living in McMansions with ugly pastic playtoys in empty fertilized yards with high fences, eating corn-fed feedlot beef with tomatoes grown in Brazil, strawberries in winter, sipping Chilean wine, dining on Asian rice, spending 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie we consume,  and bemoaning food price increases with farmers paid not to raise crops, we wonder how we got here and how to change it. 

Perhaps we need to think about planting our own gardens, growing some of our own food and making our gardening a sustaining venture.  Food shipped around the world has extremely environmental costs, the subject of a NYTimes article. Michael Pollan's books sit next to my bed, both half read.  His recent article in the NYTimes, Why Bother, suggests we act in hopes our actions become viral.  Victory gardens once supplied 40% of the food in WWII.  Since then, we've lost our hold on our own dirt and its potential in our cycle of life.

Place as Defining Self...

Who are we, really, and what makes us and defines us?  Place, past, present? Ideas, outlook, relationships?  Experience, genes? As I travel about New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, I think of how many places I have lived (a lot), while also having spent 18 years in the same place my parents now still live and where my mother grew up, even though that place was still Indian Territory when her grandparents and great-grandparents came there.  Place and roots to me are major ways of defining oneself.  I am driving through places where my present is all twined up in my past.  My memories escape into my present, unabidden (?), just bubbling up in my moment.  Life used to be like that when I lived in the place I grew up, for almost ten years while married.  I'd pass a park and remember times past spent playing.  I'd encounter a person, place or thing that took my present back, unexpectedly.  When you move to new places, it is always the present moving into the future with little interruption in the present of the past.  At least that is what I've found.

These two self-portraits,  posted in different years of blogging as I moved to new places I'd never lived (NYC, left, and Santa Fe, right), are references as I move through places that have helped establish self-definition and my ideas of the world beyond this little place of the present, wherever that is. Now. When in NYC I was a student - of media studies, urban culture and space; when in Atlanta I was intrigued with the curiosities of southern culture and I found myself being a hostess and gardener and exhausted with teens in a place few came to visit and in a way, lost myself as I dug in dirt and planted; in Santa Fe I find myself reconnecting to myself with motherhood minimized with empty nest and a husband on sabbatical. 

In NYC the culture of walking on the street, seeing it, as my daughter termed it, as dancing to the rhythm of crowds and the timing of lights, a quadrille of sorts, on a grid system.  Vastly different from navigating the self to places around Houston or Atlanta street traffic, the former on the grid or eight-lanes, the latter on old pig and horse trails! Noting other cultural things specific to NYC and navigating the sense of self within it makes the self malleable when places don't have personal roots and are new to the self.  In Atlanta, the self is determined by the first question ever asked: So, wuzzzz your Daddy do?. In Houston, the self is what you do or plan to do, a meritocracy as NYC is, although the latter wants to determine quickly how much you are paid to do what you do.

What makes us and defines our present?  People, places, things... routines or traditions, any and all.

Blooming in My Mother's Garden...

Purple iris that can probably trace their heritage to my great-grandmother's garden or before that (and yellow, and multi-colored). Roses by the doorstep.  Pansies in full bloom, still standing. Daisies in one corner.

These are the flowers that are blooming in her beds.  Her car smells of mulch.  Her doorstep holds the fragrances of roses. Her garden makes her house so happy.

I found the best of spring at the home of my youth and the landscape of my past.  Oklahoma is a sweet green at the moment.

Besides the art of nature, the art of the Oklahoma City Arts festival is a joy to share.  My favorite artist exhibiting? Oklahoma treasure Bert Seabourn.

No Burial Without Permission...

Just so you'll know, you have to have permission.  Found in Carrollton, Texas on an old cemetery fence.   I'm looking for spring and the fake flowers on the graves, plastic, they were, don't count in my quest.

California's Napa Valley...

Robert Mondavi's winery, no longer owned by the Mondavi family, is one of the centerpieces of Napa and I think that the yellow flowers blooming on the vines there are California's state flower? 

After being a snob for French wines, I must say that I recommend California wines and a trip to the Napa Valley to anyone.  My Napa Valley photos are up on Flickr.

Sheep in the Vines, Reading Between the Lines...

Only in one small vineyard in Napa Valley, on Howell Mountain, is there evidence of something other than mono-culture.  Sheep graze and laze between the rows of vines, munching on the new spring grass and weeds or whatever it is that grows there.  Somehow, this is what I find most appealing, the pastoral connotation, the idea of bucolic idyllic life that is not part of the major urban areas I've lived in, and not part of industrial farming as agriculture has become.  This isn't an eco-tourist place, though.

The agriculture economy is mostly one-word: grapes. It is all about the wine.

Hitting a bookstore in Calistoga, we get books to understand this sense of place: Judgement of Paris by George M. Taber about the famous blind tasting in 1976 where California wines ranked above French wines; The House of Mondovi - The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler; Napa by James Conaway; and The Far Side of Eden - New Money, Old Land and the Battle for Napa Valley also by James Conaway.

The story is about luxury, dynasty, place, work, leisure, tourism, environment, land and money, splashed throughout with wine and the entwining vines. 

Pop Chalee: Indian Artist Big Time...

Pop Chalee, Taos pueblo female indian artist, was hired by Howard Hughes to paint large murals that hung at the original Albuquerque Airport.  When the airport was enlarged and expanded, these old murals were pulled out and cleaned up to become stellar designs that are on view for any visitor coming into the airport.  But few really know much about this genre of one-dimensional art that grew out of the art of the tipis, the graphics painted on hides, the art of the parfleches.  You won't find them much in museums here in New Mexico and I find that actually quite odd.  You have to go to the Philbrook in Tulsa, or to the Heard Museum in Arizona to find specimens.

Pop Chalee was one of the few female Indian artists to study under Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School and the flat work produced by those students is known as the "studio style" and Dunn based her tutelage on the work that had been done with the Kiowa Five in Oklahoma. Pablita Velarde of Santa Clara pueblo was a Dunn student and her work recently was featured at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and I thought it might raise awareness of this particular niche style of Indian Art.  Hmmm... we'll see. In Santa Fe, or in New Mexico at large, these studio-style drawings aren't visible much anymore.  They were considered "tourist" art back when, back then.  Chalee died I think in the late '90s.  One of the oldest studio style artists who studied with Dorothy Dunn and still living (last I heard) is Navajo artist Harrison Begay.   He may be the very last of his breed.  Some thought Chalee's flying blue horses were trite.  I find them to be whimsical and fanciful. 

Wild Eye...

This was one of the featured outdoor posters for the last Whitney Biennial.  It was lost among the other posters, but it sure stuck with me.  Museums are  great ways to while away cold and rainy days - especially in NYC.  Feasts for the eyes.  Santa Fe, too, is a pleasure for museum lovers.  This photo is part of my EyePie collection.

It is all a matter of perspective.

Global Warming?

Last week an Austrian tourist was skiing Santa Fe and said that global warming is why she is here - it is her second trip to the Santa Fe Ski Basin.  I think it is probably the weak dollar.  A skier at Taos says the mountains and the skiing are different in both places - the slopes are maintained differently and many Europeans prefer to come here. 

My brother is in Austria skiing the Alps this week and this is one of his pics.  Me? I'm skiing Santa Fe and Taos and at 50 am starting to do moguls.  Snowboarders have been banned from Taos but will be allowed starting in March. 

Let it snow.

The Ice Storm...

It was a little tough trying to get into and out of Oklahoma City with the storms.  The ice storm devasted trees and 200,000 were still without power as of the end of the day yesterday and some are calling it the worst storm of the century in Oklahoma in terms of power outtages. Out-of-state crews to trim trees and repair power lines had to be brought in. It was the trees with huge branches lopped off, broken by the heavy ice, that I couldn't believe. "The sound was unforgettable," one of my friends told me as she described how the branches sounded as they split and fell. "Nichols Hills will never be the same," said another friend.  The scene at left is from that city-within-a-city. My Ice Storm Photos are up on Flickr that capture the unbelievable broken nature of things.

I've not been in Oklahoma  City during the last two decades when horrid ice storms have hit the state, which weather experts attribute to climate changes that cause snow to turn to ice because of uneven atmosphere temperatures. In all of my growing-up years there I never saw anything such as this.

Meanwhile, Dallas was untouched with the trees all decorated in white lights as they are here, in Highland Park Village, pictured at right. Houston's Galleria area used to be all lit up with white lights on the trees when we lived there.  So I enjoyed driving around looking at Christmas lights in Highland Park as the holiday scene in the front yards wasn't very festive at all, being in such a broken mess.