Friday, May 16, 2008
Lambchop
This handpuppet was used by my dad when he took kiddie photos in the studio and he took this photo of me. The fly on my hair was always my favorite touch. This was another photo in the box.
Some of the brood
There was an old 4x5 negative in a box and it looked like a birthday party. I scanned it this morning and converted it in photoshop so I could see what it is. There are 8 kids here. I don't think I can identify more than one or two of them. I am not even sure all of them are my siblings, but Charlotte is looking at it and will help identify who's who. No idea why the one kid's head is shaved or what's up with the saddest looking birthday cake in the world. I guess that's what a cake looks like when you're chasing kids all day.
The word from Charlotte: the kids on the left are the oldest siblings in my family. The two or three on the right are cousins. The kid with the half shaved head is Martha, who got her haircut minutes before the photograph courtesy of Donnie, the oldest boy in the family and the angel second from the left. Martha doesn't seem to be too concerned about her new 'do.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Burial Day
The landscape behind the house. The soil is a sandy loam, and it is a good clay when you're a kid. You can model figures out of it pretty easy if you bring water to the dirt. My mother and father bought about 5 acres well outside of any established municipality in the late 40's or early 50's. She was a fish that never saw water again.
Unfortunately, someone cleaned out the house before the funeral. There was never a space in her house which didn't have some sort of knick-knack while she was alive. It would have been a really different photograph if the house hadn't been "cleaned."
Most of her kids and grandkids are prolific. This is a great-grandkid I never met before today. She's Maureen's grand-daughter. There are presently 20 grandkids and 17 great grandkids. This one looks just like the rest of us.
My mother lived in a trailer until she fell and broke her hip a couple of years ago. The trailer was a pretty big step up from the retired army hospital/shotgun shack she used to raise her kids. It had running water, air conditioning, heating, cable TV and carpet.
Originally, she was a good Irish Catholic from Boston. Boston to Mission. Not that she ever stopped being a good Irish Catholic girl. She spent at least the last 58-60 years of her life in the hottest, flattest, most un-Boston place I can imagine but she was always a Catholic. And she was pregnant most of the first 20 years. I went to her girl-hood home a few years ago. Family still lives there. She grew up in the shadow of Harvard. She had an accent she wouldn't acknowlege. There were no hard "r's" in her vocabulary. Ask my sister, Martha. Or, rather, "Maatha." The Rio Grande Valley isn't Boston. And it's not even Santa Fe. It's not as pretty and it never has been. It doesn't have the spiritual thing either. It's not a romantic town. We all wish it was, but it's just not. It's hot as hell, dry as dry can be. People have no money and are often desperate. People get sick and can't get better. Anyway, it's a hell of a place to choose to move to, especially from Boston, and it is a hell of a place to birth 11 kids.
Louise was mother of 11, ten raised to adulthood. Six girls, four boys. The fifth boy died in infancy. Mom was pregnant 16 times, or so I heard.
That's the crazy kind of love she had for my prematurely authritic father. He liked it hot because of authritis. Very, very hot. He found the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the Great Depression, when he and my uncle, Woolsey, were working in a traveling carnival, making "instant" pictures. Mostly tintypes and other stuff they could deliver on the spot to families and young couples who valued time more than quality and who couldn't sit around for a real portrait.
There was always a guest bedroom in her house, but not many people wanted to stay in it. We always found some way to avoid this room.
I never liked to go in there much. My memories are all about the hard-baked south Texas land. I stayed outside most of the time or under a tree or by a window with a book. There wasn't any air conditioning as long as I lived in the Valley. One of the big days was when there was air conditioning for my mom and another was when, years later, she had potable water coming out of the faucets of the trailer, and didn't need to go to town for water anymore. For the most part, only the automobiles changed. The junk changed, but it was always there.
Since, as I said, she was a good Catholic, here's a photograph of a crucifix in her house today. It won't be there in a week. I guarantee it.
This was the hotel room I stayed in for the funeral. La Casa de Palmas. This hotel has been around forever. It burned down at least once and was rebuilt. My interview for Rice University was by the pool. It is a long way from Mission, Texas, to Houston, Texas, too.
Out in front of her house. I've printed most of these photographs and cropped them a little. There are plenty of landscapes but I won't post them here.
In no time at all, just about everything withers in the south Texas sun. I picked this blossem from a glorious tree just after the funeral. It's from a Royal Poinciana. By the time I drove to the lunch, after the funeral, it was heat-struck.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Rauschenberg is dead
This was another bit of a bummer. Rauschenberg was one of the true greats and I have been in awe of the breadth of his art for a long time. I remember the show at the Menil with the walls covered with his cardboard boxes and talking to people about that and just how mad it made some people. I just wondered what the conservationist must have thought about trying to keep CARDBOARD archival. I remember the pieces at the Menil on permanent display and just how many different kinds of art the guy dreamed up. Amazing. The painted quilt and bed on the wall in Chicago. Just amazing stuff. And a life out of a novel. Friends like John Cage. Makes you want to be an artist.
Also amazing what what a LOUSY job Houston's Chronicle did of reporting on his death. As usual, the lead stories were about murder and mayhem. Buried down below was a link to the AP article on him. That was it. Just the story off the wire. Like in a town of 10,000 people. At the same time, the Chicago Tribune reported on it as the lead story and actually went to the Art Institute and interviewed a variety of experts about why he was such a big deal. Gee, what a novel idea. Wonder if the Chronicle knows we have museums in Houston. And the New York Times ran his obit as the lead story too, with a four page article explaining his role in contemporary art. As usual, it was an excellent obituary. It was just so frustrating to see the Chronicle do such a crappy job.
One final thing about Rauschenberg: Isn't it amazing that the guy was making art up to the day he died? The guy was just pretty damn cool. Oh, and it's also very cool that he was from a piss-ant rural Texas town.