29Palms - Friday, July 03, 2009

Dawn, across the desert.

Put this on the list of things you need to do at least once, before you die.

Rising in the morning, with a glow in the eastern sky, the air caresses you. The combination of temperature and humidity is just about perfect. Made to order for flipflops, boardshorts, and a tanktop.

The hard-ass desert has a uniqueness to it that you won’t find anywhere else.

To the south, the closest range of mountains momentarily loses its brutal aspect, and is suffused with pink life as the sun first glances into it.

Don’t last long though.

Soon enough, the clarity of the air lets the rest of the sun’s gamut of light though, and the stark bare rock goes yellow-brown, on its way to the deathly gray-brown tones of midday.

But the air abides, and you find yourself just taking it in, soothing.

I’m sitting here on the back porch of the house, sucking electricity and wireless even as Newt and Cathy sleep within.

Been up since 5am and it’s only 6am even as I hit these keys.

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Just about three-thirty in the afternoon, and me and Newt have put in a bit of a day.

Right now, it’s hotter than hell outside, and anything with any sense is hiding from the flux of heat out there. I’m tucked away all by my lonesome in the wonderfully air-conditioned Hell Trailer, not that that qualifies me as having any sense. Newt and Cathy are over in the house, and nobody is doing anything for a while.

Good setup to dash out a few more words.

Once Newt and Cathy got up and got going this morning, Newt and I rolled down the road for Joshua Tree National Park.

Down the grid of dirt roads through the creosote bushes which appear to be the flora alpha predators of the flat, no-shit desert, past the abandoned homesteader shacks, past the houses where people live who just can’t care about it, past the inviting fuzziness of the cholla, which will make you seriously regret ever touching the stuff should you ever be unlucky enough to do so, past the khaki-colored dust and sand that forms the ground floor to everything out here, past life itself and on through a netherworld that’s not quite dead and not quite alive.

On the Twentynine Palms Highway

Downtown

Onto the two-lane blacktop of the Twentynine Palms Highway.

Westward into the town of Twentynine Palms, California, which I’m still trying to figure out how to describe, so I won’t bother right now. Maybe later.

Left hand turn, and the road lays itself straight out toward the naked gray-brown rock piles that loom dead ahead.

Headed for Joshua Tree National Park

Not much traffic out there today. Day before the Fourth of July, and nobody wants to deal with the heat and lack of civilized appurtenances that envelops us as we ride into the hills.

We roll a pretty good ways, but we’re only just scratching the surface of one small corner of Joshua Tree National Park, which covers a pretty fair-sized tract of land. Outside the windows, the rocks begin to take on stranger and stranger forms. Some of it looks like it was inflated, or something. Rounded, puffed up, jumbled in piles here and there, sometimes emerging from the sandy desert floor as if they were floating in it or something. Cracked and eroded into completely bogus-looking weirdness, but the shit’s absolutely real, and there’s fucking miles of it out here.

Water is conspicuous by its absence, everywhere you look.

Ravine at the abandoned gold mines

Rounded outcrops

Lichen growing on the weathered granite

Lithotextures

We stop at a abandoned gold mine, the Desert Queen, and walk over to the edge of a sizeable ravine and take in the view. On the far side, large rectangular gratings reveal the existence of mine shafts that no miner will ever go down into again. Nice of whoever it was to cover those things up, ‘cause that’s a hole you really do not want to step into by mistake.

A park service plaque helpfully advises us that where we’re standing was, once upon a time, a cyanide plant. The gold miners used the stuff to help extract their gold from the rocks and dirt that it was embedded within. Lovely. Just fucking lovely. I suppose all the cyanide has been long since washed away. I hope.

Joshua Tree vista

We depart, and as we continue to gain elevation, the Joshua trees for which this whole place is named begin to really kick into gear. Think twenty to twenty-five foot tall Spanish bayonets, with lots of branches sprouting from a sort of a trunk that lifts the crown of the thing good and clear of the ground, and you won’t be too far wrong. Severe-looking things, that fit perfectly with the rest of the exterior décor out here.

Gram Parson's ghost and the tilted rock of doom

Newt takes me by the place where, so it is said, Gram Parsons body was surreptitiously taken by a few of his friends after his death, and cremated inside of a car, for reasons not known to people the likes of myself.

Some of these rocks look marvellously fake

The National Park Service does not speak of such things, and the area has been properly sanitized, with curbs on either side of the asphalt, a parking area with neat lines, picnic tables, and everything that Ward and June Cleaver could ever ask for in a god-forsaken desert wilderness.

No signs of any burnt car or dead guy to be seen anywhere.

Up above, teetering at a drunken angle, a piece of rock as big as a boat is resting on a much larger formation of those weird-ass puffed-up rocks, and considers taking a homicidal plunge down to the level ground below.

It chooses to leave us alone, and we depart.

Looking down, a long way down, from Key's View

Pictures are nice, but it's best appreciated in person

Through the Joshua tree forest we wind, gaining altitude as we go.

Finally, we arrive at Keys Lookout, or Vista, or some damn thing.

Park the truck, walk a bit, and suddenly you’re presented with quite the view off to the south and west.

Palm Springs and the San Andreas fault lie way down in the far distance to our west, but the winds have been out of the west since last night, and there’s a pervasive haze that has blown in from the coast, and visibility is less than optimal.

Ah well, I really can’t say as I miss having been able to get a crystal-clear look at Palm Springs, but the San Andreas fault would have been pretty cool. You can see it, but it’s pretty washed out in the blue-gray haze, and underwhelms.

To the south, maybe a hundred miles away, the Salton Sea is just discernable, but the haze is making that difficult too.

We’re a pretty good ways up, almost a full mile, and the air feels wonderful.

So screw the goddamned Salton Sea, let’s get out of here.

Trending gradually down from our apex elevation, we go through a wonderland of those goofy-assed puffy rocks.

You just gotta see this shit to appreciate it. Pictures don’t work for shit out here, lots of times. The scale of things just will not permit itself to be trapped inside of something as puny and unworthy as a picture, and the scale of things is oftentimes one of the more salient features.

Keep that in mind, ok?

Finally we descend out of the park, and into the town of Joshua Tree.

Which I’d describe as Twentynine Palms with certain pretensions, but since I haven’t described Twentynine Palms yet, that’s not going to be of much help.

Ah well, such are the vicissitudes of life.

Newt has a little something up his sleeve for me here, and after we stop at the local health food store, we ratchet off into dirt roads that stair-step in a series of right angles, until we arrive at a place that I’m going to have more than just a bit of trouble describing.

Funny, now that I think about it, there’s a lot of that going on out here.

Stuff that’s hard to describe.

Bear with me on it, ok? I’m doing the best I can.

And keep in mind that my tour guide is a fucking college art professor, ok?

Somebody who knows art inside and out, talks the talk, walks the walk, and can kick your sorry ass with this stuff without so much as breaking a sweat while doing it.

So naturally, when you’re dealing with somebody like this, you’re going to be served up with things that he considers worthy, and you’re on your own when it comes to how you yourself may or may not be able to apprehend it.

I’d like to think that I did more than just a little apprehending on my own out there today, but I’m probably just bullshitting myself.

Oh well.

Noah Purifoy is dead.

Old guy in his middle eighties, who died five or six years ago, or something along those lines.

Burned up in a fire.

Horrible way to go.

Lots of people might choose to call him a crazy old guy, and who knows? Maybe they’re right.

But I think that even if he was crazy, he gets a pass.

I think the sonofabitch saw too much, is what I think.

And it scorched him somehow, kind of like this desert out here can scorch you.

And so, in a fit of compulsive creativity, he set about turning his acreage into …….. what?

Dunno.

Art, it most assuredly is, but after that, there’s an awful lot of unanswered questions.

It’s not easy art to look at.

It seeks to distract you, even as it blares at you from point-blank range with a trumpet.

What’s out here isn’t all of it, every last bit, Noah’s. Some of it is by some of his students, or followers, or whoever the hell, but it doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. Newt was very careful to point out those things that were authentic, core Noah, and those that were not. Newt was flying so far over my head with these fine points, that he may as well have been in an airliner forty thousand feet up in the stratosphere.

And for me, it’s perfectly ok if Noah didn’t do this, or that, piece.

Perfectly fine.

Both Newt, on the trip, and Cathy, once we got back, asked me what I thought of what I’d seen, and both times all I could say is that this stuff is strong. Just very very strong.

Noah seems to have had connections in the scrap industry, and access to some fairly heavy tools and equipment, and what he did out here, is, more or less, simply build things.

Simple enough concept, yes?

Well maybe.

And at first glance, what he built has the appearance of a thing thrown together in haste, with no plan, no process, and no fucking brains whatsoever.

At first glance.

But if you’re lucky, and you’re at least marginally inclined in this sort of direction in the first place, and you are fortunate enough to be accompanied by a fucking art professor (who is very careful not to tell you what you should be thinking) as you work your way around the property, then you might just begin to limn the underlying patterns that form the bottom, the foundation, upon which all of Noah’s stuff is erected.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

If you’re possessed of that lethal combination of coarse sensibilities, welded to an overarching confidence in yourself (Go and google up the Dunning-Kruger effect right now, why dontcha?), then you’re going to come away from Noah’s art with the impression that your kid sister could do better. This isn’t art. I don’t know about art but I know what I like. This isn’t art at all. Who lets these communists do this stuff, and where does the money come from? Why do so-called artists work so hard to confuse me and make things difficult? Why won’t these bastards just stick with nice landscapes and pictures of pretty people? This is really not art.

And if that’s what happens, then so be it. The art doesn’t care in the slightest, and is content to simply be itself.

Here’s my take on it, but please keep in mind that I have absolutely no skills or training when it comes to art, and also please keep in mind that good art is supposed to make you think, but it’s not too worried about exactly what it is that you think about.

Kind of open-ended that way.

Anyhow, I think that Noah saw too much.

Waaaaay too much.

Too much America. Too much waste. Too much inequality. Too much bullying of people without money by people with money. Too much ripping, raping, and destroying. Too little long-term viewing. Too little grace. Too much gratuitous chopping, grinding, burning, leaching, dumping, expelling, corroding, eroding, bulldozing, fencing, paving, eminent domaining, filling, digging, combusting, coercing, containing, crying, complaining, refraining, obtaining, blasting, breaking, beating, preventing, strong-arming, withholding, excluding, discriminating, developing, chamber-of-commercing, malling, overproducing, planned obsolescing, and he saw that it will not end until something comes along and stops it.

And when that happens, there will be a multiplication of the miseries that already stalk the land.

And so he reacted in the only way he knew.

A frenzied echoing, caricaturing, and satirizing of the whole great dark cloud of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance that came and blotted out his sun.

And if you choose to look at his stuff in this way, it has the power to bring you to tears. Or at least it does for me. You, I suppose, are on your own with it, just as you are on your own with everything else.

So much unnecessary hate, sadness, waste, and woe.

So, so very much.

And he reflected the poisonous largess he observed all around him with a poisonous largess of his own work.

Or something like that.

Keep in mind, I really don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about here.

But at least I’m honest about it.

Which is more than I can say about far too many people I know.

Oh well.

This shit hit me pretty hard and I took a bunch of pictures of it.

There, is that better?