![[Photo: dawn]](dawn.jpg)
Change of Address... Smut is in the eye of the beholder... Not all ASCII art is art... Suddenly, Ganesh...
1999.03.30
Los Alamos is on a jagged mesa. If you want to get from point A to point B in Los Alamos and you want to go on streets, your route might curve around a lot to keep from falling off the mesa. I woke up early in the morning, took a walk down a residential street. To get back to the place I was staying, I walked down a nature trail into a canyon between fingers of the mesa. I walked among trees, along a fire road, up some stairs and emerged once again on the top of the mesa. There were places in the canyon where I could see no sign of human settlement.
Photo: background: dawn reflects off LANL
foreground: ugly houses
Photo: The only thing impressive about this nature photo is
that it was taken pretty much smack-dab in the middle of Los Alamos
![[Photo: trees, rocks]](middle.jpg)
I was waiting to pay for my lunch at the health-food store when the mail carrier came in and started talking to the proprietor. "You should know," the mail carrier said, "that she did it again. She put in a forwarding, but I knew not to..." The proprietor groaned, "Aw, jeez." The carrier: "Yeah, she's been gone for over a year, she thinks she can still--anyhow, we're going to ignore it." He handed over the day's mail, exited. The proprietor went back to talking with the supplier he was dealing with; while filling out a form he said, "Yeah, the woman that used to own this building, she wanted to keep getting her mail, so she put in one of those change-of-address, like, forwarding things, but she also said that mail for the health food store should go to her too, we had a hard time working that out, and now she's doing it again." The supplier asked, "Can she just do that? Turn in a change of address, get all your mail like that?" I thought, Jeez, don't you read comp.risks? but didn't say it. Instead I said, "Kind of suggests a whole string of mean pranks, doesn't it?" They looked at me thoughtfully. The proprietor checked me out right then. I hope he didn't think I was plotting revenge just because he'd kept me waiting half a minute.
On the way from Los Alamos to Santa Fe, it was the driver who brought up WIPP. She talked about the fire danger in Los Alamos, how a fire had almost wiped out a lot of buildings early in the town's history--there wasn't a whole lot of water to put out fires. She talked about ferrying a Russian scientist back and forth to the lab, about his visits with his family.
We talked about the drought in our respective regions. She said that it had recently rained, that people had been dancing in the streets of Albuquerque. I shuddered. I hadn't been happy to see that rain.
I got a hotel room in Santa Fe just by asking. Every Santa Fe guidebook said this approach wouldn't work. I thought I would try, fail, and catch a bus back to ABQ. Instead, I got a room no problem. I decided to stick around and see some museums.
The reportedly gorgeous historical Lensic theater was showing "Life is Beautiful". I'd already seen that. I decided to skip the theater.
My next stop was the kinda-new Georgia O'Keeffe museum. As I approached the entrance, an apologetic guard let me know that they were remodelling. Admission was free, but there was only one room open.
Normally, this room would have held only one painting. Now it was holding four or five paintings. I smirked. I was going to get tourist points for seeing the O'Keeffe museum, and it was going to take me less than ten minutes.
Of the paintings, there were a couple that were the stereotypical O'Keeffe pictures of plants' naughty bits. There were some large, gradient-filled regions suggesting natural forms. And there was one painting that caught my attention.
It showed a city canyon formed by tall buildings receding to a vanishing point. There was a beige sky; the buildings were dark. It reminded me of something by Sheeler; if I knew more about art, I'd perhaps be able to point out some common inspiration. Where Sheeler's regions tended to be single-color, O'Keeffe's were more gradient. The color shifts pulled attention towards the vanishing point. The lines of the buildings pulled all attention to the vanishing point. It was a very spare picture, very sparse, abstract, free of baroque bits, low on detail, ornamentation absent. But close to the vanishing point, the center of the painting's attention, there was a little lamp-post sticking up, and at its tip a lit lamp, the brightest thing in the painting. I suspected that I was looking at a painting of New York City's naughty bits. I may have blushed.
When I walked past the Ray Tracey Gallery, I wasn't sure if it was a coincidence or a pun. I'm still not sure.
The Fine Arts Museum wasn't being remodeled, but it was pretty quick.
There were a bunch of paintings by Susan Rothenberg. They had been brought in from lots of places, lots of collections. A lot of them were pretty similar. As long as they were all separated in lots of places, lots of collections, each one was probably pretty interesting. Put them all together, and they seemed kind of redundant. Maybe if I was trying to study her progress over the years, this exhibit would have helped me. I noticed that I wasn't the only one who blew through it in a hurry, though.
There was pottery from Iran, displaying great craftsmanship and cultural significance yada yada.
There were some works by Frederick Hammersley which were supposed to be funny. Many of them had puns for titles. There was a picture of ASCII art called "YO YO WITH ENGLISH," and the art suggested the path of a yo-yo taking a circuitous route. I tried to guess how starved for humor the New Mexico art scene must be if they were coming to see this. I wondered what they would think of some of the canonical ASCII cow collections floating around.
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FR HAMMERSLEY YO YO WITH ENGLISH
(As reconstructed from a sketch by me. This isn't accurate, but captures the spirit.)
The Fine Arts museum did have one exhibit I liked, some photographs taken for a PR pamphlet for a local girl's school, many years back. They were pretty funny to look at now.
The Palace of the Governors contained local historical artifacts. There was old pottery and stirrups and stuff. I'd had my fill of Southwestern historical artifacts by this point.
I sat in the India Palace restaurant, waiting for my food, which would turn out to be pretty good. Directly in front of me was a statue of Ganesh, and I contemplated it for a while. Ganesh is god of obstacles. People contemplating a new venture try to make nice with Ganesh, hoping that he'll help them to overcome obstacles.
Me, I asked Ganesh to put a few obstacles in my path. I'd blown through a sizeable fraction of Santa Fe's museum space in an interval of two hours. There had been few obstacles--nothing to slow me down.
It occurred to me that one needed to have goals before obstacles could appear. After all, obstacles are things that interpose between one and one's goal. I needed a goal for my time in Santa Fe. Something to latch onto.
There really wasn't anything I wanted to do in Santa Fe, though.
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