The Wagon Master was inspired by a small watercolor I saw for sale at the San Antonio State Hospital. There is a little monthly thrift shop on the premises, Trinkets and Treasures. My friend (and actress with whom I often collaborate) Pam has taken to cajoling me out there as often as we both have open schedules. I rather liked the naivete of the work, as well as the sense that there was something, well, off. Anyway, I took a quick photo of the painting with my cell phone and moved along.

Later, the painting inspired a short vignette which made its way into Invocation. And around this time, Pam inquired if I might write something for Jump-Start’s 8 x 8. She wanted an eight minute monologue, to be presented during the first weekend of April, 2016. I decided to expand the Wagon Master piece, and change the gender of the narrator to female. Pam, of course, did a wonderful job performing the piece. But, also, she took it upon herself to return to Trinkets and Treasures (on a day when I was unavailable) and purchase the painting of the Wagon Master.

Below is a photo of the painting. And below that, the monologue itself.

 

 

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THE WAGON MASTER

[She sits on stage in front of an easel, painting on a small board which the audience can’t see.]

You really have a nice smile. I like painting men who smile. The mouth is easy, but I always have a hard time with the eyes. I’m getting better. Or so I like to think. The light’s nice in here. But I bet you wish we could be outside in the sunlight, right? I know I would. I think I can hear the birds singing right now.

[Pauses to listen.]

Who?

[Pauses.]

Oh. Yes, we still see each other. On occasion. But he never liked art. No passion for it. I remember this time we were at that little thrift shop over at the State Hospital. They open the gates, you know, once a month and sell donated items they didn’t need. Or, sometimes, the arts and craft items made by the patients. Little wooden backscratchers. Ceramic monkeys. Wallets. Fundraising I suppose. Everyone needs money these days.

I dragged him along, hinting that he might find some golf clubs or maybe a ratchet set. He didn’t seem too impressed with what was offered. But you never know what unexpected gems you might find at these places. I could wander all day, from room to room, table to table. There’s this subtle energy when you pick up a crocheted doily, and you can almost feel the pain of those aged and arthritic hands of someone’s grandmother working long into the night…and that great sense of pride she must have felt in the finished work. You should never dismiss commitment to craft.

I called his attention to a piece of art. He put down the salt and pepper shakers he’d been examining. I watched his eyes cross over the childish painting for maybe two seconds before he shook his head and turned away. I wondered if a patient had painted it. I enjoyed the naiveté of the little watercolor on pasteboard. So lively and vibrant! The image was of a crudely fashioned cowboy smoking a pipe. He was seated at a table playing poker, or whatever cowboys play. The piece was titled “The Wagon Master.” It was priced at three dollars. Not bad for original art. Right?

When we returned home, I hung it in the breakfast nook where we ate most of our meals. It wasn’t long before I noticed he had moved it to the opposite wall. I commended him on positioning it so that it got better light. He confessed that he moved the painting so he didn’t have to look at it. He explained that the cowboy looked like a serpent.

I laughed at that. “A serpent smoking a pipe? Playing cards? Really. Besides, he’s not a cowboy, he’s a wagon master.”

But now he had ruined it for me. No matter how the light hit it, I couldn’t help but see a snake, staring down at me. Every meal was fraught with a dull sense of dread. My morning coffee, which used to be the most comforting part of my day, was spent thinking: Is this what the artist saw? Every time he looked at a person? A snake glaring back at him? On the bus. At the bakery. Every smiling face on the television would stare back with those lifeless eyes of a cold-blooded predator.

“You’re coffee’s getting cold,” he said one day, walking in from the kitchen. When he kissed me on my neck, I turned up to him only to see slitted pupils and a forked tongue…well, for just a moment. I think I almost screamed. When he left for work, I hid the painting in the attic with the Christmas tree decorations. We never mentioned it again.

But it was too late. Those serpent eyes were well imprinted on my brain, and I was seeing them everywhere.

Please sit still. I’m working on detail. Well, not everywhere. If everyone suddenly had them I suppose I could just let snake eyes be the new normal. But, no. It seemed arbitrary. My hairdresser,  the entire staff at the deli, and my niece’s Pekinese were so obviously reptilian. And I couldn’t well look at my husband anymore. And you, well, you know how that turned out. Then there were the normal ones. Looked the same as before. My neighbor Louise, and I know well what she does to pay the bills. No saint there. Maybe the snaky ones were the good guys. Like the noble wagon master. It all got very confusing.

In retrospect, my husband was rather remiss to take me to the gun range that day. It must have been obvious even to him that I had been quite agitated for some time. And in all candor, I had been self-medicating ever since the snakes showed up.

Really, you’re fidgeting again. I’m trying to get the outlines of your features. Funny how a painting got me into all this mess. And now making little portraits like this is helping me get back. Well, that’s my plan at least. It’s rewarding to see myself progress from those early canvases of square houses in two dimension. A stick figure family on the lawn, waving. Up in the corner the smiling sun with spiky sunbeams. And now, well, who would have thought. I mean, right here, I’m layering in shadow to give your nose depth. I’m wanting to start on your lips, but they took away my red. I know it wasn’t you, but, still…. How irksome. Just because of my little fingerprinting experiment. You remember? Those decapitated boy scouts? I thought they’d appreciate a mural in the activity room. Personally I thought it so vigorous, with a good deal of action. Something to look at other than the television with the Home Shopping Network. I mean, I really managed to tell a story. And you know, I would like to work in large scale again. In fact—

[Pauses to listen.]

Oh. Oh, no. Is our time up so soon?

[Looks up. A new person has entered.]

You know, this always seems so silly. I can find my way back to my room on my own. But, okay, if I need an escort. And he is dressed so nicely…. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?

[Pauses.]

Good. It’s a date. I need to work more on the tail. Painting scales is so therapeutic. So soothing.

[She exits.]

This experimental travel film was my contribution to the April 1st, 2016 presentation of Jump-Start Performance Co.’s 8 x 8: Cabaret du Jump. It came out of a road trip I took with Laurie. We both were invited by our friends at Jump-Start to present pieces for their 8 x 8 anthology show, so our road trip was intended to provide the raw information to create a film (mine); a monologue (hers); and a two-person multimedia performance piece (ours).

My film, Up the 98th Meridian West: 8 Destinations, screened on April 1st, 2016. All of the images were shot on our Hill Country road trip. Also, the sound design includes many of the field recordings we made at various stops.

Laurie Dietrich and I have created a website for our current project, Invocation. It’s not a very innovative name, so we weren’t able to find a simple domain name. We went with invocationtheshow.com. It will be filled with all things connected to this project. We hope to stage it in the late summer or early fall. We are closing in on an agreement with a preferred venue, so we’re not quite ready to announce all the particulars. Keep an eye out for updates….

As is often the case, I have several creative projects going on concurrently, and in various stages of development. One of the more rewarding works of the moment is tentatively titled Invocation. It’s essentially a text collaboration with Laurie. We’re using images from each of our Instagram feeds as writing prompts. This early iteration is moving towards 30 short pieces each. It’s still purely an experiment. But it’s such great fun to write with someone else who can write fast and fearless. Best of all, because we stop every so often and read our stuff back to each other, I get to hear fresh work from someone whose work I love. The plan is to fashion this experiment into a cogent staged performance piece, generative in nature, and with audio and visual components.

Here are a couple of pieces I added recently (with the associated Instagram prompts).

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It sounded like metal cooling. That clicking noise. You know, like when you walk by a car with the engine still warm parked on the street. Tick. Tick. Tick. It came from above. One of the rooms upstairs. Maybe even the roof. Was there a metal roof on the building? I couldn’t remember. I thought it was tile, that red Spanish tile, curved like a section of a tube. I was sitting in a room on the third floor. It must have been a classroom. There was a chalkboard mounted to one of the walls, but nothing was written on it. Not even any chalk for me to write on it. A metal desk had been turned on it’s side. The two large and one small skinny drawers were missing. I was sitting on one of the two chairs in the room. They were blue plastic with steel legs. Maybe someone was tapping on a similar metal desk upstairs. I really wanted to think I was the only person in the entire building. I had climbed the fence surrounding the property and pushed my way in through a door almost completely rusted shut. The sun emerged from the clouds and I watched some ducks, high above, flying south in their tight formation. The entire window casement was missing and years of rain had warped the boards on that portion of the floor. I suppose anyone could have entered just as I had. And if someone were hiding out, the floor above, which would be the attic, would be a good place. Tick, tick, tick. Maybe there was a clock up there. But it would have to be the windup kind. I was pretty certain that the electricity was turned off. Wait. Another sound. Tires crunching leaves. And then the sound of a car door opening and then slamming. I walked to the window. A police car was parked in the curved drive below. A lone policeman stood on the pavement scanning the building. He saw me. I leaned out and cleared my throat. But I realized I had nothing to say. I turned and walked back to the chair and sat back down. Tick tick tick. Maybe it was an animal. Possums are always up to something. But they’re nocturnal, right? Squirrels? It seemed to have sped up, that noise. But maybe I was just slowing down.

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The shadows were sharp, well defined. I could count how many fingers I was holding out by their shadows on the ground. But, strange, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see the light source. It should be the sun. I mean, there was a lot of light. But I could see nothing above me but soft, diffused haze. I had been following my own shadow for hours, it seemed. It went all the way to the horizon, with my head too distant to be seen. But I could crouch down and move my hand over the sand, watching the shadow-play of my fingers there with the advancing dark lines thrown by smooth pebbles and odd bulbous plants which never grew higher than my ankles. So the sun should be directly behind me. I’d turn, but there was nothing but the same haze. I saw shadows pointing at me from the pebbles and plants I had just passed, but there was no indication of where the light came from. I set back on my course, following my shadow. And it was maybe an hour later—though I don’t know how I thought I was marking time—when I realized I was surrounded by little beetles, no bigger than my thumb, all heading in the same direction as myself. I now had to make sure not to step on them. There were thousands of them, but, as I was moving faster, I overtook them and was once again on my own. Eventually I came to an ocean. The shore was perpendicular to my path—my shadow—and extended as far as I could see to the right and the left. The water was infinite, and unmoving. A perfect sheet of liquid glass, with small mounds of sea foam moving occasionally in a breeze I could not feel. I sat down. The beetles caught up with me. They continued on their course, and when they entered the ocean, they began to swim with delicate movements of those tiny legs, their speed unhindered, and onward they journeyed. I sat there until all of them had passed by and had swam out of sight, and I was left on the shore all alone.

Though I’m no longer an active member of Jump-Start Performance Co.’s artistic company, I am still happy to help them celebrate with their annual Performance Party. This is their 31st anniversary. I’m not sure how many years I have contributed with a film or a performance. I think eight. And I’m sure I was in the audience several years before then. This year (2016) the theme was time. I thought I’d put together a quick time-lapse film, forgetting that there really isn’t a quick way to produce time lapse. I like wind, to whip the trees; I like low, fast moving clouds; I like dynamic change. But I was stymied by lackluster weather. Gray, cold, and torpid. My answer was to poach a few time lapse sequences I’d used in a previously produced film of mine. So, here is my offering to “It’s About Time: Performance Party 31.” I titled it “While You Were Napping.” No real reason. I just wanted to put in a title.

This is the fourth year I’ve made one of these little ephemeral films where I create essentially a slide show from my 2015 Instagram feed. I’ve cut this to “Chasing a Bee,” by Mercury Rev.  What makes me feel such a warm connection to these end of the year image collections is to be reminded how lucky I am to be surrounded by so many creative people who inspire me to engage in such a rewarding and playful manner with the world around me.

 

My friend and frequent collaborator Laurie Dietrich suggested that we create a piece for the 10th anniversary show at Bihl Haus Arts. The show was called Ten, and, as invited artists, we were given the same general guidelines as all the rest: provide an interpretation of “10,” whatever that might be. Laurie’s idea was to shoot ten images of her feet in various locations which, when presented together,  would convey the idea of a life’s journey, from birth to eventual death. We shot the opening birth scene with real blood on the bathroom floor of a colleague from the theater community. The final death scene with the foot in the sky was shot in a field adjacent to Mission San José. Other images were shot on Galveston Beach, the original Taco Cabana, the Hays Street Bridge, and various locations about town. The one other foot was provided by our friend, Michi Fink. The audio is of Laurie’s breath, mixed with a heartbeat lifted from some clip off archive.org. I most like that we took a jaunt out to Galveston for one still image. It turned out quite nice.

As part of the planning committee for Centro Cultural Aztlan’s 7th Annual Mole Throwdown fundraiser, I put together a short promotional video. I was a nice opportunity to take my camera out into the field and shoot some food. Two things I love!

My music composition here is the same as the previous posting. I decided to place it into a video with some time-lapse clips. One of the things I’ve enjoyed about time-lapse is that it reminds me of those years so long ago when I shot photos on film. You’d have a notion of what you had captured, but until you developed the film and made some prints, you’d not really know what the images would look like. With time-lapse on a DSLR you have a very good idea of what the individual frames look like (composition, lighting, etc.), but it’s that motion part that remains elusive until you process the sequence. It can be completely different than your expectations (well, it is for me at the moment, partially because I’m relatively new at this).

The biggest downside is the tedium. I try and remember to bring a book along. Often I plan on hitting at least four locations, shooting for 30 minutes to an hour each. The plan usually is modified to three stops because I’m tired of sitting on my ass, brushing away ants, and listening to that shutter click away 500 to 900 times. I’m currently enamored by slow shutter work, one to two seconds per exposure. It’s nice to blur people, cars, flowing water, foliage in the wind, but it means stacking a whole series of filters to subdue the sunlight. The train crossing the bridge in this piece is perfect, adding a ghostly and insubstantial air, as ephemeral as the clouds. Most of the clips were shot on the southside of San Antonio. Two were downtown. And two were shot at a favorite campsite of mine on the northwestern shore of  Amistad Reservoir.

I am very cognizant of the frame as far as the composition goes; however, I often forget to allow for the native 3:2 aspect ratio of the camera when in still mode. In some of these clips I have deformed the image by stretching it instead of cropping. I really need to remember to plan for the 16:9 presentation. I’m editing in After Effects because of the wonderful tools available to work with the raw files from my Canon 7D.

The title is from Shakespeare, from a line spoken by Ophelia to Hamlet. It’s not terribly relevant here, but I’ve always enjoyed its cadence and drowsy melancholy.

Another track cobbled together with crowd-sourced audio clips provided through the Reddit Play-It-Forward experiment. I wanted something slow, sludgy, and dark. I’ll probably put together a short abstract film to go with this in a week or so.

One of the contributors to the Play-It-Forward had posted quite a few samples created with a bathtub. They were presented as sounds to be used in a drum rack. From listening to the sounds, I assume he or she had used an old style cast iron tub. The sounds all had this wonderful depth and reverberation falloff. I love to use these real world sounds for percussive beats. I noticed that they all were in mono. I rather liked the richness of stereo recording I had done with similar “drum” sounds, because of their added complexity. Now, somewhere along the way, I’m pretty sure I encountered a tutorial from someone much smarter than I who recommended that drum samples be recorded in mono. Nonetheless, I wanted each element to have a wider spread. Luckily I had recently agreed to beta-test a Max for Live plugin which emulates stereo. It’s a subtle addition, but I like it.

It can be quite liberating to work with limited parameters. In this case the limitation is the sound sources. But what you do to them is completely open. As are other elements such as the length of the finished piece, tempo, time signature, what portions of the clips you decide to use, whether you might want to reverse the samples, or perhaps throw them through an audio effect, and so on.

It serves me because there is an imposed deadline, and, also, it’s helping me to better learn some of these audio tools (hardware and software) cluttering up my desk.