It takes a lot of effort to keep a working ranch like Deep End functioning as a productive farm and site for all your work. I am going to ask you all to take part in ‘a day being a labourer’ on the ranch, all this involves is a day of your time to work alongside Gerardo and me. Following your day, I would like you to write a short piece of text describing the work you have done and how you would feel doing the job day in day out, like many farm labours do.
These are not the jobs you dream about while you are at school, they are not taught at universities, people that do not know you are not going to look up to you for doing these jobs and say ‘you have done well for yourself’. Most of what is done to keep these farms running is boring, repetitive hard work. And the only reason people do this work is not for love but for money, to survive. But if it was not for these labourers, places like Deep End would not be able to function.
My project is the time you spend working, the work itself, how you feel about it and the text that comes out of it. My project depends on the collaboration of the artists involved. The text responses will form a piece that will be displayed outside “the shop” on the 17th May.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Land Slide Cloister
LAND
SLIDE
CLOISTER
Working idea for the Deep End Ranch project,
Connecting the failed ranch Skriðuklaustur, Iceland to the Deep End Ranch
As previously mentioned in the Reality letter about reality and naked women and or couples and how it relates to the idea of failed dreams, dreamt by city folk who venture into the country to live out their fantasy, I´ve been interested in drawing a parallel between the two ranches in separate corners of the world. I´m still thinking over the best way to go about it and there are several projects I am doing (some might shrink, disappear and produce new babies).
1)In the kitchen window at the Deep End Ranch, placing a TV playing a still shot of the view from Skriðuklaustur. Voicing over the silent room in which the video was originally shot, I´ll read a section from the writer who built the ranch, as he contemplates on the farm in one of his pieces.
2)For a show at Skriðuklaustur (direct translation Land Slide Cloister) this summer (a group show of folk, outsider, contemporary, non and every other kind of artist that the director is contacting, its not a professionally organized thing and is very misch-masch) I will send a picture of the Deep End Ranch. The show in the Iceland Ranch is supposed to be only photographs, drawings or paintings of the house at Skriðuklaustur.
3)Sound piece at the hot-tub at Deep End ranch. A vocal piece, conversation, monologue or dialogue, still needs to be decided, about public nudity and communal bathing.
(this might be edited out, but at the moment i´m doing a piece which will be carried out at the olympic swimming pool in Reykjavik, its a blurp-based sound piece, spoken through loudspeakers directed at the hot tubs, by life guards from a guarding tower in the pool, and will reflect on the issue of communal bathing and the idea of public nudity.)
SITE, SIDE, SIGHT
The site specificity of these projects is based on the idea of connecting two linked sites. Establishing a link that would not otherwise excist. The idea of placing the video of the view from the writers ranch kitchen to the artists ranch in California and dubbing it with a translated text about home and identity talks to the process of settlement, attempts to establish a place.
A extract from one of the possible texts,
"one are the years when I was young and still innocent except for original sin . . . the years when adventures brought me experience without bitterness . . . the years when my sympathy with all things living was uncritical and intense . . . when God seemed to me a generous, friendly grandfather, the Devil a rather dangerous and moody but, on the whole, essentially stupid and harmless godfather . . . the years when light was triumphant indeed, and all evil, all fear, could be turned aside by an Our Father or the sign of the cross . . . the years when in the morning I could but dimly foresee the evening, and sat safely in the shelter of a wall of sods playing with straw . . . these indeed are the years that will never return.
And it is not only the years that have passed. Many of those then living are now dead, others scattered to the winds; even their memory only peeps out intermittently, like stars between the breaks in a cloud-covered sky."
SLIDE
CLOISTER
Working idea for the Deep End Ranch project,
Connecting the failed ranch Skriðuklaustur, Iceland to the Deep End Ranch
As previously mentioned in the Reality letter about reality and naked women and or couples and how it relates to the idea of failed dreams, dreamt by city folk who venture into the country to live out their fantasy, I´ve been interested in drawing a parallel between the two ranches in separate corners of the world. I´m still thinking over the best way to go about it and there are several projects I am doing (some might shrink, disappear and produce new babies).
1)In the kitchen window at the Deep End Ranch, placing a TV playing a still shot of the view from Skriðuklaustur. Voicing over the silent room in which the video was originally shot, I´ll read a section from the writer who built the ranch, as he contemplates on the farm in one of his pieces.
2)For a show at Skriðuklaustur (direct translation Land Slide Cloister) this summer (a group show of folk, outsider, contemporary, non and every other kind of artist that the director is contacting, its not a professionally organized thing and is very misch-masch) I will send a picture of the Deep End Ranch. The show in the Iceland Ranch is supposed to be only photographs, drawings or paintings of the house at Skriðuklaustur.
3)Sound piece at the hot-tub at Deep End ranch. A vocal piece, conversation, monologue or dialogue, still needs to be decided, about public nudity and communal bathing.
(this might be edited out, but at the moment i´m doing a piece which will be carried out at the olympic swimming pool in Reykjavik, its a blurp-based sound piece, spoken through loudspeakers directed at the hot tubs, by life guards from a guarding tower in the pool, and will reflect on the issue of communal bathing and the idea of public nudity.)
SITE, SIDE, SIGHT
The site specificity of these projects is based on the idea of connecting two linked sites. Establishing a link that would not otherwise excist. The idea of placing the video of the view from the writers ranch kitchen to the artists ranch in California and dubbing it with a translated text about home and identity talks to the process of settlement, attempts to establish a place.
A extract from one of the possible texts,
"one are the years when I was young and still innocent except for original sin . . . the years when adventures brought me experience without bitterness . . . the years when my sympathy with all things living was uncritical and intense . . . when God seemed to me a generous, friendly grandfather, the Devil a rather dangerous and moody but, on the whole, essentially stupid and harmless godfather . . . the years when light was triumphant indeed, and all evil, all fear, could be turned aside by an Our Father or the sign of the cross . . . the years when in the morning I could but dimly foresee the evening, and sat safely in the shelter of a wall of sods playing with straw . . . these indeed are the years that will never return.
And it is not only the years that have passed. Many of those then living are now dead, others scattered to the winds; even their memory only peeps out intermittently, like stars between the breaks in a cloud-covered sky."
How The West Was Won
PROPOSAL FOR SITE WORK: How The West Was Won
Site: Outside Barn, Deep End Ranch
Funded by Interdisciplinary Grant
Addressing cultural miscegenation as it relates to the myth of the West and its misgivings, a series of collage animations will be produced in collaboration with animation artist and filmmaker Rhys Ernst (MFA1, Film/ Video). Together, using our different practices, we are seeking to bring ideas of deformation and hybridization to problematize the ideal space of both agricultural and cultural aesthetics as they relate to sexuality, labor, and the iconographic. The looping animation piece, initially shot upon my chest, will then be projected upon my back during a live-action performance piece to take place outside the barn the night of May 17, 2009 at the Deep End Ranch. The work attempts to respond to the negation of race, labor, and sexuality within the workings of the agricultural industry, which we take to be emblematic of the so-called nature-culture divide that prioritizes the ideal versus the hybrid and the deformed, and subjugates the labor that upholds it. Our work attempts to re-embed these issues into the landscape and architecture to bring forth a self-consciousness that might yield a new identity for the Deep End Ranch.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Golden Lemons of Baron Apthous Von Canker
The first part of our project would be a map of the ranch detailing the role of the ranch in
the history of the golden lemon. On the map significant spots would be marked out and at the corresponding spots on the ranch historical recreations would illustrate the significance of that spot.
Our fictional lemon time line goes something like this:
-1849, California lemon industry takes off when lemons are brought in as a treatment for gold miners suffering from scurvy.
-Gold/lemon grafting is accidently discovered when a miner attempts to hide his stash of gold by sewing it inside of lemons. This leads to more formal experiments in grafting.
-In what comes to be a specialized process of lemon and gold grafting, permutations that affect the skin, seeds and flesh meat of the lemon occur. The possibility of the ranch as a place to process the gold through the lemon hybridization process is considered.
-1850 The lemon money commodity. The ranch becomes the site of an experimental gold/lemon mint founded by Baron Apthous Von Canker. By minting the gold in California miners and mining companies were saved the long and treacherous trip to the U.S. mint in Philadelphia, Further, the lemon/golds minting process was far more difficult to counterfiet than the crude industrially produced coins of conventional minting processes. It didn't hurt that Von Canker was involved in developing early forms of hydraulic mining.
-At the height of its success Von Canker installs a hot air balloon lemon slice with golden seeds above the mint for promotional purposes. This ominous symbol becomes more dramatic still as it marks a reversal in the fortunes of the mint and the downfall of the golden lemon.
-Fall of the lemon. Sour business deals lead to a boycotting of the Von Canker mint by area mining companies. There is also an a federal investigation based on suspicion that there is not enough gold in Von Canker's coins. Improvements in minting technology make the golden lemon less appealing to investors and Von Canker falls into bankruptcy. The ranch is sold at auction.
Some Notes on Site Specificity:
If the phenomenological approach to site specificity emphasizes the body, and the social/institutional approach emphasizes the mind, our approach emphasizes the imagination. This project is an experiment in allowing the imagination to run amok in a specific site with a specific materiality and a specific history. This project is not a controlled illumination of any aspect of the site but an attempt to disturb the way the site signifies through narrative. It is a strategy of play. In some ways it is analogous to the way myths are generated in advertisements.
Fictional associations endow the orange with meaning which increases the value of the orange juice. We buy an idea of family, of nourishment, of purity, of nature, the juice is merely the bearer of these ideas (as money is merely a piece of paper that serves as a bearer of value).
Our idea is that these myths, motivated by profit, need to be countered by other myths which disturb these disturbing processes of signification and this instrumental use of the imagination. This strategy approaches the ranch as a site for the generation of meaning.
the history of the golden lemon. On the map significant spots would be marked out and at the corresponding spots on the ranch historical recreations would illustrate the significance of that spot.
Our fictional lemon time line goes something like this:
-1849, California lemon industry takes off when lemons are brought in as a treatment for gold miners suffering from scurvy.
-Gold/lemon grafting is accidently discovered when a miner attempts to hide his stash of gold by sewing it inside of lemons. This leads to more formal experiments in grafting.
-In what comes to be a specialized process of lemon and gold grafting, permutations that affect the skin, seeds and flesh meat of the lemon occur. The possibility of the ranch as a place to process the gold through the lemon hybridization process is considered.
-1850 The lemon money commodity. The ranch becomes the site of an experimental gold/lemon mint founded by Baron Apthous Von Canker. By minting the gold in California miners and mining companies were saved the long and treacherous trip to the U.S. mint in Philadelphia, Further, the lemon/golds minting process was far more difficult to counterfiet than the crude industrially produced coins of conventional minting processes. It didn't hurt that Von Canker was involved in developing early forms of hydraulic mining.
-At the height of its success Von Canker installs a hot air balloon lemon slice with golden seeds above the mint for promotional purposes. This ominous symbol becomes more dramatic still as it marks a reversal in the fortunes of the mint and the downfall of the golden lemon.
-Fall of the lemon. Sour business deals lead to a boycotting of the Von Canker mint by area mining companies. There is also an a federal investigation based on suspicion that there is not enough gold in Von Canker's coins. Improvements in minting technology make the golden lemon less appealing to investors and Von Canker falls into bankruptcy. The ranch is sold at auction.
Some Notes on Site Specificity:
If the phenomenological approach to site specificity emphasizes the body, and the social/institutional approach emphasizes the mind, our approach emphasizes the imagination. This project is an experiment in allowing the imagination to run amok in a specific site with a specific materiality and a specific history. This project is not a controlled illumination of any aspect of the site but an attempt to disturb the way the site signifies through narrative. It is a strategy of play. In some ways it is analogous to the way myths are generated in advertisements.
Fictional associations endow the orange with meaning which increases the value of the orange juice. We buy an idea of family, of nourishment, of purity, of nature, the juice is merely the bearer of these ideas (as money is merely a piece of paper that serves as a bearer of value).Our idea is that these myths, motivated by profit, need to be countered by other myths which disturb these disturbing processes of signification and this instrumental use of the imagination. This strategy approaches the ranch as a site for the generation of meaning.
The Hidden History of the Ranch Exposed by a Psychic
On Sunday 3rd May, a psychic and automatic writer are coming to the ranch to ‘psychic profile’ the ranch. I will show them around and they will prepare and set up and then I shall video both the writing and the psychic. I intend to turn this in to a sound piece using the audio of the psychic. I would like to set up the sound piece in the front room (dining room) of the empty residency house, with speakers in the corners above eye-level. I will film the text being written by the automatic writer and this could be a soundless accompanying piece displayed on a television in the front too. I’m interested to see what the footage looks like, and what the automatic writing looks like. Maybe I could do something with the text – either just presenting in the room or photocopying as a take-away.
I’m interested in thinking through my collaboration with the psychic beyond the class. I’d like to use the material in the future, but it is obviously very specific to the ranch and therefore suits a site-specific outcome. But I want to think about using the material in different ways – I’m thinking, what happens to site-specific work when the site is not present physically in the work? Can the material be reworked?
A second idea I’ve been thinking about, may not be practically possible to do before the 17th, (but if I can, I’ll give it ago). Below our house, in the tack room, is a poster advertising the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim last year. It features one of Prince’s appropriated ‘Malboro Men’. I would like to take a photograph of Gerardo practicing for the up-coming rodeo season and get this printed as a poster at Kinko’s and pin this near the Prince poster. It’s a small thought, but perhaps placing a poster of Gerardo, the authentic article (who, by the way, smokes Marlboro Lights) next to the Prince piece will both illuminate some of the ideas Prince is interested in around constructed identities in advertising, and perhaps make Gerardo smile.
Unsuccessful Grafting
In an age which, despite cultural self-labels such as “progressive” or “advanced,” there exists a fiery political debate around stem-cell research, one is reminded again and again of the sacredness we humans reserve for that which we all share, our bodies. This sacredness of human flesh manifests itself through the curious act of “setting apart,” reserving as different or special that which objectively seems to be made of exactly the same biological materials and behave in many similar ways to other bodies that inhabit this earth. Setting the human body apart is also curious because other “non-human-body” biological manipulations are often carried out without nearly the same amount of controversy or anxiety.
Surely cultural narrative plays a large part in the privileging of human consciousness. Within the context of Christianity we read in Genesis that “God created man in his own image,” and then told his human creatures to “fill the earth and subdue it[,] rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air [and] every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 1:27-29). In this very influential Western narrative, humans are set apart at the beginning as the rulers over the rest of life. This mindset persists.
One of the oldest examples of human subjugation over plant life is grafting, a practice which has been around for thousands of years (at least before 2000 B.C.E. in China). Grafting is simply a method of asexual plant propagation, where tissue from one plant is fused with tissue from another plant. In a book about grafting which David kindly lent me is a caption to a photograph of a successful graft: “EACH COMPONENT RETAINS ITS IDENTITY.” It goes on to specify that even different bark textures of the English and Black Walnut trees do not “intermingle;” they keep their distinct and unique characteristics. This is certainly the modernist dream of dominion over the landscape at its most confident. I think of the phrase, “have your cake and eat it too,” or “the best of both worlds.”
Behind the idea of grafting is the larger idea of hybridity, and with this term comes mostly positive connotations. A hybrid is an improvement, it is an accelerated evolutionary jump, it denotes progress and forward movement. It brings to mind current trends involving “hybrid” cars and the fashionable implications this has for the image of the hybrid owner as ecologically conscious. We could think of the word hybrid as often involving positive human manipulation, as opposed to the word mutation, which carries negative inferences that are not directly willed by humans and frequently equals biological life run amuck.
The gesture of grafting involves human choice in the selection of traits which are either desirable or unwanted. It operates under the presupposition that the human creature knows what is best for all biological life (again, the Genesis establishment of human rule) and that the choices that humans make move life progressively forward (more resilient plants to withstand climate shifts, a type of avocado which is sellable on the market). We now understand that there are a multitude of choices made by humans throughout history (most noticeably within the last 100 years because of the scale of environmental damage) that do not involve progress at all, but actually designate a danger to all life on the planet.
In light of human failure, several key questions arise: Do human beings have the right to manipulate biological life in anyway? Is it possible to accurately predict whether choices will have positive effects over long stretches of time? How much time is required to know whether the changes are positive or negative? Who decides what are positive or negative changes?
When I think of grafting, I think of other human attempts to bring together two seemingly separate biological entities. One of these is the human need for habitat, for shelter. With some imagination and a slight shift of perspective one could view current housing developments as an extremely unsuccessful “graft” of human beings to the land that they occupy. Levels of consumption, unsustainabilty, dependence on outside systems for basic needs, and the decentralized nature of new housing developments – these are just a few of the reasons the graft is unsuccessful.
My project, as occupying the same space as a ranch undergoing a major grafting project, and within the larger community surrounding Santa Paula (which with the rest of southern California has seen unprecedented housing growth prior to 2008) seeks to ask questions about the manipulation and utilization of organic matter for human purposes. These could be questions surrounding the hybridization of biological forms, such as grafting, or the development of land for building human habitation.
Some key questions, to end: Does human development of the land form a kind of hybrid in which “each component retains its identity,” as the book on grafting suggests, or does this hybrid become something new and entirely different, something which moves the “progression” of life into uncharted biological territories? Do we want to go to these places? Do we have a choice?
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Horse Therapy (?)
All this pulled from article here
"He would just stare off into space," Isaacson said. "I was worried it was going to get progressively worse and that eventually, he might float away from us entirely. Luckily, right about that time is when he met Betsy."
...
...a horse's movements can be powerful. For some autistic children, riding too long can overstimulate their nervous system, leading to more erratic behavior.
...
Isaacson says he couldn't help but wonder what would happen if he were to give Rowan a longer exposure to the two things that he seemed to have responded well to: horses and shamans.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Mapping...
Four Corners misses the mark
Tourists who think they're putting a hand or foot in each of four states at the Four Corners area are apparently missing the mark -- by about 2.5 miles.
National Geodetic Survey officials say the Four Corners marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is about 2.5 miles west of the real spot.
The only place in the United States where four state boundaries come together was first plotted -- inaccurately, as it turns out -- by the government in 1868 during the initial survey of Colorado's southern border.
-- times wire reports
Tourists who think they're putting a hand or foot in each of four states at the Four Corners area are apparently missing the mark -- by about 2.5 miles.
National Geodetic Survey officials say the Four Corners marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is about 2.5 miles west of the real spot.
The only place in the United States where four state boundaries come together was first plotted -- inaccurately, as it turns out -- by the government in 1868 during the initial survey of Colorado's southern border.
-- times wire reports
After Bjarki's post:
»Versions«
2009 by Oliver Laric.
(Note: definatly not work safe.)
-> reality and google: Multiverse theory, net/media as site, and reality as defined via google search.
Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.
July/August 2008, the Atlantic
->The net and the plasticity of the human mind.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Lemon Computer + Who makes the results?
Saw this post a while back and thought the project seemed interesting (?), at least for someone/somefarm with lots and lots of fruit... the possibility of using the chemical reactions/electricity in fruits as a computer.... more here.
Also, in response to Bjarki's lovely post... you remarked (and used) the power (death grip?) of google for the image search, bringing up some interesting image results, I have been reading a bit of this essay/article thing here and here, (and here) and although I haven't really digested all of it, (and sometimes it goes into nutty zones) the author(s) bring up interesting points about Google and its use of its own technology in creating its own forms or the basis for its authority...
"That is why PageRank[TM], which, as we have seen, is not merely an algorithm, becomes the cultural prism through which Google intends us to analyse everything. In a certain sense, what we witness, is an enforced extension of the peer review system - which works all right within the academic system - to the whole gamut of human knowledge."
This all may be a little off topic... but I think it relates to the kind of cultural capital/producers etc. discussion that sort of comes up in Miwon Kwon's book... and also, it should be noted, the 'blog' that we are using is a part of the Google system (bought by google in 2003), requires a google account to use.... etc. But the content is still ours, right?....
"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Picasa Web Albums, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, distribute and publish such Content"... from terms of service
*Lemon farming and or in the Tundra
Thoughts about reality and raunveruleiki.
THE FIRST IMAGE search on “reality” that comes up through Google is a b/w picture of two girls in white underwear kissing, as what seems to be a print on a douve on a bed. Hitting up the Icelandic word “raunveruleiki” Google finds a picture of two supposedly hetero teenagers kissing in front of a tomato bush.
THE WORD “veruleiki” has the same meaning as “raunveruleiki” but is detached from the idea of trial, sorrow or action implied through the front-attached word “raun”. The first image brought up by the search is a b/w picture of a naked person stretching out the hand of his/her palm towards a vague image of a person in front.
SORROW, trial or a action that demands endurance, “raun”. The search brings up a b/w picture of a woman stretching towards a camera, dressed lightly, on a mattress, which is laid on the floor.
VERU, vera, a being. A picture of a painting of a woman sitting naked on a chair holding her long blond hair. Fifth in the row is the search result of the word “veru” which is an abbriviation of “vera” and connects RAUN to LEIKI.
GAMES, PLAYING, PLAYED. Leiki means being, a “ness”. Lightness; Léttleiki. Apparently “leiki” is also a Finnish word, cause the first image is the only one which doesn´t show a human conducting some form of an erotic gesture, but a the mother character in the Finnish moomin-elf caratoon I grew up watching, but fearfully so.
LEMON FARMING AND REALITY, FAILED AGRICULTURE LEADS TO ARTIST RESIDENCY PROGRAMS
The Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson built a large ranch, Skri›uklaustur, in Eastern Iceland in 1940, while celebrating a successful carreer in Scandinavia and Germany. His farmstead was built after drawings by one of Hitler´s main architects, creating a semi-replica of the Fuhrer´s Eagle Nest summer residency in the mountains of Austria. Gunnar was printed in the 3rd Reich but later refused ideological ties with the regime (surprise?) Completed in the first years of the 40´s, Gunnarsson´s ranch failed instantly, due to its remoteness, its lack of usable land, and due to changing demographics in the countryside which was being drained of people who, in growing numbers, were seeking new opportunities in the small capital city, Reykjavik, which was booming with war profits from the continental miseries it almost altogether missed (perhaps a surprise). According to local folklore Gunnarsson´s staff left him during the night when he took his ill wife to the hospital in a nearby township. The ranch deprecated quickly and the writer left before 1950. The idea of life in the country had failed, the Nazi´s had lost, the Eagle Nest became a museum, the wife died and the writer built a modernist villa in the capital city which was quickly spending its war profits on unsustainable infrastructure and its Marshall Aid on big boats.
So, reality. As I stayed in residency at the ranch in January 2008, alone in the stone mansion built to replicate a Romantic castle in central Europe it dawned on me that the place was an emblem of Gunnarsson´s idea of reality, one that had no relationship to current trends, other than his desire.
Some 50 years later a literary institution has taken his house into its possession, a place devoted to research on literature and a safe-heaven for visual artists who need some of that fresh mountain air, far away from the city, far away from people who´d want to work the fields that aren´t big enough to be worked anyways.
So, reality. I Google´d “reality”, “raunveruleiki”, “veruleiki”, “raun”, “veru” and “leiki” taking the first image that came up through each image search. Most of my initial research now happens through Google, using it is a dictionary, a index. A sobering a maybe a problematic thing though is to look up reality and see what an abstraction it is. I don´t know, -reality, a blanket with girls in underwear printed on it. What compels me to make sense of the search, and combination of the words in these two separate languages is the relationship between the material in the images. I´m sure I´ve contributed to reality by making the connection.
I do wonder if failed farming leads to interesting artist residencies. I´ve got two examples of it in reality and I´m sure that there are no pictures of girls in white underwear kissing on the bedsheets of neither of them. At least I don´t desire there to be.
*oh my god, what is this language play? lets have it;
1)reality; raunveruleiki.
2)raunveruleiki; reality.
3)veruleiki; reality, a condition (also raunveruleiki). "þetta varð að veruleika!":"it happened!" differentiates with "raunveruleiki" due to lack of trial ("raun").
4)raun; challange, sorrow, trial, something to endure.
5)veru; an abbreviation of "vera":a being, "mannvera":a humanbeing.
6)leiki: an abreviation of "leikur": game but refers to being of something, a "ness". léttleiki:lightness.
APRIL 2009
BJARKI BRAGASON
"safe food" - wildlife must go...
Wildlife found to be unlikely E. coli culprits
Al Seib / Los Angeles Times
Christopher J. Rose, an environmental scientist with the Central Coast Water Board, retrieves swabs put in Gabilan Creek to test for E. coli after three people died.
Two years of testing show that wild animals are not 'Typhoid Marys,' California biologist says.
After wild pigs were linked to the deadly E. coli outbreak in California spinach nearly three years ago, Central Coast growers started shooting and poisoning wildlife.
Workers on one large farm killed 33 deer in a single year. Farmers poisoned ponds to get rid of frogs, ripped out trees and bushes and erected miles of expensive fencing.
Workers on one large farm killed 33 deer in a single year. Farmers poisoned ponds to get rid of frogs, ripped out trees and bushes and erected miles of expensive fencing.
But two years of testing wild animals and birds in the region suggests that only a small fraction actually carry the strain of Escherichia coli responsible for the contamination.
The results, released by the state Department of Fish and Game this week, "show that wildlife are not the Typhoid Marys some people think they are and some of the extreme measures are not necessary," said state wildlife biologist Terry Palmisano.
As part of an ongoing study of the pathogen, researchers collected samples from 866 animals, including 311 black-tailed deer, 184 feral pigs, 73 birds, 61 rabbits, 58 tule elk, squirrels, mice, skunks and coyotes.
The results, released by the state Department of Fish and Game this week, "show that wildlife are not the Typhoid Marys some people think they are and some of the extreme measures are not necessary," said state wildlife biologist Terry Palmisano.
As part of an ongoing study of the pathogen, researchers collected samples from 866 animals, including 311 black-tailed deer, 184 feral pigs, 73 birds, 61 rabbits, 58 tule elk, squirrels, mice, skunks and coyotes.
Only four -- from a pig, a coyote and two elk -- tested positive for the lethal bacterium,E. coli 0157:H7. That is slightly less than half of 1%.
Three people, including a toddler, died in the spinach outbreak in the late summer of 2006. Federal authorities estimated that several thousand people were sickened across the country.
The contamination was traced to spinach grown on a cattle ranch east of Salinas. Although the precise source was never determined, the virulent E. coli was found in river water as well as in feces from cattle and wild pigs on the ranch.
The produce industry later adopted a voluntary set of standards for growing and handling leafy greens that amounted to a big "Keep Out" sign for any wildlife considered potential carriers of E. coli 0157:H7.
Big produce buyers also struck their own safety agreements with farmers, calling for even more precautions.
Requests jumped for state depredation permits allowing farmers to shoot wildlife damaging their crops. Growers who might otherwise have tolerated a deer browsing some lettuce shot the animals, fearing they couldn't sell a crop if safety auditors found droppings or tracks in a field.
"The buyers don't want even mice getting close," Palmisano said.
Baited PVC pipes with traps are a common sight along the edge of fields. Much of the Salinas River has been fenced. Grass along irrigation and runoff ditches has been dug up, leaving wide strips of bare ground.
"Folks are having to do stuff they don't want to do in order to sell their crop," said Paul Robins, executive director of the Monterey County Resource Conservation District.
In a 2007 survey by the district, one grower reported he had lost $17,500 worth of a crop because there were deer tracks in a field. A harvest was stopped when frogs and tadpoles were found in a creek.
The district's program director, Melanie Beretti, said farmers are resisting anti-erosion and water quality projects that involve vegetation that could attract wildlife.
She cited a strawberry grower who wanted to plant a hedgerow next to a long ditch. He dropped the idea because another farmer sometimes grew leafy greens in the field and couldn't plant within 50 feet of the shrubs.
Hank Giclas, vice president of the Western Growers Assn., said farmers are caught in a bind between satisfying wholesalers' demands and conservation practices.
"We're very supportive" of the E. coli study, he added. "We want to fundamentally understand where the risks are -- and are not -- and have designs that minimize the risk with the least negative impact on the environment in which people farm."
But he said his group, which helped draw up the voluntary standards, would wait until the research was finished before taking any action on the guidelines. In the meantime, an effort is underway to expand the safety program nationally.
The E. coli testing is part of a broader investigation by government and university scientists that will sample livestock, water and soil. More wildlife will also be tested.
"You can't make the interpretation yet that there is not a problem with wildlife," said Robert Mandrell, the lead researcher and a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "But so far the data don't indicate there is a major red flag here."
For the survey, fish and game workers collected fecal samples from freshly killed deer and live animals and birds that were trapped and released. One technique is to place birds in a brown paper bag to collect droppings. But for the most part, fish and game spokesman Harry Morse said, "gloves and little bitty jars" are used.
bettina.boxall@latimes.com
Three people, including a toddler, died in the spinach outbreak in the late summer of 2006. Federal authorities estimated that several thousand people were sickened across the country.
The contamination was traced to spinach grown on a cattle ranch east of Salinas. Although the precise source was never determined, the virulent E. coli was found in river water as well as in feces from cattle and wild pigs on the ranch.
The produce industry later adopted a voluntary set of standards for growing and handling leafy greens that amounted to a big "Keep Out" sign for any wildlife considered potential carriers of E. coli 0157:H7.
Big produce buyers also struck their own safety agreements with farmers, calling for even more precautions.
Requests jumped for state depredation permits allowing farmers to shoot wildlife damaging their crops. Growers who might otherwise have tolerated a deer browsing some lettuce shot the animals, fearing they couldn't sell a crop if safety auditors found droppings or tracks in a field.
"The buyers don't want even mice getting close," Palmisano said.
Baited PVC pipes with traps are a common sight along the edge of fields. Much of the Salinas River has been fenced. Grass along irrigation and runoff ditches has been dug up, leaving wide strips of bare ground.
"Folks are having to do stuff they don't want to do in order to sell their crop," said Paul Robins, executive director of the Monterey County Resource Conservation District.
In a 2007 survey by the district, one grower reported he had lost $17,500 worth of a crop because there were deer tracks in a field. A harvest was stopped when frogs and tadpoles were found in a creek.
The district's program director, Melanie Beretti, said farmers are resisting anti-erosion and water quality projects that involve vegetation that could attract wildlife.
She cited a strawberry grower who wanted to plant a hedgerow next to a long ditch. He dropped the idea because another farmer sometimes grew leafy greens in the field and couldn't plant within 50 feet of the shrubs.
Hank Giclas, vice president of the Western Growers Assn., said farmers are caught in a bind between satisfying wholesalers' demands and conservation practices.
"We're very supportive" of the E. coli study, he added. "We want to fundamentally understand where the risks are -- and are not -- and have designs that minimize the risk with the least negative impact on the environment in which people farm."
But he said his group, which helped draw up the voluntary standards, would wait until the research was finished before taking any action on the guidelines. In the meantime, an effort is underway to expand the safety program nationally.
The E. coli testing is part of a broader investigation by government and university scientists that will sample livestock, water and soil. More wildlife will also be tested.
"You can't make the interpretation yet that there is not a problem with wildlife," said Robert Mandrell, the lead researcher and a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "But so far the data don't indicate there is a major red flag here."
For the survey, fish and game workers collected fecal samples from freshly killed deer and live animals and birds that were trapped and released. One technique is to place birds in a brown paper bag to collect droppings. But for the most part, fish and game spokesman Harry Morse said, "gloves and little bitty jars" are used.
bettina.boxall@latimes.com
"Wicked Plants"
A forthcoming book cronicles poisonous and invasive plants, and a not too subtle nod toward general nature paranoia?
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-wicked11-2009apr11,0,741600.story
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-wicked11-2009apr11,0,741600.story
Portraits
Here are some photographs taken on the ranch several weeks ago... It was pensive time then, I think. We were surveying the ranch that day.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Honeybee Population in Danger Mystery
Understand what we can't understand? Here's a link to a project about the honeybee death crisis:
http://www.aids-3d.com/populationcollapse.html
http://www.aids-3d.com/populationcollapse.html
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Chamber of Commerce weather
Chamber of Commerce Weather
Ellen Birrell
I had no idea about Chamber of Commerce weather until we bought the farm. Today is April fool’s day, 2007, and the land around me as I write this is lush and lustrous with radiant light, fragrant with orange blossom and jasmine. Spring, here in the rural hinterlands north of Los Angeles, is a feeling every morning that the world is created brand new, filled with the positive presence of being-here-now. There is no memory in this, just a busy happy energy. It is Chamber of Commerce weather, good for picnics, postcards and realtor’s open houses, not great for farming if it goes on too long.
Last winter was, by any local account, exceedingly odd. It featured the lowest rainfall on record and the worst freeze in over twenty years. January, usually a wet month, just brought bitter cold: five nights of temperatures well below freezing. On our farm, the lemon orchard on the west end got hit worst. It is a leaf shaped plain, some of our lowest lying land.
When I moved out here, the layout of the west end orchard immediately struck me as eccentric. Orchards are planted in efficient parallel lines overlaying whatever terrain is arable. In that they are like planned communities: order uber alles. Here, almost all of our orchard acreage is laid out parallel to the river that marks our northwest boundary. But on the west end, the orchard lines have been rotated to a jaunty and seemingly arbitrary diagonal across the plain. Now, if you’re going to the trouble of imposing some sort of parallel order on an organic landscape, why would you rotate the rows in one area differently? Some past steward of this land exercised plumb line logic only to a point, and then decided that she liked the straight lines of the orchard better turned just so? How very odd. At least that’s what I thought until the freeze.
Liking it just so. That’s the kind of landscape thinking I associate with Saturday afternoon garden design. Keeping a garden in the city was always about the fantasy of a nature tailored directly to me, especially in Los Angeles where the “Mediterranean climate” has permitted many years of plant importation at the expense of the scrubby chaparral native to this land. In LA you can create a horticultural masquerade of any corner of the temperate globe, or, even better, the many parallel universes of temperate globes possible in the marriage of the individual imagination and the Home Depot plant section. You like roses and I like cacti, or maybe both, as a former neighbor of mine in town does, creating a previously unknown eco-niche where cacti and roses intermingle, thorns revealed as their true communion. It is a familiar story about LA, usually told in architecture or film history, but equally true in gardens. I played this game with pleasure as an urban farmer--the summer tomatoes I planted in town, preferably exotic heirlooms, were always both earthy and flavorful but also about the fantasy of the earthy and flavorful, the fantasy of “farm fresh” and natural.
The real farm has a much more austere logic. At a very base level, it is mercenary. Even a small farm like ours requires a huge amount of labor and patience and luck. A successful orchard is result of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, ruthless diligence, and a rather spectacular arrogance that says: I will optimize this plant’s condition at the expense of all other life on this square of earth. Why? Because the farm’s productivity is what pays me to do this, and from that first principle come all other benefits, the romance that brought us to the country—the earthy yearning for the pastoral, clean air, quiet, privacy, a slow stewardship of the earth that feels ancient and familiar, a kind of visceral home coming.
We grow Eureka lemons, one of those many plants imported to California in the last 200 years. Eurekas are very strange plants indeed, for if you plant the seeds of one of our lemons, you will not get a Eureka lemon tree. You might get something more or less like one, but most likely, it would be very much less like one than you would want. Since commercial farming is built on the assumption that the lemon you find on the shelf today will be the same as the one you will need tomorrow, and so on, all year round, you can’t be allowing for a plant’s idea of creative reproduction! The ruthlessness of the farmer to cultivate just this plant at the expense of all others is only the final step for a plant that is, actually, a frankenfruit, and all the plumb line logic and the ramrod straight control of the farm starts way before we get anywhere near that plant in this ground. Someone--maybe wearing an immaculate white lab coat, or more likely, dirty bib overalls--figured out that in order to get a consistent market lemon, you must take the roots of one kind of plant , and graft on to them the bud wood of a different kind of plant, a very different kind of plant indeed: not simply a specific variety of lemon, but a clone of someone’s ideal commercial lemon, guaranteed to produce exactly the same kind of lemon over and over and over and over again.
In the history of agriculture, ends always justify means. After all, there is no need for empathy with a tomato. Played out in bodies, the methods and permissions common in agriculture rain horror on human history. I think of race purity and anti-miscegenation laws, gas chambers, closed borders and ethnic cleansing—all symptoms of a paranoid and terrified human resistance to change and hybridity. Agricultural history is the mirror image of this sanguinary trail of tears, just upside down and backwards, for agriculture has embraced any and all of these repressions in the service of its twinned practical and mercenary ends: food and commerce. Genetically modified foods, corn fed beef, Dolly the cloned sheep, and yes--even the dependence on migrant farm workers who have no legal sanction--are all excessive symptoms of agriculture’s pragmatic ends justifying whatever means.
You know the story of Chicken Little: its central figure a chicken that runs around yelling, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling!” After living on a farm for two years, I can tell you that Chicken Little is a farmer. The sky is always falling for farmers because there is so much they can’t control, not the least of which is the weather. Excesses of any kind are bad: too much rain, too little; too much fruit, not enough; too many bugs but no bees; too much wind or not enough when the temperatures drop. The margins of profitability for the California lemon crop are now so narrow that the only hope of substantial cash flow is at the expense of someone else’s fallen sky. A blight in Florida, a freeze in Spain, a bug in Central America, a killing frost in the Central Valley--farmers survive on each other’s disasters, and anxiously await their turn. Five nights in January below 25 degrees was ours, or nearly so.
Cold air is heavier than warm air and therefore pools on your lowest land—here, the west end orchard. In the old days, farmers would burn tires or smudge pots on cold nights, but because of air pollution, there are now only two legal methods of dealing with a freeze: run your irrigation system or install wind turbines. There are turbines in some of the orchards here, but there is no evidence that they have been used in the last 40 years, nor are there any in the west end block where they would be most useful. So we run our irrigation for five nights. Sprinklers help because ice forms at 32 degrees, protecting the plants by maintaining the temperature at just that point. Walking the west end every morning that week was to visit some fantasy ice palace, all glassy buttresses embalming yellow fruit and fresh green leaves.
In the week after the freeze, our packinghouse rep came to inspect the damage. My love commented gratefully on the balmy weather that had succeeded the frost, but our rep snarled “chamber of commerce weather—we need rain!” He left us with dire predictions about the west end, and said it would take some time to really tell. But when he returned a few weeks later to do an official analysis, he was much more encouraging. In fact, he got downright sunny talking about how badly the Central Valley and Santa Barbara County lemons had done. He scheduled a pick and said we would do well this year, because the price of lemons would surely rise with supply so tight. As he left, he remarked that who ever laid out the west end orchard really knew what they were doing. He explained that the odd diagonal orientation of the orchard--what I had dismissed as eccentric—was exactly calculated to funnel the cold air draining down from the canyon above, moving it efficiently across the plain and off into the river below, keeping that orchard just slightly warmer.
As I finish this, it is another Chamber of Commerce day. Sunny blue sky with just a few decorative puffy clouds; sun warm, shade cool: in short, another perfect day to sit out in the garden and encourage the heirloom tomatoes. Even so, I admit I am worried; we had less than 3 inches of rain this winter and there is none in the forecast. The hills are summer dry and the cattle have already overgrazed whole sections of the upper range. The irrigation in the groves is running all the time. Our foreman who has tended this land for many years just shakes his head when asked about the summer ahead.
You know the sky is falling.
Ellen Birrell
I had no idea about Chamber of Commerce weather until we bought the farm. Today is April fool’s day, 2007, and the land around me as I write this is lush and lustrous with radiant light, fragrant with orange blossom and jasmine. Spring, here in the rural hinterlands north of Los Angeles, is a feeling every morning that the world is created brand new, filled with the positive presence of being-here-now. There is no memory in this, just a busy happy energy. It is Chamber of Commerce weather, good for picnics, postcards and realtor’s open houses, not great for farming if it goes on too long.
Last winter was, by any local account, exceedingly odd. It featured the lowest rainfall on record and the worst freeze in over twenty years. January, usually a wet month, just brought bitter cold: five nights of temperatures well below freezing. On our farm, the lemon orchard on the west end got hit worst. It is a leaf shaped plain, some of our lowest lying land.
When I moved out here, the layout of the west end orchard immediately struck me as eccentric. Orchards are planted in efficient parallel lines overlaying whatever terrain is arable. In that they are like planned communities: order uber alles. Here, almost all of our orchard acreage is laid out parallel to the river that marks our northwest boundary. But on the west end, the orchard lines have been rotated to a jaunty and seemingly arbitrary diagonal across the plain. Now, if you’re going to the trouble of imposing some sort of parallel order on an organic landscape, why would you rotate the rows in one area differently? Some past steward of this land exercised plumb line logic only to a point, and then decided that she liked the straight lines of the orchard better turned just so? How very odd. At least that’s what I thought until the freeze.
Liking it just so. That’s the kind of landscape thinking I associate with Saturday afternoon garden design. Keeping a garden in the city was always about the fantasy of a nature tailored directly to me, especially in Los Angeles where the “Mediterranean climate” has permitted many years of plant importation at the expense of the scrubby chaparral native to this land. In LA you can create a horticultural masquerade of any corner of the temperate globe, or, even better, the many parallel universes of temperate globes possible in the marriage of the individual imagination and the Home Depot plant section. You like roses and I like cacti, or maybe both, as a former neighbor of mine in town does, creating a previously unknown eco-niche where cacti and roses intermingle, thorns revealed as their true communion. It is a familiar story about LA, usually told in architecture or film history, but equally true in gardens. I played this game with pleasure as an urban farmer--the summer tomatoes I planted in town, preferably exotic heirlooms, were always both earthy and flavorful but also about the fantasy of the earthy and flavorful, the fantasy of “farm fresh” and natural.
The real farm has a much more austere logic. At a very base level, it is mercenary. Even a small farm like ours requires a huge amount of labor and patience and luck. A successful orchard is result of daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, ruthless diligence, and a rather spectacular arrogance that says: I will optimize this plant’s condition at the expense of all other life on this square of earth. Why? Because the farm’s productivity is what pays me to do this, and from that first principle come all other benefits, the romance that brought us to the country—the earthy yearning for the pastoral, clean air, quiet, privacy, a slow stewardship of the earth that feels ancient and familiar, a kind of visceral home coming.
We grow Eureka lemons, one of those many plants imported to California in the last 200 years. Eurekas are very strange plants indeed, for if you plant the seeds of one of our lemons, you will not get a Eureka lemon tree. You might get something more or less like one, but most likely, it would be very much less like one than you would want. Since commercial farming is built on the assumption that the lemon you find on the shelf today will be the same as the one you will need tomorrow, and so on, all year round, you can’t be allowing for a plant’s idea of creative reproduction! The ruthlessness of the farmer to cultivate just this plant at the expense of all others is only the final step for a plant that is, actually, a frankenfruit, and all the plumb line logic and the ramrod straight control of the farm starts way before we get anywhere near that plant in this ground. Someone--maybe wearing an immaculate white lab coat, or more likely, dirty bib overalls--figured out that in order to get a consistent market lemon, you must take the roots of one kind of plant , and graft on to them the bud wood of a different kind of plant, a very different kind of plant indeed: not simply a specific variety of lemon, but a clone of someone’s ideal commercial lemon, guaranteed to produce exactly the same kind of lemon over and over and over and over again.
In the history of agriculture, ends always justify means. After all, there is no need for empathy with a tomato. Played out in bodies, the methods and permissions common in agriculture rain horror on human history. I think of race purity and anti-miscegenation laws, gas chambers, closed borders and ethnic cleansing—all symptoms of a paranoid and terrified human resistance to change and hybridity. Agricultural history is the mirror image of this sanguinary trail of tears, just upside down and backwards, for agriculture has embraced any and all of these repressions in the service of its twinned practical and mercenary ends: food and commerce. Genetically modified foods, corn fed beef, Dolly the cloned sheep, and yes--even the dependence on migrant farm workers who have no legal sanction--are all excessive symptoms of agriculture’s pragmatic ends justifying whatever means.
You know the story of Chicken Little: its central figure a chicken that runs around yelling, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling!” After living on a farm for two years, I can tell you that Chicken Little is a farmer. The sky is always falling for farmers because there is so much they can’t control, not the least of which is the weather. Excesses of any kind are bad: too much rain, too little; too much fruit, not enough; too many bugs but no bees; too much wind or not enough when the temperatures drop. The margins of profitability for the California lemon crop are now so narrow that the only hope of substantial cash flow is at the expense of someone else’s fallen sky. A blight in Florida, a freeze in Spain, a bug in Central America, a killing frost in the Central Valley--farmers survive on each other’s disasters, and anxiously await their turn. Five nights in January below 25 degrees was ours, or nearly so.
Cold air is heavier than warm air and therefore pools on your lowest land—here, the west end orchard. In the old days, farmers would burn tires or smudge pots on cold nights, but because of air pollution, there are now only two legal methods of dealing with a freeze: run your irrigation system or install wind turbines. There are turbines in some of the orchards here, but there is no evidence that they have been used in the last 40 years, nor are there any in the west end block where they would be most useful. So we run our irrigation for five nights. Sprinklers help because ice forms at 32 degrees, protecting the plants by maintaining the temperature at just that point. Walking the west end every morning that week was to visit some fantasy ice palace, all glassy buttresses embalming yellow fruit and fresh green leaves.
In the week after the freeze, our packinghouse rep came to inspect the damage. My love commented gratefully on the balmy weather that had succeeded the frost, but our rep snarled “chamber of commerce weather—we need rain!” He left us with dire predictions about the west end, and said it would take some time to really tell. But when he returned a few weeks later to do an official analysis, he was much more encouraging. In fact, he got downright sunny talking about how badly the Central Valley and Santa Barbara County lemons had done. He scheduled a pick and said we would do well this year, because the price of lemons would surely rise with supply so tight. As he left, he remarked that who ever laid out the west end orchard really knew what they were doing. He explained that the odd diagonal orientation of the orchard--what I had dismissed as eccentric—was exactly calculated to funnel the cold air draining down from the canyon above, moving it efficiently across the plain and off into the river below, keeping that orchard just slightly warmer.
As I finish this, it is another Chamber of Commerce day. Sunny blue sky with just a few decorative puffy clouds; sun warm, shade cool: in short, another perfect day to sit out in the garden and encourage the heirloom tomatoes. Even so, I admit I am worried; we had less than 3 inches of rain this winter and there is none in the forecast. The hills are summer dry and the cattle have already overgrazed whole sections of the upper range. The irrigation in the groves is running all the time. Our foreman who has tended this land for many years just shakes his head when asked about the summer ahead.
You know the sky is falling.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Next Class
Let's go back to our discussion of Site Work in the next class. Everyone read chapter 2, from Miwon Kwon, "Unhinging of Site Specificity". Your next required post to the Blog will be to describe your project and to discuss how it is a site work. The deadline for this post would be prior to class in three weeks - (by the end of the day on tuesday, April 21). The three weeks to develop your post is to give you time to cook your project idea and to really write about it in terms of site specificity. Between now and then we will also screen Robert Smithson's film on the making of Spiral Jetty.
FARM FLASH: We are picking both lemons and tangerines next week. This will be the last time we harvest during this semester so if you want to participate or document any of this process be prepared. We will try and get out into the orchards for the last part of the class on wednesday. Wear appropriate work clothes if you want to try your hand and picking fruit.
Also, the wild flowers are now beginning to really bloom all over the ranch. There are countless varieties and it's a good year as the rain has been just enough. Hikes are welcome and advised.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Too many Wyatt Earps walking Tombstone's streets - Los Angeles Times
date Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 9:54 AM
sent by David Bunn
check this out from today's paper... LA times is on a western roll...
LA TIMES
sent by David Bunn
check this out from today's paper... LA times is on a western roll...
LA TIMES
Sour Fruit and Ghosts
On the subject of sour fruit, both sour apples and oranges have been part of my life when in England. We have a Bramley apple tree in the garden which is a ‘cooking apple’. Its culinary uses really are extensive, we put them in all manner of desserts, but also into stews or veggie chilli for its bulk and texture. My Nan used to buy Seville oranges which are sour which are they only oranges you can successfully make marmalade with.
Both fruits are very common and you can buy them in the shops, they are not out-dated.
I did some wikipedia-ing:
Thursday, April 2, 2009
sooo great! Rena, can you also post my last email from yesterday about yesterdays LA times article?
**Those of you who have not yet posted your response to Annie Proulx and me on "reality"... we look forward to having you with us. Also, for those of you who weren't in on yesterday's seminar descriptions of your developing site project you may do so in writing to the group, now, on the blog. Everyone must participate to the fullest.
Right on!
David
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:16 AM
sent by Travis Diehl
Hey,
Anyone else heard anything about the pending HR875 / S425 bills in Congress--the Obama administration's food safety plan, which will also effectively criminalize organic farming?
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h875/show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXNJNjYBvw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeWVkTU1s1E
They say it is set to standardize the food supply in a way that puts alternative farms at risk of huge fines, bankruptcy, and purchase by larger farms... Who knows the truth?
Best,
Travis
sent by Travis Diehl
Hey,
Anyone else heard anything about the pending HR875 / S425 bills in Congress--the Obama administration's food safety plan, which will also effectively criminalize organic farming?
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h875/show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXNJNjYBvw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeWVkTU1s1E
They say it is set to standardize the food supply in a way that puts alternative farms at risk of huge fines, bankruptcy, and purchase by larger farms... Who knows the truth?
Best,
Travis
Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 1:51 AM
sent by Rachel McRae
This is arguably hyperbolic and aggrivatingly meta (and most definitely poorly written, I blame a chest infection), but here goes. [These are more notes than anything]
[I'm going to bogart, clumsily mimic, Merleau-Ponty's method of writing as illuminating exercise as expressed in the Phenomenology of Language]
I'm going to put forward a proposition, one which I am not entirely convinced of; a proposition I will set out as a kind of conceptual object free to be continually reconstituted as desired/required (this is my way of avoiding a clumsy fact/fiction diametric merger sans explanation of the relationship between the two.)
Note: Diametric having dual definitions, both applicable->
1. Of, relating to, or along a diameter.
2. Exactly opposite; contrary.
The notion of contrary/split is important. In this way, what I am trying to elucidate is not a real countered by an unreality, instead a form of embodied knowing. (An embodied knowing I'm not entirely sure is possible, at least not for a white girl living in a world steeped in a particular form of [secularized] christian logic, yet accordingly I refuse to claim as impossible.)
In an utterly romantic sense, the laborer who works with their hands within the soil is one who knows the earth as flesh. Flesh in a biblical sense: a knowing through embodiment, a being (also in the manner it is used . (S)He works the earth, spreads his/her shit over it, reaps its harvest, dies and goes back to this earth. There is no fissure, all matter on this earth has been here from the beginning, recycled (this is pat physics, but I digress). There is a continuation, a complex unity, and a consideration of existence far more elaborate than a real/unreal diametric. Perhaps that is why "reality," as a concept has "never been of much use out here".
But now I'm going to verge off; for though there is a partial ability to be flesh, at one with the landscape, this experience is also divisible. "Reality's never been of much use out here" ->but it is. There is no reality in the miasma of the west, on the farm, in California... but there is, as much as reality is defined by shifting logic sets and the corporeal concerns. The complex unity is both expansive and local, wholeistic and divisible. Reality is maybe only a tool, only of a use, but also perhaps ultimately destructive (and of no use at all.) But, this itself may shift, be reconstituted...
.............................As for the project, it'll be about fault-lines.
--
Rachel E McRae
sent by Rachel McRae
This is arguably hyperbolic and aggrivatingly meta (and most definitely poorly written, I blame a chest infection), but here goes. [These are more notes than anything]
[I'm going to bogart, clumsily mimic, Merleau-Ponty's method of writing as illuminating exercise as expressed in the Phenomenology of Language]
I'm going to put forward a proposition, one which I am not entirely convinced of; a proposition I will set out as a kind of conceptual object free to be continually reconstituted as desired/required (this is my way of avoiding a clumsy fact/fiction diametric merger sans explanation of the relationship between the two.)
Note: Diametric having dual definitions, both applicable->
1. Of, relating to, or along a diameter.
2. Exactly opposite; contrary.
The notion of contrary/split is important. In this way, what I am trying to elucidate is not a real countered by an unreality, instead a form of embodied knowing. (An embodied knowing I'm not entirely sure is possible, at least not for a white girl living in a world steeped in a particular form of [secularized] christian logic, yet accordingly I refuse to claim as impossible.)
In an utterly romantic sense, the laborer who works with their hands within the soil is one who knows the earth as flesh. Flesh in a biblical sense: a knowing through embodiment, a being (also in the manner it is used . (S)He works the earth, spreads his/her shit over it, reaps its harvest, dies and goes back to this earth. There is no fissure, all matter on this earth has been here from the beginning, recycled (this is pat physics, but I digress). There is a continuation, a complex unity, and a consideration of existence far more elaborate than a real/unreal diametric. Perhaps that is why "reality," as a concept has "never been of much use out here".
But now I'm going to verge off; for though there is a partial ability to be flesh, at one with the landscape, this experience is also divisible. "Reality's never been of much use out here" ->but it is. There is no reality in the miasma of the west, on the farm, in California... but there is, as much as reality is defined by shifting logic sets and the corporeal concerns. The complex unity is both expansive and local, wholeistic and divisible. Reality is maybe only a tool, only of a use, but also perhaps ultimately destructive (and of no use at all.) But, this itself may shift, be reconstituted...
.............................As for the project, it'll be about fault-lines.
--
Rachel E McRae
Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:49 PM
sent by Lakshmi Luthra
A farm, like a mine, is a place where our metabolic relationship to nature becomes visible. In a city, in a factory, it is possible to imagine that what surrounds us is a product of human ingenuity alone, what Susan Buck-Morss calls second nature, the world of industrial production. Sky scrapers, computers, and alarm clocks don't wear their natural provenance on their sleeves! In this sense we might see the farm as a site where the reality of our relationship to nature asserts itself. However, as we've seen over and over again this connection to nature, the way value is extracted from nature, destabilizes the opposition between industry and nature. Criticism of genetically modified foods positioned genetic modification as a crime against nature, Frankenstein being a favorite comparison (http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/wda1127l.jpg for example).
Whatever the problems with genetic modification it seems clear that from the beginning nature is something produced through its relationship to human activity, even (or perhaps especially) when it's a nature reserve (or safari).
So the task would be to trace how historically the natural and the industrial have shaped each other. This is the territory where things like suicide seeds and lemon/avocado/tangerine trees become understandable.
I keep thinking that there is also a role for fantasy or play in finding different ways of understanding our relationship to nature.Perhaps something like Barthe's notion of second order myths.
I think of Charles Fourier's fantastic insistence on nature's abundance in the face of Thomas Malthus' narrative of lack.
Or to take a more contemporary example
compare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tLzUlK4EI
to
Big Rock Candy Mountain
One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking and he said boys I'm not turning
I'm headin for a land that's far away beside the crystal fountains
So come with me we'll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
Where the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs
The farmer's trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay
Oh, I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall and the wind don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain't no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks
I'm a goin to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
See you all tomorrow!
L
sent by Lakshmi Luthra
A farm, like a mine, is a place where our metabolic relationship to nature becomes visible. In a city, in a factory, it is possible to imagine that what surrounds us is a product of human ingenuity alone, what Susan Buck-Morss calls second nature, the world of industrial production. Sky scrapers, computers, and alarm clocks don't wear their natural provenance on their sleeves! In this sense we might see the farm as a site where the reality of our relationship to nature asserts itself. However, as we've seen over and over again this connection to nature, the way value is extracted from nature, destabilizes the opposition between industry and nature. Criticism of genetically modified foods positioned genetic modification as a crime against nature, Frankenstein being a favorite comparison (http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/wda1127l.jpg for example).
Whatever the problems with genetic modification it seems clear that from the beginning nature is something produced through its relationship to human activity, even (or perhaps especially) when it's a nature reserve (or safari).
So the task would be to trace how historically the natural and the industrial have shaped each other. This is the territory where things like suicide seeds and lemon/avocado/tangerine trees become understandable.
I keep thinking that there is also a role for fantasy or play in finding different ways of understanding our relationship to nature.Perhaps something like Barthe's notion of second order myths.
I think of Charles Fourier's fantastic insistence on nature's abundance in the face of Thomas Malthus' narrative of lack.
Or to take a more contemporary example
compare
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1tLzUlK4EI
to
Big Rock Candy Mountain
One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking and he said boys I'm not turning
I'm headin for a land that's far away beside the crystal fountains
So come with me we'll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains there's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars are all empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees
Where the lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains all the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft boiled eggs
The farmer's trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay
Oh, I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall and the wind don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol come a-trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railroad bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in
There ain't no short handled shovels, no axes saws or picks
I'm a goin to stay where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk that invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
See you all tomorrow!
L
Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 12:03 PM
sent by Travis Diehl
Rhetoric of Authenticity: "axe handle," "baseball glove," "dim bulb," "coyote bait."
Symbols of Authenticity: Black and white photograph of four cowboy generations, mirrored by position of men drinking Coors Light after work. Two Browning rifles in the front seat of a Chevrolet truck. Wrangler jeans, Bangora hat, large rodeo belt buckles.
And yet, to embrace this legacy -- even briefly -- tugs at the imagination.
The morning is crisp, the ground muddy. Dark clouds from the night's rain hug the surrounding mountains like sooty cotton candy. Hawks circle overhead.
In the distance, six men and a woman on horseback push several dozen cattle across a shallow river. Their loud bawling fills the valley like a drunken horn section.
"C'mon! Get up here where the action is, please?" Steve Tellam shouts to one of his volunteer vaqueros, friends who relish the opportunity to use their quarter horses for a task they were bred to do. His brother the home builder is among them.
It's the twilit Western come back as an LA Times article--those proud few still hacking it, their brothers building houses--this implicit holiness or even martyrdom to the Last Cowboy--The Vanishing Cowboy.
It's a romanticism that in many ways stops any material discussion of the situation. This way of life is called dying, then a little show of grief, then we can file the cowboy away with the dying things. Well, what precisely is valuable about this vanishing way of life? Chiara makes a good point; there is a huge accumulation of corporeal knowledge, of cows, of the land, horses, that isn't documented, and is abandoned further down the production chain of the feed lots and slaughterhouses. Movements like Slow Food or free-range/organic livestock recuperate or reinvent this knowledge, but I wonder how much adopting the "common sense" of the long-time rancher at every level of large-scale food production could help create a healthier food industry. We don't make any progress with this human interest story; it's not news, it's not research, it's a eulogy for something that's not dead yet. Almost by its own admission, this latest LA Times article perpetuates a suspended, Romantic state of vanishing. The article has a precedent in 1934; this way of life has been "disappearing fast" for over seventy years. Already, when the arthritic senior Tellam was just learning to walk, the cowboy way of life was declared on its death bed. As a result of this nostalgic discourse, we still, as Chiara said, have yet to figure out precisely what it is that's at stake in terms of our relationship to land: what knowledge, what values. Well according to the LA Times, it's... Natural knowledge, Natural values, which are threatened by City values. Something like that. The problem is generalized and buried.
Those soulless city folk "pedal past" in their chemical, freakish Day-Glo uniforms, so sucked dry of soul by their daily commute, by the city they chose over Nature--as the city "sucks" the pastures dry of water--this pathetically mediated bicycling communion with the wild their only respite, those poor bastard cyclists, too jaded or worn dumb by civilization to so much as GLANCE at this pure miracle of life, this glowing starving calf, in the arms of the Last Cowboy, who gentles a life-giving teat between its pure and pumping lips.
But no, this is a dude who does it, this Tellam dude--he knows exactly how much it costs these days to fill the tank on that Chevy.
sent by Travis Diehl
Rhetoric of Authenticity: "axe handle," "baseball glove," "dim bulb," "coyote bait."
Symbols of Authenticity: Black and white photograph of four cowboy generations, mirrored by position of men drinking Coors Light after work. Two Browning rifles in the front seat of a Chevrolet truck. Wrangler jeans, Bangora hat, large rodeo belt buckles.
And yet, to embrace this legacy -- even briefly -- tugs at the imagination.
The morning is crisp, the ground muddy. Dark clouds from the night's rain hug the surrounding mountains like sooty cotton candy. Hawks circle overhead.
In the distance, six men and a woman on horseback push several dozen cattle across a shallow river. Their loud bawling fills the valley like a drunken horn section.
"C'mon! Get up here where the action is, please?" Steve Tellam shouts to one of his volunteer vaqueros, friends who relish the opportunity to use their quarter horses for a task they were bred to do. His brother the home builder is among them.
It's the twilit Western come back as an LA Times article--those proud few still hacking it, their brothers building houses--this implicit holiness or even martyrdom to the Last Cowboy--The Vanishing Cowboy.
It's a romanticism that in many ways stops any material discussion of the situation. This way of life is called dying, then a little show of grief, then we can file the cowboy away with the dying things. Well, what precisely is valuable about this vanishing way of life? Chiara makes a good point; there is a huge accumulation of corporeal knowledge, of cows, of the land, horses, that isn't documented, and is abandoned further down the production chain of the feed lots and slaughterhouses. Movements like Slow Food or free-range/organic livestock recuperate or reinvent this knowledge, but I wonder how much adopting the "common sense" of the long-time rancher at every level of large-scale food production could help create a healthier food industry. We don't make any progress with this human interest story; it's not news, it's not research, it's a eulogy for something that's not dead yet. Almost by its own admission, this latest LA Times article perpetuates a suspended, Romantic state of vanishing. The article has a precedent in 1934; this way of life has been "disappearing fast" for over seventy years. Already, when the arthritic senior Tellam was just learning to walk, the cowboy way of life was declared on its death bed. As a result of this nostalgic discourse, we still, as Chiara said, have yet to figure out precisely what it is that's at stake in terms of our relationship to land: what knowledge, what values. Well according to the LA Times, it's... Natural knowledge, Natural values, which are threatened by City values. Something like that. The problem is generalized and buried.
Those soulless city folk "pedal past" in their chemical, freakish Day-Glo uniforms, so sucked dry of soul by their daily commute, by the city they chose over Nature--as the city "sucks" the pastures dry of water--this pathetically mediated bicycling communion with the wild their only respite, those poor bastard cyclists, too jaded or worn dumb by civilization to so much as GLANCE at this pure miracle of life, this glowing starving calf, in the arms of the Last Cowboy, who gentles a life-giving teat between its pure and pumping lips.
But no, this is a dude who does it, this Tellam dude--he knows exactly how much it costs these days to fill the tank on that Chevy.
Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:32 AM
sent by David Bunn
Site workers,
in follow-up to last the class tour where I tried to explain some geology, here is an encounter with the real with some real geology via a geological map of the santa paula area. download the pdf from this link and look for the orange lense shape just above and to the left of the center of the map along the river and that is where the ranch is. it is just opposite two water streams that come together at the river bank on the other side. if you blow it up you will see that the yellow areas are major and still active landslides in the last few thousand years. The arrows show direction of movement. the ranch houses, barns and road are just barely visable as little blackish purple shapes in the middle of the orange lense along the river. if you follow the roadway back from the houses toward the gate you can see the area that dropped a foot in the 2005 rains, which I showed you. And, check out the Oak Ridge Fault running along the center of the river bed!! Deep End indeed!
ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/dmg/rgmp/Prelim_geo_pdf/Santa_Paula_prelim.pdf
**remember, your post is due to the seminar by the end of the day today.
in class tomorrow everyone will speak about their site work project plans under development. after the lunch and discussion you may go off on your own on the ranch or I will offer the following which you may choose to do: a screening of Robert Smithson's film of the making of Spiral Jetty; a tour of the rest of the ranch facilities, guest house, variable space (steel barn) which is available to us as presentation & work space for our show, then, my studio & the future home of the collection of orphaned collections.
david
sent by David Bunn
Site workers,
in follow-up to last the class tour where I tried to explain some geology, here is an encounter with the real with some real geology via a geological map of the santa paula area. download the pdf from this link and look for the orange lense shape just above and to the left of the center of the map along the river and that is where the ranch is. it is just opposite two water streams that come together at the river bank on the other side. if you blow it up you will see that the yellow areas are major and still active landslides in the last few thousand years. The arrows show direction of movement. the ranch houses, barns and road are just barely visable as little blackish purple shapes in the middle of the orange lense along the river. if you follow the roadway back from the houses toward the gate you can see the area that dropped a foot in the 2005 rains, which I showed you. And, check out the Oak Ridge Fault running along the center of the river bed!! Deep End indeed!
ftp://ftp.consrv.ca.gov/pub/dmg/rgmp/Prelim_geo_pdf/Santa_Paula_prelim.pdf
**remember, your post is due to the seminar by the end of the day today.
in class tomorrow everyone will speak about their site work project plans under development. after the lunch and discussion you may go off on your own on the ranch or I will offer the following which you may choose to do: a screening of Robert Smithson's film of the making of Spiral Jetty; a tour of the rest of the ranch facilities, guest house, variable space (steel barn) which is available to us as presentation & work space for our show, then, my studio & the future home of the collection of orphaned collections.
david
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 9:23 PM
sent by Karolina Karlic
Hi All,
First,
Renna, I do enjoy the idea of projecting stampedes during the end of the year. I have an idea in regards to the planes filming I would propose. Count me in!
Second,
Regarding the articles...I find myself arriving at the same end point. The idea of the Old West, what that meant for people and who it was meant for. I go back to our discussion on how land was occupied and considered cultivated, again by whom, where did peoples rights start to play into the history of the West. This brings me to the medium of photography. Photography has had an extended and probing relationship with issues surrounding human rights, migration, political violence and the plight of refugees. My interest lies in the community of children with birth right citizenship and the parents that go without political amongst other forms of representation.
I will reference an article by Anthony Downey, Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights.
"Photography as a medium, in all its immediacy, has the capacity to represent that reality-the vertiginous proximity of what it is to be a refugee, homeless, oppressed. Looking at this proposition, and the role of photography highlighting it, we need to turn to Hannah Arendt's, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) a book that addresses, among other things the quandary of the refugee and the subject who is without rights. Arendt's argument points out a profound justice, one that continues to haunt the discourse and application of human rights today: when an individual is deprived of nation-statehood and sociopolitical identity, the very rights that should protect him cannot do so. Human rights, then are the rights of a citizen, not a refugee, the homeless, the political prisoner, the migrant laborer, the dispossessed, the tortured, the silenced - all right-less individuals who are beyond recourse to the law redress before it."
I wonder if we can use this lens in looking at recent ideas of what the West has become, is changing into and if the land and it's properties have actually changed all that much at all.
sent by Karolina Karlic
Hi All,
First,
Renna, I do enjoy the idea of projecting stampedes during the end of the year. I have an idea in regards to the planes filming I would propose. Count me in!
Second,
Regarding the articles...I find myself arriving at the same end point. The idea of the Old West, what that meant for people and who it was meant for. I go back to our discussion on how land was occupied and considered cultivated, again by whom, where did peoples rights start to play into the history of the West. This brings me to the medium of photography. Photography has had an extended and probing relationship with issues surrounding human rights, migration, political violence and the plight of refugees. My interest lies in the community of children with birth right citizenship and the parents that go without political amongst other forms of representation.
I will reference an article by Anthony Downey, Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights.
"Photography as a medium, in all its immediacy, has the capacity to represent that reality-the vertiginous proximity of what it is to be a refugee, homeless, oppressed. Looking at this proposition, and the role of photography highlighting it, we need to turn to Hannah Arendt's, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) a book that addresses, among other things the quandary of the refugee and the subject who is without rights. Arendt's argument points out a profound justice, one that continues to haunt the discourse and application of human rights today: when an individual is deprived of nation-statehood and sociopolitical identity, the very rights that should protect him cannot do so. Human rights, then are the rights of a citizen, not a refugee, the homeless, the political prisoner, the migrant laborer, the dispossessed, the tortured, the silenced - all right-less individuals who are beyond recourse to the law redress before it."
I wonder if we can use this lens in looking at recent ideas of what the West has become, is changing into and if the land and it's properties have actually changed all that much at all.
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:27 PM
sent by Rena Kosnett
Hello friends,
--one idea for a site project. A stampede, according to one source, is 'an act of mass impulse in which the herd (or crowd) collectively begins running with no clear direction or purpose. Stampedes are believed to originate from biological responses in the brains and endocrine systems of herd animals. The response is believed to have evolved to help animals escape predators.'
The stampede can be used as a metonymy for the loss of control by the cowboy (literally, and historically, as it relates to the LAT article), as a metaphor for the gold rush (can relate to Brica's point about the artifact, human desire's affect on nature), and as an unpredictable act of force that is referential to countless climactic scenes from movies further romanticizing the Old West .
So one idea would be to use this classic, heavily loaded idea of the stampede, which is traditionally attributed to Texas Longhorne cattle in classic movies, but bring in the historical fantasy or UNreality of the Deep End Ranch, by using zebras, giraffes, and apes, in place of cattle, in honor of Safari West originator Peter Lang-- perhaps 3 looping stampede videos, to project on screens at a few different locations on the property. This would work well if we had the end of the year party at the ranch in the evening, and people could stroll around to look at the videos.
Any collaboration, interjections, or extended ideas on these videos are highly welcomed-- I would love to do this with others
Another couple ideas:
--update the iron cattle brand insignia of the previous ranch owner, the one that hangs on the walls of the library, to include a design that reflects Ellen's, David's, and Gerardo's historical ties to the property
--erect a memorial to the now felled orange trees :)
--take an existing blueprint or aerial shot of the ranch property and create overlays for it based on the historical fantasies of the ranch-- one representation of the safari, one representation of the English tea garden, etc.
sent by Rena Kosnett
Hello friends,
--one idea for a site project. A stampede, according to one source, is 'an act of mass impulse in which the herd (or crowd) collectively begins running with no clear direction or purpose. Stampedes are believed to originate from biological responses in the brains and endocrine systems of herd animals. The response is believed to have evolved to help animals escape predators.'
The stampede can be used as a metonymy for the loss of control by the cowboy (literally, and historically, as it relates to the LAT article), as a metaphor for the gold rush (can relate to Brica's point about the artifact, human desire's affect on nature), and as an unpredictable act of force that is referential to countless climactic scenes from movies further romanticizing the Old West .
So one idea would be to use this classic, heavily loaded idea of the stampede, which is traditionally attributed to Texas Longhorne cattle in classic movies, but bring in the historical fantasy or UNreality of the Deep End Ranch, by using zebras, giraffes, and apes, in place of cattle, in honor of Safari West originator Peter Lang-- perhaps 3 looping stampede videos, to project on screens at a few different locations on the property. This would work well if we had the end of the year party at the ranch in the evening, and people could stroll around to look at the videos.
Any collaboration, interjections, or extended ideas on these videos are highly welcomed-- I would love to do this with others
Another couple ideas:
--update the iron cattle brand insignia of the previous ranch owner, the one that hangs on the walls of the library, to include a design that reflects Ellen's, David's, and Gerardo's historical ties to the property
--erect a memorial to the now felled orange trees :)
--take an existing blueprint or aerial shot of the ranch property and create overlays for it based on the historical fantasies of the ranch-- one representation of the safari, one representation of the English tea garden, etc.
Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 1:41 PM
sent by Erich Bollmann
Friends,
on the ranch something came up about the land being "new" or changing... how the road was destroyed, had to be rebuilt with new engineering and drainage, the ground is powder-dust-sand-shifting. To consider one land being older or newer than any other land, is it the force of physical geography or our own mental geographies? The reality of what we construct or really how fluid that is... comfort and security is maybe a continual goal and trying to achieve that through any means... shaping the land, (shaping the ranch)... (western villa turns into bohemian compound?). When the WEST comes up I think of the myth of the promise of "going west" and how much my ideas (and stereotypes and preconceptions and dreams, etc.) about California and the west coast are shaped by these histories and mythologies (utopia) that are also in some ways deeply tied to how (it seems) California and Los Angeles have evolved and how they exist... And maybe how the WEST is a shifting costume or notion (rawhide = star trek) that can be adapted to whatever Present we happen to be in...
-also responding to the LAT article and Chiara's response today: i like this quote from the article "They brought instead a feeling of pathos and despair, for they came to plan the beginning of what may be the end of the great range cattle era in this county." which was from a 1934 article about the changing (disappearing?>) West. So, will an article in 2084 be about the "disappearing west" way of life and quote this article from today?...
-Erich
sent by Erich Bollmann
Friends,
on the ranch something came up about the land being "new" or changing... how the road was destroyed, had to be rebuilt with new engineering and drainage, the ground is powder-dust-sand-shifting. To consider one land being older or newer than any other land, is it the force of physical geography or our own mental geographies? The reality of what we construct or really how fluid that is... comfort and security is maybe a continual goal and trying to achieve that through any means... shaping the land, (shaping the ranch)... (western villa turns into bohemian compound?). When the WEST comes up I think of the myth of the promise of "going west" and how much my ideas (and stereotypes and preconceptions and dreams, etc.) about California and the west coast are shaped by these histories and mythologies (utopia) that are also in some ways deeply tied to how (it seems) California and Los Angeles have evolved and how they exist... And maybe how the WEST is a shifting costume or notion (rawhide = star trek) that can be adapted to whatever Present we happen to be in...
-also responding to the LAT article and Chiara's response today: i like this quote from the article "They brought instead a feeling of pathos and despair, for they came to plan the beginning of what may be the end of the great range cattle era in this county." which was from a 1934 article about the changing (disappearing?>) West. So, will an article in 2084 be about the "disappearing west" way of life and quote this article from today?...
-Erich
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