The adobeairstream blog

To look at is not to see. To see is definitely not to understand. If I started to dissect Cold Case, the network TV show I watched last night, it would meet right up with my story on the Heretics at adobeairstream.com in the sense that you can’t separate out class from discussions of anything.

But in this case, please hear this the show’s network producers (Jerry Bruckheimer), the plotline seemed to be so vague as to be an accidental object lesson, if at all. In the end, for lack of a better way to end the show, they have the hockey player savagely murdered by his brother’s stick done in by the guy least likely to commit a crime — the high school doper who wanted to just get the heck out of being trapped, and felt dissed that his friend was likely to do so, because of a possible hockey scholarship  to college. Somehow on reflection the story of this story strikes me as being nostalgic for those of us who came of age in the 70s. Kids getting out of college now are taking on more debt to continue at school because the job market is so bleak. Meanwhile as the government stresses things like tax credits for small businesses of which we at adobeairstream.com are certifiably one, I keep thinking that what I can offer is slim yet we are still here. I believe we who came of age in the 70s are a powerful psychographic with an embedded desire for conversation about critical mindedness in a time of cultural savagery, deceit, and all manner of blind alleys that tend to be presented as done deals. For anyone who caught Robin Williams last week on HBO in Weapons of Self-Destruction, it strikes me that that is really all so right for now. Things have gone extreme and need to be talked about (while swigging bottled water and working up a sweat). We change by participating.

A trip to Truth or Consequences is for me always somewhere between the last words of Kurtz’s trip into darkness and the first words about emerging into light. It is a very light place, white in fact, with a desert clarity that tends not to romance shabby edges. And the shabby edges exude a whiff of the American dream meeting the dangerous; viz the dark. Water rights cede to Texas;  “meth watch” signs dot a road (“riverside drive”) begun with a park with swings, retirement trailer parks opposite the skinny Rio Grande. It’s a town of betweens where geography might still be destiny, one day.
Conrad and I first went there years ago over a Christmas holiday. I remember the seediness of a place with torn floors where a woman ran the bath water. Many of those places of course are now gone or fixed up, as the town bears such destinations as Sierra Vista and Blackstone, on the uphill side, and such camp and cult favorites as Firewater, La Paloma, Riverbend Hot Springs, The Charles, along with signs of past glories now being turned into vacation rentals.
Delmas Howe, the artist, in a famous event before Joe Waldrum died, showed his Stations of the Cross New York City pier paintings at Waldrum’s Rio Bravo Fine Art. Stephen Low, who was William Burroughs’s secretary back when in Lawrence (Kansas), hit TorC before decamping to Desert Hot Springs for his final stop this life. Burroughs, Low and Waldrum are sadly now gone. But a more recent attempt to up-market TorC found a guy from Mádrid (NM) who for a brief spell some four years ago founded and started a bunch of small art galleries along Main Street. From the looks of things today those aren’t operating anymore although while they did one had the opportunity to imagine all the storefronts repainted and a jam of traffic incoming and outgoing. Visitors would take baths, thriftshop, and recede back into the air conditioning for martinis and runways. Landscaping courtesy of the Exotic Cactus Ranch, perhaps the audacity of a century plant amid the statuary. Ah, Tor C. I will always love you. Call me a desert rat, the coalition of old aluminum Airstreams, Civilian Conservation Corps projects near the lake, and the springs that make water and property synonymous, are as close as we get to Lourdes around here. 95 years worth of Hot Water” Festival was celebrated with an aplomb play on words in mid-November.

I don’t know if you guys feel the same way but the reality of sometimes taking on more than you know at first is that you get tired. So the last six months have been about the pleasure of learning to re-feel six months old when you can play without much fear and the notion that curiosity gets you somewhere. We are in our sixth month of producing adobeairstreamdot com at that plain old web address. I may change the title of this blog but if so will make sure it links on through.

Late May this was written: It is with enormous pleasure that I announce the launch of our full magazine site at adobeairstream. This blog has been a terrific adventure and for all of you who are seeing this post consider this a simultaneous thanks and wave on to join us as we really step out now.

There’s Life After Spock ….

Now that you’ve seen J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek, the prequel to the show that   launched a thousand sequels, you might be wanting to see two films that have just as much imagination and far lower advertising budgets (left, Rudo y Cursi).
Star Trek is clearly a product that can be expected to be one of America’s stronger exports this year – not that there’s much competition. This flagship franchise of the “knowledge economy” that now seems invested with as much hope as money didn’t bring surprises. Nor did it economizes on explosions. There are enough of them to destroy the World Trade Center or any other iconic location more times than you could count. And there are some glittery new faces playing earlier versions of the old faces that you know from the television show. Yes, Leonard Nimoy is back as an old sage. The script is about family and loyalty. And it’s making lots of money. Surprised? Keep reading →

I have just returned from the Marfa Film Festival. And on Cinco de Mayo, we are closing in on what has been a compressed trajectory between launching this blog and finalizing the launch components of our full online magazine site, coming next month. What a time. We are in a revolutionary phase that I know I have never experienced before. One’s skillset, to use a word keyed into American life, has to parlay itself into new definitions in a society that loves definitions. Just this morning, as I was interviewing Ivan Barnett of Patina Gallery for my Art and Antiques article (due next Monday, appearing in July issue), we talked words briefly. We touched on Ivan’s own work, a series of recent metal fabrications called “Homage to Sandro (Chia)” that opened last Friday at Patina.The metal mobiles hang in the gallery like countervalances of light springy things with weightier questions about where art meets design meets craft. The word “craft,” Ivan reports, is back in. Does it need the adjective, “fine,” appended to the front of it, like before? “Interesting question,” he replied. Andrew Wagner, formerly of Dwell and recently the last former editor of American Craft, has gone on to edit Readymade, a magazine for young do-it-yourselfers chockfull of all sorts of craft (without adjective) projects. Janet Koplos replaces him at American Craft. Her article on studio jewelry appeared in the recent issue of Art in America. I digress, and yet not. Where Santa Fe plans its summer festival season, is where I have been–my usual interviewing journalist self, pen in hand, tape recorder at the ready. Yet how Santa Fe is seen from without, and the complexity with which we exist from within, have been the benchmarks of my creative efforts to launch the coming digital magazine. In the process I have (I hope) learned what feels like a doctorate’s worth about new media and immediacy, which can and do exist without sacrifice of integrity and critical discernment that make for strong content. Don’t let anybody tell you ever that content doesn’t matter. Our numbers on this blog spiked up last week to 200 a day. That’s a 100 percent increase. I don’t say this to brag as Internet audiences, as we know, can be fickle, and the question of judging who is seeing you, where they come from, what they think, do they like it? what do they want more of? Well, in this universe of the everyday, these questions are sort of like the kitchen sink, the dinner table, and the crystal palace all combined into one synergy of great service, excellent food, and the conversation that can only tick if all participate. So, consider this my hello for the week to our very valued set of early payer-attentions-to, of which, if you are reading, you are one. Thanks for your support so far. I’ll be back to say more about Marfa.  Keep reading →