fifi’s grafitti

Playing around with Photoshop and some of its filters…..Been thinking about Day of the Dead and these images appealed to my macabre senses. Like too many of my projects I had no plan when I started.

It’s a holiday weekend, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like disaster waiting to happen. It’s hurricane season, and New Orleans residents are evacuating as Category 4 “Gustav” bears unswervingly toward them. Emergency services in North Texas are in 24 hour operating mode. Thirty thousand individually packaged meals are stacked in readiness, shelters have been put in order, and the first 4,000 of what may be 45,000 refugees begin arriving today. I don’t envy those people running before the storm. I surely don’t wish them to come to harm or to lose their homes, but I have to wonder if it’s “right” for adjoining communities to have to foot the bill for the folks who choose to live in a town that may be inundated by the Gulf of Mexico in any given year.

It was three years ago today that I posted excepts from Tim Henderson’s circa 1981 song, Atchafalaya, and I will post the lyrics here again today as both tribute to the victims and survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and to posit the idea that maybe New Orleans shouldn’t be a major population center.

(”Atchafalaya” refers to the Mississippi River and the damage done by flooding to the areas surrounding New Orleans.)

Oh, Atchafalaya, she’ll be comin’ on down
Ain’t no way to stop her, ain’t no high ground!
There’s a swamp and a bayou ever’where around
And a couple small Cajun towns.

Up a billion-dollar alley north of New Orleans
The Mississippi don’t come away clean.
She’s poison.
Big concrete dam up around the bayou
Hold back the water; keep the flood plains dry
(For the rich ones.)

Lord, the Corps of Engineers try to do good things.
Hell, tell it to the Cajuns when it floods next spring.
Cause the Corps ain’t God and they can’t turn the flow.
The Lord made the Mississippi long time ago;
He’s still working.

Made a livin’ off the river in the old folks’ time
And they don’t no more, and you ask’em why,
They say, “Look child,”
(Take a look around you, boy.)
Lord, last year’s wet is this year’s dry,
And the river ain’t a living; it’s a way to die.

Atchafalaya, she won’t rise slow,
Volunteers to the Levee,
Fool, you better not go!
Pack up and run with what you can save
Cause the river’ll be aboilng on your grandpa’s grave tomorrow.
The river’ll be boiling with snakes tomorrow

Well, one of these days, and it won’t be long
When the winter is wet and the spring floods strong,
Mississippi gonna flow where she never has been.
‘Bout a hundred miles away from New Orleans;
- she’ll be a ghost town.

One of the few teardowns I’ve been in favor of was this old dump located between two stately multi-story Victorian homes. Despite a somewhat sloppy attempt to revive the place last year, it couldn’t creep past its status of “eyesore”. It was finally razed last week.

I got to thinking about the personal “dumps” in our psyches that need to be razed. I know I have more than my share. I try to prettify them because I don’t want to let them go, but someday I’ll have the strength to bulldoze ‘em.

“ancient” grafitti: Oak Cliff (Dallas), TX, circa 1990.

This was the beginning of the cell phone era, as I recollect, and there were a lot of transmitting towers being built around “The Cliff”. You can see the Dallas skyline with the Hyatt Regency Hotel (the “big ball on a stick”) and transmission towers at either end of the city.

I met a one-eyed caterpillar on the way to town yesterday. He was a fierce looking creature, and carried many scars of past encounters with steel beams, concrete chunks, and other industrial birds who’d thought their feathered appendages would allow them to swoop off with an easy meal. Sometimes a cumbersome bulk can work to your advantage. The caterpillar was resting, his empty eye socket rusting away, and his one halfway good eye hanging tentatively by slender red ligaments. I hoped he wouldn’t open his mouth and clamp down on me!

One of the few things I miss about living in Dallas is finding and photographing grafitti. I rarely see any in McKinney. Every once in a while though, I do spy something, like this face on a trash bin.

I’m inspired by how many people can do a project every day. I hadn’t planned on doing a card-a-day project yet, but since the heat has me mostly hibernating indoors, and since the smell of the paint on the outside of the house deters me from painting on the inside, I’ve started doing a few little projects. I may not be consistent, but am going to try to keep it up.

We had to quickly choose a color for the outside of the house. I had a green swatch I got at the paint store several months ago, but had never really looked at it outside in the sunlight. It was so shockingly bright in the sun I had to immediately procure some more swatches and try to choose a better one. I have a hard time imagining what a swatch will look like once it’s a big mass of color; I usually go through at least three different colors when I’m looking for an interior color. That’s hard to do with an entire exterior. Now the first coat of primer is on the house, and it seems “dirty”. I hope it’s not going to be too dark.

The smell of freshly ground and brewing beans may sound like an invitation as it winds its way up your nostrils. It’s not. Burt’s Bad Bird is watching you, just past the wooden gate topped by barbed wire. He is fierce. He is wise. He was Dead-Eye Dick in a former life. So keep on lopin’ by, partner. Get yer grounds at Storeboch’s.

I brewed coffee this morning as a countermeasure to the primer they’re spraying on our freshly scraped and sanded clapboards. Man, it stinks. Even though we’re cloistered inside with the air conditioner running the smell of toxic chemicals seeps inside. Now the coffee’s gone, but there are cinnamon sticks and cloves simmering in a pot of water. The house smells like cookies, but I know the fumes are under there somewhere.

My co-worker’s two young daughters made the background for this card. They scrawled some words and designs with crayons on a kraft envelope, and then tried to copy it on the laser printer at work. I was so enamored of the result I took the scraps home with me. I may have to try this myself.

Man it’s a hot one
Like seven inches from the midday sun
Santana: “Smooth”

another day of 100-plus temperatures, and I’m digging my collages out of the ancient history archives again. Overtime at work is pushing my bedtime up to about 2 a.m. and the painters decided to start scraping the paint off the house at 7 in the morning this week. Earplugs can only block out so much sound, but they enabled me to get a bit of sleep through the earsplitting power sanding.

“Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged broken edges because those edges cut things and leave an imprint…” - Harry Crews

a small tribute to an old friend, Larry Killingsworth. I just learned that he died last month. The last time I talked to Larry was about six years ago, but I still carry his words of encouragement with me. I hope, like Shemp Howard, that he died laughing.