dia de los mUErtOs (2) - el muerto quiere camote

these photos are from a few years ago, mostly:
prints by José Guadalupe Posada from Aguascalientes
Diego Rivera's Alameda mural featuring an apparition of la Catrinarelics and ruins in Mexico City (zócalo and anthropology museum)
and the Rafael Coronel museum (masks) in Zacatecas

dia de los MuErTOs (1) - calaveras

Great Basin NP, NV w/ TR

As a young man in the fall of 1858 he had left for the Deseret Territory and taken a job in the Beehive-shaped charcoal ovens. It was only his third week when, one day, having climbed atop the cone, his bootheel melted and he found himself tumbling helplessly into the scorching furnace…. When he finally awoke, after what had been to him a long and dreamless sleep, it was to the rumble of a freight train no more than a rod from where he lay. He found himself whole and his limbs without injury. And when the train had passed he looked up into the quiet sky and blinked at what seemed a white stylus of a bird, drawn across the blue.




We found that, in an unprecedented compromise between extreme conservationists, under-funded and lazy parks service personnel, and people who were just in a hurry to get somewhere else, wilderness had now been made available for a small fee from a vending machine just outside the park.


Lehman, brother


so little depends upon a rusted and beaten wheelbarrow left by miners in a field of white stones.


Once the craft had departed, and the column of flame had been carried away on the wind, the creature emerged awkwardly from its yellow pod. Then, raising its long, fleshy blue ocular trunks, began to survey its new surroundings.


Sunday morning in a forest of bristlecones, several of which have been around since the Iron Age. and they’re like, “‘iron age’ eh? sure, you can call it what you want, I guess.”




some more photos here

Hallelujah, Bum Again

I
Oh, why don’t I work like the other men do?
How the hell can I work when the skies are so blue?

Chorus:
Hallelujah, I’m a bum!
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah! Bum a handout,
Revive me again.

If I was to work and save all I earn,
I could buy me a bar and have whiskey to burn.

Oh, I love Jim Hill, he’s an old friend of mine,
Up North I ride rattlers all over his line.

Oh, I ride box cars and I ride fast mails,
When it’s cold in the winter I sleep in the jails.

I passed by a saloon and I hear someone snore,
And I found the bartender asleep on the floor.

I stayed there and drank till a fly-mug came in,
And he put me to sleep with a sap on the chin.

Next morning in court I was still in a haze,
When the judge looked at me, he said, “Thirty days!”

Some day a long train will run over my head,
And the sawbones will say, “old One-Finger’s dead!”

II
When the springtime does come,
Oh, won’t we have fun!
We’ll all throw up our jobs
And we’ll go on the bum.

Chorus:
Hallelujah, I’m a bum,
Hallelujah, bum again,
Hallelujah, give us a handout,
To revive us again.

Oh, Springtime has come,
And I’m just out of jail,
Ain’t got no money,
It all went for bail.

I went up to a house
And I knocked on the door.
A lady came out, says,
“You been here before!”

I went up to a house
Asked for some bread;
A lady came out, says,
“The baker is dead.”

I went up to a house
Asked for a pair of pants;
A lady came out, says,
“I don’t clothe no tramps!”

I went into a saloon,
And I bummed him for a drink;
He give me a glass
And he showed me the sink.

Oh, I love my boss,
And my boss loves me;
That is the reason
I’m so hun-ga-ree!

“Why don’t you go to work
Like all the other men do?”
“How the hell we going to work
When there ain’t no work to do?”

From The Hobo’s Hornbook, A Repertory for a Gutter Jongleur, collected and annotated by George Milburn, pp. 97-101. Copyright, 1930, by George Milburn. New York: Ives Washburn.
It is hardly safe to classify the following widely-sung ballad as a Wobbly song. There is some dispute as to its origin. Budd L. McKillips, who has himself written some first-rate hobo poetry, has given me the following notes on “Hallelujah, Bum Again’s” history:
“A member of the I.W.W. is credited with having written the words to ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.’ The question of authorship isn’t worth an argument, but if anybody will take the trouble to do some investigating, he will find that ‘Hallelujah, I’m a Bum’ was a lilting, carefree song at least eight years before the I.W.W. came squalling into the industrial world….The song was found scribbled on the wall of a Kansas City jail cell where an old hobo, known as ‘One-Finger Ellis,’ had spent the night, recovering from an overdose of rotgut whiskey.”
The first version is that of One-Finger Ellis, as well as McKillips can recall it, and the second version is the song that the Wobblies sing today. Both songs are sung to the hymn tune, "Hallelujah, Thine the Glory.”—G.M.


from A Treasury of American Folklore, edited by B. A. Botkin, 1944



related post: hoboclowns & coelacanths

East of Ephraim: amid hard economic times, secret gardeners put entrpeneuring shoulder to the wheel

last Saturday a friend called to make sure we were ok. on the news a family that sounded kind of like us had wrecked a car kind of like ours. "wow, no. thank God. that's not us. we're alright. everything's fine."

then yesterday afternoon another friend called to check up on us.
"Hey man, we heard about the bust. everything ok?
"yeah, fine. what?"
"I was just worried 'cause, you know."
"what?"
"you seriously didn't hear?"

it turns out that over the weekend a grove of around 20,000 marijuana plants was found in the foothills east of town. how had I not heard about this? and what have I been doing wasting my time with carrots and corn? actually, I have some serious questions about irrigation, climatic zones and frost tolerance for these guys. nothing on this in the Farmer's Almanac. nothing at the local library, IFA, county archives.
from the photos in the paper those little stalks of pot are looking pretty sad by the time the DEA agents make the scene.

how about it? other suggestions for a viable cash crop for central Utah? turkeys are out. kudzu too. also, I'm gonna say no poppies.

related posts: Humbaba, cherubim, chainlink
church demolition & informal public middens

thank you card to a knot of blowflies caught screwing in midair

With all your sliding rules and abaci,
accounts you’ve been keeping so charily
I guess you weren’t exactly counting on
the pop of the flashbulb and all that would
follow: cottages, industries and so on.

You should know, a neighbor called the other
night to arrange a meeting in our home
for the discussion of our signing on
with their new “health drink”, which I may
owe to you and the convenience of my
name printed near the top of the ward list.

Oh, and thanks a bundle for your reps who
at even’s end, when all was awash in
peanut shells and stubbed-out smokes, still rolled
their sleeves to scoop vanilla, pop corks
and pass wine floats to the last ones standing.

But seriously, for real, thank you for
the apostle-ex-retailer who last week
came tottering up on a pulpit of slow
retracting walnut to kick everything
off with a review of Walden before
a congregation of ten million.

P.S.- And I’ll thank you for telling me of the last time we lathered and rinsed
with actual shampoo, and what to do now with all these bubblewands.

a virtual fridge door for Ash

Paul "Moose" Curtis

who all saw the big September moon last night? it is manifestly –if not yet officially- fall and the wild sunflowers on the highway seem to be feeling it too. I don’t know if it was the wet winter we had last year or what but lately there have been a lot of tattoo removal billboards sprouting up along the freeway as well. what has been conspicuously absent, however, is any measurable uptick in billboard removal tattoos. now if we could put some kind of index on the latter then we might effectively gauge our progress. a voluntary exit poll at the ink studios; I don’t know.

in the mean time Soundclash DJ Paul Curtis has got your back. last spring he went out and did this with San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel. all the towering florae that once covered the Pacific northwest and where now 20,000 cars pass daily.

since beginning in his hometown of Leeds with a sock and a bucket of water, Moose has gone on to using wire brushes, stencils and high-pressure sprayers to clean his reverse graffiti into the walls and sidewalks of Manchester, London, Edinburgh. apparently you don’t even need a can of paint to be charged under the UK’s Anti-Social Behaviour Act. just scrub the image into the already existing surface filth of modernity.

as you can see, Curtis is not above working with lichens either, and he's fearlessly taken on NYC’s the Splasher, cutting this whole sucker down to the bricks so the big beetles can crawl out. (I think that’s one of Banksy’s under it all.)

also check out:
Brazil’s own Alexandre Orion and his hundreds of skulls
Brooklyn’s Edina Tokodi
Scott Wade, who’s doing it in Texas, sort of
and the whole Ancestral Puebloan Massive. aww yeah, APM in the house!

one foot in the fishtank: Gene Hathorn has a posse

last Saturday afternoon I lost a perfectly good breakfast; toast, juice, everything went seeping into the lupine and dry needles while I knelt retching. and if that weren’t bad enough, I missed out on what Amy was saying on the other side of the road about this arrangement between a shock artist and a Texan. luckily for all of us, she outlined the details again for me later that day.
here’s the gist:
“I don’t think his appeal will work, so if he is executed, we will ship the body to Germany, deep freeze it there and turn it into fish food.”

back to school: some simple equations

think of a number, any positive whole number.
(you can also open your desktop calculator while you’re thinking.)

now multiply that number by 3.

now multiply the resulting number by itself.

add the digits repeatedly until you have a single digit.
(for example: 5432 becomes 14, which becomes 5)

place a “1” in front of the digit you found.
place a “2” in front of the same digit.
multiply these two numbers together, please.
(for example: the digit 5 becomes 15 x 25)

then multiply the resulting number by 5.

now multiply each digit of this number together.

you probably came up with something like 350, right?
as in 350ppm