Daily Create #1482 Jan. 29, 2016 was to photograph a local historic monument. Thank God the city name of “Skinner’s Mudhole” got changed to Eugene, Oregon!
Daily create Jun. 28, 2016 was to place a reflection of a Western landscape as a reflection in the windows of your house. Today is dark and rainy, so no external photography to be had. However, I took this kitchen shot a couple days ago when it was sunny and used the Bazaart app to add the view of Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills Unit…not wanting to reinforce Arizona ’s inflated sense of owning at the Western scenery.
Daily create Jun. 28, 2016 was to place a reflection of a Western landscape as a reflection in the windows of your house. Today is dark and rainy, so no external photography to be had. However, I took this kitchen shot a couple days ago when it was sunny and used the Bazaart app to add the view of Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, Painted Hills Unit…not wanting to reinforce Arizona ’s inflated sense of owning at the Western scenery.
Daily create was to wildly paint a cow. These Fauved-up contented cows were sighted recently grazing in the video check out section of my local Haggen’s supermarket. What’s up with that?
@cogdog has called reveille on Week Two of Blog Ridin’ Camp!
I am part of an online, ten week cadre exploring digital storytelling through the lens of the genre of westerns. At the end of Week One, known as Blog Ridin’ Camp, we were asked to write a on the topic, “What do Westerns mean to you? Do a blog post about your familiarity or experience with the genre Western.”
Today’s Daily Create was an image of the wheel of life. As we are on the #western106 theme, the wagon wheel being pushed by a woman says a lot about how my grandparents got to Oregon.
Daily Create was “Even Cowgirls Get the Memes” during these ten weeks at the beginning of 2016 when we are having fun with #western106. This wasn’t difficult–do a Google image search for “cowgirl humor” (and realize how sexist it is!), choose this cute image, move it into Bazaart for text.
On the Road to Krumbo Reservoir: Guardian Juniper, Oldest Living Being on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge
That dirt road runs straight at the cliff then falls
like an unraveling basket to the coulee
lake, blue eyeball of the yellow day.
Juniper, ancient of days, grips cliff top,
roots snaking down basalt columns, tying
loose stones like little wandering donkeys
to the wall. You can find dried owl pellets
under gin-scented branches; broken open, tiny
vole bones shine clear and somehow holy
in your hand. You can sit there like a Paiute
did a hundred, two hundred years ago,
looking out for Bannock warriors, or maybe
a lone vision quester—the one who left
his red handprint on the rock shelf hidden
right there almost out of sight.
–Sandy Brown Jensen
Jan. 13, 2016
Today’s Daily Create was to do some folk art around the Robin Hood legend. For the referent point for the future, the satire is around the current situation here in Oregon where a self-styled “militia” group is occupying federal property at Malheur NWR.
This is the first sketch I did for the Color Your World colored pencil online art class from Toucan Create! It reminded me of the poem, “Moon Roses” by my husband Peter Jensen. The marriage of the two speaks to the soul of the Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal. Moon Roses Written after my shock at 9/11 turned into an endless grief Sometimes, we have to leave the…
(Click on title tile above to play the gif if you don’t see it.)
Male Revenge Fantasy Writ Large
The Daily Create was to make a gif from a “classic” section of a classic spaghetti western. The section was Clint Eastwood riding into town on a mule. Three racially stereotyped Mexican men, members of a local street gang, try to bully him and shoot at his mule’s feet as it turns and runs away from the sharp, explosive sound. The Eastwood character dismounts from the running mule by grabbing hold of a swinging crossbar. As he walks back to encounter the bullies, he passes the coffin maker and says, “Prepare three coffins.” I.e. He is premeditating murder.
Uncool.
He then returns to the men, and in an act of revenge that must swell every bullied schoolboy’s heart, he shoots not three but four bullies. I understand this is a male revenge fantasy, but I am definitely a person who correlates media saturation of violence with the acting out semi-adult males allow themselves to do with guns in public places.
In my neck of the West, the massacre at Umpqua Community College is still freshly with us. I jumped and my heart raced when Eastwood killed the four Hispanics at the end of the clip. The Kip Kinkle school massacre happened here at Thurston High school, and I was at the hospital when the victims started to arrive and the coffin rate started its grim count. The Clackamas Mall shooting happened not long ago near here, and my sister’s nurse colleague was shot. Need I start the current death toll from police shootings of women, blacks, and unarmed civilians?
Like many if not most American (women), I have a kind of citizen PTSD. I am not enured to the sound of gunshots. I don’t think the Eastwood character is even remotely cool. I see him for what he is: cynical, amoral, murderous. One review I read called him “mystical."
Murderous young men are never "mystical."
And that coolness factor is admired only by wannabe gang members and bullied, revenge-driven school boys, many of them older professionals now who grew up on this violent, poisonous pap and haven’t yet mucked out the barns of their interior worlds.
Gun violence is institutionalized in this country by a long history of media saturation, and while I am behind Obama all the way in his efforts to f-Ing finally DO some thing, ANYTHING about it, it still takes you and me examining our own soul’s deepest thinking about how okay it is to continue to endorse media violence.
Cuz cold blooded, premeditated murder is never cool.
Once Upon a Time in the West
The photo above on the left is from the movie “Once Upon a Time in the West” by Sergio Leone. Considered by many to be his opus magnus, in it, the railroad and increasing modernization, i.e. Change with a capital “C” sweep away all vestiges of the so-called “Old West.” Only Jill, the eternal whore according to Leone (the whore is also maiden, mother, and crone; that is, WOMAN) survives.
All the men with their cruelty, misplaced romanticism, their vicious rapine natures and their twisted so-called humanity get pretty much killed off, thank God. This much mourned “Old West” was about grazing rights, land ownership, the capitalist pigs vs the worker, the Civil War and the dubious influences of the Church.
The photo on the right was taken a couple of days ago at a place my husband and I hold sacred; it’s the domestic terrorists who have taken over one of the last best places for wildlife in the US–Malheur National Wildlife Refuge Headquarters.
If there is a woman there to survive the standoff of the coming days, she’s nowhere in evidence, so no Jill to Ammon Bundy’s Jack.
The themes here are disputes over land ownership, the capitalist pigs vs the worker, disagreements over the interpretation of the Constitution, illegal occupancy of federal property, all given a twist Leone didn’t foresee–the self-styled “militia” leaders are the sons of a rich rancher.
These domestic terrorists are all grown up sons of survivors of the 1970s, whose values Leone was also conflicted about. These “kids” grew up watching westerns, spaghetti westerns, and western spoofs like “Blazing Saddles.” PLUS they grew up in the REAL West, the one that in spite of Leone’s violent nostalgia, still very much exists.
My point is that their heads are so full of a mishmash of cultural images from the movies that I suspect they don’t know what is real and what is Miramax. They’ve invented their own sense of what is right and acted on it. And nothing good can come of this as-of-this-writing unexploded powder keg.
If you want to watch a real life spaghetti western, turn on the news and crank up the sound track of your choice.
10 Beautiful & Powerful Ways You Can Nurture Your Creativity
NOTE: The next Color Your World two week class begins Jan 4, 2016. What makes this class different is the one-on-one daily interaction with an empathetic instructor and with a supportive community of fellow artists. Only $50.00. Click this button to learn more and to register: If you would like to experience a free class, click here: How do you nurture creativity in yourself day by day? Let’s…
Daily Create #tdc1456 was all about capturing sunsets, which I’ve done plenty of–I just ain’t gonna do it today cuz it’s too friggin’ COLD outside, and too sharp and clear for a sunset probably.
Instead, I used the fun Replay app to make a musical collage of a few sunsets I have known and loved.
Johnny’s Place
Johnny said December would be bad for produce, after they fired the clown guy. The undertaker had discovered the jewel in the tomatoes; after that, we were all supposed to keep the secret. But was it really the clown guy? The undertaker implied as much to me in that late night meeting we took after all the tomatoes had been searched and made into pasta sauce for the clown guy’s going away party at Johnny’s Place. There just had to be more to the story, and I wondered what Johnny himself was hiding after his dire predictions about the December produce delivery.
We all relied on it, of course, the produce delivery, I mean.Without it, this place would dry up and blow away in the high desert wind. Could anything be salvaged of situation? The thing is, it was a full moon night the undertaker and I huddled for a smoke in the lee of Johnny’s Place out there in the desert. The night was cold. I could smell snow on the light wind skittering the tumbleweeds in slow motion across the hard pan. I never was much of a smoker, so I remember when I started to cough, how the undertaker clapped me hard between the shoulder blades with his enormous hand.
I hadn’t been afraid of him before that, but there was something in the clamminess of that hand, something in the way he said, with more of a leer than what you might call genuine concern, “You all right, kid?” that made me think of the clown guy and Johnny’s prediction, and the secret I was keeping, of course, and the way that was choking me up worse than the smoke I thought I was old enough to inhale.
But his hands were big, I tell you, really, really, big, and he kept slapping me between the shoulders long after I stopped choking, long after the smoke had fallen from my fingers and fizzled out in the cold desert sand.
Well, Johnny said that the tailor stole the money, but I can’t remember that part of the story. But you know Johnny, he didn’t think the clown guy should have been fired in the first place. The jewel in the tomatoes? You know, that could’ve happened to anyone – why the undertaker? The vicar was there, too, and he could have been the one implicating his personal assistant in a cover-up. The vicar said to me personally that they would never find that strange man with the limp. And I believed him.
In the end, face it, without the produce delivery, none of us could go on living there. Johnny’s grandmother revealed their true allegiance to the Giordano clan. It was she who said they had to abandon that old house we called Johnny’s Place up there on the high desert plateau. They moved to Blongthorpe Cottage, a tiny stone dwelling seemingly built into the cliff overlooking the coast somewhere north of Cistow Harbor.
I know you’re wondering about the clown guy – last I heard, he had gone into interior decorating and had gotten badly burned in a fire. As for the undertaker – I know his son secretly married the receptionist, but that was long after Johnny’s Place became a ghost town.
