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…

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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.

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.