SUSAN KLAHR, ARTIST

"I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on."

--Susan Klahr

Artist Susan Klahr died before dawn New Year’s morning. For the last several years, she had been struggling with cancer, and finally the disease asked her to cross to the other side. She is survived by her husband David and her two sons Sito and Arlo.

Susan has long been an important force within the intellectual and artistic community that makes El Paso/Juárez unique along the U.S./Mexico Border and in the United States. Her art spoke of the world she witnessed before her, especially the people that populated her imagination, people who in her paintings radiate a spiritual presence through Susan's imagination. A few years ago Lee and I asked Susan, because of her own Jewish immigrant heritage, to paint the cover image for the YA novel Double-Crossing by Eve Tal that Cinco Puntos was publishing. (Last year, during her illness, she painted the cover for its sequel, Cursing Columbus.) During our conversations about the novel, we expressed our admiration for the two paintings I’ve pasted above, Celia and Rose. [Excuse the poor snapshot quality of the images. I took the photographs this morning inside the office with my little Nikon.] One day she showed up with the paintings and asked us to hang them in our office. She wanted people to see them, she didn’t want to roll them up and put them in storage. They’ve been on loan to us ever since.

The paintings are really one piece--Celia is Susan’s grandmother, who died shortly before Susan was born, and Rose is her mother. Rose died when Susan was 14. Susan painted black and white death masks of her grandmother and mother from old snapshots, she then dressed herself in their clothes and was photographed holding the masks in front of her face. Then she painted portraits of herself as her grandmother Celia and her mother Rose. We’ve been lucky here in the offices at Cinco Puntos to see these paintings everyday and to tell admiring visitors about them. Her illness made these paintings even more poignant and powerful, revealing how our presence continues to live in our families and in the work that we do.

Below, beneath the close-ups of Celia and Rose, are the inscriptions that Susan wrapped in the blue border around each of the paintings. And below those is the story of her grandfather Max and grandmother Celia and mother Rose that Susan wrote for the display of the paintings.

●

CELIA

I never saw her.

The one of five sisters.

The one that Max picked.

The mother of Rose.

ROSE

It's a painting of my mother.

How I never saw her.

She's in my body

and I was in her body.

●

THE STORY OF MAX MY GRANDFATHER

AND CELIA AND ROSE

Whenever I think about telling a story, I think about Max. Max was my grandfather and he had one of the two bedrooms in our apartment and he had a big steamer trunk in there. When he opened the trunk for me it was like magic. It was like this… Once upon a time there was a strong young man named Max and he lived in Chernobyl, near Kiev, in the Ukraine. He called it Russia and he had brothers and sisters, and the youngest sister, in the photo he always showed me, so many years later, looked out at me across time, across the ocean with eyes so large, so luminous (like my son Arlo’s) and hair so black, I wished I could have known her but Max came by himself with his trunk; he braved the unknown alone. He was young, 17 or 18. He made his way across Europe to England or Scotland, speaking not a word but Yiddish, and got on a freighter or a steamer or something and his cousin Joe met him in Philadelphia and gave him a banana and he started eating it with the skin on and what a joke! You greenhorn! Laughed his cousin and Max loved to tell it over and over. He went all the way back a year or so after and came back to America and that was the very last he ever saw any of his family again.

In Chernobyl, Max’s father was the town butcher. I would see them in my mind wandering over hill and green fields, going to neighboring towns to do business. Back there was green and wintry snow and the old life and here (he loved America) was opportunity and no pogroms. Everything was Yiddish, he didn’t need English to make good--leave that to his children. And he was strong and handsome and tall. His shoes were size thirteen and he worked hard. He was young and he worked in a butcher store in New York and upstairs from the store lived a mother with five daughters and this mother came from the old country by herself with her five daughters and she was tough and she was strong and nobody seemed to know how many husbands she had and what happened to them. Her daughters all looked different and she lived to at least one hundred years old and she was my mother’s grandma and she was bubbe to me.

But Max was handsome and he visited upstairs and they would giggle and talk and there were five girls: Celia, Clara, Fanny, Esther and Becky. Clara was the oldest. When I knew her she was a big, square woman with legs that looked like tree stumps to me. Fanny I never knew. In the pictures, she looked thoughtful, exotic. Becky never married. She was fussy and critical, the corners of her mouth turned down. Esther looked like a shiksa. We thought she was pretty. Not dark and mysterious and beautiful like Celia but she was pretty and she put rouge on her cheeks and she was always smiling and kind and generous.

One day the Mother looked at robust Max and put her hands on her hips and said “enough! Which one do you mean?” And Max picked Celia, the most beautiful of her sisters. And she had deep eyes and dark hair and a delicate face and he courted her. So he married Celia and he worked hard and he opened his own butcher shop in the Bronx and he had his picture taken behind the counter and he’s big and strong and proud. In America. And Max and Celia had a daughter and they named her Rose. Rose, an American name for an American girl. Rochel was her Jewish name.

Rose was my mother and this story goes on and on and on. Celia died shortly before I was born and Rose died when I was fourteen years old. I lived with three men, my father, my brother, and my grandfather. It was amazing for me to put on the faces of Celia and Rose: to feel them in my very being. I’m part of the story, it’s my story now and it goes on and on and on.

--Susan Klahr

George Carrizal, 1945-2009

El Paso artist George Carrizal is dead. David Fleet called me up last Wednesday to tell me. “He was my friend and once he was my lover who I talked to every night. He cared for me and worried about me until the very end.” Artist Cesar Ivan put together a wonderful blog of photographs and paintings to honor George and David wrote a moving tribute to his dead friend which he read at George’s funeral yesterday (Saturday, 10/11/09). This is an act of re-membering in the old sense--putting a life back together in one’s memory, in the collective memory.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man El Paso Blues

I love this photograph and have wanted an excuse to put it on this blog. My excuse is I re-discovered this piece of mine that I am pasting below--“Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues” that originally appeared five years ago at newspapertree.com. The photograph and the cutouts in the window are by my friend Cesar Ivan. The display window decorated the now-dead Bridge Center of Contemporary Arts on San Antonio Avenue in downtown El Paso. My essay, with all its dreamy imaginary wanderings, is a eulogy for the Bridge. May it rest in Peace. It was a vibrant although very fragile organization, like so many non-profit arts organizations, and it died a slow and tortured death. Cesar Ivan must have taken the photograph in 2001, perhaps just before 9/11/01. His cutouts are meant to give form to the El Paso arts scene back then. David Romo, who was at that time the director of the Bridge, hired Cesar to do the work and probably collaborated with him in the design. For me, because I was involved with the Bridge Center for much of its history (and honored to be included in the window), it’s an eerie and sad photograph, creating a surreal kind of sadness that you get when you look at an Edward Hopper painting for too long. Things are lost in the constant flux—institutions, people, ideas—but the ghosts hang around and make you remember.

Gloria Osuna Perez is the beautiful woman in the window on the right, her hair gone from radiation treatments in her battle against ovarian cancer. Long an important artist in El Paso and the Southwest, she died in 1999. Gloria was known especially for her soulful portraits of Chicanas and Mexicanas who were important to her personal history. She concocted a special palate of colors to create the signature cinnamon skin tones that radiate warmth and sensuality and beauty. Cinco Puntos had contracted with her to illustrate Joe Hayes’s book Little Gold Star / Estrellita de Oro, and she had completed five of the paintings when her cancer recurred. As she lay dying, she collaborated with her daughter Lucia Angela Perez to complete the work. Because she died in 1999, a few years before the internet became omnipresent in our consciousness, very little of her work is available on the internet. Hopefully, in the next few months we can collect some images and post them on our Cinco Puntos blogspot. In the meantime, I’m posting this lovely photograph of Gloria and Lucia.

The two chess players are, of course, Teresa Urrea, aka la Santa de Caborca, squared off against Pancho Villa. Both wandered the streets of downtown El Paso in the very early 1900s when El Paso was the political and intellectual center of the Mexican Revolution. If you want to know more about Teresita and Pancho Villa in El Paso, read David Romo’s The Ringside Seat to the Revolution. For a great biographical novel about la Teresita read Hummingbird’s Daughter by our good friend Luis Urrea (a blood descendent of the Caborca Urreas). The novel follows her magical life from her birth until her entry into El Paso. Luis is working on the sequel that will complete her life story. I guess Pancho Villa is still playing la Teresita chess somewhere in our communal psyche. I’m hoping she wins.

The sax player is the legendary Art Lewis, long a fixture in the El Paso culture scene. A truly wonderful musician and a very wise man. My notebooks are filled with things he’s said to me or friends. He stars in the piece below. And of course the dude reading book of poems is me. My friend Steve Yellen bought the cutout in an fund-raising auction a few years back and it now haunts the Yellen home where the food and wine are very good.

By the way, I wrote this essay while I was working on my book of poems White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love, so many of the ideas and themes here you will find in the poems and vice versa. I’ve edited it just a little bit. Re-reading the piece after these five years, I'm so glad George Bush is no longer president. His was a most dangerous presidency. Maggie Herrera, by the way, has disappeared into the dream which is Los Angeles. She's fine, I hear. So is Art Lewis. He comes back to El Paso for his famous birthday parties where the musicians all line up to jam with him. He blows his heart out and leaves us in peace.

Sort of Lost Sad Empty Useless Old Man EP Blues
April 2003

It’s been a very sad and sorrowful year, and I got the blues bad. Very bad. Sort of lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues. A friend, the godfather of my children, is up in Albuquerque dying a slow death inside a coma. Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, the ship has sunk, Ahab that bastard is dead and Ishmael is riding his handmade coffin on the wide green sea. But, unlike Ishmael, my friend cannot tell his story; nor can he let go and simply sink deep into the ocean. He lies in the hospital bed, breathing and sweating and gasping for breath, and his wife and the rest of us rub his body and wonder if he’s inside.

Then George Bush’s war came along and sucked buckets of hope out of my heart. Like a martinet with a tin badge, George strutted out naked onto the stage everyday thinking he was wearing a brand new wardrobe. He had to do his strutting. So every evening I get down on my knees like Marlon Brando in the Godfather and I whisper into my grandchildren’s ears that the President is really wearing nothing. He is wearing no clothes at all. I tell them to ignore the flag he has draped around his nakedness, I tell them to be careful of the heavy Bible that the President carries like a loaded gun, and I tell them that one day they will come to understand that he is not wearing any clothes. He is naked. He is a fool. But he is extremely well-armed and should be considered very dangerous.

This is the stuff that lies at the heart of my lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues.

Used to be when I got to feeling depressed like this I could go hang out at the Café at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Arts and watch the people walking back and forth outside the door. The Mexicans and the abuelitos and the penguins and the high-heeled ladies and the Mennonites and the niños. Inside I’d always find weird and interesting people from all over the world. I could read books and look at the art on the walls.

And the best part was that red-headed Maggie Herrera would console me. She’d smile her wonderful freckle-face smile and say, Hi, Mr. Byrd, the silver post punched into her lower lip bobbing up and down like a cork. She never called me Bobby. She’d fix me a double café breve. She’d give me a big glass of water with ice.

Maggie always wore her jeans so lowdown that I could watch her bellybutton riding the magic of her thin and beautiful body. Her bellybutton was a cave that opened up into the beginning and into the end. When I was in college, the allegory of Plato’s cave bored and confused me with its shadows and darkness and absence of meaning, but the cave of Maggie’s belly button has real meaning about the sacred world in which we live. A few minutes of drinking my coffee and contemplating the metaphysical implications of Maggie’s bellybutton always refreshed me. I would be ready to return to the world. But the Bridge Café is closed. So I got no place to drain myself of these old man El Paso blues.

Art Lewis said a white man can’t know the blues like a black man knows the blues. I don’t know if Art is right or wrong, but I wish I could talk to Art and tell him about these goddamn blues I got right now. Art is a wise man and he would know how to give me some relief. But Art took his sax and went back to Houston. He’s sick. He got diabetes and a double-hernia, the hernia from blowing on that horn without a mike all these years. Besides, Art’s momma is fragile and old. Rumor says she has Alzheimer’s. So Art needs to be taking care of his mother, but I bet he wishes he could blow his horn because he’s got some real bad troubling blues.

Once over a year ago, a few months after 9/11 and I was feeling just like I am right now, I walked over to the Bridge Café to drink coffee and to talk to Maggie. But Maggie was busy with paperwork and she was sad because her boyfriend had left her. Every one of us had some kind of lousy blues back then after 9/11. Remember? Maggie quickly concocted me my double-shot café breve, gave me a glass of water with no ice and told me straight out that she didn’t have time to talk. She told me to go downstairs in the basement. Art Lewis was preaching to an assembly about the gospel of music. I went downstairs. Art was sermonizing and playing at the same time. He tooted his horn and said, “Bobby, sit down. Take a load off.” He had poured his lanky black body into a black suit and a black shirt and shiny black shoes and a very nice black porkpie hat. The man was black. Always black. Maybe he was 60, maybe 70. I didn’t care.

Every day Art Lewis stepped into the river of his life and prayed into his saxophone. He prayed jazz. Improvisation was his devout way of life. His sacred horn was always blowing away the stifling air of fundamentalism. As far as Art was concerned, right and wrong, innocence and guilt--they were all notes in the same piece of music. Playing the sax was Art Lewis’ religious practice, and he had become a wise teacherman by following the path the saxophone had shown him.

“Music,” he announced, “holds many of the answers to the riddles about life and death.”

“Why doesn’t it hold all the answers?” I asked.

Art got that big wide smile on his face and said, “Because we don’t know all the questions.” He played a riff and added. “Besides, there aint no answers in the boogie-woogie. No answers anywhere in the be-bop. The jingle-jangle is so empty of answers you’d go hungry if you got lost inside. The only answer we got is just us doing what we are doing. Like the dogs and the fishes. Like the homeless blowing down San Antonio Street like afternoon trash. That’s why I play my horn. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Art was wearing a long necklace of wide golden links. A cheap necklace really, not real gold, but it was handsome hanging around Art’s black neck.

“Art,” I asked, “where did you get that handsome necklace?”

“Oh,” he said, “a wino in the alley outside the Cincinnati Street Bar gave it to me. He wanted me to play him some blues. So I played him some wino alley blues. He liked those wino alley blues. Said those blue made him feel sad and happy at the same time. Said he didn’t have any money, so he gave me this golden necklace. It’s fake gold, you understand. But it sure makes me feel good.”

Art smiled again. He didn’t have many teeth.

That night I had this strange dream.

National Public Radio announced that Osama Bin Laden’s soul, tainted and crippled by fundamentalism, had escaped her master’s body. The soul of Osama Bin Laden had witnessed airplanes disappearing into glass buildings. And dead souls floating off toward the moon. In despair she had fled the body of Osama Bin Laden. Art Lewis was in the alley next to the Cincinnati Club playing saxophone to the wino, and the soul of Osama Bin Laden appeared like a moth attracted to a candle’s flame. She hid behind garbage cans and listened to Art play his horn. She realized that she had never known such generosity and compassion. She began to weep while Art played the many riffs from his golden horn.

And she fell asleep.

In her sleep, the soul of Osama Bin Laden dreamed. Like I was dreaming the soul of Bin Laden. A dream within a dream. And in her dream the soul of Bin Laden was giving birth to a child. When she opened her legs, she found a dead baby boy. Art Lewis sighed and with his horn he collected up the grief and blood and afterbirth like a priest who is preparing to give the holy sacrament. While Art Lewis blew this sorrow into his horn, the soul of Osama Bin Laden and the wino buried the dead baby in a dumpster behind Geo Geske’s. The lid clanged shut. The alleyway smelled like urine.

Art Lewis was weeping, the big tears dripping down his black face. He continued to blow on his horn about the sorrows in his heart. He said his piece was called “The Soul of Osama Bin Laden and her Dead Baby’s Blues,” a song so sad it made the wino weep too. The wino’s name was John, and John wandered away looking for some sort of God. He left behind the golden necklace as a gift for Art.

The necklace was stolen merchandise. Art didn’t care. He put it around his neck and played to the dark alleyway.

And the soul of Osama Bin Laden disappeared forever.

That was the end of my dream, and for what it’s worth, the Bridge Center and Art Lewis made that dream possible. Now the Bridge has locked up its doors, I haven’t seen Maggie Herrera in a couple of months, and I feel this deep emptiness in my imagination. George Bush, meanwhile, continues to strut around on the stage in his imaginary suit of clothes--the American flag draped around his nakedness, the Bible dangling from his manly hand like a smoking AK-47. My lost sad empty useless old man El Paso blues just won’t go away.

But this I have learned--Art Lewis has put his saxophone next to his bed in Houston where it generates a warm glow inside his room. His mother is with him. She is ancient. She has found memory to be of no further use. A hopeless tool. She does not know Art’s name but she knows that he resided in her belly. And that was a long time ago. Now she is waiting to unlock the door that opens into the void. She wants to step outside. Art watches her from his bed, learning some more about the questions that have no answers, and he meditates upon the meaning of music without any sound. “It’s a perfect music, exquisitely improvised,” he mumbles to anyone who will listen. “It’s a high pitched sound that resides inside the holiness of our brains. We all first heard that music inside our mother’s belly. Down in that magnificent slime where I first saw my father’s face. This is a strange secret.”

Airports & Horses: Jimenez & Hauser

Every time I drive to the El Paso airport I am startled by John Hauser's don Juan Oñate rearing up on an oversized Spanish mustang—“the world’s largest equestrian statue.” Hauser was into exact realism, so driving almost under the hooves of the thing, it’s impossible to ignore the mustang’s gargantuan package hanging like a wet dream gone terribly bad. What is that thing doing there? That’s a good question too. Public art, especially a piece of this enormity and expense, speaks about a city’s cultural vibes. El Paso has endured a 10-year-plus name-calling debate about this bronzed humongous conqueror. For a number of years the thing couldn’t find a home--nobody wanted it downtown, nobody wanted it on the river, nobody wanted it at City Hall--so the airport became the home of last resort. The debate teams had the usual suspects. On one side have been the conservatives (a buttoned-down assortment of Republicans, traditional Catholics, old-school and well-heeled Mexican-Americans, etcetera) and the other side is populated by the progressive community (a more vociferous hodgepodge that includes artists and intellectuals, the left side of Democratic Party, political activists, old-school Chicano activists, etcetera). This political and divisive history of Hauser’s statue has been documented in a number of places, including a long piece in the New York Times that as usual denigrates El Paso and a POV PBS documentary, The Last Conquistador. More important to the history of arts funding in El Paso and a critique of Hauser as an artist are Richard Baron’s articles, one of which is archived here at newspapertree.com (others are buried in archived pre-online fishwraps like The Bridge Review and Stanton Street).

And of course by now you can guess which side I’m on.

Sometimes when I see the Hauser I get angry. But when I’m lucky I laugh. El Paso got suckered again. Tom Diamond wiggled his finger and wagged his tongue and John Hauser patted the ricos on the back and smoothed their tail feathers and sweet green money slimed into their coffers by the millions. Why not? Oñate was a good Catholic boy, even if in 1599 he earned the nickname of “the Butcher at Acoma” for ordering the masacre at the pueblo, killing 800, enslaving 500 women and children, and cutting off the right foot of every remaining able-bodied man in the pueblo. Not to worry. He boasted pure Spanish blood.

Not like that Benito Juárez indio guy.

Not like that meztizo vato Pancho Villa.

I grew up in Memphis where huge statues of Confederate generals on horseback (Jefferson Davis, Nathan Bedford Forrest and others) dominated a number of public parks. Those pieces of public art left a bitter taste in my mouth. I didn’t have to be told what the underlying message of those statues of men on horseback meant—those guys were heroes because they fought to preserve slavery. So from the beginning I didn’t like the politics of the Oñate thing and I didn’t like how its funding was rammed through city council back in the 90s. Now that it’s done I don’t like it as a piece of art and I certainly don’t like the symbolism of having this huge statue of the Butcher at Acoma becoming part of our cultural landscape. I have a friend, poet Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo, who talks about how the dark shadow of Oñate and his butchery still reverberates through the oral history of his people’s language and stories.

In Denver a few weeks ago with Lee on business, I made sure I saw that city’s public art at their airport: the Blue Mustang by paseño Luis Jimenez (1940-2006) that has finally been installed. It had consumed much of the last years of Luis’ life and, with a final bit of irony, as he was working to finish the project the almost-finished head toppled over and killed him. As I approached the airport, I saw it from a half a mile away. Before the airport itself comes into view, the mustang rears up grandly on its hind legs out in the prairie, its mysterious red-orange eyes glowing in the cloudy dusk.

Luis grew up in El Paso in the 1940s and 50s. As a young man he left El Paso burdened with that rage that so many young Chicanos of his generation—especially the artists, the writers, the intellectuals—grew up with in their hearts and minds. El Paso is a Mexican city, a Mexican-American city, but the übercultur of his growing up was Anglo-American topped with a boring salsa of conservative Mexicano. The political structure, the banks, the big businesses—all were in the hands of the Anglo-Americans and a handful of rico Mexican-Americans. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the public school systems in the 40s and 50s. Spanish was not allowed. And kids in high school didn’t hear the Mexican history of El Paso, especially the stories of El Paso as the political and intellectual center for the early stages of the Mexican Revolution, they didn’t take field trips down to Monument Marker #1 to see where Francisco Madero crossed over the river to launch the historic revolution, and they didn’t learn about Pancho Villa living over in Sunset Heights, waiting for his return to Mexico. Instead, they learned about the Anglo-American history of the city and the state of Texas (the gun fighters, the Texas Rangers, the Alamo, etcetera). Artists and writers like Luis, Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Antonio Burciaga, Ricardo Sanchez and others realized early on that they had been deprived of their heritage and they learned to express their anger and resentment through their work.

Sometime in the early 80s I heard Luis speak at UTEP as a guest of the art department. Lee and I had moved to El Paso in 1978, but I knew Luis’ work from traveling from our home in Albuquerque to Santa Fe to see his cutouts, drawings and prints at the now defunct Hills Gallery. It was the first time since leaving El Paso (he was then over 40 and had received national acclaim) that he had been asked to speak in El Paso. His speech was hesitant at first, uncomfortable to be in El Paso, but, feeling the good reception of the standing-room only crowd, he warmed to the task as he showed slides of his work. Somewhere in the middle of the speech he started talking about his anger, and he spoke about how in the first part of the century the city government had outlawed the use of adobe as a building materials for homes. Adobe, of course, is the indigenous building material of the American Southwest. It’s a cheap material (you can make it yourself with the dirt in your backyard if you have the right dirt), and the result is buildings that, if properly maintained, can last forever. Indeed, the ambience of cultural boomtowns Taos and Santa Fe is rooted in adobe buildings. But the local power-brokers here made their anti-adobe law, and of course one of those helping to make the law was the local brick-maker. The story of bricks and adobe in El Paso was symbolic to Luis of his hometown, much like the stories of his and Hauser’s sculptures have become to me.

To take a picture of the Blue Mustang, I had to park the car illegally on the muddy shoulder of the road and run across the half-frozen ground to get close enough for a decent photo. I was happy to do it. Luis’ Blue Mustang is an incredibly potent piece of work, married perfectly into the landscape of the prairies to the east and the Rocky Mountains to the west. It represents the power of the Western mythos in our national psyche. Horses, of course, were introduced on this continent by the Spanish, but it wasn’t long before they became the symbol of the indigenous horse cultures of the prairie Indians. By staying away from historical particulars, the Blue Mustang synthesizes many disparate parts of our history to give us a symbol of the American West.

So I get back home and go to the El Paso airport. There is don Juan Oñate riding through the parking lot on his over-sized Spanish mustang. Even in its enormous presence it seems inconsequential. I can’t help it—I remember myself five-years-old playing with toys and realize this thing is like a blow-up of those little pot metal Indians and cowboys I used to play with. The Indians were on one side, the cowboys on the other. The cowboys were always rearing up and shooting their guns, the Indians were slinking down behind their little horses, they were running away. That hokey scene. Except that hokey scene speaks about one people’s conquering and domination of another people. It’s a complicated history that should contemplated and discussed, especially in classrooms, but it’s certainly not a history that should be romanticized with a monstrous and well-hung macho statue.

Oh well. Hauser’s Oñate has become a fact of life for us here in El Paso. It’s not going to come down. Still, I have a secret wish.

I wish we could cut off Oñate’s right foot. Not in the dead of night. No, I want to have a huge ceremony and invite the Governor of Acoma to El Paso. I want to invite Simon Ortiz to write and read a poem for the occasion. A poem that will honor the dead of Acoma, a poem that will honor the history of the pueblo peoples, a poem that will honor the land we live on, a poem that will honor our common future. After Simon has read his poem and we all have tears in our eyes, I want the mayor of El Paso to give the Governor of Acoma a large blowtorch and I want him to cut off the statue’s right foot. I want it to fall thud to the ground amid cheers and sadness and prayers. Then I want a powwow to begin. Maybe we can call it “Cutting Off the Butcher’s Foot Powwow.” Or maybe we can call it the “Asking for Forgiveness Powwow.” We’ll figure out something. The important thing is that we invite all the Fancy Dancers, the Traditional Dancers, the Grass Dancers, the drummers and the singers—the drums will pound and the songs will wail at the moon and the beating of feet will pound into the desert night. Vendors will be selling snow cones and churros and elotes, tacos and hamburgers and sodas and Oñate piñatas. No booze, no dope. Those are the rules. That’s because all of the Kachinas and the holy clowns will be there, watching us. Our Lady of Guadalupe too. She’ll be wearing cowboy boots and a big smile. We’ll invite Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed. They'll be hanging out in the shadows, mumbling about the uselessness of words. At midnight, holding hands and dancing around the circle, the big drums still pounding, we will melt the Spaniard’s foot. The molten bronze will seep steaming into a cauldron.

Hauser, like Sisyphus doing his existential but very sacred chore of pushing the rock up the hill, will recast and re-attach the foot so that the next year we can re-enact the ceremony. He will be well-paid and he will have a studio to work on other projects. The festival will become a huge annual fair. El Paso will become known as the City of Forgiveness. The federal government will tear down its ugly fence, the drug war will become history and peace will be declared in Juárez.

I wish.

Luis Villegas: Let Us Now Praise Famous Artists

“In hindsight, it’s good that I was never successful selling my art. I’d be tied down to a lot of stuff that I don’t care about. Now, I rely on all the information I’ve ever gathered, and whether it’s mine or not, I make at least a little bit of art everyday, and making art is being an artist. My art is made in the spirit of adventure and discovery, and my life is lived in that same spirit. My art and my life are the same.”--Luis Villegas from an article Profile: Luis Villegas by Richard Baron.

El Paso artist Luis Villegas is truly a remarkable man and a good friend. He earns his living as a “fine arts handyman”—his own description of his professional status. For the last eight years or so, Luis has been doing a number of jobs for Lee and me, from painting the inside and outside of the storefront of Cinco Puntos Press to painting a mural on the floor of our front porch. So when the old elm tree in our backyard died, we knew we didn’t want to rip the tree out of the yard. Nope, we wanted Luis to make something special of that tree. And his creation is incredible--two large fishes (a gar and a catfish) that will be hanging on the front porch and in the house and the tree itself, a cornucopia of fishes diving into the heart of our earth. He calls that piece “Fish Swimming Downtree.” Luis, I believe, is a wonderful example of a strong tradition of American art, men and women who work art-making into their working life. They may not become famous or rich but by the insistence on the making of art as an honored and essential profession--indeed, as a celebration of themselves and their vision--they leave an indelible mark on the psyche in the locale of their work.



On November 9th Lee and I had a party to celebrate and honor Luis and his work (our home and our office are truly molded by his imagination and work) and hopefully to get him more creative work like the sculptures and the murals. Below are pictures from the party and also photos of Luis working on a number of other projects at Cinco Puntos and at our home. Some of the photos I have lifted, with her permission, from the blog of Carolyn Drapes. She’s a wonderful photographer. Please visit her blog for more photos of the party at her Flickr site plus other images that reflect the quirky ambiente of the city of El Paso. And of course read Richard Baron’s profile of Luis as well as other profiles of the artistic folks that roam the streets here.

Other photos below are of two of the "float alone" fishes, the garfish with grandson Eddie hung from the front porch and the catfish that swims in our bedroom (our granddaughter, via a contest at the party, named them Garfunkle and Simon) and Luis with his two primos, Henry and Joe.

When asked what one word best describes that life, he matter-of-factly replies, "Oh, I’m still a musician. Everything is music."--from the Baron profile of Luis