So much feels lost

In a recent interview with Kelly Reichardt, director of the new film "Meek's Cutoff", she describes her experiences on the road and the monotony of the American highway system:

"Ever since I was a kid, we had one of those piggyback campers where you could ride up in the bed; I don’t think you can do that anymore. We would go from Miami to Montana pretty much every summer and take a different route out west. I’d be in that bed looking out the window, and there was just a huge feeling as each state changed, and I had my little transistor up there and got local radio, and every place was just so distinct. We would camp our way across the country. And as it’s turned out, I continued doing that. In my 20s, I used to get those rent-a-cars and drive to the next state and wait for the next car, and that decides where you’re going to go. In these last years, I’ve been going back and forth between Oregon and New York, and the drive is now just something to get through. The interstates are horrific, there are no local radio channels. It’s Clear Channel, conservative corporate radio, all the way across. It’s just a series of chains, and they never end. Days Inn, Applebee’s—you really have to go far off. Even when you take the smaller roads, you still see the motels and stuff have all been run out of business. The gap between the big corporate motel and the mom-and-pop motel is huge now. It’s not exciting. It’s not an adventure now. It’s really just more of a chore. Once you get past Colorado, there are states that are very beautiful to drive through. But you can’t help it—you have a lot of time to think about what it could have been, how great it could have been, and it’s just depression, I guess. The things that Americans value, and it has been passed on to people outside of America now… So much feels lost. It’s hard. It used to be a really inspiring thing that I would do, and now I find it just really depressing. The complete corporate takeover of the country is so evident, and you can’t escape it. Your choices are so few, and they are so bad."

I agree completely.



For further thoughts on the human habitat, check out the Kunstlercast - an excellent podcast by James Howard Kunstler.

Speaking of movies - if Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" is playing anywhere near you, it was captivating and highly recommended:

Wheatfield

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982

Wheatfield—A Confrontation (The Harvest), 2 acres of wheat planted and harvested by the artist on a landfill in Manhattan's financial district, summer 1982.

photos from the Chelsea Art Museum.

Greenmuseum.org writes, "In 1982, she carried out what has become one of the best-known environmental art projects when she planted a two-acre field of wheat in a vacant lot in downtown Manhattan. Titled, Wheatfield -- A Confrontation, the artwork yielded 1,000 lbs. of wheat in the middle of New York City to comment on "human values and misplaced priorities". The harvested grain then traveled to 28 cities worldwide in "The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger" and was symbolically planted around the globe. "

Aren't these photos great? I remember learning about this work some time ago, but running into it again at Mount Olympus renewed my excitement about the work and the idea. As it gets more and more expensive to ship food across huge distances (what James Howard Kunstler likes to call the "3,000 mile salad"), it will be more important to grow food nearer to where it is consumed - so I think this work in particular will have increasing relevance over time. There's recently been a boom in urban farming. In fact, Denver's Westword ran a feature on the movement in May called "The Urbavore's Dilemma: Getting down and dirty with Denver's backyard farmers".

See also; this post at Coolhunting about landscape ecologist Eric W. Sanderson's decade-long Mannahatta Project, an exhaustive study and recreation of the Manhattan ecosystem circa 1609 (the year of Henry Hudson's arrival in Mannahatta).

New Press: Humanist Magazine

I have a photo in the September/October issue of Humanist magazine that accompanies a interview with one of my favorite authors, James Howard Kunstler. It should be on newsstands soon and you can pick it up at Borders. Here is the online article.

Bill Wray

I love the show Ren&Stimpy - and the paintings of Bill Wray really enhanced the show:

Bill Wray, "Ren and Stimpy in: ‘Space Madness." Cover art
He also does non-cartoon paintings like these:

Bill Wray "Michigan" Oil on Canvas, 12x12"

Bill Wray, "Sunland and San-Fern"

I like these two paintings especially - they remind me of James Howard Kunstler's work in his choice of subject matter. Both artists depict the landscape as it is, without editing out less attractive elements like McDonalds, power plants, and automobiles. These are the things that we see the most - it should seem obvious for landscape painting to incorporate these places and things. I often eliminate the excess of the landscapes I choose to paint, but I admire the honesty in these.

James Howard Kunstler, "Off-ramp at Exit 29 of Interstate 87"

The End of Cheap Oil as an Opportunity

Car/Bus/Bike (found at theartofwhere)

photo by Nathan Abels

I highly recommend this article by Claude Lewenz at WorldChanging, called "The End of Cheap Oil as an Opportunity". The author outlines how the American economy and habitat changed after the Great Depression and WWII - establishing a period of unprecedented economic growth based on the abundance of cheap fossil fuels.

In a letter quoted in the article, Stuart Udall writes, "As a freshman congressman in 1955, I regrettably voted with my unanimous colleagues for the Interstate Highway Program. All of us acted on the shortsighted assumption that cheap oil was superabundant and would always be available. This illusion began to unravel in the 1970s, and it haunts Americans today.

Oil lies at the epicenter of a critical energy crisis. Petroleum is a finite resource and is the most precious, versatile resource on the planet. Cheap oil played a crucial role in the development of American power and prosperity, and sustains the military machine that dominates the world today. Oil is now nearing a historic transition that will alter the civilization Americans have come to take for granted."

The article does not only specify the problem, but has an interesting proposal for building communities (referred to as "villages") that do not rely on the automobile. In fact, Lewenz expresses great positivity about the possibilities of the future, writing, "if cheap oil is a thing of the past, change will come. We can either suffer it, or realize it as a great opportunity."

Similar to James Howard Kunstler, this article's writer, Claude Lewenz points out how problematic the suburban environment truly is in the long term; "In simple terms, it is time to stop building new developments that are based on the shortsighted assumption that cheap oil would be abundant and would always be available. It makes absolutely no sense to build another suburb, another shopping mall or another office or industrial park where people must drive distances to get there."

I could quote nearly the entire article, but you should read it yourself. If you are curious about Peak Oil, gas prices, and the suburban environment, this is a great place to start.

Great Cities of the World

Image by Andy Singer from a Peak Oil/Climate Change Art Show in San Francisco

Quite ironically, I was listening to yesterday's mentioned Kunstlerkast on my commute to work this morning. It is ironic because the one I was listening to was about parking garages and the influence of the automobile on our lives. In the discussion, James Howard Kunstler said, "You know, one of the upshots in America is that sure, we all have our own cars at our disposal all the time, but because of that, there’s almost no place in America that’s worth being in or going to. That’s one of the unintended consequences of mass automobile use is that you actually destroy the terrain so voraciously that nowhere is worth driving to."

James Howard Kunstler

I've noticed that lately I've been posting more about audio than painting or visual art. I suppose that is because I'm trying to finish up preparing for my show and I'm doing a lot more listening than looking right now. On last week's road trip I listened to a podcast from Humanist Network News that spoke with James Howard Kunstler about the "human habitat". He's very entertaining and informative in the interview, and I'd highly recommend listening to it:


I was especially interested in the emphasis that Kunstler made in the interview to criticize a lot of the hypocrisies or fallacies in modern environmentalist thought. In particular he notes that the current push to find new liquid fuel sources like ethanol shows the reluctance if not refusal to let go of the automobile and embrace other modes of transportation and urban planning. The description to one of his own podcasts sums this up well saying, "The problem in America is not that we're driving the wrong kind of cars, per se.The trouble in the United States is we're driving incessantly. We're driving every kind of car there is, incessantly. And we've got to find a way out of the incessant motoring and a way to live without it, and a happy way to live without it—not a punishment way to live without it, but a way to be happy and do it. And it means, really, a completely different paradigm for everyday life."

His book, The Geography of Nowhere is also highly recommended:


He's recently started his own weekly podcast called the Kunstlerkast - which you can find here.