Going into the Tunnel

If you had caught me in the middle of last week, you might have seen a beat-up, deflated woman of indeterminate state of mind, (wandering around with dirty hair and hands) wondering what in the hell she was doing painting huge rats and half clothed women for an art show, taking place in a tunnel, no less: why why why? I asked, as I slogged through masses of butcher paper and mistakes. What good could possibly come from this? Shouldn't I—the thought seriously crossed my mind, as the exhaustion wore on— be doing something useful with my time?

 

Not that I'm unfamiliar with this state of mind, but it almost stopped me, and boy am I glad it didn't. Not only because I wanted to work with artist Margaret Gallagher, who curated the Tunnel Art Show, but being part of a local art exhibit in North East Los Angeles turned out to be a gas! Seeing the people who filed through the tunnel on Saturday night was worth it alone. There was the art crowd, the college crowd (Margaret just graduated from Oxy, with a degree in art), the friend crowd, but there was also the Cypress Park neighborhood crowd, who probably never thought of going into a tunnel on a Saturday night, but seemed generally excited about what they were seeing. A lot of discussion was taking place under Figueroa St., when you get right down to it (down to it, get it, underground, hah!).

Thank you Cypress Park neighbors for participating in this event! Thanks to Yancey at Antigua Coffee House for his original idea to open the tunnel that runs from Loreto St. to Nightingale Middle School for local artists each month. (Here's an article about it.) And...Thank you Margaret!

Margaret Gallagher

curator of the Cypress Park Tunnel Art Show

 standing in front of her paintings

And, especially thank you to Molly Ruttan, my trustworthy, risk-taking, wheatpasting friend, who has helped me on almost every one of my street art ventures without uttering one complaint (and she's not even getting paid!). Thanks Molly, I couldn't have done it without you. 

Wheatpasters to the end!

 GOING INTO THE TUNNEL

(photos by Tom Harjo)

 Molly and Charlotte pasting...

Margaret at top of stairs

 

If you missed the tunnel art show, look for it as part of the NELA Art Walk, every second Saturday. For those of you who'd like to see the wheatpastes, the tunnel's closed, but you can view them from street level, on both sides of Fig. They'll be around for another month.

(And I almost forgot, thank you to Jocelyn Grau for her generous contribution!)

Ode to NYC

I'm back from New York and getting used to the streets of L.A. again, but I'm still in the city in some way, still in the grip of tulip mania, thinking about the colors, variations, multitudes, which are hard to get out of my head. Here's my ode to the city, and my gratitude for being there this spring!


After nine eleven
the ballrooms lay empty,
the streets slick with tears
Sideway glances/suspicious stares



   (street art across from B.A.M.)

But the city, now, this spring, 
this year,
is full of tulips
Tulips, tulips

everywhere!     

A kind of 
Tulip mania (without an effect on prices*) 
Someone— was it Bloomberg?—
planted tulips
from Battery Park to Morningside
from west side
to east side,
     
in rows, in lots, in tiny garden boxes 
And in one bright moment,
they all popped! 
You could hear the sounds of
cameras clicking, tourists gasping, petals dropping



Multitudes of tulips 
(and the High Line)
expunged the past
They, not Liberty Street, beckoned us
(but be forewarned, if you go on the High Line, it's hard to walk!)
Oh, NYC,
this spring, how you celebrate yourself!
     

* Tulip mania, the first recorded speculative bubble, when the market for bulbs went haywire and then collapsed. 

~~~~ 

And a new Rat's Nest Comic, straight off the presses!

 

Tulip City

It's spring in NY and nothing could be finer!

 

Tulip sniffing at Barrow St. Gardens,

at St. Luke's in the Field

(Tulips in this post spotted on the High Line, in Chelsea, West Village and St. Luke's, but they're everywhere!)

••••••

And Readers, please take a look at the new Rat's Nest comic, done a few days ago, before coming to New York: ratsnestcomics.blogspot.com

Faded pictures

I started this blog to somehow cope with my empty nest, but despite my attempts, the facts remain: you raise your kids, they go away, their youth stretches out in direct proportion to you getting older, and just as you find solace with your creative life, you're back to facing the same old demons, whatever they may be. Good thing no one tells you this at the beginning. Maybe that's what my mother was trying to say when she said, so forthrightly (and she wasn't always so forthright), if given a choice she might not have had kids.

I thought about this all weekend, just to match the mood of the cold and rainy, gray and overcast days, and then as i was rummaging through the fridge this morning, I noticed them— faded, partially hidden pictures, pinned on the door by magnets, of past trips, of past happinesses, faded and almost gone. But not gone, like a memory lodged inside the brain. So, not empty either, when you get right down to it.

 Joshua Tree

 Mekko and Ben

In London on Abbey Road with the kids

Along the Arroyo

There's a perfect little spot off Via Marisol in Highland Park, called Hermon Park, not more than ten minutes from my house, with lush lawns, a busy dog park, tennis courts and Art in the Park, home of the Lalo Guerrero School of music, run by the formidable Berta Sosa, a Mt. Washington neighbor. But best of all, and something I just discovered, is a way down into the Arroyo Seco, and onto the bike path. 

(You can't access the bike path at the pedestrian bridge, as Wikipedia claims, but further north, adjacent to the dog park. Watch out, sharp curve here!)

The Arroyo Seco is a stream that starts in the Angeles National Forest, makes its way down the mountain into La Canada Flintridge and Altadena, flowing underneath the Foothill Bridge, under the Colorado Bridge, then into a concrete flood control channel along the Pasadena Freeway, flowing southeast of Mt. Washington, past Hermon, Highland Park, Montecito Heights, Cypress Park, and ending at the LA River, near Elysian Park.

Whew. That's a busy stream, for such a meager trickle once it reaches L.A. But because it runs inside this wide, concrete channel, making the stream seem even more meager, there's plenty of room for biking.

The concrete walls are gray and ugly, but the ride itself is not, as you take the graceful curves and experience another world along the Arroyo. The other day, I rode past Montecito Heights, past my own exit, off the 110 freeway, then turned around and headed north for a mile or so, emerging near the San Pascual Stables in South Pasadena. 

Along the way I kept noticing chipped off indentations in the concrete banks, things that I'd otherwise not notice, save for the fact I'd just read cartoonist Lynda Barry's Picture This, a hard-to-describe illustrated book about the creative mind. She finds images in ink spots and stains on paper (Saul Steinberg found them in fingerprints!), augmenting them just a hair to make a monkey or a buffalo or any kind of  demented animal. And here they were in the Arroyo, chips that were life size, gouges formed by wind or water, or, perhaps, weak construction. 
 
I noticed this one in particular:

What does this look like to you?

A few days later, when it was almost dark, I came back with my partner in crime, Molly. We painted in the indentations:

  

Then I went to work stenciling what I had imagined: 

Africa and the island of Tazarat, Land of the Giant Rat!

(click to make larger)

It got darker and darker and I kept adding more rats, until it became a heavy migration. I'll call this one an experiment, not yet done. Of course there's no Tazarat, except in my mind, and on the digital pages titled "Voyage to Tazarat" in my computer. Now it exists on this wall, as well.

•••

For those of you who follow my other blog, Rat's Nest Comics, here's a new one called "Woman Seeking Treatment." Enjoy.

 

Lily

Lily

They call them exotic pets, but there was nothing exotic about Lily. She was blind, she didn't like to be touched, she'd bite our toes under the blankets, she wouldn't come when we called, spending many a night in the oven, but sometimes, when she was on the verge of sleep, we could pet her and she'd relish in the touch. 

The first time I saw her she was on the shoulder of a teenager who sold her (and Blu) to us. We knew the minute we got home, they'd given us a blind, unfriendly rat, but we didn't care. We still loved her. Tom found her dying in the cage this morning at 4 a.m.; I took her into the vets around 9, to have her put to sleep. Her heart was strong, but she was in pain and Tom insisted I take her in. Perhaps it was the best thing, but I don't know, maybe the business of dying for a rat takes a long time.

Here's to you Lily, for being who you were without apology.

Street Art on the eastside....

I've been roaming around Highland Park and Silverlake today, trying to distract myself, bumping into dancing bums and art everywhere. After today I might even say that northeast LA is the street art capital of the world.

Take this first mural, made by Sand One that I saw on the side of a building on York Ave.

 Sand One

in Highland Park

Sand One is one of the most popular street artists around in this part of town. At first I wasn't so keen on her style, but now that I know what it takes, I'm a fan. See more of her work at: www.sandoner.com.

 My favorite mural in Highland Park, Monte Vista and Ave. 52

 Transmission Shop, York Ave. Highland Park

Wheat Paste on Figueroa near Ave 34,

Cypress Park

 Spray paint by Vixz

Ave. 56 and Fig

Utility box at Tropical Icecream

 Silverlake 

(where AA meets)

Today I started to experiment with a stencil and some cans of paint. It was the only thing, besides driving around and bumping into things, I found I could do.

This last one I call Triple Ratz, or Rat Dance

(Thanks, Melanie!!)

••••

And one last one: original art made in the street, with Louise Steinman, for a performance piece called, Dog's Head Route, performed in Portland, OR, 1980.

This is not a Rat