This is the view from my desk. If you hunt for Taos Mountain on this site via Search or Tags, you’ll find a zillion similar shots, but I don’t care. There’s an acequia (traditional seasonal irrigation ditch from Moorish Spain that looks just like a stream) at the bottom of the hill. That huge aspen on the left was planted 50 years ago by hippies, and you know it’s happy to be rooted near the water. Dennis Hopper lived less than a hundred yards away back then. I doubt he had a role in digging up the aspens in the mountains and transplanting them down here, but who knows and it doesn’t matter. The point is that this very hillside was completely barren in the early ’60s, and some crazy people made it better. They planted apple trees as well and they’ll be blooming soon.
No idea who made this but I’m grateful
Introduction: Early this morning a Twitter friend happened to mention the Sex Pistols. Whenever anyone does this, no matter where I am, I have to tell the story of how my wife and I actually saw them. It almost didn’t happen, either. The above video is from the show. What follows is a slightly edited 2010 blog post from my old FarrFeed site.
I was a major fan of their one and only album. The main takeaway from seeing them play one of their very last gigs was how good the sound was. Not that you can tell from the video, of course. Guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook carried the band. I may have permanently damaged my hearing that night too, but this was the real deal.
From the vault:
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Oh wow. Gotta love YouTube!
On a whim, I just searched for a video of the Sex Pistols’ show at Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio, Texas on January 9, 1978, and I found one! This blows me away because my wife and I were there.
We’re not in the video, but at least one person I recognize from Austin is. I was standing 10 feet in front of Sid Vicious with broken glass crunching under my shoes, loving every second of it. So loud, the loudest music I’d ever heard until that time. If you watch clear to the end, you can see Sid taking off his bass guitar and hitting someone with it.
So how did this come about?
We were visiting my sister in Austin over the between-semester break (my wife was teaching at Washington College in Chestertown, MD). To have a little time to ourselves, we’d gone to San Antonio for the day. I knew the Sex Pistols were on tour and playing at Randy’s Rodeo, a country-western dance hall, but hadn’t even brought it up because I thought for sure the venue would be sold out. When it came time to drive back to Austin, I took a road that went right past. Tempting fate and all. It’s a little complicated, but the upshot was we saw the sign, I said let’s go, and she agreed. The whole thing lasted hours.
The Sex Pistols had chosen a raunchy cowboy venue just to piss off the regular patrons, which worked like a charm. They also didn’t come on until almost midnight, five full hours after we’d walked in and had our ticket stubs stapled to our collars by an armed guard. There were at least four opening acts, all local, loud, and very bad. From what I read afterwards, the local bands were chosen because they were bad. By around 11:30 p.m., the mood had turned decidedly ugly, and the mixed crowd of rednecks, Latinos, and Austin hippies was ready to crack heads.
Finally, the Sex Pistols took the stage. Before they’d even played a note, the air was full of flying pizza slices, beer bottles, and spittle. Johnny Rotten began by making fun of the “cowboy faggots,” which cranked the tension up even more. Obviously relishing the chaos, the Pistols then launched into a bone-crushing rendition of “God Save the Queen” that transported me to another realm of pure rock and roll joy. It was also the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life. (Three days later, my ears were still ringing.)
The bare concrete floor was wet with spilled beer and vomit. Tossed beer bottles littered the joint with broken glass. The Pistols were outstanding. The noise was beyond pain. All in all, it was one of the most outrageous, dangerous, wonderful experiences of my life.
Watching that video brings it all back home. Enjoy.
Horizontal dark line is the Rio Grande gorge. The river is 800 ft below.
The Pedernal (Cerro Pedernal, elevation 9,866 ft) is the narrow, flat-topped mesa in the middle of the far distance. From where I stood in bitter cold to take this photo on February 23rd to the peak is 50 miles. Just imagine, no cities or suburbs between that peak and me. A boyhood dream come true, if I would only let it happen like it wants to. It seems so strange that I could be this old and still be talking about my life this way—compared to how I look at everybody else, that is, which is precisely what one must not do. I am unique, the quintessential Juan. Desire is the engine. Let us play.
It isn’t all exactly bad
Behold the view from a foreclosure we saw recently. If it only cost a third less, selling the Bugatti might just get us there, except for all the water damage—probably needs a new roof, oy. Foreclosures are weird, too. In this case the seller sets a price that lasts a month, only takes bids above that, then accepts the highest after thirty days. In the absence of any bids, the price goes down another fifty (!) grand like it just did, and then you wait another month. No telling how that goes. There must be investors with offers set to kick in when these places hit a certain price point. Anyway, we dug the scenery, and there’s a couple acres fenced for raising something cool that might eat sagebrush. Nice neighborhood. (The hovel in the background has four garage bays.) I’m more a farmhouse-on-the-hilltop kinda guy, but let’s just take things as they come.
Last night before dinner I was rambling on interminably, driving she-who-loves-me half insane. I was critical of my work and how if there weren’t so much chaos in our life, I might relax enough to find my muse again. The odds were miniscule, but still. Too late I sensed a clenching of the force.
“Is this what you really want to do?”
“Um…”
Which soon devolved to money. Amazingly, she wasn’t worried. That only happens when she opens up her checkbook. The rest of the time, she thinks that running at a happy door will make it open. I am a very lucky man.
“So what’s your writing plan?”
“I don’t have one, dammit! That stuff never works with me.”
“I have this crazy thought off the top of my head: why don’t you just quit, say that you’re retired, and have a good time?”
That didn’t make me mad so much as take me by surprise.
“How can I do that?” I said. “I want to be successful. I know I have it in me. We’ve been lucky, but there’s not enough to live on and it isn’t going to last.” [Insert morbid recitation of my sins, more money rants, relocation fantasies, gratuitous insults, self-pitying excrescences, bluster, thoughts of how to make the last half hour go away…]
By now the mood was edging into grim. She was right, though. So was I. Who knows how we moved on to soup and Rachel Maddow—practice, probably—but we did.
After she went to bed, I meditated on “retirement.” I wanted to. It had a certain ring, a sense of recognition and reward. Artists never quit, of course, and that’s not what she meant. She hasn’t quit except for teaching and plays her piano many hours every week. Suggesting I “retire” was an act of love that spoke to years of beating up on myself like I’d been trained, an invitation to abandon guilt, even in the face of our uncertainty about the future. In fact, she’s never demanded I earn money. That’s all up to me. The kindness of this stance is startling, as if a mother I never knew had stroked my forehead as I lay in bed and told me to sleep in on a lazy summer morning… My real mother used to splash cold water on my face to wake me up on Saturday so I would do my chores. “Holding up your end of the family,” was how the old man put it.
And then the looming rockslide in my psyche shifted slightly. I heard the pebbles sifting down between the stones. What if I retired from my life, at least the way I’ve lived it?
What if I retired from the struggle and slipped into who I really am?
She no wake up she dead
Well, here we go. Is this all there is? Probably. But I think it can take us somewhere.
Now look at the colors in the shadows. That was one of the first things I learned from my painting instructor at the college where my wife taught. Before then, I’d never even noticed that shadows have color. In the example above, there’s a yellowish tinge across the bottom area of the top shadow (above the skull), probably reflected from the adobe-colored stucco. All those blues and purples, too. Some of that is from the sky. Hell, all of it, I guess.
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