Timewasting

Far above the fruit fly's lazy circle a red-tailed hawk glides for food. Leaning into the backyard's cushiest chair, I see chores to do like changing the chicken's water, tinkering with the museum window displays. More laborious projects like moving the limestone blocks to build up a new garden bed. I should go in and write. But right now it's time to stare at the sky and watch plants grow.

There is this work of looking around that leaves no trace, and then the hard, fun, gradual, collaborative labor of assembling atmospheres as viewsheds—land- and cityscape vistas designed to be looked at from certain perspectives (but that also sound and smell certain ways). Ross Ward was a sign painter who settled outside the ghost town Madrid, New Mexico, in the ‘60’s. One of his signs reads, “‘Tinkertown’ was begun as a hobby in 1962. It was not intended as a public display, until your interest helped build ‘our museum!’” Over the years he and his wife Carla built up bottle walls to house their collection of miniatures arranged in a long homemade display case. Their tiny objects and figurines live on Tinkertown’s Old West-style main street, where garbage becomes anything but what it was. The saloon’s bar stools are spent spools of thread. A big old roll of canvas becomes the circus Big Top. Years of public intoxication at Madrid's Mine Shaft Tavern transform into glowing bottle walls built of mortar and sunlight. If you look closely you'll find the bottle with Tinkertown's slogan: "We did all this while you were watching T.V.!" You can look at Tinkertown forever and still catch something new.

Leisure time, viewing habits, hobbies that become lifestyles or all consuming full time jobs. More than full time – never enough time to tinker on the (unpaid) labor of building DIYsneylands. Vince, who can never go on vacation because tourists drop by the Cathedral of Junk every day of the year, talks with a visitor. “This started out as a hobby. Some people play video games, or go fishing or whatever.” The wise visitor says, “You don’t even have to catch a fish.” “Exactly. Catching fish isn’t the point.” Later I see a bumper sticker “I’d rather be fishing” on the same truck as “I used up all my sick days so I called in dead.”

Tinkering, and sitting back to gaze at what you tinkered, taps this longing to be dead to labor. Realms of ordinary aesthetic production like cooking, gardening, or playing music disengage the efficiency or scientific management of goal-oriented labor that drives formal economic production. These activities unfold in special spaces for timewasting, like the front porch. You have the privilege of leisure time and spend it hard at work on your hobby. Maybe productive wastes of time like playing guitar or baking cookies is all you really want to do, but it doesn’t pay the bills. It is a block of time and sensation that slows way down, saturating a moment with its own density and repetition that starts to feel like a little eternity.

Getting around the city can also involve this slowing down and wasting time. The commuter train's flashing red light gates swing down at the railroad crossing, making traffic back up to the next major intersection. Cars swerve out from behind buses stopped to unload passengers. Sustainable forms of mobility like riding public transportation, biking, and walking generally all waste time compared to car travel. We want to be like digital information, with its magic trick of moving instantly from here to there. It seems to be nowhere and everywhere at once (but you know this is a false perception when your hard drive crashes or you lose your phone). This is why time on a walk or jog or bike ride feels like it puffs up – because you are loitering in the ordinary liminality of commuting.

Music seems to float in the in between. A song is an infinite stretch of things to know through hearing or feeling out the rhythm, or to remember in your muscles. You could waste eternity improvising variations of a song. The song and instrument teach you things in an education that never stops.

At Tinkertown, “Otto the One Man Band” is an antique machine that plays a single song on drums, accordion, and glockenspiel with the notes punched out of a player piano roll for the automaton to feel. Ross Ward also carved a band of puppet hippies on their porch playing fiddle and guitars and hooked them to a found mechanism to make them move. Feed it a quarter to watch them perform and hear the tinny prerecorded song. Before his death from Alzheimer's in 2002, Ross salvaged and repaired these machines, playing around with them ‘til they worked right. They were antiquated things beached in the ghost town. At the Mine Shaft Tavern, Ross’s paintings tell the story of Madrid’s rise as a coal company town and its post-war abandonment. In a way the whole town became garbage like Otto, waiting to be recycled and repaired by the hippies as a tourist trap, the perfect place to drop out, waste time, see what happens next.

We were drifting through town on the scenic Turquoise Trail National Scenic Byway heading from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. After a tour of the Old Coal Mine Museum, stopped for lunch and a beer at the Tavern and got to talking at the bar. A local pointed out Ross's paintings of Madrid all lit up with Christmas lights in the '30's, back when the coal company supplied free electricity. Then the company leaves town and the houses become dark skeletons. He said we had to backtrack to Tinkertown, and we were welcome to camp on his land on a hill top under red mine tailings and stars. Wasting time opens up these kinds of discoveries, as if the landscape's micro-tourist enchantments only become sensible when immeresed in spare time.

2012

DIYsneyland

Somehow my sense of the good life got pinned on Ephemerata Gardens and the Museum of Ephemerata, a sort of do-it-yourself Disneyland that I dream one day will become my way of making a living. People say, "You should start a non-profit, move into a store front! Make it into a business!" But my role models are people like Grandma Prisbrey, Reverend Howard Finster, Isaiah Zagar, Ross Ward, and most close to home, Vince at the Cathedral of Junk, all of whom wound up living off micro-tourist donations and other support from visitors to their little worlds without setting out to do so. It just happened. Of course there are plenty of cautionary tales of people whose art environments engulfed them in an insular retreat, like the hermits Emory Blagdon in his Healing Machine and Legler in his Valley of the Moon.

Around the time Jen and I reopened the Museum of Ephemerata in Tucson in 1999, we visited the Valley of the Moon on the outskirts of town. In the 1920s, George Phar Legler, a postman who raised rabbits on his land, built up hillocks of desert plants, foothills clustered with little fairy and gnome houses made of smooth river stones cemented together. A little dirt path through the miniature town leads to the Wizard’s Tower, BunnyLand Theater, and the Enchanted Garden, a waterfall grotto with built-in seats. It opens into an underground house called the Cave Room that exits beneath a waterfall.

Following his Spiritualist beliefs, Legler built the Valley of the Moon as a healing environment where people could go to rejuvenate their bodies and minds by exercising imagination. Every week he offered free guided tours: “Fairy Tours” that appealed to children’s magical sensibilities and “Metaphysical Tours” that unpacked the mysteries of life to adults. After Disneyland was built in 1955, a reporter for the Tucson Citizen opined, “Should Disneyland cover the entire State of California, not one corner would speak to childhood as does this imperfect, perfect little theater.”*  In the early 1970s some high school students found Legler, then in his 80s, living in the Cave Room, subsisting on vitamins and milk to appease his chronic stomach pain. The students’ families adopted him and started the Valley of the Moon Restoration Association. Legler lived to 97, long enough to see his lifelong project listed on the Arizona Register of Historic Places and preserved by an association that would care for his environment into the future.

The Valley of the Moon’s enchanted concrete structures recycled the fantasy architectures built on the estates of European elites in the 18th and 19th century. They built grottos of ferns and fake stalactites, as well as landscapes dotted with follies--artificial ruins overgrown with plants, inhabited by gentle fauna. Aristocrats delivered tours of their estates and curiosity cabinets to visiting dignitaries in performances of power, of owning the whole world. By the end of the 20th century, these microcosms had broken away from the realm of the rich to become mass leisure spaces--Coney Island’s parks, Disneyland, and a slew of knock-offs, second-rate theme parks, and seedy roadside attractions. Fantasy worlds also drifted into the yards of people like Legler, possessed by some vision of an other world that manifested in gradual accretions of concrete and masonry work where fairies and bunnies lived.

In Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, John Beardsley makes the case that such “visionary environments represent a survival in popular culture of a form long out of favor in the institutional world”: the cabinet of curiosities (19).** Some visionary environments (like Tinkertown outside Albuquerque, or the Orange Show in Houston) are built as mini-museums, while others cobble together and embed collections of wondrous objects into the environments themselves. “Survival” points to how Beardsley sees curiosity cabinets as genealogical origins in a line of cultural forms that went extinct as far as institutionalized collections are concerned, but that still survive in vernacular patches. In 19th century anthropology and folklore, “survivals” were cultural forms that should have been wiped out with industrialization and rational thinking, but that still existed among backwards peasants and uncivilized cultures as shreds of the past, living fossils that never went extinct.*** The old practices and forms barely surviving civilization could be salvaged and preserved by folklorists and anthropologists (often driven by intense concern to save something unique from disappearing forever). They were seldom seen as survival tactics in themselves, struggles to recover ways of life from being trampled under a march of progress into a future that deemed them obsolete.

Beardsley continues, “both gardens of revelation and Disneyland involve entering another world” (19). In tours of the Museum's “impermanent collection,” we flow from Wunderkammern to dime museums and Coney Island, implying that the enchantment of curiosity cabinets survives in amusement parks of all kinds. But for Beardsley, the overly-simulated, nostalgic, and sanitized environments of themed spaces atrophy imagination by replacing local culture with corporate schlock. Disney worlds avoid and repress the countercultural sensibilities expressed in visionary art environments. Theme parks exist to profit off fantasy, whereas visionary environments exist regardless of money. As Tressa Prisbrey says of her Bottle Village, “Anyone can do anything with a million dollars. Look at Disney. But it takes more than money to make something out of nothing, and look at the fun I have doing it.”****

Although Beardsley sets up Disneyfied spaces as the anti-gardens of revelation, the well-funded tinkering of Imagineers directly inspires some homemade projects. As one do-it-yourselfer writes on his 'how to' website, "You, too, can have the best of Disneyland in your own backyard. After all, Disneyland was essentially Walt’s backyard."***** The Orange Show’s Jeff McKissack wanted his creation to rival Disneyland as a roadside attraction; he was in competition. In Hamtramck, Michigan, near Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, Dmytro Szylak started making his “Ukrainian Disneyland” on the roof of his two garages after retiring from the General Motors factory. At the Museum, we’ve borrowed Disneyland tactics like hiding fences in plain sight, camouflaged as décor. Our Pepper’s Ghost illusion was partly inspired by the Haunted Mansion’s ballroom scene of transparent dancing ghouls. Rather than being the opposite of bad Disneyland, some vernacular environments consciously adopt the park’s aesthetics and tactics with admiration (albeit without massive funding or status as mainstream tourist destinations).

Such places are do-it-yourself amusement parks of informal economies that slip into utopian gift economies--DIYsneylands created not to make money, but because habitats for dreaming and tinkering are wonderful places to call home. The immersive process of making them is better than being in any theme park on earth (not to mention, free). They become something to live for and belong to, a relationship of creativity, care, and upkeep that brings an inhabitable future into being at the humble scale of a small patch where you can imagine growing old. They might attract tourists, and entertaining visitors becomes another adventure. Once ‘discovered’ by popular/institutional/mainstream culture, things can change for better or worse. Being made public can vault their makers out of their houses, into the official art world of gallery shows. Or ruin their privacy and make them want to tear it all down. Or threaten them with code violations and the dreaded bulldozer. Or it doesn’t matter and they keep on tinkering like nothing happened. Above all, what is happening in DIYsneylands is lanscape play, a kind of affective labor that immerses players in a layered environment that is at once ecological, aesthetic, historic, and noetic, without any of these layers being “the point.”

Yard art environments are generally viewed as large-scale forms of folk art that express aesthetic and technical abilities rooted in class, ethnic, and religious identities, instead of the economically and academically established realm of fine arts. Jill Nokes sidesteps this usual framing of ‘vernacular art’ by approaching such places as “vernacular landscapes” (3).****** ‘Vernacular’ indexes amateur, self-taught, indigenous, or local forms, practices, and knowledges (as opposed to, say, invasive forms, standard practices, or expert knowledges). Nokes traveled Texas searching for peculiar homes and gardens transformed by their inhabitants into “powerful [gestures] of hospitality and sociability” that convey “the story of a person’s life” (5, 13). She focuses on what vernacular landscapes mean to their creators, but how do these landscapes work as urban ecosystems, parts of the City of Living Garbage? What kind of learning and teaching do they assemble? Some of the art yards in Nokes’ book operate as vernacular forms of ecological restoration. They transform urban wastestreams into wildlife habitats and act as informal educational institutions as community gathering places. These patch dynamics are not planned so much as emergent, sweeping up their makers into unanticipated worlds. "Do-it-yourself" isn't quite right... a person's life becomes part of a singular landscape, able to act only through relationships with many others--living garbage, plants, the knowledges and feelings of like-minded yardists...

Whatever you want to call them, and whatever these places do and don’t have in common, otherworldly yards and houses have proliferated in hundreds of sites across America: some big, some small; some young, some decrepit; some well known, others as yet ‘undiscovered’; all vulnerable. There seem to be as many books, magazines, websites, blogs, and online galleries about these places as there are places. Self-taught photographers go on pilgrimages to see the work of self-taught artists and architects. Fans of these places make a life out of visiting them on roadtrips. I’m ready to retire, get an RV, and hit the road myself. Of course, being discovered and catalogued brings the people behind the places in touch, and some become extremely knowledgeable about their fellow art environments. They get caught in a spiderweb thrown across roadside America, trapping unwitting passers-by in DIYsneylands similar to something they’ve experienced before, but not as fastidiously engineered by teams of experts. Not as permanent as Disney’s sturdy, constantly repaired facades, and much smaller--a city block or house lot. Not quite as sprawling as zoos, botanical gardens, or restored ecologies you may have visited, but overgrown and crowded with plants and animals nonetheless. And most remarkably, made of cast-offs, bric-a-brac, junk no one else would touch. A million wandering forms of life gather and find a common home here. As the venerable Reverend Howard Finster put it on a hand-painted sign of blocky letters in Paradise Gardens:

I TOOK THE PIECES YOU
THREW AWAY AND PUT THEM
TOGETHER NIGHT AND DAY,
WASHED BY RAIN, DRIED BY SUN,
A MILLION PIECES ALL IN ONE.

2012

*George Phar Legler Society, “Valley of the Moon,” http://www.tucsonvalleyofthemoon.com

**John Beardsley, Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists, photos James Pierce, New York: Abbeville Press, 1995.

***Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. London and New York: The Free Press, 1991, 164-78.
****Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, http://home.roadrunner.com/~echomatic/bv/history.html.
*****T.R. Shaw, “Backyard Imagineering,” http://www.hiddenmickeys.org/Imagineering/
Imagineering.html
******Jill Nokes, Yard Art and Handbuilt Places: Extraordinary Expressions of Home, Austin: UT Press, 2007.

Ephemerons

After the Crash we started renting out the little house in Ephemerata Gardens as a bedroom. Our roommate--a School of Business grad student working on alternative and private currencies--chipped in to leak-proof the roof and get the house rewired with help from an electrician and carpenter through the Austin Time Exchange Network (ATEN). No gas or running water, so we share the kitchen and bathroom in the house propper. Three neighbors on our block have similar relationships with informal renters, including a simple pitched tent. At first Susan jokes it feels like permanent camping. Within a month we'd all adapted. In the winter she sleeps with a few of the stray cats as auxilary heaters. In the summer we all lounge in the Cool Room, the only one with A/C, to keep the power bill down.

We had been using the little house for Museum of Ephemerata exhibitions since the "House" show in 2012. Next came "Plantae Kingdom," then "Islands" and "Screens," and finally, "Money!" which is how we met Susan. She laughed off our "Ephemerons," a fanciful local currency that doubled as our guidebook (printed in 3 point font legible with a magnifying glass). Boutique bills--of course they never caught on like Ithaca Hours or Linden Dollars. They are a survival circus currency for moments of crisis when time is not money, but life itself. You could only buy Ephemerons with Austin Hours.

The Crash of '17 stimulated hundreds of cities to try similar micro-currency schemes. Countless books published before and after the fact explained in gory macroeconomic detail the convergence of three factors that led us into depression and the reemergence of "script" economies. First, Bank of America finally went under, dragged down by its response to the mortgage crisis a decade earlier, and the Feds couldn't bail them out. Then oil prices spiked insanely overnight, affecting everything from food to gas prices (they had to tack up cardboard 1's to advertise double digit prices at the pump). And the hurricane that ploughed across the east coast topped it all off. China's huge relief package in strong Yen, alongside people's informal economic responses across the US, saved perhaps millions of lives and pulled dozens of cities out of bankruptcy.

Against expecation, no zombie hordes emerged to riotously burn and loot. Various Occupy organizations, meshed with community gardens and food security banks, had laid down DIY disaster response to provision cities to some degree during the worst weeks of food scarcity. Power and water shortages were scarier. FEMA functioned as more of a hub to coordinate hundreds of little organizations. Homeless youth became key organizers in triage response, working through the night with volunteer architects and doctors, tirelessly biking loads across town. For a whole year, it seemed like nobody had a paying job, but everyone was swamped with all kinds of volunteer work: community gardening, constructing and fixing houses with carefully salvaged materials from demolition, teaching and learning.

"The homeless" became a fuzzy category. Motorhomes were everywhere, the far side of Wal Mart parking lots like neighborhoods on wheels. The trucker Rusty Davis became famous overnight for his biodiesel rig with a built-in bedroom at the back, moving free food and medical supplies up the coast even before the waves stopped crashing. Austin and other cities turned a blind eye to the squatter zones of tents and less temporary junkitecture that cropped up in brownfields and along the tracks. While these had started forming well before the Crash, they swelled and aglomerated afterwards, not without bad stories of violence from within or poor-bashers that terrorized the camps at night. Police usually sided with the camps, or ignored these incidents. Again, youth self-organized as gaurdians and dispute arbitrators while also taking on the role of ambassadors to the code inspectors and reporters who came nosing around.*

Sometimes they meet in Ephemerata Gardens. Susan has been inviting teens from Austin "Freetown" to get them in the Austin Hours/ATEN loop. They can use skills like electronics repair or sheer labor power to earn different kinds of money to purchase camp supplies. Her idea is to push a local/macro currency mix through city services, especially Waste Management. This takes some of the pecuniary pressure off the strapped city budget while giving unskilled workers access to a little macro-money to buy things like sewing machine needles or new rechargable batteries that aren't for sale in the local currency market. 

We harvest most of the salad lettuce and stir fry snow peas and brocolli leaves and crowns for a meeting. Pass around the dry figs. Someone brings strong homebrew cider made from dumpster dived bad apples. Free food is everywhere these days, as if it alone was out of the austerity loop. 

2019

*See Linda Stewart's Fast Crash: Youth, post-monetary services, and urban unplanning (Duke University Press: Durham, 2019).