Homer's Feather

In the 2012 “House” exhibition in Ephemerata Gardens, the Santa mug, a Kinkaid nightlight, and other tchotchkes were props in our dwellings’ happy cocooning into private, cozy dreams. Others explored the pressing risk of collective vulnerability from elemental forces that could wipe our cities off the earth’s surface. I built a window display case from the neighbor’s remodeling debris and parts of an abandoned bed frame found down the road. Inside a white feather floated above a Hummel figurine modified by artist Michelle Foster with little bindles to look like depression-era hobo children. In 1988, activists with the Street People’s Advisory Council (SPAC) bought a goose from Callahan’s and threatened to kill and grill him unless Austin city officials would meet to address helping the homeless. Although it outraged animal rights activists, the publicity stunt resulted in some office space and funding for homeless advocacy groups. For several months Homer camped on a SPAC raft, the SS Homer, in Town Lake with two homeless men. After fainting at a summer political rally, Homer moved in with activist Lori Cervenak-Renteria where he lived for 18 years before retiring at Austin Zoo. His theme song goes:

Oh, give me a home

So I don't have to roam

Through the alleys and dumpsters today.

Where seldom is heard an encouraging word.

They just wish we'd all go away.

I can't pay the rent

So I live in a tent

Beneath the Montopolis Bridge.

I just need a home,

With a bed and a phone,

A stove and a toilet and fridge.*

The Austin Zoo and Animal Sanctuary got its start in 1990 as the Good Day Ranch, Cindy and Jim Carroccio’s private petting zoo of goats and other livestock. The local paper’s 2002 Day Trips column described “the zoo [as] a natural progression for Cindy's love of animals. When she lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Austin her back yard was full of strays and homeless critters.”** Good Day Ranch’s population grew by accepting rescue animals seized from abusive situations, like the crowd-drawing leopards in Reverend Lavender’s traveling revival tent that PETA helped save through the courts. In 2000 the business gained nonprofit status to protect its animals in the long term and have more access to grant money. By 2005 the Carroccios were getting divorced and the zoo’s financial situation was an unorganized mess. The nonprofit board discovered boxes of uncashed checks and $700 cash, bags stuffed with receipts and vet and bank records in the barn.*** By 2008 the nonprofit board had taken over, firing Jim as executive director and replacing him with Patti Clark. In 2009 the nonprofit bought the 54-acre tract of land from Cindy for about 400K. There is a mini-train you can take on a loop through the Hill Country past gazelles and llamas.

Lacking the slick Disneyland aesthetic of places like the San Diego Zoo—intense theming or “landscape immersion,” concrete rockscape waterfalls, and an exorbitant entry price—Austin Zoo strikes some visitors as a rinky-dink knock-off of the real thing. They ask just $8 to get in. It retains the feel of a DIY menagerie, partly improvised out of everyday objects donated by local businesses and families. You can sense the collective effort that composes the sanctuary. The zoo has a strong volunteer base, and you can help with daily chores around the facility, even work directly with some of the animals. They have a sponsor an animal program (“$150 feeds Austin Zoo’s monkeys for one week”) and accept meat to feed the large cats (no pork or horse), hay, fruit, veggies, nuts, and so on. Their Amazon.com gift register features an array of specialty products like a $400 lion bungee toy and chandeliers for parrot play, as well as commodities put to unintended uses: buck and raccoon urine to spray around for tigers to investigate, rattling baby balls for the coatis and kinkajoos. The new Primate Palace is a converted pony barn. The zoo’s homemade habitats include repurposed postconsumer products, like 55-gallon drums the tigers toss around, a castle of milk crates wired together for the goats.

Sometimes salvage animals arrive at the zoo needing intensive veterinary care and rehabilitation. Some of the large cats are retired circus performers or private pets that otherwise could have ended up at “canned hunting” ranches where people pay to kill. A lion from a junk man’s menagerie was so malnourished it had broken an ankle from its own weight. Former lab-testing primates are missing digits or tail tips crushed by cage doors. The Zoo gets 50 requests a month to take in new animals, but they generally accept a dozen a year to stick within their space and funding limits. They say it’s hard to turn animals down.

In 2010 Austin Zoo took in two lions from a private owner that were suspected to be Barbary lions. Their extinction in North Africa is knotted up in Roman, British, and French imperial cruelty. Moroccan royalty who saved captive lions in private menageries preserved a few dozen specimens. This led to Austin Zoo’s first involvement with a breeding program: the Barbary Lion Project, a collaboration between the Rabat Zoo in Morocco and a professor at the University of Oxford funded by the UK-based Wildlink International. The Project’s goal is to selectively breed lions with mitochondrial DNA from the Barbary sub-species gleaned from a museum specimen's bones. By salvaging and amplifying shreds of gene sequences in captive lions breeders hope to reconstruct purebred Barbary Lions to be released on a preserve in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains and reverse extinction. The species is doubly homeless, lacking bodies and a safe habitat. Austin Zoo provided DNA screening to assess if their lions were indeed Barbary lions (measured as a percent of the animal’s genome). They bred two baby lions that drew record crowds on Spring Break. The growing cubs found a new home at the Texas Zoo in Victoria. But Wildlink International mysteriously vanished as an institution, leaving the breeding project in unfunded limbo.*** (Did they ever find out about the DNA?)

What happens when we try to cheat extinction and reverse calousness by salvaging animal lives? In The Chances of the World Changing (2006), a moody documentary directed by Eric Daniel Metzger for PBS, we watch Richard Ogust’s life spin out of control as he encumbers himself with caring for his family of 1200 rare and endangered turtles in their improvised habitats of tanks and tubs. First they take over his loft, then rented warehouses. His “assurance colony” (to preserve species diversity) grows by accepting turtles seized by customs agents and by relieving other turtle conservationists of their burdens. The film meditatively lingers on the turtles’ expressive and colorful faces and shells, their slow floating and leisurely eating. For Ogust, the turtles become at once an ecstasy and a woeful impossibility, their very conditions for preservation leading to insurmountable technical and legal troubles as his collection becomes too big to handle. He hatches the plan to overcome these problems and limitations of the individual by founding an institute.

I in some way wanted to prove to people who were close to me that my having them had some value to it, and it wasn’t all based upon (sigh)…you know, emotional weakness and collection mania and stuff, but that it would somehow be… the whole project would be converted into something of real value.

Another turtle collector shares Ogust’s dream of a collective atmosphere for turtle conservation: “It would be nice to have one giant institute that could take care of everything. It’s called the world, and it’s not working. You can’t build a big enough greenhouse to house everything the way it should be, so maybe keeping fewer things in better condition, more space in smaller areas…” In this daydream the atmospheric institute of the world is broken, and atmospheres maintained by individuals and institutions alike are in constant danger of overburdening their carrying capacity. A third collector commiserates that to ensure the health and manageability of their turtle atmosphere, “we’d have to pass animals by, and that’s the hardest part, is learning to put your hands over your eyes and say, ‘I can’t take these animals even though they need me.’”

In Ogust's world, evolutionary fitness has been replaced by a measure of happiness. Since long-term species survival is out of any individual's hands, Ogust tinkers with making the turtles look "happy" in their homes, an end result determined by meeting their health, food, and social needs. He delivers some of his ward to another collector's outdoor turtle pond where he thinks they look really happy as they slip into the murky water. But his dream of founding an institution recedes as the Environmental Protection Agency seizes one of his turtle shipments. The film obscures exactly how Ogust was able to fund his turtle world, but in the end lack of money impedes his institution.

Institutions in the City of Living Garbage emerge through unplanned, slow aggregation by giving home to undervalued beings. Projects and missions are tacked onto old forms as they are given new capacities and become parts of new processes. Institutionalization of DIYsneylands involves a changing of the characters in the landscape and the professionalization of roles that regenerate landscape patches (as we see with Austin Zoo, as well as Magic Gardens, the Healing Machine, the Bottle Village, and many other landmarks in the City of Living Garbage), but also a constant making do with inherited forms that have taken on lives of their own. While institutions firm up to preserve and save idiosyncratic, vulnerable beings, they are themselves vulnerable. Hoping to save trashed things that have no clear value, they risk underfunding and not being able to pay the rent. They turn instead to an economy of happiness, building just the bare forms of home as refrains in this homeless ecology.

2012

*Austin Avian Rescue and Rehabilitation, “The Story of Homer the Homeless Goose,” http://www.austinavianrr.org/homerpage.htm.
** Chronicle Gerald E. McLeod, March 29, 2002, Day Trips, http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2002-03-29/85377/
***(http://www.statesman.com/news/news/local/new-day-for-the-austin-zoo-1/nRWPS/ Andrea Ball, “New day for the Austin Zoo: Animal sanctuary overcoming problems, board says” Jan 6, 2011)
****Being Lion, http://beinglion.com/barbary-lions.php. The author is “a Barbary lion that grew up human,” longing to have its body back. She is an animal-person, feeling transspecies as some people feel transgender. “Even though I take many shapes that seem solid, seem to be built of fur and muscle and bone and claw, when you zoom in to see the essence, it is always Water flowing” (http://beinglion.com/being-water.php).

Glow Rose

For about an hour after dusk the rose glows softly like ghost flowers. A gift from Janice Washington's GMOasis to Ephemerata Gardens, we had to strategically plant it to catch the sun's last rays, and it only works in the summer and fall. You can also zap it with a blacklight any time at night to see it phosphoress.

Janice is a former Monsanto employee who lost her lab job when the Supreme Court blockbusted the corporation. She wound up teaching at UT Austin and started her own little garage lab as a hobby. Everything she modifies winds up in her garden, from aphid-resistant arugula to vine borer-immune zucchini. She also practices organic gardening and biocontrol, and insists on irrigating only with rain water. This indiscriminate melding of natural and artificial made the GMOasis one of the most befuddling gardens in this year's Austin Art Yard Tour.

The rose garden features carefully bred miniature black roses, "GM  heirlooms" with green petals, roses that smell like rotten meat, and the famous glow rose that expresses a mushroom species' phosphoresence. Turning away from instrumental modifications for insect resistance, Janice likes tinkering with plants' sensate aesthetics, their shapes, colors, and odors. Her fig has perfectly heart shaped fruit. The lemons are cubes. Purple San Pedro, magenta and albino mother-of-millions. Oak leaf lettuce that smells and tastes like marzipan.

Then there are bacteria that devour plastic. She sprays them on her fence of decaying dolls and trucks. She shows you the microphotographs of polymer chains that break down completely. Janice is most proud of this innovation and is working with her grad students to develop commercial application in ecological restoration projects. She gushes about the bacteria like they're her kids: "They're such great learners and hard workers! I'm so happy they have plastic to eat."

The neighbors are organic gardening purists. Their food patches just happen to back up against each other, divided by a chain link fence in the sunny part of the yard. When an almondy-tasting oak leaf lettuce sprouted in their garden, the neighbors lost it. They jumped the fence in the night and went at GMOasis with shovels and clippers, killing all the monsters while Janice secretly watched from her darkened window.

As far as I know our glow rose is now the only one in the world.

2020

Catmospheres

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens inevitably ask, “So just how many cats do you have?” For years, Delphi was our official greeter and Mia did her hoop jump at the end of the Museum of Ephemerata tour. Cats lounge everywhere, throwing together temporary forts and bedding out of whatever's handy. Laps and bathroom sinks serve as improvised hammocks. The shed roof provides the perfect patio lookout. In the winter they seek warmth, discovering accidental passive solar junkitecture like Perlita’s greenhouse, a broken window leaned against a wall. There are also cats you don’t see who sneek away from the clutter of other felines to enjoy solitary catnaps, like PT’s burrow under the kitchen sink where we used to save plastic grocery bags.

The yard came with strays  – a tatter-eared tom, a soon pregnant golden tabby kitten, and six or seven other felines who depended on scraps from the butcher two doors down. Every day an employee fed them in the alley, calling out “Here babies!” to summon the clutter. The colony was growing fast thanks to steady food and no sterilization. Over the years we “fixed” more than two-dozen (as if their reproductive capacity was something broken).

Our second winter at the house, the tomcat lost his left eye. As the cold came on he stopped roaming the yard and just lay there, missing eye suppurating a clotted yellow flow. We were letting him waste away. My stepmom, also an animal person, asked, “Shouldn’t you just put him to sleep?” Instead we used holiday gift money to take him to the vet. Tricked into a cat carrier with wet food, he was neutered, vaccinated, eye sewn up, body purged of parasites, gently “interpellated into the modern biopolitical state” under the aegis of love and care.* For three days he healed in our bathroom, saturating it with litter box smells and a polecat stench of spray from his oily coat.

The missing eye healed well, stitched skin dimpling into a little bowl of fur. We called him One-Eye. He became the guardian of our TNR (Trap-Neuter-Release) colony. He even began to purr. His territorial aggression to male cat strangers dwindled, but he still sprayed everything and fought off dogs by leaping on their backs despite his partial blindness. Then one cold November night we heard a dog growling in the yard and One-Eye went missing. He just vanished from our vulnerable cat preserve.

Cat characters like One-Eye saturate spaces with their presence. Cat fur finds its way everywhere. Purrs resonate bodies with healing frequencies.** Hints of spray or urine linger in the air for months, marking objects with pheromone messages about an animal’s sex, age, and health that humans, lacking vomeronasal sensory organs, can’t comprehend. It is an affective writing that is smelt and felt, not seen and read. Becoming a part of these atmospheres by caring for cats involves daily feeding rituals, close contact with wounds, suffering, and feces, and crime scenes: dead roaches, anoles, bird feathers, the occasional baby possum or squirrel. Sadly, caring for mortals inevitably involves burying dead cats or wondering if missing ones will ever return. Worrying about cats, slowing down and enjoying their company on your lap, stressing out over vet bills, being annoyed by nagging midnight meows or stepping in puke – a welter of feelings spins out of our self-imposed responsibilities to the felines. And you can’t care for an animal without caring for its life-support habitat. Like any form of life, cats need a certain kind of atmosphere in order to survive, but also emanate an atmosphere of their own. We cohabit that territory, a catmosphere crossed by little weather patterns of feline love, need, and aggression.

For cats, love, aggression, territory, and smells are not linguistic or symbolic statements, but relational atmospheres expressed through layered sensory patterns of purrs, meows and hisses, touches, bites, scratching, and phermones. As Gregory Bateson puts it, “the cat does not say ‘milk’; she simply acts out (or is) her end of an interchange, the pattern of which we in language would call ‘dependency.’ But to act or be one end of a pattern of interaction is to propose the other end. A context is set for a certain class of response.”*** Developing his cyber-ecological model of identities, Bateson argues that relationships between self/other or self/environment

are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called “feelings” – love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the “feelings” are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern.****

Feelings are not strictly internal events, but waver somewhere in between individuals, saturating a common atmosphere through repeated relational experiences. Each kitten's features, mewls, and purrs tug at something in us that wants to care for them, to become responsible for their lives.

Catmospheres are inflated with feeling responsible for other life forms, but it is unclear where catmospheres and feeling responsible begin and end. The intimate little catmosphere balloons out to problematic landscapes of open pit bentonite and clay mines that become kitty litter, and landfills where bagged animal feces and litter make up around 4% of municipal waste. At the urban scale, ornithologists are concerned that feral and pet cat populations turn cities into “sinks” that suck bird species diversity out of the atmosphere.***** The American Bird Conservancy blames cats for 500 million bird deaths a year, arguing against TNR colonies as bottomless bellies.****** Cats are atmospherically judged as far surpassing wind turbines in their deadly impact on bird populations, while still falling significantly behind windows.******* Feeling responsible floats out of control. We want to do something for all the strays, but they can’t all live inside with us, and that makes us accomplices in the ecological crimes of our “subsidized predators.”********

We became crazy cat people. One winter freeze we had over a dozen cats inside, with temporary barricades to keep the eight indoor cats separated from the outdoor ones, each with their own food, water, and litter boxes. Every year we weatherize the back porch with sheet metal and plastic bags and set up a heat lamp bulb to warm them. Catering to the cats and their litters can become overwhelming and take over our lives, like the eight kittens one spring that all needed sterilization. Or chores back up, dried poop on the litter box room floor with empty 10 pound food bags (saved for some reason) falling over on top. Scenes that tire me with the recognition that I have hours of work to do.

A special voyeuristic fascination is reserved for people whose atmospheres become glutted with life forms, who can’t say “no” to animals or objects in need. Building on the morbid popularity of A&E’s Hoarders, Animal Planet’s Confessions: Animal Hoarding adopts the soundtracks and gritty aesthetics of horror movies. Shaky cameras maneuver houses swarming with cats or dogs or both, stacked floor to ceiling with animal cages and aquaria of captive life forms. We see catmospheres layered with scratch marks, walls browned knee-high with wreaking phermone graffiti. Cats give up on the moldy, overflowing litter boxes and use beds, couches, and piles of clothes. Feelings of nurturing, saving, and rescuing animals in need have tipped over into scenes of excess, transforming houses and people into overwhelmed life support systems. Watching these scenes, a sense of disbelief and the humor of excess mingle with pity and disgust. Something familiar and ordinary has taken an extreme trajectory, without the atmosphere’s inhabitants quite noticing.

Once we had two kids, the patterns of our relationship with the cats quickly changed. All the indoor cats now stay outside in the front yard. Our oldest cat Mia and three-legged Lacy get to come in for rainstorms and extreme temperatures. It wasn’t the occasional scratch, but the constant sweeping up of fur, one too many meows that woke the baby. Our son likes to eat the cat food and tip the moat that keeps out ants. He thinks the litter box is a sandbox. Maybe we were unfairly treating the cats as surrogate babies. Now we are a little hardened to the cats' neediness. Why change the litter box when they have the whole yard?

2013

* Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2008), 281.
** Elizabeth von Muggenthaler of the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina studies the healing qualities of cat purrs. She patented a therapy device based on findings that frequencies from 25 to 50 Hertz – the cat purr range – help heal torn muscles and broken bones (von Muggenthaler 2009). Her research dovetails with claims that pet owners make fewer doctor visits and have lower stress levels. In a 2008 study, researchers found that cat people’s risk of suffering fatal heart attacks are 40% lower than those without cats (BBC News 2008).
***Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 2d ed., Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (2000), 275.
****Ibid., 140-1.
***** Anne L. Balogh, Thomas B. Ryder, and Peter P. Marra (2011), “Population demography of Gray Catbirds in the suburban matrix: sources, sinks and domestic cats,” Journal of Ornithology, 152(3):717-726.
****** http://www.abcbirds.org/newsandreports/releases/120329.html
******* http://www.sibleyguides.com/conservation/causes-of-bird-mortality/
********Balogh, Ryder, and Marra, 724.

Biomortar

Ephemerata Garden’s back wall mosaic grotto is starting to crumble, and I can’t find any mortar. We used up the last of the half-ton I bought three years ago from a bankrupt construction company to repair the Garbage Gyre mosaic and patch up the greenhouse bottle wall. Sinking foundation on the grotto’s left side is causing the façade to crack, and a Chinaberry seedling that got in the crack on the alley side of the wall is speeding the process.

Given cement scarcity since last year, I’ve been making do by bolting parts of the façade to the substrate. Limestone and clay mining operations are at a slow dig with their limited solar energy rations, and the coal kilns used in the calcination process work within strict carbon emission regulations. All available cement is first allocated to government agencies for infrastructure repair, and to public sector institutions like hospitals and schools.

In Philadelphia, the Magic Gardens’ caretakers are experimenting with bacterial biocement using castoff concrete chunks pulverized with sledgehammers. Following Ginger Dosier’s method,* they mix the powder with Bacillus pasteurii and urine to make a very slow setting mortar suitable for repair work. The nonprofit Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, instituted in 2002 in response to the art environment’s threatened demolition, preserves Isaiah Zagar’s mural works around South Street and organizes events focused on folk and self-taught art.

I was encroaching on somebody else’s land and we had to buy it. The owner came back and wanted to sell it. He didn’t care about the land, just about the money, so we paid him three hundred thousand – where you gonna get that kind of money? So Lawyers for the Arts made me into a nonprofit organization and raised the money. It became a wonderful thing for me. It scares the shit outta me too, now I got some kind of responsibility. We’ve been very lucky about code. [When Zagar started Magic Gardens] the area was a derelict area so there wasn’t a big problem. But now, nobody could do anything now. It would be impossible to do now. He bought it for 70K and sold for 300K in ten years – maybe because of art. Maybe art has that power.

When I first talked with Zagar by phone a dozen years ago, he was busy repairing one of his mosaics with a volunteer. He had become an ant at the center of the hectic nonprofit nest.

Everything is vulnerable to the weather. Any kind of thing like this has got to be eventually taken over by an entity to preserve it. To actually pay people to preserve it. Preservation is the key – but you can’t always do this. Vandalism is a big thing. People will feel that what you’re doing is ungodly. “Squash it, kill it, kill it!” But I’ve certainly been very lucky… In the nonprofit there are administrators, I have an executive director, someone for education, for outreach, a daily manager, garden guides, people who tell my story to 35-40 people on a tour. It’s very mysterious to an artist who is still living. 

Art is a collaborative social-economic venture that can inflate an excess nonprofit value within a rarified atmosphere assembled by aesthetic practices themselves. Aesthetics and cement can hold together bits of broken ceramics, cast-off glass bottles, bent bike wheels, sensations of unity, and derelict urban areas, but these borderless compositions are materially fragile and in a sense require undervalue or abandonment to firm up. Some other form of wealth rises up out of conditions of poverty or making do. Preserving fragile art environments often depends on unpaid volunteer labor at the same time it makes jobs for a few administrators and skilled restoration workers. But when cement prices inflate, mosaics struggle to take shape or stay in good shape. Philadelphia's seasonal heating and freezing has its toll on the Magic Gardens' mortar. And there are vandals who kill someone else's sense of beauty for cruel fun or righteousness.

This mortality makes evident that mosaics, junkitecture, and other urban forms in the City of Living Garbage only survive through aesthetic behavior or the relationship of care and repair between artistic characters and landscape patches. Agencies and institutions are epiphenomena that mysteriously redistribute the behaviors, supplies and moneys, and affective attachments required for preservation; their support and continuity is itself vulnerable. When the 1994 Northridge earthquake severely damaged Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pledged close to a half million dollars in restoration funds (while the Watts Towers, another self-taught architectural art environment on the National Historic Register with the Bottle Village, received nine hundred thousand). FEMA responded to controversies surrounding the worth of the Bottle Village, including a petition to block the funds introduced by City Councilwoman Sandi Webb, by rescinding the restoration money, claiming that it was inappropriate as the Bottle Village had not been regularly open to the public for years.** Webb was joined by Representative Elton Gallegly in the call to bulldoze the Bottle Village, “an eyesore 25 or 30 years ago that has gone downhill dramatically ever since … How in the world can we spend half a million dollars on something no one wants” when so many real world problems need money thrown their way?***

Grandma Prisbrey wanted and needed her luminous Bottle Village where she lived with her collection of 17,000 pencils. Volunteers with the nonprofit Preserve Bottle Village continue to give occasional tours, organize events like weeding parties, and rally small injections of money from individuals and private foundations. Their mode of survival is more about preserving Bottle Village by asking people to help physically create it, more than by donating cash. In 2010, Disneyland offered support by including the Bottle Village in its “Give-a-Day, Get-a-Day” program whereby volunteers earned a free day at the theme park by donating a day of work to a nonprofit, including Prisbrey’s DIYsneyland. A group from the Anthropologie store took a tour as part of its “Inspiration Day” for drumming up design ideas. By 2016, the Bottle Village had still not received enough funding for a major restoration, and Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens stepped in to help with preservation efforts—sixty years after Grandma Prisbrey started building. By 2020 masons and mosaicists had repaired the remaining 14 structures, just in time for the 8.2 magnitude earthquake that hit, like the weaker 6.7 magnitude quake in 1994, only eight miles form Bottle Village. Rebuilding is still underway, but five of the buildings are large piles of glass shards and masonry that the engineering assessment deemed “beyond repair.”

To Isaiah Zagar, the five destroyed structures are mosaic shards for a new composition. His team plans to pulverize Prisbrey’s old hand-mixed mortar to use as the grit for biobricks. The broken glass from bottles dating back to the 50s and 60s**** will be used to mosaic the bricks’ outer sides, and a new building will be constructed out of the resulting modules. They are learning to cultivate their own B. pasteurii colonies to make the restoration project more independent of money; the other main ingredients are our everyday urine stream and worthless cement chunks like highways after earthquakes. Zagar talks about how things like mosaics, mushrooms, and  B. pasteurii spread as spores with roots in particular cultural landscapes, something that's "in the air, they spread in the air ... For the mural projects in Mexico, the roots are all in the Renaissance. Diego Rivera – he loved to see the murals and mosaics in the churches. He dug it. ‘I can do this thing, I can do it. I can give it a twist,’ and then others followed him." The roots of preservation and reconstruction are more ecological, with the model of a landscape that never stops making itself out of its own life forms. The roots are also biotechnical, and artists and self-taught biologists are saying "I can do this thing" and giving their own twist on scientific bioengineering.

If you have any B. pasteurii or know how to culture them, please get in touch so we can repair Ephemerata Garden’s back grotto. The Cathedra of Junk could also put the biocement technique to work in its constantly growing amoeba of mortar, bottles, and junk.

2024

*Mike Larson, "Professor Uses Bacteria to Make Eco-friendly Bricks,"  Engineering News-Record online, July 7, 2010, http://enr.construction.com/products/materials/2010/0707-EcoFriendlyBricks.asp 

**FEMA eventually dedicates close to 20K for an architectural engineering assessment for rebuilding and preservation. 

 *** Quoted in Patricia Leigh Brown, “Reading the Message in the Bottles, New York Times, February 6, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/06/garden/reading-the-message-in-the-bottles.html
****See wonderful letter to Grandma about bottles at http://www.myspace.com/bottlevillage/blog: "Nowadays, most of the bottles are plastic and they are EVERYWHERE! ... We have these big gray 'Recycle Cans' and I know you'd get arrested for messing around with those cans... Well Grandma, all that stuff and all those bottles you got from the dump; it's hard to find today, except maybe on eBay."

Trilling

After quiet winters, trilling begins again around the time yellow-crowned night heron fly back into town. Gulf coast toads come out of hibernation to talk at dusk around the pond with chirps and burbles. Our two year old knows the sound and says "night toad," sensing not just a being, but being-in-time. You can hear them over the A/C. When they spawn they chorus. Sometimes a few days later we find strings of white eggs, then hundreds of tadpoles thriving in our shower greywater.

Why does this soundscape make me feel happy and relaxed? Maybe it cues remembered feelings of our two tropical vacations to St. Croix and Costa Rica. We stayed in open-air bungalows with no A/C surrounded by amphibian choruses. All night multirhythms lulled us. Our getaways were romantic couple vacations melded with a desire to support sustainable economies. We were nature-loving eco-tourists experiencing the beauty and force of the tropics. Then there was the bed and breakfast on the way to Grandpa’s in Missouri, where a couple had built a two story waterfall out of local rocks surrounded by a deck, and tree frogs that moved in serenaded you all night. The sounds conjure atmospheres of the Global South—swampy regions, jungles, islands, humidity.

Maybe toad sounds tap what biologists like E.O. Wilson claim to be a hard-wired human biophiliac response. Amphibians are indicator species that index a healthy ecosystem, and hearing them lets my body know "the environment" is okay, at least in the backyard. But "we need not naturalize [the love of nature] as a universal biology in order to appreciate its global spread."* In an ethnographic account of environmentalisms set in Indonesia, Anna Tsing argues that loving nature expresses a nascent cosmopolitanism, an ethical sensibility and self-building project that steps out of a parochial blindness to one's environment to appreciate local peculiarities in a global context. Cultural and national modes of nature loving have their regional flavors, but share the sense of “the environment” as a human-free thing out there, to be protected against a different kind of objectification of nature that destroys its object.

So maybe it is just a US middle class environmentalist/nature lover response, delight in a lively nonhuman atmosphere that is supposed to be the opposite of urban. The pond is what landscapers and Home Despot call a “water feature.” Aquatic habitats are key parts of “wildlife gardening” design schemes that try to attract urban animals and maintain their eating and mating habitats. Our pond fits into biophiliac markets that include bird keying guides and hiking gear, the pet world, perhaps even the vast formal economic sector of the food industry (for those who express their love of living things by eating them). My qualia of life is enhanced by this nature soundtrack** of toad jazz.

Something else in the sound itself moves through my body. The trill's texture, like rapidly rising flute notes, and the response from another part of the yard, is a musical composition offset by a deeper range of wet growls. Sometimes the splash of a diving toad, and always the sound of the pond's waterfall. The sound itself is compelling, regardless of where it comes from.

Sounds are one of the sensory modes through which toads live in our yard. The texture of their seasonal refrains conjures synaesthetic impressions of their molten bronze eyes and dried leaf patterns on the backs of their heads. The toads and I indulge in the pleasures of feeling and seeing sounds, the work of listening, acknowledging talk, exercising sensitivity. I would miss these sensory habits attached to the toads if they went away. They live in cracks, unintended spaces in anthropogenic landscapes that provide an atmosphere where autonomous things can take care of themselves. Caves accidentally formed when I dug out a pit for the Jacuzzi shell that serves as the pond’s lowest pool, in the hollows under the front courtyard’s juniper tree, under logs around the garden with stripe-backed walking sticks. They inhabit a captivating little world of their own that has nothing to do with us, except that we assembled the junk art yard they call home. Despite the toads’ autonomy, I suspect we need each other.

Inside the museum, silent toads play pool. These taxidermy bufos are notorious for a hallucinogenic excrescence from glands on their backs that poisons dogs and makes teen toad-lickers trip. Cane toads, a bufo species introduced to Australia to control beetles eating sugar cane crops, are invasive nuisances that eat everything. In the Monstrosities exhibition, we displayed a gaff “Flesh Eating Toad from Madagascar” doctored out of a bufo with a set of piranha teeth. The pool players enjoyed a toad mariachi band with a horn section, drummer, and guitar players near the toad bartender. But their eyes are dead unseeing black orbs. Small nails through their feet and hands give them a crucified effect. Their bodies look bloated, overly stuffed, and their mouths are sewn shut. Somewhere in Mexico someone is preparing them, right now.

While bufo species like the gulf coast toads (Bufo valliceps) that inhabit our yard are not particularly endangered, since the 1980s, ecologists and biologists have documented rising vulnerability and extinction of amphibian populations. Suggested causes include habitat destruction and fragmentation, lethal funguses introduced from non-native frog species, climate change, and increased anthropogenic noises that drown out the sounds of amphibian mating calls.*** Industrial pollutants, insecticides, and herbicides also contribute to these population crashes. Controversial research on the widely used herbicides glysophate (first engineered for Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide) and atrazine have found that the chemicals cause changes in amphibians ranging from nervous system disorders to hermaphroditism. Amphibian die off joins bee colony collapse and bat white nose syndrome as troubling and mysterious ecological crises.

Publics gather around these vulnerable life forms to mitigate crises and preserve biodiversity. In Great Britain and Scotland, the nonprofit Froglife works to rebuild wetland and pond habitats in urban areas and help frogs and toads cross roads during spawning season. For twenty years volunteers with the Toads on Roads project have documented crossing sites, pushed road builders to install “wildlife crossings,” and manually hauled over 60,000 animals a year in buckets during “toad patrols.” The Living Water project “is creating and restoring prime wildlife habitats in gardens and parks throughout London and Glasgow.”**** They do this partly by using a chemical called rotenone to kill invasive stickleback fish that prey on tadpoles and newt larvae.

Bruno Latour tells a story about toad ethologists who “transformed the mores of these creatures into indisputable essences, and this in turn obliged highway builders to hollow out costly ‘toadways’ in their embankments, so that the toads could get back to their birthplace to lay their eggs.” But the toads rejected the “costly and dangerous tunnels” in favor of the new ponds on the road embankments. “After the experiment, the location of the egg-laying site was thus transformed from essence to habit: what was not negotiable became negotiable.”*****

These little toad worlds are different than approaching “the environment” as a pre-human thing out there that becomes perceptible through its decimation or conversion into resources (whether sustainable or not). The capacities of ecological beings to act on and in the world have become less about timeless essences and more of a set of problems in engineering and behavior modification within a common world -- problems to which nonhumans sometimes find their own surprising solutions in excess of objectifying knowledge that claims to know how things should be. The learned and shared behaviors of toads and humans change. Landscape patches emerge through these collective behaviors, through extended or collaborative bodies like the toads-in-human-carried-buckets living machines.

Intimacies and couplings are taking shape here. People are helping toads mate, and toad sounds wrap couples in romantic soundscapes. Children learn to talk, listen, and love nature by relating to toad vocalizations. Teens experiment with toad secretions. Scientific and conservationist communities gather. Friendships and careers are made. “We”s and worlds firm up.

2015

* Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 154.

** “Qualia” are sensations or feelings (not meanings) in response to aesthetic forms like sounds, colors, or gestures. Conservation and habitat restoration efforts can be driven by desires to preserve nature or the environment as an asset for quality of life in urban areas, and/or by an ethical orientation that protects species for their own sake, in political support of their autonomous existence. The latter orientation has to deal with questions of who belongs and how to control unwanted/invasive populations. Despite being the major ecological source of habitat destruction, humans are, of course, excluded from consideration in invasive species eradication programs.

*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations

**** http://www.froglife.org/habitats/ponds.htm

***** Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press (2004), 87.

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).

Pits

When we pick the last fruits of the season from the peach tree near the shower water wetland, it's time to make jam. We eat the little oranges raw, cook with and juice limes, sun dry palm dates and figs and tomatoes on the car dashboard. Cold winter morning peach jam has the smell of the white blossoms that always bud a few weeks before the last freeze, a gift for the bees in spring. The little water well at the tree's trunk is filled with hundreds of peach pits the texture of brain folds. The ground thinks peaches into being, but no peach trees from the pits--I guess the flowers aren't self-fertilizing and there's no other trees nearby. 

Ephemerata Gadren's little orchard is a slow boat to food security. The peach, orange, and lime trees have taken ten years to reach maturity (while the avacado has yet to fruit and the apple tree died one summer). Two female and one male date palms live in a polygamous circle near the olive tree in a sunny, dry part of the yard. Now that they're established, even the freezing dips of winter can't kill these generous life forms. We weather the droughts with our surplus shower water. The pecan towers over us all with dappled shade. In a good year we can make three or four pecan pies, entranced by shelling for hours. We share with friends and neighbors, and squirrel away some nuts, dried fruit, and jam for winter. Sometimes we trade these luxury items, homebrew kombucha, or eggs for a chiropractic adjustment. The trees, edible weeds, and other seasonal foods we cultivate in the City of Living Garbage double as fun foodie pleasures and deadly serious preparations for food shortages or catastrophe scenarios that have yet to hit at a national scale. 

Right around Y2K and its menace of complete computer failure leading to economic collapse, people calling themselves Preppers started getting ready for something. Practicing "survivalism lite,"* Preppers are part of a shadow movement, a public vaguely stitched together from online forums, talk radio shows, and events like Self Reliance Expos. The affective fact of a future catastrophe--be it a local disaster or complete economic collapse--animates their preoccupation with getting ready for tomorrow's survival mode. Checklists help organize ways to prepare, and stockpiling seeds and guns (for both hunting and defense) is a good place to start. Every day you need to scrimp and save and equip your bunker a little more so it is a managable process. Try not to let disaster preparedness become an obsessive way of life. 

Preppers are ready to bug out (with provisions stashed in some secret forest hideout) or bug in (the home fortified and stocked with props for the next earthquake or Snowpocalypse). According to Prepper blogs there are millions of self-identified Preppers in the US, and perhaps millions more who secretively store up the means for nuclear family surival. They share a social aesthetic or collective emotional expression that has lost faith in forms of group agency like "government" or FEMA to instead hole up in self-preservation of the individual or family (or perhaps a community of "prepper networks"). This retreat is fortified by anxieties over real and imagined vulnerability, sadness and frustration with what feels like a never ending recession, or mysanthropic fear of the rioting, murderous masses who will surely manifest when catastrophe hits. This fringe way of life is mainstreamed with its own National Geographic show, lavish disaster response kits available for sale, and encouragement from FEMA and the American Red Cross for citizens to get ready for emergencies. 

Some suburban Preppers prepare for modest 48 hour shut-downs, while others are getting ready for massive changes that will leave the world as we know it undone. The God's Gardeners are a millenarian religious sect that preaches and prophesies the Waterless Flood, a pandemic that will wash away urban populations.** The Gardeners are non-violent vegetarians who make do with their Edencliff Rooftop Garden, tending its vegetables, beehives, mushroom beds (in the celler), and humanure toilets called violet biolets. Everything is driven by fanatical self-reliance, from herbal remedies to treat disease, to "maggot therapy" that clears necrotic flesh from bad wounds (107). The Gardeners hoard stores of food like dried soybeans, honey, and prepackaged protein bars. Although "they [have] the idea that turning into compost would be just fine"(59), they struggle hard to preserve their repetitive, austere lifestyles.

Like Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood, some Prepper blogs narrate fraught life after the catastrophe. When the Waterless Flood finally comes, it leaves just a few survivalists and a freed menagerie of bioengineered animals like liobams (spliced to "fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy" [94]), or pigs with human brains (made for medical testing) to scrounge among ruins. Human monsters roam outside compounds, taking what they want with guerrilla maneuvers. The website PrepperNation.com serializes a nightmare encounter with "Mutant Zombie Bikers," a.k.a. "looter, brigand, scavenger, opportunist or even neighbor," who violently invade bug in bunkers to steal food and women. Narrated as a kind of macabre choose your own adventure story in which you are the central character, you must not only stock up on your provisions, but defend them against ex-military, ex-cons, and ex-civilized humans. In some Prepper fantasies these potential monsters are "very low socio-economic demographics" who are just waiting for something--an earthquake or austerity cuts to social programs--to tip them into frenzy. Zombie movies are just rehersals for the coming urban masses crazed by catastrophe, thirst, hunger--you better be prepared!***

The Preppers are all about planning, practicing disaster response for tomorrow's catastrophe, and not so much about improvising, gleaning, and scavenging to survive (or just enjoy) today. I wonder about the teen sons and daughters of Preppers learning how to shoot and clean rifles--do they take their parents seriously, or too seriously? Gardener children have cruel nicknames for their teachers, make fun of the hell on earth they foresee. On "Young Bioneer scavenging [days]" they glean soap from hotel trash cans, wine from bar and strip club garbage to make vinegar. Some of these "recycled materials crafts" are sold "to tourists and gawkers at the Gardeners' Tree of Life Natural Materials Exchange, along with the bags of worms and the organic turnips and zucchinis and the other vegetables the Gardeners hadn't used up themselves" (68). Sometimes the kids hide the wine to drink. 

The sweetness of peaches and date palms and figs! They are luxurious gifts from the yard when this kind of produce in organic markets is twenty bucks a pound. Ephemerata Gardens is partly a prepper landscape patch, the always imperfect means for future survival, but also (sharing in the God's Gardeners' ecological ethos) a form of awe or joy in emergence and improvisation. Stuck in the pit of an austere survival mode, the garden's colors and tastes and unfurling life forms provide a frivolous circus of sensory excess. 

2019

*Jessica Bennett, "Survivalism Lite: Rise of the Preppers," Newsweek December 2009. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/27/survivalism-lite.html

**Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood, New York: Doubleday, 2009. 

***Thanks to Shaka McGlotten for his writing on the zombie figure in Bruce LaBruce's films. Zombies embody "fears of capitalist exploitation" and the deadening effects of consumption, but also homosexuality as a metaphorical contagion ("Zombie Porn: Necropolitics, Sex, and Queer Socialities," unpublished manuscript). LaBruce's movies play with this ambivalence by jumping between identification with zombies and the erotics of their gleefull, brutal slaughter. 

Busybody

Visitors to Ephemerata Gardens often ask us how long we've lived here, how long did it take to get this way? How many thousands of hours tinkering? What sightseers see is only a snapshot of something non-visual: ways of living in atmospheres. Landscape patches are composed of different tempos and rhythms, the blur of hands seeding and weeding, the speed of root growth and heron migrations, the slow collection and decomposition of garbage. Yardist symbiont people become contented busybodies, endlessly encrusting landscape patches with aesthetic layers as the years fly by. Isaiah Zagar in the Magic Gardens grew three left arms because he works so fast: "My work is marked by events and is a mirror of the mind that is building and falling apart, having a logic but close to chaos, refusing to stay still for the camera, and giving one a sense of heaven and hell simultaneously." Far from being in control, a living machine's engineer just tries to keep up with emergence, just one of the processes that holds the superorganism together.

Over a dozen years every surface in Spunky Monkey Ranch became permeated with art. Visitors entered the land through a twelve-foot arch cobbled out of deadwood, skis, crutches, and scavenged wood panels painted with a bright monkey face and vibrating letters spelling out the yard's name. A smaller arch spanned the path down to the creekside bamboo grove. Held together by wire and tension, the arcs bristled with gravity’s potential, poised on falling apart; they want to move. They match David Pratt’s body – a shaky livewire, hands and boots tapping out excess energy. He likes to work fast to override making too many decisions, swinging lengths of wide transparent tape over a pile of collage scraps so static electricity sucks up an image. Slapped directly onto picture frames, compositions emerge with a depth of multiple layers, some obscured. Art lives off the frame, swallows it up, the same way Susan’s mosaics live on house walls and garden paths. They match her, too – still and patient. Susan has a quiet presence that blends in, then pops out with simple joy and generosity. Spunky Monkey Ranch embodied Susan and David’s still and jittery ways of being.

When they moved out to Further Farms in Elgin, some people were shocked that David and Susan could abandon the art environment and just leave everything to its fate. David and Susan accepted it as part of the place’s lifecycle. David wondered, “How can I take it with me when it all lives here? It’d be like dragging a heavy load around by my neck. I’ve never stuck around anywhere long enough to build a foundation like Vince has” at the Cathedral of Junk. David keeps moving, starting over. Maybe Further Farms will emerge as a foundation, maybe not. While their “everything must go” yard sale moved as much art, plants, and materials off the Ranch as possible, the rest stayed or got tossed. Vince helped move the mosaic Monkey King on his throne. What about the small portable pond? “Well, if it looks like it belongs here, it stays.” It belongs to the place, and maybe some other artist will tend to its life there (which is what happened to the mini-Old West town at Spunky Monkey Ranch in the first place). If not, it goes the way of all mortals and falls apart. Like any garden, it needs tending to exist. Art environments take on a life of their own, but need a spunky cultivator to repair things as gravity, weather, rust, plants, and animals shuffle forms around. Aesthetic patterns materialize through processes of constant recomposition – tending a place’s emergence, laying down layer after layer of endless care and repair. From one day to the next, art environments are never the same.

Before Spunky Monkey Ranch, Susan and David ran the Alternate Current ArtSpace in a rented building on the same South Austin lot. Opening in 1991, this live-in art gallery hosted unjuried gallery shows that art critics and careful curators described as “cluttered.” It was a hodgepodge place where anyone could show art. Themes for group shows were inclusive and quirky: “The Mojo Show,” “White Trash/Black Helicopter,” “He Said/She Said.” Their last show in 2002 focused on 9/11 only nine months after the event. Alternate Current aimed at being a habitat to encourage and support south Austin artists and connect them to an older generation of creative people. Both the gallery and the Ranch were places that gathered an eclectic public of artists, musicians, gardeners, filmmakers, and their kids into a welcoming intergenerational scene.

Like the Alternate Current art gallery before it, Spunky Monkey Ranch reveals the fluidity of places, how fast they change, the inescapable vulnerability of aesthetic patterns in time. In “The Vulnerability of Outsider Architecture,”* Roger Cardinal laments the loss of vernacular art environments as an almost inevitable fate. Given their improvised aesthetic compositions like mosaics or structures held together by gravity, these singular places share an in-built precariousness of form. Without their perpetually tinkering creators (who abandon them in pursuit of lower rent, or are institutionalized, or die, or commit suicide), the places swiftly fall to pieces. Often built of junk, the public can see them as eyesores or rat farms; arsons and vandals assault some places, while municipalities dismantle others on the grounds of code violations or health hazards. Very few are preserved by nonprofit institutions (like the Orange Show Foundation in Houston). As an art historian, Cardinal mourns not only their "extinction," but “that extinction should lead to oblivion: we can only guess at the number of outsider sites which have vanished across the years. The only consolation is that a number of demolished structures enjoy an afterlife” through visual documentation (2000:172). A powerful mode of melancholic narrative presents itself in vanished or decayed expressive forms, lost arts, and extinct species of beauty. The affective pull of lost places, or their potential loss, motivates preservation – the avoidance of "extinction" of singular atmospheres that will never grace the world again.

Is there really any way to freeze these places? Aesthetic patterns in vernacular landscapes cannot be preserved without preserving the process of perpetual emergence, the relationship between spunky monkeys and their homes. If "outsider architecture" takes form through the pleasures of unfolding processes – tinkering, gardening, creating, scavenging, dreaming, partying – preservationists should follow by shifting attention to the vulnerability of action. This reframes preservation and destruction as generative actions in themselves. Rather than a melancholic vision of the loss of place, the vulnerability of art environments helps us to see these landscapes as momentary triumphs of doing or living against the odds -- despite thermodynamics and capitalism. At the same time, animating places through historical narratives helps us understand what drives the pattern of vulnerability itself. Rent goes up. Economic development patterns recognizable as gentrification and code regulation bring about the abandonment and destruction of these precarious urban landscape patches.

Meanwhile, out at Further Farms, Susan’s mosaic and collage patterns begin to encrust the kitchen walls. The trailer’s living room offers plenty of wall space for a gallery of David and Susan’s paintings, collages, and mosaics, as well as art they’ve collected over the years. The sunny open spaces outside called for gardens, and the farm is taking shape as veggies watered with caught rain in raised beds of cinder blocks and car tires. Vince helped assemble fence wood and windows into junkitecture walls for the carport turned studio workshop. The circle of lean cedar elms suggested a sundial, and every equinox and solstice David is out there at sunrise calibrating a solar calendar out of metal poles and mortar chunks gathered from the land. A skeletal metal arch unfolds near the sundial with a chair up top like you could sit there and enjoy a fine view. David calls it "the East Gate to the Garden of Eden, or the West Gate, depending on which side you’re on." The potluck gatherings that connect generations of creative people and families continue at Further Farms with Thanksgiving dinners and Easter egg hunts, when people come together to catch up, share home-cooked food, and play some music. And then there is the new pattern of driving from the exurbs into town, where Susan works for the City, and David has seasonal work with the IRS or as a movie extra. Life is quieter out there, stars brighter, and the art of wildflowers, deer, and hawks graces the fields.

The busybody is ready to mosaic, aching to dig. The relationship between the busybody and living garbage surges with a dream or possibility. Never finished, always ready to start over or go further into what is emerging.

*Roger Cardinal, “The Vulnerability of Ousider Architecture,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 1-2 (2000): 169-186.