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.

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).

Pyrolized

Our experiment with pyrolizing the poop was a total flop. It just took too much heat, logs and coals blazing over four hours to bake a measly week's worth of three cats' and three humans' manure in a sealed metal gallon can. DIY biochar is one of those homemade things that aren't worth the effort, unless you have a pyrolizing unit that can more effectively cook waste at 1500°F than logwood.

Biochar is organic matter burned in an anaerobic atmosphere. Mixed into soil, this porous carbon offers  tiny housing to microorganisms. It also functions as a sponge for nitrogen and phosphorous, preventing them from washing away. You can make it by incinerating any kind of organic trash--agricultural waste, manure, bodies and bones. Controlled pyrolizing processes also yield bio-oil that can be burned for heat or to generate electricity. Climate change geoengineers believe the biochar "miracle substance" to be an extremely stable form of carbon sequestration, while organic farmers hype its productivity as a soil amendment.* Archaeologists say the terra preta (black earth) in ancient tracts of agricultural land in the Amazon are still fertile after thousands of years. Biochar gives even James Lovelock a little hope in human survival: "There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste--which contains carbon that the plants spent the summer sequestering--into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil."**

But isn't there another massive flow of organic trash to burn? The Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant processes 1 million gallons of sewer sludge a day, which is only 1% of the total sewage water treated daily in Austin. The grounds are beautiful and a little stinky, located right along a bend in the Colorado River. 

The sludge water treated here settles out of sewage in the first stage of processing at Austin's two wastewater treatment plants, and is then pumped to Hornsby Bend. Here, the treatment process begins by passing sludge over conveyor belt screens that allow solids to settle out. Sludge then enters anaerobic digesters--six huge pressurized floating domes--where it is metabolized by bacteria kept warm by gas combustion. The gas itself is methane farted out by bacteria in these digesters. In 2012 the domes were retrofitted with "co-gen"--electricity generators that run on gas combustion, such that burning methane from the digesters simultaneously heats the domes and generates electricity sold back to Austin Energy. The treatment facility's 112 acres are also an agriculture research facility that experiments with fertilizing alfalfa and hay fields with biosolids and irrigating with wastewater. Current research focuses on the persistence of emerging contaminants (from pharmaceuticals like birth control and viagra) in treated biosolids. 

After the digesters, biosolids are mixed with mulched leaves and sticks from curbside pickup and composted for several weeks. Compost then ages up to three months and is screened and trucked to Organics By Gosh for bagging. It winds up in Home Despot as DilloDirt for all your landscaping needs. And this year Hornsby Bend's new product DilloChar hit the market--bioslids and mulch, pyrolized in a methane-powered furnace. 

Once most of the biosolids are removed from the raw sludge in the conveyor belt stage of processing, wastewater flows to three pools that draw bird populations and recreational birders. When I visited in the winter, koots and shovel bill ducks paddled around, picking through the pools' banks. Migratory herons, painted buntings, and swifts nest in the summer. Red shoulder hawks and osprey also hunt here, likely drawn to rodents that live in the hay fields and topsoil hills from gravel mines that surround the treatment facility. The pools are divided by raised levees that are open to the public year round during daylight hours. Public sludge is remediated into a park for urbanature--ecosystems that thrive in the world only because of highly technical large scale human-made systems, in this case, collective intestines of post-poop.

After percolating through the three pools, the water flows into narrow ponds inside a football field-sized greenhouse. The ponds were once stocked with water hyacinth plants for further treatment (to draw out metals) until the water hyacinth babies clogged up the aeration pumps. Next they tried duckweed, which was recently all washed away when the water flow rate went too fast. Now algae have taken over the ponds, and management are throwing around ideas on what to do with the greenhouse. The banks of the ponds have little holes dug out where turtles have been laying their eggs.

Hornsby Bend and other municipal facilities in the US have succesfully transformed sewage--the ultimate worthless garbage--into commodites, energy forms, and urbanature. But biosolids can also start backing up in some kind of megacity-scale hoarder scene: in 2006, Kern County outlawed Los Angeles' dumping of its processed biosolids as agricultural fertilizer. As sludge piled up, LA responded with an experimental geothermal anaerobic digester at Terminal Island. EPA permit in hand, they inject biosolids into five thousand foot deep wells that tap depleated oil and natural gas tables. The earth heats these pits of hell to 150°F. The wells are filled with briny wastewater (from a desalination facility or fracking?). Like the domes at Hornsby Bend, bacteria digest the biosolids, producing CO₂ sequestered by the water (turning it into carbonated water) and methane gas collected at a second well's vent.

Of course, some people are just waiting for some mutant bacteria to evolve in the pits, infecting LA with a pandemic. Others say demons will crawl out. Or the deep wells will activate fault lines, mega-volcanoes. Meanwhile the methane vents power whole neighborhoods and the biosolids facilities themselves.

This summer Ephemerata Garden's DilloChar test patch yields dinner plate poppies. The sunflowers grow fifteen feet tall, absurdly propping up the sky, sequestering carbon. Curbside pickup accepts diapers, pet poop, and meat for pyrolization. The crumbly biochar could have been somebody's shit, or dinner bones, or just branches from a dying hackberry. Smells like burned dollar bills.

2018

*Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, New York and London: Viking, 2009, 240-1.

**Quoted in ibid., 288.

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.