The Brothers

First of all I must tell you that the Arizona legislature in Phoenix voted yesterday to establish a state gun, which, not surprisingly, was the colt revolver used by the U.S. Cavalry in John Ford movies starring John Wayne. That is a first as far as I know. The state bird is a Vulture. They feed it defeated Democratic candidates.

Before Mike, Sue and I went into town yesterday, I had an appointment with my lung specialist. He never did call me about the throat scan so I was both eager and nervous to hear about it, although I went basically assuming the news would not be bad. It wasn’t. We talked for 5 minutes without him mentioning it, so I asked, what could you tell me about the throat scan? Oh, it was nothing he said, calling it an “accidental mismeasurement.” If you recall I bitched about the Respiratory Therapist, who was more interested in his damn cell phone than watching what how was doing. It pissed me off that they made me worry about nothing. The doctor suggested I get a shingles shot from my Primary; that came out of the blue and he never gave me a rationale for it. As it happens my brother wrote me two weeks ago that he had shingles around the back of his neck. The doc told me to see him again in 6 months. I felt he was blowing me off. That’s okay, I don’t like him either.

When I got home we got it together to go to the Tucson Art Museum to see a very funky show by two Mexican artists, the brothers Jamex and Elnar de la Torre, who specialize in blown glass sculpture and who have a wild imagination that embraces Dada, a Baroque extravagance, and a spirited attack of political correctness. They are bemused observers of social reality and technical masters of their medium, laughing wizards who practice an “Aesthetic of the Absurd.” Given the nature of the drawings I am currently doing, I can say I am in total sympathy with such an approach to creativity. Unfortunately, they did not provide a catalog for the show—apparently, all the pieces in the show are work owned along both sides of the border between the States and Mexico, which is why the show is entitled Borderlandia: Cultural Topographies. The form that shows up the most in all of the work was a red, transparent heart. It shows up again and again. In one large spectacular work, a rotating merry-go-round mandala that is approximately 10’ high and wide, there is a outside ring of red hearts about 18 inches apart and as the wheel rotates the hearts at the dip into the blood contained in a canoe underneath the merry-go-round mandala becoming the sacred hearts of Catholic lore. When I say blood I mean a red liquid of some kind that simulates the look and thickness of blood. I think they called the piece a “Bota-graph.” It is both a multi-layered pun and hybrid symbolism. A bota is a wine bag made of goatskins that can hold a couple of liters of wine. There is so much organic stuff in the pieces—blood, gore, skulls, vomit, interior body parts, animal skins and erections—that both Mike and I experienced some nausea walking around the museum. I don’t think that has ever happened to me before.

Technically speaking the work was brilliant. Besides all the body parts they included—and this has to be but a partial list—you can find many cultural artifacts in the “visual clutter,” embedded in the glass or cemented to the outside. There were bottle caps, small figurines, dolls, hot wheels, nuts and bolts, pictures and bas-reliefs of Jesus, kid’s toys, television sets, and everything else under the sun along the border. The brothers know what they are doing and carry off some incredibly complicated scenarios, all designed for two basic effects: a technical exuberance to wow you and to make you laugh. Mike and I laughed our way around the galleries, as their black humor hit home for us. Most pieces had a social subtext but others were just enjoyable nonsense. It was the best and most exciting show I have seen in Tucson in a long time. The last exciting show I saw in town was the Jim Waid show at the Pima College about three years ago.

As a side note, Mike discovered a wheelchair in the lobby of the museum and was kind enough to push me around which saved me a lot of pain and energy.
We had lunch at some genteel new age place Suzie had been to before during her in-town phase or when she goes on the town for one reason or another with her closest girl friends. The menu was a bit daunting for Mike and me so we played it safe and ordered hamburgers, expensive hamburgers too, $11 with Cole slaw on the side. They turned out to be really great burgers made out of quality meat. They were delicious, the best Hamburgers I have eaten since those hamburgers I had in Milwaukee in 2007, which were made from Kobe beef from Japan.

When we got home we continued watching “Mildred Pierce,” with Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce, a depression-era melodrama from a story by crime fiction writer James Cain that has been made into a movie before starring Joan Crawford, Ann Blyth and Zachary Scott. It was released in 1945 and it won Crawford an Oscar for her performance. We had started it the day before and we were determined to finish it last night. Altogether it is a five-hour movie. “Mildred Pierce” is a melodrama
between a mother and a spoiled daughter, with the daughter capable of ringing her mother’s bell whenever she wanted to and she wanted to rather too often. It would always end the same way with Mildred blowing her stack and then groveling to make it up the Veda, the daughter. Mildred never seemed capable of handling her, or standing up to her. She made the same mistakes over and over again, as Veda knew exactly what to do to set her off and to get her way. It got to be depressing to see Mildred so ensnared by her demons and so conventional in her comprehension and values. She was also very naïve, so bad she lost her chain of restaurants that she had worked so hard to build up due to being outsmarted by one female business partner and one ex-lover; she also lost her husband (Guy Pearce) to Veda, whose cruelty reached new heights by the end of the movie. The daughter and Mildred’s slacker ex-husband go off to New York to make their fortune with her singing voice, while back in lowly Glendale, a place Veda hated with a passion, Mildred and her first husband, now remarried—they were a fit from the beginning--go back to the way it was in 1930, with her husband a small-timer in real estate and Mildred back to making pies to sell to her old eateries. How sad it was to realize she had learned so little through her salad days in business.