Stu Jenks: Fezziwig Photography, Music, and Writing

"In The Mustang Rain" (c) 2007

"In the Mustang Rain" (c) 2007 Stu Jenks

       [Images: "Spiral in the Mustang Rain", "Agaves in the Mustang Rain"]

       It was a Male Rain at my apartment earlier today: buckets from the sky, bright lightning, flickering power in my apartment, yellow-tan sand and water in the motorways. Here though, it's a Female Rain: gently falling,  my glasses clean and clear under the bill of my Krispy Kreme hat, bare legs barely getting wet from the mist.

       It's late in the afternoon. Been reading the last Harry Potter book. Hard to leave the house because of that, but I have to, for the Mustangs called me. Well, 'Called' is a little overly dramatic. Closer to say, I could see The Biscuit and The Mustangs in my mind's eye and those images wouldn't go away. I know what that means. I won't be happy until I surrender to a trip. So I did and here we are. Plus I really long for a short hike up some stout hills.

       No cattle on the range today. Saw a couple cattlemen though just a few minutes ago, as I turned onto the muddy dirt road that leads into the Mustangs. They were out with a small tractor and a blade, smoothing out one of the tracks that crosses the range. Land isn't theirs. Land isn't mine. Land belong to the State of Arizona. They lease. I come for free. Guessing they don't really need to be out in the rain, with a blade this afternoon. Roads ain't that bad. I bet they just wanted to get out of the house and play in the mud.

       I park sooner that I normally do. The track is very muddy after all. Maybe the cattlemen are doing the Good Lord's work. I park and walk the rest of the way in. Having a 4 x 4  truck doesn't mean I don't get stuck. Just means I can get stuck farther away from things.

       The rain is a delight. It's the monsoon season in Southeastern Arizona, one of the best kept secrets in Tourista-Land. Everyone around the country sees 115 degrees in Phoenix on The Today Show, not knowing that just two to three hours south of The Surface of The Sun, is a region of a lot more rain, a lot less heat, and a lot gentler people. Only tell your best friends now.

 The bushwhack up is easier that I thought. The rain has pushed down the tall grass. The footing is sturdy and true. The drip, drip, drip of the Female Rain doesn't impede me but rather helps pull me up the hill. I stop along the way to shoot a spiral or two in the conglomerate rock. There are a lot of spirals here, made from the merging of different molten rock. They look like fossils but they appears to be quartz mixed with basalt. (Then again, fossils are mineralized organic material, and this land was underwater eons ago. Could be prehistoric snail shells or something like them.)

       I drew a spiral in the mud back behind me, near a corral, a half hour ago. Didn't take its picture. Was more of a prayer, a reminder that the journey always goes on. Never stops. Even in death. The end of my mud-spiral flew out and open toward the North. The rock spiral glistening at my feet does that too, yet better than mine. That's fine. It's not about me, really, my quest for Art and Beauty. It's about something timeless and eternal. I just use the Personal to get to the Universal. And no matter how old or bald or broke or lonely or fat or scared I feel, the path always goes on, with or without me. I just have to walk it as best I can while I'm here, find some friends along the way, use my volition for The Good and The True. Not perfectly mind you, not always with my head held high, but I need to just move the feet, even when I don't feel like it, and again do the best I can. God and I are partners here, with other people too. I ain't a puppet. He/She/It ain't no puppet master. And the other good folk who walk with me, in front, behind and beside me, are all equals too. The illusion is, that it is otherwise, that we are not the same, that we didn't climb out of the same ocean.

       I've only gone about halfway up. Going to be dark in a couple hours. Don't want to be hiking out in the dark. Off to the south, across a mile wide valley are some hills of the Southern Mustangs, peaking in and out of the clouds. First they are obscured completed in white, then ten seconds later, a peak shows through; a half minute after that, full details can be seen of the ridge-line; another minute later, back to fully obscured in misty clouds. I sit on a rock, try once or twice to shoot the mountain across the way, and then realize, this is for the Mind's Eye, not the camera's. Photography is a wonderful lie sometimes. It can show the details, the specifics, even sometimes create something that isn't there, but mostly it fibs, giving the strong illusion that what you see is what there is. The slow swirling motion of the mist, the tap tap tap of the rain, the smell of the grasses, the cactus, the ocotillo, and agave, a fragrance that can not be describe well or bottled. The smell of a Barn in Heaven, with angel clouds to boot. Turning these sights, smells, sounds in a three dimensional sphere of existence into a two dimensional photographic window is one tall order. But I try, partly to stir my emotional memory later on, but also, sometimes, to seek the Eternal and share it with others. I try as I can. A Fool's errand that I must do, in order to be happy.

  I get back to the truck with much time to spare. Looks like I have another hour of light. I drink some Coke Zero, and light a Camel. I look in the back seat and see my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I grab it, open it to page 424 that I book-marked before I left my apartment and read "Harry fell, panting, onto grass and scrambled up at once..."

"The Gated, Gated Community" (c) 2007

(Images: "Spiral at the GG Community", "Resurrection Falls and the Three Surrender Trees" & "Do Not Enter at the GG Community")

“The Gated, Gated Community” © 2007 Stu Jenks

    I got to be careful here.
    I met (or rather met again) a very nice, ethical, considerate Interior Designer. She wanted one of my images for a house she was furnishing, ‘Resurrection Falls and The Three Surrender Trees’, a diptych printed very large on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper. Framed, the image is five feet by three feet. A big ass print.
    Anyway, this house she was furnishing wasn’t just any house. I was an unsold foothills mansion: 5700 square feet, four bedrooms, five baths, five fireplaces. So last Monday I went up the hill with ‘Resurrection Falls’ and enter this gated community. Got by the guard house without much trouble (even though I’d heard that other artists bringing up stuff had difficulties getting inside.) The main street was a winding desert drive, ascending up the mountain, divided by plump Saguaros and Palo Verdes in bloom. Paved with new asphalt as black as a New Moon night. A rusted steel ramada with a large fountain was at a fork in the road. Million dollar houses peaked thru the brush. Then after about a half-mile, a turn right here, a couple of lefts, I came upon something totally unexpected.
    A second gate.
    I hit the squawk box and the guard down below mumbles something, and then a large rust-colored two door gate, with spirals cut out in the metal, slowly swings open (Spirals are everywhere on the way up and in, and back down and out, laser-cut in mini metal megaliths, in gates, on signs. The logo for this development, I suppose.) I put my Pathfinder into gear and head into the Gated, Gated Community. No asphalt here. The streets are paved with precision cobblestones. Mature Saguaros come right up to the road’s edge, and the homes are twice as large as the big ones I just drove by. They aren’t tall. They are long. Very long homes.
    I find the street I’m looking for, I make a left and find the address. My house is a long house, with volcanic rock completely covering its exterior. Nice. I park the truck and get out. The Designer isn’t there but her assistant is. We speak briefly. Nice guy. Says the house is open, to go ahead and unload your print. I go back to the truck, grab the big ass photograph and head back to the house. He holds the tall iron and glass door open for me. I walk inside
     I look around. Quite the spread. I place ‘Resurrection Falls’ down and lean it up against a wall. No one in the house but me. I decide to walk around a little.
    At one end of the house are three bedrooms, at the other end is the Master bedroom, the Master bathroom and a dressing room. The Master bath with its large circular shower area, its big whirlpool tub, its gold plated dual sinks, and its huge walk-in closet is larger than my entire apartment. I kind you not. And I live in a pretty good size shotgun shack one-bedroom flat. The carpeting is so lush and the house so tightly build that there is no sound at all as I walk around. I can’t even hear the birds outside. The living room is two stories tall, with an aged wooden vaulted ceiling and floor to ceiling glass windows that look out to the mountains to the north. The kitchen has a stainless convection oven and a large commercial stove that you see in high end restaurant kitchens. Tall recessed nooks are everywhere throughout the house, where large artwork can live. I look to see if a nook is my image’s size. A couple are. I’m hopeful.
    I stay just a few more moments. I feel uncomfortable.
    I don’t feel at home here.
    I am not at home.
    This is not my home.

    A few days later, I came back up and picked up ‘Resurrection Falls’. The Designer kindly said it didn’t fit with her vision of the place and with the house itself after all. She was sincerely sorry. I had no hard feelings and I agreed with her. The blues and blacks of my image didn’t complement the earth tones of the home, but I still wish she had picked it though. Would have meant a grand in my pocket, if the house had sold with it in it. I had a camera with me that day and thought of taking some pics of the interior of the house but it felt wrong, so I just packed up my print and headed down the hill.
    When I got to the inner gate and was outside of it, in the Land of Only Million Dollar Homes, I parked my truck and took the images you see on this blog entry. I started a series on Circles and Spirals years ago. The richly rusted spirals on the monoliths and the spiral on the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign are nice additions to that series, plus the irony isn’t lost on me. Ancient universal symbols of The Journey, of the Path Inward and the Path Outward, used to sell homes to the half of one percent of Americans that can afford them.
       By the way, the house’s asking price is $3.2 million unfurnished, $3.5 million furnished.

       [Addendum: I was talking yesterday with a friend who is a hotshot big-ticket real estate developer, with $50 million a year to play around with. I mentioned the oddity of entering the Gated, Gated Community.
       “I guess they don’t want the riff raff from the million dollar homes below, coming up,” I said chuckling a bit.
       My friend said, with absolutely no humor or irony at all;
       “No, they really don’t.”]