Welcome back to Dispatches.
A little less than a year ago, Arlington, Texas.
I’m walking between a roadside Howard Johnson’s and a friendly Denny’s in search of an early breakfast.
On the other side of a long fenced perimeter that skirts my concrete path
is the Six Flags over Texas theme park.
It’s quiet and abandoned —not yet “open” to visitors— its shapes coercive but without purpose.
As if according to their own logic or that of makers long since departed, the shapes swoop this way and that. Shapes confused, jutting, groping out of swamp and brush.
Opened in 1961 by an entrepreneurial Texas oil man named Angus Wynne Jr., this “historic,” Texas-centred theme park billed itself the future of family entertainment. Safety concerns have dogged the place, as have labour scandals, and dipping attendance, as “the future” soon seemed elsewhere. In 2017, controversy attended the removal of the park’s “Six Flags,” most notably the Confederate one.
I’m surrounded as I walk to breakfast — the effortful, rust-denying jumble of roller coasters to one side, and vast ribbons of highway and a cloverleaf interchange for the age of automobiles, to the other.
And yet the experience of traversing these living ruins of “too late capitalism” isn’t only a rebuke of humanity’s long twentieth century.
For these are edgelands of the kind explored so carefully and wondrously by Christopher Brown …
The unknown adventures of some small birds — maybe Great Kiskadees? — alighting on wires and fences, surprising, flitting between trees, soon focus my attention.
After a ballgame, I take refuge in the corner of a Mexican restaurant to think about those birds, and to draw and paint them,
while puzzling too, over their human contemporaries.
◇◇◇
It’s a different, smaller set of shapes that, more recently and in quite another place,
draws me in again.
Beneath the streets of downtown Phoenix, Arizona,
with its dark entrance off an alley,
rests the underground and labyrinthine Valley Bar.
It’s a locally-esteemed music venue. Concert-goers dressed in black queue up and trickle in and out. One guy has a dog’s head, his mask sported as if an afterthought, unremarked upon by anyone.
There are also a few pool tables, two rows of booths, some side tables, and a series of odd little rooms, nooks and crannies. In at least one, you expect a proverbial Edwardian grandmother to serve tea.
I’m there for the little bar on the side. During my short visit, the Valley Bar becomes a kind of scriptorium for me. While I make a few friends, I mostly just do my thing at the same table along the side.
The table isn’t much to look at. I’m drawn to it because it offers what an architect, interior designer, and environmental psychologist might agree to call refuge and prospect.
A space for seeing things from the side, at an angle. A space for delectation beyond words.
My table offers a perfect vantage on to a series of exquisitely simple shapes, silhouettes and shadows to be precise, that move slowly past my field of vision as if crossing a stage.
Wrapped tightly around and above a horseshoe bar
is a screen,
behind which bewildering sets of suspended objects are spinning,
slowly, with subtle lighting from behind,
casting the shapes’ shadows on to the screen.
The languid pace of the movement and rotation is part of the magic.
The effect is mesmerising, undemanding, somehow inviting both daydreams and focus.
The shapes are perhaps as random as they are predictable.
A passing train, a Model T, a treasure chest, an agave plant, a man in a bowler hat, a gate, a set of keys, some disembodied human limbs . . .
I can’t resist playing with their forms and with colour, sitting in the dark, infusing their simple forms with life.
. . . a she-wolf, a bird with a lizard in her mouth, there’s a phoenix (of course!), and a rodeo cowboy . . .
The walk to Denny’s was only so long back in Arlington.
Leaving those roller coasters behind, like leaving that bar in Phoenix, the streets, the world, “reality” offers more to notice than before.
More shapes. More inventions.
More meanings and stories to meditate upon.
The helmeted head of a would-be Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the conquistador-explorer who stumbled through the region in the 1540s, adorns a ramshackle hotel,
this place a shoe-in during auditions for the headquarters of the next TV series
starring Billy Bob Thornton.
Stretching back, beyond the conquistadores and burros,
there are more shapes. More signals.
Some reflect a Mesoamerican-inflected yearning to somehow fuse and express this region’s indigenous peoples, the Zumi, Pima, Hopi, Apache and so many more.
Thanks for reading Dispatches.
* photographs, drawings, and watercolour painting by Kenneth Mills
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