Good bye Tour Addendum...

Packing and cleaning the last bits around the house, I came across an old lady friend. She used to be a resident of Seadrift TX, in the Matagorda Peninsula. We bought her and was part of our art collection in our yard. This is the sort of item that deserves a special place and belongs among art and people who appreciate it.



So, with this in mind, I loaded Lady Seadrift in the back of the truck and drove to a place that I reproachfully omitted form my Austin Favorite Places list: The Cathedral of Junk.
I have visited this place many times, mostly to photograph the place, but also for some events, and other times, just to chill, relax and meditate.



Meditate and ponder on creativity and the commitment required to transform anything into Art. Form the many times that I visited the Cathedral of Junk, this is what I learned form Vince Hannemann, the creator of the Cathedral.

Vince graciously accepted to house Lady Seadrift in the Cathedral. I can not think of a more appropriate place for her.

So, if you call yourself an Austinite, stop by the Cathedral and pay your respects to the true spirit of "Keep Austin Weird".

Good bye Austin tour...

Now that we have almost finished packing, I have had some quiet time for my departure from Austin, Texas to start to sink in. I started to actually realize that there are some places that I will not see or visit for a long time, maybe never, and if I ever come back, chances are that the city will be so changed that these places may be obliterated.

So I decided to list places that I want to visit one last time, my favorite places in Austin, Texas. Places where I had a grand time, truly enjoyed and made living in dreadful, suffocating humid heat bearable.

Such popular, hyped places like 6th Street, Downtown, Zilker Park, Town Lake, and SoCo are not in my list, nor any of the excellent ever growing list of local restaurants or popular parks.
Instead, the list is composed of places where I got away from the popular places, in a way you could say, places that made me forget that I was in Austin, Texas.

Curiously, when I completed the list, I realized that some of these places have been vanishing from some time now, and others are actually gone. This gave the sense that my departure came in some weird synchronicity, like saying "there is nothing here for me to see or do anymore".

I've run around Town Lake since back in the 80's and I toured and raced my bikes all over the place, until there was no new roads or trails to get exited about.

So, on this note, I start my list with the last stretch of road heaven for us, old bike hammers (pre-Lance, please) Texas 45

The Road of Life,
a metaphor and the signs that we encounter on our path.
Riding a bicycle on Texas 45, life is all it is supposed to be.
But all things must come to an end...
This day, this ride, Texas 45....all good things.

For:
Charlie, "The 35 mph Beast"
Bob, "Bones On A Merlin"
John, "Let Him Burn"
Javier, "Broke Another Fuji Frame"
Rick, "Oh! Shit Buddy..."

.....

"The Tulip",
"The He Whale"
"The Pirate Mocho"

And to all the Pre-Lance Austin Cyclists,
The good'ol days.

Close to making the list, were the "Tuesday Night-er" nine mile loop in south east Austin, where every Tuesday for years we trained and raced until the loop was swallowed by sub-divisions. And the Velo-Way, before it became the Roller-Blade-Way / Baby-Stroller-Way, and got filled with people that do not know how to ride a pace-line.

Next on the list is the Green Belt.
Truly a jewel stretch of land. I biked the Belt for the first time in 1987, and kept doing it for years. I ran the back paths and swam there when it used to have water year around. One of my favorite things to do was to sit behind the many waterfalls on the Belt and see the world through the falling water and let the roar of the water lull me into a trance. Now, it is dry all year around.

Barton Creek Greenbelt, Austin, Texas. After a bone dry summer, we got some much needed rain in Austin, Texas. Here is a mildly cold October morning at Barton Creek Green belt...with running water! Sadly, a rare view since most of the year is dry.

Next entry, is another creek, and although it is not a good location for biking or running, it was a wonderful swimming hole, and some of my best local landscape photography took place here, in Bull Creek:








But perhaps the places where I had the most fun and the time that I spent there reached that idyllic state, were a series of water drainage ditches around South Austin. I used these ditches for skateboarding, two in particular were perfect for this purpose: "The Turkey Bowl" and "The Alexandria Ditch".

"Turkey Bowl"

"Alexandria Ditch"

For skateboarders, these types of places are a treasure of sorts. The main appeal is the thrill of the find, the find of something that is perfect for an unintended use. A place to paint outside the lines. These two places survived the onslaught on suburban intolerance for years. Neighbors of the Alexandria Ditch poured tar and gravel on the ditch (the sk8ers cleaned the mess) and eventually called the police to patrol the area and mark it as "off limits."

The "Turkey Bowl" survived for years because it was out in a field far away from any mortified suburbanite loosing peace of mind under the threat that someone nearby may be having fun.
But in my last visit to say "good bye" and have a couple of runs, I discovered that the city finally made an effort to ruin the place. They painted the walls with a slippery paint and peppered them with concrete rivets. This is a fairly big surface...probably it took a crew of 4 a day or two to perform this idiotic task. Our taxes working hard.

This graffiti over the paint and rivets seems to ask the question "Why?" or "WTF?" Why spend money and effort on a ditch out of anyone's view or concern?

Grey slippery paint, and rivets (eye) making the bowl hard to skate. The free spirit that refuses to obey the "play only on the designated areas" tacit threat, frames the rivet to lift a tacit middle finger in the air.

On my last visit to the Turkey Bowl I left as an anthropological find for posterity one of the decks that I used to skate and broke there. The handwriting on the bottom reads: "2001-2003 Austin golden ditch days"

Anthropological clue for posterity

Every time I leave a place that I want to return to, I have tried to leave behind a physical object that I may come back to retrieve. When I left Los Angeles, I buried a bicycle fork in Griffith Park (one of my favorite places in LA).

The last place made it on my favorites list due to chronology, not preference. This is the place where I went to seek refuge and, unknowingly at the time, I started to slowly "close shop" in Austin. In the last years, here is where I ran and biked trails. This is where I took on long photography projects.

Stephenson Natural Preserve

Here I did the Longview Project documenting temporal clandestine sculptures



and eventually, the project culminated in this book:

Longview Sculptor

Sculptures by Jeff...

By Photography by Ado...

Book Preview

Also, in this place I developed the "Gethsemane" project.

In the end, even this refuge started to dwindle. People started to miss use and destroy the place and the art in it.

Well, that is it. The places to freely seek shrunk, and the designated areas to do this or that expanded. We are all victims of our own design, I guess. I will carry these places in my memory as happy precious places.

Now, all that is left is to find new ones, and this time keep them secret as long as possible.

Adios Austin, thanks for all the fish!

Storage Tetris and the Salad Bar principle...

Tetris arrangement on the right, Salad Bar arrangement on the left

We are almost done moving stuff to the storage place. Estimating the adequate size needed for the storage place was a stressful experience. There is no "try out" or "do over". Once you get a particular unit size, and things do not fit, your next stop is a Garage Sale or Good Will.

Packing is an art form of sorts, we have been refining minimal packing through all our overseas trips. But packing the entire house has been different, almost the opposite: It is not packing the things that you need, it is packing the things that you will not need, at least for a good while, which begs the question: Why not just get rid of all of it? Go to the outskirts an have a bonfire and some roasted marshmallows.

We got rid of a considerable amount of stuff. Craigslist, Good Will, and other venues helped us pass the excess of belongings. For the things that we decided to keep, we had to come up with a strategy to fit it in the storage space, in a specific order: Non important things first, daily life essentials last, so we could function during the last weeks here.

Funny, besides the obvious essentials such as food, clothes and hygiene, such things as computers, music and tv and net access easily managed to claim prominent spots in the empty house.

To fit everything into the storage area, we followed two strategies:

• Storage Tetris
• The salad bar principle.

Have you played Tetris? If you have, then you get the idea. The trick is not to leave any empty spaces between boxes, and stack them vertically. For this is best to favor small to medium boxes of similar size and shape and avoid big bulky ones. We used this approach on one side of the storage area.

What is the Salad Bar Principle?
This so called principle has its origins in my college days at the school of Architecture, where my friends and I applied our newly acquired knowledge on structural design to pile high pizza and salad on our plates at the local "All you can eat" parlor. This approach consisted on using the flat pizza slices to create walls around the plate and then pile the salad bar fixings in the center.

We adapted this approach by disassembling all tables, shelves and stacked them vertically against the walls of the storage area. Mattresses and tall poles where used in the same fashion.
Then, used heavier irregular shaped furniture to keep all the tall vertical pieces form falling over.

So far, these two approaches have worked pretty good, and by now, we are living with just the bare necessities. I am typing this entry on a rigged desk made out of plywood and saw-horses as legs.


Next time I set up an office, I will make my next desk in a similar fashion. A good piece of wood or composite as a top, and mechanic tool chests as legs/drawers.

Austin first earhquake...

Last week I had to pick-up one of my photographs that was in exhibit through 2009 in The People's Gallery at Austin City Hall.

Cathedral Of Junk No 59

For this I had to drive down town and struggle with parking driving the humongous Sierra 2500 ("Blue Bailout"). This is an extended cab, long bed truck that barely fits any parking spot. The only places where I have found comfy parking is Home Depot (contractor parking area) and Cabelas.

Well, this time, I had to venture into the underground parking at Austin City Hall. I tested my spatial awareness skills maneuvering the behemoth truck around the tight underground parking.


I finally found parking at the very bottom. The funny part came when I was exiting the underground parking. When I reached the paying booth, the attendant looked at me wide eyed and said:

"Oh! so it was not an earthquake, it was your truck -- brom, brom, brom -- The diesel engine and the weight rattled the building!

Good bye old friend...

Last week, amongst all the planning, packing and all kinds of preparations for the trip, our faithful Toyota 4Runner got sold. We debated the idea of keeping it in storage, but the expense and logistics were just not on the side of this desire. This was a terrific car, we had lots of fun traveling all over in it, camping all over the South West and along the Rockies.

I was glad to see that the new owners take good care of their vehicles and I hope they enjoy the 4Runner as much as we did.