Other Peoples' Paradise: Joshua Tree

So Lily Stockman http://bigbangstudio.blogspot.com is not the only one.  There have been other New Yorkers who have given it all up and moved to Joshua Tree.  Or at least taken up half-year residence.   WHY?  One might wonder. Is this your idea of paradise?

Dr. Seuss-ey kind of trees.  Scrubby grass.

Strange rock formations.  (Hey, that's positively prehistoric!)

Why would NY'ers, who can barely make it to Pennsylvania ("Where America starts") come to Joshua Tree?

To live in this empty landscape.  Totally bereft of coffee bars, fresh mozzarella, sushi?

No, no nail bars either!

 Maybe Lily can tell you.

Me, I came to visit a dead guy on my wedding anniversary.  Am I a cool wife or what?  Anyone know about Gram Parsons?

  

Strangely Joshua Tree marks the beginning of a whole new life for me.  The weekend I visited, I found my house in L.A. 

That's my story, I'm sticking to it.

Lily Stockman - Big Bang Studio Blog

This morning in my cyberwanderings I found this blog:  http://bigbangstudio.blogspot.com/


Lily moved from NYC to Joshua Tree and is painting full time.  Nice blog.  I will add it to my blogroll.  She is participating in the open studio event in Joshua Tree the first weekend in November.  If you are in the area, or are looking for something to do that weekend, why not visit Lily in Joshua Tree?

Photo: Lily Stockman

Meanwhile my next post will be about Joshua Tree.  And maybe a little story will go along with it.

More Animal Sightings in the Wild Wild West

Yes.  Shamu lives in my neighborhood.

If anyone out there knows who did this get in touch and we will credit the artist.  If you REALLY need to know.  I will go down there and knock on the door.

Debi Van Zyl - Full Spectrum Cake

I think you all know how I feel about color by now.  WHAT A CONCEPT!!!!!!!  I LOVE!  Find Debi and her inspiration at:  http://debivanzyl.blogspot.com/

Varanasi (also known as Benares)

I have a miserable cold which is sapping my energy and much of my enthusiasm.  I lost a battle with the scanner yesterday.  Downloaded alien entities to my laptop and achieved complete paralysis of any scanning software that might once have been harbored in my printer's entrails.  Must wait for hubby to come home and bail me out technologically.

Yesterday I was thinking oh no, these do look so flimsy and negligible compared to the pieces I shared from the Boston Globe.  But today the sun is shining again in L.A. and the colors seem more felicitous and conducive to our lightened atmosphere.  They want to be shared.

Varanasi:  home of silks, of a venerable university and probably the holiest Hindu pilgrimage site: the ghats and temples on the banks of the Ganges River. Known affectionately by the Indians as "Ganga Ji", the Ganges is considered the mother of all life, a goddess.

On the other hand, it is said that the Ganges at Varanasi is biologically dead because of the paradox of the many myriad aspects of life that are ritualized in it.

Washing oneself

Prayer.

Washing other peoples'

 clothes

If you like these pictures don't forget to click and enlarge them.

There is a world of mysterious beauty here.  (If I say so myself!) 

Once the scanner is reconquered my great ambition is to achieve larger pictures WITHOUT having to ingeniously revise code or enlist the assistance of intermediary software.

Yeah right.  Meanwhile life will go on in Varanasi.  As will death.

The dear deceased will be burned at its banks.  And ashes sent into the water.

The whole of life is lived and comes full circle here.  

Varanasi takes the world into its arms.

And sends it's young into our future.

For Poppy Fields because of the Mistral

Santons Fouques, Aix-en-Provence

I read http://poppyinprovence.blogspot.com/ because she is living the life I sooooooo wanted once upon a time and think I still do.  She lives in Salon-de-Provence, a quiet country town between Aix-en-Provence and Avignon.  I went through there on the bus with my friend Sylvine and fell quite in love with it.  It looked a little sleepy and peaceful and was washed in splashes of orange and yellow and green - all dusty.  With the gnarled shady sycamores that every southern French town has.  As we rode further on we saw a shepherd standing in his field with a flock of sheep.  I thought I could hear the jingle of their bells.  It was evening and the sun cast an almost electric light over this man and his herd and he and the animals and the ridgetops of the mountains behind were outlined in a fluid neon.  That was it for me.  A picture for a thousand years.  Otherwise the countryside was green and lush and darkening in the declining light and tucking itself in from the world.  The houses were dusty, the roofs were orange tiles and all the shutters were a faded dusty green.....there were geraniums in nearly every window box.

Life in the "Midi" as it was called then, is glamorized in magazines and movies but the one I loved is so different from those polished up images.  It's the sound of gravel under your feet, or high heels clicking on the cobblestones and someone calling up to a window in an otherwise still, still night.  The rattle of someone's motor scooter as it barrels past you between narrow walls.  The sound of water running in mossy fountains and the sour-salty whiff that rises up from them with the wind.  The same smell that comes from the streets when they wash them after the market.  It's the aromas of the plat-chauds that float out from those deep windows with iron bars where the radio is playing in the background and the canaries are singing on the window sill.  Where people are eating humble dinners of pates aux viandes and salades aux oeufs durs with sauce vinaigrette.  And chatting in those family ways.

Now the Mistral has arrived.  It is the wind that comes from North Africa and rakes and batters the provencal countryside from time to time.  It is legendary.  Probably it would have made me crazy living in a small town in France, especially in the winter.  Where all the streets lead to the same place (the bus station or the market).  And everybody knows everything about you.  And your husband is in front of the TV every night watching le "foot" or at the cafe with his buddies.  While you stay at home and put the kids to bed and fold the laundry and get their clothes ready for school the next day.  Thinking about what to make for tomorrow's dinner.  With that wind blowing and blowing and nowhere to get away from it.

But oh!  To have just had the CHANCE.........

WE ARE INTERRUPTING TODAY'S PROGRAM...........

Of hole digging, wall taping, laundry washing, cat chasing, contractor emailing, reference-seeking, list-making to bring you:



OK these will make my pictures look like doo-doo but I embrace risk for your AND MY (I'm sure ultimate, no-yes I mean IMMEDIATE) edification.  My stomach is churning and my temperature's just gone up about 20 degrees.


I credit Toujours Dimanche (the Canadian one from What Possessed Me's blogroll) for leading me to these images.


http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/09/recent_hindu_festivals_and_rit.html


I'm showing you a picture that more closely characterizes my current state.  Rather than a picture that I hope will elicit such a state in you.  Those other pictures, they peter out in interest factor (to me) towards the end.  But in all there are 35 of them or so.  With the first 8-10 I gasped out loud as each one came along.


I didn't think an "outsider" could get these first pictures.  OOPS!  I'm wrong.  Apologies to AP's Kevin Frayer, he is the exception (-al photographer), the others are all done by South Asians.  They are so intimate in a way.


I've said it before, I am not a religious person.  But religion sure makes people do amazing things, good and bad.  In fact, I did witness some religious ceremonies in India and being ignorant and disinclined to the tedium of religious ritual I was not so moved.  These do make amazing visuals though.  And I'm not about sharing to shock in a gratuitous way.  It's not about shock.  It's the sensation.  And the transposition and near derailing of almost physical/physiological norms.  Your eyes are so accustomed to sending the usual messages to the same brain places and filing that information off.  India just twists your brain into loops.  The patterns that can be created by so much colorful humanity acting in concert are just very unexpected to us.  As our Western world neutralizes, homogenizes, degrades and denudes its public face of color and variety - India's particularity persists.  I hope it can be impressed upon them before it is too late that what they have is of tremendous value.  Probably I will be disappointed.  


Now if someone knows if this has been made into a book, let me know.  Because I need to have that book.  But I would only look into it about once every five-ten years because I would not want the images to become banal and routine to me.  I want to have that WHOOSH of sensation and jumping out of my skin everytime I saw them.