Towards the back of The Field Guide to North American Birds, east or west, are several color plates of the birds of southern Texas along the Rio Grande River. The books are called the Peterson after the author. The birds on these pages are common to Mexico and Central America but the northern most area of their natural habitat is southern Texas. Of these birds one of the most colorfully conspicuous is the Green Jay, a relative of the east coast's Blue Jay and the west coast's Stellar's Jay and Scrub Jay. The Green Jay is without crest and flashes brilliant greens and yellows more similar to parrots than the blues and blacks of its northern cousins.
An excellent place to see the Green Jay and many of the other birds of south Texas is the Bentsen-Rio Grande Valley World Birding Center, a Texas state park near Mission, Texas. Here the Green Jays may be seen careening noisily through the dense brush and scrub trees. Although the Green Jay is spectacular there are other intriguing species in the park including the Chachalaca which resembles a cross between a hawk and a rooster with a dull brown coat. The Chachalaca can run incredibly fast propelled by elongated legs, leaning forward, head first. One can imagine a similarly sized dinosaur running in such a position. The Rio Grande in south Texas is a wide, slow moving river running through an equally wide, flat landscape.
Jacob Riis Beach faces south on Long Island Peninsula as it juts into the Atlantic Ocean. The beach is part of Jacob Riis Park which was built on the site of Rockaway Naval Air station. The park was designed by Robert Moses and was intended to be a poor man's version of Jones Beach. Public transportation made the park accessible to poor immigrants who lived in Manhattan. It is still a public beach for people living in Brooklyn and Queens. Jacob Riis was one of the 'muckraking' journalists who documented with writing and photographs the ordeals of poorer New Yorkers. Riis was originally from Denmark.
A 2.5" lcd monitor is embedded in a silicone rubber fish cast from a 'jello' mold. The video playing on the monitor was sampled from a You Tube video which shows a seriously overweight nude male reclining on a bed. The scale of the video has been enlarged so that the nude flesh also appears to simulate the fishes flesh.
The monitor and media player are battery run.
Kaymoor is the site of an abandoned coal mine with coke ovens, located at the bottom of New River Gorge in southern West Virginia. The mine is half way down the gorge. The coke ovens are at the bottom of the valley, a 2000 step stairway below the mine. A little further down the gorge is a railway line which runs adjacent to and slightly above New River. The mine was in operation from 1900 until 1970. The coal was baked in the brick ovens to remove impurities until it became coke which is a more usable form of energy for industrial uses.
As I begin to walk down the steps towards the bottom I can hear thunder, distant but approaching. The woman at the tourist center in Fayetteville had told me about the steps, but I basically ignored her until now. I clearly hadn't appreciated how far 2000 steps were. I also hadn't brought the video equipment with me because I was unsure if the site was what I needed. So I had to get down to the bottom of the gorge, find the coke ovens, determine their utility for my video, run back up the stairs then climb the dirt trail to the car. Put the video projector and battery packs in the daypack and run back down to the bottom again with the rain drops beginning to fall and the thunder becoming louder. Later, in the car on the highway after having completed my task, the rain came down. So heavy that I could not see the road in front of me.
The video is projected on the brick wall of the domed oven which is one of a series of ovens overgrown and collapsing. Russian cosmonauts float in a simulated gravity free capsule. The video projector is battery operated and plastic cased. It looks like a toy.
Lake Martin is a broad shallow swamp lake in southern Louisiana near Lafayette. Large stands of Cypress and Tupelo trees surround the lake and create homes for a great number of different wading birds, as well as hundreds of alligators. The alligators float on the lake like gnarled logs, cruising amphibious submarines the size of a kayak. It borders an enormous rookery which is home to roseate spoonbills, white ibis, cattle egrets and various herons.
I finish videotaping the installation and begin to row out from the trees towards open water. I am looking at the rest of the lake trying to get a sense of the size and layout of shoreline with its different bays when I look at the pea green water near me and see a large object floating along next to the boat. Yes, there are alligators in these waters. They are startling. Those loud deep croaking sounds are not bullfrogs. I decide to stay away from the shore.
There is a movie, screenplay by Somerset Maughn, starring Bette Davis, black and white and released in 1940. In the movie, Bette Davis plays the wife of a British administrator of a rubber plantation in Malaysia. He is bumbling, inept and totally unconscious of his bored, lovely wife's extracurricular activities with another British national. However, Bette's beau has decided to give up his fling and return to his own wife, an exotic Eurasian dragon lady (long curled fingernails, heavy eye make up). Bette becomes panic stricken and summons him with a letter to have it out and salvage her dreary life. When she meets him, she becomes enraged when she discovers that he really does intend to throw her over. She, then, shoots him, dead. She claims to the Malaysian authorities that she thought he was an intruder. There is a trial and she is found not guilty. Meanwhile hubby has no clue that she has been unfaithful and gallantly stands besides and behind her. After the trial there is a gala victory celebration at there Malaysian mansion. Bette comes down the stairs, walks through a circular foyer before entering the main room where her well wishers wait. This sequence of 'Bette wearing gown walking' plays repeatedly on the media pad hanging from the cypress tree in a swamp in Louisiana.
The Rio Grande wanders through flat, dry land in the south of Texas. It is not until it cuts through the mountains to the north in west Texas that the landscape becomes distinctive. The Rio Grande flows south from Colorado, through New Mexico before it becomes the border between Mexico and Texas. At Big Bend, the Rio Grande carves limestone cliffs. Water induced erosion carries naturally occurring carbonic acid etching existing rock formations.
I walked across the Rio Grande to a gravelly sand bar on the Mexican side. The river is hardly knee deep at Hot Springs. I shoved a rod into the silt where I hoped it would be firm enough to support the rods upright position. I hung a 'media pad' with monofilament line from the top of the pole. I began to videotape the river and surrounding hills. I returned to the suspended monitor hanging two feet above the river and videotaped the screen with river in the background. As I was completing the task I turned around and saw a man on horseback watching me. He had high cheekbones, taut reddish brown skin, black hair and cowboy shirt. He finished observing and slowly turned his horse around and left. The park rangers said that Mexican cowboys rode through the valley routinely.
A father, his daughter and son are playing in Lake Champlain, water waist deep. It is late afternoon, early evening and the figures are becoming silhouettes.
The white sand at White Sands National Monument is composed of gypsum crystals. Rain water dissolves gypsum cementing it together and forming a solid layer. The winds break up the solid patches and blow the gypsum crystals into dunes. Gypsum does not retain heat like quartz based sand crystals so the dunes can be walked on barefoot. The Park Gift Shop rents flying saucers to slide down the mounds. White Sands National Monument is in southern New Mexico.
The monument is completely surrounded by military installations. White Sands Proving Grounds was established in 1945 and the first atomic bomb was exploded at Trinity site the same year. The V-2 rocket was assembled and tested in 1946. Further development of the V-2 continued throughout the 40's and was succeeded with the development of other rocket programs including Mercury and Nike missles. These rocket programs were the beginning of the American space program.
I began videotaping the landscape with my Nexus pad in the late afternoon. The wind was blowing continuously, noisily. In the motel that evening I decided that the material I had wasn't good enough. I got up the next morning and arrived at the park for it's opening. Some campers did spend the night, however I hadn't brought any equipment. As I walked out onto the gypsum surface, it was completely still except for the crunching sound of my footsteps. The shadows cast by the sun in the east were spectacular.
In 1971 Alan Shepard became the fifth person to walk on the moon. He celebrated that achievement with the longest golf shot in human history. Shepard hit two golf balls each of which could have easily gone over a mile (estimates based on gravitional pull on the moon and average distances of golf shot on earth). As a commemoration to that performance the video played on the nexus pad was of a golfer repeatedly swinging at the ball. The 'man hitting golf ball' video was sampled from the movie Falling Down.
Monument Valley is a tribal Navajo park on the border of Arizona and Utah. The Navajo reservation covers approximately 30,000 square miles of primarily northern Arizona. In Chinle, Arizona, the gateway to Canyon de Chelly, there are Navajo run Burger Kings and Holiday Inn among other chain businesses. The monuments of Monument Valley are sandstone buttes carved by wind and rain for thousands of years. They have become the backdrops for countless Hollywood movies.
The video of the Lone Ranger and Silver was excerpted from the original movie "The Lost City of Gold" (1958).
Tropicana Boulevard and Las Vegas Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada, also known as the strip or Las Vegas casino district.
'man on a lawnmower' was videotaped in Montauk, NY, at Beachcomber's Motel along the Old Montauk Highway.
Petaluma was originally a farming community fifty miles north of San Francisco and ten miles from the Pacific Ocean. Zoning regulations have limited the sprawl which effects many rural communities so consequently the hills just outside the city limits still maintain their agricultural look. Cattle graze on hillsides. The roads weave around the rounded domes. The rainy season in California lasts from October through May, so in the summer monthes there is virtually no precipitation and the grasses dry up and the hills become golden brown.
I have a daughter and two brothers who live in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. One brother lives in Petaluma so I was planning to stay with him for a week or so. I knew about the hills outside of Petaluma, so in a sense this was a destination. I spent most of a week driving through the hills east and west of Petaluma looking for a site which included a highway rising to a ridge between multiple hill crests and the best time and day to videotape the video screening. I also cast a rod in concrete so that the monitor could be placed on the paved shoulder of a rural road.
'woman Walking' was videotaped in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
The Bonneville salt flats is a densely packed salt pan in northwestern Utah. The flats were formed when an ancient lake, Lake Bonneville, dried up. Interstate Highway 80 runs through the salt flats, east to west.
Driving east from Nevada on Interstate 80 there are signs for a rest stop where it turns out that visitors can stop and walk out onto the salt flats. I did not stop, however, thinking that there would be other areas I could stop and walk out onto the flats without as many people present. I continued driving, straight. No exits. Eventually fifty miles later there is a sign for a frontage road. I am able to leave the highway and drive between the railroad tracks and the highway. Stop. Disembark. Videotape.
The video playing on the lcd monitor is an original video of three scuba divers wearing wet suits standing next to or wading in Lake Tahoe.
The Badlands are an area of west South Dakota with sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires surrounded by a mixed grass prairie. The rainy season peaks in May - June, producing vibrant green fields of grasses mixed with wildflowers. The land to the immediate south of the badlands is such an enormous prairie which begins to break apart with fissures cutting into the various plateaus. The Oglala Lakota nation co-manage half of Badlands National Park.
It began with the image of a runner in the sky over the badlands in South Dakota. I had seen the badlands when I was 12 and although there are more spectacular vistas, such as the Grand Canyon, I had fixated on the image of the runner in the sky above the badlands.
A nexus tablet hangs on a hollow steel tube stuck in the tall grass mesa overlooking an eastern rim of the badlands. A jogger runs on the screen of the nexus tablet. The jogger was originally videotaped at Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
The following video is a computer animation, a 'virtual gallery' where the previous videos on this web page are exhibited. There is a point on the floor in front of each bay where a motion detector would trigger the playing of a specific video. As the viewer leaves the spot, the video turns off. The viewer then proceeds to the next bay where a succeeding video plays.