nieu bethesda « ann rosenquist fee

The last thing I did before I left South Africa this week was buy all this great food to bring back for everybody. Tasty stuff. Ostrich pâté, springbok pâté, crackers called Salticrax which aren’t exotic but the name is funny even if you’re sophisticated, like me. Supersophisticated. Look how poised I am while the manager at the duty-free shop takes back all my stuff once he realizes I’m American, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection doesn’t allow meat. And the Salticrax aren’t that funny on their own.

This left me torn between sadness over not having any treats to bring to work on Monday, and excitement over looking non-American enough that I got away with buying this at all. If that’s why it happened. I’m pretending it was. While I sort that out, here are some hassle-free souvenirs:

For Claudia, an undead flower.

For Brian who’s been painting and posting the most contagious black lines in search of his Black Madonna, a tavern wall.

For the Black Madonna.

For all my artistically risky friends, and the regular risky ones.

For my friends who worry about size of their ass or anything else.

For my friends who brew their own. This was in the yard of a microbrewery where Scott accidentally ordered a popular lager and the proprietor said, man, you’re at a microbrewery, you’re being insulting. We re-ordered. The head was impassive.

For Jacob who enjoys a roadside skeleton.

For Rachael who is macabre.

For Amy who thinks about decorating her rafters.

For Goth Mom whose shadows are delicate yet terrifying.

For Launa who would wear these quite well.

For Shandy, the only woman in the Western world to wear a baby as stylishly as Africans do. Check this out, with a bath-sized towel. Every mother there does it just like this. I don’t know how the baby doesn’t fall out backwards or why this looks so right.

I don’t know why I’m cursed with hair that won’t turn into soft dreds.

It’s possible that I haven’t surrendered enough, yet, to something. A shampoo-free life. Something.

This is for Scott and Becky who showed me a version of surrender, the version where Scott drives an hour in a traffic jam to a city that’s closed.

To see the lights.

Hello from Gandhi to Jake.

Also for Jake.

And here’s a little take-home for me so I remember how it felt to spread out my pencils in front of a breathtaking tableau and then remember that I can’t actually, like, draw. I can’t draw big things.

I tried anyway, of course, artistic risk and blah blah blaaaah. That was enchanting for only so long. About this long:

I was so blank in the face of that, I went up to the edge of the pool and took a picture of that instead. Like, fine. If the sky’s going to be that way I’ll just see what’s in the pool.

The pool was at Glen Garriff Lion Farm in Harrismith, where I also got to see this. I watched and watched and watched.

To simulate my experience, imagine that it’s chilly but the sun is relentless. Imagine smacking sounds and tearing sounds, longer and more luxurious than noises you can make yourself. But you can try. After a while you maybe can’t help it. There you are in the sun and the stillness, watching this, not a single canned thing for miles and miles. I mean hectares. Just this, and this is everything, and it stuck in my eyes and ears and now I’m giving it to you, and Border Protection can’t really do anything about that.

Last Saturday night I went out all dressed up in other people’s credentials. They looked so good on me, you’d swear I was the real thing. The centerpiece was a brooch from retired dean-professor-poet Jane Earley. Here it is in its original habitat, the navy polyester of Jane’s lapel.

Here it is Saturday night.

My shoes and pants came from the yard sale of author Nicole Helget. The sale was late last summer. I rode my bike which limited my purchases to what I could fit in my backpack, so I had to leave behind these pumps and this one great pair of black pants with zippers on the legs, even though I really wanted them both. Not because I wear pumps or pants, but because I was delighted to find that Nicole and I shared a shoe and ass size. Oh please. What. Like you never went to a prominent artist’s yard sale and checked the pant tag, and saw they were the same as yours, and thought, excellent! I’m famous-sized!

A couple months later, I really needed some pumps to wear to a work thing so I messaged Nicole and sure enough she still had them. She left them on her porch for me to pick up that night, along with the pants, which I didn’t wear to the work thing because the zippers were a bit much. But obviously I had to wear them at some point, if I ever expect to publish.

You would think there’s no topping that but you haven’t seen the earrings. The earrings are what nailed it.

The wires and blank frames came from Hobby Lobby. The photos inside are from the contact sheets of pictures I took in Nieu Bethesda, South Africa, where outsider artist Helen Martins filled her bleak and tiny back yard with more than 300 concrete sculptures of camels, owls and people. Helen and her hired man Koos Malgas shaped each piece by hand. Do you feel what I mean by that, have you ever touched wet concrete? I bought a box of it after I visited the house, to see if I could make a little statue or two, and I did, and it burned like hell. You can’t wash it off because by the time you realize it hurts, it’s already in. They used crushed glass to make the concrete sparkle. I don’t know if the palms of Helen and Koos were completely numb, or if the sting was part of what they needed, or what. I know they kept going for twelve years, making and making despite heat and poverty and the neighbors’ disdain. In 1976, Helen’s eyesight began to fail, and she told Koos the yard was full. No more making. She sent him away and ingested a mixture of lye and crushed glass and olive oil, and collapsed on her kitchen floor and died a few days later.

I believe she would have liked my outfit.

One thing you can’t see here is the glitter in the shawl. It’s not as good as crushed glass in concrete, but I’m telling you, layer this with the brooch of a smart person plus hand-me-down famous pants and publish-me stilettos, plus crafty little earrings of despair, and seriously. You could not be more ready for thinking, making, shaping, busting forth into the light and other fashionable acts of spring.