Norm ‘n’ Norma’s rock ‘n’ Roll tour stop one: Cameron NC. First six photos: New York artists were commissioned to paint the sides of old tobacco barns in the ’90’s…Last photo: A heist from the abandoned Castle Videogames on the boarder of South Carolina….

 

 

 

 

 

I had intended on being about finished with the studio at this point, but alas…the heavy rains in the last couple of weeks have brought unexpected plan-changes, accompanied by inevitable and invaluable life-lessons to boot.  The garage has flooded almost every day, and water’s been building up under the stage floor, and behind the structure.

I spent the first couple of days sort of standing around overwhelmed, covered in mud, feeling exasperated that my plans had been derailed. The idea that I could quickly divert the water was blocked off by giant tree roots and cement slabs, and the grade of the back yard is so slight, that I finally settled down with the fact that I was going to have to chip my away through the cement and roots, and dig trenches for gravel and pipes (french drains) that would carry the water all the way through the back and front yards. Once I accepted the fact that this was going to take a couple of weeks, everything became a little less overwhelming. And then the life lesson thing came in….
This past year, I’ve been working REALLY hard on re-channeling some thought processes and patterns in my brain. I’ve been hearing a lot about how repeated thoughts and patterns can actually create physical paths in your brain, and that with a great deal of effort, one can clear new ones. So I started imagining that, as I dug, that that’s what I was doing. The whole process became this huge extended metaphor, and I LOVE extended metaphors. Alll along, I was touching corners of the yard that I hadn’t tackled in years (for example, there was a piece of plywood with brush and yard-waist piled up against it that used to be a make-shift gate, and in order to get through it, I had to clear it all out, and build a new functional gate, which I never would have done).
The main thing that I’ve learned in this whole process, is that certain goals and timelines can really mess up one’s ability to appreciate what’s happening around them. I mean it’s great to have an idea of where a project is headed, but if you’re working on something every day anyway, why not really be present with the work, without being pulled out of it by the metering of how close you are to being done? Or whether or not you’re doing what you thought you’d be doing with your time?
There’s nothing like some good ditch-digging to really slow you down. In a good way.

 

This is the tiniest of kaleidoscopes i made for a friend. It’s a perfume jar, a spring, some beer bottle glass, a reflector, and a brake light, all of which were found on walks with harvey-sue.


I finished putting in the shack’s newest window just before a rain this morning. It hinges at the top, and hooks on the ceiling.

  

We started working on an art space in the garage part of the Chateaux. The original plan was to make a stained-glass studio for kaleidoscope building, but it’s turning into more of a multi-use community art space + music / workshop / earth-shaking venue (We took out a wall between the garage and a mud-floored weird closet space, and built a new floor, which is about a foot higher than the garage floor. oops! A STAGE!)

Here is a”before” pic of the garage, and of the creepy muddy room on the left (I was originally gunna make it a dark-room, but who needs another dark room when there are already so many closets in the universe???

  

Here’s Norma dressed up as a two-by-four after we tore the wall out and built a support wall:

 

Dave playing the first song on the surprise stage that came when we put in a floor….

And Kaji showed me how to wire electricity.

 

 

 

I made this one for a friend who’s going through a particularly transitional time of self reflection. So it’s got mirrors in the wheel, which creates a real wild reflection of a million of your own eyeballs looking through the kaleidoscope (the body is a bottle neck). It’s kind of rad.