THERE SHOULD BE ZEROES

THERE SHOULD BE ZEROES

 

We were working on the little reach-in sandwich prep.  I’d called him when he was halfway home and asked if he could come help me because I was too tired (depressed) to work alone.  I was grumping at him now & then, as usual, when he got kind of bull headed about putting things together too fast & furious, like he’d done for years, but we got along.  Then all of a sudden he said,

 

I feel dizzy. 

 

But he wasn’t articulating enough that I could understand him.

 

You’re busy?  You don’t want to work with me anymore?

 

No I feel dizzy.  I need your help.

 

He looked at me like a child, thinking a grownup could move mountains and reverse the course of rivers.

 

How can I help you?

 

I need to sit down.  Can you take me over to the tables. 

 

He put his hand in my arm and I led him over to the upholstered benches he’d made himself in this restaurant he’d built himself.  He took his bridge out and laid down in the booth.  A little later he rose up enough to look at me and say,

 

Today was a very ugly day. 

 

Why?

 

I don’t know.  I couldn’t do anything right. 

 

I knew he had a tumor, just above the ear where he puts his cell phone.  I’d heard of other cases.  But they’re just anecdotes.  Let’s wait until a few thousand people die and before we do something. I said,

 

I think we’re wasting precious minutes.  You need to go to the emergency room.  I’m calling an ambulance.

 

No, that will cost too much money. 

 

I’ll drive you there in your car then.  What hospital do you want to go to?

 

I don’t know the name....the one my doctor works out of....

 

Where is it?  What are the cross streets?

 

Grand....(again he couldn’t articulate, he was trying to say Grant)

 

I don’t know any such street...here let me draw you a map....

 

It’s on Stone. 

 

Stone and what? 

 

His hand moved over the lines I drew on a card....he couldn’t recognize anything about the city he’d been in for thirty years. 

 

OK I’m taking you to the ER at UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is we’ll go there if you don’t we’re going to University Medical Center.  Come on, let’s go.

 

He looked even more like a scared, confused child.  He went into the back where we’d been working, just to get some little thing or go to the restroom, I thought, but he was taking too long so I went back to check on him and he was putting stuff away and pushing the reach-in back into its hole in the wall as if he was perfectly healthy.

 

Come on let’s go, I can do that later. 

 

And after this display of sudden strength I had to help him into his car. 

 

Do you know how to drive this car?

 

Of course. 

 

Turns out I didn’t know where the emergency flashers were & instead pushed the button to open the trunk while I was trying to look back through the rear view mirror.  I kept thinking, 

 

This is too mundane, this isn’t real.  There should be Zeroes on my tail, there should be MIGs, I should be going low, to get under them, doing barrel rolls and end to end flips and hitting them with fifty caliber machine gun rounds, ka chaka chaka chaka chaka BOOM! I should be radioing in my kills, and dive bombing down into the smokestack of a carrier and watching the engine room explode.....I should ask for a police escort to the hospital and at least make a little noise,  but they won’t get here until it’s too late and all that racing and jarring would just make his condition worse probably....

 

But there should be Zeroes......well maybe they’re here. 

 

I was sorry I’d been so grumpy with him all these years.  Telling him,

 

Fuck that other restaurant (abandoned up in the foothills), fuck your big ass ideas about turning the restaurant into condos and destroying the land, come on, let’s turn the café’ you’ve still got into a sculpture garden with big old trees over live ponds and sculptures and kinetic sculptures people can sit and  eat in....we’ll get a grant, come on, you think I want to do this boring grinding crap the rest of my life, give me a little hope, I can’t work without hope....

 

And he’d laugh like I was crazy and amusing, but lately he was actually coming around, agreed to draw some blue prints for the project....he could do that, better than a lot of architects and then this had to happen....now there’s nobody even there to grump at.  John Muir said, “In wilderness is the salvation of the world”. We don’t get to wilderness by building condos in it, we get there by recognizing the need for a respectful distance between it and our miserable species....which I’ve been watching for years and still can’t crack the code. . 

 

He vomited on the way in to the hospital, and the rasta guy in the weird haircut with shaved temples and a pony tail shoved a tray in his lap.  I noticed they had a dozen trays just like it stacked up behind the desk.  We got to an examination room and his wife suddenly appeared behind me, finally, someone who knew how to handle this guy.  But did she?  He’d used all their money on schizophrenic dreams and schemes.  One day he’d be telling me he’d traveled all over the world, knew seven languages, had grown his huge garden, played his music,  seen his children grow up, didn’t need anything else, wanted to give something back, and the next day he was going to make millions building condos.  Meanwhile I was feeling Schizophrenic too.  I needed his constant optimism but it drove me crazy because it seemed to be about nothing. 

 

Big shots,

 

I said, driving his used up old Mercury out of the parking lot, and wanting to ram every car in it,

 

Big shots, they can all just go fuck themselves.

 

And out on the road I was especially attracted to cop cars, anything with those beautiful red and blue and white flashing lights, sudden strange vectors of vehicles crashing into each other, sweet oblivions that you could crawl into out of the same old same old daily grind that was killing you worse than any sudden death ever could. 

 

Brains,

 

I said,

 

Brains, I was thinking, back at the restaurant, cleaning up the mess, putting the tools away.  And then I just sat in one of the empty booths, looking at the picture on the wall of a sweet little kid holding a dog.  The kind of thing he’d chosen to fit the theme of Old Times Restaurant.  It made me sick.  How was that part of this reality? It just was.  Part of that tumor with cells going nuts, making blood supply lines, sloppily, randomly, like a developer on steroids.  Maybe those vessels burst, maybe it was just the tumor pressing on the arteries or the brains themselves.  Brains, I thought,  because just that morning I’d been listening to a naturalist on NPR talking about the wonder of insect brains, so, what about human brains....

 

HUMAN brains?  Hey, wait! Is this some kind of joke? 

Note on a grant app to WWOOFUSA

Casa Goofy International is about community. 

 

It’s about art and humor as bridges between ego and reality.

 

And about art and humor as bridges and interfaces between human communities, and between the human and the natural community.  Bridges and interfaces that we need because?

 

Because the natural community is the enduring community and we’re just transients, just passing through, packing up and moving on (at least since we got here).  

 

Because OUTWARD is the primary principle of the universe and the intelligence of nature (at least since the Big Bang & possibly even earlier).

 

And when we invest in that enduring community we can endure all the losses of ego that flesh is heir to, because all flesh is grass and all grass is dirt. And therefore art is dirt.

 

And so the emphasis on Art-In-Nature.   

 

And so the emphasis on crossing borders to build the real community, the invisible community of those who care about the earth but who may never see each other

 

It’s about creating interfaces between the human and the natural communities through art, art-in-nature and intensive gardening methods, interfaces, (art and culture and gardening methods) which can give people in cramped apartments in cities, and even the homeless, the same sense of entitlement to the community of nature as those who have inherited farms and ranches. 

 

And so we’re about creating a third world gallery circuit with an emphasis on art-in-nature____________because there is a need there for recognition that art becomes most real when it pauses and then begins again like a child, improvising, working beyond the illusions and stresses of recognition, the structures and anxieties of traditional esthetics and their abstract commodity and speculative and investment based systems of value that flock around people and things that are “special” like teenagers on Facebook. 

 

Au contraire we’re about community  and investing in community that recognizes no such mandate in anybody to be judge and jury over the ultimate value of any being, any work.  We’re about seeking and building community that cares about essences instead of appearances. 

 

Therefore we’re about reinventing the old International Arts Center that used to be here in the old Y before the gentrification steamroller smashed it down under the inevitable injustice of money (because money is an abstraction).  We’re about reinventing it as an investment in community and common ground instead of big buildings with money targets on their butts.

 

How would that work?  It would work like student exchange, and Couchsurfing and WWOOF USA only it would be an international exchange of art and artists who are like those hardy souls above, born to look and move OUTWARD because they were born knowing that we are community before we are individuals, that we are the earth beneath our feet so we can never be lost, and the common man, the common person is common to us. 

 

I enjoy having a house I built beside the road, I enjoy hosting and being a friend to these transient people and I enjoy being part of a larger conversation than what occurs in board rooms and university seminars, a conversation made of dirt and rocks and plants and written on the living air between us.  I have been overwhelmed by the largesse of those who have nothing, and underwhelmed by the betrayals of big shots who have enough to worry themselves to death with the fear of losing it.

 

Physicists are now telling us reality is just information, and law books are telling us truth is just an arbitration.  Dude like whatever floats your ego, I’m just glad to be a nobody in nowhere representing the little guy, not with much hope that any of us can survive the feedback loops of global warming, but with a grain of faith the size of a mustard seed that shitty as life with others gets sometimes, this much is given to us, that we can hold dirt and water and seeds in our hands and look up at the stars.

 

And once we get to a place that’s not a place but a process, a process that’s real made of things and dirt and rocks and plants, we have nothing to fear except those constructs of mind divorced from nature, those things that aren’t things at all, those things that like money and drones can kill without conscience or feelings, those things which we call abstractions because they are abstracted, i.e. taken from something more basic and real.  But all  language is an abstraction, every word is a leap of faith, so?

 

So ya gotta have a sense of humor.  And therefore:  Casa GOOFY International. 

 

But what are we about in more concrete terms?  We’re a program under the non-profit, Artfare with six ponds and six greenhouses almost at the point of being an off grid aquaculture system, a sculpture garden, 17 units of housing about 25 percent converted to artists’ live/work spaces with workshop/studio/greenhouses attached. Two units of free bunkhouse housing for volunteers onsite, two units of offsite bunkhouse housing for volunteers (and maybe, just maybe an atrium gallery as one station in a Third World Gallery Circuit)  at the Artfare Hotel in the hotly contested and not quite totally broken heart of downtown Tucson.  (But keep trying Centurions, et. al., once you get the riff raff and the city bus center and a certain historic hotel block out of the way, downtown will be totally revitalized and sterilized.)  And we’re supporters of Los Amigos Childcare.

 

We bring the music and art and gardening (natural science) hour to children of low income families Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3 p.m. (or times like this when the funding is low, WHEN WE CAN) right after their naps, so they’re not totally cranky and impossible to control.  We’re pursuing solar water heating, solar electric generation, waste veggie oil processing, biodigestion for methane and fertilizer, parking shades with unisolar roll out photovoltaic film, and all other mechanical sustainable permaculture contrivances that might help our cause without costing too much money during the start up chaos with the inevitable 98 percent failure rate for most inventions.

 

And what in particular will we do with two thousand dollars if and when we get it?  The West side of the pond/greenhouse complex is finally ready to rumble with solar charged Caterpillar batteries running pumps that circulate water between all the ponds and from the lowest to the highest pond.  The water then flows down through siphons back to the middle and then the lowest pond.  That’s the basic pond system.  Here’s how we add the greenhouse system to the pond system:

 

A pair of larger solar powered pumps pump a greater volume of water to the top pond where it comes down through a larger siphon into a hydraulic ram pump made from common plumbing parts which uses only the energy of a large volume of falling water to pump a small volume of water, 30 feet, three times as high as the fall, to the top of the highest greenhouse where it will trickle down through troughs made from salvage sheet metal duct and eventually arrive back at the lower pond.   

 

In these troughs are “grow boxes” made from junk food coolers with slots in them so plants can grow out the sides as well as the tops.  The food coolers have wicks in them which wick up the pond water into the soil so the plants can use just as much as they need with minimal loss to evaporation and so that no soil goes back into the ponds.

 

Meanwhile heavy duty steel shelving frames over the top ponds repeat this kind of cycle for outdoor planting and some of the lower shelves in these frames have vermiculture tubs in them where kitchen scraps are used to feed worms for the fertilizer. 

 

In the back of the greenhouses where there’s less sunlight are mushroom beds and storage of gardening supplies.    

 

Two thousand dollars would buy us enough supplies, expertise and skilled labor to repeat the hydraulic ram pump application on the East side of the pond/greenhouse system.

 

This completed system with the addition of living fences made from recycled pallets, intensive raised bed gardens,  a stock of fingerling Bass, Tilapia, and Catfish, a stock of small livestock and birds will turn us from an experiment into a working farm and art-in-nature laboratory for international exchange artists to use and for children from Los Amigos Childcare and children of all ages to tour under shade cloth and tree shade to protect them from the merciless Southern Arizona Sun that’s soon to get more merciless under the stresses of global warming. 

 

But more importantly are we having fun yet?  Are we there yet?  How will we know when we get there? 

 

We’ll know when we complete the giant turtle out of shade cloth stretched between poles which can be seen from GOOGLE EARTH, just to tell those illegal aliens from outer space to come on down, but just be aware that we don’t care....

 

....WHAT some silly bunch of intergalactic bureaucrats think our purpose here on earth is, we’re all about the native Americans’ concept of America as “TURTLE ISLAND”.   Aliens, (illegal schmegal) global warming?  (Charming.)  Can’t scare us.  You guys are visitors here. You can’t actually arrive until you know you’re nothing.

what's an assault? & what weapons should be used?

Attention K-Mart Shoppers

 

There has been an incident in the ladies’ lingerie section

 

a broken person with no other hope for meaning in his life

 

than death and a headline

 

Has shot and killed five hostages, wounded eleven other people, and then

 

Killed himself

 

The police and paramedics are here and the incident, ,

 

Is under control.,

 

The mall is safe for you to continue shopping

 

For items of denial

 

Attention grade school students, someone jealous

 

Of the attention you are getting because of your potential

 

Has stolen his parents’ guns

 

And entered the building in order to kill

 

As many of you as possible

 

Because he is angry because

 

Parts of his brain dealing with sympathy

 

For others, no different than ours only

 

More so, are missing,

 

don’t worry, the President will make a speech

 

And we’ll enact new gun laws

 

In your honor

 

Good Evening, this just in,

 

A disappointed actor has broken in

 

To a studio shooting a soap opera and shot

 

Everyone in a scene full of self conscious anxiety

 

And a man in fatigues has cried “I’M NOBODY!”

 

And opened fire in a crowded theater.

 

And a dictator representing all our anxiety and will

 

To power and simultaneously our failure

 

To grasp our decaying relationship

 

With the natural community, a drug lord,

 

A poor little bitty person who needs to be a big shot

 

In the name of the people, has just seized all

 

Government power in Columbia

 

And legalized and nationalized all drugs

 

Please try to contain your enthusiasm.

 

Attention Wal Mart Shoppers

 

Listen to the words of the former President

 

Be afraid, be very afraid,

 

Go shopping

 

Buy some stuff, buy a gun in our sports

 

Department or else the terrorists will

 

Win. In the words of a very former President,

 

“Let us begin again.” . let us also remember

 

the political posturing can never end. 

 

With all due respect (and then some)

 

 Mr. President, Mr. Vice President,

 

Speaker of the House, since both sides of this debate

 

Are wearing invisible Nascar patches on their

 

Adult drag suits, let’s not get too sanctimonious

 

About this,  yes we have to do

 

the assault weapons ban but how about a ban

 

on 3-D printed guns, how about a ban

 

on nations using drones against innocents or

t

their own citizens? Or have you ever noticed

 

How fast someone with no training and just a little

 

practice can reload?  Or that there are hunting rifles

 

that can hit a nine inch target at 1000 yards?  So which

 

is more terrifying, being killed from a distance

 

with one bullet or up close with fifteen?  It took one bullet

 

to kill Lincoln, approximately three

 

to kill JFK, one to kill Martin Luther King...

 

Mr. President, members of Congress and

 

K Mart and Wal Mart shoppers for more symptomatic

 

Relief try some Asprin or Advil but I submit the issue

 

We need to address

 

Is not

 

The number of rounds in a magazine,

 

It is the number of sensationalist, frivolous articles

 

In the nation’s magazines, it is the disappearance of self

 

That comes from the disappearance of

 

The community of nature, it is the number

 

Of  holes in the national soul. 

KJKJK

HJHJH

IMAGINE ALL THE PICTURES

 THIS SILLY PROGRAM WON'T LET ME UPLOAD.

FOR A COMPLETE COPY OF OUR INCOMPLETE PROSPECTUS JUST EMAIL:

dennishwilliams@gmail.com

                                                                                                                                                             

                      

 CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL

(and los amigos childcare) ARE:

Programs Under Artfare (a five oh one-see-three)

Below is the Artfare block on 6^th. Ave across from the Ronstadt Bus Center where

We’re writing a grant to turn the block green with photo voltaics and roof gardens everywhere.

This grant will include the 16 rental units and temporary housing, gardens, greenhouses and pond systems in Casa Goofy waiting to become an art-in-nature laboratory AND the parking lot at Los Amigos Childcare.

If we can defray utilities we can start making real progress.  But it will take a year of work and writing.   Meanwhile we do what we can.

CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL MISSION:

CROSSING BORDERS TO BUILD THE REAL COMMUNITY

(The Invisible Community Of Those Who Care About The Earth But Who May Never See Each Other)

In a world in denial, a world in which even science, has consistently failed to figure the rate of acceleration by which Global Warming progresses, Casa Goofy International is here to help individuals take their physical and spiritual survival into their own hands, think globally and act locally, with homegrown food, art and culture.

GOALS:

 

CREATE:

AN INTERNATIONAL ART & ARTIST EXCHANGE

(Because The Rest Of The World Is The Rest Of You.)

 AN ART-IN-NATURE LABORATORY

(Because If We’re Not Going To Destroy Our Own Habitat We Need An Interface Between The Human And The Natural Community

A THIRD WORLD GALLERY CIRCUIT

(Starting just south of the border in Mexico and proceeding South until it turns North)

STRATEGIES: 

Maintain contributing memberships in:

WWOOFERS (Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms) and COUCHSURFERS.COM

Continue converting 16 units of housing, (50% so far) to artists’ live/work spaces and WWOOFER quarters

Turn 6 ponds and two greenhouses into aquaponic urban farms and art in nature labs.

Reinvent, (with a sense of humor this time)  The International Arts Center as an investment, like Student Exchange, in community and people instead of big buildings (with big money targets on their butts).

Where are these people?  Where is this “community” we’ve chosen to invest in instead of big buildings? 

As the man in the trench coat and slouch hat who hangs out in front of large public buildings always says,

“Time will tell.  And questions still remain.  And now back to you in New York, Bob.” MEANWHILE BACK AT THE RANCH, LAREDO AND LASH AND THE BOYS WILL:

MAKE SAFE, COMFORTABLE, INSPIRING SPACES FOR VOLUNTEERS AND VISITING ARTISTS

(spaces in which nature can come IN and creativity can go OUT)

FACILITATE THE GROWTH OF NATURAL COMMUNITIES BY:

INVENTING INTENSIVE GROWING METHODS FOR LIMITED SPACES

COMBINE WITH PHOTO VOLTAICS

COMBINE WITH ART

RECYCLE, USE & REUSE ALL RESOURCES

MAKE COMMUNITY MURALS FOR FENCES

UTILIZE THE “CITIZENS’ AUXILLARY” GROUP TO

CREATE ANTI GLOBALWARMING FEEDBACK LOOPS

(To Lobby For Large Scale Community Wide Projects such as:

“smokestack algae biofuels plant” and “Solar Farm Trolley”

and solar electric roof gardens.)

polar ice melt, loss of reflectance, more tundra & permafrost melt, decaying biomass producing greenhouses gasses, ocean turning from carbon sinks to carbon emitters, acidification, coral reefs dying, etc. etc. these loops will go on multiplying each other’s effects ad infinitum even if we get greenhouse gas emissions down to pre industrial levels  A decrease in an increase in emissions is a good political deal but nature doesn’t make deals (she makes hurricanes & heat waves).

Proceed modularly.  Make modules small enough to be feasible and repeatable. Create modules that are anti global warming feedback loops combined with art opportunities for children of all ages. 

TACTICS

Casa Goofy International DOES (one WWOOFER volunteer’s description): 

“Develop methods of growing food which save water, produce food in a small space to feed tenants/children at Los Amigos Childcare,

Provide affordable and creative living spaces for artists in the city,

Teach others (local as well as international) about innovative ways of growing food, Promote recycling (water, resources, trash,etc) to create art and a beautiful space for people to live and work.”

WHAT’S IN IT FOR TUCSON?

The profitable exploitation of one of our most plentiful local resources: artists.  We have more artists and musicians per capita than any other city in the U.S. and there is a 10x multiplier effect for business with art events. 

If a little town like Bisbee can put itself on the map with a once a year Poetry Festival.  If a little city like Cleveland (with a river so polluted it burned one night) can put itself on the map with a once a year, month long, International Performance Art Festival, if San Antonio can put itself on the map with its River Walk, Tucson can put itself on the map with an International Arts Center and a Third World Gallery Circuit starting in Nogalles and proceeding South until it’s North (and don’t stop there it’s too freakin’ COLD!).

Tourism is low infrastructure & high dollar business.

And the added attraction just might help fill those seven hundred units of student housing that filled the hole left by the destruction of the International Arts Center when the City Council vacated its own stipulations and subverted its own Historic Preservation ordinance,

JUST MIGHT...

also help fill the seven hundred more units of student housing proposed by a millionaire consortium (I can name names, and I know where the bodies are buried) if it gets to tear down the sixth block in the history of Tucson).

AT 1323 HUALPAI:

COMPLETE VISITING ARTIST QUARTERS

AND ART IN NATURE LABORATORY

AT 1329 HUALPAI AND 3428-34 E. PRESIDIO ROAD:

FINISH CONVERSIONS OF APARTMENTS TO ARTIST HOUSING

AT ARTFARE:

BUILD BALCONY IN THE “BRAVO GALLERY” & USE FOR

ART-IN-NATURE DEMONSTRATIONS & PERFORMANCES

AND AS MAIN SHOWPLACE FOR THE

3^RD WORLD GALLERY CIRCUIT CITIZENS’ AUXILLARY

AT LOS AMIGOS CHILDCARE:

BUILD “LIVING WALLS” GARDENS AROUND SANDBOX AND BUILDING AND SHOW KIDS HOW TO GROW PLANTS IN THEM

(Have kids come on field trips to Casa Goofy at 1323 Hualpai to see how it’s done.)

FOR The Future:

Container (raised bed style) Gardens at each rental.  Roof Gardens at The AZ Hotel shaded by photovoltaics on brackets anchored to roof decks.  The gardens arranged in patterns like the Plain of Nazca, ancient temples, petroglyphs.

Smokestack Algae Plants at TEP, the Apache Power Plant  (in the million gallon water tank left by the U of A when it gave up on “pond algae”) & electric cooperatives.   Live video projections of algae combined with visitors on the walls & ceilings. See if the life of the algae changes any depending on how many visitors are watching them.  Arrange the plants so they are visible as art from Google Earth. 

Aquarium shaped like the human body with fish in them in storefront windows at Artfare, water pumped up to roof gardens in the shape of human body & siphoned back down again, utilizing the falling water for art ferris wheels & other machines.

Dirigibles with thin film photo voltaics stretched between them to shade critical, strategic areas where commerce is heaviest etc. beaming down the generated electricity by microwave.  (Someday the most strategic location could be over the poles to combat loss of Albedo (reflectance)).

Display banner art and project images on the underside of the dirigibles and thin film substrate/membrane.  Most appropriate images might deal with ancient cultures with or without images from modern street life being juxtaposed.

            IMPOSSIBLE!?  OK Fine….how about

For Now:

OK Here’s some “modules”:

Waste Vegetable Oil and biodiesel plant at 1323 W. Hualpai Rd:



(this is a miniature anti global warming feedback loop, it filters waste vegetable oil and makes biodiesel, close to zero carbon footprint, and NO WAR REQURIED imagine how many greenhouse gasses we added to the atmosphere with the Mid East wars.)

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU AS ARTIST OR INDIVIDUAL?

Opportunities to:

Have enriching cross cultural experiences by becoming hosts/guests to international artists.

Host field trips for kids of all ages to the art-in-nature lab in process at Casa Goofy International.

Do projects in that lab and have display space in Artfare’s atrium “Bravo Gallery” across from the Ronstadt Bus Center.  

Have hands-on learning experiences growing their own food and art with very limited space, time and money.  

Experience in real time, the real meaning of the word “RENNAISSANCE” .

Demo projects done:

Solar pump/siphon system for utilizing sunlight and pumped water over and over  for maximum efficiency & use of  limited grow space.

Solar pond Food coolers used as “earth boxes” or grow boxes set in troughs to use water being pumped by solar pumps between ponds

Made plans to expand this system to circulate pond water through existing 24 ft. high greenhouses to use fish poop as fertilizer.

Set up air compressor & home made “air stones” for pond aeration.  

Set up large (8# diameter) plastic pipe grow system for capturing water and sunlight under eaves of all units, especially where limited sunlight is a problem (the pipes have portholes & bottom holes to grow “strawberry pot” and “upside down” style)

Created cheap raised bed, intensive planting & coldframe designs & demos to utilize limited spaces. 

Shrines To Go (“Shrines A Go Go”) series of art on wheels with these common elements: dirt, plants, melting ice, a black pocket that can’t ever be opened, a chalice with an offering, a prayer/chant/dedication ceremoney, candles, a picture, some part of a clown suit/image. Leave them at prestigious institutions so that a decision must be made: to discard, keep, give away, destroy, not decide. 

Set up Thursday afternoons at 3:30 at LOS AMIGOS CHILDCARE AND:

Taught mask making with

Ned Schaper from the Matt Bevel Kinetic Sculpture Institute:

John White, musician from CGI who plays banjo, fiddle, guitar and ukulele, taught them music.

            

                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Jim from Artfare, has an education degree and plays clarinet and trumpet:

   

                                                                                                 

Taught about insects with a puppet show by an entomologist.

In spite of what Dr. Laura says about single parent or no parent families, the kids are affectionate and are well behaved.  They learn, they sing they dance, they do art.

In spite of what Dr. Laura says about Day Care Centers, the teachers here really care and they are a community within the larger community.  This Day Care has become the well, the commons, the village it takes to raise a child.  It accepts and cares for kids with problems that no other Day Care will take and is having some success with them. 

we’re working up a regular schedule of fundraiser performance nights with food, entertainment, games and raffles.               

We’re planning on doing:

Community participation murals (make a place for the art of children of all ages).

Gradually changing Dennis Williams’ HVAC-R business by

Adding businesses one at a time that can offer: waste cooking oil, use of space on off hours, catering, or just sympathy for the project so that, little by little, our little community grows withing the larger community and more and more time

Can be devoted to CGI. 

                                                                       

AND IN ALL THE ABOVE:

We have fun and,

KEEP IT GOOFY!!!

CASA GOOFY NEEDS:

(a new blackboard to provide for dialogue aka “exquisite corpses” among residents, (I call it our ‘Little Black Mountain Black Board” and we REALLY need)

a $60,000 line of credit.  Several amortization schedules have been drawn up for any individual or institution to choose from or offer their own terms.   Payments (around $450/mo.) will all be handled through a title company with one free and clear duplex, appraised at $125,000, for collateral.   The uses of the line of credit are:

Purchase grid tie photovoltaics to stop the escalation of utility bills. 

Finish the conversion of 8 rental units into artist live/work spaces. 

Finish the construction of visiting artist quarters at the art-in-nature lab at 1323 W. Hualpai Road.

This will:

make the project financially and ecologically self sustaining,

complete the artist community that will support the mission of outreach to other countries

unite the project around one clear vision:

a world in which the imaginary lines drawn by scientists, economists, politicians and countries are seen for what they are, so that our vision of global problems and solutions can be made whole. 

   

      

AND…THIS JUST IN!!! (from NEWS MAN)

ASSETS/PROJECTS IN CASA GOOFY:

1323 W. Hualpai Rd: a 2 story concrete dome house with 6 ponds,  2 greenhouses, sculpture garden, & garden. 75% complete.

Two visiting artist quarters in back.  50% complete.  (see below)

1329 W. Hualpai Rd: a duplex converted into four artist studios. Raised bed gardens and ramada all around, kiln, workshade in front parking lot.  75% complete.

3428 E. Presidio Rd.:  1 2BR single family residence being used as a studio, and a duplex with sunroom/studio and greenhouse in large back yard.  75% complete.

3430 E. Presidio road.  Duplex not converted.  40 X 30 X 12’ High steel building converted into two artist studios.  Greenhouse attached.  75% complete.

Art-In-Nature Lab 50% (?) completed.

Community participation murals on front fences and walls 5% completed.

International art exchange website, planning stage.

VISITING ARTIST QUARTERS IN CAMP GOOFY:

Vans & busses in U shape with campers on top, common kitchen & bathroom.  50% completed.  Large work-shade common studio between. 

(When finished, these will be free housing for WWOOFERS & visiting artists in exchange for working on projects in the art-in-nature lab. 

ADVISORY BOARD & ASSOCIATES:

Brian Flagg, Casa Maria Soup Kitchen

Bill Knauss, Builder

Jon McLane, host of “Free Green Radio” (KVOI) and Green Party Mayoral Candidate

Carlos Lozano, CEO hunter for Lozano And Associates

Paul Schock, founding partner of the former International Arts Center at the old Y at 5^th. Ave and 6^th. St.

Peter Anton (retired) electric bike enthusiast, ecologist.

John Peterson, HVAC-R engineer

Daniel Ryan, artist, educator.

(Your Name Here)

MY VISION:

We create modules that can be repeated for our own projects and can serve as models for other people’s projects. 

Each rental has a studio/workshop attached or integrated and a small raised bed garden shaded by a ramada or photo voltaic panel. And photovoltaic car shades and at least one raised bed garden for each class at Los Amigos Child Care.  And a progression of modular gardens on the roof of the Arizona Hotel with demonstrations in the store windows below.  This is survival itself in an age when the family farm and good food itself is becoming a thing of the past or something only the rich can afford. 

These modules are also playgrounds or art-in-nature laboratories because if there isn’t play involved then human interest can’t be sustained.  Survival has to also be defined as artistic and cultural survival, the life of the mind and the adventure of consciousness. 

At Casa Goofy itself I see:

The cooling tower on top of the dome finished and cooling the house.  The greenhouses and ponds functioning as one system.  The living quarters for volunteers finished in back.  The shop open to all who need to do projects.  Kids from Los Amigos visiting on field trips.  Solar electric and solar hot water systems, working, and swamp coolers with dehumidified and super cooled air coming out of them.

And what do I hear? I hear conversations among artists and between artists and the parts of the natural community that can only communicate with silences or experiences written on the living air between us. 

PRINCIPICUS GOOFICUS

(first principles)

WHY Casa   GOOFY   International?

“A very good philosophy could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

---Ludwig Wittgenstein*

“So, let’s WRITE one…AND… .act it out…maybe we could call it….

er…uh…something like Casa Goofy International”---Super Dummy

So from the “Free And Worth Every Penny” department heeerrre’s……

SUPER DUMMY’S GAME PLAN!!!

MISSION

(according to Super Dummy)

Saving the universe (from itself) one idiot at a time

“Human survival depends on our vision being restored to wholeness by artists and clowns.  Science doesn’t do well with process and whole systems.”

---General Lies, Philosophy Professor, Casa Goofy University (retired, emeritus, a latin word sometimes translated as meaning “without merit”.)    

GOALS

Develop a sense of humor about the apocalypse and a welcoming committee called….

Armageddon To Know You.

And Armageddon To Know You will have a one man band called,

The Lake Tucson Yachting Club Dance Orchestra

Sometimes the one man band is unavailable because it has to split up…

(so it can walk through the same river twice)

and then we just have to wait until it gets back together again.

Form a super committee to investigate the conundrum:

“If nature is intelligent, why are people so stupid?”****

STRATEGIES

The community does not end at the city limit sign or any other line.  

Therefore embrace absurdity around the world (and in neighboring universes).

 “It’s time we got serious about getting silly.”  ---Captain Nobody, author of “Global Warming Natural Disasters On $5 A Day”

When we’re joking we need to be dead serious and vice versa.  When we’re doing something we need to be doing nothing and vice versa.  You see, THE HUMAN MIND….uh, er……hey wait! Is this some kind of JOKE?!!---Fathed **

TACTICS

Rebuild the old International Arts Center but

this time invest in people & community instead of big-as-death buildings

with big-ass-money targets on their butts.

Work with local barrio child care center called Los Amigos (and a sister day care in Mexico) because:

Children’s art is unfair competition for adults.  That means it’s OK to STEAL from it. And because it’s THERE.

It keeps us younger than we might otherwise be.  As far as imagination, gesture and improvisation are concerned, after the first two years of development, old age sets in.

You see, the human mind……hey wait! Is this some kind of JOKE!!!???  (Hey wait! Did I say that before?  Well, this time I’m being SERIOUS***.)

Create shrines on wheels “Shrines A Go Go” shrines for a

Fast moving world, interactive shrines that force people & institutions to decide or at least to decide not to decide.

And remember:

People who don’t stay out of the way of the gentrification steamroller

Get rolled.

ADD END DUMB:

And so forth and SO WHAT? . 

St. Francis, when asked what he’d do if the world would end tomorrow, replied he would just keep on hoeing his garden.  Right on, St. Francis! My Main Man!

If enough people grew their own food we could survive global warming.

If a few people grew their own food they could create their own art, culture and religion and survive global warming culturally and spiritually even if all else fails.

But first you gotta get REAL QUIET

And then…you gotta laugh a lot.

* Ludwig Wittgenstein was officially adopted as the Camp Goofy Philosopher Mascot, April 1, 2007 .…NO FOOLING!)

** “Brains are like eggs.  If you drop them from a great height, like falling stars, they splatter out in all different directions, and they seem to be bigger and smaller than each other, but if you cook them up in global warming, they come out nice and round and more or less the same.”  Fathed (See You Tube: Dennis Williams: Performance Art In Tucson)

*** “Anything expressed in words can’t be taken seriously.  Language is a leap of faith.  And then you die.”  Captain Nobody

**** In regard to nature being more intelligent than people: “If a lion could talk we couldn’t understand him.”  Wittgenstein.  This goes without saying. People CAN talk and they can’t understand each other.  Which just adds further evidence as to their alleged (but obvious) stupidity. 

 The Camp Goofy Philosophers’ Society

AND NOW A MESSAGE FROM

BIG BOX MAN:

Keep up the good work, folks.  Reduce that annual INCREASE in greenhouse gas emission and call it a DECREASE.  Maybe nature will make a DEAL. Have the scientists measure individual factors and pretend for the sake of sanity they’re not part of a non linear process where the hotter it gets the faster it gets hotter (that’s never happened before has it?  I didn’t THINK so!)  Keep the money and the GROSS national product safe from those evil non linear processes.  Sort the data into boxes, label the boxes, feed them to the mainframe and instruct it to ADD them with grade school math.  ADD a box called AWAY, ADD a place called DOWNSTREAM, ADD a place like HOME, ADD a box called EVIL, stick all the things we can’t understand in the boxes and all our possessions will be safe from that old devil PROCESS while it multiplies the boxes by exponents on exponents.   The national and world economy depend on careful, tedious, bureaucratic maintenance of this illusion, that  ALL the lines we draw across time and space remain sacrosanct AND the absolute value of this random, speculative process we made into a BOX THINGY called MONEY. 

(Since Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING came out in the fifties, and ever since all the news media have been spending a lot of energy NOT observing this (Yogi Bera says you can observe a lot just by looking), scientific predictions of global warming factors have turned out to be UNDERestimate by at least a hundred percent, and normally by over three hundred percent.  Could a simple semantic mistake cause that much error?  I don’t THINK SO!!!)  Your money is perfectly safe, perfectly safe, REEELAXXXX!  The conventional wisdom has never been wrong before, and it’s never been wrong before because?  BECAUSE WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY!!!  Case closed.

Let me just second the emotion of an eminent local attorney here when he advised the U of A board that their obligation to the shareholders’ MONEY must override their concern for the whole wild wide world outside that MONEY, and must therefore override their personal ethics.  If a few minorities get hurt and the institution is running in the black, we have served the greater good.  If large lending institutions create situations that work against green building and leave people with their houses underwater, figuratively and literally, the monetary principles on which this great country was founded still stand. If banks, resolve their responsibility to their shareholders by telling the drug companies to do research in areas that are profitable instead of areas of the greatest human distress, economic survival must still prevail over these minor concerns.  

Money, like construction, has to grow without limits or else it dies like a cancer that has eaten its host.   Our survival depends on our daily acknowledgement, that if money is to retain its value it cannot afford to have values.

AND THE ICE MAN

REPLIES: 

Excuse me if I look a little wasted.  They found me in melting ice in the Otztal valley in the Italian Alps BECAUSE the permafrost and tundra are melting and billions of tiny organisms are awakening, and billions and billions of their tiny nano farts are going up to add methane to C02 AND hundreds of OTHER feedback loops which are multiplying and adding themselves to the inertia of global warming.  Even if you returned to pre industrial levels of Carbon Dioxide what about the other greenhouse gasses? How could you ever replace the lost reflectance of the ice caps, refreeze the permafrost, restore the coral, the forests, the lost species, the whole web of life you’re right now shredding like an incriminating presidential document?   And now let’s add the feedback loops of social damage and along with them various forms of denial, not to mention one of your favorites, BIG BOX MAN, obsessions with one or another I SO LATE ED form of so called sustainable energy, obsessions which prevent the creation of ANTI global warming feedback loops.

But what’s art got to do with it?  And why international art?  I’ve been dead for over five thousand years so you may think I don’t know much, but I learned from the petty political squabble that killed me, that WORDS can’t combat denial, they reinforce denial. They can’t cross BORDERS, they only make more borders.  But once we get an IMAGE into the back brain, (because as  Dr. Bong (ad man, ret.) sd. in Howard The Duck:

"IMAGE is ALL!!!) why then the argument is over and, in the best of all possible worlds, at least some amount of real communication could begin, let’s see images, images….

Including me and my companions on photovoltaic dirigibles over the city, images of algae making photographs projected on power plants, images made by gardens arranged in a pattern on the roofs of Tucson, images from the Art-In-Nature lab at Casa Goofy BUT…. 

….a certain comic silliness is required. A certain single minded seriousness has been the tragic flaw of similar efforts in the past.  (Therefore, Casa Goofy

But, we have to keep asking, can this thing work?  After all, the whole stinkin’ world is against it.  The mass of the whole social world doesn’t WANT to hear about solutions because that might indicate there’s a PROBLEM.  OOPS!!!

What if it’s too late? WELL, as I bled to death from a spear wound there in that beautiful valley, I wished I’d forgotten about all petty disputes between us all-too-humans, so I could REALLY have been there, to have really lived this life every moment as if it were (actually each moment WAS) my last and as if it were (the way each moment actually WAS) my first.  And then, as life ebbed and the world seemed so close and yet so far away, I wished I could have always been so moved...moved (as when watching a great tragedy) from the place where things are happening to us to the place where we are WATCHING things happen to us, that first and last act of will?  Like it says in Samson et Delilah,

“Beautiful is it not, the end of the world?”

It comes down (to put it in YOUR terms BIG BOX MAN) to a cost/benefit analysis of living in a world that moves versus a static world where we can hold on to concepts called THINGS which can only approximate process by being broken into pieces, or as Hart Crane said,

“And so I entered the broken world.”

But it’s our concepts of the world as a static assemblage of bits and pieces that is broken.  Once the world is  moving, and once we’re there, we do what we’ve done for thousands of years, just pack up and move on, and keep on walking until we find the distance that can make us whole. 

WHAT YOU CAN DO

PARTICIPATE:

Get on our mailing list.

VOLUNTEER:

Volunteers will be fed, entertained and spoiled rotten.  Donations of $100 or more grant you founding member status and get you a comic book face and a few choice words on all our community murals. 

Bring food, friends, art & entertainment to fundraisers.

Help with clean up, construction and gardening.  Help us work with the kids. Just take an interest.  Be someone we can talk to about how we’re doing and what other things we could be doing on an on going basis. 

Become a host.  Think about what space you might have for visiting artists to use for a few days to a few weeks.  Help us get a list of potential hosts going.

Participate in the fence mural project.  There's a place for you and your kids. 

BECOME A MEMBER:

Lifetime:  $100  (gets your name, photo, & comic book face in one of our participatory fence murals (you participate in the creation of your image, and to get to attend (or not attend) all meetings of The Bored).

Annual: $50 (free pass to our shop & kiln & other facilities).

Contributing: ($25 or more.  Five free art-postcards & whatever other goodies we can come up with.)

COSIGN A RE FINANCE WITH CASH OUT:

See “Casa Goofy Needs” or do it your way and organize your own gift.

 (be a big time artist) DONATE ART

or just DONATE:

vehicles, ,anything that could be raffled off or sold for scrap.

(have trucks, have people, will clean your yard)

New or used vegetable oil.

(any kind of waste oil)

Solar panels, PVs, DC or AC pumps, generators, tools. Building materials

(come visit, see what we’re doing, see if you have anything to

contribute, and talk to us about YOUR ideas.)

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE EXECUTIVE BOARD:

(attend online meetings, and less often physical meetings, help with fundraising, structural problems and planning.)

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE ADVISORY BOARD:

No responsibilities, just be wherever you are but be there for us: read, bear witness, listen, review & comment.  Be somebody just to talk to about how we’re doing.  (What is this? See the note below.) 

BECOME A MEMBER OF THE CLOWN COUNCIL

Be on call to help mediate disputes, misunderstandings, etc.  You have to wear some part of a clown costume while you’re mediating.  (hmmm “The Clown Council”….does that phrase sound FUNNY to you?!)

CONTACT:

Dennis Williams

1323 W. Hualpai Rd.

Tucson, AZ 85745-2051

520-429-0347

dennishwilliams@gmail.com

ON FACEBOOK:

Dennis Williams

Casa Goofy International

AT BLOGSPOT.COM

http://casagoofy.blogspot.com

http://superdummyinlovandwar.blogspot.com

http://secretidentity.blogspot.com

http://logosteleos.blogspot.com

AT BRINK.COM

Superdummy

Fathed

Note:

I see the Del Rey Motel is being re-opened as a place for live/work art studios and galleries.  Looking at this through the eyes of a non profit making spaces for artists and making places for people this is enough competition to force us into foreclosure but I’m glad to see art moving away from the gentrification bulldozer and into the “scenic route” on Miracle Mile and there is a concept from Lincoln Steffens that is equally true, that all business is good for all other business, and if so, maybe all art can be good for all other art IF we work it a certain way, understand Henry Kissinger’s comment, “The infighting is so bitter because the stakes are so small.”  And look OUTWARD and learn to cooperate because the stakes are now so high.