night deer

At night when you drive or walk here, deer step out in front of you. I am completely enchanted by their ephemeral appearance and departure against the incredible weight of seeing them.

One night, while we were driving, a huge buck walked from the bushes and stood in front of us in the road. We were meters behind him, lighting him up white in the headlights. His head was turned away, looking at something invisible to us up the hill. It was startling and silent.

a gentle sign

One of the things I love most about being here is that it is possible to see an beautiful and forlorn empty sign by the roadside, pointing at nothing, go in and talk to the amazingly friendly people who work in the shop (on the counter is a sign "free hugs") and arrange to borrow it from them for a week. They will bring it on the back of their truck for my exhibition opening in December. The sign has a space where you can write text using removable plastic letters. I will write 7,000 STONES on it.

They told me that the local kids come at night and steal the plastic letters from the sign. A boy was recently killed in the village and the kids come and take the letters that spell out his name.

The best shop

deer season

This is the only country I have been to where it is not alarming to see a large group of men dressed in homemade uniforms loading guns by the side of the road.

haunted house

The fraternity house opposite my front door held a haunted house event over Halloween.

This is how it went: You go in and wait in a wood paneled room with a huge flat screen television mounted on the end wall. There is a bowl of twiglets. There is American football on the television with the sound down. We are the only guests. Two boys/men? stand outside and argue quietly about what to do with us.

One of them comes to get us. He has a pale face and may have had vampire teeth, I don’t remember clearly. He is though definitely holding a torch. He beckons us with the torch to follow him and tells us, with a very sincere and concerned expression, that no harm will come to us if we stay with him.

He leads us down a hallway hung with paddles, the oar-like sticks that new recruits to the fraternity are beaten with. These are not part of the halloween decoration but I have been imagining the inside of this house for three months and I am scared of the sticks. I am not scared though of the cobwebs and bloody rags that have been draped over them.

We go down a narrow stairway to the basement. A small plastic skull on tracks moves a few inches up and down. In the basement there is a 1930’s bar.

One barkeeper cleans a glass with a tea towel. One man leans with his girlfriend on the bar. She dances in the way that people do on television when there was no music. He looks at her.

The rest of the huge room is empty save for the lazy reflected light of the glitterball. Everyone looks at us (this happens here anyway). Our leader takes us to a serving hatch where we see a huge grinning hand-wiping chef. He wears a bloody apron and shouts that we should come back in ten minutes to eat. He laughs a lot. We go upstairs back down the hallway of beating sticks. Our guide tells us we should look in the rooms. He says it like this: “Oh! I wonder what will be in here??” then after we have seen a screaming person's leg buzzed off by the disc sander or the student repeatedly stabbing a boy he says it again, with exactly the same intonation. “Oh! I wonder what will be in here?” There is always something scary in the rooms, and then people try to grab you.

After ten minutes we went back down to the kitchen. A silver serving dish waited for us. The waiter lifted the lid and there was a real screaming woman’s head underneath it. I think it may have been the dancer.

The hand-wiping chef burst forth from the kitchen revving a chainsaw. A real chainsaw. He chased us, brandishing it in front of him. We ran upstairs to the top floor between the rooms and witnessed half-finished scenes of confused murdered people about to lie down, a group of three boys shouting on the fire escape and the t-shirt of our guide become covered in blood and stab wounds. We were upstairs and the high drone of the chainsaw seemed to be at the bottom of each flight of stairs we tried to descend.

halloween

We went dressed like this to a private party in a log cabin in the woods to which we weren't invited and sat at the end of the table. A man played Oops I did it again on a 12 string guitar. It was wonderful.

L to R; M. Hernandez, L. Clayton, J. Price

At the natural history museum

(batteries, broken chairs, metal)

animal competition

Three dogs
One cat
thirty-two horses
Five Vultures
Some Ravens (or Crows)
A groundhog
A kestrel
An American Screech Owl
A barn owl
Two deer
A skunk!

>>Animals we saw today in upstate New York<<>

Grand Canyon of the East

Photograph by James Price

In the car park two older women had been left in the back seat of their car by their daughter and son in law. The woman on the west side had trapped a towel in the rolled up window and they silently sat side by side in its half shade.

The waterfall at Letchworth Park had been used the week before as the backdrop to a romantic scene in the American soap opera Days of our Lives. The daughter, who now lived in Florida, had been so excited to see a background that she remembered from her childhood on the television that she had driven up and insisted on visiting. And that’s why they were there, in the car park, quietly waiting for them to come back.

night dear

Pet Pals

In the library we saw a leaflet, that had been hand cut to resemble a do not disturb sign that you might hang on a hotel door knob. It was made from blue photocopy paper and said “do you miss your pet?”

Pet pals meetings are held each week in an abandoned gym on campus. The back door was ajar and opened onto a small antechamber behind the main hall, full of thick blue mats standing like monuments, and a vertical maze of javelins and other sport sticks. The floor was peppered with broken glass and drops of blood.

We climbed over and through the door into the hall. There was little daylight and a low ceiling. An elliptic wooden running track with ramped, boarded sides contained the familiar coloured painted rules, circles, boundaries, centre points etc. of all possible games.

The room looked abandoned but there were some signs of recent use, the doors were open and there were notices on the walls assigning groups and demonstrating warm-up exercises. We followed scratching sounds from upstairs, through abandoned locker rooms, past a filthy mattress, offices full of medals with broken blinds, upstairs to a dark hallway and closed door.

Inside the room were a circle of chairs, the kind with a table integrated in the armrest. A group of young students sat and squatted unsmiling in the middle, each trying to tempt a Labrador puppy to come to them. When the dog moved, the students followed on their knees. One girl kept picking it up and walking to the far end of the room, shielding the dog from the other people who missed their pets. There was a palpable tension in the room, and everybody seemed to hate each other. It ended when one boy picked up the puppy, stood up in the circle and clasped it tightly to his chest. Each week there will be a different pet.

HALF PRICE SUNDAY

The on-site sale of the house and contents of a deceased couple.

It felt like visiting the home of a friend who is out and whose possessions you've always coveted. Like being one of the the last people left in the world, scavenging abandoned homes for useful goods, sentimentality left behind when the human race died out. The items were still in their rightful places, the brooms in the broom cupboard, the tools in the garage, the t.v. remote in a pocket on the comfy chair, but they had been placed there by an inept diorama maker. They were a stage set of a life, laid out with transparent casualness. Objects had been grouped according to their use, memories sorted into bags
“minstrel show” $15 “fire brigade” $10 “army“ $10

Many of the people browsing the home of Mr and Mrs Sweeney were their old friends and neighbours. The possessions for sale kept prompting memories; “He always wore this, poor Jim” said a man trying on a grey felt hat, $3. A couple commented on an empty wall that had once been full of pictures and was now full of sticky fixers. Most of the people there were seeing the house not as it was now but as it had been; full of the ghosts and memories of their friends. Everything was pretty cheap and everyone complained how hot it was upstairs.

bragging

Jasper Historical Society Museum

guide: This is my father's corn shredder. This tyre belonged to my husband. This is the typewriter I learnt to type on. These were our neighbours...





I'm in the bottom right photo. He's gone now. She's gone.
Five of us left out of eleven.



Does it feel strange to show people around a museum that's mostly full of your old things?
I don't tell them.
why not?
It would be like bragging.

the demolition derby

Photograph by Michelle Illuminato

The cars are like evolving sculptures created by driving into each other until they're finished. I shook the hand of the winner. It is a strange urge to touch something that has performed a great feat. Like a living relic. The hem of a cloak or the inadvertently polished “lucky” areas on a bronze statue.

an advert in the local paper

Andover Haunted House
the following items are needed for this years Haunted House
Light bulbs/batteries, kids school desks, chalkboards, mirrors, suits/old clothes, gowns/dance outfits, old instruments, big school bell, old uniforms, mannequin parts, old record player, CD players, carpet/foam, old lamps, old tools, crowd control velvet ropes.
Call Jerry J. 607-478-5113

Value of Birds

Today I found a beautiful typewritten list in the university archive entitled Value of Birds. An Albatross is $25. A Heron $4.25.

Alfred Historical Society

This morning I called Mr. Alfred Historical Society;

“yes?”
“Is this Alfred historical society?”
“Well, what remains of it..."

------->

I went to photograph an evangelical service at a church high up on a hill. A woman greeted me at the door with the muffled question “do you like hugs?”. I answered “um, yes…” She hugged me.

I ended up at the front of the room, standing on a chair, photographing the congregation. The camera was on a tripod, set as high up as my hands could reach. I looked as though I might fall forward on to the front row, being higher up than the preacher and the musicians. It must have actually looked crazy now that I think about it.

Driving around I am noticing many of those big signs with flashing arrows and space for people to write messages on. Two of the several I saw today were pointing at nothing, or perhaps at where something used to be. They are old, with peeling paint and the lights are turned off. That could be a very interesting project to follow one of those mobile signs guys and see what they are asked to point at.

simple tools

I have started a new collection called “simple tools” that consists of second hand sticks which have been slightly modified to become tools of sorts, whilst still essentially being sticks. I am only going to collect sticks that are offered for sale and that have previously been used for a specific purpose. So far I have a set of water divining sticks and a apple butter stirrer.

Many of the small communities here have their own historical societies – often a room packed full of objects from the town. These collections appear to have grown organically, and are distinguishable from yard sales only by the inclusion of handwritten labels or signs, detailing what the object was used for. Greenwood Historical Society has an example of an old straw and feather bed, two mannequins dressed in old clothes, a list of people who used to live in the town, two beautiful string dispensers and a cabinet of photographs with the title “Help” where if you know somebody you should write their name on the back of the photograph.