glass in the garden

Tags

Arizona, art, chihuly, desert botanical garden, memoir, papago park, park, sculpture

In 2009, my sister visited me in Arizona, and we went to the Dale Chihuly exhibit at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix. I used to have a lot more photos at higher resolution, but many of my photos from the early 2000s were victims of a transitional period where I made some mistakes with photo storage. So, here are the seven survivors from that amazing exhibit of glassworks in a desert environment that was in full bloom for spring. The glasswork was gorgeous during the day but also impressive when it was lit up after sunset.

sunshine and sculpture at smith-gilbert gardens

Tags

georgia, memoir, nature, park, smith gilbert gardens

Smith-Gilbert Gardens features a network of walking trails that wind their way through all kinds of plants and various sculptures — some abstract, some representational, and some a bit of both. It’s an easy walk, and if you have a couple of free hours, you can see just about everything. If the weather’s nice, you could sit on one of many benches and just enjoy the serenity of this lovely place in Cobb County.

Mom and I didn’t do a lot of sitting on the day we went, because after several weeks of glorious mid-seventies temperatures for my recent nature walks, we had to brave chilly winds at barely fifty degrees. Still, the day was sunny and pleasant, and I swear we were the only two people in the park who weren’t employees. Although the gardens were not yet in the full bloom of spring and summer, we enjoyed many splashes of color and greenery, the gentle sound of water splashing over rocks, and being serenaded by a cardinal.

And what better song for gardens and flowers than the live version of Gardenia by Kyuss?

river and ruins

Tags

forest, georgia, marietta paper mill, memoir, nature, park, sope creek paper mill ruins

The Sope Creek Paper Mill Ruins are the remains of an industrial complex that was large enough to be a military target in the American Civil War. The mill produced, among other things, paper for the Confederacy’s currency, and Union troops pretty well destroyed it. The walls that stand today are a historic feature in a maze of walking and biking trails of various difficulty that offer scenic views of the creek and plunge you into the forest despite never being far from civilization.

I say “maze” because although the trails have many markers and maps posted, it can be challenging to get a sense of scale and direction if you haven’t been there before, and many trails intersect at weird angles. There is an easy way to get from the Sope Creek Parking Lot to the ruins, but there is also an easy way to miss it and make the journey much longer than it needs to be.

Plus, although Google Maps shows exactly where the ruins are, my portable Garmin GPS unit for driving had no clue. But hey, I don’t mind a little wandering and getting lost on the way to something scenic, or musical, or fun. It’s part of the adventure, and I was driving to random places all across the States for years before we had global digital mapping conveniences. I used to get so damn lost in states I’d never been to before that I’d have to stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere and buy a paper map, and maybe ask some locals for help. Taking a wrong turn in the forest when I can still hear cars in the distance is nothing.

Anyway, I would rate this mini-hike as moderate, not easy, due to the fact that it requires some moderately steep uphill walking, and portions of the path are rocky or muddy (or both). Traipsing around the ruins and the surrounding creek rocks could be dangerous for the less sure-footed. I was here in the fall about eighteen years ago, and this time was the cusp of spring. I’d like to return someday when all the greenery is in full bloom.

Today’s tune from the psychedelic woodlands is Ruins by Wooden Shijps, performed live in the studios of Seattle’s KEXP.

For an hour-long, paper-themed musical adventure, crank this up:

PBN 118: Paper and Fire.
January 2023.
Listen or Download the MP3. 56 minutes. 128 Kbps.
View or Download the playlist.

wandering to the waterfall

Tags

allatoona falls, forest, georgia, memoir, nature, olde rope mill park, park, toonigh creek falls, waterfall

Getting to Toonigh Creek Falls involves taking trails in the opposite direction of the ones I took the previous time I visited Olde Rope Mill Park. But the specific trails to the waterfall aren’t marked at all, and it’s easy to take a wrong turn, get spooked by No Trespassing signs, or just walk right past the correct path entirely. Unlike some other nature walks I’ve taken recently, this was a fairly strenuous trek where the path was often covered with rocks, or roots, or mud, and it involved climbing over fallen trees and jumping over small streams with muddy banks. The trail also resembles the proverbial path my grandfather took to school during the Great Depression: It’s uphill both ways.

You need to walk under the bridge that supports highway 575, then through a mining area that is ugly and stinky. But just past the mine, you will be rewarded with a gorgeous forest path alongside the Little River. You might, like me, see some fish in the muddy water, a crane or heron, and a couple of deer. One of my wrong turns took me to a mud flat where I found mollusc shells, flowers, and deer tracks. Eventually, exhausted, I found the Falls, and though they are not the most spectacular falls in Georgia — an honor that belongs to Amicalola Falls — they were well worth the journey. I could have laid back on a rock and just listened to them for an hour, but I’d started out late, and both the temperature and the sun were dropping quickly. I’d like to visit again when I can spend more time with this lovely little waterfall.

Today’s musical waterfall appears in a gorgeous interpretation of Jimi Hendrix’s May This be Love by Emmylou Harris, with guitar layers by Daniel Lanois, and U2’s Larry Mullen Jr. on drums.

rainy day at the river

Tags

etowah river, forest, georgia, memoir, nature, park

The weather forecast for the afternoon said “100 percent chance of rain”, but I wasn’t about to sit at home feeling bad that I missed a chance to see some scenery. Etowah River Park turned out to be a lovely place to walk for a couple miles despite the moderate rain that made good on the forecasted promise about 1/3 of the way through my excursion. The park has a pretty awesome playground for kids and also a built in ping-pong table and chess table near a wide expanse of grass encircled by a paved path. Take the path to a wooden bridge to cross the Etowah River and enjoy the view, and keep an eye out for little unpaved side paths that get you down to the riverbank. The paved path ends eventually at another lot which, if I read the map correctly, is called Heritage Park. It’s a mellow, level path suitable for a leisurely afternoon jaunt, and though you are never far from civilization, it’s quite scenic with an abundance of greenery. It also features a place to launch a canoe, complete with life jackets you can borrow.

Today’s arboreal music is Forest by Psycada.

a forest on the verge of spring

Tags

blankets creek, forest, georgia, memoir, nature, park

It was a pleasant but overcast day at Blankets Creek Mountain-Bike Trails, and the forest is not yet in full bloom. Still, it was a nice place to take a 1.375-mile stroll along the Mosquito Flats trail. It’s a mellow, level, unpaved path alongside the creek and through the forest. Cyclists have the right-of-way, but respectful pedestrians are welcome — even if, like me, they brought a cheeseburger and a large basket of french fries to fuel the journey. Mosquito Flats starts at the parking lot and is a beginner-level trail for cyclists. At several points along the way, you can access much longer trails and presumably more challenging terrain.

For today’s woodsy soundtrack, enjoy the retro-psychedelic Secret Enchanted Broccoli Forest by the Babe Rainbow.

i ran into spider-man in the forest

Tags

forest, georgia, memoir, nature, olde rope mill park, Spider-man

By the time I met Spider-man, I’d walked about three miles over some rather intense mountain-biking trails at a lovely little park in Georgia called Olde Rope Mill Park. It’s named after a mill whose ruins you can still see and walk on in stone and concrete where a small town of about 500 workers once toiled in apparently inhuman conditions to harness the power of the Little River to create rope. Near the entrance to the Avalanche Loop trail, the park also includes a memorial to a competitive cyclist who died in a “freak accident”.

Despite its morbid history, this park is a gem. The forest trails are gorgeous, and the much more mellow, level, paved pathway along the river is quite scenic. Below is a gallery of a few other photos from my excursion.

No post about walking in the forest would be complete without my favorite forest song by the Screaming Trees.

This animal’s wild, and he roams where he wants.

postcards: the robot riddle

Tags

mail, postcards, robot

art generated by humanely raised free-range robots

One of the traditions here on Mars is sharing the weird and wonderful postcards that arrive in my mailbox, but it’s a tradition that hasn’t got nearly enough love in the past two years. Friends, family, and clients have sent me a joyous pile of fun, thoughtful postcards since I relocated to Tucson in early 2021. They are always a bright spot in my day, and they get displayed in the Martian HQ for months before being filed in my archives. Maybe before I blow out of this hellhole in Tucson forever in three weeks to start the next chapter of my life, we’ll enjoy a postcard retrospective.

Before we get to all that, I want to share one that arrived this week, because you might have some insight into the question it poses. This postcard is the very first to arrive completely unsigned since the hilarious call to begin the intergalactic invasion in 2013. Sending random unsigned postcards to make someone’s day a little more surreal is exactly the kind of frivolity this blog was founded on more than a decade ago.

I still don’t know for sure who sent the invasion postcard, but I am pretty sure I know who sent the following robot riddle for me to solve. I thought you might like to take a shot at solving this riddle, too. Post your answers in the comments, and maybe you will help the mysterious sender get some ideas for her robot novel.

What is the sound of an inert robot when he’s laughing?

I came up with one solution to this riddle based on a post at https://www.livescience.com/electricity-humming-noise, but you might have ideas of your own. And if you have never received a postcard from me personally, then that’s on you! Email me your address and get on my list for mailings that go out at irregular intervals once or twice a year.

Another year lost in the wasteland.

postcards

Tags

clown motel, postcards

‘Tis the season to send and receive holiday cards, but traditional themes of snow, Santa, and religious imagery are lost on me. Fortunately, I have pen pals who understand what a nut I am and how much I enjoy weird, wonderful, wacky images. They send stuff like this:

Although I lived in Nevada for a year in 2002, I never visited Tonopah and its famous Clown Motel, which has had a comic book and one or two movies made about it since it first opened in 1985. The sender of this postcard is an inveterate road tripper and included a quote attributed to Hal Hartley who, among other things, directed the film Henry Fool which I saw on the big screen at Ann Arbor’s incomparable Michigan Theater in the late 1990s: “There is no such thing as adventure. There is no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble and desire.”

Cynical, perhaps, but after several decades of pursuing romance and adventure, I can’t really disagree with Hal on this point. Speaking of holiday cards, I sent out a batch of 50 custom-made cards for the first time in several years. It’s been so long that I discovered today that one of my addresses was outdated by four years. So, if you didn’t get a card but would like to get on my list, send me an address update via email. Keep in touch!

The fronts of this year’s cards featured my drawing of Meteor Mags playing piano in space, with the interior message “Peace on Earth and throughout the Solar System”. The back was a reproduction of the cover to Mags’ latest book, The Singing Spell. And you know what that means: The cost of the cards is a deductible marketing expense for my publishing company! Nothing says Happy Holidays quite like reducing one’s tax liability.

And what festive holiday imagery did I choose for the stamps on the envelopes? That’s right. Tyrannosaurus Rex! To hell with reindeer. I need dinosaurs! Check out the awesome T-Rex series from USPS.

Deck the Halls with Prehistoric Carnivores!

Stay safe out there this holiday season, and don’t do anything dangerous like visit a hotel that’s haunted by evil circus freaks. Or if you do, at least send me a postcard, darling!

postcards

Tags

balladeer, continental drift, Jose Guadalupe Posada, postcards, tellus science museum

Two fun postcards arrived in September. The first was a print of “Balladeer” by Jose Guadalupe Posada. My pen pal claims to have carried it around for more than twenty years before mailing it! I wonder if the guitarist was still alive back then.

The second postcard comes from the Tellus Science Museum I visited last year. It’s a lenticular print, meaning the image changes depending on the angle, and it has not two but six different images representing stages of continental drift.

Mom did not know when she sent it to me that I had been working on a story that involves continental drift, and the postcard made me realize I got something wrong in my story, despite all the research that went into it. The original draft got the date wrong about when Australia completely split from what is now Antarctica, and the error was off by about 470 million years. I’ve since made the correction. Thank you, educational postcard!

Here is a brief time-lapse video showing a few billion years of continental movement.

pop-up card

Tags

butterfly, memoir, mothers day, pop up card

Mom and I have a long history of exchanging handmade cards. Store-bought cards can be wonderful, but there’s something special about knowing a person took the time to not just buy something but create something unique for you.

For this past Mother’s Day, I wanted to make a card that would be unlike any I’d sent her before: a pop-up card. It turns out the Internet has a treasure trove of tutorials and inspiring examples, so I picked one and ran with it.

Mine has a pretty simple front: a butterfly based on a design I pulled from an image search, with the black lines done in Sharpie marker and the color done with acrylic paint thinned with water. Mom likes blue and butterflies, so I couldn’t go wrong with a blue butterfly.

All the paper is Bristol paper: what comic books used to be drawn on before the digital age. I did all the butterflies and other colored pieces individually, then cut them out and glued them in place.

Here’s the interior:

Thanks to the sturdiness of Bristol paper, which is a bit like cardstock, the card can be displayed open like this. It took me the better part of a Sunday to put it all together, but this barely scratches the surface of what’s possible in a pop-up card. People have made everything from multi-layered hearts to dinosaur skeletons, so clearly the sky is the limit in the pop-up master class.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward, though. The body of the card is two pieces of paper. For the interior pop-up sections, you cut one of those pieces along lines perpendicular to the center fold. You fold those cut-out sections so they pop up at right angles to the fold of the main card. Glue the inside piece to the outside piece, without putting glue on the folded pop-up sections. Finally, cut out and glue anything you want to attach to those sections.

Bristol paper is sturdy and well-suited to being painted and displayed, but it can be challenging to make precise, smooth cuts in it with scissors. I originally intended to cut out the butterfly antennae. I settled for drawing them on with Sharpie after I glued the butterflies in place. If I were making another card from shapes with finer, more complex details, I would try a thinner paper stock for those pieces.

dead computer guy postcard

Tags

computer, dia de los muertos, postcards, skeleton

This “day of the dead” postcard came to me this year without any indication of the artist’s name, but it does have an address on the back for Milo Papers in Boulder, Colorado — which, as far as I can tell from the Internet, doesn’t even exist anymore. It doesn’t get much more dead than that!

scotty karate postcard

Tags

henriettahaus coffee roasters acoustic, music, postcards, scotty karate, smalls

 We love getting weird stuff in the mail. Who doesn’t? No, not creepy weird. More like “strange and mysterious and fun” weird. This mysterious postcard arrived in the martian mailbox signed only by “The DJ Who Shall Not Be Named”. That just brings a smile to our little late-night-blogging-obsessed faces. It features Scotty Karate, and you can witness him performing in this same outfit and colorful stage set-up in the video below.

Video notes: Scotty Karate plays Dig A Hole at Smalls. February 13, 2011. Part of the Henriettahaus Coffee Roasters Acoustic series.

Tiki Lives!

Tags

memoir, postcards, tiki, tiki glass

In the misty dawn of the twenty-first century, a young human purchased an incredible vessel. Carved from glass in the likeness of the great Tiki gods, this sacred vessel cost merely twenty-five cents. First, it served as a planter for small cuttings of succulent plants. Tiki served in this capacity on his second but not final cross-country journey.

Of his many travels and ill-advised drinking adventures, Tiki remains silent. He offers no more explanation than a frightful but strangely ecstatic smile. These days, Tiki’s brains are full of Sharpie markers and paint pens.

Please Select Your Offering of Praise to the Great Tiki:

postcards

Tags

postcards

More missives manifested in the Martian mailbox this month. We will let you guess which one came from Mom… and which one did not!

postcards 13

Tags

cedar waxwing, Jack Kirby, postcards, squirrel, wildlife art

We may have ‘maintained radio silence’ in the month of April, but that doesn’t mean our readers’ postcards and messages went unappreciated. So, let’s kick off May with a few highlights from the Martian Mailbox.

The fifth most influential man on Pinterest certainly has our number, as evidenced by this wonderful Jack Kirby postcard from the Jack Kirby Museum.

Up next, a postcard made out of wood. Yes, we know paper comes from wood, but this isn’t paper. It’s a slab of wood with a squirrel on it! Now that’s how to do wildlife art.

Last but not least, we present a card from Mom, who recently picked up photography as a hobby and is learning all about digital cameras. This bird is a Cedar Waxwing, for those of you who haven’t seen one before.

quarterly report from the martian underground

Tags

airplane, cats, ellie, memoir, quarterly report

Even after twelve quarters, we still receive inquiries into the nature of the cryptic phrase ‘mars will send no more.’ A page dedicated to our secret origin illuminates all.

But in another sense, Mars is our virtual garden. Or maybe a plant in our garden, grown from a digital seed. We tend it, trim it, prune it, feed it, groom it, give it love, and even worry that someday Mike Baron will show up and make us take down the whole thing, since he invented the phrase. It’s scary, sometimes: having a digital pet someone could just turn off at any time.

Blogging is like writing a book you can never touch. Paper burns, but what do pixels do? Where is the page when you turn off your machine? When we were kids, we read books about magic. When we became adults, we lived in an electric world made of it.

And you know what? We love it. Why do 7000 people drop by every month to look at 7 or 8 pages in the Martian Archives? We don’t know. But we do get a kick out of being referred to by such notable sources as The Atlantic, who referenced our scans of America’s most famous comic book: The safety instructions found on every airplane! Interestingly, they don’t reference the exact post. Instead, they use a URL for our tag archives for the word airplane: https://marswillsendnomore.wordpress.com/tag/airplane/

What if we posted something new tagged with airplane? It wouldn’t matter what the post was really about, as long as it had a tag for airplane. We could post propaganda for the Martian Underground Resistance, in hopes that Atlantic readers will someday join the revolution. Or, we could just leave them a greeting card with a cute cat and a cozy scarf on it.

LONG LIVE THE MARTIAN RESISTANCE! MOUNTAIN LIONS FOREVER!

Museum Heart by Alberto Rios

Tags

alberto rios, museum heart, poems, poetry, postcards, scottsdale museum of contemporary art

The poem Museum Heart by Alberto Rios appears on a beautiful installation in the entrance to the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. An award-winning author and a faculty member at Arizona State University, Rios became the state of Arizon’a first Poet Laureate in the summer of 2013.

secret origin of ellie the studio cat

Tags

cats, ellie, memoir

Ellie doesn’t care that today is sort of her birthday. And really, she wouldn’t care even if we got the date right. That’s just how cats are. We envy and emulate her ability to live in the moment free from cultural expectations and rituals. When you think like a cat, any day is just as special as any other. No one day in the solar cycle represents more of an opportunity than any other for love and affection, for bonding and relaxing, or for just zipping about the yard scratching trees.

Above is her too-cute-for-words picture from the Humane Society ad. It seems she had been there before. Someone adopted her but then brought her back. Poor little Ellie. She even had multiple names. Anyway, we met her, she rubbed her face on our hands, looked at us with her big blue eyes. Its been love ever since.

the dude of dudes

Tags

dude, High Museum of Art Atlanta

He probably has a real name, but we call him the Dude of Dudes. See, the big dude is made up of a bunch of little dudes. If you look closely, you will notice they resemble the wooden figures artists often use as models. You buy them for a few bucks at the art supply store and pose them. They became obsolete for us once Marvel licensed a Spider-man figure with even more points of articulation than these little guys. You can find big dude outside the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA.

dino cards: tuojiangosaurus

Tags

dinosaur, postcards, Tuojiangosaurus

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of Tuojiangosaurus!

dino cards: hadrosaurs

Tags

dinosaur, hadrosaur, postcards

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of the Hadrosaurs!

dino cards: parasaurolophus

Tags

dinosaur, parasaurolophus, postcards

Intrepid Internet adventurers may want to track down the set of cards that include these dinosaurs. We haven’t yet, and so they remain part of the mysterious collection of postcards we joyfully receive here at Martian HQ. As a bonus, the bright colors look amazing in our black light chamber. Witness today the awesomeness of Parasaurolophus!

eric’s skull

Tags

art, drawing, eric, Eric Sprayberry, postcards, skull

Feliz Dia De Los Muertos from the lord of darkness himself, our old high school buddy Eric. We sent him… something in a round of postal anarchy a couple years ago. He sent back some artwork of his own! Eric was always into punk and hardcore as long as we can remember, so it fills our Martian hearts with rock-and-roll to have this original skull. Eric said he used paint pens for this one.

andy’s big red tiger

Tags

alwun house, art, cats, painting, Tiger

I never met Andy Bach, but I dig his tiger. Acrylic on some sort of art paper, it measures 17.5 x 23 inches. Andy painted the tiger in fifth grade. Since I bought it in 2009 or 2010, he should be wrapping up junior high about now.

Most visitors to the Martian Headquarters assume I painted the tiger, but no. I bought it. The Alwun House Foundation hosts Salon des Enfants, an annual children’s art show in partnership with local schools. The galleries in the first story of the house display visual art. Children perform music and dance on the stage in the back yard, entertaining a huge crowd of parents and community. All the money from the art sales goes directly to the kids. Andy’s big red tiger cost me $20. I always wonder what he did with the cash!