Well I left the beef fat and downstream petro behind, and took a plane to Midland TX. The earth looks scraped clean – and it kind of is, at least in patches (scraped and then bored down down through strata of hard and soft, old and older. Lots of oil pump jacks – the term I like best for them is Thirsty Bird… but more on that soon.
Then I hopped in a rental that looks like a cop car (black 4 door, maybe the FBI will forgive me now) and drove to Marfa. Nice clouds, look scribbled and placed.
HOUSTON (AP) — The Coast Guard says a nearly one-mile stretch of the Houston Ship Channel will be closed for at least four days as workers use pitchforks and fishnets to corral, pierce and remove 15,000 gallons of beef fat.
Coast Guard spokesman Richard Brahm says shipping has not been impacted (but our scheduled boat tour was: they canceled ship channel port tours because of BEEF FAT). The refinery-lined (and beef fat biodiesel storage-lined) waterway is one of the busiest marine thoroughfares in the country.
On Tuesday, about 250,000 gallons of beef fat leaked from a storage tank, and some reached the waterway through a storm drain. The fat solidified when it hit the colder water.
Initially, the Coast Guard thought the channel would reopen early Thursday. But Brahm says the cleanup is taking longer than expected. By late Wednesday only 25 percent of the mess had been removed.
– Representatives of the company say the rupture was the result of an employee error – It’s better than an oil spill, is it not? – This storage tank of tallow was not intended to be edible’ it’s the fat used for cosmetics and soap. – They chunks in the channel are being referred to as “patties.”)
I am in TX — in Houston for the week. It is balmy.
Jan 04 I flew from NY in an extra legroom three-seat row, next to two enormous men (one wide, one tall). Aisle man pushed into middle man, leaving me a minuscule (standard) patch of space next to the window. The aisle guy looked like a student; the middle guy was an oil exec for Schlumberger (I know bc I read all his email). All three of us were reading about geology: The student was reading Bill Bryson’s “A Short History Of Nearly Everything” the oil exec, power point docs about noise reduction in fluids dropped down wells, and I, John McPhee’s Basin and Range (the poetics of geology).
Jan 05 Texas City. This morning I got stopped by private security for photographing the refineries from the road. (Are you following me? I ask. Yes! with a smile; I’d stay put, Ma’am, we have your plates. The police and FBI are coming.) 10 minutes later, the policeman took my drivers license, looked at my photos – the first dozen of which were pretty abstract – and then called his FBI contact from his iPhone. You have a smart phone? I ask. It’s my personal phone. He’s sweet, actually. I’m thinking, Why’s he calling FBI from his personal cell phone? The policeman believed me, I’m nothing more than an artist and so the FBI doesn’t have to come make me delete everything… And he really was a very nice policeman. He suggested that instead of continuing my photography of the refineries, I should go look at the dolphins down at the end of the dike: Our pod is back. I would like to do some testing of their pod’s bioaccumulation (not to mention the people who live in the little sleepy town of Texas City and eat their catch from the 5 Mile Dike.
–––––Texas City, from the 5 Mile Dike.
***
Jan 05 Galveston, The Ocean Star Offshore Rig and Museum. Everything you always wanted to know about offshore drilling but were afraidto find out. Fantastic. A working rig, fully labeled; costumes to try on (“so you want a job in offshore?”; personality tests; brass plaques; miniatures; a dizzying derrick; 3D displays of seismic geological detection; an extensive “life on the offshore rig” display; and a corner of the 2nd floor devoted to environmental consciousness and care.
–––The Ocean Star Offshore Rig and Museum.
***
Jan 05 Peak experience of the day: driving back from Galveston along the service road of I-45. Just before the causeway back to the mainland, one passes a series of wetlands, called the John M O’Quinn Estuarial Corridor. pull over, as I see birds paddling about. Texas is the #1 birding state apparently. And they are everywhere, squeaking, cawing, peeping, singing, wading, flapping, drying out. But here… so poetic: just beyond the meandering estuary is a long line of freight cars, all oil tanks, and beyond that, the refineries of Texas City. And up in the sky is something pink, the color of sunset (really), I am thinking flamingo, it’s so pink. It’s a roseate spoonbill, it’s exquisite, alone, and flapping its pinkness across the late afternoon.
––The John M. O’Quinn Estuarial Corridor, Roseate Spoonbill
A petrochemical system integrates the country through a continental network of facilities and pipelines. This network, assembled over the last hundred years, moves crude, gas, and chemical feedstock, from coast to coast, production areas to processing plants, tank farms to tanker ports, touching every state. It is a circulatory system of the American Land, moving the lifeblood of the economy, in this Petrochemical Age. Though the complexity, scale, and forms of the industry resemble those of science fiction fantasy, they are real and present. If the oil industry has a heart, then it is Texas. And Houston is its aorta.
— The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau reconstructed at the Menil
Also at the Menil was the exhibition “Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision,” which besides many great gems of the movement, presented a room of objects the surrealists had or would have had to inspire them. These included: “coconut seed resembling buttocks;” “Mickey Mouse Kachina;” and “Pestle in the Form of a Phallus.” 133 objects in total, organized by anthropologist Edmund Carpenter.
Got to hang out with Diane Barber, curatrix extraordinaire, her partner Karen and her 2 dog-buds Bosco and Domino.
Kurt Schwitters. The Merzbau, transformation of six (or possibly more) rooms of the family house in Hannover, Waldhausenstrasse 5. This took place very gradually; work started in about 1923, the first room was finished in 1933, and Schwitters subsequently extended the Merzbau to other areas of the house until he fled to Norway in early 1937
