Home, home on the web…
I’ll never look at a piece of humble A4 photocopier paper in quite the same way again after seeing the range of works by amazing Danish artist Peter Callesen.
Just look at the detail and creativity that must go into his paper scultures:
Cowboy
53 x 40,5 x 7 cm.
Acid Free A4 115 gsm paper, glue, acrylic paint and oak frame
Some days you just hit pay dirt - that was the feeling I had when I came across this fantastic store tucked away in Hakanoa St in trendy Grey Lynn, central Auckland.
The owner Tom is a wild west aficionado with genuine American connections and a passion for all things cowboy themed.
He self-built the store/home in the traditional adobe style of New Mexico - how much more passion for the American south west can you get that that?
Out the front of Trigger Happy is parked Tom’s yank barge and an assortment of selected clothes displayed in a small covered wagon reminiscent of so many settlers’ transport of choice. There’s even room to tie up your horse.
Inside there are racks of old western shirts and jackets, a selection of classic guitars (Tom and his wife play country music in their act Tennessee Sister), native American blankets and cowboy boots galore. More stock arrives regularly from contacts in the US.
If you’re in the area I highly recommend a visit!
‘The Long Walk’ is etched into the memory of the Navajo Nation as a time of death and defeat when many died during the forced migration from their ancestral home of the Canyon De Chelly area of northern Arizona, 300 miles south to Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
Stanley Stewart, writing a travel piece in The Times about this most magnificent part of the American south west, gives a great summary of this period in American history - the 1860s - now looked back on with a sense of shame.
To the Indians of the American Southwest - the Navajo, the Apache, the Hopi and numerous others - the great ellipse of red-rock country between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River is the sacred land of their own beginnings. It was here that the first of their ancestors climbed through the sipapu, the hole in the earth, to emerge in this world.
At the heart of the region is an area known today as the Four Corners, for the four states that meet here - Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. It is one of the emptiest and most dramatic parts of the continent. To the west, it abuts the Grand Canyon.
To the north, it fades towards the surreal rock formations of Monument Valley, which have played a starring role in countless films, from John Ford’s Stagecoach to Back to the Future III. And occupying the largest part of it is the Navajo Nation, a swathe of country almost the size of Scotland.
Read the comments written by readers and you understand the mixed feelings today about the ‘genocide’ of the native American tribes during the period of westward expansion. The strongly held views are wildly divergent.
Cowboy Country sits at the heart of this region and I’d highly recommend a first hand visit to many of the sites mentioned. For now though take in this set of Flickr photos by Sublime Dharma of the Canyon De Chelly and Hopi Reservation:
If there’s one thing that always upsets me, it’s when the generic term cowboy is used to describe somebody who’s an obvious out and out villian.
You can suffer bad work from a ‘cowboy builder’ and be told to watch out for cowboy mechanics but convicted murderers being described as ‘an old cowboy’?
That was the way lawyer Thomas Phalen described Viva Leroy Nash - “the oldest death row inmate in the United States, who spent most of his life behind bars” - who has just died of natural causes at the age of 94.
Phalen tells the NZ Herald:
“He was born in 1915 and he was sent to prison in 1930,” Phalen said.
“Think about it - he had 15 years of life in southern Utah, at a time when Utah and Arizona was the wild, wild West - and he went to prison in 1930, and he remained in prison for the next 80 years, more or less.
Not the kind of guy I would have wanted to bump into down a dark alley!
Apologies all for the 2 month hiatus from the blog - I moved house again for the second time this year and have been slowly sorting out all the associated chaos that brings with it.
I’ve also been working hard to source a supplier for the Cowboy Country Owners Packs in NZ who can offer good quality veg tan leather to produce further portfolio packs for new owners. Despite the country’s reputation for lots of livestock it’s proven harder than expected!
So, as of tomorrow, I’ll be calling a pause to orders for 2009 and revamping the product offering ready for Feb 2010 (January is pretty much written off down here I’m told, much like August in France).
Many thanks to those of you who’ve ordered the pack this year - be sure to tell your friends or colleagues about the unique gift but please advise that ordering won’t be back up and running until the new year.
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Enough product promotion! The real topic of this post is news of a major new wild west themed computer game launching in 2010 - Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar Games, the company behind the often scandalous Grand Theft Auto series.
The London Times explains how programmers have to date always found horses and gunsmoke hard ‘to do’, well it seems from the trailer video below they have cracked that problem.
The game, featuring ‘John Marston’ - who looks a lot like a spaghetti western era Clint Eastwood - is due out on 27 April 2010 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. I can’t say I’m a big console gamer but the video promo looks superb and may entice me into shelling out the dollars required. But which platform to buy? Recommendations welcome.
Like it? Love it? The game’s got everything a wild west buff could want: red butte landscapes reminiscent of Monument Valley; railroad trains with cowcatchers charging across creaking wooden bridges; dusty one horse towns; even Mexican bandits and pueblo architecture straight out of The Magnificent Severn.
Going to pre-order my copy come January. In the meantime, a Merry Xmas to all!
Back in the days of the Great Depression, the US National Parks Service was persuaded by Charles E. Peterson, a young Park Service landscape architect, to create a new programme to generate work for jobless architects, draughtsmen and photographers.
And so the the Historic American Buildings Survey was born, its’ mission: “documenting a representative sampling of America’s architectural heritage“.
Now I love American history and love the access the web gives to search these historic databases. My first search turned up several treasures (I use the word loosely) in the city of Holbrook, Arizona, the city some 10 miles southwest of Cowboy Country.
Holbrook has a rich western history and an interesting mix of characters who were active during the second half of the nineteenth century when cattlemen and sheep ranchers roamed the vast lands around the soon-to-be Navajo County seat.
The HABS database has an entry for the Armijo House located at 301 Montano Street, Holbrook. Although it wasn’t built until 1915, the simple adobe style construction and freestanding water tower make it the most interesting building in the CF Perkins subdivision south of the Little Colorado River:
The house was originally built by the Armijo family “a pioneer group of Hispanic northern Arizona farmers and ranchers”. To learn more about the history and view another dozen black and white photos check out the report written by historian Robert G Graham on the HABS database.
I only wish I’d had the opportunity to know about this house and the other features of the city before my visit in January this year. If you are passing through and are able to send a photo or report of the location (16 years after the report was drafted) then I’d love to find out if the house is still standing.
