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Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Footnotes to the Waste Land







Several listeners to this blog requested footnotes to the previous post. Well, I don't want to ruin anybody's scavenger hunt, but I will provide a few clues. My model will be T.S. Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land.

First of all, and many of you got this correct, the High Priestess in Fergus Hall's James Bond Tarot Deck is Jane Seymour. Secondly the top-hatted "Western Exterminator" joins in at a re-enactment of the hammering of the Golden Spike. Next is Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, which is near the Golden Spike National Monument. Smithson chose the site because of its salt-tolerant bacteria thriving because of "the building of a causeway by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1959" (Wikipedia). The bacteria turns brackish water red. A spiral jetty makes brackish water (sounds like an old Dutch aphorism). Reminds me of the LA County Museum Art and Technology show held in year zero (1970). When I attended this show there on a marble plinth in front of the museum was an empty TV Dinner with each compartment filled with salt and water. Each one turned a different color based on the type of bacteria. A similar effect is seen from a plane flying into San Francisco International airport and viewing the colors of the saltworks below. Finally we have the mountain lion, resident of the Sierras.

p.s. the Izzyland remote-control boats with their striped awnings represent XIV (Temperance), I (the Magician), and IV (the Emperor).

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Friday, April 2, 2010