ephemerally curated: december 2024
musings from newsletter extraordinaire, Kenny Fallon, Jr.
Hi! I’m Kenny, a designer and writer in Green River. Maybe it's the approaching end of the year, or maybe it's the process of collecting myself after a long trip through the hills and hollers of East Tennessee and North Georgia, but I've recently been caught up with how things age and what that means for "the future". Broadly speaking, the same forces (which are also all getting more extreme due to the ecological crises) regularly act on stuff in southern Appalachia as in the Colorado Plateau. Heavy rains, blistering winds, and an intense sun hit both places. It's the differences in quality and frequency that make the contrast. A ghost town in the desert (like how Cisco is described here) is almost baked into a preserved state of splintered and shrunken wood, peeled-paint metal, and footprints set in the soil's crust while a ghost town in the Blue Ridge mountains melts away as the forest digests its swollen wood, rusted metal, and any biodegradable trace of life (not too unlike what William Christenberry took pictures of further south).
The similarities in the aging of things probably have more to do with the shared social forces acting on these environments. While not always in sync, the seizing of once-common land, expansion of resort economies, and development of heavy industry (including nuclear research and refinement in both places, oddly enough) happens in both rural regions. How stuff ages – like what kinds of things are left to deteriorate, what kinds of things are preserved at sometimes significant cost, and what things might have been intended as temporary –can tell you this too. Looking at aging also gives you a glimpse into the future,highlighting the ephemeral forces shaping it.
Rural places might be the best ones to explore this, and the idea that "as ever, renewal comes from the margins, not from the centre" (as mentioned in this piece about the failing transition to renewable energy.) There are a couple of interesting articles about how art might also benefit from the outer margins:
"Manhattan Syndrome" by Sean Tatol in the Manhattan Art Review. Sean talks about the hollowness of art in the center of New York, and has a strong view of what's lacking, whether you like it or not.
"On Art After Risk" by Travis Diehl in Spike Magazine. Travis surveys art being made today in similar ways that Sean does, and also explores a bit of how people are making a living and doing cool stuff out of the spotlight anyway.
Some other recommendations:
Music: I've been alternating between the intense I Lay Down My Life For You by JPEGMafia and the dreamy Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay, and suggest both, depending on your mood.
Book: I recently enjoyed rereading Phil A. Neel's Hinterland, about the political and cultural futures of rural areas and the urban fringe!
Artist: Dianna Settles is someone making art exploring “moments of joyful stillness amidst the cascading series of crises called modern life”. Here’s her website and she was profiled by Oxford American here.
More more more: I gotta boost the media projects I work on: The Green River Observer newspaper, The Last Straw magazine, and Crust Castle on KZMU (every other Tuesday from 2-4pm)!
I'll leave you with some pictures of a bench I made in 2018 and took pictures of in 2019, 2020, and 2021. I made it out of mostly-uniform scraps from a construction site with the intention of using this "waste" material as densely as possible to avoid it getting thrown into the burn pile. I haven't been back since then, but I'd like to think it was allowed to age gently.
some notes from the editors
Hi all, it’s the ephemeral crew here. Just popping in with some announcements, some resources, and some ways to get involved:
more ephemeral!
We’re still open for pitches for Issue 2: Vessel! Click here to read the submission guidelines, and send us your ideas by January 13!
Issue 1 is still available for online order, and is on the shelves of more bookstores than ever! Find us at Back of Beyond Books and Más Cafe (not a bookstore, but you get it) in Moab, Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, and Out West Books in Grand Junction.
Save the date! We’ll be having our first open collective meeting on January 14, 6:30pm at the Grand County Public Library. Mark your calendar, and join us to chat about your creative community dreams and visions for this collective. More details to come. (Can’t make it? Fill out our survey!)
creative opportunities and resources
Southwest Contemporary compiled this list of residencies across the Southwest with upcoming deadlines.
This Watershed Moment, a Utah Humanities project, is accepting submissions (in various media) that imagine the future of your watershed (within Utah) until December 31st!
Winter classes at the MARC are in full swing! Check out this one on professional practices for artists.
The Sunflower Troupe out of Cortez, CO has put out a call for scripts for their third annual Sunflower Shorts Festival! Seeking scripts for short plays set in a hotel room, deadline January 31.
That’s all! Thanks for being here!
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