Wendover Air Field

Bristen Lee Phillips, Wendover, Utah.

Warrior

This is the best time of the day—the dawn
The final cleansing breath unsullied yet
By acrid fume or death’s cacophony
The rank refuse of unchained ambition
And pray, deny me not but know me now,
Your faithful retainer stands resolute
To serve his liege lord without recompense
Perchance to fall and perish namelessly
No flag-draped bier or muffled drum to set
The cadence for a final dress parade
But it was not always thus—remember?
Once you worshipped me and named me a god
In many tongues and made offering lest
I exact too terrible a tribute

Take heed for I am weary, ancient
And decrepit now and my time grows short
There are no honorable frays to join
Only mean death dealt out in dibs and dabs
Or horror unleashed from across oceans
Assail me not with noble policy
For I care not at all for platitude
And surrender such tedious detail
To greater minds than mine and nimbler tongues
Singular in their purpose and resolve
And presuming to speak for everyman

Oh, for another time, a distant field
And there a mortal warrior’s lonely grave
But duty charges me remain until
The end the last battle of the last war
Until that ‘morrow render unto me
That which is mine my stipend well deserved
The fairest flower of your progeny
Your sons, your daughters your hopes and your dreams
The cruel consequence of your conceit

~ Steve Earle

Wendover Air Field

Bristen Lee Phillips, Wendover, Utah.

Goblin Valley, Utah.

Goblin Valley, Utah.

A fire pit marks the
 entrance to a cathedral
 carved out of packed
 sand + stone + silt by
 geo goblins pouring cook
 water and bellowing
 unknown gases through
 the hoodoos praying at
 altarpieces underneath
 short circuit lightning
 and raging thunderclaps
 in cobalt skies leaving
 rain-washed wind-swept
 rubble offerings and
 small trinkets of lost
 worlds set beneath lit
 candelabrums of plant
 life that may have grown
 underground.
Goblin Valley, Goblin Valley, Utah, Utah.

Goblin Valley, Goblin Valley, Utah, Utah.

“Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it…was like photographing a photograph.”

-Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.”

Texaco Laundromonument, West Wendover, Nevada

Multimedia

14 x 30 x 40’ (approx.)

9/9/13, 5:09 pm

“TOP LOA” is emblazoned vertically in dimensional wood crimson letters on one of two yellow-beige rectangular pillars in a room filled with machinery, human figures, liquids, and fabric. This same type spells out other enigmatic messages spread throughout this interior space—“THANK YO, ”TOP LO D,” and “2 35 L B B.” West Wendover’s Texaco Laundromonument, like these messages, is at once cryptic and familiar, a zone of repetition and routine that nevertheless embodies a character all its own.

The Laundromonument’s cubic interior space is divided into three distinct sections, defined and reinforced by the two aforementioned pillars and enclosing walls, two freestanding rows of high-capacity washers and dryers, and three evenly spaced groupings of rectangular fluorescent light fixtures, whose bulbs’ inconsistent hues reveal their various vintages. The floor, like the room itself, is spatially regimented by a grid of beige tiles. These are punctuated at irregular intervals by drains, which like the doors of the washers, function as safeguards against flooding, tools for cleaning, membranes between the terrestrial and the aquatic worlds of the Laundromonument. Walls, pillars, ceiling, and floor, all hover in the same imitation vanilla tone, vibrating harshly against the red of the tables and the wooden lettering dotting the wall surfaces.

Rows and columns of mighty “SpeedQueen Drying Tumblers” and “Commercial washers” line two sidewalls and stand back to back in two rows in the center of the room. Nearly all of the machines are engaged, engorged with quarters and clothing, spinning at mechanically equal speeds. Despite their kinetic likeness, their contents differ, igniting a tension between seriality and divergence. Their tone, a grinding low bass note, causes the floor to tremble gently underfoot.

The front and back walls are each punctured by large, glass windows on either side of swinging glass doors, which look out in the front on the gas station beyond, and in the back toward the highway. Above the front door, the Laundromonument’s scarlet letters spell “THANK YO,” and over the back, they read “WELCOME,” facing off in an eternal dialogue of polite exchange. “WELCOME” is bestowed, then, upon those who exit, not to the Laundromat itself, but to the rest of their fresh-smelling lives.

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