James and the Dusty Machines

Once upon a time, and still to this day a man named Adam lived in a dust bin of an universe. Adam worked as a mechanic in The Dust Creating Machine.  Each machine part was tainted with dust, which added more and more dust, and made piles of dust each and every day (365 24/7). 

No matter how hard Adam tried to get rid of the dust, the dust was always there. 

The King of the kingdom, had kept an eye on the machinery of his subjects and was not pleased with the continual accumulation of dusty particles.   King El, knew that the only solution was for him to step into man's story.  The king knew that Man was bound to the factory and too endebted to the factory cycle.   The only thing that could be done was to send his son into the factory.  Joshua turned over the factory and busted the machinery into tiny pieces.   He redirected man's energy to the king himself. 


The machinery would no longer be able to produce the sinful dust that had so plagued man.  
 
Man was/is stubborn and it took time for man to see the awesome power of Monkey wrenching Joshua.
 Some men even went and started building more machines.
 
So Joshua proclaimed, if you join that crew you can not be part of my kingdom.   

Joshua knew the answer was to return man back to an agrarian society absent of dusty machines. 

{The Beginning}

Original Story by Gregorio Roth

 

Thomas Hart Benton An American Original

(Kansas City)  I recall enjoying the brisk September air, and that flap jacks were sitting heavy in my stomach.  I had just eaten at a local greasy spoon.  I was enamored with all of the big pretty white suburban houses.   Then, I chanced upon the former residence of Thomas Hart Benton.   I had no idea who he was.  I decided to go and visit and find out!   I am glad I did.  His studio was left just as if he had gone out for an errand, downtown.  Coffee cans held paintbrushes.  His studio was a  place where work had been done, not necessarily orderly and clean. A place reserved for creative expression.  Thomas Hart Benton embodied the Western Landscape just like the buffalo did long ago.

 Thomas Hart Benton
on the model for Susana: 
"that delightful hillbilly girl (a true Ozark product gone wrong) who became the model for "Susannah" - My boy- what a skin what a blood pulsing skin - just enough yellow in the belly to make the tits look pink - we don't find models like that anymore."
on his art 
"We were different in our temperaments and many of our ideas, be we were alike in that we were all in revolt against the unhappy effects which the Armory Show of 1913 had had on American painting.  We objected to the new Parisian aesthetics which was more and more turning art away from the living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty patterns."

Simpson Marc, Sally Mills and Jennifer Saville The American Canvas Paintings from the Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1989), 218.