11x17 print, full color on glossy archival stock, shipped, folded once, via media mail. signed and numbered.
The First Frame, Wherein the Semiotic Ineptitude of a Young Voyeur Leads to Misreading the Bull
It begins with this bull, the Bordertown bull. Waking up after nineteen years in a small South Texas bordertown--Laredo, Texas, USA, to be exact. Throughout my childhood I thought that the mural featured on the Bordertown Drive-In was of a giant mutant bull, terrorizing the countryside and being attacked by U.S. Air Force jets as a giant cowboy heatedly pursued from behind.
I was wrong, of course.
That is, I had read it wrong. The giant bull was merely a personal idiosyncratic creation, a misreading, owing to a mistake in perspective. Without the tools to understand the concept of perspective in an illustration, I had taken the mural at face value: giant drawing of bull = giant monster, mutant bull. That the animal was merely foregrounded and thus larger than its surroundings was, at the time, a concept as abstract as quantum mechanics or multilateral arms-control negotiations.
The painting was misread.
The mural in question faced out on the main strip leading out of and into Laredo and adorned the back side of a projection wall for the local drive-in called the Bordertown Twin Drive-In Theater. Some fifteen years ago, the Bordertown was a booming two-screen haven of movies, alcohol, and sexual abandon for auto aficionados, raucous families, and young adults on both sides of the Rio Grande River. But in the year 1988, that monument was slowly falling apart. No longer a haven for movie-goers, it was home to a flea market open on the weekends, where one could find various used articles, recycled furniture and a huge assortment of deserted, dated consumer artifacts that could have passed as trash in any dumpster. In the half-decade before the current period when the North American Free Trade Agreement and individuals associated with its passage were heralding the arrival of the New World Order, the Bordertown Drive-in was an icon for Laredo itself--a depressed market selling trash in various disguises as merchandise. But then again even trash is not trash in and of itself; trash is not a generic designation (trash for one may be treasure to another). Given the depleted economic resources of the city, even trash might be repackaged in some way so as serve a purpose or garnish a profit. Even the Drive-In had been repackaged as a pulga, as a flea market
But let us not allow the caress of nostalgia to blind us from the present for I must report that the Bordertown Drive-In/pulga is no more.
The Godzilla-esque bull has been erased from the space of Laredo--my photograph must proxy for the structure as a kind of ersatz visual relic.
The structure was torn town and sold to the Wal-Mart corporation. On the site of the giant cow arose the specter of what is known as Sam’s Warehouse--a discount marketer of groceries and other assorted sundries. Gross sales of Laredo’s Sam’s Warehouse and Wal-Mart were so huge that just before his death in 1992, Sam Walton flew to Laredo to celebrate his profits. Walton was visibly weak and ailing as he greeted cheering workers and shoppers like some latter-day vision of Cortez.
I would have included a picture of the store if I didn’t miss that old bull so much.
