Category Archives: Blue Mountain

http://www.bigfoottx.com/page8.html

Bigfoot Wallace Museum

This cabin, the exact replica of Texas legend “Bigfoot” Wallace’s home, opened in 1954 as the result of local inventor and philanthropist Bunyan Balckwell’s many months of organizing and planning. Later, rooms were added to house the numerous items of interest donated by people from near and far, all interested in preserving the colorful heritage of Bigfoot Wallace’s adopted state.

William Alexander Anderson Wallace was born April 3, 1817, in Virginia. He came to Texas to avenge the death of relatives who were killed in battles for Texas’ independence from Mexico. By the time he arrived, Texas was already a republic. He stayed in his beloved adopted state and fought Indians, joined the famed Texas Rangers, and carried the mail for the Pony Express from San Antonio to El Paso.

Wallace was imprisoned in Mexico and took part in the famous Mier Expedition, where beans were drawn from a bucket to determine which prisoners would live or die. He fortunately “drew deep” and got a white bean, saving his life. The name “Bigfoot” originally belonged to a large Indian who stole livestock and many things from the settlers. A good friend of Wallace’s, William Fox, jokingly gave Wallace the name of “Bigfoot”, saying that when the Indian wasn’t around, Wallace — being a man of large stature– could easily take his place. The same story also goes that Fox was killed in a raid by the “bigfooted” Indian several years later.

Bigfoot Wallace never married. He died in the town of Bigfoot, named for him, in 1899 and was buried at Longview Cemetery. Later his remains were moved to the State Cemetery at Austin.

Next door to the museum is a replica of the building where the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed at Washington-on-the-Brazos. Inside are antique wagons, buggies and clothes from the past.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happening

(I’ve highlight some stuff that might pertain to the recently completed Bigfoot Happening.)

A happening is a performance, event or situation meant to be considered art, usually as performance art. Happenings occur anywhere and are often multi-disciplinary, with a nonlinear narrative and the active participation of the audience. Key elements of happenings are planned but artists sometimes retain room for improvisation. This new media art aspect to happenings eliminates the boundary between the artwork and its viewer.

Allan Kaprow first coined the term “happening” in the spring of 1957 at an art picnic at George Segal’s farm to describe the art pieces that were going on.[1] The first appearance in print was in Kaprow’s famous “Legacy of Jackson Pollock” essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. “Happening” also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist.[2] The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac referred to Kaprow as “The Happenings man”, and an ad showing a woman floating in outer space declared, “I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere”.

Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique and completely different from one another. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader, “The term ‘Happening’ has been used to describe many performances and events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s, including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally scripted and invited only limited audience interaction.“[3] Another definition is, “a purposefully composed form of theatre in which diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are organized in a compartmented structure”.[4] However, Canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting, who himself had “constructed” several happenings, wrote in 1972: “Happenings abandoned the matrix of story and plot for the equally complex matrix of incident and event.“[5]

Kaprow was a student of John Cage, who had experimented with “musical happenings” at Black Mountain College as early as 1952.[6] Kaprow combined the theatrical and visual arts with discordant music. “His happenings incorporated the use of huge constructions or sculptures similar to those suggested by Artaud,” wrote Botting, who also compared them to the “impermanent art” of Dada. “A happening explores negative space in the same way Cage explored silence. It is a form of symbolism: actions concerned with ‘now’ or fantasies derived from life, or organized structures of events appealing to archetypal symbolic associations.”[7] A “Happening” of the same performance will have different outcomes because each performance depends on the action of the audience. In New York City especially, “Happenings” became quite popular even though many had neither seen nor experienced them.

Kaprow’s piece 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) is commonly cited as the first happening, although that distinction is sometimes given to a 1952 performance of Theater Piece No. 1 at Black Mountain College by John Cage, one of Kaprow’s teachers in the mid-1950s.[12] Cage stood reading from a ladder, Charles Olson read from another ladder, Robert Rauschenberg showed some of his paintings and played wax cylinders of Édith Piaf on an Edison horn recorder, David Tudor performed on a prepared piano and Merce Cunningham danced.[13] All these things took place at the same time, among the audience rather than on a stage.

Digital media examples of Happenings could be as simple as artists creating a webpage about their issues or going on to blogs, forums and other networks that they could send mass art and information through.

[continued from]

bb:

So we’re back with actor Billy “Wild” Thornberry talking about his latest and finest production, the Bigfoot Toy Happening, coming soon to a theatre near you.

Wild:

Let’s hope. So we have both the Blue and the Red Ring Society, Red being replaced by Blue. The dinosaurs were the *Red* society. Blue came later. I can at least say that but not much more.

bb:

Who introduced the change?

Wild:

I can’t say too much more about it. Blue came from the outside. There was a red satchel destroyed and replaced by [a blue satchel], similar to the way my character Lazy Sideburns Man was obliterated during the Erath toy happening over in Sharieland, as you call it.

bb:

I have a feeling Taum Sauk introduced the blue ring.

Wild:

Mmmmmm. (with mouth closed)

bb:

But anyway, in present Bigfoot we have the blue ring and also possibly the blue mushroom in the center of the spool table, where Empty Promises now lives. You’ve known Tom Jones, the actor who plays that role, for a long time.

Wild:

Childhood friends, yeah. We grew up near Jonesborough, named after an ancestor of his, actually. He was a glass half empty kid who grew up and emptied the whole darn thing.

bb:

Meaning he was a totally negative being.

Wild:

Not negative. Realistic. Down to Earth in 3d. Not prone at all to philosophizing.

bb:

Yet he is our greatest philosopher.

Wild:

Bigfoot wasn’t founded on iron for no reason.

bb:

Irony, yeah. I get it. I think.

Wild:

He can live off the blue mushroom all winter long. It will keep him going, warm his plastic bones. He can eat it, set it on fire, drink it, even sleep with it. But let’s not go there.

bb:

No. The movie, named “Bigfoot the Movie”, will continue where the toy happening left off.

Wild:

It will be a harsh winter in Bigfoot yeah. But a twist will come early.

bb:

Come on, give us a couple more hints (!)

Wild:

Nope. Okay, one. Nah, better not. The Producer will get mad.

bb:

So let’s go back to the happening. What do you see as the connection between Taum Sauk and the early character you played in a happening: Lazy Sideburns Man?

Wild:

These are question we aren’t suppose to answer.

bb:

Give it a whirl.

Wild:

I’ll have to have my brians retuned.

—–

Wild:

Toy avatars don’t think like that. They see themselves, at best, as actors playing different roles. But they can’t philosophize about it. Tom Jones can because he is considered the Original Man of Bigfoot, a representation of something greater than me or even you, baker b. He remembers the wars between toys and virtual avatars that ended in The Wilderness. He recalls, through the ages, the first appearance of toys in Herman Park. “Why can’t toys appear anywhere except for Herman and sometimes Frank Park?” he asked. And so he set about to change that. He came early to Bigfoot. He worked with God and dinosaurs to change and mold the Erath for a specific reason. He knew the limits that Frank and Herman Park would tolerate about the toy happenings. There was a limit there. Bigfoot limit. And so establishing that as an Omega Point, he created a reflective Alpha Point. This is the Bigfoot we know now as a toy happening. The Omega was channeled back into the Alpha. Bigfoot sits about as near to civilization and Blue Mountain as possible. Rust Spot — isn’t that the name for it? — is furthest away. That’s where the *real* Bigfeet live, isn’t it baker b.? We know that much. We can say that much.

bb:

Wow, that’s a lot to say! Opens up a lot of possibilities. Let me save that and read it back.

[to be continued]

bb:

We’re here this morning with Billy J. Thornberry, star of the Bigfoot toy happening. Billy, glad you could join us here on the Baker Bloch Blog.

Billy:

Thank you as well for having me. But, please, call me Wild. All my friends do.

bb:

Thanks, um, *Wild*. So tell me how you got roles in several toy happenings so far. I know there’s the one over in Sharieland where you made your first appearance. And then there’s the kind of unfinished one involving Whitehead Crossing. That’s a Gene Fade production, isn’t it?

Wild:

It was such a brief role I can’t remember who directed it. Wasn’t that Albino Turtle [filming that day]?

bb:

Well, I’ll just have to check. So let’s go back to Sharieland…

Wild:

Well, you know I’m a clone of course, in that I am an actor playing [cloned] roles. Many of my wild, wild friends, hehe, worried that I was actually killed by Hater the Cow during the production. But of course that was a stunt double… er, stunt dummy I should say there.

bb:

I think people were shocked that the cow picked you and you alone for the crushing. None of the other toy avatars in the happening seemed to even be touched or affected at all. Yet you were in pieces (!).

Wild:

My wife was too when she saw the film, briefly forgetting that I was sitting there by her side and holding her hand through it all. “Oh, there you are,” she said after the shock and looking around her again. We both had a good laugh out of that one.

bb:

Toys are easily copied, so the replica seemed very close to the original.

Wild:

Indeed. And toy avatars are sometimes easily fooled because our brians develop in different ways.

bb:

Brians?

Wild:

Yes. (pause) Oh, I meant brains, haha. See??

—–

[5 minute pause to adjust Wild’s brains]

—–

bb:

So we’re back after a seating adjustment, we’ll say.

Wild:

Say we. Umlaut swastika German memory boat wampum negative carrcass.

—–

[10 minute break to reboot Wild’s brains back to default settings]

—–

bb:

Okay, let’s give it another try. Brian, I mean, Wild… ready?

Wild:

Ready, yep. So my wife also played Nina Sauk in the new happening, which I’m very proud of and what I consider my finest role.

bb:

Where you played Taum Sauk of course. The accompanying action-adventure movie should be out by December, correct?

Wild:

Maybe. Hopefully. But I feel that is the role I was born to play. Taum Sauk, the iron smelting genius who founded Bigfoot and what was originally called Irons.

bb:

But we have [the name] Middle Game in the middle, between Irons and the finalized Bigfoot, after the influential survey of the swamp where it was found to be exactly 100 feet long. A big number of feet. Big feet Swamp.

Wild:

Other toy avatars moved in after Mina and I settled into our rustic cabin, later replaced by a nice brick house, the first in the village. But it turns out [the producer] decided to change all their names to Johnson. So we have Howard Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Andrew Johnson, and Lyndon Johnson, both Elder and Younger. Andrew and Lyndon were secret twins, and that will come out more in the movie.

bb:

Can’t wait. What else can you tell us about the early days of Bigfoot? Was Taum Sauk there even before the planting of the trees?

Wild:

No, of course not. That was the days of God and dinosaurs alone, who original made the roads; planted the plants. We came after all that was done. There were no humans before us.

bb:

Dinosaurs were in the Bigfoot toy happening. I suppose that’s a direct connection to its past, then.

Wild:

Sure. And they all lived off blue mushrooms and blue stuff in general. The Society of the Blue Ring. Those were the dinosaurs.

bb:

Secret dinosaur society?

Wild:

Surely.

[to be continued]