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How low can you go
You'll see all kinds of funny things if you walk around this place. It's probably like that where you live too, if you're not in suburbia. Older small towns are best, I think. What follows doesn't include pictures of everything I noticed last week, but the descriptions are more important anyway. The first sighting did find me with my camera, however, so have a look.

At first I didn't believe my eyes, or maybe it was just that I couldn't understand what they were trying to tell me. The orange truck in front of me looked for all the world like a big kiddie toy. It made me feel like a kid. I wanted to go running up to the owner (wherever he was), tug at his pants leg to get his attention, and say, "Hey Mister, your truck's broke!" Nothing could be that low and actually work, could it?

The brain-lock brought about by the pavement-scraping posture of the truck was quite extraordinary: it really did take me two or three takes to grasp that I was looking at an actual vehicle.

The builder of this superb example of lowrider automotive art had no doubt intentionally parked it in this state to show how proud he was. Man, lowriders are nothing if not form over function. This thing is all statement. Note how the plainly-visible hydraulics render the pickup bed virtually unusable. I love this stuff! (Jeff, if you're reading this, you really ought to do some special mods on that junker Lincoln Town Car you just bought ...)

Dinero sucio con iMac
Afterwards I had a less enjoyable task, taking the last rent check over to the new owner's art gallery. It turned out the joint was closed, but I dropped the envelope through the mail slot in the front door. There was a window on the south side of the building that looked into an office, so I walked over to make double-sure no one was inside. If anyone had been there, I'd have mentioned the check, but all I could see was the back of an iMac screen. Ahhh. Now that's nice.

Living the way I do, I don't usually lay eyes on too many new Mac products in the flesh, so this was a treat as well as a surprise. Doggone it if the damned thing didn't look positively elegant sitting there! Form and function unified, how could an art gallery use any other kind of computer? Yes, I know, they do. But I hate it every time I see a PC in these spaces. I should do a survey, you know? Taos has fewer than 6,000 people but over 90 art galleries. I could do the whole thing on foot. (Maybe next week ... )

Rock different
On Friday night I went to a free Robert Mirabal concert on the plaza. This is someone you should know, incidentally, because he deserves a much wider audience and will probably have one someday. His latest CD is called "Indians, Indians" and the lyrics are killer. The title song is about a girl from Iowa who comes to Taos "to meet an Indian, any Indian, who's taller than her." It's actually a love song, kinda raunchy for grownups who know what's really being talked about, recited like performance poetry over a grinding rock & roll beat. The man is really funny, too. In my book Native Americans and rock & roll is a fantastic mix. I love this stuff too, form, function, statement, all in one. Wow.

I took 60 or 70 photos and had a great time. One thing I've discovered is that by holding a big camera in front of my nose and wearing my "Think Different" cap on backwards so the Apple logo shows, I can get away with crawling right up front. Or right in back, for that matter. I can even stand briefly in front of people and they don't mind too much, so long as I don't stay in one place very long. These gatherings are dangerous, though (oh, the voodoo goddesses). If I only had the nerve to take more close-ups, I could show you a thing or two. Actually, I did this time, just not of the ladies. See?

Oh give me a home
Rounding out the week was a bit of serendipitous magic, or at least I hope so. I need a new place to live, see, and I've met a new helper. He's an Anglo from Dallas who's only been here three years but blends in fine, even got himself elected mayordomo of the Acequia Madre del Rio Grande. What that means is that he's in charge of scheduling irrigation for several hundred families in a large chunk of the old part of Taos. He's in with the locals, in other words, and just might have found me an old adobe farmhouse to rent.

I don't have a picture of this place, but it's nice on the outside: full-running irrigation ditch along one side, huge cottonwood trees, surrounded by fields and a corral or two. The only neighbors are a couple of horses, yet the place is geographically more or less in the middle of town. I haven't seen the inside yet, which will probably be sobering (these places usually are), but the green grass, water, and tall trees are a sight to behold. If Mr. Martinez and his sisters agree to the rent I'm willing to pay, this could be my new digs, with plenty of room for a garden. Here's what my contact just emailed me:

"Don't worry - I'll set it up, (and call you), but I'm tellin u you ain't gonna like the inside -- but as i said you could fix it up, where you would.

Also, I think it's a path -- so if not this one, then the next one?"

Oh, I'm in the Taos reality distortion field now, all right. (GOOD!) And I have an answer for the question of what any of the above, much less this last part, is doing in a column on a Mac Web site: INTEGRATION, by damn. Hardware and software. Form, function, statement. For our purposes, the "software" is the spirit of the place.

Free download, y'all ...

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr invites your emails.

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(Beautiful land for sale here: "What It Is About El Rito,")

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