el paso daily photo blog by chacal la chaise

Texas plated cars with expired state inspection stickers receive a ticket, while the owners receive a court date. If for some reason there is need to reschedule, due to unforeseen events, a form (from an attorney) will abate the court appearance. Either fax or take the form to the Municipal Courts building on Overland Street, and pay the clerk 10¢ for a copy (she’ll give you a receipt for the money.) Parking availability in front of the building is nil due to all the reserved spaces for police vehicles and consulate cars (the Mexican Consulate is around the corner on the not so ironically named San Antonio Street.) Therefore, if a member of the public has business to conduct within the courts building, they must park their car at the US Parking lot across the street.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault explains how certain spaces work together to form areas which discipline, punish, and control public behaviors. These change and shift over time and by location. While a community designs their towns in certain ways over time, such collections of formations will create such barriers and constraints, which the public never sees or feels. The layers of buildings, torn down, others built in the same place, lanes widened, streets change to one-way, all result in outcomes never originally planned. In a painless but effective formation, such changes will punish and discipline. Whether these are designs and buildings situated to perform those particular outcomes, as with prisons and schools, there are also more subversive and invisible spaces that discipline those of us who willingly walk into a space and follow the implied or written instructions meted to us. I found one such space this week and was shocked when Foucault’s theory met with the place where I stood—in a parking lot across from the Municipal Courts building on Overland Street.

Most of the US Parking facilities are simple blacktop lots with diagonal lines and numbers to denote a space, along with a simple metal box at one entrance that accepts your coins and bills. In the case of this location, US Parking charges $4 to rent such spaces (0-12 hours). On a slow day, as this was, this means I paid for about 15 minutes of space rental time. What makes parking there so byzantine and punishing is not merely the amount you must pay, but how you pay. To pay for a space, put money into the corresponding slot cut into that red metal box attached to a signage pole. On the day I went, a pink piece of paper taped to the sign above the box politely asked people to pay in “cash, no checks please.” It is not so much the price of the parking lot space because this is America and the need and lack of choice drive space rental.

Yes, it is four dollars because hey, they want to see if you will pay with a $5 bill because you are in a rush or do not have change. It is also because the box with its slots work together with this location in a manner where you will pay; that is punish and discipline. The box disciplines by making you cram the money into that box, which you would not have had to do if you had had your car inspected on time. The slot punishes because you must stand and roll your bills so tight that you think about your grandfather rolling his own cigarettes with Bugler Tobacco. It punishes by making you remember that you miss him even though he died in 1975. Before you finish, you must make sure the money drops inside, so you cram the money into the box with a metal shive attached to the box with a chain. Overall, geography can and will discipline and punish, through this place, those spaces, and the box—across from the courts, as no parking is available on the street. Your money, the metal shive, the street, the courts, and the red box—that is discipline and punish.

Labels: discipline and punish, el paso, foucault, municipal courts, parking

New images based on Kaleidic Lite - #1

New images based on Kaleidic Lite - #4

The Judge at Prada Marfa the weekend after it was vandalized following its public installation ceremonies.

Stencils. MJ and his sister Ellen in the Maxwell Street house, El Paso, Texas.

One of the things I love (and have to be ready for) is sundown after snowfall. From my home, the mountains face southwest and usually after it has snowed, the following evenings sundown will be as pink and rose colored as could ever be imagined. It is as if a carnival came to town and wrapped the mountains in a pink soft blanket confection. It does not look real. But you must be ready to grab your camera and run to the closest available vantage point. I was slow this time, but did capture a few shots from my backyard.

Labels: el paso, franklin mountains, pink, snow day

Snow came and claimed its spot on the radar of all in town and beyond. The schools had to give it its due, even if this is the last week of regular classes. Schools, including UTEP, opened at 10:00 AM. At 10, the mountains were completely shrouded in a misty fog and rain mixed with snow continued until 1:00 or so.

Taking a break around 3:00, I drove up to the foothills to snag a few shots before running back home to work on a paper due tomorrow. (Like I should be writing this now, right?) No matter, I love the mountains and the time away from the screen was good for the soul and eyes.

Labels: clouds, el paso, fog, franklin mountains, snow, snow day, UTEP

It isn't often I get the opportunity or the time to drive-by shoot images these days. Yet this drive-by was too good to pass up. On the way to class, I caught up to this antique Bentley (possibly from the mid- to late- 1930s) near Mesa Street on Shadow Mountain Drive. I photographed two images while we were stopped at the light. We started up again and It turned left, as did I. Although I tried to get another shot of the beast from my rear view door mirror, I soon lost it in traffic.

I've always thought Bentley's were supposed to be too "cool" for a hood ornament. I also heard a Bentley was a Rolls-Royce without the hood ornament. (These are myths because in the case of this beauty, it had the Bentley marque on the rear near the license and a winged "B ornament on the bonnet. In any case, it was a delight to see on such a beautiful day.

Given FB cannot publish "notes" from more than one blog, I thought I would republish this entry originally posted to a new Moleskiners blog. To me, Moleskiners throws too much in its interface of multiple horizontal menus with a heinous orange and green default color scheme. 

That said, it did make me go and collect my thoughts and write about something that occurred recently. And although not specifically about El Paso nor was the image taken in El Paso, it was created by someone from here; it also tacitly covers issues concerned with education and parenting. 

We've been told that The Judge is not the only student from here who currently attends Michigan State, but sometimes it seems she is. However, there are many more students who do leave home every year to attend college away from El Paso. This is something from one parent with one student who has left home for the past four years.


Fall 2009 marked the first year I was unable to go with MJ to take The Judge back to Michigan State University.

The reason was simple. The schedule for MSU differed from that of UTEP as MSU’s fall semester began a week before UTEP; and so, I did not want to miss the first week of graduate school classes and teaching my crucial first week of freshman composition.

The Judge’s freshman year was 2006, a year when both schools had the same schedule outcomes (a week difference when beginning classes.) For that one year, I had been able to pull it off, but this year was a no go. However, with cell phones available for all, it was almost as if I was there with them—almost. Granted, the calls were not as intimate as when I have virtually walked her back from a frat party or accompanied her from the library at 2:00 a.m. EST (midnight here.) I love walking/talking with her this way. The Judge finds herself to be on the phone with one of us a comfort when walking at night. I don’t blame her at all. She believes that if she is on a cell, she is not alone. She feels safe when we talk/walk together like that.

But back to the first move-in chaos of her freshman year. I loved seeing and watching the cars unload the students, their pillows, stuffed animals, their stuff. The frantic, chaotic mess that only occurs when the luggage, t-shirts, jeans, and other priority/ephemeral details of life collides with all other priority/ephemeral details of “the New Roommate.” Not only are the small rooms awash in clothing contained in the luggage bought, there are also boxes, personal items, microwaves, refrigerators, books, iPods, TVs, speakers, and hundreds of tiny girl T-shirts. That year it was all a blurr to me and probably MJ and The Judge; her things seemed to float around and land all over the room and hallway. Now, multiply that by two. And, I know all this sounds terribly bourgeois, and having nothing (at first) to do with studying for a profession, but it is fun and stressful and most of all sad. You are about to leave your kid at school. But this is the fact of it all—least for us each fall in East Lansing, Michigan, those first few days each fall.

Now, I cannot tarry too long with this initial blog post. I must begin posting other things for my classes. However, what I wanted to share was a moleskine page from way back in Fall 2006. It is a list I made of the items we needed to purchase for The Judge before we left her in Michigan and MJ and I returned (as a couple for the first time in decades) to El Paso, Texas. That first year she lived in the high-rise chaos that is Hubbard Hall.

Labels: drawing, fall, freshman year move-in, Michigan State University, moleskine, notes, parenting, Spartans, the judge, university life