This scene is like a shot from a B movie back-lot production based on Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, some fantastic tree massacre slash ‘n’ burn flick, or an environmental snuff film. Think BBC eco-documentary meets Japanese exploitation gore-horror meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Auf der Maur’s production still of Out of Our Minds / OOOM’s pagan set conjures a homespun version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mordor, the middle-earth from Lord of the Rings. Mordor has two meanings: “Black Land” and “Land of Shadow.” The name translates as 魔 多 (mo duo) in Chinese, “[a place where] demons are many.” Auf der Maur delves into the dark history of ritual blood-letting of the land by the human species, a dominating race that has systematically abused, conquered, exploited, raped, and ruled over mother nature, one another, animals, and land. This is a shadowy realm where conventional Western wisdom is no longer of use, and destructive patriarchal patterns are ritualistically sacrificed to the Goddess.

Christopher Haun, Artist

In my mind it’s 1965 in Diamond Bar, California, standing at the top of Covered Wagon Drive looking into the golden Chino Hills. Life is pretty crazy for me, and the empty hills are a place I can use my imagination away from other peoples’ attention. I can walk up my street out into those empty hills and be free to wander day or night. The emptiness was important to me then. It still is. I learned how to pay attention from playing in that emptiness, and I became skeptical of organized experiences with built-in meanings.

Of course those hills are gone; they’ve long since been chopped off, filled in and built over. The photo I remember, too, is either lost or was never taken, and this picture I found on the Internet is a substitute, standing in for a memory.

Experiences, once we pass through them, tend to disappear. In California this is also true of landscape.
Geoff Tuck, Observer