–Kate Watson, …mightbegood

So the story goes like this. When my father, Jim Brown, who was the first in our family to go to college, took off for school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and during his time in college, gave away all of his childhood toys in an attempt to be an adult. He married my mom, Sara, in 1963, and they gave birth to me in Tulsa in September of 1968.

In 1972, at the age of 32, Dad went to a used book store sale at a local private school. It was there he found a book he had loved as a kid, called “Gene Autry and the Thief River Outlaws,” and he bought it for a dime. He was happy to reconnect with his past, and the idea of getting something so dear to him for so cheap a price was really appealing to him.

It was around this time that the Tulsa County Flea Market started about a mile from our home.

From that point on, my Dad was hooked, and Mom was an active accomplice. They filled our house with furniture, wall hangings, and porcelain product signs, the latter of which my dad was particuarly interested. In what was probably a monumental find for the both of them, they contacted and were given access to their childhood soda fountain, called the Crystal Palace in Muskogee, Oklahoma. I grew up around a lot of memorabilia from the Crystal Palace.

We would normally go back to my father’s hometown of Harrison, Arkansas every summer for at least a little while to visit my Great Grandmother Clara Belle Duckworth, who was still living there. Junk malls would be everywhere along the way, and the normally three and half hour trip would sometimes take eight. Initially, I was miserable waiting in the car while Mom, Dad and sister worked bargains. But then I got it: start collecting, and get out of the car and start looking around for bargains instead of staying in the car and sulking. Baseball Cards were my first love, and then antique dogs, and then stamps, and then Batman memoribilia, then vinyl LPs, then musical instruments, then antique postcards, and all through this time, action figures and figurines.

“Generations” is an antique mall in Tulsa where my father has a booth currently. Yep, I stole the name of the mall for my show, but the owners of the mall didn’t even name it themselves- it’s from the previous business, which was an antique furniture store. They merely covered parts of the outside sign with a banner that has new contact information, and kept the previous name in tact. Like the title, everything in this show is borrowed; the only thing I’ve done is rearrange it.

The Sports Center- My first big dream was to be a pitcher in the big leagues. This was obviously not to be. After a little league game that had me walking in seven runs as the pitcher, I learned that you can’t be anything you want to be in this world. I still had a glorious vicarious season in 1979 as a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who ended up being World Champs that year. Being in Tulsa, I didn’t really feel geographic affinity for any major league club, so I just went with who my older cousin liked.

Dog Sculpture- Like my Dad, I’m a big fan of dogs, especially when I was a kid. In one of those short-lived obsessions, between the ages of ten and twelve I collected completely worthless Dog figurines that I would arrange in type trays in my bedroom. Until recently, I kept them wrapped in yellowed newspapers dating back to the Iran Hostage Crisis. I always wondered why I never got rid of them. I guess it was because I was going to build this.

Action Figure Pyramid-With action figures, as well as a lot of the toys I had, the more beloved they were, the more obliterated they ended up being. Some of my favorite toys were played right out of existence. Here are all that remain.

American Flag- Sewed by a Great Aunt, but I don’t know who. Forty eight stars, so it must be before 1959.

Mad Magazine Paperbacks- These paperbacks were presented en masse by my father to my sister and I before we took a long road trip to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico sometime in the late seventies. I remember my father saying that it was an 800 mile trip, and for my sister and I, this was plenty of time to thoroughly loathe and despise each other. But on this trip, Dad gave us the paperbacks, and instead of the requisite yelling and screaming, we shared laughs. Stroke of genius.

Lunch Boxes- All used in elementary school. On the bottom of each one there are two parallel marks that are rubbed down to the metal. This is from the practice we as kids had of sliding our lunches down the long hall to the cafeteria to see who could get closest to the hand washing we would do before standing in line for lunch.

Cancelled Stamps- My Aunt Mary, who was my Grandmother Cranks’s sister, was a little kookie and even though she was a very dynamic personality in her youth, I only remember her as a perpetually miserable person with clinical hypochondria. I didn’t like to visit her unbelievably messy house in Muskogee, but when I did, she would give me a letter envelope filled with cancelled stamps she collected for me. I never had the heart to tell her that cancelled stamps weren’t worth anything. Here they are collected in a tribute mandala to Mary.

On the Table:

Navaho Blanket- bought by my parents while they were teaching on the Navaho Reservation North of Gallup, New Mexico, sometime between 1963-1967. I’d like to believe I was conceived on the reservation, but my Dad doesn’t agree with that assertion- more than likely, it happened in their small apartment in Gallup. The moved back to Oklahoma soon after my mom learned of her pregnancy.

Dictionary- owned by my Grandmother, Ruth Crank, a public school teacher who kept it in every classroom she taught, Muskogee, Oklahoma.

Candy Dish with Assorted Buttons, Safety Pins, and Sewing Needles- owned by my mother, Sara Brown when she died in 1999, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Electric Lantern- Used by my grandfather, James Alexander Brown, when he was a Conductor for the Midland Valley Railroad, 1970s, Muskogee, OK.

The show involved a three-cubicle installation, one large painting of 200 portraits, a grid of sixteen log book sketches I had drawn as I spoke to Houstonians on the phone, and recordings of some of the phone calls I had taken over the two month period.

Here’s the show statement:

As with everything, this show started small. There I sat , in Austin, summer of 2003, hunched over a cubicle at a dead-end call center job, drawing pictures of tombstones on Post-it Notes while I talked with people about cancer. I was miserable.

Then I took a call from a woman in Dallas. A Talker. A gum-smacking Talker who would not shut up. I’m a extremely patient listener, but this woman was driving me up the wall. I picked up a pen and drew a woman with a big mouth, then I drew another woman with a bigger mouth, then a bigger mouth. The more she talked, the more I drew, and the bigger her damn mouth became. It made me happy, like I was controlling the exchange somehow. We ended the call, and I had a drawing.

My next day off, I bought a sketchbook and a couple of black felt tip pens. I drew a grid of eight rectangles on the page, and whenever I had a chance during one of the 35 or more calls I took a day, I drew what I thought the caller looked like on the other side of the line and noted the city from which they called. When I finally quit my job six months later, I had two hundred and fifty portraits. The large painting here is the culmination of that sketchbook series.

At some point, I realized that talking to strangers wasn’t the reason I was miserable at my call center job. I was miserable because my job dictated what I had to talk about, and that meant not being myself. What if I removed all of the “jobbiness” of taking calls from the public and just interacted with strangers with my own rules? Nothing to sell, nothing to say, no agenda, no answers, no questions, no needs, and no rules. What would that feel like?

The Listening Post was born. For the last two months, I’ve advertised a toll free number with a variety of messages in the Houston Press and on Craigslist. I’ve gotten quite a few calls, and have drawn portraits of the callers and taken notes during our interactions. For about a month now, I have recorded our conversations (with their consent) and I’ve realized that The Listening Post isn’t just an intake process- it’s also a performance.

People like to think that they need an expert to figure things out for them. I do- that’s why I listen to Fresh Air and watch Judge Judy and pay for someone to do my taxes. But after having talked through a lot of problems with people these last two months, I think all we really need is to have someone listening.

If you need to talk, I want to listen. 1-877-EARS KNOW.

First of all, local poet and writer Dan Boehl did a great job giving a sense of scale, context, and the experience of the mural in this article published in …might be good. Check it out for additional background.

And local photographer Andy Mattern was kind enough to do a series of final portraits of the finished tableux.

Nathan Green, co-mountaineer, posted a bunch of the in-process photos on the Arthouse blog as well.

More soon on the Okay Mountain group show “It’s Gonna Be Reverything” at the Project Space of Paragraph Gallery in Kansas City, Mo.