The Abandoned Mall in the Middle of Nowhere

The new picture at the top of this page is my own, taken at Budaghers, New Mexico recently. Budaghers is a strange place. Here's Wikipedia's take on it:

"Budaghers was a thriving trading post in the 1950s that was started by Joseph and Sally Budagher, who personally knew and traded with the Pueblo Indians in that area. Before Interstate 25 was built, shoppers pulled off the road and filled up with gas or bought Indian rugs, jewelry, pottery and much more. The bar was attached and only a small part of it.
After the freeway came, the New Mexico Outlet Center mall was built in 1993 and closed in 1997. The mall was redeveloped in 2000 as ¡Traditions!, featuring New Mexico products and a cultural center, but it stands empty today.^[1][2][3] At the south end of the West Frontage Road in Budaghers stands the Mormon Battalion Monument. It is a rock pillar with a wagon wheel at the top and with an information plaque on the east side. Also in Budaghers is a brightly painted cylindrical metal tank which changes subject from time to time. As of June 2013 it has a quirky skeletal car scene on the south, a misplaced saguaro on the east, and jazz instruments on the north. The west is plain green paint and rust."

Here's a bit about the Harp pictured at the top of this page:

"An Aeolian Harp is a wind-driven, kinetic instrument. Wind rushing across the strings create eerie beautiful harmonies, which perfectly offsets the eerie creepy abandoned shopping mall in which the Harp resides.

There are 45 strings tuned to C, D, Eb, G, and Bb in three octaves.

24 feet high, weighs about 3000 pounds.
The bearing is from a semi truck.
It was designed and built by Bill Neely and Bob Griesing in June and July of 2000."

I've been stranded at Budaghers twice; the first time, it was a blown radiator hose. I think the bar was still open but the gas station was closed. There was still a payphone at the gas station which I used to call for rescue. The second time I was less lucky; I was driving a little Ford Festiva and just about a hundred yards from the overpass, a computer chip stopped working and so did the car. I spent all night there that time, singing to keep warm. (Richard & Linda Thompson's The Wall of Death is an excellent song for such situations.)

This October, my bandmate Dwight Loop organized an experimental music festival to take place in a suite at the Traditions mall that's been transformed into a studio and performance space. It was the Rampant Egos' 1st actual gig, though we've made 9 albums!

Before the show, I walked around with the camera my friend Devin gave me. I'm no photographer, but this camera is a pretty good one.

To start, I thought the trashcan frame with no trashcan (but with some trash) made an interesting sculpture:

Then there's a cluster of abandoned bird feeders:

There are wind sculptures all over the place. This smaller cluster is on the west side:

We've come to call this style "Yuppie Deco":

The gazebo is in the center of the 'U' formed by the mall, with its open face to the south. Just south of the gazebo is a small building by itself, next to a purposeless traffic circle.

Just south of the traffic circle are three hornos (adobe ovens) out in the desert, why I don't know; and the wire buffalo sculpture makes it all the more bizarre:

These carved posts are everywhere...

...including marching off into the desert for no apparent reason.

The entrance from inside. I-25 is just beyond.

The east end.

And a very strange...playground?

More of the east side.

And the crowning strangeness of it all; a giant wind sculpture garden on painted concrete, parts of it either unfinished or dismantled:

More sculptures and weirdness:

And to top it all off, when I got back to the studio which was in the center of the place, Michael Stearns had just arrived with his 12-foot-long, 24-stringed awesome instrument The Beam, and I got to photograph it while they were figuring out where to put it inside!