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Blas Jess Cascarrabias was born on Comer Street in Garden City, Georgia, a municipality just outside Savannah. How his wetback parents ever got to Savannah is another story, but they did, and an even stranger story is how they came into a substantial amount of money. Blas Jess grew up in this southern town, which tainted him to a certain degree, but then his home was close to Savannah, and it was the milieu in Savannah that ignited his brain to a more worldly concept of living. It was said by his nanny that his first words were, It was a black-headed woman with deep set eyes who started his trek to sanity. She was sitting on a park bench when she spoke in a low voice to the eleven-year-old Blas Jess who was playing hide-and-seek with friends in a park in Savannah. She had said, "Come here, young man, and I'll tell you how to get out of this hellhole." She meant Georgia, not Savannah, and Blas Jess had sat with her for over an hour before she rose in mid-sentence and announced, "and that's how it's done and that's that." So compelling was her story that Blas Jess never forgot a word and can recite it verbatim to this day. It should be mentioned that her story was related in Spanish, the language that Blas Jess spoke at home. After he graduated from high school, he tried to attend two different universities in Georgia, but hated the systems. After one professor had yelled at him, "Why don't you take your snobbish ass to Europe? They'll straighten you out," he applied to Oxford in England. Blas Jess was accepted at Oxford and off he went to England, but Oxford was no better and he moved to Madrid, in Spain, where he finally felt at home. All of his degrees were earned in Spain. For years after he returned from Europe, he wrote columns for papers in San Miguel de Allende and Mexico City. Today, he is semi-retired, but writes a column for RIOBRAVOFINEART in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He calls his writings, Seor Cascarrabias has not allowed a frontal photograph to be taken of himself since that terrifying incident in June of 1988. We know nothing about the incident except that it involved a horse, a bucket, a quarter pound of liver, a jar of warm water, and a Polaroid camera. The police have dropped all charges, and today, Blas Jess lives in an recreation vehicle down by the Rio Grande. Seor Cascarrabias is a tall and elegant man who hushes a room when he enters. He always speaks Spanish until he needs to speak English. He speaks extraordinarily beautiful Castilian Spanish, and is the epitome of good manners when he speaks Spanish. When he speaks English, one hears the distant bells of a Southern accent, but when he gets a burr beneath his saddle, the sounds of a Georgian cracker peal forth and that's when he's at his best; that's when his spear seeks the heart of nonsense. In short, he's a southern curmudgeon who doesn't suffer fools well at all. Those who socialize with him have learned to take care with what they say because of his penchant for listening and responding precisely to your end of the conversation. We at RIOBRAVOFINEART at Hot Springs feel more than lucky to have intercourse with Seor Cascarrabias: we feel blessed. He cares just as much about the subject, our main subject, ART, as we do. He recently wrote, "When each and every epoch in history is finished, all that's left of that epoch, is its art. Because of its use as a record, I love art, and I never wanted to write about any other subject. Art has the most personally rewarding and unfettered bond with something good I can imagine, BUT Jess Cristo, can contemporary art ever draw nut cases, neurotics, and unimaginable blowhards out of the cracks and crevices of today's aesthetic bunch. The universities and colleges of America have done the "Art World" an amazing disservice. I plan to write a book on this subject or possibly just compile my essays; I shall call it Beneath the Bullshit Bane. |
(Get me out of here!)
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