[Lapg] Tim Dundon ZEKE the Compost Sheik needs the community to come out on Labor Sept 1-3 day Pasadena to create /build a gate

Mon Aug 27 10:59:39 PDT 2012

*Tim Dundon ZEKE the Compost Sheik needs the community to come out on 
Labor day Sept 1-3 Pasadena to create /build a gate*

The La Loma Development Company gate workshop to benefit Tim Dundon will 
run Saturday through Monday, September 1-3, 10am-5pm, 1355 Lincoln Ave, 
(@ Washington Blvd), Pasadena. The final day may be on site in Altadena. 
Admittance: $75 or work or goods in kind. For more information call 
(818) 834-7074.

Labor Day weekend Barrantes' firm will be hosting a three-day metal and 
glass workshop to build a gate needed at Dundon's home to meet code, but 
a gate with a difference. Sculptor Ray Cirino will be leading the class 
and glass artist Leigh Adams will oversee the metal and glass-work 
component. The design (above), Cirino says, was inspired by the idea of 
a lens to magnify Dundon's teachings about soil. "It will signify a 
looking glass into Tim's world."
"It must be so perfectly balanced that Tim can open it with his pinky," 
he said, before adding, "You might say it's a balancing act."

http://chanceofrain.com/2012/08/a-lens-into-paradise/

Tim Dundon Zeke the Sheik Compost
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3UD2rKFoIE

A LENS INTO PARADISE

Posted on | August 24, 2012 | 1 Comment
If you live in greater Los Angeles, chances are good that you've heard 
of Tim Dundon. The deputy of a Los Angeles County supervisor once 
compared Dundon's pile of compost in the unincorporated foothill city of 
Altadena to the mosaics of  Simon Rodia in Watts.  "Watts has Watts 
Towers. Altadena has the pile," Kathryn Barger told the Los Angeles Times.
Eleven years later, most of the pile is gone and Dundon is in deep 
trouble over what is growing on the remains. Labor Day weekend a star 
line up of Los Angeles County artists will be leading a community 
workshop to bail him out.

Tim Dundon with charcoal. Photo: Ray Cirino Facebook Gallery

Begun by Dundon in the 1970s, the compost pile near the Altadena 
intersection of North Fair Oaks Avenue and West Mountain View Street had 
reached forty feet tall when in 2001 the Times made comic hay of 
Dundon's straggling grey beard, a tendency to lapse into rhyme and his 
Pasadena Doo Dah Parade alter ego, the caftan-wearing "Zeke the Sheik." 
The Times coverage by Richard Winton over a series of pieces was 
memorably vivid, funny and good, but only Michelle Huneven, writing in 
the LA Weekly in 2004, succeeded in capturing both the absurdity and 
profundity of Altadena's self-styled king of crap. It helped that 
Huneven has a novelist's eye; it helped even more that, as a serious 
gardener, she'd been a customer of Dundon's. Through passing swarms of 
flies, Huneven studied Dundon as he made delivery after delivery of 
stable manure to her Altadena property. This briefly hot mix smothered a 
weedy lawn that soon gave way to a fecund garden. The transformation of 
her yard imbued genuine respect for Dundon.
Manure deliveries were often accompanied, she noted, with "a few minutes 
of his compost-based philosophy, occasionally delivered in rhyme with 
periodic bursts of song and biblical quotation." Punning on the TV show 
'Walker' starring Chuck Norris, Dundon emphasized to Huneven that he was 
'Talker.' Whereas Walker was violent, Dundon prided himself on being the 
opposite. "Dundon's compost, you must understand, is ultimately more 
than a product," Huneven explained. "It is also a worldview, and a way 
of life --- a means to health, happiness and world peace. 'This is the 
way, the truth, the life,' he says of the stuff. Indeed, Dundon does not 
talk so much as he preaches, and what he preaches is the Gospel of Compost."

Gallery at the End of the World piece by Dave Lovejoy and Leigh Adams; 
Adams will be providing the glasswork for the Dundon gate. Photo: Emily 
Green
After almost two decades of running skirmishes with the county health 
and fire departments, Altadena's answer to Watts Towers, which sat on 
borrowed land next to Dundon's family home, was finally bulldozed in 
2005. Dundon retreated into the compost-fed overgrowth his side of the 
property line. In the seven years since the pile was demolished, Dundon, 
now 70, has become sharply stooped. Too frail to shovel compost, he 
still manages to operate the stable front loaders to fill his truck, and 
then drive the battered jalopy to long-standing garden clients. His 
favorite customers are schools, from which he will accept no payment. 
Zeke the Sheik could be roused for events like the yearly meetings of 
the Los Angeles Community Garden Council. To compost customers, it 
seemed that he had finally made peace with the county agencies he once 
battled -- until last month, when according to the Pasadena Star-News, 
county sheriffs arrived, this time followed by demands that he restrain 
wandering pets and trim his property's thick fringe of plants away from 
the curb.
This is more easily accomplished by those able to stand without a cane. 
On learning about Dundon's plight, the Pasadena-based landscaping firm 
La Loma Development Company sent a crew of gardeners over to prune just 
enough of Dundon's mixed cactus front hedge to achieve a legal setback. 
"We kept cuttings, both out of respect for Tim's garden, and because he 
has a lot of rare plants," said La Loma founder Marco Barrantes.

Amphitheater at Arlington Garden in Pasadena by La Loma Development 
Company's Marco Barrantes and sculptor Ray Cirino. Barrantes and Cirino 
are organizing the Dundon fence workshop. Photo: Emily Green

Over Labor Day weekend Barrantes' firm will be hosting a three-day metal 
and glass workshop to build a gate needed at Dundon's home to meet code, 
but a gate with a difference. Sculptor Ray Cirino will be leading the 
class and glass artist Leigh Adams will oversee the metal and glass-work 
component. The design (above), Cirino says, was inspired by the idea of 
a lens to magnify Dundon's teachings about soil. "It will signify a 
looking glass into Tim's world."
"It must be so perfectly balanced that Tim can open it with his pinky," 
he said, before adding, "You might say it's a balancing act."
The La Loma Development Company gate workshop to benefit Tim Dundon will 
run Saturday through Monday, September 1-3, 10am-5pm, 1355 Lincoln Ave, 
(@ Washington Blvd), Pasadena. The final day may be on site in Altadena. 
Admittance: $75 or work or goods in kind. For more information call 
(818) 834-7074.

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