11/09/2009

Home away from home


We're in Tonopah for the weekend.


Again.

Downtown Tonopah without the
Mizpah, Nevada's most haunted hotel,
as the centerpiece.

This is my 13th assembly here in seven years. On the surface nothing's changed much although, since we were here last, the town has put up a spiffy new official sign on 395. You can see it in the first photo. And, by the way, the Mizpah Hotel will be on the auction block September 16th. That's just a few days away! Just think. It could be yours for a song.




The Ramada didn't have our reservation so we're at the Economy Inn for half the price, $35 a night. It's not as bad as it looks from the street plus it has free wi-fi and a great view if you like defunct mining/desert ghost town scenarios. However, the clowns next door carried on until 6 in the morning. Given the volume of their voices and the number of "fuck him, fuck thems and fuck hers" they had to be out of their pea brains on speed and booze.




The sticker on the windshield of the Mustang parked outside their door explains that the car is being moved from Vegas to Portland by a hired driver, so hopefully they are, by this time, gone. Otherwise the manager promised to move them to the front, a place he reserves for Assholes.


Desert elan

Of course, changed or not, I photographed the same old roadside apparitions we pass every time we take 395... Luning and Mina which are wide spots in the road which are well on their way to becoming ghost towns and a roadside brothel called Playmate Ranch.




You will be happy to hear they are all doing well, ie they are still inhabited.



Playmate Ranch (brothel)

White limo at gas station next door to Playmate Ranch



My favorite photos from the trip so far are of the fat, flat, white clouds drifting east although they suggest rain by Sunday, which is exactly when we head out into the Great Basin for a week of camping. Lovely. Well, rain here usually evaporates before hitting the ground but we shall see. We're leaving early tomorrow morning.


09/09/2009

Toulouse Lautrec


Today is the 108th anniversary of Toulouse Lautrec's death.

The artist

He died of complications from alcoholism and syphilis at the family estate in Malromé at the age of 36. A couple of years before his death he tried "drying out" but soon returned to hard drinking, despite a series of paralytic fits. According to Wikipedia, his last words were, "Le vieux con!" ("The old fool!") This was his goodbye to his father.


Self-portrait

I liked his work the minute I first laid eyes on it back in high school. And I suppose his glamorous depiction of the seamy Parisian nights in Montmartre, its brothels and, in particular, the Moulin Rouge, helped lock in my childhood notion that to be an artist one must be willingly and tragically lost. Certainly the fascination helped him to an early death. At least I avoided that.

Self-portrait at the Moulon Rouge


Salude Toulouse.

08/09/2009

Outtakes


Me! That's who wants to know.
Portland

Here are a few photos from the last few weeks. Locations range from Portland, Reno, the Mohave, and LA to the lateral universe wherein dwells the Invisible Theatre.


Baby Thea x 2


Glow Boy
Spice Rack, Indian grocery in Reno





Burning Man van



Carson City. NV





Mohave cloud



LA cloud
Station  wildfire



One last round of Bánh mì sandwiches
for the road from the pigeon friendly
Saigon Bakery in San Gabriel's new China Town



Perfunctory Hollywood sign shot.
See it through the smog way off, up on the hill?



Headed home


Mohave hills


~WINNER~
Bad Grammar Sign of the Day Award



Invisible Theatre
Uncle Monkey, Baby T and the Gang



07/09/2009

Baby Thea's big adventure


Corn for the critters and an amazing adventure for Baby Thea.


Larger format here.


06/09/2009

Home again


The graveyard, the Savannah Memorial Park Pioneer Cemetery, was a bust, by Nevada standards sterile and tame. It got a drive-by. We didn't even bother getting out of the car. Historic? Old graves. Okay. In America anyway but Z-E-R-O character. Now Nevada has graveyards. Desert crazed. Lovely. Lonely. Graveyards. If you are very quite, you can just make out, mixed in with the wind, lingering sighs.

Turns out the motel had coffee in the office after all, plus cold orange juice, danish in cellophane and free copies of USA Today. Makes up for the hair choked shower. We would definitely stay there again. The knock out feature was its incredibly thick walls. I really hate motels with thin walls. I do not want to be hostage to TVs and toilets and late night conversations through the wall. We did not hear a peep at the Rodeway Inn. Now Del Mar Ave. was another matter. Getting past that required ear plugs and Valerian root tablets.

Now we're home until Friday then off to Tonopah for the weekend then we're headed back out to camp in the Great Basin until Thursday.


04/09/2009

New Chinatown in a galaxy far far away from somewhere


We're in LA for the weekend. Drove down today, after driving down from Medford yesterday, after driving down from Portland the day before that, where we spent a few days cooing Baby Thea after driving up to Medford to pick up our other granddaughter so that the three of us could drive up to Portland and coo Baby Thea before we drove her back down to Eugene to participate in the U of O's Project Tomato where, she told me yesterday, they picked and transformed a whopping 900 lbs of tomatoes into organic pizza sauce. After making sure she was settled in, Mr. Lee and I drove back up to Portland to coo Baby Thea some more and that gets us back to the beginning. I think. Does that make sense? And all this up and down? Compared to what? Earth is basically round.

Well, we're not exactly in LA. We're in San Gabriel Valley, the new Chinatown, truly a country within a city, staying at a $59 a night motel run by Pakistanis. The room is huge and nice other than little details, like legacy toothpaste splatters on the bathroom mirror and no coffee in the room or office, plus we have a great view of an impressive plume of smoke rising from the current wild fires burning nearby. We had Bánh Mì sandwiches for dinner. They were great but the best part was the pigeon walking around inside the restaurant looking for crumbs under the chairs. He was an old guy with a limp and not moving too fast. The people running the bakery didn't seem to take any notice or care. Eventually he nibbled his way to the door then stepped back out onto the sidewalk. My kind of place. After dinner we followed up with moon, cassava, and mung bean cakes. Much too much but tasty.

And this evening I learned some cool things about the nearby Mt. Wilson Observatory. Given that it was threatened by the fires, LA Weekly republished an article on it by Joshuah Bearman. Did you know that the reflecting element at the bottom of the scope is 9,000 pounds of wine-bottle glass from the Saint Gobain bottle works in France? It was carried up the mountain by tiny burros in 1917 (poor critters) and is still the largest solid plate mirror ever cast.

It was up on Mt. Wilson that Edwin Hubble "first discovered that there are galaxies. Many many many other galaxies in the universe. Then, he discovered from the light of those galaxies that the universe is expanding." Full article here. Amazing, isn't it? Before Hubble's observations on Mt. Wilson, everyone thought the only thing out there was the Milky Way. After his discovery, even Einstein had to rethink things and came up for a visit.

Anyway, it's late. Given that we're in the general neighborhood, we thought we'd drop in and see The Blue Boy tomorrow, but the museum charges $20 a head. We're going to an old, free graveyard instead.

27/08/2009

Photos from the Deeps


We are the tiny yellow dot in the middle of the grid.

Roy, this one's for you.








Cookie's Special after a long hike



25/08/2009

Back from the Deeps

We're back from our camp trip to the Deep Creek Range. More later.


Hotel Nevada, Ely


Homestead junker, Utah


17/08/2009

Gone camping


Evening in the Bird Park
Hasta luego mis amigos. Hasta la vista la próxima semana.


Crow talk

photo by Life Writer

"I shall live bad if I do not write, and I shall write bad if I do not live." ~ Françoise Sagan


And to this end, Mr. Lee has dedicated himself to see that I LIVE. Fuck him. Tomorrow he is dragging me out into the Great Basin for an off road, off the grid, out in the true heart of fucking Nowhere for yet another wilderness experience. I am sneak writing this. Mr. Lee has his eye on me because, at this point, TIME HAS RUN OUT. I should be packing but I am barely packed however I am charging my two camera batteries and have amassed a pile of pens, pencils, erasers, notebooks, and sketch pads to comfort me out there. We go to very remote places. In one favorite location, a military plane crashed and wasn't found for 50 years. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?

For the last few days I have been scaling down the amount of food I shovel out into the Bird Park so that it won't be a total shock when the food dries up but, even as I write this, my old friend Minerva, and her similarity decrepit buddy, have showed up for a mid-morning peanut. I am sorry to say that the crows are winning the contest of who trains who. The other day Minerva landed and clomped (crows don't hop, they clomp) straight to my bedroom window (she not only knows where my office is, she knows where I sleep!) and demanded a treat. Unchecked, this will not end well. Crows have a hot-line. I fear that, before long, hundreds, perhaps thousands, will take up cawing at my window. I suppose it is better we go to the desert a while. Let things cool off.

And when we get back, if we do, it's off to Portland to see Baby Thea (a good thing), then LA (a just okay thing), Tonapah (an okay thing) and, on October 1, we leave for Costa Rica. Yikes and ey yi yi! It feels like a yawning chasm has opened up beneath me into which I plummet.

15/08/2009

Beco's Tub Toy


At least somebody is having fun.

I don't believe elephants should be hostage to a circus or confined to zoos, but this little guy at the Columbus Zoo is making the best of it and, with the dummies on the reactionary right pitching absurd, hysterical tantrums at town hall meetings across the country, don't know about you, but I need a time out from the madness, even if it is only 01:27.

13/08/2009

Local news at 12:56


Detail in a painting
Getty Museum in LA
.

It is all in the details and today the details are driving me crazy so I thought I'd drop in here and complain a bit. Not only are we leaving for Costa Rica on Oct. 1, we are busy pretty much up to that time. It's all good but I am overwhelmed.

Do you like the photo? Sorry I don't remember the artist or the painting, something at the Getty. You'll have to go and see for yourself. One of the many great things about the Getty is that you are allowed to take photos, JUST NO FLASH. But back to work. Thanks for the shoulder.


07/08/2009

Rest in peace Koala Sam


Sam the little koala rescued by firefighter David Tree during Australia's devastating wildfires earlier this year died yesterday. She was euthanized during surgery after the veterinarian found the cysts that threatened her life were inoperable.


Sadness upon sadness, Sam's cysts were caused by stress and these days are very common among Australia's koala population. One bright spot is that her life, rescue and death have helped raise awareness and support not only for koalas, who are in serious trouble throughout Australia, but has also helped highlight the plight of wildlife worldwide. Bye-bye little Sam. I am so sorry it ended this way.

Full story here

06/08/2009

Local news at 11:24


The Bird Park is full of little birds today. They must be fueling up for bad weather. Snow is predicted above 9000 ft. in the lovely Sierra at whose feet we are nestled. I am in the hamster wheel today. Too much to do and too little time to do it all. We are going to Costa Rica on Nov. 1 for six weeks and already the long shadow is upon me. It would be wise to layout the newsletters through the end of the year. And I just volunteered to do a blog for a local animal welfare group. I got the url and did a mock up for it last night but much remains to be done before it's functional. So far I am 0 for 2 on this kind of thing but what the hell? Three is supposed to be a charm. The one I started for the shelter in Nicaragua turned out to be a terrible experience. The director was impossible to work with. Anyway, I should already be out the door, but just had to come here first and cry. It's a tradition.



Oh, and Baby Thea is now 12 lbs. 6 oz.
and more beautiful than ever, if that is even possible.