So, I was obnoxiously ignorant enough to start a blog called LP's on the Jukebox without actually owning a record player. Got one for Xmas.
At first last night the only one I had to put on was one I'd bought as a novelty at a thrift store in Joshua Tree, CA two years ago. It was some best of compilation from a Boston radio station, that I got because on the front for some inexplicable reason was a bear in a pair of shades and a bomber jacket playing a guitar made out of a Boston street map, the neck being Comm Ave. The cover was better than the content.
Then today, in a frenzy I bought three albums, all new, totally not adhering to the dregs and discovery ethic that I swear I will uphold from here on out, but COME on, how could I not ensure that now that I'd tested the bugger, that the first voice I should hear on my newwww medium would be someone worthy to be heard in that much accoladed fashion of vinyl.
I see Small Change. It's 22.99....can I really spend so much on an album? After all, wasn't the point of this to pick up second-hand copies, hear history in the cracks, see some scrawled happy birthday on the liner notes (that would hopefully lower the price.) This needs some pondering. Or rather, I need time to come up with the proper rationalization, as it turned out.
I snag Death out of the New section as well, then find the small bin marked Country. My fingers were crossed for Patsy Cline, and then my heart stops. Look who has his own special tab. Townes. Van. Zandt. Double album. 16.99. Live at the Old Quarter. Pancho and Lefty on the first side.
My fingers pick it up before I tell them to.
And yes, I have to go back and pick up Small Change. Townes, I love ya, but there is only one man that can fully test vinyl for me. And that is Tom fucking Waits.
So yeah. Vinyl is good. Analog. Shoulda known. Film looks better because of its literal nature and all its little imperfections. After all what you're hearing played back to you is the actual imprints that the sounds forced into an actual material, not the way that a computer interpreted those sounds.
Listened to the whole thing with mounting excitement as I do all the Xmas unpacking I was far too lazy to do the night before, and it builds until...
Smitten. I'm swooning, I'm actually swooning as I hear that match strike and the first velvety tones of that lonely saxophone on the beginning of Small Change. The man himself, he's whispering in my ear, and it's dirty, and it's warm, and I can even smell the whisky on his breath as he rasps that Small Change got rained on with his own .38.
Hang on, I must put on Side Two again. After all, at some point later tonight, I am due a shower, and my usual mediocre rendition of Invitation to the Blues is going to get a bit of an oomph to it.
Okay, I'm not trying to be political here. Well not entirely, but seriously, how the hell can the Republicans voting against or refusing to vote for the 9/11 Healthcare bill justify themselves at all.
And you know what? I did feel guilty about the fact that I was getting all outraged about something I heard about on a comedy show. I figured maybe it was being spun. I figured maybe if I saw it on some other network, it would be explained more rationally, so it wouldn't seem like total insanity. EXCEPT for everywhere I saw it on news.google it was talking about how Jon Stewart was the main force bringing up this fucking outrage because the networks are all asleep about it.
I'm not about to get on my high horse and bullshit about how I have some sort of longstanding commitment to 9/11 First Responders health issues, because other than when I see the posters on the subway asking you to call in if you've been having health problems due to, say inhaling massive amounts of toxic ash, hazardous materials and the ash that was once human beings, I don't honestly think about it on a daily basis.
But you know what? I haven't been part of a political party that did everything in its power without the slightest shred of shame to try to associate itself with these people's example to push its own agenda, to lead people into a war for crying out loud, and to duck all possible criticism for the consequences of these actions. I'm not in charge of whether or not this passes, and I'm not holding it up because I want to make sure that the richest two percent get to keep their goddamn tax cuts.
Like we haven't all seen an instance or two where a Republican in answer of a question about the war, or about civil liberties or even about the economy wraps themselves in 9-11 in order to avoid any serious questioning.
And all this time while Republicans were using the specter of this tragedy as a shield, the people who had actually been digging through the rubble, spending hundreds of man-hours putting their bodies, their organs, their lungs in the company of the harmful byproducts, of say, the combustion of a couple planes, a couple skyscrapers, and some thousands of human beings, started to, good lord, have health problems?
While these people were actually dying as a result of 9-11, the Republicans used this country's mourning of that day, and their fear that there would be another to run smears against anyone opposing them, and when this bill comes up, they're too busy defending people who totally don't need this kind of assistance. Not the way that people who are terminally ill from the effects of being at Ground Zero need to know that their families won't be left in debt because of hospital bills. Not the way that someone who may just be starting to be sick from it needs the reassurance that they won't be given the run around and will be given the respect and help that they deserve.
It would almost be appreciable as a perfectly fitting symbol of how these worms actually work, almost goddamn art or a joke, if it weren't so fucking tragic.
Just a few months ago, the right-wingers wanted us to get all up in arms about the possible horrors that would develop if a Muslim community center (That's right. It's not a mosque. It's a community center, freakin' deal with it.) was built near Ground Zero. The horror. The callousness. The disrespect that would pose to the NYFD and the NYPD.
Gee, well you've really got your priorities straight, dontcha?
Who needs a drink?
The only thing that will soothe me right now. This awesome band from Detroit in the 1975, just recently rediscovered. I guarantee that when you first hear it, you'll be like "goddamn, this existed BEFORE Hardcore?" And the first track I'm putting on Politicians In My Eyes. Yup. Some things don't change.
Having just been to Vegas and embarassingly ignorant of Rat Pack movies, I decided to watch the original Ocean’s Eleven. Throughout the movie, I found myself glad of the updates that the remake affords. Different social mores and all jokes should be taken with a grain of salt, I know, but hearing Dean Martin claim that what he wanted to do with his share of the money would be to repeal the 14th and 20th amendments and make slaves of the women made pretty clear what a different time 1960 was, especially as there’s nary a wince meant to be elicited by the fact that when he says it there’s a black guy in frame with him.
Admitted, the outfits and style are total class. I saw that photo of Lawford, Sinatra, Martin and Davis in various degrees of impeccable formal dress playing pool in more than one place in Nevada and it doesn’t lose it’s touch when in motion.
Admitted, the musical numbers are gorgeous.
Admitted, Dean Martin, constitutional aspirations aside, is an insanely charming human being, and more than a few of Sinatra and Lawford’s jokes hit the mark. Not to mention as someone who hadn’t really seen any of Sinatra's acting work, I instantly understood that he wasn’t a singer turned actor in any cynical meaning of the combination. Danny Ocean, proud and cold on the outside. But nothing cold about his loyal to his squadron, and or about his feelings about the fact that his marriage to the woman he loves isn’t salvageable. One hell of a solid package built up around a broken heart.
However, I’m a sucker for a clever hard-bitten line and an ensemble cast that is slightly more developed than “that old guy with the scar and the wife” and “some guy who works at a casino whose name I don’t know,” the whole way down the line to fill out the rest of the eleven that ain’t the Rat Pack.
Don’t think it wasn’t killing me as a perpetual pisser-on of remakes to know that I liked the remake more throughout most of a classic movie.
Then came the end. And it was perfect. A dozen times better than silhouettes in front of the Bellagio water show. I will say no more about it, but it’s simple and funny and pretty darn brave.
Least I thought so until my father cynically pointed out that *SPOILER* it was probably because of the Hollywood Code that *SPOILER* charming as they were, no way they would be allowed to keep that money because as criminals, they would not be allowed to have profited from their crime at the end of the movie.
This sent me reeling to try to prove other movies from the era where the charming crooks have gotten away with it at the end of the movie. I couldn’t come up with one, and I pretty much only watch movies from that era that involve some sort of crime. I guess that I consider the part where I like them as a victory of sorts and ignore the fact that at the end of the movie, anyone who’s done something wrong is dead, disgraced, or in jail even if they got there in glamourous fashion.
By way of settling this dispute, my father found it right there in wikipedia. “All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience”
My response “But Robert Mitchum had a career that whole time and he’s a total degenerate!”
Makes me wonder about this whole romantic fatalistic view of crime portrayed in movies so attractively still is the after effects of this. You watch Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy movies knowing how they’ll end up. Movies like Rififi, Night and The City, Out of the Past, The Killing, would they have packed the same punch if at the end, someone strolled off into the sunset with a bundle of dough?
And I’m not sure if it even comes across as a denunciation of crime, like “if they’d just been straight instead of crooks, then they wouldn’t be dead.” It comes across more like “even the best-laid, most faithfully executed plans isn’t going to stop you and your gang’s personal flaws and shit luck from putting you in the ground.” Christ, who can’t identify with that?
Not saying I don’t just totally LOVE post-code 1970s movies, but in a weird way how the code forced storytellers to portray life had such a beautifully opposite effect from what was intended that I’m a little grateful to it. C’mon, nowadays for every time code-less Hollywood provides you with a moment of honesty about sex or violence that you’re glad was allowed to be shown, there’s about 80 times you’re like “okay, there really wasn’t a reason to see that guy do a line of blow off a stripper’s ass and then shoot a guy in the face, I mean, he's not even a major character and it wasn't even surprising. Where's the art in that?”
So here's to fatalism, and the code that inadvertently made the bad guys all the more glorious.
We see our first snow on the way in to Salt Lake City, coming up from Arches National Park. Toss some idle snowballs at each other after we pull over at a visitors center of some kind to use the bathroom. Train whistles waft down from the hill above it.
Once we get into sight of the city, we turn off the iPod and start flipping through the radio. It's whole lot of talk, some country, some church, some Latino. "And the number one best thing about November..." Tumbleweed hits scan.
"No, put it back! I wanna hear the best thing about November."
She turns it back in time for us to hear "...family sweater night. Put on those sweaters and save on the heating bills. I'm Donnie Osmond for..." But we miss the rest because we're all cracking up. Family sweater night? What does that even mean?
I feel more of an East-Coaster than I ever do here. Hell, I didn't even know that living in one side of the country had a feeling.
But Salt Lake City will learn me about planning to spend a whole day in a city without making any concrete plans about what to do there. There's a mentality that I had based on places I'd been previous, of that in a city, there's something to see always, a main drag to walk down, a populated waterfront. Failing that, at least a museum of some kind. Even if I'm surrounded by mediocrity, some dusty spurs or a meteorite fragment might spark some interest. But Salt Lake City isn't made for the casual browser.
It's an entirely car-based city set up on a grid. No main drag to stroll down. No pockets of interesting sights created with the pedestrian in mind. Something always strikes me weird about planned cities like this. It lacks the element of the accidental.
A perusal of a guide given to me by a chatty fellow hostel-stayer doesn't shed that much more light on what to do. After I come back with it, Butterscotch says "new rule, no one goes anywhere alone. Otherwise, for all we know, you'll have come back converted."
"You're talking about it like we're in The Thing." I snort. I don't get corrected.
Not that we didn't try to ask locals what to see. As soon as we saw there was a coffee place next to the hostel called Mormon coffee, we knew where we were going to get our morning's fix. We ask our barista, a young lady with a nose ring, so hip, we assume, the must-sees of Salt Lake City.
"Oh you should go see Temple Square now that there's finally a snow down."
One of the first things that we saw upon driving into the city the night before were the huge spires of the Mormon temple at the center of town. Around it there are a couple of visitors centers, and plenty of people willing to explain to you the wonder of their church square. The visitors centers come in sort of handy, because as we find out from an old man watching a wedding party exit the Temple (featuring a heartbreakingly young-looking bride and groom) we aren't allowed in the church because we aren't Mormons.
Judging by the model of the temple we saw in the visitors center and the artwork inside there, we aren't exactly missing the Sistine Chapel. When you walk in there's a wall-length painting depicting scenes from a proper Mormon life, weddings, family dinners, deathbeds, cemetaries, playing with children, all that. When walking past it, I have to abruptly speed past to keep from breaking into nervous hysterical laughter when I hear the guide say, "I like this painting, because even though there's like sad stuff, people are happy too." As Tumbleweed puts it, never heard anyone older than about 7 talk like that.
Okay, this is going to sound shitty, I know, but when the tour guides walk up to us, big wide smiles on their faces, American flags on their chest, pleasantries cued up behind their lips, some part of my brain screams "pod people!"
Because I know that hidden beneath that smile, and that temple that looks like a Disneyfied version of a Gothic Cathedral is the church that was the major sponsor of Proposition 8, that wouldn't let black people in until 1978, claiming that they were descended from Noah's disgraced son Ham, and if we're going to be honest, only outlawed polygamy in order to gain admission to the United States. Hey, not that I'm necessarily defending it as a belief, but it's not entirely dignified to, after the dozenth time a country won't let you in due to your illegal practices, to suddenly look at your scriptures again and go "Well, looky here, guess we never said we had to practice polygamy after all."
Feel like it's a hell of a dilution from the Puritans you know? Traveling across an ocean because they felt persecuted by a church and state that didn't let them be as all fired strict as they wanted to be. On to a group traveling across a continent because they felt persecuted by a church and state that didn't let them have a couple of wives instead of just the one.
And I guess it's easier to see the faults of a church magnified once they actively run a government. And when they have a creepy statue garden in the middle of their city that has Joseph Smith's head on the body of a sphinx. Okay, that was kind of awesome.
After seeing a pretty awful movie. Catfish. Bleh. We decide to go bowling, then cook a dinner in the hostel. And we made Salt Lake City cool.
But before we did what we could to improve on it, we were driving around, not knowing what to do, past pawn shops, boarded store fronts and concrete mini-mall looking churches, this got voted our jam, so here it is.
Good lord, how did Utah manage to grab itself such a generous portion of the gorgeous landscapes that the American West had to offer. On the road before Monument Valley and in between that and Arches, there's not a stretch of natural landscape that isn't majestic.
No small wonder that the Mormons chose to settle in a place that when the sun shines in literal beams onto the rocky landscape, looks more than a little Old Testament.
Monument Valley was a place on the map to me, one of those "must-sees" of the Southwest. Of course I recognized it later as something that's a catch-all in any movie of that's about the free-spiritedness of the out west, that and a salacious scene in Preacher. Thing about it is, that it's so expansive that unlike other national monuments, there isn't a single iconic shot of it that can capture all of it, so I didn't feel like I could even recognize it. I wasn't prepared for how spacious and gorgeous it is.
Funny is this first band of explorers, that knew they were giving names that might stand as long as people were there to gaze at these things were as struck as simple as we were.
"Those ones look kind of like oven mitts." One of us observes at nightfall staring out from the parking lot of the hotel at the formations we later find out are the Mitten Buttes of Monument Valley
"See, how that one looks like an elephant? The trunk's right there and - " Snake Eyes points at a cluster at Arches National Park that once we have oriented where we are on the map, we realize is The Parade of Elephants.
I like to chalk it up to the Aw Shucks spirit that the American West inspires.
Just the other day, I watched The Searchers, maybe the reason that this park is as associated with the movie Western culture as much as it is. The doomed Edwards clan conveniently set up their homestead plunk in the middle of the Monument Valley, even though theoretically, they lived in Texas.
Always got a kick out of that when I was watching Westerns, how people picked the most picturesque vistas possible to look at while they eked out their living dirt farming. I was all cynical and shit about it until I actually went out there and got it set straight for me that really, it would be more challenging for them to find themselves an ugly view.
Ford ended up filming 7 movies here. There's a vista point named after him. Good movie and all that, under all the racism, but I got a real kick out of them "searching all across the West for five years" when everything looked like it was in Monument Valley, sometimes the front and back views of the same buttes.
Later that day we make a quick stop at the Hole N The Rock. There's a fourteen room house carved into this rock, due to the peculiar ingenuity of Albert Christensen. It took him over 12 years to complete home. Couldn't find anything on how long it took him to do his earnest shrine to FDR above the home. There's also a sweet little cove where the Albert and his wife Gladys were buried, next to a little angel statue.
Outside is all the kitschy things that one could possibly put in their yard, a general store, and a couple of cute pieces of car art.
But it's time to get on the road again, heading to Arches National Park for more mind-melting awesome. I think we wound up going at the perfect time of year to get a full variety of climates. At the Grand Canyon it was in the mid-sixties. Pleasant, but not too hot for all the tramping around we were doing. Drive a bit further up and there's that perfect study in contrasting setting. Stretching out at our feet, the petrified dunes. Sandy, dotted with vegetation here and there. Springing up from that red rock formations. And spanning out in the distance behind them, distant blue-gray mountains sprinkled with snow. Just looks too perfect to be real.
In the presence of all that beauty, it is only natural that we pranced around, taking dozens of photos and clambered up and and down anywhere we could get ourselves a foothold. On the way out, I looked up at some of the more strikingly huge formations and hope to myself that there is some expanse at the top that a human has never managed to set foot on. An idea that I'm sure can't be true, and I'm not sure why I'm hoping for it, considering that I, like anyone else here is a looky loo, here to be amazed by what I see without necessarily understanding it, but the thought stayed with me.
And on through a sudden mini snow-squall up to Salt Lake City.
Now that we're back in a gas-guzzler, might as well head onto America's most romanticized highway, or what's left of it. There's a lot of back-tracking needed and sudden dead-ends to deal with to stay on that fabled road.
The Twin Arrows attraction is literally just a detour off the highway. A jersey barrier has been constructed between it and the highway, so you can't even pull over and take pictures of the improbable sight of telephone pole sized arrows sticking out of the ground. The barrier hasn't stopped graffiti artists from scrawling anti-Obama slogans across the whitewash of the long-closed gas station that once reaped the benefits of the tourist attraction.
Fortunately Two Guns has a bit more going for it. Our first sign of it is off the highway, KAMP written across the roof of a red building. Near as I can tell it used to be some sort of combination camp-site, gas-station and tourist attraction. Not too far before it on the highway we passed by a stone building still advertising mountain lions after all these years.
There's a few skeletal buildings there when we pull off the highway. A gas station, a train-car or trailer looking building, a brick structure, a large red barn, and a small cinderblock structure that we later discover is next to a drained pool. Twin water-silo looking cylinders have the peeling remains of gunslinger murals that presumably gave the attraction its name. Everything is covered in tags, stencils and obscene drawings. Also, sometimes, bulletholes. I am delighted to find a couple of cartridges amidst the tumbleweeds.
There's still the grills and poles sticking out of the ground here and there. Once perhaps, they marked off the boundaries of different campsites, now all they do is pepper signs of civilization in the yellowed grass.
One of the websites I found, the author recalls having spent a night there in a tent in 1978, and finding it a fenced off ruin twenty years later. The highway we'd just gotten off, I-40 of killed Route 66 by degrees across the southwest for decades before 66 was decommissioned in 1985. With it went the reason for people to visit these quaint roadside attractions.
The ruins extended beyond just the immediate ones around the gutted gas-station. We find a few stone structures and a giant pit. Wonder if these are from further back, if these are ruins from when it was a stopover on an even earlier trail than Route 66. Ghost towns litter this desert. This sort of isolated and extreme life can't be easy, and if the incentive to be there dries up, I'd imagine it would only make sense to pack up quick and not look back.
There were even more ruins over the ridge, but it isn't the only thing on our itinerary for the day, so we too take our leave of Two Guns.
