RIP MJ !

1. This is what I need to see at 7:30 AM

2. It's fresh - she's still mourning

3. Upon passing I saw it was an old Asian woman at the wheel, not the hip child/asymmetrical haircut I was expecting!

a fool there was

Mykil Zep's art at Lux. I will take both of them. Waugh! Why can't I buy whatever I want.

Theda Bara was my favorite silent film actress in high school (is my only-childness showing?). Her studio so successfully branded her as an evil vamp, specifically "The Wickedest Woman in the World," that she received loads of hate mail from the clean and decent women of the country, cursing and chastising her wretched on-screen behavior. Teenaged goth idol hellooooo!

This one is particularly impressive, viewed large. Damn, Gina!

CxO'xB

When family is in from out of town, the convergence is always at Carlos O'Brien's. I have no idea how this was decided, but it's been the case for about twenty years. Each time, I ask myself: why? Why Carlos? This is the blandest, most generic Mexican food you can find. These are native Arizonans, in from the east, and that is where they go.

That's my dad in the photo, presiding over his siblings.

Tonight I found out that one of my relations (by marriage...) is suffering from advanced syphilis and as such is or was the dubious darling of Barrow because they were so excited at the opportunity to study him irls, as it were. His brain is damaged beyond all repair - cases like this don't just grow on trees anymore. I guess he was such a badass mountain man that he simply refused to acknowledge or treat his condition, and now he's dying like Baudelaire, but more slowly.

Finalize!

Finally sorting through some holiday photos. Cindy & Dana's party was a blast, and these photos unfortunately depict what kind of shape I was in. Phoenix is as small a town as ever - I ran into my cousin's cousin whom I haven't seen in I don't know how long. I somehow have random scenester cousins that I don't know running all over this city, associated on the fringes of my own social radar.

This looked better on the camera. Too cold/too drunk for accuracy! Still the greatest thing ever.

My brother and I.

New Year's Eve in the semi-corporate world: now with mimosas.

Little else to say. I'm over it. '09 was ok, I guess, and 2010 looks terribly futuristic in print.

recents

week two of this cold/sinus infection. it's starting to make me a little crazed. i feel 5% better every day, which isn't a great improvement.

HAH! someone recently pointed out to me that i constantly use percentages to describe any manner of thing or status. i guess i just proved that.

there's the cat.

how i loved this. i left albuquerque late and had no time to be dicking around with yelp trying to find the perfect coffee shop. enter mcdonoz. how happy was i when i walked in to see that the place was packed with octogenarians, most of whom were wearing commemorative WWII baseball caps. they were arguing and sassing and shaking newspapers at each other as i waited in line.



the fashion serial killer and i went out for a quiet drink on sunday and somehow ended up getting completely hammered and staying out most of the night. monday was not a good day. but the swizzle was all lit up like christmas in vegas, as evidenced in the pic below of the random bar patron. i felt like i was going to have an epileptic fit...if i had epilepsy.

Reservation dogs! Reservation dogs with their spooky eyes. Is everyone over there descended from Aleutians?

For one second, I schemed about whether I could just apply to NAU, quit my job, move to Flagstaff and live off of student loans. I concluded that no, I cannot survive there without a job. I don't even know what they offer. I just like downtown, and the trains, and the Riordan mansion and the old cemetary and the smell of the woods.

Speaking of dogs,

i entertain myself pretty good

i'm ready to hit the road again. i've been thinking of bisbee. i need to do more research into abandoned towns along the way. one of my dad's friends took us on an obscure tour of the old west one year when i was in middle school. i'd like to pick his brain now and find out what else he knows about. we drove for what felt like centuries to a spot somewhere east of tombstone, i guess, where the remnants of a tiny town still stood - somewhat. i wish i could remember where we were, but my memory is of nothing but scrub bushes and golden sandy dirt. there was a jail which was made up of two rooms - office and a cell. it was still intact, and it looked like it had become a hangout for creepy locals. someone had drug some large rocks inside and arranged them in a half circle, and there was a dog corpse in there, minus bones...just fluffy fur, and teeth. he better have died of natural causes!

other than that, you could see the foundations of two small homes. i'd like to hit that place with a metal detector.

we were also so lucky to get to see the place where johnny ringo died, and the same oak tree they found him sitting in. it's on private land and the owners had apparently had an assful of lookie-loos and drunken scout parties looking for ringo's grave, so they shut down the boundaries and started cracking down on trespassers. my dad's friend slow (slowie, as big don likes to call him - adorable, if you could see these scary looking dudes) started writing letters - remember a time when no one had the internet?! - to the guy who owned the place and started an acquaintanceship. slow calls himself a "student of the old west," which i love. anyway, he gained permission to access the area, and we drove out. it's a pretty serene place, a stand of oak trees next to a dry creek that probably isn't always dry. there's a lot of controversy regarding whether johnny killed himself or was murdered (yanno, by wyatt earp, not), and i side with murder.

i guess there's a marker there now. when we went, there was nothing but a pile of rocks that johnny was allegedly buried under. i don't know if the body's still there or what. seems like it would have been graverobbed at some point, no?

i particularly enjoy this, "his main claim to fame was shooting an unarmed man named Louis Hancock in an Arizona territory saloon in 1879 for ordering beer after Ringo told him to order whiskey." indeed!

what a world to live in. why are people such pantywaists now? just staying alive is no longer a challenge, and it doesn't take any grit to make your way in the world and have enough to eat. not that i want to live in a lawless sideshow where i can get my ass killed by ordering the wrong drank, but it can't be much worse than the current state of affairs, right? rush limbaugh, twitter, two girls one cup? or using a block of ice as a refrigerator, bathing once a fortnight and dying in childbirth. what's worse? honestly - on the fence about that one.

all this reminds me of tombstone, 1994. oh my god i love this movie. it is so, so cheesy, but val kilmer! and sam elliott. i feel like i've made this post before.

check out that piece of consumptive ass. anyway, the movie's out of control, but i'm into it. historically, highly inaccurate. but who's counting? ~neither~ of wyatt earp's wives were that cute, despite being prostitutes (in a day when being attractive and selling sex: not necessarily found in a pair), nor was big nose kate some kind of sexy espanish siren, john ringo did NOT know latin nor did he kill that many people, and wyatt did not kill him. what else. the gunfight obviously didn't go down that way either. i hate that shit. also weird, boot hill isn't where it was in that day. what the fuck is with transporting cemetaries from one place to another.

one weird event that was sort of truly captured in the film was the accidental shooting of the marshall fred white by curly bill broci0us. he accidentally killed his biff! too sad. i just read that that went down on the site that later became the birdcage theatre. 1. i thought the birdcage was already standing when all this bullshit went down? and 2. no wonder that place is so fucking creepy. and it IS. tombstone is trite as hell and sort of "dirty disney" now, and by that i mean fake & manufactured, yet also still just a shitty small town where you're hard pressed to find a place to eat that doesn't have picnic tables or a bunch of flies on the screen door. anyway, in spite of the lameness, the birdcage is interesting - dark, dusty, chilly and quiet. the creepiest spots to me were the old bedrooms where the gals would take their quarries for the night. it was like all that shit was still in the air, the walls, the floors. come to think of it, i've got some pics from the last time i was there in 05.

that's a weird wyatt earp mannequin. apparently the caretaker finds his hat on the floor below on a lot of mornings.

bullet holes in the stage

a chamber of ill (the illest!) repute. who wouldn't i murder to get those drapes.

curly bill sat in this chair! oh my gadd. they say he was sitting there getting a haircut when they came to apprehend him for shooting fred white.

i love these parts. i think this was around benson.

and the biggest rosebush in the world. tombstone has it all.

I drove out to Albuquerque this week for a friend's birthday. I like solo road trips because I can indulge all of my annoying behaviors, like having to pee every 45 minutes and wanting to stop and look at EVERYTHING.

Twin Arrows! The light was awful, and I am lazy. Took shitty pics like this all day long. I was surprised to see the arrows have been restored recently. I thought the place had been abandoned longer than 11 years...looks longer. A metal sheet closing off one of the kitchen doors had been pried up and away...I wanted to go inside, but chose to be prudent for once due to being out there on my own. Too many movies have left me a little wary out by ramshackle rural places.

Holbrook isn't a nice place.





I loved the El Rancho in Gallup. Everyone stayed there, even Tom Mix! oh, damn.



Around Window Rock. This was definitely the most picturesque spot on the route. Really gorgeous area. I got waylaid at a trading post talking to a kid who was shipped up there by his parents from Tucson after he got into trouble selling drugs for MS 13. Now he sells $5 rugs and hangs out in Gallup. There are worse things.





Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains.

watching ray charles on dick cavett.

JETTEXAS

giant is one of my favorite movies, and not based on the integrity of the thing as a whole. the entire point of interest to me (and the rest of the planet) is james dean as jett rink. it's impossible to not instantly feel that slinky dog quiet raw pain of his, and yet it's not overacted at all. that makes one of you, rock hudson. in the end, it's hard for me to accept him as a middle aged jett, but the crusty, miserable self-abusive routine makes it convincing enough.

frank worth

i don't usually realize that i've fallen for a movie until i find myself thinking about it later.

my favorite movie of allllllll time (gone with the wind is sort of the figurehead of this subject, but that's another story) is A FACE IN THE CROWD. a kazan film that fairly tanked when it came out, even though it was so forward for its time. a very sharp and unromantic look at america, advertising, television, fame, corruptive relationships, crowds. andy griffith is lonesome roads. i cannot believe what an incredible actor he was, SO GOOD, and oddly really magnetic and dynamic. he's such a dirty dog and so charming about it although lacking most traditional types of charm. tell you what, it feels kind of strange to be hot for andy of mayberry. patricia neal was great in this movie as well. i love the way he is constantly shouting in this movie.