Every time I hear Marion Harris' version of Tea For Two (more often than you'd think; it's 1934 over on 8tracks), I think of Big Edie Beale singing along to an old recording in her squalid bedroom.  She's obviously transported at one point and really gets into it, reliving her prior glories.



This scene was one of the most memorable for me.  Big Edie shaking her arms at her daughter saying, "Dance to that waltz! How can you resist that?"

I love music of the 20s and 30s, but some songs are just way too adorable and saccharine or goofy for me to handle, and Tea For Two was one of them.  Rarely do I want to hear a song that you can tap dance to.  Still, Grey Gardens changed my mind and I quite like it now.  I think Doris Day is the reason why I couldn't deal with the song, originally.  Although I think she's an under-appreciated actress, she was often styled in a way that created an almost toxic combination of cuteness and squareness.

The real DD seems to be a bit of a badass.  Yes, be.  She still lives.


DD 1950


Marion Harris 1924

Researches

I miss this.  I tend to pick topics that are hard and ultimately probably unrewarding, but are nevertheless things that I MUST KNOW.

Current topic: What (if anything) stood on the land that now hosts my office building?  We are in a residential area that has a really curious mix of housing, age-wise.  We are just a couple of miles outside of the original Phoenix city limits, so it's reasonably likely that there was something there in the 19th century or around the turn of the century.  It could have been orchards, farmland, perhaps a mix of the three with a dwelling, etc.  We are close the the state hospital (formerly: The Insane Asylum of Arizona), too, which was located on a sprawling acreage that included orchards, grain crops and vineyards, but I have no real concept of how large 160 acres is, so I can't tell if we are close enough to have been part of that, or if the hospital ever even got rid of any of that land.  I haven't found a map of the hospital from that time.  Sidebar, the hospital also has its own cemetery with graves dating back to 1888.  Want to see!  It seems pretty securified there, though, and like many places, probably won't let me in.

Obviously, the reason I want to know is because of THE GHOST.  I mean, the alleged ghost.  I haven't seen shit and that is fine.  But continued conversations with someone who claims to have seen it indicate that it wears a giant, oddly-shaped hat the likes of which your great-great grandmother was probably into.

There are precious few early Phoenix maps that are of any use for this.  The Assessor's office doesn't seem to have any historic property info.  Do parcel numbers change, ever?  How can we keep track if they change them?  I can't seem to find anything about the previous zoning or address situation of any given parcel.  The current residential developments around us cannot be original - they're inexpensive 40s and 50s builds, some of which appear to have been built to house airport personnel.  And one street over, we have much earlier homes.

Because we are so close to the original city center, and not far off the path people used to get to Tempe, and because we are right smack in between the downtown area and the hospital (which was pretty impressive at the time and therefore a bit of a landmark), it seems likely to me that there could have been a few scattered homes in the vicinity of our office building.  Perhaps more than a few.  I'll find out eventually.

1890s hospital administration enjoying their "lake" hole

Westward

I just love that Robrt Pela at the New Times.  He is an outspoken and prolific preservationist who has gotten inside many of Phoenix's shuttered historic buildings downtown.  He expresses adequately the outrage that I feel about beautiful things being torn down and replaced by repugnant mundanity.

Last weekend, my dad, brother and I were thrown out of the Westward Ho after trying to sneak in to explore.  I thought we had made it after one of the residents negotiated the front buzzer for us, but a security guard quickly intervened.  He wouldn't even let us check out the lobby in which we were standing, and no amount of polite explanation (my dad) or angry-child outbursts (me) would change his mind.  He wouldn't even let me take photos.  Outrageous.

Robrt Pela made it in as described in this descriptive but photo-short article.  

This site has photos that seem recent.

This crappy site has some interesting pictures of the "tunnels" and a short video including some interior shots.

I'm just excited that so much of it has been preserved.  Unfortunately, there is no touring of the building due to "liability," which - fine.  But whose stupid idea was it to turn that building into a home for the old and disabled, thus closing it to the outside world forever?  Was there not a more appropriate, public use for such a building?

I'm not really aware of interesting WH trivia, and I've rarely heard it discussed among the old, native or history crowds.

"A long, elaborately-choreographed but awkwardly-executed dance"

Here is an article in which Jonathan Franzen and Clay Shirky debate whether technology is good, toxic or both.

The most interesting thing to me about internet culture is how it creates or facilitates relationships and interactions that would never occur otherwise.  This is particularly significant in the case of people who are reserved or not prone to making lots of new friends in their "irl" lives.  Suddenly, no one is totally inaccessible.  Potential friends and creeps alike have multiple avenues by which to pursue your attention.  In the past, when meeting interesting strangers or friends of friends, you generally had to rely on happenstance or time in order to get to know them.  You couldn't just go home and learn about them in anonymous privacy.  You couldn't just send a message that would instantly appear before their face, forcing the situation, the immediate extraction of a response.

Overall, I think it's a good thing that interactions are so easily had.  It makes it easy and less frightening to connect with someone you would never have a chance to know.  It helps the socially inept, the lazy, the reclusive, the avoidant and the noncommittal to carry on some semblance of a social life.  It helps to overcome otherwise deterring circumstances.

Example: I'm friends with someone my ex briefly dated.  I didn't know they were dating and she didn't know he was my ex.  It was a situation that could have been weird, but wasn't.  We chatted in person and later made internet friends, and I put her in contact with my out-of-town best friend because both women were about to move to the same city.  Weeks later I received a Snapchat of my old BFF and my new buddy drinking together in a bar in New York.  Technology!  The future!  Improbable connections made from random situations occurring thousands of miles apart.  In a historical context, I don't think it would have been possible for us to connect the way we did, with social mores generally dictating that we should be awkward around each other due to the nature of our mutual connection.  Or maybe she and I are just grown ass men who don't care about trifling shit.  Either way, it's a weird example, but they're all weird examples.

Still, in making private stranger-interactions so easy, the internet in turn makes them less meaningful, because there is almost no risk involved.  Interactions can almost seem random, motivated by boredom or curiosity rather than a genuine interest or purpose.  It's easy to stay in some vague contact with someone you don't care about, someone who otherwise would have fallen from your life like a dead leaf if you had to maintain that connection in person.  In the end, many of these relationships strike me as a false pantomime of human interaction.

Office Ghost

I recently learned that several people have seen an apparition in the building where I work.  Where does this apparition like to hang out?  Outside my office door.

Although I am generally skeptical of what most people believe about the paranormal, I still acknowledge that I have heard convincing stories from trusted sources, and have experienced some mid-level weird shit myself.  As a child, I was obsessed with ghost stories and had stacks of books of them.  This slowed into adulthood, but I have spent many an hour trawling Fortean Times' "It Happened to Me!" board, another source of high quality weird shit.  As such, I pay more attention than most when I hear about real, live stories of house hauntings.

Immediately upon receiving this rumor, I texted our admin and treated him to a Macaulay Culkin/John Candy in Uncle Buck style rapid fire questioning session.

B: I hear you saw a ghost and didn't tell me about it.
K: I've seen her three times.
B: TELL ME.
K: She's not very scary, she just stands there and looks at me.
B: When.
K: Late at night.
B: What is she wearing.
K: A white dress and large white hat.
B: Old fashioned?
K: IDFK!
B: Where did you see her?
K: In the back hallway...In the corner.
B: Which corner.
K: West.
B: AT MY DOOR.
K: Bingo.


Any time I try to re-decide if I believe that things like ghosts exist, I remember our experiences in my childhood home.  While I have no expectation of understanding that arm of the paranormal, I think it's there.  I wrote a creepy overview of my experiences in the house a few years ago.

Earlier today, I came across an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that I liked a couple of years ago and marked to remember.  A oddly-timed reminder.


The Little Ghost
I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high - higher than most
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Til after she was gone-
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown's white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do - and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favorite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled
There was no hint of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused - then opened and passed through
A gate that was once there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1917

Is it always like this?

Music for Moody Children from initials bb on 8tracks Radio.

Music to have a tantrum to.
Just kidding.  This music is awesome.

There's a very young Nick Cave, then some more Australians, Cocteau Twins singing in their made up baby language, classic Cure, my favorite Dead Can Dance song, extremely depressing NIN, amazing mid-90s Siouxsie, an excerpt from the dreariest Cure album ever, and we prefer to forget the last news stories about Peter Murphy as we listen to songs from Love Hysteria. THE END.

Supernatural vigilantism

I hexed someone when I was 13.  This style of revenge may or may not have been influenced by the movie The Craft.

My mother's boyfriend was the sort of timeless asshole that no one wants for a step-father.  Self-importance, manipulation, toxic emotional issues and an unchecked temper were among his lesser qualities.  I had hated him instantly, and he knew it.  Our relationship was a power struggle; I was the mutinous pre-teen, he was the selfish adult who resented the presence of a prior child.  We fought constantly.

Problems had been escalating between he and my mother.  Although he had been sober when she met him, he had returned to bouts of problem drinking, which exacerbated his temperamental moods and combative behavior.  It was my best friend who suggested I find an alternative means to destroy him.

I've been interested in occult matters for as long as I've been able to read, but had never really considered witchcraft to be a viable hobby.  I had by this time rejected organized religion, but was otherwise fairly superstitious and possibly hoping that there might be some other natural force to take the place of religion.  At the same time, I was skeptical enough to be unafraid.  I planned the hex.

I bought a tiny glass bottle with a cork stopper and hid it in my room for a few weeks. The next time he made me angry, I went to his bathroom and removed loose hairs from his brush.  I needed to burn them, but wasn't sure how, so I grabbed some nail polish remover and a spoon.  I put the hairs in the spoon with a little pool of the remover and set it on fire while I watched after school TV in our den.  I blew the flame out before the noxious fluid could evaporate, poured it into my bottle, and corked it.

After that, I took the bottle outside and dashed it hard against a concrete paver in our yard while reasoning diplomatically that he had brought this on himself.  The bottle shattered into thick wet shards, which I kicked into the lantana.

I solemnly confided the story to my best friend the next day at school.  She was impressed; normally her role was to be the rebel and I was the square, and she hadn't believed that I would do it.  We both felt a little apprehensive of what was to come.  When a week passed without incident, I began to suspect the curse to be a dud.  Not enough hair, maybe.  Or maybe I should have said a little incantation.  Or done it at midnight, or on a full moon.  Something.  With no apparent curse activity, I soon forgot it.

A year or two later, I started to more actively read about the history of witchcraft (depressing) and the contemporary state of it (embarrassing).  I read about various rituals for various effects, and remembered my little curse.  I was thinking about how it hadn't worked when I remembered the timeline afterwards.

Shortly after that day, probably 1-2 months later, my mother's boyfriend fell and fractured his leg.  This was his "good" leg as he had lost the other one below the knee in a motorcycle accident years before.  The temporary disablement had badly increased his drinking and shitty temper, which erupted in a terrible fight with my mother in which she finally ended the relationship.  Breaking his last good leg and getting dumped and evicted did seem like a crop of unusually bad luck...

Naturally I refuse to allow one way or the other that my two-bit little kid hex was the catalyst to his misfortune and ultimate removal from my life, but the events certainly were timely, and I enjoy the story.  They say that people committing malicious magical deeds are subject to three times the damage that the hex inflicts, a sort of three-eyes-for-an-eye spiritual punishment for bad behavior.  I have no way of knowing if I received this rebuke from the universe for my hex, because I entered high school immediately thereafter, and untangling the regular troubles of that age from those inflicted by supernatural policy would be impossible.  I never tried any such thing again.

But just in case, make it a policy that you don't end up in anyone's bottle, especially not one belonging to a pubescent girl.

I've been tearing through a collection of stories by Dorothy Parker.  What a tricky trickster, hiding her caustic and wounding messages behind a screen of neutrality and intentionally sparse writing.  It must be highly disorienting for people who take everything (or anything) at face value.  We wouldn't know.

Someone I used to know referred to me for years as Little Dorothy Parker.  I was mildly offended at the time - "You make a couple of sarcastic remarks and suddenly you're the queen of the miserable blades?" but I got over it.  I don't think he had ever read anything I wrote, so perhaps he was just trying to let me know that he knew about a writer, namedropping the dead.

I'm always surprised (sometimes offended) by the way people perceive me, either because I do find it to be wildly inaccurate, or so loaded up with their own projections as to be useless or irrelevant to comment on.  Luckily, I no longer care how I am treated in the minds of people who aren't part of my ever tightening sphere.  I always said I didn't care before, but now it's real.  The magic of aging!  These days, the only people who are still able to set me into fits and reactionary tantrums are, of course, my parents.  They have lived to thrice regret every sideways comment they have made about religion or politics in my presence.  As they should.  #adolescent

In Parker's stories, everyone is deluded, a bore, smugly bourgeois, self-obsessed or all of the above.  She lets her characters hang themselves with no encouragement or comment.  That's a skill I'd like to master: silently and invisibly allowing people to show their flaws or ill intent without having to offer my commentations.  But I have so many of them!

In one of Truman Capote's later stories, the title of which I've forgotten but it's from the unfinished "Answered Prayers," he recreates, falsifies or recounts a night in which a drunk Dorothy Parker and Tallulah Bankhead show up to a dinner party where they meet an also-wasted Montgomery Clift. At this time, he is young, beautiful, on the cusp of his career and gay as a parade, which doesn't stop the crones from delightedly and lasciviously batting him around.  It stuck with me, although any story about him makes me sad.

Sometimes, those alarmist articles re: "What's wrong with Generation __!" strike a chord of fear inside me if I recognize more than two quirks of my own in those lazy numbered lists.  I begin to think that my behaviors are out of my control, are part of some sort of fated wave of bad luck and bad responses.

That, of course, sounds a hell of a lot more like astrology than psychology, and even though my pinterest has 47 instances of 17th century etchings of star paths, I hope it's clear on what side I fall.

The "quirk" that frightens me most about the pop culture generation I belong to is the Peter Pan thing.  I hate the idea of being emotionally frozen between adolescence and adulthood.  I accept that people like myself will APPEAR to be grown children to older generations, but that's just because I don't have kids and use most of my disposable income buying rocks* on the internet.

But I think that the appearance of one's life - however ridiculous - is fine as long as they continue to mentally evolve.  Rejecting the traditional life milestones does make it hard to mark movement along the path, though.  The easiest way for me to measure whether or not I am a sophisticated-ass grown up is imagining how I would respond today if met with the various interpersonal offenses I experienced in my twenties.  Infractions, negative encounters with friends and lovers, the usual stuff.  Without even having to think about specifics, I know that none of the various instances would either have happened or have been stood if they were to occur now.  Confusing way to describe what I am saying, but I think racking up emotional intelligence points is going to be the only criteria that I care about re: Am I successful?  What is my life about!  Do I exist?  That and having enough $$$ to continue shopping at Mainely Agates: Agates from Maine.

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*not a drug reference.  just regular silicate mineral stuff.

When your niceguy facade finally melts away at work,