Parting Shots

A few final, random thoughts on Arizona:

• Three days here, and I reiterate my scruffy but well scrubbed comment about the boys here. The only time I saw a tattoo was on a fat woman at Wal-Mart. (I know, I know. Lock me up, but I needed a watch battery and didn't have time to waste.) It really reminded me how I want to launch my campaign for a tattoo-free America by 2012. If I want to read in bed, I'll pick up Proust, not look at the ink on my man's ass.
• Why, oh why, would old people want to retire to a place where it's over 90 degrees 90% of the year. I do love the high desert of Flagstaff, Prescott, etc. but Phoenix and Tucson are what I call hell. When I retire, I feel that I have earned my right to live someplace (likely Victoria) where it rarely gets above 60 degrees.
• On top of that I would like to make it illegal for anyone over 55 to wear shorts in public. Most definitely myself included in that.
  
• I am notoriously not attracted to blonds except for those that are a sub-category of those noted in bullet point number 1 and who seem to be in abundance in Arizona -- the aforementioned scruffy and scrubbed, light growth of beard, thinning to premature balding, lightly furry but not those hideous cotton candy forearms, lean but lightly defined, sweetly edgy and slight assertive. Perfection and grow like cacti on the highway here.
• What's up with the "You came at a nice time of year. The weather's gonna be perfect today." It's 95 fucking degrees in Phoenix today! Sorry, there's no amount of air conditioning that can compensate for that.
  
• Say what I may about those libertarian Republicans here, I commend them for providing free internet access at Sky Harbor allowing me to post this piece before I board my plane.
  

TUCSON

As if it weren't confusing enough that you take I-10 East to El Paso in order to go south to Tucson, all the exits through central Tucson where blocked for road construction with only one tiny sign saying you are supposed to use the access road as the freeway through the central part of the city. Being short on time for an appointment, I was screaming like a girl with rabies but did make it on time, albeit frazzled and cursing that I'd ordered a venti coffee 30 minutes earlier..
Doorway art. Don't ask.
Downtown has a lot of this and stumpy "highrise", sort of a large El Paso or tiny San Diego.


Ah, the start of a wonderful friendship. Any scowling barbs will be immediately deleted!!!!
A lot of this between Tucson and Phoenix. More than once I thought I was going from San Diego to Orange County and then remembered where I was.
I was pushing it to make it to the airport, so just managed to snap this campus shot just as a pack of scruffy-scrubbies scampered ou of my view.

Arizona Highways (as Seen by a Californian)

Lots of miles, lots meetings in less than 30 hours, but I couldn't keep my loyal readers in the lurch. So here's a rundown of Monday and Tuesday.
I have been getting around the state in a Chevy HHR. I'd never seen or heard of such a thing. Imagine a PT Cruiser with birth defects.

TUBA CITY

I spent Monday on a Hopi and Navajo reservation east of Tuba City. Fascinating visits to several villages where photography is not allowed, but I saw several sweat lodges and hogans. I did manage to snap these shots at the little known Coal Mine Canyon on the western edge of the reservation.

Near the San Francisco range south of Tuba City on route 89.

FLAGSTAFF
Huh, huh. I said beaver.
No jokes about the snarling. Having been there twice this year, I think Flagstaff (or Flag as locals call it) has one of the highest cute boy indexes of any college town in the west. Just scruffy enough to have an edge in a freshly scrubbed way. I was thinking about not actually seeing one of them as this one was shot.
Seeing me take self-snaps, an especially yummy boy kindly shot this one of me, but I wasn't so bold as to ask him to let me do the same. Anyway, you can see that he made me smile. I wanted to see if he could make me really smile, though.
Oh, the art.
Overall, I much prefer Flagstaff to Sedona, at least people-wise.

ROUTE 89A to Sedona
Embiggen to get the joke. It amused me for the 5 minutes waiting to pass a one lane road.


Scenery on the route.
Scenery with scowling Californian.
Did you know they have a lot of cacti in Arizona? The stay in Sedona was mercifully brief. Honestly, I'd love the place if it weren't for the locals and the tourists there.

Jamiroquai You Say? No Way!

I've always loved the campy performances of Vincent Price and the bizarrely macho-homoerotic flicks of Samuel Fuller. House of Bamboo is a great piece of evidence, if only for its wacky production aesthetic. However, I never knew that Fuller and Price once collaborated on the gloriously wacko The Baron of Arizona, a little known film of more than half a century ago about an equally obscure tidbit of lore of wild west self-deluded aristocracy equal to Emperor Norton.

At first it seems a tad odd to see Price in a Western, but he's soon hanging out at a monastery, and then off to Paris and Madrid, making me long to be back in the madre españa in outfits that make his turn in Laura seem outright butch. Oh, the floral waist coats, glam bauble adorned hats, scarves and lace cuffs!

My only complaint with the usually thorough Criterion is that there aren't any extras or director commentary in this volume of the set of early Fuller films. But it's worth checking out, if only for the gloriously arch dialogue. A few samples:

Narrator: But the Baron would not see the Contessa that night as he said. He had other plans. He was ready to come out in the open!

The Baron: Aren’t you happy to see me?

Sophia: I can’t see you for the tears.

The Baron (First in a scene with the Contessa and then with Sophia): I have been with many women before, but with you I am…afraid!

Sophia: I loved you from that first time you gave me a second piece of candy.

I will have to remember this lines the next time I am back in Arizona or, better yet, Spain and can claim my royal heritage.

Gusty Winds May Exist

Sixteen hours on the road, 778 miles and the upper triple digits in gas purchases (probably more than I put into my Saturn for all of 2006), and still a few hundred miles to go before reaching home. I'm sure everyone is just dying to know the mundane details of this journey, but since my two brain cells are barely functioning, I'll just share a few shots I managed to nab during the day. I promise not to have so many shots of my scowling ugly face once I am back home.

Welcome to the Cadillac ranch...
...with a rather sleazy looking docent to guide you.
Such politically correct, high minded culture here in Arizona!

No remarks on squinting and scowling unless you can smile while staring into the sun when it's 102 degrees.
I didn't stay here but liked the sign.
At the Flagstaff depot.
This must have been taken in...uh...Flagstaff too.

Not That I Would Ever Vote for McCain...

...but Phoenix Sky Harbor is the only U.S. airport I have been in recently to provide free wirless. God only knows, I might be prepared to put a little cash into the Arizona economy as a result of that. But then it's going to be 95 degrees here. Ugh. Luckily this is just a one hour, indoor transit visit.

Distinguishing the Faux from the Fakes

Do you have a favorite style of regional architecture? Growing up on the Great Plains, I saw a lot of faux Tudor, Prairie Provencial, Sage Brush Deco, Cattle Baron Baroque and Airplane bungalows. My favorite was always faux Tudor, and I would always get into arguments with my mother when she spoke of it dismisively. "Isn't it redundant to call if 'faux'? As if anyone thinks that an original Tudor mansion was built in Omaha." She would point out that the London Bridge had been transplanted to Arizona, so it would be much easier to dismantle, ship and reconstruct a Tudor home somewhere in Topeka, so it was important to be accurate.

I was always struck that John and Cynthia Lennon lived in a faux Tudor home in Kenwood, letting us know that faux is not a uniquely Midwestern pretense. We always associate John's home with the Yoko years at the Dakota, but that house in Kenwood was always the one that I adored. When I listened to "I Am the Walrus" and John sang the line about sitting in his English garden, I was always annoyed that it seemed redundant to call a garden in Kenwood English. Would someone in Kansas say they had a Kansas garden?

That song, particulary the image of the custard coming from a dead dog's eye, was when my mother started becoming concerned about my obsesson with the Beatles and John in particular. So it was with considerable resistance that she caved in early in 1969 to help me make the transition from clunky plastic framed glasses to uber-hip John Lennon wire framed glasses -- er, I mean faux John Lennon wire framed glasses.

The Lennons' faux Tudor home could have passed for one in Kansas City's Westport or Oklahoma City's Nichols Hills, though it was smaller than the ones there. One thing my mother and I did agree about was that Cynthia was always our favorite Beatle wife. Mind you, I adore Yoko and always came to her defense, but Cynthia's long suffering angst really earned her many a badge of courage. But the name the Plastic Powell (her maiden name) Band probably lacked the level of menace that John was after.

Around the time Rubber Soul was released, the Camelot Inn opened in Tulsa, and I always forced my parents to stop there on our trips back and forth to Kansas City or St. Louis. They made the best faux reuben sandwiches on the Great Plains. The Camelot was not really a true faux Tudor design but sort of a modernist Tudor homage. I was particularly fascinated by the knights' armour that could be found throughout the lobby. During its eventual demise, the Camelot became even more fascinating than during its heydey. It has long since disappeared, an embodiment of All Things Must Pass and a reminder that it's really hard to find true faux these days.

Left Turn Yield on Green?

Once upon a time, I actually had mild respect for John McCain as a Republican who would not sell his soul to the flock of sewer maggot Evangelicals. It seems they have since infested his brain like the maggots that they are, moving from the fecal matter of Bush's shallow, alcoholic cranium to the septuagenarian senator (already a year older than Reagan when he first ran) from Arizona. Tonight we hear him on 60 Minutes, musing, "I say 'I know that I can.' But I also believe that America is a right-of-center nation. And I think that Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, with all due respect, are liberal Democrats. And I'm a conservative Republican. So I believe I can make a better case to the American people."

Just when it seems that any hope for the future of the world lies outside of the U.S., there was speculation that The Right would take back power in Spain. However, sanity prevailed, with tonight's election results proving that my plans to relocate there should not be abandoned. Though there is that little Euro-dollar conversion thing. At least you can still get gas for $1.98 a gallon in Ecuador .

Which D Scare Us the Most?

Despair is one of the most maligned emotions, and it is the one that has been on many of our minds recently. All people, regardless of political stripes, seem to feel it about the economy. A likely -- we hope definite -- majority feel it about a McCain-Palin White House. That woman who told John McCain that Obama is "an Arab" obviously felt it in her murky mental haze that gave even the Arizona Senator a certain pause. Though this supposedly brave warrior lacked the courage and decency to respond, "And wouldn't our country and world be a better place if, in fact, he were?"

Wouldn't we all long to erase despair from the earth? It seems to be part of that horrible, sequential trilogy of Ds -- dread, despair and depression (or as many are filled with dread and despair will translate into Depression not just depression). We have an entire industry that provides us with little pills that we believe will protect us from these three dreaded Ds, yet they never manage to erase their root causes.

Much of my life I have experienced at least one or all three of these Ds, sometimes coming from divergent streams. At the moment I feel only a slight part of the first one, but it's not even that pronounced. I only appreciate that I feel it, acknowledge it and don't yield to it. Am I just singing another word for nothin' left to lose or have I reached a point of contentment without even realizing it?

Finding the Fatherland in Torrance

Although I often think that I am a typically rootless Californian, having only recently landed here, the truth is I have nearly a century of family history in the state. During my sojourn to southern California, I connected with various strains of my family, all connected by my great-grandfather -- "little Mr. Biggs" (he was barely five foot tall) -- who arrived here shortly after World War I in Torrance.

Torrance is a place where so many others I've known (Bryce Digdug, Friendatella, Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights) have roots. I've driven by it many times, glancing over at its towering oil derricks yet never felt compelled to actually enter this city where my great-grandfather brought many of his 10 children through the years while he wandered the country hitch-hiking, getting into bar room brawls and managing to shirk responsibility.

All of his children have been gone for nearly a decade, and on Thursday one of my cousins from Riverside took me to meet his first and oldest living grandchild, a woman of 99 whom I'd never heard of until recently. Her home was supposedly a museum to our family history, and I wanted the chance to meet her, especially since I'd heard that her health has been fading. She has recently been moved to an extended care facility that is in a private home in Huntington Beach. Two sweet Nicaraguan women greeted us and told us that she was napping but to go ahead and say hello. We knocked on the door and heard no response but entered, seeing a small bed with a mound of covers. My cousin boldly rustled the covers and then lifted them to unveil a tiny near-centurion without her teeth or glasses. A bit disoriented, she soon knew who my cousin was, and then I was introduced. I explained who my grandfather was, and she immediately responded "Oh, I used to play with Lucille." My heart nearly stopped. Lucille was my father's parents' first born child, who died in 1914 from a tragic accident at the age of three. I had never known of her as anything but a painful memory that caused my grandmother to leave the room in tears at the mention of her name. The tiny woman on the bed shared a couple of stories of playing with dolls and kittens with Luceille, and then my cousin reached for a pile of papers on her bedside that she had wanted us to have.

They were three essays she wrote in 1922 -- the year my father was born -- recounting the family's journey across the country to settle in California two years earlier. The descriptions were vivid and poetic, especially for someone only 12 when they were written. A polo match and chamber recital at the Broadmoor Hotel (which had opened only three years earlier) in Colorado Springs, the foul-mouthed, dirty oil field workers of Amarillo, a handsome Navajo boy's profile caught nearly romantically outside of Taos and a dirt road leading from Arizona into California were all captured with pointilistic detail.
My 99-year-old cousin is likely the young girl in the nautical hat above. My dad is the baby being held by his father, and his mother is the woman in the center with her head turned. This photo was probably taken around the time the family headed west, and my great grand father is the mustached man on the right.

Later that evening, I caught up with a dozen cousins in eastern Orange County, seeing my father's face reflected in almost half of the room. Amazingly, I had met only two of the relatives in the room, separated by thousands of miles and nearly 80 years of parallel lives until this journey.

Today, I felt compelled to actually enter Torrance -- a town that has produced a quirky list of celebrities that include Quenton Tarantino, Michelle Kwan, porn star Lucy Lee, several NFL, MLB and MLS players, Bill Clinton's brother Roger, a few NASCAR stars and guitarist Larry Carlton.

So I slipped over to where our family first settled in the late teen at 1321 Carson Boulevard, a mix use business of tax service, insurance and who knows what. It is surrounded by Circus Doughnuts, car washes and tire repair shops, panaderias and sushi joints.

With only minutes to spare I headed north to the famed Alpine Village, about a half a mile north of where my family first arrived in the west. Bryce Digdug often raves about this oddity on the Pacific. I've been to the "Danish village" of Solvang in northern Santa Barbara County and have enjoyed it tackiness. The Alpine Village makes Solvang look like a UNESCO cultural heritage site. When I arrived, I saw several thousand cars for a swap meet where people were sorting through rags. When the Filipino security guard asked if I were there for the swap meet, I responded that I was there for the Alpine Village and he looked a bit shocked. He pointed me to the parking lot where there were five other cars. I wandered around this odd, odd place and into its shops filled with large German women and smelling of must. Each spot smelled of mold, filled with dusty Hummel figurines or sun bleached copies of Der Spiegel. I managed to purchase a special memento just for Bryce and then headed north to LAX where I was greeted at Avis by a sea of swine flu obsessed attendants in surgical masks.