Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

The light-up entrance sign at the Unicorn Motel on 82nd street. I want to party here so bad.

Now I can’t remember this guy’s name, which is the same name as the store. It’s kind of a junky store that sells mattresses and electronics on 82nd. That’s the owner’s huge head, looming Oz-like over the front door.

Found at a thrift store today. Jeremy and I watched this film a couple of months ago where Phillip Seymour Hoffman has this ridiculous gambling addiction. I was watching it thinking, what could be more fucked up? And Jeremy was like, ‘I want a gambling problem.’ Sorta makes me wish I was still a cub scout. It would be so cool to have these sewn onto my uniform.

More bad news.

On Christmas eve, Jeremy, Donna and I played a new (?) game called ‘Who, What, Where’ at Your Father’s Place, which is a pretty decent bar. Has anyone been there (besides Kathy)? There’s been an elderly group that shows up and sits at a table in the front and they just drink coffee and do word searches. They’re the coolest. Anyway, in this game, there are three sets of cards: a Who deck (all famous people), a What deck (mainly kooky activities) and a Where deck. You pull randomly and end up with a kind of exquisite corpse/mad libs type sentance, like ‘Big Foot tap-dancing in Paris’ or something. It’s kind of like Pictionary, but less stressfull. Each player gets a sheet of paper to draw their own wacky thing and a scoresheet. After four or five minutes, you guess on another player’s drawing, getting a point for each correctly described drawing. And the artist gets a point if the who, what, where are correct. Here’s a ‘best of’ from some of the early games. Jenny, Katherine and Parrish showed up later to play, but by that point, it seemed to become really, really hard guessing each other’s drawings. It could have been the beer. See if you can guess what these sketches are about. A perfect answer will receive a prize.

I had a really good holiday, but I’m already feeling that post-xmas malaise. Last night I remember how when I was a kid, we opened our presents on xmas morning and then, inevitably had to go to church. And then when we’d get back, the malaise had already kinda set in and it was like, ‘oh yeah… presents… big whoop.’

Has anyone read this while logging in to blogger? Jeez!

A quick lunch excursion today (Pal’s Shanty, closed Sundays) kicked off one of those fun Portland odysseys into the outer reaches. I feel like I haven’t even begun to go out and start photographing this town, which is really screwed up, because Portland is comparable to New Orleans for its density of great obscure outlying places. The Cameo Motel is on Sandy, near 82nd street (and that great jug-shaped bar). I’d like to check out those amazing ‘tv phones’.

Jeremy and I saw this thrift store and freaked out. It looked amazing from outside. It was really dirty and disappointing and shockingly expensive. I do really like how these old bridal gowns are lining up for their mug shots.

I’m not sure what the numbering system meant.

If I had a time machine, I would just travel back to the classic grocery stores I remember from New Orleans in the 70s: National Canal Villiere, Schwegmans, Ferera Yaeger (all deceased now). If there’s anything better than discovering an old time-warp grocery store, I’m not sure what that is. I didn’t think anything could top an old Ingals in Ashville, NC, but this place was preserved in moth balls I suspect. It still had a very 70’s color scheme and lettering system for each section.

Jeremy has an excellent expose of The Puppies on monotonous.

I guess I’ve been kind of estranged from calendars lately, cause I didn’t realize xmas is next week. Ugh. Somehow I thought I had more time. Since the group of us live in a somewhat more conservative neighborhood than we used to, it’s been decided that the lights will have to come down after the holiday, instead of staying up until the they burn out one by one. Jeremy suggested that we do the whole house in opaque blue lights next year. I think it will look really cool. Perhaps we could have ‘Christmas Time is Here’ by Charles Guaraldi looping on outside speakers for maximum gloomy effect.

I kept wondering if it was real or not. It was just so perfectly still. I had lunch at the Meijer and Frank luncheon room (a place were shopping ladies can lunch) and was sad I wasn’t there with my grandmother, though the waitress did give us those little mints afterwards that are super chalky.

This old department store downtown, apparently really used to be somthing back in its day. Seems like most cities have killed off these white elephants, causualties in the Target/Walmart war, so it’s nice to see one so well preserved. I did a day in NY where I just walked around the big flagship stores like Saks and Bloomies and Macys and they’re incredibly impressive and movie-set-ish to the point of seeming unreal (esp. Saks), but I like the democratic middle class places (like R.I.P. Maison Blanche or Holmes used to be in New Orleans).

Did everyone see Patrick and Kelly’s pictures of Iceland? They’re pretty amazing.

This train yard/warehouse area was three blocks from my old apartment in Brooklyn and is being planned by Jay Z and Frank Gehry (!) to become a massive sports stadium complex for the NJ Nets. I know it really doesn’t matter anymore, but it disturbed me how NY Newsday kind of made it seem like a good chunk of Prospect Heights was going to get swallowed up in this plan, which seems likely since the area in question is not that wide and the plans unveiled show a massive stadium with skyscrapers and bunch of other stuff. The whole thing really infuriated me on so many levels: 1) the place was starting to chug out of its slump on its own. Those warehouses on Dean and Pacific were being turned into lofts. A lot of small business and grocery stores were opening. 2) Areas around stadiums are miserable. There’ll be nothing but sports bars and date raper jar heads trying to park their SUVs. And 3) Frank Gehry = pukey architecture. In Santa Monica, where every other building is the work of that flavor of the month, I worked in a Gehry building and it was the most shoddy, poorly planned space I’d ever been in. His work is kind of instantly dated before it’s even finished.
Shockingly, the Times is in love with the whole idea and compared it to Rockerfeller Center and Battery Park. Make sure you check out the slide show.

Over two years ago, when I moved to NY from LA, I guess I lost a roll of film that was taken in Utah. I shot so many rolls of film during this trip, but I distinctly remember taking shots of this weird caveman statue. Since I didn’t really unpack until months later, I just assumed I’d lost it. Then I get back a roll of film that was still in the camera until recently and I find all these double exposures over the lost roll. I guess I hadn’t used my childhood 35mm camera since I moved East. I took it with me on the recent trip to Astoria.

Here you can see Jeremy and Katherine’s old apartment building transposed adobe village style into the side of a cliff in Utah.

Here’s the famous caveman shot, though I think this statue has something to do with Mormonism. Not sure.

That’s the Goonies’ house floating ghostlike above the desert rock formation.

Same thing here. It’s sad I have no good Goonies house pictures now since I forgot to take any digital pictures when I was there.

Oh, Megan and Elizabeth, please send me your addresses.

Somehow I managed to spend most of the weekend in various thrift stores and Asian grocery stores. This is The Bins above, which has kinda sucked the last two times I’ve been there. Katherine and I argued about $1.25 a pound being a good price on clothing. The first time I went here, I didn’t have a big car to take anything home and the place was loaded with cheap furniture and all sorts of crazy stuff. This is where Jeremy’s organ was purchased (and they always seem to have one, bigger and better than the last time).

Remember when your parent’s credit cards looked like this?

This was the beginning of a crazy stretch of downtown that included a three story western wear store, which I went crazy over.

This was from the third floor of the western wear store. There were no clerks upstairs and I could just wander around and take pictures.

Pretty much the whole room was filled with saddles.

The second floor was more of a mezzanine of formal men’s wear.

This is what most bars look like in New Orleans, also part of the amazing mezzanine.

This was a strip club in Beaverton we saw on our way to a Japanese super grocery. I’d bet anything this was once a ‘Sambos’ restaurant.

The parking lot of a Lamplighter Inn.

Out near Oregon City, heading to the Red White and Blue thrift store, we got lured into checking out this old grocery store because it looked REALLY seventies from the road. It turned out to be pretty unspecial, but all of the signs in the windows were made with copious amounts of glitter.

So I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. We went over to Paul and Molly’s house and had one of the best Thanksgivings that anyone could remember.

There was tons of food. Paul and Molly cooked their brains out and then everyone brought really amazing stuff. There really wasn’t a single bad thing on the crowded table.

This was Jeremy’s artichoke dip. I ate way too much of it before dinner and then ate a second platter of it when I came home last night. I felt really sick afterwards.

They had a great covered front porch where most of us hung out for the day.

Today, I checked out this ancient McDonald’s on Powell Rd.

Jeremy and I kinda freaked out when we saw it for the first time a week ago. Today, I thought I saw people inside, like people from the fifties, stuck in some kind of Twilight Zone time warp. But it was decorated to host McDonald’s birthday parties. There was a real McDonalds about 20 yards away.

Later on, we headed out to a weird store in the NW called Wacky Wallys that mostly sold medical supplies and weird electronic parts, like diodes and circuits and stuff.

All these Teddy Ruckspins were $3 each. Part of me wanted to buy about 2 dozen of these but I couldn’t think of any purpose for them.