Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Some recent pictures from around the neighborhood. Today was kind of rainy and blase so a bunch of us ended up sitting inside and watched ‘cabin fever’ ‘ghost ship’, ‘lost in translation’ and ‘blue sunshine’. the last one is my favorite for all it’s footage of malls and apartments in 1970s LA.

As promised, pictures from Stephen’s 38th birthday party. I’m not sure who that cat is. The story is, I had left the party to sit in my car and cry after a girl said something mean about my outfit. And this cat jumped on the hood of the car and it was like God was sending me a little message of hope.

I read tonight that they may open an IKEA near the airport. I hate their furniture but secretly love/miss being able to go there. I saw a documentary about the company recently and was delighted to learn the very hands-on CEO was a former alcoholic nazi.

In front of the house, from months ago, on a very John Carpenter-y foggy night.

Harlem, fall 2003.

I saw the best movie last night, Los Angeles Plays Itself. It was a three hour documentary about locations used in movies shot in LA and what that tells you about the city. It was kind of like a Chris Marker film, in the way it associately jumped around from one idea to the other, all footnoted with movie clips from the obvious (Double Indemnity) to the obscure (Midnight Madness). This was the film I dreamed someone (mostly myself) would make about L.A. cause it was all about the idea of how do you photograph a city that conveys some kind of truth about the place (juxtaposed with the very LA-centric issue of ‘how do you photograph a place that’s already been featured in about thirty movies?’)? Having lived in L.A. for four years I constantly thought about how the place seemed to me with how it looked in the movies. My first house there was right next to the location of a famous Laurel and Hardy film and my next street was prominently featured in LA Confidential and Naked Gun. Both places were shown in the documentary and I kind of gasped, as if there’d been a brief glimpse of an old friend.

Also, if you have $2,000 dollars to blow, you could buy a print by William Eggleston.

Has anyone seen the commercial or much less tried Chaser?

happy lundi gras!

sigh… no pictures to post from the weekend. It’s not that I haven’t taken any, just that I’ve been mostly shooting film for the last two weeks and haven’t dropped anything new off at the lab. here’s a preview of what’s coming:

stephen’s house party

gay mannequins at the mall

kathy’s kiddnapping and shocking rescue

and hookings up of every single person in portland

otherwise, the final sex and the city turned out to be a real dud and i got much more emotional watching the final ’surreal life’.

One of the nicer neon signs in the neighborhood. Jeremy’s been threatening to fix it himself.

Skyview Diner, also used to have amazing neon, now gone.

Jeremy and I were just hanging out and then the need to record a hit single overwhelmed us.

It was very, very loud.

Katherine came down to show off her new gravity-defying haircut.

This should be in a different series, like ‘housework in the face of basement rockin’, though Jeremy pointed out how Katherine clearly belongs on the cover of the next Belle & Sebastian album.

I was trying to make her pose like Divine did in this still I remembered from ‘Hairspray’, though it ended up being more Belle & Sebastian than John Waters again.

Having realized that the secret to maximum feedback is pictures of Jenny, I present wall mural depictions of Jenny in various stages of her life. Here is young Jenny.

Here she is later on in life, married and in a league.

Anyway, this is what the Alibi looks like from the outside

On the way to Mt. Hood.

I dug up my Holga camera recently and have vowed to learn how to use it.

Both of these places are near our house.

On Friday night, we went to Hal’s Tavern for the first time, which proved to be a lot of fun. They have an especially nice shuffleboard table. Jeremy and I lost by a nose to Jenny and Stephen. I think this is going to be Jenny’s new Friendster picture. Lambchop have their version of the Friendster interface out. It’s kinda funny.

In an attempt to take advantage of the fleeting sunlight on Saturday morning, Jeremy and I went to the darkest place in town: the Alibi in North Portland. Maybe it was only because it was so sunny outside, that I found it nearly impossible to see for about five minutes when I got in there. Taking pictures with a long shutter were the only way to see that Jeremy was sitting in front of a giant coconut. We were the only people in this mega-tiki restaurant/bar. I want to go back and karoke when it’s packed. I took a bunch more pictures of the insanity, but they will have to wait for the special page I do in collaboration with J celebrating and great restaurant booths of Portland.

Another attempt at enjoying the good weather was my idea to drive up to The Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. It wasn’t a long drive, but it took us from sunny, to rain, to sleet, to snow, to full on scary blizzard up crazy winding mountain roads with the car slipping on ice.

We literally got within a few miles of the famous Shining Overlook Motel before the whole proposition just started to get too freaky. The only other cars we saw were SUVs and neither of us were wearing much more than a sweater and t-shirt. It sucks because having made it to the hotel, it would have looked exactly like the movie where Wendy is running around in the snow with the big knife trying to escape in the snow cat, which we could have used as well.

Having survived the mountain, we checked out the much-recommended LeGin restaurant off 82nd street. There was all sorts of crazy stuff on the menu, like sea cucumber and chicken feet. I boldly ordered Sesame Chicken.

Later that night, everybody went to Stephen’s house. I had resolved to master my amazing Polaroid Propack camera that Jeremy gave me for xmas. It’s got a lot more variables than a regular Polaroid does, which is probably why all my pictures up to that point were looking pretty terrible (mostly over-exposed or out of focus). I love how it’s 1971 in all of these pictures. I wish I had this camera last May when we were staying in those 70’s time-warp cabins in Fredonia.

Saturday night at Table (that’s Tab-Lah), where our friend Matt Brown is a bartender. We hung out there for a while. It’s a nice place, except for the intense Kleig lights behind the bar.

Stephen bought this in the bathroom.