Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Kind of on a whim on Sunday, Jeremy suggested we check out Vancouver, WA (not to be confused with the one in Canada). Even though it’s over the state line, this town is only about 20 minutes outside Portland. I nearly wrecked the car when I saw the sign for ‘Waddles’, which was right next to the highway in Jantzen Beach.

This link from PDX History gives you the basic historic outline. Jantzen Beach was a sprawling art-deco F.Scott Fitzgerald-esque amusement park on a little island outside of town and was ripped down in 1970. It’s now the site of a mega-mall. I originally thought Waddles had been torn down when the park was destroyed, so I flipped when I saw it was still standing.

This masterpiece of Googie architecture was designed by Pietro Belluschi, who went on to design the Pan Am building in NYC.

The missing minute hand used to be a knife to go with the hour hand’s fork.

The bad news is: the food was pretty disgusting, even by diner standards. The even worse news: the whole place is being torn down on May 15th to be replaced by a Krispy Kreme (puke!).

I was really hoping for a Waddles t-shirt, but there were none for sale. Here’s a blog entry from someone who got a t-shirt.

Somehow Vancouver, WA was even more depressing. More tomorrow.

Last night’s double feature baffled me when I got home because I couldn’t find reviews of either film on the internet, so maybe this will help. The first, The Doberman Gang (1972?), was about a bank robber who trains a pack of said dogs to rob a bank. The dogs don’t wear ski masks or use little guns and it took forever to rob the damn bank. And it’s not a comedy. In the second, The Children (1980), wackiness ensues when a school bus full of kids drives through a cloud of ‘nuclear gas’ leaked from a power plant in New England. Instead of growing really tall or shrinking, these kid’s fingernails turn black and they fry people/parents when they hug them. Nearly half the town dies before anybody puts it all together. The strangest part was that the blind girl and the slutty girl both died right away without fanfare.

Has anyone been listening to Air America? I really like the Janeane Garofalo show. When I heard she was going to be on the air I thought it sounded lame, but she’s really very smart. Reminds me of something Pauline Kael wrote about how an actor’s intelligence always comes through in a performance. I always assume all actors are dumb as dirt.

I convinced scaredy-cat Jeremy to rent ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’ (1971) yesterday from Movie Madness because I thought it would be interesting to see if it still freaked me out. I watched this movie on a Saturday afternoon when I was a kid, hanging out in my room building models and watching horror double features on TV (on a black and white TV). And, wow, it freaked me out all over again. What is it about horror movies from the 70s?
Even more unsettling is the wax museum of country stars for sale on eBay right now. Why do all wax figures look so much like dead people in their caskets? Regardless, I need to own this so bad! I’d set up these life-sized replicas all over the house and maybe I’d have them eating fake food (also for sale on eBay). This is probably the longest description of an item I’ve ever seen on eBay.

Speaking of scary stuff, here’s a picture from a recent run in with Extremo. I was standing on 82nd Street, taking pictures of the ‘All People Travel’ agency when he drove right by. It happened so quick that it didn’t really register until I got the film back from the lab and was like, ‘Yikes!’

Wilco’s (non-scary/forthcoming album) A Ghost Is Born can be listened to in its entirety through streaming audio.

Nicely curving architecture around town.

I found this when I was trying to figure out my taxes. It was from somebody I sold a record to on ebay. I love this type of obsession to detail.

Snap Judgment!

Pictures from Sunday. I was shocked that these prints came back in black and white, since I could have sworn I had color film in my camera.

This is the never-open costume store again.

Jeremy, Katherine and I all took a risque picture of Jenny posing as a hooker beneath this bridge. Of course Jeremy’s camera broke and this particular print in my camera came back ruined (never happened before with my Holga). If I was Katherine, I’d start worrying about the hooker-photo curse.

From Saturday night. I accidentally took some double-exposures, which explains Jeremy’s extra hand and Leslie’s levitation. This novelty lighter Katherine bought was the hit of the party. People were literally coming up to us and begging to be our friends and I was like, ‘Fuck off, poseurs!’

I’ve tepidly started to make t-shirts with stencils. Stephen’s wearing one of the designs here. It was even more popular than the giant novelty match lighter (actually, that’s not true at all).

In the dying hours of the party, our group attempts to get people out on the dance floor weren’t very successfull (except for a brief stint when ‘hey ya’ came on).

A recent conversation with my mom ended with her being really disappointed that I didn’t want any Easter candy. I just didn’t want her to go to any trouble since I’m vaguely working on not getting any fatter. But then today I got a card in the mail with the following picture below attached:

And it reminded me of when Jeremy and I were recently watching that episode of the Sopranos where the son moves out and Carmela comes home to the completely empty house and kind of sighs. We were instantly struck by what lousey kids we are. I bought the bunny below today at Fred Meyer for 79 cents and I’m going to let Jenny eat it.

From a recent search to find those ’smurf’ houses up in the hills.
My friend Margaret is coming to town in two weeks on a visit from Chicago (and some say to possibly live here). When I was driving around my neighborhood tonight, I thought about how much I want to go the Pagoda restaurant, since no one wants to go cause the food’s not that good (I’m told) yet the place is gorgeous. Perhaps we’ll go there when she gets to town and play the following games:

I found both of these on Sunday at this new thrift store near Division. Stephen said the new version of Cootie that came out celebrates diversity since not everyone is trying to build the identical vermin. Those little pink girly legs from the 1949 version give me the creeps.
I’m not sure how Snap Judgement works yet, but the box is one of the best things I’ve seen since Elizabeth sent Probe.

I’ve gone to this costume store on Hawthorne street twice now and it hasn’t been open. And it looks amazing inside, though Jeremy and Katherine reported the clerk was really snooty.

Otherwise, it was a pretty fun weekend, though it kind of ended on a sad note when Jeremy’s amazing Nickelodeon camera fell out of his coat pocket and smashed on the ground while he was on his bike. It was pretty terrible. The undeveloped film went flying out the camera, just like in the movies.

Here’s some more pictures of St. Johns in North Portland, a particularly untouched part of the city.

Through some synchronocity, I’ve been rekindling my interest in ghost towns, or specifically the idea of hastily abandoned cities. The first thing that set it off was watching a movie called ‘Night of The Comet’ an 80s sci-fi horror movie where (on a night where a comet passes earth) everyone exposed to the ‘radiation’ turns into red dust, leaving L.A. (and the rest of the world? what about the side of the planet that wasn’t facing the comet? did it satellite around to make sure it got everyone?) completely devoid of all the people who lived there, except for a couple of lucky teens, natch. Jeremy’s really into films where some catastrophic event allows the last survivors to go the mall and take what they want (think ‘Dawn of the Dead’ and ‘28 Days Later’ to name the obvious examples… if anyone can spiel off a list of films where this happens, please forward it).
Then Stephen sent me a link to a site that documents a woman’s motorcycle journeys through the ghost town of Chernobyl and outlying regions. This takes a little time to read through but it’s ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING. Obviously, the reactor meltdown was a very catastrophic event and it probably seems morbid to want to go to Chernobyl, but I can’t help it. Certainly the after effects of it are pretty interesting: a town that will remain largely unchanged and uninhabited by humans for the next 600 years (which is when they say the radioactivity will be at safe levels), stuck in April 1986 forever.
For more of the same, check out Rick Moody’s story, ‘The Albertine Notes’, where you can read the first few pages here. And check out Robert Polidori, an amazing photographer, who shot in Chernobyl for three days and produced a pretty interesting book.

Went to the Sandy Hut with Megan for a drink last night (or the ‘Shanty Slut’ as she calls it). I only stayed for two drinks and left before Megan got drunk and crazy as usual. She was karaoke-ing Juice Newton’s ‘Queen of Hearts’, when I snuck out the back door.

The clientele at the Sandy used to be a lot fancier, if you go by Hirshfeld’s version of things.