Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

At the end of April, Sally, Leslie, Jeremy and I went to the skate rink at Oaks Park for the old timers reunion skate.

This rink has been around for a hundred years, as were many of the people who showed up.

I guess I was expecting it to be like it was when I went skating as a kid. But since the average age of the group that night was around seventy, there was a vibe that had nothing to do with my nostalgia.

There was a lot of complicated skating going on, the strangest of all being theGrand March.

The biggest deal was that all the music for the entire evening came out of this massive pipe organ, whose guts were suspended over the rink, while a guy played from a booth on the side.

His version of ‘If I Only Had A Brain’ from the Wizard of Oz soundtrack is still burnt into my head. That song was written for the pipe organ.

People there took their skating very very seriously. And from the looks of this old collage, it seems like they always have (been very creepy).

More pictures from the trip to the coast recently… Here’s Jenny reading one of her new books.

The local video store in Waldport, OR (pop. 2000-something) had a pretty interesting video store. It also was the hangout for the village teens, thus the public service advice.

I had to sit through the whole damn movie to see the killer poodle. And by that point, it was like, ‘fine… fine… killer poodle… whatever…’

Jenny flaunts the law against public dancing in Waldport by showing off her latest hip hop moves.

Disturbing dog mural, directly across the street from the cabin we stayed at. This should have made the viewing of Boneyard scarier, but…

Aaaaaaah… Japanese snacks of the future, in Beaverton, OR.

The national anthem ends in a question mark?
This drive-in was out in the big box suburbs, but hasn’t changed much with the times. We went to see Starsky & Hutch and Hellboy, though we left after the first movie.

All the other patrons at the drive-in seemed pretty retarded. The best was this big van that pulled into the lot with the most amazing air brush fantasy art I’ve ever seen. One side showed a naked couple on their knees and facing each other in profile while behind them the sun was gloriously setting. The other side had a giant sphinx with a bunch of mystical stuff going on as well. I was desparate to take a picture, but didn’t have the nerve. The family (!) that got out of the van seemed pretty normal, though they were obviously killers.

Chilly Dillys are pickles. I only know this because there was an animated dancing Chilly Dilly urging us to go to the concession stand. One thing that was even weirder than seeing the national anthem before the movie (like are you supposed to stand up and sing along?) was this very, very serious public service type announcement about how the owners of the theater don’t make much of a profit on the ticket prices, so it’s really important to support the cause by buying as much food from the concession stand as you can stomach. I mean, duh, that’s basic economics. I’ve just never been made to feel guilty about it before. Despite that, we bought so much crap to eat.

The beginning of the movie, before all the bad stuff happens…

These pictures from a recent trip to the coast seem like stills from a horror movie, perhaps. Certainly, this was on my mind when I left Portland to go to the cabin: people from the city spending the weekend in an isolated rural cabin. Actually, it was a really fun weekend, despite the hauntings, demonic possesion, piranha and zombie attacks and various mongoloid serial killers in hockey masks killing us off one by one.

The killer’s point-of-view shot.

I hadn’t sat around a campfire in maybe twenty years. And every monster/killer sneaking up on you scenario rushed through my head. On the second night, we had a fire and I didn’t worry about it so much.

Maybe not so much a still from a horror movie, but more like a Cocteau Twins video, which is kind of the same thing.

Piranha.

Bigfoot sighting or last survivor stumbling away?

Tonight I caught up on about the last 2 months of old issues of The New Yorker, which was not that much of a daunting task since so much of it was very out of date: I knew how Martha Stewart ended up and what Condoleezza Rice said (or didn’t say) when she testified. But I nearly had a heart attack while reading the March 29th issue, where in a Talk of the Town piece, it’s mentioned that the Pepsi Cola sign in Long Island city was being taken down. I realize this is very old news by now, but still!!! For all you non-New Yorkers: the Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City sat above an old Pepsi factory on the East River that was pretty much parallel
to the United Nations/Chrystler Building in Manhattan. It was one of the last classic-era-NY signs still around and certainly one of the biggest. And it was always cool to see it lit up all red and swirly when driving downtown on the FDR. Since the place closed about five years ago, it’s set to become condos, though there was mention in the New Yorker piece of it being re-assembled somewhere along the river. An artist named Vera Lutter look these arty pictures of the deconstruction process. Sigh.
The closest I ever got to the sign was one Sunday last summer when I was driving around LIC with Rachel and Bobby and we got a little lost and turned a corner and there it was! For more of Long Island City (where they filmed Sesame Street and Sex and City!) see Jonathan Nossiter’s amazing film, Sunday.
I guess it could be worse, because it’s not like the sign is going to end up in somebody’s loft or whatnot. And by 2005, it should be lit up again in front of those condos. But it does seem like an Umberto Ecco-style example of cheesey ‘hyper reality’ and naturally just another example of how New York looses beautiful pieces of itself every day. And it makes me grateful for the art deco masterpiece sitting atop the (still functional!) 7Up bottling plant on Sandy Boulevard here in Portland.

And if you’re trying to fill up a slow day at work, check out this amazing link Stephen sent me.

More photos of Enchanted Forest. The progression here, pretty much follows the outline of the park, pictured on Saturday.

This was the dining room of one of the snack bars. You could buy a small Red Baron-style pizza and watch this colored light and water show unfold in this large terrerium built into the wall. The whole thing was loosely choreographed to a synth score, which sounded very early eighties and was for sale at the snackbar (CDr) for $5.

The saddest thing in the world: driving back home from an amusement park.

More amazing Asian theme parks.

I’d read about The Enchanted Forest, which is right outside of Salem, OR, when I was looking for things to do when Margaret was here. But it wasn’t open during the weekdays yet (it’s a spring/summer park), plus Salem seemed kind of far away. Then last Friday, Jenny and Jeremy and I drove past it on the way to the coast and it seemed like an inevitability.

The park was mainly built by one man in the late sixties and opened in the early seventies. He bought the land for $4,000 and made most of the cement architecture in his garage on weekends. He was a draftsman for the state highway department and had a family to support. This park was created through out of pocket expenses and was purely a hobby.

Which is what made it one of the greatest tourist traps (I don’t use that expression pejoratively) I’ve ever seen. Imagine a scaled-down fourth-rate Disneyland that never revamped itself and this is kind of what EF is like. Plus admission was only $7!

The place seemed like such a lawsuit trap. The park was full of claustrophobic underground cement tunnels that were amazing and made us all wonder, how can this place still be open?

Considering it was such a beautifull spring day, the Forest was pretty empty and we never had to wait in line (except briefly for the log flume and fake-Materhorn roller coaster).

The three of us were the only adults in the park that weren’t accompanied by children, which I thought was going to get us a bunch of strange looks from parents, but not really. Plus we ran around the place like maniacs, pushing kids out of the way that were slowing our fun down.

I found this superhomo school supplies set in the gift shop (there was ONLY ONE! in the whole park).

More enchantment tomorrow!