I found these post cards at a massive yard sale I stumbled across on highway 99 on my way back to Portland. Trees of Mystery is in Northern California, near the Oregon border. I’m dying to go there because you take this gondola/ski lift up through the ancient redwoods and there’s a giant Paul Bunyan statue. The Giant Log is in California, too, actually. Marineland seems to be gone, like so many other amusement parks.
Ah! It wasn’t all a dream. Since we got there at night, it wasn’t until Saturday morning that I really got to look this place over. Driving around downtown Grants Pass, I got to see the other motels better and think we made the right decision.
The fifties diner they had there was really in need of an intervention. Is there a kit you can buy called ‘So You Want To Go Fifties Diner’? Jeremy pointed out the 45s hanging from the ceiling were not from the 1950s.
So on Wednesday night, I played bingo at the Hutch and Jeremy won a five-piece chicken dinner and a share of an $80 pot. But another player won on the same call on two separate cards(!) and she demanded splitting the winnings three ways instead of two. Donna and I were shouting out ‘Bingo off!’ And then we really went nuts when we overheard her desire for 2/3s of the cash. I think Jeremy walked away with $27 and a new life-long gambling addiction. Since bingo only happens twice a month there, I’ve decided it’s important to start spreading out for more action.
I had a minor epileptic fit looking at this site and now I’m dying to go to Tahoma, WA.
This year’s Vice photo issue is pretty interesting, with this one being my favorite.
Jeremy and I left Portland on Friday afternoon at rush hour on our road trip and sat in traffic for about two hours in 100 degree heat. Without air-conditioning and the windows wide open, if felt like someone was pointing a hairdryer at us set to ‘Max’. At a rest stop, I saw the fattest woman in the world with the biggest cankles I’ve ever seen on a human being… like an elephant’s foot. She was eating fried chicken at a picnic table with her family with a getting-down-to-business air that said, ‘Really, at the end of the day, isn’t free will an illusion?’ Back on the road, the traffic started to break up around Salem, once we passed the Enchanted Forest and then got more and more rural. I’m really starting to love the small towns of Oregon. They’re still functioning. There’s still a downtown, with a Chinese restaurant and party supply store.
Naturally we passed about a million amazing postcard-type places to eat and then it was nothing but rolling hills forever. This has happened to me every time I’ve ever driven someplace far away. We stopped at a place called ‘Heaven On Earth’, which was named that not so much for the food, but because it was a Christian diner. Our booth looked in to a bookstore. The whole time, I could see one title called ‘We All Die Alone’ and thought, jeez, isn’t that the ONE THING all religions are trying to hide? Whatever, though, cause we had bigger fish to fry when our free desert didn’t’ show up. After that, it was another 45 minutes in the car, driving through the dark listening to old Loretta Lynn songs.
When we got to Grants Pass, there was a bounty of old motels to stay at, which totally made me start freaking out. Since it was a small town, we rode around for a bit and tried to asses the competition. There was place with a neon bunny rabbit, a place with a neon palm tree and a place with a neon medieval look and a place that seemed to have mini golf. But we ended up a the first motel we saw called the ‘Royal Vue’.
So we got the last room! I couldn’t believe the luck of it. There’s a strip of old motels in New Orleans on Airline Highway I’ve always daydreamed at staying at but just assumed that they were full of prostitutes and crack, but the Royal Vue was still a functioning normal motel.
Jeremy wanted to stay at a place with a lounge and then when this happened wanted to go to bed.
I’m now going to ‘turn over the mike’ to Jeremy:
But then after nearly dying of heat stroke earlier that day, it turned out to be too cold to swim.
The first floor store front of the LoveLee Ladee is now being used as a church. Needless to say, I enjoyed the decision to paint over the signs instead of removing/replacing them.
The Pietros, on Lombard in N. Portland is also closed.
I met Jason and Sarah tonight, two new friends who run The Wurst Gallery at Beulahland, where we played trivia and lost very badly. Jason mentioned that Stephen Malkmus is rumored to be a regular and then, like magic, there was Stephen Malkmus! I’ve had so many moments this last week when crazy stuff happened that I wish my friends were there to witness (like going to karaoke in Grants Pass, OR, which I’ll deal with in painstaking detail later). This was one where I couldn’t believe Kim wasn’t there for. Jeremy said, ‘No matter what, we’ve got to beat Malkmus’ team.’ We did pretty badly, but his table didn’t win either, so I guess I’ll never know.
Tillamook, Oregon in five minutes. Jeremy, Stephen and I briefly walked through town after the factory tour. It seems like all small Oregon towns have a boarded up Masonic hall. Where is all that Masonic energy being directed?
Leaving Portland that day, we came across a yard sale with almost nothing but cassettes for sale. A lot of tapes got purchased in a flurry of activity, including Bone Thugs-and-Harmony, H Town, Silk and Kylie Minogue. Kim insisted we play Kylie’s cover of ‘Locomotion’ over and over again.
The new issue of Revol is out with photos from Brian Ulrich and Jason Fulford, though the piece by Benjamin Cheaves is the best part.
And dance steps of the sixties.
The CCU in the Hollywood neighborhood really charms me with it’s 1970’s baroque font, giant scissors and flowing locks of hair that remind me of Lilt. Jeremy got his haircut there recently so I found myself inside for the first time. The interior is very ‘hair salon circa late 80s/early 90s’ right down to the Patrick Nagel prints. I spent my time in the waiting room in severe distress over building up the nerve to ask some students if I could take their picture. There were about three young women styling mannequin heads, which I thought was pretty fascinating. I chickened out and now have to live with this shame for the rest of my life.
Here’s a nice page showing an old menu from Disneyland and a place to get some much needed Piggly Wiggly merchandise.
Pictures of Kim from her trip to Portland. This is the beach near Tillamook.
Mardi Gras iconography we can all agree on. It may be hard to tell, but this is a fake plastic cigarette, which I think is amazing. This was brought from NO by Kim.
Who says factory tours aren’t exciting?
This better depicts the excitement of the Tillamook Cheese Factory tour, where there are numerous places to buy ice cream, cheese, chocolate and smoked meat. It was like the puppy dog/toy/fireworks factory that Bart Simpson is taunted with.
The actual ‘factory tour’ part is a little on the slim side. You basically stand on a wide glass-enclosed terrace and look into one big room where blocks of cheese are getting wrapped up. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted to see: tons of raw product being shrink wrapped. Jeremy was disappointed that there was not a big cheese river oozing through the factory area. I liked the special hair net one of the workers was wearing over his beard.
I gotta say… not the biggest fan of their ice cream, though there were a lot more flavor choices here than you can buy at the super market. I will stand by the cheese, which I’ve eaten entire blocks of (only baby-loafs) at one sitting. And the gift shop satisfied another desire in that they sold oddly-shaped cheese remnant clumps, which was something I was hoping to see.
I used to think the only reason you’d go to Sir Loin’s was if you were on the way to the airport. I went on July 4th on the way to the airport to drop off Jami. It was nicer than I thought inside: kind of a Denny’s vibe (not so Steak House-y — just go to Prime Rib), but decorated with old fancy liquor bottles and ancient black and white pictures of Portland. From it’s outside appearance, I was imagining those old yellow oil cloth table cloths and grease congealed on warped paneling. Not so! I had the biscuits and gravy. Nobody got the Lady Combo at my urging or the optimistically named Golden Age. On Saturday, I drove past a place near Kathy’s house called ‘Lady Secrets’, which I thought would be a great name for an album.
I got my hands on the new Eightball this week and it was worth the wait. It felt like old times. I also started reading Black Hole, after seeing some of Burn’s stuff in the last McSweeney’s. Highly recommended.
I’ve always dreamed of being mentioned in this industry trade publication. Now I need all new dreams.
I drive past the vacuum cleaner museum almost every day and naturally was very curious about it. But it’s been something I’ve saving in my back pocket for a while. When Jami and Dave were visiting, Jeremy and I took them there as a consolation for dragging them all over the city in the vain attempt to find lunch. It was the Friday that kicked off the Fourth of July weekend, so the entire city had evacuated as if a meteor were expected. We were happy to find the museum open, which was probably due to the fact that 95% of it is a store. The ‘museum’ was a side corridor full of old broken down machines crammed together.
This display was at the very back. I’m no Marilyn expert, but I doubt the authenticity of this scene being depicted. Still, I recommend checking this place out, because the store part has big tupperware containers of fake dirt and fake dog hair that you can toss on squares of carpet and then vacuum up to test the strength of the products. We were too chicken to do this, for fear of the hard sell.
