Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Getting frustrated with squares. Couldn’t have said it better than Mr. Ruscha.

I stopped at an estate sale in Laurelhurst today that was one of those houses where the elderly couple who lived there hadn’t made any new purchases since 1964. The medicine cabinet was all glass bottles of mouthwash and floss. How Portland can have so many of these places is baffling. Then there was a table of paperback books that were all nurse romances. I bought about thirty of them. I was not previously aware of this subgenre of literature, but the previous owner of this house must have been a university chair on the subject.

Click the book at the top to see a mere sampling of the nurse porn I acquired.

Steve Hough.

On Thursday night, I finally got to hang out with Christian Patterson, one of my favorite photographers. We caught the opening for Chris Verene’s new Galesburg photos at Alona Kagan. Verene’s photos of his family blow me away. He makes it look so easy and natural, but it’s hard to think of other contemporary portraits that are so sincere and charged and completely surreal.
While stalking him on the internet recently, I discovered there’s this whole other aspect to his work, where he does these crazy art events. I was lamenting the other night about how much I wanted to check one of these out, my cousin casually mentioned that he had been photographed at a Cat Baptism ceremony by Verene.

Perfect!

While house sitting, I watched part of a documentary about the displaced musicians of New Orleans and there was a section where Irma Thomas walks through the ruins of her club and her house in New Orleans East. You can see my picture of The Lion’s Den, Irma’s club on N. Broad by clicking here.

My friend Drew had a shoe box full of unprocessed film from the last eight years. I convinced him to get it developed so I could scan it (the cheapest method) and I got to vicariously enjoy his excitement of suddenly getting to look at over 300 hundred pictures he’d shot. Click the image above to see a selection of my favorites.

I got a hot tip from a guy named Jeff that Tom Peterson’s on 82nd was being demolished. And he wasn’t lying. I told myself after going home to Katrina-ed New Orleans that I never wanted to see a ruined building again, much less photograph it. But I had this hope that I’d find the Tom face in a pile of trash and that I’d take it home and lean it against the wall next to my bed so I could get hypnotized to it while I fell asleep. Or at least take a picture of it in the dumpster. I poked around those white letters in the second photograph, but no dice.