Ford Museum

After the ACD, our guidebook said that the Ford Museum in Detroit was the grandfather of all museums and not to be missed. As it was on the way to Canada, we thought, hell, why not? The Ford is almost like the museum of Presidential death; there's the chair that Lincoln was sitting in when he got shot while watching the opera and there's the limo that Kennedy was shot in while driving through Dallas. But then again, as the richest man in America for a while, Ford did collect everything under the sun (including one of Amelia Earhart's planes). It was definitely, again, worth the splurge ($15 per ticket). We were here in September 2010...I'm just terribly late in getting all this posted up.

A mail carriage used to deliver mail in Minnesota, circa 1900. There's a little pot bellied stove in there to keep the mailman warm during the winter. The outside is covered in graffiti from ages ago.

Motorized roller skates!

The original Wienermobile by Oscar Meyer

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House. One of the first kit houses, suitable for any terrain or environment, first developed in 1929 and then redesigned in the 50's to cater to the housing boom. Unfortunately it never took off, and if I understand it correctly, this is the last complete example.

Greil Marcus at The Pinhook-Durham, NC

We're heading down to Durham tonight to our favorite downtown dive bar in order to see rock critic god, Greil Marcus, speak. He'll be at The Pinhook and I love that he's taking time to appear in a venue that's a little more accessible than up on one of Duke University's untouchable podiums. Mr. Marcus has written countless articles and books on American culture and is thus, one of my favorite icons.

I can't wait!

Steampunk NC

Has anyone ever heard of the term "Steampunk" before? Because I haven't, and certainly not before coming to NC.
According to Wikipedia, Steampunk is a branch of science fiction that centers around steam-powered Victorian England and where technological innovation as the Victorians would have envisioned is at it's core. We're talking alternative universes where machine and man were both decked out in 18th English garb and could time travel or venture to the center of the earth, a la Jules Verne. I think "imaginary flying machines, goggles, and corsets" sums it up just fine.

Steampunk Gallery:
City Of Lost Children kick-ass French film
The Clockwork Cabaret weekly podcast

The Affinity Bridge novel

Water For Elephants

No such luck on the job front yet although Conner and I have been pounding pavement like nobody's business.  I do have a couple interviews coming up this week and hopefully one of those works out.  Job hunting sucks.  I've put in applications at J Crew, Williams Sonoma, Trader Joe's, Barnes & Noble...basically everything at the mall.  And again, hopefully one of those will work out this next week.

In the meantime I've picked up a couple books from the library.  Immediately I got sucked into Water For Elephants which was amazing and I almost finished within the day.  Awesome!  Read it.  It's about a young man who runs away and joins the circus during the Depression.  It's been a while since a book has sucked me in so completely...since the Twilight series but that was "book crack" and I offer no other explanation for that literary blip. 

They have several photos reprinted from the Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida.  I had no idea they have a Ringling museum!  We're absolutely going to make a quick stop in Florida and go to the circus museum...I dreaming of pink sequins and cotton candy this evening.

Radio Flyer Car

From Old Hollywood Glamour Blog

No Cell Phone Service

A while ago I heard Rich Juzwiak of the pop culture blog fourfour being interviewed on This American Life about contemporary horror films.  The dude watches a ton of movies and always has a strong opinion about everything-just like a New Yorker.  He did a youtube mash-up of all cellular misworkings from 66 horror films. 
And yeah, it's a total cliche but geez, most of those movies could have been filmed in northern New Mexico because there's so many no-service zones in this area. 

Prince Poppycock

“A Louis XIV confection or occasional Nancy Sinatra-esque chanteur/chanteuse in gold glitter boots with world-class vocal talent. No lip-syncing for Mr. Quale, who is a true artist and transforms himself Klaus Nomi style once he graces the stage. Nina Hagen would be proud, as would Diamanda Galas.” – Roy Rogers Oldenkamp for WeHoNews.com

"Part randy dandy, part rock star, part drunken courtesan, Poppycock instantly owns the audience with but a glance and a wiggle of bedazzled pantaloons, and that’s just the beginning. His operatic prowess, glamourous costumes and ostentatious prose leave not a heart unstirred."
~Zoetica Webb via Coilhouse
Poppycock official website 

Thoughts On Eat, Pray, Love

I frankly can’t stand Elizabeth Gilbert’s writing.  She kowtows around religion a ton in her books like a proper politically correct New Yorker, but the thing is that she’s very religious and it comes up a lot in her writings and well, I just wish she’d stop stuttering around God and Jesus and straight up come out with it.  Venting aside, and in spite of myself, I’ve read both her books; Eat, Pray, Love and Committed. 

She does her research and there are always at least a couple ideas I seem to quote from each book.  I fear my favorite is from Eat, Pray, Love.  While studying Italian cooking in Rome and an Italian man tells her that every city has a special word, like a zeitgeist keyword, and every individual has their own personal word.  If those two words don’t mesh in some way then the individual will never truly feel at home.  In the book her word is PURITY (or something along those lines) and Rome’s word is SEX.  Because they are two such opposed ideas, she will probably never feel truly comfortable in Rome.

I latched on to this because if I didn’t feel comfortable in a place then I would always think it was my failing for not finding some aspect of the town to like, or that I hadn’t given myself enough time to settle in.  This idea freed me to understand that you know what, sometimes it’s just not my place.  Austin, North Carolina, Paris, Germany—these are my kinds of places.  London, Greece, southern Colorado—these are not so much my speed.  I will always be able to appreciate these places for what they are but I’ve come to discover that I’m a big fan of bustling, quaint, and orderly kinds of places.  Try as I might to change that, I’ll always desire cute orderly bustle.

Which is not to say that I haven’t grown to adore the people of Arboles, because I have.  Cookouts, internet access, boating, borrowing movies--it’s been wonderful to get to know all of you.  And geez louise, we really couldn’t be doing this project in such style without your help and support in getting Breathless all ready for the open road.  So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being so wonderful.

I suppose I’m still young enough to feel like I’m missing out on something if there’s not a ton of activity around, so for now I’ll be a city girl.  However, at the recommendation of Bryan and Laura we watched Cars last night.  Through the story of a young hot-shot race car finding love and a home in a small town…well, let’s just say that through the magical life lessons taught in Disney films I’m down for the quiet life with my garden, a pot-belly, chickens, and Conner in the shop working on restoring yet another vintage car.
Photo: Trevi Fountain in Rome via Washington Uni

Varying Flora and Attitudes

It's interesting to be back in North Carolina after spending some time in the high desert of southern Colorado.  The juxtaposition of flora, fauna, and society in both areas makes me look forward to traveling the rest of US and seeing how different the terrain and the people all are; from the northern farmland of upstate New York to the muggy swamps of Louisiana, I'm excited.

Luckily I didn't have to spend the night in the Charlotte airport last week because my mom and little sister came to rescue me late at night.  Sleepless night averted.  I was whisked right back into the Zaslow family life again in Asheville and their passionately fussy dispositions.  Maybe the southern climate nurtures fiery temperaments because my family is always having some "passionate discussion" about the effects of whop-sided population growth and cognitive evolution on humanity as a whole or the state of my brother's life choices.  I think the fact that 3 out of 6 people in the household have done debate of some sort helps fuel the discussion fires.

 Photo by Rachel Letcher

There have been numerous NC summer thunderstorms pouring from the sky in mid-afternoon and the mountains are so green and luscious.  The trees are gi-nawmous and the kudzu's blanketed everything in these big green vines.  It's like a northeastern rain forest up in these hills.  Where as Colorado is so dry and the trees don't seem to get much higher that a one story building, at least not in the southeast where we're staying.  The blues, greens, and browns look much more vivid to me which makes photographing the landscape around Arboles much more exciting.

People of North Carolina get up in your face and ask many more questions about your life in general than people of Colorado, who will listen to whatever you want to reveal about yourself but who don't want to ask too many questions for fearing of prying into your personal life.  NC people also appear to have no problem telling you that they don't whole heartily approve of what your doing...
An example of an exchange:
"Oh yeah, we're going on a road trip and live out of our car for a year."
pause..."Well now, why ever would you do something like that?  What if someone tries to break in when you all are sleeping in the back?  Doesn't that seem dangerous to you?"

 Photo Via Swimming Holes.org

Arid and reserved in Colorado.
Lush and fussy in North Carolina.

Haha, I love my roots.

Tortilla Flats

Maybe on account of there being no registered sex offenders in the area, people are rather trusting and take a lax stance towards security here.  It reminded me of the Canada segment of Bowling For Columbine and took me a minute to get used to.

So when we went to housesit at the Gummersall’s and they have a locked gate at the end of their driveway, lock all their doors, and have timers on all their lights to deter potential highjackers well, that struck Conner as funny. 

Jenny explained that the dirt road they live on leads directly to Miller Mesa, aka “Tortilla Flats” or “Little LA”.  Technically it’s in New Mexico although it’s within spitting distance of their house.  It’s kind of a “No Man’s Land” because the only police station is 1 ½ hours away in Farmington, a place everyone refers to as the Armpit Of The World.  They have an agreement with the fire station in Ignacio, a town 20 minutes away, in which Ignacio will come to their aid if fires are consuming their mobile homes.  But when it comes to vanquishing evildoers they’re on their own, and thus a lot of naughty business goes on in Miller Mesa.  Apparently they have a thriving Crystal Meth production biz going on there and it’s best to avoid the place all together.

I was under the impression that Crystal Meth was passé, was so very early ‘90s, and that only the most hard-up druggies even considered it.  But hey, what do I know?

Bear Grease

On the 45 minute commute into Durango, equipped with a cooler in the back seat to do her weekly market shopping Melody told me a couple of stories about this area.  My favorite has to be this one…

I want to say it was during WW1 that this story takes place although I’m not all together positive.  Typically the mail arrived daily by train but because it was during the war when coal was scarce and there wasn’t a lot of mail that needed to be delivered every day to Arboles, the post decided to let the mail accumulate to a sizable bundle that they would hand out once a week.

A young lady living in the area was expecting a letter from her sweetheart who was off at war and she heard that the train wouldn’t be making it scheduled delivery until the following week.  Intent on getting her letter, she went down to the train tracks where it angled upwards over all large incline and smeared bear grease on the tracks.  Bear grease.  When the train came barreling through it couldn’t get enough traction to get up the hill because of all the grease and had to stop in Arboles.  The girl got her letter.  Ever since the mail has always been delivered to the town despite the size of the bundle. 

That seems to sum up the ethos of this area—the taking of matters into their own hands with a resounding, “The hell I will…”

Colorado Boating

Behold Colorado Boating!

Someone told me about Colorado Boating a couple weeks ago and the other day I stepped out of the shop to find Jesse doing precisely that.  It's when you hook up your boat to a car and have someone else drive you around the parking lot...to emulate the rush of wind in your hair, I suppose.  Haha, it was good for a short laugh.

Brew Time

C and D’s older brother Josh, who has to be one of the nicest and most patient people ever, has been totally re-hauling the ’54 to get it road worthy ever since the Finn family was able to dig it out of the Colorado snow. Josh has taken the whole frame apart and painted it, put in a new drive shaft, and even took the engine and the gas tank from a ’97 Suburban and stuck in the ’54 so we won’t have to fill it up that often.

 Conner and Josh

At one point or another the whole family has worked for the San Juan Timberwrights carpentry shop making timber frame houses.  Luckily the owners, Tammy & Mike, are super cool and have let us all use their shop to work on the car.  We came up this month to help finish it and then get on the road to Taos.  I’ll eventually help reupholster the interior but in the meantime I just crash in on bro-time a lot and hang out. 

Speaking of bro-time: evidently the San Juan Timberwrights is a large part of the Arboles community and every day at 4:30pm the shop shuts down and they all have “brew-time”.  Men come out of the woodwork to have a cold beer from the Durango Ska brewery and shoot the shit for a minute.  It seems such a romantic aspect of small town life to me since we never did that back home, and it happens every day like clockwork.

L to R: Brian, Jesse, Josh, Dan, Denny, and Conner

The beer comes out of a “kegerator”—a freaking brilliant idea!  They modified an old fridge to accommodate a keg and they attached a tap to the side for easy access refills.  Beer mugs are kept iced in the freezer and every month they all chip in and get a new keg.  Brilliant, I do say.

Gatsby Summer Afternoon

Hello fabulous!

I just read about the annual Gatsby Summer Afternoon festival in San Francisco. Who knew such a thing existed? I would absolutely love to attend this one year. This was the 26th year they've put on this shin-dig; every September 13th.
Via Dandyism.net

Ahh! There is an Art Deco Society of California! How freaking fabulous is that? Oh say no more, my heart has melted.

I'm Not With The Band

I’m not in a band.

Nor am I With The Band, although I did finally read the book after tracking the out-of-print book down three states away at the Northeastern University library.  After seeing Pamela Des Barres, original Plaster Caster groupie, interviewed on VH1, I had to read it.  I have also read Peggy Boyd’s Wonderful Tonight about George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Suze Rotolo’s A Freewheeling Time: A Memoir of Greenwhich Village In The Sixties about Bob Dylan, and Marianne Faithful’s Faithful: A Memoir about all of the Rolling Stones.  I got on a kick of reading memoirs by rock star’s ex-girlfriends for a while, until I ran out of them.  The one I really want to read hasn’t been written yet, but one day she will and I’ll be first in line.  Betty Davis will one day write her autobiography about being a total badass in New York City in the 1970’s, being married to Miles Davis, getting divorced on account of an affair with Jimi Hendrix, and then beginning her own controversial career in the funk world.  It’ll be great, once she writes it.

SXSW 2010!

It's only the second day of the official SXSW music fest and we've already lost one of our party to the croup and the rest of us are struggling along trying to rally the troops each night.  Although, in all honesty, we did start last Sunday at the annual Austin Kite Fest in Zilker Park.

Festival Finder

We want to hit up as many music festivals as we can on this trip, but there seem to be so many different festivals that I didn't really know start researching.  I just found Festival Finder that seems to have a pretty comprehensive listing based on genre of music.  Check it out.

Festival Finder

It would be good to go ahead and scope them out now because the only way we're really going to be able to afford a music fest is if we volunteer.  It'll be good to sign up early and get in the back way.

This American Life

  

I love This American Life.  Words cannot express how much I adore the idiosyncratic stories that make up the hour-long radio show.  It often comes up in dinner conversation by saying, "I was listening to This American Life the other day and I heard that..."  There's one episode in particular that I just love called Numbers.

"Alex Melamid and Vitaly Komar hired a polling firm to investigate what people want to see in paintings. Then, using the data, they painted what people want. It turned out to be a landscape, with a mountain and a lake, and deer, and a family, and George Washington. Then they applied these techniques to music, with composer David Soldier. They surveyed audiences about what kind of instruments and topics they liked most in their songs. Then they produced one song based on what people most want to hear—and one song based on what they hate the most. The one people hate includes bagpipes, children singing, lyrics about holidays and religion, wild volume and tempo changes."

The thing about both experiments is that the artwork resulting from what people want is completely weak and uninteresting; like a Thomas Kinkaid painting.  However, the painting and song that were created out of everything that annoys people ended up being different and amazing.  You can go to Melamid and Komar's website and buy the songs or you can listen to the streaming episode for free.

The experiment reminds me of an ancient Greek sculptor that allowed fellow Grecians to critique his sculpture of an ideal feminine beauty and he would make changes as requested.  The resulting sculpture was considered grotesque.

It also reminds me of a contemporary French performance artist named Orlan who has been undergoing multiple plastic surgeries to combine the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, nose of Jean-Leon Gerome's Psyche, lips of Francois Boucher's Europa, eyes of French School of Fountainbleau's Diana, and the forehead of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa.  Entitled The Reincarnation Of Saint Orlan, the project began in 1990 to morph herself into an ideal beauty as suggested by men who paint woman.  She even makes the act of plastic surgery into performance art by staying awake and reciting poetry while filming the procedure. A few stills of the operations can be seen on her website.  I love her.  She's extreme but fascinating.  By combining all of these various elements of feminine beauty she's making herself look rather disturbing, but in a very feminist way...there's lots of articles about the whole thing.

Cute Overloaded

I recently read an article in the December issue of Vanity Fair--Edward Cullen was on the cover and I couldn't resist.  The article, "Addicted To Cute" by contributing editor Jim Windolf, takes a look at how cute is taking over popular culture.

An article in 1940 by ethnologist Konrad Lorenz stated that evolutionarily speaking, we’re more compelled to care for things that are cute—big head, big eyes, round face—it makes the mamma/papa complex kick in.  It also tends to make things that are not pleasant at all suddenly palatable; such as GEICO’s gecko who was much more reptilian when it first debuted in 1999.  Now the gecko became cuter, more debonair with a English accent, and a total advertising hit.  Same thing happened with Mickey Mouse.  As Disney become more successful, the mouse went from a scrawny rodent to the large headed character we know today.

Social misery and cutness have always been linked.  Take for instance, Japanese culture since the 1950’s.  It’s inundated with Hello Kitty, kawaii culture, and manga comics.  A theory on why cute is just so damn popular in Japan is that after the emasculation of WWII, Japan positioned itself as the non-threatening and bumbling “little brother” who needs protection more than anything else.

During the 8 years that Bush Jr. was in office, America went from being viewed as the world protector to aggressor.  Now it seems, America is in on the cute wave too.  Our new president’s face has graced pajamas called Ojamas and Ty Girlz have made dolls after the first-daughters until Michelle raised a complaint…now their names have been switched from “Marvelous Mahlia” and “Sweet Sasha” to “Marvelous Mariah” and “Sweet Sydney”.

Cars are cuter, YouTube’s Hahaha video is one of the most watched clips ever, Cute Overload website gets over 100,000 hits a day, and even bands are getting cuter; such as Weezer or Cute Is What We Aim For out of Buffalo.  Seemingly over the myth of the “tortured artist”, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Elliot Smith are now viewed with something more akin to pity than awe.   

With all this cuteness floating around, America is apparently saying, “Please like us again.  We’re not out to hunt terrorists, we’re out to have fun!”  I think we’re all over the doom and gloom and yeah, totally ready to have fun before the next round of catastrophy happens...
the Reign of Buttercup Sprinkles

Doc Ellis

I just began reading Austin music writer Thomas Fawcett's blog after hearing his Texas Soul Round-Up on Texas Music Matters.  I really love his writing and the subjects he writes about are great...such as the story about Doc Ellis.  In 1970 Doc pitched a no-hitter baseball game on acid.  The video that Thomas posted is fabulous and now I'll halt any attempt to botch the story up myself and re-post the video.
The Corner blog.


And now he's become a cult hero and star of many a song.