For Spring Break I enjoyed the chance to cruise 2,676 miles of the the great northwest. Highlights include a quick stop at the Shasta (CA) ghost town, flying my quadcopter over an ersatz Maryhill (OR) Stonehenge, shooting neon signs in Yakima (WA), searching for the Wallace (ID) “Center of the Universe” sewer access cover, photographing the Anaconda (MT) Club Moderne (a classic of streamlined architecture), visiting the Rigby (ID) Birthplace of Television museum, driving down rutted roads to survey the Ely (NV) Ward Charcoal Ovens State Park, and staying a night at the infamous Tonopah (NV) Clown Motel and Miner's cemetery - all while grooving on old Dragnet radio shows, complete with Jack Webb taking a Fatima "smoke break" at least once per episode.
While attending the National Communication Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas, I learned that, yes, it is possible to do an all-nighter without gambling or clubbing. Nothing against those activities, of course, but Jenny and I wanted to explore some of Sin City’s other nocturnal delights. Here’s the itinerary:
6:30 p.m., Neon Boneyard: Joined by our pal Chip Hall, we wandered an outdoor museum dedicated to some of Vegas’s glittering, twinkling, glowing marquees that have drawn gamblers and gangsters to the desert for decades. The fee is a bit steep, and entrance requires a reservation, but the trip is essential for anyone who loves classic neon. Though many of the signs no longer function, strategically placed lights produce delightfully eerie shadows on these icons of the past.
8:30 p.m., Zombie Burlesque: Jenny and I had never seen a Vegas show, and I’m a bit amazed that Jenny OK’d this one as our first. The good news is that the “burlesque” was pretty much PG-13. A little skin, some naughty humor, but nothing too raunchy. Best of all, the theme was a goofy send-up of 50s and 60s atomic-age pop culture, a hidden history of America’s hidden zombies next door, and a genuinely sweet message about diversity that rings especially true in an Age of Trump. Oh, and free jello-shots.
10:30 p.m., El Cortez and Fremont Street: Jenny, Chip, and I grabbed a meal at Siegel's 1941, a comfy old school restaurant at El Cortez, one of Vegas’s original mob haunts. Their off-menu prime rib dinner is delectable [well, it's palatable], but this time I went for a wedge salad and some caffeine. Afterward we surveyed the enclosed zaniness of Fremont Street, where you can snap photos with a Tony Montana lookalike, rock out to competing 80s cover bands, and pay dearly to drink from a replica of the Christmas Story leg-lampshade.
1:30 a.m., Fremont Street and Vegas Boulevard: Jenny and I continued our adventures north of the Strip, driving around some of the city’s funkier environs in search of neon signage for a video I've long wanted to produce. At this point, we were both getting sleepy, but neither of us would discuss quitting. We both remember pooping out around this time in an ill-fated Santa Cruz all-nighter we attempted a few years back. Every time I proposed a retry, Jenny’d say, “Nope. This time we’ll wait for a place like Vegas or Paris.” Now that we were here, there was no way we’d give up.
2:30 a.m., Flamingo Wildlife Habitat: We returned to the Strip, racing south on an interstate that had been a traffic-jammed parking lot just a few hours ago. Inside the Flamingo, the “Vegas, Baby!” vibe had begun to sour for a few folks: Woo Girls crying in the bathroom, Bro Boys itching for a fight, couples arguing next to taxi cabs ("But you said you loved me!"), that sort of thing. Jenny and I made our way to the habitat, searching for flamingos and koi. I was a little annoyed that the lights had been switched off, but the sight of fish sleeping in their shadowy pools delighted us nonetheless.
3:30 a.m., Bellagio Conservatory and Botanical Gardens: While hard core late-night gamblers (Sorry, I mean “gamers”) plugged away, hoping for their big break, Jenny and I visited one of the Bellagio’s lesser-known destinations. The hotel’s high-end shopping mall offerings were closed, but the gardens remained available - and free! At the Conservatory, we wandered quiet walkways amid gorgeous arrangements of autumn blooms, stared upward at an indoor waterwheel, snapped pictures and - Hey! Did that tree just wink at us? Yeah, the Bellagio’s got an animatronic tree - because, of course it does.
4:30 a.m., Caesars Palace and LINQ: Getting our Third Wind, we toured Caesars Palace, which famously doesn’t include an apostrophe because, “Everyone’s a Caesar here.” Well, OK, but you could put the apostrophe after the second ’s,’ right? Never mind. Anyway we gazed upward at replicas of Italian statues, including a version of Michelangelo’s “David.” At LINQ we found an all-night breakfast at Hash House A Go Go. Jenny ordered Froot Loops, and I got a BLT Bloody Mary - because who doesn’t enjoy cheap vodka, soggy bacon, wilted lettuce, and a side of toast?
5:30 a.m., Luxor and Excalibur: I’d always wanted to visit the inside of the Luxor pyramid, so we drove about a half-mile south to our last stops of the night. The Luxor is suitably mammoth, a vast atrium filled with shops and restaurants and leering advertisements of Criss Angel and Carrot Top. Jenny was hankering to check out Excalibur, so we boarded a moving walkway through the omnitopian continuum and found ourselves in a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy domain that also offers 24-hour Krispy Kreme donuts. I figured my Bloody Mary needed some company, and the price was right.
6:30 a.m., Exit: Riding the travelator back to the Luxor and our parking garage, we noticed that the sun rise had begun to color the clouds in delicate wisps of pink. We wandered past creepy video gaming devices - the ones featuring life-sized and blandly sexy dealers who appear to look around before beckoning you from across the floor (“There’s a seat over here!”) - and exited into the cool morning air. Driving north and then east, the sun now glowed fully fat orange and round, celebrating the new day.
During a 2008 trip to Portland, I edited a video-celebration of the city's gorgeous assemblage of neon signs. The piece turned out OK, but I regretted not bringing a higher resolution camera to grab the footage. Ever since that trip, I'd awaited the opportunity to return to the Rose City and revisit those old haunts.
At last we made the return trip!
Some highlights - the Republic Cafe, Tip Top Cleaners, Holiday Motel, Billy Rays Dive Tavern, and Mt. Tabor Theater - no longer glow (at least not when we visited them during our four-day journey), but Jenny and I found some new places that give renewed hope that Portland loves its neon landscape.
Here's some homemade video of Minsk lit up to celebrate Victory Day. Note: I shot this hours after nearly getting my finger severed in a poorly executed plan to hop off a mobile rocket launcher. A combination of adrenaline and painkillers inspired me to get out of my apartment and gather footage from one of the prettiest evenings I ever saw in Belarus.
Today I delivered my first off-campus presentation for the U.S. Embassy in Belarus. The event was the nation's International Book Fair held these past few days in the capital city. I had little idea of what to expect until I started noticing oversized posters throughout the city advertising the event. Like, really, really big posters!
So today was the big day. I arrived at about 10 a.m. to set up and noticed... that the event center was almost empty.
"This doesn't look good," I whispered to myself.
My presentation was part of a series of talks commissioned by the embassy on the theme of Undiscovered America. I'd fretted for a couple days, trying to dream up a topic that would fit that vision. At first I went overly historical: "Little known facts about the Constitutional Convention," stuff like that. Then I heard about my colleagues' topics. They were talking about national parks, Native Americans, southern music. At once I knew what to do.
I built my talk around Route 66, discussing the Mother Road as a lens upon an America not often seen in Hollywood movies and reality TV shows. Many folks in Belarus presume that all Americans are wealthy and, let's admit it, spoiled. Few have met an American or heard an excerpt from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath about the Dust Bowl:
"66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these, the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."
The presentation included a discussion of how highway travel represents that quality of the American Dream that enables people to reinvent themselves far from home, unconstrained by our backgrounds or our histories. It also included highlights of tourist traps, motel architecture, and wonderful people like the recently departed Gary Turner who stuck around to breathe life into the highway, even after its replacement by the interstate system. And naturally I included my video of Route 66 neon.
As I walked around the expo center to settle my jangled nerves, I wondered if anyone would show. To attract interest to the slide announcing the time of my talk, I hooked my roadtrip playlist to the speakers. Owing to the interesting acoustics of the site, with its undulating roof that resembles a jellyfish sweeping through the water, I'd sometimes hear echoes of my favorite highway songs far away.
Tom Petty's Runnin' Down a Dream alongside the Chinese display. Johnny Cash's I've Been Everywhere past the Russian tables. Simon and Garfunkel's America near the Iranian exhibit.
Five minutes before my talk was scheduled to begin, there were about four people milling nearby. Then with one minute to go, dozens of folks roared in and grabbed seats. I launched into my remarks, focusing on the people sitting nearby, only then to notice that another dozen or so were listening from outside the exhibit. I never did get a full tally, but I'd estimate that about 50 people saw the talk.
Highlights:
• Seeing two of my BSU students who'd taken the bus so they could catch my presentation.
• Diving into an a cappella rendition of "Get your kicks on Route 66" and hearing the audience clap along.
• Getting a laugh when I explained the meaning of a "No-Tel Motel."
After the talk and a rollocking question and answer session, several folks stayed to chat a bit more. And I've already received invitations to present my Route 66 speech two more times, once at the Embassy for visiting teachers and elsewhere at a software company in Minsk. And I've gotten a tip to check out a song about the road from Moscow to Brest, Belarus.
During my recent Devils Tower solo road trip, I shot some animated video of two swell motel signs: the Santa Fe Motel in Tehachapi and the Siesta Motel in Salt Lake City:
This is a video I've wanted to edit for more than 20 years. Really. For even longer than that, I've had a love affair with retro-futurism. Things to Come. Metropolis. Streamlined moderne architecture. Teardrop-shaped cars... For as long as I can remember, I've been entranced by the wind tunnel efficiency and earnest optimism of yesterday's tomorrows. William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum" reminded me also of the totalitarian underside to these fantasies, particularly those arising from the Great Depression. But I am drawn to their plucky can-do spirit all the same. So when I found myself in the middle of this semester's crush of projects, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the minutia of these days' obligations, I dug up hours of source material and cut this video. The song is by Donald Fagen. The scenes range from 1927 to 1968, the year I was born. The future, of course, is where it has always been: Just beyond today's fears.
Source Material
American Telephone and Telegraph (1961) Seeing the Digital Future
David Butler [Dir.] (1930) Just Imagine
Fritz Lang [Dir.] (1927) Metropolis
General Motors (1940) To New Horizons
General Motors (1956) Design for Dreaming
General Motors (1956) Keys to the Future
Peter Bogdanovich [Dir.] (1968) Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women
Philco-Ford Corporation (1967) Year 1999 A.D.
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (1956) Man and the Moon
Westinghouse Electric Company (1939) The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair
William Cameron Menzies [Dir.] (1936) Things to Come
Many thanks to Birmingham ABC affiliate reporter Robert Richardson for sharing a story they produced about Anniston, Alabama's Goal Post neon sign, which features some footage I shot several years back:
Would you believe it? Folks were emailing me yesterday about the demolition of the Anniston [Alabama] Goal Post Bar-B-Q sign - and now there's word of a reprieve! Once the mayor heard about the imminent destruction of a local landmark, city workers were dispatched to place the sign in storage. The Anniston Star offers some historical context:
Tod Swormstedt, founder of the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati, told The Star in September that the sign is well known among collectors and historians, and its custom-made, animated neon is a reflection of the happiness and prosperity of post-World War II 1950s.
Now there's time for someone, hopefully in town, to figure out a way to keep the sign lit somewhere nearby. San Jose, California did the same with the Stephens Meat Products sign (although that sign has not fared well in recent years). With a little luck, folks will enjoy another chance to see the Goal Post in action one day.
Geni Certain shared the distressing news that the Goal Post Bar-B-Q's animated neon sign, which features a kicker punting a ball, is being dismantled. A short piece in the [Alabama] Anniston Star features the YouTube video I posted some years back, which offers me at least a little solace.
One of the goals of my (slowly) growing collection of animated sign videos is to inspire folks to explore these "potent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm" while they stand today. At the same time I recognize a sadder outcome that, for some, these videos may be the only records that remain. As ever I am drawn to William Gibson:
"I shot one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived and drove right through the structural truth of plaster and lathing and cheap concrete."
I can't recall any such dramatic bulldozer moments in my years of architectural wanderings, but I do remember my last drive through Alabama, thinking, "I should get out there and see this sign again, maybe shoot it in higher definition." More pressing engagements called me away, and I made the right call in forgoing that opportunity. Still, you never know when your last visit becomes your last chance.
Last week Jenny, Vienna, Mike, and I saw It's a Wonderful Life on the big screen in Scotts Valley. Naturally the theater projected the unadulterated black-and-white version, but I must admit a fondness for the colorized version - at least for the scenes in which George Bailey stumbles through the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is Pottersville. To be clear, I'm not referring to eighties-era Night of the Living Dead colorization that transformed human beings into ghoulish pastel mutations; I mean the much more subtle revision engineered by Legend Films in 2007.
OK, I get it: Colorization adds nothing substantial to It's a Wonderful Life. You hardly need techno-fakery to identify with young George's wanderlust ("You know what the three most exciting sounds in the world are? … Anchor chains, plane motors and train whistles"). And you certainly don't need a software solution to celebrate Bailey's appreciation for the fortune he finds in boring old Bedford Falls. When considering the larger themes of Frank Capra's masterpiece, the addition of chromaticity offers nothing more than a clever cheat. But for that gloriously nightmarish sequence in Pottersville, color makes a compelling point.
I am reminded of Gary Kamiya's outstanding Salon piece, "All hail Pottersville," which makes a convincing case that monochromatic Bedford Falls, despite its Norman Rockwell charm, is actually a pretty miserable place ("like Bentham’s Panopticon with picket fences"). In colorful contrast, Pottersville, with its hepcat jive music, garish neon, and shoot-first-ask-questions-later cops, could actually be a lot of fun: "Alas, we will never know what delights are hidden behind the door of the Indian Club or the Bamboo Room, the Midnight Club or the Blue Moon." Kamiya is (mostly) kidding, but his point stands. It may be a guilty pleasure, but give me Pottersville in color!
I'm experimenting with Cinemagraphs, those clever animated gifs that combine elements of still and moving imagery.
Albuquerque, NM
Albuquerque, NM
Denver, CO
Castle Urquhart, Scotland
Castle Urquhart, Scotland (another view)
Salzburg, Austria
Spanish Pavilion, 2010 Shanghai World's Fair
So far my workflow doesn't allow for precise frame-by-frame control (lengthening some frames, shifting their order, etc.), but I've found some tutorials to help me work those problems. More to come!
Footage of the 500 Club's lovely neon martini glass. As usual, I recommend that you select HD for decent quality video. Select 720 from the settings menu.
I'll be sprinkling images and memories from my recent Texas Solo over the next few days. Let's start this week with an animated neon sign that glows in Addison, TX. Syd Nagoshi writes that this google-style beacon for Sigel's Liquor once resided near the Dallas intersection of Lemmon Avenue and Inwood Road. It was moved to this site sometime after 2009.
In fact, here's a surreal time travel experience: As of today, Google Street View shows the sign in its original Dallas location, where it stood for more than five decades. The scene shows construction work underway but the sign still hangs on. Advance the map left or right though, and - poof! - the sign is gone; the place has been replaced by a bank. This effect will surely vanish as Google updates its files, so...
During my 2013 Spring Solo I spent a lot of time searching for animated neon signs. I only found a few that spoke to me, but they were worth the wait. This one -- Jack Starr Cut Rate Liquors in Forth Worth, TX -- surprised me. I was cruising the boulevards waiting for dusk, an ideal time to shoot a nearby motel, when I saw this glorious sign. After all my research, I'd never heard of this place. I couldn't wait to set up my tripod. Most folks ignored me; they were intent on grabbing their bottles and scooting out. But a few stopped and stared at the sign, almost as if they'd never quite noticed it before.
Jenny and I finally visited Cars Land, a remarkable addition to Disney California Adventure. Quick verdict? Cars Land presents an intricately detailed reproduction of Radiator Springs, and a perfect illustration of how Route 66 is becoming "Route 66." This is not to critique the achievements of those amazing Disney imagineers. Touring a life-sized Cozy Cone Motel, gazing upon Ornament Valley's perpetual late-afternoon glow, and savoring the thrill of glorious animated neon at night, you get a charming Route 66 fantasy squeezed into 12 kid-friendly acres. [Check out my video, and click 720 for highest quality!]
Cars Land is predictably crowded, but that's part of the fun. And folks seemed to enjoy the sense of place in this part of the park (something DCA hasn't quite pulled off with their 1920s Hollywood reboot). Sure, beneath the colorful facade resides the same Disney experience: wander-wait-ride-eat-shop. If only Cars Land included more spaces built to inspire interaction among park guests, perhaps a wandering storyteller or two, or at least a couple educational displays about the real Mother Road. Maybe Disney will add a little more Route 66 to their version of "Route 66." But there's no point in complaining. Cars Land, simulacrum that it is, still offers up one heck of a ride.
Planning a visit? Here are a few tips:
1. If you want a chance of snagging one of those Radiator Springs Racers fastpasses, line up early outside the DCA entrance, before the park opens. On both days we visited, they were gone by about 9 a.m.
2. Got your Radiator Springs Racers fastpass? Great. Prepare for frustration anyway. The ride seems to break down a lot.
3. Missed a fastpass? Try the single-rider line, which allows the park to fill every last seat with folks willing to separate from their groups. When Jenny and I used that line (twice!), we managed to sit together anyway.
4. One last Radiator Springs Racers tip: Ride it at night. The neon glow adds to your personal show.
5. Grab a meal at Flo's V8 Cafe. The food is tasty and reasonably priced (considering that you're on a Disney property).
6. Take a look at the Blue Sky Cellar near the Cars Land entrance. They've got a small but interesting set of "making-of" displays.
