My wife wasn’t answering her phone and I was dying to tell her about what had happened. I spent the next hour looking for her and when I landed on the main street I found myself in the middle of an art car parade.
The spectacle rolled down the street, each car more amazing than the last. The first one to pass me was made from a VW bus and was festooned with thousands of sequins in dozens of colors. A fiberglass sculpture of a whale was attached to the roof and dwarfed the bus. It too, was covered with blue sequins and glinted in the sun.
The VW bus was followed by a 57 Chevy, coated in chalkboard paint and covered with chalk drawings. There was an old volvo that looked like a Chuck Taylor shoe, a conversion van that looked like Teddy Roosevelt and a Smart car that had been turned into a stretch limo covered in fake leaves.
I watched 30 or so cars pass by and then, for the third time in 24 hours, I crossed the path of the strange and blue. A station wagon passed me. It was painted cobalt blue and blanketed end-to-end in small blue and gray alien figurines. On the side of the wagon, the mix of colors spelled out the words “Blue Blood.” The driver wore a blue hooded robe and dark sunglasses and looked straight at the road in front of him.
As I stared at the car, my cursory knowledge of high school Spanish came suddenly back to me and I realized “sangre azul” translated as “blue blood.” My senses were heightened and my brain was buzzing with the implications of what I had witnessed the night before. Had this strange group of people hurt someone? Was I the sole witness to a heinous crime?
In an effort to make sense of what I was seeing, I asked the local man to my right about the blue wagon and curiosity shop. In just a few minutes, I learned what I was seeing and who these odd people were.
October 16th, 2008 by rob
“What do you spy when you raise your eyes to the sky?”
For a moment I thought he was still talking on the phone, more loudly than before. I turned and his gaze was firmly fixed on me.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked.
“Your flesh’s byways are someone else’s highways,” the man hissed.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understa…”
“They’re someone else’s highways!”
This last phrase was practically bellowed and the hairs on my arms stood up. I wanted to leave, but I stayed rooted to my spot and the man continued without inflection.
“Have you ever seen the trails in the sky?”
“You mean like the ones from jets?”
“Yes, like the jets. The trail holds the vapor, the vapor holds the chem, the chem holds the slow death.”
“Um, ok.”
“NO, IT’S NOT OK! IT’S DEATH! IT’S THE SLOW DEATH!”
This last sentence was screeched at me in a high falsetto and the man’s face contorted into an ugly mask filled with hate.
I stumbled back a couple of feet and replied nervously:
“I can see you’re agitated. I’m going to go now.”
I turned around to leave and he said, in a perfectly calm and rational voice, “The blood. It’s yours. For now.”
As I turned to leave, a short latino man came out of a room behind the counter. As I made my way to the front of the store he began speaking to the pale man in spanish. And I heard very clearly the words “sangre azul.”
My stomach fell and I paused. Looking back, I realized my hesitation had caught the eye of the pale man. His eyes were wide, staring at me. I bolted from the shop and hurried quickly down the street and out of sight.
September 15th, 2008 by rob
Bisbee, Arizona is a drunken old man with a broken back. Its narrow twisted streets hunch over the mountainside it rests on. Strewn about these back alleys lie antique stores, artisan shops and the city’s illegitimate children who haunt the place.
Bisbee leered back at me through my viewfinder as I captured its crumbling facades and urchins clogging its crooked veins. I ducked in and out of cluttered stores and climbed steps to nowhere, all in search of the perfect shot.
I was at the dead end of one particularly broken street when I happened upon the most interesting thing I’d seen all day. I stood staring at a curiosity store that looked more like some kind of temple to the strange. The building was painted in cobalt blue and was encrusted with a mosaic made of thousands of rhinestones and pieces of ceramic tile. The top of the building was crenelated with hundreds of what looked to be cast iron forearms and hands, all raised to the sky. The windows were filled with a strange assortment of nude mannequins, suspended sheets of aluminum foil and hanging galaxies of crude planets fashioned from paper mâché. Finally, above the door was an enormous mosaic eye, made from plaster and inset into a pair of eyelids which bulged from the blue facade. Below the eye hung a hand painted wooden sign that read “Blue River Curiosities.”
Stepping into the store, I immediately left Bisbee and found myself in someone’s dusty attic, filled with a hundred years of conspiracy doctrine. The shelves and floor were piled with books and trinkets devoted to the Illuminati, Freemasonry and everything paranormal. The sparse lighting and the music of wind chimes only added to the atmosphere. I strolled slowly through the store, perusing the items on the rickety shelves and as I reached the back, I met the person responsible for this garden of earthly bric-a-brac.
The man behind the counter was dressed in a hooded crushed velvet robe, covering a black tee shirt. His face was completely shaven including his eyebrows and he was so pale he could have been dead. He was speaking to someone on the phone about a book and gave me a sidelong glance with some very bloodshot eyes. Behind him, in another room, I heard someone rummaging through boxes and paper.
The man ended the phone call and I began one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had.
September 13th, 2008 by rob
In the hard reality of morning, the radio incident seemed like a dream. Instead, I was confronted with thoughts of my latest family crisis.
The trip to Bisbee was literally just what the doctor ordered. My family had been in counseling the last month after my oldest daughter Stacey decided that drugs would be her teenage rebellion of choice. This trip was the result of that counseling.
We had recently moved from Albuquerque to Scottsdale to get Stacey away from the bad kids at school but she managed to find a new group and now we were in deep into family rehab. Our therapist recommended that my wife and I take some time alone to regroup and discuss our family. We figured that leaving town for a weekend would give us a chance to talk about how to best help Stacey and keep our family together. So here we were, just north of the border, distracting ourselves in a sleepy ramshackle mining town.
After getting ready for the day, Kate and I drove into town and stopped for breakfast at a local joint. The order for the day was antique shopping (my wife’s favorite past-time) followed by shopping and more shopping. I figured I could use the time to take some quirky photos with my new digital camera. During meals, we would discuss the elephant in the room.
As we sat eating and chatting about Stacey, I kept thinking of the night before. I felt silly mentioning it to Kate, but it was so strange that I couldn’t just leave it alone. As I related the whole experience to her, she laughed and chalked it up to stress. It’s funny how the light of morning and a few bites of pancake can make scary things seem trivial. By the time we’d finished eating, Kate’s pragmatism and a little maple syrup had me convinced it was nothing. We tipped the waitress and set off to explore our own paths through the old mining town.
August 20th, 2008 by rob
Yet another The Dark Knight review? I think not, what would be the point? There have already been numerous reviews written by much better writers and more informed followers of cinema than I (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080716/REVIEWS/55996637). Besides, a key reason for reviews is to help people decide if a movie is worth seeing. I can help you with that without mentioning a thing that happens in the film. Go see this movie. Don’t like brainless summer action films? Go see this movie. Hate comics, cartoons and superheroes? Go see this movie. Don’t watch film at all and prefer a good thought provoking novel? Go see this movie. There is no hyperbole here folks. Its just that good. Period.
So rather than do a traditional review of the film, as in telling you about it directly. Let me just mention my impressions and reaction to it. To say there was hype and exposure prior to seeing it is an understatement. I knew going into the theater that I was going to be blown away. I knew it was going to surpass my expectations…but how could I really know what that meant? We have all had our expectations exceeded, but have you ever had them exceeded when you were told they would be exceeded? Think about what that would take to accomplish. It would mean that you would have to experience something that you had never experienced before.
When it comes to film, being able to have such an experience just doesn’t happen very often. As you get older it becomes even more difficult. The best part of seeing a good film is the act of witnessing that the team that made it really understood the material. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was an example of that, the filmmakers of LOTR, really loved the material and it showed. What makes a great film, though, goes beyond just being a labor of love. Like great literature, it can’t just be finely crafted, it has to be able to connect in such a way that it gets inside you, the audience. It isn’t enough to just tell a good story. The best works will challenge you, make you ask tough questions of yourself, all while entertaining you. We see those sorts of film from time to time. This is such a film. It doesn’t matter that it is about comic book characters. If you let that stop you from seeing it then you are just a bigot and don’t deserve the experience anyway.
It is somewhat ironic that one of the trailers before the showing was for the Watchmen. This is another comic book, but one that has received a bit of respect, even from the more traditional critics (http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/0,24459,watchmen,00.html). I read the Watchmen in 1988 and have watched its on and off again flirtations with becoming a movie since. It is one of my favorite items of literature (yes literature) so I was indeed beyond thrilled to see the trailer. My thought was, “if they pull that movie off then it will truly be the best of the comic book films because its source material is so great.” After seeing TDK, I almost don’t even care. I have seen what may very well become the best film to ever be based on a comic book. How it will be topped I can’t even begin to comprehend. In fact, others have said it and I agree, it is in the same league as movies like The Godfather and Unforgiven. Movies that transcend their genre to become masterpieces in their own right on their own terms.
August 6th, 2008 by david
A blog, David? Really? Uh…yeah. But let me explain. Last night, while checking out some new apps for the iPhone, I found one I really liked. I tweeted it, but still had more to say that just wouldn’t fit in a single tweet. That’s where this blog comes in. I see it as a means to supplement the twitterverse. Not sure it will get any real use, so think of it as, yet another, silly diversion that I will tire of soon enough.
August 6th, 2008 by david
It was four o’ clock in the morning and I woke to the sound of voices on the radio.
For a moment I stared into the blackness, struggling to remember where I was.
In bed. In a trailer. In Bisbee. Friday morning.
I had tuned the old radio in the Airstream to the white noise of a dead channel so I could sleep. And now I was listening to a broken conversation, crackling over the speakers. An odd voice, lacking inflection spoke first.
“My arm. Limbs. Why. Halted?”
I heard a second voice, crass and guttural.
“Don’t move. Stop moving!”
Some time passed and the first voice spoke twice without response.
“Where–myself?”
“My [unintelligible]. Crew. Vassal.”
I could also hear a third person speaking in Spanish. I caught the words “carro,” “sangre azul” and the phrase “tengo miedo.”
The first voice spoke again, only now with emotion, pleading.
“Please. No.”
Then a new, deeper voice, very clear over the radio.
“Take care of it now.”
Suddenly, there was a high-pitched shriek and a popping sound, both on the radio and somewhere in the distance outside. Then silence.
The static resumed and my whole body was stiff. The combination of the hour, the strange mix of voices and the scream left me buzzing, wide-eyed and awake.
My wife stirred in the bed next to me and my body relaxed a little. “Kate?” I whispered. Nothing. She hadn’t heard any of it.
I laid awake for probably another hour or so before I finally gave up and got up from bed. I slipped on my sandals and quietly stepped out of the trailer. It was a quiet, moonless night in the desert.
There was a soft breeze and I could smell the rainy scent of creosote. The neon motel sign cast a dull pink glow over the adjacent trailers. All was dark outside the court except for the halo of light from downtown Bisbee and a fire at the foot of a nearby bluff. I found an old metal patio chair and sat down.
I had chosen this motel as a destination after reading about it in a local magazine. The “rooms” were 50’s aluminum trailers, completely restored and decorated with vintage furniture and tchotchkes. Kate and I figured it would be a good place to get away for the weekend. Until tonight, it had been a relaxing and uneventful trip. After an hour or so, I finally began to nod and so I retired to my bed.
August 2nd, 2008 by rob