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Route 66 Under the Tires and on the Screen

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Bad Photography, Movies

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

Arizona, Cars, Driving, New Mexico, Photography, Road Trip, Route 66, Tourism, Travel

Cars_2006So my girlfriend has this theory that the Pixar movie, Cars, did a lot to help revive the tourist trade along Route 66. I don’t know how serious she is about this theory, but it’s as good an excuse to talk about Route 66 as any, and about Cars, so here goes…

What has Monica talking about Cars? We’ve taken a couple trips along I-40 this summer and last. This year, we’ve taken a few of the detours off I-40 to see what we can find along Route 66. It’s nostalgia for me. I’ve driven large parts of the southwestern route enough to get to know quite a few of the stops quite well. Having someone unfamiliar with it all is interesting though, because I get to see these old sites through her new eyes.

Also she gave me an assignment.

…to watch Cars.

I’ve certainly done worse duty. The movie is cute, perhaps a little too cute. I should probably gruff it off, but I actually enjoyed it. Funny though, I spent the first half of the movie thinking the judge-car (Doc Hudson) sounded an awful lot like Paul Newman. Couldn’t figure out who else it could have been until I mentioned it. Turns out the voice for the car is Paul Newman, and the film turned out to be a little older than I thought.

It’s fitting that Newman would appear in Cars, because I think The Hustler is pretty much the prototype for sports movies. I know, straight pool is a bit of a stretch for a sport, and perhaps a cartoon race-car is an odd subject for a sports film, but I’m sticking to my guns on this one. It’s a story of a prodigy in a competitive field, one who needs to get his priorities straight. That’s almost every sports movie I can think of, and the voice of Fast Eddie Felson (Newman’s character in The Hustler) haunts them all as far as I’m concerned. In this case Fast Eddie’s voice sounds a bit aged, but it’s literally there. And this is certainly a film about a prodigy that needs to get his priorities straight.

…which is an interesting theme through which to explore the relationship between I-40 and Route 66.

***

…er spoilers!

There are no people in this movie; just cars, cars that seem a lot like people. The film’s main character is a race car named Lightning McQueen. Lightning is a talented race-car who is tearing up the tracks during his rookie year on the circuit. He is one of three contenders for the annual Piston Cup award, which would effectively make him the biggest champion of the year. Unfortunately, Lightning’s ego alienates his pit crew and so they leave him just before the final show-down, a race against two great rivals to be held in California. Lightning plans to win the race all by himself, but first he must get to California. For reasons best watched for yourself, Lightning ends up stranded in the tiny southwestern town of Radiator Springs. Having accidentally destroyed the towns main road (a section of Route 66), McQueen finds himself sentenced to repair it before he can go.

Radiator Springs is very much in decline. It had its heyday in the fabled days when Route 66 was alive. The creation of Interstate 40 effectively rerouted the traffic just a few miles off the old route, and in this case, that few miles proved enough to be the undoing of the town. Its inhabitants can only hope to catch the attention of an occasional tourist, but it gets precious few of those.

…even before Lightning comes disastrously to town.

Pressed for time, Lightning struggles first to escape and then to finish the repairs in time to make his final race. In the interim, he must contend with a small cast of character-cars (most of whom were based on actual people living along route 66), including a love interest (a lovely little Porche). He wants out badly, of course, but in time Lightning grows to appreciate the town and its four-wheeled denizens. Having finally grown to appreciate the human side of things, …or at least the personified motor-car variant thereof, Lightning finds himself both a better race-car and a better person car for it. In the end, he doesn’t merely repair the damaged road and make a good showing the race (I’m not going to tell you who won, ha!). Lightning also revitalizes the town, establishing it as a thriving tourist trap with a promising future.

***

So, what does this movie have to say about Route 66? Well, I think one of the best lines about that topic comes from Sally (Lightning’s love interest). She tells Lightning that people moved through the landscape differently when it was Route 66. Asked how, she says:

Well, the road didn’t cut through the land like that interstate. It moved with the land, it rose, it fell, it curved. Cars didn’t drive on it to make great time. They drove on it to have a great time.

So there it is, the claim this movie makes about Route 66. It represents the rich experience that travel can be in direct opposition to a modern strictly utilitarian form of transportation.  The question is which matters more? The experience of traveling across the landscape or simply getting there? This theme smacks of nostalgia, of course, and I can’t help but begin to imagine counter-examples (great road-trips on I-40 or the near certainty that at least some people must have taken to Route 66 for the specific purpose of getting somewhere fast). If there is a concrete difference between the actual roads, it also lies in way the old route goes through small towns while the new one goes around them. Which approach is more welcome may depend a lot on why one is behind the wheel, and how much time one has to get where they mean to go. Still I-40 does nudge things a bit in the direction of getting from point B to point A with a bit more efficiency, and that does come at the cost of seeing a stretch of small-town America.

This nostalgic moment has its own creative force. Many of the small towns along Route 66 have indeed made precisely the transformation depicted in Cars, turning themselves into tourist-traps in the hopes of diverting people off the main highway. As far as I can remember, references to Route 66 have always lured tourists off the main highway along the route, but I can’t help thinking the scale of Route 66 marketing has gone up a notch in the last decade or so. Perhaps Moni is right. Maybe that’s a post-hoc fallacy sweetened with a dose of confirmation bias on my part, but I was rather surprised to see just how much draw some of these towns seem to be getting out of the subject. Whether or not people used to drive Route 66 to have a great time, many do seem to be pulling off onto the small detours now for precisely that reason. No doubt, such traffic brings a few smiles to the faces of locals to match those of those taking in the sites.

Moni and I couldn’t help but notice at least one person who wasn’t so happy about all the traffic. Sitting in gridlock traffic in the middle of downtown Williams, Arizona, neither of us could quite tell what the woman a few cars ahead had been ranting about. The words; “Oh my god, Get out of my fucking way!” clarified things a bit. We watched as a tourist slowly decided to take advice from a green light and the exasperated local finally got around him and made a little headway along main-street. A few minutes later, I heard the same woman shouting “One way street” as she walked along behind a vehicle making a rapid and quite unplanned side-turn.

Yep, there are definitely definite down-sides to tourism.

Didn’t stop Moni and I from taking pictures.

(Click to embiggen; it’s what Fast Eddie Felson would want you to do.)

Seligman *
Seligman *
Williams *
Williams *
Williams again *
Williams again *
Willaims ^
Willaims ^
Nuther Sligman Pic *
Nuther Sligman Pic *
Seligman Again *
Seligman Again *
Ruins Somewhere East of Flagstaff
Ruins Somewhere East of Flagstaff
Seligmania *
Seligmania *
Aging Perpendiculars
Aging Perpendiculars
WIlliams is probably more than a 1 horse town, but it has 1 for sure. *
WIlliams is probably more than a 1 horse town, but it has 1 for sure. *
Seligman Bison *
Seligman Bison *
Ruins East of Flagstaff
Ruins East of Flagstaff
Moar Ruins
Moar Ruins
Whole Lotta Ruination Goin On!
Whole Lotta Ruination Goin On!
Mural Holding Up Well Actually
Mural Holding Up Well Actually

 

* Pictures marked with a star came from Moni’s camera. She also helped me find a source or two, and of course it was Moni’s request that we take some of these detours that led to this post in the first place. She also reminded me to give a fuck to a certain quote, so to speak. Moni is solely responsible for the good parts of this post. I of course am the devil messing up the details.

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Ship Creek Trail in Anchorage

18 Wednesday Dec 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Bad Photography

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Alaska, Anchorage, Creek, Fishing, Photography, Ship Creek, Tourism, Trail, Travel

Sometimes I get lucky.

Sometimes I get lucky.

Ship Creek Trail near downtown Anchorage is always good for a nice walk, even in the winter. It’s at least a little odd, because there are always factories and warehouses just beyond the trees, and of course downtown is never far away, but the trees and the water work their magic quite wonderfully.

In the summer a small shack sells fishing gear near the bottom of the trail, and a good day will see plenty of people hoping to catch something, or perhaps to just pass a little time with a rod in hand. Alongside the shack, one finds an upscale restaurant on a low bridge, all of this under an overpass. The end result is an oddly rustic (almost rural) scene nestled snug into a concrete frame. The restaurant is only open for 3-months of the year

I’ve wandered down this route a time or three now and managed to get a few decent pictures. So, let’s see…

(If you click it, it will grow!)

Ship Creek in August

Restaurant on (and under) a bridge.
Close-up of Bridge restaurant
Fishing Gear

Bridge Restaurant with Fisherman
Green Bridge
Ship Creek has plenty of bridges.

Ducks on Ship Creek

Urban beaver doesn’t give a dam!
Okay, maybe thebeaver does give a dam.
Under Construction

Under Construction and under the Sky

Ship Creek in December

Sometimes I get lucky.
Overpass and a restaurant below.
Factory across the creek.

Steamy water.
Green Bridge Again
Cross the Green Bridge and find the factory.

Creek again.
“Walk this way…”
A cold culvert

Creek
The covered can again.
Winter Ducks

Construction completed
Urban beaver gives a cold Dam

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Always a Tourist in Vegas, or Look What I Found! (Street Art, Part I)

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Bad Photography, Las Vegas, Street Art

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Art, Las Vegas, Murals, Nevada, Photography, Photos, Street Art, Tourism, Travel

Clowns Close-Up

Clowns Close-Up

When I mentioned that I was in Sin City for Christmas, someone on Twitter asked if there were any murals in Vegas. I hadn’t really thought about it, as I soon proved with my answer. Vegas to me can usually be divided between the bare (earth-toned) walls of most residential neighborhoods and the kitchy goodness of the Strip and its progeny. …I tend not to notice either as I go about my business.

If you look closely you can see signs of effective graffiti-abatement programs all over the town. Graffiti does not last in much of Vegas, and it doesn’t appear that most of these programs distinguish a well done work of art from a simple tag. Even a legal mural can apparently be quite a problem.

This area was home to me for a good chunk of my life, but I always feel like a tourist when I come back to Vegas. …more so when I venture near the places this town is known for. Some parts of Vegas are more Vegassy than others.

…and sometimes it’s better to be a tourist than others.

Like this time for instance!

I decided to look around and see if I could find a mural or three, just for the heck of it. I soon discovered the Las Vegas Arts District, a neighborhood that was nowhere near this colorful back in the days I called this area home. But here it is, the source of most of the pictures I posted below. They hold an art fair here on the First Friday of every months, but my own interests lay mainly with the murals strewn about the walls of various buildings in this district.

Suffice it to say that I was very wrong to think Vegas doesn’t have interesting Street Art. They have rather a lot of it. You just have to know where to look.

***

This is a two part post (cause I got a lot of pics). I’ll add a few comments on some particular locations to the second post.

(As always, you may click to embiggen!)

Blue Face
Wall of Tolerance
Colorful Door

I wonder where this leads?
Liquid Chronic
A Hopeful Message

They say that as though it’s a bad thing.
Bail Bonds and Art, Who Knew?
Random Coolness

The Face of Coolness
Coolness Claimed
Moar Bail Bond Art!

An Owl Named Black Wolf?
Found the Wolves
Must have been neat when you could see it.

Schoolyard
School
From an Alley

Close Encounters of the Cool Kind
Sexy Martian!
Well Painted Wall 1

Well Painted Wall 2
Well Painted Wall 3
Well Painted Wall 4

Well Painted Wall 5
Well Painted Wall 6
Well Painted Wall 7, (I seem to have cut a Warhol piece in half. …I’m not sure he would disapprove.

Well Painted Wall 8
Well Painted Wall 9
Well Painted Wall 10

Well Painted Wall 11 (This pic, no zoom!)
Photography Studio
Pretty Face

Back Alley Goodness I
Back Alley Goodness II
Back Alley Goodness III

Museum
Old Version of The Attic (taken over a fence)
More Eyes than Most

Wild
Modernist Antiques
Quaint Shop I

Quaint Shop II
Quaint Shop I
Carriage

Art Imprisoned!
Cluster of Houses
House 1

Cool Character, …I seem to want to sit at his feet and learn.
Random Wall
Freaky Face

Mystery Girl
Dice Girls
Gotta Have Elvis

Wild Wall
Wilder Wall
Wilder Wall, Close-Up

Hero
Moar Wild Walls!
Antiques

Boxers
I wonder what she is thinking?

House Details)
House Details II
House Details III

Clowns and More
Clowns Close-Up
Ball Cap

I cannot read this
We’ll come back to this in Part II
Meeting of Styles

Burger
A Well Written Wall
Head Dress

71.271549 -156.751450

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The Spirit Always Grows Deeper On the Other Side of the Fence

23 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Native American Themes, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

American Indian, Indian, Native American, Navajo, New Age, religion, Spirituality, Tourism

Canyon de Chelly national Monument (Chinle)

It had been a very long drive into work that week, not the least of reasons being a heavy snow storm that descended upon the central Navajo Nation just as I got into the area. I didn’t expect to see my landlady in the office, but there she was. She and I normally passed each other going both ways of our weekly commutes, and upon seeing her I assumed she had been trapped in town by the snowstorm. Would I be on the floor that night? …or asleep in the office? Not to worry, my landlady and her 4-wheel drive were on the way out of town, but she wanted me to know that I would have company that night after all.

I cocked an eyebrow and waited to learn more.

It turns out she had picked up a guy on the side of the road near Chinle. She didn’t know much about him, except that he was a bilagáana (a white guy) and he had come out to the reservation looking for native wisdom. She had blessed him with his first taste of that wisdom by getting him in out of the cold. She added that she thought he was sick. So, I taught my class that evening and headed over to the house wondering what (or rather whom) I would find.

I’ve long since forgotten the man’s name, but he was indeed sick. A doctor had apparently told my guest that his Prostate Cancer could not be treated. So, he had come to Navajo country in the hopes that a Medicine Man could accomplish something that modern science could not. My guest didn’t elaborate much on his condition, though his frequent trips to the bathroom might have testified in some sense to the diagnosis. He was French, as I recall. I don’t think he ate at all that night, nor did he accept an invitation to breakfast.

The house contained two quite decent beds, but no central heating. So, my guest slept on the floor that night and I slept on the couch, thus putting us both near the coal-burning stove. In the morning, he pulled out his tarot cards and tried to get a sense of what the day had in store for him. The man offered to do a reading for me, but I declined. It had been a long time since I had left that sort of thing behind, and I didn’t want it back in my life, not even as a sort of social experiment. Instead, the man explained what each card meant as he drew it during his own reading. There was some good and some bad, and as one might expect, a lot of wiggle room on the particulars.

Although I asked, the man never really told me whether or not he was looking for someone in particular. I suspect he thought the practical problem of finding a Medicine Man willing to help him would resolve itself, perhaps with the aid of his cards or some comparable means of divination.

I don’t think my guest ever asked me for anything, nor did he accept anything I offered. The storm had broken late that evening, and his reading had been promising. So, the man opened the door to find a truly beautiful morning. Soon, he was on his way.

***

It is hard to explain just how out-of-place my guest for the evening had been. The man would have had far more luck turning south and heading into Sedona. Perhaps one of the more shady medicine-men would have sold him a quick Blessing-Way, but the real thing, so to speak, is a family affair. It would take friends and relatives to put together the resources, to aid in the ceremonies, and to help in the long rites. The proper healing from a local perspective might have taken several nights on end with several participants needed to make all this work. The logic of the system is as much social as it is metaphysical. Repayment for all of this effort would take the form of similar service when those same people needed help in various forms over the course of their lives.

This man didn’t really fit into the scenario he was trying to bring about. It wasn’t just the clumsy eclecticism of tarot cards and native healers that seemed off to me. On a much more profound level, my guest had come seeking a personal experience; its social implications were simply beyond him. With enough goodwill, folks could of course devise a work-around, but how likely was it that anyone would give him the chance? To say nothing of the odds that any of it would work!

Who knows?

I could easily hope that my guest for that evening found what he was looking for and flourishes today, living evidence that my sense of both metaphysics and indigenous culture are dead wrong on all counts.

It was desperation, not malice, that brought this man to Navajo country, and yet his failure to appreciate the social setting was part of a much larger problem. I often wonder just what is it about other people’s rituals and beliefs that makes them so attractive to those on a spiritual quest, even with personal health hanging in the balance? Among other things, this question always comes to mind when I think of that particular night in Chinle. Once that question takes hold of my thoughts, I cannot help but to want to follow it down a few similar paths.

***

I’m not altogether unfamiliar with the sort of thinking my guest brought with him that night. I remember reading about the ascended spiritual masters (Kuthumi, Maitreya, St. Germaine, etc.) in my grandmother’s old Theosophy books. The masters dwelt on this earth, at least when they wanted to, or so I read. The home of the masters, so the story goes, rested in the remotest parts of Tibet. I suppose that when the books had been written, this seemed an adequate explanation for the seeming impossibility of finding the masters by normal means. It took meditation to bridge the distance.

I remember sitting in on a séance as a child in the early 70s, one in which I and several family members received the names of our spirit guides. I remember the name of my “Indian guide.” It was “White Thumb.” With the name of “Wee One,” my “Joy Guide” also seemed to bring to mind an Indian, albeit a little one, perhaps an invisible playmate, …very useful to a kid living on a ranch inconveniently far from my classmates. I wasn’t half as interested in any of my other guides as I was in these two.

I also remember that the name of my father’s Indian guide had been of the South Asian variety. I cringe at the explanation, …this was a higher form of Indian guide, so he was told. I cringed again many years later when a family friend dismissed questions about the authenticity of sweat baths run by non-Indian practitioners. She assured me that she and her spiritual mentors were engaged in practices far more advanced than anything Native Americans had actually done. And of course I thought about all of this when I learned about the tragedy of a sweat bath lead by James Arther Ray. I wonder if he too was engaged in practices far more advanced than those of the Indian peoples from whom he borrowed piecemeal?

I remember a woman at a Native American Studies conference who once asked me if I was following the “Red Road,” a question so loaded with cultural baggage I couldn’t begin to unpack it in time to give an adequate response. I expect the woman must have found me quite a disappointment.

But Spiritual appropriation isn’t just limited to Native American traditions. I recall with great pleasure reading Karma Cola long before I headed out to the rez. Gita Mehta’s brutal observations on the antics of spiritual tourists in India touch upon issues quite familiar to those observing how Native traditions fare in New Age circles. Many of the characters she describes in Karma Cola appear quite as hapless as my guest sitting there reading tarot cards on his way to find a Medicine Man. Few seem quite so innocent or nearly as sympathetic.

Mehta has been rightly criticized for focusing on the negatives. So many claim to have found something of value in Eastern traditions. What personal pettiness it must take to deny or to minimize this! And yet the specter of people on a personal quest, proceeding oblivious to the social context in which they operate rings true for me. Whatever folks may have found in these strange, foreign, traditions, it seems a safe bet to suggest that they commonly miss much more.

What bothers me most is that the part spiritual tourists miss may well be the most important piece of the story, the part which anchors all that spiritual talk to an established community. I cannot help but wonder if the quest to learn someone else’s spirituality isn’t rather commonly an effort to escape that very thing!

Those traveling (literally or metaphorically) through another people universe are freed from much of the social context in which the symbols and ideas they seek to learn acquire meaning. They can learn how to perform a ritual, or even what it’s iconography means in some idealized sense, but they are freed from the tedium by which that ritual is connected to countless aspects of daily existence. Most importantly, spiritual tourists are free to fill in the gaps of their understanding as they see fit, unencumbered by multiple sources of information, some of which will surely disagree. What spiritual tourists acquire is a radically simplified version of some other world view, all the easier to tweak it to their own tastes. Perhaps some people need this; perhaps some even do great things with the opportunity. Either way, the point stands. Something highly important is lost in translation.

For some at least, the chance to strip a practice of its social context and rebuild it as they see fit is precisely the pay-off for embarking on a trip into unknown spiritual territory. There may be good reasons for doing that, but how often do people even realize that is what they are doing?

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