Mulholland Drive

I am still in bad shape, but I put in a few hours on HOLLOWPOINT. I kinda looked like this all day. I've been having images of lobotomies. If this plays right, you'll be hearing R.E.M. Usually at this time of night, I'm listening to Cannonball Adderly or Dizzy Gillespie. Not tonight. I'm Martin Sheen. I'm Steve McQueen. No chance in the fucking hell I'm headed for.

Tales Yet Told

I'll get to them. Not been able to type and think at the same time lately. I'm in my wishing for grave time mood.

Universal Monsters Monday III

I'm beat for some reason, the evening kinda folded into me, or vice versa. Its in the low 80s and its almost 1 AM (don't ever go by my blog and its South Pacific time), and there are times when the humidity makes the rods in my head start sliding in and out of their sockets of their own accord. So its like my brain is telling my right tricep to bebop. It never does that. Ah, well.

Nope. Just like I'm taunting you all everybody with the Sixteenth Street Bridge, I'm doing the same with Bela.Before I get to Dracula, I should point out that I had discovered that I own fifteen or so cards from the 1996 set of Universal Monsters of the Silver Screen. Yea, I know! Crazy stuff indeed! These things are straight-fwd, like collecting baseball cards. Monster's Mate on the front, Info the the film BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN on the back. Henry Hull as the Werewolf of London. The incredible Rondo Hatten with Gale Sondersgaard in THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK, a film where she pretends to be blind to attract young men, she poisons them with a plant in some scheme to drive farmers off her land. Green Acres Noir. There's a scene, the necklace one, from THE CAT CREEPS, the cat in question not being Sammy Davis Jr. THE LEECH WOMAN is by far one of my favorite films of all time, starring Colleen Gray in the title role and Gloria Talbot, my person favorite 50s hottie, as the scheming BFF who causes...well, just Wiki the film. I think the first word that will come to mind is Botox. Way ahead of its time.

THE MAD GHOUL. 1943. George Zucco turns David Bruce into a zombie to scare Evelyn Ankers, the same chick Larry Talbot chased after in THE WOLF MAN. She later married 50s B-movie stud Brian Denning and then he became mayor of Honolulu or something. The two of them had cameos in several episodes of HAWAII 5-0. By the way, Gloria Talbot also starred in I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE, but that wasn't made by Universal. You'll have to look that up while you check out the collagen monster of 1957.

Fifth Avenue

The most common way for anyone driving straight south from west of Pulaski to get onto I-90 is by doing a diagonal on seedy, beat-up Fifth Avenue, which a century ago was Colorado Street. I talk much of the areas that are being infested by town homes, but everything around here is nothing but squalor. I took these photos at the start of the kayaking trip, the one where I finally took photos (too many!) of the Sixteenth Street Bridge, and I'll get to those tomorrow. These shots of Fifth are from right off Cicero going east. See, I live on Leclaire, the other side of Cicero. For awhile, every major street starts a new letter, up north the city streets go as far as P. But the closer you get to Pulaski proper (where the K's start), its just plain sad.

Blood on The Red Line

The Tears of My Tracks

Tears as in rips, not the crying kind. I found out I had a way (OK, OK, my 10 yr old niece found this out and showed me) to take a 1.3 MB photo with the webcam. So I thought, hmnnn. Let's see what I can take photos of off of my face and arms. The head one might show an odd scar shaped like England, still there since I broke my arm in 1973, riding a bike in Kentucky. There's one of me pointing/pulling at my hand; back in the winter of 1983, some guy on angel dust pulled a knife on me on the A train (as they were then called), and like a fool, I slapped his hand, somehow smacking the damn knife itself. So much for depth perception. The guy did cut out, though. My first experience with idiots and meltdowns. I knew I was going to love being a writer. The cut was to the bone, I found out later, 26 years later, its hard to see even when I'm tanned. The other shots try to do my left arm justice, what the "good" scar and the "bad" scar loom like. Also, a nice perspective thing to show how might left arm really looks when I'm not bending it into normal fashion when I'm around people. My knuckles really don't hit the ground, no worries.

Taste of Chicago, Joey Waso, And An Indian Chief Punching A Bird

See, I had thought I'd lost the camera. Watching the band, letting it lay on the grass. I found out I have two slots for water bottles on my backpack, and I use neither, being the idiot I am. Well, the one time I DO use it, I find an obstruction, which was, of course, the camera. Every year, I go to the first day of the Taste with Joey Waso, we always head to the original Blackie's first and sit and talk, not so oddly, about the printing business, as this is where I know Joe from, Dipple's PrintShop (as it is known in my fictional Chicago). From there, we just cut around the old Dearborn train station and bam, we're there. It's just a hang out day, my not drinking helped considerably, because a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi cost $4.00. There's like a billion restaurants offering up food and I went with...Gold Coast Hot Dogs. Can't help it. We saw a band, Joe decided to take a photo of the lead singer and I, seeing as we are at poolar opposites of the hair thing, but he also took a photo of a girl watching the band, because I sure didn't. (These photos are about a month old). I took a few shots of Buckingham Fountain and the general area where the Taste begins, but, honestly? My favorite shote is of the statue of the Indian chief on the horse, trying to punch the seagull.