Dream Trip: Texas

January 24, 2012 — OTIS is stuffed with cool places that I’ve been, but there are way more cool places that I haven’ t been. Take Texas. Not only have I somehow never been to this state, I don’t even think I’ve ever said its name aloud. But there’s so much in this gigantic hind leg of the continental U.S. that I want to see. After some shallow soul-searching, and taking into account my current level of ignorance on the matter, I came up with a list of ten sites in the Lonely Star state that, had I a chance to visit, would be top on my list. In no particular order:

Congress Avenue Bridge Bats: Bats are one of my proofs against the existence of a Creator. Had there been a mastermind behind this ball of biology, he’d of made bats the dominant species. And you know what? They almost are in Texas. The state has giant colonies of the flying mammals all over the place, but none so large as under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. Up to 1.5 million bats roost there, flying out every summer night in a dark column of ominous flapping to take over the skies like some black aurora borealis.

Jason Tinder, Flickr

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Restaurant: I’d actually want to visit every location from that most important of all pieces of cinema, but I’d settle on Leatherface’s home sweet home, if only for the fact that the cannibal abode was moved from its original location to the town of Kingsland, where it was renovated and turned into a restaurant called the Junction House, which touts its cinema provenance with various signs throughout the place. Chains [aws] of events like this one make me believe in a Creator.

Jimmy Emerson, Flickr

Odessa Meteor Crater: Speaking of craters, why would anyone pass up the chance to walk across a 60,000-year old, 550-foot-diamater depression made from space rock? I mean, it’s the kind of first contact you don’t want to be around for, but thousands of years afterward it’s a party. Unfortunately it’s filled in quite a bit over the years, but that’s cool. It’s not like I’m from Tunguska and can be picky about such things. Actually, there’s an older, larger impact crater in Sierra Madre, but that’s on private land, and if The Texas Chain Saw Massacre taught me anything, it’s not to trespass in Texas. 

chadada, Flickr

National Museum of Funerary History: Death is fascinating, but almost more so because of all the ritual we’ve placed around it. This Houston museum is supposed to have everything you want to see about the funereal without having to go through the whole mourning over dead family members part.

Robert Kennedy, Flickr

Johnson Space Center: All our rockets and shuttles might’ve been launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, but Houston is the home of NASA Mission Control and where the astronauts do all their training. And while I’ll never forgive them for what happened to Major Tom, I’m too big a fan of space to pass up seeing the reason why the city’s baseball team is named the Astros. 

Francois Roche, Flickr

Waco Siege Site: I’ve done my best not to make this list of sites completely morbid, but I think this falls more under the Historical Event category. It’s not my fault that history itself is morbid. The Waco siege happened in 1993 when I was a teenager and was probably the first time I paid attention to the news, so it’s kind of stuck with me. I’m not sure what all is on the site today, but there are memorials to the standoff between the FBI and the David Koresh-led Branch Davidians. 

Mark Miller, Flickr

Marfa Lights: I mentioned earlier that I was a big fan of space. Well, that encompasses both the fact and the fiction of it. An example of the latter is the Marfa Lights. Every night, on the plain east of the town of Marfa, surreal globular lighting effects can be witnessed…and then completely misinterpreted as UFOs or ghosts or extradimensional shenanigans. And while they’ve long been debunked as distorted car lights, the town throws an annual festival dedicated to it and has built a viewing center specifically for it. And that’s the kind of party I want to go to. Wonder what cocktail pairs best with strange phenomenon?

Jon Hansen, Flickr

Graves of Bonnie and Clyde: I am programmed beyond my power to overcome to visit graveyards everywhere I go, and while Texas has some pretty famous frontiersmen and gunslingers under its dust, I’m going to pass up the six-shooters and coonskin caps for tommy guns and fedoras, in this case, and see the separate burial sites of the famous criminal lovers in Dallas. Plus this way I can fit two graves into this list. 

Michael W. Pocock, Wikipedia

Michael W. Pocock, Wikipedia

Hueco Tanks: Just Northeast of El Paso are a series of small rocky hills that that act as natural reservoirs. They’re covered in hundreds of strange Native American drawings dating back about a thousand years, and give lay-bastards like us the chance to play archeologist without having to duck Nazi scum. 

Chad Horwedel, Flickr

Moonlight Towers: In the late 1800s a serial killer, dubbed the Servant Girl Annihilator (by author O. Henry of all people), began a reign of terror that was so reign of terror-y that the city of Austin erected 165-foot-tall moonlight towers to banish the cover of darkness for him. And they’re still there and operating. Oh, you’ve seen ‘em before: “Party at the moon tower.”

Matthew Rutledge, Flickr

Narrowing down this list was an extremely hard task. Honorable mention goes to the Museum of the Weird, the Kennedy assassination site and Sixth Floor Museum, Dinosaur Valley, the Alien Grave of Aurora, and the Alamo...but only because of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. And if any of you more knowledgeable about Texas think that this list goes awry at some point, definitely let me know what, why, and offer some replacement sites in the Comments section below or on the OTIS Facebook page.

Check out my Dream Trip: Iowa piece, as well.

Yellow Brick Road Trip

January 22, 2011 — Minus a few obstinate contrarians, Stanley Kubrick, and probably three quarters of the residents of Kansas, we’re all fans of The Wizard of Oz, whether it's the 1900 L. Frank Baum book with the word Wonderful in the title or the 1939 movie adaption. I recently realized that I’ve been to or heard about enough Oz-related sites in the northeast that I could put together a road trip themed accordingly. So I did.

I’m not going to lie to you, though. It’s a whirlwind trip. But that’s just effing appropriate. It goes from Washington, D.C., all the way to Burlington, Vermont. All told, about 16 hours of pure driving time, one-way.

However, most of these sights are in New York, and if you want a more manageable trip, just stick to that state and you’re only looking at a one-way trip of about seven hours. But you can’t call yourself a Wizard of Oz fan. Just kidding. You can call yourself anything you want.

A. Ruby Slippers (Washington, DC): It’s the first thing Dorothy got on her road trip, and just the thing to start this jaunt up the northeast U.S. Today, one of the few existing pairs of ruby slippers used in the movie can be found in the Icons of American Culture exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, alongside the likes of Kermit the Frog and Archie Bunker’s chair. Europe gave us Shakespeare, Africa the Pyramids, Asia the wonder material that is silk. We added to culture a pair of red-sequined shoes and a ratty Barcalounger.

B. Grave of the Wizard (Brooklyn, NY): Although I’ve been to the famous Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, I've never been off to see the wizard. Nevertheless, here lies Frank Morgan, nee Wupperman, the actor who played him and four other characters in the movie. He’s hiding behind the curtain in Section 168, Lot 14447.

C. Grave of the Cowardly Lion (Ridgewood, NY ): Put ‘em up for Bert Lahr, who really went all out to sell a character that could have easily come off badly and been a blight on the movie. His reward? The same as the rest of us. A plot of dirt. His is in Union Field Cemetery in Ridgewood, New York. I’m not sure which plot, so you’ll have to check with the cemetery. They don’t accept my calls anymore.

D. Grave of Judy Garland (Hartsdale, NY): Her life was legendary, and her funeral almost even more so. Garland is buried in the cemetery to the stars that is Ferncliff in Hartsdale, New York, just north of Manhattan. Here, she rests amid such august company as Joan Crawford, Basil Rathbone, and Jam Master Jay. She’s in a bottom drawer in the main mausoleum, Unit 9, alcove HH, crypt 31. Hail, Dorothy.

D. Grave of the Soundtrack Composer (Hartsdale, NY): While you’re at Ferncliff, trot outside the mausoleum to the grave of Harold Arlen, who composed the score for the movie, including the music for Over the Rainbow. He’s under the ground in Hickory Section, Grave 1666.

E. Grave of the Good Witch (Valhalla, NY): Not too far from Hartsdale is Valhalla. Inside Valhallha is Kensico Cemetery. Inside Kensico Cemetery is the grave of Billie Burke. Inside Billie Burke is Glinda the Good Witch. For those of you who don't travel by bubble, here's how to get there.

F. Baum’s Hometown (Chittenango, NY): Chittenango, the awkwardly named town where it all began, has sidewalks paved with yellow bricks in honor of their native son. If one molecule had been misaligned here on May 15, 1856, we’d never have had L. Frank Baum, which means we’d never have the book, which means we’d never have the movie, which would’ve led to the ultimate tragedy of never having The Wiz. I wrote about my visit to Chittenango here.

G. Baum Houses and Star (Syracuse, NY): Baum spent a few years in Syracuse, and there are spots all over the city connected to him, including one of the houses where he lived at what is now 266 Holland Street and the house where his sister lived (and where he met his wife) at 678 West Onondaga Street. He also has a star on the city’s Walk of Fame at the Landmark Theater, 362 South Salina Street.

H. The Real Yellow Brick Road (Peekskill, NY): There’s a great case to be made that a centuries-old parking lot in Peekskill, New York, where Baum went to military school at age 12, is the remnants of the road that inspired him to include such a thing as a yellow brick road in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Here’s the explanation and an account of my recent visit.

I. Wicked Witch of the West Melting Spot (Salisbury, CT): Although I’ve done it myself, there's no real reason to actually stop here, but you should at least be aware that this road trip route skirts the location of the last breath of Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West. Just over the border in Salisbury, Connecticut, is Noble Horizons, the nursing home where Hamilton spent her final years before dying in 1985 at age 82. Her last words weren't recorded, but I can only hope they were “What a world, what a world.”

J. Flying Monkeys (Burlington, Vermont): Baum's book and the movie it inspired bequeathed us quite a few indelible images, but none so seared itself into our cortex more than monkeys with wings. Who knew they would look so good on a city skyline, though? Burlington, Vermont, that’s who. My visit here.

Paper House

January 20, 2012 — Not even any of the three little pigs were silly enough to make their houses out of paper. But that’s what separates man from the animals. Silliness. Also, that they haven’t figured out how to make bacon out of us yet.

In [paper beats] Rockport, MA, just northwest of Gloucester and right on the end of the peninsula that is Cape Ann, sits a full-sized 90-year-old house made of paper. End of article.

In 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman looked at his calendar and said, “God damn, that’s a lot of blank spots,” and then decided to fill them by building a house out of materials so improbable that our culture doesn’t even use “house of paper” as a metaphor…even though it sounds like a perfect one.

At his day job, Stenman designed machines that made paper clips, so doing things to paper was kind of his thing. Originally, the paper was just supposed to be insulation for his summer house. In fact, the important bits of the house, the roof and the floor and the frame, are all wood. However, at some point, he liked the material so much, that he didn’t clapboard it up and even went so far as to make all the furniture for the place out of paper, too.

Now, almost 90 years later, the single-floor house still stands at 52 Pigeon Hill Street, and it’s open for visitors.

The people who own the paper house these days are located in an adjacent, more conventional abode. On the day we visited, and probably most of the time, a sign on the red-painted wooden front porch of the Paper House read, “Honor System Today. Please Go Right In.” I didn’t understand that first sentence, but the second one sounded cheery.

The exterior of the house, in between the red wooden frame, is made up of about an inch of paper, pressed together and glued with a homemade concoction of flour, water, and apple peels that sounds more like a desert recipe than a construction material. The paper is sealed with a varnish that gives the walls a deep brown hue akin to leather and is layered in a scale-like pattern of diamond shapes. The varnish is translucent enough that you can still see the newsprint from headlines and classifieds and comics almost a century old. In places, the varnished layers have ripped, revealing naked newsprint beneath.

Inside, it’s much the same as the outside, except instead of marveling at the walls, you’re marveling at the furniture. Every stick of it is made of rolled, one-inch diameter tubes of newspaper.

It’s a remarkably cozy effect and somewhat pseudo-rustic. There are lamps, tables, chairs. A grandfather clock that incorporates newspapers from the capitols of the 48 states that made up the Union at that time. A desk was created out of newspaper stories about Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing. The only interior elements that aren’t paper are the brick fireplace and the piano, although the latter is still covered in those paper tubes.

Honestly, the whole thing has a very cabin feel due to its size and the face that everything is brown and gives the impression of being made out of very tiny logs. I guess that’s what I meant by pseudo-rustic. The house is also fully electric and at one time even had running water. No bathrooms, though.

All told, about 100,000 newspapers went into its construction, adding one more thing to the “Stuff my Kindle can’t do” list.

On the way out, as per posted instructions, we threw a couple of dollars per into the mailbox of the adjacent house. ..although I probably needed it more. After all, the plaster in my house is cracking in a million places and I’m pretty sure I have termites, while Stenman’s Paper House will probably last until the last person on the planet forgets Star Wars. Or until this happens.

Bad-Ass Poe Is All Out of Bubblegum

January 17, 2012 — Yesterday I was contacted by a representative from the Poe Foundation of Boston in response to my piece in October on Edgar Allan Poe landmarks in that city. In the piece, as I've done in multiple other places, I made fun of Boston for not properly honoring a native son who is one of the few universally acclaimed greats of literature. After all, this is a city that honored the mayor who banned Led Zeppelin with a ten-foot-tall bronze statue and immortalized a children's book about ducks in one of its most public spaces.

Apparently, the foundation is about to make my comments on that topic completely out-of-date and a waste of good insults.

The foundation, along with the Boston Art Commission, is currently mid-process in developing an honest-to-God Poe monument for permanent installation at the recently christened Edgar Allan Poe Square, the small brick triangle at the southeast corner of Boylston and Charles Streets, near where his birth home once stood.

After receiving proposals from 265 entrants last year, they recently announced the three finalists for the monument design. They’ve also posted those artists’ statements of intent and concept images and are awaiting public comment through the end of February before choosing a final design in early March. Here are those three finalists:

I like the idea of this one, Poe eternally shadowed by an ominous figure that could be interpreted as anything from inspiration to destiny to curse. For some reason, the idea reminds me of the intimidating Saint-Gaudens sculpture of Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church in Copley Square. However, the size of this entry seems less monument and more alcove statuary. And somehow the size and spacial relationships of the two figures takes away from Poe himself.

Poe Park in the Bronx recently unveiled a new raven wing-inspired visitor center, and I assume that this proffered interpretive structure is something similar in idea. Titled, Tis the wind and nothing more, it mines imagery besides the usual Poe icons and focuses more on his body of work than his actual body, and I do at least like that about it. However, Poe Square is a pretty small space and the structure seems too vaguely connected to the author, so I’m not sure whether this would work or not.

My favorite of the three. I'm dubbing it "Bad-Ass Poe," and I’m pretty confident that it's the best of the group. The few Poe statues out there are sedate affairs, but this Poe is toting a satchel full of his work like a machine gun, strutting down the street unleashing nightmares and quoting Rowdy Roddy Piper. This is the second coming of Poe, the one we never saw, the one who has finally realized the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. And he’s a cocky bastard.

The artist states that the statue will have a grayish patina to give the impression that this is the ghost of Poe, and she offers the option for including two other figures at other points in the square, an oversized black cat and Fortunato, freshly resurrected from his brick crypt.

More pics from all three proposals can be found at the aforementioned project site, along with the artist explanations for the designs. So check it out and then give feedback on your favorite. You can do it right on that site or on their Facebook page. You might not have a stake in Boston, but I know you, and you do have a stake in Poe.

As for me, I know where my vote is going. The city, nay, the world needs a Bad-Ass Poe.

L. Frank Baum’s Yellow Brick Road

January 16, 2012 — Dorothy might’ve went over a rainbow, but her feet landed solidly on yellow. And while we may never know the reason that L. Frank Baum chose green for the Emerald City or silver for the magic slippers, we may know exactly why the road that leads to the wizard is a yellow brick one.

And the hypothesis is extremely…visitable.

The town of Peekskill, New York, is located on the eastern shore of the Hudson River, about 40 miles north of Manhattan. In 1868, at the age of 12, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz author and native New Yorker arrived in town to begin his two-year stint at the Peekskill Military Academy.

That’s the biography, now the theory.

According to local Peekskill historian John Curran, maps reveal that a road, West Street, once led from the river up to the site of the academy (which was demolished sometime after it closed in the 1960s). In addition, the Dutch settlers there paved that road with a yellowish brick often used in their homeland and which drew its color from its high lime content.

That seems direct and pretty cool. Baum lived for two of his formative years in a town with a yellow brick road. But Curran goes further than that. He thinks Baum probably arrived in Peekskill by way of the Hudson River, in a steamboat. Since he didn’t have a map app for his smartphone, he probably asked directions to the academy when he landed. The inevitable answer? “Follow the yellow brick road.” Which, then, of course, we all imagine him doing while skipping arm-in-arm with a scarecrow and a man made of tin.

Granted, a few places Baum lived or visited supposedly had yellow brick roads. Enough, in fact, to make it almost too pedestrian of an element to include so centrally in a fantasy story. But he did include it, so it can be assumed that the first one he ever saw probably left an impression…and it very well could have been that Peekskill road.

Now, I have a credulity prone to compound fractures, but this idea doesn’t even make me twinge, honestly. Still, whether true or not, the theory can at least be checked into even without any research credentials…because a remnant of that yellow road still exists.

Today, it leads to nowhere and is basically a parking lot the size of two living rooms. That’s right. It’s no longer “Follow the yellow brick road.” It’s “Park in the yellow brick parking lot.”

You can find this stretch of faded glory at the intersection of Hudson and South Water Streets, on the property of the Standard House, a three-story, 150-year-old [red] brick building that was originally a boarding house and tavern. Today, it houses a wine shop.

Colors may have been saturated for your enjoyment.

Directly behind that historical building is a municipal parking long, most of which is made up of your mundane, off-to-see-the-dentist asphalt. However, at the back door of the building and running its length, is the aforementioned patch of possible literary history. You can easily see it in the satellite view of Google maps. The strip runs perpendicular to the river, which is only about 200 yards away across the train tracks and a park.

When I visited there was a car squatting on some of it, despite all the open spots on the asphalt part, and it was also half-obscured in the gloomy noon shadow of the Standard House. Pictures online show that in warmer seasons it can be a bit grass overgrown in spots, as well. Nevertheless, the section that was clear and sunlit was definitely striking and had me looking around for fireball-wielding witches and monkeys with wings.

But as fascinating as it was to walk on, it was also a bit sad, both because of its condition and also because Baum’s story turned the gleaming road into a metaphor for hope, which has since become ingrained in our cultural brain. A yellow brick road that can’t be followed is just depressing. The ultimate in dead ends.

However, far from leaving the rectangles of hardened clay to the forces of decay and the howling dogs of society, Curran is currently leading efforts to restore, protect, and market the pavement. Surprisingly, this decade-long task has not been going easy. According to reports, nobody with serious funds wants to protect the humble stretch of brick, even if it means that the town can boast an Oz-themed wine shop.

It’s kind of like Dorothy telling the Munchkins, “Yellow brick roads are stupid. Get your lollipops out of my face and just leave me alone.”

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

January 12, 2012 — Celebrity does a lot for a person. Doesn't keep you alive, though. Exhibit A: Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA.

The cemetery is located right in the space where the heart of the district would be if Hollywood had one, at 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard. The 60-acre, 110-year-old cemetery even shares its southern border with Paramount Studios. From just about any point on the grounds, you can see the iconic white water tower with its blue Paramount Studios logo staring balefully over the cemetery like a grandfather that has outlived its grandchildren. Or a like the Eye of Sauron. Depends on one’s mood, I guess.

The Walk of Fame is only a mile away, but Hollywood Forever is a much better place to tread upon the stars. If that Paramount water tower ever bursts, it’ll wash over the remains of some of the most famous names in Hollywood, names that most of us have only seen rolling vertically in white letters on a black screen, names that are now incised in granite and marble.

Now, I’d visit this cemetery if it only held the remains of Peter Lorre, but it also features what’s left of Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, Mel Blanc, Fay Wray, John Huston, some of the Ramones…it’s the cast, crew, and soundtrack of some crazy motion picture that never happened.

The official cemetery site provides plenty of information these days on the stars buried in its turf, as well as an interactive map. I visited the cemetery in May of 2009, and the only person on my itinerary whom I couldn’t find was Maila Nurmi. The 1950s horror hostess known as Vampira had just died the previous year, there wasn’t much information on her grave site online in general, and, most importantly, she still didn’t have a headstone. That’s changed since then thanks to her friends and fans, and she arguably has the coolest corpse weight out there now. Or maybe it looks like this. Confused.

Also with the hindsight of the 2012 Internet, my wife is probably standing on top of Ms. Nurmi while taking that first picture of me.

I’ll never get used to the idea of a cemetery with palm trees, but Hollywood Forever is certainly a beautiful place and well-kept. Even better, it maintains a much more relaxed attitude than most of its peers, treating the place less like sacred ground and more like a venue. It features regular concerts, tours, Halloween and Dia de los Muertos events, and outdoor movie nights where the film is projected on the blank side of one of its mausoleums. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we’re all going to entertain worms.

I'd like to say that seeing the final resting places of the rich and famous will move one to profound philosophical speculation, but mostly, it'll just make you say, "I've been to his grave" every time Darren McGavin’s scenes come up in A Christmas Story. It’s pretty annoying, and I’m sorry to suggest you put yourself in that situation.

For real, though, I've been to Kolchak: The Night Stalker’s grave.

Rudolph Valentino

Peter Lorre, to add to my collection of grave of horror stars.

Cecil B. DeMille

Fay Wray...I wonder how the cold, icy grip of death
compares to the warm, furry one of King Kong.

There were lots of birds at the cemetery, and I had to chase
these away (i.e., make them chase me) in order to get to the
grave pictured next.

The tragedy of Virginia Rappe and Fatty Arbuckle.

Just a cenotaph for Johnny, but
Dee Dee's buried on the grounds
just across that pond under a custom
Ramones headstone.

A Long Day on Long Island

Can't even begin to describe
the random shop these were in front of.

January 10, 2012 — From the time I pulled out of my driveway pre-dawn to the point I rolled back into it post-prime time, my road trip to Long Island this past Saturday to visit sites for my upcoming New York Grimpendium ended up eating about 17 hours of my precious allotment on this Earth.

The weird thing is, I’ve gone through and retraced everything that happened, re-plotted the mileage, double-checked my itinerary…and I still can’t account for all the hours.

Normally, I wouldn’t try, but somehow I botched seeing a few sites on this trip and wanted to figure out why. I mean, besides not taking into account seasonal closings, misestimating the onset of darkness, and under-researching elements I thought could be determined on-site.

Still, the misses were trivial against the successes and will be easily fixed later in the month. Plus, the fact that I had a friend along with me “horribly awry”-proofed it since the trip doubled as a chance to hang out. The lost hours I can’t account for, I’ll just have to write off on my taxes.

I’m going to save discussing the individual sites for the book, but they included grave sites of the famous and the unfortunate, horror movie filming spots, houses of the unholy, and general things ignored in New York Tourism Board brochures. Probably rightfully so.

But I did get some random shots worth sharing. Guess that’s inevitable when you cover 700 miles in less than a day.

The stuff one finds on graves...

I'm still young enough to want to trespass every time I see
one of these signs, but too old to actually do it.

Even when the temptation is gaping.

Same random shop with the dinosaurs.

A deer friend...

...who got scarier the closer he crept.

Sometimes mis-planning is okay if it means accidentally
hitting the beach right at sunset.

The actual real-life Amityville Horror house.
Cool to see it at night, but need a clearer pic
than this if I'm going to use it in the book.
Shorter days are dumb.