Positively 4th Street...

Huh!!!  What the hell am I doing in Cleveland?

Strong armed by Jackie in one of those marital standoffs that you find your self in and know you can't win, I came here, kicking and screaming all the way to a Flynn family gathering at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for three and a half days of rocking and drinking. Not to say that there are not some perks to being here, but my ass hurt after the 7 hour drive, and it took a few days and more than a few scotch on the rocks to appreciate my relatively good fortune in being here.

We are staying in the Arcade Hotel, a crystal palace built on 1890 above and around the most ornate, tastefully extravagant indoor shopping mall in an architectural style and elegance that is breathtaking and rivals anything that could have been imagined by Renaissance Europeans.

Across the street is 4th Street where Clevelanders go to drink and get wild.  We spent a lot of time there drinking and celebrating something.  Somewhere along 4th Street is an alley that leads into a dingy netherworld where unspeakable things happen after dark and one is advised to stay away.  From the street, it looks pretty benign, even inviting once we got by Maurice, the official greeter who took a buck to pose for this picture...

I was lured in by the pretty flowers, the bright twinkling lights and a glimpse of graffiti at what appeared to be the end of the alley, but was just the beginning of something evil.  I took this picture of the graffiti and way prepared to go further which I started to do when I was approached by two guys who looked like they had nothing to lose and could eat you alive.  I smiled, waved, and moved back carefully and quickly, no longer curious about what lay beyond.

Other than that, loved Cleveland a town that exceeded all expectations in terms of intact architecture and inner city vibrance.  It is the hometown of the two guys who created the Superman character and comic.  At the public library across the street from the hotel, they had an exhibit celebrating the Superman thing.

    Pablo                                                         

YES Books in Portland...

Here I am at the YES bookstore in Portland Maine troubling myself about buying a cheap stained and tattered first edition of  henry miller's book, an air conditioned nightmare, a travelogue about his amble across america in the 1940's after his return from europe which i have been meaning to read, but have been unable to track down off line until now.  surprised to find that it is nothing more than a 200 page rant, a spewing of venomous distain and unvarnished hatred about everything american, and i mean everything.  after 10 glorious years in europe screwing and sucking and writing his way across the continent, the inconvenience of WW2 forced his return to the object of distain he previously sought to escape.  guess the french resistance should have been more to his liking although i guess obviously not.

i often trouble myself about buying used stuff becauseyouneverknow when the object will be inhabited.  i am generally not a believer in the paranormal, but i have had some unsettling experiences with antiques, a certain "inhabited" hotel room in Epinal, France in which I awoke with a start to the feeling of an overpowering presence that drove me out in the middle of the night  and don't even get me started on "vintage" clothes.  "nightmare" is the kind of book i would have written if i could write (minus the venom), but i can't so i take pictures and am often capable of 20 or 30 lines of moderately pithy prose to annotate this pictures so i am thankful.  never had that problem with a used book, so i should probably go back in and buy it, which I did.  thought it would be a funny sexy romp through america in the 40's, but i got that wrong.

Coincidently, we were just in Portland Oregon a few months ago on the last leg of our quest to see all of the lower 48 states and other than Voodoo Donuts, going to  Powell's Bookstore (no pictures...too big and under renovation), had to be a highlight where I found the holy grail...my search for a 1940 edition of the book that has had the most influence on my career as a photographer had come to a happy end, "California and the American West" by Edward Weston and Charis Wilson, and published by Deuel Sloan was on the shelf with dust cover for $50 an unheard of price.  Interestingly, Jackie said she had the feeling I would find it there.

Two Portlands, two books, and two donut shops.  Voodoo in Oregon, and...here, which I failed to document because it was great but not visually compelling and I didn't know it would be this important.  Love Portland, so another great reason to return.

                                                                   Pablo   

The Sand Hills...

Ever since coming across an October 1978 edition of National Geographic in my dentist's office  many years ago that had an article about  "Nebraska's Sand Hills" in it, I knew that was someplace I needed to see.  Like so many articles in NG, most of the pictures were of the people in the area, but it was evocative, there was one good little map suggesting that state road 2, beginning in Grand Island and ending in Alliance,  pretty well bisected the 19,000 square mile sea of sand hills that dominated the western part of the state.

We left Lincoln a little too late in the day expecting to spend the night in Grand Island and then beginning the journey along Route 2 from there.   Once we got to Grand Isle, to the uneducated eye, there appeared to be no compelling reason to be there, a decision I now regret because it was the beginning of the journey, but at the time, how could I have known what the journey was,  so we decided to keep driving to Broken Bow, driven by an evocative name that offered hope that this would offer the "authentic" Nebraska experience we were in search of.  Because it was now even later in the day, it was more of a mad dash to Broken Bow and bypassing what I now know were many missed opportunities.  But how could I have known then.  The only town we did stop to see between Grand Island and Broken Bow was Hazard and it's little downtown that consisted of about 2 unoccupied storefronts.  So much was missed along the way, but  like so many of our journeys, it was a learning curve that only made itself known along the way and even then, there was so much to learn.  Only looking back do you see what there was to be seen, how much you missed and hope you will get the chance to return to get it right.  On the balance, there was a lot good, but as always, it is the regrets of what could have been that prevail.