Remember, Remember the 11th of September

Another 9/11 came and went.

With the nauseatingly predictable, parasitic media again seizing on the opportunity to try and use planes smashing into buildings to sell me soda and laundry detergent.

Another 24 hours of the android choir singing "We will never forget!" As if that was ever an option.

Another 9/11 and we're still in Iraq.

Where we've now killed 100 times more people - who had nothing to do with our tragedy - than Al-Qaida killed in The Twin Towers.

If we apply our own mathematics of war to the Iraqis, then we owe them tens of millions of innocent American lives. I guess, then...we better pray that, unlike us...the people of Iraq do forget.

Being from Guetemala, and most likely not a taxpayer at all, this guy didn't have to share my sense of imperialist guilt. Instead he just smiled and sold me a Tear Jerker watermelon ice.

15 feet away, this guy was sleeping off his own personal 9-11 on the sidewalk.

I grabbed the camera and wandered around my old neighborhood for a few hours trying to find a little bit of peace in the small details.

Of course...there's death there too, but at least there it's not being funded by my paycheck.

I just drifted, trying to avoid newspaper stands, radio signals, and the internet.

Appreciating the random luck that allows me to skip the screaming and burning and just record one quiet corner of a very loud city.

This is what the Armenian Power gang was up to on September 11th, 2009 (if anybody was wondering).

The guy living in this van was M.I.A. when I stumbled across it. No clue how he spent his day.

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I had to scratch my head at this one - parked in front of a Sikh Temple. Sikhs, though from India, are permitted to eat beef (unlike Hindus). If this is Hindu graffiti, slandering the Sikhs for their beef consumption, no wonder you don't see much Hindu graffiti. Takes forever to vandalize with masking tape.

We could actually use one of these outback of our place, since someone's been using our parking lot as a sit-down toilet.

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Another Los Feliz residence on wheels.

It was 9-11 for this poor little guy, too.

Lying in the boiling sun outside the most expensive grocery store in California (Gelson's).

And still there when I passed by the next day, the smell of death wafting through a parking lot full of Benzes and Land Rovers.

I shoot and post a photo every day, and this would have been my posting for 9/11 (taken on the 10th), but it felt out of place. The driver of this car escaped before it exploded on the freeway, and no-one was hurt.

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Still plenty of beauty in the small details. Some days, that just has to be enough.

When the Well Runs Dry

The crude oil refinery - an economic windfall, followed by an ecological wasteland.

At its height, this facility - in a location I won't disclose, other than to say it lies somewhere between Los Angeles and San Francisco - refined 20,000 barrels of oil a day, and was capable of storing another 870,000. 

Hazardous waste produced at the plant - such as sulfide sludge and mono-ethanolamine - had to be hauled off-site for disposal. Who knows where that shit is now (probably in this bottle of Arrowhead I'm sipping on).

The refinery's parent company proposed a $100-million expansion to the facility in the early 1980s. Neighbors succeeded in blocking the move, protesting that the plant represented an environmental hazard to the surrounding community. Because the site's profitability depended on the expansion, the company closed its doors in 1984.

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Since 1984, the company has tried repeatedly - and unsuccessfully - to sell the property off.

Frustrated by their failure to develop the site into an industrial park, they came up with a new idea: have the site re-zoned for residential development.

They even tried to have this ammonium sulfide tank converted into a Baby Gap.

 

Okay, I made up the thing about Baby Gap, but still...residential development?  So far they've failed to line the right pockets.

(One potential town slogan the company batted around, should the re-zoning scheme bear fruit). 

U.S. Oil Production in 2008 - 5 billion gallons. U.S. Oil consumption - 238 billion gallons.

"EMERGENCY LOADING RACE SHUTDOWN." Not sure what that means.

One day I should put together a collection of all the forgotten chairs I've photographed at these sites. 

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"Revolt thru art." Ugh.

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Wandering through this place was surreal. We only covered about a fifth of the site.

Environmental warhead.

Inside the control room.

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We were restricted to ground level exploration, as so many of the staircases and ladders on site had rusted and collapsed.

A quarter mile north, shuddered company housing lies in about the same state as the plant.

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I always wonder if families that move on know what shenanigans their house has been up to in their absence.

View from inside the barbecue grill.

Taaka vodka. It doesn't get much worse than that.

Oops...spoke to soon.

Meditation Mount

Not every inch of Southern California has been paved over, built up, burned down or drilled into.

Meditation Mount in Ojai's still pretty much the same today as it was at its dedication in 1971.

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Open 10am to Sunset every day of the week.

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Quiet enough to hear a pin drop.

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And completely free.

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Go.

Bagdad to Zuni

We're back in L.A. after one of our most inspiring (and fun) trips so far, and I'm finally getting around to throwing some shots up. We made it as far east as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Before we hit the border with Arizona we pulled off the interstate and tracked down the little package store (and now boarded-up motel) where they filmed "Bagdad Cafe."

Our first few days were in Sedona - hiking and wandering, not shooting much.

Coffeepot Rock.

We spent a lot of this trip in folk art shops, galleries and museums. They're everywhere.

I came home with a newfound obsession with Mexican folk art and am working on building my own first little Hell-themed nicho.

Sunset over a Sedona parking lot.

Pushing east we hopped off the 40 and visited a couple famous stops on Old Route 66, starting with Twin Arrows.

Twin Arrows was a hybrid of the old and the new - from the Depression-era Valentine Diner to the postwar Trading Post and Gas Station.

The huge wooden arrows once used to lure traveler's in off the highway are falling apart. I'm too young to have visited any of these old independently owned tourist traps that Route 66 was famous for, but it's a drag that they've all been replaced with Clone Formations of McDonalds, Exxon and Taco Bell that make an off-ramp in New Jersey indistinguishable from one in Texas or South Dakota. America's like one bigass Wal-Mart.

Taylor shot the overgrown picket fence next to the Valentine. It's one of my favorites pictures from the whole trip.

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Our next stop was Two Guns, Arizona. According to The Road Wanderer Website: "Believe it or not, (the name Two Guns) actually comes from the original inhabitant of the area, a wild, violent individual called "Two Gun" Miller. It is said that this eccentric hermit lived in a cave in nearby Canyon Diablo and was hostile to visitors."

Two Guns was also the site of a particularly bloody confrontation between the Navajo and the Apache in the 1800s. According to a former resident, a group of Cavalry soldiers were later ambushed by Indians in the Canyon just to the left of the old resort house (seen below) and had to shoot their horses and stack them in the mouth of a cave they holed up in for protection until reinforcements arrived two days later.

Two Guns was fenced off for years, but taggers and vandals have been making up for lost time.

A little something left behind by some "anarchist" (see: angry teenager with spikey hair and a Che Guevara t-shirt from Hot Topic) for all us petrol-slaves to chew on. Ironically, this location is off a mangled chunk of Old 66 and completely inaccessible by bike - meaning he had to cruise up I-40 in an automobile to throw up his velocipedian manifesto.

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Two Guns eventually became a Wild West-themed amusement park, but just down a dirt access road is the ruins of a previous incarnation - a wild animal side show. The tiny cages they kept the big cats in are still standing just behind the Mountain Lion building and, with no shade or running water, they must have been a living Hell in that searing desert heat.

Old gas pumps used for target practice.

About an hour past Two Guns, in Navajo country, we passed this old service station and pulled off the 40. Here you can see the actual physical conditions of Old Route 66 in macro-detail.

Santa Fe, New Mexico - old world missions and Catholic Church Paraphernalia out the ass, amazing food, and more than 250 different art galleries and museums.

Taylor caught this shot through a broken wooden fence.

The San Miguel Mission is the oldest church in the country, built between 1610 and 1626. In the 1680s it was torched during The Pueblo Revolt but survived (unlike most of the Pueblo Indians who participated in it).



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Heeeeeeeey boyz...welcome to the gay Archangel workout hour! Now swing those swords - and one and two!

Taylor's shot of the Votives.

He's gonna feel that one in the morning.

In three days here, this is one of the only spots where we saw any kind of graffiti. Santa Fe is a much older town - not a lot of young vandals on hand. The streets and buildings are in pretty good shape, considering some of them have been here 500 years.

Not the case on the Zuni Indian Reservation.

I felt pretty uncomfortable here, due in part to my own caucasian guilt at seeing the conditions that were forced upon the native peoples so I could have my apartment in Silverlake - and due in part to the fact that some people were actually staring at us like they wanted to drag us out of the car and chop our heads off and then take a shit on them. I would definitely like to come back here one day with someone familiar with the place so I could get a different perspective.

Zuni women baking bread in a traditional horno.

It took us forever to find the Old Zuni Mission (also torched in the Pueblo Revolt) as it sits on a dirt road with no visible signs to find your way.

We didn't take many pictures on the reservation because we didn't want to act like tourists at a zoo.

Apparently, back in early 2000 a convention was held entitled "Moving Forward In the New Milennium: How Can We Make Our Lives Even More Fucked Up Than They Already Are?" and Native American tribes from all over the U.S. and Canada attended. The rampant alcoholism, domestic violence, grinding poverty and drug addiction that plagues Indian communities was deemed insufficient to finish the job the Conquistadores and early American settlers started, and a more expedient means was deemed necessary to assist indigenous Americans in wiping themselves off the map. The vote on how to do it was unanimous: L.A. style street gangs.

Seeing a tag for the Salvadorean Mara Salvatrucha gang came as a pretty big shock on an Indian Pueblo. Zuni was a really sad place, and I left wondering how people could come together to help address some of the challenges the reservations are facing. 500 years of intense suffering is hard to work with.

It was a quiet ride back from Zuni.



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To split the drive time from New Mexico to L.A. in half we stopped in Flagstaff for the night, which ended up being a lot cooler than I expected.

Somehow they've managed to save and restore old hotels and signs that would have been paved over by Target in most other cities.

Historic Motel Du Beau sign by Taylor.



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Flagstaff train station.



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Seriously, y'all. Please keep an eye on ya littl'uns.

We got out of Flagstaff just in time. The morning we left they got hit with something like two feet of snow from a storm that stretched from Los Angeles to New Mexico. Getting home required driving through it.

After hydroplaning across the freeway for the fourth time in a driving rain we had to pull over and wait the storm out in a little Arizona town called Kingman.

When we woke up in the morning it was snowing, but after about a half hour on the freeway it turned into a light rain.



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And then big open sky.



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Peace, love and common sense.

Welcome to Deadlow

"Ludlow, California is a town that refuses to die. Located along the railroad tracks of the 35th parallel, it became a water stop for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in 1882 (now the Santa Fe RR). The discovery of ore in the nearby hills assured the town of growth in the late 1880's. The decline of mining and rail traffic in the 1940's spelled Ludlow's decline. Ludlow is a ghost town of two eras; it was also a stop on old Route 66. When Interstate 40 was built Ludlow died a second time. Businesses moved once more to meet the demand of travelers on the new Interstate leaving another collection of highway memories baking in the intense Mojave heat." (From The Road Wanderer Website).



This little ditty scrawled on a rotten wall inside Deadlow Manor (seen up top) has invaded my unconscious. It keeps me up at night. I can't eat. I can't focus on my work. I won't be able to lead a normal life again until I solve the riddle: What in the Hell are Brave Eagle Shits?



The Murphy Brothers bought the Ludlow Mercantile, built in 1908, and then moved on with the rest of the town's residents after the construction of I-40. The building has somehow survived multiple fires and an earthquake that almost brought it to the ground in 2000 and still stands, a hundred years and counting.



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Maybe a century from now some kid with a camera will be crawling around inside the guts of my local Jamba Juice. I'll keep my fingers crossed.



The interior of the Ludlow Fire Engine, which hasn't moved an inch since before I was born.



Unfinished housing tract wedged between the town and the railroad tracks that bisect it.



One of many old classics marooned on former Route 66.



Wandering not far from Ludlow, we came across another imploding farmhouse.



"Hey, where do you wanna put these old shitty tires?"
"Oh, just throw 'em out back behind that fridge."



Unmarked grave containing some long gone resident of Daggett, CA. The town was a stop on the old "20 Mule Team" route that hauled borax out of the Mojave until some local scum decided to lynch one of the company's black employees. The universe returned the favor and now Daggett sits long-forgotten under an inch of desert dust. I guess that's just how it goes.

Lockdown: Fort Ord Military Prison

Part two of the Fort Ord trip - the old prison.

Jail is jail, but it must have been harsh doing time in these damp, dank, tiny cramped cells - some of which housed American GIs who refused to fight in the Vietnam War. In 1969 there was a nonviolent uprising here by upwards of 500 inmates for better conditions and access to visiting media. Of course they received neither.

I doubt the convicts that used to haunt these halls were as mesmerized by the light filtering through the bars as I was. Fear of being shanked in the shower really throws off your creativity and capacity for abstract thought.

One of the first things we saw walking through was this giant mural by a Nuestra Familia-aligned gang from Northern California. NF and La eMe - The Mexican Mafia - run California's prisons, and thousands of street gangs claim allegiance to each. The dividing line between the two, the state's 38th Parallel, is the city of Fresno. Gangs north of Fresno add the 14 to the end of their name to show their connection to NF, and cliques south of the dividing line use the 13 to indicate their allegiance to La eMe. This was painted long after the prison was shut down by the Base Realignment and Closure Commission, meaning recently - which persuaded us not to linger too long.

The newer section - more modern looking outside your cell, less room inside to preserve your sanity.

Like everything else on the base, the prison has been heavily vandalized. Due to it's rock-solid construction there isn't much you can do to the place but spray paint on the walls.

Which this character, EH ("Epileptic Hero") applied liberally.

The panic button.

Inside the mess hall.

To the left: sucks. Through this door: sucks less. Your mom: sucks more. And then, of course, It's Turban Time!

Blatant violation of the "no snitching" prison code.

A little healthy political discourse - "Hippies suck" painted over "George Bush = Douchebag."

Strolling down the cellblock on the south side of the facility. 

To get in we had to crawl through this hole in the prison's back wall. It was a relief crawling back out.

"(At least for now) no more accumulating cuts and scars

Behind bars."

-Slick Rick

Fort Ord Military Base

The former Fort Ord Military base spans the cities of Seaside, Monterey, Sand City, Marina and Salinas, California on the Central Coast. At its peak it covered 28,600 acres and housed over 30,000 soldiers and their families. It's been in continuous use since World War I, but has roots stretching way back to the late 1700's when the Spanish built their first garrison to protect from what they considered an imminent Russian invasion (sound familiar?). Since being decommissioned in the '90s its thousands of remaining structures are rapidly being redeveloped for civilian use or torn to pieces by scrappers and vandals. 

 

Taylor and I took a tour with one of the agencies responsible for cleaning up the unexploded rockets, grenades, 40mm projectile rounds, and other miscellaneous innard destroying shrapnel scattered from one end of the facility to the other. Whole sections of the Fort are being burned off by the army and then swept for ordinance. Due to the explosives and myriad forms of contamination and toxic waste left behind it's a designated Superfund site.

This mural inside the 8th EVAC medical unit headquarters was a little confusing. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for a soldier being wheeled on a gurney into the emergency room, clinging to life, and looking up to find a flying, flaming skull with fangs staring down at him. Probably not too comforting.

The insides of all the buildings on the base are technically "off-limits" (although a few Bay Area photographers are shooting extensive clandestine documentary work inside them). It's a race against time, though, as unfortunately they're not alone - scrappers are hard at work and destroying the place at a pretty alarming rate. Everything that can't be sold is smashed in place or drug out into the street and abandoned.

Like so many of the locations I've visited, it seems like a lot of the families that moved on left half of their possessions behind.

Positive community redevelopment: this section, marked "TO BE DEMOLISHED" is slated to be razed and then redeveloped for the expansion of Cal State University, Morro Bay.

Though completely different, architecturally, this sprawling abandoned apartment complex reminded me of images I've seen of housing blocks in the former Soviet Union.

I debated bringing this old reel home with me and trying to find some film nerd to digitize it for me but decided against it, remembering the cliched but important UrbEx photographers' motto: "Take only pictures/Leave only footprints."

This old building close to the massive motor pool section of the base appeared to have been some sort of weighing station. 

This "Love Me?" pointed down into the blackness like a gauntlet thrown and I pulled out my lantern and went exploring to see if that was a question with an answer down in the abyss. 

This is about all I got for my troubles.

"The Retreat" entertainment complex hasn't entertained much of anybody (other than local vandals) in over a decade.

This one brought along his spraypaint to make a statement protesting the presence of illegal immigrants in the United States in defiance of U.S. law...while illegally trespassing on and destroying property of the United States Government.

Pointing the way to the old soldiers' canteen, now long gone. 

These old wooden World War II-era barracks go on forever, almost as far as the eye can see.

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Dryer drug out into the streets and smashed. With downed powerlines, knee-high weeds shooting up from the pavement and destroyed furniture strewn from one end to the other, certain sections of this neighborhood looked like they'd been hit by Hurricane Katrina.  

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The Ace of Hearts. I'm curious what the story behind this place is.

"Respect."

It looked like somebody may have been squatting in this building for a while. He moved on without his job interview shirt. 

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Hulk maaaaaaaaad!