by Travis Mateer
It started before I got off the highway. Jim started singing in my headphones as the highway sign that passed overhead read CROSSROADS. Ok then.
When I’m approaching a new city I’m not familiar with I like to find a book store on my map-app for my first stop, and Los Angeles was no different. Sideshow Books looked good, so that’s what I picked, and the signs indicated I was on the right track.
I got into LA pretty early, having failed the previous evening to find Slab City, an interesting place that attracts drifters and snowbirds, which Jon Krakauer depicted in his book, Into The Wild. Since Krakauer platformed the cop who I think deserves a fan club in his book about Missoula, it seemed like a good idea to check out at the time. But when the sun went down on the wasteland I was exploring, unsuccessfully, I decided to give up and sleep, hitting the road the following morning around 4am.
The two previous days were NOT enjoyable, since I had clearly angered the Native energies with my second poem about bodily functions on the road. I did what I could to appease the spirits, which included heeding the wisdom of the gas station attendant who told me the roads where I was going could get bad, and he was NOT WRONG, so NO Chaco Canyon human barbecue site, though I was within just a few miles of this creepy place, and ended up sleeping in my truck at 7,000 feet near a windmill in the middle of no where.
I stayed one night in Sedona, where storms kept following me. I barely missed the heavy rains in Austin a few weeks previous, just like the previous road trip where I barely missed the flooding in Joshua Tree, and the road trip after that, where the Brooklyn deluge absolutely drenched me. And guess what it’s doing in LA right now? Raining HARD, like it’s been doing since I’ve been here, and the forecast is RAIN until I leave. Sounds about right.
I drove through Phoenix and, while getting some food, remembered that a reader of the blog had sent me a link near the beginning of my trip about the White Lion I was tracking, Mr. Wags Capital. Apparently this former football player turned developer just had a zoning request DENIED in Scottsdale, which my map-app told me was just a few miles from where I was eating. Cool!
I talked to the editor who wrote up the first story about this zoning denial before heading to this VERY HIP suburb of Phoenix, so hip I got a warning from the editor that’s a Bourbon Street wannabe part of Phoenix, and he was right. It was GROSS and PERFECT for someone like Mr. Wags, so I’m sure getting shut down here is REALLY bugging the White Lion.
Here’s the latest on this project from a few days ago:
Aaron Wagner, a newcomer to Scottsdale’s development scene, proposed building a fine dining restaurant of his own last year. Swags was slated to replace the shuttered Three Wisemen bar, which is across the street from Yari’s Maya site and about 700 feet away from Calle Rosa.
Wagner said Swags needed a third-story patio to make it pencil out financially on his tiny 0.2-acre lot, so he asked the city for permission to build one floor higher than is typically allowed in that area. The plan was backed by the Scottsdale Planning Commission, city staffers, the Coalition of Greater Scottsdale and more than 30 nearby property owners.
Yari was the only major player in Scottsdale against it, saying he was concerned the rooftop dining would blast too much noise toward his Maya Hotel. And because he owns at least 20% of the surrounding properties, his opposition required Swags to get five “yes” votes from the seven-member City Council, rather than the usual four.
Swags came up one vote short on Jan. 9 when Ortega voted “no” along with two council colleagues who generally oppose developments. Ortega said he had problems with Swags’ third floor and another zoning request.
Ortega said he voted “no” because he believes rezoning such a tiny lot to allow an 85-foot-tall building “sets a bad precedent.” Swags was slated to be about 30 feet shorter, but Ortega explained the “zoning runs with the land,” so if the property were sold another developer could build to the full 85 feet.
I don’t think this bodes well for the Wags plans for the old Missoulian building on the Hip Strip, but only time will tell if this developer who appears to be pissing off people in MULTIPLE states has what it takes to persevere through adversity.
We will be returning to Phoenix in just a moment, but first I must explain what I discovered in the book I found at Sideshow Books, a book I zeroed in on BEFORE knowing it was about Jim Morrison. Here is how the book by Craig Kee Strete begins:
WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? A joke? Since it’s literally how the book begins, there isn’t much context for the reader to glean what the author is intending. Exaggeration for shock value? Who the fuck is this guy anyway? From the link (emphasis mine)
Craig K. Strete earned his B.A. in 1975 at Wayne State University and his M.F.A. in 1978 at University of California at Irvine.[citation needed]
Beginning in the early 1970s, while working in the Film and Television industry, Strete began writing emotional Native American themed, and science fiction short stories and novellas. He has had three Nebula Award nominations: two for the short stories Time Deer and A Sunday Visit with Great-grandfather and one for the novelette The Bleeding Man.
In 1974 Strete published a magazine dedicated to Native American science fiction, Red Planet Earth. His play Paint Your Face On A Drowning In The River (originally produced May 16, 1984 by East/West Players in Los Angeles, CA) was the 1984 Dramatists Guild/CBS New Plays Program first-place winner.
PAINT YOUR FACE ON A DROWNING IN THE RIVER? For someone who is reluctantly investigating the Smiley Face Killer theory, this DEFINITELY got my attention, so I read on in the book about Morrison and found MORE disturbing shit, like this scene from chapter 3 (TRIGGER WARNING):
The bloody-haired girl who had been throwing up on the door as we went out is being dragged into one of the bedrooms by four tough-looking guys in biker gear as I walk in. Her shirt’s already ripped off. Skinny little ribs and little-girl breasts. Maybe she’s thirteen years old or fourteen. She’s screaming hysterically but nobody pays attention to her.
Some party she’s h having, if she survives it.
A few paragraphs after this graphic scene, our author write this:
Ok, enough of this trash. Let’s move on.
Oliver Stone is now REALLY on my shit-list, alongside directors like David Lynch, who was born in Missoula. Why? After re-watching Natural Born Killers, I realized how much nefarious messaging is really going on throughout the movie, which means I’ve got to reconsider ALL his material, which includes a movie about JFK and, of course, a movie about The Doors.
But it wasn’t either of those films I watched last night. Nope, instead I watched a TERRIBLE movie by Oliver Stone, titled U-Turn (1997), which takes place in a little town outside of Phoenix. And the name of the town? Well, it should sound familiar to Zoom Chron readers who know about my interest in Mineral County because the name of the Arizona town depicted in this movie is SUPERIOR. Ok then.
With my new impression that Natural Born Killers is a movie about psycho-initiates and the metaphysical marriage of the dark masculine and dark feminine energies, I was interested in the plot of the movie, which has the dark masculine (Sean Penn) pushed off a cliff near the end of the movie by the dark feminine (Jennifer Lopez).
Why did I find this interesting? Well, because it mirrors a REAL LIFE scenario that has personal implications for me that I can’t write about, but I WILL quote the gist of what happened when Jordan Graham pushed her newly wed husband off a cliff in Glacier Park because she apparently decided that the whole “consummate the marriage” thing was too terrifying to go through with. From the link:
MISSOULA, Mont. – A Montana woman was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison for killing her husband of eight days by pushing him from a cliff in Glacier National Park while they argued about her second thoughts about the marriage.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy sentenced Jordan Graham, 22, who had pleaded guilty to second-degree murder just before closing arguments during her December trial.
Prosecutors argued Graham was having second thoughts about her recent marriage to 25-year-old Cody Johnson when she lured him to a steep cliff in Glacier Park on July 7 and pushed him over.
Getting back to the movie, I checked out the town of Superior, Arizona, on a REAL map and something stood out to me, since one of the meta-themes I’m investigating is how WATER fits into all this. I immediately noticed that the creek flowing through Superior is QUEEN creek. I wasn’t sure how significant this was to the film until I saw Jennifer Lopez holding a QUEEN OF SPADES card in her hand. Interesting.
What unleashes the dark feminine? In this movie, it’s sexual abuse, specifically incest, which echoes one of Hollywood’s FAVORITE movies about itself, Chinatown, a movie that thematically combines incest with an element VERY important to a city like LA, which is WATER. From the link:
The plot of Chinatown is also drawn not just from the diversion of water from the Owens Valley via the aqueduct but also from another actual event. In the movie, water is being purposefully released in order to drive the land owners out and create support for a dam through an artificial drought. The event that the movie refers to occurred in late 1903 and 1904 when underground water levels plummeted and water usage rose precipitously. Rather than a deliberate release, Mulholland was able to figure out that because of faulty valves and gates in the water system, large quantities of water were being released in the overflow sewer system and then into the ocean. Mulholland was able to stop the leaks.
Isn’t this interesting? I think it is, and I could say more about all this, but there are things I’d like to actually accomplish while in LA, even though the sky is trying to drown me.
To wrap this up, here’s poop-tune number two (ha!), which I hope you enjoy, because I incurred some spiritual wrath to bring it to life.
Thanks for reading!