David St. John - Venice, CA
I see "the actor" before my wife does. We're killing twenty minutes in a Mexican restaurant in Venice while waiting for my interview with David St. John. "The actor" is not famous. He's not George Clooney or anything. I mean, if he was, I'd be sitting here typing this minus one wife. (I'd wish them well, you know, I'm not a bad sport.)
But anyway, "the actor" is a TV guy. You'd know him. He was on a sitcom in the 90s. He's well known enough that he's wearing a sort of disguise, dark glasses (though it's dusk), and one of those stocking hats that he probably thinks suggests "hip hop" but makes me think of sledding.
This is the only reason I might live in L.A. I don't get the appeal of the weather. It's 71 degrees in my house 365 days of the year, too. The freeway thing is okay, but my enjoyment of them only extends for a few days. Now I just feel like getting a moped and staying on surface streets. But of course those paths have their own risks as well. Let's just say that there are a lot of reasons to want to live in L.A. They just aren't right for me.
"The actor" gets his chicken burrito and scurries over to corner stool/table combo and faces the corner to eat. His cellie rings and he gets into it with Paul, giving directions or giving them. He's getting lousy reception so goes out onto the street leaving his food behind. A little girl, about 9, pokes her Mom and they both look out the window. "Is that him?" she asks her mom. And the mom nods. When the little girl looks over at me she smiles and then points out the window, making sure I see him, too. I give her a nod and a smile. She's a nice little kid.
"The actor" is talking on the phone still but walking away now. I can see he's left about 85% of his burrito. Never took a swig of his bottled water. I can't remember when, but my wife says his show went off the air years ago.
David St. John lives in a friendly and warm little house in Venice. We stand on the street in front of it for a couple of minutes when I first get there to get some photos. It's late in the day and I don't want to miss the last of the light. Usually we shoot these photos at the end of the interview, once we've grown comfortable with each other. But I ask the favor and David says, "Sure." We make small talk and I shoot David against a backdrop of towering palm trees and his pretty, quiet street. He's interested in the crazy trip so asks some questions that I'm happy to answer.
We go in after a while and settle at dark wood table (I'm thinking arts and crafts) and talk about a variety of things. David's work is majestic, serene, literally shimmering on the page at times. He's a literate guy, but his poetry is only better for it - this is not always the case.
He talks beautifully about growing up in the nearby San Joaquin Valley, living and working in Italy, and being a teacher and writer for almost 20 years here in L.A. He's clearly thought about how place works in his poems, and I rarely need to say a thing. We fill one side of a tape, flip it, and just keep going. At the end we talk about some other folks I've seen or am scheduled to see. David knows them all. He has a message he wants me to take along to someone and I'm happy to.
He walks me outside to my wife and our rented car. He says hello to her and goodbye to us both. He tells us to keep enjoying the trip, which I think is a better send-off than almost anything else.
Carol Muske-Dukes - Los Angeles, CA
Dogs love me. Dogs see me coming and think, "Chewy Treat. Big Shiny Head Like a Ball. Slow of Foot. Easy to Lick." Carol's three dogs all go for me like I was covered in Gravy Train, even poor, dear Fletcher hobbled by a recent ligament repair to a back paw.
I've been missing our poor old boy, Tucker Satellite, so I give all the dogs a little love before Carol and I settle in to big soft couches in a gorgeous room (paintings, piano, Christmas tree.)
Carol Muske-Dukes lives in a stately neighborhood east of Hollywood, an area that first boomed in the 20s. Her daughter takes two of the dogs for a slow walk around the block while Fletcher hunkers down at our feet.
We talk a little about L.A. I'm intrigued by the folks who live here. Nobody thinks of it as a city. It's too sprawling for that. It's a bunch of compact and busy towns built on desert and mountains, bounded by the sea on one side.
Carol tells me that it's a good town for a writer, easy to isolate oneself from the fray. Any place you want to go is 20 minutes away, so you've got the preliminary buffer of the car ride. Plus, if it's just too far, you can stay home.
We're talking about influences to Carol's writing and she remembers being 4 years old, pushed in a swing while her mother recited Robert Louis Stevenson in the backyard of the family home on Pascal Street in St. Paul, MN. "I had the sense of being pushed out into the world, and yet brought back," she says. She tells me that it remains a lovely and unforgettable memory, which of course I know.
We take all the dogs and Carol's daughter into the back yard and we shoot some photos under a steely winter sky. And then I go.
Donald Revell & Claudia Keelan - Las Vegas, NV
Donald Revell and I stand under a brilliant blue sky laced with Las Vegas's ever-present jet contrails. We're in the backyard of the house that Revell shares with his wife, the poet Claudia Keelan, and their son, Ben. We're south and west of Vegas near a tiny settlement called Blue Diamond.
Like most people who live here, Revell lives nowhere near The Strip, where the casinos pulse with gigantic and gaudy lights, and where the flood of tourists gamble on cards, dice, and love. (Oh, c'mon, let me wax a little poetic.) But the point is, Vegas is a city like most cities. You've got your downtown, your suburbs. There's industry (here it's roulette, showgirls, and magicians). And it's populated by a wide variety of folks: friendly, happy, creepy, noisy, kind, etc. People from all over the world come here, but the citizens shop, drive, work, just like it was a regular place.
Revell and Keelan both teach poetry; she runs the MFA program at UNLV, and he commutes to be a part of the excellent program at the University of Utah. (Revell flies to Salt Lake City once a week - 2 hours door to door.)
We talk for a few minutes, and when Keelan gets home from turning her grades in at semester-end, the three of us sit in patio chairs near their newly installed lap pool. They point out the spare desert landscaping. Everything out here was planted by them, including a lovely acacia, and - surprisingly - 6 full size Christmas trees, one for each year (minus one) that they've lived here.
Keelan is originally from California, and Revell comes from the Bronx. But they both are at home in the desert. Their work, too, is heavily influence by the empty spaces of their adopted home, especially in Keelan's Utopic and Revell's My Mojave.
After we finish talking we shoot some photos. Their son Ben peers at me through the blinds of a back window, and I give him a wave one time when I see him. As I'm finishing up with his parents, Ben emerges - taking a break, I think from some Tony Hawk game or likewise on Playstation2.
He stands between Revell and Keelan against the stucco wall of their home, and I shoot the family.
Area 51
I must admit to being a bit of a conspiracy theorist. (Nut, I guess, is what most people would substitute.) It's really not a good idea to get me started on the faked moon landings or the real killers of JFK. But I'm pretty reasonable about Area 51, the main jewel of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), a large and remote area 100 miles north and east of Las Vegas.
Since the 1950s, the NTS has been used as a test facility for the most advanced aircraft the U.S. military has (starting with the famous U-2.) Since then, everything from the F-117 to the B-2 has done its first trials there.
Of course, if that's all it were, perhaps the internet wouldn't buzz like it does about Area 51, a multi-acre tract of buildings and runways around the dry Groom Lake. Here are the essential bits of info:
- The past two American presidents have signed legislation exempting the NTS from having to release anything about its research, nuclear waste disposal, personnel records, etc. The Freedom of Information act does not apply to anything related to the NTS.
- Two past scientists - both now discredited badly through a variety of means - claim that when they worked at Area 51 (in the 60s, 70s, and 80s) they - hold on - worked on reverse-engineering alien spacecraft. At the time of their departures from the NTS, they were both credible, well-respected scientists. They now get painted with the "GREAT BIG NUT" brush.
- Workers sign confidentiality agreements that some lawyers believe are illegal. Workers are sent to the site for 4 day shifts via Janet Airlines, a private fleet of 737s that fly out of Vegas and go the NTS or the Tonopah Test Site further west. Security around the boarding ramp to the nondescript planes (white with orange stripe, no insignias) is very high - metal detectors, wands, armed guards, and police dogs.
- The NTS is in the middle of nowhere, geographically hidden by a variety of moutain ranges in the Pahranagat Valley. Any mountain vantage points that would allow viewing the site from within 30 miles have been closed off to visitors. The only photographic evidence we have of the area come from satellite photos from space - the first were released by the Russians.
But the place can be found. If one has a handheld GPS unit, one can use it to drive along the nearly deserted Hwy. 375 and find an unmarked gravel road (about 4 lanes wide) that disappears 13 miles through desert scrub and cacti. It is to be noted that once one is actually on this road, magnetic sensors are transmitting the size and speed of their vehicle to the guard post dead ahead. (This has been confirmed by a local researcher who was arrested last month for digging some of the sensors up and taking photographs of them - all on public land.)
At the 12 mile mark, one sees the first and last sign one will see here. It looks like this:
There aren't a lot of places in the country where the use of deadly force is authorized. Just here, I suppose, the West Wing of the White House, and probably in the locker room of the Portland Trailblazers.
Now, if one were to get to this sign, and then pause momentarily - say, to shoot some shaky video - a Ford F-150 pickup truck with two employees of EE&G (a private security firm whose only employer is the Department of Energy) drives down from its perch on a small hill nearby and keep rolling toward one until one makes a really crisp u-turn and heads the 13 miles the other way down the oddly flat and very wide gravel road. These so called "cammo dudes" carry sidearms, wear camoflauge jumpsuits, and have twin shotguns in quick release carriers in their pickups.
Of course one doesn't have to get that close to feel a little spooky. Or to see them through the continuing shaky video.
It certainly sounds like a neat place to visit. And one should probably take a rented car (in one's wife's name, for example) for greater security.
Should you still be reading, you can get a little more background on the real and imagined activities at Area 51 at this excellent, earnest - and maybe only a little nutty - site.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Fifty yards from the entrance to the unmarked road, right in the middle of Hwy. 375, was this. On whom it was used we do not know. Nor care to:
