You don’t have to be an enlightened sensualist to realize that railroad trains are romantic. The train is a streamlined fist of American steel and spirit that has punched its way across this nation in movies, paintings, photographs, songs, stories and real life. Trains brought the coasts together. Trains begat…
The head of Wilhelm Richard Wagner is cracked in many places. There are bulging veins of yellowed glue across his cranium, and a hole gapes in his right temple. Also, the head is no longer attached to the upper torso. But wounds like these are to be expected when you’re…
Clouds of dust and grit in waves of wind the size of nightmares blew in across the lake bed, where water had not been an option for at least 1.8 million years, while the sun moved in so close that human life was barely able to survive. And that is…
Two weeks ago, I bought a portrait of a Chinese woman, a paint-by-numbers of a kid fishing, and a beautiful, hand-colored photograph from the turn of the century of a man dressed in a kimono. I purchased a photo taken in 1918 of a fat woman all dressed up, an…
Common wisdom has it that a wooden statue cannot actually see anything. But if the Pilgrim Statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary were to look out from her designated home upon a certain glass coffee table in a certain living room, here is what her eyes would fall upon:…
A 25-year-old professional skateboarder is sitting on the floor of his Tempe apartment saying this to me: “We don’t have any footage of them actually penetrating anything, but they appear to go into the ground, they appear to come out of the ground; I think they would go right through…
April 19, at approximately 8:50 a.m., I set out to become an Outdoors Woman. I never made it. I drove all the way to Friendly Pines Camp outside Prescott. I brought a sleeping bag. I brought a pocketknife. I brought a long book (a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman). I…
Sure. Friends, relatives, even Gail, my mail carrier, are always telling me what a thoroughly talented individual I am at this words-on-paper thing, but imagine my surprise when I opened a big manila envelope last week and pulled out a letter from Spelling Television Inc.! As in Aaron Spelling. As…
Let’s say you are meandering down the rows of a vast junkyard in South Phoenix. On one side there is a porcelain graveyard of yawning toilets. On the other, the entire history of American ovens–Dixie, Roper, General Electric, Amana, Monterey–simmers quietly in the sun. Walk toward the rear of the…
What began as simply another Arizona Gallery of Art exhibition on the history of fried chicken has recently sparked an unprecedented uproar on a national scale. Yet, of the numerous works on display in “Old Crispy: The American Chicken, Fried and Otherwise,” one piece in particular has fomented the fracas…
This is something you must remember: Giving plasma is a good thing. It helps people. If you are thinking of doing it, by all means, go ahead. Do not allow yourself to be dissuaded by anything that you might read in the following story, which does not stray from fact,…
Sometimes, a hole in the crotch can make all the difference. Not to mention a ragged hem, two-tone stitching, a “big E” tag, red lines or an exterior rivet. And being Japanese has a lot to do with things as well. It’s all part of the fast-moving, no-holds-barred, big-bucks world…
A few days ago, I stopped my car along the side of Silver Bell Road, about seven miles north of Tucson, at the site of a thoroughly dilapidated, 19th-century lime kiln. In addition to a lot of scrub brush and dirt, this is what I found: a twisted tire tread,…
When Charles Holden first walked the halls of the White House, he was wearing an imitation Alpine mountaineering hat with a huge ostrich feather sticking out of it. That was in the spring of 1964, and he was in from New Jersey on his eighth-grade class trip. A government official…
Here are some of the stories and characters that appeared on page B3 of the Arizona Republic on February 27: a gnomish man with a bulbous nose reading a sign. A smarmy, overweight woman with a Seventies hairdo and a heart on the front of her shirt who is mystified…
Now I thought we could discuss one of my favorite musicians, favorite humans, and for no other reason than let’s just go ahead and do it. And this person is Louis Armstrong. Satchmo. Pops. Everybody knows the names. Everybody knows the list of achievements–jazz visionary, cultural icon, goodwill ambassador to…
Just read the headlines. I know I do. It’s a jungle out there. No, it’s more than a jungle, and it’s not just out there. It’s in something hiding its bacterial calling card–courtesy of chemical preservatives–right there in the rear of the bottom shelf of your fridge. It’s in that…
Somewhere, those kids are snickering. You can bet that they are–whoever they are–getting quite a kick out of this whole thing, their adolescent, pimply faces breaking into grins of vandalistic glee every time a news account of their devilish handiwork appears in print or on TV. God knows, they’re high-fiving…
So I’m sitting there in a bar, talking with a guy I know, and he’s complaining to me about his job. This guy works in a furniture warehouse and he says that one of his coworkers is a wrestler. A wrestler, huh? Yes, indeed. He is the Drifter. And the…
It is a little after 7 a.m. on Friday, and, strangely, everyone in the Bikini Lounge is drinking beer. The strange part is not that the patrons are drinking at 7 a.m., but that they are drinking beer. Beer in this place? In Phoenix’s last remaining shrine of ripped-off, modified,…
According to the Super Bowl XXX Host Committee Information Hot Line, “Share the Warmth” is the “official slogan” for Super Bowl XXX. Yet, perhaps, it is even more … It is the dead of winter. A small child wanders away from his family’s campsite, unnoticed as the adults sit around…
Who can take a sunrise, sprinkle it with dew Cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two The Candy Man, oh, the Candy Man can The Candy Man can ’cause he mixes it with love and makes the world taste good … Oh, that Candy Man was certainly a…
