Bostworld

The day after Christmas, my wife and I attended a hockey game at the Jobing.com Arena. This state-of-the-art facility stands adjacent to something called the “Westgate City Center.” On what was once a quiet corner in Glendale is now erected this new mall “concept:” a pre-fab fake “town,” surrounded by lots of freshly bulldozed, freeway-accessible real estate: “Shop Here – Dine Here – Live Here – ONLY HERE!” I’m sure there are several of these sorts of places in your town as well.

This “multi-use destination” is mostly comprised of restaurants as big as city blocks. The “food,” served up in different shapes and “flavors,” is your typical modern corn and soybean based cuisine. What these places offer is not so much “nutrition,” as a Disney-fied, sports-bar kind of “atmosphere” designed to simultaneously stimulate and dull the senses.

As we stood huddled beneath five-story-high images of Carlos Santana and Mel Gibson, we watched a teenage fake-rock band supply the soundtrack to house-sized video displays broadcasting ads for local casinos and upcoming “tribute “concerts. At one point, an ugly long-haired dude in a shiny shirt came on the screen. He sat on a brand new leather couch, moving his lips inaudibly. Above his luminous head appeared this grave message: “$998.”

Spaces like the Westgate City Center make Phoenix’s older box malls look like palaces of quaint subtlety and restrained taste. But the kids that milled around the grounds that night seemed just as enthusiastic about their current shopping arrangements as our grandparents’ generation must have been. And as these old photos from “Arizona Highways” clearly show, nothing evokes “civic pride” like a new retail innovation. These photos leave little room for debate on the matter, taken as they are from an article entitled “Phoenix – City Of Shopping Centers.”

Most of the businesses in these pictures are long gone, but if you look closely, you might recognize something of what remains.



People always ask me if I’ll ever do another installment of my “Report From The Country” series from a few years back. “More Connie Eaton,” they say. “More ‘Pass The Biscuits, Please.’” I guess I’ve been dragging my heels because the artist I want to honor is getting along in years, and I don’t want to jinx him right into the ground. But it’s almost criminal that Jim Ed Brown’s solo albums remain out of print, so I’ve decided to take my chances.

Despite lavish reissues devoted to his early work in The Browns with his sisters Bonnie & Maxine, and easy access to his duets with Helen Cornelius, Jim Ed Brown’s steady stream of solo albums from the late sixties and early seventies remains elusive to all but the most patient of Usenet users. One of two have shown up on the occasional share blog, but the majority are still out of reach.

The Browns were one of the first country artists to enjoy cross-over success, helping to define country music’s space in the mainstream. Hits like “Scarlet Ribbons,” The Old Lamplighter” and their smash folk-pop version of Edith Piaf’s “The Three Bells” were just as popular on college campuses as they were in Nashville. As a solo, Jim Ed Brown was a regular on the Grand Ole Opry, and even hosted his own syndicated television program for a few years. In 1967, his cheerful anthem to alcoholism, “Pop A Top,” became an instant classic.

After that, the hits were harder to come by. Unfortunately for Jim, he recorded for RCA-Victor and was often assigned to mainstay Elvis Presley producer, Felton Jarvis. Like Elvis, Jim’s records were suffused with the bland surface gloss that marks most of that label’s country fodder from the period. Just as they did with Elvis, RCA was content to churn out collection after faceless collection of commercial filler, overexposing the artist and bleeding his fans until the revenue stream dried up. But also like Elvis, Jim rose above the limitations of his output. The effect of Jim’s smooth control and sweet tone wedded to the wistful dark material provided for him produced unearthly performances of an odd ambivalence that borders on the surreal.

But don’t let my perverse assessment put you off these great records. The gems are plentiful and offer deep rewards. Even if all you ever hear is “Sunday In The Country,” “Barroom Pals and Good Time Gals,” or the essential “Ginger Is Gentle And Waiting For Me,” you’ll be better prepared to face the world. But if you want to mainline a full-on Jim Ed Brown overdose, you’ve found the right place.



(thanks to the LP Discography site for the cover scans.)

Whatever happened to the grand livestock of yesteryear? The one’s we’d to proudly parade up and down the central arteries of town? The ones for whom only our fanciest ranching duds would do? The ones we’d pose our children in front of? The ones our popular local photo magazine would so graciously feature in four colors between its covers?

Long since eaten I’m afraid, and their decedents relegated to the evil confines of some factory farm hidden out of site up in the hills somewhere. The only time they get their pictures in a magazine these days is if they’re lucky enough to have some PETA spy smuggle a camera into one of their torture sessions.

I joke, of course. The Arizona National Livestock Show continues to this day, going strong, “supporting youth and promoting livestock and agriculture since 1948.” In fact, you can go see it this year from December 28 through January 1 at the Arizona State Fairgrounds. Bring your camera (hidden or otherwise).

But if you can’t muster the effort to head down there (I know I can’t), you can check out these glorious pix from yesteryear — the October 1968 edition of “Arizona Highways” magazine, to be specific.

My old assistant was really into “affiliate programs.” He’d grab a bunch of info from Wikipedia about, say, Stevia, publish it to an ad-laden “blog,” and use all the SEO techniques he could think of. Naturally, since he was just out of his teens and still living with his parents, he thought he was making “good money.” He never understood why I don’t populate Bostworld with ads. Apparently, he saw no contradiction in profiting from the uncompensated work of others.

I like to hope this site trades in forms of capital that are in some ways more valuable than actual money. Obviously, we derive great pleasure from helping keep alive work by Les Humphries, Butterscotch and other forgotten artists. But it’s also about making connections. Fans aren’t the only ones who enjoy our posts about the Golddiggers or Love Workshop — so have the artists themselves. We’ve received nice notes from members of the Doodletown Pipers, The Going Thing, the Young Americans, as well as Michael Lloyd, Joe Scott and even Wonderful Russ himself. We’ve also heard from family members eager both to share memories of lost loved ones and to connect with fans who help them celebrate those memories.

And now we come to “Grazing in The Grass” by the Adam Ross Reeds. It’s a great album, certainly well worth the quarter we paid for it almost two decades ago. It’s a marvelously breezy souvenir from the late sixties, rendering such contemporary classics as “Summer Samba,” “Music To Watch Girls By,” ” Watermelon Man” and “The Theme From Black Orpheus” in eclectic up-tempo arrangements sure to please fans of the “turned on” big band discotheque jazz idiom. But as for Mr. Reed himself, we know nothing about him – never heard of him before this album. The liner notes confess that he worked on “The Donald O’Connor Show” and “Allan Ludden’s Gallery,” but let’s face it: that’s not much help. So, until we hear from Adam Jr., this is the best we can do.

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After my wife’s ankle surgery last summer, I was forced to pursue my love of strenuous exploratory hiking without her. But there was a bright side to this, since she has never been as keen for climbing as I am. Last spring, I was able to spend just about every Sunday morning at the the top of one of the many small mountains near my house.

I brought along my camera to keep me company. But an hour after sunrise, Arizona skies are bright and hot and the shadows are deep and dark. Getting a correct exposure under such high-contrast conditions is a challenge. While it’s usually best to let the smart machine in my hands make most the decisions, I still have to know how to help it along if I want to avoid white skies and crushed shadows. There’s only so much I can fix in post-processing.

I have to say I made a lot of progress working under these conditions. But one of the many skills I’ve not yet mastered is how to shake off my early-morning exhilaration long enough to really capture the magic of a mountain-top vantage point. I took hundreds of photos, but only a small handful of shots really give a sense of the terrain’s sparse beauty. I hope this selection manages to convey the quiet extremes of the desert landscape.

Alas, you can short-list a bad picture, but its not so easy to cull Paradise Valley’s rampant population. Who knew that the top of Camelback Mountain is as crowded as a shopping mall at 9AM on a Sunday? On the other hand, though it’s surrounded on all sides by expensive, well-patrolled private residences, the expansive summit of Mummy Mountain is nearly desolate. Hopefully, once the summer abates, I can continue my exploration before all the remaining open space is fenced off.

When I was growing up, nobody could explain my grandfather’s job to me. Even when I was an adult, my mom couldn’t really tell me what he did for a living. I knew he was a Shriner, because I saw his hats. I knew he liked to collect restaurant menus, because I saw the blog posts. Beyond that, all I ever knew was he had an office downtown. Last month, I finally learned the truth.

Turns out, my grandmother was a regular fangirl when it came to her husband. From the 1930s right up through the mid-sixties, she kept a huge scrapbook about my grandfather, tirelessly collecting hundreds of photos and newspaper clippings documenting the ups and downs of his career. And while my grandfather was no Frank Sinatra or Mikey Mantle, he was quite a superstar in his own right.

The story begins shortly after my grandparents’ marriage and finds my grandfather working for a liberal newspaper in Syracuse, Nebraska. In 1936, the Otoe County Democrats elected him the youngest party chairman in the nation.

In short order, he was formally swept into the local bureaucracy, first as Assistant County Clerk, then as a trucking inspector for the Nebraska Railway Commission. Thanks to his ties to the newspaper business, or maybe just due to his his basic inherent interestingness, my grandfather collected boatloads of ink throughout his career. He gathered tribute every time he climbed the ladder, garnering praise and support from peers and politicians. Along the way, he signed off on major issues of the day, and contributed “humorous” human-interest filler that would be considered inappropriate today.

Alas, despite Nebraska’s deep roots of progressive populism (or maybe because of it), the state couldn’t sustain a consistent majority for FDR. In the spring of 1940, my grandfather managed the Democratic candidate in a special election to fill the vacancy left by the death of a sitting senator. The Republicans campaigned against the New Deal and won by a landslide. Later that year, after Nebraska awarded its electoral votes to Wendell Wilkie, my grandfather found himself out of power and planning his return to the private sector. He soon relocated to Minneapolis, reinvented himself as a successful businessman, immersed himself in the Chamber of Commerce, and continued to generate column inches in the local newspapers.

Around this time, his media visibility expanded and took an unexpected turn. During the war, my grandfather began appearing as a model for print advertisements. (An earlier accident kept him out of the service.) Significantly, the roles he adopted charted both his own trajectory and the country’s — out of the Depression and the war, and into the boom of the late Forties and early Fifties. The earliest of these ads portray him as an overall-clad working class hero putting his back into the war effort. Later, he’s an upwardly mobile everyman in a hurry to claim his slice of postwar prosperity. Finally, he’s a successful self-made man, living the model suburban dream.

After the war, my grandfather owned several successful businesses before he finally moved out west and joined CIT Corporation (yes, the very same CIT that’s been struggling for its life lately). As the vice president in charge of the Phoenix office, he doled out financing for many of the construction companies that built the modern Arizona. Here, he finally becomes recognizable to me as the man who became my grandfather — the guy with the carving utensils, serving up the holiday meals with a gruff efficiency and a policy of zero tolerance for tom-foolery at the dinner table. While these later years tend to strike me as anticlimactic, this period certainly brought him his greatest rewards. Like so many of the men of his generation who saw his country through the crises of the day, he was glad to take his place in line when it was time to reap the rewards he deserved.

And yet, my grandfather lived long enough to watch his country become unrecognizable to him. He saw the Democratic party fall apart during the Sixties, prey to both its own hubris and events beyond its control. Unable to corral its own disparate elements, the party splintered. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Eventually my grandfather switched sympathies. But if he found any real satisfaction in the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he never said anything to me about it.

In the end, extreme age and deteriorating health telescoped his life into a series of restless nights and passing days. And then he was gone. I got to know him a little better once I got older, and he always impressed me as a serious, savvy son-of-a-gun. To hear him tell it, he never knew a fool that he suffered gladly. As his photos clearly show, he was a good-old-boy to the core, even as a young man — a true big fish in a small pond. And though I might not have believed it when I was younger, nowadays I can’t help but see a little bit of him staring back at me in the mirror. I’m glad I finally found out what he did for a living.

Many of my favorite pix from 2008 wound up on a calendar, which I gave out to friends and family last Christmas. There were no actual friends or family in any of the pictures — just the usual collection of abandoned buildings, desert scenes and vacation photos — but people were properly ethusiastic all the same. I spent all year trying to figure out how to make decent pictures, and in end I struggled to find a dozen images I actually felt strongly about. But I stopped short of despair when I compared them to my favorites from the year before. I’m happy to say that few of those would have made the cut this time around, so I must be making some kind of progress. I only hope I can say the same thing about this current group when next year rolls around.




These Ron Paul supporters showed up at a poorly managed Hillary campaign stop in Phoenix. We never got near the actual event — it was drastically over capacity and no one appeared to be directing the crowd. But we did stand in line long enough for me to capture these two. Then we walked back to our cars, where it took over an hour to untangle ourselves from the parking lot jam.
 

Last year, my grandfather’s memory was honored by the school that bears his name, the Bostrom Alternative Center. This photo was taken afterward, during a visit to the nearby family plot. While my father and his siblings alternated between somber contemplation of my grandparents’ final resting place and enthusiastic discussion of arrangements to join them, I wandered the grounds, getting a better feel for shallow depth of field.
 

When my father-in-law visited us last year, my wife dragged him down to Bisbee and the surrounding area. I stayed behind, unable to free myself until later in the week. As my wife is quick to point out, it is she who holds the true creative talent in our relationship. It would be foolish, therefore, for me to omit her very nice composition from that trip.
 

Since my father-in-law likes to gamble and I like trips to the desert hinterlands, my wife decided that we’d kill two birds with one stone and visit Laughlin, Nevada. Along the route, we stopped at as many ghost towns and tourist traps as we could stand. This shot is from the underside of London Bridge in Lake Havasu City.
 

Late one night after a lively family get-together, I accompanied my nephew Lucas and his buddy Carbon to The Ice House, where they were preparing for a small exhibit of their work. Lucas’ triptych was stunning, but my photos of it sucked. But I liked this detail from Carbon’s piece.
 

I always wanted to visit Crown King, but neither of our little cars are worthy of the rough dirt road up into the Bradshaw Mountains. Last summer,we rented something large enough to take us there. Turns out Crown King is less a ghost town than a thriving community of off-road enthusiasts, bikers and folks otherwise disabused of city living. Even nearby Bumble Bee is more of an abandoned tourist exhibit than a bona fide ghost town. This shell looks to be barely a couple decades old.
 

A trip in the fall to Victoria, British Columbia on Vancouver Island gave us a nice break before the onslaught of holiday season. It also gave me the opportunity to to shoot in something other than my desert environment for a change.
 

These two shots are both from the gardens of Hatley Castle, a beautiful early 20th Century estate built by coal and railway magnate James Dunsmuir, and later used by the military for officer training. It now serves as grounds of Royal Roads University.
 

While in Victoria, we stayed in a very nice b&b right on the water. It was during this trip that I came to understand that vacations are not for sleeping late.
 

At some point during our trip to Canada, detail started creeping into my highlights and my shadows began to not block up so much. As I started to not mess up my technique, my composition started to improve and I started seeing greater rewards from my efforts.
 

I can only imagine what someone with actual skill could do with such a location, but I’m learning.
 

Eventually, we had to leave the island and prepare for re-absorption into our real lives. But I couldn’t leave without a quick tour of Vancouver’s historic Gastown district. I chose my wife’s point-and-shoot for the early morning photo walk, but what I lost in control I more than made up for in feelings of personal security.
 

A short afternoon rainstorm, rush-hour freeway traffic and someone else behind the wheel all contributed to this shot. As my wife cursed the other drivers, I scrambled around in the back seat getting this picture of a very lucky Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
 

Thanks to the recession, you can find smokin’ deals on some pretty swell digs. No sooner had we settled into our Pricelined room at the Loews Ventana Canyon Resort in the Tucson foothills, I grabbed my gear and went hunting for some long exposures. The night was overcast, and the lights of the city reflected an eerie brick red back up into the clouds. Afterward, I told my wife, “don’t ever let me leave the house again without my tripod.”
 

I don’t get out to my brother’s property in Pearce nearly as often as I’d like. Last fall, we decided to visit him for Thanksgiving. As luck would have it, the day was gorgeous. The sky was full of fat clouds which combined with the open terrain to charge the scene with magical hues of gold, blue and gray. The vegan feast wasn’t half bad either.
 

We took our final trip of the year around Christmastime, to visit family in Georgetown, Texas, north of Austin. Georgetown is home to Southwestern University. Founded in 1840, Southwestern is the oldest university in Texas. And as such, its surrounding neighborhoods are a treat for the eye, full of classic old homes.
 

The light was right for this one.
 

Salado College was built in 1860 in Salado, Texas, just north of Georgetown. One last ruin to round out the year.