Anyway, I’ve finally finished my yearly task of archiving last year’s photos, and already my nascent education is affecting what I consider worth keeping. Suddenly, a whole new catalog of errors jumps out at me: blown out skies, camera shake, clueless use of flash, noise, chromatic aberration, and of course, mediocre composition.

But they say that a healthy part of any education is putting your work out there for better or worse, so here’s the short list from 2007. It’s no surprise that my favorites of the bunch are actually the ones taken by my wife. But this year, I hope to surpass her in at least the math department, which she hates.



I tend to steer clear of downtown Phoenix these days. It seems every time I venture down there, I discover another of my old favorites consigned to the scrap heap or worse, a target for “renovation.” The cheerfully run-down squalorous downtown Phoenix of my childhood is all but gone, a victim of the kind of people who have always complained that there’s not enough to “do” in Phoenix. Our downtown has never reflected the cultural aspirations of these folks who envision a shiny urban entertainment mecca full of fun for the whole family and free from spontaneous structural failure and those annoying homeless people. But now that they’re finally getting their way, I hardly recognize the place any more.

My wife and I don’t have much reason to go downtown very often, aside from the odd sporting event or circus protest. But she dragged me to a particularly galling theatrical performance one evening recently, and afterward we were restless from sitting on our hands for two hours. The night was warm and pleasant, and somehow, my wife got the notion that we might find something open up the street. So she forewent her usual fear of the empty after-hours desolation of the area and suggested we walk a little. As luck would have it, the Irish bar in the Hotel San Carlos was still open. While we drank beer and ate french fries, a group of college football fans watched the home team finish up a game across town.

As we headed back towards our car, we saw the old Professional Building at Central and Monroe, sitting empty as it has for the past two decades. But something made me stop and cross the street. As my wife’s paranoia began to reawaken, I peered conspicuously through the cracks in the boarded up windows. Sure enough, the ground floor showed signs of being recently gutted. As I looked left and right for some sort of posted zoning documentation, my wife began to make noises like it was time to go. When I began to move around the corner and towards the back alley, she grabbed my arm and hurried me towards the parking garage.

Fearing the worst, I returned home and hit the net. Sure enough, renovation was indeed slated to occur. Our once proud bedrock of former financial stability will soon be a holding space for upscale lodgers besotted with gourmet chocolate and high-end champagne. What’s more, I also discovered the old Hanny’s Building was undergoing a similar fate. I admit, I greeted this news with mixed emotions — I didn’t even know the Hanny’s Building was still standing (I told you: I don’t go downtown much any more).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m delighted that these wonderful old giants will not be sacrificed to make way for downtown’s “invigoration.” I hate to see what to me represents an important part of my city’s past scraped away just because a theater or fast food chain is desperate to maintain the unrealistic runaway growth they’ve conned their stockholders into expecting. But I’d rather these beautiful buildings stand abandoned forever than be thrown under the wheels of a doomed business plan. But that seems to be the way things inevitably go.

Anyway, the next chance I got, I grabbed my trusty point-and-shoot and went downtown. I need to start doing that a lot more.



It’s finally starting to cool off around these parts. Soon enough, I’ll able to once again take actual road trips to parts of the state I haven’t seen yet. But the internet still continues to offer an adequate substitute for real experience. I’ve recently found a few great sites that are new to me at least.

Aaron Walton’s Western Mining History site is probably my favorite, if only for the sheer perversity of its presentation. Clustered around its prominently displayed Google ads, the site’s photo galleries offer exquisite views of dilapidated small towns throughout the western United States. Its brief tour of Miami, Arizona is a real treat. The town’s hovels, back alleys and shuttered buildings are lovingly exhibited without commentary or any trace of irony, as barren as the streets of Miami themselves. Meanwhile, Globe and Bisbee look positively opulent by comparison.

I had varying degrees of success finding photos of the others towns in my personal pantheon of destinations. I enjoyed Jeff Knapp’s photos of Superior, even if they were all in black and white. The Library of Congress American Memory page has a lot of great pictures of Tombstone from the mid-20th century, before the place was tarted up for the tourist trade. But you’ve got to use their cumbersome search engine to find them. All I could find about Yarnell were pages about the Shrine Of St. Joseph, of which this one is my favorite.

None of the above, however, can match Prescott’s Sharlot Hall Museum site for sheer volume. Stretching from the mid 1800s to the present day, exhaustively documented and annotated in most cases by by accompanying articles, the collection has no rival that I’ve found. The also voluminous Arizona Memory Project, to which the Sharlot Hall Museum is a major contributor, comes awfully close though.

Readers as equally bitter as I am about the modern state of things might enjoy whiling away a few hours lost amidst these fantastic photo collections from Arizona’s past. The rest of you can get a quick fix from my latest batch of postwar postcards from the fine folks at Curt Teich:



I remember a couple of shows that I once had on tape, but they are long gone. One was called “This is your wretched Life” where an Ethiopian –Azumbu was his name, was told about his life, and he had to guess the identity of significant people in his life based on their stories. One “participant” related how they thought they found some food, but it was only dirt. Another told how the wind came along and blew the dirt away and then they didn’t have anything to sit on, and finally, how they ate someone’s shoulder. Gruesome stuff! Another show featured a family who was lost in a strange neighborhood and there weren’t any Circle K’s and they didn’t have any snacks, so they had to eat the baby. The last one I remember was called, “The Bensons: America’s favorite migrant working family”. They basically ate meals from a sewer pipe… I would never have thought anyone else would remember these guys, but I’m glad I was wrong.

Alan wllll be happy to learn that while “This Is Your Wretched Life” is still in the wind, the other segments he remembers are present and accounted for. There’s also a 4th Grade class presentation called “We Remember Kent State,” and a not as gruesome but equally delightful visit by Verne and Craig to a local bar, where they cheerfully abuse a waitress. They heap on plenty of abuse on everyone throughout these programs: minorities, women, children, animals, gays, lesbians, consumers, sports fans, and of course, their employers. But perhaps my favorite routine is their simple assurance that what we’re listening to is “brand new material.”

The recordings themselves are far from brand new, however, and sound in fact like they’ve seen a little abuse themselves. Carelessly archived, hastily edited and probably even injudiciously noise-reduced, these poor old shows are suffering a final indignity: compression into the popular MP3 format. So take the audio quality under advisement.

If you’re an acquaintance of my Mystery Benefactor, sent here for the goods, I bid you welcome. While you’re waiting to complete your download, take a little time to discover some of our other Phoenix-centric content. We’ve got old menus and newspapers, and even a great album by one of Phoenix’s top disco bar bands from the late 70s. More importantly, you’ll find lots more “Love Workshop!”


Download “The Best Of Love Workshop” Part One

Download “The Best Of Love Workshop” Part Two

Learn more about “Love Workshop”

JP Morgan Chase & Co. owns the building and is willing to save the bank…if the neighborhood will play nice and let developers rezone and make over the bank’s yard with four-story condos and luxe shopping…The neighborhood wants nothing of the kind: no more condos, no demolition…

Preservationists lean in favor of giving up the green space in order to save the bank. “In order to keep this icon,” Councilman Tom Simplot said, “they need to develop that green space. They are not going to be able to save the building if they don’t give it up.” But wedging condos onto the lawn, said Frank Henry, 73, the building’s celebrated architect [sic], is “like taking a painting and cutting off a corner of it.”

The empty land has been a pawn before. The bank was the first commercial development in that area, and the space was offered to placate neighbors. Now, it’s the only grassy expanse on a heavily commercial intersection that has grown up around it. Neighbors insist that the bank made a promise to keep that land green, but according to Chase and city zoning officials, no formal record requires the space to remain open.

It’s just a shame, Henry said. “The whole park and the building are all one thing, one composition. The geometry of it all was together…” When Henry was dreaming up the building in the ’60s, he was making an anti-war, anti-establishment statement. He took his inspiration from the circle so that he could combat the boring square box. “I always thought that the circle, the curved line, the curved space is so beautiful,” Henry said. “It’s always changing.”

(Note: Walt Lockley informs me that Frank Henry was the designer; Weaver & Drover were the actual architects.)

I have house guests this week, relatives visiting from out of town. But when I read the article, I had to drag them out in 110 degree temperatures to get my pics. They’re not great: it was afternoon and half the building was in shadow. But I managed to stitch together some nice panoramas. The Modern Phoenix web mag offers much greater detail on the subject.

Of all the VNB buildings left in the Phoenix area, this one is the jewel. It combines space age aesthetics with desert motifs, playing nice with civic responsibilities in the bargain. It’s even got two bronze nudes which I can only assume are the work of John Henry Waddell. I still remember when it was built in 1967. I’ll miss it when it’s gone, and the best intentions of various factions notwithstanding, I full expect it to go away soon.

UPDATE: Here’s an audio interview about the bank with Phoenix architecture critic Walt Lockley, plus a link to his site.

Back in high school, I was naive enough to think we had them safely on the ropes. The Watergate affair and its attendant fallout was so encouraging. But three decades later, it’s obvious my optimism was premature. Bombing innocent foreigners, depriving the American people of their civil rights, robbing the country blind at the behest of corporate cronies — as it turns out, this stuff doesn’t really bother people all that much. Hell, the man in the big chair does it today — no problem. But the swearing was just too much. After the release of the transcripts of Nixon’s White House tapes, the country realized that they didn’t have a nice person in the White House. They just weren’t comfortable having such a potty mouth for president.

After that, America stuck with candidates that seemed like ordinary family men, folks that reminded them of the guy next door. Mainstream media began giving more and more play to the reactionary “family values” that continue to dominate the discourse today. But back then, we considered it an aberration, the decadent death throes of an old order. If we paid any attention at all to such “spokespersons” as Anita Bryant and Pat Buchanan, it was only to laugh at them. When, after a highly entertaining local political contest, the despicable John Conlan lost the Republican primary to the equally hateful Sam Steiger, who in turn took a trouncing from the Democrat Dennis DeConcini, how could we not puff up our chests? How were we to know how much grass roots ground work these forces were laying? Who could have guessed how effectively they would sweep back up on the table what I had always believed to be be dead straw issues like personal liberty, freedom from theocracy and sane foreign policy? Perhaps if we had known then what we know now, we may have chosen more effective weapons against them than custard cream.


Expletive Deleted

The family that campaigns together

The presidential sibling demeans our beer

Funnies reflect American values

Singers seeks prison terms for homosexuals

Patrick Buchanan denounces Gay Pride Week

Woman Derives Being From Man

Conlan Disputes Accusation

Sex Film Protest

Lipstick message in Idaho threatens Carter

Schafly meets Kay: The pieman strikes!

After a couple hours of leisurely research, we made our choice: a new vacuum cleaner! I spent the rest of the weekend eagerly sucking incredible quantities of dirt and pet hair out of our lives. But Monday returned as it always does, and with it, another week of petty dramatics, inefficiency and indifference. Not to mention the stuff my co-workers do that bothers me.

What kind of person counts the minutes at work so he can spend the weekend doing housework? Well, around my house, you never know what treasures you’ll find once you start moving things around. I discovered these fabulous ruins under a particularly intractable clump of pet hair. The product of a previous attempt at organization, these crumbling artifacts were glued to old sheets of scratch paper and discarded in a corner. I know: if I don’t want my collection to end up in the belly of my vacuum or clinging to the linings of my sinuses, I need to move the whole mess to a climate controlled underground bunker somewhere in Montana. Believe me: I’m working on it.

In the meantime, I offer consolation to the also-overworked among you. It could be worse: It could be 1944. People worked in conditions far worse than yours and mine. And the consumer distractions available back then were meager at best.


Job security — Nazi style

Plan on eating with us at your convenience

Ah, the fifties! When innovation blossomed, conformity abounded and paranoia lurked behind every tree! (Or so I hear — I wasn’t alive then.)

Rather than offer fresh historic perspective, don’t these laboriously culled excerpts merely serve to confirm our own self-serving predjudices? We love to laugh at these tatters of media ephermera, at the unashamed nakedness of their bias, at the barefaced innocence of their wrongheaded arrogance. Otherwise, we’d be forced to admit that we have more in common with our former selves than we care to admit.

Let’s face it: we’re no less xenophobic and consumption obsessed today than the folks from back then. It’s just that our ad design isn’t as clean nowadays, and the quality of our news reporting isn’t as good. No matter how much we may slap each other on the backs over the clarity of our insights and the industry of our endeavors, we’re still grounded in the same old dead end. At the end of the day, it’s all about grinding out survival via the buying and selling of goods and services.

Consider the poor bastard who sweats through the pursuit of a liberal arts degree and lands himself a good job on the local newspaper. There, he discovers a life of working until three in the morning, cranking out mindless copy to fill holes in the layout. “Through These Columns Pass Announcements of the World’s Finest Products Offered at Interesting Prices.” Fifty years later, the sour stink of self-loathing jumps right off the yellowing page and cuts right through the mold and mildew.


When getting and spending, happiness our aim, life can be beautiful:

Ezy Angel Mix has ‘em all talking
The king of cottage cheese
No more dust
Sales are up when heat and humidity are down
Let a check do it for you
I sure wish all my customers paid by check

Fighting the good fight:

The Red Braid
A staunch believer in advertising the product
Fallout from the “Couppee incident”

The view from the funnies:

Clean up the breeding place
Homework=Schoolwork
Thanx to many grocers
The other red menace

Though it may be Arizona’s capital and largest city, Phoenix began as a small agricultural community set up to supply food to the mining towns that thrived north of the valley. The most famous of these is Jerome, which still supports a mini tourist mecca perched on the side of Mingus mountain atop a maze of abandoned mine shafts. But a hundred years ago, over a dozen boomtowns clustered among the Bradshaw mountain range. These were sustained by the “Impossible Railroad,” so named for its ambitiously precarious route into the remote hllls.

At the foot of the the Bradshaws lies the remains of Arizona’s most prosperous gold mine. Discovered in 1862 by immigrant Henry Wickenberg, it lies about ten miles south of the town that still bear his name. The Vulture mine maintained a population of five thousand during its heyday, and brought in millions of dolllars. Though crime and fraud were rampant throughout its history, the mine stayed in operation until the 1940s, changing hands serveral times. It only closed for good after wartime restrictions on the production of non-strategic metals pulled the final rug out from under it.

My wife and I discovered Vulture a couple years ago, during one of our desperate periodic weekend flights from the effects of our workaholic lifestyle. As enchanted as I was, I still managed to “produce.” That is to say, I took some dandy photos.

The two-story assay office building is still intact, as are its upstairs apartments. The remaining machines at the worksite are awesome to behold, especially the huge ancient diesel engine which towers above the rest of the powerhouse bulidling, rusted to lustrous craggy hues of copper and gold. The mess hall and many residential buildings also all remain in various degrees of ruinous detail.

The Vulture mine is far and away the best of its kind here in Arizona, and if I ever graduate to a better camera than my little Canon PowerShot, I will definitely return. Fortunately, the town has attracted the attention of folks who’ve made a greater investment in photographic equipment than I. The Ghost Town Gallery site run by the Swiss team of Daniel Ter-Nedden and Carola Schibli smokes anything you’re likely to find on my Flickr pages. Likewise, the site by Christian L. Deichert also offers excellent coverage.

If you’re like me, however, these pix won’t be enough. You’ll want to find a way to visit Vulture yourself. Fear not — it’s entirely doable, as this page attests. And if that’s not enough, you might even want to buy it. Of course, if that’s more of a commitment than you can handle, there’s always the DVD.

One of the fondest memories of my teens is The Love Workshop, a fifteen minute comedy program produced in Phoenix for KDKB radio back in 1976. Nowadays, we’d call its themes and subject matter “politically incorrect.” But during its brief run, the Love Workshop’s hosts, Vern & Craig, were merely “offensive.” In fact, they still are, and the modern potential listener would be wise to take this fact under advisement.

In one segment, they microwave then eat a small boy surrounded by an accompaniment of jawbreakers and new potatoes. In another, they seduce the recently widowed wife of a Vietnam vet with bourbon and Quaalude. In another, they punch out the subject of a public television “empowerment” program after calling her a stupid lesbian. In still another, they force a guest to try out an I.U.D made of pop tops and bottle caps attached to a dead scorpion.

Offensive it may have been, but my friends and I worshipped Vern & Craig. They make “bad boys” like Howard Stern and Jimmy Kimmel look like insipid hacks. They regularly offered listeners “shows about nothing” fifteen years before the notion gained respectability. (In one of the samples available here, the boys enjoy a light snack while Vern recounts his weekend in Rocky Point with some “typical west Phoenix types.”) And the kitschy background music used on the show can only be described nowadays as highly collectable.

The writing on the show was brilliant. Their sense of comic timing and attention to detail was impeccable. And in the climate of the mid-seventies, the scorched-earth nature of material didn’t raise as many eyebrows as it would now. (They did get into trouble with the State Banking Examiner, however, for their fake ads for American Woman’s Credit and Trust.) But not everyone admired it, apparently. Just as the show was poised to expand into other markets, it was suddenly cancelled as part of a controversial housecleaning of KDKB management.

Here’s an interview that ran in the Phoenix New Times Weekly the same week the show was cancelled.

This ad ran in a local magazine shortly before the show’s cancellation.

After the cancellation, Vern Schaub joined the staff of the National Lampoon. Later, he worked in Hollywood, where he supplied screenplays for “Clean & Sober” and the film version of the Workshop-inspired “O.C. & Stiggs” stories he wrote for the Lampoon. By the end of the 80s, however, he had disappeared without a trace. Craig Hoover, meanwhile, put aside his career as a local celebrity (which included an unsuccessful run for Governor), became active in Scientology, and settled into a successful living as one of the top producing residential realtors in the country.

I used to have a good collection of Love Workshop shows on cassette. But I foolishly loaned them to an acquaintance and never got them back. Now all I have left is about an hour’s worth of material on a beat up old tape. Like so much of the crap I have in my back rooms, however, I have no recollection of where it came from. I seem to recall a friend of mine running into Vern several years ago, and asking him about the whereabouts of the master tapes. If my memory serves me right, I believe he gave my friend the impression that the Love Workshop was a part of his life he’d just as soon not revisit. I’m afraid I cannot share his sentiments.

Download what’s left of my Love Workshop collection.

EXTRA: Thanks very much to reader Blixco for digitizing and posting his Love Workshop collection! In his words, “Good lord! We’ve got the most complete Love Workshop archive ON THE PLANET!”

Frankly, I hope he’s wrong, and a few more kind souls come out of the woodwork with more shows. (I remember one in particular in which Craig screams at a guest for being the sort of person who might own a large tub of “cut-rate peanut butter found ONLY at department stores like Newberrys.” I’d love to hear it again.

The Blixco collection can be found here

NEW: Thanks to reader Alan for sharing his recording of “Frog Night!”

Love Workshop, Redux