Zombie Apocalypse Las Vegas

I just got back from the annual Viva Las Vegas rockabilly festival in (where else?) Las Vegas. It's my third time going, and if there's a better opportunity to see the kind of mid-century upbeat dance music I love--rockabilly, rock and roll, jump blues, western swing--I don't know where it is.

I always come back with a few hundred bucks worth of CD's. Leaving aside the current bands who play this kind of stuff, there is a mind-blowingly huge catalog of old recordings out there. Seems there were hundreds of record labels in the 40's and 50's, all recording great stuff that dedicated music nerds have saved and reissued on CD. For every Sun Records, there were dozens of tiny regional or city-specific labels who recorded some killer tracks by local bands who promptly went back to their day jobs driving trucks or whatever.

I feel like I went for a long time loving this stuff but having no idea where to find it. There are bajillions of recordings. Once you find a vein, there's so much it's almost overwhelming. Go search out Wild and Frantic, Hey DJ!; East Coast Teen Party; or Rock 'n' Roll Orgy--each of these CD series has a dozen or more volumes, all packed with great stuff. (Um, watch out googling that last one though.)

Aside from the music, the event itself is sort of like a Star Trek convention for Back To The Future nerds, right down to the ballroom full of people who are obviously not teenagers, dressed like 1950's teenagers and cutting up the floor like professional swing dancers. There's a huge classic car show which--even for a committed pedestrian like me--is pretty impressive.There are merchant booths selling vintage threads, tiki knicknacks, and industrial-strength pomades to keep your ducktail tuff.

There's a whole other post to be written sometime about the appeal of this whole subculture. Were I to summarize, I would say that there are a lot of reasons to wish it was 1955 again, if you were able to surgically remove the racism, sexism, homophobia and ubiquitous second-hand cigarette smoke.

Anyway, as per my usual habit, I went down a bit early and spent a couple of days in the old downtown around Fremont Street. That original Rat Pack, Bugsy Siegel-era center has been gussied up in recent years for slightly less seedy audiences; they've clapped a giant roof over the street, and the roof is embedded with gajillions of LED's, making it a gigantic Blade Runner flat-screen TV.

Also as is my wont when I visit a new city, I took a walk out of said tourist area. Within two blocks found myself in the most desolate, messed-up urban post-apocalyptic ruinscape I have ever seen--and I have seen my share of messed-up urban et cetera. It was like I'd walked into a parallel universe where the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended very badly indeed. Block after block of demolished (or close to it) motels, their original and now-very-retro pylon signs flaking away in the desert sun.

 Looks like you're still charging too much.

 At a certain point you just give up and fill the pool with rocks.

If Downtown and the Strip are like Blade Runner without the rain, the surrounding area was like... I dunno... Planet of the Apes without the apes.

 

You maniacs! You blew it all up.... And I really wanted a burrito!

I recently heard an episode of This American Life, talking about how federal disability insurance has largely taken over the role of welfare in the United States. This tour bears it out. Almost literally everybody I saw--and there were a few people out at eight in the morning--had a cane, a walker or some sort of mobility device. I saw a guy pushing his girlfriend around in a grocery cart. Vegas being what it is, the extremes of poverty are probably particularly visible. But it looks like there are whole districts that subsist entirely on federal Social Security.... and this is what they're like.

The next day I took the bus out to something called the Zombie Apocalypse Store. It's a ridiculously stupid, not to mention awesomely cool, little store that sells all manner of stuff you would need to survive the hordes of living dead. Machetes, ammunition, army MRE's, first aid kids.

I thought about asking them for a ride back to the hotel but I didn't like the look of the guy they'd already picked up.

The Zombie Apocalypse Store is located out the Clark County exurban sprawl, in the middle of a vast, depopulated, de-industrialized wasteland of abandoned one-storey industrial buildings, many of which formerly sold granite countertops and other necessities for the great twenty-first century housing bubble which now, five years after popping, feels like a whole other world. As I trudged back to the hotel, I thought it was one of the few places on earth where a zombie apocalypse would be an improvement. At least there would be someone walking around.

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective (Part 5)

This is the fifth in a series on the Back To The Future franchise as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes.
We left off with a quick look at Hill Valley's downtown, and specifically its central Courthouse Square, in five different time periods. The Courthouse Square, more than any other single location in the franchise, is our anchor--it's what tells us what year we're in, and what is going on in that period.
Our first introduction to downtown is in 1985, when Marty cruises through on his little four-wheeled death wish on his way to school. Growing up in the suburbs, I was--well, whatever the opposite of "streetwise" is, with a relatively blind eye to the poverty and decrepitude of the inner city. So I never really noticed, until years later, just how crappy and run-down Hill Valley 1985 is.

How crappy and run-down? If you've arrived at this blog, chances are you've seen the movies at least once and you know the story. So rather than rehashing it, maybe the best way to describe the change in Hill Valley over three decades is to imagine an alternate version of Back To The Future--one in which a teenager from 1955 is accidentally whisked thirty years into the future:

Our guy knows the Courthouse Square as a public green, occupied by people who to all appearances are there by choice. Pedestrian paths crisscross the green, providing shortcuts to well-dressed adults and comparatively well-behaved minors on their way to and from their various no-doubt-wholesome engagements. The streets around the square are lined with a variety of businesses--a travel agent, a stationery store, a record store, two movie theatres, a corner cafe and several others.

When he arrives in 1985, he is shocked to discover that the Courthouse Square has been paved to make a parking lot:

Surprisingly, given the 1980's shall-we-say muscular approach to foreign affairs, even the war memorial...


... has been torn out to make room to park one more Buick.


Our naïf from 1955 might conclude that, for all the talk about honouring the sacrifices of its soldiers, his country is more fixated on keeping its cars running--indeed, that the former talk is usually just a pretext for the latter. (And since this is 1985, not 2015, he could say so without being hauled off to Guantanamo for the rest of his life.)

As for the businesses, they've been replaced by marginal operations including an occult bookstore, a bail bondsman, payday loan joint, and a shop dedicated to the sale of, um, adult accessories.


The travel agent is still there, oddly enough. Maybe it thrives because anyone who finds themselves in downtown Hill Valley is overcome by the urge to get out of town, fast.

Not everything has changed, of course. For instance, the movie theatre...


... is still there, albeit with different programming and slightly more talented actors.


A running joke in the original movie was that everyone in 1955 thought Marty was a sailor because of his "life preserver." I expect that our guy from the fifties would observe that half of downtown Hill Valley's business is now dedicated to sex industries and conclude that the entire town has been taken over by sailors on leave. Hopefully someone will clue him in before he passes the window where a dozen women in skintight costumes wave at every passing male, lest he misread their intentions...


Not that the entire town has been given over to marginality, sleaze and Spandex. The other movie theatre from 1955...


... is now a church, albeit of the evangelical thunder-and-tarnation variety.


(Spoiler alert: Just as the B-movie actor from 1955 is President in 1985, in the sequel our guy goes to 2015 and finds that every single candidate for the Republican nomination got his or her start preaching at that church!)

If our guy sticks around 1985 for awhile, he'll learn that suburbia has sucked the life out of downtown, to the point that no one lives there anymore. But this is not quite true:


All in all, our guy from 1955 will notice a pretty drastic change. It's summed up rather nicely by the sign, which in 1955 promotes Hill Valley as "A Nice Place To Live..."


But at bare minimum a town's motto has to be something people can say with a straight face, and if you can't say something nice...


...best say nothing at all.

As I've suggested earlier, BTTF is a remarkable piece of storytelling, not least because it makes us believe that Marty really, really wants to get back to this decrepitating dump. But it sets a bit of a challenge for the sequel. Having established that Hill Valley is basically Frank Capra's Pottersville, we need to come up with an alternative so bad it makes this place worth saving.

Stay tuned...

Nostalgic for nostalgia.

Steve Jobs is dead, the leaves are falling and the global economy continues to lurch around looking for brains to eat. It's hard these days not to think of decline and decrepitude, entropy taking its toll, the world winding down.

This weekend I had to go out to St.-Laurent Shopping Centre with Sarah to pick up some mundane necessities. I note with some shock that gradually, without my noticing, and even in major cities with nominally thriving downtowns, many basic goods can no longer be had in the urban core. Expensive niche goods for affluent bobos have taken over much of the urban retail landscape, while getting a basic pair of pants requires a trip to at least the inner-ring suburbs.

Once we finished at the mall, we made a Logan's Run to the outside to hit a local second-hand store. The neighbourhood around St.-Laurent has seen better days, to put it charitably. At one point it was Ottawa's rural hinterland--there's an old French Catholic cemetery nearby where, among others, my great-great grandparents and Sir Wilfrid Laurier are buried--but the Development Fairy arrived just after World War II and waved her magic can of whoop-ass. Now St.-Laurent is a standard automotive kill zone with the strip malls, gas stations and other bric-a-brac clustered to take advantage of six lanes of passing car traffic.

We broke for lunch at Rockin' Johnny's, one of a local chain of 1950's-themed chrome replica diners. You've seen these places, or others like them, in every city on the continent. They started springing up as part of the wave of desperate Happy Days nostalgia that seized North America after the 1973 oil embargo and that, subsequently, everyone agreed to squint real hard and mistake for optimism throughout the Reagan years.

If you're in the restaurant business there's probably a decor kit you can buy, containing neon Coke signs, rock-and-roll '45's complete with pre-drilled screw holes, and framed shrines to patron saints Presley, Monroe and Dean. One phone call will summon a van with four nostalgia installers in immaculate white Maytag Man uniforms. With NASCAR pit crew efficiency, they will roll out a Wurlitzer jukebox, slap black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor and chrome on everything else, and reupholster the booths from a ten-foot-wide roll of sparkle-infused vinyl.

The appeal of these places is obvious--a longing for the perceived simpler time of cheap gasoline and giant tailfins, gainful employment for high-school graduates and (not least, for its target baby boomer demographic just then starting to develop post-adolescent metabolisms) a time when you could wolf down a giant cheeseburger with fries and a litre of chocolate shake without spontaneously inflating like the driver-side airbag in your Chrysler K-car.

But now here's where it gets meta. Because what can you say about a nostalgia-themed place that makes you wistful for a time you could go to a nostalgia-themed place that looked convincingly new? When I was young, if you went to a fake reproduction of a 1950's diner, that fake 1950's diner looked like it was just built. That was the whole point. If you're in a 1950's diner and it looks like it's thirty years old, that means you're in at least the 1980's and who the hell needs that?

As it happens, this particular establishment was pretty grim.

Its once-shiny chrome exterior was coated with grime from sitting next to a six-lane arterial for twenty years.


The blinds were pulled down over all the windows. When we arrived at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, we were the only customers aside from a pair of babushkas nursing their coffee.

The table jukeboxes had red duct tape over the coin slots. Perhaps they were out of order, or maybe they were just trying to prevent any customers from denting the already-shaky ambience by cranking up The Eagles or Huey Lewis. The wall plaster bore the scars of decades of being whanged with the napkin dispenser.


The mandatory iconic James Dean poster had faded into the same suicide-blue colour as the walls:


Since we were the only actual customers, it was tricky trying to take pictures without being noticed by the staff. It's too bad because possibly the saddest element (I couldn't get a decent shot) was a clock over the counter, looking distinctly unfabulous with long-burnt-out neon lettering reading "The Fabulous '50's." In a similar vein, the menus sported the slogan "Bring Back Great Times and Great Food." Hey, kitten, you wanna bring me Johnny's Irony Burger with a side of pathos?


For all of this, it wasn't an unpleasant experience. Truth is beauty, even at its ugliest. I found it delightfully freaky to be in a place that so sharply illustrates the end of the rope we find ourselves at, where even our shrines to the golden age are battered, grimy and all but abandoned.

Sarcastic Smurf.

I went to a movie last night and saw that there's a Smurfs movie coming out--in 3-D.

This is amazing as it effectively triples the number of dimensions traditionally allocated to smurfs.

Once Upon A Time... WTF?

Classical music is one of those things that, until now, I have simultaneously not been interested in but recognized that someday I probably would be. Last week, I headed over to the library and borrowed some CD's, intending to make up for years of indifference and see what I've been missing.

Even if you don't care about classical music, you've almost certainly been exposed to a lot of it just through movies and TV. At the very least, you've heard it in popular movies as a lazy shorthand for stuffy elite opulence. Whenever there's a string quartet playing, you can bet there's a bored pretty rich girl who's about to be spirited away by the charming working-class hero to a way funner party drinking moonshine down by the river.

Anyway, the first piece on the disc I borrowed is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, better known to pop culture as Creepy Frankenstein Organ Music.

I'm still unclear on how any given piece of music, absent lyrics, can be "about" something. But I've always felt like this piece was about either the creation or the destruction of the world. That's because it was the theme music to a certain educational cartoon I used to watch when I was a kid.

I'm a bit of an anxious guy, and I was certainly an anxious kid. My childhood memories are of one apocalyptic neurosis after another. In grade four, during Fire Prevention Week, the psychopaths at the local fire department came to our school and showed us a film on fire safety that included a series of horrifying images of people who had died in house fires. Not just anonymous charred corpses on a coroner's table. I mean images of people where they were found, in context, all pathos and horror--real people whose tragedies were burned into your mind with shrieking Psycho strings. A half-naked man inches from the window, his upper body burned beyond recognition, who awoke too late and tried and almost succeeded in crawling out of a burning house in the dead of night. A woman, roasted in the fetal position, wrapped in towels in the bathtub where she tried to hide from the flames.

For years thereafter, I worried about spontaneous combustion, soaking matchbooks before throwing them out; even today I'll turn back halfway to work to make sure I've turned off the stove.

Rest assured, dear firemen, you've made your point.

Later there would be fear of fire of a more primal sort. In one year was the accidental shooting down of a Korean Airlines passenger jet by a Russian warplane, TV specials like The Day After and documentaries If You Love This Planet--this last shown to us by our spikey-haired peace activist teacher, who had determined that the most effective way to prevent nuclear holocaust was to scare the living shit out of seventh graders.

But throughout those years, extinction and immolation--my own and that of the world--were never far from my mind. And as far as I can tell it started with Bach's Toccata, and an educational cartoon called Once Upon A Time... Man.

TV Ontario in the early 1980's had a whole raft of educational and/or foreign kids' shows running for several hours after dinner. This parade of odd, not-quite-cool, but strangely gripping programs defined my early winter evenings for a few crucial years. A reading show with talking shoes, followed by Doctor Who (the old, crusty, un-hip version.) Then an epic French puppet series about a singing bear with a magic whistle stuck in his throat, travelling the world in pursuit of a kidnapped rat. And, finally, Once Upon A Time... Man.

OUATM follows a group of humans throughout human history, the same characters in more-or-less similar roles in different time periods, from the paleolithic through to the mid-twentieth century. I only dimly remember the show itself, but the opening credit sequence, Bach and all, has been lodged in my mind ever since.

Cold space condenses into the solar system. A fish in a stream becomes an amphibian, which crawls out of the water and becomes a lizard. The lizard becomes a monkey, then an ape, who picks up a spear and becomes an australopithecine. Ape-man to cave-man to Neolithic Man; Babylon to Egypt to Greece to Rome, the medieval to the Renaissance to the industrial to the modern; stagecoach to steam train to automobile to jet plane to, finally, a rocket ship, launched into the same starry sky from which it all emerged.

I am enthralled; the doors to my eight-year-old mind have just been pried open to an epic of geologic time, from the beginning of it all to the boundless future, brought to you by friendly and relatable cartoon characters.

But, wait. There's one more bit, tacked on to the end.


A man's face, terrified. Pull out. He is running towards a rocket ship, waiting on its launch pad. A dozen more follow, running for their lives. They board the rocket and blast off into space, moments before.... Earth explodes!

Cut to tonight's episode, which is about, I dunno, Egyptians or whatever. The eight-year-old, who has been given every reason to treat this entire sequence as factual, isn't exactly paying attention at this point. Hey, whoa, back up--what was that last part?

Tony the Oncologist

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective (Part Four.)

This is the fourth in a series on the Back To The Future franchise as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes. Downtown Hill Valley and Courthouse Square As I noted before, it's Hill Valley itself that is as much a co-star as any actor in the Back To The Future franchise. We see various parts of town in one or more time periods. However, it's only the Courthouse Square and its surrounding city blocks that appear in all five eras. Before we get into particulars, here are the town square's five incarnations, in no particular order. Courthouse Square, 1955: Courthouse Square Parking Lot, 1985: Courthouse Square Mall, 2015: Biff's Pleasure Palace Parking, 1985A: Hill County Courthouse, 1885 (under construction): There's so much going on here that I'm not even going to try to get into it in this post. I'll be going into detail in the next few weeks. For now, suffice it to say that these images speak volumes about what has happened to North American towns in the past century, and our wishes, feelings and hopes in this regard.