Author: Jim

THING 1: Jitney.

I recently saw Jitney. I’m not much of a theater guy. I think if I lived in Manhattan, I’d be a theater guy. My friend Mark a theater guy. He’s my go-to when it comes to Everything Theater. He knows what’s great and has never steered me wrong. When I get to spend time in my most favorite city in the world, Mark and I usually go on a ManDate, usually off Broadway, usually to attend the theater. We’ve seen some terrific performances. So when he told me August Wilson’s acknowledged masterpiece was playing in Phoenix, I took my mom. On a MomDate. To see Jitney. Cause ManDates and MomDates are just about all the Hot Action I get these days. And of course Mark was right. Set in a 1970s Pittsburgh “jitney” — a cab stand for unlicensed taxis that pick up customers in neighborhoods a Yellow Cab won’t — it’s about work, pride, fathers and sons. The most surprising part? Decent theater in Phoenix, Arizona! Good things do happen outside NYC. Sometimes. That’s a joke. Kind of.

THING 2: The Single-Screen Theater.

A few days ago I drove past the Valley Art on Mill Avenue in Tempe. It’s shuttered. Dark. The marquee still has letters on it though—big, black, and in all caps: MOVIES ARE FOREVER. SEE YOU SOON. For decades the Valley Art was the last single-screen theater still standing and in operation in the Phoenix area. You’ve probably seen a movie in a single-screen. My first visit there was to catch The Atomic Café, my freshman year at ASU in the fall of ’82. But it was also where I saw one of my first punk shows. I grew up an arena rock kid—Styx, REO Speedwagon, The Who, BÖC. Thousands of people. Giant stages. The dank smell of weed a few minutes after the lights dimmed. Always a good fist fight in the parking lot after the show. But I digress. I caught the Meat Puppets at the Valley Art in November of ’84 with maybe a hundred other people in the room. I couldn’t get over the fact that, if I wanted to, I could actually reach out and touch the band. But I digress. I still love the experience of a movie in a theater. Last one for me was Nürnberg, through it all knowing it’s better here than streaming at home. But the Valley Art is a dinosaur, and we all know how large corporations feel about dinosaurs.

THING 3: The 33⅓ Series.

If you’re into music, the 33⅓ series is one of the more interesting publishing projects of the last twenty years. Each book focuses on a single album—sometimes a famous one, sometimes something a little more obscure—and the writers take wildly different approaches to it. Some read like memoirs. Others are cultural history. A few are almost like long essays about why a particular record mattered at a certain moment. The one I’m currently peddling is the Colin Meloy signed volume on his take of Let It Be by the Replacements. If you know the record, you know why it deserves a book. If you don’t know the record, the book is a pretty good place to start. A better place to start, of course, is with Let It Be. Anyway, an album you love and see if someone’s written a 33⅓ book about it. Chances are they have. It’s a fun way to spend an afternoon with a record you already know. I’m digging into Bruce Eaton’s take on Big Star’s Radio City.

THING 4: Listening to a Record I Don’t Know by a Band I Do.

I’m not a morning person. And I’m certainly not a morning-exercise person. But every now and then I manage to drag myself out of bed for my “morning mile with Molly.”  My pooch Molly loves her morning walks, and so do I.  Lately—with airbuds firmly inserted—I’m listening to something I don’t know much about. I’ve probably heard of the band. Or know a band’s famous record or two. But my general, self-imposed rule for My Morning Mile with Molly: Listen to a Record You Don’t Know by a Band You Do. This morning it was the 13th Floor Elevators—Easter Everywhere. 13th Floor Elevators! Love their first record. Never heard a lick on their second. I’ve never even heard of Easter Everywhere. And you know what? This sort of thing just…lands differently. I really can’t explain it any better than that. So this week pick a record you don’t know by a band you do and listen. On a walk. In the car. At your coffee shop. I’m learning the best way to really discover a band is by listening to the records I’ve skipped…for whatever reason.

THING 5: Blood Meridian

I’m rereading McCarthy’s masterpiece—mainly cause of my recent obsession with Tombstone—and, just as I remember, it is the most brutal book I’ve ever read. Dead babies hanging from trees. Eyes pulled from their sockets. The terrifying episode at the end of Chapter 4 when the Kid and his crew are slaughtered by the Comanches. The violence is relentless, and McCarthy doesn’t treat the American West the way most Western novels do. No romance. No heroic gloss. Pretty much everyone is a bad guy and his West seems older, harsher, and completely indifferent to the people moving through it. I love it. If you don’t know the book, McCarthy’s story unfolds mostly across the Texas–Mexico borderlands in the late 1840s, following a gang of scalp hunters through deserts and badlands. The land dominates everything, and McCarthy’s landscape is as much a character as anyone in the book. Give it a try. It’s not an easy book; meaning, it’s violent and unsettling and sometimes it feels more like a surrealistic fever dream than a traditional novel and every once in a while I do get a tiny-bit annoyed with McCarthy’s Faulknerian prosey. Just feels a little forced is all. But I’m no lit critic, and if you’re interested in the mythology of the American West, you won’t find a darker—or more honest—version of it anywhere.

THING 1: The Dusty Ramblers Project.

The band is part of what I’m calling “the CattleTrack Scene” — although I’m sure I’m not the only one calling it that. The CattleTrack Scene: the creatives orbiting in-and-around (about) a 2-mile strip of road called Cattletrack in Scottsdale, where the desert homes (among them is Fritz Scholder’s estate), studios, and back-porch stages blur together and the art feels very much lived. If I had to label them, I’ll borrow one and call The Ramblers “Sonoran Americana”: pedal steel and acoustic guitars under open sky and violins and petal-steel guitars that breathe in our warm air and don’t really ask for a whole lot of attention. Their sets move easily between covers I forgot I loved and originals that sound like they’ve been around even longer than the band’s “many years” of playing together. Big bonus points here: one of the band’s members, Brent Bond, runs Santos Press, so yea…I’m partial to The Ramblers due to Brent’s work both singing with them as well as pulling paper through his Vandy Universal 1.

THING 2: Heroic Harry and His Partner Blasting Boy.

I’m a collector. Have been my whole life. But you know this. I can’t remember, though, if I told you it started with my love of comics — specifically The Hulk and Daredevil — when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. They’re the first thing I ever collected. Here’s something I know I’ve never mentioned: I loved them so much, I even attempted to draw my own. Fast forward to 2010-ish. I’m poking around one of my favorite, SoCal flea market haunts when I stumble upon a stack of discarded paper. Among that paper? Heroic Harry and His Partner Blasting Boy. Pencil on lined paper, 2 issues staple-bound, multiple covers, logos, issue numbers, villains, time-warps — a fully realized comic book universe imagined by some unknown kid who believed in his characters enough to publish them under the proud banner of “Bravo Comics Group.” I’ve held onto it all these years because it reminded me of my childhood, when I did the exact same thing: folded notebook paper in half, invented my own superhero, numbered the issues like collectors would someday argue over them. There’s something very honest about that level of conviction.

THING 3: Michael Rutter’s Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West.

Whory Dory. Rockin’ Chair Emma. Poker Alice. Fuzzy Girl. Little Gertie. Cuttin’ Lil’ Slasher. Big Nose Kate. Those names aren’t pulp inventions. They’re pulled from documents — arrest records, city directories, newspapers — and they live again in Michael Rutter’s Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West, which has been sitting on my nightstand…when it’s not sitting on my lap. Rutter’s book is less moral judgment and more ledger book: who worked where, what they charged, how they moved from boomtown to boomtown as mining camps rose and collapsed. Prostitution in the West was infrastructure: brothels stood near saloons, hotels, assay offices. Women rented cribs, upstairs rooms, and paid city fines and license fees, navigated madams, pimps, lawmen, gamblers, and the steady churn of silver and gold money. In Tombstone around 1880, they were as much a part of the street life as the Cowboys and the Earps or walking up Allen or Toughnut to Hop Town to score some opium under gaslight lamps.

THING 4: The Annual VNSA Book sale. 

The VNSA Book Sale is tomorrow, which means I’ll be up crazy-early — a rare event unless I’m catching a flight to Paris, Amsterdam, or, paybe, New York City. Short of a flea market at dawn, this is about the only thing that pulls me out of bed before sunrise. The sale is put on by the Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association, a Phoenix organization that began in 1957 to support the Visiting Nurse Service, raising money to provide in-home healthcare for people who needed it most. What started as a modest fundraiser has grown into one of the largest used book sales in the Southwest, filling the Arizona State Fairgrounds with tens of thousands of donated volumes. In recent years they’ve added a “rare book” section — which, yes, will be my first stop — but I’m just as excited about the art book tables and the long rows of hardback fiction where some real surprises tend to hide. Massive sales like this are democratic in the best way: high and low sharing the same folding tables, treasures misfiled, forgotten first printings sandwiched between book club editions. It’s part treasure hunt, part civic ritual, and part reminder that books still circulate hand to hand in this desert city. Did I mention the massive line to get in?

THING 5: The Discipline of Letting Things Go.

I don’t really need the money I earn from selling books. It’s a nice supplement to whopping Social Security check, sure, but that’s not why I get up early for flea markets or wander into junk shops. It’s my idea of rescuing things. And I use that word deliberately. So much paper ephemera — books, handmade comics, forgotten art — is one bad decision away from a dumpster. I’ve always felt a kind of obligation to intervene. But lately I’m learning that rescue doesn’t mean permanent custody. Some of the things closest to me — the Heroic Harry comic I held for fifteen-odd years, the record collection I swore I’d never break down, books I loved enough to read twice — eventually deserve to move on. Letting go is its own discipline. It clears space. It sharpens taste. It reminds me that collecting isn’t about possession; it’s about stewardship. I get to hold something for a while, appreciate it, understand it, then send it back out into the world. What’s next? Maybe even the books inscribed to me. Why not. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the story doesn’t end when an object leaves my shelf.

Sometimes that’s when it actually begins again.

THING 1: Volta 5ive (The Lettered Edition).

Although not called for in the colophon, this is letter “__” from an edition of 26 lettered copies, each accompanied by an original found Kodacolor print from the Halloween Party.

THING 2: Straight Up.

I was scouting a flea market a few weeks ago when I stumbled on a copy of Badfinger’s fourth record sitting in a musty box with maybe a dozen others. I don’t really bother digging through booths that specialize in records anymore. They’re just too expensive. Which is a strange thing to complain about—if records are selling (and they are), then they’re priced exactly where the market says they should be. Still, I can’t shake the memory of my own buying “heyday”: the early aughts, up through about ’05. That’s the price baseline burned into my brain. But there are still deals out there. You just don’t find them at record booths. You find them behind the table of kitchenware, next to the wobbly stools, beside a box or two of empty beer cans (anyone else collect those in the mid-’70s?). That’s where the dusty crate of mostly forgotten ’70s records lives. And that’s where you pull out a copy of Straight Up on the Apple label for four bucks. Six, if you can grab one more record to sweeten the deal. I couldn’t.

THING 3: Support The Revolution.

I pulled the Wallace Berman monograph off my shelf recently and spent an afternoon back inside it. Partly nostalgia, partly timing. Sending Volta 5ive out into the world put me in the right headspace to revisit it. My copy came off the remainder table at Moe’s in Berkeley maybe thirty-five years ago. I didn’t know anything about Berman at the time. Not even his Semina 2, which featured a Bukowski poem. Support the Revolution was my first Berman encounter. The book was published in collaboration with the Pasadena Art Museum and documents his Verifax collages, assemblages, correspondence, and the strange gravity of his orbit — Beat poets, mystics, outsiders, printers, believers, rock stars and celebrities. Call it an obsession if you want. I think of it more as a long, quiet influence that keeps resurfacing when I’m busy making things.

Thing 4: Tombstone, Arizona.

I haven’t really sat down to write anything “serious” in years. I wrote a novel that got me out of grad school. I turned that into a screenplay. I wrote maybe a dozen short stories. A couple landed in the little-little lit ‘zines of the early ’90s. Really little. Like, teeny-tiny. Then life happened. Lately I keep circling the same thought: maybe it’s time to try something substantial again. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, the right side of my brain keeps whispering Tombstone. Not the O.K. Corral version. Not the gunfights and good guys versus bad guys. I’m more interested in the other population — the sex workers with their daddies, the performers and their stages, the hucksters and con men, the preachers, the drifters, and the glorious freaks and geeks who really made the place. The Earps’ shenanigans are background at best. Which then feels like it could be an original story. And maybe the one I’ve been avoiding.

Thing 5: Erotica

I just spent a not-insignificant amount of money on a small chunk of Eric Kroll’s erotica collection. I love this material. Not the penis-in-vagina hardcore stuff. I’m drawn to cross-dressers and spankers and spakees and leather-clad femme dommes and Bettie Page and the figures most people have never heard of — Sam Menning, Reuben Sturman, Cass Carr, Irvin and Paula Klaw, Bunny Yeager, John Willie. Then there’s the fringe legends: The Mish, Louis the Fink, Subway Pete, The Walrus, Glass-Eyed Benny (who didn’t have a glass eye — just one that “didn’t focus right”). Early producers who hired photographers like Menning, who hired models like Page, who made content that ended up in small fetish magazines like Erotique and Exotique and in 50-foot loops that ended up in the grindhouse economy of the dirty, filthy Times Square.

Now all I have to do is price it.

THING 1: Volta 5ive

If you know me, you know I’m a huge fan of Wallace Berman. I’m an even bigger fan of Semina—his artist’s book / little magazine / zine-before-anyone-called-them-a-zine—which was (mostly) gifted to Berman’s pals. Enter Volta. It’s my response to Semina. Not that Semina needs—or deserves—a response from me. But damnit, I felt I had to. I named it after James Joyce’s business venture, The Volta: his failed movie theater in the middle of Dublin around 1910-ish. How does a movie theater fail in 1910? Especially when it’s the only one in the middle of a major European city? Joyce sure did. But then again, without failure, a lot of great fiction never gets written. But I digress. I’m up to the fifth installment of Volta. Berman got to nine Seminas. Maybe that’s when I’ll quit, too. Maybe. Anyway, if you’re reading this—and obviously you are—there’s a good chance one’s already in the mail to you.

THING 2: Plur1bus

Plur1bus, now streaming on Apple TV+, is one of the strangest and most quietly unsettling science-fiction series in recent memory. Imagine being the key to saving humanity from its own happiness. Enter Carol Sturka. She’s a best-selling pop fiction writer who hates her audience. She’s also one of just eleven humans immune from “The Joining.” And she’s the main character of one of the most original TV shows I can remember in a long time. I don’t want to give much more away, except to say it’s pretty much what you’d expect from the writer who created what is, perhaps, the greatest T.V. ever made, Breaking Bad. But this isn’t that—that’s for sure.  What Plur1bus does—quietly, patiently, and sometimes very, very slowly—is ask whether happiness without misery can ever be “happy” at all? Or even human? It’s eerie, creepy, and funny in a dry, almost irritating way. And it’s anchored by Rhea Seehorn (as Carol Sturka), who makes bitterness feel normal. You know—the same way your angry dad or brother or boss or uncle or fill-in-the-blank angry person does for you, too. Only here, it’s art.

THING 3: Train Dreams & Jay Kelly (tied)

Talk about two terrific films that, as the final credits roll, make you take a step back and reconsider not only Robert Grainier’s life or Jay Kelly’s life—but your own. At least that was my takeaway from both.

THING 4: 3 Shades of Blue

One of the things I loved most about Cameron Crowe’s memoir were his stories about musicians—not just during the interviews, but afterward, once the tape recorder was turned off. James Kaplan does something similar here, except instead of Bowie or Gregg Allman or Eagles (before the “The”), he spins tales of Miles, Coltrane, Thelonious, Bill Evans, and everyone else who mattered when jazz was at its absolute peak—say 1955 to 1970. Give or take. The difference is Kaplan wasn’t there. Somehow, it doesn’t matter. He still pulls it off.

THING 5ive: Let it Be — The 40th Anniversary

Speaking of Cameron Crowe—and I’m paraphrasing loosely here—one of the great things about music is how a favorite song can drop you back into the exact place you first heard it. In the fall of 1984, I was living next door to Ben. Ben managed a used record store. I spent a lot of time at Ben’s. And in addition to giving me a first-rate education in music, he also guided me through all sorts of (first-time-for-me, duh) recreational drug use—soundtracked by records like Let It Be. This was before big corporations told us what to stream. But again, I digress. Ben and I are still close friends. And whenever I hear “I Will Dare,” “Unsatisfied,” “Sixteen Blue,” or “Gary’s Got a Boner,” I remember Ben handing me that record forty years ago and telling me to take it home and listen to it. It’s just been reissued as a Deluxe 40th Anniversary Edition, with all sorts of cool new doo-dads added in. But honestly I’m happy with the original to go along with all my memories. (Quick aside: my photog pal Steve Diet Goedde (who’s made my list before) made a terrific pic of the band around this time and you can buy the print here.)

THING 1: LA DIA DE LOS MUERTOS.

For me, November started on the 9th at Tucson’s Día de los Muertos / All Souls procession — a mile-long walk of drums, candles, flowers, and memory. It’s a community ritual with roots in Mexico’s Day of the Dead traditions, where the living honor those who aren’t here anymore. I asked this woman if I could make her picture; she said yes, and as soon as my shutter clicked, she began to cry. Which made me cry. And together, we quietly wept for a brief moment. Without another word being said. Of course I didn’t know who she was thinking about, but I had my dad on my mind. My Da.

THING 2: THE UNCOOL: A MEMOIR.

SAVE OUR REPUBLIC! JOIN THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY! “The Birchers,” my mom rumbled—she was never one to squander an opportunity to teach—“watch out for the John Birch Society” she said. “One day they’ll take over. They’ll disguise themselves as Republicans and put all the teachers in jail.” This is Cameron Crowe, and he’s reading The Uncool, and it’s wild how fast it drops me back into the world that became Almost Famous. I’m eight chapters in, and just like the movie, Crowe’s mom in the memoir runs the house with a kind of fierce, loving, borderline-claustrophobic control. But in the book, she’s full of terrific aphorisms — and also a bit of a soothsayer. She certainly is close with her Birchers prediction; and early on, when she’s teaching in Japan before Crowe’s birth, she gets this overwhelming feeling that something terrible is coming. So strong, she moves out of the apartment she shares with another teacher. A few months later, a tsunami hits — killing a whole bunch of people, including the roomie who stayed in the apartment. And I haven’t even gotten to the part where Crowe meets David Bowie.

THING 3: MINX.

Looking for something to watch? I’m late to this one, but Minx hits a weird, sweet spot for me. It’s on Netflix, and it isn’t the amazingly-written, awards-season kind of show. Sometimes the ideas you care about only get heard when they hitch a ride on the vehicle people are actually paying attention to. Main character Joyce wants to publish a serious feminist magazine; the only way she gets it printed is by wrapping it around a stack of dick pics. Remember the guys who claimed they read Playboy “for the articles”? Funny thing is, the articles were great — and for someone like Joyce Carol Oates, Playboy probably offered the biggest circulation she’d ever get. That’s the grim honesty about building an audience, compromise, and how creativity travels in the real world. And yeah, I kinda feel Joyce’s pain — the one on Minx and the one behind the typewriter.

THING 4: THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

Minx doesn’t do it for ya? But you’re looking for something to watch, right? You probably know about the new Ken Burns doc. Maybe you’re already working your way through The American Revolution. If not, you should. I’m doing it, but slowly. And by “slowly,” I mean in 45-minute (or so) chunks—the maximum my brain can handle before it politely taps out. Not because Burns’s new documentary is boring. The opposite. It’s fabulous! It’s like being trapped in a classroom with the greatest history teacher who ever lived, hitting me with beautifully arranged facts until my mental buffer hits FULL. Turns out, that’s actually how the brain works: after about 40–45 minutes of dense information, we drift, not from boredom but from overload. So I watch it the way I’m supposed to eat rich food—small portions, savor everything, breathe between bites. Which means it’s probably going to take me a month to get through it all.

THING 5ive: THE TONE POETS.

I’m not an audiophile — my ear isn’t that good, and I’m certainly not about to start arguing about audio cables or turn tables or JBL vs. Klipsch (I’m a JBL dude) — but the Blue Note Tone Poet reissues are magical. Joe Harley and Kevin Gray are the wizards behind them (I had to look that up), and whatever they’re doing, it works. The fine folks at Blue Note just shipped me A Night at the Village Vanguard; I close my eyes, and for as long as I keep them closed I swear I’m in the Vanguard: small room, clinking glasses, Rollins’ horn right in front of me. I don’t know how they pull it off, but these records sound alive.