A2 Art Fair

For the first time in sev-eral years, we ven-tured to down-town Ann Arbor to check out the annual art fair. Nationally known for both its size (several hundred artisans draw half a million visitors), and the caliber of art. Other than a handful of artists selling paintings or pottery that resembled the fingerpaintings and ashtrays we made in junior high special ed art class, the pool of talent was deep and wide. Highly acclaimed photographers, sculpters, painters, wood carvers, et. al. from across the country distinguised the event from the countless other summer art fairs held in Michigan towns where local hobbyists sell wind chimes made from Budweiser bottles and air-brushed license plates. At the A2 Art Fair, you get chrome musicians from welded Harley motorcycle parts.

The crowd, as to be expected in Ann Arbor, was nearly as entertaining as the specimens on display. Tattooed artists with more piercings than a Borneo tribal chieftan displayed works ranging from abstract to modern. Roaming groups of middle-aged hippie women smelling of patchouli oil marked the fair as home turf, like packs of coyotes claiming a few acres of sagebrush desert. In front of the nearly-vacant courthouse, the nearly-always present protesters waved anti-war and legalize hemp signs. Add in a few thousand yuppies from the Detroit 'burbs and how-ever-many college students stuck in town for the summer to the eclectic mix.

One small group who felt compelled to make their viewpoint known in the crudest of terms were the pro-lifers. We don't like abortion anymore than anyone else, but walking through the streets carrying a picture of a dismembered fetus (which we had no choice but to edit), is not the way to gain public support for your cause. People were grossed out and upset- at you.

How annoying. Located next to our favorite Korean restraurant on Packard Street is a woman's health clinic. Whenever we want a bowl of spicy beebimbob and kimchee, sure enough, the protesters are walking the sidewalk with their foul signs. It accomplishes little other than making diners lose their appetite.

For the people who could stomach the nasty placards, good food was in abundance. Street fair fare is reason enough to go to these events. Although, with some of the dishes, it can be difficult to tell exactly what you're eating. On this smoky grill, skewered ground squirrels roasted over a low flame. We're guessing that's what the delicious little bastards were. Sometimes, it's better not to ask and just enjoy.


Street performers helped keep the collective mood light and jeery. Guitarists strummed away and jugglers juggled. A trinidad drum band banged away on Liberty Street while a jazz pianist played under the EMU public radio tent near the Diag.

One "street artist" spray-painted himself gray and stood motionless on a platform for minutes on end. He had a small crowd mesmorized and a bowl full of money in front of him. We didn't quite grasp the artistic merit of his performance, proving art is indeed within the eye of the beholder.

New Format

Thanks to our highly-skilled IT support team, we've altered our template a bit. The previous Blogspot format was ok, but read like so many of the countless other sorry blogs out there. We don't claim to be any better, but at least now we look a little different.

And we have disabled the RR comment link. For a while, we enjoyed the hearty banter inherant with allowing open and anonymous comments. But, it wasn't long before some faceless lowlife came along and began to post messages far beyond the boundaries of spirited opinion. Unfortunately, the wierdos and losers are drawn to the internet like rain drops to a raincoat. We're not going to allow some degenerate who sits at home sniffing his own body odor and surfing the 'net dump his mental garbage on this site. We tinkered with moderating the comments but ultimately said to hell with that as well. Mental telepathy only from this point forward.

And we apologize about not having any recent river trip postings. The holiday weekend was spent updating the kitchen (no easy task. On the first day, the rented steam machine transformed old wallpaper and fifty years of paint into globs of unmanageable gloop. Day Two was spackling and priming good times. Day Three was forfieted to painting the walls and ceiling. On Day Four, we put up new trim and cleaned up). The kitchen no longer looks vintage 1978. It was worth the tediousness and aggravation.

We're hoping to be back on the river by the end of the week, and we'll be sure to keep you updated. As for the above photo- it was taken last week on our recent noodling trip, when the morning sun speared through the Kentucky trees and shards of light exposed a simple truth not previously illuminated: life's too short. Don't suffer the fools.

Back from Hell

Baseline Lake in Livingston County was a scene most tranquil this past weekend (as you can attest to from looking at this serene photo. Breath deeply and think of pleasant summer nights and warm cider wine. Try to forget about that rash problem. Turn up the new Enya cd a couple of decibels. Light another stick of pachouli incense and dream of warm-oil massages. That's what RR is doing right now). Over in Hell, though, after last weeks "666" party, things aren't so blissful. In fact, all heck is breaking lose....

After we left the shindig, things spiraled downward, as reported in this newspaper article:

Disorderly behavior, parking complaints and crowd-control problems mounted in Hell Tuesday as John Colone's much-publicized "666 Party" continued into the night, and when Colone — the Putnam Township hamlet's unofficial mayor — found himself at the wrong end of a punch from a disorderly reveler.

"It was no big deal. I have a cut on my nose, and it feels a little worse," Colone said after staying until 2:30 a.m. Wednesday cleaning up. "It was over in seconds, and we left on good terms."

Livingston County Sheriff Bob Bezotte said problems began to increase as the festivities and devilish fun wore down late Tuesday evening. Bezotte sent five extra deputies to Hell as the party intensified along with complaints from area residents. He said he heard about 8,000 people attended Tuesday's party, but Colone said there were closer to 12,000 visitors.

The police arrested someone for throwing a beer can at a police lieutenant near the Dam Site Inn. The department is seeking felonious assault charges against the person through Prosecutor David Morse's office. Police also arrested a Midland man for disorderly conduct after he pushed two people on the porch of Screams Ice Cream, and for assaulting another person as he ran away.

The man, who was believed to be intoxicated, later attempted to strike police troopers, and was lodged in the Livingston County jail for the night.

In a related situation, a man driving an all-terrain vehicle reportedly crashed his ATV around midnight near Weiman Drive, south of Patterson Lake Road. Further details were unknown Wednesday.

Colone said there were a couple of thefts Tuesday, including a slab of children's cemented footprints and a witch's head from that was mounted on a cooler.

Crazy shit for town of 75 people, eh? The "mayor" got popped in the nose. Traffic came to a complete stop. Cops hauled drunken idiots off to jail. An ATV flipped over. 8,000 or 12,000 or noonereallyknowshowmany people jammed into a quiet midwestern village with 75 year-round residents. Frankly, we're surprised it wasn't worse, much worse, when we look back on the day. The crowd, a bizarre mixture of bikers and weirdos, well-intentioned preachers and misguided hellions, was amped to 11 on the civil disturbance dial thanks to summer temperatures and heated arguments over the wages of sin and the cost of another beer. We're surprised Hell didn't go up in flames.

And you know the three businesses that make up the Hell Chamber of Commerce (the Hell General Store, Scream's Ice Cream, and the Damsite Inn), made a killing on 666. We predict they will celebrate June 6 every year from now on. And next year, the hype and hoopla will warrant replacing Dead Elvis with Alice Cooper.

Once was enough for us. Next 06/06, we'll instead hit the river, like we did on Sunday. It was a perfect day for our fourth trip down the Huron this year. We could canoe this river every day. Everytime, we see something new. Here's another little river vignette, courtesy of RR adventure films. Some people make home movies of birthday parties or their cat playing with a ball of yarn. Not us.


We'll leave you with another moment on the Huron. Enjoy. We sure do.

Halloween in June

We don't celebrate Halloween in June but every hundred years, and after witnessing "666" this week in Hell (Michigan), we're going to squeeze more blood from the turnip and conjure up another post. It was a macabre mix of fake dimestore blood and real (who knows?) skull and bones dug up from who knows where. Some of the folks that showed up were dressed like ghouls and ghosts for the simple festive fun of it. Other folks, who looked like week-old road kill, probably dress that way all the time. It was easy to differentiate the two groups: one smelled of beer and brats from the food tent and the other smelled of rotten possum and dead reptiles.



Over by the old hearse collection, a skeleton in a body bag was parked on the grass. It'd be easy to assume it wasn't real (we couldn't tell), but for the fact that human skeletons are so remarkably easy to get. Numerous sites (including ebay) legally sell old skulls and skeletons (this $1000 fetal skull is rather unsettling. Whoever would buy such an item is one sick pup. But those people are out there. Some people collect Beanie Babies and duck decoys. Other people collect deformed brain carriages. It's a strange world we live in). If Mr. Bones here was fake, they did a damn good job making him look real. If this was real, somewhere out there is an empty grave.



Also bizarre and noteworthy was this collection of embalmer tools. Anyone who would collect an assortment of tools used to pull out yer innards is a little off. Not as much as the whack who collects fetus skulls, but still a little off. What's wrong with collecting baseball cards and old fishing lures? Or old Playboys and license plates? We've never understood the obsessive nature of the hard-core collectors. We once knew a 6'6", 350 pound tattoo artist in Ohio who collected gumball machines, skulls (he had hundreds of skulls ranging from field mice to hippos), and the artwork of serial killers. He had several originals from the likes of John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas. Collecting wierd shit was his mission in life. Apparently, writing about it is ours.

On a lighter note, behind the ice scream shop, Dead Elvis was belting out his tired collection of Halloween songs. Ugh. How many times must we suffer through "The Monster Mash" and "The Addams Family Theme"? When he did a rap version of "Hootie the Boo Owl", we threw up in our mouth a little. He had an audience of maybe three people at any given moment.

Needless to say, the kids weren't exactly digging his act. They were amused by it, but with the kind of funny-pity amusement you get while watching a doofus embarass himself in public. The kind normally reserved for, hmmm, karaoke night at the local bowling alley. You're laughing, but not because the song's funny.

The best costume award had to go this thing, whatever the hell it is. And with temps in the high 80's, no doubt it was hotter than hell under all that rubber and fur. That alone deserved a prize.

The Canyon Grande

One place we've been meaning to visit for several years is the Grand Canyon. We'd make plans, then something unexpected would come up: a paternity hearing. Bankruptcy court. Electroshock therapy. Reverse vascetomy. Life always found a way to interfere with the most well-intentioned of plans. Last week, we finally were able to stand at the south rim, and for the first time, look down into the biggest hole on earth. Like the Louvre in France or the I-94 tire in Allen Park, the Grand Canyon is one of those places everyone should see at some point in their life. Mash your greasy finger here and witness the RR panoramic view, filmed in full technicolor.

Viewing the layers of strata takes us down into the basement of time, when the earth was in primordial infancy. While the canyon is estimated at being 6 million years old (a geological blink of the eye), the strains of Zoroaster granite at the edge of the Colorado River date back 1.8 billion years. Like the rings in a crosscut section of a tree, the layers of shist, shale, and sandstone correlate to notable eras in the history of the universe: when Shinumo Quartzite (1.2 billion years ago) was the crust, your great-grandparents were miserable little flukes floating in a murky inland ocean. When the Temple Butte Dolamite (360 million years ago) was the top layer, your kinfolk were slimy snakeheads with jointless legs that ate little bugs and slithered around in their own excrement. The existing top layer of Kaibab Limestone has been there some 245 million years. Your ancestors were just beginning to grow fuzz on their nape back then. It was sometime around 5 million years ago the Colorado River began to carve into the Kaibab plateau, about the same time your grandpappy became a bipedal primate, swinging on jungle vines and beginning to walk upright.

One giant mis-perception is the canyon was created by years of gentle pitter-patter rain and grain-by-grain erosion. Not true. The process, like many in the natural world, was violent and brutal. Pacific ocean winds, warm and moist like a bran muffin from Tim Hortons, release their wet load when they collide into high cold air from above the plateau. The storms are short but powerful: the rain falls hard and fast and hits the soft sandstone and shale with bullet-like velocity. Side canyons and small arroyos flood with sudden immediacy. A fast-moving slurry of water, mud, and rock explodes downward and further deepens the canyon before dumping into the Colorado River.

Looky here. See that ribbon of green and white in the lower right corner of the pic? That's one of the major rapids on the Colorado River, as seen from a mile (or thereabouts) above. That's the closest we'll get to western whitewater this year. Sucks, too. Could be worse though, especially after last year's ride down the Middle Fork of the Salmon in Idaho, where we almost became a permanent resident of the river. We made it out alive (obviously), but three flips and three long gnarly swims on a swollen mountain river is too close to the edge. Speaking of close to the edge, there is a fascinating book about the 600 people who have died in the last 100 hundred years at the Grand Canyon. Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon maticulously chronicles every fatality; some were leathered old prospectors who fell into mine pits. Many were ill-prepared hikers who succumbed to heat stroke or dehydration or had a heart attack on the hike back up. Other deaths were more bizarre: like the guy who was trying to impress his friends by jumping from rock outcrop to rock outcrop but slipped and and fell 400 feet to his death, as his buddy had the camcorder going. Or the dude who was taking a photograph of the El Tovar Hotel and keep backing up and backing up until... Ooops! BAH BYE! Or the hikers who figured they'd take a short cut up a sandy-bottom side canyon, unaware a thunderstorm had earlier dumped an inch of rain up top, and suddenly they're riding down a death-slide on roiling, boulder-chocked torrent towards the Colorado River. Or the many suicides: the Grand Canyon must be second only to the San Francisco Bridge in this regard. Every year, people walk to the rim edge, give white-eyed onlookers their suicide note, and then take 600 foot Nestle Tea plunges into the abyss. And, so far, ten people have done a "Thelma & Louise" (named after the final scene in the movie where the two despondant women drive their car over the cliff into the canyon). No shit- people actually do this in real life. According to the book, one driver ran atop some rocks on the very edge of the rim and high-centered his car, stopping all forward motion. So he hopped out of the car, smiled and waved at the shocked bystanders, and jumped anyway.

Further down the rim trail, we stumbled across the Orphan Mine. Running into old mines in national parks is rather unusual, especially in parks as well known as the Grand Canyon. Hmmm. Let's look into this a bit: the mine was patented in 1906 after hardscrabble prospectors found some copper deposits. For years, the operation was one of the thousands of small scale mining operations that dotted the western landscape. Until 1951, when geologists found one of the largest known uranium deposits in North America at the site. Uranium, huh? Well, we're kinda in an arms race with the USSR right now. Guess we'll dig the shit up. No reason to let it sit in the dirt. We need more bombs. Fifty-five years later, the site is a debris-strewn eyesore with radioactive waste that will be there 500,000 years from now.

So, we'd advise you bring bottled water if you visit the Grand Canyon, unless you worry not about your bell-end glowing like ET's finger after drinking radioisotopic water. And you might want to avoid the many tourist traps on Highway 64. Unless you're into "authentic Indian crafts" made in the Republic of China.

Go see the Big Hole. Someday.

Only in Vegas

2,000,000 years from now, long after the sun has imploded and our planet has turned into a lifeless ball of ice, spacemen in little silver orbs will land on Earth on an intergalatic reconaissance mission. We hope they land in Las Vegas, for this reason: no where else in the Universe will they find a place that represents the duality of mankind in such well-defined and transparent terms.

Getting to Vegas from Laughlin meant a 90 mile drive across the desert on a two-lane highway where the concept of speedlimit was purely subjective and allowed drivers to answer this question on their own: how fast can this car go? In our case, in a four-cylinder Nissan rental, it meant all of 68 mph. With the pedal pressed to the floor.

The only time (some) motorists made any attempt to slow down was when they passed this police cruiser parked on the side of the highway. We had little to worry about, as we were well under the posted limit. We still let off the gas and slowed anyway, out of habit. A Lotus grew larger in our rear view mirror before zipping by at 110 mph- right in front the cop. We looked at the cruiser expecting to see reds and blues flashing in fast pursuit. Nothing happened. Something wasn't right. We slowed down even more, and when we pulled alongside the cruiser, we saw the officer was a mannequin. Ha ha ha. The Lotus must have driven by Officer Ken Doll before.

One stretch of road where no one was speeding (much less moving at posted speed), was Las Vegas boulevard, better known as The Strip. Everytime we've been to Vegas, one constant feature is the crowds. It matters not the time of year or time of day. Tens of thousands of people clog the sidewalks and the traffic moves slower than a desert tortoise. For what? $12.99 steak and lobster tail dinners. Free drinks while you play nickel slots. Don Rickles at the Stardust. The town, both smarmy and pretentious at the same time, provides an interesting insight into humanity; billion dollar casinos treat millionaire high rollers to beluga cavair brunches and helicopter tours of the Grand Canyon while penniless bums scavage for cigarette butts in front of the Graceland Drive Thru Wedding Chapel. No where else will you see the extremes of the human existence so oblique. Only in Vegas.

Everywhere we went, we witnessed more evidence supporting this conclusion. At the Bellagio, the digital billboard advertised the Ansel Adams photography exhibit (lower right), and Rolex watches (lower left). We submit there is no greater value spectrum span than seen here, side by side, (with one unique common trait): Ansel Adams represented a humble existence dedicated to protecting our most sacred natural jewels. Rolex watches are lined with sacred jewels and represent affluence, vanity, and consumerism. Only in Vegas.





Over at the Aladdin, thousands of gallons of water plummet over a fake waterfall. Not like this is a desert or anything. Not like water evaporates quickly in 100 degree plus temperatures and 7% humidity. Not like in 50 years from now, Vegas and Phoenix (and all the other rapidly growing western cities), will be ghost towns when the aquifier runs dry from all the golf courses, wave parks, and citrus farms. Mark Twain once said, "In the West, water flows uphill. Towards money." Very true. Water can also shoot into the sky towards money, as seen in front of The Bellagio (and choreographed to an Aaron Copland composition). Only in Vegas.