the groundhog day project

On the Stampede Trail near the Sushana River, about ten miles west of the Teklanika and Savage Rivers (and 22 miles from the closest road), sits an abandoned bus--Fairbanks City Transit System 142. Matthew Power (2007), at Men's Journal writes about this "green and white WWII-vintage International Harvester [which] looks surrealy out of place, like an artifact from a vanished civilization." (And, Chris (Emil Hirsch) just found it as I typed that; nice timing.) Power continues: "The bus doesn't at first seem a likely time capsule of American mythology, a shrine to which people from around the world make pilgrimages and leave tributes in memory of a young man whom they see as a fallen hero." Objects, like films, can anchor memories, anchor stories. Looking at the graves in at Boot Hill a few weeks ago, for example--while my kids didn't get it, I thought on the story of the "Gunfight at the OK Corral" the men who died there. If I had a car han...

I lament the fact that we arrived in Tombstone too late last week to get into a few of the places. But, driving into town, we saw Boothill Cemetery first. The gift shop/entrance had this on the door: Doc Holiiday (Val Kilmer) didn’t need his guns just now to kill a man, of course, in Tombstone . Set his guns on the table and stabbed the guy instead. Sure enough, Holliday was a bit of a killer and not a particularly nice guy. Some graves, starting with the Cowboys killed at the “Gunfight at the O.K Corral”: And, this marker which could fit right in outside the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland: A couple more: Two gift shops—and a shot glass for my collection later and we drove into the town proper, parked about 20 yards from this: For the record, once again, the gunfight did not happen at the Corral but a good distance off, next to Fly’s Photographic Studio. right about where I was standing when I took these pictures: first, on fremont looking east, the porch at the ri...

I really should just be doing multiple entries rather than these extra long double movie ones. But I like them being numbered nicely. Today: The Searchers and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral . The opening of The Searchers offers us one of the structural oppositions that Henderson (1985) and Wright (1975) discuss--wilderness/civilization. Also inside/outside society. The door opens to the outside wilderness and Ethan (John Wayne) arrives, not unlike Shane yesterday . Henderson's focus is this very film and he offers up an important summary of one of the major themes: The Searchers is explicitly concerned with a number of anthropological issues. On its surface it treats questions of kinship, race, marriage, and the relations between tribes. These questions also have to do with the identity, status, and responsibilities of individuals: who is responsible for the retrieval and burial of the dead, for the search and recovery of captives, for vengeance? Who can marry whom? Which marri...