A stone wall and empty sign post are the only visible exterior to what was once the nicest brothel in Ely, Nevada. "Bronc Alley" is the name given to the west end of Ely, Nevada's High Street. Throughout the mining and railroad town's history, brothels flourished in a couple different sections in town, though Bronc Alley was the heart of its Red Light District. Today, active houses of prostitution along this section of High Street continue to bathe adjacent Highway 50 in red neon. However one former brothel remains empty and slowly falling to the elements. Opened in 1959, The Green Lantern wa ...
Sitting along an infrequently visited beach on a distant corner of the Caribbean island nation of Aruba is a collection of shacks built from scavenged and salvaged materials creating a colorful ghost town beside the cerulean blue waters. In a sense appearing odd and slightly eerie, the shoreline of Aruba's Rincon Beach is lined with waterfront buildings that sit empty and sometimes varying in different stages of prolonged decay and collapse that is the result of a unique combination of cultural and geographical factors. Built as weekend fishing cabins, the range of permanence in materials and constr ...
“When we recorded, I wasn’t thinking about other people. I didn’t have anybody to really look to, because it wasn’t a genre back then,” recalls Trinere, reflecting on her recording sessions in South Florida penning what would become some of the most well known songs of the freestyle musical style. “I came from the jazz world. He [referring to “Pretty Tony” Butler who she would partner with in music and romantically] was doing his own style. I wasn’t gonna allow him to give me just any type of simple track. I wanted a bridge, I wanted a chorus. I wanted to sing! And that’s where we gelled.” Trinere Farrington, known simply b ...
With a prime location on a Hawaiian black sand beach, the Punalu'u Village Restaurant and Ka'u Center of History and Culture deteriorates into the elements. Historically the land on the southeastern coast of Hawaii's Big Island was that of the Ka'u Kingdom. In the late 1800's, this area was connected to other parts of Hawaii by commercial shipping, allowing the land to build a large economy based around sugar plantations. Prior to the completion of the island's first railroad in 1878, which connected the village of Punalu'u in the Ka'u District to the town of Keaiwa, Punalu'u harbor and landing would be the prima ...
Environmental conditions of an intermittent river, combined with the unforeseen results of road maintenance ignited a slow, nightmarish scenario for several residents who saw their homes buried in drifting sand in a small Mojave Desert town. The Mojave River flows for 110 miles, originating on the northern side of California's San Bernardino Mountains and typically ending in a basin at the edge of the Mojave National Preserve. The majority of the river flow is beneath the surface, though unusually wet periods will lead to the river surfacing along a larger portion of its course, as well as its terminus stretching furt ...
The Cherry Patch Ranch brothel in the southern Nevada town of Crystal has a storied history. The building, owned by infamous brothel owner Dennis Hof, sits just up the road from the Love Ranch building where Hof's dead body was found after celebrating his 72nd birthday. While he unquestionably used his media savvy to build the reputation and advertise his properties, Dennis Hof may not have even been the most interesting personality to have had a hand in the brothels in Crystal... A view of the Cherry Patch Ranch brothel trailers and adjoining restaurant Maynard "Joe" Richards was born in Duluth, Minnes ...
"I think I have a desert soul. I was inspired by that my whole life - a lonely highway and a neon sign and a derelict shopping mall. Sort of those castaway places." So explains Loviet, referring to the imagery for her new record, 777, which has several photos taken in the United States' southwestern desert area, despite the musician hailing from Canada's Nova Scotia province. "I kinda relate to the desert. Even in my hometown there's a desolate vibe. I kinda relate to the middle of nowhere." While she now resides in Toronto, she talks about her lyrics stemming from imaginative sources - "I wish I ...
In August of 1903, an American fugitive named Paul Watelet attempted to enter Canada via Washington State. Watelet was trying to avoid an Ohio arrest warrant for fraud charges in connection to his company, the Colville Group Mining Company, for having misrepresented the group's operations in order to obtain an investment from a John Carnahan for $4000 (approximately $120,000 in today's money). The warrant named "Count" Paul Watelet in the scheme of obtaining the money by means of false pretense. Watelet was not actually a Count, but instead was a Belgian miner from Oakland, California. And sometime In 1905, he made his way ...
"Nevada City is just such a beautiful sweet town and a very idyllic place," says Alela Diane reflecting on the town at the confluence of the foothills and mountains in the Sierra Nevada where she grew up. The musician and multi-instrumentalist, who has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2006, creates a woodsy ethereal folk sound that fluently joins inspirations of her landscapes and geographies both personal and physical, and it's clear to pick up on how the forested winding roads and surreal daydreamy Yuba River of those Sierra mountains can be heard throughout her earlier recordings. While the quaint town lies mostly off the map, sitting alo ...
"I went to junior high with Tony from the Adolescents. Before punk rock even happened, we were listening to Rolling Stones records, and then the Ramones record came out, and we're like, 'What's this?!!'" Greg Kuehn has made a life crafting the sounds that you've probably heard without giving much thought to where it came from. CNN, Ford, Amazon, Verizon, Vans and music from the Barack Obama campaign represent just a handful of entities that Kuehn has worked with. With his company, Peligro Music, Greg Kuehn has partnered with, and created music and sound design for international brands and companies but you wouldn't know this from speaking wi ...
"It's hard for me to separate myself from music. I feel like creativity is so important to me that when I have writer's block or a lapse in creativity, I feel like a stranger in my own body," explains Luna Shadows, a writer and producer, talking about music being her passion and primary creative outlet. "I feel like creativity is part of my personality, but I think a lot of time I really struggle to feel confident in my own ideas or in my creation. But I think the thing about that is I'm used to that feeling. I'm used to feeling uncomfortable." As a performer who admits to experiencing stage fright and who says she's not a natural when it ...
Set at an elevation of 9600' amidst the mountain peaks above Mono Lake and the town of Lee Vining, the Log Cabin mine experienced prosperous boom periods before a presidential executive order during World War II banned the mining of non-strategic materials, leading to the shuttering of operations at the mine. The mine was maintained and ready to be reopened at a moment's notice, however a couple fledgling attempts at reopening and the discovery of contamination of the grounds has instead led the mine to a slow decay. Originally mined under the Mendocino Claim filed in 1890, the Log Cabin Gold Mine ...
The poor treatment and commodification of recording artists and creators by the mainstream record industry is well known. "The record industry went through an era of just hand over fist cash. But they made a few mistakes along the way," says Steve Knopper, author of the book Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, discussing the traditional system of an up-and-coming artist with no financial leverage basically having no choice but to sign a recording contract with terms heavily favoring the record companies. Though as a writer who penned articles under a freelance basis before taking a ...
Constructed into the area's natural tide pools, one of the most surreal swimming experiences in Laguna Beach may be the infinity pools. Built at the ocean's edge in a private cove along the city's wild shoreline, Laguna Beach's hidden pools have long been a picturesque destination. However for those who don't have one of the few multimillion dollar homes overlooking the ocean with a private staircase to the cove below, the pools are only reachable by coordinating entry and exit through a sea cave with low tides or by swimming around the rock outcroppings from a nearby public beach. Built at the water's edge, the poo ...
"It can be super overwhelming! I've been doing it all myself for six years," laughs Limbo, a producer who has a knack for creating dreamy bedroom pop anthems that can take a kaleidoscope of emotions and lyrics written with humorous double-meanings, and distill them into a collection of sounds with the end result being deceivingly simplistic and catchy songs. The singer, having taken the name from an age in her life when physical and emotional limits struck her as being in a fluid state of limbo, as well as a childhood skill she had growing up around two musical brothers, has taken the DIY ethic and model seemingly to an extreme. "I've been ...
As one of the most arid states in the country, Nevada may not share in the presence of breathtaking waterfalls in neighboring states like Arizona, California or Oregon. Though those who have an appreciation for the desert can find a meditative quality in coming across the areas with streams, freshwater springs, and year-round waterflow in places that are otherwise hot and dry most of the time. While much of the state's landscape of over 300 mountain ranges and valley floors that once lied beneath ancient seas were formed in part by water - either inland seas or flash flooding - in current times there is much less water present, with ...
Standing like a scene from a horror film, what sets the abandoned cabins of the Round Hill Pines Resort apart from any other collection of log cabin lodge buildings are the real estate that they sit on. Occupying a hillside vantage point set atop the lakeshore in Lake Tahoe's exclusive Zephyr Cove area, the former Nevada resort site covers acres beneath picturesque pine trees overlooking Tahoe's emerald waters. Though several old ghost towns, mill sites and mining camps lay throughout the Lake Tahoe area, the high value of the area has left this resort a rare outlier in that it sits adjacent to the lake itself, remaining empt ...
In the late 90's, a power pop trio called Co-Ed made an instant impression upon first seeing them at a local show. Based out of the Claremont, California area, the group had such an immediately radiant feel to their performances, often joking back and forth between songs, all smiles, and playing with an upbeat catchiness that far betrayed some of their lyrics of uncertain relationships (although they also sang about the at-the-time staple X-Files TV show). I remember seeing them play often in Orange County at venues like Koo's Cafe and Public Storage/Chain Reaction, and they put out an album (Sometimes, Always, Maybe, Never), a 7" (the Sof ...
Whether a high-intensity action photo, or a staged and posed image, it is the moments when our guard is down - a look of concentration, a genuine smile, that shared look of affection that happens when it's forgotten that others may be around - these are the moments that we look to capture. These are the moments that elevate a picture into a mood, a memory. Using colors and tone consistent with the time and place being presented, our goal is to present these authentic moments in a scenic and narrative way...
Having spent years as a real estate, parcel, and commercial property photographer, we understand the importance of communicating the feel of a space in a way that showcases lighting and features. Whether the goal is to generate interest in a property on the sale or rental market, or is simply to inspect an area for potential purchase, our aim is to capture as much of the feel and relevant details as possible, ideally from a variety of angles and perspectives. We understand that not every property is a high end luxury development, however we carry over and apply the same vision and goals to all scale of architecture and properties that ...
Product, Location, Branding and Lifestyle photography make up a few of the most popular outlines for our Commercial Photography. We have partnered with companies, tourism offices, food and hospitality providers, and events promoters to produce visuals for media and digital marketing campaigns - including digital and traditional restaurant menus, social media influencer partnerships, and online retail catalogs.
With an aim for creating visuals that make an event stand out amongst a crowded market, we approach each event with an emphasis on capturing not just participants and performers, but also the surrounding elements that make each event unique.
As a travel photographer, a large part of our work is capturing and creating interest in locations. Whether this be in the interest of tourism, uniquely illustrating a story or simply to set a mood that the viewer will carry with them. We have partnered with destination marketing organizations, media outlets, and individual brands on presenting their locations in the most memorable way.
'Who's Aberdeen?' she asked, scrolling through my music. Outside the car, Spanish moss hung over the sidewalks, lending an eerie texture to the dense Southern night. The streets were quiet, and we sat inside the car just steps from the front of her house, though neither of us really wanted her to go home... yet. I have this theory that writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald aren't actually all that good, they just happen to be the Stephen King or Danielle Steele of their era; remembered less because of their boundary-pushing innovation and more because they happened to be the ones who fit the formula for mass ...
It's the first light of daybreak on the small beach in Neskowin, a pocket of beach on the northern Oregon Coast that is easy to pass completely owing to the highway only touching a single market's parking lot as it weaves through. Chill air blows slowly over silhouettes of dozens of stoic figures rising from the shore's wet surface. For these hours the waves have retreated, and the emerging daylight begins to reveal an apparition in the hazy luminance. It's called the Neskowin Ghost Forest, and while aptly describing this scene's appearance, the name begets a trend lying all along the Oregon and Washington coastline: once living forest ...
Everyone who has a passion or job in a creative field understands the amount of work it takes to begin seeing recognition in your art. It often takes years, if not decades of effort, of networking, and of struggling in order to gain an audience for your work. Arrested Development, a rap group from Georgia fronted by lead DJ Speech and turntablist Headliner, were fortunate enough to experience the lightning-strike odds of their debut record, 1992’s “3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of…” (the title is a reference to the length of time the group was grinding it out before being signed to a record deal) immediately hitting the mainstream ...
Growing up in a pre-internet age, the punk scene in my area was great at creating its own hype, fostering a network of touring bands, and encouraging a culture of passing around cassettes since there was little hope of any mainstream music outlets broadcasting the bands. Cut to a generation later and the internet has presented what basement shows and low cost 7" records had existed for: for those passionate enough to create music and be heard without radio play. Music became accessible over an endless range, rather than being confined to local scenes. While college stations in my area never really had the numbers or range to compete w ...
An interview with Pleasant Gehman: writer, vocalist, promoter, and actress from the first wave of Los Angeles punk. This interview took place in Winter of 2011. One night a friend laughingly joked with me that no matter how hard you try to fight or deny it, habits tend to eventually come back full circle, sometimes startling you when you unexpectedly catch a glimpse of your past re-emerging in the present. Before the internet, the history of punk's early days -barring the hazy memories of those who were at the shows and the parties- was available either through mainstream media that, by nature and almost witho ...
From swirling electronic melodies to earworm stream-of-consciousness raps to climactic beats – all layered over booming house bass sequences, producer LP Giobbi – nee Leah Chisholm – has fused her upbringing in a musical household and background in jazz study to her EDM songwriting, creating a sound appropriately described as Pianohouse. LP Giobbi performs at SnowGlobe Music Festival, December 2018. photo: Shaun Astor With a high-energy live performance which has taken her around the globe, one may very likely be surprised to learn that the producer jumping atop the decks and whipping the crowd into a sweaty mass-movement frenzy ove ...
The year is 1998… The internet, which is beginning to become commonplace in American households, is beginning to change the landscape of music. Up until this point, music was listened to primarily on full length albums or singles played on the radio and exchanged through trading cassettes with friends. Compilation CD’s and traveling festival-style shows like Warped Tour and Lollapalooza were just emerging as the dominant method of music fans having the chance to check out bands and performers from different genres. In short, depending on where you lived it was a lot harder to hear music outside of the popular styles and a hell of a lot ...
“…It’s not just about being on stage. This industry is so male-dominated. We need more women in the music industry, behind the scenes: producers, mixers!” Cristal Ramirez handles the lead vocals and plays guitar for The Aces, a 4 piece power pop band made up of four friends who grew up in the outskirts of Provo, Utah. The band, rounded out by Ramirez’s sister Alisa, and two best friends – one of whom has also been in the band since the beginning - played their first show at Cristal’s 11th birthday party. They’re currently in the studio working on their second album, the follow up to 2018’s When My Heart Felt Volcanic. Th ...
Punk Rock Bowling Festival 2019. Pictures from the annual beer-soaked festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. With over 50 bands on the festival's two stages, along with nearly two dozen late night club shows taking place in bars and venues throughout downtown Vegas over the weekend, Punk Rock Bowling mixes music, pool parties, a poker tournament and bowling tournament to create a scene in Las Vegas reminiscent of the dystopian scenes from every 80's after school movie where the punks take over and civil society is at their mercy. 2019's headliners included Rancid, Descendents and The Specials. Here are a few pictures from this year's festivities... ...
For all of its reputation for being a paradise of palm trees lining beachfront real estate, beautiful people driving down sun-soaked iconic streets and glamorous displays of wealth parading through global pop culture screens and pages, Keith Morris has spent his life furiously writing about the manic depravity, the cankerous potholes underlying the façade, the stains that lie in the shadowy alleyways between pastel offices buildings and designer grocery stores. “There’s construction going on right outside my window. Can you hear it? At least we’re not having this conversation on a Wednesday when the leaf blowers are out,” he says to me ...
“The Beatles created a world I wanted to belong to…” says Colin Hay while he prepares to embark on a West Coast tour of the United States. While the singer names Bob Dylan and Booker T. & the M.G.’s as being amongst the performers who made him want to play music, he explains that the Beatles and his parents owning a music shop and the constant presence of music around him growing up that really influenced him. Cut to the present; Colin Hay has 13 solo records and continues to write and tour constantly. He is subject of a documentary film. His wife, Latin singer, Cecilia Noël, is a part of his touring band, along with ...
Ask anyone who was around in punk’s early days – the late 1970’s and early 1980’s when the music was raw, intentionally against the grain, and subversive by its very nature – and they’ll tell you that shows had the potential to erupt into violence, sometimes against the police, sometimes against each other. “People used to tape razor blades to their combat boots and swing around these chains. And the circle pit was just insane,” John Feldmann, recalls. “I got knocked out at a Suicidal Tendencies show. This guy had these steel toe combat boots and did a backflip off the stage and just knocked me out. I was laying there unconscious for l ...
Reward / Brown Monster Mine An abandoned gold mine in the Eastern California mountains with an extensive underground network of tunnels and adits. The site today known as the Reward Mine is made up of multiple mining claims that have merged over time, though which today sit in a mostly abandoned state. Following its discovery in 1870, the Reward Mine primarily produced gold and silver, with copper and lead being secondary minerals mined from the mountain shafts located in the Eclipse Canyon area of California's Inyo Mountains overlooking the Owens River Valley. At an elevation of 4000', the Reward Mine sat adjacent to ...
Growing up a basketball fan in Southern California in the late 80's, not only was I always aware of Paula Abdul as a powerhouse pop singer who put out Forever Your Girl, a well-loved record that I still play often to this day, but I also knew of her background as a Lakers Girl cheerleader. On her most recent tour, I got to speak to her about her background in cheer, dance and singing, and was absolutely blown away by her story of how she made the Lakers squad to begin with, and how everything unfolded from there. The conversation still feels surreal to me, but here it is: my interview with Paula Abdul... “I was yo ...
Above anything else, what has always stuck out to me the most about Pearl Charles' music is her honeycrisp voice. That it hovers atop a vintage Americana sound that touches on a pop clarity, but can border on the psychedelic or nearly eerie is the recipe for repeated plays as the dusk turns to night. Such was the case as I drove across rural Florida, that strange belt of the not-quite-South, where the music of her Sleepless Dreamer album and the tropical and Spanish moss-kissed two-lane highways combined to create a feeling of the surreal. It was with these echoes of her storytelling crooning through car speakers on backroads that lit up aft ...
October, 2018 - about a week before Halloween - and soundtrack composer, Alan Howarth, announces "I'll bet you know this one" to the sold out crowd inside Portland, Oregon's Hollywood Theatre. This appearance is four years after after his last time playing inside this theatre. Both sets followed movies that he helped create the soundtracks for (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch in 2014, and Prince Of Darkness this year), only this show is in support of his first live album. Recorded at that 2014 show, boutique small-run vinyl record label, Wyrd War, packaged and released the album - Alan Howarth - Live At Hollywood Theatre - som ...
Throwing her hands up in the shape of a heart, CloZee stands in front of a cheering, sweaty, sold out crowd at The Bluebird on Reno’s 4th Street. The show was just one of the French producer’s sold out appearances on her first headlining tour across the US, and her music, an electronic amalgamation of melodic glitch-hop and organic ambiance, had the room dancing in the glow of laser light visuals for the entire set. CloZee, nee Chloe Herry, is touring to promote her album, Evasion, which dropped on October 5th. A veteran of performing at festivals around the world, she explains that this travel makes up a large pa ...
It was a response to an era when I had realized I was getting too comfortable - at that point I had lived up and down the West Coast, I had travelled almost constantly for several years, and even the trips when everything went wrong, I realized that everything too easily worked itself out. I wanted to push my boundaries again. I wanted the feelings that came from being completely outside of my comfort zone. This is always where I had felt that I learned the most, the situations that always resulted in the memories that shaped me and came up in conversation years later. I decided I wanted to move ...
“I think we are that animal,” says Matt Muirhead, trumpet player and producer for the New York three-piece band Too Many Zooz. Muirhead is talking about the group’s use of imagery on record covers and t shirts – even the band name itself – depicting wild and unconventional animals. “Myself and Leo [Pelligrino, the group’s baritone sax player] both went to the Manhattan School of Music. A lot of what we did was just frowned upon; the music we liked and played, and who we were as people. At a certain point, once we were playing in the subway, it kinda gave us the confidence to say, ‘Fuck that’. I t ...
Sneaking into the Go Go's! The Go Go's have the honor of being the band who I've snuck into see on more occasions than any other band. Owing it to the band being one of my favorite groups of any era, coupled with their tour circuit of medium sized venues lacking in serious security in their waning years, at the time of their breakup, the running total was me: 5, venue security: 0... The second time I saw them play was in Reno at the Silver Legacy casino theater in 2011. After having hitchhiked from Oregon to Nevada - with a break in hitching in order to float in a sporting goods store inflatable raft along the Sacramento River b ...
Before his appearance at The Saint in Reno's Midtown District on August 18th, I had a chance to speak with Dave Wakeling, who, along with Ranking Roger, was the primary songwriter behind the bands The English Beat and General Public. The band was en route to 2018 KAABOO Del Mar Festival in Southern California. Dave shared stories and lessons he's learned from his years of writing and touring, but most interestingly, he reflected on changes he's made to his lifestyle following those years on the road. Below is an interview with Dave Wakeling, along with pictures of The English Beat playing at The Saint in Reno, Nevada on August 18th, 2018. &nb ...
Three Kids Mine; Las Vegas, Nevada Three Kids Mine on the outskirts of Las Vegas, Nevada may be less worthy of mention for its past than for its post-use roles due in large part to its position on the increasingly-encroaching fringes of the urban center. Built in 1916 and opened the following year, Three Kids Mine consists of a massive 300 foot deep open pit, along with two other nearby smaller pits from which high grade manganese ore was mined. Though today it sits not far from the boundary of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, at the time of the mine's construction, the Hoover Dam was still over a de ...
The Captain George Conrad Flavel Home It was from the plot of a horror movie: the haunted house sitting abandoned on the hill, the strange labyrinthine history of the family who owned it and the influence, even in their absence, that they still cast upon the town, the outlandish rumors circulating around them that were repeated by more than a few of the town's long-term residents, and to a lesser and more personal extent, my desire, ever since having moved to the town, to somehow make my way inside of the house. Astoria, Oregon. This was the oldest town west of the Rockies, at least in terms of having the first post ...
The International Car Forest of the Last Church On the outskirts of the mining town of Goldfield, Nevada - a population of only a couple hundred people in a town without even a gas station on Nevada's Highway 95 - is an installation that is part outsider art and part surreal junkyard called The International Car Forest of the Last Church. Though no signs will direct you there, and nothing will explain the history or motivations behind it even after you arrive, the sprawling collection of vehicles - cars, limos, busses, and delivery trucks - rise upended down a few double track dirt roads near Goldfield's southern en ...
Death Valley Albatross Plane Wreck On the day of January 24th, 1952, a Grumman SA-16 Albatross took off from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho bound for San Diego carrying a 6 total occupants. The one-day, non-stop flight was part of a classified training mission supporting CIA Cold War operations. As night engulfed the skies around 6:30pm, one of the Albatross' dual engines gave out. Losing elevation and velocity, the pilot gave the order for the plane to be evacuated. All of those onboard would jump from the rear door and land about 14 miles north of Death Valley's Furnace Creek with no injuries, while the now-unman ...
an interview with Godfrey Reggio - director of the film, Koyaanisqatsi spring 2011 --- [ introduction ] On a visit to Las Vegas, Nevada, one evening I was lead into the desert. After the sun went down, we left the parked car beside the highway and set off in the direction of the river, the direction of the darkened night sky. Through washes that wound into deeper and narrower canyons, until we emerged onto the open banks of the river. We helped each other over rocks, up inclines, across sloped smoothed banks that had the moonlight glow in its orange sandy surface, and up the path of a stre ...
An accidental series of events while drilling in search of sources of geothermal energy in the rural Northern Nevada desert resulted in the growth of a picturesque formation of terraced pools and colored spouts that has come to be known as Fly Geyser. It's one of the most colorful and odd land formations in Nevada, though its creation was purely an accident. Fly Geyser, a misnomer as it is actually an artesian spring, was created when a 1964 geothermal exploratory drilling operation struck an underground hot water stream, sending the mineral-rich water gushing into the air. Efforts to cap the spring weren't ...
Bobbie's Buckeye Bar was a legal brothel in Tonopah, Nevada, run by the charismatic Bobbie Duncan Himes until her death in 1989. Despite efforts to later reopen, it would never operate as a brothel again. Born in Billings, Montana in 1915, Mary (Bobbie) Duncan would first make her way to Tonopah in 1941 en route to Hawaii. She worked Tonopah's red light district until World War II, during which she travelled to Lusk, Wyoming where she came under the tutelage of 'frontier madame' Dell Burke at the Yellow Hotel brothel. Burke would take those she felt showed the drive to work as lifelong brothel owners and ma ...
"We were six prostitutes in a ranch house in the middle of the desert, isolated from the rest of the world, screwing frustrated and horny men for money. That was our life and as far as we were concerned it was as normal as Rice Krispies." -Vickie Star, brothel owner Vickie Star's is a story of a woman who moved west from her Missouri farming upbringing and eventually ended up owning two separate Nevada brothels before retiring to live off of the money she saved from her years in the business. Born to a Garrison, Missouri family in 1923, at age 16 Vickie received an invitation from her older sister to move into her apartment in Sa ...
(Actually... 23 Nevada Hot Springs) We got out of the car, excited to see a small pool of water in the place that we had hoped to see one. The last dozen or so miles of the drive was down a rutted dirt road, and after hitting more than a couple jarring holes without enough time to bring the car's speed down, we did the long drive slowly, checking the trip odometer judiciously as the setting sun left its glow across a wide plain of sagebrush with few discernible landmarks to use as reference points. Nevada's natural hot springs are remarkable because the state has more of them than anywhere else in ...
Zzyzx Mineral Springs Resort Sitting near the northern edge of southern California's desolate Mojave National Preserve is the incorporated community of Zzyzx, California, a small area centered around a the Zzyzx Spring. In recent history, this water source formed the foundation for a small population center first based on a train station, and later as the real estate speculation of a quack "medical doctor" and scam artist. Lake Tuendae, where the spring water collects into a large rectangular march - with a fountain remaining in the center of the lake from the days of Howe's resort - is some of the only habitat for the ...
The facade of the Lazy B Guesthouse Ranch sits on the outskirts of Fallon, Nevada - what remains of the brothel is as no-frills as the brothel itself was during its tenure of service. The Lazy B Ranch was a small brothel sitting just east of the town of Fallon. Opened in 1975, the ranch was located along Nevada's Highway 50 near the mining and ranching operations of the north central region of the state, along with the nearby Fallon Naval Air Station. The ranch operated during the peak 1980's era of Nevada's legal houses of prostitution with 35 located and operating throughout the state. Though the later years of the Lazy B would be ...
Lake Los Angeles Lying about 50 miles northeast of the city of Los Angeles, California, sits Lake Los Angeles, a community in the eastern Antelope Valley whose lake, today, is the non-existent remnant of the town's manipulative speculative real estate history. Lake Los Angeles has no lake, and sits on the western edge of the Mojave Desert at an elevation of over 2600', feeling much closer to an eastern California desert town and much further from the metropolitan image evoked by the name, Los Angeles. Once called Wilsona after then-president Woodrow Wilson, and then Los Angeles Buttes, it was real estate speculators in ...
Susan Vaslev - theme park soundscape composer winter 2015/2016 --- [ introduction ] "Idiot Hill" was the name given to a small forested plot of land in a rural area bordering Oregon's capital city of Salem in the mid 1960's when Roger Tofte, an Oregon Department of Highways worker with no experience in running an amusement park, would spend his free time pouring and shaping bags of cement following an idea to construct just that - an amusement park that could become a haven for his and other local children living in the quiet area. Built in his hours after work and on weekends, while taking on ...
Conflicts over use of Nevada's Garden Valley is the location of Michael Heizer's land art project, City, led to the region being designated a National Monument. Michael Heizer is an artist known for his creation of large works of 'land art', typically sculptures, or 'negative sculptures' created by displacing large amounts of dirt and stone and left on location, primarily in desert regions of the American Southwest. Started in 1972, Heizer's project, known as City, covers an area nearly 1.5 miles long and a quarter of a mile wide in Nevada's Garden Valley. However, over that time, the federal government has eyed Garden Valle ...
The remains of the Old Bridge Ranch (which sit on the site of the original Mustang Ranch) amidst a picturesque Nevada landscape. Sitting in the Truckee River valley of northern Nevada lies the Old Bridge Ranch, a legal brothel that operated near the storied Mustang Ranch - in fact, the Old Bridge Ranch was built on the site of the original location of the Mustang Bridge Ranch, and over the years has acted as compliment and competition to the Mustang. Popular for being one of the nearest brothels to the Reno area, Old Bridge owner David Burgess was the nephew of Sally Conforte (the wife of colorful Nevada brothel o ...