Dear Necropolitan Liver (hmm, somehow that doesn’t sound right):
You love the disturbing, vaguely nightmarish roadside attractions out there in the middle-of-nowhere hellholes of America, right?
I know I do. To me, it’s not a road trip if it doesn’t involve stopping in some godforsaken spot for some oddball site or bizarre experience. And one of the most memorable was running into THE THING.
Ever see THE THING?
Few roadside attractions are MORE bizarre than The Thing — that grand-daddy of southwestern gas station stopovers that blows away the rest in its sheer weirdness and twisty corridors.
When we drove with friends across the desert one Christmas holiday, we stopped at the nearly-unavoidable roadside attraction.
Now, the southwest is full of bizarre, unusual and downright messed-up little roadside attractions with snakes, scorpions, two-headed babies in jars…but The Thing was something more impressive than most — for all the right reasons.
The rule of a Roadside Attraction is:
The exhibit can never be as disturbing or creepy as imagining the person — and the deranged mind — that put the attraction together in the first place.
The Thing satisfies on oh so many levels.
First, the entry fee (back then — several years ago) was about 75 cents . Good price! I believe the price has only gone up very slightly in the intervening years.
Then, you have to walk down these hallways full of Tim Burtonesque desert driftwood — and it predates Tim Burton — until you come to the most bizarre exhibit I’ve ever seen in my life:
A torture chamber, with women being whipped and people being beheaded (or at least, that’s how I remember it) — all carved from tree stumps. Creepy! And yet compelling. And yet…creepy.
And then, like the cherry on this bizarro sundae — right next to the crushed nuts — there’s the Nazi car.
This vehicle is made all the more disturbing because someone put it in this collection with the wood-stump torture chamber and The Thing itself and those Tim Burtonesque mangly desert-wood creatures.
What old crazy desert rat spent a lifetime amassing this collection? It’s not the current owners. It was someone who had a dark imagination, and maybe the kind that spilled into daily life. The Nazi car did it for me. And I hadn’t even seen The Thing at that point.
And it’s disturbing to have gone through the corridors to that goal — that Thing — but when you get to the Thing, it’s not shocking as much as it is just another spoonful of “Danger, Will Robinson!”
Should I reveal what it is?
Naw.
You’ve got to see it for yourself.
After visits to The Thing and to some other roadside attractions, I decided to write a horror version of this kind of place when I wrote my story, The Attraction.
Which, coincidentally, has one of my least favorite covers on the paperback and digital edition.
Take the video tour:
The Thing is off that odd stretch of the 10 Freeway between Phoenix and Tucson — in an area of the desert with the strange name: Dragoon, Arizona. Plan your next vacation around it! It has earned its spot among the Places of Eternal Darnation.
Here’s the Book Trailer for The Attraction — made by COSProductions.com. Nice ‘n’ creepy. Be sure and turn up the sound, too.
Best,
Douglas Clegg
p.s. In the next episode of Necropolitan Life, look for “Drug Deal With the Devil, or Why Great-Great-Grammy was a Junkie.”
If you’re going to some weird, unusual, off-beat place –
Take a photo, email it to me at DClegg@DouglasClegg.com, and if I post it here at Necropolitan Life, I’ll run a photo credit and link to your blog or website.
Where you going, down that desolate road to nowhere?
Welcome to Necropolitan Life — these are weird little stories or places or curios my team and I find on the web. I launched this in late 2009 as a “hidden” part of this site just to see if I might be able to blog consistently about it.
But I’ve decided to make it an intermittent feature into my regular website blog.
Whenever you see the logo up top (”Douglas Clegg’s Necropolitan Life” with the cool Glenn Chadbourne illustration), you’ll know it’s a day of weird stuff on my blog.
I’ll bring you stories of odd museums, the haunted or not, the scientific creepies, the stories of weirdness and the craziness of life and history.
Come back often – it’ll also make great linkage content for your Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and other social media pages. Just click on the “Share” icon at the bottom of this note to instantly pass any Necropolitan Life news on to your friends, tweeps and followers.
If you’d like to submit a link for Necropolitan Life, just leave the link in your comment here and I’ll check it out and see if it’s right for a future Necropolitan Life moment here at DouglasClegg.com. Thank you.
I’ve got a little ebook for you — and something you can pass around to friends, too. Get it by subscribing to my free newsletter — and if you’re already a subscriber, just re-subscribe and you’ll get back to the secret members’ only page.
It must be seen to be believed. You will never look at a john, a crapper, a porcelain god or a turkish horror in the same way again.
For the gossip-rag lovers, you even get celebrity potty sightings — like Jude Law and Ewen McGregor, sharing a private moment at home — ah, the morning ritual of tea and newspapers, a good bath and a good…
Coming up in Necropolitan Life: The Oddest, Most Bizarre Stuff Ever!
File under: Beautiful art, insects, beetles, bug-eyed, art with a twist
Dear Necropolitan Reader,
Corpse art — I love it! And when it comes to bugs, why waste all that chitiny-goodness? Today’s Necropolitan Life deals with the arts and an artist who works in dead things — beetle carcasses to be specific.
His name is Jan Fabre, and he lives and works in Antwerp.
He produces beautiful, odd sculptures with a variety of materials — including bone. But the beetle work is my favorite — it looks classical, yet it includes thousands of little beetle corpses. It’s like a beautiful catacomb of bugs.
I couldn’t include the image here, but click the link below to see some of his work.
Fabre says, of his “Heaven of Delight” piece (pictured here, as part of the Royal Palace in Brussels) : “I was involved with Heaven of Delight for three years, although actual work on the ceiling took three months. This sculpture/drawing comprises 1.4 million jewel beetle shells. My first drawings in blue ballpoint were created by following insects on paper—the splitting of space. Next, I proceeded to replace the ballpoint line by the insect itself.” Read the full interview here — and see some of his strange yet beautiful art.
As many of you know, I love insects. I worked in the Insect Zoo at the Smithsonian in its first year when I was a teenager, and have always been fascinated by the little buggers.
Dead things are seriously underused in the art world — after all, why NOT become part of art after death? Why just rot in the ground? I think these beetles would be proud to adorn this man’s art.
Enjoy! (And the stag beetle pictured here is not from his art — it’s just another satisfied Necropolitan Life reader.)
Don’t you just love advertising from a bygone era? Who knew so much coke, heroin, liquor and even chloroform was doled out to grannies and babies and those tired mothers who needed a good calming sleep?
And what about that toothache? Rub a little coke on it, and it’ll go away fast!
I use them all the time on message boards, in chat, instant-messaging, blogs and elsewhere. What’s an avatar? It’s a little square box that sometimes has a person’s photo or else other fun or interesting imagery.
Pick an avatar
Right-click on it and “Save as” or “Save Picture As” — to your computer.
Then, from your computer, upload it to your message board icon/avatar account or elsewhere.
Sean Akers, at SeanAkers.com, designed these cool avatars from Glenn Chadbourne’s illustrations for my book Isis, which hits bookstores September 29, 2009. Grab them, use them, play with them — and help spread the word about ISIS. Thank you.
You love the disturbing, vaguely nightmarish roadside attractions out there in the middle-of-nowhere hellholes of America, right?
