Memphis.

ant man bee wrote:When I was on tour this past summer with Blame Game (EA board member Wiggins band) we stayed at this place in Milwaukee that was amazing. First off the guy was amazingly nice, being in a touring band himself he hosted bands at his house many nights a week. He cooked us some amazing curry, gave us beer, and let us look at his rather impressive record collection.

What made this house strange/amazing was two things:

First the shrine to Williw Nelson that was the living room...Every single thing in this room was Willie related...the picture does not do it justice.

Then the coup de grace....the bathroom. The walls are covered with signed polaroids from touring bands that are taken with the polaroid camera which is helpfully hung right by the john. All four walls of this bathroom were 95% covered with pictures of shit.

All of this, plue we got the rare treat of drinking Old Style.

This has to be Rob's house.

I stayed there once. I deeply regret that I didn't have to take a shit there.

I ate a lot the night after the show hoping that I could wake up, take a dump and use the polaroid. Shit didn't happen.

In high school, my girlfriend's best friend was a babysitter for the drummer from Iron Maiden. Well, his children that is. This was down in South Florida. So we used to hang out at the house fairly often. I have very little memory of what I said to the drummer, if anything at all. He seemed friendly enough, and his wife was incredibly hot. Oh, and there were about 20-30 Iron Maiden imports/live CDs in his personal collection.

Also: Van Horn, Texas. Anyone ever been here? There was a restaurant which advertised a "John Madden Haul [sic] of Fame" We ate there---because there wasn't anything fucking else for a thousand miles---and they actually had the place where Madden *once* ate lunch cordoned off. Plates and silverware and napkin still on the table and all. Spooky shit. I halfway expected Leatherface to come crashing through the kitchen door.

I grew up in a town that was about a 2 hour drive from the Salton Sea. I spent a lot of time there.

I have been quite a few places since, but the Salton Sea is still #1 for me.

Angus Jung wrote:I grew up in a town that was about a 2 hour drive from the Salton Sea. I spent a lot of time there.

I have been quite a few places since, but the Salton Sea is still #1 for me.

That is number one on my list of places in the continental US that I want to go photograph.

I kinda feel like I'm not worthy.

Ladakh:






Unfortunately, I don't have any shots of a yak galloping through a barley field, a whitewashed cottage with a huge blue swastika on the side, or a stuffed snow leopard suspended from the ceiling of a tiny temple that pre-dates Buddhism.

I haven't been too many weird places. Valencia, Espania during Las Fallas is probably tops.

Oh, and I once went to Butte on a school trip. Butte, Montana, home of Evel Knievel.

Hitchhiking through Indian when I was 16 was bizarre.

Every single person without exception that gave me a ride said, "hey do you do drugs?" to which I'd respond with, "well I smoke pot sometimes" to which they'd respond with "no, I meant CRANK!!" and then they'd pull out a bag of bathtub crank and try to do it with me.
No thank you sir, tonight is not the night, not today, not with you, not ever.

When I got to Indianapolis apparently the place where everyone hung out was a huge shopping mall.
Really, really creepy.

Calais, France is pretty weird. I once hung out there for two days in the middle of the fucking winter waiting for some friends from London to come off the ferry. Basically this incredibly gloomy assembly of shabby restaurants, equally shabby waiters, hunch-backs, one-eyed prostitutes, drunken poms and asylum seekers.

In fact, the whole region between, say, Liège and Paris is entirely depressing. Completely bankrupt ex-mining towns full of gun-slinging maniacs, junkies, pederasts and people with terrible coughs. Forum member Chris JH once compared it to Kinshasha, and, while I've never been to that city at all, I can really understand the comparison.

Every red light district in every single Dutch town is pretty similar, but also kind of different, almost festive. It's like people sort of celebrate their being completely screwed over. Which is also pretty weird/cool.

Also the Bowary I thought was plenty weird when I was there.

I think border towns (such as Calais) usually have a tendency for weirdness, which is way I would really, really like to visit El Paso, Tejas, one day. 'Cause, you know, I enjoy that.

Carpenters Road in Stratford, East London, four or five years ago.

I was there to visit a small client on the industrial estate, and on the map it looked like an easy 15 minutes walk from the station. It was the closest that I have ever seen to Mad Max style post-apocalyptic scenery in real life. The road was lined with corrugated iron shanties where men in torn overalls did stuff to dull metal car parts, dug into a high fence behind which were alternating dead car and dead fridge mountains.

My poverty of description fails me, but it was a truly desolate, spooky and bizarre sight. One of the guys I was working with got mugged outside the client a few days into the job. It felt like a good place to take a murder victim to. It felt special to me as well, as it brought back very old and vague memories of how a lot more of London was like back when I was four years old. Ramshackle and messy.

The area is being renovated as part of the Olympic regeneration shebang, I believe, so it has probably changed completely.