2
One of these people, Robert Alexander, was known as Purple Pants for the outfit he was always strutting. A local gadfly, well known for calling into every call-in show on the local stations and expounding his dodgy theories, and for his massive collection of bicycles. I never met him because by the time I moved to Westhaven, he was recently deceased, an unsolved murder that was rumored to have been carried out by his neighbors for allegedly getting too friendly with some local children, so to speak. I knew his daughter, who barely knew her father but inherited his twelve acre spread, liberally covered with ramshackle structures, out-of-commission school buses, and piles and sheds full of bicycles in various states of disrepair.
She ended up married to a wild-eyed recently converted pentecostalist named Neil. He had set the property on fire burning old Purple Pants’ huge collection of ‘sinful’ books, and had saddled the property with an insurmountable lien from the local fire department for an unpermitted fire. I headed up there one day with Vijay who was always down for an adventure no matter how boring. I was enrolled in photo classes and was bringing into critique the kind of junky scenarios that a suburban kid like myself found endlessly fascinating, something we call nowadays poverty porn. I love the way the land looked, the burned over land with piles of melted bike carcasses and freshly burned stump sprouts festooning the old burned stumps from the 1800’s, disaster upon disaster mirroring the slow moving disaster of the personal lives of so many around these parts.
Humboldt County, CA, 1991
Pentax ME Super, Kodak Plus-X Pan
2
One of these people, Robert Alexander, was known as Purple Pants for the outfit he was always strutting. A local gadfly, well known for calling into every call-in show on the local stations and expounding his dodgy theories, and for his massive collection of bicycles. I never met him because by the time I moved to Westhaven, he was recently deceased, an unsolved murder that was rumored to have been carried out by his neighbors for allegedly getting too friendly with some local children, so to speak. I knew his daughter, who barely knew her father but inherited his twelve acre spread, liberally covered with ramshackle structures, out-of-commission school buses, and piles and sheds full of bicycles in various states of disrepair.
She ended up married to a wild-eyed recently converted pentecostalist named Neil. He had set the property on fire burning old Purple Pants’ huge collection of ‘sinful’ books, and had saddled the property with an insurmountable lien from the local fire department for an unpermitted fire. I headed up there one day with Vijay who was always down for an adventure no matter how boring. I was enrolled in photo classes and was bringing into critique the kind of junky scenarios that a suburban kid like myself found endlessly fascinating, something we call nowadays poverty porn. I love the way the land looked, the burned over land with piles of melted bike carcasses and freshly burned stump sprouts festooning the old burned stumps from the 1800’s, disaster upon disaster mirroring the slow moving disaster of the personal lives of so many around these parts.
Humboldt County, CA, 1991
Pentax ME Super, Kodak Plus-X Pan