I go to visit a friend in Oregon… not Portland, but the second city; something like McClintlock… Not a real place, but he has a house overlooking the river and seems to be doing very well. He says he works in Airplane Salvage. It’s a bit like the deep sea divers who search for gold, only he finds airplane crashes and salvages all the crap in people’s luggage that gets scattered around the disaster. I say to my friend’s father, “Must be a lot of drugs, right? He must be going after the drug planes that run out of fuel and ditch with tons of cocaine?”
He assures me I am mistaken… “Those planes never crash,” he says. “These are just regular planes.”
Are there really that many plane crashes? Have I been missing something? I wonder.
The house is like one huge art installation, with moving bits of welded steel sculpture and lighting effects and a stage for performance, people are playing music all about, and dancing, and I try to shoot this “set” with my video camera and the father gets very upset. Later I find the father has rented the swimming pool for a Porno shoot. I don’t think I trust the father at all. I put my camera down on what turns out to be a burlap bale of Columbian Cannabis. McClintlock is one strange town.
