Remember Me, The Salton Sea

Plagues and Pleasures of the Salton Sea, a documentary narrated by the amazing John Waters, came out in 2006. The film takes viewers on a tour of the waning former resort towns near and about the eponymous Salton Sea.

Impovrished, polluted, swarmed by sick birds and even sicker fish, the people who live there yearn for the good old days of abundance, days of celebrity vacationers and slick, modern conveniences. Now, many people stave off hunger by eating the potentially hazardous fish. They live, almost exclusively, in mobile homes. And Hollywood starlets no longer go to Salton, or know it exists.

This National Geographic article by Joel Bourne Jr. was published a year before Plagues and Pleasures was released. You should read it. It's interesting.

For more recent information (since its been a few years), see the Salton Sea Authority website.

Plagues and Pleasures ( Directed by Chris Metzier and Jeff Springer) won 35 awards for best documentary. I like it because it is a blatant reminder that the land, the water, and the people are wholly dependent on one another, even in the U.S where we often get the privilege of ignoring dire environmental consequences.

Lawler Literature 002:Human Cadavers, Animal Brains, and Shakespeare on Film

Lawler Literature is a feature in which I discuss books I've read, books I'm reading, books I've lent away, and books I've sold online as Lawler Books.

Here's an excerpt from Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach:

Outside the gate, we spend a long time scraping the bottoms of our boots on a curb. You don't have to step on a body to carry the smells of death with you on your shoes. For reasons we have just seen, the soil around a corpse is sodden with the liquids of human decay. pp. 69-70