Saturday, September 8, 2007

Tabetha, Photographer

The woman at the right is my wife, Tabetha Tomaselli (Bokovoy), with her sister and cousins in Buffalo, May 2006. Tabby was a well-regarded pastry chef in Philadelphia, where we met in 2000. She worked at some of the great restaurants in the city, Le-Bec-Fin, Rouge, Blue Angel, and Bliss. She's been on PBS cooking shows and won the "Chocolate Contest" one year. She's back in school to get a fine arts degree in photography, something she wanted to study when Temple University had the faculty strike in 1991. She left school for the kitchens of Philly afterwards, and is now back in school.

Now she's back to school and we have Boy Boy, I'm "retiring" from the historical profession to be at home with Spencer. Once she's done with school, we'll do an illustrated book on environmentally degraded towns in Oklahoma, mostly destroyed by the oil industry. It will be great to do a book that will matter, and is also close to home.


Wind Chimes, at our house.


Skeleton of a cicada.


Winter, 2006.


Our friend, Jeffrey Wilhite, February 2006 at my birthday party in OKC.


Grain silos at Sunset, Oklahoma


The monotonous suburban landscape of Moore, Oklahoma.


The Hong Kong Nightclub, Broadway Street, San Diego 2005. I like this shot and this old-school lounge bar in San Diego. The place is one of the last remaining Navy lounges from San Diego's old heyday. Tabby and I hope that it will not close due to gentrification, and I recommend this place if you travel to the city to catch the old local atmosphere.
I wrote about the place in a piece I wrote for Jim Miller's collection of essays Sunshine/Noir: Writings from San Diego and Tijuana (City Works Press, 2005) in my piece "Ghosts of the San Diego Rialto." You can read a review here:
Cranes over downtown San Diego, 2006. Tabby's shot shows the "apartment boom" in the downtown, where 30% remain empty as "spec properties." San Diego has yet to develop a sizable stock of "affordable housing," most of which is above market for low-to-moderate income families.

Death of the SRO Hotel, San Diego 2006. With upscale revitalization taking over the downtown, I often wonder where the homeless, diabled veterans, and low income people will live. In my visits home, I've noticed their migration to city suburbs on the edge of downtown and in the numerous canyons around the downtown in hoboe villages.


After my book release party at Landlord Jim's in October 2005, this enormous tour bus full of zombies dropped off 100 zombie party goers at the bar. There were some great costumes, and it will likely be the last time in our lives we will experience a "zombie invasion." Southern Californians are cool that way, who would think about a zombie tour of a major city?


Sunset in Oklahoma


My friend Pat McInerny's wife, Kim and Marxist critic Jim Miller, La Jolla, October 2005. Jim is the undisputed social critic of San Diego, in both fiction and nonfiction. Every Californian should own Under the Perfect Sun (2003) and his novel Drift (2007)


Brad Hayes at our house, 2005. Tabby's portraits of our friends, to me, grabs their inner nature.

Historian Todd Kerstetter, Scottsdale 2005. Todd is a scholar of religion in the west, and his book God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land (2006) is quite impressive and highly recommended. Todd was showing his usual wit by poking fun at the nickel plated revolvers for sale in True West Magazine. That is, mixing western myth with violence.


Ross Frank and me at the University of New Mexico Press booth, Scottsdale 2005. I was honored sit with Ross and sign books at the Western History Association meeting. Ross is a social and cultural historian of New Mexico, and a commited social activist. He and my brother actually know one another from U.C. Berkeley, where both were involved in protesting the university's investments in South Africa during the 1980s, and they also were organizers in the GSA union. I highly recommend his book, From Settler to Citizen (2000). He was signing his edited volume, Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion (2005).

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