DisasterLand Centralia - Release Announcement.

18 months have passed since Ashleigh and I started working on DisasterLand: Centralia.  I was thrilled to announce its completion several months ago and I'm even more thrilled to reveal its release information to you today.

DisasterLand: Centralia will be released next Tuesday, September 25, through A Carrier of Fire - pre-orders are available for now.  In the meantime, a free promo package is available by clicking here, which contains the first 20% or so of the project, a mobile wallpaper and a desktop wallpaper, as well as ordering information for a standard text of DisasterLand: Centralia for just $2.50 and a content-packed deluxe bundle with more wallpapers and behind-the-scenes reading for only $5.00.

Thank you for your support.  Ashleigh and I are looking forward to hearing from each and every one of you with your opinions about our contributions to DisasterLand.  Please leave us comments on here or reach us through our publisher, A Carrier of Fire, by emailing acarrieroffire@gmail.com - and tell your friends!

DisasterLand Centralia.

I am proud and excited beyond words to share with you the news that DisasterLand: Centralia is, for all intents and purposes, completely finished.  Ashleigh and I are going to work out some fine details, but the pictures have all been taken and edited and the words have all been written and fine-tuned.  We're literally past the finish line for content production.  From here on out, it's a very simple matter of deciding on page layout, bonus goodies, release strategies etc.  Even still, if you're reading this, you're in for a treat, and a ride of 10,000 words and many beautiful photographs of one of America's strangest chapters of folklore.  Put this project on your radar for a surprisingly inexpensive and accessible late spring / early summer release, complete with free merch!  In the meantime, to keep you tantalized, here is a sampler/teaser of content from Centralia.  Enjoy!  Tell your friends!

"Over the course of a hundred years, the small town population swelled until the anthracite business dwindled in the 1950s.  With it went many of its residents, though in the early 1960s there were still over 1,500 people still living in Centralia and its immediate vicinity.  It was an idyllic rural community, complete with a redbrick school building, a church with a steeple, locally-owned businesses and a small police & fire department office.  Today, nearly every building in town has been leveled and fewer than a dozen people remain."

"As my gaze fixed to look at the entire view, it started making sense.  We were standing at a firehouse and town government building.  From its front door, looking northeast, we saw the intersection and I had a flashback of an ex-girlfriend’s rural New York town, which was really just one intersection itself.  Here there were two churches (the second was hidden from view by a gravel pit we had seen at the west end of town) and what turned out to be four cemeteries.  One church, the Ukrainian Orthodox building just northwest on Locust, obscured the first two graveyards; the hidden church, the St. Ignatius at the southwest corner of town, was home to two more – the Odd Fellows Cemetery and St. Ignatius Cemetery.  The alleyways by the parked car used to be streets.  The bricks were probably what were left of torn-down homes, and I’d be willing to bet that under the trash heaps were disturbed earth and, beneath that, hushed by soil and dead leaves, utility pipes and wiring.  It was like a footprint – more a skeleton than a town."

"Shortly after the government buyout began, Penn State researchers spoke with remaining Centralians and found that a full third of them believed the fire was kept alive by a government conspiracy to swindle the residents out of the coal under their feet, likely a theory fueled in part by the July 1983 GAI report regarding trench-digging.  “They know how to put this fire out,” one resident told them, “they’re just experimenting with us."  Residents at the time had estimated 35 million tons of anthracite coal under Centralia.  Selling at $100 a ton, there could be over $3 billion in coal still waiting to be excavated.  Some residents believe this is the true reason they were offered $42 million to evacuate once the GAI report was published, which would severely undercut a full excavation and allow for minimal governmental risk of increasing overheads.  Locals believed that if the government fully bought and evacuated the town, even spending an estimated $60 to $80 million for trench-digging to stop the fire – which, officials had always told the residents, was “too expensive” – the government would be sitting on billions of dollars of coal to mine at the government’s leisure."

"At the bottom was the normal dirt and grass, which had only ever been disturbed by the eventual tearing down of the house. Leftover garbage from the original tearing down of the house – linoleum floors from the ‘80s buyouts, newer drywall from the ‘90s – rested on the ground. Apparently the trash collectors never bothered to pick it up. After that, what sat above those creature comforts varied from lot to lot as we walked down the street. Sometimes it was another 10 or 20 years of dust and dirt, grass and spider webs and anthills blanketing a mash-up of kitchen and family room. Other times, depending on the age of the buyout, it skipped that layer to the final addition to most of Centralia’s construction heaps: new trash. We found ourselves able to date the trash within a couple years based on the packaging of soda bottles, hamburgers and prophylactic wrappers. The familiarity of geological commercialism, wrapped comfortably in my cynicism, warmed me from the creeping feeling of Armageddon preying on the afternoon."

"“Someone has been waiting very patiently to get their hands on this coal,” Anne Marie Devine, then-mayor of Centralia, said. “We’re just not that gullible.” The DCA and the DER initially claimed that the dangers of the mine fire prompted them to set an original deadline to shut down the town completely by June 30, 1994, but later admitted this deadline was agreed based on the expiration of the original federal buyout program, which at the time was in August of that year. Furthermore, residents and Centralia officials argued that if the town were to be completely shut down by the state, it would legally cease to exist and therefore its coal rights would escalate to the nearest body of government – the very state offices forcing them out."

DisasterLand: Centralia.  Coming Soon.

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305 Miles.

I left the house at 5:20. The hardest part struck around 3 p.m.; I really didn't want to be away from the baby for three days. The longest I've spent in a different dwelling than Lenna was for 9 hours during my old retail shifts.

The flatlands of south Richmond gave way to the long, low mounds of I-95 on the way to Tysons Corner as it started raining and didn't stop until I pulled into my hotel. From Chesterfield to Tysons is a drive I've made a hundred times before, so no surprises there.

Just north of Tysons and the I-495/Rte. 7 exchange, a traffic jam due to a vehicle collision in the right center lane (of four) slowed time to a crawl. I'd made it over halfway up the state, right to the hump and the state line, in about two hours. The next mile and a half took 20 minutes to clear by itself. By the time I exited left for my next interstate, I was hungry and in desperate need of a bathroom.

I finally pulled over in Gaithersburg, MD, at about 8:15 and turned north. Had I gone the other way, I would've immediately seen an upper-middle class seafood restaurant but the highway sign said that route was a highway with only southbound exits so I was pressed north towards a run-down part of town and another fast food meal.

Back on the road, the suburbs came fewer and further in between. Rural areas with ages-old warehouse and general store signs were peppered along the countryside. Every 30 or so miles I saw one large, brand new building - some deteriorating township's final effort to bring in business, I imagined.

I don't mind taking road trips, for whatever purpose. I like driving alone in the car and turning up music, or with my wife and daughter and talking about matters of no lasting import. Unfortunately, my lower lumbar has been getting worse this last year, since we had the baby, so slouching in the driver's seat reminds me every 20 minutes or so that I should be sitting up straighter. I also never mastered comfortably keeping my foot on the gas for three to four hours on end, which sent aches moaning up through my right leg. Finally, I've been rolling over onto my left shoulder in my sleep for the last month and holding the baby in my left arm almost exclusively since she was born, and this bad practice has led to Tendonitis. If I move my arm more than a bit, it shoots a pain along my shoulder and into my bicep.

I practiced leaving my left arm slack, sitting up straight and changing my right foot position every few minutes for almost six hours while the car was a fingertip tracing a gentle caress up America's cheekbone.

Mount St. Mary's College looked dark and lovely since dusk had surrendered to the black of night. The number of streetlights and house lights waned a bit and I started seeing patches of no lights at all. The lights in the neighborhoods and towns along the highway were becoming less uniform and more vertically graded. After I crossed into Pennsylvania, the last city on the way to Frackville was Harrisburg. It looked to be about half of Richmond's skyline, with a beautiful domed capitol building and several business skyscrapers.

I've driven through Chattanooga, and I'm no stranger to the concept of exiting three times to stay on the highway on which I started, and Pennsylvania was no exception. I think I exited at I-83 to stay on I-83 at least once - a two-lane highway branching off from a three-lane exit to a state route.

Then everything went dark. All around the car. For a half hour, I saw nothing but the road in front of me. The panic came in waves, then. Nothing strong enough to call a "panic attack," but I could feel my tarred heart pumping fast, my throat drying up. I think the more poorly kept buildings on my 70 mph journey into the unknown reminds me of the six days I lived in Montana, on a subconscious level, and I find myself gripping the wheel a bit more tightly and looking forward to going home. Traffic dissipated and often I was the only car in sight, despite being on another interstate. About 40 miles from the exit for Frackville, the fog rolled in and trapped the beams from oncoming brights in a thick cloud. It was then that I saw the mountainous range I'd found myself among.

Every mile closer to the hotel I drove, the fog thickened. No matter how loudly I pummeled my ears with prog-metal, it still felt like too quiet of a night. By the time I turned off I-81N at exit 124B, I could barely see the lines in the road. But I checked into my hotel room at Granny's Motel in Frackville and Ashleigh should be here by noon. I wasn't incredibly thrilled by my room's lack of ice, central heating and bathroom soap or shampoo, but every time I get in a huff about a motel I'm reminded of my uncle once making fun of one of our relatives, saying "Oh please; his idea of 'roughing it' is staying at a Ramada," so I try to keep my dumb fuckin' mouth shut.

However, despite a hiccup or two, I'm excited to get DisasterLand's first site researched starting tomorrow. Of course the irony is not lost on me at all that part of me wishes I were at home taking care of the baby but instead I've come to research and document people who only want to be left alone, but in the end it will smooth out to some extent. We're here until sometime Monday, depending on what we can find in Centralia and its two nearest libraries. If and only if we can cover everything we need and pack up by noon Monday, my final battle will be to race home in time to beat DC's mass exodus heading south at Tysons Corner at 3 or 4.

Stay tuned. And like I said in that last post, which didn't format for shit, keep your eyes open for live updates in the field from me and Ashleigh tomorrow and Sunday on my Tumblr account at http://thisjobiskillingyou.tumblr.com

Thanks.

The Essentials.

The Essentials: One bottle Cetaphil Moisturizing Lotion (For my tattoo, perv!) Four bottles prescription medication One toothbrush One can Axe Touch Body Spray One tube Colgate toothpaste One Fossil Starck digital watch One sweater One tanktop One t-shirt Two polo shirts Three pairs white socks One PSPGo Charger Cable One extra pair contact lenses One 2 GB Cruser FlashDrive One pack dental floss One MacBook Charger Cable One CD discography: The Ocean One pair Bose in-ear headphones One Samsung Galaxy S Charger Cable One Flip HD Video Recorder One PSPGo One copy 'Blood Meridian' by Cormac McCarthy One copy 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fjodor Dostoevsky One HP laptop One MacBook Pro One pair Converse All-Stars, black leather One pad 8.5 x 11" college-lined white paper Three ink pens One satchel (Indiana Jones has one) Not pictured: One Sony Cyber-Shot 7.2 megapixel digital still camera One fall jacket One pair Oakley X-Metals, gunmetal One pair Ray-Ban eyeglasses One Diesel automatic watch One pair denim jeans, dark blue One pair pajama pants Two sets printed directions Catch up with live updates on http://thisjobiskillingyou.tumblr.com/

Lori Nix Interview!

Lori Nix is a photographer, sculptor and diorama artist. Her latest diorama series, The City, depicts nearly 20 post-apocalyptic urban indoor scenes in which humanity has disappeared - and nature is slowly taking back over. Painstakingly crafted by hand almost in its entirety, The City shows her brutal attention to detail, from incorporating real full-sized houseplants to hand-painted globes and maps. Her earlier works, "Accidentally Kansas" and "Unnatural History," show a human-less rural Midwest and a beautifully cluttered black and white Museum of Natural History, respectively. She loves disaster flicks and lives and works with her partner Kathleen in Brooklyn; here is a portion of our phone interview.

jonny: Lori, I first wanted to congratulate you on winning 2010’s New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Grant.

Lori: That money’s already spent. [Laughs.] The money went to doing three quick scenes for the New York show [of The City] last November. We have 18 total now.

jonny: I read that in college you made the transition from photojournalism back towards ceramics. What inspired you to primarily work in dioramas?

Lori: When I was in college I worked for the darkroom. I was the photo editor; you have to want to stand in a crowd and know what’s going on. I’m horrible at photojournalism; I’m horrible at portraits. I’m not a street photographer at all, so catching interesting things around me is difficult. After being a ceramics major and building things with your hands, building dioramas is a more natural process.

jonny: How did you come to work for New York Magazine?

Lori: When they have an idea that they think I can illustrate through a model or photograph, they usually call me and see if I’m interested in it. They only call me once a year or once every couple years. We just finished an editorial piece called “The Ultimate Sportsman” for Field & Stream Magazine.

T-Rex, from Unnatural History

jonny: What did you take away from working on “Unnatural History,” since its black-and-white film lent to expediting the set building?

Lori: I still enjoy them – they’re light, they’re humorous; I can re-use a lot of sets over and over again which is something I’ve never allowed myself to do before. I’ve been collecting plastic figures for a long time; I have a whole room full of them and it’s good to finally have a use for them. I’m just enthralled by the Museum of Natural History.

jonny: The main inspirations for “Accidentally Kansas” and “Unnatural History” are pretty clear; did “The Lost” have a specific muse?

Lori: Most of that just comes from living in a large urban city and reading the New York Times, the New Yorker, reading published articles. Those were just kind of the inspiration – just being here and feeling like a lost soul.

jonny: When did you bring Kathleen in to work with you?

Lori: In 1999. We’d get home from work and I’d be working [on dioramas] and she’d want something to do so I’d just ask “Here, why don’t you help me with this?” so she started doing that. The work has improved a lot since I’ve brought her on board.

Library, from The City

jonny: Do you still like disaster movies, despite the almost complete reliance upon CGI? Any favorites?

Lori: I’ll still watch them; I just don’t get to watch them that much. I work a full-time day job, and there’s a bedbug epidemic in NY and you get a lot of bedbugs from going to theaters. I need a plot though.

jonny: I read your comment about changing our impact on the climate; how and when do you imagine mankind will finally end?

Lori: Am I being a pessimist when I think it’ll happen overnight? It’ll come so fast that we won’t get science to see our way out. Just the last two years, the summers are hotter, and the crazy weather we’ve had this winter…we’re gonna reach this tipping point if we haven’t already that we can’t come back from.

jonny: Have you ever visited any major disaster sites? There are plenty of ghost towns and toxic dump areas that could easily find their ways into your future projects.

Lori: I live close to the Iguanas Canal, which is an EPA superfund site, but purposely? No. I like to stay home and do all my research on the computer.

jonny: How did “The City’s” winter New York and Chicago tours go? Did you have a chance to go with your work to visit Chicago?

Lori: The show’s up right now [in Chicago]; it’s been up since the beginning of January. I was out there for the opening. It was cold, but at least it was sunny.

The Bar, from The City

jonny: My favorite pieces in “The City” are “Map Room,” “Library” and “The Bar.” Do you have any favorites from it?

Lori: No; some ended up being closer to my original vision than the others. I like most of them; probably all but one.

jonny: Do you have any other projects you’d like to start work on soon?

Lori: I’m always having new ideas but I need to finish the projects I have going on. I was going to start a whole different type of photography, but I know in my heart of hearts that that’s just going to take me off the path I need to finish; it’ll be too distracting. Even the black and white will be a little distracting. I think I know what I want my next body of work to be about but I can’t start for another three or four years.

jonny: Will any of your work be touring any other cities in the near future?

Lori: It’s gonna show up in Buffalo in the summer, and at CEPA (a non-profit gallery space in Buffalo) then I’m having a showing of the series of The City in Toledo in November sometime.

jonny: Thanks for your time, Lori.

For more on Lori Nix, including galleries of her stunning work, please visit her website at http://www.lorinix.net

before and after the township / inspiration #3 (licensed music).

What would make you found a township? If you could go back in time a couple hundred years and really immerse yourself in Westward Expansion, what would your motivation be to set out into the wilds and find a place to set up shop for 50 families?

I can't imagine that every founder of every municipality in the country just decided to clear-cut some forestry for the sake of fame and fortune. I just don't believe that. Sure, port towns were ideal places for seafaring businesses, but it seems much more likely to me that plenty of adventurers wanted a place for their own, a community in which they could proudly stand and stake a claim of parenthood. It was always clear to me that people pour into their homes the same optimism, care, hopes and dreams that parents pour into their children. Maybe, with just a bit of guidance and love, it'll stand on its own two feet and really make something of itself, we can hear them say.

Upon that, I've come to understand that that attitude, believing everyone can take lemons and make lemonade and shoot for the stars, is much more prominent in Western/European-based civilizations than in others. I may be wrong, but that's how it appears.

On the other hand, the post-apocalypse has always distinctly felt futuristic to me. Knowing what little I do about the space-time continuum, I live with the assumption that the end of human civilization hasn't happened yet, and its image must come later, further down the road. Even a sudden event ceasing the existence of mankind would leave cars in streets, mail in boxes - our cities would be "frozen in time." Even that sounds like the stuff of science-fiction. And yet we're developing a book in which we will step into a dozen of these very scenarios.

So in thinking about these two juxtaposed philosophies - the idealistic optimism for a town's future and the landmarks of its eerily rapid end - I felt they were, at baser natures, traditionally Western and blindly looking for the future. Musically, "traditionally Western" strikes up lonely guitars in my mind - clean, quiet Stratocasters and Les Pauls with a hint of reverb and Humbuckers. Ignorantly future-seeking reminds me of all the things we think music will sound like in thirty years - glitch, crushbits, twinkly Moogs and Pro Tools.

There's even an irony in their sound. The lonely, empty desolation of dustbowl guitar and the self-assured seething drive of radio-unfriendly electronica borrow attitude from each other's supposed timeframe.

At any rate, I wanted to reconcile the starlit night six-string with The End and I pulled out 19 songs from my music library to inspire myself, Ashleigh and anyone else we drag into this project. Of course for legal reasons we can't host this "working soundtrack" here, but we're happy to provide the tracklist for you to hunt down on iTunes, Amazon or however you get your music.

01. The Ocean - Siderian

02. Between the Buried and Me - Mirrors

03. Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around

04. Tool - Eon Blue Apocalypse

05. Talk Talk - The Rainbow

06. Radiohead - Hunting Bears

07. Tuk - Welwitschia Valley

08. Gorillaz - Hip Albatross

09. Tom Waits - Soldier's Things

10. Kevin Shields - Goodbye

11. Gorillaz - Bobby in Phoenix

12. Atticus Ross + Claudia Sarne - Human

13. The Mars Volta - Asilos Magdalena

14. The Protomen - Intermission

15. Godspeed, You Black Emperor! - 09-15-00 (pt. 2)

16. Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)

17. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross - What Were the Shares Diluted Down To

18. Saxon Shore - May 26

19. The Sadies - Rhoda's Death

Music is a major part of the lives of everyone involved in creating DisasterLand. We're already chomping at the bit to discover how listening to this playlist on a good set of headphones can inspire us on-site and off. We hope to share more music news with you soon, as we're currently reaching out to musicians to create music using these songs as inspiration for use as an actual score or soundtrack to the project.

Pre-Production (Centralia; North Brother Island).

The decision came to do a test run of our documenting skills and partnership. The way we see it, we could either ask for fans, support, donations and word-of-mouth advertising with nothing to show and just promise it'll rock...or dig deep in our own pockets and beta test the process at two locations. That way, we can compile the photography, resources, experiences and interviews into a couple free samples and root ourselves firmly in the upper echelon of feature photojournalism, or microapocalyptic creative non-fiction or whatever the Hell it is we're doing here.

So where should we go? I live in Virginia; Ashleigh lives in upstate New York. The logical choice, then, is to putt around New England working our magic on the 13 colonies' catastrophe locations. Once we narrowed it down to such a small geographic region, it was a simple matter of choosing which ghosts to chase. There was the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, but the only aftermath of that is that on a hot summer's day, some Bostonians claim to detect a sticky-sweet fragrance in the air, and it's remarkably difficult to take pictures of a smell.

After following a couple dead-end leads, it came down to Centralia, PA and North Brother Island, NY, to document the former's coal mine fire and evacuation and the latter's hospital-turned-ghost-town. Our safety, should one fall through, is Love Canal in Niagara Falls, NY, where a civilian township was built atop a former chemical dump site.

The final point of discussion was when to sojourn up north. In December I blurted out March or April while on iChat with my brother, and it just stuck. Since then we've narrowed it down to one of the last two weekends of March - either the 18th to the 21st or the 25th to the 28th.

So now, in the second week of February, the time has come to secure permission to shoot. A quick Google search led me to the website for Columbia County, PA, and a phone number for its conservation district. Their offices directed me to Centralia Borough [sic] Secretary John Likitos and Mayor Carl Womer, and provided phone numbers for each. Let's not call the mayor, I thought. Not yet. Maybe an interview down the way when I've gotten more research done.

Secretary Likitos was kind and nonchalant and gave us permission to shoot still photography and walk around through the town. "As long as you stay off private property, you won't be botherin' anyone," he told me. Journalism law claims that any photographs taken on a city street are in public domain - "Never walk around naked with your blinds open," our professor told us; "It's fair game." This means there is a large difference in legality between taking pictures on private property and taking pictures of private property.

At last, I called the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting in New York City. North Brother Island is technically a park and bird preservation site off Rikers Island, but I figured best to call the MOFTB first. The receptionist re-directed me to someone else, who placed me on hold just after decreeing "I don't believe you can film there; hang on." Juggling the baby in one hand and the phone in the other, I waited for her return.

"That's owned by the state, not us," she said. "Here's their number."

"No," the state said. "I'm not sure why they're so...short on the information today, but technically it's a part of Riker's Island, which is all city-owned property."

"Should I call them back, then?"

"Your best bet is to call the Parks Department. They'll be able to help you."

"Ok."

"But call the Mayor's Office back first. Ask for their contact in the Parks Department; it'll be faster that way."

"Ok."

I called back to the Mayor's Office and asked the receptionist for their contact in the Parks Department.

"Hold please."

I was transferred, then, to a new person, who told me they had no specific contact for the Parks Department but to go to http://www.nyc.gov/parks/film and fill out the form to request filming on park property. I felt a headache building deep in my left hemisphere.

I called the Parks Department and they told me the same thing. So I went to the site and filled out the request form. Right now I'm waiting to hear back from them; once we get the green light I can forward the approval back to the Mayor's Office and get a permit - let's hope it's one of those "8 to 10 business days" things and not a "8 to 12 weeks" thing. After that it's just a matter of securing transportation, which means a boat. I've always been pretty hydrophobic, and taking a dip in the East River near Rikers rates about a 9 on my terror factor, but it must be done.

I'd brave twice that for coverage of a bird's nest built atop a smokestack.