Vivian Courtney's Hollywood Restaurant

Once this restaurant's namesake, Vivian Courtney (click on her name to view a video tribute to her and photos of the inside of her restaurant), died in 2004 it was closed. The main building, which was as unique as the sign, was leveled (wished I'd taken a shot of it before it was bulldozed) but the place's unique sign remains to this day.

In fact, if you want the sign you can have it. John T. Roberts posted this @ Fort Worth Architecture, "If anyone is interested, the old neon Vivian Courtney's Restaurant sign is available to anyone who wishes to take it away. It is a two-sided exposed neon sign with the letter 'V' on top. It sits at the corner of Jacksboro Highway and Roberts Cut-Off Road @ 5915 Jacksboro Highway. I tried to find a home for it with two organizations but they did not have a place to put it. Now I'm offering it to anyone who thinks they can remove it and preserve it. The sign is about 28 feet tall and about 12 feet wide at the widest point."

Me and my friends ate their several times. It was a cool a place, with photos and posters from Old Hollywood --- we're talkin' John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Gone With The Wind, etc. --- hanging on the walls and in each booth there were equipped with miniture jukeboxes that really worked. You put in a quarter and got to choose three songs.

It had a buffet at lunch or you could order off the menu. The eats were simple good ol' white trash cuisine dishes.

A beautiful place that is now in the dustbin of history. Too bad. To me, the old stuff is, and still will be, the best stuff.

Yeah, as I get older I cherish the good ol' days more.

Yes, I'm sentimental but that comes with age and there's nothing wrong with getting older because you get smarter and realize that the modern stuff is just stuff that's not worth a damn (iPods & cell phones, for example) in my opinion.

OL' SOUTH PANCAKE HOUSE

This white trash soul food eating place makes the dreamiest pancakes you'll ever put into your mouth.

Buttery, sugary, greasy homemade goodness.

For more info on this long-time Fort Worth institution, located at the intersection of South University Drive and Interstate 30 in Fort Worth, visit Fort Worth Culture.

The place has changed ownership, from reading reviews online, and people now say the old staff, little old ladies who worked hard, are now all gone and the food sucks. That is too bad. It was a great place to congregate. Every class of folk went there. Reading these bad reviews of it now makes me sad but that's life, with everything changing for the worst, as always.

Fair well, Ol' South, you were an oldie but a goodie but, apparently, not anymore.

MASSEY'S RESTAURANT

To celebrate my youngest nephew's birthday me, my dad and step-mother took him to Massey's Restaurant for lunch. He had a chicken fried steak. The place has been in the same location, on 8th Avenue almost exactly between Berry and Rosedale Streets, since the '40s and it remains extremely popular with it's home cooked meals and delicious desserts. The fried catfish is excellent.

A few years ago the original owner was gonna close the place down due to his age but a couple of younger fellas talked him into leasing it to them and they contacted my dad to buy from and install new flooring. I know a lot of folks were very happy to see it re-open as the same place with the same good food. The different color of carpeting they paid no mind to.

White Trash Photo Shows

Here's two video slideshows I put together using my photos, and those of some others, of my white trash redneck friends from over the past decade or so, living the low life while drinking Miller's High Life and listening to rock 'n roll like Molly Hatchet's Flirtin' With Disaster and Gary Glitter's classic arena rock anthem Rock 'N Roll, Part 2. You can also see these videos at my YouTube page. All of us somehow surviving divorces,needy friends, fucked up friends, the ups, the downs, the all-arounds, tales from Fred's Texas Cafe, cold ass beer, cheap booze, soul crushing shit jobs, pieces of shit cars, break downs --- mental and otherwise --- shopping for threads and footwear at thrift stores & flea markets, meeting all sorts of fucked up losers, freaks, weirdos and what the fucks?, suicidal depression driving us to near insanity, meandering through headbanging mid-life crisis's, doing the SSDD (same shit different day) routine, facing SNAFUs, barely making it through FUBARs, spending nights at dive bars with fellow barflies, reading Bukowski to make sense of it all, inhaling the bud, surviving chrushing thuds and and all sorts of crud.

Fuck it. Hell, yeah.

NOTE: The Anti-HeroArt.com website is no more.

Grandma Chuggin' Down A 40

Here's a pic of a friend's mom I took back in the mid-'90s during a classic back yard white trash redneck BBQ cookout party at his place.

Yes, she's drinking a 40 of Colt 45. Pat is still kickin' too and, as always, is busily drinking beer and smoking cigs.

The photo was picked up by the website Sorry I Missed Your Party. Click the link and then scroll down to read the hilarious comments.

I took this photo of her using a cheap ass auto focus 35mm camera and, at some point, scanned the print. I was spending a bit of time going back over old, old photos and decided to look them over for ones I could restore to my satisfaction using today's amazing digital darkroom image editors.

I enlarged and improved this one's look by using two photo editors, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Capture NX.

In Photoshop I finished it off by applying the 'poster edges' filter then manipulating it to where it looked good to my eye.