The short fiction of j hardy carroll
In the late nineties, I had the good fortune to be the director of Überhaus, the last bandit loft in southwest Portland. We had an anti-art event called Last Thursday that started as a protest against Portland’s famous First Thursday gallery walk and soon became its own thing. We would feature a show of work curated by Sugar from the Bone, an east…
Ever since I was hip-high to my father I have had a thing about vintage aircraft, especially planes from the wild experimental age between the wars. I loved the stories of Jimmy Doolittle winning the Schneider Cup, flying on instruments and generally doing insane things in the air. I loved the biplanes and sleek monoplanes.…
In June of 1999 I was traveling back to Portland after visiting my father in Tucson with my three-year-old daughter in tow. We missed a connection and wound up in the Las Vegas Airport. It was my first time in that city, and in the late hour the airport was almost empty An island of garish casino machines…
This is a shorter vignette, almost a poem. It dates from October, 1999. The rainy city poised on the brink of a new millennium, floodlit cranes in sharp relief against the blooms of gray mist. The world was full of possibilities for a man just past thirty, full of longing. This little piece brims with some…
One of the benefits of city living is that you generally don’t need a car–f you are willing to make certain compromises. Cargo carrying is one of them. Groceries, laundry and other bulky errands require ingenuity and planning. Groceries especially, since laundry can be put off ad infinitum. I grew up in the supermarket era.…
Here is an Überhaus Diary entry from 1998 where I talk about a show and then bitch about rich people. Ever the trendsetter. I remember this Headhunters show well. Paul Jackson, the bassist, broke a string on his bass in the middle of a solo. Rather than abandoning it, he motioned his bass tech over. The guy knelt…
It’s pretty fun (an a little embarrassing) to look back on my first forays into the impenetrable jungle of fiction writing. I was like a guy on vacation in the tropics who wanders off the path from the hotel to the beach, takes a wrong turn and finds himself in a stew pot surrounded by…
In the early days of the Überhaus site I liked to experiment with format. I came across a post I did sometime in 1998 that was constructed of framesets that randomly linked to one another. For those who don’t remember, a frameset was an HTML hack that allowed multiple web pages to display on the…