once upon a time

Way back in the day, I was taking an AP history test junior year at the other high school and saw a girl wearing purple converse all-stars and had an instinctive feeling for some reason that I wanted to be her friend. A year later, we are seniors taking community college classes and learn that we have mutual friends from the punk-metal-hardcore contingent in our hometown. I was an elitist jerk about music back then and probably could have torpedoed anything right then and there but we ended up working at the zoo together for a summer, bonding over literature and rock and roll and a similar enjoyment of humanity's foibles.

We had long long-distance conversations, and long late night drives around the city that have already been chronicled. I enjoyed her so much that I introduced her to my friends, and she got close to them too. My friend who played in pop punk bands who came out later on (and probably broke many a punk rock girl's heart if the anecdotal evidence is to be believed), my roommate, a guy I knew who turned out to be a huge huge creep (the only time I've ever wanted to inflict serious harm on another human was some things he did).

In 2005, a bunch of us went to see some punk rock together, she met the guy she married this past Saturday there for the first time, though he has no memory of this. A few years later they met again, and the sparks kindled, and it was kind of crazy to be there to celebrate with her family and my old crew of friends from the Kent days, seeing where we all are now, in various stages of employment and love lives, less scruffy than we once were, more confident than we once were. 

My roommate was in her wedding party, the park was beautiful, the music good, no one made me dance. We talked and ate and set off those floaty glowy balloons, and then I sipped cheap beer on the patio of the punk rock bar with my homie who's now in Chicago until I just got too tired and had little to contribute as it was by that time. I don't find weddings stressful anymore, I celebrate them like birthdays and with ones like these, there's ample time to laugh.

Canada Day for Clevelandians

In my days as an a solitary teenager in the summer, when my parents weren't home, I'd listen to the radio and read and on days when the weather and the winds were right, I'd get the rock stations from Windsor and hear other middle-of-the-road alternative rock and Neil Young songs that never got airplay on this side of Lake Erie. It seemed there must have been some minor fandom in Clevelandia, because we're still on the tour circuit for the likes of Sloan and the Tragically Hip, no doubt due in part to my generation watching MuchMusic in its glory days. My college roommate had VHS tapes full of old music videos that we would watch on the weekends while doing homework.

I still have a big soft spot for that first Our Lady Peace record. I don't know how many of you besides one even care, but here's a Canada playlist.

 

we call this Friday good

I know the vast majority of my readership comes here for the art nouveau and the college radio tuneage and not my existential digressions on politics and religion, but anyways. It's Good Friday, and that calls for some degree of observance even from lapsed-catholics-turned-bleeding-heart-evangelicalishes like yours truly. My goal tonight is to find a dark church playing old requiems where I can ponder existentially for awhile.

all the love in the world

My sister's having me over for dinner tonight, so I'll get the love of my nephews and hang with the folks and maybe decamp to Algebra or a greasy spoon for some homework time and tea, we'll see. Life is pretty damn good, no need for single awareness days or gross candy or self-indulgent pity. Just big riffs and little babies. I see way too much drama around me to desire anything more than what I've got.

Though I love my misanthropic yearningish tunes. I don't think my inner teenage goth kid will ever grow out of it.

hibernatia

Family functions fun, too much good food, the perfect amount of snark and conversation, lack of sleep now attended to, scares of the hope-they're okay kind at 2 in the morning, a crashed computer at the station meant I probably pissed off my sludge loving listeners with ample medieval chantish spooky noochies Christmas music, playing the same Arvo Part and Anonymous 4 CDs in rotation with a dash of Lanegan and Kristin Hersh, no cars on the road, no one called in. My mom asks why I bother because it's so deserted, but it's always deserted at 5 in the morning there.

No regrets on jettisoning epic travels, I've spent the snowy days drinking tea with neighbors and old friends. I have no need to really go anywhere, the hibernating feels good after the masses of people. I come home, listen to tunes, drink more tea, read, repeat. This is a true vacation. There is peace, and it is good.

christmas music

 Over coffee and super-doomsters Cathedral, we were talking about Christmas music and how most of it sucks, and due to having a more austere approach to the holiday and having already been burned out on winter wonderlands and frosty snowmen and jingle bells and anything involving Santa acting like a CIA spook, especially after several weeks of retail hell in the punkass years.


So my show falls on Christmas morning next week, and while I've always skirted around trying to find holiday music I can stand, (in the past I've always done an annual Joe Strummer tribute show), but this year, I really have to do something a little more of the season. I also have to pick church music for the Sunday before and always debate whether or not I want to go all quasi-medieval and such or play it safe. I also know I'll get no sleep that night, usually opting to duck out of family functions early to get chill at midnight mass in a dark old Clevelandia church with ample amounts of candles.

I really love these songs and their rendition, being all choral and somber in a way that I find missing in the saccharinity of the season. Something about the excess makes me crave more austere sounds. Also, I really hate the Trans-Siberian Orchestra for ruining Carol of the Bells.

My dad had some John Fahey Christmas album that is curiously absent from the interwebs but here's a few clips.

and I've really been loving on this Mark Lanegan Christmas EP. No St. Robert of Dylan schmaltz, no lounge music snake-dance shtick (Scott Weiland you suck). Old-school obscure carols and that voice that Randal so accurately describes as menacing yet inviting. Seriously this is so good that even though I don't listen to much holiday music I've been listening to this obsessively.  Minimal and do I mention that voice again?

So yeah, kind of at a loss otherwise. We had that Harry Simeon Chorale record when I was a kid which I also loved and Catholic neo-troubadour John Michael Talbot's fabulous recordings of old songs with orchestra and boychoir.

And then there's these...

 And then the more absurd...

Randal of course suggested this. 

oh Mike Doughty you scamp

 My aunt had this on a Christmas compilation that also included a song about a dead cat. These chicks are kind of cornball goth, but it's polyphonic and simple so it meets the Duchess' approval.

and of course, because I like spaced out sonics and crushy drone

So my zuckerbookers have weighed in with some I'll definitely be doing (Kristin Hersh, Monster Magnet) and ones probably not so much (nothing affiliated with Colin Meloy or Zooey Deschanel). Your suggestions, of course, are much appreciated.

earthing

The car is 3/4s done, these Clevelandia roads take a toll on frames and inner parts, I got it back from the mechanic, walked the Jungle Puppy, fed the cats, scrounged together some leftovers, called a friend to talk about possibly starting to go to Al-Anon to figure out how to deal with the drunks in my life, and drove out to the east side to get my drone on.

Got a cup of coffee near closing time, drank it outside, ended up talking to Dylan (generally I don't seek out the band, but he was out there, a few others were, and it coalesced naturally) with a couple of college radio people from the community college in the next county over, and found out there were mutual friends, because this world up here is so very small. We made the requisite black metal jokes, discussed the might of the Melvins, and talked radio business about the FCC.

The first opener was half the headliner playing chilled out bass and mellotron jazzness, Eagle Twin was heavy and more compelling live than on online clips, oodles guitar hero riffage, propulsive drumming, and lyrics referencing a whole lot of literature that made for a satisfying set.

Earth is a slow-burning thing, watching the interplay of keyboard/trombone, basslines and ringing chords, and the deliberate drumming (sadly no cello this time, probably would have dissolved into emotional sappitude if it was there). Reflective Powers have led to earplug wearing which was good because everything was loud, and clear even through the foam. By the end of the night I was sleepy and lost in the sounds, resting my tired legs on a chair in the corner since most people in this town work early and were starting to disperse.

Maybe it's the socialness that nicotine engenders, the small turnout, or something in the crisp November air, but despite the introverted music, it was a friendly crowd, or maybe I was more social because I was there alone and so were others who drove from other rusty environs to congregate in the meditative sounds, but people were mingling and talking in ways that I don't always see at shows. I don't have the idealistic view of music bringing people together, but there was something nice about watching some good tunes with some nice folks that felt really good in the middle of a long week...

spooky noochies

Not as into the Hallow's Eve as much as others, surprising given the melancholic persuasion. Not so much into the macabre, I guess, which makes me no fun on movie night sometimes for not being so much into cinematic excursions like Cannibal Holocaust, though we did watch the following and I enjoyed it immensely and was glad that my CD player worked well enough to drive home through the dark streets listening to choice cuts off Bloody Kisses.

It's been a straunge week, what with these storms and the dark streets, the breakdowns in communication and the kafkaesque absurdity of human resourcing and Infernal Papers of Doom. Thinking of The Children means the postponement of trick-or-treating til the weekend especially since there still isn't electricity at church and therefore no way to see much inside. My lights are back on and there's some feline lurking in my stairwell meowing back and forth with my cat, not sure what the story is there.

Never liked a lot of horror outside the Hawthorne/Poe/Gorey some bits of Calvino and mythology and folklore, preferring spooky to slashy. Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan ghost stories from old Japan are highly recommended, as is anything having to do with Baba Yaga. That being said, swank art redux:

 And for those who prefer to call it Reformation Day, you can insult scurvy popery like Martin Luther who had a potty mouth indeed.

Also, tuneage.

scary monsters and super creeps

While the east coast prepares for the storm of doom, we just get a lot of rain, and I was running through the West Side Market Friday night a few minutes to closing time in search of a bag of sweet potatoes and some cilantro. Hung out at the usual spot with the usual suspects talking music and sundry geekery, listening to punk 45s. Kids were running around and playing with balloons among aisles full of records and CDs covered with ersatz cobwebs.

Helped decorate for the big radio station party we throw every year with a night of free tunes and general revelry. Did lots of random finishing-touch kind of stuff, last-minute runs for art supplies and lighting and rock band tour rider items, by the time we were finished, it was time to start, and I didn't bother wearing a costume, just the flannel shirt and the black leather jacket, no makeup, nothing weird. A few people said something to me but they were drunk anyway.

The people-watching was of course fabulous, I had to wonder if some people are just really like this all the time or if they were just playing up that other part of their nature. Not as many unoriginal skanks as a Kent Halloween, a few of the local creepers, enough people I knew that I could mingle freely as both Glenn Danzig and Beavis shilled for votes.

And The Avengers sounded great. I'm a huge sucker for female-fronted punk rock though after taking a hit to the sternum by some crusties, I got out of the pit area after four songs, being too old for this kind of thing. 

The end of the night, we were caffeinated and some of us were buzzed, plans to go nighthawking at the diner down the street deemed irrelevant with the presence of leftover pizza, swank soda, and booze. Conversations about the existence of God, colonialism in Africa, and life, the universe, and everything ensued that kept us laughing and loud until 4am in the dark theater.

And now the daily grind, and bailing my sister out of her apartment situation so that she's not stuck living with some real jerks, and wondering what to do if we've got Halloween shindigs planned for The Kids and the city's decided to cancel it. I fell asleep in class today, but there was so much good time with good people that I'm still buzzed on all the love.

color and sound part 2

No high school reunion for yours truly, no wine bar and appetizers, none of my slacker friends were there if the photos were any indication. Instead I had dinner with the folks and extended family and went down to the radio station to play two hours of riffage. Usually the audience is too busy toking and/or driving to call in and request anything, but there were a lot of listeners online, including France and Germany, and a few people called in to know what I was playing, which is always kind of gratifying. The following's what I remember, though not in this order.

 

 

 

 Drove out to meet up with some of the garden folk for some unknown factor free show involving a Chi-town metal band with violinists at a social hall in Slavic Village. Walked in to behold a fog machine, sundry flashing colored lights, a rendition of "Raining Blood" performed by two ladies in leather on electric violin playing to a crowd of senior citizens in white plastic lawn chairs clutching glowsticks. I wish I had my camera to document this, but having been on the run all day, that didn't happen.

It might be the only show I've ever been to where the definitive opening riff eliciting little response, and after its conclusion the audience clapped as hard as they did for Vivaldi and a similar rendition of Metallica's "One." It was surreal to say the least, but I found the best acoustics were just outside the door at the fire pit where I ended up chilling with the other band members and a nanny and some other sundry folk.

The next morning, we had a full band and as the sun came through the windows and it felt so good to just play guitar and not have to sing, to noodle around and lock in with a fabulous drummer and one of my favorite bassists, thankful for the artistic freedom in a liturgical setting to send out waves of Gibson SG reverberations through my beloved 1950s tube amp.  The Queen of the Bondo was in the mood for a cemetery jaunt as was I, so we went over there for the afternoon a few hours after Randal as it turns out, though we detoured through East Cleveland past storefronts selling insecticide and hymnals and the abandoned observatory once visited in an earlier dumber time before the blossoming of Reflective Powers. While everything inside was intact upon our clandestine entry a few years back, now the copper's been stripped off the domes and doubtless the green marble and the chandeliers are long gone too...

The cemetery's lovely pretty much all the time, the colors came damn close to stealing the show from the gorgeous monuments and angels. When the sun broke through the clouds, it was dazzling, all the orange and yellow, multiple colors on each leaf. We parked by the chapel and wandered up to the Garfield monument, up and down the hills out to where the more recent mausoleums for former sports team owners were that she referred to as the "exurbs of the dead," with their water sprinklers and long paths and bland richness. Still, one couldn't ask for a more perfect day to get the inner goth kid on. 

 

his little black book.

I loved art class as a kid, and that was the one nice thing about that freshman year of high school hell was having an 80 minute block to work in projects with a teacher who gave us assignments that were cool enough that I saved almost all the pieces I did that year, even if in a moment of post-Columbine  paranoia she sent me to the guidance counselor due to my antisocial tendencies, strange musical preferences, morbid subject matter, and the cat scratches on my arm that were obviously a cry for help/suicide attempt.

Still, that classroom was a refuge, because I could lose myself for an hour and a half, experimenting with india ink and forging a lifelong brand loyalty to Prismacolor pencils (used heavily on black paper of course), a love of carving linocuts, and having way too much fun with scratchboard, which is what these remind me of.

The process involved staining the pages of vellum black and then painting over them, which hasn't always aged too well, but looks swanky nonetheless and is a nice stylistic change from the usual. 


Images courtesy of Tumblr via the Morgan Library...

These last three are from a facsimile of the one owned by Charles the Bold.

hanging gardens

Police cars in front of the house up the street, an alternate route taken past beautiful Victorians and the coffeeshop where the Albanians hang out, and I admire everyone else's balcony plantings, the sunflowers in 5-gallon buckets and scraggly tomato plants entangling the ironwork, the sweet potato vines dangling over, Babylon this is not, but it'd be nice to have some wonders of the world.

I talk to my mom about gardens and work, and my dad's going in for some kind of crazy heart surgery so he doesn't get clots and die, and then I talk to my dad and we have our camaraderie of rock and roll and God and gleeful morbidness, this is where it all comes from, and I say I want him around as long as possible and he says that won't be all that long. I know it's the truth, and that nothing lasts forever, but it's hard to think about.

There's a vigil up the street for Bridget's friend, and a friend of a lot of people in my orbit that I don't know all that well, but it seems he was a wonderful and full of life person, and I walk past the throngs of people I've seen at shows or out and about, connected enough to know faces, but not enough to hug or stand alongside, to where the candles are on the corner, and I don't know what to think or say so I stand there silently and pray for all these grieving souls around me, the friends and family and for the guy who'll go to jail over this, because I don't know what else to do, and it's too close, but not close enough and I don't want to colonize another's grief. I'm not good at this whole thing, and it seems like people around me are losing people they love all too quickly.

One of my friends lost his best friend to cancer a few weeks ago and is still torn up, a lady at my church who'd been in and out of rehab and jail died last night. I didn't know her well, I had her grandkids in my class, and one time she asked me for money and I said I had none, because it's easy to score drugs outside the doors of my place of worship and I didn't want to be responsible for enabling that. I wonder if I was wrong. An award's being handed out today at the place of employment in the memory of someone I really liked and never got to know, whose memory is used to project an ideal that he would have laughed at.  It kills me how inevitable this mortality thing is, how easily it gets used for this or that or the other,  that it costs so much to bury, and that as we get older, the ashes and the bones continue to rattle in our memory.

I walk through the ghost town, this would be my city...

Two huge cups of coffee in front of me, woke up to the dog whimpering last night, I don't know from loneliness or kidney stones, her family comes back today and I've become adept at administering medication through canine teeth but end up opting to sprinkle the contents of the capsules atop the kibbles and bits like sugar on corn flakes. If austerity ever really hits, maybe I can work at a kennel or something. It'll be nice to come home and sleep at my own place.

I think the cat actually misses me, because I hear her crying when I come up the stairs to check on her water and food while I've been gone the last two weeks. I'm sure we'll have a movie night soon because I'm still sleepwalking and while the weekend felt like a vacation, I don't know how I got through grad school taking a full load, working 30 hours a week and still finding time to go see bands every couple days back when such acts came through Clevelandia, Kent, and Akron on a frequent basis.

With the game cancelled, I took the other dog I watched down to the valley where the lush canopy of green filtered the sun like stained glass, the river sparkled, and we ambled through side trails down the side and if I was home more, maybe I'd get a dog, because I kind of like this companionship thing. Having another breathing mammal along for protection and accompaniment, with its drooling adoration for you are the one who pours the water and the food, and takes it on car rides with the windows down, it's something I could get used to.

There's a garden walk even in Clevelandia so me and one of my community garden people end up driving around parts of the west side I've never explored getting inspired by these green spaces created in other almost-hoods, these serene enclaves with spiraling wisteria vines and repurposed scraps as trellises. Her son isn't interested so we drop him off and drive out to the east side with a map that isn't terribly accurate, driving through the parts of the city where my relatives once lived before white flight.

She's not from around her so she has no loaded assumptions or fears of environs like St. Clair, Hough, Superior, and it's been awhile since I've come through these parts now that my friend who used to live down there now lives further down in the hood and would rather come to the west side to see me than have me drive over to his parts where drive-by shootings have escalated more to the occasional mortar round being tossed on someone's lawn.

We drive by a couple of gardens in vacant lots, and I think about all of the data that I pore through at work about the problems of the urban core, one of which was once overcrowding and now there are vacant lots everywhere, and where there are no vacant lots there are so many houses empty, curtains blowing in deglassed windows, crumbling front porches, because not only did white flight decimate these neighborhoods, the people that moved in get out if they can.

But yet, there is a greenhouse on the land of a deconsecrated church in the heart of a forgotten neighborhood, across the street from the Hell's Angels clubhouse, where the vast space has some people from the neighborhood singing soulful acapella renditions of Steely Dan songs and people playing piano in the former sanctuary and chalkboards scrawled with ideals, and the girl who shows us around shows us heating built with adobe for the greenhouses in winter and the former nunnery getting restored to be livable again and it reminds me of some hippie commune or crusty squat but the people were pretty friendly. I think about how I would have been all about this when I was 22 and idealistic and prospects for life were bleak, and I'm glad The Kids still have this energy even if I've more or less sold out to The Man.

I took her through the streets of the old Polish neighborhood, where St. Casimir's just reopened, and where my grandpa's side first settled, where he played tennis and went to dances, where his brother got mugged on East 79th, the house that my dad was born in, the house where one of my best guy friends lived where I'd sleep on his couch beneath the African mud cloth on the wall listening to the Fugees while he got ready.

And then we ended up in Hough, where there were race riots back in the day, and shiny new homes where the streets once burned, and an older lady there shows us and the cops who came through her massive gorgeous garden on a side lot, full of flowers from Alabama and vegetables and I wonder how she does it. We're all talking about what we're growing and I'm finding it kind of surreal that we're all here together with common ground that we otherwise wouldn't have if we weren't connected to the earth that we walk on. I'm also kicking myself for not having a camera with me even though that might have ruined some of these moments.

But I love driving these streets, getting lost in forgotten corners of shuttered factories and crumbling towers, to the amusement of the old men sitting on front porches at these crazy white girls driving through with the windows down and the Screaming Trees on the CD player in the beatup car with the front end taped together. She's of a similar mind, someone who appreciates the grit without romanticism, curious, friendly, and pondering. I feel so thankful that I get to see these places with her and that we're equally willing to explore.

It feels like a coda to to the end of the day when I pick up a former bandmate to go see Agalloch at the Beachland again. I wasn't feeling the opener all that much, but we got two hours of meandering alternately beautiful and heavy tuneage, and while the vocals will never be my thing, the songs hit me in that place I can't explain, those guitars and the bass lines and Aesop's drums. She wasn't as into it, but one of my fellow DJs was there so we enjoyed it together. I guess I'm not the only one who goes alone, there were a lot of solitary folk there. Once again, I wish I had a camera, but at least Randal was there to document a little closer.

Drove back to the house of my friends for one last night to get five hours of sleep, feeling like there were few wasted moments in the past days, and so much strange and surprising beauty.