54 Dunkin' Donuts

There are now 54 Dunkin' Donuts locations within a 5 mile radius of my home. The red pin is for my cardiologist's office.

Dia Beacon

Robert Ryman painting @ Dia Beacon with some random dude.

When I tell people about my visit to Dia Beacon, I am sure to include an amusing anecdote about how I was not sure I was looking at the art or the wall. Because it was so minimalistic.

This I can add to my list of anecdotes I can rely on to fall flat. It is also a totally dishonest about how I feel about art and it plays to the preconceptions I have about other people's ideas about art. I naturally assume people don't like that crap because who does?

But really, you have to say something, right? When you are talking to people? You can't just say, "we went to the museum." And if you enthuse you sound like an idiot too. "We went to the museum and saw the Flavins and it was fantastic!" Nobody wants to talk to that guy.

Well, it turns out tons of people like minimalism. The museum was packed on a beautiful autumn Saturday morning. And I like it too.

Hold Steady / Minutemen

The Hold Steady perform the Minutemen's "History Lesson Pt. 11" in 2008.

What if you encourage your fans to start their own band and your disciples start the Hold Steady?

I like the Hold Steady but am set on edge by their endless celebration/lament of the good old days. The typical Hold Steady song is a story of carousing and rehab set against a musical backdrop that ranges from Thin Lizzy to Bruce Springsteen. I am not surprised by their choice of the Minutemen's little ballad of nostalgic self-deprecation. The history of punk rock is best understood as a personal history of those who experienced it as a first hand fact in their lives. The music and fashion means little without the shared experience of punk rock as a community of outcasts.

Seeing the Hold Steady involves standing in a sea of people in their late twenties to their early forties raising their drinks and partying, egged on by beer saluting of the band. It ain't no punk show. It's a remembrance of a mythical punk show of the past. Are they celebration their own history of dissolution?

At best, the Hold Steady is about survival. You made it through your difficult years. Hoist a beer and give yourself a pat on the back.

Big Bear Bear

Big Bear Bear

New Big Bear Bear items in the shop.

Lincoln Caverns

This door leads to the cave.

Imagine all the things you could be right now if Lincoln Caverns was your mother.

The discovery of both of these caverns was remarkable. The first cavern was discovered in 1931 by road workers dynamiting a hill to build a highway. Pushing a stick of dynamite into a hole drilled in a rock face, they were surprised when the stick fell through the hole. Rather than proceed with caution, they dropped a lit stick of dynamite in and blew the side off a large hillside cavern. The blast revealed a quaint little cave, easily traversed in a half an hour. Opened by the land's owner as "Hi-Way-May" Caverns, the property was soon sold to as Myron Dunleavy, a small time vaudeville, circus and amusement park operator. Dunleavy saw the potential of a roadside attraction that was more than "roadside", it was practically part of the road.

The second cave's 1941 discovery was even darker. Sixteen years old and experiencing the sort of frustration that could not yet be slaked by punk rock and heavy petting, neither of which had yet been invented, teenage caveman Myron Dunleavy Jr., the son of Lincoln Cavern's owner, starts digging into the hills above the original cave. After two solid years of shoveling out a sinkhole, he uncovers the second cavern at the site, naming it "Whispering Rocks". Two years of digging a sinkhole. At age sixteen. And then spending the rest of one's life marketing the hole he had dug into the ground. I heard the rocks whispering "get away while you still can."

Charles Mingus's "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother" shows the opposite end of the burdens of lineage. In his radical reworking of the standard "All The Things That You Are", Mingus propels his jazz combo out to the fringes.

Charles Mingus - All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

Star Wars, Nothing But Star Wars

R2D2 trashcan

My son is finally getting to see Star Wars. As his 6th birthday present. Star Wars, the movie. Uh, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, as he will always know it? Which is the proper entrance, but is not his entrance into the Star Wars property. Primed by the Star Wars Legos video games and various toys and the school yard misinformation, my child already knows the Death Star explodes. He knows Anakin grows up to be Darth Vader. He sees Luke as a one-handed gimp of a hero. As soon as he hears Lord Vader intone "Luke, I am your Father" it is game over. I understand no one's entrée to the world of Star Wars can be as pure as those of us who were blessed with experiencing the original movie as an pure childhood event, miraculously untarnished by the promotional campaign. I will refer to us as the First Generation. Unlike the clarity we experienced, the new entrant is faced with a tangled web of storyline tangled beyond recognition.

Star is now entered into as a multi-generational, multi-threaded morass of characters and events scattered upon an vague time line. This is the way the Star Wars generation entered other adventures, including Star Trek and Lost in Space. But TV shows are ahistorical. There is simply a creation myth and an endless series of repeated adventures, all ending back in the spaceship. History never occurs, nothing ever really happens. Episodes can be viewed in any order and nothing changes. Star Wars is historic and needs to be viewed in sequence.

The biggest loss in all this mess is the primacy of Han Solo is overshadowed by Anakin/Vader, Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda, the characters who endure all the episodes. Han Solo is the decisive character in Star Wars. He is the only one who is capable of independent thought and who can choose his own destiny. All those around him are compelled by their character, their upbringing, their temperaments to choose good or evil. Han is conflicted. He values both self preservation and grudgingly the good of all. He has to balance these two impulses, which is the root of the conflict of man and society. He is also a shoot first, ask questions later badass, or at least he was until Lucas has Greedo shoot first in Star Wars.

First Generation Star Wars fans of the male persuasion had to choose: Han or Luke. Cool guy or good boy. Fonzie or Richie. That is the choice that has been taken away from the youth.

Rockhill Trolley Museum, PA

Rio #1875 built by CTC (Companhia de Transportes Coletivos), Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in situ Rockhill, PA

Is it exotic to be ferried through the center of rural Rockhill, Pennsylvania in a lovingly restored 1912 Brazilian open sided trolley car running along a track previously only serving a pig iron factory? Is it displacing to ride said trolley from an old railway station, through backyards, past a factory floor plan, along side a creek, ending at a state highway, a route no trolley would ever take. On a trolley that would never have run there.

Because no one here seems to blink an eye. For all the cultural noise about placing treasures from foreign lands in context, nothing seems to better than good old stupidifyingly unexplained contrast. When someone says historically accurate or local materials, yawn and scratch at the ground with your foot. What would be worse than riding a trolley on its actual route? Where is the charm of the unfamiliar? Where is the electric jolt of the unfamiliar intruding on the tedious realities of the familiar?
So why all the words on the walls, museums? Why all the "didactics" as my professor used to say? Isn't everything a little out of context anyway? The only art in museums that is "in context" would be the art made for museums. If we are looking at the plundered treasure of an ancient civilization from strong off lands, why not just label it "pirate booty" and leave it at that. Those who care will figure out what it once was and the rest will not be puzzled by what it is.


Robert Smithson cunningly pointed out the displacing effect of museums with his mirror and displaced object works in the late 1960's. This is a piece made for a museum, that incorparates the museum, shows the obects in the museum, includes the viewer in the reflection.

Robert Smithson. (American, 1938-1973). Corner Mirror with Coral. 1969. Mirrors and coral

Prisonshake: The Cut-Out Bin

Prisonshake missed their moment in 1988 and god bless them for that. Right at the critical time when they could have dropped an album (which was not the parlance in 1988) to take the mantel of drunk sloppy rock and roll from The Replacements, they stepped on their own dicks by releasing a box set: CD, LP, cassette, and 7" vinyl all packaged in a green foam stadium seat. By the time they released "The Roaring Third" CD in 1990 their best songs were gone and the moment had passed. And now after a ten year hiatus they come back with what? A double CD. Of course? And it is a brilliantly sloppy collection of rock songs. One that would have cemented their place in the record rack had it been released about twenty years ago. But one that sounds even sweeter today, when it stands alone.

The signature song, the coup de grace, is The Cut-Out Bin. Beginning with an answering machine message (though sadly, not left by or for GG Allin) (could anything be more dated than an answering machine message? Sounds of the telegraph tapping?) the song launches into a melodic mid-tempo corker containing all the truth about rock and roll and Prisonshake's place in it and our place in it.

Lyrically, the song breaks into three distinct sections with three powerful messages:

1. [Back in the day/before songs were numbered/and only bikers and sailors had tattoos/I worked all day, selling records to assholes/and huffing boo/and screwing you.] Has the particular sweet science of record store retailing every been so perfectly characterized? this is the view from the other side of the counter, where that apparently seething self-loathing bastard staring at you lurked.This nostalgic turn concludes with the line [Some say rock and roll has died/and at times like this I wish they were right] So goodbye record store and goodbye records. We have turned our back on the mighty transformative project of rock music.
   
2. [When they bring back the Cut-Out Bin/Save a spot for us right behind the Pretty Things] Did Prisonshake actually look into my record collection before writing this line? There they are in the lineup: ...Powertrane, Pretty Things, Prisonshake, Psychedelic Furs, Q65... Its uncanny how well they know their place in the rock order.
3. [No one gets a twilight to their career anymore/No gets to make mediocre record number 4] Depending on how you slice it, this could be Prisonshake's 4th record. Coincidence?

A more seemingly romantic and unwittingly unaware approach to the record rack came from The Kinks in 1996 with their final released song, To The Bone. [In the back of the record rack/ there's an old double pack/12 inches and black with an old crumbled cover but every track is stacked] The song takes a nose dive into being a pleasant romantic diversion after these towering introductory couplettes, and why shouldn't it? The Kinks had been loading up the Cut-Out Bin since 1973. Still it was nice for them to backhandedly acknowledge the dusty end of their output before packing it in.
Play:
Prisonshake - The Cut-Out Bin

The Kinks - To The Bone


Download:
Prisonshake - The Cut-Out Bin
The Kinks - To The Bone

Wild West City Scenario

Tucked into a a dark building on the main street of the outstanding old-timey Western attraction Wild West City in Netcong, New Jersey, this mechanical wonder depicts in gruesome, twitching detail the travails of frontier life.

Giant Slide at Smith Memorial Playground

Deeply tucked into Philadelphia's Fairmont Park there is a forty five foot long waxed wooden slide. Built in 1904, the slide is the last remnant of the old attractions at the recently revamped playground next to the Smith Memorial Playhouse.

People have probably broken a lot of bones on this thing. Riding down it on your burlap sack is like sliding down a bowling alley with children at the bottom instead of pins.

Bushkill Falls

Bushkill Falls postcard showing catwalks

Bushkill Falls (the Niagara of Pennsylvania) (not to be confused with the Niagara of New Jersey)was crawling with people on an August Sunday. Crowded like no roadside attraction has a right to be.

The eight waterfalls of that make up the Bushkill Falls attraction are scaffolded with catwalks. Encased in trails. Stairs disappear into impossible gorges. Streams are spanned by bridges that dead end into walls of rock. No vantage point or vista is unreachable from this elaborate set of rustic, log hewn walkways. A family, lost on the labyrinthine trails for "over an hour" asks me for directions but I can see in their eyes that they have lost all hope of finding the exit ramp.

Contained, edited, sublime. This is nature perfected by man.

Olaf Eliasson Waterfalls of NYC Tour

Olaf Eliasson's Waterfalls on the East river of New York is most similar to an industrial waterfall. Like the one in Paterson, New Jersey. Not overwhelming, in the way a natural waterfall can be. Not really overwhelming the way an art installation can be, either.

Best seen from a tour boat. Proximity, a key to waterfall viewing, is not allowed. They were no Gullfoss. You can't get your feet wet.

Ginger Strand's Inventing Niagara covers all the major components of waterfall management: building tourist traps, altering the landscape to accommodate throngs of people, sending weird things over the falls, and polluting.

Penn's Cave

Penn's Cave: Rocks, Underground

The quality of a "tourist cave" (a term I swear I am not making up) depends up its quality of the morphization of its rocks by the tour guides. The proper guide can conjure up all manner of fairies, demons and food from the minerals. Penn's Cave is home to piles of rock looking vaguely like the Statue of Liberty, a Nittany Lion, bacon (a pereniel favorite), the Pope, and other tasty morsels. Or so said the tour guide. To me, they looked like rocks. Can't they just be rocks? All representation is morphic. You have to see the duck in flat line shape and color to "get" a picture of a duck. It's magical.

Did Clyfford Still's abstract paintings, often characterized as "cave-like" suffer through double morphization? Is that brushstroke a dog represented by rock formation?

Penn's cave is navigated in a long narrow boat, six of which are floating through the cave at any given time. The boat goes through the narrow, winding series of rooms and passages, then out a hole blasted through the hillside, into a man made lake. You edge by some ducks and the dam, which backs up the natural stream that fills the cave half full of water. Penn's cave, when discovered, had a stream flowing through it. Now it has a lake in it, thus making it : "Penn's Cave - America's Only All Water Cavern and Wildlife Park".

Scott Morgan's Powertrane @ Maxwell's

I did not like Scott Morgan during my formative years (say between 16 and 36 years old) and it was chiefly due to his beret. And his seemingly tenuous connection to Detroit Rock glory years. In the 80's and 90's it was correctly assumed that anything that occurred after the first three Stooges and MC5 albums in the Detroit rock scene was busted.

But maybe it was just buried under the berets. Or unavailable, or unimaginable. The Bob Seger System lps were long out of print and Seger was embarrassing himself at that time. The Sonic Rendezvous Band squeezed off one great song and disappeared. Nothing else about them was known. The Rationals were unknown. Scott Morgan's two eighties albums suffered from eighties production and lack luster side men.

Fortunately, our current age of transparency has exposed all lost recordings. Scott Morgan, who has suffered from the neglect of the ages, has reemerged with recent work, that while not spotless, has been as strong and varied. He has released soul albums with The Solution, rock albums with Powertrane, rock albums with the Hydromatics and guested on rock songs with the Hellacopters. Maybe strong but not so varied.

The Powertrane featuring Scott Morgan with special guest Deniz Tek performance at Maxwell's was poory attended, at times sloppy, a little creaky. The drummer is fine straight up rock but can't find a soul groove. A couple songs chosen were not the strongest, especially as the band has transitioned from the Sonic's Rendezvous Band material that has floated many of Scott's recent efforts into newer material. Lyrics were being forgotten.

But by the end, the three guitar attack of Robert Gillespie, Deniz Tek and Scott Morgan was absolutely in sync and roaring. It was pure noise: unhip, out of step and complete true to its uncompromising rock roots.

Powertrane- Mixed Up Shook Up World

Canned Hamm "Father and Son"

Let's take a moment to salute the end of an era. At the end of this month my Father will be retiring, leaving my brother, his Son, alone at the helm of the Howell Sears store.

Okay, done.

Rye Playland

The Whip at Rye Playland has a surprising violence. I have always considered the Whip to be a quintessential date ride. Tucked into a rolling love seat, the fairer sex is gently nudged into the protective underarm and side of the gentleman. Centrifical force is employed as an aid to increasing affection. Next stop, Tunnel of Love. The Whip at Knoebel's Grove and at Kennywood are prime examples of the amorous Whip.

The Whip at Rye Playland has other intentions. It attempts to destroy you. It attempts to use your body as a Kudgel to break your date into smaller pieces. It is the antithesis of love.

Pre-war amusement rides use a series of body blows to rough you up. More modern fare aims higher, causing severe head aches and sore necks.

Other violent older rides of note:
The Wild Mouse at Blackpool Pleasure Beach
The Hi Speed Thrill Coaster at Knoebel's Grove

Great Falls Paterson NJ

Have now visited a couple waterfalls around New Jersey. In Michigan, we didn't have waterfalls. Just "rapids." Nothing you couldn't guide a canoe through. Which reminds me that on my many visits to "Grand Rapids" Michigan, I never saw any such thing. Just saw a lot of disaffected white kids hanging around some crappy hotdog stand. In Philadelphia, I lived in "East Falls." No falls. Snuffed out long ago.

So, behold! The power of nature! Man's insignificance! The ever changing world! All that! Paterson uses abandoned industry as a place setting for its Falls. The American side of Niagara Falls without the Canadian side. A number of people sleeping, mid weekday, by the banks of the river.

Even I am not that lazy.

Seven Second Delay House Party

WFMU's Uncle Andy and Uncle Ken threw a house party. Above the door buzzer: "Lonely Hippie Party." This was not false advertising.

Irving is interviewed about 5 minutes in. I just missed: they went by age, and at 39, I was next in line when the show ended. Irving also scored the pinata and ate his own weight in cookies.

I love WFMU but this may have broken a standing rule against fraternizing with the enemy, or in my case fraternizing with the same side I am on. Fraternizing with my fraternity? The rule, when summarized, goes like this: Don't make friends with people based on their likes and dislikes. This rule has kept me from: donning the embroidered satin jacket of the American (Roller) Coaster Enthusiast club, attending Cheap Trick's Trickfest conventions, meeting any other Stay At Home Dads and in general prevented me from having any worthwhile conversations for the past seven years. And good riddance! What do I want with meeting a bunch of (like minded) comedy geeks (friends)!

Listen here. Or in the pop up player.

Chris Burden "What My Dad Gave Me"

Chris Burden may be well known for:

1. Having someone shoot him for a performance piece called "Shoot".

2. Creating the single greatest ever work of art, a dangling ton of rock and model train track called "Medusa's Head". This fact was confirmed by the independent critical analysis by myself and my brother Tim. Both analyses included the exclamation "Dude!"


Chris Burden pays homage to his engineer father with the title of his six story high erector set skyscraper. It stands near and echoes the shape of Rockefeller Center. I took young Irving way out of the way to see it, carrying him on my back across Midtown like a Silverback Ape. I got a little choked up telling him what the sculpture was called. We thought it was really cool and he asked if he could get build a smaller version of it with his own Erector set.



Thank you again, Chris Burden.

Mike Schmidt: The 40 year Old Boy Podcast

Mike Schmidt, unnecessarily angry comedian

We are undergoing what I would like to call the Third Golden Age of Comedy without defining the first two Golden Ages (maybe the "sick comedians of the 1960's- Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, etc and the everywhere a brick wall and a microphone boom of the 1980's) Please try to enjoy this Comedy Renaissance festival. The shear volume of great stand-up comedy going on right now may be unequaled. Todd Barry, Maria Bamford, Brian Regan, Patton Oswalt, The Sklar Brothers, an on and on.

The podcast format would seem to be perfect for comedy. Most ventures into it seem to be doing radio imitations or are poorly produced panel discussions. Of those to leap above the fray, Jimmy Pardo's Never Not Funny, which is kept on the rails by Pardo's unrelenting focus on comedic quality, and Mike Schmidt's The 40 Year Old Boy.

Schmidt approaches his podcast as a roughly 45 minute monologue- no guests, no music bed, just mano on microphono. He is a motormouth, spitting more words in a podcast than I utter in a week. He is unflinching honest, disturbingly so. Many of his topics can be boiled down to "Am I a good guy?" and frequently the answer is, not so much. He is your asshole friend, tons of fun but embarrassing in equal amounts.

David Byrne "Playing The Building"

Dropped in on David Byrne's Playing The Building installation in the old Battery Maritime Building in NYC on Saturday. There was plenty of stroller parking. It was free and we slogged over despite 100 degree heat that kept no one away. What this David Byrne fellow up to? Something ironic yet genuine? Arty but not alienating?

Intriguing concept- rigging up a building to an old organ to make it "play". Pipes become FLUTES. Radiators become CLANKY THINGS. Columns become metal things. Something somewhere becomes a LOUD ENGINE SOUND.

Listened to a endless line of hipsters play the same song on the building. All sounds from homemade instruments fall into three catagories: "tweet!", "thud!" and "crash!" also "ping!"

American Hamburger Club

"Drunk on the kind of applause / That gets louder the lower you sink"
Mark Eitzel with American Music Club from "Gratitude Walks"

The new Neil Hamburger ...Sings Country Greats mixes comedic country songs with a few covers, John Entwistle's suicidal "Thinkin' It Over" and American Music Club's "The Hula Maiden". While I could see Hamburger having a few solo Who 8 tracks piled up by his console stereo, his selection of "The Hula Maiden" shows a certain amount of self awareness. He admits he is not actually a just a struggling comedian doing a country album in a jokey "I can't sing" sing-song style but that he is a guy who could and would select and sing an obscure indie rock number from a very obscure release from quite a number of years back. This may be the first instance of Hamburger winking at the audience. We now know that he is also "in on the joke."

Neil Hamburger's lifetime of misery illuminates the song from the inside, it also submarines the Mark Eitzel sad clown image in a way that all the funny lyrics Eitzel has written couldn't do. But do we want Eitzel to remain a person and Hamburger a character? Can Neil Hamburger be taken solely as a humorous creation? I think a certain amount of empathy has to be formed. Aren't we rooting for him to pull it together and become a successful comedian? Because he can't sink any lower than he has.

Neil Hamburger also sounds a lot like Doc Dart throughout this disc and the more melodic leanings of the Crucifuck's Wisconsin album- a masterpiece. Doc Dart (nie 26) sings country greats is a concept I could get behind.

Neil Hamburger - The Hula Maiden mp3