Jerks

I know I haven't been a very good blogger lately. I'm sorry. I'll have some stuff soon.

Today I was emptying the food waste into the yard waste bin and I noticed that one of the young families that frequently park in the neighborhood to go to the zoo had left us a little present in Nancy's beautiful garden:

Two dirty diapers.

Thanks a lot, assholes.

Taking Away Their Toys

I'll just pretend to post this here for the benefit of my readers (uh-huh) who don't read Slog, and not because I'm blowing my own horn again.

You may have heard about the recent NPR broadcast about the little boy who wants to play with dolls and wear pink, whose parents, on the advice of his psychiatrist, have taken a harsh approach to making him behave like a proper little boy and stop with this horrible fag nonsense. It's a heartbreaking story. Dan Savage Slogged it, and as usual I had to comment. My comment was adjudged to be good enough to get another Slog front page. Of course, I'm chuffed, but I also think it bears repeating. I'm proud of what I wrote:

Look, people. The boy isn’t asking to go in and have his willie chopped off. He wants to play with dolls. He wants to identify as a girl for a while. That doesn’t mean that he going to be transgendered when he grows up. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Why don’t you deal with that when it comes up—or maybe let HIM deal with it? Then?

Nobody has to make a final, permanent, irrevocable decision when they’re six.

In the meantime, though, torturing him by taking away his toys and, most importantly, implanting in his mind the idea that WHO HE IS IS WRONG, is a really, really bad idea.

Nobody cares if you’re squicked out by gender reassignment surgery. Nobody cares. This isn’t ABOUT gender reassignment surgery. It’s about a little boy who is being turned against himself.

And, really, even if you think the surgery is “as bad as plastic surgery”, the correct response is—as always—”then don’t have it.” Adults who think it’s right for them have the right to have it EVEN IF THEY’RE WRONG. Even if they’re “making a terrible mistake.” It’s none of your damn business. And, you know, there is a large number of people for whom it absolutely WAS the right decision, and if they squick you out, it’s your damn loss, not theirs. I don’t have a problem with it, and I embrace my transgendered friends every bit as much as my gay and straight ones.

But that’s nothing to do with this tragic little boy. Maybe it will be someday. You don’t know, I don’t know, Dr. Mengele there doesn’t know, HE doesn’t know. He’s a little kid. Let him play with his toys.

I didn't say it there, but I'll say it here: if bullies beat up your kid, and you side with the bullies, I don't understand you at all.

Photo of pink child's coffins (by Maurycy Gomulicki) swiped from Pingmag.

They're On To Me

How do they know? It hasn't even happened yet. Way to rub it in, guys. Jeez.

No, I'm not going to send it in!

To top it off, Julio Franco, who was long the only major-league baseball player older than me, retired from professional baseball the other day. He was playing for the Quintana Roo Tigers in the Mexican league, which doesn't count; but last year, in September, he was with the Atlanta Braves, which does. You're not old as long as at least one guy older than you is still playing. Franco was that player for four blessed years, ever since Jesse Orosco hung 'em up in 2003. Thanks, Julio!

Bullshit!

Yes, it's sticking. Yes, we (and a hundred other families) have a giant yard sale tomorrow covering hundreds of blocks.

Snow on April 17th is BULLSHIT!

Boston ball grounds - 1912 (panorama #3), 9/28/12 (LOC)

Boston ball grounds - 1912 (panorama #3), 9/28/12 (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

This is part of a panoramic series of pictures of brand-new Fenway Park in Boston in 1912. It's from a glass-plate negative taken by an unidentified photographer for the Bain News Service -- possibly George Grantham Bain himself, I wouldn't know. The Library of Congress has it up on their Flickr page.

This particular view shows the left field bleachers, the little jog next to them, and the famous Green Monster, the biggest wall in baseball, in the days before it was green; it's covered with advertisements.

The bizarre thing about this is the six or seven rows of seats in front of the wall. These must have been insanely dangerous, being closer than 300 feet to the plate (the wall is 304 feet, whatever lie the Red Sox are telling these days), and well within right-handed line drive range.

I'm guessing that's why these seats were removed. I've never seen or heard of them before. Left field at Fenway in front of the wall is famous not for seats but for "Duffy's Cliff", a slope of grass running up to the wall, an unprecedented (and never repeated) ballpark feature that confused and tumbled opposing fielders until 1934 when it was leveled. Duffy Lewis, the master of climbing this mountain, was the left side of Boston's incredible outfield of the teens.

There's a shot of his centerfielder Tris Speaker right after this in the series; Speaker is seriously on the short list of possibly greatest players ever -- a hitter comparable to Ty Cobb, and arguably the greatest defensive centerfielder ever (though I'll argue for Gary Pettis, a player I've actually seen).

There's no better place to watch a baseball game than Fenway Park. I know Safeco Field and all the modern parks have the brick and retro gewgaws that make numbskull traditionalists swoon, plus all the modern amenities like adequate toilets and edible food (or so they claim), but there's nothing like sitting in a hundred-year-old park and seeing the mound that Babe Ruth pitched off of and the grass Speaker and Ted Williams patrolled.

Unlike modern stadiums, the "rake" or angle of the stands is sharp, which raises the fans up but keeps them close. The views at Fenway are incomparable; you simply cannot get that close in a modern ballpark. For comparison, the closest row of seats in New Comiskey ballpark in Chicago is further away from the action than the furthest row at Old Comiskey, built in the same era as Fenway here.

On the downside, all the seats in the right field stands face not towards the plate but towards the field, resulting in about 10,000 cricks in 10,000 necks on a typical day, but hey, you can't have everything. The atmosphere is worth it.

Muscat Grapes Are Here!

My favorite table grapes are finally in stores. Yeah, yeah, they grow them in Chile or someplace and fly them here, but I don't care. They're sweeter and richer than regular grapes, with a honey-flower-citrus ping that I can't get enough of.

These are the same grapes they make Moscatel from, along with loads of other varieties, usually sweet. Asti sparkling wines from Italy are made from muscat grapes. I like 'em right off the stem. Check your supermarket.

A Fenny For Your Thoughts

I like booze. It's no secret. Love the stuff, and I've tried everything. When I go places I try to find exotic liquors, like the bottle of Suze (a gentian-and-vanilla flavored aperitif) I brought home from Paris, or the Xtabentun (Mayan honey-and-anise liquor) I enjoyed in Mexico.

Today I discovered a new one, from Goa in India. It's called Fenny, or Feni, and it's distilled from the cashew apple.


The cashew apple, as I also discovered today on Slog, is a false fruit that grows behind the true fruit (which bears the seed, or cashew nut as it's called) of the cashew tree.

I've never seen or heard of it before, and I'm quite certain it's never been sold in this God-forsaken state with its repressive licensing laws and state liquor stores. I don't understand why the State of Washington is in the retail business, selling me booze, and telling me what kinds I'm allowed to have and what days I can buy it on; or why the only place within a mile of where I'm sitting that can sell me ANYTHING stronger than beer or wine closes in FIVE MINUTES. Hmm, perhaps that's a rant for another day.

While poking around the web, though, looking for an online seller (whose deliveries would be illegal but unlikely to be traced or stopped) I did discover this Indian exporter, who praises his "Fantasy" brand Fenny with the words "it has been designed to manulise your string of ecstasy" and "you will find it hard to resist howling in to one now and then." Which is exactly what I like to hear.

"Howling into one" doesn't make any sense, but it's the best description of what happens to me and a bottle of 40-proof I've ever heard.

Tickets to Goa are out of my price range. If this was a perfect world, someone would tell me in the comments where I can order this stuff online. I won't hold my breath.

Doing My Part For Global Warming

This afternoon I headed out to the store to get tonight's dinner, and while I was out I decided to sneak into Epilogue Books in Ballard on the way. So I pulled over, put 'er in Park, and hopped out. Epilogue Books was closed. Everything is closed; it's Easter Sunday.

On the way back to the car, cursing Christianity, I reached for my keys. Not there. When I got to the car, I saw them dangling from the ignition. I bent down; yes, the engine was still running. That's a photograph of them up there.

My spare key is in my wallet. I patted my ass; no wallet. No cell phone. The only thing in any of my pockets was a single dirty sock, red.

I know you think that the life of Fnarf must be one of unceasing glamor and fascination, but the reality is this: standing on the corner in the pouring rain, locked out of my running car, penniless and brainless; nothing but the suddenly inadequate jacket on my back.

No coathangers happened to be lying around, but I did spy a chunk of brick in the entry of a nearby building. I could break out my own window! But if someone saw me, how would I prove the car was mine without identification? How would I avoid an expensive ticket for driving without a license?

I walked home. It took me about half an hour, up and over the hill. When I got home, I had a brief meltdown when I couldn't find my wallet there either; could I have locked it in the car? My mental fog was so thick I couldn't rule it out. But no, there it was; but of course no key was inside. Do I even have a spare key? How would I know, I don't have enough brainpower to turn my goddamn car off when I park! I couldn't find my cell phone either (still haven't).

Nancy drove me back down there, and sat patiently with me while I phoned Triple-A with her phone, and we waited for over an hour for the guy in the truck to show up. He had it open in less than five seconds.

Colors

Ochres, at Jumped Up Creek, Northern Territory, Australia (from the book).

• Victoria Finlay. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. 2004 [2002].

I admit the recent trend towards narrow single-topic histories has struck a resounding chord within me. You know what I mean -- books like Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Salt: A World History, and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. These books are like core samples taken at an oblique angle through our world, revealing angles and facets you would never imagine. Now Victoria Finlay has written one. Well, by "now", I mean I've just found it, but since this blog is all about me, I'm going to pretend it's new.

And it is new to me: I know a little art history, not too much, but I've never thought much about the technology of paint. I knew that some of them had funny names, like "burnt sienna" and "carmine lake", but I never thought about what they meant, or what the connection is between what artists do now and what they have done for millennia. Lately, as I've been thinking about aboriginal Australian art, a modern art but also the oldest art tradition on earth, the question of materials starts to appear, and I found this book fascinating.

One story that's not in here, but has echoes in the slapdash work of eighteenth-century British painter Joshua Reynolds, which is, is that of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. I'd heard how in the forties and fifties he would dash out and buy the cheapest, nastiest paint at Woolworth's, and that now, many of these paintings had faded into uniform browns that, despite the oohs and ahs of some modern viewers, didn't reflect the color glow that he originally had in mind.

Reynolds did the same sort of thing, as told here: he used megilp, a combination of mastic (an evergreen resin) and linseed oil, to give some of his paintings a golden glow that was supposed to evoke the Old Masters, but which has darkened and degraded to the point where people now mistake it for a presage of the Impressionists.

That's just one of the stories in the "Orange" chapter. The entire spectrum is represented here, and the entire history of art, from the first ochre daubs in Australia up to modernists using acrylics colored with artificial dyes made from coal tar.

Given my recent interest, the Australian chapter, the first in the book, was the most interesting to me. Findlay traveled to the Australian outback, including some normally off-limits areas of Arnhem Land in Northern Territory, to see the traditional styles, which are still practiced. Australian rock painting forms an unbroken tradition up as long as 35,000 years in some places, but many of the sites are not historical; they are palimsests, with new paint applied every year, and on many of them you can trace a clear stylistic history all the way to the present day.

This is the question that's been driving me crazy lately, though it's mostly not in this book: how did Australian aborigines arrive at modern art without knowing anything about modern art, without working through the Western tradition that became modern art? Because aboriginal art is emphatically not primitive art, even when it's in a traditional mode, and it transferred seamlessly into a modernist idiom when acrylic paints arrived.

Traditional Australian art is done on rock with ochre. Ochre isn't a single substance, but a range of brown, red, yellow rocks that crumble easily and have the plasticity and easy drawing stroke needed to paint with directly. You just pick up the rock and rub; or you grind it up, and make a paint, or take it in your mouth and spray over a stencil, such as your hand -- a technique used by the Mayans in Central America as well as the Australians. Ochres are found on every continent, but their most developed use is in Australia. Traditional painting is done on bark as well, and much of this work is modern (though in a traditional vein) -- because barks, and canvases, can be carried away by paying customers.

The process by which the aboriginal peoples were introduced to the possibilities of commercial art, and modern materials, like most dealings between the whites and aborigines, is immensely painful to read. The most horrific story, and an act of cultural and artistic vandalism as brutal as the destruction of the enormous Buddhas at Bamiyan, Afghanistan by the Taliban, is the story of the Honey Ant Dreaming at Papunya, in the central desert west of Alice Springs. There, a white man named Geoffrey Bardon taught the locals how to use acrylics, and how, haltingly at first, to find and express their own voice while still using the language of their tribe and ancestors. It is in cultural collisions like this that the modern world is invented.

The elders of the tribe took this new possibility and offered to paint one of their Dreamings on the concrete wall of the school. This was momentous: never before had the black men used the white tools to tell their story, on an equal footing: for the white man to see, but with equal meaning for the black men. The first version of this painting, the Honey Ant Dreaming, was after its completion deemed by the elders to be too revealing; too many secrets were shown. They painted it again. This time, Geoffrey Bardon said no, it has too much of the whitefella in it. They painted it again.

It was probably the first time that symbols had been deliberately swapped in order to show the "blanket" and yet keep the secretes that lay beneath it. In a way it marked the beginning of these dispossessed people finding a way of representing what was esoteric by something that was exoteric -- something that was hidden by something that could be shown.

It was an amazing act of generosity for these men to paint their Dreaming -- the representation of their layered system of knowledge -- on the walls of a whitefellow building, Bardon said. "But few people really appreciated it. Nobody cared what they were doing." In those days he used to joke that with the industrial-strength glue he had provided to bind the colored poster paint, the Honey Ant Dreaming would last a thousand years. But it didn't, it lasted only until 1974, when a maintenance man, on someone's orders, painted over it with acrylics. If it existed today it would be one of Australia's greatest works of art.

In addition to destroying their masterpiece, the whitefellow overlords started to steal their money, taking the proceeds from sales back in Alice Springs before the artists could get their hands on it.

Not every story in this book breaks your heart. Some of it is just weird, like the manufacture of carmine red from crushed cochineal insects living on a particular Mexican cactus; some of it is exciting, like the discovery of the secret of Chinese celadon in sealed-off caves. Saffron yellow, from the stamens of flowers, was once a mainstay of Spanish agriculture, but is now mostly grown in Iran. Findlay visited the fields there, and she went to Afghanistan, where she saw the Bamiyan Buddhas and visited the lapis lazuli mines, still today the source of almost all of this beautiful blue stone, which is ground into ultramarine pigment. Along the way we meet Antonio Stradivari and Michelangelo, shell-divers in Mexico and Lebanon (for their purple), indigo farmers and the stained glass masters who worked in the great medieval cathedrals of Europe.

I'm a bit obsessed with the Australian chapter, but it's a small part of the book. The entire history of art is in here, in terms of the materials they used. It's beautifully written, and works as art history, cultural history, history of technology, and travelogue. I loved it.

The Sound of Young Huddersfield

• Simon Armitage. All Points North. London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1998].

One can't read pop books all the time. A book I'd bought online after returning from England last fall, but which only arrived in the mail recently (via the slow boat from England), was this little oddball. It's a highlight of the short shelf of (semi) recent books about the North. It's illustrated on the cover by a Martin Parr photograph of an old couple sitting glumly in a cafe, which pretty much sums up my aesthetic worldview. If there were a thousand of these books, I'd read them all. Sadly, there are not.

All Points North (from which this post's title was stolen) is more phlegmatic, more impressionistic than the partisan enthusiasms of John Grundy's Northern Pride: The Very Best of Northern Architecture or Stuart Maconie's seven-eighths-brilliant Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. It's about the author's life in insular Yorkshire, starting in Huddersfield and then in a widening ring as he discovers the world. The book thumps with exciting (to me) placenames: Staithes, Emley Moor, Elland, Keighley, Crimble Clough, Ravenscar, Scisset, Penistone, Marsden, Bridlington, eventually across rivers and ranges to places like Rochdale, Manchester, Grimsby, and London.

Armitage is a poet by trade, and has a deep demotic feel for his native region -- which is a bit of a trademark of Northerners; they feel place more acutely than soft southerners, or suburban Americans for that matter. There sure aren't any books like this about my suburbs.

He not only has a good eye for the landscape of trains, motorways, stone walls, terraces, probation offices, and so on, but a keen awareness of the humorous truth of Northern cliche: the grimness, the self-deprecation, the amusing stupidities, the embarrassment, the attitude, the bitter wit. We get amateur theatrics, quail fighting, Alan Bennett, and this: "Inside the building, above the taps, there's a notice saying PLEASE DO NOT WASH FOOTWEAR IN THESE SINKS, signed by the Chief Technical Officer of Ryedale District Council, and above the hand-dryer there's a plaque commemorating the 1989 Loo of the Year Award, presented to Helmsley car park." That's the Britain I love most.

On John Peel:

His comments and quips and mumblings were just as important as the music, as were his technical hitches, which included playing at least two records per night at the wrong speed, and talking at great length about somebody's new single before playing the B-side. Such cock-ups usually ended in Peel apologizing through a burst of laughter as he dragged the needle across the vinyl and flipped the record over, or cranked the turntable up to the right speed. I still can't listen to the twelve-inch version of Atmosphere by Joy Division without anticipating the moment when Ian Curtis changes gear from 33⅓ to 45 r.p.m., about three seconds into the opening line.

At Headingley, watching cricket:

viii) Some bright spark on the Western Terrace shouting, 'I'm Spartacus,' followed by thirty or forty shouts of 'I'm Spartacus' as security guards try to identify the man responsible for throwing a plastic beer bottle on to the field at deep square leg.

ix) The spontaneous chant of, 'Three pounds an hour, you're earning three pounds an hour' to the tune of 'Guantanamera', as security guards move in to eject a man from the Western Terrace for shouting 'Fuck off you Aussie cunt' as Matthew Elliot raised his bat to the sky in celebration of his second Test century.

At a social-services training exercise:

In an exercise designed to put us in touch with our body language, we were all invited to select a sealed envelope that contained a word describing a human emotion. Turning to the colleague on our right we then had to demonstate that emotion usuing facial gestures only. The colleague had to identify the emotion, and then it was his or her turn, and so on.

Finding the word LOVE inside your envelope, you turned to the tall shy man who'd taken the seat next to you, and in the spirit of the occasion, beamed lovingly at him, summoning up all those achingly precious moments of devotion and desire, and shutting out the image of the pale, bespectacled and bewildered man only six inches from your lips. Just at the point where you wondered if you might have to actually kiss him, he nodded his head and asked, 'Is it HATE'?

There was a moment of tense silence, before he further misinterpreted an expression of dumbfoundedness for one of agreement, and went on to announce, 'It is HATE, isn't it? I thought so.'

During a trip to the US:

New York, New York. Internet, the Yorkshire Post. Robert Ancliff of Bradford was left with 'a sour taste in his mouth' when he read the note left by his milkman on his doorstep. The previous day, Mr Ancliff had typed a polite letter of complaint, asking what had happened to the extra pint of milk he had requested. The handwritten reply read: 'I did get your milk delivered. It must have been stolen, so kiss my f****** a***.' The milkman has quit without notice and has not been seen since. A company spokesman has apologized, and Mr Ancliff has been given complimentary milk for his trouble.

This is a very sweet, funny book. I wish there were more like it.

A Bouquet of Barbed Wire?

The June Brides, NME cover, 1 September 1985

I bought this magazine for Zeke Manyika, who was the drummer in Orange Juice. I didn't know who the June Brides were. I still didn't; I didn't pick up one of their records until the "Every Conversation" 12" on Pink about two years later. I missed out; they were done by then. All the while I was sitting in my stupid apartment thinking that Orange Juice was the end of the world, and no pop records would ever be made again, things were happening. I remember buying the LP version of C86 and a Felt record and, I think, "I Heard You The First Time" by the Razorcuts at the same time, in Berkeley, which is when I found out how wrong I was. I bought a lot of records then, which seemed to always suck; but all of a sudden they didn't. I got a Chesterf!elds record right after, and then a Brilliant Corners one, and then a dopey-looking single on something called Sarah Records, and I was down the rabbit hole.

The June Brides, NME, 1 September 1985

"Bridal Suite" by Mat Snow, New Musical Express, 1 September 1985, p. 14. Photographs by Derek Ridgers.

I wish I'd listened up in 1985. I could have heard a lot more a lot earlier! It seems so bizarre now that the Brides were actually on the cover of a big-time magazine, picked to pop, you could say. Of course they didn't, which is the world's fault, not theirs.

The June Brides played out of tune; that's what everybody said, and it was true, and possibly out of time as well, but they were wonderful too, and all you had to do was cock your head and all the flaws fell into place and the delicacy shone through.

The June Brides, NME, 1 September 1985

The article here makes some oblique references to Josef K, and you can hear a little Paul Haig in Phil Wilson's reedy, uncertain tenor, but where Josef K scratched and jerked, and kept the listener at a distance, the Brides bounced and popped, and pulled the listener in. What really made it work was the trumpet. God love a trumpet in pop.


I don't hear any Smiths in them, and certainly not any James, though I can see why someone might have in 1985.

My favorite quote from the article:

Jon: "We played a gig in Glasgow and we got up early so we could go to Liverpool, where we had a gig, via the Lake District so we could have a picnic by Lake Windermere. We could have stayed in Glasgow and got drunk down Sauciehall Street, but we didn't!

This is the most genuinely shocking on-the-road story I've ever heard.

You'll have to click on the article text pic and view the large size to read the rest. The pics are magnificent as well!

An Amazing Connection

Camas Prairie High School Girls Basketball
Originally uploaded by Fnarf

A couple of years ago I scanned in an album of my grandfather's photographs, taken in Montana mostly in the 1910s and 20s. The majority of these are from Jordan, a remote town in Garfield County -- the most remote town in the contiguous United States, in fact. I occasionally get comments from Jordan residents or other Jordan genealogical researchers, which is always nice.

But some of the photos are more obscure, like this one. After college, my grandfather taught school in a series of small towns across the northwest, in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. One of these was tiny Camas Prairie, a hamlet on the Flathead Indian Reservation southwest of Glacier National Park.

At Camas Prairie School, in 1924, my grandfather shot the girls high school basketball team, the younger kids playing in the school yard, some young boys displaying their freshly caught fish, the lake they caught them in, and some local Indian children. About all I know of this place is the name and where it is.

Today, out of nowhere, a fellow named Michael Lee Ross found me. It turns out the picture of the girls basketball team features his grandmother, Rose Ross (nee Muster), and her sister!

This is an amazing coincidence, and an amazing find, all the more so if you have ever spent much time looking for your obscure Montana relatives online. I hope Mr. Ross doesn't mind me blogging here my excitement at being found by him.

Edwyn Collins in Smash Hits, 1983.

"Flesh of My Flesh" was the follow-up to "Rip It Up", the Juice's only top ten hit, released in May 1983. It was supposed to propel them, and our fresh-faced boy Edwyn here, into the stratosphere, right up there with the likes of Paul Young. God, it's hard to even type that name: Paul Young!

The top ten that month was topped by "True" by Spandau Ballet, followed by Heaven 17's "Temptation", "Dancing Tight" by something called Galaxy featuring Phil Fearon, "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" by Human League. Tears for Fears, Wham!, Bowie, the Police, Culture Club, Yazoo, and the immortal Blancmange. But there was no room for "Flesh", which topped out at 41, and it was all downhill. Malcolm Ross and David McClymont split, Polydor was disillusioned, and further records were promoted less and sold less.

Not that I care. The song's great, with a nice faraway jazz in the next room horn part, and a swinging guitar riff over Zeke Manyika's groove. The long version on the back of the 12" reveals shades of dub things to come.

Glory, Glory Tottenham Hotspur

Congratulations! Tottenham Hotspur defeated Chelsea 2-1 in extra time at Wembley today to win the League Cup (aka the Carling Cup). Nancy and I watched it at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont (Seattle). Bit rough getting out of bed and down to the pub at 7 AM, but a hundred or so people did, about 2/3 Spurs fans by the looks of it. We roared them out of the house when Jonathan Woodgate bumped in the winner, a slow bobbler that came off Petr Cech's and then Woodgate's faces; it bounced once, twice, three times into the net. Spurs' first hardware since the 1999 League Cup.

Now on to the double: the UEFA Cup is next.

Next year we'll win some serious silverware as we return to major-club status. We're too good to sit down at eleventh in the table, and in the lesser cup competitions at home and in Europe.

small factory at the Middle East Cafe, Cambridge, Mass. 1992; one of a set of 20

I just found these long-forgotten pictures in a drawer. They were taken at the Middle East Cafe in Cambridge. Honestly it's been so long I can't remember, but I think this is downstairs. Or upstairs. Whichever is smaller. I don't think they had an upstairs yet. I imagine the proscenium arch isn't there anymore!

Small Factory were part of a little early-nineties Providence-Washington "Love Rock" axis, along with Honeybunch and Velvet Crush (RI) and Black Tambourine and Velocity Girl (DC). Tsunami and the Simple Machines stuff sort of squeeze into the booth, too. It was an east coast counterpart to Beat Happening and that whole K Records scene; the bridge between the two was Lois Maffeo, the vivacious folk-punk strummer/singer who lived in both Olympia and Washington, DC at various times.

It's funny how at the time it seemed like Boston, where I was living, and New York didn't really seem to have any indiepop to offer; American indiepop has always come mostly from weird, out-of-the-way cities like Providence, Champaign-Urbana, Olympia.... College kids, sure, but Boston's packed with college kids, and in the immediate pre-grunge years none of them was listening to indiepop.

I gather that Seattle was having its little scene explosion around this time, too. The difference is, the music coming out of Providence and Washington wasn't terrible. Take that, grungesters, with your flannel, your chain wallets and your testosterone poisoning!

Quite a few times I took the train down to Providence to see Small Factory or Honeybunch at Club Babyhead or the Church House. This sucked, because there was no way to get home until the morning, so I spent a few late nights hanging out in all-night diners waiting for the trains to start up again at 6 AM or whenever it was.

But occasionally someone would venture up to the Middle East or TT the Bears. Usually that someone was my favorite band, Small Factory.

Alex Kemp played a great big Martin acoustic bass guitar, which gave their music a kind of dry crunchiness underfoot, while Dave Auchenbach strummed and jangled on guitar. The drummer was Phoebe Bluesky Summersquash, a perfectly ridiculous name for a perfectly charming girl, the perky and effervescent life of any party. She was the drill sergeant, too, as Alex frequently needed reminding that his between-song banter needed some songs to go between now and then. Everybody sang, and the harmonies were what you came for; Alex sang most of the sweetly nasal leads but it was when Dave joined in that they started to soar, and when Phoebe made three in the choruses they were zinging. Just pure joy.

By the time I first saw them they had quite a local following in Providence, mostly girls -- always a good sign, boys tend to prefer bands that suck -- who would do a little choreography with hand gestures when they played their big hit "Suggestions". They were FUN, and their songs were bright and cheerful even when they felt like being morose:

Keep your chin up, and I'll watch the highway
While we drive off for someplace cheap and amazing.

It's not so stupid and it's not so dumb
I am only suggesting that we could have more fun
Than we do....

Small Factory - "Suggestions" (mp3)

Small Factory never really came across on records; the "Suggestions" single captures some of the charm, but seems thin, and plods a bit compared to the real thing; and as the other records got better the band was getting worse. Tired, I think; and they tried to rock it up. Alex started playing electric bass, Dave's guitar got louder and fuzzier. It's a funny thing, when bands become better players on their instruments they often drive out the sweetness that drew you to them in the first place. The volume goes up, the drums start to pound, and the next thing you know they're, uh, rocking out, wailing when they used to talk to you. It happened to Small Factory too.

They got an album out, and had a good tour of the UK (with Heavenly) and a crummy one in the US, and they were done, really. There were some good moments, and some good songs, but it was never the same. Another album, another tour, and then Dave split and Alex took over on guitar in the spectacularly dreadful Godrays. The less said.

But man, those early days in Providence were magic.

I'm Sorry, Jane

steve and jane c1963
Originally uploaded by Fnarf

I would like to publicly apologize for torturing my sweet younger sister Jane when we were children. You can see by the hangdog look on her face that I'm about to inflict some kind of unnecessary roughness on her, compounding the torture that our parents have already put her through with the cowgirl outfit. I don't think she liked it much -- the outfit, or the abuse.

I liked it very much indeed. I can still remember the feel of that tin star between my fingers, and mentally checking just how cheap and inauthentic it was -- cheapness and inauthenticity having no bearing on play value, of course. As for the chaps, well, let's just say it's a good thing it was a safe neighborhood, with no older boy bullies around. Because I would have been dead meat.

That's a phrase I remember hearing a lot as a child -- "you're dead meat", following by the pounding of feet and my heart. I was a dweeb. A dork. A geek.

This is about the time I had to be removed from my second-grade class for having pooed in my pants, out of a pathological sense of embarrassment that prevented me from raising my hand. Despite my best efforts I was unable to prevent a few pellets of shame from falling down my pants leg onto the floor. A teacher -- a woman! -- took me to the bathroom and gave me the most horrible thing in the world: a pair of school pants, with an elastic waist. I wanted to die.

I peed my pants all the time too.

Sweet Jane didn't think I was a dweeb, though; she worshiped me. I repaid this devotion by telling her, right about this time, that there was no Santa Claus. That may explain the face in this picture.

I used to do naughty things, like scatter my dad's tools around, or damage them, or damage furniture with them. My dad would attempt to teach us both a lesson about honesty and forthrightness, and ask us each in turn, "did you do this?" I would solemnly shake my head "no", and Jane would just as solemnly nod her head "yes". Our dad was not a fool, and would punish me, not her -- twice, in fact.

This photograph was taken by dad with a Kodak Retina IIa in 1963 or 64 in Magnolia, Seattle, Washington. I recently found it in a tray of my grandfather's slides.

Pump Up The Volume

Hey, ladies! This doc wants to inject collagen into your G-spot to make it bigger:

Mind if I watch?

Australian Aboriginal Art in the Sixties

Unrecorded Melville Island artist, depicting a shark, sea-snakes, fish, shells, and other features encountered on a canoe journey in Snake Bay, Melville Island; ochre on bark, 28 by 19 inches; collected by C.P. Mountford, 1954.

• Ronald M. Berndt, ed. Australian Aboriginal Art. With chapters by R. M. Berndt, A. P. Elkin, F. D. McCarthy, C. P. Mountford, T. G. H. Strehlow, J. A. Tuckson. With 73 plates in full color. New York: The Macmillian Company and London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd, 1964.

This book is the earliest general book on Aboriginal art I've been able to find in a Seattle library. (All the pictures in this post are from it). By 1964, the commercial sale of Central Desert paintings in modern media (acrylics on canvas) was starting to get underway, but was still regarded with scorn as a debased product for tourists. There's none of that in this book; this is all traditional artists depicting traditional scenes in traditional media: ochre and other natural pigments applied to bark or wood or stone with traditional implements.

Which is not to say "primitive". Ronald Berndt, who along with his wife Catherine was the most prolific and perceptive anthropologist of the Aboriginal peoples in the 50s and 60s, is careful to point out that, far from being a "primitive survival", as the old-fashioned Herbert Read put it, "the Aboriginal art available to us today is contemporary, or almost so, and no more prehistoric than the people who are responsible for it."

This was a hard idea for people to get their minds around in the 1960s, especially anthropologists; note that they still treat their subject anthropologically, and bury the artists' names deep within the footnotes, if they bother to collect it at all; they are still generalized representatives of an alien primitive culture. And much of the art depicted in the book is not only traditional but traditionally sacred, with ritual and often secretive meaning. It's interpreted in a modern way by modern people, is the conclusion Berndt is striving for, but he's not quite able to make the leap into seeing these artists as people fully involved in the modern world in quite the same way as his fellow researchers back at the University are. But he's getting there.

All the pictures reproduced here are traditional in style; but the root forms of modern styles are visible. Aboriginal art today, almost 50 years later, is a modern art; even if the forms echo the tribal traditions, they are identical to them, and they are market productions. Berndt seems to think, in 1964 at least, that market productions can't be art; he is not yet willing to let these artists be modern (or have names). Such is the state of white thinking in 1950s and 1960s.

I hope to show in some future posts just how wrong he was, and how powerful modern Aboriginal art can be (much more so than the etiolated, often vacuous, culturally starved productions of many civilized modern artists. Much of this art is not sacred, but is mundane and everyday; but it still throbs with power. For just a hint of the electric visual jolt of some of this work, even in the traditional mode, check out this Picasso head, by an artist who had never heard of Picasso; followed by some other favorites:

Joshua Wurungulngul, of the Gunwinggu people in the Oenpelli region of western Arnhem Land; molded ochre head, 6.5 inches tall; collected by R. Berndt, 1950.

Minimini, from Groote Eylandt, barracouta fish; ochre on bark, 36 by 13 inches; collected by F. D. McCarthy, 1948.

Dowdie (b. 1921), Milingimbi, NE Arnhem Land, Julunggul the rock python, protecting her eggs from the Wawalag sisters; ochre on bark, 28.5 by 15 inches; collected by the Methodist Overseas Mission, 1959.

Unknown artist, from Cape Stewart, north-central Arnhem Land, sacred maraiin painting, usually painted on men's bodies during secret rituals; ochre on bark, 20.25 by 11.75 inches; collected by the Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory Administration, 1959?

Sergio! Sergio!

After my eviction from Jennifer's apartment, I was homeless. I went to work that day with a duffel bag and the newspaper, circling ads for rooms. The appearance of a duffel bag in an office always causes a commotion, and this office was pretty well geared for commotion anyways.

I was working on the Upper East Side, barely; we worked out of an apartment house on E. 62nd Street, just east of 3rd Avenue. Two apartments across the hall from each other, packed with telecommunications gear and eight or nine employees. We ran a calling card business; you know, the cards you buy at the corner store or the tacqueria that allow you to call long distance for cheaps. The business model was to buy minutes from AT&T and sell them on the cards. If we paid AT&T 6-and-a-quarter cents per minute, we made a fortune; if we paid six-and-a-half we lost our shirts. The company was run by two brothers, Victor and Raul, Venezuelans. Victor was the handsome, suave one, Raul the dark, funny, dangerous one. They were from one of Venezuela's richest families, and frequented places like "21", which seemed like something out of a dream.

The whole operation seemed shady; there was a closet full of binders of shell companies, maybe a hundred of them, and little stashes of serious cash in various drawers. I got the impression that the cash was there to tempt me, and if I took so much as a single bill I'd spend the rest of my life in a different time zone than my skin.

There was a third brother, Sergio, who was the black sheep of the family. I think that was his job title; all he did all day was sit with his feet up on his desk smoking furiously and reading the newspaper. We all smoked furiously; Victor the boss smoked cigars.

The office was a fire hazard in other ways too. Our primary lighting came from halogen torchieres with wobbly bases. They would fall over and burn the carpet. Once Victor stored a box of supplies on top of the stove in one of the kitchens (these were outfitted as ordinary apartments), only to fill the room with smoke shortly after as the gas pilot light in the burners ignited the box.

Despite the chaos of the office, Victor and Raul were fun to be around and fantastically loyal. The second they saw my duffel, they had their lawyer on speakerphone, who explained to me how stupid I was for vacating the apartment. Alas, it was done. But Victor said, "no, you can stay here until you find a place". So I moved into the apartment, sleeping on the sofa. The only drawback was that I had to be up and showered and dressed before anyone got there in the morning, about six AM.

The neighborhood was lovely; to the east, Madison, Lexington, Central Park and Midtown; to the west, the charming and leafy Upper East Side. I used the laundromat at the end of the block, and drank in the friendly bar on First. It was a lot closer to Brownies and the other clubs I was frequenting than my old place, too, seeing the Magnetic Fields, Holiday, and the Mad Scene play every other night. 125 blocks closer -- a feasible walk, even, from the East Village, which I did many times, either through the lonely wastelands of First Avenue past the United Nations, or the surprisingly varied neighborhoods up Second or Third, Lex or Park.

One day as the office was closing I was introduced to my new cross-hall roommate for the night: Miss Venezuela. She was the most beautiful creature I've ever seen to this day, achingly gorgeous, like a porcelain doll. She was going to be in one of the apartments, I was in the other. When I saw her in the morning I was suffering from a terrible hangover; she was still perfect. I wonder if I terrified her. She terrified me.

After a month of this kind of living the Alves brothers had a proposition: move in with Sergio. Sergio lived in the company apartment and his roommate was leaving. 14th Street between Second and First. My room was a shoebox -- eight feet wide, twelve feet long. Sergio's room was the living room, stood off from the tiny open kitchen and hall with rows of tall bookcases. His room was three times as big as mine.

Sergio lived there with his Japanese girlfriend Yuko, who came to the US for expensive dentistry and found a chainsmoking Venezuelan instead. Yuko was stereotypically Japanese, covering her mouth with her hand when she talked, laboring endlessly in the apartment, cringing before her master and now her master's new roommate. I was unnerved to come home to her scrubbing the floors and apologizing for not doing it well enough.

Sergio's main form of entertainment was watching war documentaries on his large-screen TV. The volume was always turned up. He also liked to engage in loud sex with Yuko, featuring lots of vigorous spanking and crying. I would cower in my room hearing the rumble and roar of thousands of B-17 bombers with the voiceover describing the destruction of Dresden down below, punctuated by loud slaps and Yuko screaming "Oh, Sergio, Oh, Oh, Sergio!" and Sergio himself demonstrating the kind of command and discipline that was denied him at his job. "You've been very BATT!" Whap. "Oh, Sergio! Sergio!" Whap. Grrrarr, boom, boom-boom, boom. WHAP!

New Yorkers spend most of their spare time going out. Now you know why.

Sergio also smoked pot continuously, and he had a little cocaine problem as well. When he and his friends were high, and after inviting me into his side of the apartment to enjoy the evening, he would get paranoid, and push me up against the wall, alternately threatening and cajoling me, don't tell Victor, don't tell Raul, you're not going to tell anyone are you, I swear to God I'll cut you, man, PLEASE don't tell them, here, you want some?

There was an Irish bar on the corner, an old-fashioned workingman's bar, not fancy at all, and cheap. Three dollars for a pint of Guinness, and in the grand New York tradition the barman buys you every third one. I have no idea if this bar or this tradition has survived the relentless gentrification of the city. I hope so. Where else are the telephone linesmen and delivery drivers going to drink? I sat in there for hours most nights, if nothing was going on, sipping the black stuff and reading at the bar, to avoid the seige of Sergio and his bellicose love life.

This was the apartment which Mrs. Fnarf came to visit again, in summer. We were engaged to be married by then. The discussion about where we would be living afterwards was very short. The 100 square foot room with no furniture except a bed and a bookcase, with Yuko and Sergio and his giant TV on the other side of the wall, did not make up for the excitement of having the East Village on my doorstep. On her first night, we walked down First and Avenue A as far as Houston, and when she realized she had to walk fourteen blocks back as well she threw water on me. New York was not to be.

My New Favorite Car: Citroën Ami 6

Picture of Citroën Ami 6 by Flickr user davidbally, by permission.

I've had many favorite cars over the years -- the Mini, the Isetta (or even better, the French Velam model), the Smart, or the Hillman Minx that I used to own.

Picture of my old Hillman Minx by Flickr user nancyo23, by permission.

But I have a new contender: the Citroën Ami 6 shown above. Dig that crazy reverse-slanting rear window! And the jaunty way the roof flares over it! And the sexy drape of the hood over the headlights!

It also had a classically weird Citroen suspension: check out this lean! These two pictures are from the great Citroenet page.

They were sold from 1961 to 1970. I want one! I want to drive around in tight pants listening to Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, France Gall, and Brigitte Bardot.

PS --
I've given up on ever figuring out Blogger's screwed-up HTML implementation. Their "preview" isn't even close to what you actually get.