the village buzz

i was hanging out with laurie last night, and she was telling me how much she missed picture of the day, and that she wanted to see some pictures of california. it has been MONTHS since i have done this, so i decided to put up a series of california pics. these are from my last visit, for my mom’s birthday party. so, laurie, this series is for you! oh.. and laurie.. i keep losing your email address.. so send me an email when you get this.

today’s picture is the view of the sunset looking north from carpinteria. the shiny things are railroad tracks. the bumps in the water are santa barbara.

i never realized how much the train tracks were a part of california until recently. it seems that everywhere i went, train tracks and train cars crisscrossed daily life. when we were kids, the train tracks were a playground. every time the train ran by, we would grab as many pennies as we could, and toss them on the tracks. one day, when i was a really little kid, i did this with my grandma, and the penny came out shaped like a heart. she put it away, to save it until i got older, but i lost her in 1987, and never got the penny back.

there were always stories of kids putting pennies on the track and derailing the train, but i never saw one topple over. i can name the names of three kids who would shoot at the train with bb guns though. they lived across the tracks. they were nasty little kids. i won’t name names, but their initials were juni and tito (and jerome).

this shot is from some night at the bottom line in cleveland. i would give a link here, but a google search turned up nothing of interest. just a bunch of messed up old broken links. if you are interested in finding it, it’s in the hood.. on fulton, off 71. i just drove by it the other night on the way to the great lakes brewery to throw some beers around with corey and it looked pretty dead. it was also a thursday night, so that might be the problem.

the band is sindust, in one of their earlier incarnations. i have some photos of even earlier incarnations, but i can’t find them right now. i haven’t talked to chris in a long time.. usually about this time of year, we trade phone calls for a few weeks, trying to get ahold of each other, but our timing never quite works out..

i see they have a new album out.. gotta check it out, but never seem to have time to track one down..

i heard on the radio that he (chris) has a solo album out, too .. but i just haven’t had time to track that down… sure, could buy it off itunes, but i am still kinda old school. i still buy cd’s.. and throw them onto my ipod..

anyway.. this is sindust.. in the pooper of the bottom line.. a very long time ago..

this is another old school photo from the days when i was throwing as little light onto tri-x as possible.. this was down in the basement one night during something said’s rehearsal. for awhile, i had this bare lightbulb in the basement fetish.

i am trying to get a time frame on this one, but i am clued out.. if anyone can give me a hand as to when this line up was, let me know..

i spent about ten minutes trying to figure out who the face on the right (poking into the picture) belongs to, but i can’t figure that out either..

this is an old promo shot for an akron band called “three.” i checked for about five minutes, and couldn’t find any relevant links, but i am sure if you spent a couple minutes on myspace, you might be able to find a few.

i had no idea what i was gonna do with this shoot, so i took jarrod along for an extra set of artistic eyes.

i had just picked up an old f1.2 lens at some kinda rummage sale a few weeks before, and i really wanted to try pushing tri-x as far as i could with that lens. it ended up that the lens only fit on a pentax k-mount body, and rendered all metering useless. it wasn’t that big of a deal. i eyeballed it, and i got some good negatives..

i wanted to shoot in a dark basement, lit by only a tiny incandescent bulb, and we found such a corner of their practice room. i started noodling around, and realized that there was not much of a shot there, so i saw an old drum head in the corner, and knowing that jarrod was all artsy like, said.. “make me a ouija board!” and tossed him a sharpie.

within minutes, he inked this one up..

the ULTIMATE cool thing he did on it (and you can see it if you have good eyes) was to put the numbers on the bottom like 1 2 “THREE” 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 .. i thought that was the coolest thing ever.

haven’t heard from chad or stef in years, but i hear from tony every few months..

this is liz wittman, from the band “tender blindspot.” i did a little bit of searching around for some relevant links, but i think this was all done and over before internet came bombarding into everyone’s house..

this was tender blindspot’s last show. it was at cleveland’s grog shop (not the new one, but the old beat to hell one..) it was an interesting show in that it was kind of an end of an era..

tender blindspot was one of the first bands i interviewed and followed during the formative days of the village buzz (the paper one, not the website..) and i shot this on one of the final nights i was in the game.

it was a different time in the mid 90’s. there was no internet.. no myspace.. not signal to noise overload. we were a tribe. a gang. when we wanted check out what was going on in the underground music scene, we packed into my car, and hung out in the trenches until the sun came up.

unfortunately, it seems like that sense of adventure is gone. i hope i am wrong. i would love to hear that there are kids going into the clubs, drinking it up, whooping it up, and most of all.. doing it without the urge to put their exploits on the net. i would love to hear that kids are running wild.. and keeping it within the tribe.

anyway.. i ran into liz awhile back.. i had found this band that i was totally digging.. called kiddo.. and the girl’s voice sounded really familiar. i dug into the liner notes, and it was liz.. very cool..

stop over, check out her new project. buy the cd. it rocks.. if you like them, drop me a line, and i can point you to some other band you will dig..

i have been getting a good deal of mail lately from people wondering if i have been in touch with pepper mcgowan lately, and i realized that i hadn’t heard from her in a few years.

coincidentally, while cleaning my office the other day, i ran across a postcard she sent me when she was recording “bad stars”.. she was leaving for la, and i asked her to send me a postcard. in true pepper style, i got a hand cut piece of colored construction paper in the mail one day, with a scrawling on that back reading “hi you… love.. me..pep” when i finally got my copy of bad stars, she pulled out the original liner notes, and scrawled a picture of a martini and a star, shoved it into the cd.. and shoved it into my pocket. i then noticed that in my box of stuff, i had a smallish stack of scraps of paper with drawings that pepper had made for me when i was started asking for things.

in the same vicinity of my house, i found a box of negatives of millions of events in cleveland rock history.. and on the top of the stack were some pepper pics.. i will be putting a few of those historical shots out over the next few days, just for kicks, and maybe to hear how pepper is doing these days. if anyone has a line on her, tell her i said hex!

back in the day, when she was pepper acton, i would find her before the show, and make her dedicate “solar flare” to me, and look off into the crowd longingly. she pulled it off well enough that even i was half convinced.

one night, a mutual friend, tim kaye, came in from baltimore for a show with pepper. after the club closed down, and we were shuffled out the door, i somehow ended back up at pepper’s with pepper and tim. the night ended up in a surreal concert of of the two of them running through some old cure songs… to an audience of one.. me.. weird.. but the good kind of weird.

anyway.. this is tim and pepper. singing something off ’staring at the sea’ .. to me… and the herd of cats..

okay, one more photo from the camera phone…

at the grocery store where i shop, they pack up your groceries and send them outside. for each bucket of groceries you have, you get a little plaque that has some random numbers and letters on it. the guys match up your plaque with the groceries and toss them in our trunk.

every time i get in line to get my groceries, i look at all the buckets and see if they spell something out (a huge bonus would be a bad word!) but i have only seen this happen a few times. the problem is that there are usually lots of numbers thrown in there.

the other day, i got my plaques, and threw them into the passenger seats, and lo and behold.. they spelled a word!

HIPPIE!!

not as cool as a bad word, but a pretty cool word nonetheless..

one more photo from the camera phone.

this is yet another mannequin that was standing around upstairs dressed in period clothes.

i have been asked by a few people where this flea market is.. you can find it here..

wandering around up there, i think the most interesting thing was that almost everything up there is no longer needed. paper ledgers, coats and hats, rotary phones. then, i took a look over the railing, and realized that this whole place was full of stuff that no one wanted anymore.

stuff that is so unwanted that even for a buck, you wouldn’t drag it home.

one thing i did find was a treasure trove of old 40’s era books on the supernatural. they were bound in black leather and the spines felt like they were never read. they had the spookiest pictures you have ever seen in there. they must have been published before we had our standard glammed out ideas of what vampires and devils looked like, because these cats were scary..

they were 20 bucks. i didn’t want to make that many trips to the car, so i ended up buying a hot dog and eating it on the front steps.

another camera phone shot…

every fourth of july or so here in ashland, they drag out a bunch of canons and fire up the 1812 overture. it’s really amazing that in this day and age, they allow canons to be shot off in the middle of town without everyone suing the city.

what is even more insane is the there is a HUGE amount of fanfare before they fire these canons off. there is a commander who shouts cadences. the canon firing guys almost do a dance with their giant q-tips before tamping down the powder. then, there’s a countdown, the commander draws his sword.. and BOOM!

the most whacky part about this is that even with all this fanfare, people STILL wander aimlessly. right in front of the canons. hell, even people rolling baby strollers wheel right out in front of those canons, completely oblivious as to what is about to happen.

have they never seen a canon, and are unaware of what the business end does? have they never heard the 1812 overture?

the beautiful part about the whole thing is, even with these people wandering out front, the show goes on. BOOM! and a family completely jumps out of their skin.. BOOM! and the orchestra trills.. BOOM! and every dog in a five square miles chimes in.. BOOM! and car alarms near and far scream..

here’s another camera phone shot. if anyone out there knows where strasberg, ohio is, there is an old general store there that has been converted into a flea market. depending on your point of view, it is either REALLY cool, or REALLY creepy. i found it really cool..

in the upper deck, there is a little museum of the things that used to occupy the building back in the day..

this was a vintage costume thrown onto a vintage mannequin.. very cool, and very classy.. i think i was a full two feet taller than her, though…