Edith Frost, In Space

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I’ve Been Looking Forward to this for a long time now. Yes, it’s still in its saran wrap, waiting for a moment when I can sit down & really listen. It’s due for release at the end of February, but I managed to get myself an early copy.

How, you may ask? Well, even if you didn’t here’s how. Back in 2017, I joined Mastodon because hey, everyone was doing it! (It turns out almost no one was doing it) then in 2022 when M*sk began burning Twitter down, people did start moving over in pretty good numbers. I was super-excited to see Thor Harris show up on Masto, as he’s one of Austin’s greatest treasures. If you don’t know about Thor, to put it in his words, “you’re fucked.” Love the guy. We’ve known each other from “around” since our respective bands played some gigs together at the end of the 80’s.

Anyway, although Thor’s presence on Mastodon was short, this lady who was friends with him kept popping up in my feed, so I followed her and we got to taking. She’s from Austin. She knew Phyllis, my favorite waitress from Xalapeño Charlies! where I was a cook in the early 80’s. Dang, I miss you Charlie. She knew Deborah Damm, my old hair stylist who tragically died in a car accident in the late 80s! (What a loss…) She traveled to Mexico a lot! This lady was cool, and we had some great talks. And she was trying to talk herself into playing out live again for the first time in 20 years. She thought I’d be the perfect bass player to help her get it together and get back on stage. I hemmed and hawed a bit.
Then she booked a gig. My entreaties of “I’m retired from working as a gigging bass player” were summarily ignored, and I got drafted. So since she had an album in the works, and a gig coming up, I was lucky enough to get to hear her demos, then some roughs as we were working up a set list for her show at Cheer Up Charlie’s last November. “But we need a drummer,” she said. “Why not ask Thor?” I said. “He’s too busy, he’d never,” she said. Anyway, Thor agreed to play drums & keys (one with each hand – this guy is something else) and we had us a nice trio going! The gig went really well. Right before we played, I walked up to Thor who was chatting with a friend, and he said “This is Steve Shelly. He was in a band called Sonic Youth.” (I plotzed) and it kind of dawned on my the stratosphere I was inhabiting for that one evening.

So I learned to play most of the songs on this album a year before it was released, and now I’m sorta savoring the idea of sitting down and hearing it all on a nice turntable, because these are really, really great songs. I was also overjoyed to see this on the back. Thanks Edith! You’re the best.

The Great Collapse

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I thought this would live on in legend and lore only, until I came across this slide last night quite by chance.
For the past year, I. have been archiving the vast slide collection of my old dear friend Gill Ediger, who for a while, was a part-owner of my old shop Vreeland Graphics. Most of them aren’t online yet – I’ve put a few on Facebook to enlist help ID’ing people, but I am less than 3000 pieces into a maybe 5000 piece project. I will get them all online, probably at Flickr some day relatively soon, in geological time.

So at somewhere around the 2300 mark of slides, I came upon this in a box of uncategorized stuff. Gill was an amazing handyman. He had an electrician’s license, he could weld, he was a carpenter of some repute, he could fly helicopters, and any number of things. He was a thinker- had a head full of ideas. And if you needed something moved — I helped him move a house 10 ft for Christ’s sake — he was your man… most of the time. After we bought our first automatic press, it became clear after not very long that we needed a better dryer, so we went to the bank, got an SBA loan, and lot’s of stuff had to be re-jiggered in our old building to make space for it. We needed to move an ink shelf. I lobbied for taking all the cans off, moving the shelf, and putting them back on. Gill said “No, no, no that’ll take way to long. I’ll handle this.” I sad “Fine, I’ve got to go to home depot.” Gill jacked up that shelf with all the ink on it, put it on the big yellow cart you can see behind me in this photo, and proceeded to roll it across the shop and around a corner to its new home. While rounding the corner, something went wrong.

When I walked back in from home depot, I was greeted by the image of an utterly defeated Gill (A thing that literally never happens) sitting on an upside down 5-gallon bucket with his face in his hands. Surrounded by upended ink cans, and a busted up shelf.

After a brief interlude of “What the fuck?” and “I just don’t know,” we determined there was nothing to do but laugh and get to work. Plastisol tends to move slowly when at rest, and we did salvage about 80 percent of the ink, and slowly wiped up the rest. Not long after we began the cleanup process, Gill managed to recover his sense of humor enough to determine we should at least have a picture of the scene. He filed it away, and we both forgot it had ever been taken, until I found it last night.

I am clearly trying to have the best attitude I can in this pic, and although Felicia, while playing along, looks considerably more nonplussed. Thus ever was our marriage.

Way Station, new Coffee Sergeants single is out today!

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We’ve had this album in progress since we started recording at Stuart Sullivan’s Wire Recording late last December. Flak Records has been crafting a single release schedule and the first of those is now available. This is very uptempo for us – I’m playing a Rickenbacker 4001 instead of my usual Thunderbird, because I thought this one could use the grind. Doug is relentless on the high hat. And of course, written by the inimitable Carey Bowman. I am proud, honored & humbeld to have been invited to participate in this experience. More to come soon, with the entire album available on CD & blue vinyl Nov. 1st.

https://thecoffeesergeants.lnk.to/waystation

Oakwood Cemetery Online Exhibit!

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My wife got me in touch with an old co-worker who works for the State Preservation Board (I think?) Who got me in touch with the lady who runs the Oakwood Cemetery Chapel website, to show them my collection of photos from the cemetery. It just so happened that they had just put up an online exhibit, and I was asked to contribute to it. It took a month of hemming and hawing to pull out a few favorites, get them adjusted for color and write up a bio, and now it’s online!

Not too much more to say about this except what an honor it is. I’ve been taking pictures there a coupe times a year since early 2019, and have about 600 pics now, a mix of film, both black & white & Velvia slide film, and a sizeable number of digital shots as well. I need to get back on that rainy day project of linking my Flickr pages to the Austin Historical Society’s online burial database.

It looks a lot better on the desktop than on mobile, if you’re so inclined.

2022 Book 6: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics of People in a Hurry

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Nothing too earth-shattering here. I blew through it in a couple days last spring simply because it had been sitting on my to-be-read shelf for way too long.

Astrophysics

Truth of the matter is, I didn’t learn much because I had recently read the way more in-depth Katie Mack book The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) but it was more enjoyable than I thought it would be. I was surprised by the quality of deGrasse Tyson’s writing, and his easy-going sense of humor belied his recent reputation as somewhat of a scold and curmudgeon of social media. I would certainly recommend this accessible book to anyone who still needed a basic understanding of cosmology.

Three Satellites for accessibility 🛰🛰🛰

Delete Delete!

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I’m tossing up a quick note on here for a couple reasons:
1, to get used to the idea that a blog can be an ok place to put quick notes, that posts don’t have to be over-thought for months and never posted, and
2. to mention that I am about done with Twitter. I don’t trust Musk as far as he can roll in a burning Tesla, and I abhor the idea that he might reinstate Der Gropenfürer. I’m afraid lazy, click-bait oriented media will revert right back to hanging onto and publishing every ill-planned tweet instead of reporting, and as we saw between 2105 & 2020, that was a measurably bad thing for media and the state of America.

I will still be around in other places! I will be here, and am going to experiment with leaving comments open for a bit on posts, unless the spam gets unbearable. I’m on Metafilter! I’m on Flickr! I’m on Facebook. If I know who you are on FB, I will accept your friend request. I’m on MLTSHP though not much lately – hope to pick some steam back up there. I’m on Bandcamp! Buy from and support independent music.

I am also out here in the real world, doing real world stuff, like working 10 hours a day, playing bass in The Coffee Sergeants, occasionally caving, and taking pictures of stuff. Meet me out here in the flesh sometime – it’s nice outside.

2022 Book 5: Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburator Dung.

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Book Cover

I’m sure I’ve read some of his pieces at some point in Rolling Stone… actually, I’m not sure. I have seen a lot of references to this book over the years, and how Bangs is considered the best Rock critic of all time. So, it took me almost 20 years to get around to it — but I’m going to assert it has aged well. At first I was a bit put off by his overly florid and bombastic (yet mellifluous) style, I think designed to either throw the reader off the scent or to challenge them to push through to the point (10,000 words about The Fugs?) but I found I was struggling through articles about artists I didn’t know, then suddenly paying rapt attention (10,000 words about Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, no problem) to the ones whose music I understood, and it all clicked.

Bangs loved music. And he loved the people who authentically created art, he loved getting deep inside those artist’s brains, spending an inordinate amount of time to develop an intimacy with his subject, and capturing every grain. Music moved him like nothing else, and he needed desperately to tell everyone how he felt about it. He dug deep and uncovered angles and truths that were deeper than just the songs. His essay on the Clash and the early London punk scene is the best I have ever read on the subject, and it hooked me.

Ultimately, His baroque embellishments of language are best understood as evidence of his passion. He loves his garage rock, hates him some over-produced radio pablum, had a thorough knowledge of the underground garage scene in the 60’s and 70’s, some amazing insights into Jazz, and I now have a to-be-listened-to list as long as my arm.

Cool factor 5 🕶 🕶 🕶 🕶 🕶

Charlie McCoy on Desolation Row

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At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
– Bob Dylan, from a verse of Desolation Row

I have opinions about music. I have always been highly attuned to extemporaneous playing, having grown up in households full of jazz and 60’s rock, and incorporate it a lot into my playing. The people I admire the most are the players who can take an idea and dissect it in real time, as the song proceeds, and find their way around the theme in as many different ways as possible.

I don’t know much about Charlie McCoy, but from what I do know about Bob Dylan’s recording style, He wants to lay them down quick and be done with it, and everyone does their best to learn the songs in real time & keep up with him. According to Wikipedia, they recorded 5 takes of this song. That means McCoy might have had an hour to come up with a theme, then execute this track. This has to be extemporaneous. He figured out more or less where he wanted to play in between the vocal lines, and was probably just off to the races.

Say what you will about Bob Dylan, (and I probably won’t disagree on a lot of points) but I found myself listening to this on repeat the other day, and really focusing on the 2nd guitar part instead of the lyrics for the first time, and it really jumped out at me what he’s doing here. In an 11-minute song, he methodically goes about re-inventing his part every single verse, every single line. He manages to only repeat an exact phrase once or twice throughout the entire song. An extremely impressive feat. So if you’ve read this far, I encourage you to take a pass through it and focus on the guitar and the myriad ways he moves the song forward through an ever-changing multitude of distinct arpeggios. Brilliant!

Candela 1997

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It has been almost 25 years to the day since this picture was taken. On that day I realized, though the words had not yet been spoken, that I was about to be divorced.

I was in Bustamante for one of the Texas Speleological Association Grutas del Palmito restoration trips, and we took a side trip to a cave called Carrizal, which is near the town of Candela, a little ways north of Bustamante. The train tracks are still there, but only for freight, so the old train station was already in some disrepair, though it was still standing, and access wasn’t problem, so we pulled over on the way and wandered about a bit and took some shots. This was originally a slide in my old Pentax K-1000 that I got around to scanning some years later.

It wasn’t until yesterday when I put together the visual metaphor, from my vantage point in the hills, 25 years hence. I was still drinking, and would proceed that September and October to blot out the divorce and my crumbling life with alcohol, leading to a culmination on my birthday on Halloween when I came to the sudden realization that I was going to kill myself before I killed the pain.

In the photo, I am standing in front of a wall. In between me and the green grass and hills in the distance, the path through lies in ruins. They say the only way out is through (whoever they are) and so I find myself faced with crawling through the wreckage (Dave Edmunds style) – the shards and splinters of a broken life to get beyond the wall. Out in the daylight on the other side lies a pile of rubble – my past, that I must set right before I make it to the green fields beyond, and eventually the mountaintop in the distance.

Today I’m standing on the mountaintop looking down – I don’t like everything I see from on high, but I know my part in it has been a straight path through.

2022 Book 4: Eckhart Tolle, Practicing The Power Of Now

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I Gathered, after having this re-homed by a friend, that this is essentially a pamphlet meant to be a guide to understanding the key points of the larger book, The Power of Now.

A very austere cover.

While his philosophy is enlightened, and presented in an easy-to-digest language here, I find it to be largely syncretic, borrowing widely from Buddhism, and especially Zen, without as much as saying so (and a couple bible verses thrown in to round things out). I’ve done some reading on Buddhism lately, as I’ve moved into a regular practice of meditation, so not much of this struck me as new thought, though I have to admit that it’s more easily digestible than parables, fables, and riddles, so I still marked some particularly poignant passages & will probably turn back to it from time to time for quotations.

I hit a couple sticking points that were off-putting — a couple passages about the duality of masculinity and femininity, and his larger thoughts on illness as a state of mind. I am a modernist who believes in medicine, and am admittedly a dinaosaur who is working hard to understand the nuances of gender, beyond their outward physical manifestations, so I will put those aside in the pile of things to leave behind.

I take away other points, particularly, the broad message of living in the present, and becoming aware of when your mind is dwelling in the past or future, and how that is unhealthy. I doubt I will make time for the larger volume, sine I’d prefer to go more directly to the source of these sorts of teachings, however arcane.

Inspirational in places, 3 of 5 rays of sunlight. ☀️☀️☀️🌩🌩