Route 2. Airport Highway. Perrysburg, Ohio.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Old Playground Blues
When one learns that the swing set from one's grade school has been dismantled, and the surrounding jungle gyms and slides moved across the parking lot to an opposite field, one first feels the pangs of nostalgia for playground recesses and squeals and shouts four decades old, then one questions the value of sentimentality, then one chides oneself for imagining that one's past is any more urgent a home to return to via nostos than another's, then one feels stupid for feeling that one is special, then one feels childishly insignificant, returning to the playground where it all started.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Bodiless in the City
Sometimes in a city crowded with people, their urgent movements an odd blend of narcissism and desperation, you come across an image of bodilessness, a contrapuntal silence both creepy and mesmerizing. Violence, maybe—found art, maybe—accidental, probably. In any event, the pause that the image induces was welcome, if in the service of the macabre.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
The House on the Hill
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.
Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.
Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,
And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.
There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897
Sunday, December 15, 2013
No Other Song
In 1999 Paul McCartney released Run Devil Run, an album of a dozen covers and three new originals. One of those covers is the marvelous, timeless "No Other Baby," a simple but haunting song about loyalty and lust. In the album's liner notes McCartney describes the song as the album's most obscure, a tune he heard sometime after it was released as a single in 1958 by the British skiffle group The Vipers. As McCartney says, "I've no idea how this one got so embedded in my memory.... I never had the record, still haven't."
"No Other Baby" evokes deep-seated devotion in the face of temptation, glad luck in a random world. The singer has "lots of other women" saying to him "be my daddy, do," and one's just down the hall, alluring. But he only wants his one girl. The melody is unfussy; the sentiment is confident, cocksure even, in defense of faithfulness and pride. It's hot stuff. One listen and it's understandable how the tune could linger in one's consciousness over decades. McCartney doesn't mention where or how he knows the song—he might've heard the Vipers' single, maybe a mate had it or it was on a jukebox somewhere. But it stuck. His take on the song four decades later is utterly terrific, one of his great late-career performances, sexy and casually assured. The Vipers' version is sprightly and peppy, but McCartney tempers his exultation with a bit of caution, as if it could all go away. He slows down the tempo, bathes the song in reverb, and eliminates the pleading final verse. His restraint was perhaps inevitable, as he was grieving, and the words must've carried unbearable poignancy: he recorded it at Abbey Road eleven months after his wife Linda died of cancer.
Here's McCartney's version, as well as the Vipers', American country singer Bobby Helms' from 1958, and the original by Dickie Bishop and the Sidekicks, another U.K. skiffle group, from 1957. Enjoy. I bet it'll get stuck in you for years, too.
"No Other Baby" evokes deep-seated devotion in the face of temptation, glad luck in a random world. The singer has "lots of other women" saying to him "be my daddy, do," and one's just down the hall, alluring. But he only wants his one girl. The melody is unfussy; the sentiment is confident, cocksure even, in defense of faithfulness and pride. It's hot stuff. One listen and it's understandable how the tune could linger in one's consciousness over decades. McCartney doesn't mention where or how he knows the song—he might've heard the Vipers' single, maybe a mate had it or it was on a jukebox somewhere. But it stuck. His take on the song four decades later is utterly terrific, one of his great late-career performances, sexy and casually assured. The Vipers' version is sprightly and peppy, but McCartney tempers his exultation with a bit of caution, as if it could all go away. He slows down the tempo, bathes the song in reverb, and eliminates the pleading final verse. His restraint was perhaps inevitable, as he was grieving, and the words must've carried unbearable poignancy: he recorded it at Abbey Road eleven months after his wife Linda died of cancer.
Here's McCartney's version, as well as the Vipers', American country singer Bobby Helms' from 1958, and the original by Dickie Bishop and the Sidekicks, another U.K. skiffle group, from 1957. Enjoy. I bet it'll get stuck in you for years, too.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
More Songs that The Fleshtones Taught Me
single, 1956
single, 1968
Teenage Head, 1978
Out Of Sight!, 1967
single, 1975
single, 1961
single, 1968
single, 1967
b-side, 1966
single, 1968
Friday, December 13, 2013
"Hold Your Phone To This Essay And Select Tag Now"
I have a new music essay out in The Normal School:
The Normal School currently publishes twice each year, Spring and Fall. Get a two-year subscription, or four issues for $20, here.
A couple of weeks later, I drove slowly past Kate’s house, then hit I-495, the Beltway through Maryland and Virginia, and for a couple of hours circled Washington, D.C., drinking a six-pack of Schaefer, listening to the oldies station. The songs that night scored a pathetic evening of remorse and lurid imagination, singing in pop changes a story I made up and made myself believe, of acting nobly, charitably, ignoring the truths that every other song dangerously skirted. That playlist is long-gone, irreplaceable, broadcast through night air from some remote place. For those aimless hours, no other arrangement of tunes could have mattered, could have approached the songbook of twenty-something sorrow they achieved as I dipped in and out of music, loudly singing along to songs I couldn’t replay, believing their promises and then bitterly denouncing them, and drove around and around. Kate’s body and voice, the songs that reshaped them, ghosted the car. The music was intense in its presentness, issuing from speakers and leaking out of windows, and trailing me like exhaust. That they were here and gone—in the car with me, then not—only made the heartbreak of their arrival, full of promises and good times, worse. Or, sweeter. These songs weren’t in my pocket. They were gone.~~
The Normal School currently publishes twice each year, Spring and Fall. Get a two-year subscription, or four issues for $20, here.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
The Origins of Super Rock

Naming and finding these tunes, plenty of which I hadn't heard, was a tremendous and joyous education for me as I researched the book. The band adds to the list every other month, it seems. Here are some of my favorite songs that the Fleshtones have covered, in no particular order:
single, 1962
b-side, 1967
Rock Starve, 1987
b-side, 1966
single, 1965
single, 1965
b-side, 1972
single, 1970
b-side, 1966
War & Peace, 1970
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
If They Will Be There Tomorrow: A Conversation with Derek Stenborg
As even a cursory glance of No Such Thing As Was reveals, I'm a big fan of abandoned buildings, those inter-spaces between lived-in and ghosted, having and losing. One illustration of abandonment is a painted sign on a building, peeling and fading under decades of sunlight and gentrification. For the past two decades, Brooklyn-based scenic artist and designer Derek Stenborg has been traveling the country photographing these civic disappearing acts, what he calls "Ghost Signs." He's collected and self-published over 200 of them in a new book, Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book, a terrific and culturally valuable document of literally fading times. His striking, exquisitely composed color photos capture the end of brick-and-mortar advertising, signage that was dependent upon the life of the structures that it emblazoned. In a sense, and with the vantage point of a kind of aesthetic hindsight, these Ghost Signs amount to found art, perishable and aesthetically pleasing illustrations of a long-vanished way of life. Many of the signs are beautiful in the early- and mid-century graphic ad style, illustrative, colorful, spirited; others are grimly utilitarian, boxy and industrial. What I love about Stenborg's photos is the way they complicate Alain de Botton's statement that "Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter." Possession notwithstanding, our photos ultimately become a documentary on loss.
Stenborg's photographs evoke nostalgia for a lost era, a romanticized notion of a genteel age before blaring 24/7 television and Internet pop-up ads. Such antiquity is revealed without recourse to the filters and lenses that millions now use on their camera phones, courtesy of Instagram, Hipstamatic, MagicHour, and the like. I'm ambivalent about such digital photography applications—I marvel at and indulge them, all the while being sceptical of their irony. John D'Agata recently wrote about a pivotal instance when nature photographer Ansel Adams discovered that it was only through utilizing a red filter on his camera that he was able to capture the reality of a mountain he was photographing. D'Agata writes:
As he himself later put it, this is the first time in Adams’ career that he has managed to make a mountain look like how it feels. To do this however, he has deeply manipulated the mountain he loves, he has wrangled the reality of the world around him into what he has needed it to be.No deeper manipulation of ghost signs is needed, it seems. Their very obsolescence and deterioration—time's filters—tell their stories.
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© Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book |
Recently, I virtually sat down with Stenborg to discuss photography, nostalgia, and Lost And Found.
~~
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Derek Stenborg |
You're a professional scenic artist, designer, and photographer. When did you begin taking photographs?
Growing up, my dad had various media equipment about the house, including an 8mm movie camera that I was obsessed with. I also inherited a Minolta SRT 101 from my dad when I went off to college in 1988. I loved that camera and I took many photographs with it. That's when I seriously looked at photography as a standalone art form and studied about certain photographers I liked. I unfortunately lost that camera with a checked bag on an airplane about 15 years ago. I did have the Minolta when I moved to New York in 1992. Urban landscape became inspiring, so some of my photos happened to be of signs and graffiti. Every once and a while I'd take a train or bus out of town for a job and I started to notice fading ads along rail lines, specifically on a trip to Durham, North Carolina 1996 and also on my honeymoon trip in the same year. Being an artist I have always taken photographs to document my work. It wasn't until the mid nineties that I got the spark to photograph old advertisements.
What camera and equipment do you use?
After losing the Minolta, I didn't have a camera for a while. I went through various point and shoots: Kodak (35mm), a Russian camera called a LOMO, a couple of digital Fuji's and then a Minolta DiMAGE Z10, at which point I revisited the idea of photographing fading ads. in 2005. That camera was dropped a couple of times so I got a Nikon E4800 point and shoot. It had been a real mish-mosh and somewhat frustrating period of equipment until recently. About a year ago I bought a LUMIX DMC-GF3. This is the marriage of the Leica camera body and interchangeable Panasonic lenses. I have a standard 35mm lens and a portrait lens that zooms to 200mm. In some ways, this is the contemporary version of my original Minolta set up from 20 years ago. Although it is fully digital with presets, you can override in a manual mode and adjust the aperture and shutter speed just like an SLR. Needless to say I love this camera, and many of my sign photos in my book I re-shot with it.
© Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book |
That navigation is the key. My aesthetic has been to take something that people often ignore, like a dilapidated sign and present it in a beautiful way. The presentation comes in photoshop with pushing the depth of field, sharpening, blurring, and vignetting. Visually and metaphorically this creates a portal to our past. I tend to square up the sign artwork and remove the perspective, so that it is viewed as designed, like the sign painter arriving at the work site with a rolled up drawing that will be transferred to the wall. I sometimes think, "What would this advertisement have looked like to the painter painting it?" Decades later, the lettering and layout is barely visible, but the weathering creates a beauty all on its own. I think the gritty realism comes when you don't see these nostalgic brands in perfect form or in a well kept setting.
What is it about vanishing signs that appeal to you?
Ghost signs and fading advertisements have lived through environmental changes brought by the weather, decades of additional painting, added construction and removed construction. At the point the paint wears off and the texture of the building facade comes through, palimpsest is an appealing part of my work. A palimpsest is a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. It is a work of art only brought about by time, and to see these ghost signs in our contemporary environment is like an installation piece.
I enjoy hunting for them. I often map out where I'd like to go to find old signs. I actually have a road trip planned to go to Texas during the holidays, so I'm doing some research now about the best scenic route on the way. Lastly, I enjoy deciphering them when parts of the sign are completely faded, or only certain colors are left. I will save a version of the photo and run it through all of the black and white filter options in photoshop. This will remove colors and make it easier to read some signs with multiple advertisements. I discover brands that I never new existed.
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© Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book |
I feel nostalgia is recognizable, it connects people and serves as a spring board for new ideas. In terms of my photography work, it is not limiting, it actually gives me focus. Although I like seeing new examples of old advertisements, I'd much rather find a ghost sign to photograph. I'm presenting an evolution of the original intention, that often conjures up feelings connected with loss and survival. Nostalgia gives you an appreciation of where we've come and gratitude of what we have. The trick is not to allow it to stop progression, that is why I briefly visit contemporary sign painting and muralists in my book.
I'm very interested to hear your feelings about the current vogue of digital photography apps Instagram and Hipstamatic and the rest, and the prevalence of filtered photographs into the mainstream. As a photographer, what's your attitude to the myriad of filter, lens, and flash options available to anyone with a smart phone? Are such things aids to "cheating?" Writer John D'Agata spoke very recently about how Ansel Adams didn't feel he fully caught the reality of a mountain until he'd used a dark red filter. Are their positives and negatives to such manipulation, and do you feel tempted to manipulate the photographs of signs?
I was taught to strive to get the best exposure and to know your equipment so your able to predict your photo before taking it. That takes skill. I was also taught to experiment with the negative and printing. Then along came digital photography which has revolutionized the industry because it opened the doors to the history of photographic techniques. Although I use photoshop a lot, I think back to a time when I was doing the same developing and printing in a dark room. Using rodinol to get crisp negatives and double exposing prints, manually dodging and burning. This post production work can now be achieved with the click of a mouse, or a preset using Instagram. Ultimately this is good because it conveys your expression in a less laborious way. I think Ansel Adams was a brilliant artist. He transcended technical limitations (in pre- and post-production) to convey his emotional response to his subject, and his universe. A photograph is what the photographer wants it to be. Ansel Adams helped evolve photography as an art form with his techniques. As artists, we share our vision in the universe we create. I think filters have become a vocabulary and can inspire vision. I think smart phone apps are fun and can inspire the next generation to make interesting choices. The whole concept of Instagram keeps people interested in photography for a little while longer, which isn't bad.
~~
Find Lost and Found at facebook and Lulu.
All images by Derek Stenborg © Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Bush League
Baseball Boy Ceramic Figurine via Etsy.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Monday, November 25, 2013
My Favorite Skips
Like millions, I grew up with the U.S. Capital Records' versions of the Beatles albums, cobbled-together, inflated rip-offs of the band's more considered U.K. releases. In retrospect, though I wince at Capital's crass bowdlerizing of the Beatles' original output, I've always loved the liberal echo in the mixes perpetrated by the Capitol Records engineers under the supervision of executive Dave Dexter, Jr. The sound on The Beatles' Second Album is muscular and loud, and George Martin's EMI Studio mixes are tame and thin by comparison. I'm happy that I lost myself in my rec room rocking chair to these rowdy mixes.
My favorite albums aged as all records do, accruing skips and pops and scratches. To this day I cannot hear "You Can't Do That" without unconsciously bracing myself for the epic scratch that comes during the second middle-eight (during "and if they've seen you talking that way..."). For years I lived with that scratch, and many others on many other albums, and it's become a fading emblem of the analog era, a blemish that's become part of the song itself, literally embedded in the grooves, figuratively as aspects of Memory's Mix. Those growing up with digital files won't know the agonies of skips and scratches, though corruption will, of course, manifest itself differently.
The Beatles' Second Album was released on April 10, 1964. Can you hear the scratch at 2:02? I can. Viva vinyl.
My favorite albums aged as all records do, accruing skips and pops and scratches. To this day I cannot hear "You Can't Do That" without unconsciously bracing myself for the epic scratch that comes during the second middle-eight (during "and if they've seen you talking that way..."). For years I lived with that scratch, and many others on many other albums, and it's become a fading emblem of the analog era, a blemish that's become part of the song itself, literally embedded in the grooves, figuratively as aspects of Memory's Mix. Those growing up with digital files won't know the agonies of skips and scratches, though corruption will, of course, manifest itself differently.
The Beatles' Second Album was released on April 10, 1964. Can you hear the scratch at 2:02? I can. Viva vinyl.
Image of 1960s record player via Fine Arts America.
Saturday, November 23, 2013
Holy Rollers Rockin' In A Killin' Machine

Whenever I need to press re-set, I reach for Bodeco. It's probably a good thing that the band hasn't released many albums. Their slim but pulsing oeuvre hasn't overstayed its welcome, indulging eternally in a Platonic, bad-ass, trance-inducing groove.
Here are some faves. Pour a Wild Turkey and turn it up.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Buon Compleanno, Marty Scorsese
"It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily."
"My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else."
"My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else."
Thursday, November 14, 2013
The Drunkest Man I Ever Saw
The drunkest man I ever saw was on Meserole Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I was staying at the YMCA on Meserole below Manhattan Avenue. I left the building in the early afternoon and turned west; I got a block or so away when I heard a commotion, swearing, raised voices. Violence in the air. An apartment door opened and two men dragged another onto the street and dropped him like a canvas bag. He staggered to his feet and yelled after the men but they'd already retreated into the apartment. I watched as he swerved in place for several moments in a slow, demented twist-dance, and then tried to walk. He couldn't go three feet without falling to his knees. He'd haul himself up again, but he moved like a marionette puppet orchestrated by a cruel puppeteer; he'd stagger, thin arms reaching wildly in front and to the side, as if searching for walls in the middle of the sidewalk, and then fall to a crouch, steadying his wobbly knees; then drop; then bellow and lurch up again. He was tall—well over six feet—thin and bony, with a shock of white hair. He was undoubtedly Polish. I could leave the Y and walk three blocks in any direction and not hear a word of English. There was something in his relationship to the other two men: was this the dire result of an all-night card game? The brutal end of a three-day binge? On the sidewalk, he looked as if he might fall and die at any moment. I'd never seen a man so far away from his own body. He resembled a human being in outline, but in behavior and tone seemed wild, imported from another universe. The tensions between his body chaos and his vain attempts to remain standing wrote a kind of surreal playlet. He managed to get halfway down the block before he dropped for good, with an audible thud and groan. Not knowing what to do, absurdly and childishly fearing a reprisal of sorts from the men who kicked him out, I turned the other way onto Guernsey Street, heading toward the water. An hour or so later, I saw that he'd made it to a front stoop of a building a block or so down Meserole. He was rubbing his head, muttering something. I'd turned away from this staggering misfit of a drunk, wondering if I'd seen a human being in his final moments alive. A circle of instability and recklessness spread from him, and I'd turned the other direction so as not to get caught in it. What did I fear? The man attempting to reach out to me. The graphic, destructive melancholy of high-noon abasement for which I had—for which I have—no words.
Friday, November 8, 2013
Abandoned, Ctd.
South 1st Street. DeKalb, Illinois
The F. Landon Cartage Company was a successful Chicago-based trucking business. How this tiny office—I think that's what it is—ended up by the side of the road south of DeKalb is beyond me. "Go First Class."
Thursday, November 7, 2013
Sam & Dave's "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby"
Sam & Dave recorded Issac Hayes's and Dave Porter's "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" in Memphis in November of 1966. The song was issued as a single on Stax Records early in 1967, backed with "A Small Portion Of Your Love." There are times when a song can tell you something that you didn't know you knew. When I was maybe twelve or thirteen I bought Sam & Dave's Soul Men for a quarter at a garage sale. I knew "Soul Man" from the Blues Brothers, and I dug the 60s' lime green colors on the cover, the mod design, and especially Sam Moore and Dave Prater's pork pie hats and peg-leg suit pants in the photos on the back cover. The vinyl was terribly scratchy, but the songs grooved wonderfully: "A Rich Kind Of Poverty," "The Good Runs The Bad Away," and the title track were irresistibly funky and warm, sincere-sounding to my teenage ears. These guys are singing truths: I understood this without really understanding. The love songs on Soul Men were sung with such lived-in urgency and desperation that I believed them, though I had no experience yet with romantic love.
These songs prepared me for "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby," a delirious ballad that I wouldn't hear for many years. By then I'd been in and out of a long, vexed relationship that I'd let linger for too long, mistreating my girlfriend in childish, self-centered ways. She certainly deserved none of it; I should have broken up with her earlier than I did. Now, when I listen to "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" I hear something that I never heard during all the years of that relationship. I feel as if I've known Amy for years, even before we met, and the devastation I share with her when she's down—when she's unhappy, embarrassed, frustrated—is lived-in, ancient, frightening, glad and heartening. The simple but enormous lesson in the song—when your loved one is down, you will be too—was a lesson I acted out before, dutifully, and with good intentions, but onstage, in front of footlights. When I heard the song after being with Amy for a while, my knees went out: yes, this is love, helplessly.
Sam & Dave sing this knowledge with deep gratitude. They address their singing to an unknown other who might be doubting the relationship, because "she's no good." They respond, "she's my woman and I know I'm her man." Their confidence is palpable, and moving, and, as in all of their greatest performances, Moore and Prater sing as if they're one man, navigating between the conflicts and harmonies every one endures, the tenors and baritones of being alive. And one line always grabs me: "Oh, you just wouldn't understand." They're signing to the doubters, but as I listen they're singing to me in the earlier relationship, that kid. You just can't understand yet....
If you're in a relationship and you're not sure if it's the right thing, listen to this song. It will tell you.
These songs prepared me for "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby," a delirious ballad that I wouldn't hear for many years. By then I'd been in and out of a long, vexed relationship that I'd let linger for too long, mistreating my girlfriend in childish, self-centered ways. She certainly deserved none of it; I should have broken up with her earlier than I did. Now, when I listen to "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" I hear something that I never heard during all the years of that relationship. I feel as if I've known Amy for years, even before we met, and the devastation I share with her when she's down—when she's unhappy, embarrassed, frustrated—is lived-in, ancient, frightening, glad and heartening. The simple but enormous lesson in the song—when your loved one is down, you will be too—was a lesson I acted out before, dutifully, and with good intentions, but onstage, in front of footlights. When I heard the song after being with Amy for a while, my knees went out: yes, this is love, helplessly.
Sam & Dave sing this knowledge with deep gratitude. They address their singing to an unknown other who might be doubting the relationship, because "she's no good." They respond, "she's my woman and I know I'm her man." Their confidence is palpable, and moving, and, as in all of their greatest performances, Moore and Prater sing as if they're one man, navigating between the conflicts and harmonies every one endures, the tenors and baritones of being alive. And one line always grabs me: "Oh, you just wouldn't understand." They're signing to the doubters, but as I listen they're singing to me in the earlier relationship, that kid. You just can't understand yet....
If you're in a relationship and you're not sure if it's the right thing, listen to this song. It will tell you.
Wednesday, November 6, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
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