Abandoned, Ctd.

Route 2. Airport Highway. Perrysburg, Ohio.

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.

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.

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

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.

More Songs that The Fleshtones Taught Me

Told ya that there'd be more to come. Is it too early for a Blue Whale where you are?

single, 1956

single, 1968

Teenage Head, 1978

Out Of Sight!, 1967

single, 1975

single, 1961

single, 1968

single, 1967

b-side, 1966

single, 1968

"Hold Your Phone To This Essay And Select Tag Now"

I have a new music essay out in The Normal School:

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.

The Origins of Super Rock

Fleshtones drummer Bill Milhizer once defined his band's patented Super Rock as "taking the best, most exciting elements of rock and roll, and exaggerating and amplifying them beyond proportion, with no apology whatsoever." Crucial ingredients in that wacky stew are cover songs. One of the great pleasures I experienced while writing Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, America's Garage Band was compiling the list of songs that the Fleshtones have covered since forming in 1976. (The list is featured as one of the appendixes at the back Sweat.) One of the ways I attempted to understand what made the Fleshtones tick was by identifying the diverse musical and inspirational currents that they've plugged themselves into over the decades. Avid vinyl fans and collectors, the guys in the Fleshtones—especially Peter Zaremba and Keith Streng, and earlier on sax player Gordon Spaeth and his brother Brian—have always turned to obscure singles, scratchy b-sides, and deep album cuts to find songs to cover and reasons to live. 

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

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.

© Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book

As Stenborg puts it in Lost And Found, "I used to look up at signs, then look away. Now I look up and photograph them, because you never know if they will be there tomorrow. The companies responsible for the advertisements and the painters who painted them never knew how long their images would remain. These signs and ads fade away or get painted over, which compelled me to document them. Each photograph has been captured in a decisive moment."

Recently, I virtually sat down with Stenborg to discuss photography, nostalgia, and Lost And Found.

~~

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

Your work navigates between gritty realism and nostalgia. Can you talk a bit about that?

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.

© Lost And Found: A Sign Photography Book

Most ghost signs (when painted as original advertisements) were never intended to be stand alone objects for long. Ghost signs tell a story of survival. The signs that I have photographed span a wide range. Some ads might have been painted a 100 years ago, whereas others only 20 years ago. Some of the older signs may have been well preserved, whereas some recently painted signs may have been hit hard by weather more than an old one. Some of my favorite photographs have been of multiple older advertisements, for instance a Gold Medal Flour painted over a Bull Durham Tobacco and collaged with a Uneeda Biscuit. Each one of those nostalgic brands have historical significance and have their own success story, but when you mash them together and add the elements of weather and the environmental effects, it tells a story of survival. Occasionally these stories of survival are also satirical commentary for the survival of a brand. For instance, a peeling General Motors advertisement during the automobile bail-out or a money roll with a happy face during the mortgage crisis. I love the irony of those images.

What do you feel is the cultural relevance of nostalgia? Do you feel that nostalgia limits you in any way?

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

“Be an opener of doors." Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bush League

Maybe it was the bit of sun leaking through the gray today, but I thought back to my two (only) proud moments playing CYO—Catholic Youth Organization—baseball when I was a kid. I had no arm so I usually played second. Never a big fan of competitive team sports, I liked baseball so much that I put up with the nerves and anxiety that came with Saturdays during the short season. I remember well the pit in my stomach watching my mom wash my jersey and stirrups. Some glory: I was playing second one day when the batter hit a sharp grounder back to the mound; the ball ricocheted off the pitcher's left leg—there was an audible thwack and ouch! from the mound—and headed directly toward me, one of those funny, weird baseball bounces. I fielded the ball cleanly and threw to first in time. I remember my manger's relieved, and probably surprised, cheers for me all too well. The thing is, I wouldn't have had a chance fielding that "screamer" if it'd missed the pitcher, though any remotely decent fielder would have. My UZR was, shall we say, meager. On another Saturday, only nine of us kids showed up on the blacktop at Saint Andrew the Apostle, and so I was guaranteed a start. (I was just as happy to warm the bench.) Sometime in the middle innings I was at the plate when the pitcher—who looked like he was already shaving—threw high and tight and socked me in the ribs. I actually "went down." But, hero that I was, I got up, brushed myself off and hobbled melodramatically to first, insuring that our team wouldn't be forced to forfeit the game. We probably lost anyway. My two proud diamond moments: blind luck and grim necessity. There were worse ways to spend sunny Saturdays.


Baseball Boy Ceramic Figurine via Etsy.

Thanks...

...from a few faves.

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.

Image of 1960s record player via Fine Arts America.

Holy Rollers Rockin' In A Killin' Machine

Regrettably, I've seen the great Bodeco only once, in 1993 at Stache's on High Street in Columbus, Ohio. The band was late getting to the stage because when their gig time arrived they were eating at a cheap Chinese restaurant up the street; someone from the club had to go fetch them. After they paid their bill and wiped their mouths, they hit the stage and tore it up: I didn't know who Bodeco was, and that show is still one of my favorites. What I learned later: the band—the line-up that night was Ricky Feather, Brian Burkett, Wink O'Bannon, Jimmy Brown, and Gary Stillwell—hails from Louisville, Kentucky, and their name derives from "Bo" of Diddley and "'deco" of Zydeco. And that's all you really need to know. Bodeco plays muscular, gut-bucket, funky, 12-bar rock and roll, greasy, honest, and fiercely propulsive, led by guitarist and singer "Shaggy" Feather, who growled into the mike at Staches that night like he was pissed off but determined to have a blast. The groove Bodeco lays down is insistent and raw, but loose and swinging. That night in Columbus I picked up the album they were supporting (1992's terrific Bone, Hair and Hide) and since then I've snatched up everything. There are many bands who lock in to a rootsy, retro, lo-fi sound and mine it for all it's worth. Bodeco is great because their songs (about half of which are instrumentals) and ensemble arrangements—including Latin-flavored bongos and shakers as well as over-driven blooze and rawk guitars—are so guileless and timeless and invested in age-old rock and roll values that kitsch and retro stylings are beside the point. Bodeco plays the real thing as passed down from blues to rockabilly to Link Wray to the Swamp to Bo to the Meters and back, leading with spirit and affection and fun. They're playing out and about still, mostly in the south.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

Bridge Out

Keslinger Road. DeKalb, Illinois.

Take me back to where I came from

DeKalb County, Illinois