Thursday tracks: summer's gone, kids

Summer is firmly in the rear-view mirror, and to lament its passing I'd like to include a couple of bittersweet post-summer songs.

The first is from a Hamburg group called Saal 2. The title of this 1981 song, "Strandgefuehle" translates to something like "beach-feelings." You can listen to it here.

The second is called "Summer Girl" by the Summer Sounds.

Finally, and more recently, this is "Summer Dress" by the Red House Painters.

But do not wilt in the face of these wistful melodies -- there is hope. This Sunday, you can catch an exciting new duo called Slow Bros at McCoy's Public House in Westport. They're playing a show with the Denver Broncos (best band name of the century) at around 9:30. I mean, just look at these guys.

Song samples and more info at www.myspace.com/slowbros

Next time on lucubrations.net: gargoyles and dinosaurs in Kansas City

Brothers in Radio

Last Thursday I revisited the KJHK shack for the first time since my last radio show in July 2004.

It was great to be at the old shack, which is -- somewhat miraculously -- still standing. I mostly hung out outside, sitting on that blue plastic chair that always has some rainwater on the seat and listening to the broadcast on the small outdoor speaker.

DJ Tom K was also kind enough to let me contribute a few tunes to his show, a hodgepodge of psych, folk, krautrock and other good stuff, like this tune from D.R. Hooker. I snuck in a few songs like this one by Wimple Winch called "Lollipop Minds." Pretty vacuous stuff lyrically, but with a delightfully playful melody.

Tom's excellent program, "Fractal Ephemera," runs Thursday evenings at 8 on KJHK. Tom is also a fearsome Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly player, and his intense will to win has earned him the nickname "Monopolean" in local board-gaming circles.

It was fun to sneak back on the airwaves, and it made me think of all my good friends from KJ who have ventured on to various DJ projects across the globe...

Sam Hopkins aka DJ Balagan

Sam went on from being the World Music Director at KJHK to spinning records in locations from Baltimore to Brooklyn to the clubs of Tel-Aviv. He's got a new international mix called "Funny Accent" that I got to preview when he was in town. It's an hourlong mix full of great beats, unfamiliar instruments and voice samples of languages I can't begin to discern. One description of the Balagan sound, from the Baltimore CityPaper:

"Balagan creates mixes and tracks from samples and first-hand elements, borrowing styles into a musical pastiche that makes the foot tap while the brow furrows. International elements figure prominently, as the diverse melodies of field recordings mingle with modern beats to represent the United Nations of soul."

To hear some of Sam's beats, find the link to recent mixes and read some of his music writing, you can start at his myspace page and go from there. You can read about some of his travels and global investment advice at www.orbusinvestor.com.

Andrew Giessel

This is my friend Andrew Giessel. Most people just call him "Giessel." Recently Giessel got a tattoo of a sprouting wheat plant on his arm. His interests include fixed-gear bicycles and anything related to dendrites. He's a smart kid. Harvard smart. Giessel had a long-running show on KJ and these days he can be found DJing occasional sets at the Enormous Room in Cambridge. To stream some of his recent playlists, visit Giessel.com. Giessel, by the way, is also the person who set up this blog for me a few years ago.

Robert Wells

Robert Wells is one of my original Brothers in Radio. I used to stay up all the way to midnight (I know...can you believe it?) to listen to his show, the arrival of which could be signaled by the acapella melodies of Beach Boys' "Our Prayer." These days Robert does double duty in Ann Arbor and Detroit, spinning rare soul 45s under the "Ann Arbor Soul Club" banner.

News of Rob's Ann Arbor activities and a few sample cuts can be found here, or heard on the radio Wednesdays 11pm-1am on 88.3 wcbn fm Ann Arbor. If you don't live in the area, you can stream the show at www.wcbn.org.

(Oh, and Rob...you've still got to hook me up with one of those mix CDs. Pretty please.)

Jay Wells

Robert's brother and my radio show co-host back in the day, Jay is responsible for events such as The Parlance and Your Parents Got Breakbeats. More recently I've heard rumors of something called "Maximum Tight."

After a stint in Brooklyn and a couple of gigs back in his hometowns, Jay is currently spinning records in Chicago. Jay's introduced me to more great bands than just about anyone, and his infectious enthusiasm for Larry Coryell eventually drove me to travel all the way to Amsterdam to see the guitarist play.

Jay is pictured here on the right. On the left is DJ Cyrus, another KJ alum who finished out his career at the station by doing a 5-day straight broadcast -- eating in the studio, taking cat naps during long saxophone solos, doing whatever it took to complete the longest consecutive broadcast by any one DJ in that station's history. (I'm pretty sure)

Miles Bonny

An old friend of mine and one of the most prolific and likeable beat producers Kansas City has ever known. One half of hip-hop duo SoundsGood, Miles can be found DJing clubs around town, spinning R&B alternating Fridays at Spitfire and alternating Saturdays at his "FeelSexy" event at Bobby's Hangout.

His album "Smell Smoke" is available on iTunes now, and a new release called "Closer Love" will be out soon. You can hear some of Miles' music here and keep up on his many involvements in and updates about soul, r&b and hip-hop events/releases in KC. Or as he calls it, Cans Ass City.

SUPERWOLF

Not a personal friend of mine, though the records he plays are the kinds you fall in love with upon first listen. The Pitch did a good write-up of him here. He spins every Friday night at Chez's, which believe it or not used to be a pretty quiet place on weekends. It's more crowded and smokier now, but the sweet sounds are worth it.

I'll be adding links to these guys' (and a bunch of other peoples') music sites on the sidebar soon, so keep them in mind when you need some new beats in your life. Also, if you or someone you know got left off this list in error, drop me a line. Thanx.

Photo credits
Sam: modularmoods.com
Giessel: ghostdad
Rob: Pattay
Jay: Jennifer Brothers
Miles: also by Jenn
Superwolf: Anna-Marie Perry

KC Wolf, etc.

This photo by David Eulitt and article from Sunday's KC Star is one of the finest examples of sports journalism I've seen in some time. KC Wolf came to my grade school one year to speak out about the dangers of drugs and alcohol (at least I think so -- that's what most speakers in wolf suits came to talk to us about). It's good to know he can put his money where his muzzle is.

Most of you in town have probably already seen this, but for Chiefs fans abroad and my friends in countries where football means something entirely different, this should at least show you that "touchdownball" (as German sporting goods stores call it) can indeed be an fun, visceral fan experience. I am of course referring to the video of the Chiefs mascot taking down a drunken fan who ran out onto the field before being tackled by the 7 foot 2 wolf and a pair of security guards. Emboldened by the play, the Chiefs went on to win the game against the Minnesota Vikings, 13-10.

While I'm link farming, I might as well send you to a couple of other vids that show how interesting life can be in America. The first is another view of the Kerry speech in which a student was tazed. I know...I found the whole thing ridiculous and annoying, too, but this is a well-done spoof. The only thing that eclipses it in silliness is this short interview with a hippie filmed during anti-tazing protests at the Florida campus where the incident took place.

Enjoy, and look for a more traditional post soon.

Next time use the getaway bike!

According to this breaking news story from the KC Star, a couple was seriously injured after jumping off the Lewis & Clark Viaduct during a police chase. They apparently stole a car, drove it to the bridge under pursuit from the fuzz, and then jumped off. Unbeknownst to them, the perfect getaway vehicle was within reach. Just under the bridge they jumped off is a walkway overlooking the intersection of the Kansas and Missoura rivers.


At the beginning of the walkway is this fanciful bicycle, which looks like it is stuck to the gate, but will actually come free and travel unbelievably fast if you just say the magic word (Sacajawea). So if any of you are out committing felony theft in KCK and need a safer, more efficient escape route, you'll know what to do.

The Real Voice of Darth Vader

A few months ago I posted a link to the Vader Sessions, which I was obsessed with at the time, thanks in no small part to the accompanying Isaac Hayes fanfare. Here's another alternate glimpse at Vader vocals, this time featuring the original voice of Vader actor Dave Prowse. I wish the entire movie could be seen with this guy's speech parts, although that might get old.

More traditional bloggishness from me soon.

Friends who can write

Recently I've been made aware of the fact that there are other outlets for writing on the Internet besides personal blogs. These sites are called "Online publications," or sometimes, "Online magazines." A couple of particularly fine online rags called "McSweeneys" and "FailBetter" currently feature stories by a couple friends of mine, Jeremiah Tucker and Stevie Davis, respectively.

Jeremiah's story is something making fun of Thomas Kinkade. I don't understand exactly what's going on in the piece, which makes it perfectly at home for McSweeney's. Jeremiah also has a blog full of entertaining musical selections and writings, including this, his most heartbreaking post of the past year.

Stevie's story can be found at failbetter.com, just below the one about vibrators. According to the author bio provided by failbetter, Stevie is a firefighter from Topeka. I never knew.

So check these guys out, along with the sites that published them.

P.S. How about you? Anything you'd like to share with the humble but growing readership of lucubrations.net? I'd be happy to send the spotlight your way, even if it only has as much wattage as a keychain light.

I Think I'm Going To Be Okay

I've always known I was pretty, but this image -- taken from my rather exhaustive photoshoot yesterday in the bowels of KU Med Center's Westwood facility -- just proves I'm a real peach.

I was reporting to KU Med to just get a routine series of head-shots (some stuff for my new portfolio -- as many of you know I've been hoping to break into commercial work for some time now) but they wound up putting me in a machine, subjecting me to a series of noises in cramped quarters, giving me a shot of something called "a coloring agent" (though if you ask me my face make-up leaves a lot to be desired!) and then took five more minutes worth of pics.

Now I know headshots in this town are expensive, but you should have seen the sticker price on these! It was so bad I have to have my medical insurance help pay for this. Which just adds insult to injury, considering they came out so...so ghastly.

Actually, none of this is true, and this light-hearted joking about serious matters is probably not in good taste toward those unlucky enough to be suffering from real maladies requiring MRI scans. I was actually at KU Med to make sure there was no suspicious swelling, bleeding or other activity in my brain, which doctors thought might be possible given the past week of severe headaches I've experienced. Fortunately everything looks all right, and I feel a lot better.

Pretty, though, don't you think?

COORDINATES

After nearly a year of compiling and designing the place-themed magazine, Coordinates, limited amounts of the magazine are now available in stores such as City Lights in San Francisco, Quimby's in Chicago as well as a few places in LA, Virginia, Portland, etc.

About 30 people from everywhere from Ohio to Mongolia contributed photos, stories, poems and artwork, and Editor Jon Allen and friends did an excellent job of putting it all together. I've got a piece in the mag celebrating some of my own favorite spots, including Clinton Lake, the Vondelpark and abandoned missile silos of Kansas.

If you aren't in a position to snag one of the few remaining copies, you can download a PDF of Coordinates here. The regular PDF will bring it up in linear form, with the collated one available for anyone who wants to print it out and bind it. Jon says the next issue, which will be printed next summer, will have a theme of music/sound. If you're interested in contributing to future publications, just let me know and I'll give you more info.

Enjoy!

ABOUT THE COVER
The cover of "Coordinates" was cut from a 10' x 10' original mono print depicting synapses in the human brain by Janie Hammerschmidt (Lawrence, KS). There were 108 covers culled from the composition, each one being entirely unique. If all the covers were brought back to a single location, they could reform the original images depicted above. Once the covers were cut, Janie then letter pressed the title to each one using 48 pt. Bernhard Gothic, Light font.

DDR Night in Kansas City

I'm a big fan of Germany. I studied there, I have friends there and I'd like to go back at some point. Most of you know this. So you can imagine my excitement when I walked into Muddy's coffee shop on 51st and saw a shiny poster advertising a special "DDR Night" at the UMKC Campus.

At first I was perplexed. Why would our local university sponsor a tribute night for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik? (The DDR, or the German Democratic Republic in English, was the offical name for East Germany from 1949 - 1990)

Then I was excited. I figured there was a former Ossi in the school's German department, or maybe a bunch of kids had somehow developed an interest in the former East Germany and wanted to meet up to discuss the benefits of socialism, dress up in stonewashed jeans, eat Spreewaldguerken and dance to Nina Hagen. Whatever they planned to do on DDR night, the shiny, retro/futuristic poster sure made it look it would be fun.

The next meeting was scheduled for Monday, Aug. 27, so I arrived at the UMKC dorms that night with a freshly trimmed punk-rock haircut and a volume of Brecht under my arm only to find this.

Apparently in the United States, DDR does not stand for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but instead a video game called "Dance Dance Revolution" in which players move their feet to a set pattern on a dance pad, stepping in time to the general rhythm or beat of a song. How foolish I felt.

Even though the cameraderie I was looking for at UMKC didn't pan out, I do have a couple of film recommendations for anyone interested in learning more about East Germany. Good Bye Lenin is an excellent movie about the transition from life in the DDR to western capitalism, and The Lives of Others provides a fascinating look at the scrutiny East German artists faced by the secret police.

If you didn't see The Lives of Others in the theater, it's now available to rent on DVD. Even if you don't have any interest in the subject, it's a fantastic film and you'll easily see why it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2006.

Finally, here's a few songs you might enjoy from the former East. The first is featured in the Lives of Others soundtrack, by the East German group Bayon. The song, "Stell Dich Mitten in den Regen," takes its lyrics from a poem by the German poet Wolfgang Borchert, a Hamburg native who was killed at age 26 in WWII.

The second is a propaganda tune called "Ami, Go Home" performed by the Freie Deutsche Jugend, a sort of boy scout group for former East Germany. The lyrics, set to the tune of "Jesus Loves The Little Children," basically tell the U.S. occupiers to go home and split the atom for peaceful purposes. Thanks to Susi and Adam for this one.

Track #3 comes from the DDR prog-rock group Berluc's 1979 album, "Reise Zu Den Sternen" (journey to the stars). This song, "Bleib, Sonne, Bleib" is a nice hopeful number about the experience of leaving Earth behind, something East Germans prog-rockers and Dance Dance Revolutioners can surely both relate to.

Thanks for reading and stay-tuned for a more general mix of German music soon.

Live blog of the lunar eclipse

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I would be doing daring and/or innovative things to keep this blog from moving to Blogger-mandated rolling blackouts, and one of the bright ideas is to do a live blog of the eclipse. So here you go. Stay tuned for updates...

4:51: Last night's dinner of tacos and red wine has not sat particularly well, so I am able to wake up with little difficulty to go outside and see what this eclipse thing is all about.

4:52: Just as suspected, the moon is just above the television tower in the sky west of my apartment. A tiny bright sliver is in view below a murkier looking sphere.

4:54: Girlfriend wanders out into living room, confused as to why I've suddenly decided to go outside.

4:56: I look below to see if any of my neighbors are out on their scooters or skateboards to take in the event. The only person walking by is a crazy-haired kid with a dirty t-shirt and a white rat perched on his shoulder. I've seen this guy around once or twice before.

4:58: Sliver has more or less disappeared and the moon has turned a burnt red and gray color.

5:00: Girlfriend goes back to bed, but not before we listen to a 30-second clip of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on iTunes.

5:10: I decide to go live with the eclipse blog, knowing that this could turn out to be a significant event in the history of Midtown Kansas City live lunar blogging. Besides, it's nice and cool outside.

5:20: I'm not sure that I'm ready for coffee or tea, and begin to wish that I had a Boulevard Lunar Ale in the icebox to help wash down the experience. Unfortunately Berbiglia will not open for another several hours, and I'm not sure this new, polarizing local brew is available at the nearby KwikShop.

5:22: It dawns on me that, as cool as live blogging an eclipse is, it would be much cooler to spend the night at some secret campsite in Clinton Lake in the company of friends, preferably with a small campfire and no worries about work or school the next day. I hope that some of my friends are having an experience more like that.

5:27: Oblivious to my flurry of entries, the moon has grown darker still so that it's burnt orange almost fades into the dark blue sky. In areas with lower light pollution, the effect is probably more dramatic, but this is still impressive. At this stage, and for most of the past half-hour, the ecliptical orb would be hard to identify as either the sun or moon by the casual observer. The color suggests sun, but the low brightness suggests moon. Perplexing.

5:30: I still don't think I'll get ahold of any Lunar Ale, but if I did I'd have to go ahead and mix in a bottle of Leinenkugel's Sunshine Wheat to achieve a ratio that sufficiently represents both celestial bodies/brews.

5:40: The moon is really dark at this point, especially on the right side. It almost looks like it's disintegrating. Hang in there, moon!

5:42: The time is flying by, but not too fast to allow some moon-related recollections to creep into my head. I think back to summer nights as a young boy on lake Okoboji when my great-grandmother would sing "Moon, Moon, Bright and Shiny Moon, Won't Ya Please Shine Down on Me?" I guess it was supposed to be a light-hearted song, but the part about the guy around with corner with a Gatling gun always scared me quite a bit.

5:44: Another moon-piece comes to mind, specifically American poet Vachel Lindsay's old nursery rhyme, The Moon's The North Wind's Cooky. The first part reads:

The Moon's the North Wind's cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there's but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.

5:51: Driven mad by lunar hysteria, I begin tearing up the upholstery and writing free-verse poetry in a frenzy (not really, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention)

5:52: According to my chart, total eclipse has been underway for an hour.

5:53: I decide to have a cup of green tea (a neutral color so neither moon nor sun thinks I'm taking sides) and an M&M Kudos bar. Kudos, by the way, have not aged well. Remember how they used to be completely coated in chocolate? No longer. Now only the bottom is covered in chocolate, making them basically any old granola-type bar. Which is sad.

6:00: Gradual lightening of the sky. The eclipse is lowering slowly out of view in a soft pastel blend of orange and light blue. Most of the moon remains obscured.

6:15: Though I have only been listening to crickets up until this point, the sound of cars and buses motivates me to listen to a version of "Sail To The Moon" that Radiohead performed in Portugal back in 2002 (click link to listen along). Though I could easily listen to enough moon-mentioning songs to keep me busy until the next lunar eclipse on Feb. 21, 2008, I think I will limit it to this track. And maybe the entire Neu! 75 album.

6:23: In the growing light of day, I can only see a tiny shard of moon. The prospect of live-blogging the eclipse also begins to look less attractive as I think ahead to a 10 o'clock staff meeting. But I'm not giving up just yet.

6:30: If the moon is the sky's earring, she appears to have lost it. The moon has disappeared somewhere beyond St. Luke's Hospital, the building in which I was born.

6:33: Daylight, basically. People walking their dogs. A squirrel does a hire-wire act on the power line across the street. Lovely light purple and blue shades on the western horizon.

6:35: I have lost sight of the moon, but it occurs to me that perhaps my friends elsewhere haven't. Friends in California, for example. Rather than exhaust everyone trying to come up with every notable moon reference I can think of, I would like to encourage you to add comments or links in the comments section of your own favorite moon mentions.

6:39: It was neither a murderous red Jean Toomer moon, nor a phantasmagorically overblown Tim Burton moon, just a full-on, balls-out overlapping of the light from both spheres. I'm glad to have seen it.

6:43: Cars are going by, air-conditioners are dripping and I'm starting to hear saxophone solos in my head, a conditioned response from many semesters of waking up early to play Jazz in the Morning on KJHK.

6:47: The moon and sun have left the playing field. I wish them well but I'm sure I'll see them again. Painfully soon, in the sun's case.

6:52: I have now been live-blogging the lunar eclipse for exactly two hours and boy has it been fun. Now I'm going to smoke a cigarette and go back to bed, if only for an hour.

So if you'd like scientific information, this might not be the page for you, but if you're up for entertaining coverage of all the big events, stop back by. Thank you for reading, and I bid you all good morning.

Century o century of clouds

Today I'd like to give birthday regards to Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, better known as Guillaume Apollinaire, who was born on yesterday's date in Rome 127 years ago. This French poet and father of the surrealist movement is one of my favorite European poets, especially his 1913 collection, Alcools.

Rather than scrap together a biography here, I'd rather include some links to his works translated into English. This site has a number of selections in English. You can also find pretty good translations of my two favorite pieces of his, Zone and The Betrothal (Les Fiancailles) by clicking on the title of each in this sentence.

What I enjoy most about Apollinaire is his rhapsodic, dreamlike images and the way he mixes surreal elements with a sense of loss to give his poems a dramatic melancholoy. The poems are at times so solemn and melodramatic that they can bring the reader a sense of hope, or at least they do so for me.

A quote from one of his successors/counterparts, Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval, describes a method and motivation for making strange juxtapositions within verse that I find in Apollinaire's work as well as Nezval's. He writes:

Logically the glass belongs to the table, the star to the sky, the door to the staircase. That is why they go unnoticed. It was necessary to set the star near the table; the glass hard by the piano and the angels; the door beside the ocean. The idea was to unveil reality; to give it back its shining image, as on the first day of its existence. If I did this at the expense of logic, it was an attempt at realism raised to a higher power.

(taken from Poems for the Millennium, Vol. 1, University of California Press)

Finally, I'd like to honor Apollinaire with a piece from local international poetry site, Lingua Obscura, which owes a fair amount to Apollinaire's Les Fiancailles. This piece also goes out in honor of the total lunar eclipse, which is scheduled to occur over Kansas City skies around 5 tomorrow morning. Enjoy.

the dog days

Well listen friends I just got off the phone with the folks at Blogger and boy are they not happy. It seems that because I'm not generating enough ad revenue or page views they might have to put me on a rolling blackout. Meaning that by day my page would be visible to readers and by night it would go offline in order to give resources to non-popular bloggers in places like Singapore. So unless I can drum up some more readership soon, this could spell the end for lucubrations.net.

While it is tempting to continue to lay on the couch and let the flies joyride on the back of my fan blade while I drink horsefeathers and spoonfeed myself jars of chilled marshmallow fluff, I feel that I must use my between work hours more wisely. More aggressively. More bloggorifically.

So in order to keep this ship from going down I'm going to hit visitors to this site with everything I've got, only in more regular, manageable doses. If I'm going to exist in this blogosphere, I might as well keep the wheels turning...

Kicked Out of Candyland: the Mysterious Disappearance of Plumpy the Plumpa

This morning, while proofreading one of the finer comics in today's funny papers, I had the occasion to look up the spellings of old-school board games such as Mousetrap, Chutes & Ladders, and of course, Candy Land.

The google image result for Candy Land brought up a large map of the Candylandscape circa the 1978 edition. I thought of the Wizard of Oz movies or Willy Wonka as I let my mind wander back along the Lollipop Woods, the Ice Cream Sea and the Mollases Swamp.

I looked at each landmark and remembered my childhood, but also wondered why the picture was so quilted-looking before I read the caption and saw some lady had constructed it out of beads. 100,000 beads, in fact.

The dedication this artist put into the project was as astounding as the end result, and it also took me from feeling sheepishly nostalgic to realizing Candy Land serves as an affectionate homeland for many more than just me, as this image I found on flickr demonstrates.


A wikipedia search revealed that Candy Land was invented in 1940 in San Diego by Elanor Abbott, a woman recovering from Polio.

Hasbro (which bought Milton Bradley) had to sue in order to retrieve the domain name www.candyland.com from the operators of an adult Web site.

I also learned that Plumpy the Plumpa Troll was replaced by Mama Gingertree, reportedly for unknown reasons.

The more I looked, however, the more clear it became that Plumpy had over the decades become the personfication of bad luck for thousands of highly sensitive and impressionable young children.

For example, I found an article by a psychologist describing her special needs student's reaction to playing Candy Land for the first time:

For those of you who forget (or never played) the game is played by choosing cards and advancing to that place on the board. The winner is the first one who gets to the castle at the end.

Daniel was very intense as he played, and kept getting flustered by "Plumpy" Plumpy is the card in the deck that sends you back almost to the beginning. No one likes Plumpy, but I think of the game as a highly evolved, spiritual game, in that it lets us know what we can control (taking turns, not cheating) but is like life, in that there is much we cannot control, like love, or birth or death.

So, when a Candyland player is going along, and is suddenly swept up to the Queen Frostine card, or cast down to the little plum, Plumpy, then that is a lesson in things we cannot control. For children, much of their lives are involve things over which they have no control: where they live, who their teachers are, whether their parents get divorced, or stay together, etc.

So I love Candyland.

But Daniel did not.

Another article, this one written by the mother of a young girl, seemed to take it personally every time her daughter was dealt the unfortunate "Plumpy" card (a reverse trump card, if you will), which sent the girl into a state of despair.

That said, the main trouble with Candyland, in my opinion, is not the win-lose scenario. It’s Plumpy. Seriously, I really do think that Plumpy is responsible for a good deal of the rising Prozac trade. With Plumpy in action, a game of Candyland can last as long as the Dark Ages. Maybe longer. As soon as you approach the final curve of the path, Plumpy will rise from the depths of the card pile and send you packing your bags back to the sugarplum trees. After about six encounters with him, most parents are ready to ring his fuzzy little neck.

Normally I would seek a response from Plumpy's people, but he was nowhere to be found. Even the Wikipedia text that came up when I searched for him had vanished from all but the cached version of the entry.

All we know for sure is that Plumpy was replaced by Mama Gingertree. So what does that tell us? Most likely, replacing the scapeplum Plumpy with a matriarchal character was the result of recent breakthroughs in child psychology.

Or perhaps the collective resentment against Plumpy had become multi-generational, and a simple change of face was needed. In other words, Plumpy had to take the fall.

Another possibility is that Hasbro is guilty of the same anti-purple prejudice displayed by the McDonald's Corporation when they gave Grimace the so-called "purple" slip.

Or maybe Ma Gingertree's just got that certain spice.

Whatever the reasons, history has taught us there are grave consequences to deposing public figures for political gain. Also worth considering is whether the gender switch suggests that this country may, in fact, be ready for a female president.

Certainly much about the circumstances attending Plumpy's downfall invites further discussion. But let us end instead with a salutation to the Plumpster himself: Plumpy, you may have been kicked out of Candy Land, but there I'm sure there's a special place for you in Plumpa Troll Paradise.

Our Modest Metropolis

Kansas City's urban renewal ambitions scored some PR points with a front-page feature in Thursday's USA Today. The headline, accompanied by a nice photo of the new Nelson at night, read: Kansas City: Modest Metropolis in Midst of Mighty Renewal.

The article contained the usual fanfare about new buildings, how much companies are investing in the Power and Light district, and some quotes from New York publications about how schnazzy the Bloch building is. The "If You Go" sidebar even mentioned my favorite neighborhood barbecue joint/gas station combo, Oklahoma Joe's.

The most colorful part of the article, in my opinion, is the transition from talking about entertainment options to mentioning at length the WWI museum. And I quote:

Among the more established draws is the 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District, home to the American Jazz Museum and nightspots such as The Blue Room. But tourism also has gotten a boost from another significant new museum that opened in December, the National World War I Museum.

Built underground at the site of Kansas City's iconic Liberty Memorial — a 22-story obelisk-like war monument that is one of the city's most imposing structures — the new museum offers a comprehensive history of the Great War, with thousands of rare historical objects ranging from battle flags to biplanes.

"I can guarantee that this is the only place where you can touch the tube of a Bavarian field howitzer," says curator Doran Cart, rubbing his hand along one of half a dozen howitzers on display.

I haven't been to the WWI museum in a couple of years, but just from reading that last quote, it sounds amazing.

In fact, I think when visiting dignitaries or heads of state first arrive in our modest metropolis, they should be greeted with the customary kiss on both cheeks, handed a platter of OK Joe's fries and addressed with the words: "Welcome to Kansas City -- the only place where you can touch the tube of a Bavarian field howitzer."

Thursday Tracks: Laura Wetzel

In the last post, I mentioned my own involvement with our high school's "bunch of bands" competition, which my siblings and I performed in a combined 8 times over the last decade. The most recent Wetzel to join this list is 17-year-old Laura. She's been playing piano and guitar for a while, but it was only about 6 months ago when she started churning out some amazing little tunes that she'd written herself. David helped her record and mix the tracks over the last couple of months, and the end result is a gem of an 8-song EP that you can find on the iTunes store if you just type in Laura Wetzel.

I've already e-mailed some of you about this, but today I thought I'd post a few of the tunes so that you can hear them in their entirety. Just click on the song title and wait a moment for it to play. These songs include...

1. The Old Days: This is one of the first tunes she wrote and a family favorite.

2. Tahoe Love: She recorded this only a few weeks ago in a closet at the leadership camp she went to this summer at Lake Tahoe. They wound up using it as the background music for the slideshow at the end of the week.

3. Time Will Tell: This more subdued number is one of my personal favorites. It's got a nice calming feel and David contributes some organ playing as well.

Once again, if you'd like to hear more, either look on the iTunes store or drop me a line and I can get you a copy. Or if you've got some music of your own you'd like to share or have me post a link to in the sidebar, feel free to do that as well. Especially if you play the bagpipes. Stay tunes and thanks for reading.

(insert lyrics from the school song here)

On a Saturday morning in April, I paid a visit to my old high school for the first time in several years. I'd been out the night before at Jay's birthday party, which was full of SME grads from several different years, and after finding out a number of the 40-something ladies at work also went to East, it was starting to look like my future would be made up of an increasingly insulated circle of former Lancers.

In my hungover state, with Jenn driving the car to SME for the school's Earth Day celebration, it felt like I was being forcibly taken back to high school and the last 8 years had just been a game.

The reason I was going back was for the library book sale fundraiser, which my mom had told me about. Because the place was so busy, we had to park in the Sophomore Lot, home of countless after-school showdowns. In the Spirit Circle a bus named "The Magic Bus" contained a bunch of smaller children working on craft projects. As tempting as it was to hop on for the ride, the school itself would prove to be as time-unwinding as any magic bus could hope to be.

When we got there we realized Earth Day Fair was much larger than just the book sale. There was a health food lunch set up and the gym was full of booths selling organic plants and stuff like that. There were some parrots and things in the back of the gym and a number of craft workshops for kids.

I bought a huge stack of dollar books, including a collection of essays by Hesse, some young adult fiction, a star chart, a travelogue by someone named Betty Wetzel called "After You, Mark Twain: A Modern Journey Around the Equator," and a World War II history book in which someone had added silly and mostly illegible captions to the stern black-and-white wartime portraits.

[side note: visiting a used book sale when hungover can be dangerous because you feel like if you don't buy and read these out-of-circulation books than you're the one responsible for letting their subjects and authors fall into eternal obscurity]

After buying the books, making "Save The Earth" buttons and talking to my sisters (both current SME students), we stopped by the band room to play with the animals that the environmental ed students were keeping an eye on. I watched some little kids interact with a skittish little chinchilla and marveled at how neat it was that East basically has its own mini-zoo.

Walking further down the hallway, past the stairs to the locker room and the little theater was like unzipping a compressed file in my memory. The experiences and emotions of a decade ago came back into focus, and I could picture my classmates and I going about our daily high school lives.

On the ramp beside the cafeteria, I looked out into the courtyard, which looked like it has a few new picnic tables and benches. I could easily picture the group of friends I used to eat lunch. The funny thing was I half expected to see everyone there, laughing, hacky-sacking and/or throwing food at one another.

While cruising through the halls, it dawned on me that sophomore and junior year in high school were when my current life really began. That was when I first started staying up late, filling up notebooks with awkward but honest lines of verse, drinking Coca Cola early in the morning, driving around with friends, writing for the school paper, filming comedy skits with friends and drinking beer. By the time I graduated, the template for my lifestyle thus far was pretty much in place.
East is also where I got developed a more diverse taste in music, thanks to some friends of mine in the jazz band whom I joined to form the seminal high school funk group Funk in the Trunk. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I haven't regularly played in a band since high school, but after winning B.O.B. with F.I.T.T. as a sophomore, I thought it would be futile to try and top that experience.

Thinking about my own high school days made me think about all the amazing people who have passed through the halls of SME. We may have had a reputation as a priveleged, sheltered school, but most of us seemed to be aware of it on some level and did our best to step outside of the bubble whenever we could and as soon as we could. The teaching staff -- no doubt as a result of dealing with the kinds of parents and administrators you get in a district like Shawnee Mission -- did a good job of instilling us with healthy bit of skepticism, and it always seemed like there was a bit of a subversive spirit alive in both the faculty and student body.

I'm always interested to hear about what my former classmates are up to now. I've seen friends from high school live in other countries, get involved in political campaigns, become teachers, scientists and parents. I've also seen people drop out, mess up and find their way again.

So, former classmates, I'm happy to have known you. I'm proud of you guys and I wish you the best, wherever you may be. Now I better end this speech and bid you all good night before I wind up quoting the school song.

ADDENDUM

For Further Reading...
My friends and I fancied ourselves quite the satirists when we were at East, but former biology teacher Rick Gould has literally written the book on the subject. "The Leaping Tuna of Kirschenbaum East" follows the trials of principal Alexander Papadopoulus and staff, with each of the 180 (short) chapters representing a day in the school year. I ran into Mr. Gould recently and he said he put the book together using the hundreds of humorous staff memos he'd written over the years. I'm only a couple weeks into it, but so far it's fantastic. You can find it on Amazon. And don't be daunted by the page length -- each chapter is just a few pages and there's a lot of blank ones in between.

Class of 99 Reunion Info... Following the suggestion of another former classmate, I proposed to the reunion committee that we hold the 10-year get-together at the McDonald's on 95th and Mission where we could loiter, smoke cigs and then go to Rock'n'Bowl at Ranch Mart. Though the idea was a popular one, I'm guessing the actual location will be held in a slightly more traditional venue. Either way, it should be a good time. I'll keep you posted.

Bugles in the Afternoon

This picture is not of my place, but my mental landscape right now probably bears a resemblance. Full of hubcaps, crime scene tape, keyboards, parachutes, pumpkin lanterns and colorful plastic detritus. I'll probably go to the art museum this evening (Nelson is open until 9 Tues,Thurs,Fri,Sat) in hopes that the impressionist exhibit smoothes things back over.

Today is Thursday, the day I usually post a couple of songs. The first one of today's pair is something that came on my car stereo courtesy of an unlabeled CD-R mix I pulled out of the glove compartment on Saturday. As I drove around and listened to it, I thought about the song's composer, Lee Hazlewood, and how he likely wouldn't be around for much longer. I found out a few days later that Lee had passed away that very day. That song is called "We All Make The Flowers Grow."

I'm not going to post any lengthy tributes to Hazlewood, as I only know so much about the guy and I'm sure the Web is awash with them at this point. Instead I'll just include another song he wrote that Nancy Sinatra sang on. It's called "Sundown, Sundown."

Finally, here's a little party pic send-off for my friends Zach and Ben who are both moving away from Lawrence. We used to play music together, from Canterbury House cookouts to late-night hootenannies. On the night this photo was taken, Ben and Zach had just finished pouring water on each other, and Zach also ate a cicada.

I'll miss them both.

thursday tracks and photo retrospective

Above is a picture Jennifer took of our porch at Warwickshire. It's three stories up and covered in trees. At night I'll sit out there, sip summer brew and listen to music for hours. If you'd like to hear some of the music I've been playing lately, you can drop by the the lukebox. And if you're not familiar with this so-called perpetual mixtape, this post from a few weeks back will explain its origins and how to download these tracks in iTunes.

Now I know most of you visit this site to read my long-winded rants and to see the latest photos from miss brothers, but today I'm going to post a few photos of my own, part of a recent flickr set culled from past trips to Berlin, Barcelona, Dubuque, New York, Lawrence, Hamburg and down the street. Here goes, with a wee bit of haiku accompaniment:


Kermit and Peanut
at Hell's Kitchen Flea Market
discussing their lives


aboard the Twilight
The ancient deckhand stares down
the Mississippi


sticker removal
my sunburst telecaster
with a tiny star


swimming skeleton
Berlin's famous decadence
has caught up to him


Eppendorfer Park
Till woke up to discover
he'd aged sixty years


Laura makes a mess
covering the counter in
chocolate syrup swirls


At my uncle's ranch
I trail behind the horses
on the four wheeler


she used to live in
the Valentine neighborhood
but she moved away


trees hills ruins trees
we've got everything you need
to build dead cities

If you'd like to see more pictures, you can go to my flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/lukasfotos to see the rest of the 40 or so pics from the past 2 years that I just put up. Or check out this digital pinhole set by Tara Sloan. It's pretty cool, as you can see below. Thanks for reading and have a splendid day.

Banging gongs and hunting for ghosts

Summertime at night is the right time for spectral photography.

Usually the nocturnal photo shoots we complete are whimsical and innocent, such as the shadow dance-off that Adam and I took part in during last weekend’s Bloch Party, or the Kermit the Frog shots we took last Winter. But sometimes we stumble into a realm of photography more informed by the supernatural.

One source of ghastly images this summer has been the University of Kansas campus. Set on a hill overlooking both the Kaw and Wakarusa river valleys, the KU campus is at once a shining academy on the hill and the rugged ancestral Indian grounds the white man first referred to as Hogback Ridge.

Aesthetically, there is much to interest the nighttime visitor to the KU campus: The primordial mists and willow trees of Potter Lake. The snow-white glare of the streetlights on the newer buildings. The hum of the generators and giant air conditioners. The alluring darkness of the tunnels and steam vents behind the old limestone buildings. The sculpture of Moses kneeling reverently before the stained-glass burning bush at Smith Hall.

Another lovely aspect of the KU campus at night is the colors. A row of columns stand especially tall in the dull orange glow of an almost burned-out light. The bright yellow windows of Anschutz look like panels on a giant spacecraft that's stopped to recharge its batteries overnight. The lights, leaves and sky combine to paint the hill in a spectrum of soft yellows, greens and blues – a gentle but highly expressionistic palate that reminds one of Van Gogh.

Music Hall Mystics


Among the many picturesque landmarks and buildings on campus, the one that fascinates me the most is the music building.

Today, Murphy Hall is a modern, well-lighted place, but you should have seen it in the fall of 1999. They were demolishing, rebuilding or renovating most of the building, transforming an already confusing structure into a labyrinth of blocked-off hallways, burned-out lights and construction equipment. My friend Andrew had a class there that year, and he was convinced the place was haunted.

To test his theory, Andrew recruited two of us to go on a ghost-hunting expedition, which we excitedly agreed to. The three of us met one Thursday at midnight, drank a few beers in the bushes and proceeded to scour the premises for any trace of spirit life.

We were greeted by the sounds of warbling tubas, atonal piano scales and faint violins, lured on by flickering EXIT signs that instead led to chained-off doors you could open up just enough to see a sudden drop-off several stories deep.

Though the sound of instruments indicated there were people in the building, we didn't see a soul until we went outside, where several figures were walking around garbed entirely in white. These, however, were not specters, but a small crew of Mexican construction workers wearing haz-mat suits to protect themselves from lead-based paint and/or asbestos.

If we had sought to find an honest-to-goodness ghost, we had (perhaps predictably) failed.

Still, the adventure provided me with images that would haunt me for years, such as a partially chained-off hallway door giving way to an abyss of broken pianos.

Return to Murphy


This month I got returned to Murphy for only the second time since my student days. Dave and Mike were helping Andrew Morgan put some finishing percussive touches on his album, and Andrew had secured the key to the large rehearsal room for the week.

After playing bell trees, celestas, chimes and drums, Natalya and I decided to explore the premises while our friends got down to serious recording.

Once again, we didn't run across anyone, just took pictures, rode elevators and followed stairwells, aimlessly combing the miles of silent hallspace within the music building complex. In the courtyard, we took off our shoes and sat on the steps facing the full moon.

Almost two hours passed by the time we made it back to the rehearsal hall, and the guys had finished recording everything except for a few crashes from the giant gong. As the last blast of the gong faded, we said our goodbyes and drove back home through an empty campus.

When we uploaded our photos the next day, we were spooked to find that there were indeed spectral images lurking in the corners of the digital compositions. The midnight ghosts of Murphy were real after all.



A closer look revealed that these spirits were not unfamiliar. Like all those "Sixth Sense" style movies where the protaganists discover they're actually dead, we recognized the ghosts in the photos as ourselves.



Skeptics among you might chalk this up to a slow shutter speed and not the supernatural, but I personally felt as if the apparitions I'd searched for years ago were finally appearing to me through the medium of digital photography. In the words of an acquaintance of mine who is an expert on the occult: If you let a black cat loose on the world, that cat may one day find its way back to you.

We later learned that David had stayed around and played piano for several hours after our departure, and I felt a lot better knowing that any spirits we'd photographically conjured had likely been dispelled by D's soulful sweeps of the Steinway.

It will probably be a while before I go back to Murphy Hall, at least in the dead of night. Fortunately, we preserved a number of images from our journey in this photo set. Even if there aren't real ghosts in the music hall, the music majors among you can attest that the difference between zombie and music student can be hard to distinguish. So be wary if you visit.

Speaking of zombies, if I don't wrap up this post, I'm going to become one myself. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more stories of brushes with the spirit world.

point of departure

Last week I climbed up this signal tower to see what kind of signal I could get, but unfortunately I forgot my computer and telephone so instead I just let my eyes adjust until I could see all the way to New Zealand. Pretty soon I'll come down and we can all catch up. In the meantime, here's a set of photos from Adam's visit to Kansas City.

Music/Appreciation

Yesterday evening I was invited to a little gathering at Tim and Lily's. They live on the other side of the art gallery from me, not a far walk at all. The theme of the party, besides an opportunity to sample delectable treats such as masa cakes, fresh vegetables, brie and homemade chocolate mousse, was for everyone to bring their favorite song to play.

Trying to pick your one favorite song is kind of a nightmare scenario for music aficionados. The very idea of selecting one tune before all others can be paralyzing. But with music so often relegated to background noise or informational "ones and zeros" (as they say), having an active listening party was a great idea. People played some great songs, all of which Tim is compiling onto a disc. And music goes down so well with several glasses of red wine.

As I left that night, I thought about Kansas City versus Chicago, where I just got back from. There's sort of a classic pattern middle-class American lives follow, from college town to big city and eventually back to the suburban origins we sprang from. I generally think of the "big city" phase as taking place somewhere cool like NY, Chicago or San Francisco, but for some of us this just isn't practical.

The other day I looked at all the stuff piled around my apartment -- books, crayons, guitars, tennis rackets, multicolored plastic easter eggs, obsolete foreign currency, photographs, harmonicas, a small wooden artists model dancing behind a pair of candles -- and saw it not as the mess it is but as the work of art it's trying to be. In Kansas City, I thought, it is possible to live the dream.

Someone asked me recently if I ever worry that life is passing me by. Of course I do. I'm always looking at where people I know are moving to or traveling through and thinking how much fun that would be. Living in the town you grew up in, it's hard not to feel stuck at times. Life passes all of us by, whether we like it or not. But part of being free is to free yourself from sticking to goals that no longer apply and letting your dreams morph into something new.

Big cities and foreign countries will always be cool to me. And I'll never take my eyes off that prize. But for now, we've got a nice little city of our own, my friends and I. Life, like a pop song, is short. Cities, like favorite songs, are multitude. In the end the one you pick is almost arbitrary. Better to enjoy it while it lasts.

Ice Cream Gets On Your Face

Life lately has been a veritable McFlurry of activity. Maybe you have heard the old jazz standard, "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," (used as a theme song for early generation smoking ban proponents). Well the modern-day version of this chart for my friends is "McFlurry Gets On Your Face." Hey, did you know you can now rent movies at McDonald's? Yes, it only costs one dollar (per night). And you can drop them off at McDonald's anywhere, including Albany, Missouri. The catch is that McDonalds employees, especially in rural areas such as Albany where the locals are not familiar with DVDs, have had a hard time incorporating digital video disc technology into their customer service. This has resulted in several hilarious but deadly scenarios including people being served DVD on a Big Mac bun and shards of disc in their french fries. Even more alarming, some people have even reported opening up their drive-thru bag only to find their double cheeseburger pressed between the bulging covers of a plastic DVD case. McDonalds has shown their willingness to be technologically innovative, but no one said it would be easy...

At the McDonalds yesterday, kids were still lighting off fireworks, and the playpen reeked of gunpowder while country kids smoked cigarettes. This gave us the idea to market a brand of cigarette called "Black Cat Lights." You could smoke it and at some point it would detonate, mildly. This would allow people to play high-risk party games such as "Russian Roulette Cigarette."

The McDonalds yesterday was also in a state of emergency, as they were plumb out of lots of essentials until the truck arrived that night.



This blog is kind of in the same shape. Many of you have expressed amazement at the breadth of topics covered on this amateur Web page, but surely none of you are naive enough to think it's all entirely original material. No, sir, to keep this site going at the rate of at least one post per week I must hire barely trained English undergrads in community colleges across the nation to ghostwrite my material. But given the floods, Jackson County street violence and hostile takeover of K-Dot turnpike shacks by vultures, the material does not always make it through in a timely manner. For this I apologize.

There is indeed much to ketchup on here in mcbloggyville. The Fourth of July always brings a wave of musings on what it means to be an American, what it means to be free. I promise to serve up a nice cold 44oz rhapsoda once the smoke clears.


thanks to cate for top foto

Ghosty as Zombies

It's the end of June, the perfect Time Of The Season for another Ghosty tribute night. This time they are the 60s British group, The Zombies. I'm all but Goin' Out Of My Head with excitement for Friday night's performance at the Taproom, which will feature openers The Jake Blanton band. I strongly recommend you come out and see these guys play. They Are Friends Of Mine. They Are Friends of Mine. And they've got something that's so hard to find.

See you Friday. And if you've got other plans, I Don't Want To Know.

photo courtesy of The Zombies. Top photo by Jenn and Dave.