Local filmmaker Jay Kanzler’s got a biography in the works on comedian Bob Zany. The in-progress version plays the St. Louis International Film Festival shortly.
The details are found in this story, which I’d invite you to visit. Again and again.
Author Archives: admin
October’s 13
Saw Jim Utz spin records for Rue 13 this past week, notable here for two reasons: we were sold a round moments before the lights were turned on; and Jim Utz is the only person reading this featurette and I wish to use his name repeatedly.
Events future, Kick Ass Awards: The seventh edition is coming up next week. Seating will be at a premium. (We hope.) See you there.
Events present, Kurt Groetsch: Happy 29th, Slats.
Events past, Dewes Chili Cookoff 10: Thanks to the charming Dewes family for allowing me to enjoy one of my favorite days of the year each fall.
UFC fighters, Johnathan Brookins: Kinda dig this cat’s zen approach to fighting. Looking forward to his next Ultimate Fighter bout. You, too? You don’t say!
Press clips that keep giving, Enormous Richard: Blessings be to rock groups that keep the flame alive, digital-style.
DJ’ing, Silver Tray: Very much looking forward to Dana Smith joining Silver Tray on Friday, November 5, as he discusses his newest art show – held that same night at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary – and as he programs the first hour. ‘Twill be much fun.
DJ’ing club, LucaBrasi CD release show: Opening, closing and otherwise entertaining during the hard rock band’s release set at the Duck Room on Saturday, November 20. Not looking much forward to this.
Books, “The Urban Hermit by Sam MacDonald”: Couldn’t make heads nor tails out of this memoir for the first 100 pages, then caught the spirit of the work and enjoyed every page of the rest. Can you eat lentils and tuna for an undetermined amount of time, lose 100-plus pounds, find your dream job, kick a beer habit and locate your wife in the span of a book. Apparently, yes.
Corner bars, Behrmann’s: You kind of have to experience it to fully understand. Ask for Rendy by name.
Energy drinks, Full Throttle Agave: Really need to kick this stuff.
Agitprop, signage: Had no real feelings about The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, but I’m always amused by friends who crash a party.
Films, “Phantasm“: Should’ve watched it when I was 11.
Classic cuts, Angel’s “Tower”: So this fella at the Black Bear Bakery booth at Soulard Market sounds talking about Angel and their prog track “Tower.” Couldn’t recollect it, but it’s now a favorite and will be for the next couple weeks, until full burnout results.
The 13 Series Special Edition: Projects, DOA
After punching up a few dead project ideas, I realized how depressing a concept that was. But I also started the process along, so here’re 13 more projects that are in the ditch, with wheels spinning. In a day/two, happier stuff, if that’s possible.
1. A book on O’Connell’s. (Not my idea, actually. Awaiting okay from money sources.)
2. A blog on Gaslight Square. (A new book is on the way this fall, negating need. I think I’ve picked these bones clean, from my needs/wants perspective.)
3. A Collinsville Road photo series on Flickr. (Too lazy to pack a camera, but this could still happen. Interesting road!)
4. Asummeratthetrack.wordpress.com. (This one was up, got six readers and the day I took it down, two people asked about the track. Let’s repeat: six readers, two questions on the day it was blown up. Oy.)
5. A Venice Cafe book/zine. (Interest was there, interest wasn’t there. From all parties. Alas.)
6. Some type of Silver Tray component online. (May resurrect this via the new, improved kdhx.org site. No point having all these orphan sites out there.)
7. A Way Out Club zine, in celebration of the 16th birthday of the club. (See #5, above.)
8. A book on burlesque. (There’s this guy, he’s got lots of pictures and scrapbook-worthy content. But books cost a lot to make. And, honestly, I ain’t that into the burlesque scene.)
9. The Messhuggah Sessions. (Owner Patrick Liberto saw multiple reasons why this would annoy his already-highly-annoying clientele, at STL’s most-awesomest coffeeshop. And my principal interview subject got super rich and famous.)
10. 100 Untold Rock Stories of St. Louis. (Yeah, whatever. I agree. Had an artist lined up, who kills it. Something else, sometime.)
11. Lou Thesz for the Walk of Fame campaign. (Seriously, Lou Thesz should be on the Walk of Fame about 20x more than Nelly. And I’ll argue with you all day as to why.)
12. A soccer video on the last season of STL United. (Just a little documentary. Would’ve cost the US Soccer Federation a couple thousand dollars, for a vid that would demonstrate the challenges of inner-city ball. The USSF spends its money as it sees fit. Cool enough. And I hope the US National Team gets hammered every match from now ’til eternity.)
13. Political blogs for square candidates. (Connect with the youth and all, through the miracle of the WWW. Maybe still something here, but politicians don’t make decisions for themselves.)
Over, out. Something else soon.
Temp Crib
As evidenced by the complete lack of content here – and the most-recent posts being dedicated to things not done – it’s possible that this site’s namesake is temporary stalled, in terms of creative output and inspiration. And as much as I love the hometown and much as I hate (and let me emphasize the word HATE) travel, it’s time to actually find myself in a place that’s not my own. So, to the wisdom of the crowd goes a request.
With one project majorly overdue for completion, I’d like to find a place to write. For parts of four days, specifically: Monday, October 18 – Thursday, October 21. This place needs to be within driving distance of St. Louis. (Can’t fly. Blood clots. Such is life.) And this place needs to be cheap. Expectations would be appropriately minimal. Just a place to lay my oversized melon. With some running water. And a cook-top would be nice. Even WiFi’s not essential, as paper-and-pen could do the trick.
If you’ve got a shack in the woods, please tell of it. If aware of a Children of the Corn-meets-Barton Fink roadside hotel ‘tween here and Ames, I’m all ears. On the other extreme, if your kid or cousin is a hotel manager with-hook-ups at a swank facility in Milwaukee (or Nashville, Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, Madison, Little Rock, Memphis, Indy or Des Moines), your family is of great interest to me.
In exchange, I’ll write you a part in a web series. Or two. Deal?
Membership Mania
Rub some pennies together for yo’ boy.
Thursday, September 30, 2-4 p.m., with Doug Morgan and the Record Sto’
Thursday, September 30, 7-9 p.m., with Grace Woodard and Nomadic Reverie
Friday, October 1, 12-2 p.m., with Doug Morgan and Silver Tray
Friday, October 1, 4-7 p.m., with Art Dwyer and Blues in the Night
Monday, October 4, 2-4 p.m., with Sherri Danger and Dangerous Curves
Wednesday, October 6, 7-9 p.m., with Rob Levy and Juxtaposition
Friday, October 8, 12-2 p.m., with Ann Haubrich and Silver Tray
The Great Unload III: Fighting Ryan Coyne
Back in the age of yore, when Hoosierweight Boxing reigned in backyards, streets and other assorted venues, I used to partake in a bit of the action. Between Hoosierweight fights (and between assorted injuries brought on by same), I’d find an occasional club fight, just to stay sharp. I won my first, then lost the rest, but emerged with a few good stories to tell. The one I couldn’t tell before today goes a little like so…
While working out at the SBAC’s annex, about six or seven years back, I was approached by the club’s coaches about taking a fight in Saint Charles. This question came after only a few days, maybe a week, of being back in the gym, after some time off. When asked, I knew that I wasn’t match fit. But in boxing, if you don’t take a fight when offered, you don’t have much credibility and you might to reconsider even being there. Fighters are supposed to fight. Everybody else is there for nothing more than cardio work. That’s all good, too, but I considered myself a fighter that afternoon. So I took a match on a day’s notice and then made the mistake of looking up my opponent on Google.
The fighter was named Ryan Coyne. And he’d just wrapped up a football career at Mizzou, which ended prematurely, with an injury. Didn’t know about the injury, but I could still tell from that little bit of information that Ryan Coyne was: young, assumedly very fit, and recently involved in a contact sport, at a high level. The next day, the day of the fight, I bagged the match, claiming some bogus reason, or another. And then I stopped training at SBAC for a bit, sliding over to Cherokee Rec for a few months, just to live down the internal shame.
Interesting to me, Coyne would go on to fight a big batch of amateur matches in Saint Louis, before turning pro. In time, he’d be a part of Oscar De La Hoya’s “Contender” series. And then he’d move into the heart of his pro career, now sitting with a 15-0 record, recently burnished by a win in at the Scottrade Center. There’s some talk of his fighting for some of the smaller title belts in the near future, a good place to be for a 28-year-old, especially one who picked up the game late.
So, here’s today’s idea reveal, one that was proposed to Coyne’s camp within the last month: three rounds of sparring. On-camera. After a couple of months of training for yours truly. I figure in that time, I could shed enough weight to not completely embarrass myself, while working around a drum-tight Achilles tendon. Coyne’d be interviewed, I’d be interviewed. We’d talk about age, athletics, what it’s like to hit somebody, what it’s like to be hit. Maybe a doctor could chime in, on the dangers of the sport, particularly for those in retirement.
I was imagining an interesting-looking, possibly black’n’white, short film. A “Supersize Me” in reverse. And, during the process, a one-sided ass-whipping for my troubles. Sure, I’d defend myself as best as I could, but this cat’s climbing the cruiserweight rankings and I’m just climbing the numbers on the scale.
And viewers? Well, I figure on this: we all slow down for car crashes.
This one’s been proposed. It’s been presented to the fighter. Me, I’ll just wait and see and eat doughnuts ’til the decision.
The Great Unload II: Tee-Shirts
In the interests of making this meta-exercise even more shoegazatory, I wanna note that tomorrow’s entry was written yesterday for posting today. 
But I wound up reading some stories of STLtoday.com this morning, and one jumped right into the make-a-mess-mix.
Seems that local nostalgia merchant/savant Steve DeBellis is attempting to salvage the Goldenrod Showboat, but he’s being tested by the great humbler, Money. I wouldn’t mind seeing the old boat cruising the Mississippi (or Missouri) again, but lacking cash, I’ll just wish DeBellis well and leave it at that.
What was eye-popping was part of the last paragraph, written by Mark Schlinkmann: “DeBellis has written a book on the history of the Wehrenberg movie theater chain and produced T-shirts honoring defunct local pro sports teams like the 1934 football Gunners and the basketball Spirits of the 1970s.”
Wah-wah.
Early this year, I pitched a local-dead-sports-teams-tee-shirts idea to a tee-shirt company on the South Side. The good folks there blew me off for several months and then I started shooting out some nibbles to other folks, just in the past few weeks, with even less feedback. Mind you, there’s no small amount of dead teams to select. In soccer alone, you’ve got the Stars and Knights and Ambush and Storm and Steamers and surely some more. Whether, or not, these teams have any rights-holders who’d put the kibosh on a modified, modern t-shirt, I couldn’t tell you. I was going to leave that up to the pros, while offering CreativeSaintLouis.com as a sales point.
Well, it appears that this idea’s already been done, though I’ve never seen these shirts on a store rack. And it appears my mind is less blender and more trash compactor, with little bits’n’bobs of half-churned influences clinging all over.
Self-flagellation aside, I still think locals would wear a St. Louis Hummers shirt, don’t you?
I mean: St. Louis Hummers. Come on!
(Photo swiped from uniwatchblog.com.)
The Great Unload I: Jeff Barbush/Painkillers
Don’t know about you, but my vehicle’s got a tape player. For playing good, old-fashioned cassettes. And with my iPod seemingly down for the count, I’ve been revisiting some old favorites from the long-disgraced, but suddenly-hip medium of cassettes.
My big, plastic cassette box is really a vibrant time capsule. Whether it’s pulling out an oddball artist (Shellyann Orphan), a long-forgotten bootleg (Pixies, The Cure) or a personal story-maker (a Concrete Blonde live recording, hand-delivered to me the day after the show by the bootlegger), the cassette box has been a giver of great and surprising things of late.
The tape that got the most play in recent weeks is a mixtape of songs by Jeff Barbush, who headed up bands like the Painkillers and the Deadbeats, and who also did a fair share of home recording. The tape was given to me, if memory serves, by Marcia Pandolfi, whose brother Carl was a member of the Painkillers.* That group, as I’ll ramble on about to anyone, is primarily responsible for my caring about pop music, at all, as they practiced two-doors-down from where I spent a chunk of my teens. Just as I was ready to absorb local rock, a local rock band was playing on the block.
Those Painkiller songs are special to me. And, with a bit of time, the entirety of the Barbush cassette is locked into my head.
Of late, I’ve played with the idea of what to do with material like this, in terms of sharing. It’s solid music, still. It extends the life of a musician who passed too soon. It’s classic Saint Louis pop and is deserving on just that level. It really should be heard by more than just myself and the passengers in my truck; or by the other folks hipped into similar cassettes and home tapings.
So, the thought goes like this: start by finding some of the principals behind the music. See if they’re down with a limited-run CD. Talk to folks like Chris King, whose Enormous Richard recently re-released a long-ago cassette onto CD. Locate someone to bump the original recordings into a more digitally-pleasing form. And then drum-up the couple-hundred dollars to run, let’s say, 100 discs, for those who’d be naturally inclined to also fall in love with these songs.
This idea, it seems, could have legs. Or it could not. I’m open to discussions. And, in the meantime, I’ll be humming along to songs so catchy, so sweet, that I’m not the only deserving to hear such treasures. Thanks, Jeff Barbush, for leaving me something so wonderful, a cassette of magic, as much as a cassette of music.
* Rene Spencer Saller also made for me a fantastic mix-up CD of Painkillers tracks a few years back and it’s gotten steady play over time, as well. But, as determined, I’m not blessed with a new-fangled CD player in the car. Some of those cuts, too, deserve a hearing.
The Great Unload: Preface
As someone who, by and large, works alone, I find myself coming up with ideas. All the damned time. They don’t necessarily have a straight path in moving from my head to some type of reality, due to lack of finances, shaky technical skills and countless other mix-ups that can trip up even the simplest of them.
These ideas come too frequently, at times, and without that over-the-cubicle vetting that office workers can employ (and, dare I say, enjoy), these schemes all seem really, really good. To me. At some point, I begin to act on them, solo or with a small group of (hopefully sympathetic) sympathizers. Some die a gruesome, public death, after being bounced into brief web life. Others are sent to an early passing via countless, unproductive e-mails. More just sit around, flat-lining through a few conversations of marginal encouragement and the bullying presence of newer concepts.
In some cases, there’s still a feeling that a project’s in there, untapped and somehow doable. In others, my thought is that some type of karmic good can come from freeing the information, allowing the germ of an idea to be picked up by somebody with the resources to make them happen.
In other, more-accurate words: I’m sick of the contents of my own skull. And in the spirit of some late-summer, mental housekeeping, I’m going to bounce out as many ideas as I can find from notebooks, scraps of paper, e-mail sent boxes and faulty memories. If this takes a week, it takes a week. It’ll probably take more than a single one, probably well into September. My five readers are welcome to comment, borrow or steal anything along the way, assuming there’s even the mildest basis of usefulness to them.
The process starts to play out tomorrow, with one that’s actually a project that could happen without a ton of cash and with marginal amounts of legwork. From there, bullets fly in all sorts of directions. Enjoy this embarrassing display of unfocused creativity and feel free to comment, pass along to idea-thieving pals or simply ignore.
The Great Unload, 2010. Should be stupid. And freeing. Type at you tomorrow…
Programming Note
Greetings, five readers. A week from today, the site’s namesake will undertake a one-week airing of grievances, with the results no doubt lingering well beyond that Friday. Tune in, yes?