The hidden/lost DVDs/tapes keep turning up. The latest is this parody of “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” shot by Meatloaf Productions for the 2009 St. Louis International Film Festival trailer competition. Another selection of ours was chosen, though this remains a fave (’til now) lost production.
Thanks to Alex Ihnen and nextstl.com, the 10-part series on local graf is up-and-running. Hope you enjoy.
The first piece, just shy of 3,200 words, went live this morning. It’s here.
For almost exactly two years, or about 100 weekly columns, I was given an interesting opportunity at stlmag.com. The initial idea I pitched them revolved around exploring. A weekly blog that would let me get to know St. Louis in new and unique ways. If not truly “new,” at least new to me. At first, I opted for some tried-and-true stuff, like running around abandoned packing plants; at other times, I visited people in interesting jobs, folks like the hellbenders exhibit keepers at the Zoo. It was fun, though all over the place, thematically. In trying to find the weekly outlet’s “voice,” I eventually settled into a pattern of four stories a month around a common theme. At that point everything clicked.
When posting these stories to Facebook in recent months, a common joke intro was that I was trying to be a better St. Louisan by writing these. And while that was just a goofy conceit to get hits for the pieces, it also turned out to a be a bit true. This November, for example, I took the concept of Autumnal Wanderings and went to four places in/around town (and one short road trip), all of them being locations new to me, despite most of them being well-known. Every experience was cool, even one made while in the throes of a killer cold. I visited some massive graveyards, walked down a path off of the Delmar Loop, visited Cairo, IL.
As the blog is now going into a new direction, my freestyle columns are going away. Interestingly, the piece on Cairo is going be the last. The vortex of loss surrounding Cairo is apparently very strong indeed. But I feel like it’s a decent piece of writing, a worthy capstone to an enjoyable, two-year experiment.
In the summer of 2010, a well-regarded local video producer asked if I wanted to work on a web series with him. Familiar with the term, but not the form, we spent the better part of an afternoon watching Apple TV and talking about what “works” for web-based, episodic programming. For various reasons, the project never came into being. Oh, well. If you’ve worked in independent media circles for any length of time, it’s more surprising to see a project come into being than it is to see it fizzle.
A few months back, I met with two trusted folks at O’Connell’s. The place had meaning because I’m (to this point, more theoretically than actually) working on a book about O’Connell’s, to celebrate the pub’s 50th anniversary. I needed to talk so someone else about making sense of creative progress, as I’ve recently started getting bogged down in every phase of project creation, from prepping to execution. The advice gleaned at that meeting was that I should focus on the O’Connell’s book and not the web-based web series, now known in my head as Half Order Fried Rice. I agreed with the advice, then did the exact opposite of the plan. Good intentions didn’t carry the day vs. inspiration.
To get Half Order out of my head and into reality, I needed some major elements to come into being. Either a producer who could execute the video components, or a sudden uptick in even the most basic skills of web video on my own part. After annoyingly striking out on the former, I borrowed some money and bought a solid camera, then a MacBook Pro. And those things sat underutilized for another good while, until I figured out how to finally use the kid-and-elderly-friendly iMovie. When you’re psyched out, it’s sometimes hard to get past the first, big push needed to learn a new skill. And, for me, it wasn’t until artist Kevin Belford sat down with me one afternoon at Kaldi’s that the fog started to lift. In the span of a couple hours, I dumped down some video from old SD cards, cut together some clips and generally left feeling as if the project might actually happen. Which was important, because…
By this point, I’d already shaken the digital beggar’s cup on the Indiegogo corner stoop. Not sure how much money to ask for, I chose $1,001, figuring that the amount would give me enough to buy any additional, needed equipment, plus could spot me some cash for lunches and drinks for the cast, plus other unknown add-ons during the shooting process. Unlike Kickstarter, Indiegogo accepts any project, but with different pricing gradations; to get the full percentage, I needed to raise at least the $1,001 and the final push to that number didn’t really come until the literal last few hours, when the day prior’s $600 became, magically and exactly, $1,001. Everyone that kicked in to that fund is thanked on the site and in my brain, whether they potted $200 or $5, the range that came in. (And, in the interests of disclosure, one of the cooks at The Royale handed me a $5 bill, an old-fashioned twist on the whole process.)
With the Indiegogo cuts taken out, I had $931 in my bank account about two weeks after the campaign ended, monies that were already being spent on the show. Turns out that the SD cards I had been using were too slow; I had no idea that SD cards had speed capabilities, but this is the kind of thing you learn at the camera shop. So that was about $80. And the cabbage for the Food Trunks episode cost $17… cabbage for cabbage. The virtually-unseen rodents of the Mouse Racing episode were another $17. Various lunches for cast members nipped a few bucks here and there. And a cast/contributor party at the house ran a modest $49, for snacks and drinks. This wasn’t the no-budget production that many people claim, but it was pretty close.
Several of the actual shooting days will go down as my favorite moments of 2012, with people generously saying “yes” to a project that was mostly improvisational and with the bulk of the content in my head, as opposed to the page. But people kept agreeing and shoots came about at a crisp regularity. Virtually every shoot took place the day prior to posting, so there was a steady production schedule at work, even with actors falling out and with my forgetting to turn on the audio on a couple occasions. An early attempt to use a Flip camera was quickly abandoned when that camera proved unsteady and unreliable, forcing me to re-choose the better looking/sounding Canon.
And therin lies the whole point of the experience, as far as I’m concerned. Prior to this, my attempts to bring video into stories were mixed, at best. Here, for five weeks, I had to force myself to use a camera for both stills and video on a daily basis. And I had to cut the pieces together, into something marginally viewable. I’ll probably be more critical of my own technical work on the project as time goes by; already, I’ve gone back and added a few things that sit there as obvious glitches. More will get fixed with time. But the show, the experiment, is over for now.
Folks invested dollars in my personal education. And I invested enough hours to feel that an honest effort was given.
Intending to extend the show one additional episode, I ran into the wall. My primary actor, aged 13, got a free ticket to Six-Flags and headed to Eureka. Some added folks couldn’t make a shoot that day; maybe I’d burned out my talent pool completely. Actually, I did do that. But the scene I had in mind can be picked up later, for another project, which I now know is more than just a theoretical. It’s doable. What a good feeling.
There’s also a good feeling in watching this last piece. Starring the one-and-only Thad-Simon McRosenthal. A great way to end things, as it turned outz’ a loose idea and some inspired improv combined into a fun segment.
Thanks to those thankable.
HOFR Tight Shoes from Thomas Crone on Vimeo.
A while back, I got a chance to hang out with some of my music pals from the 1990s, Judge Nothing. Now a five-piece, the band’s playing shows in the St. Louis area through the coming weekend, with an anchor show at Fubar on Saturday, along with a Record Store Day gig at Euclid Records at 2 p.m. It’ll be a great day of music there (JN, Sleepy Kitty, Jans Project, Finns Motel, etc.) and I also get to play some music as a deejay, outside from 2:30 – 3:00, just before the latest Painkillers reunion.
While doing on-scene “reporting” on Judge Nothing, I also ran a bit of video and after multiple, failed attempts at unloosing the video tracks from my SD card, the results are out. Rob Wagoner, who wrangled much of this reunion, recorded the rehearsal sets and placed my video against those live takes. These are what resulted from that AV marriage.
In going through some notebooks in the late summer of 2010, I realized how many odd ideas had been circulating through my head that year, only a few of them meriting, you know, actual follow-up and action. So I started throwing out the possibilities on this site and, lo!, one of them came into being: a re-release of the music of The Painkillers, which saw the group re-form as a result the renewed attention to their career. So, yeah, that was cool.
Today we revisit the Unloading concept. And in doing so, I offer a St. Louis nightclub/restaurant owner the opportunity of a lifetime!
Unlike other ideas, in the summer of ’10, I honest-to-goodness pursued this concept briefly, working with an industry veteran. Buildings were examined, plans were typed up, a lawyer was even summoned for drinks and conversation. And, then, poof! Dead letter office, new addition welcomed.
(This idea, by the by, came back to me just this week, after reading a piece by Stefene Russell on transplanted St. Louisans; you should read it.)
There’s no great reveal to this piece, since the idea’s right there in the lead. If there’s a town that tends to spill over into St. Louis’ population, it’s Chicago. Expats are all over the place, along with attendees of the University of Illinois, who naturally affiliate with Chicago. A bar that appealed to that population would have an obvious, early start on building a regular audience, with TVs consistently tuned to: the Bulls, the Blackhawks, the White Sox, the Cubs, the Bears, the Fire, U of I sports, etc.; and with a kitchen that featured Chicago-style pizza and dogs.
You’d have two flags outside, one for St. Louis, one for Chicago. There’d be Old Style on-tap. Original paintings of the Daleys, MJ 23 and Honest Abe on the walls. Every year, on the anniversary of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the whole bar could riot, freaks versus conservatives, and SLMPD forces could squelch them (while beating on the freaks). Really, the hooks are both obvious and many. It would just take a little nerve.
And here’s why: there’s always going to be some sorta local yokel/a-hole/yay-hoo who’d want to put a brick through a Chicago bar’s front window. You can just see the dude, wearing his Blues sweater and KSHE cap, gettin’ off on stickin’ it to the Windy City with a well-timed toss. But that’s the price of business. The radio stations would give the concept so much free advertising at the beginning of operations that a bit of broken glass would be offset by volume sales of Vienna Beef.
You could go a bit upscale with this, locating on Locust or Washington. You could go a bit downscale, with a spot on way South Grand or Morganford. A true bar professional could open the space with real, live money, not even needing to stand on the digital street corner, shaking that Kickstarter cup.
So, here you go. Enjoy building your business. And remember yo’ boy with an deep-dish anchovy pizza on opening night.
Last week, the St. Louis Fimmakers Showcase played the documentary short “My Name is Haji Haji,” which I worked on with Brian Spath. I had another short on the same bill, but in picking up Tyler DePerro, the DP/editor of “The South Side of Luck: Frank’s First Alarm,” he and I showed up late enough to miss both works. At some point in time, that’ll become an amusing anecdote, brought on by just a classic run of bad luck and weird circumstance. So goes life. For now, I’ll just remain miffed.
If things had broken a bit different, young Haji would’ve been in St. Louis to see his mini-doc on the screen of the Tivoli, too, but he wound up visiting Saint Louis during the wrong month this summer, missing the the showing by a couple weeks. Luckily, there’s the web, and the short “My Name is Haji Haji” can live there for a good, long while.
At the time of the shooting of the video, the fall of 2009, Haji was already living in North City. But he was a South Sider for about four years prior to that, part of a large, growing population of Somalis that’ve taken root in our city. He’s a real corker, with a curious, hyper-talkative way of expressing himself and watching him in new situations immediately got me to thinking of ways to feature the kid in his own video series, which we envisioned as “I Am Haji Haji.” But as soon as Brian and I started the project, his family first moved North, to an immigrant-centric housing complex on the City/Wellston border, followed by a more dramatic move to Lewiston, Maine.
We initially envisioned a variety of fun scenarios for Haji to get into, from cooking goat (a Somali specialty) to visiting new places and working/visiting with the crew, like at the City Museum or at Zoo. Who knows what it could’ve turned into? This summer, I tried to get back to the concept, but things didn’t click again. A new camera proved trickier than I thought, Haji got his job back at the flea market, then poof! he was gone again.
He’s a wacky kid, though, with an interesting, curious way of looking at the world. I’m happy that Brian dusted off the old tape and put together this short, shot over four sessions with him, most of them after his move to Maine was announced. Enjoy.
(Cross-posted with thesouthsideofluck.com. And thanks to DJ Wilson should’ve been in the credits, but we’ll add them here.)
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.
A few weeks back, Angelo Ranzini walked into that wonderful nightclub, The Famous Bar. While enjoying a series of Bloody Mary’s with a friend, the conversation about great, old St. Louis bands came up, and maybe because Ranzini was in the bar, I determined that A Perfect Fit was the top St. Louis group that I’d love to see reunite for one show. Because I’ve been vaguely intimidated by Ranzini since I was about 17, for no particular, realistic reason, I passed on the opportunity to talk to him about my idea. After all, it was a quiet night at the Famous, he was in conversation with the bartenders and, hey, I’d probably come unglued just saying “hello.”
High-school-induced social anxiety disorder. My longest-running malady.
Anyway, I’ll go ahead and hang onto that notion of an A Perfect Fit reunion, though it’s now an impossibility, due to the death of drummer Joe Longi, who passed this weekend. In the modern way of things, I was first alerted to his death via text; it was then confirmed with some back-and-forth on Facebook instant messenger. It’s been years since I’ve seen Joe; gosh, could have been a decade since we really talked. But I remember him well, in my own, admittedly-dated fashion, as both the kit drummer of APF, and, later, as the percussionist of Funkabilly. Certainly, he did other things in life and his closer friends and family will remember a different, more current person; but I’ll be forever locked in on the younger Joe Longi, with his spiked hair, intense, on-stage facial expressions and sliced tee-shirts.
Back in high school and into college, I had a set of drums and played them with (essentially) one band, before letting go of the dream, at an early enough age to spare the embarrassment of getting cut after auditions, or dealing with the post-adolescent angst of band break-ups. And so musically illiterate! I never could figure out the worship of certain drummers. In the late-’80s, you couldn’t talk drumming or percussion without Fish, Larry Mullen Jr., Stewart Copeland, Bill Bruford, and Neil Peart coming up again-and-again.
My drum heroes lived on my block, like Jack Petracek of the Painkillers. Or they lived around the corner, like Peter Lang of Corporate Humour. Or they went to Webster U., like Richard Bach of the Stranded Lads. Or they played in the rock royalty of Webster Groves High School, like Jeff Herschel of the Urge, or Longi, with APF.
Joe had a special place within that sub-group thanks to his kit. He was the first drummer I can recall (though it might’ve been Peter Lang…?) to play an electronic set and he worked in eye-catching pieces like Roto Toms and Octobans. His kit just looked a bit more contemporary and cool than everyone else’s and that added to his appeal. When the Urge and APF would play VFW Halls and small, local clubs, I could’ve just watched the drummers, with Herschel’s left-handed set-up and Joe’s new wave kit always impressing; their taste in gear was just as sharp as their playing.
I can distinctly recall catching those two groups at my first “hall party,” at a VFW joint in some corner of St. Louis County. And, if faulty memory serves true, I seem to recall being very moved by the scene, this simple idea that kids from my high school were igniting other kids from my high school on a weekend night, with the vague notion that even more excitement was happening on the parking lot, or at post-show parties somewhere deep in Webster Park. Existing on, at best, the outer perimeter of any particular clique at WGHS, simply being at those hall parties was unbelievable, though, a much-needed release.
Local bands like the ones mentioned above changed my life; far, far, far more than the Beatles, or Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd, or R.E.M., or Fishbone, or any of the college radio bands that served as gateways to the world of rock’n’roll for so many teens of my era. The local bands were the ones that hooked me, for good.
Thanks, Joe Longi, for playing a role in all that.
Owe you one.
-30-
Though this has been plugged elsewhere in the Thomas Crone Media Empire, I only learned today that I’ll be introducing the film noted above, “Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness,” on Thursday night at the Winifred Moore Auditorium; start time is 7 p.m. The film’s being co-sponsored by 52nd City and we’re happy to do so. In fact, we recently ran an interview with the doc’s director, Melody Gilbert, which you can find here.
If you happen to attend, the students you’ll see scattered through the venue looking like they’re working for some extra credit will probably be students of mine working for some extra credit. Just so you know.
If this is the first you’ve heard of it, the film’s description goes like so: “Plunging into the world of urban exploration, a growing international subculture of adventure-seekers who explore places where most people would never dream of going, documentary filmmaker Melody Gilbert follows Max Action, Shane, Katwoman, Mr. X, Slim Jim and Turbozutek on their ‘missions’ to infiltrate sewers, ‘lunatic asylums,’ storm drains, faded tourist attractions, secret U.S. government sites and even the forbidden Catacombs in Paris. Some do it for the thrill of being where they’re not supposed to be and not knowing what lies ahead. Others do it to document history before these long-forgotten places are demolished.”
It’s a sharp li’l motion picture. Hope you can drop in.