A Tour of OTR With Johnny Cash
and Eli Wallach


Friday would have been Johnny Cash's 78th birthday. I celebrated the guy's life watching The Pride of Jesse Hallam, a made for TV movie filmed on location in Cincinnati around 1980. I have babbled here about watching old movies & TV just to watch the backgrounds before. Route 66 is super duper megacool. A film called Wanda, shot in Pennsylvania around 1970, is another gem. This movie is fairly low budget & the disk is made from a pretty crappy print. It's out of print but is available from second hand dealers (cheap).
It's filmed in OTR (Eli Wallach has a stand at Findlay Market), Hyde Park, Clifton, Mt Lookout, Downtown & the riverfront. Some places have changed considerably, some look exactly the same. I moved to Cincinnati a couple years after the movie was made. The scenes around Findlay Market show a market with a very different vibe than what is there today. It had a much more "old world" thing going on.
It's not a great movie, it's ok & the backgrounds are a lot of fun.

Teenage Wasteland

Friday weirdness with a tip of the hat to GeeBee

Amateur Theater

Ever notice how the Tea Parties kinda look like local dinner theater presentations of Marat/Sade ?

A Drug Against War

Seeing all the Shepard Fairey 2 tone stuff made me think of this wild & wooly video from KMFDM. The graphics even inspired a nutty video game. Dunno if Fairey does animations, but he should. All the layered but isolated objects lend themselves perfectly. But then, nobody takes you seriously if you make "cartoons"....

Winton er Spring Grove Village er Northside Montessori Plans

Winton Montessori will be moving to Northside on the site where Schwab is now located, 4370 Beech Hill Ave. Demolition on Schwab will begin September of 2010. Currently, they are trying to remove and reuse as much from that location as they can. Construction is slated to begin at the end of this year, following demolition. School is slated to open at the new location in September, 2012.
The architects are: Cole+Russell, Fanning/Howey, Moody Nolan.
Plans include:

• Separate parking and drop-off for Pre-K.
• Garden beds for Student Garden
• Landscaping with Native Plants
• Increased capacity from current location: 6 Classrooms for Pre-K/K, capacity for 650
• Dedicated art room
• auditorium, gym, cafeteria & music room
• The Goal is to achieve Silver Leed Certification.
• 90% usage of materials in construction - very low waste produced.
• Higher ratio of sunlight in classrooms
• - Additional funding is possibly coming from Duke Energy for Chilled Beam heating and cooling.

This post would be, I guess, what the folks at the Arkham Beacon would call, a media release. It's not the kind of thing I usually write about but the guy over here, apparently, did a runner.

The Springfield Summer Arts Festival kicks off June 17. yeah, I know nobody is going to remember this but thinking about June just sounds kinda nice right now.
There are now johns on both sides of the stage, so fewer toes to step on when nature culls.
The full slate of acts is not available yet. Damn website has last year's schedule posted. Funding is only about 60% of what it was a few years ago.
The Dark Star Orchestra and Phil Dirt & the Dozers will return & a guy from a TV talent show, Neal Boyd, will perform.

Noose Son story here.

Steppenwolf - OU Convocation Center 1971
This was Siblings Weekend, or something, at OU. My sister asked me if I wanted to come & if so, did I want to see a concert. I was a big Steppenwolf fan, I had even read the book! I think I was vaguely aware of the name Edwin Starr, of course I knew his recording of the Bruce Springsteen song, War. Steel River? No clue. Don't think my sister thought much of Steppenwolf. Seats seemed to be a million miles from the stage. I had never been to an arena show before. Never been to an arena that doubled as a dorm either. Haven't been to one since, for that matter.
I had never really experienced college dorm life either, still being in jr high. The idea of a bunch of young people having free reign over a residential building was like heaven. Nowadays it just seems like a good reason to keep everybody under 24 in prison, manacled & with black canvas hoods over their heads.
I was introduced to something called cable TV that weekend, too.
Anyway, it was fun & extremely exciting for a kid. One thing especially intriguing was the antiwar message of Steppenwolf & Starr on a campus that had, less than a year earlier, erupted in rioting.

At this concert, the police were be-bopping to the music in their bright yellow slickers. If they knew what these kids kids were going to be like....

BEAUTY IN THE GROVE: Spring Grove Cemetery & Arboretum

The recently published coffee table book from Orange Frazer Press is, as usual, full of large well printed pictures. As is Orange Frazer's style, though, it is also a typical desktop publishing disaster. Well, not a disaster but not exactly a qualifier for any best practices award. It's busy. Too many cross page images with the focus right there on the seam. Probably looks great on a computer screen in Quark, but when it hits the bindery? not so good. Also hard to read. Tiny reverse type on busy backgrounds, not much to say & a number of fonts that don't seem to have much to do with one another. Not a ransom note but still....
Not much in the way of info, either. Names of some sculptors are listed. Who the deceased were is skimpy. Photos of descendants are kinda weird. Other than Mr Bruckmann, most don't seem to have much to do with the deceased. There is a lot of info straight out of the front office of the cemetery like it's list of notables that excludes, oh, I dunno, Israel Ludlow ??
sheesh
Overall, the writing credit doesn't seem to be much of a deal.
One of the photographers is Charlie Gast. I never met him in person, only online through the newsgroup:
alt.binaries.pictures.cemetaries
(Don't bother with alt.binaries.pictures.cemeteries - it's spam central)
He seems to be a great guy & his pictures that are not in this book should be in one of their own.
While my review might not seem exactly glowing, he and two other photographers make the book worthwhile.
Orange Frazer has also published Beautiful Ferncliff chronicling Springfield, Ohio's Ferncliff Cemetery.
Beauty in the Grove should be at The Ohio Bookstore.

Springfield to Compete for America in Bloom Award

This summer, the city of Springfield will compete against similarly-sized cities in a national competition called America in Bloom, which concentrates on community efforts in categories such as tidiness, environment and heritage preservation.

Tidiness & environment aside, over the years, Springfield has demolished it's train station, essentially it's entire downtown, recently, an entire neighborhood, it's Memorial Hall is abandoned & slated for demolition, it's old city high school is abandoned, it's old men's club is abandoned, numerous old schools are vacant lots....
lotsa luck on the heritage preservation part, folks....

Noose Son story here.

Sidewalk Safety
~ or Adventures of the Third Class ~
The City of Cincinnati is damn near paranoid about your sidewalk safety. This is why you so rarely see sidewalk dining or street musicians. They are a clear danger that the city seeks to protect it's citizens from. The city is currently working on saving the citizens from the horribleness of advertising on bus stop benches. yay
Citizens are required by law to keep their sidewalks clear & this pertains to snow from heaven, too.

Sec. 723-57. Removal of Snow.
The owner, occupant or other person having the care of any building premises or unimproved lot of land abutting any street where there is a graded sidewalk or a sidewalk graded and paved, shall, within the first four hours after daylight after the ceasing to fall of any snow, cause the same to be removed from the paved or traveled part of such sidewalk. The provisions of this section shall also apply to the falling of snow or ice from any building onto a sidewalk.
Snow or ice shall not be moved into the gutter when the gutter has been previously cleaned, and in no event shall snow or ice from any area other than the pedestrian walk be moved into the gutter.
(C.O. 702-33; renumbered to C.M.C. 723-57, eff. Jan. 1, 1972)
Cross references: Penalty, § 723-99-I.

So, why does the city routinely violate this law ? It's one thing to not enforce the requirement of individuals to clear their walkways, but when a pedestrian encounters walls of snow at the ends of driveways, I think some enforcement is in order. But I don't see it coming anytime soon, since a prime violator of this ordinance is the city itself.
Throughout the city, snow is moved from the streets to the sidewalks, effectively obstructing them without even offering a jaunty tune, a place to sit or a sandwich. Further, the city piles snow up at the ends of sidewalks making it akin to a mountain adventure crossing streets at designated street crossings & intersections.
Salway Park is a stunning example. The sidewalk is untouched but the parking lot is immaculate & at the entrance to the street, snow has been dumped onto the sidewalk. The fine corporate citizens at Spring grove Cemetery have done a great job of clearing their sidewalk, but remember, you gotta climb over city provided hills of black snow & wade through rivers of brown slush to risk your life crossing the street.
I realize the city's first obligation is to the good people, the zombie cage pilots, but after the streets are cleared, couldn't they kinda finish up ? Couldn't they follow their own rules & clear the obstacles they have created? and, yes, I do realize it only benefits the young, old, poor & infirm.
pathetic, shivering fleshbag peds.....
Speaking of the young - After clearing my & my neighbors sidewalks, I looked out front to see a little boy gleefully making his way down the street by climbing through the piles of snow adjacent to the freshly cleared sidewalk. kids

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The Clash - Clevo Agora 1979

Garage Band
This was, I believe, the first of many pilgrimages in Phil's van up to The Cleveland Agora on Euclid Ave. Why we would go to Cleveland in February for anything is beyond me. Well, nowadays. friggin' cold, maaannnn.....
The Clash had just really hit in the U.S. recently, had just released their second album, Give "m Enough Rope, & we were hooked. They were young, loud & snotty, not to mention drunk, sloppy & generally noisy. That is, they were great !
These British punk bands were big on giveaways for some reason. At this show, we got iron-on patches!
This concert is available at Wolfgang's Vault.
yup. We drove all the way to friggin' Cleveland for a half hour show.
sigh
There was an opening act or two. I forget them.

Reasons for Streetcars

Apparently, in communities with streetcars, pretty girls are more likely to walk around half naked. Even in the dead of winter!

An Alternative Ohio River Bridge Design

You want an exciting, distinctive, iconic bridge over the Ohio that will serve as a memorable gateway to the city?
ok - Here's my shot.
A loop de loop bridge held up by atomic powered anti grav hover units that would also serve to illuminate the span at night. The material would be a plastic that, would hold the vehicles tires to it via static electricity. Simple, yet elegant....

To see the ideas that the clowns ODOT hired came up with, click, here.

Capitalizing on Our Comic Book Heritage

When asked why one would take a train between Clevo & Porkopolis & how would the line pay for itself, proponents say nothing pays for itself an opponents wail and compete to imagine greater and greater numbers for costs. Proponents cite sports & entertinment as reasons for travel, opponents curmudgeonly dismiss such prattle. If we play on our comic book heritage, we can create reasons to utilize the line and, perhaps, get corporate subsidies.
Cincinnati's Union Terminal, as most of you know, was based on the Justice League's Hall of Justice. Here, the League (Superfriends) plotted out their New World Order under illegal alien, Kal El (Superman). To the north, sunny Cleveland was the hometown of the 2 nerds who created Superman. Seems to me we could have memorials to the comic book characters in the corresponding stations & dedicate one of the trains to the DC characters. We could paint the cars bright primary colors & the conductors could wear super hero outfits. We could call that train The 3CDC. ok, maybe that name is in use.....
A room at Union Terminal with bronze statues of the League could greet travelers to the Queen City. We could hang some cables from the ceiling & tell people they hold Wonder Woman's invisible airplane. The cafeteria could sell sandwiches with names like The Manhunter. They could run Lenten specials on The Aquaman. The news stand could sell Time magazine & DC comics. A statue of a kid reading The Black Freighter could be placed nearby. News stand sales would be astronomical as people realize the scenic void between Washington Courthouse & Kent.
Cleveland could build a glass pyramid or something in honor of Joe & Jerry.

"It's not about where you were born. Or what powers you have. Or what you wear on your chest. ... It's about what you do... It's about action."
~Superman

Music After 50
Found an interesting website dedicated to musicians who are over 50 called Music Over 50.
I have to say I have found nothing there of much value but I think the concept makes sense. It is not a year old yet. I found the site through the FaceBook Gretsch page. While it might sound kind of morbid, this site could be a great asset for older musicians who have suffered disabilities, strokes, arthritis & such. Obviously it s meant to appeal to an older audience of a world dominated by yunguns.
It's a web 2 / social media type site & will need some time to build up and will, of course, be dependent on user activity, but it targets a real niche & could just catch on.
So why is the tune, "Old & In The Way" bouncing around in my head, now ?
LOL

Why I Like Comics

Slogging through Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis, this panel caught my eyeball. This is just the kind of graphic representation comics lend themselves to.

Why Does This Woman Have No Nose ?

She can dance. She has super slicing powers. She lives in an enchanted world rich in giant vegetables. She can fly. But she ain't got a nose.


Why ?
Are all the inhabitants of that strange and enchanted world noseless ?
I'm certainly ok with the whole 3 finger thing & distorted eyes & all - but no nose?
Dunno if this is the Tostitos/Fritos guys or some mad fetish of the Laika guys, but it's just disturbing. The real people in these companies ad work all seem to have noses. Did they just run out of polygons? Is it considered attractive?


Dunno if it works any better on guys..
You can see the disturbing ad here.