I like to pop into @barn.owl.vintage in Georgetown now and then to visit my friend @jpdand and see what new treasures they’ve found, but this week was different. They had one of the all-time holy grails of Filson gear, the legendary Golden Cruiser.
The Band Owl held an auction and it sold for an eye-watering $10k, which has to be close to the record for a piece of Filson gear, so I just had to see it before it went on its way to the new owner. Much to my eternal devastation it fit me like a glove, a most beautiful piece forever out of reach. Still, a pleasure to wear around the store however briefly.
Thanks to Barn Owl for adding to the lore and having so much fun with vintage clothes.
It’s 10PM on a Wednesday, raining, 55 degrees and windy. I’m leaving a holiday party full of musicians in Georgetown only to find that under the highway bridge these folks are fully committed to a soccer scrimmage.
It takes all kinds to make a world. I’m sharing the world with these folks and we have less than nothing in common in this moment, but I know I could sit and talk to any of them for an hour and enjoy it.
Which are you, musician holiday party that ends at ten or rainy soccer game that goes into the night? It’s probably a spectrum.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when my kid organized my ties? She said, “I LOVE ORGANIZING!” and it warmed my heart.
Now daddy has a NEW project, let’s see if she REALLY loves organizing!
Adults argue until they’re blue in the face! Does she go strictly alphabetical? Separate by genre? By era? I have a bunch of 78s, some with her great-grandmother’s voice. My sister bought tons of euro and Japanese import 12” singles in the early 80s, do they belong together? Rock EPs and jazz 13”s? I don’t have that many 45s but some box sets for sure.
I don’t think everything will fit in these shelves so THEN what will she do?
(Remember, my CONTROVERSIAL parenting style is to sit with a coffee and watch her work, so there may be street protests.)
I also expect to hear some opinions from @nabilayers @easystreetrecords @easystreetguy @gibbstack and others about best practices but I’m going to let her make this call and hopefully we’ll be listening to records as we go.
Because these crates have been in storage she’s become a teenager in Streaming Times and has never really sat with albums. I think she’s ready, but is she ready for Martin Denny’s Forbidden Island? Ahmad Jamal’s Chamber Music of the New Jazz? MC Frontalot’s double album D-20? Is she prepared for how many Alice Cooper LPs she’s going to find? What will she make of a 12” dance remixes of Union of the Snake or Malcom McLaren Fans?
A quick glance at a bin the was once organized a certain way finds The Challengers>Captain and Tennille>Cheech and Chong>Cheap Trick>Cher>Chicago>Chipmunk Punk>Clash>Elvis Costello>Cream>Creedence>CSN(Y)>Cult>Cure
That’s all pretty normal stuff for a person my age but it would be a nutty playlist. I’ll keep you posted!
Hi friends! I want to alert you to some movement on the Bandbox saga. I’ll be traveling today so won’t be monitoring this closely but the site bandbox.sucks is preparing to open a claims process for people who ordered Bandbox editions of The Long Winters. The site says it opens today, Dec 5th, although as of this moment the link is not live. Technically it is still Dec 5th somewhere until 4AM Pacific when it’s midnight on Baker Island in the US Minor Outlying Islands.
Only people who weren’t refunded by their credit card companies are eligible so if you got your money back after Bandbox folded you shouldn’t apply. That means, hopefully, they have plans to sell the remaining LPs and there will be an opportunity for people who wanted them and did manage to get their money back to still acquire these editions.
We (Barsuk Records, The Long Winters and me personally) have zero insight into the process or control over the outcomes. If we can buy any of the remaining records at cost we will certainly do so but I imagine the folks at bandbox.sucks will sell them first. I have no indication either way.
As I’ve explained before, we (Barsuk, The Long Winters and me personally) were also ripped off by Bandbox and kept in the dark. We have no stake in this process and can neither influence it nor profit from it. We just want everyone to get these records and for this whole episode to be resolved. I cannot answer any questions because I have no more information than what I’m posting here.
If you are part of this group, or know someone who is, (ordered the records, paid the money, didn’t get a refund), it is up to you to monitor bandbox.sucks and fill out the claim form when it goes live. After that, it is in other hands. There will only be a two week window to submit your claim.
For those of you in the back with your hands raised let me say it again, I don’t know anything more than this, have no contact or connection with this enterprise, cannot influence it or explain it, and make no guarantees. I have hopes that in the end everyone will get what they want and I am an optimistic person. Bless you and good luck to all bands!
Fun times! Even though the Ducks handed it to us. #sound up!
Walking the sidelines with UW President Robert Jones. Huskies having a rough go of it but we’re having a blast thanks to Jack Martin.
When my kid became a teenager I started to understand the passage of time. I’ve always suffered from a kind of time-blindness, unable to imagine the future, convinced I’ll live forever. Now I can see she’s growing up and everything is changing. It’s not that I need to treasure every moment—I’ve always treasured every moment—it’s that time is finally real to me. She’s on her way to being a grown person and I won’t live forever. She’ll go for walks with me along the beach still, grousing at first about how boring I am, but four years from now where will she be? Where will I be?
I’ve always floated along, every new day kind of a mystery. She’s not thinking about the future yet but now I am, for the first time.
My daughter discovered that I have over 100 ties. You see, I inherited ties from my father and uncle and I’ve been thrifting ties for forty years. I like them, they are fancy.
So she decided to organize them and here they are. She is very proud of having organized them and hopes that you enjoy them.
Sometimes a picture can contain a whole universe of feeling.
Chair 1, Mt. Alyeska, Girdwood AK, 1979.
Trash and garbage is what it’s for, to save us all from a messy floor. Just drop the MovieMessBag™️ in the barrel by the door. Use the NEW MovieMessBag™️!
I’ve never worn penny loafers. I always preferred boat shoes and thought penny loafers were a little fussy. Like, “Oh, you’re a fancy lad, would you like a glass of milk?”
They make your feet look like cloppers, like hooves of a little deer. I’m not saying my salmon-colored Topsiders are MACHO, just that Penny Loafers had an air of belonging to good boys.
Lately I’ve been trying them out. They’re a little clip-cloppy, sure, but they have a kind of casual elegance. The thing about boat shoes is they’re like semi-formal flip flops. At one end of the spectrum you can absolutely wear them with a blazer and a tie but they are also right at home in a half inch of water with no socks. The penny loafer can handle the blazer but the bottom threshold is probably jeans and a polo and I don’t like that look. I dunno. Still feeling it out.
A big part of what I love about clothes is THINKING about clothes. I imagine this is what many people, especially men, hate about “fashion.” But thinking about clothes is another way of studying history: class history, technological history, French and English and Japanese and Indian history, it’s all interwoven (ding) in the codes and keys of style. Penny loafers are a SYMBOL, they can be interpreted and repurposed and turned on their head. My interpretation of them is personal, not definitive, and for me repurposing them happens within a context. We learn the rules partly to break them but playing WITHIN the rules (as I see them) is part of the fun. It’s another level of pattern, tension and release.
We live in a world where a lot of people convinced themselves that “freedom” means “no rules.” Living without rules is astonishing if you’re truly anarchic but most people aren’t. To them no rules just means “I get to be thoughtless and lazy.” That’s why everything seems uninspired now.
Culture is another word for rules, signs and symbols, codes and keys, and most of those rules took thousands of years to evolve and are languages at their heart. Your clothes are another voice, a way of speaking and even singing about who you are and who you want to be.
Are penny loafers for fancy lads? I’ll wear them in a half inch of water and see.
I haven’t seen this movie in a long time but it doesn’t matter. It’s still with me always.
Thirty-five years ago next month I came to Seattle for a funeral and got stranded here. My first job, starting in January 1991, was in this building, at what was then the Off Ramp. The Seattle music scene wasn’t yet “Grunge,” it was hundreds of bands with unique approaches to playing rock and roll. Most of them were… pretty rough.
I was such a n00b. I knew nothing about anything. Seattle was dark and sordid then and The Off Ramp saw it all. That original crew, Sue, Davey, Jason, Jeff, Iklil, Melody, Rob, Tom, Val and Bobby (I’m missing a few) was like the cast of a misfit sitcom out of Dante. It shaped us all.
I got fired right before the whole world crashed like a wave on this bar. (I should’ve been fired, there’s a reason I haven’t had a job since 1999). A year later grunge was ascendant and the whole city was groaning under the weight of New York music writers, kids with shiny Docs and looky-lous from the Netherlands and Germany. In November of 1990 I never would’ve guessed what was coming. By April of 1991 the writing was on the wall.
I was here today with @lancemphoto taking some pictures for @asmanyweirdosaspossible, a project to document the people who made the Seattle scene what it was in the 80s and early 90s. Not just the famous ones we’ve all celebrated a thousand times, but the people who worked the clubs, the hip hop scenes, the regulars and the faces. By those standards I’m STILL a n00b but I was lucky enough in my youth to stand in one of the epicenters of a cultural explosion we won’t see the likes of again.
Did I invent Hash After the Bash? Not exactly. You’ll have to read the book to learn the whole story.
I was a guest today on Week in Review on @kuow, talking about the upcoming mayoral election in Seattle, the deployment of the national guard to northwest cities, police contracts and reform, the surveillance state and more!
With host @billradke_seattle @radke.bill and eminent guests @reuvencarlyle and @jcbalter
Check out our conversation on KUOW.org or watch it on YouTube because we streamed it too.
I love guitars. In the 1960s and 70s an entire industry in Japan made tons of inexpensive and unusual guitars for the US. They marketed them under a dozen nutty names, selling them at department stores and in catalogues, and these “cheapo” guitars were the gateway for a lot of people into the world of music.
When I was coming up in the 80s these used import guitars were everywhere, looked down upon by almost everyone. Most hadn’t been cared for and many were trashed. You could buy them for <$50 all day long and even then it could feel like a waste of money. These were the guitars that bands would pull out to smash for their grand finale. @stevesbadideas was my cheap guitar mentor. He put them to good use.
In the mid-90s I worked off and on at @ecguitars and one of the perks of working at a guitar shop was getting to play everything, so over time I developed a personal sense of what a “good” guitar was. You either like a guitar or you don’t care about it or you hate it.
$50 guitars came through the door every day and most sat on the wall gathering dust. Every once in a while one would stick out as special, and when it was slow I’d sit and strum it and sometimes I’d bond with it. Then it would hang on the wall and I’d stare at it. It would be there week after week and I would look at it thinking, “That’s a good one.”
This was a time when a full day at Emerald City, opening to close, paid $50 in cash, and that $50 was meaningful. My rent was $350 a month. It was not very responsible of me to trade my work hours for Japanese guitars. I had a Rickenbacker for my main guitar and should have been saving up for a Telecaster or something. I resisted the impulse many times to trade my work hours for stuff, but sometimes I couldn’t resist. My guitar pedalboard I used my whole career, and still use, I got for a days work at Emerald City. One day I worked all day for an old blue Celestion Alnico speaker. Not every deal I made was a good one.
And sometimes I just couldn’t resist a Japanese guitar. Lyles, Univoxes, Arbiters, Musicians, Howards, Guyatones, I didn’t want to smash these. These weren’t “cheapos,” these were the good ones.
(Solo on Ultimatum by @brdcrp)
Get your tickets now for a live taping of Omnibus—Ken’s final show as a regular co-host (he’ll be coming back to guest host!)—Nov. 8th at Town Hall Seattle.
Don’t miss this exciting cultural event! Pick up this screenprinted poster by @dangrissom at the show! There will be many goods and cheese!
I think the greatest threat to America is the Mariners not defeating the Blue Jays tonight. God save our Republic.
Go do stuff!
The United States is an amazing place full of amazing people.
Have faith.
I’ve been in and out of four separate marches so far today, all headed to Seattle Center, and every one has been peaceful and celebratory. Honestly, whatever your politics you have to be cheered by the fact that tens of thousands of people care enough to gather in a public space in support of a philosophy of government. Not everyone agrees on the best philosophy of government—probably no two people in this march do—but this event, nationwide, is an expression of belief in the future of the United States.
It’s easy to sit behind social media and think everyone is “brainwashed.” That’s why attending public events is CRUCIAL to understanding the world. These marchers all have beliefs, and those beliefs stem from membership in communities, they are ideological, they are learned, they are class-based and regional, but no one here is FORCED. (I mean, I’m sure there are some kids whose moms are forcing them but they should quit their bitching).
When you see an enormous crowd gathered together and take the time to look at individual faces (I like to walk ahead and then walk back, step aside for a while, perch here and there, always making eye-contact with as many people as I can), you see how invigorating it is to gather. Everyone is THRILLED to be part of an event like this.
Not only are these protests peaceful, they’re downright goofy. Protesting is fun, it’s meant to be fun, and even though the chants are corny (and the speeches at the end are strident and boring) these are life-affirming events. This IS what Democracy looks like.
No Kings protest gathering at the Ferry Terminal. Mini protests are starting all over town marching toward Seattle Center while the big parade comes down from Capitol Hill. The crowd just doubled in the time I was writing this caption.
