Einstein's Box of Tapes

Just before Theory Shop/Einstein's Kitsch Inn closed I wandered in to chat with Tammy Faircloth about what she was planning to do.
"Get a job, I guess," was her depressing answer.
This woman was responsible for introducing me to the counter-culture. I bought my first Mudhoney and Pixies cassettes from her. The first time I ever heard a Primus song was at Einstein A-Go-Go, her club at the beach. The best live shows I ever saw in my high school and college years, I saw there. Nirvana, Mercury Rev, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk. The best local shows - Lysergic Garage Party, Dampading, Gizzard. It was a place that I thought would last forever. Both the record stores and the club were the lone bastion of cool things happening in Jacksonville.
My assumption was that this cutting-edge placement in Jacksonville culture would eventually evolve into Einstein's being Jacksonville's CBGBs or Criminal Records. I figured once all of us grew up and got money, we'd send the next generations there to rebel against us. The Faircloths would be living fat and happy in retirement with a slough of punks to run their registers and new kids buying cool new shit like hair dye and CDs and band Ts would keep it alive forever and ever amen.
That didn't happen.
I went to see Tammy and she was sorting through the last couple of things that had not sold yet. There was a crate of cassette tapes in there with a sign that read: 10 Tapes for $1.

Allow me to digress for a moment.
My wife and I recently purchased a new car. We spent a long time shopping for just the right Volvo wagon. It sounds really soccer mom, but we have no interest in an SUV and we have two kids that play music, do gymnastics, play basketball, and Tae Kwon Do, so we needed a big vehicle and Volvo's get the best gas mileage. We ended up getting a 2001 from CarMax (of all places, the Blockbuster video of car buying) and they had it brought down from North Carolina. Why the hell am I telling you all of this? Well it just so happens that, much to our surprise because it had not even dawned on us that it would be a possibility, the steroeo did not have a CD player. Our last car was a 1995 Volvo and it had the factory CD player in it still. This 2001 Volvo had AM/FM Stereo Cassette.
I didn't even own any tapes anymore. I take that back. I have one Robert Johnson tape, a mix tape of bootlegged Bob Marley that one of my wife's hippie friends gave her, and an old, stretched-out Nirvana Nevermind tape (which I actually purchased at Theory Shop back in 1993). But even after only owning the car for a week, I was totally sick of these tapes. In fact, the Robert Johnson tape was the only one I played and those eight songs got really tired.

Anyway - Tammy had a crate of tapes and I started looking through them, since I suddenly have a use for cassette tapes. There weren't many I'd heard of. This crate had obviously been searched through by hundreds of people after my last visit to it (for that Nirvana tape in 1993) and then probably sat dormant for ten years after people stopped buying tapes, and then was searched through again a few dozen times during this whole "Going out of Business" nightmare, so all the real gems had been seen by thousands of eyeballs already. As I plucked through the tapes, discovering various local recordings by bands that have long since disappeared, I realized there was a wealth of undiscovered music in this crate representing several time capsules. Generations of bands in Jacksonville's music scene that would never be heard. Never be documented. Never be remembered.
"I'll give you both of those crates of tapes for $5," Tammy said like a vendor at the Flea Market. What had this Bush economy reduced her to?
"Sold."
My wife was going to kill me for bringing home two dusty crates of music that she has no desire to hear, but to me, it was important. Someone has to listen to these and report on them. For the good of all of mankind! This was Jacksonville's origins, Einstein's A-Go-Go and Theory Shop. This was once the future of Jacksonville, and now, this old crate, this is Jacksonville's history. As much as the great fire, as much as the movie-making years, as much as Isaiah Hart giving Hemming Plaza to the city, this is Jacksonville's creative core dating back fifteen years. The invisible, underground Jacksonville that will remain invisible if someone doesn't do something about it. So my wife would just have to understand.

Some of the tapes I look forward to reviewing in the next couple of posts:

Dampading - Perhaps the most avant-garde rock band of the late nineties. They were far ahead of their time then and since Dave This died, there will never be a reunion.

Galt - This is Isaiah Brock from The Cadets in a band in the late 90s that is named after an Ayn Rand character. Yikes!

Bowie, Sight & Sound III - This is the Thin White Bowie album. It's as "experimental" as the man himself.

Hank Marlee - I wonder if I should have just left some of these tapes with Tammy. Not EVERYTHING has to be remembered.

Mudoney, Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge - It was inside of a Piece of Cake tape cover. There was also a Five Dollar Bob's Mock Cooter Stew tape with no cover.


Neil Young, Harvest - I can't believe no one took this.

Cowboy Junkies, Black Eyed Man - This follows under the Scholastic Rock category. There are some albums you have to listen to, no matter how much you hate them, because they are referenced so much. For some people, Lou Reed is scholastic, for others, Peter Gabriel, but you still have to know these musicians to have a well-rounded musical perspective. Otherwise you become one of those dudes that just listens to radio rock all of the time and thinks he "is really into music."

The Pogues, Yeah Yeah Yeah - I would normally not call The Pogues scholastic, but this album definitely is.

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde - Are you serious? There should not be an un-owned copy of this album in the world. This is how low tape cassettes have sunk.

REM, Automatic for the People and Green - Get ready, 1994, because I'll be flashing back.

MC Hammer, Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em - Oh snap! What would my counter-culture experience have been if not juxtaposed by MC Hammer. I woish I could tell what kid turned this tape in and what tape they left with in return. Hell that might have been me with Pixies Doolittle.

MK Ultra, Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - John Vanderslice's first band? As a Jacksonville Native I wonder if he gave thoes to them personally while visiting family.

Human Radio (1990) - Probably their first terrifying forray into the major label market.

Screaming Trees (1990) - I think Lanagan gave this tape to Tammy personally back inthe Einstein's days. I wish he had signed it.

Steel Toad, Lick the Toad - There is much to discover in this crate.

Plus more than 135 more tapes. I will be exploring as many of them as I can stand in this blog for the next several years, so check back often and feel free to comment. I take criticism well.

It was about this time last year that my friend Norm told me that he could get press passes to the Vans Warped Tour and he wanted me to write about it for his skate magazine. This was the beginning of my professional writing career in Jacksonville, as it was this piece that got me the job at Entertaining U Newspaper.

I named the piece "Battle of the Sweaty Tenth Graders" after a flier that Chris Spohn made in high school for the Battle of the Bands at Orange Park High. It just seemed so fitting, and like a title that should live on beyond the walls of Orange Park High in 1992. Now that the Warped Tour is back (and this year it's in Clay County) I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone what the festival is really like. Enjoy!

Battle of the Sweaty Tenth Graders
Van’s Warped Tour, Metropolitan Park, Jacksonville, Florida

“Italy’s team represents everything that’s wrong with Europe,” my friend Juan is really into the World Cup. He has teams he likes, and a couple he doesn’t, but he watches them all because he just likes the game. The Van’s Warped Tour represents everything that is wrong with the underground rock scene in this country. The only time I ever even wanted to go to this annual festival was when the Cadets played many moons ago. They wore their astronaut jumpsuits in that blazing heat and the drummer almost passed out from heat exhaustion.

After enduring the sweaty, brazen, and unforgiving social climate this year, I would pay for a video of that Cadets performance. I bet it was heartbreaking.

Punks’ not dead, it’s just a little embarrassed. Like the selection of sunglasses and fashion accessories at the various vendors around Met Park, everything at Warped Tour was pretty much the same. For an event that simmered out of a hardcore, skater punk ethic, it has become a grotesquely bloated marketing tool thinly veiled as activism.

Who the hell are all these kids that come out of the woodwork for Senses Fail but never darken the door of an underground music club in this town? Out of about 20 stages and hundreds of bands, everything sounded exactly the same. There was no punk (except the Buzzcocks), no noise rock, not even any real hardcore. Just a thousand versions of Further Seems Forever. The only thing that changed band-to-band was which instrument the fat kid was playing. In some bands the fat kid was the bassist, in some the guitarist. In a few rare occasions the fat kid was the singer. They’ll never get on the MTV with a fat kid singer.

Wanna feel like you are there? Imagine it’s a thousand degrees where you are standing and you’re surrounded by 15 year-olds that are either jumping or trying to masturbate against your arm. The band on stage is thugging away at muted power chords in 3-chord syncopation and then the song either goes double-time for a screaming chorus, or half-time for a screaming chorus. There is no variation from this format and there wasn’t a single good drummer in the lot.

That isn’t fair, I obviously couldn’t see every band, but since there was no printed schedule, it was hard to intentionally coordinate your listening experience. So there you are, trying to learn this new Emo-Core’s philosophy, and all that you can decipher from the lyrics is that someone’s gone and maybe they’re sad. Probably because their drummer is so bad.

Speaking of bad drummers: Helmet. Helmet was once revered as one of the Indie rock greats, when they were among the first indie bands to get a big-money contract. But when it came to their actual music the shining star was always the drummer. John Stanier, who currently plays with Battles and Tomahawk, is a machine, and he always managed to make Helmet’s stop-start half-metal sound edgy. Unfortunately he is no longer with Helmet and it shows. Their new drummer isn’t bad, he just doesn’t have that hammer that Helmet needs. They played mostly songs off of Meantime, their last big record in the 90s, and then a few even more torturous songs from their latest release. They sounded tired, off-balance, and stale. But who wouldn’t in that heat. I think a node from the singer’s vocal chord hit me in the face during their screaming chorus.

When I managed to find some shade next to a tent to stand in while I urgently poured gallons of $4 bottled waters down my throat, some security lady (off-duty moms I suspect) would come and instruct me to get out of it. I even offered to pay once, but apparently their only hope of getting all those sweaty teenagers out of there was in ambulances and so we were all required to stay in the sun.

I would have retreated to a covered picnic area next to the SmartPunk tent or the Ernie Ball Battle of the Bands tent, but if I could just wait out Helmet’s eternal medley finale and a set by some schlock band (whose name I never caught, but I know they have a fucking album coming out next fucking month and they worked really fucking hard on it) then the Buzzcocks would come onto the stage and the skin would fall from all of their eyes and they would see what rock is supposed to make you feel like. The Buzzcocks will lead the way for these lost souls.

Walking through the crowd, it is difficult to tell what lineage of rock brought them to this place in their lives. I’ve never seen anyone dress quite like the kids at Warped Tour. I’m not sure who their leader is. I’ve never seen anyone on the MTV (or even Fuse) that dresses like these kids. All eyeliner and black pants that look like dresses. They started the day off all dolled up, but as the sun burned brighter their eyeliner melted down into to their faces and the necks of their shirts. That was the Alice Cooper phase, between one and two. After that they all just looked wet. The fashion tastes were interesting in that a musician could be easily distinguished from the fans.

The musicians were really into ironic clothing. Dudes wearing tight, Sergio Valente designer jeans rolled up to the knee and a mullet. Or they wore daisy dukes, when they had really skinny, hairy legs. Aviator sunglasses were on all of the musicians, but not on sale anywhere in the park. Fans, on the other hand, were into low-rise jeans that accentuate prominent love handles. Even girls that are far too big to pull it off, wear Quicksilver…I mean Roxy half-shirts and jeans that show off their coin slot and their thong. Fishnet clothing was also popular with the fans.

There are times when I assume that a middle-of-the-day concert will mean lots of sexy punk rock girls in their late teens and early twenties running around spraying each other’s Sonic Youth and Against Me! shirts with Super-Soakers. Don’t ever think that of the Warped Tour. The Warped Tour is dangerous. If you accidentally look around, you’ll see the thirteen year-old girls whose dads told them there was no way they could go to a concert in their bikini tops, so they just ran around in their training bras, riding on the shoulders of their boyfriends.

Somewhere in the history of youth culture and rock and roll, the line got blurred between the tattooed junk rockers, who Korn brought into the fold after they awoke and found Dokken had split up, and the dorky new-rockers with their ironic haircuts and wallet-chains.

The schlock band on stage was taking their time, but the throngs of kids seemed to keep encouraging them, so I decided to get out of the sun for the rest of their set. I was thirsty as hell but had already spent all of my money on water, so I went to look for a water fountain. There was some sort of inflatable slip and slide I could run through, but I didn’t think being hot, wet, and thirsty was any better than just hot and thirsty. What I did find was free energy drinks. This is a terrible trick to play on people. When you are thirsty and sweating and not allowed in the shade, an ice cold 16-ounce energy drink sounds so delicious, but the truth that you don’t realize until 8 ounces into it is that it tastes like battery acid and leaves you twice as thirsty.

After two cans of battery acid, I headed back to the mainstage to see the Buzzcocks. As I passed the Cingular tent, where Helmet was signing autographs, I noticed that all of the sweaty teenagers were evacuating the mainstage area. I wondered if I had missed some terrific tragedy. Maybe terrorists had rigged the stage lights to kill the schlock band and that is why all the teenagers were flocking desperately away to hide their grief and reapply mascara. But, in fact, they were running away from the Buzzcocks.

The Buzzcocks are old, sure, probably in their mid-forties, but they are punk rock legends and they had all of the pizazz and shtick that they ever possessed. They were fun to watch, which should have been lesson number one for all of the other bands, and they looked like they were having fun playing for us. Both of us. Okay, there were more than two people watching, but the field seemed empty in comparison to the prior acts.

In the end I found that it is easier and cheaper to just catch the Buzzcocks, or even schlock bands, at a little club that is moderately air-conditioned and has $1.50 PBRs. The fashion show isn’t as entertaining, but it still has its moments. And I thought there was supposed to be extreme sports? Does a single half-pipe with eight skaters count?

The Not-Ready-for-the-Paper Movie Review
Tideland

To call this a movie review could be quite an understatement.
I've been thinking about art a lot lately. Part of being the editor of a weekly paper is coping with the omnipresence of deadlines and stress. Things always need to be accomplished now and now and now. I love my job dearly, it's the first time I have ever been okay with my life becoming my job, however there are some things that are important to me that fall to the wayside because of this hectic new pace. The most precious of these failings is my time for my craft as a writer.
I was frustrated and driving through our hot town in my black, air-conditionless car this week when my phone rang. It was my writing mentor. She claimed to have a vision of me red-faced and pursing my lips. This vision wasn't too far from accurate. She asked me to come over and so I did. In the brief few moments that she and I spoke I realized that my life would have no modicum of satisfaction or joy unless I worked on the things that satisfied me on a deeper level than just Jacksonville's entertainment.

I recently interviewed a good friend and a talented writer and artist (among other things) Oscar Senn. Oscar told me of an equation for happiness that he had learned about and how important it was to make good use of your time and invest in voluntary activity that makes you happy. It is one of the few aspects of our happiness that we can control.
Taking all of these things in only frustrated me further, because the desire to adequately use your free time is great, but if you only get a few moments of free time every week, you tend to fall asleep in those moments. But the other night, instead of sleeping, which I desperately needed, and instead of working, which I had plenty of backed up, and instead of writing, because my wife prefers that I spend my minutes with her actually with her, I watched the movie Tideland.
In college I have always had a tendency to way overshoot expectation when it came to papers. I rarely did the least I could do. I have a love for learning and a natural curiosity that has always driven me on, so when I took on a director's analysis paper of Terry Gilliam, I turned in a paper and a DVD that almost rivaled a master’s thesis, even though this was only an elective, humanities credit. The point being, I am an enormous Terry Gilliam fan and I am thoroughly versed on his voice in cinema, so I have been eager to see this film for some time. Lord knows his vision needed some redemption after Brothers Grimm.
Kellie Abrahamson, a skilled writer that contributes to EU, wrote a review of the DVD when it first hit the disc, and although her review was complementary, it was ambiguous and understated (read that short review). Plus, I have no way of knowing just how familiar she is with his work or how to frame her opinion. It didn't matter; I had to see it for myself either way. Then I got scared. Everyone I asked, even those whose artistic appreciation I truly respect, said it was a terrible film. Even Brothers Grimm, easily Gilliam's most clumsy and forgettable work, was not a "terrible film."
The mentor I spoke of earlier, she sends me this email every six months or so (it may be because she is getting batty in her old age or it may be she thinks the lesson hasn’t been learned yet) that quotes the beginning of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer: "This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse."
When Tideland starts, it opens to a black and white, close-up shot of Terry Gilliam. He explains that many people will hate this film, but it is important to understand how it celebrates childhood. His remarks were unsettling, and my wife and I had second thoughts about watching it. When a man and his wife are snuggled between pillows on a couch to watch a movie, it is hard not to be in the mindset that a movie is about entertainment. Terry Gilliam's Tideland is NOT about entertainment.
Don't misunderstand that statement. This film is beautiful and truer than any true story. Consistent with Gilliam's constant theme, that the line between sanity and insanity is a choice (or if it isn't a choice, then it doesn't matter) this film tells the story of a girl who was abandoned by the only world she ever knew. She unwittingly kills her father and strands herself in a nearly imaginary world, sleeping at night on her dead father's lap and engrossing herself, socially, only in the world of her doll heads, each of which has their own personality, name, and voice.
Soon she meets a woman named Dell who has an irrational fear of bees and a "brother" named Dickens who had his brain severed to stop his seizures. Dell has imaginary friends in her dolls too, only her dolls are taxidermied corpses. It just so happens that the young girl also has a corpse that can use Dell's talents. For this abandoned and alone child that is so resourceful and has had to be so resilient and autonomous throughout most of her life, the end of the world could not possibly be a bad thing. So when she falls in love with the mentally disabled Dickens, he with his own strange fantasy world, and he moves to bring the end of the world to their strange, isolated existence, he saves the little girl by destroying many lives in order to bring the little girl out of hers.
This movie was painful to watch, and as Kellie said in her review "Like a car crash, you want to look away, but your eyes won’t allow it." It is not a popcorn flick. You will not laugh out loud. You will not sit on the edge of your seat. You will cringe and peek through parted fingers as the terrible adventure rolls on. As you dread each new reality that this innocent young girl encounters. This is not a Hollywood movie; this is a work of art. This film does not make you smile or excite your senses, as Fisher King, Brazil, and 12 Monkeys all did, this film serves only one function: to teach. To make us look harder at the spirit of a child and to try harder to understand its depth and meaning. To look at imagination and how it heals, hurts, helps, and destroys. This film makes us pursue that elusive concept that is love, human companionship, relationships, sympathy, empathy, passion.
Amazingly shot and flawlessly acted, this film tells a terrible story that everyone needs to hear.
With that said (that is the movie review portion of this rant) the point is that I remembered how important art is, even when it is not wanted. People said this film was terrible because an 8-year-old girl kisses a thirty-year-old man and it is presented as almost innocent and acceptable, given these circumstances, and that makes it even harder to deal with.
I first learned of the film more than a year ago, all of the information about it was on imdb.com but I could find the film anywhere. All I could find were bloggers railing the film (which goes to show that mass media cannot be blamed for America's disdain for art...that is to say, it isn't television's fault that most Americans would choose a night at Applebee’s over a night at the local art museum, it is something dreadfully imbedded in American culture). So I forgot about the quest until I saw Terry Gilliam panhandling from people in line to see The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Jon Stewart called attention to it. Hollywood wouldn't distribute his film. It wasn't commercially viable, and that is the problem. Commerce in this country gets in the way of art, but art is so important because it makes us think about what we believe, what is real, and what humanity is capable of.
If only for this reason, I now know that art, regardless of whether it pays any bills, is the most important thing in my cultural awareness. It is the only way, other then sex, that any two people can really communicate without all of our rhetoric getting in the way. It is as Oscar Senn said. "God is my progenitor. He creates. That's what I do. I create." It is humankind's need to create that pulls from our very souls why we exist. We don't name our airports after artists here, we name them after politicians. We don't believe in expression the way we think we do, we believe in ideologies. We believe in concepts. We believe in things as a mass populace, but we refuse that very thing that makes Americans different from most other nations - the strength and power of individualism. To celebrate an artists' vision is important even if all it does is facilitate their next vision, or the next artists' vision. This film has certainly bolstered my need to get back to my craft. To write, not just to tell you about cool new artists or musicians through the paper I work for, but to be one of the individuals that contribute to art. American art. American culture. We are what we eat. If that is all video games and action films, we are fucked. We are all stuck in Applebee’s forever.
Anyway, it was a good movie.

The Flight of the Foxies

The boys and girls up at the Fox work hard to make everyone in Riverside/Avondale feel well fed in the morning. They scramble around a tight little dining and service area while a handful of hipsters slave away in the kitchen washing dishes, making waffles, and prepping the menu items. The result is one of the best breakfasts in Riverside. It is consistent, and their wheat toast is the best in town.

So when those Foxies cut loose, they may come across as a little crazy, but I would argue that it they are actually just far more enamored with science then you may at first suspect. Take the morning I spent helping chronicle one of their recent experiments, for instance. The Hot Air Trashbag.

When I finished my breakfast I wandered around back to see if any of the Foxies wanted to take a smoke break and I found Ian Chase, owner of the Fox, with mad scientist eyes as he scrambled to test and retest his hypothesis. Ian was certain that he could create a vessel that would attain a great loft. The evidence leading to his certainty was hanging from a high tree over this expensive Avondale neighborhood. A wilted, white trash bag sagging between branches and slightly masked by Spanish Moss.

"We're lucky that one didn't catch the whole neighborhood on fire."

So Ian, Josh, Mark, Ien, and the rest of the Fox breakfast crew were intermittently coming back and fine tuning this next craft, each with their individual specialties. Josh was something of the Fuel Technician as he advised Ian on how much Sterno to place into the cup.




During this flight attempt they had changed the fuel compartment from a styrofoam cup, which they found melted when in flight, thus dripping flaming Sterno dangerously down from this altitude onto the crew below. So during this test flight they switched to a grape soda can cut off at the bottom.

Here we see Ian and his flight test crew as the bag fills with heat, eagerly anticipating a successful launch. Ien was the Flight Engineer outside. Inside, a server would occasionally come back to partake in a cigarette break, cheer on the ambitious project, then announce that someone needs a waffle as they retreated back into the melee.

As the bag filled with hot air, it became obvious to Ian and his crew that the heat source was not close enough to the opening of the bag, so he adjusted the wire harness to increase the effectiveness of the fuel delivery system.



After adjustments are made, Ian readies the launching pad and begins launching preparations.


The crew looks on with baited breath as the bag, bulbous with hot air, tugs gently on the metal basket. Orders are being screamed out of the back door, but the crew is rapt and ready.... Nothing. In a disappointing fervor, Josh proclaims the wire harness is too heavy and slumps his shoulders as he returns to work. Ien suggestes that the tow line they attached, to keep it from disappearing into the trees like the last test flight, may be what is restraining it.


Ian snapped into action and feverishly cut wire harnessing away, trying to minimize the weight to just a more simple harness suspending a tray of Sterno, without the grape soda can. He is trying to do this without burning himself and without compromising the heat of the air still filling the bag and making it bouyant.

The bag wants to go. As the Sterno fills it with more hot air, it skips along the parking lot, taunting the crew. Ian heaps on another load of Sterno and suddenly she goes airborne.




After enjoying this elation for a brief moment, Ian realizes that the rest of the crew has gone inside to work and they were missing the joy of their struggle - the big payoff. Ian snapped open the back door and screamed "We have liftoff!"

Josh and Mark came out first to see the Hot Air Trashbag as it poked higher, finally clearing the rooftops.







When Ien came out to indulge in a cigarette and hopefully enjoy the spectacle, the Hot Air Trashbag was moved by a breeze at the high altitude and it shifted direction, moving hauntingly closer to the buildings. Ian struggled to reel in the guideline, to hopefully change its course from the nearby tress and buildings, and the sudden jolt made the basket tilt and drip flaming Sterno down on Ien like napalm.


Finally, similar to their first launch experiment, the Hot Air Trashbag came to a final rest between the branches of an overhead tree. Mark climbed on top of the walk-In cooler to retrieve the glorious vehicle, now reduced to a simple melted and tormented piece of trash. But had it not been for the devotion and dedication the Fox's flight crew, this piece of trash could never have known such great heights.

The Flight of the Foxies

The boys and girls up at the Fox work hard to make everyone in Riverside/Avondale feel well fed in the morning. They scramble around a tight little dining and service area while a handful of hipsters slave away in the kitchen washing dishes, making waffles, and prepping the menu items. The result is one of the best breakfasts in town. It is consistent and their wheat toast is the best in town.

So when those Foxies cut loose, they may come across as a little crazy, but I would argue that it they are actually just far more enamored with science then you may at first suspect. Take the morning I spent helping chronicling one of their recent experiments, for instance. The Hot Air Trashbag.

When I finished my breakfast I wandered around back to see if any of the Foxies wanted to take a smoke break and I found Ian Chase, owner of the Fox, with mad scientist eyes as he scrambled to test and retest his hypothesis. Ian was certain that he could create a vessel that would attain a great loft. The evidence leading to his certainty was hanging from a high tree over this expensive Avondale neighborhood. A wilted, sag white trash bag sagging between branches and slightly masked by Spanish Moss.

"We're lucky that one didn't catch the whole neighborhood on fire."

So Ian, Josh, Mark, Ien, and the rest of the Fox breakfast crew were intermittently coming back and fine tuning this next craft, each with their individual specialties. Josh was something of the Fuel Technician as he advised Ian on how much sterno to place into the cup.



During this flight attempt they had changed the fuel compartment from a styrofoam cup, which they found melted when in flight, thus dripping flaming sterno dangerously down from this altitude onto the crew below. So during this test flight they switched to a grape soda can cut off at the bottom.


Here we see Ian and his flight test crew as the bag fills with heat, eagerly anticipating a successful launch. Inside a server will occasionally come back to partake in a cigarette break and cheer on the ambitious project, announcing that someone needs a waffle as they retreat back into the melee.

As the bag fills with hot air, it becomes obvious to Ian and his crew that the heat source is not close enough to the opening of the bag, so he adjusts the wire harness to increase the effectiveness of the fuel delivery system.



After adjustments are made, Ian readies the launching pad and begins launching preparations.


The crew looks on with baited breath as the bag, bulbous with hot air, tugs gently on the metal basket. Orders are being screamed out of the back door, but the crew is rapt and ready.... Nothing. In a disappointing fervor, Josh proclaims the wire harness is too heavy and slumps his shoulders as he returns to work. Ien suggestes that the tow line they attached, to keep it from disappearing into the trees like the last test flight, may be what is restraining it.


Ian snaps into action and feverishly cuts wire harnessing away, trying to minimize the weight to just a more simple harness suspending a tray of Sterno, without the grape soda can. He is trying to do this without burning himself and without compromising the heat of the air still filling the bag and making it bouyant.

The bag wants to go. As the Sterno fills it with more hot air, it skips along the parking lot, taunting the crew. Ian heaps on another load of Sterno and suddenly she goes airborne.




After enjoying this elation for a brief moment, Ian realizes that the rest of the crew has gone inside to work and they were missing the joy of their struggle - the big payoff. Ian snapped open the back door and screamed "We have liftoff!"

Josh and Mark came out first to see the Hot Air Trashbag as it poked higher, finally clearing the rooftops.










When Ien came out to indulge in a cigarette and hopefully enjoy the spectacle, the Hot Air Trashbag was moved by a breeze at the high altitude and it shifted direction, moving hauntingly closer to the buildings. Ian struggled to reel in the guideline, to hopefully change its course from the nearby tress and buildings, and the sudden jolt made the basket tilt and drip flaming Sterno down on Ien like napalm.


Finally, similar to their first launch experiment, the Hot Air Trashbag came to a final rest between the branches of an overhead tree. Mark climbed on top of the walk-In cooler to retrieve the glorious vehicle, now reduced to a simple melted and tormented piece of trash. But had it not been for the devotion and dedication the Fox's flight crew, this piece of trash could never have known such great heights.

Bloggers Infighting GO!!
I'm so flattered to be the subject of so much blogging. If you haven't seen or heard any of it, you probably don't really care, which is a good place to be, but if you do care but just aren't in the know (I'm the topic of many of these blogs, and I didn't even know about them) then I will try to lead you down the threads I've found.
People are a-buzz about the Downtown Living issue of EU. There are people from The Landing that are up in arms because i said The Landing was the least interesting thing going on downtown these days.
The quote:
"The Downtown of today is a far cry from the ghost town that celebrated the opening of The Jacksonville Landing in the early 90s. In fact, The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days, although it always makes for a nice photograph. Now there are galleries, artists co-ops, some of the best dining in the greater metropolitan area, great night clubs, and even a friendly community."
I know. Harsh right. Theres one typo and the landing actually opened in the late 80s. I didn't really focus enough time on that "dis" to really make sure it came across right. So people are saying the writing is bad, EU isn't journalism, etc etc. The funny thing is that four pages later Kellie Abrahamson talks, in detail, about the great shops in The Landing:
"Take the Water Taxi over to the Landing and grab a quick bite to eat at one of their many restaurants and eateries. The Landing has a wide variety of restaurants, each with very different flavors, atmospheres and prices. Once you’ve eaten your fill, do a little shopping. Pick up unique gifts at Edgewater Treasures or an “I Love Jacksonville” T-shirt at Destination Jacksonville. Be sure to pop on over to The Toy Factory and let the kids check out some of the hottest toys in town."
Pretty berating, right? So The Landing is ostensibly pulling EU from its halls. That actually isn't much of a loss for our paper, in my mind, because I want our paper to appeal to locals and local people don't spend much time at The Landing. That's not because it isn't interesting. Its just because most of us have seen it and done it. I still go there all the time. Fortunately the people that have been blowing my phone up and blogging their bloody little fingers off about me don't have the first clue what I look like.
It is sort of fun to be written about, so I will share some of the highlights. Check out this thread at MetJax. Metjax is a blog about downtown by downtown merchants, residents, and other interested parties. Here's some of the highlights:
Pearlstone says:
"The Landing is probably the least interesting thing happening at our urban core these days..."
Well if that isn't a dis I don't know what is.
Doesn't matter anyway because Toney Sleiman just instructed all of them to be removed off the Landing property and not to be allowed back on.
If they feel we are the least interesting thing then they don't need to be utilizing our property free of charge to solicit their materials.
Downtown Parks Said:
I think you are taking this way too hard, personally. The fact of the matter is, downtown is more than just the landing, yet EVERYONE thinks thats all there is to it.
I dont think they were saying the landing isnt interesting, just that there are other things going on. The landing gets covereage all the time.
If its true Toney removed the EU, then he lost some credibilty in my book. Since when do large scale developers care about small scale magazines?
The IT Steve said:
the point was - what is going on at the landing that people can see? I have no doubt that Sleiman has good things planned, but until he turns dirt on these, people won't buy it.
Meanwhile places like the Burrito Gallery and Boomtown are doing very well, and didn't exist two years ago (boomtown did, but not in downtown).
Trust me, the landing gets it's due. Ask anyone from Mandarin what they know downtown, and the landing will be one of them. The next step is to get people to thing of Bay Street, Hemming Plaza, Laura St, the Cathedral District, LaVilla and Brooklyn. Downtown must be more than the Landing.
Duval Democrat said:
thats your first mistake, confusing the EU with journalism, or anything printed in this area really.
Then Pearlstone said this, which is hysterical to me because what better promotion did Downtown get last week than the cover of the EU?
"That's why it is incumbent upon each and every one of us to promote our city, especially our urban core, as a whole and to the very best of our abilities ... that way our enthusiasm is the impression the visitors are left with. Something they can truly 'FEEL'.
We do have an AMAZING amount of influence how the outside world thinks of us and I say it's hightime we use it!!!
Are you ready? I am!!!!"
So there is a lot of drama on those three pages of threads, feel free to check them out yourself if you can bear the catty infighting of people at their computers discussing an outside world. But if that isn't enough to fulfill your need for local gossip and you still feel like your personal opinion hasn't been conveyed, but you're teetering on the edge wondering if you should log on and insert your opinions, maybe this will push you over.
Another local blog, probably more popular with general audiences, is Urban Jacksonville. Go to urbanjacksonville.info and read the 30 posts about this same issue. Again, I've pulled some of my favorites out for you to read right here.

fawnleibowitz said:
The way i feel about downtown in general is kind of the way I feel about really good unknown bands I like: I really want people to like them, but not too many people, if that makes sense. It’s like, I want downtown to become vibrant and appreciated, but I don’t want all the bandwagoners just latching onto and making it lame. I like that when I go to TSI it’s full of cool kids while Mark’s is full of Yuppie douches who’re dressed like they just came from Sunday school. Coincidentally, its the latter people who I feel are the bandwagoners who are going to make downtown as lame as the rest of Jacksonville is. So, i mean, i want progress, but I would like downtown to keep what is, i think, it’s edge and coolness, if that makes sense.
Adam Beaugh said:
i checked out EU over lunch today, and overall it’s pretty good. My main problem is with the guy who writes the movie reviews. They are so poorly written that it’s almost fun to read. Maybe he’s 16, which would explain it. the wording, sentence structure, and stream of thought are horrible. i don’t want to be mean, but it’s just in my nature.
Nick said:
EU’s redesign is nice, but the writing is often atrocious. There doesn’t seem to be much of an editorial presence at the mag.
Vicup state said:
Excellent coverage and publicity for DT. To Tony, Joey, Terry, Stephen, et al….Thanks for bringing Sexy Back !
UTurn said:
So, if we’re supposed to be going to all these cool bars and restaurants at The Landing and Downtown and Springfield and hanging out at the coffee shops and the record stores while we’re purchasing furnishings at Urban Outfitters for our new $300,000 downtown loft and taking part in all the art gallery galas and taking in all the indie bands playing in the various venues - when is anybody supposed to actually work?
And then Travis really brought it home with this hit:
I’ll make a fortune in recycling Pabst cans. You can be my helper. We’ll give each other horrid haircuts and listen to bands with impossibly long names that tend to sound like a marching band farting in an elevator.
We’ll have business cards with so many buzzwords on them that the pure synergystic light will melt the face off of mere mortals.
At the end of a day of hard work, we’ll both retire to our floor on the strandoplex and web 2.0 the shit out of each other.

If there are more threads out there about EU or the Downtown issue, please let me know. This has been solidly entertaining me for days and days. If I could get people talking about EU like this all the time, our paper would be filled with only the advertisers i want in it and I could afford to hire the writers I want to hire that will provide real local representation in the media the way no other paper does. So blog on, and let me know where you blog about it. I want to read it. I want to laugh and get mad and use lots of exclamation points in my posts!!!

Atlanta Pranks Boston

I have spent many a night in front of my television trying desperately not to fall asleep so that I could watch Adult Swim on Cartoon Network for just a little longer. It's during these nights of laughing myself to sleep, that I often wish I worked at Adult Swim. I want to be one of the people that makes the chat-room-like spots that run between the shows. They are this hysterical dialogue with the viewer, making your single-sided television experience slightly more intractive.. or at least seemingly so. I get the sense that I have friends on Williams Street in Atlanta sending me funny texts at inopportune moments. These friends just haven't met me yet.

Although I've often wanted to be one of them, right now I wouldn't. If you didn't see the news yesterday about Adult Swim's guerilla advertising campaign for the new season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, They sent out almost forty light-boards that has a flashing Mooninite (an Atari-looking character that speaks in a refined thug slang) flipping his middle finger.

Authorities in Boston saw flashing boxes with wires and batteries on them on local bridges and buildings around town and naturally assumed a terrorist attack was underway.
CNN reported it thus:
"The devices displayed a 'Mooninite' -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities."

In an age where we are numb to the forced advertising impressions of television and we avoid or ignore most solicitations because we are so thoroughly inundated, reaching us is especially difficult. Advertisers are learning (as displayed by the recent drop in dollars from major television advertising in expensive and ineffective television campaigns) that get the attention of your target customer, you have to be creative, innovative, and relevant. Adult Swim employing a guerilla advertising campaign is both innovative and brilliant for a medium (TV) that is usually so sycophantic in its approach to promotion, made the most relevant impact a campaign in this new era can make.
How can the blame for the panic be blamed on Turner Networks when the panic has been nursed and cultivated by the administration on television everyday? Well they can be blamed because they got outside of "the box" which in this case was a television set. Bush and Fox News can terrorize us across the ariwaves, because we know not to listen to any of the propoganda that comes to us through ellectronic media. Thats why television advertising doesn't work for all things. When you are a bizarre channel that only operates late at night, you want to do what you can to cost-effectively get the attention of your target consumers, but you can't just advertise on your own network, because that's preaching to the choir, you have to do something that gets people talking about your product.
Had I seen a flashing Mooninite flicking me off on one of the bridges, you better believe i would talk about that all night to everyone I saw or spoke to on the phone. That's good advertising, Adult Swim, and frankly, all this news coverage ain't half bad either, but the bottom line: Adult Swim didn't do anything illegal.

CNN:
Boston's Attorney General Martha Coakley:
"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."
"I just think this is outrageous, what they've done ... It's all about corporate greed."

Corporate Greed? Our president bought his way into a professional baseball franchise by negotiating a deal with city government in Texas wherein the city claimed private property and used taxpayer dollars to build a stadium so that he could own his own baseball team with no money down. Adult Swim trying to get some people to watch their show is corporate greed? Wal-Mart walks into towns and they substantially increase that towns health risk by driving the employers that live in the community and pay for their employee's health benefits out of business, then hiring those people to work half of their old schedule with less pay and no benefits. But don't arrest them, they have the lowest prices everyday. When the Mays family can sell off Clear Channel to private companies (that the Mays family also owns) so that they are able to simultaneously broker a deal that pays the stockholders off handsomely (including the Mays family, who are the primary stockholders anyway) and also enables the Mays company that purchases Clear Channel to be private instead of publicly traded, so that a large portion of their restrictions are removed and they can essentially do what they want with the electronic media; That's what I call Corporate Greed. Not a Mooninite flicking me off. That makes me laugh.

"The first device reported was at the Sullivan Square commuter rail station, near the suburb of Somerville, Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoon, four other devices were reported -- near the Longfellow and Boston University bridges over the Charles, at New England Medical Center and near the intersection of Stuart and Columbus avenues in the city itself, and four more turned up over the course of the day."
So everybody was scrambling around in a panic and ordering hundreds of thousands of dollars of response services, but between Wednesday morning and the arrest on Thursday morning, no one walked up to one and said "Hey this is just a Lite Brite, guys, no big deal."

CNN:
Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, "Whoever thought this up needs to find another job."

"Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok," Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called it "unconscionable" that the marketing campaign was executed in a post 9/11 era. "It's a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting," he said. "In the environment nowadays ... we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened."

Sorry, Adult Swim, that you have to get punished for your innovation, but look at it like this: You've created folklore here. There is a Big Brother tale in this. Your advertising campaign may be the thing that puts this panic and hysteria into perspective for some of us. Your art has transcended the screen, in that sense, and proven what the Mooninites have always known. Mooninites are "Advanced beyond all that you can possibly comprehend with 100% of your brain." (that link takes you to a Mooninite game on the Adult Swim website. Go and show your love.) Our hearts go out to those people, filled with corporate greed, that were stuck in traffic on their way to work because of the panic our president instills in all people, that they must be scared and independently wealthy to be of any use to this adminsitration. But my heart especially goes out to those poor souls that are going to jail for their great ideas. I hope Turner sends his best attorneys.