I’m on the road again so this entry will basically be a hook to hang comments on. I saw Dirk Hamilton, the subject of last week’s blog entry, last night though I didn’t arrive in DC on a train as planned. The train was canceled so the outing has turned into a more typical road trip. I got in a little bit of National Road on the way east and plan to go home on US-50. I’m curently in Ocean City. The trip journal is here.
Thug of Love was Dirk Hamilton‘s fourth and (so far) last major label album and it makes a great title for a blog entry. Thug… wasn’t Dirk’s last album by any means. There have been at least ten more and the count keeps rising. But now, as then, too few people know about Dirk Hamilton and that includes readers of this website. If you know me personally, there’s a good chance you’ve heard me mention his name or play some of his recordings, but if you know me only through this website, you could only have seen his name on my “Favorite Links” page or noticed the single quote or my visit to a venue I associate with Dirk. No Road Trip or Oddment has involved Dirk himself though I guess it would have been technically possible.
I’ve been a huge fan since hearing Dirk’s first album at a friend’s house around 1977 but I’ve hardly ever seen him. I don’t believe he’s played in Cincinnati to this day. Dirk recalls doing a show in Dayton but that may have been before my conversion or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. In any case, the first time I ever saw Dirk was in December of 2000. That was a decade after his self imposed exile from recording ended and two after his drive to stardom veered off course. It was in San Antonio, Texas. My girlfriend Chris and I had flown into Austin where we would see a second show two nights later. Dirk was accompanied at both of these shows by the excellent guitarist (and just generally nice guy) Bradley Kopp. That’s Dirk, Chris, Bradley, and me in the photo from that first show in San Antonio. I assure you that, despite looking disgustingly uptight in the picture, I was enjoying the hell out of meeting my idol after twenty some years.
So, theoretically, I could have documented that trip on this website. The site existed but contained only that first Route 66 trip and a day trip to Dayton. I’m pretty sure I still thought of it as something temporary.
If I had documented it, a highlight of the trip would certainly have been something that happened at the show in Austin. With Bradley producing, Dirk had just completed recording a new CD. I knew of it and was quite disappointed to learn that it wasn’t yet available and wouldn’t be released until the end of January. Bummer, I thought. Missed it by that much. I’m pretty foggy on whether it was before or after the show or during a break between sets but at some point Dirk sat down beside me and slipped something my way under the table. Holy crap, I thought when I realized it was a copy of the unreleased SEXspringEVERYTHING. The disk had a plain white stick-on paper label and was in a bare-bones clam-shell case. I imagine it was created by Dirk or Bradley earlier that day. We had nothing to play it on until reaching home two nights later. The hour was late but there was no way I could sleep without hearing the entire CD. Of course, Dirk had played several of the new songs live but it was still a thrill to hear the studio versions and there were others that were completely new to us. I tried playing the CD just now after scanning it for the picture but no luck. The ten year old CD-R has simply faded to blank. But it sure was cool to listen to it back in 2000 and it still means a lot to me. It may now be nothing but a mute piece of plastic but it’s a very cool piece of plastic and I’m hanging on to it.
I’ve seen Dirk live once since then. It was less than a year later when I was visiting a friend in Dallas and Dirk was opening for someone at a coffee shop sort of place nearby. I’ve kept my library up to date with the new CDs and a concert DVD and there have been a couple of near misses but that night in Dallas in 2001 was the last time I’ve actually seen Dirk. That’s about to be remedied. Next Saturday I’ll see Dirk perform at a house concert in Jessup, Maryland. I’ll be there as part of a Road (partially railroad) Trip and expect to have a panel or two from the concert as part of the trip report. Somehow that fact seemed to justify making a blog entry out of ten year old events.
The show I’m attending in Jessup is one of a handful Dirk is doing in the eastern US. Friday’s concert at Tupelo Music Hall in New Hampshire was simulcast over the Internet. I watched, of course, and got a screen capture of Dirk and long time sideman Don Evans. I’d love to see Don but he won’t make it to Maryland.
I used phrases like “self imposed exile” and spoke of veering “off course” without elaborating. Bits and pieces of the Saga of Dirk can be found around the web but a very good and recent version is here.
Monroe, Ohio, is a city of 12,000+ that sits on I-75 about halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton. A little more than a mile of the expressway lies within the city limits. The southern boundary is right where the northbound ramp of exit 29 begins. Turn left from that ramp and you’ll find one of Larry Flynt’s Hustler Hollywood stores doing quite well. Something of an entirely different nature is doing well at the northern edge. There, the Solid Rock Church sits just east of the expressway and east of the Monroe city limits. The huge church with its electronic billboard is definitely hard to miss, but it was even more of an eye catcher when the King of Kings statue stood there. The statue attracted national attention while it stood, and I’m sure the eyes of the world were on Monroe, Ohio, when lightning struck it in June of 2010. A different but similarly sized replacement is due to be completed by the end of this year, and the frame is already in place. Apologies for the dark and crappy picture I took from the expressway.
So what lies between Monroe’s offerings of sin and salvation? Shopping. Lots and lots of shopping. Facing off across the interstate are two humongous flea markets. Treasure Aisles is on the west side inside the Monroe limits. They say this pirate-themed market is where the barrrgain hunters go. There was live music inside, although it neither looked nor sounded particularly nautical, and there was an optional gun & knife show which I skipped.
To the east and, like the church, just outside the city limits, is Trader’s World. The theme there might be “jungle”, though “Jungle Jim’s” seems even more accurate. Both the area’s one-of-a-kind grocery and Trader’s World have a lot of large animals prominently displayed, plus lots of stuff with no jungle connection at all. Trader’s World has murals inside and out; there’s no shortage of things to look at overhead, and antique cars and wagons are displayed in several of the unoccupied booths. No live music that I found.
I drive this stretch of I-75 a lot, so have often driven by all of these sights. All four have huge signs, and while the Hustler store isn’t visible from the expressway, its tall sign is. For the others, the signs almost seem unnecessary since pirate flags, roofs full of giraffes, and a 62-foot Jesus are all fairly successful attention getters. But despite getting my attention over and over, they never got me to stop until yesterday. I was driving by on Thursday when I was struck by the fact that this is exactly the sort of thing I chide others about: Not stopping at attractions in your own neighborhood. Maybe flea markets, churches, and porn shops aren’t typical roadside attractions, but they are using time-honored tourist trap techniques to make passers-by aware they are there.
So I visited both flea markets on Saturday. I bought some Brita filters at Treasure Aisles and a slice of pizza at Trader’s World. I haven’t decided if I’ll also visit the church and the porn shop, but if I do, I’ll probably hit both of them on the same day to see if I can spot any parishioners picking up DVDs on the way home.
Although they ever so slightly miss the limits of the actual “Magnificent Mile”, two sites just south of the city add to its magnificence. One is the recently opened Cincinnati Premium Outlets, which caters to upper-crust bargain hunters not yet ready to mingle with giraffes or pirates. The other is LB Ranch. LB is Lawrence Bishop, who is not only a very successful horse trader but the founder and Senior Pastor of the Solid Rock Church. Photos of his ranch and his church abound on the Internet, but I’ve always been fond of his silo. Before the big Jesus and the elephants and giraffes came along, the horse-topped cylinder was the biggest attraction along this stretch of interstate. At one time, the horse fell over but remained atop the silo on its side. It was returned to an upright position sometime in the last year or so, but appears to be on its last leg.
There has always been some hardware associated with my road trips. In order to update a website, I needed some sort of computer and, if I intended to include photos in those updates, I needed a digital camera. GPS has also been part of the mix from the beginning. A computer, a camera, and a GPS receiver have been my travel companions on every trip but they have changed at least as much as I have though in different directions. While I’ve gotten weaker and slower and balder, they’ve become more powerful, faster, and more loaded with features.
Noticing changes in electronic gear occurs fairly frequently. It’s unavoidable when something new enters my toolkit, but I also think of it at random times, like when I upload a decent-sized picture in less time than it used to take to upload the tiniest of thumbnails. I thought about it in some detail in August of 2009. It had been exactly ten years since my first road trip post, and I was on another one. I commemorated the first trip by posting a picture and some musings on each day’s tenth anniversary. I think the idea for something like this series of articles was born then, though I didn’t quite realize it, and I had no idea of the form it would take. The “series of articles” I’m talking about will be a set of blog posts talking about the various bits of gear I’ve used in maintaining DennyGibson.com. This is the first. Others will appear, in sequence but not consecutively, as space and time permit.
In July of 1999, I bought an Agfa ePhoto 780c from an online outfit called uBid for $185.99. What I got for that nearly two hundred dollars was a zone focus 350 kilopixel (Does that sound better than 0.35 megapixel?) camera that stored JPGs on an included 2 MB Smart Media card. The standard resolution was 320×240 but it also offered 640×480 and 1024×768. That last resolution was produced by extrapolating those 350 kilo-pixels into 0.786 mega-pixels, and I’ve always assumed that is where the model number came from, but don’t really know. Click on the picture above for one of those full-resolution photos from 1999.
I also carried a Nikon 35mm pocket camera for “real” pictures, but the Agfa did the job it was hired for, giving me a way to post pictures on the same day they were taken. Back in the twentieth century, that seemed pretty cool.
The camera came with Agfa’s Photowise software, which allowed me to copy photos from the camera and edit them on my Toshiba Libretto (the subject of a future post). The interface was RS-232 serial and none too fast. I soon developed the habit of immediately firing up the copying when I checked into a motel, then heading out to dinner while the photos flowed through the wire. On my return, I’d select and edit the photos, prepare the web page, and start the upload — assuming I could actually connect with my 10¢ a minute dial-up.
The journal of that first trip is here. It is the only trip where I truly relied on the Agfa. The ten-year reminiscences begin here. Look to the right side of the page.
Two years ago I didn’t even know who Josh Hisle was. Now I believe I can call him a friend. I first went to see Josh perform about a year and a half ago in response to some very complimentary chatter in the local blues society’s online group. Between the time of that chatter and actually meeting Josh, I realized that I had heard of him before. I’d seen the CNN report on a guitar playing Marine in Iraq but hadn’t really connected that with Cincinnati. Josh lives in Indiana but it’s in the corner that is often claimed as part of Greater Cincinnati. He did two tours in Iraq. One as a gung ho young dude with no personal attachments and one as a more contemplative husband and father. His music was an important part of both tours. That CNN report is here.
That first time seeing Josh was sort of like getting the sampler platter at a BBQ joint. No, it was more like getting the sampler platter at a Burmese sushi Tex-Mex gelato Cajun pizza BBQ joint. In the years between Ramadi and that night in Rising Sun, Indiana, Josh had performed head-banger heavy metal, soft acoustic folksy stuff, blues ala country, country ala blues, and every other musical genre that he could hook on to. That evening contained tastes of just about all those flavors.
The show was supposed to be sort of a shakedown for Josh and cellist Michael G Ronstadt who were about to start a tour as the two-piece group Lost In Holland and, to a certain degree, it was. The two of them played a fair amount as a duo but they also played as the point men of just about every permutation of musicians that could be concocted. It was great fun, great, music, and showed off both Michael and Josh as extremely talented and versatile musicians. I saw that show as part of a short trip and wrote about it here.
I was impressed and went to see Josh several more times. That sense of variety continued as I saw him alone, with Lost In Holland, Ronstadt Generations, and other mixes of people. It became something of a joke that I never saw Josh twice with the same lineup. On Thursday I saw another pre-tour shakedown.
Lisa Biales began the concert at the Oxford Community Arts Center solo but brought up violinist Doug Hamilton after a few tunes. Josh joined them for a couple of songs before Lisa and Doug finished out the first half of the show. Lisa is both musician and actress and the evening was something of a sendoff for her as an actress. She has a significant role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt and would head to Toronto the next day for the movie’s premier.
But it was Josh who was there for the shakedown. Singing in a war zone brought the Marine to the attention of Neil Young who was working on a documentary. That was 2008’s CSNY/Déjà Vu which Neil asked Josh to appear in. Josh said yes and that soon led to meeting the ‘C’ & ‘S’ & ‘N’ parts of the group, too. When the ‘S’ guy, Stephen Stills, needed an opener for an upcoming tour, he turned to Josh. Once again Josh said yes, and on Thursday he shared with the OCAC audience the songs he will draw from when he begins the tour in October.
It’s a powerful collection of songs including a couple written or completed specifically for the tour. His time on stage with Stills will permit playing only a portion of the set we heard Thursday but it won’t be the same portion every night. He will mix it up depending on location, audience, and probably his own mood. Josh is very aware that getting to present himself and his music at sold out Stephen Stills concerts is a valuable opportunity. He’s not going to waste it. He will be doing his portion of the show alone but will return to the stage each night to sing Love the One You’re With with Stills and his full band. Not only will that give the audience a little reminder of the guy that opened but it’s got to be one hell of a thrill. Good luck, Josh. Go get ’em, buddy.
Today is the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Every form of media — TV, radio, papers, Internet, etc. — is filled with reminisces and other commentary. I’ve nothing to add but making a blog post today without at least acknowleding the date doesn’t seem quite right, either. So I’ll point to what I wrote on the first anniversary when memories and emotions were more powerful. Yes, we’ll never forget but our memories may change. That nine year old piece is here.
In Springfield, Ohio, Ben Hartman’s backyard creation has been saved and refubished. A page on my first visit since the redo is here.
I did, I did make it to Sault Ste Marie. Both of them. I spent one night in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, at the end of the Dixie Highway East Mainline and a few hours in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, on the Canadian side of the border. And I followed the Dixie Highway, in the form of the Northern and Midwestern Connectors, home, too. That’s where I’m at now, home, but, with today’s journal yet to be posted, I’m going to make this extremely brief. There are now eight days posted here and the ninth and final day should be there by Monday morning.
I apologize for having such minimal blog posts on these last two Sundays but I think that’s just the way in will be during road trips. I must be off.
Even though it’s about 8:00 AM in Ohio, I’m counting this as my Sunday afternoon post because, as we all know, it’s 12 o’clock somewhere. I started a road trip yesterday and have that first day posted. If you’ve watched the website closely, you may have seen my plans to head east on Saturday in order to drive US-44 and US-22 back home. However I’ve decided that Provincetown just ain’t big enough for both me and Irene so I’m substituting a drive on the Dixie Highway’s eastern mainline. On the first day, I traveled from the National Road in Vandalia, Ohio, to a little beyond the Lincoln Highway in Beaverdam, Ohio. I think I’ll reach the northern end in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan, and may even slip into Canada briefly. I’ve even thought of driving the western connector back through Indianapolis but I’m not 100% sure of any of that. The journal is here.
Not only will this satisfy my commitment for a Sunday post, it will satisfy my commitment to have at least one blog entry per road trip so there is a place to hang comments. Hang ’em here.
I wasn’t really satisfied with the end-of-day mailing provided by FeedBurner but I convinced myself that it was the best available. I have since learned of a way to offer real-time mailings on every post and I’ve now made that available. What some could see as a negative is that this newly installed method will send only a pure text excerpt of the post with no pictures. I see that as yet another advantage.
People with less than whippy quick Internet connections don’t like being surprised by large emails and, when traveling, I am often one of those people. At those times, getting a short message that lets me know something exists then lets me access it on my own schedule is much preferred. With this change, I am now emailing unto others as I would like to be emailed.
Since there is no reason to kill them, the FeedBurner feeds will remain and existing subscriptions will continue to function. However, new FeedBurrner subscriptions, can only be made through this site’s FeedBurner page. Email subscriptions entered through the blog will now be to the new mechanism which will deliver a pure text excerpt of each new entry shortly after it is posted. If you want to switch, just unsubscribe from FeedBurner and subscribe here.
EDIT 30-Oct-2011: Although existing Feedburner subscriptions may or may not continue to function. DennyGibson.com no longer actively supports Feedburmer and the subscription page referenced in the preceding paragraph no longer exists.
I have also added links for the Entries and Comments RSS feeds simply to make their existence a little more apparent. The Entries RSS currently contains the full post but I’m a little uncomfortable with that. I opted for publishing the full post rather than a summary because that’s what nearly, but not quite, all of the blogs I’ve subscribed to do. I’m now having second thoughts. Even though I subscribe to those blogs via RSS, it is funneled through Outlook and eventually looks a lot like email. Of course, an RSS feed converted to email looks exactly like email because that’s what it is. There have been a few times when I’ve turned off RSS feeds because of a slow connection so I’m feeling a little guilty about larger than necessary RSS entries and am tempted to switch to just publishing summaries. FeedBurner emails have contained the full posts simply because they are just a repackaging of the RSS feed so changing the RSS will change FeedBurner. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.
The new email mechanism is a WordPress plug-in called “Subscribe2”. I’d looked at it when I first set up this blog but erroneously decided that it wouldn’t work for me. When I asked a cyber-friend what he was using on an installation similar to mine, that’s the answer I got and a second look revealed my error. Note that I said the installation was similar to mine; Not the blog itself. The Civil War Daily Gazette is about 1000% better than this blog will ever be and is a tremendous source of Civil War information. There is a new well written and researched post every day telling of events exactly 150 years ago. I suggest that anyone with even a little interest in America’s Civil War take a look.
1992 must have been a fertile time along the big river in southwest Ohio. As noted in last Sunday’s post, the annual Cincinnati Blues Festival was just held for the 19th time. Yesterday, the 19th International Cardboard Boat Regatta took place just a few miles up river from Cincinnati. I don’t know what triggered that little rash of event birthing at Ohio’s southern edge. Maybe Iron City Brewing up in Pittsburgh had a big spill or something. Or it might just be lucky coincidence that got these two wonderful events going in the same summer.
It was definitely a coincidence that I stopped by New Richmond’s Cardboard Boat Museum last month on the day before RoadsideAmerica.com was to arrive for a photo shoot and interview. This is the world’s only cardboard boat museum and the driving force behind the annual regatta. Of course I eagerly returned the next day for a chance to see Doug Kirby & Ken Smith in action. I’d submitted a few photos to the site and exchanged some email with Doug but had never met either of these fellows. For me, it was kind of like meeting Tiger Woods would be for a golfer. The report produced from the visit is here.
Now that the name dropping is out of the way, I can move on to yesterday’s regatta. Even though I’ve heard of it for years and watched many after the fact reports on local news, this was only the second year I’ve attended. New Richmond is one of those river towns that, in recent years, I tend to end up in during semi-aimless weekend drives. I naturally started popping into the museum whenever I saw it open and last year actually knew of the race date in advance. I used the 2010 race as the starting point of my Blue Ridge Parkway drive. As I recall, there were about fifty boats last year. That record was shattered by this year’s fifty-five entrants. There are different heats for juveniles and adults and for single and multiple person crews. Boats with “mechanical assistance” make up their own distinct class.
By rule, the boats are constructed of nothing other than cardboard, tape, and paint. The paint is critical though there is nothing special about it. The same basic house paint that keeps water from soaking into your wooden siding keeps it from soaking into cardboard. Of course, should water somehow find its way in, the cardboard reacts even quicker than peeling wood siding. By using different crews, many boats run in more than one heat. Some run in less than one heat.
After all the various class competitions are finished, any surviving boat with any crew can compete in a wide open free-for-all with the winner taking home the prestigious Cardboard Cup. In previous years, the Cardboard Cup race was the last of the day but this year a new event was added. This double length race would seriously test the stamina of any individual with the nerve to try it. Rather than the single downstream pass of the 200 yard course that makes up every other event, this race required entrants to paddle the course in both directions. The picture shows Sam Richmond about to cross the start/finish line to become the first recipient of the Cardboard Man title.
The Cardboard Man title is clearly out of my reach. In fact, almost everyone in a boat expended a lot more energy than I’d ever consider. The lone exception was the fellow who played steel drums while his wife propelled their craft. Now that’s a gig I think I could handle.
