sparkrobot

Ventured up to Seattle last night to see the Little Steven’s Rolling Rock and Roll Show. On the bill were four bands, newcomers The Charms from Boston, garage rock pioneers The Chesterfield Kings, Seattle-via-Tucson’s Supersuckers and the New York Dolls. To be honest, the whole thing stunk of corporate advertising and bumptious, celebrity notoriety exploitation, but we had a get-in-free pass. What the hell, right?

The Charms were on when we arrived, but the line to get a drink was so long that I didn’t see a lick of their set. (Seriously, we were in line for 20 minutes. For beer. While a band was on. Ugh.) $13 later and two beers later, we made our way into the main room to find The Chesterfield Kings (instant audio and ridiculous, skip intro screen. You’ve been warned.) on stage doing their thing. This was the first time I’d seen them play, and they looked pretty tired. I’ll sum this up with one word: meh.

Countryfied, punkish and self-proclaimed “The greatest rock n’ roll band in the world”, The Supersuckers (instant audio warning) were up next. Say what you will of these guys. Are they breaking new ground? No. Are they gimmicky? Totally. Do I think they’re the greatest rock n’ roll band in the world. No. Do they care? Absolutely not. Will they leave at the end of the night having put on a entertaining show doing exactly what they love to do? Count on it. I’ve never left a Supersuckers show feeling slighted. Put a stamp on it and stick it in the mail. They deliver the rock.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED TO WORRY. I’m rolling my own eyes at that last line FOR YOU right now.

Protopunk glam rock veterans New York Dolls (photos) headlined the show. What can I say that hasn’t already been said? In one incarnation or another, these guys have been putting on this show since before I was born. El Corazon was super crowded and I didn’t really have the vantage to bust out the camera earlier in the show. When the Dolls hit, I decided to just stick it up there and see what happened. These photos were all taken from pretty far back in the crowd. The stage was pretty well lit, but there were a ton of asshats in front of me. These shots are all digital and held overhead. It would have been nice to get up closer and actually compose the shots, but I mentioned the whole asshats thing, right? Whatever happened, happened.

Again, here are the photos of the New York Dolls.

After a recent trip to Austin, TX, I’ve decided to try out the concept of blind double exposing some film. I’ve got a 24 exposure roll of FujiFilm Superia 400 which I’ve run one time through a Lomo LC-A at 200 ISO. The only thing I’ll reveal about the subject is that the exposures were made in Austin, Texas on Sunday September 17th. I’m looking for someone who shoots film—preferrably someone whom I don’t know—to double expose the film and return it to me. I’ll then develop the film and scan and make prints.

Couple of things: I’d like the subject to be people and I’d like the location to be Tacoma. Other than that, I don’t care what you do. Actually, I really don’t even care if you stick to that. What do you say? If your’e interested in this project at all, contact me. Use the comments field. Or not.

I was downtown a while back. I dropped by the Kulture Lab at the Catapult Gallery. There were a lot of people out and interested in the event. There was some good stuff on display. Blanco Bronco (sorry no photos), The Plastards (photos), Beat Box Fred (photos) and The Fucking Eagles (photos) played a party at the Blacksmith (Jefferson & Fawcett) later in the evening and I brought some 3200 B&W film. I missed most of Blanco Bronco, but liked the last song they played. I mentioned it to their singer later to which he replied “Oh, that one we screwed up?”. I said “Um, yeah, I think so.” The Plastards played next and call me crazy, but I think they had some new songs. Beat Box Fred was at the show, up from Olympia. Fred drops beats—mostly with his mouth and a wireless mic. I think I heard some Moby Dick in there. Hard to say. The Fucking Eagles went on last and included an impromptu “jam” with BBF.

The reason it’s taken me so long to post about this is that I shot with actual film (the horror!) and it’s taken me this long to get everything scanned and some of it up on the web (blah blah blah). I like film. I like the results. It’s a lot more work. I don’t have any photos from the gallery event, I only had black and white film and it didn’t really suit the scene.

A sidecar: evidently, a woman was murdered—shot in the head—around 2:30 AM (well after we left, but still…) near the Fawcett House at 19th & Fawcett. There were some condos going up across the street at 26th & Jefferson.

Man, I had a busy Saturday. I also popped into Hell’s Kitchen on 6th Avenue to catch Vancouver, BC’s Taboo Revue and caught the Broken Oars playing their version of anthemic punk rock. The show got off to a slow start with some karaoke with made up drunken harlot lyrics, but revved up and ended up being quite entertaining. Watched some uncomfortable squirming when the boylesque started. I didn’t finish the show, Seattle’s Neutral Boy also played, but I just couldn’t hang any longer.

There are photos of Taboo Revue here and Broken Oars here.

Took the dogs down to the South Tacoma Auto Show on South Tacoma Way yesterday afternoon to get them some exercise. The street was blocked off to auto traffic from about 50th St S down to around 58th. The streets were lined with mid-century classic american automobiles the entire way. In particular, I picked up on emblems as a lost design element that is for the most part missing from modern vehicles. There are a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr.

An interesting parallel note, we met a group of people from the Edison neighborhood who were participating in the Edison C.A.R.E.S. Action Team program who were working on their initiative sponsored by the City of Tacoma’s Community Based Services program. The group meets once a week to focus on creating solutions for local issues like clean up, street trash, curbing and lighting maintenance and speeding. All things that have come up in conversations I’ve had with Dionne about what it would take to improve our neighborhood. They’re focusing on the Edison neighborhood, which is south of us, Oakes to Washington, 56th to 66th. If they succeed in simply slowing the traffic on Oakes it would be a major improvement for the area. According to the city’s website, a recent speed sting in Edison netted $2,700 in tickets issued for speeding violations.

Oakes has a 30 mph speed limit, though routinely people buzz through here like it’s a the freeway. It’s scary sometimes. In spite of my usual support for privacy, I’ve even said aloud we should go the Lakewood route and install cameras, as long as a proper appeal process is in place. 5 mph over? Yeah, too bad. Ticket. Slow down. The volunteers told me most of the speeders were from other neighborhoods around the region. Well… duh? Who would speed into their own driveway?

While not without it’s share of issues, South Tacoma is still an affordable option for living in the city without paying exorbitant prices North End homes pull in. Especially as projects like this succeed in polishing up the area. A while back, I ran across a Tacoma city map circa 1887 (via exit133.com) which indicates that the entire area of Tacoma was formerly connected via cable car lines. While the light rail system downtown is nice. It doesn’t do much for connecting the entire community of Tacoma. (Or much of anything for anyone for that matter. Every time I’ve been on it, it’s been almost empty.) It might be an interesting proposition to connect all the areas of Tacoma in a manner similar to what Portland has done with it’s MAX light rail.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that downtown Tacoma is getting lots of attention, but there are other areas in town that could really use some love too. By romanticizing the idea that downtown Tacoma is going to become an urban utopia, and in doing so is going to auto-magically make Tacoma the greatest city ever, collectively we may be unable to see the forest for the trees.

I guess this post is not just about the auto show, but it was still pretty cool.

Tranlation: Let’s go. I lived in a house next door to a guy Russ before I bought my house in South Tacoma a couple of years back. He started a band called the Vamanos. They have a bluesy rock n’ roll sound and their songs—while fun are typically—um, how you say? …long. I’ve been recording the band in a combination of spaces lately (their basement, my basement) and they’re nearly finished with about 7 songs which they intend to release independently. They dropped a last minute show tonight at O’Malley’s on 6th Avenue. O’Malley’s is weird. I wouldn’t typically think of it as a live venue. It’s just, kind of… a bar. While it wouldn’t be altogether a bad idea to host more live shows, patrons might be better served if there were a few tables moved out of the way and there was room for people to move around.

In contrast to my last post on film shooting, these shots are digital. While they’re not entirely bad shots, I can’t help but think they’re a bit flat. Err… digital. Don’t listen to what I say, take a look for yourself and let me know what you think in comparison with the previous shots of the Boss Martians. Or not.

Made a trek up to Seattle on Thursday night to see the Boss Martians play at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard. The Hot Rollers played first, but I missed the majority of their set. The Boss Martians played a strong set of songs, some of which I was familiar with and some of the newer songs I hadn’t heard. This was the first outing I had seen them play with former Midnight Thunder Express & ex-Valentine Killer Scott (the Machine) Myrene on the bass, who seemed to easily lock it in step with newer drummer Thomas Caviezel. Playing for about an hour, they blasted through their set of pop-tinged punk rock n’ roll. It was loud & fast(how it should be, duh?). Evan Foster has been a busy man lately, writing tons of material for the Martians’ forthcoming record (demos on myspace) and evidently also co-writing songs with Iggy Pop. What a job? That does NOT suck.

As far as the photography goes, I did things a little differently than usual. Recently, I’ve decided if I was really going to learn to shoot photos, I was going to have to learn how to shoot them on film. Sure digital is easier, and I’d probably get better results, but it’s akin to recording music to tape. Neither method is without merit, but learning the way everyone else did can offer some insight into the craft. Anyway, I removed the crutch. I didn’t bring my Nikon D50. I took 2 rolls of Kodak BW400CN black and white film, a roll of Kodak Ektachrome P1600, a 50mm 1.4 lens and the Nikon N80. I figured this way, I’d have to pay more attention to what I was doing and not just let the camera do the heavy lifting.

I was kind of stoked to see the depth in some of the shots. I shot 108 frames—most of them totally sucked, but I expected that. The shot in the lede of this post is the only (of 37) from the Ektachrome roll that made the cut. Enough of my blabberin’, the frames that did not suck are online. Go on, take a looksee there, punk rocker.

I had run across one of these in a toy store in Portsmouth, New Hampshire years ago and passed it by. At the time I thought I was probably just being a sucker for the packaging. I didn’t pass on the domain name however, partially inspired by a book I was reading at the time. I’ve used this site mainly as a gallery/blog since then. I ran across another Spark Robot on ebay recently and caved right in. I put up some pictures on Flickr.

I was surprised to stumble on the Western State Hospital Hill Ward ruins in Fort Steilacoom Park a couple weekends ago. Judging by the graffiti, I’m probably the only one who didn’t know about it. I guess it’s been abondoned since 1972. Here’s a link to recent article from TheNewsTribune.com detailing some problems in the area, and here are some photos of the ruins.

Last weekend we hit the Humane Society’s Dog-A-Thon down at Forst Steilacoom park. My wife put herself (and her dog) on the task and helped to raise $500 toward the no kill shelter in Pierce County. I think overall, the event raised $151,000, up $30K from last year. This was a pretty good opportunity to shoot some photos, and that I did. There are a bunch of dog-a-thon photos up on my Flickr site.