#(there are also a few sierra needle songs that became

[stone-stars]

okay you talk about naddpod music all the time and i love it and i want to listen to more naddpod music!!! but there's only like two albums on spotify.. where are you listening to em? is it a patreon thing?

hi! so here’s a post i made a bit ago breaking down what music has been released! there’s a few more songs out there on the patreon than just the ones on spotify, but unfortunately most songs haven’t actually been put anywhere outside of playing in the background of the podcast.

since i made that post there are a few extra notes i can add, though!

home is where the hearth is, the new c3 lyrics song, was released after i made that post

also, some of the songs from emily’s old albums on bandcamp were later repurposed as naddpod songs. notably, from spooky grooves and groovy spooks, “mummy strip tease (sex beat)” became “stallios” and “demon strut (ambient strut)” is “the mindflayer’s lair”. (“halloween at philip glass’s house” also became “broken heart banshee”, but that one is available on the patreon already)

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Rolando, San Diego

This is from a three-part series that ran in Rolando's community newsletter last year. I'd interviewed people who grew up in the area between the late '50s and early '80s, but the self-indulgent second part was the one best received and now featured permanently on the RCC website. Kevin B. Staff, February 15, 2019

Growing Up in Rolando, 1960s - early 1970s

On a hot summer day in 1960, a young musical group piled into a car for a drive to North County. They called themselves Rosie and the Originals. Their destination was an airplane hangar in San Marcos that doubled as a recording studio. Their saxophonist was missing because he had committed to mowing a lawn, and his mom wouldn’t let him out of it. Another group member knew the rudiments of blowing a simple instrumental break, and the unpolished nature of the recording that resulted is probably part of what makes it so hauntingly appealing, as if emanating from no particular place or time.  

By fall, Rosie’s “Angel Baby” had become popular locally. By Christmas, it was an international hit.

In mid-September 1960, as the song was first getting airplay, our next-door neighbor on College Avenue walked me to Henry Clay School for my first day of afternoon kindergarten. My mom had broken a toe while chasing my little brother and me around the coffee table in our living room. The plan was to show me a definite route to follow—from College to Acorn Street to Seminole Drive to Solita—and, after a week of escort, to let me walk it on my own. There were no sidewalks along College Avenue in those days, but I was able to make the walk.

During that first week, a kid kept crying in class, and on one occasion tried to escape. Old Ms. Leber seemed to leap across the room in a single bound as she grabbed him by the collar and dragged him back. Resistance was futile. My best childhood friend, a year younger than I, spent several days with me trying to build an airplane out of bamboo strips and pinwheels that we thought we could use to fly away in, so that I wouldn’t have to go to school.

I came to like kindergarten after a while. I began to walk with a girl who lived in the back unit of a duplex near the corner of College and Acorn. I tried to impress her by breaking glass bottles on the wall of the Campus Drive-In until an old lady came out and made me sweep it up and that was the end of that. One day, I came to the girl’s door just as her father was rushing off to work. The screen door hit me and knocked me into a cactus garden by the side of the house. He actually seemed relieved to be able to call in late. While her mom telephoned my mom to explain what had happened, he took me into the bathroom, had me pull down my pants, removed a number of cactus needles from my bum and rubbed the area with Bactine. It was quite embarrassing.

The rest of my elementary school flew by, in retrospect, although a year seems to take forever when you’re a kid. Kennedy was inaugurated in January 1961, To me, he was President for a long time. It was hard to think of him as young, since all adults seemed old and he was even older than my dad! He was assassinated while I was in third grade. We heard about it just before recess and did talk about it on the playground, but it wasn’t as if the world had stopped. We played ball and ate our lunches; I even bought a bag of Planter’s peanuts for a nickel that day.

We moved to our new house on Seminole Drive on Veterans’ Day 1965. Although it was less than a mile away, I didn’t see as much of old friends and started hanging out with a different set of kids. The area west of Henry Clay had been developing steadily since the early ‘60s. The apartments on the south side of Acorn Street went up around 1963; we used to climb around on the building materials until the workers chased us off. An old-style ranch house with a big front porch was torn down, and four houses, including the one we moved into, went up on the west side of Seminole. The shopping center where the BLVD63 apartments now stand started out as a large dirt lot with just a De Falco’s Food Giant on the east end.

As the rest of the shopping center developed, Thrifty Drug Store and College Theater opened, with a few small retail businesses between them. There was a vacancy between Thrifty and Von’s for several years, until Straw Hat Pizza Palace opened. It showed old Laurel and Hardy films and such, and instantly became a favorite hangout for older kids. The back of Thrifty had a tall flat wall and a good-sized parking lot that quickly became a place for playing handball and racquetball. We got to know most of Thrifty’s employees, who let us go up to the roof to retrieve our ball if we somehow hit it up there. We bought candy bars that over the years went from five cents to ten cents to fifteen cents while becoming smaller and smaller, and could get a scoop of ice cream on a cone for a nickel, with two scoops for a dime.

Sixth grade at Henry Clay ended in June 1967, just before the weekend of the much-remembered Monterey Pop Festival and several weeks after the release of the Beatles’ much- overrated Sergeant Pepper album. In the fall, I moved on to Horace Mann. Because I went to Sunday school in the College Area and had joined the church-sponsored Scout troop, I already had a collection of acquaintances from other elementary schools that I now saw every day. It was quite a change, having to go to different classrooms and listen to bells ringing every hour. Miniskirts were much in fashion, and we guys were beginning to notice.

For those who went through adolescence in the late ‘60s, the era has always been something of an enigma. That time in a kid’s life is chaotic and confusing enough, but we also had to deal with living in one of the most tumultuous eras in modern history. There was a lot of anti-establishment posturing by kids my age—mainly aping older siblings, I suspect. At heart, I think, teenagers are the most reactionary of conformists. If you were going to rebel against society, there was a very definite way to dress and behave. But political posturing aside, kids will be kids. We enjoyed going through what we called the A&W and Uni-mart storm drains, identified by the businesses nearest the tunnel entrances. We had raucous impromptu after-school football, basketball, and soccer games. We took off on long bike rides without bothering to tell our parents where we were going or when we’d be back. We threw water balloons at each other in hot weather.

In fall 1970 I started high school in 10th grade at Crawford. It seemed a much more easygoing place than Horace Mann, with basically no dress code and fewer ringing bells and public announcements. I didn’t take part in many extracurricular activities, having embraced the current drop-out-of-society ethos. That fall I took drivers training, then offered by public schools. Dad occasionally let me borrow the car, but I really wanted a motorcycle. In July, after working a few months at Campus Chuck Wagon, I was able to buy a little Honda CB160. By the middle of my high school years, several of us had small bikes and would take them on weekend camping trips in the backcountry. Although my Honda wasn’t built for off-roading, we did a bit of that too, often in the area that is now Mission Trails Park. There weren’t a lot of restrictions on where you could ride then. Soon enough, the noise and dust got on people’s nerves and laws changed.

I participated irregularly in wrestling and track, but for the most part was uninterested in school-related activities. I did stay active in the Boy Scout troop throughout high school because of its outdoor program. A half-dozen other boys my age felt the same way and we’d all become friends. It was through the troop’s outdoor program that I got to know most of San Diego County, particularly Anza Borrego State Park. We climbed Mount San Jacinto in the San Bernardino mountains each year, in preparation for an annual week-long trek through the Sierras. I’d climbed Mount Whitney twice by the time I was 16!

Watergate was just getting underway when I graduated from high school and American participation in the Vietnam War had ended earlier that year. For us, the feeling was that the ‘60s were definitely over but nothing particularly cool had come along to take its place. There was a lot of soft rock music, and it was considered fashionable to be a “sensitive male.” On the other hand, it was the era of the Guitar Hero–all about making a lot of noise while playing fast. To me, most of the hard rock seemed much less tuneful than ‘60s music.

I left San Diego that fall of 1973 to become an auto mechanic in Arizona. It seemed like a practical thing to do until I realized I intensely disliked the work. After a year, I joined the army. Although I came back to San Diego for short periods, I didn’t live here permanently again until 1997. The Rolando area was basically recognizable as the place where I grew up, until about ten years ago when the shopping center was demolished to be replaced by BLVD63, the Thrifty became Rite Aid and moved to its present location by the Post Office, and Henry Clay got some upgrades.

When I taught at Palomar College in San Marcos, I had the chance to ask Rosie Hamlin, the lead singer of Rosie and the Originals, if she remembered the location of the hangar where they recorded “Angel Baby,” but it was all too long ago and far away from her current life. In March of last year, Ms. Hamlin died. *The author of this article is Kevin Bradshaw Staff, Class of 1973 and is on the Rolando News Staff.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: New Jersey’s One Million Acres of Undeveloped, Otherworldly Land

Still from David Scott Kessler’s The Pine Barrens (all images courtesy David Scott Kessler)

I first saw David Scott Kessler’s experimental documentary film The Pine Barrens in the heart of the Pine Barrens itself, at the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, a cranberry farm and nature preserve nestled deep down a long dirt road in southern New Jersey. I watched, rapt, as the Ruins of Friendship Orchestra performed a lilting, wandering, live score replete with harp, strings, banjo, and ethereal vocals. I became so engrossed in the film that at times I forgot the orchestra was even there.

The Pine Barrens is a sprawling, elegiac film that touches on the area’s delicate ecology, its commercial history of having some of country’s largest cranberry and blueberry farms, “Piney” culture and local folklore, and an imminent pipeline proposal that may threaten it all. That iteration of the film was a draft, only partially complete. Kessler, a 2015 Pew Center for Arts and Heritage Fellow, has spent the past few months shooting, re-cutting, and editing the film, and just launched an Indiegogo campaign to complete it. He hopes to release it in its finalized form this year, and a short film assembled from selections of its footage, Nine Fires, will be screening on April 22 at the Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival.

Still from David Scott Kessler’s The Pine Barrens

The Pine Barrens is comprised of 1.1 million acres of pine trees, acidic soil, and a network of bogs and marshes, spanning across more than seven counties. It is the largest area of undeveloped land between Maine and Florida, set within the most densely populated state in the nation. Kessler began with the intention of making a short film charting the region’s ecological and human relationships, but he ended up filming for over six years, capturing the Pinelands in every imaginable state and season. In the process of filming, Kessler fell deeply in love with the landscape, and The Pine Barrens is marked by long, lingering shots that fixate on the area’s flora and fauna — orchids moving in the breeze, water coursing over mud through reeds, mist rising off the water — in ways that appear strange and alien, heightened by the sparse and atmospheric sounds of the Ruins of Friendship. Some of the most astonishing footage is Kessler’s shots of the Pines engulfed in flame, which open the film and recur throughout it. The camera appears mere feet away from plumes of fire licking the trunks of trees and consuming underbrush. The fire is, in fact, an ecologically important natural occurrence that promotes regeneration, and it serves as a guiding metaphor for themes of destruction, mystery, and transmutation in the film.

Still from David Scott Kessler’s The Pine Barrens

Allen Crawford, a New Jersey native and amateur naturalist, serves as a guide for much of the film. Middle-aged and lean, he carouses the woods in sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat, and wading boots, leading us through the Pinelands, which hosts 43 threatened or endangered animal species. “Do you smell that smell? It’s the pine needles baking. That’s a summer smell. I’ve been all over the world, but I’ve never been in a more fragrant forest,” he says in one of the opening scenes in the film. Crawford escorts us through brush and brambles, lazily kayaks down a stream, and traipses across barricades of fallen trees, all the while pointing out a rare orchid, or mimicking the sounds of the tree frogs. This is the history of the Pine Barrens not from historians and academics, but from the people who populate it themselves.

The Pines are imbued here with a sensation of otherworldliness, and many scenes take place at night, amidst croaking frogs and howling winds. This is the stuff myths are made of, and storytelling, passed down through generations of the Pinelands’ residents, is wound throughout the film, giving the forest a sense of richness, depth, and mystery. What makes it even more intriguing is that this “forest primeval,” as one of the storytellers dubs it, exists in one of the nation’s most populated states, bordered by highways, in a place more associated with shopping malls and suburbia than rare natural wonders.

Still from David Scott Kessler’s The Pine Barrens

The Pine Barrens also provides a portrait of the denizens of this enigmatic landscape. The camera hovers around a campfire as locals, who refer to themselves as “Pineys,” swap tales of their famed mythical monster, the Jersey Devil, and talk about the waves of settlers, from the Lenape Indians to English, Italian, and German immigrants, who make up their family trees. The story of the Pines is inherently complicated, as are its Piney residents. One fireside storyteller discusses the origins of a smear campaign against Pinelands residents in the early days of American eugenics, which branded them as inbred and intellectually bereft. Tales like this are intermingled with scenes where men casually wear hats emblazoned with confederate flags, or sing songs about how people must speak English in America. Some residents take up the self-proclaimed mantle of “rednecks” and ride ATVs and trucks through the ecologically sensitive landscape. Others seem to value the Pine Barrens as a personal sanctuary, or as a point of familial pride. The film is tinged with a deep sense of nostalgia, a reckoning of marginalized pasts, and a look forward to an uncertain future.

Still from David Scott Kessler’s The Pine Barrens

The film has recently acquired a new sense of urgency — a proposed pipeline to transport natural gas was green lighted in February, amidst a throng of 400 protesters, by the Pinelands Commission, a governing body whose purpose has historically been to protect and preserve the Pines. A nearly identical proposal was previously halted by the Commission in 2012, but Governor Chris Christie took the unusual step of refusing to reappoint the members of the Commission who opposed the pipeline and instead replaced them with others who have close ties to the energy industry. The pipeline is currently tied up in litigation after the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Alliance sued following the Pinelands Commission’s decision. Much like the recent widely opposed North Dakota Access Pipeline, this pipeline threatens a carefully sustained, but fragile ecosystem and its residents’ way of life. The Pine Barrens feeds the 17-trillion gallon Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer which contains some of the purest water in the United States, meaning that the pipeline could also be in danger of poisoning the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention plants and animals. In addition, residents and activists are afraid of the legal precedent set by this ruling, which undermines the Pineland Commission’s ability to prevent further development on this environmentally important land.

Not initially intending to make an environmental documentary, Kessler now hopes that The Pine Barrens can serve as a call to arms, inspiring others to take action and to raise awareness of the unique nature of the Pinelands. The magical and mysterious swamps of South Jersey have been subject to ebbs and flows of nature, agriculture, and history, but have always regenerated through the smoldering ash. The pipeline’s impingement on its storied ecology may be the Pine Barrens biggest challenge yet.

David Scott Kessler’s Nine Fires, a condensed version of  The Pine Barrens, is screening at the Philadelphia Environmental Film Festival on Saturday, April 22. For more screenings, check here.

The post New Jersey’s One Million Acres of Undeveloped, Otherworldly Land appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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