#from my previous post it seems people think the matte paintings were a TOS thing only? but all the old shows and movies up to voy had them!!

[smileyobrien]

STAR TREK MATTE PAINTINGS APPRECIATION VOYAGER — by Syd Dutton, Robert Stromberg, Eric Chauvin (Illusion Arts Inc.)

Zahl Colony — "Year of Hell" Ocampa — "Caretaker" USS Raven crash site — "The Raven" Ocampa City — "Caretaker" Access shaft (Ocampa) — "Caretaker" Martian City — "Lifesigns" Ocampa City — "Caretaker"

[andrewbiscontini]

Animal Tracks

It’s been a stack of years since I last saw my friend Dave, not since before he relocated to California. We shared an independent streak, coupled with moderately obsessive work habits. It’s not unusual for me to go years without seeing people I care about very much, and I think it was the same for Dave.

Sometimes people die in the interregnum.

Dave died yesterday, in Oakland, California, at age 40, in a tragic accident. I’ll address that later. First, I want to tell you about my friend Dave.

I first heard about him from Brian Geltner, who I met while he was playing drums in Nervous Cabaret, and who’d recently scored a movie I’d made. Brian is both an immensely talented multi-instrumentalist and a singularly great guy. Somehow, everyone I’ve met through him is similarly stand-up and also, improbably, immensely talented.

“You gotta hear this guy Dave Deporis,” Brian said, “He’s pretty special.”

So Edna and I went with him to see Dave play at 169 Bar on East Broadway. Maybe it was ’04? I’m bad with years. And yeah, holy shit. The guy was special. His voice was spectacular: resonant, soaring, ghostly and full, an elemental human voice through which you could also hear that other thing, that coherent trans-dimensional energy which animates a human. Call it a soul.

I liked the songs, too. “Swan King” and “Catholic Smoke Ring” are still favorites. I’ve seen a bit of live music, and not all of it sticks with me like those songs that night. “The Adult Song” maybe toed right up to the twee line for my tastes, but it was a Millennial anthem a decade before anyone cared what a  Millennial was.

The title of this post comes from a song of his I heard later, at Nervous Cab’s first record release in the basement of 68 Jay, and only heard him sing that once. It encapsulated what those performances felt like: a singular moment in this world, imagined or seen only by one human’s eyes, encoded into words and sound and brought to life in the mind of the listener, becoming a shared emotional experience.

For Dave, the practice of music was fundamentally and profoundly spiritual. He taught himself to sing and to play guitar in service to the embodiment and expression of that spirit. And he was good at it.

But he rarely admitted to being satisfied with a performance, and he was never satisfied with a recording.

It was enough to drive you crazy. Peter Himmelman touches on the phenomenon in the excellent tribute to Dave he posted at Forbes.

It wasn’t that Dave never finished things, it was that he would never declare anything finished. Nothing, no matter how good, ever got his stamp of approval. Everything came with a caveat: it was a demo, it was a scratch mix, it was okay for now but don’t play it for anyone. Great recordings went unheard because there was no correct order in which to present them.

His talent wasn’t unrecognized. People wanted to work with him, to record him. But jeezis the guy was uncompromising. That’s not to say he was a diva: he wasn’t. Nor was he exactly a perfectionist: he appreciated a beautiful aberration. Nor, for all of his eccentricities, was he some precious naïf (I never quite got his David Who Loves the Sky persona, but whatever it was it definitely wasn’t a shtick).

He understood the realities of the music industry and he understood the economic necessities of life, and life as an artist. The guy worked his ass off. He could be pushy, sometimes to a fault. And he was tough enough to withstand the brutal shitkicking that Bloomberg era New York delivered to artists.

Money for survival was always a problem. He was expert at acquiring recording equipment on Ebay, getting a couple demos out of it and flipping it at enough of a profit to keep him going.

But Dave was not, and was never going to be, a “professional” musician in the industrial sense. He put in the work, alright. But for Dave it was impossible for the practice of music to be anything other than a spiritual act, and certainly not an obligatory, commercial one. His resourcefulness, resilience, and commitment to making music were astounding.

The danger with that approach, of course, is that in New York City, where the stress level and the demands of the dollar are relentless, the psychic conduits of spiritual energy can quickly fray and short-circuit spectacularly.

Which is to say that not every performance was transcendent. Even with a decent sound system and a friendly audience, things could go haywire. I remember one night in particular. Fred Wright and Matt Morandi put together a show at Charlotte Glynn’s loft. I think Fred and Matt played as Pntgrl, Andrea Hansen did a great solo Painting Soldiers set, and Dave played.

He was frazzled when he showed up, visibly agitated, and the performance kinda went sideways. Dave never phoned it in in those situations. Rather, he’d just open all the valves and let loose, which could have the effect of exacerbating the short.

Anyway, after he played, some angry dude showed up demanding to know where Dave was. Dave managed to dodge the guy for a minute, but it wasn’t a huge loft and the dude confronted him. Apparently this asshole had been harassing Dave on the phone all day, claiming that he was owed money because he’d voluntarily sent out an email blast about one of Dave’s previous shows, and felt like that entitled him to a cut of the door as a promoter. He was clearly desperate and nuts, and threatening. I remember Freddy expertly defusing the situation and sending the guy packing.

And I know Dave got frustrated seeing people who weren’t any more talented than him get a lot of attention and press and notoriety and shit. It’s the kind of scene bullshit that you can’t let mess with you, but it can be overwhelming in this city, and I remember it feeling particularly noxious in those days.

The thing is, there’s no one scene in New York City, whether you’re a painter or a writer or a musician or an artisanal cheesemaker. It’s a city of 9 million badasses. There are hundreds of scenes. And all of them think they’re the scene. But the one with the most money around it tends to crow about itself the loudest and, certainly back then, usually draws all the press. There was a sense that going to shows was more of a fashion statement for most people than it was a musical experience. It turned me off from a lot of stuff, for sure.

And I think it got to Dave. He told me once he was more comfortable walking into a roofers’ bar in rural Florida where he didn’t know anybody and playing a set than he was a Brooklyn hipster spot.

The analogy I make about living in New York is that it’s like the relationship between the alternator and the battery in a car. When the relationship is healthy, it draws from you and charges you in equal measure. When it’s not, it can fry you.

And all the crappy stuff about New York just kept getting crappier, and pretty soon the only “creatives” anybody seemed to give a shit about were the cheesemakers.

I found out Dave had split town on social media. He was in Northern California. It looked like he was happy making music there, and that he’d found a community that gave a shit about it, and him.

Brian told me he hung out with him the last time he was in town. Dave had played a bunch of his new stuff for him, and was actually excited about the recordings he’d been working on.

Then, sitting at an outdoor café in Oakland, somebody snatched Dave’s laptop. According to reports, Dave chased after them to get it back. They got into a car. Dave grabbed them and wouldn’t let go. They peeled out. He died of his injuries.

I don’t think for a minute that Dave cared about the machine, costly as it may have been.

But his music was in it.

It is one of the ultimate evil banalities of American life that no matter how hard you work for what little you have, there is always someone ready to steal it from you.

I’m sure that banal human didn’t intend to end my friend’s life when they yanked his laptop.

I’m also sure that Dave didn’t deliberately risk his life to get it back. He put his whole life into his music every moment he breathed. I doubt it was other than instinct.

It was a horrible accident, a wrenching tragedy, the loss of a special human, and a real friend. My heart breaks for his family, for the life-long friends of his I got to know, Daniel Greenspan and Jared Whitham, and for the many other friends like me Dave collected over his many travels and his too few years, whose love and support I know he felt, appreciated, and returned.

So, Dave. 

Thanks for that Radiohead ticket at the Tower. It was a great show, but the fonder memory is wandering around rainy Upper Darby with you beforehand, swapping stories, talking music and hearing song snippets.

Thanks for helping me move my mom from Pennsylvania to Virginia. It was a brutal job, and you held your own against my grandmother with grace and wit.

Thanks for the friendship.

I cannot imagine you coming to rest in whatever quantum state exists beyond this one.

I can only imagine you soaring.