THE LAST DAY

Last Days 2: The Jah Cables Conference

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This is as weird as it’s going to get people: a digital movie recording an AV iChat I had with Jah Cables, myself in Philly, JC in Brooklyn, sharing old (actual) photographs, recorded on a digital camera, uploaded to the internet, embedded onto our website, and watched by you on your computer, wherever you are. What’s the meta?

End Of The Century

Blu-Ray and HD Security Codes Cracked

The codes protecting the content of individual discs have been cracked by these guys over at doom9.com. The security algorithms for all aspects of the discs, including processing key, media key and volume ID were figured out. Early on, user Arnezami says: “This means that (especially for future software player updates) there would be no need for anyone to do a memdump/debug or anything. Only once per Media Key Block Version does the Media Key have to be extracted by one person in the world. If this is released everyone can decrypt any disc!!” Now FSD doesn’t really know what a memdump is, but we’re guessing memory dump. Sounds like something one would like to avoid.

Later on page 6, the Processing Key is discovered by user arnezami. User hd1080p says: “February 11, 2007 is a day to be remembered. I predict that movies will one day be liberated without DRM and we are all going to loose all the fun and excitement. Fairuse wins!!” Pretty awesome.

Any Several Sundays

Opera Night, with J-Lou, the Vee, and the Big E. Where to begin? Sometime around the winter of 00/01 I got hell deep into going to see the Philadelphia Orchestra. I heard somewhere that the cheapest seat in the house was five bucks and having hit rock bottom in the Totally Crushing Loneliness Department I figured this was cheaper than a movie. I got hooked pretty fast. If you had ten in your pocket you could totally get your Bach on for a measly fiver then two hours later shuffle down to the Glinch and spend the other five on a few brews while getting tips on prime classical vinyl from Fred the Bartender (who once played in an orchestra conducted by Stravinsky.) Fred’s tips were (and still are) always the best.

“The Budapest String Quartet?” I’d say. “So they’re really the real deal?”

“Their teachers,” Fred would say, leaning forward, “KNEW BRAHMS!”

Classical was and still is a cheap thing to get into. Why punk rockers don’t realize this is beyond me. Five bucks is cheaper than any show at the Church or even most basements and you can get most classical LPs for around a buck. To me, it was no-brainer. Opera Night was an extension of this sensibility. It occurred to me that I didn’t know jack shit about Opera, so one day I went down to the Free Library, took out a copy of the Magic Flute on x2 CD, and went over to Lou’s. We put the opera on, cranked the volume, and got drunk. Holy shit, we thought. That was fun.

Operas are hours and hours long, and the fact that you could get them from the library meant there were countless hours of FREE ENTERTAINMENT to be had. Amazing, right? Lou and I didn’t know the first thing about Opera but we figured as long as we had a few bottles of wine and listened to one Opera a week that some day we’d get it. Thus, Opera Night was born.

People got interested, hearing that indeed Lou and I were drinking wine and listening to an Opera every Sunday night. A few months into it and more and more people showed up. It kinda became an Urban Legend: five dudes got drunk and listened to an Opera once a week — huh?

Maybe a year into it we went official. Big E’s friend Mettea worked at Fuime and West Philly, Sundays no less. So we brought the Opera, they served dollar glasses of Carlo Rossi, and we cranked the volume all the way up. You really should have been there. On our biggest night the place was packed, mostly girls and our gang, Verdi at full blast, everyone wasted and super happy. Who does that? Who listens to Opera at a bar that loud? No one, man.

It’s a shame how much shit we got for it. Philly’s come a long way since those days, now that we’ve got Avant Gentlemen, Unicorn Girls, Freak Parades, Solstice Celebrations, and Man Men — because back then five dudes who just wanted to listen to people singing their lungs out about love, death, poison, and being lost at sea — all for free while drinking on the cheap — got clowned till the days end on the tired grounds of being “Pretentious.”

Man, Philly…

Hot Toddy Night, early ‘02, at J-Klew’s East Falls Manse high up on Calumet Street. Basically, this: none of us had ever had a Hot Toddy before, but seriously, on a cold winter night, doesn’t that just sound like the tastiest thing? We Googled every Hot Toddy Recipe we could find and made huge boiling pots of them all, the kitchen smelling like oranges and cinnamon. The only rule was if you came to Hot Toddy Night, you had to wear a sweater, and you had to drink Hot Toddys. No one complained.

I am the Lizard King. I can do anything.
- Jim Morrison

Yet another Outer Limits pic from The Trip, DE/Maryland, Summer ‘05.  This one feels so Turned On it’s giving you the Flashback, and you weren’t even there!  See you on the other side.

Never Forget

Seriously.

Interrupting the FSD/Philadelphia History and the eBadering for a Moment, Here is the Idiot Box

The Luckiest Guy On The Lower East Side

Wait so you think the island is somewhere near Portland? A-a-and meanwhile what was that crazy Clockwork Orange style vid they had dude watching when — Michael? Hell if I know whether he got home or not! But if Ben’s daughter — uh, hello? Oh shit, we’re rolling! Ahem. Sorry about that folks, just discussing that latest Lost with my gang here at Ye Olde FSD Offices. Anywho, so yeah, the above pic is from that Legendary Summer of ‘01 which, the more I find myself thinking and writing about it, really was one of Those Summers, like the Summer of ‘95 (greatest Summer of my life) and like Summer of ‘07 is sure (and I mean sure) to be.

Image snapped at one of the too-many insane parties I found myself at with Carr and friends. Still basking in my newfound unemployed freedom, with a pseudo-girlfriend who was touring the country with a band she’d soon be dumping me for, I headed up the Turnpike to NYC where I flip-flopped between rolling with Carr and Screamin’ Joe, whose bitter end as friends was speedily coming its inevitable nasty conclusion. Screamin’ Joe was living out in Astoria…there was a store down the street where you could cop a deuce-duece of El Presidente for 99c and they had lime chunks for it in a big bucket right next to the door. Joe’s crew then was D.U.G., Colty, and Joey “Fucking” Robinson — Doug plays in Dirty On Purpose now and they’re pretty danged good — and Joe’s favorite line that summer was “You ever fuck with a knife?”

Meantime, Carr was living in an amazing Park Slope brownstone — the “fillet of the neighborhood” — and embarking upon a dreamy dream life that most people, well, dream about. When the sun went down we’d roll with his pal Yong out past the dried up concrete fountain (Carr’s caption for the pontificating concrete Merman was “Dryyyyy!”) to Prospect Park armed with bottled beer, rolling tobacco, and a watermelon, and we’d have ourselves a good old time, carving up that watermelon and talking about the essential stuff in Life. Everything was interesting. Carr and I would sit on the beach on Coney Island and he’d point out far-off seagulls backlit by the setting sun and say stuff like, “You ever get into birds? I mean they can fly.” And I’d nod my head in total amazement. I mean it is kinda crazy when you think about it right? Birds fly.

Up in Lou’s room, perusing books, talking shop, and drinking Delirium, with the Reason, ‘01 again. The dudes lived right off of South Street, in a big and strange house where lots of good stuff happened. Wow, the more I think of it, summer ‘01 really was the intense-iest.

Off the top of my head, Truly Important Folks I met in that year:

Loren Hunt
Matt Schwartz
Jordanna Rock-Garden
The Reason
Alexander Zahradnik (officially)
Lauren Meade
Scott Kmiec
Sara-Jane Billard
Melissa Frost
Father Gibbs
MalPal
J-Lou
The Big E
Kelsey Lee Forbes

And that’s just a few. Did you and I meet in 2001? Let me know if we did, this is all kinda blowing my mind right now.

Ocean City Zero One, with the main man himself, Vee. My own OCNJ obsession started way back in 1993, when, having had my heart broken for the first time in my life, I found myself wandering dejectedly along the drizzly boards until I realized that girls asking you for a light (I didn’t smoke) actually just wanted to talk to you. Me and Vee first hit those boards in 1996, because a.)Vee just got a car and b.)I was like, get me out of this too hot fucking city man let’s just go to the beach. Crazy stuff happened. We stole bicycles and rode them across the beach and into the ocean. We found that if you went down the potato sack slides in the evening (when everything was closed) that you didn’t need a potato sack because the night-dew turned it into a kind of water slide. We found that if you stayed up all night illegally sliding down potato sack slides you could just sleep on a bench for a few hours and no one gave a shit. And we also found out that sometimes if you’re sleeping in the back of Vee’s Blazer, and suddenly you wake up to a loud sound, and you realize that what you just heard was someone opening up the back of a tractor trailer that happened to have been parked in front of the Blazer, that the back of said truck could in fact be filled with fresh buckets of Johnson’s Caramel Popcorn.

Which it was. It was Vee’s idea, really. Vee turned the truck around, opened the back up, and said okay get up there and do it. And so I did it. I tossed in as many buckets of fresh caramel popcorn into the truck as I could fit. And that’s a lot, brother, let me tell you. And so, riding back down the AC Expressway, cackling like madmen, me and Vee ate more caramel popcorn we had ever eaten in our lives.

Up to that point, that is. Because what we had on our hands was what could, for one person, possibly be at least four years worth of caramel popcorn. For the first few weeks it was fine. We ate it every day. But after a while we just couldn’t stand it. There you were, sitting in a hot apartment on 6th street, no money to your name, nothing to eat, except, except…don’t say it! Not again!

We started giving it away. We were in a band at the time and we’d have free caramel popcorn at every show. What band does that? None. But still there was more caramel popcorn. We gave buckets away to the homeless. We gave buckets to our parents. We threw buckets at each other. And still we couldn’t seem to get rid of it.

It’s been nearly eleven years now and I still can’t even so much as look at caramel popcorn. I’ve made myself sick just writing this thing. Ugh.

eBader Returns

Here’s another shot at our so-far wildly unsuccessful attempt to have you — AKA the reader, our dearest friend — bid on things that Erik is trying to get rid of in the comments section of these posts.  Current thing for sale: a huge — and when I say huge I mean huge — stack of beat up issues of the New Yorker, a similar stack (really it’s a bunch of stacks) of Harper’s, and the first, I guess like 16 or maybe even 20 issues of the Believer.  You want this stuff?  Opening bid starts at a measly 15 bucks, auction closes on Wednesday night.  None of it is in great condition, so this one is for readers not collectors.  But there is a LOT of shit, like you could get a twenty year prison sentence and not read all of it.  Bid Today, Get Smart Tomorrow!

Fight This Generation

More snowy antics up on Raven Hill, in East Falls. This was around the time that I was writing the View From The Falls column for The Philadelphia Independent, the first installment of which I shared a page with none other than Lord Whimsy, who — blessed be he, and blessed be we — comments on here more than anyone I know. Gotta say, I really believed in the Falls back in those days. Steep hills, tiered rowhomes, magic gardens, secret streets, the lonely whine of distant freight trains at night, a river and three bridges — it truly is a magic place, a Philadelphia out of Philadelphia that’s still in Philadelphia. The first time I saw the river flood over and watched a duck floating serenely down Kelly Drive I knew I was living something that could never be quantified or coherently explained. All we wanted was for everyone we knew to move out there — the rents were pretty competitive back then — and to start a La Vita Nuova with us, a collective reinvention of What Living In Philly Could Actually Be. From what I understand, the place is going through a Total Manyunkification right now…sad, sad. What could have been will never be, but y’know? Fuck it. The same people who will tell you that Philly’s too small will always be the same people to say that East Falls is too far away.

Mikey Prema. For the first time during this entire project, I’m seriously no joke totally stumped for a caption.

Goddamn, isn’t San Fransisco like the prettiest city in America? This one from July, 1998. Me and Vee were just bummin’ around the West Coast when our hostesses in Davis, CA one morning drove us to SF and dropped us off. No problem, we figured, as we got out of the truck (we road in the epic fashion in the open air of the back of a pickup truck), cracked open our fresh cans of Rolling Rock and walked down Market Street, trying to guess what was next. Best bet: a half built home in posh Nob Hill. Walk across the wooden plans, make sure the neighbors don’t see, and you’re in, among the sawdust and fresh wood. No roof was a problem, but it never rained, thank God. Freezing cold at night, up at dawn before the workers arrived and we were off. We met Cassie Powell and her friends at a bookstore. Cassie loved the Beat Generation and but hated me and Vee: two travelling writers on the road. Huh? Either way, Cassie let us crash at her place, but when I got home she never returned my letters. Bummer. No thang, since the next night I met Rosemary, who totally let us crash with her friends in their hotel. Yes, I got Rosemary’s address too, and she totally wrote back. Wait, hold on a sec…holy fuck, I totally just found Rosemary on Myspace! Wow! Now let me just write a — man, isn’t this century cool? Wait till I tell her about this blog!

Let it be said that we met Rosemary while drinking in the park that’s featured on the cover of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America. The whinos we met there were just as interesting as the whinos in the book. And after we met Rosemary and her friends, we realized that yep, magic things still happen there too. Aces.

Okay wait now that I have the browser open I might as well go ahead and look up where — oh crap, you’re not going to believe this, but Cassie Powell is an actress now! No really, she totally has an IMDb entry! Okay, sure, so I haven’t heard of the three 2005 films she’s apparently starred in, but what the hell, who said I knew anything about film anyhow? That’s right, no one!

Back to the above photo…

Question One: What film was this street prominently featured in?

Question Two: Where’s Waldo? Uh, I mean, where’s Bader?