Let's not forget that in the end, when you're dying in some rest home, nothing will matter but the friends you have...  And whether you can eat the fruit cup of the person in the hospital bed beside yours while they're sleeping. 

If I was about to fall asleep in a rest home, I'd hide my fruit cup in my sheet. 

Musings

I have some thoughts at times beyond the Group of Four. This page will collect some of those about miscellaneous topics.

More about Erie, Pennsylvania and the Marx Museum

I’d like to follow up on my blog about Erie and the closing of the Marx museum (blog below). After I wrote that the museum closed because of lack of community support, an editorial ran in the Erie newspaper (liberally quoting from my blog) and claimed I was wrong. The newspaper made the charge that the museum folded largely because the museum’s 87-year-old director wouldn’t cooperate enough with other local organizations that had an interest in helping her. I actually called the 87-year-old director of the museum after I read the editorial and found out… guess what… the Erie newspaper, if not out-and-out lying, certainly has a slanted view of the facts (No wonder the newspaper industry is dying).

I spoke to Betty Portenier (museum director) and she was the sweetest lady. She said she started the museum with four volunteers and a little money, and those volunteers were responsible for the running the place for years (How many of you feel up to volunteering your time to keeping a museum running?). She said they looked into grants but that grants aren’t as easy to get, or as fast in coming, as you might think. To give you some idea of how well regarded Betty Portenier is by the community, if not by the scummy reporter from the Erie paper, sixty percent of the museum collection was on loan from members of the community. Those people who loaned items to the museum/Miss Portenier said they would again if the museum reopens. 

I titled the last blog “The entire town of Erie stinks.”  I was wrong about that. The volunteers for the museum, the many people who loaned material to the museum, are all great. What stinks is a newspaper and community leaders who would sink so low as to gang up on an 87-year-old woman who has volunteered more hours to their community than they had any right to expect of her. She tried to do it “her way” and they wouldn’t help her. The community leaders’ only defense is that she didn’t want to do things “their way”.

Frank Sinatra wouldn’t do things “their way” either! Maybe the Erie community leaders and the Erie paper want to try to kick Frank around when they’re through trying to kick around 87-year-old women!  

The Erie community leaders and Erie newspaper reporters are a bunch of elderly-women-kicking no-account four-flushing goons!  

The entire town of Erie, Pennsylvania stinks

Where I live, old toys are big business. People come to Rochester just to visit the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, which is a museum-sized collection of old dolls, dollhouses, and other toys. It’s one of the major local attractions. I was interested in stopping in Erie, Pennsylvania over the summer, on my way back from Pittsburg, to see Erie’s museum of Marx toys. I’m not sure what Erie’s connection to the Marx Toy Company is, but as far as I could tell they had one of only two Marx toy museums in the entire country. 

The day I was looking into information about the museum I found all these articles online about the fact that the museum had CLOSED about two months previously. I sort of lost my interest in stopping in Erie. 

As I understand it from the articles I read, a few old-timers from the Marx Toy Company ran the museum, but as some of these people were in their 90s, they were going to have to give up the ghost. They were receiving next to no help financially from the local government, and just generally running out of energy. I think they said they averaged about 1000 visitors a year. Not a huge number... but that doesn’t sound too bad if even half those people were from out-of-the-area; they were buying meals in Erie and maybe staying in hotels there as well. 

I don’t get why the Erie government or Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t have purchased the collection and housed it in display cases in a local public library or other public building open on weekends. How much of an ongoing expense would that have been? Zero dollars?

I guess I’m old enough not to be too surprised that people tear down things of historic significance for no good reason, but it still hurts. In this age when people are trying to conserve gas and vacation locally, Erie has given people a reason not to visit.

John Lombardo, Mary Ramsey, and the 10,000 Maniacs

Having lived in Western New York my entire life, I was able to see some very early performances by the 10,000 Maniacs and actually talk to Natalie Merchant. Having reached middle age I’m now becoming nostalgic for those things of youth at the same time that the music of Natalie Merchant seems ever-present on radio and the speakers of mall clothing stores. I’m struck by how lucky I was to see the band just before and after the release of the CD "Wishing Chair", and before they exploded on MTV and then radios everywhere. For those of you unfamiliar with the band's development, they released an album and EP themselves (later collected on the CD "Hope Chest") before getting a major label contract and releasing "The Wishing Chair". At around this time they became tour-mates with R.E.M. (then in contention to be the world’s greatest band, a title their peers U2 have since taken) and Natalie began a relationship with R.E.M.’s lead singer Michael Stipe, a partnership which would lead to a number of duets. Also about this time the 10,000 Maniacs' rhythm guitarist John Lombardo left the group.

Unfortunately for John Lombardo, with the 10,000 Maniacs' next CD, "In My Tribe", the group would rocket to stardom with a newly poppy sound. Even the group’s following CD, "Blind Man’s Zoo", although a little uneven, would also be a hit. At this time John began recording CDs with singer/violinist Mary Ramsey under the name "John and Mary".

Natalie, always a little bit the outsider even in her own group, decided to leave the Maniacs but not before releasing, with the group, the popular CDs "Our Time in Eden" and the live CD "MTV unplugged".

After Natalie left the group to begin to begin a solo career, John Lombardo returned to the group and brought Mary Ramsey to take Natalie’s place as vocalist. Although the Mary Ramsey-fronted group released two CDs, they failed to win over fans of Natalie’s work with the group. It was disheartening to me that the 10,000 Maniacs CDs with Mary Ramsey falter not only in relation to the group’s previous work with Natalie Merchant, but strangely, the CDs don’t quite manage the charm or energy of the John and Mary CDs.

An undiscovered gem for fans of the band are those little-heard John and Mary CDs. They continue the folky experiments of the Wishing-Chair-era Maniacs, a time before the band dedicated themselves to pop hits.

Larry Bangor’s vapor trail

It’s odd how some bands disappear from history and others go on to become generally regarded as some of history’s best. Back in the early 80’s, in the time when New Wave was big and CDs were only starting to replace the LP, the band Human Sexual Response really caught my attention. Now there's almost no trace they ever existed. 

I first saw them play on a stand-up comedy show. It was pretty usual at that time for a half hour show broadcast from some comedy club to feature a number of comics and one band performing a single song (Sounds like an odd mix now, but before cable maybe more things got crammed together that way).   

HSR got up and played a song called “Land of the Glass Pinecones”. They were clearly part of the New Wave Movement. The sound of the song was odd and atmospheric and involved one of them playing the strings of a guitar with drumsticks. To make the moment odder still was the fact that they were crammed onto a stage built to hold single man stand-up acts.

I bought their second LP (“In a Roman Mood”) and was quite impressed. I feel it measured up to the best product of the age, which was quite good: LPs by Devo, the Pretenders, etc., everyone else who would be considered part of the New Wave Movement.

Then HSR disappeared. And they did so in an age before the internet, when there was no easy way to track the movements of bands except through the big music publications.

A few years ago I bought their first album, which was released on CD for a brief time. Certain songs pointed toward the accomplished sound of their second album, but more often the sound on the album suggested a party band. The last time I looked the CD was out-of-print and selling for a pretty good price. To my knowledge their second album has never been released on CD.

Recently, through Wikipedia and other sources, I read that the core of the group went on to release a CD as The Zulus. I bought a copy of this used and it arrived this week. This late 80’s CD shows the band in fine form. The CD was produced by Bob Mould of Husker Du fame.

Maybe one day in heaven they’ll be some bar and in it I’ll run into lead singer Larry Bangor and he can catch me up the history of the band I don’t know. 

Freakies cereal and the end of the world

If you haven’t heard of Freakies cereal, you missed out.  To put things in perspective, Freakies was to cereals what Nirvana was to 90’s bands.  Nirvana rose and fell quickly, but became as large a rock legend as there has ever been.  There was a cereal collectors’ magazine I saw once, actually called "Freakies".  That’s really saying something that they would name their magazine that, considering Freakies was only around for about a year or so while other cereals, like Captain Crunch, have been around for decades.

Why did Freakies have such an impact?  It was really that first set of promotions more than anything.  Back when I was a kid, virtually every cereal had some sort of new plastic prize each month.  I don’t know why so few have anything now.  Maybe it’s too costly.  But when I was a kid, walking down the cereal isle was like walking through a toy store.  What set Freakies apart from the pack was that first set of prizes.  In the first boxes of the cereal, the prize was one of the seven plastic Freakies characters.  What made that special was the box itself.  On the box they explained to you who the Freakies were, what their names were, that they lived together in a tree, what their personalities were like.  It’s like you were buying into a whole other world.  I collected all seven Freakies, sold them while I was a kid, bought six of them on EBay a couple years ago for $40.

Another set of prizes was seven Freakies character magnets.  The second or third set of prizes was seven Freakies’ automobiles.  The magnets were cool, but most prizes were not as good as those in that first set of prizes.  And then the Freakies really started losing me.  The prizes got less interesting and I don’t remember the later boxes functioning as the early one did, almost like a picture book with tons of Freakies information.  The cereal stuck around for about a year and when it was gone, it was sorely missed.  We didn’t know how much we’d miss it until we didn’t have it any more.