Today I worked on demolishing an old chimney at the old house on 22nd Ave. This was kind of fun, but a lot of work breaking up the old brick and mortar, hauling out the bricks, and cleaning out the 107 years of debris that had collected at the bottom. But now that this chimney is out, we can finish out the loft and other work that needs to be done with that house. Owning two houses is a lot of work, I'm. hoping that we will be able to finish up the old house before summer arrives and my thoughts will be wandering towards the mountains.
ALSO,
I have posted selected pictures from my recent trip to New York. Check them out here.
April 4, 2007
Today is our last day in NYC. Here is a quick recap of what transpired over the past few days:
Big Apple, continued
Tuesday: We took a side trip to Philadelphia, PA, traveling via Amtrak's Keystone route, which is a high-speed electric train. I think that having too much coffee and then staring at the 90mph scenery for 1.5 hours gave me a headache and I felt kind of dazed when we arrived in Philly. We visited Penn State University, Independence Hall where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, an overly-elaborate museum housing the Liberty Bell (our nation's testament to shoddy workmanship), and rode the SEPTA Subway. Then we returned back to NYC via Amtrak again. Later that night, I once again met up with the Hungry March Band to play at a Bocce Ball tournament at a pub in the Park Slope neighborhood. This was an interesting gig, our performance basically consisted of playing happy peppy music when the ball landed in a good spot, and but play blatty dissonant sounds when the ball landed in a bad spot, with some theme music thrown in between rounds.
Wednesday: Mom and I rode the F Train to Coney Island. Unfortunately, the amusement park was closed to public, although it was being overrun by school children wearing traditional Jewish garb. We took the N and Q train back. The N train is an interesting line; it is like an open-air subway running in a pit. That evening, we visited the Empire State Building, now the tallest building in NYC!
Thursday: We visited the New York Transit Museum, which was very cool. In the afternoon, I rented a bike and rode around the south end of Manhattan Island, over the Brooklyn Bridge, back over the Manhattan Bridge, and then crosstown on 20th/21st Streets. Despite the frenetic traffic and impatient drivers, New York is a fairly bike-friendly city; there is a nice bike tail that circumnavigates most of the island, and there is a good helping of bike lanes. The one-way streets provide lots of options for setting up to make turns, and allow bikes to ride on the left side, out of the way of buses. Drivers seem to expect bikes on the road and respect them as much as any other vehicle; I would prefer riding in New York any day over riding in Anchorage, AK.
Friday: I had an assignment to finish for work this week, so of course I put it off until the last day. I spent the morning parked at a nearby coffee shop called The Coffee Pot with the laptop and some paperwork that I had to review. That afternoon we headed to Newark Airport and boarded a plane back to Seattle. I passed the time in the airport and on the place by pulling out the laptop and writing this blog entry.
In all I had a good time in New York, but there seems like so much going on in that city that I only scratched the surface in the week that I visited. I hope I get to come visit again sometime.
March 31, 2007
This week I am visiting New York, with my mom, Pat, and Mason. This is my first time in New York, or anywhere in the Northeast region for that matter. We arrived on Saturday at Newark Airport, and took a cab into Manhattan; this took almost two hours due to a major traffic jam approaching the Lincoln Tunnel. After this cab ride, we quickly learned that driving is a pretty dumb idea in this city, and quickly switched to the subway as our preferred travel mode. The subway, by the way, is an impressive system; the rolling stock is spacious, smooth, and quiet, the stations relatively clean and some nicely renovated. The main drawback to the system is that it is a bit complicated, with a tangle of routes sprawling throughout the city and a confusing array of platforms and passageways at many stations.
Visiting the Big Apple
Saturday night, I met up with my new friends from the Hungry March Band for a late-night party at an interesting venue in Brooklyn, called Rubatu. A smaller subset of the band was going to play a set around 2:30 AM. They obtained a sousaphone and invited me to play. The only problem was that this was a BBb sousa, and so I quickly had to re-learn how to play the songs with new fingerings. Also, it was a fiberglass sousa, and didn't have the nice punchy sound as my beefy all-brass sousa. After the party, I headed back to Manhattan on the subway around 5:30AM. It is impressive that most of the subways run 24/7, at regular headways with full 8 or 10 car trains even late at night.
On Sunday, after a late start, we embarked on the Circle Tour, 3-hour boat ride around Manhattan Island. This was a nice way to get an overview of the city and see all of the cool bridges. Today, Monday, I found a coffee shop nearby where I could spend some time catching up on my blog, which I have been neglecting as of late. Sitting here, I can look out the window onto 9th Ave, where there is a frenzy of activity including multiple hot-dog carts being pushed down the street, yelling cabbies, and a German Shepherd wearing green rubber booties pooping on the sidewalk.
More later...
March 26, 2007
Honk Festing
For the past week, I have been furiously playing sousaphone with a band from New York, known as the Hungry March Band (HMB). The HMB embarked on a mini-tour of the Pacific Northwest, playing in Portland, Olympia, and finally culminating here in Seattle at Honk Fest West, a three day festival of street bands.
About two weeks prior to the festival, I was contacted by the HMB; they were trying to put together this tour, but had no sousaphone player. The tour would be a no-go without a sousa, so they found me through the grapevine and asked if I could play with them. It was an ambitious mission; learn approximately 15 songs in about two weeks, on my own, with only some MP3s to go off of and maybe some written music possibly coming later. One of their sax players, Jason, would fly out a couple of days earlier to help me work out the parts. Another challenge was that my sousaphone is in the key of Eb, and the fingerings on this sousaphone are different than the standard BBb horn that I am more familiar with. I felt honored and overwhelmed to have been chosen for such a mission. Luckily, the barn out back in our new house proved to be the perfect space to practice these tunes on my Tuba; I spent some quality time out there trying to play along with the recordings.
Jason arrived on Monday, and helped me work through some more of the parts. On Wednesday, we headed down to Portland for the first show, and I met the band. The HMB is crazy and incredibly talented. Their repertoire consists of mostly: a) Traditional Balkan/Gypsy music sped up to a ridiculous tempo, or b) unclassifiable stuff that the band members have written themselves, also played at a ridiculous tempo. The songs have a loose structure, not always played the same way each time, relying heavily on improvisation. Many songs are also sousaphone-intense, and they start out whenever I decide to start blatting out a bass line.
We played a show at The Hippodrome in Portland on Wednesday night, then headed up to Olympia on Thursday morning. In Oly, we played a spot on Evergreen's radio station KAOS, and then later played another show in town. On Friday, we headed up to Seattle. I had to work that day, while the band had some gig for local TV. That night, we roved around Ballard and played at a couple of bars.
Honkfest was partly about playing for crowds, but is was also a sort of community gathering of local and traveling musicians, numbering around 100 people. At the odd-fellows hall in Ballard, we gathered each day over the weekend for meals. While we gathered and feasted, we would be entertained by other bands, such as Ballard's own Sedentary Sousa Band. There were workshops for band people, such as an improvisational workshop and one on arranging music. At one point, a multi-band jam session erupted in the odd-fellows hall; someone would start playing a riff, and then others would join in. I jumped in where I could, but I never did learn my scales very well, which limited with what I could do on the fly, particularly with the Eb horn. This was a phenomenon quite different from my previous band experience and it I really enjoyed bonding with these other band geeks of all ages.
On Saturday night, we played in Georgetown, where the party spilled out onto Airport Way with another multi-band jam session. SPD stopped by, but rather than shutting down the party, they actually set up blockades on Airport Way to stop traffic for us. On Sunday, we had our last show at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. Unfortunately, some of the band members had to leave midway through the show to catch their plane back to New York, and it was kind of an anti-climactic finale to the tour.
It was a real treat playing and traveling with these talented musicians, and an interesting experience. My lips were pretty well beat up by the end of the tour, and are just now starting to recover. My shenanigans with the Hungry March Band are far from over; it so happens that I will be traveling to New York next week...
February 18, 2007
I have been furiously moving for the past four weeks, and haven't had much time to do much else. This new house is rather grand, I am especially growing fond of the barn out back. I have set up a killer sound system in there, and as soon as we get our moving stuff sorted out, we'll be able to use the space for parties, as a community gathering/classroom space, as a workshop, or any number of other possibilities. I finally have room to set up my electronic noise toys in the office that is attached to the barn.
Settling In
This house has an interesting view. Across the street is the Westfarm (a.k.a Darigold) fluid milk processing facility. If you buy any Darigold milk in Western Washington or Alaska, then it probably was processed and packaged right in our neighborhood. The noise from this place in interesting too: think of 40 diesel refrigerator trucks parking in your neighbor's yard and being continuously loaded and unloaded. From the office upstairs, I can see Downtown Seattle, at least the tops of some of the taller buildings. Across the valley is one of those long public staircases, the kind that provide pedestrian short-cuts in hilly neighborhoods.
The old house will be up for rent or sale as soon as we complete some needed work on it.
© 2007 Owen Kehoe
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