Category Archives: Narrative

Henry Rollins in Fredericton

When I lived in metropolis of Washington DC in my younger days, I passed on lots of shows and events for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps I was too cool – highly doubtful. Maybe I had better things to do. Also highly doubtful. Lack of funds? Safer bet.

Be that as it may, one person I never got around to seeing was Henry Rollins. If you don’t know who he is, I’m not gonna school you, Google can do that.

For the most part I missed out on the DC Punk/Hardcore scene, even though it was going on/trailing off when I lived there. I was kinda young, and lived in the ‘Burbs in Virginia. It was only later on in my early twenties that I realized the music and lifestyle revolution that was going on – literally a few miles from my house. Oh, the irony.

I wish I could claim to have been a part of that, knowing now the full magnitude of what was going down and how it would effect things in the future, but alas, I cannot. About the closest I can get is to say I’ve seen many shows at the original 9:30 club, great shows I’ll never forget, and honestly – though it’s improved, nice, high tech and will hold a boatload more people – the new 9:30 hasn’t 1/8th the character of the original.

I came to Rollins post-Black Flag, when he had the band and I can’t even say I was in on the old-school End of the Silence days. I didn’t hear of him ’till he sort of broke mainstream with the Weight record and obligatory ‘Liar’ video. I know, I know, my street cred is taking a hit. In my defense though, I did go back and dig the Black Flag stuff, learned the history, and most of all started reading Hank’s books.

I’ve ebbed and flowed with regards to his musical output over the years, but I’ve always stayed with and connected with his writing on all kinds of levels and found it at times insightful, inspirational, enraging, and compelling – often in the same sentence.

Those who know Hank, or even know of him also are probably aware of his status as a pioneer and bastion of the ‘Spoken Word’ milieu, performing what I can only think has to be thousands of shows up to this point just standing on a stage talking at you, though ‘talking’ really isn’t a strong or accurate enough word.

Now, I’m old and I live in a  small town. I, like many before me, have fallen woefully behind in ‘all things hip’ and I’m beginning to come to terms with that. One of the benefits of my scenic locale though is that when anyone of any sort of repute manages to make it out to our hamlet, it’s a real treat, and an opportunity to see them in really small, intimate venues that some of my counterparts down in the Metropolis would kill to have access to.

So when I heard Hank was coming to The Charlotte Street Arts Center for a speaking gig to an audience of only 200, I, to use the parlance of the times, ‘got all up on that’.

I’d listened to his spoken word albums and watched the DVDs but had never seen the man in person, so I was really looking forward to the show and he didn’t disappoint. Attempting to recap it here would be both parts pointless and unfulfilling for you, dear reader, so I won’t bother with that. He is to be experienced first hand, without doubt.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the man and his stories is the travel. There is something to be said for guy who travels to places others don’t of his own volition, sometimes against the advice of pretty much everyone, for the interaction and desire to experience new things/people/cultures.

Although we can aspire to go forth and experience the world in a similar manner and perhaps succeed to some level, we all will have different and varied experiences and I truly appreciated the opportunity to get some of that vicariously through him and his stories. It was great that he finally made it out to Fredericton, I thank him, and hopefully it won’t be the last time we see him ’round.

As everyone spilled out of the stickiness and heat of the auditorium last night – the temperature of which was no doubt elevated at least a few degrees by the intensity of the man himself – into the dark, cool streets, I had purposely parked a few blocks away so I would have to walk afterwards late downtown – an opportunity I don’t get very often.

It was calm, the streets were quiet and relatively deserted. I let myself succumb to the reeling of possibilities, reactions and questions raised by he had said. Indeed while the show had been fantastic, the subsequent feeling I left with was just as good, if not better.

A testament to the Word of the Man.

Taking The 100 Thing Challenge.

I recently finished the book The 100 Thing Challenge in which it’s author, Dave Bruno, attempts to live for a year with only 100 personal items. He did this in response his  fatigue with what he called ‘American Style Consumerisim‘ and in an effort to simplify his life and make more room for the important things. I highly recommend you read the book, whether you opt to take the challenge or not, as it has some great insights in it with regards to why and how we buy and collect ‘stuff’.

I’ve decided to take up this challenge myself, for better or worse and have set a tentative date of May 1st as the point of no return. As such I’ll be spending the winter ‘clearing the baffles’ so to speak and whittling down my possessions to my 100 (or dare I say sub-100?) list. I’ll be trying to document some of the process here and in future blog entires if you wanna read along. So a heads up: Don’t buy me anything.

Coming up with the list does pose some unique conundrums – some of which Dave provides his own solutions for in the book. One of the tenements of the Challenge is that it is and will be different for everyone, there are no steadfast rules. As such I’ve a few issues to work out myself.

Clothes

In his  book, Dave talks about limiting your clothes and counts each item of clothing as one item on the list. While I’d like to say I could do that, I don’t know if it’s as simple. For one, I live in an area of the world with a much different climate than him (San Diego vs, Fredericton, New Brunswick) and bottom line, I have seasonal requirements for more clothing items. Think LAYERS people, among other things. I’m not sure how I’m going to address this for the list yet. Currently I’m leaning towards counting categories or groups of clothes as one thing, i.e. ‘t-shirts’, ‘pants’, ‘hats and gloves’, etc. I do want to try and get rid of some of my clothes. I mean I have stuff in my closet that I never wear or I’m saving for one day, which I know will never come.

Bike Stuff

I have a lot of bike stuff. Both bikes and accessories. I’ve never had much guilt about it as I ride my bikes to work at least 50% of the time each year, even in lousy weather. My bikes aren’t super top of the line, but I have made some decent upgrades and especially when it comes to bike specific clothing/gear, I have in some cases bought quality stuff as it makes commuting in rain/sleet/snow that much more possible. I always have justified the expense of gear with the fact that it enables me to do more of something that is good for myself, the planet, and the pocketbook. That said I do plan to cull some stuff from the bike herd. I have a pretty good stockpile of ‘spare parts’ which I probably will never need and even if I do need replacements these are outdated. I hope to find some way to get rid of these without just trashing them.

This leaves me with my question of how this stuff relates to my 100 Things list. I feel that it’s important that I include it somehow and not exclude it offhand. For the clothes/gear, I’m leaning towards using the same method I mentioned above with regular clothes. That seems reasonable. With the bikes, well I’m thinking, realistically, I should count each bike as one ‘thing’. I mean, really I can only ride one at a time so any more than that are superfluous. If I’m going to keep more than one, I think I have to be willing to suck it up and count each one towards my 100 Thing list. I will probably include spare parts I do end up keeping for each bike as part of the bike, so essentially one ‘thing’ = bike and spare parts. We’ll see how it goes.

Books

Dave talks about this in his book and his final solution to the problem was to simply say he had one ‘library’ that encompassed his books. The ‘library’ counted as one ‘thing’. I’m ok with that. I don’t have a lot of books, but I have some that I’m fond of, and some I’ve even worked on or designed, so I’ll be keeping them. I still think there’s some that could go, and will, but I’ll be sticking with his idea of one ‘library’ counting as a thing.

CDs

I’ve got at least 900 CDs. Up until about a month ago, they’d been in boxes in the basement for the better part of 2 years. By example that would mean that really, according to the 100 Thing Challenge, I don’t really need ’em and they should go. Part of the reason they were in boxes is simply because I had no logical place to store them while I refinished my basement. But as time passed, I’d kinda forgotten about them. I would think about them sometimes, on several occasions even digging into boxes to pull out specific ones to burn to my iTunes library, but the simple fact is that the bulk of my music (all 140GB of it) now resides on my computer and I don’t see any going back. I’ve talked from time to time with Lyn about taking the CDs to the used CD joint and just making a few bucks (prolly far few than I think they’re emotionally worth, sniff, sniff) but then I’d be done with it.

As a designer, I’ve got a huge attachment to the album art, sleeves, liner notes, and packaging that these represent. The physical object is hard to let go of, even I really have no need of them anymore. Several times I’ve said to myself that I’d get rid of them once I’d burned them all to my computer but the reality is that not only would that take forever, it would eat up huge volumes of hard drive space I don’t have. I’d have to buy an external drive to hold it all and it seems I’d be just setting myself up for a huge heartbreak when that drive eventually takes a huge shit like they all eventually do. (One thing working on computers all my life has taught me is that no information stored anywhere is permanent, it can go away in the blink of an eye and we should all accept this fact, it makes things easier.)

Right now, my current frame of mind is to go through them, cull the really meaningful and/or out-of-print ones and either keep those or burn ’em to the Mac and sell/dump the rest. We’ll see what happens. I’ve thought about applying the ‘book library’ idea here, and calling this ‘one music library’, but the difference is, I can easily convert these physical CDs to digital files and save the space/clutter. To do that with books I’d have to actually re-buy the books. I’m not sure I’m down with the ‘audio library’ idea. Like I said, we’ll see.

One idea I am toying with is if I do ditch all the CDs, trying to do something with the artwork from inside them, some sort of mural or something. I dunno. Haven’t fully flushed it out yet. I have some that are autographed as well and thought those would be kinda cool if framed nice.

Tools/Lawn and Garden

Although Dave talks about ditching his fine woodworking tools and streamlining his toolkit down to a few essential tools, I’m not gonna go that route. I don’t harbor any fantasies of ever being a fine woodworker, but what I do have is an hyperactive DIY drive. Being that we live in a pretty rural area and in addition to getting extreme satisfaction from doing stuff on/around the property myself, it saves money, I try to do as much home maintenance/renovation as possible myself. (I’m currently in the midst of an – ahem – 2 year basement refinish that is about 50% done. Hey, I work on it when I can.) I’ve accrued a pretty good arsenal of tools, but I’m also adamant about maintaining them properly so hopefully they will last indefinitely. Self-sustainablity and resourcefulness, I think Dave would agree, are both 100 Thing Challenge compliant. And even if he doesn’t, as he says so many times in the book, this is my list, not his.

For the above reasons, as well as the fact that all of the stuff is used for the benefit of everyone who lives here not just me, I’ve decided to not count tools, hardware and lawn and garden stuff (snowblower, lawnmower, etc) in my 100 Things list. I consider that stuff ‘household’ goods.

So the whittling down will commence. I’ll post up my list and revisions of it leading up to my May 1st date once I have it going. Stay tuned.

Whole lotta #meh.

At three different points this weekend I’ve thought ‘I should blog about that.’ I think one of them might have even been on a moderately interesting topic. Alas, the ‘meh’ won. The to-do list or whatever else was going on. Fatigue. Forgot it. Dog ate my homework.

I finished Country Gentleman Mat’s bike. Had to consult my bike guru Nature on high in the Colorado Rockies for some sage tech advice.

I’ve taken on redesign/maintenance/social media personification for The Nashwaak Watershed Association. I wanted to get involved regarding what’s going on in my neck of the woods.Y’know. ‘Cause I don’t have enough to do. And I’ve sorta ‘meh’d’ that off lately as well.

Research for that did however lead me to some great work/folks/product/codery at Studiopress which has inspired me to want to host my own site again over at kentfackenthall.com – ‘meh’ central.

I’ve got some other freelance in the hopper that I’m ‘meh’ing on as well. Mayhaps because I’m a bit pissed off (and quite strapped coming into the holiday season) as I’m 4months out on some other invoices that a freelance client hasn’t paid. Hard to ‘meh’ that off, but have to try.

Still reading and working on the 100 Thing Challenge. I was going to sell my CDs and got them out of the boxes to catalogue them so I could send a list over to Backstreet and see what they wanted and then I became re-infatuated with them. Dammit.

So this weekend was supposed to be all, or at the very least some of the above. Instead it was baking chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies, watching the Habs shit the bed, yet again, even after the axe fell on Martin, and a 4H hike to see a waterfall that almost was only the trail was blocked by high water/ice.

Meh.