Archive for December, 2012

the bronx

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

me and chuck went up on a day trip last month up to the bronx cause she hasn’t ever really been, at least in her adult life. my plan was to take the m-60 bus from astoria across into manhattan and then jump on a 1 train up to the top and walk around van cortland park. a really beautiful and underrated NYC park.

one of the craziest things about the bronx is the huge boulders. you may see them in central park but they’re out there in the bronx all over too. we ate some lunch up on one of the peaks and a few feat away all of the bros of the bronx were getting drunk off bud light while another guy seemed to be sketching them

really nice view. i used to run cross country up at this park in high school, if i hadn’t i probably wouldn’t know about it. charlotte, on the other hand, had a childhood friend who lived right around the way. so she had vague memories of the scenery

these geese were all over and really confusing. they could decide whether or not to stay or go and just circled around our heads always threatening to shit on us

looks really beautiful though

on the flip side of beautiful is this weird bathroom where once you close the door a troll comes out of the floor to bit off your testicles.

the lighting was super awesome at that time of day, rembrandt style. what a babe.

we headed back into manhattan to the columbia area to take a short visit at the national park of Grant’s tomb. a building that always seems suuuper out of place in new york city, because it really feels like a transplant from DC dropped onto the upper east side.

and here is the church up near columbia that is transplanted from minas tirith

here is an amazing view of the east river from riverside park. the leaves of autumn were in full effect. click on the panoramic above for a larger view.

after we got back into astoria via of the m-60 again we walked around our hood again. the leaves were insane.

some of the trees seemed to be producing way better product than others. like look at that. other trees take notice and step up your game.

look at these yellow leaves. those are always my favorite. the trees that just go yellow like woah. this block is the block my grandma grew up on. she met my grandfather in the park across the street. i love that story. old thymey astoria, l.i. i gotta post some photos of that stuff at some point that i have touched up

brain boys

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

played with the altered boys last weekend. it was a good time all around. played a west philly house called “the farm” the first night

AB was a four piece which was a little weird but it was cool shit regardless, they tore it up. their new 7″ is out and it’s great old fashioned hardcore

an awesome dude colin clark drew me this weird concept that was in my mind. we didn’t end up putting it on a t-shirt (yet) so i turned it into a flier. AB took it and crossed us out and wrote “sucks” under our name and made it into a demo CDR cover. classic.

the whole show was awesome but this fucker’s normal luck with amps came back around. he plugged into ray’s head and it fizzed out. work it out, dre. some dude filmed us on an old camcorder for  a “movie about the show” apparently. uh, whut? can we just see the footage? did anyone get his info?

as you can see it was pretty wet outside. after the show we had to make a choice of whether to drive to richmond during the night (which would cut our drive to raleigh, nc in half) or stay in philly the night and bare the long trek in one day the next morning. it  was already midnight by the time the show ended and we’d have t o wake up pretty early to leave on time so we decided to drive.

we hung out a bit before getting some shitty pizza and chinese in the hood

how about this? tour cats are the best. we left shortly after eating and made the night drive. everyone was in a good mood after a good show but as it got later and later people nodded off one by one. whoever was riding shot gun with ray passed out at which point i decided i should take the passenger seat after ray got some coffee. the coffee held him down for about 30 minutes but he couldn’t stay the full length of the drive to richmond. i took over on the graveyard shift from about 5-7 am. it was pretty brutal just because it was so dark and boring. timmy stayed up with me at least and we chatted.

i didn’t sleep too deeply that night because everyone else (who had slept in the van) woke up at a pretty normal hour. then geoff let the dogs into the room me and andre were asleep in. it looks like that dog is crapping on him in this picture

saint andres

geoff’s friend logan from the band permanent let us crash at his place. he had tons of weird crap in his place (and a good shower). check out jeff cannonball with this bow

it was about 65 degrees out, a welcome change from the 40 something we left in philly. how about that whole equator/distance to the sun thing?

the neighborhood in richmond seemed pretty nice

me and  ray went out to the van and were greeted by a little outside cat. the thing was really cute and lovable but was sick as shit. it sneezed a long green string of snot and snorted it back up. we went back inside and thoroughly washed our hands

poor little stinker

we got on the road to raleigh and while we were crossing some river we got a phone call from the folks out there saying the show was cancelled because the bar no longer wanted to do hardcore.

well that sucked. so we ended up hitting up Barge and jumping on a house show in richmond. they were super nice about it but we only played 4  songs each because it was already a full show. luckily our equipment was being shared

i wilded out for AB a bit because we played before them that night. it was super sick. people seemed to dig both bands.

we also hit up a sick record store while we were there and sold a few copies of our seven inches to them

we got some food from a place called like 821 or something (food was kinda boring), ate, went and played, the cops came but didn’t shut anything down, and then we went back to logan’s again. awesome guy for letting us crash two nights in a row

we were happy to have time to watch tv and relax

after kicking it with junk food and snacks i was wiped

i felt like i wouldn’t make it through the show already, but did because of adrenaline. after that wore off i had nothing left. i went to sleep around 11:30 and got up super early.

i went outside to call charlotte d and was greeted by Dirt Nap, the little pooch. we hung for a minute

the other dog, Dahlia, was up and hanging out with AB when i came back inside

a little grey bearded pitbull. really cute. she was driving drew nuts by constantly stepping on his yoga mat and trying to sleep underneath his weird poses.

we were about to drive off to DC for the last show. a lingering shittiness was in the back of my head because i knew that the DC show was supposed to start at 8

i knew that after we played we still had to drive 4 hours back to NYC and i had to be at work at 8 am.

crozier figured out how to get some sleep in before the gig

ray had the heat blaring so about half of the van got shirtless, myself setting the trend

when we hit DC we checked out smash records where i found some dope shit, a saxon lp and a beastie single. then we went over to casa fiesta for the show. the show was taking place above a pretty awesome mexican restaurant.

the show started on time with a lot of gearing sharing. it was all ages and it was super cool to see it being taken advantage of. this is the shit that fucking blows about NYC. we don’t have any 14 year old skinz. what the shit. you know why? cause there is literally no where for them to go and no where for them to find out about shows. not only were these dudes here, but it’s possible a member of seminole DC bands such as dag nasty and minor threat was at the show. not positive. we think he was scared off by the poor quality of one of the bands

i found a couple live shots from someone at the show on the net. we played our full set and then about 4 or 5 covers, two or three of them sung by geoff. highlight of the night for me was seeing timmy and jeff cannonball falling all over each other and crozier bass-skanking.

after the set we went loaded back into the van and headed back to new brunswick. ray drove like a mad man through rain and fog. it was a brutal drive. he also kept the heat off for the windows and probably to keep awake. i did my best to sleep because i had to be at work in about 2 hours. i maybe caught about 37 minutes total in the van. after hitting NB we unloaded into drew’s car and then i drove to queens so that drew could catch a break before driving straight back from queens to work in sayville, li. insane shit. i slept that night about an hour and twenty minutes. shit sucked. i was so dead that day at work. fuck. all for the core. good shit.