Passaic Prosaic
I like things with a good end-of-Summer vibe. Maybe not as much as things with a good beginning-of-Summer vibe, but you follow the season you're in. A good river story works in any season. From a small gem of a Friday afternoon radio show on WFMU, I got just that. Billy Jam's show on WFMU was done out at Rapp's boat house (Bill Rapp proprietor) on the Passaic river in Kearny New Jersey, a couple of miles up the Passaic, a couple of Fridays ago. Billy Jam, natively Irish, like many WFMU Dj's seems possessed by a certain wanderlust, and will often do his show from seeming random points of the globe to spread the old school hip hop news. Have skype will travel. The point of the show was to have a sizable cast to speak to the theme at hand - the Passaic river. This all necessitated two posts Looking for dead bodies in the Passaic with X-Ray & Wheeler and Put the Needle, the Baseball Bat and the Canoe, in the River... on the WFMU "Beware of the Blog" plus the photo-laden archive of the show itself September 10, 2010: Dirty Jersey : Live from the banks of Passaic River in Kearny. There were New Jersey's two Marks -- the people responsible for all the Weirdness -- [their website: weirdnj.com - HOME]. I have the Maryland book. PG county has a contribution to that, the "hook-man" legend. Which either inspired, or was inspired by the Half Japanese song "Thing with a Hook". I've always been unclear on that. I think the Mothership is supposed to be in lost in PG county somewhere too. On hand too was Wheeler Antebenez, Wheeler Antabanez - Wikipedia, pen-name of a New Jersey writer photographer and camicaze canoeist. All of these things in the tradition of a Thoreau of course. There was Kearney native, resident and WFMU DJ X Ray Burns. He brought an eyewitness account of the burning baseball bat factory to the game. His elementary school was built on the grounds of the original Kearny mansion. There were a couple of graffiti artists there, to give the urban landscape as canvas, perspective. Also Diane of the Tuesday show "Diane's Kamikaze fun machine", to engineer the whole thing, and provide a list of New Jersey punk bands from the '80's. Unfortunately I didn't catch the name of the band she was in. Diane is to thank for the second playing of the Electric Six song. "I belong in a Factory" off of last years "Kill" Billy played it Friday and Diane played it again the following Tuesday on her own show. It's been my favorite song since, all month, but I'm just one of the Busy Bees buzzing in time to the one two threes .. todays angry youth ain't angry enough for me.. I'm being all that I can be, on a working man's salary. There were enough towns in eastern Massachusetts like Kearny that I felt at home in the transmitted ambiance of tales of old Kearny. The town consists of many things, yarn and thread factories (Holliston had a shoe factory, Plymouth a rope factory), not least there is the man who lent his name to the town: One dashing but possibly mad cavalry general Philip Kearny. Sent to France in the 1830s by the Army to learn cavalry techniques. He came back and wrote the US Army's book on cavalry operations. He left the Army because he felt he was not seeing enough action. Rejoined to fight in the Mexican war under his uncle Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny, where he lost an arm to cannon fire before the gates of Mexico City. History does not appear to record whether he thought he had seen enough action then. For some reason Mckeldin Library does not have a copy of his biography Kearny the Magnificent. After a divorce he married a much younger woman and left New York society for a mansion he built on the bluffs of the Passaic. Soon; however, he was again fighting in europe in the Army of Napoleon III. I am a little mystified here, Napoleon III's empire I believe was the same empire he fought in Mexico [actually Napoleon III's intrigues in Mexico using Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Max occurred some years latter]. Kearny died early in the Civil War shot off his horse by a confederate picket while attempting individual reconnaissance. Stonewall Jackson died almost a year later in near identical circumstance. The best story of the show was the Exploding Baseball Bat Factory. Not their design function mind you. Back in 1989 the American Aluminum Extraction Co. hard by the Passaic embankment, caught fire and burned down. Apparently aluminum bats explode and shoot off like rockets if they get hot enough. Who knew. I was impressed enough by that tale, that I watched the Weird NJ YouTube channel tubeisode of the Marks and X Ray Burns poking about the ruin of the old factory; shooting video with a extremely ordinary and expendable digital camera, not unlike the GE 950 I picked up for $50 (video and sound - will take as large a SD card as they make). Brilliant move! I thought. if you're knocking about abandons and ruins with a touch of trespass here and there, you don't want to be trying to outrun dogs, cops or crackheads lugging a Sony VX2100. High def? Forget it, it's just YouTube Jake. On a related notion I should put up a post some time of the pictures I took of the inside of the sand dune that saved Philadelphia from the Bismarck. Another of Kearny's features (South Kearny) was a Federal ship yard prominent in the nation's defense history, the buildings from the 1940's are still there, where they built numerous World War Two warships; cruisers and destroyers. Many of which, the cruiser USS Juneau notably, were sunk later during the war.
I don't think I have an ending for this, I'm not sure it really wants it. I'm going with a few minutes of random thinking, while I check. The Electric Six started out calling themselves the Wild Bunch. I think that's a Sam Peckinpaw movie. They found out it was taken. I guess they could have called themselves the Magnificent Seven, but that's seven -- they would have been one off. They could have hired someone I suppose. I'm putting the needle down on Nick Drake's "Riverman" while I try to think of something here. Was it Roy Harper who did that cover of "Both Sides Now?" Dave Von Ronk maybe? Well him too, but no I think it's Davey Graham I'm thinking of. The Standells did the original "Dirty Water" - The song that Billy Jam and all the others ended the show by singing, That was about the Charles River in Boston wannit? The Charles oozes up out of the ground about a mile or so from where I grew up. I like the Real Kids, whether they call themselves that or the Taxi Boys -- as long as "Up is Up." I saw a news item that a Maureen Tucker down in Georgia is an outspoken Tea Partier. Mo Tucker, really? I saw two stories on this, both fellow traveling under the headline "All Tomorrows Tea-Partys". A-ha, I get it. "Oh it hurts to know that that kind of fellow is a Newspaper Joe. Dropped his teeth on the floor, caught his hand in the door. Guess that's the way the news goes..."
11:39:07 PM  ;;
|
|
