Ta Da!

Some Stories about Jimmy Gestapo

I'll tell you an interesting story. I don't know how I feel about it. So I'm standing in front of CB's with the guitar player from this punk band I was playing in at the time, Skin Candy. Was I playing there that day with Killing Time? Killing Time and Skin Candy were around at the same time. I was playing in both bands. We ended up recording albums in the same month. So, I'm standing there talking to Dave - Dave Grillo. [I gotta send him a friend request. I found him on Facebook. You know what's weird? I think I found his Facebook page on Thanksgiving but I didn't send him a friend request then because I thought it would be weird. Why am I searching for Dave Grillo on Thanksgiving? Don't I have better things to do? Don't I have a family to be with?] Ok, so we're standing there and this broken bottle flies in-between our faces. Like, say we're sitting like this and: whoooo. And then I'm thinking about it, I'm like: well, usually bottles fly through the air intact until they hit something then they break. But this guy got thrown out of CB's and he took a beer bottle and he smashed it on his own head. So, the bottom of the bottle - cause he grabbed a long neck and BAM on his own head - and the bottom of the bottle flew in-between Dave and I. So, we look over at this dude and this dude's pissed because he got kicked out of CB's and so...the white power kids from Pennsylvania, they were tolerated at New York shows if they kept their mouths shut and didn't do any of their business. They couldn't openly fly their regalia or anything in New York. That was not tolerated. And probably people wouldn't mess with them at shows as long as they didn't pipe up. You know, because New York was always very racially diverse and was completely intolerant of racism or anything like that. So this guy starts, maybe using the N-word or something? He was saying some racially offensive stuff which puts you in a little bit of a weird position because we're this scene that's supposed to be not judging other people. We're about freedom and doing what you want. But then, at the same time this guy's saying some racially offensive stuff. So do we support his freedom of speech? Or do we reject his racism? So Chaka steps up - Chaka who was in Burn and then Orange 9mm. I think he came from D.C. I remember when he first started hanging out. He's a good guy. I like Chaka. So Chaka steps up and starts brawling with this dude. Now, the dude was like, pretty damn muscular, and Chaka was just a regular stature guy. So Chaka starts losing. No one's gonna really let that happen. So a bunch of people jump in and just start beating this dude. I remember, even Jimmy Gestapo from Murphy's Law had a broken foot or a broken leg at the time, he had a cast, and he was walking with a cane. Jimmy Gestapo ran across the street to beat the shit out of this guy with his cane. So an ambulance came and took the guy away and the story always goes: "dude, I heard he died." Everybody always dies and the end. I'm like, nah, I don't think so. There's so many stories like that where the dude dies. He probably didn't. Maybe sometimes. But I think most of the time that's not what happens. 

Oh! I'll tell you another one that I only got confirmation on just a few years ago. Not that long ago. So I was over at a show at CB's or maybe The Pyramid or something and my friend Sammy Crestbow says: I was just over at Tompkins Square and I seen Jimmy Gestapo from Murphy's Law sneak up behind a dude and hit him in the back of the head with a brick! And you don't know whether to believe that or not. That sounds like a pretty outlandish tale. So, I just kept that one. So then years later, like 20 years later…and I'm friends with Jimmy Gestapo now…I say: Hey Jimmy. I heard this story maybe '86/'87 that you snuck up behind a guy in Tompkins Square Park and hit him in the back of the head with a brick. Did you do that shit? And he said: Hells yeah I did that shit! Him and another guy named Blue Eyes caught me one night and they beat the crap out of me, the two of them. So I seen him in the park one time and I go around in the bushes and I find a brick and I go up behind him and just POW, right in the head. And he goes: I found Blue Eyes too. I saw him sitting on the wall one time and I came up to him and I said "Hey! Do you remember me?'' And he didn't and he [Jimmy] said So I just started kicking the shit out of him on the ground. So that's weird, because I don't really support violence. But I don't know. These two guys jumped him. He got them both back. I don't know what I think of all that.   

let's watch TV...

made a Zenith, hahah

Also here's Rich playing with Breakdown at This Is Hardcore in 2012. 

And a video of Killing Time back in 1990 at CBGBs

What Hardcore's All About

Here's a little segment from my interview with Rich McLaughlin of Breakdown and Killing Time in which he explains to me how hardcore punk works musically and thematically. And, below is a video of Crazy Spirit [I brought in a few of their records last week] playing a show at -- the now defunct -- 285 Kent last year, just to give y'all an idea of what shows are like.

"Of course, in hardcore you can't let any part go for very long. You have to constantly be changing the parts. You know, if anything drags on like sixteen times…it's not…like eights and fours, and if you want to get crazy you can do threes and sixes. So we would sometimes do threes. Like, this part's only gonna go three times. People want it to go four or two. It's not! It's going three! Or, it's gonna go two and a half. Or it's gonna go five and there's gonna be a little thing on the end before it goes to another part, so it jars you. It's gotta keep some jarring aspect. I mean, some of that is the tension of rhythms that push and pull in between the two so that the thing is never settled. Because one of the things you don't have with hardcore is you don't have dynamics. That's one of the things that's mostly off the table. You always play at full volume. So your pallet is: double time/half time and opposing rhythms. So you gotta work out all your songs out of those things and you could also have guys playing at different times against each other. Like, two guys are playing half time and two guys are playing full time -- or whatever you want to consider it, double time. And you could also have that move. You could have three guys playing and the the drummer drops down to half and then people follow him into half or…you know, all kinds of stuff. 

This is also something I bet you all bands like that do, but I named it. It's called "personal hardcore." So, sometimes you mash the parts together…the next [part] jumps onto the one before it and cuts off a little piece. But sometimes you can't exactly explain how that happens. Like, the last repetition of a part you have to rush or your not going to make it to the next part. So you gotta figure out your own way -- that's not really musical -- there's no real musical explanation that I know of, of how come the next part's gonna come a little bit too soon, before you're ready for it. That's personal hardcore.

 We also have a song called 'Personal Hardcore' about friends stabbing friends in the back. You know, every hardcore song is basically about getting stabbed in the back. Don't you think so? I thought you were my friend! Then you stabbed me in the back! If you had to distill down "what is a hardcore song?" it would be I thought you were my friend, then you stabbed me in the back. I trusted you. Nine million hardcore songs are written from that basic idea. And I guess that's a thing at the point where most people are at in their lives then. It's like, leaving your family and trying to make some kind of support group of friends which, you know...I almost don't even want to say this. Young people often need something out of their friendships that just doesn't exist. If they're lucky, maybe that stuff will exist in some degree. People say: my friends are my family. I can trust them through anything. That's why we end up with so many songs: I trusted you, you stabbed me in the back. Kids do that. ' I don't know, that was not particularly important to me. But for a lot of people it was. It probably was more when I was younger. I just already knew, most people you can't depend on. Or you can depend on them in varying degrees. Like, who can you call in the middle of the night to come pick you up? That's some real shit there." 

Civil Rights Footage

Stokely Carmichael - Passive Boycotts

 

August 1964 - Martin Luther King - Missing Civil Rights Workers Found Dead

 

August 28, 1963: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

 

Bob Moses- Freedom Summer

shout out to heddie-- this is literately one of my favorite songs (and i have no idea what he's saying)

Some Musical Stuff

Capturing, creating, reflecting the mood of  life lived by my interviewee and an entire peoples.

In the kitchen grandma would turn the counter-top gas burners on, and in the other room grandpa would prepare for dinner by turning on la radio:


Volare, by Dean Martin:

Or This: 

Specifically the first song on this playlist. Grandma would sing along to "Tu Vuo Fa L'americano"

This is a sample of what they would hear as teenagers growing up in fascist Italy:


Fascist Anthem:

"this isn't a safe space: the bedroom"

hey guys-- here's a sketch of my multimedia exhibit. for now it's titled "this isn't a safe space: the bedroom," but that might change. it's weird, right? what i hope to accomplish here is transport viewers to a space which appears safe- a childhood bedroom (mixture of my mom's bedroom and mine), but with a closer look, it's disturbingly not. i plan on including my childhood items as well as some of my mother's for the "safe" stuff, while "unsafe" stuff will include lines of "coke" w/ razor blade, AA tags,  broken glass, a needle, egg shells, and dirt (this will be in the form of a "carpet" metaphorically representing all of the treacherous things one can walk through in their life. ultimately, this is a project which conveys the loss of my mother and my aunt and how that is a safe/unsafe issue within my family (represented by the duality of the bedroom as a whole: intimate, yet disturbing and altogether something i inescapably own [like my childhood]). for this, i'll incorporate the video as seen on the "tv," as well as using the actual cross from my mother's casket and her funeral guest book and funeral cards from her and my aunt. i really, really, really! hope the video will come together in time.

Hour Children Event:

Family Photos

Gread Grandfather Poppy Sam and random woman
- bookie for Dutch Schultz(Arthur Flegenheimer)
- Responsible for five deaths 

Grandfather Harold "Hal, Poppy" Chalfin 

Grandmother Audrey "Armoire" Smiles (Chalfin), Mother Randi Sue Chalfin and photo of myself in 111 clear view.

Father Hugh Austin-Benedict Patrick Piney, Mother, family dog and Grandmother Gladis Lillian Fleet "Gangang"(Midwife of 60 years)  Piney in Essex.

Cigarette Story

The following is a two minute audio clip from an interview I did with my grandpa (aka nonno, aka Biagio). I've included the transcript (copied verbatim) so that you can better understand him through his accent.


Nonno's Cigarette Story (AUDIO CLIP)



"You can’t buy pack cigarette, no way in the world. Was too expensive. And you no have money because you no make enough money to cover everything, and ugh (coughs) I was a teenager, goin’ to school an’ I make uh my own cigarette with uh paper school, you know you cut it in chewed off some potato you know the…how do they say…the leaves that dried in the sun, you chew em out good, you smash good and you roll. When it was a holiday, you know like New Year, Christmas we chip it in, you know few cents each boy, was bunch a teenager and we bought pack cigarette. But you can’t smoke, we put it away, smoke once in a while one cigarette we smoke about ten guys. Get one pop each, ya know? Make a turn. It was a funny, it was a funny. We never saw a stake cigarette like here, you can’t buy the way they cost. But we get along because we don’t know better, we don’t know better. We don’t know there was cartoon cigarette. When I came here I start working and buy cigarette, i got a cigarette in my car cigarette in the garage cigarette in the pocket wherever you go there was cigarette yeah, i was a big shot. yeah. uh but like i said before, we made it we made it."



*IMPORTANT NOTES FOR THE MULTIMEDIA EXHIBIT

Elements for the show. sights, sounds, smells: 

I was listening to these interviews again and I kept hearing this sound. It was a sound that I've heard I'm used to ignoring because I've heard it all my life: the clanging of porcelain espresso cups. Throughout the interview my grandfather is slurping espresso, stirring it with a little metal spoon, and rattling the little cup on it's little saucer. I've been thinking about maybe incorporating the sound of an espresso machine, or at the very least espresso cups into the multimedia exhibit. It may also be nice to have the smell of espresso wafting throughout the room.  Perhaps I will bring in some espresso and porcelain cups for class on monday. :)


POSSIBLE TITLES? :

The following are two phrases that are repeated by my grandfather over and over in our interview sessions. They have been echoing in my head ever since so I I thought I'd share them with you all:

"That's what it was."
"It's been like this." (followed by: "...it probably gonna go like this."

In this broken English my grandfather is trying to say, that life has gone this way in the past, this is the way it was back then. And in the second phrase, life has been like this for decades. But because of his limited abilities with language they come out in these two choppy phrases that I think, even in their oddity still capture some of the essential essence of the sentiment with a random elegance. At the very least these are two interesting axioms but forth by an old man.    

Wondering who this band is. A photo from New York's Alright 2013. Yesterday concluded New York's Alright 2014. Many injuries were sustained by all. Broken noses, broken cheekbones, cracked sculls. And that's just people I know.

Welcome to Johnstown, New York

Around the bend form the place of the old Karg Bro.'s leather and tanning factory, you'll find the Dwyer's ownership of half the block on Dove Street. On that half a block, you'll see Dunham's Spring Shop, Inc. It’s the family owned and operated automotive business that Sonny Dwyer purchased back in his 20s that has since made all of his kids millionaires— all of his children except the black sheep and his first born, Carol who never worked for the family business. She was also the first of his five children to die, followed by his only other surviving daughter, Sonya who died suddenly four months after Carol. With tragic irony, both of his daughters were found dead in their vehicles. This is the story of those losses and that family. In these videos you will see the Dwyer home, the family business and the location where Sonny found his daughter Carol’s body (represented by the white minivan). However, making this a family project has not gone as planned. None of the surviving Dwyer children were willing to talk about the tragedy of losing both Carol and Sonya. And only one of the three brothers agreed to an audio interview, in which he was not forthcoming about the life or death of his sisters. As the first born daughter’s daughter, I feel as if it is my duty and obligation to represent these two lives, yet without my family’s cooperation, this seems impossible. This weekend, I found myself at my knees, sobbing uncontrollably, at a loss yet again feeling helpless and insignificant against a challenge I thought I was prepared to face. Nobody wants to talk about my mother or my aunt— their life or death, it is too painful for the family. To me, the silence is more painful than losing them. It’s like they were never real at all. 

{still keep's saying "error uploading video", here's some pictures because I can't it work} 

Sheila Michaels

Originally, I sought out Sheila Michaels because she was also involved in an organization called The Feminists, and had been credited with coming up with the title ‘Ms’. I recognized these as elements of a more complex narrative of coming to feminism than the well known Mary King and Casey Haden position papers on sexism within SNCC. But the more we spoke, I realized that Sheila had many other stories that I had never come across while studying SNCC. In fact, she was not asked to contribute to The Freedom Plow, which was an anthology comprised of women’s stories from SNCC (a work that was created because a cohort of women were frustrated that their experiences had been ignored).

*This project is not meant to treat women in The Civil Rights Movement as an immutable category, but to recognize that there has been an underrepresentation of women’s voices in this particular historical period.

What is the process of unearthing women’s narratives of the Civil Rights movement?

It was right before a very big demonstration, a voting rights demonstration. And [Sandy] was at some hangout, some bootlegger because Mississippi was a dry state so everything you got, you got from bootleggers or you went out of state to get them. That was one of his weaknesses, and he was hanging out at a bootlegger and he came home down the street and he was being followed by a bunch of cars. They lined up in front of the building, and all of them had their lights on into the window. Our office was in a store, which she had on either side of the downstairs. They were calling him over a bull horn to come out. And he said, “Here comes Mama Woods down the steps” ‘clomp clomp clomp’ in her Minnie Mouse shoes. And she has a sawed off shot-gun or a shot-gun anyway and she throws open the door and she says, “Who’s out there? Cal is that you? You know I know everything about you. Now you get to gettin’.” [laughter] She’s waving her shot gun around. And she calls out everybody, you know, fire chief, everybody, and “You get to gettin’ you hear me?” [laughter] And they all turned off their lights and drove away.

People used to hang out in the front with, you know, a riffle. Across the street, watching us all the time. There was always somebody who had a riffle. And they never used to come behind the building because Mrs. Woods used to feed all the stray cats, and it stank [laughter] you know. And this was Mississippi in the Summer, and it was humid and it was hot and you did not go out the back [laughter] except she did to feed them. So I always thought that those cats really protected us. They kept the Klu Klux Klan from siting out the back and taking a shot at people because they couldn’t stand it.

What is revealed by taking a ‘life history’ approach for the women active during the Civil Rights Movement? How does this feminist practice provide us with a more complex history?

Pat and Frank were married in my apartment, which was another story. They were supposed to be married a little bit later. A few days later, I mean. Then there was a CORE meeting, I think it may have been in Syracuse. People were coming in to go to this national CORE meeting. It was not in New York City, but they were in for the day, and Pat, since these were all her old friends from New Orleans CORE, she decided to move it up I think a day or two. And then the minister who was going to do the wedding called I think the day, that day, or the day before, and said, “I’m really sorry but I’m in Cincinnati and I can’t come in.” It had been the plan all along for him to marry them because the women he was later to marry had been in New Orleans CORE too, and had actually risked her life the day that Pat got arrested in Poplarville. She had been... we always had somebody at a telephone booth to call in case something terrible happened, to keep track of what was going on. [...] She was in the telephone booth and the bus pulled off without Pat and Frank and Shirley. No Alice. Alice was small and serious, Shirley was a little more joyful [laughter]. Yeah they’d surrounded Pat and somebody pushed her and Frank pulled back the sheriff. And Frank’s father was (and mother too) were in the mafia. Mother was Jewish and Polish, Jewish and German... German, Jewish and Polish. And she had been a gangster’s mom. [...] So he’d grown up in that atmosphere. Actually they’d decided to change their name and move to the Bronx, so he had a pretty normal childhood. But you know, these habits. So when the sheriff or whoever he was pushed Pat. Frank pulled back his arm and said, “Don’t do that,” in a tone of voice that carried a kind of threat. They arrested him too, and they put him in Willy McGee’s cell, which was easy to get to for lynching if they wanted to lynch him, and it looked like they wanted to. [...]

Anyway, she was trapped in the telephone booth when all of this went on and they were looking for her because they knew there was one other person. Or they thought they knew there was one other person. That was her husband to be who was supposed to be the minister and we had actually gone to hear him preach his first sermon when we were in Washington D.C. So, he bowed out the day before and there were all these CORE people who came in for the wedding and there wasn’t going to be a wedding. Then Jerome Smith who had a stutter, and could hardly... actually he had been almost killed in, was it Poplarville? It was on a freedom ride. They broke in his jaw, and they were kicking him. [...] And Jerome had this terrible, terrible stutter. And he went down to get some beer at a corner grocery store, and he came back with a minister [laughter] who had been defrocked for his drinking. Presbyterian minster who’d been defrocked because he had become so bad an alcoholic that, you know, he couldn’t do his job anymore. I was cooking this dish that had shrimp... it was expense. It was shrimp and sherry and cream, and it was going to curdle. And I said sit down and have a drink and everyone said, “Noooo!” So the dish was ruined, and we had this wedding in our apartment, in the dressing room in our apartment. There was a closet next to- Marry had the front room, and I had the living room, a pullout couch on the living room. So it was between our rooms, and everybody crowded in around this closet and I then couldn’t get my shoes because they were in the closet. And everybody said it’s okay just have the wedding [laughter] you know, have the wedding. So everybody who was anybody was there for the wedding. And it happened. What were the chances that Jerome who could hardly get a sentence out was going to find a minister when he went down to get beer for the whole group? I’m not telling it well, but everybody who was there remembers it very, very well.

In our interview, Freida mentioned how she loved to wake up and watch her mother knead dough. There is something so simple and evocative in hands covered in flour.

http://www.google.com/search?q=pictures+of+kneading+dough&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&imgil=1i6eFGjY2KX5RM%253A%253Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ft2.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcRw0W7EwhLM0Dx0mdFjxsJxWcp62-A27AdFOfwohDm_0Ia6S2m4%253B425%253B282%253BBRx-Io-uImfX9M%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.pennmac.com%25252Fblog%25252F2011%25252F10%25252Fmaking-pizza-dough%25252F&source=iu&usg=__y5NjvAkC43a4iUmKQtfyZjjEIls%3D&sa=X&ei=UENTU5eqLbOrsQTnw4Ao&ved=0CC4Q9QEwAg#facrc=_&imgdii=_&imgrc=1i6eFGjY2KX5RM%253A%3BBRx-Io-uImfX9M%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.pennmac.com%252Fblog%252Fwp-content%252Fuploads%252F2011%252F10%252Fkneading-dough.jpeg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.pennmac.com%252Fblog%252F2011%252F10%252Fmaking-pizza-dough%252F%3B425%3B282

In keeping with the spirit, if not the style of that memory, here is a video on how to make basil that celebrates the beauty and tenderness of making food for the people you care for:
http://vimeo.com/34766296

Also, PBS loves an overview: http://www.pbs.org/alifeapart/intro.html and http://video.pbs.org/search/?q=Hasidic+ (who knew there were Hasidic reggae musicians?)

*Every time I tried to include pictures or videos in post, it shut me out. I apologize for the links.

ORAL HISTORY AND THE ELUSIVE STORY 

AMANDA'S PROJECT  

original topic:  

d e b u t a n t e    

NEW TOPIC:  

***

WHAT IS ORAL HISTORY? 

?? 

EXCERPT OF CAITLIN'S INTERVIEW:

                                                                  *****

MUSIC CLIP AND/OR EXCERPT OF CATE'S INTERVIEW


                                                                    ***

GABRIEL'S CONFERENCE PROJECT:

FAMILY STORY:

                                                                              ***
                                                     ERIN
                                                       project description:

                                                 link to other SNCC oral history projects:



                                                                               ***
PETER

upload audio clip

Meghan -- upload video footage: