Doc Watson: 1923 - 2012

"Just one of the people"

Levon Helm: 1940-2012

Posted on levonhelm.com yesterday:

"Levon Helm passed peacefully this afternoon. He was surrounded by family, friends and band mates and will be remembered by all he touched as a brilliant musician and a beautiful soul."

Levon Helm was an American treasure, his talent and energy gifts to us all. I haven't the words to express my respect for the man, my love of his music or my sadness at his passing. Safe travels, brother.

Listening post: 'Flyover States'

Rallying points for the rest of us

Y'know, it'd be just fine with me if this image went viral:

Feel free to grab it and pass it along -- Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, whatever. If you want, hell, turn it into a bumper sticker.

And now, with apologies (or not) to songwriters Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, these lyrics seem appropriate:

Well, I won't back down
No, I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down

Gonna stand my ground
Won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won't back down

Hey, baby, there ain't no easy way out
Hey, I will stand my ground
And I won't back down

Well, I know what's right
I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin' me around
But I'll stand my ground
And I won't back down

I won't minimize the tragedy of Trayvon Martin's death, nor should you infer that I'm leaping to defend shooter George Zimmerman. But facing elected officials' cowardice and largely one-sided coverage of Sanford, it's time for those of us who responsibly exercise our right to self-defense to make our voices heard.

An unexpected gift

Mrs. KintlaLake and I were the first to arrive at our shop yesterday, as usual. When the first of our two co-workers strolled in a half-hour later I noticed that he was carrying some sort of flat parcel, wrapped in a white trash bag.

"I found this at my parents' place yesterday," he announced, pulling back the plastic. "I thought you should have it."

Without further fanfare, he presented me with his discovery: an original album cover from McGuffey Lane's self-titled 1980 recording, the band's first, complete with autographs.

According to my co-worker, the members of McGuffey Lane were regular visitors to his parents' house, since (the late) Bobby Gene McNelly's back yard bordered theirs. The guys signed this particular cover while hanging out in the basement one day shortly after the album's release.

This is a bona fide keeper, of course. Preserved in a proper frame, soon it'll adorn the wall of my office.

Zachariah's Red-Eye Reunion XII

A week has passed since the 2012 edition of Zachariah's Red-Eye Reunion. Again I had the privilege of photographing the event, and despite having a rash of camera problems toward the end of the show, the Reunion remains a musical and photographic highlight.

This may have been the best one yet. Enjoy the images.

Listening post: 'Red Solo Cup'

Toby Keith's playful tribute to quintessential partyware gets me giggling. If you ask me, this should be the official anthem of anyone who's ever survived a kegger...

First Amendment moment-of-the-week

The opening of last night's Country Music Awards show was, by any measure, priceless. I hope you enjoy this clip as much as I did.



(If you don't know the story behind Hank Williams Jr.'s cameo at the CMAs, click here. The awards show was broadcast on ABC which, like ESPN, is owned by The Walt Disney Company.)

Listening post: 'Cost of Livin''

We tuned the shop radio to a local country-music station while we counted stock Friday night. I was about to take a break when Ronnie Dunn's "Cost of Livin'" began playing, and I stopped to listen.

Co-written by Dunn and Phillip Coleman, the sparse and touching song was released earlier this year but I hadn't heard it before the other night. As good as the radio single is, the video is even better -- watch.

Tags: Cost of Livin', Ronnie Dunn, Ronnie Dunn Videos

"Cost of Livin'" and what it represents breaks my heart. Maybe my reaction has something to do with the road I've traveled over the last few years, the simple labor that now helps feed my family, or what I see happening all around me here in the Heartland.

The get-a-damned-job crowd has no idea.

'The Sound of Silence'

On a day filled with poignant remembrances, the performance at Ground Zero this morning by an elderly Paul Simon -- arguably the quintessential New Yorker -- was moving, fitting, perfect.

Gameday recap

Yesterday's noon kickoff had Mrs. KintlaLake and me arriving on the Ohio State campus around 9am. Once there we strolled north along Neil, crossed Lane and, in a parking lot next to a venerable OSU watering hole, resurrected one of our favorite gameday traditions.

It had been three years since Danger Brothers left Lane Avenue when Hineygate, "the world's largest tailgate party," ended its 26-year run. The band played on, albeit at a tiny outdoor venue over a mile away, but pre-game hasn't been the same since.
But there we were behind the Varsity Club yesterday morning, sipping ice-cold Budweiser at an hour more appropriate to cereal and milk, digging Danger Brothers' wonderfully adolescent shtick. We'd been there less than a minute, I'd guess, when another member of the Beer-for-Breakfast Club approached me, grinning.

"You're here!" he shouted over the music, reaching to grab my hand. "My buds and me wondered if you'd be here -- I knew you would!"

I have no idea who that guy was -- and yeah, the encounter was just a wee bit disturbing -- but the spirit of Hineygate, cultivated over a generation of football Saturdays, has returned to Lane Avenue. It was like a big ol' reunion, familiar faces in a new place.

The missus and I hung around through Danger Brothers' first set so that we could extend a personal "welcome back" before heading over to The 'Shoe for another band and another reunion.
The first game traditionally hosts the annual return of TBDBITL alumni. The sight and sound of nearly a thousand bandsmen -- 225 current members and more than 750 scarlet-shirted alums -- is unforgettable, stirring our souls in ways I won't even try to describe.

As for the game, I'll cut to the chase: Ohio State 42, Akron 0. (Maybe there's a reason they're called "Zips.") The Bucks looked good, not great, and a win is a win.

My wife and I didn't see the whole game, however. We didn't even make it through the first half.

In 49 years of watching OSU play football in Ohio Stadium, I can't recall it ever being as brutally hot as it was yesterday -- upper 90s, heat index well above 110°F, stifling humidity and a smog alert.

An official went down from the heat ten minutes into the game. After the first quarter, fans started bailing down the aisles like they often do when the Buckeyes are up by four touchdowns at the end of the third. We went below shortly before halftime.

The concourse under the stands was jammed, the walls lined with people trying to cool off. Woozy patrons packed first-aid stations, with more standing in long lines awaiting medical help. Ambulances came and went like cabs at Grand Central -- hundreds of fans suffering from heat-related maladies, some reported to be serious, were transported to area hospitals. I'd never seen anything like it.

We chugged water and cuddled cups of ice for a half-hour, but we knew that if we returned to our A-deck seats it wouldn't take long for the relative comfort to broil away. Ultimately we decided to call it a (game)day.

I snapped this photo of Mrs. KintlaLake just before we walked out of the stadium. The sign means to convey that once we left, we wouldn't be permitted back in.

The double entendre, certainly unintentional, suited the occasion.

Overall it was a great day, despite the fact that we ended it utterly gassed. We still are, stumbling through the middle of our long weekend and trying to re-charge.

Wallpaper: McGuffey Lane

Here's a page torn from my sketchpad -- a simple image, massaged a bit in Photoshop, becomes an appealing desktop background.

My sketchpad

My wife and I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drop in on the annual Reynoldsburg Tomato Festival last night. It was no coincidence that McGuffey Lane occupied the main stage when we arrived, making this the second straight weekend that we've caught their act.

This time I wasn't there to photograph the performance. I left my pro gear at home but, as I often do, I brought along my digital pocket camera and snapped about a dozen images of the show.
A little silver PhD* camera naturally is less capable than a big black SLR with interchangeable lenses. It works well for documenting events and preserving memories, but even its best work should be passed through the filter of lower expectations.

Then again, because it's much smaller it's more likely to be carried. (That should sound familiar, by the way.) And "getting the shot" requires actually having something to shoot with.

Put another way -- if Jeff Cooper, quoted in Friday's post, had been a photographer instead of the Father of Modern Pistolcraft, he might well have said,

"Remember the first rule of photography: Have a camera."

So a point-and-shoot camera is, potentially, an EDC item. For the committed photographer, however, a high-quality PhD* has other, less obvious applications.

Photography's components -- composition, exposure, highlight and shadow, color, etc. -- are fundamental. Different equipment may render a given subject in different ways, but I've found that spending time with a pocket camera and then transferring lessons learned to a like-branded SLR (I choose Canon) to be extraordinarily helpful.

Most often I use the smaller camera to play around with composition. I bring the results of those tests back to my PC, looking for promising angles worth exploring with my SLR.

Essentially, it's equivalent to the artist's sketchpad.

That's what I did two years ago with the barns. I do it whenever I shoot a knife, a morning's harvest or other subject to accompany a post on KintlaLake Blog. It was my mission last night, too, as I captured McGuffey Lane's show from a band's-eye perspective.
The images I've posted here today document a scene but by no means are they great photos. That's ok by me -- the goal of the exercise was to create sketches, continuing my exploration of the medium.

*PhD = "push here, dummy"

The circus comes to South Carolina

"Before we get started, let's all say 'Happy Birthday' to Elvis Presley today!

"Happy Birthday!

"We played you a little bit of 'Promised Land' when we pulled up. You can't do better than Elvis Presley, and we thought we would celebrate his birthday as we get started celebrating taking our country back to work!"

(Rep. Michele Bachmann, candidate for President of the United States, at a rally today in Spartanburg, South Carolina -- on the 34th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. This, fellow citizens, is the gaffe machine that won last weekend's Iowa Republican straw poll.)

Forty-eight hours (illustrated)

In yesterday's much-ballyhooed (but patently inconsequential) Ames Straw Poll, Rep. Michele Bachmann won a squeaker over Rep. Ron Paul. Stealing a piece of their thunder, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas announced that he, too, wants to be President.

Never mind what you hear from giddy conservatives -- neither development heralds the defeat of Pres. Barack Obama. So far Bachmann and Paul have polled poorly in a hypothetical matchup with the incumbent, and Perry will show that he's incapable of shedding the perception that he's nothing more (or less) than George W. Bush II.

Worse, and despite thumping the "Liberty!" tub, all three of these GOP hopefuls pander shamelessly to (so-called) "social conservatives" -- white evangelical Christians, mostly, whose ideology couldn't be more antithetical to Liberty.

Barely a week before declaring his candidacy, Perry led 30,000 in a "Prayer-Palooza" at a stadium in Houston -- a sitting governor keynoting a camp meeting. Even Paul, arguably dean of the small-government movement, has been sucked into the anti-libertarian abyss on abortion and other issues.

Considering the weak Republican field, this is not good.


"I may not be the gearhead I used to be, but I'm still plenty redneck."

Those aren't my words -- they came from my smiling wife as we sat along a curb in nearby Reynoldsburg last night, joining thousands of others to watch the annual Mopar Nationals "Brice Road Cruise."

The air was thick with tire smoke. Some of the onlookers, many of them children, laid down patches of water on the pavement, hoping to lure a good burnout. Drivers were more than willing to oblige, a token police presence having little effect.

Either you get this sort of thing or you don't. We had a ball, and besides, dropping by the Brice Road Cruise was Mrs. KintlaLake's idea.

I married a redneck gearhead. Somebody pinch me.


Ohio's state flag appears on a new postage stamp, released on Friday. It's part of the "Flags of Our Nation" series and, since I'm a born-and-bred Buckeye, it's a source of pride.

Yet another harvest shot, this haul from midday today -- nine large cukes, five peppers, two Romas and five yellow pear tomatoes.

I'll end this roundup with the way our weekend began -- at the Huntington Park Hoedown, a benefit concert held Friday evening at the home ballpark of the Columbus Clippers.

We arrived at the will-call window just before the gates opened, fetched my media badge and my wife's field pass and made our way to the visitors' dugout to deposit my photo gear. Local solo artist Chris Logsdon took the stage first, followed by Jonalee White and her band. Both treated the crowd to typically great performances.

McGuffey Lane, by far our favorite local band (and the source of our comp passes, by the way), was next on the bill and didn't disappoint. My wife and I adjourned to the parking lot for a smoke after their set.

When we returned, the reunited Exile was onstage. Of all the acts, we figured, this was the lone take-or-leave proposition.

Boy, were we wrong.

I don't remember the last time I was as blown away by a performance. I mean, here was an '80s pop-turned-country band showing chops that had the show's other musicians gathering, awestruck, behind the stage. Exile's a capella rendition of "People Get Ready," the Curtis Mayfield classic, had the ballpark so quiet I swear I heard the outfield grass growing.

Seriously, people -- if you have a chance to catch Exile live, with all five of its founding members, do it. I promise you won't regret it.

Hoedown headliner Pure Prairie League, over five hours after their sound check, closed the show with a high-energy set, including three of my favorites: "Early Morning Riser," "Two-Lane Highway" and, of course, "Amie."

Photographically the night had me wishing for faster glass and steadier hands. But incomparable music performed in a great venue, on a clear summer evening that saw a full moon rise over the Columbus skyline behind the stage -- it doesn't get better than that.

Forty-five

Like millions of other Americans, my wife, younger spawn and I watched Super Bowl XLV. We settled in our living room, the glow of the TV before us and a fire flickering on the hearth behind.

From the bluest of blue-collar cities, small markets both, Green Bay and Pittsburgh brought a refreshingly non-NFL atmosphere to the Jerry Dome, an enthusiasm rivaling that of big-time college football. And three former Buckeyes -- A.J. Hawk, Ryan Pickett and Matt Wilhelm -- earned championship rings as members of the Packers.

It turned out to be a pretty good game, too.

As you might expect, I could do without six hours of pre-game falderal. Ditto a pop star flubbing the one song she was paid to sing -- the National Anthem. I was out of the room during the halftime fluff, but from what I hear it was a gremlin-infested Charlie Foxtrot.

I do enjoy the commercials. Bridgestone's beaver brought a grin, as did the VW ad with the kid in the Dick Cheney getup. But my runaway favorite -- by a mile -- was this Chrysler spot.



That one pulled me out of my recliner -- from concept to production it's pure genius. Whether coincidence or not, it's the second Chrysler commercial that I've dropped here on KintlaLake Blog.

As the football season faded into memory last night, we turned off the TV and retired to bed. Sleep eluded me for a time -- my mind was restless, but it wasn't replaying Super Bowl highlights. It was still stuck on rewind, conjuring scenes from 42 years ago, remembering one foggy summer morning when my father and I went plinking down by Coxey's Quarry.

It'll be a while, I think, before I can shake those visions and move on.
(My father hadn't yet marked his first birthday when this ad appeared in the July 1927 issue of Boys' Life. Methinks that Remington's claim is a bit of a stretch.)

Accidents happen

It took me longer than I'd expected to wade through the images from Saturday night's Zachariah's Red-Eye Reunion. I'm not sure why.

I managed to pull and tweak 65 decent photographs, roughly one of every ten frames that I shot. I won't post them all on KintlaLake Blog, of course, but it's a pretty respectable ratio.

A few of the best were unplanned, anything but deliberate, arguably even accidental. Here's an example, previously posted on Sunday.

(McGuffey Lane)

I grabbed that image as I dashed from one wing to the other while headliner McGuffey Lane paused between songs. Something about the shadows caught my eye, so I turned off the flash, raised the camera to my chest (I didn't take the time to sight through the viewfinder), banged off two shots and moved on. For a what-the-hell photo, the result surprised me.

I love the challenges of concert photography -- moving subjects and rapidly changing lighting, to name just two. I'll close this post with a pair of images illustrating what can happen when the curse of unpredictability becomes a photographic blessing.

(Guest artist Delyn Christian performing "Long-Haired Country Boy")

(Molly Pauken of McGuffey Lane & the Jonalee White band)

Zachariah's Red-Eye Reunion XI

Last night I photographed Zachariah's Red-Eye Reunion 2011, the third time I've had the privilege of shooting this annual concert.

I clicked off 650 frames, give or take, 500 of which I kept. Now comes the task of earnestly previewing the lot, culling the bad and editing the best. Little of that will happen today, though.

The music echoes yet this morning and the afterglow of friendship still warms me, but I'm flat exhausted.

I'll hold my place with these two images. More later, I believe.


(Previous years' Reunions: Reunion recap, an epilogue; Reunion recap, part two; Reunion recap, part one; Satisfaction; Backstage past; An uncompensated plug)

Boxing Day

I skipped posting here yesterday, choosing to preserve a wonderfully peaceful Christmas Day in the KintlaLake household.

Our holiday revelry began on Thursday, actually, when my wife and I marked her birthday with a trip to Cementos for an evening of good friends and great music. The John Schwab Party Band, a subset of McGuffey Lane, provided the perfect soundtrack to our celebration.

Thanks to Christmas spirit, perhaps, the crowd was in a playfully festive mood. And thanks to the Italian restaurant next door, the all-you-can-eat buffet was free -- no cover.

Cementos, as it often does, hosted a high communion of local musicians. Gifted guitarist Mike Nugen guested throughout the gig. The five-piece band was joined at various times by an aging Kid Rock impersonator, a silver-haired fellow who played a mean harp -- sans harmonica -- and a vocalist known for his Zydeco stylings.

A light dusting of snow Friday night fulfilled our dream of a white Christmas. We drew close 'round our tree, exchanged gifts and embraced a life not imagined a year ago.

Although each day in this place is special, the last few weeks have presented us with sparkling reminders of our good fortune -- this holiday season seems to have gathered our blessings. Yesterday we shared our Christmas Day meal, mindful of the road that brought us here.

As Thoreau might say, these days we advance confidently in the direction of our dreams. It's all good.

Now, if you'll permit me, I want to thank Mrs. KintlaLake and the younger spawn for my holiday haul: an Everest Designs hat and a Leatherman MUT.

The fleece-lined wool hat, hand-knit in Nepal, is a welcome addition to my cold-weather kit. The practical-tactical MUT is rather specialized compared to my trusty Wave, fitted with gadgets designed to aid in servicing the AR-15/M-16 rifle platform. It appears to be well made, as I've come to expect of Leatherman, and very thoughtfully conceived. I'm especially impressed that a number of its normal-wear items are replaceable.

It's a safe bet that I'll have more to say later about the MUT.

Today we've escaped the Nor'easter battering the East Coast. The Lake Erie Snow Machine gave us another dusting anyway, enough to lure a few sledders to the hill behind our house but not enough to shovel.

The woods are laced in white, the landscape quiet save chattering chickadees and barking squirrels. It's a cold cap to a warm holiday weekend.

'The Journey Continues...'

This music-slideshow just hit YouTube:



What a treasure -- those images of McGuffey Lane, from roots to present day, collect vivid memories, special moments.

A good day, indeed.