Kinderhook Is Rocking Again

Kinderhook Creek was a popular New Jersey country rock band in the 1970s and 80s. They kind of created a live bar band market for country rock music in the Jersey/NY club scene. They had a devoted following of fans that literally followed them from gig to gig.

Kinderhook Creek (now shortened to just Kinderhook) was a band I knew well. Jerry Kopychuk (banjo, guitar, lead vocals) was a friend in high school and we both went to Rutgers College together. I recall acoustic sessions in our Tinsley dormitory with a rotating group of other students including Andy Fediw who would become the band's bass player.

They got serious enough about the music in 1973 to leave school for awhile and give the music business a chance.

The other founding members were Yuri Turchyn on guitar, violin and vocals and Stan Taylor on pedal steel guitar. Craig Barry came on later on the drums and when the rest of us were graduating a few years later, Joe Breittenbach was added on lead guitar.

They played a regular circuit of venues (most of which are now gone) including The Wooden Nickel, Widow Brown's, The Gypsy, The Final Exam, Dodds Crest, Dodds Orange, Creations, The Beach House, the famed Stone Pony, the Royal Manor, Baby-O's, and The Joint In The Woods.

They later opened for the The Flying Burrito Brothers, Conway Twitty, Pure Prairie League, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, The Outlaws, Richie Havens, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Commander Cody, Poco and others in larger venues.


Kinderhook might be the Dutch word for “children on a hill” but most of the band was Ukrainian and Kinderhook Creek was a popular place for Ukrainian get togethers in New York state (near Albany) and hence the band's name.

Though a record contract and national tour eluded them, they played six nights a week for almost nine years, and were arguably the top drawing band in the state.

Kinderhook were the only unrecorded act to play the Central Park Schaefer Music Festival (1975), opening for Poco before 25,000 people.

Kinderhook 2010

This year, they reunited and will be playing gigs in New Jersey.

• Video of the reunited  Kinderhook performing March 2010 in NJ on a bill with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Lineup: Yuri Turchyn, Craig Barry, Andy Fediw, Jerry Kopychuk, John Greenaway and John Korba
• Kinderhook's Official website
• Listen to some tunes at myspace.com/kinderhookcreek

What I'm Listening To: Speaking of Faith

I have always been a big radio fan. Nowadays, a lot of my radio listening is done via podcasts that I listen to on an iPod. But it's still radio. This is one in a series of posts about programs that I am listening to on-the-air, online or via podcasts.

I have been listening to Speaking of Faith (SOF) since 2003 when it became a weekly radio program. I think some people may be put off by the word "faith" and think that it's a show about just religion. It's not.

Though many religious practices are topics, so is finding the spirituality and meaning in many other parts of our lives.

If you look at the extensive show archives, you'll find programs on elephant vocalization and quantum physics , on novelists as God and also forensic pathology, torture and parenting and play.

I have used these programs as starting places for several posts here and especially on the Weekends in Paradelle blog. When I listen to a show on the meaning of intelligence I can't help but want to write about and spread the word.

Krista Tippett

Krista Tippett is the show's host and producer. She has an interesting bio - grew up in Oklahoma, the granddaughter of a Southern Baptist preacher - studied history at Brown University and went to West Germany in 1983 on a Fulbright Scholarship - stayed in divided Berlin as a correspondent and became a special assistant to the U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. She left in 1988 later got an M.Div. from Yale in 1994.

In 2007, Krista published her first book, Speaking of Faith.

She sees the  program as one that can "draw out the intellectual and spiritual content of religion that should nourish our common life, but that is often obscured precisely when religion enters the news."

Her book Einstein's God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit is actually the one I read first because of my own fascination with Einstein and the ways science connects and rejects religion.

You can listen to many of the programs online at http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org and subscribe (free) to the podcasts of the show with iTunes or other services.

Hidden Kafka Papers Found

Not to overdo the Franz Kafka connections the past week, but you know how it is - when you focus on something, suddenly you see it all over the place.

I wrote about Kafka last weekend and then I was listening online to the radio show The Takeaway and they spoke to the director of the Kafka Society of America. It turns out that there are unpublished papers by Franz Kafka that have been hidden away in safety deposit boxes in Zurich, Switzerland and Tel Aviv, Israel.

You may know that Kafka published only a few short stories during his life, and never finished any of his novels. He told his friend and literary executor Max Brod that his "last request" was that "Everything I leave behind me... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread."

Luckily, Brod did not obey. Kafka's girlfriend at the end of his life, Dora, also ignored Kafka's last request and had notebooks and letters. They were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 and were missing since then. It looks like they have been found.

Israel’s supreme court recently ordered that the boxes, which contain thousands of handwritten documents by one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century, be opened. However, there is still an ongoing legal dispute about who owns the collection of private papers.

Listen to the radio story...

Kafka and R. Crumb

     

I was reading about the late writer Harvey Pekar and it got me thinking about another artist/writer, R. Crumb who is well known in the "comic book" world, but who also wrote some serious graphic books.

Robert Dennis Crumb, better known as just R. Crumb, is the American artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream. He is considered one of the founders of the underground "comix" movement.

Though he is a celebrated comic book artist, Crumb's entire comic book career is really outside the mainstream "comic book" publishing industry.

If you think you don't know him, you may be familiar with his Keep on Truckin' comic, which was a huge pop culture phrase and icon of the 1970s. You may also know (maybe via films) his highly sexualized Fritz the Cat and hippie Mr. Natural characters.

The films of Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic were quite controversial when they were released. Fritz the Cat came out in 1972 as an animated film written (drected by Ralph Bakshi as his feature film debut) and was the  first animated feature film to receive an X rating in the United States.

Fritz is a very human feline in mid-1960s New York City who get into many sexual and hedonistic situations and also has a sociopolitical consciousness. When I saw it in college, its takes on American college life, race relations, free love and politics were all hitting resonant notes with me. It was the most successful independent animated feature of all time, grossing over $100 million worldwide.

Crumb had issues with the film. He claimed his first wife signed over the film rights to the characters, and that he did not approve the production's approach to his material. (A sequel, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, was made without Crumb's or Bakshi's involvement.)

Crumb has also published a number of more serious titles with artwork in somewhat different styles - for example, his R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz, & Country and R. Crumb's America.

One that I bought recently was his brief but interesting biography of Franz Kafka, simply called Kafka. It's an interesting way to get into Kafka and his writing. It has summaries and is illustrated by Crumb.

Even if you never read Kafka, more people know the often-misused term "Kafkaesque" and have at least heard of his story "The Metamorphosis" which is regularly anthologized and assigned in school and even has its own book-length critical edition.

I don't know how many people will read Crumb's graphic biography and then move on to Kafka's short stories or his challenging novels like The Trial, but I'm sure some readers will make the leap.

Although Kafka said "What do I have in common with the Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself," his style is often said to be in the tradition of the Yiddish storytellers who used a bizarre fantasy mixed with humor and self-loathing.

Kafka brings to that a high level of consciousness, alienation and paranoia. Kafka, who I have wanted to write about for awhile, was alienated from his family, his "friends" and his surroundings. If you read his stories as autobiographical, then he is the one turned into a cockroach, an ape, a dog, a mole or a circus artist who starves himself to death in front of admiring crowds.

Crumb's book is a good introduction to Kafka and will give you a pretty concise biography and the plots of many of his works, all illustrated, and will hopefully get you to want to explore Kafka's writing in the original.

I wonder if anyone assigns R. Crumb's America and Kafka's Amerika on the same reading list?

I Write Like

I don't what the voodoo algorithms are behind the I Write Like website. You paste in a sample of your writing and it "analyzes" the style and tells you what writer you write like.

I took a blog post that was pretty good and pasted it in. Rudyard Kipling. I cut all but a few sentences and did it again. Dan Brown. Then I used the middle section. Margaret Atwood. Section 4 got me Leo Tolstoy. On the fifth try, I pulled out the paragraph I liked and got Ernest Hemingway. That's where I stopped.

No one will object to having their writing compared to a famous author.

I write like
Ernest Hemingway

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Doing a bit of clicking on the site's blog turns up this explanation:

“Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It’s a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet.

Take for example the “Mark as spam” button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how “I Write Like” works on my side: I feed it with “Frankenstein” and tell it, “This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley.” Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.”

Is their a lesson in style hiding in here? Or is it all just an interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of logic that enables reasoning with uncertain statements? Probably...

The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

This poem came to me via a new contact on Facebook (so there can be poetry in social media) who saw it on The Writer's Almanac, and it seems to be an ideal Evenings poem.

It's by Charles Wright,from his 2009 book Sestet (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Evening is Tranquil, and Dawn is a Thousand Miles Away

by Charles Wright

The mares go down for their evening feed

                                                              into the meadow grass.

Two pine trees sway the invisible wind—

                                                          some sway, some don't sway.

The heart of the world lies open, leached and ticking with sunlight

For just a minute or so.

The mares have their heads on the ground,

                                 the trees have their heads on the blue sky.

Two ravens circle and twist.

              On the borders of heaven, the river flows clear a bit longer.

Wright's poem "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night" is one I thought of recently I was using an app on my iPad that allows you to look up at the sky above you and actually know what stars, planets and constellations you are seeing. A planetarium in your hands.

Later, I like to sit and look up
At the mythic history of Western civilization,
Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.
I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what and how who got
where,
Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,
But I've spent my life knowing nothing.

I'm feeling like I know less and less every day. I suppose it's the old "the more you know, the more you realize that you don't know."

Back to School?

Okay, I know summer classes are in session. Kids are studying for college entrance exams. But Back to School sales already? That's just wrong!

Are parents, students or teachers really buying school supplies already? There would have to be some really good early sales.

You know that Staples commercial that comes in August with the parents smiling and the music is the Christmas tune "Most Wonderful Time of the Year?"  Must be. I have already sen 2 posts on Facebook from parents going crazy with their kids and it's just July 13th.

I was just ordering office supplies which is my version of back to school and I still like getting a new 3-ring binder, paper, Post-Its, pencils and pens.