Friday Night Videos

I've always liked Jill Sobule, but my appreciation for her has grown tremendously in recent years. She's a very strong songwriter with witty and insightful lyrics that never quite take the road less traveled. The sarcasm she laces her songs with could be caustic from anyone else, but her delivery always seems to have an element of joy that smooths the sharper edges. And I mean that in a good way. She's too quirky to have enjoyed more than fleeting mainstream success, but that doesn't diminish her talent. She's like a modern harry Nilsson. Here's her video for "Bitter," a song that manages to not be.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Kinks.

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Mourning the sandstorm

It's gone. I've lost it through a combination of carelessness and dumb luck. Pleading and bargaining with fate has failed. My efforts to do an end-around have failed. I have to force myself to accept the ugly truth: My beloved Monument Valley Sandstorm, Infrared, is no more.

Oh, I still have a gorgeous 36x24 gallery wrap on my office wall, and the web-sized version you see here persists. But the original RAW file is gone. The full-resolution tiff and Photoshop working files are gone. The finished-edit jpeg is gone. Which means I can never make another quality print of this image, which resonates with me at a level hard to explain.

The sad discovery of my loss came about because I had an offer to publish it in an upcoming photography book. I felt all the regular emotions--excitement, validation, yadda yadda--which quickly gave way to sorrow and denial when I could not find a single print-quality file. I'd had many multiples of this image on my home computer, my laptop, my work computer... all gone. My work computer ran out of hard drive space early this past spring, so I deleted all of my personal stuff to clear operating room. My laptop suffered a Windows implosion, so I did a clean install, wiping everything from it. All those duplicate files on my home computer? I deleted those duplicates, and apparently the master file as mixed in amongst those. Ah, but what about the official backup, the one kept by The Wife? Well, those turned out to be on an external hard drive I accidentally knocked off her desk and destroyed whilst attempting to install some new hardware. The awful part is that this drive continued to function for another dozen hours or so before going kaput, hours we foolishly did not use to transfer everything off it. We couldn't remember what was on it at the time, and didn't worry too much, because there were multiple copies of files kept elsewhere. Except those that weren't.

Other images are gone as well. All of my photos from the Very Large Array (with the sole exception of "Listening to Nightfall") and the Horseshoe and the Grand Canyon... Some of those were good photographs. None of them were great. All of them can be replicated, more or less, by me in the future if I ever return to those locales. But Monument Valley? In a sandstorm? Under these unique lighting conditions? Never gonna happen.

It's hard to let go, but it's time to move on.

Now Playing: SixMileBridge No Reason
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Chicken Ranch report no. 50: Tx Citizen comes a-callin'

Saturday was Edna Milton's birthday. She would've been 87. It's hard to believe that six years have passed since I first met her and started on this Quixotic quest to write the definitive history of the Chicken Ranch. When I look back over that time, all I can do is shake my head and say, "Wow."

Things are afoot in Chicken Ranch Book Land. Some I can share, some I can't. Rest assured I am not sitting on my laurels and am talking with publishers to get this book in print in the most widely-available, professional quality form possible. And people are noticing. I gave several lectures on the Chicken Ranch in 2014 and expect to give more in 2015. And the good folks (okay, the somewhat disreputable folks) over at the TxCitizen have taken notice and devoted an entire cover story (!) to yours truly. Very cool! And Lisa on Location scored that nifty cover shot as well.

Nick Rogers came over a couple weeks back and spent an afternoon talking with me about all things Chicken Ranch. He wrote up a pretty good piece, which can be read at this link or via the embed below. Here's a small sample:

The long history of the infamous "Chicken Ranch" of La Grange is, according to author Jayme Blaschke, "the story of Texas."

"It parallels the evolution of Texas as a culture and society," Blaschke said. "Every piece of history is reflected in the Chicken Ranch." The story of the Ranch and its demise is a reflection of power structures, clashing cultural mores, urban vs. rural conflicts and the power of television media. The story is also one of the people involved, strong personalities whose battle mirrored such growing chasms.

TX Citizen 1.1.15

Now Playing: Six Mile Bridge Across the Water
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Friday Night Videos

The Kinks. "Father Christmas." Merry Christmas, y'all.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Young MC.

Now Playing: The Kinks Misfits
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Friday Night Videos

Young MC's only hit from the 80s, "Bust a Move," is certainly catchy and infectious. And the video is amusingly charming in its own 80s way. But you know what I always remember about this song? That maniac bass player with the stuffed animal pants. That's just magnificently weird, and I've never gotten that image out of my head.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... Pink Floyd.

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Friday Night Videos

Well, it's no "Wish You Were Here." It's not even "Learning to Fly." Polly Samson is never going to be mistaken for Roger Waters. But "Louder Than Words is the last new Pink Floyd song we're ever likely to get (not counting a handful of early unreleased recordings, including pre- and post-Barrett material), so that's worth celebrating. The album, The Endless River, is apparently not too much like the long-rumored The Big Spliff, even though it repurposes some of that material--notably Rick Wright's keyboard tracks. There are sections that don't quite hold together, and "Talkin' Hawkin'" amounts to table scraps from "What Do You Want From Me." But the album is enjoyable overall, with echoes (see what I did there?) of Dark Side of the Moon, A Momentary Lapse of Reason and Wish You Were Here. It's not a masterpiece, but it's no Final Cut, either. And despite its shortcomings, "Louder Than Words" has its moments--not to mention a video filmed at the Aral Sea. Enjoy.

Previously on Friday Night Videos... The Jacksons.

Now Playing: Pink Floyd Animals
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That was the move that was

This past weekend, we moved. And moved. And moved some more. I know because today I am sleep-deprived and very, very achy. I broke my kneecap in a car wreck 30 years ago, and halfway through Friday it started to swell on me and spasm in protest against all the work I was making it do. It's probably been close to 20 years since it acted up thusly. My hands ache. My fingers are swollen and sincerely do not want to bend. I'm certain I became dehydrated several times over the course of the weekend, and ended up taking multiple showers each day because I reeked that badly.

Still, the move is completed. Mostly. This is something that, at times, I doubted would ever happen. Back in July when we first decided we desperately needed a new residence, we pretty much expected the process to take a year or more. When we rented a storage garage to being packing things away, we purposely left out all of our Christmas decorations, because we expected to live in our old house through the New Year at least. But then our house sold that quickly when we put it on the market in September (shocking everyone) that we were suddenly faced with the prospect of being homeless and having to find a short-term rental. At which point the ordeal that was 3148 Oak Hollow in New Braunfels inflicted itself upon us. As I've said elsewhere, this was the first property I saw online at the beginning of summer that convinced me a move to something nicer and more suitable for our family (ie more distant neighbors and more land) was within our means. That the Oak Hollow house was still available, with its 3.5 acres of land, when we were ready to buy seemed a sign from above. Myself, The Wife and kids fell in love with its potential. But then the realtor started jerking us around and once that was settled and we were under contract... well, the disastrous inspection report resulted in us getting out of the contract very quickly. That was rough. Very, very rough. The Wife likened it to a painful breakup, and I have to agree. We went through a period of mourning, even a brief bargaining session with ourselves where we asked "What would it take to make it liveable, and viable for our budget?" But it was not to be. We had to put it behind us.

Fortunately, we had one heck of a rebound waiting for us. While negotiating for the Oak Hollow house, we looked at another on the market nearby. It was gorgeous. It had lots of space, a pool, solar panels, a 5-car garage (which could be converted into a nice studio for Lisa On Location Photography... in truth, it was more swank than normally befits the Blaschke family. And it had flaws--a homeowner's association, which we'd wanted to avoid, and only one acre of land as opposed to the 3-plus we wanted. It was also out of our price range. Not a lot, but enough to tell the kids not to get attached to it. So when the Oak Hollow deal officially died, following a whirlwind viewing of countless houses in our price range that didn't offer much more than the home we'd already sold, in desperation we made an offer on the rebound house, now dubbed Plan B. It was a big offer for us, but less than the sellers were asking. They countered. We countered that. They countered again and we accepted--even throwing in a 5-day pre-lease prior to closing, because we really didn't want to be homeless.

From Thursday afternoon on through Sunday we moved. It was brutal. Saturday was hot. Piano, refrigerator, washer, dryer, beds, dressers... if it hadn't been for my brother and sister-in-law driving up to help with a huge trailer in tow, we'd never have made it. Even last night The Wife and I were at work, me collecting the beagles, fish (30-gallon aquariums are heavy even when empty), pet chicken and on suspicious outside cat, while she went over the house one more time making sure all the cleaning had been completed properly and not undone by someone's muddy boots tracking through the house (someone, namely being me).

Today I went back to the old house during my lunch break to drop off the final key, so that the new owners (a young couple married barely a year) could get in a little big ahead of time. I dropped off a map/key of all the fruit trees/plants I've been growing in the yard, with harvest/care instructions so they won't think all the pears bad (pears don't ripen properly on the tree--if they drop, they're already overripe and gross). The Wife had left a scrap book on the kitchen counter for them, a photo essay of the old house's first 10 years with all our family's milestones chronicled, with a lot of blank pages for the new couple to add their story to the book. To be honest, it choked me up. Hell, I'm choking up now just thinking about it. A tremendous amount of our lives were spent in that house. We made it ours. The new house, as nice as it is, still isn't ours, so to speak. We've moved in, but haven't put our mark on it. We missed the old house in Temple when we moved, but never like this. I hope the new owners love it as much as we did, because leaving the key and locking that door for the final time was far, far more difficult than I ever imagined.

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