I, Lamont

A deep dive into the history of The KLF

2026-04-18T12:17:00.005-04:00

I've talked before about my early career in the music industry, working for KLF Communications (see An education with the KLF Communications). I just stumbled upon a really solid article about the history of the British art-pop duo on Discopogo, and I learned a few things that I hadn't know before.

Author Joe Muggs has done a fine job, interviewing many people in the KLF's orbit, including Cressida Bowyer (Jimmy Cauty's former partner) as well as Bill Drummond's earlier Liverpool colleagues like David Balfe.

Muggs also avoids the trap that so many journalists can't help but fall into when it comes to describing The KLF's more outrageous stunts in breathless tones. Instead, he explores the creative crucible that led to the formation of The KLF in the mid to late 80s, and summarizes the impact of the music to the present day.

So, what was in the Disco Pogo article that I didn't know before?

First, the pseudo-mystical lyrics and imagery wasn't something picked out of a book, like Jimmy Page digging into old writings by Aleister Crowley. Muggs writes:

If there’s an origin story for all this madness, it comes in the mid-1970s when Drummond, down from Scotland to study art in Liverpool, became a carpenter and scene painter for the notably progressive Everyman Theatre. It was here that actor and anarchist provocateur Ken Campbell put on his 24-hour production of ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’ by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – and Drummond was drawn into the worlds of both Campbell and the serious-not-serious pseudo-religion Discordianism, which surrounds all things ‘Illuminatus!’ Pyramids, golden apples, secret societies, lost continents, the number 23 and the idea that the fabric of reality could be an artistic medium all entered the mix.

Second, the early KLF seemed to be gravitating toward a factory pop model, and at one point even fashioned themselves after The Beastie Boys, which kind of makes sense if you listen to 'Whitney Joins The JAMs' or ‘1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?)’:

“I think they were trying to be the Beastie Boys,” says Iain Baker, later of Jesus Jones. “You could see it with them calling themselves King Boy D and Rockman Rock. They probably wanted to be popular. But I was working in a record shop then, and I can tell you they were only selling to chin-stroking, John-Peel-listening, art-rock-type guys.”

Third, Trancentral was not a state of mind or a fictional place, as I had assumed. It was a squat in Stockwell:

Drummond moved into the Stockwell squat that would soon become known as Trancentral, and as he and Cauty became thick as thieves the weird symbolism started flowing, starting with the JAMs name, which came straight out of ‘Illuminatus!’.

It was here that a lot of musical experimentation took place, feeding off and contributing to the energy of the emerging Acid House scene. One witness described it as "a five-storey squat ... they just ripped out every internal wall, the place was full of acrow props holding up the ceilings. Their parties were a bit terrifying."

Trancentral was also the headquarters of KLF Communications for a few years. This was before I became a contractor/employee, first at Lillie Yard studio (cofounded by Hans Zimmer in Fulham when he still was based in London) and later in the Brixton Enterprise Centre.

Finally, there's a summary of post-KLF activities by Cauty and Drummond. Some I had heard about, including K2. Other activities were unknown to me, such as the donation of music masters going to the British Library and film material to the BFI. There was even a bit about Jarvis Cocker singing ‘Justified and Ancient’ at an event in 2017, plus other connections to younger artists and collaborators.

Read Muggs's article here.

An Amish farmer's struggle with drought

2025-08-20T12:43:00.005-04:00

“We need the rain."

I’m talking with Eli, the Amish owner of a farm in northern New York, not far from where my grandfather was born. At 11 am, it’s already 88 degrees, with not a cloud in the sky. It’s been so dry this month that the entire county is under a no-burn order. The fields of corn look parched.

Eli is in his late 30s. He looks like actor Jesse Plemons, except he’s wearing a blue work shirt and trousers and no shoes. Eli’s straw hat has seen a lot of use, and at one point was repaired with a squiggle of pink yarn.

The fruits and vegetables in his family’s roadside stand look fresh. A box of green beans and a cantaloupe cost $1 apiece. A pint container of pickling cucumbers is $2. I offer $3 for a dozen enormous eggs, but he’ll only take $2.50. He says if the melon isn’t good, to bring it back and he’ll give me another one.

I point at the other melons on the shelf. “Don’t those need a lot of water?” I ask.

“We fill up a tank from the well every day, so the water is warm,” Eli explains. “Then we water the front garden after dinner.”

Nearby, a ewe and her lambs urgently bleat from their small piece of shade, an open-sided loafing shed constructed of sheet metal. Beyond lies an old wooden barn. Ancient farm equipment is arrayed outside: a manure spreader, a stalk chopper, and wagons that might have been featured in the 1908 Sears catalogue. I spot two of Eli’s barefoot sons wrestling a giant bale off of a hay wain.

Eli and his family are living a life not much changed from the 1800s. Everyone reading this has parents or grandparents or ancestors further back in time who tilled the land. They would surely recognize the scene: a sprawling rural property with a farmhouse, barn, and a dozen outbuildings. Farm animals. Sturdy work clothes and dresses hanging from a clothesline off the porch. Horse-drawn farm equipment. A workshop to repair furniture and tools, and make things that can be resold.

Our ancestors paid close attention to the weather, and feared extended periods of dry weather. A lack of water could ruin a harvest, or even cause a farm to go bust. In the 1930s, the Dust Bowl led to millions of people migrating out of the Great Plains, mostly to California and other West Coast states.

Eli is likes to chat, but there is concern in his voice. He and his wife have 7 mouths to feed. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, they will harvest less corn and hay. In recent years, there have been more hot days and long stretches without rain. Winters have been milder.

Around Eli’s farm are yellowing fields. Selling produce and repairing furniture brings in a little cash, but it’s the crops and pastureland that are the foundation of the family’s income. Hay has been harvested early from one field. The stacks look shorter than usual.

And then there is the land itself. “The soil is not deep here,” Eli complains. “My plow often hits rock.”

But it was cheap. Around here, farmland costs just $1,000 to $3,000 per acre. It’s not just because the soil sits on a shelf of rock 18 inches down. The population of northern New York has been in decline for decades, and few English families stick with farming.

Eli and many other local Amish were originally from Ohio. “There was no more land there,” Eli explains. “You needed millions of dollars to buy a farm.” Even if it were a sale within his Amish community in Ohio, the minimum price would be $6,000 per acre, he says.

I glance at my phone. “Forecast says a 65% chance of rain tomorrow,” I tell him.

“Really?”

“Yes, around midday,”

“Let’s hope,” he says.

Before tech, making a living in the arts was hardly a utopia

2024-12-16T18:10:00.001-05:00

People in the arts and creative media have been bemoaning the impact of new Internet and digital technologies upon their careers and businesses. Many of the criticisms I agree with, and have covered elsewhere on this blog - see Google's news vision misses "boots on the ground" (2010) and Amazon cracking down on newsletter recommendation services? (2017).

But I take issue with statements like this, portraying the pre-1995 arts and media world as an unfettered opportunity to connect with audiences and build successful businesses:

... The cultural infrastructure has been falling away for decades now, and there isn't much left. At this point literature has been "captured" by the University, but it's for a good reason: you can't survive as a fiction writer without it. People complain "but they're so insular" but the truth is: they don't have an alternative. You can work at a University or you can not be a full-time writer: that's your choice.

This is true of other industries too. Music: you used to be able to support yourself as a studio musician. You might also be the guy who was the resident expert on classical music for the neighborhood at the store, who would recommend operas conducted by Karajan and the best recordings from Deutsche Grammophone (I remember those guys). Art: you could paint signs or design posters, back when there was a real demand. Writing: you could write for the alternative weeklies (I'd read those) or be a regular journalist, writing as little as one story a day. Movies: you could be a video clerk (I also remember this). And those 'subcultures' were incubators. Quentin Tarantino graduated from the video store in a sense. Who can follow him, if there are no video stores anymore?

As someone whose first job in media was working for an independent record label, wrote for a weekly newspaper arts section, worked as a movie theatre projectionist in Harvard Square, wrote music and performed as a musician, and now operate a profitable independent publishing company, I have a few thoughts to share.

In many areas of the arts in the 20th century, "the cultural infrastructure" was dominated by oligopolies: local broadcasters with allotted bandwidth, record distributors who only worked with certain labels, an insular book industry that favored certain types of literature and nonfiction and poetry, and magazines which promoted a "cultural conversation" but overwhelmingly favored artists who happened to live in or near New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Some great art came out of that environment, but there was a lot of garbage that made its way past the gatekeepers because of laziness, broken incentives, bias, and outright bribery.

The artist's "day job" is nothing new

Few artists made a living solely from their art in the 20th century. Almost everyone had a day job - Phillip Glass driving a taxi, Cormac McCarthy doing odd jobs, Gene Wolfe editing Plant Engineering magazine. And those are the ones who eventually hit escape velocity.

The interesting stuff was happening at the margins - the alternative weeklies, the independent presses, the music scenes in second and third tier cities, the artists in remote locales driven to do what they needed to do and hopefully could connect with audiences, albeit small ones.

I was a participant in these scenes as a creator and a consumer. The photo at the top of this page was taken from the top of my apartment building in Kenmore Square, Boston, in 1990. Kenmore Square is a luxury dead zone now, but 35 years ago it was the center of Boston's underground music community with venues such as The Rat and record stores like Nuggets and Planet Records. This environment birthed groundbreaking and influential bands such as The Cars, The Pixies, and Mission of Burma, as well as thousands of others that were hardly known outside of a 25-mile radius.

Later, I lived in London (the picture above is from my apartment building near Earl's Court) and Taipei. I can tell you making a living as a musician or indie publisher was extremely hard. Everyone had day jobs (hopefully in an arts-adjacent industry) and expected little or no remuneration for their creative activities. Recording an album or publishing a fanzine or operating a small music venue cost real money, too, and sales could hardly be expected to cover these costs.

Why bother, if we couldn't make money? We did it for love ... of creation, of camaraderie, of community. Getting read or noticed was the immediate reward, creating something that influenced others was the gift that kept on giving, sometimes years or decades later.

As for the claim that literature has been captured by the University, I don't know what to say. For the most part, university presses (and university employment) are not reliable sources of funding for creative projects.

Moreover, despite the rapacious nature of Amazon, it does provide an opportunity to bypass the oligopolies of old. Every year, out of the millions of new books that are published on Amazon (or spewed out by AI), several thousand great new books by self-published authors rise to the top of Amazon's algorithm. It provides an opportunity for talented new authors to start careers or at least a promising side gig that might turn into something big. They don't need to be in New York, playing the game involving agents and slush piles and paying a PR agent to suck up to the books editor at the Village Voice.

Text and Images copyright ©️ Ian Lamont

The Price of Amish Butter

2024-11-04T12:35:00.004-05:00

In rural areas across the country, Amish farmstands are a common sight. On recent visits to northern New York, where one branch of my family comes from, we’ve been able to find seasonal produce such as corn and beans and squash, as well as year-round items like raspberry preserves and eggs.

But not butter.

Last week, I asked our regular farmstand operators, the Zooks, if they had any. The teenaged daughter ran barefoot back to the house to ask her mom, but came back with the news that no, they don’t have butter because they sell all of their dairy to the local cooperative. “Try the Amish family that lives on Wharton Road,” the girl said. “They don’t sell to the association."

A boy at the first Amish farm on Wharton Road was playing with a homemade wooden crossbow in the front yard when I pulled up. A friendly border collie mix with burrs in its matted fur ran up to greet me.

I asked the boy if they had any butter. He went inside to ask. “My sister says no,” he reported. “But go down the road, you’ll pass two English houses, and then there is an Amish house on the left, they may have some.”

His parents weren’t home. They had gone with the ambulance that had just taken their youngest son, not yet three, to the hospital with a chest injury. A piece of furniture had fallen on him in his father’s woodshop. One of the other children had run to the nearest English neighbor to ask them to call 911. The local volunteer fire department quickly responded.

There is a hard edge on these remote country roads, where the Amish subsist much as our ancestors did 200 years ago. Horses are not for riding or racing. They are beasts of burden, pulling antique plows or the black carriages the Amish use for trips into town. There are no phones or automobiles or refrigerators.

Life revolves around family, faith, and the rhythm of the farm. It starts early. Children help out on the farm beginning when they are 5. They attend their own schools through 8th grade. Full-time agricultural and household labor starts at age 14 or 15. A few summers back, two teenaged Amish boys came to take away some furniture and a cast iron stove that must have weighed at least 200 pounds. The Amish teens came with the biggest dray wagon I have ever seen, and handled the job without a word of complaint.

Further up the road, I found the other Amish household. The farmstand was closed and no one was about, but I could see laundry hanging outside the clapboard house, rocking in the light breeze. The family dog on the front porch barked furiously. A pale face appeared in the window brightened by the fall sun. I waved and smiled. It was the wife, who opened the door and greeted me. Her name as Amanda. She seemed surprised when I asked for butter, but said she could sell me some.

“One of your neighbor’s daughter’s sent me here,” I explained. “The Zook’s daughter. She says you aren’t in the dairy cooperative, and might have butter to sell.”

“We used to belong,” Amanda said with a resigned sigh. “It seemed good at first, but the prices …”

“Not enough?” It’s well known that milk prices are falling.

“No, not enough.” She went inside. Her teen daughter appeared and started to take laundry off the line. Nearby, a little boy of about three with a bowl cut and wearing blue overalls and a brimmed hat silently watched me. As the girl finished, she said something in German dialect to the boy. The only word I recognized was komm, “come.” The boy followed his older sister inside.

Amanda returned with a pound of butter, wrapped in plastic.

“How much?”

“Oh, $2 or $3.”

I gave her $3. Later, when we tasted it, we knew it was the best butter we have had in years.

“What will you do now, if you can’t sell dairy to the cooperative?”

“Well, we sell eggs, and on Friday I make donuts to sell,” Amanda said. “My husband does carpentry, and he talks about making seat cushions for boats this winter, but his stitchwork is not that fine.” She grinned.

I thanked Amanda. We will be back in the spring.

Boston-area 1980s videos from the WGBH archives

2024-08-09T18:29:00.001-04:00

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a quirky social media account operated by a public broadcaster in Boston, GBH Archives (aka WGBH Archives). It has proved to be a fountain of 1980s nostalgia.

The GBH Archives Twitter and Facebook accounts provided a daily dose of old videos from the vault, many from the 1980s. Street scenes (Facebook). Storms (Twitter). Shoppers (Twitter). High school students (Facebook). Snowstorms. Interviews with locals, from a “Celtics superfan” to our former governor, Michael Dukakis. Bettors at a chariot race (yes, this was a thing):

Much of the shared clips are B Roll - supplementary footage used to provide context or establish the background of a news story.

For instance, “Back seat drive along Memorial Drive and Mass Ave Bridge in April, 1984” shows the view from the back seat of a car driving around Cambridge and Boston while the driver fiddles with the radio.

It’s utterly mundane, and utterly delightful to watch. I’m clearly not the only one, as such clips typically garner hundreds or thousands of likes and shares.

Why do we feel nostalgic when looking at 1980s videos of street scenes, hairstyles, and automobiles? Because it reminds us of our youth. It shows us how cities and towns have changed, for better or for worse. We hear accents that have faded, and performers that are no longer with us. The footage brings to light the places and people and music and fashions and trends that made us who we are.

It’s fun to find these repositories. We salute the media archives, history societies, and museums that make an effort to preserve and share them. This often means resurrecting obsolete technology formats (see "Digital reality check: CD-ROM database of WW2 airmen can only be opened on Windows 98").

But they are constantly under threat, as the recent deactivation of the MTV News archive shows. Thousands of hours of interviews with artists and producers dating from the 1990s were taken offline as staff were laid off. Some of it may be stored on the Internet Archive, but much of it is gone forever.

Nostalgia can be a huge aid to genealogy research, whether the goal is to gather information or family stories.

I was reminded of this when researching a maternal great-grandmother, and an old print archive turned up - the “Old Timer's” column in the March 1933 issue of the Canton Commercial Advertiser in Canton, New York, reminiscing about attending grade school where my great-grandmother was his teacher … in the 1880s!

The games we played as children: Relievio

2023-09-09T04:03:00.013-04:00

It's now early September. Hearing the crickets at dusk takes me back to the warm late summer evenings of yesteryear, and the sounds of neighborhood kids playing outside.

Growing up, what were the games you played with your neighbors or siblings? Hopscotch? Stickball? Jumprope? A list of children's games is endless. But I wanted to mention a special one: Relievio.

From age around the age of 8 to 12, this was a favorite game in our neighborhood. Relievio was a simple game, a cross between hide and seek and capture the flag, but spanned all of the properties on the street, including back yards. You needed at least a half-dozen kids to play, who were divided into teams. There was also a "jail," but the captured kids could be freed by a teammate. There were special phrases and calls, including "Ollie Ollie in come free."

We would play after school until it got dark or it was time for dinner. On a warm night, we would go home for supper, but then come out again to play until twilight or our parents called us in. The cries of the game and shouts of glee when someone was tagged echoed throughout the neighborhood and then faded as everyone drifted home. As darkness fell, the crickets started their own calls. The block fell silent until the next day.

I always assumed that one of our cleverer or more social friends made up Relievio, or perhaps learned of it from other kids in our town. Recently I learned that Relievio actually has a long tradition, going back to the 1800s and spreading across at least two continents under various names. The origins are obscure, but it seems to have come from Britain. The game-ending phrase that I heard as a child - "Ollie Ollie In Come Free" - was likely "All ye, all ye, in come free" at some point. We had no idea!

Nicole grew up on the other side of the world and never heard of Relievio. But growing up, she and her siblings and friends had their own games and traditions. Every group of children did, no matter where they lived, or when they lived, as this Breughel painting shows:

Remembering these games now brings a smile to our faces!

As for our own children, our teenage son never heard of Relievio. It's sad, but it's not the first gaming tradition to fade away. I remembering hearing about kick the can, and would find scuffed marbles in the school playground, but never played these games myself - they were the domain of an older generation of children.

But other games live on. Our son played some of the same games that we did 40 or 50 years ago, including touch football and run the bases. In the winter, he went sledding with his friends. Both of our kids were enthusiastic Halloween participants through middle school. These and other childhood traditions will live on ... or perhaps be replaced by something new.

Boom and Bust, 1800s edition

2023-07-18T17:31:00.006-04:00

There's a story in our family dating to the late 1800s. At the time, a maternal branch living just south of the Canadian border was engaged in farming - specifically, the farming of hops, which is used to brew beer. My great-aunt takes up the story, in a hand-written written account that is now part of our family history:

“Raising hops was very profitable at one time in Northern New York which caused my grandfather to buy a farm and take up raising this crop. The farm was in Burke, New York. Unfortunately, there was one bad year. When the price of hops went so low that he was ruined. He had to go back to his original trade.”

I've heard variations of this tale that this hops-growing ancestor was a millionaire on paper one day, and completely broke the next. But it wasn't the end of the world. My great-great grandfather was able to fall back on his original trade - stonemasonry, which his Irish-born father had taught him. Life went on.

I bring up this tale because much of the world is currently headed toward a deep economic crisis. Inflation. Energy shortages. Stock market selloffs. Wild fluctuations in the supply of certain types of goods. Layoffs.

Sure, it's worrying. But most people reading this can remember recessions, layoffs, gas shortages, and inflation that was even worse. Before the pandemic, I experienced 3 major downturns as an adult - the early 1990s recession, the 2000 dot-com crash, and the 2008 financial crisis. I have childhood memories of the 1970s oil embargoes. A few readers may even recall the darkest days of the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate hit nearly 25% and Social Security wasn't yet available.

We'll get through it this time, just as we did back then.

This old house: old owners come back

2023-04-20T11:39:00.000-04:00

Do you ever get mail for people who used to live at your address? We do. It's usually junk. Until now, we have always marked it "return to sender."

But a piece of mail from a state retirement system a few weeks ago looked too important to send back. Through a neighbor, we contacted the previous owners of the house, who lived in it from 1991 to 2005, and asked if we could forward the mail to their new address. They said that they were going to be in the area the following day, and we could give it to them in person.

Why not? We had some questions about the house, and knew that they probably wanted to see what it looked like as they had done a lot to improve the property and had raised a family there.

So we invited them over. And it was a lot of fun! We were surprised to learn that they were only the third owners of the house, which was built in 1916. They purchased it from an elderly lady who was related to the original owners.

When they got it, the house had good bones. But it needed a lot of TLC, including a new roof, better drainage, work on the gardens, and work on the interior. We learned about the plants they had planted, the construction they had completed, and the little things that seemed strange to us when we moved in in 2007 but made perfect sense once they explained the situation that faced them in the 1990s.

We laughed about the house's quirks, such as the roof's tendency to attract nesting birds. Or, carrying the window air conditioners up from the cellar every June, and taking them down in October. One year, when Steve was mounting the air conditioner, he pushed too hard and the air conditioner went right out the window to the garden below!

We also talked about some of the same activities that our families had done, such as waiting for the bus when the kids were little, or going down to the river nearby to canoe. The house has mysteries like the outdoor hatch (anyone remember the history mystery from last year?) and the check stubs an electrician found in the attic crawlspace.

If you have a chance to talk with the previous owners of your house, do it! It's an opportunity to learn about the history of your house ... and pass down stories to the next family.

The Amish come for furniture, and how to age a dovetail joint

2023-03-17T13:07:00.001-04:00

Last summer, I went to northern New York, to work on a construction project on a family property and blog about genealogy and family history when I could. Here is an anecdote that relates to antique furniture and a visit from an Amish family.

We are demolishing an old structure. There are lots of items to give away, as well as a smaller number of special things we want to keep for the new cabin that will be built on the site.

We have already given a wood-burning stove made of iron and several beds to a local Amish family, whose two middle sons, aged 18 and 19, loaded it up on the biggest horse-drawn wagon I have ever seen:

I was about to give away a chest of drawers to them. It's a piece of so-called "brown furniture" that is well made but not very popular nowadays.

“Don’t give it away," my parents said. "It’s a nice piece of walnut furniture with dovetail joints.”

That interested me. Dovetail joints are an old-fashioned method of manufacture. It went out of style 150 years ago, but furniture made this way is renowned for quality construction.

I looked on the outside of the chest and couldn’t see any dovetail joints.

My father took out one of the drawers and showed me. I couldn't believe how small and fragile they looked, but they had held together this chest of drawers since sometime in the 1800s!

“The smaller the dovetail, the older the piece,” my father said. They are indeed tiny, a testament to the skill of the artisan who made it.

We are keeping the chest. But I also took a lesson to heart: Important details are easily missed. Sometimes, you need to look twice.

A brick wall breakthrough for Granny Wallace

2023-02-14T20:02:00.005-05:00

The lady in the photo above is my great-great grandmother, or "Granny Wallace," as my great aunt used to call her.

We didn't know much about Granny Wallace. She was born in the 1830s or 1840s. She moved around, living in 3 or 4 countries over the course of her life. She married twice.

I recently made an unusual major brick wall breakthrough, thanks to FamilySearch's database of free genealogy records. I typed in my great-great grandmother's maiden name in the basic records search. There were only three results, but one of them was pure genealogy gold!

It was Granny Wallace's 1891 marriage record from what is now Niagara Falls in Ontario. It showed her second marriage, and confirmed a story that my great aunt had told me decades ago - that after Granny Wallace's first husband died, she married the brother. Indeed, the marriage record showed that she married the younger brother. She was 50 at the time, and her new groom, himself a widower, was 41.

Crucially, the record confirms the birthplaces of the newlyweds. It also contains the names of both sets of parents, which I had not known. It further lists their religions - she was Baptist, he Presbyterian. It's enough information for me to dig further back in time on both lines over the winter.

It was an unusual find because I have searched FamilySearch hundreds of times for my great-great grandmother. She never turned up under her maiden name. But one of the wonderful aspects of FamilySearch is the regular addition of new records from all over the world. The 1891 Canadian marriage record must have been added in the last year or two.

The lesson for family historians: For genealogy brick walls, the passage of time can loosen the mortar. Re-check online databases and family trees to see if any new information has turned up since the last time you looked!

Favorite holiday traditions, and revisiting Ebenezer Scrooge

2022-12-22T16:22:00.003-05:00

Nearly everyone has a favorite holiday tradition. Small children gravitate toward opening presents. Some people love shopping for presents, or wrapping them in a very creative way. For our daughter, it is decorating the tree. Our son still likes to leave out cookies for Santa, even though he is a teenager!

For several Jewish families on our street, it's lighting the menorah. For some Catholic neighbors, it's attending midnight Mass.

Music is popular, from religious songs to modern seasonal hits. Performances of The Nutcracker are frequently sold out in Boston. One of Nicole's colleagues has attended the Boston Pops annual holiday concert every year since 1987!

One of my favorite traditions is watching a film version of A Christmas Carol. There are more than a dozen movies dating back to the early 1900s, ranging from by-the-book renditions to musicals to modern adaptations. I prefer the 1951 black and white film starring Alastair Sim:

This week, I read Dickens' original novella, A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. I expected it to be dated in language and plot, but that was not the case. Indeed, it was a gripping story that brings together horror, drama, and even a touch of humor - I couldn't stop reading! You can read it online here. Take a look at the vivid description of Ebenezer Scrooge on the opening page:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Then we come to Scrooge and Marley, Ebenezer's place of business and the single-minded focus of his life - making as much money as possible, no matter the cost to the people around him:

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

No wonder "Scrooge" is now a noun for miserly tightwad! I won't spoil the ending, but A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption and finding humanity even in the most unlikely of characters.

Dickens' story was a hit the moment it was released in England in December 1843, nearly 180 years ago. It would have been a story treasured by generations of our English-speaking forebears, first in book form, then on the stage, and later in film.

Whatever holiday tradition you observe, enjoy the time to celebrate traditions and connect with family and friends.

We remember

2022-11-12T18:58:00.001-05:00

Continuing the I Lamont family history series, this time prompted by Veteran's Day. More than a century ago, my great uncle Adrian stepped off a troop transport in France and into the maw of the greatest war Europe had ever experienced.

It would in fact be known as the "Great War" for several decades, but we now call it World War I. By April 1917, the European powers had been pounding away at each other for 3 years. Millions had died. The fields of northern France and Belgium were pockmarked by craters and crossed by trenches and fortifications. It was a stalemate.

The American "doughboys" were there to break it. My great uncle, along with most of his all-male college classmates, enlisted as soon as exams were over in the spring of 1917.

He was sent to officer’s training camp in Plattsburgh, New York, and by the end of the summer was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the field artillery, assigned to the 18th Calvary. He was commissioned 1st Lieutenant that fall, and sent to San Antonio that winter. The photo below is from the training period. He's on the right:

The following May, in the spring of 1918, they were thrown into the war. I can only imagine the feeling of foreboding as his unit traveled inland to eastern France, passing blown-out buildings, blasted trees, military camps, and wounded and dead being brought back from the front. There would be the sounds of conflict. Artillery. Machine guns. Gas sirens. Airplanes.

This was different than their training experience back in the U.S. Now it was for real. A few miles away, German forces were firing guns and dropping bombs, in an effort to maim or kill them and stop the reinvigorated Allied forces from advancing. And the doughboys were trying to do the same with their weapons. This map shows the approximate location of the front from 1916 to 1918:

Much later, his sister penned a family history. She said he participated in the Battle of St. Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne offensive that ended the war. Another source, a 1922 reunion note for his college class, described a recognition he received:

“For distinguished conduct in action, for exceptional devotion to duty, energy and courage. On the day of November 7, 1918, while at a forward observation post adjusting fire in preparation for firing accurate barrages, was subjected to heavy enemy shell fire but displayed great courage by remaining at his post until the work had been accomplished. This is in the vicinity of Jaulny, France."

November 7, 1918, was the 6th week of the Meuse-Argonne offensive and a mere four days before the Armistice. He almost didn't make it. We still have one of his medals, from the earlier battle at the St. Mihiel salient:

But we have an even more important reminder of the bravery of this young man more than 100 years ago. We named our son after him.

Influences: Punk rock

2022-11-08T14:51:00.005-05:00

There's a video doing the rounds titled "how to write a hardcore punk riff" (see below). I never learned much music theory, other than what my high school bass teacher imparted to me regarding basic major and minor scales and the structure of blues-rock. So the video was interesting, as 12tone breaks down some of the patterns behind hardcore punk-rock.

But I think he missed a few things, too. I say this as someone who used to write this type of music in the 80s and 90s in bands like Mr. O, Uckfay, and Feiwu.

Let's start with something 12tone nailed: "It's really easy to make boring punk music." So true! It was easy to identify the greats back in the 1980s, some of whom the narrator cites - Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and the Dead Kennedys. We found out about these bands through word of mouth, live shows, fanzines, listening to records at friends' places, or college radio.

But boy, was it hard to write songs as good as them. I realize why. It's not just a question of getting the theory wrong. In our zeal to reject everything about "classic rock," and the 80s electronic influences that were taking over the pop charts, we were listening to too much punk and hardcore. It wasn't until Feiwu (1997-1999) that I really began to consider other influences, including Taiwanese nakashi music.

It's very clear that the most creative and impactful musicians and artists are usually the ones who are doing things differently, not blindly adhering to the "rules" for whatever came before.

All of those seminal hardcore bands not only had fantastically skilled musicians (including vocals), but also they were coming from a much different place than we assumed, something I didn't find out until later. It's a mistake to think of them as amateurs who only knew the Sex Pistols and Ramones before they picked up their instruments.

Bad Brains started out as a jazz/pop band. Greg Ginn of Black Flag also had a jazz backgroud. I read somewhere that one of Black Flag's favorite albums in the tour van in the early 80s was ZZ Top's Eliminator - Texas blues rock meets synth drums.

Flea, who played bass in Fear before cofounding RHCP, was a high-level trumpet and French Horn player in high school, and grew up listening to his stepfather's jazz influences. East Bay Ray of the DKs - surf and jazz. D Boon of the Minutemen studied flamenco guitar at one point, which you can hear on Double Nickels on the Dime.

There's a great book by Michael Azzerad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) which gets into the influences of many 80s/early 90s bands including Minor Threat, who late in their existence were veering off into U2 influenced rock.

How I became a family historian

2022-10-12T13:29:00.001-04:00

Someone recently asked how I became a family historian.

Some of you will know the answer, if you take on this role for your own families. For most of us, it starts when we are young.

At an early age, I showed interest in family history. Where did we come from? What did Great Uncle Anthony do for work? Why do most of our cousins live in a certain part of northern New York?

A few relatives had lived through world history, which was fascinating. People remembered when the first man landed on the moon, or the Great Depression, or seeing a famous athlete or musician.

I remember asking my grandfather about his time in the U.S. Navy in World War II. More recently, I have asked details about my father's service during the Cold War.

Oftentimes it's the anecdotes that stick in your mind, and in the minds of the people you share them with. I remember my grandfather telling me about his own grandfather, who arrived in the United States in the 1830s as a young child with his destitute migrant family. All they had were the clothes on their backs, and agricultural and masonry skills that would prove useful after they settled in a wilderness tract on the New York/Canadian border.

Despite the hardships of the journey, my great-great-grandfather remembered the crew squirting him with a hose on the ship while crossing the Atlantic. He told this story to my grandfather in the early 1900s, and my grandfather shared it with me one spring in the late 1980s, when I was driving him on I-95 up from Florida on the "Snowbird" route. I still remember it today.

In my late 20s, I started doing serious genealogy research. I also started sharing findings with relatives, or looking at old photos or headstones with them. If the older generation sees the interest is sincere, and you seem trustworthy, you may become the designated family historian, whether you want that responsibility or not! I did, fortunately.

Photos, documents, and other relics started coming my way. And they keep coming! The photo above shows a photo album from Ian's great-uncle, our son's namesake.

But it's not just the things, it's the discussions. I am constantly interviewing older relatives, and if they give permission, recording the interviews on audio or video. Those recordings are so important ... particularly the stories and the "why" explanations - why someone moved to a different state, why she studied a certain subject in school, why they never had children.

Irish clues at a cemetery in northern New York

2022-08-12T11:27:00.002-04:00

I am in northern New York this week. I took the scenic route through Vermont, because I wanted to stop at an ancestral graveyard on the far side of Lake Champlain to pay my respects ... and see if there are any other details I may have missed since my last visit 15 years ago.

The graveyard, located on Irish Settlement Road near the intersection with Military Turnpike (which has an interesting history) is small, but well kept. It contains mostly 19th-century graves of Irish settlers who came this area starting in the 1820s after an economic crisis struck the local weaving industry in County Meath, Ireland.

A 4x great grandfather is buried here, along with two of his sons, daughters-in-law, and many descendants. He died in 1837. The gravestone gives his place of origin - "A native of Philpotstown, Meath." In the past I have looked up this townland, and found two possibilities:

Rataine Civil Parish, Barony of Lower Navan, Co. Meath. South of Navan, containing part of the town of Dunderry. It is small and has a small population (blue arrow on the map below).
Ardsallagh Civil Parish, Barony of Lower Navan, Co. Meath. Larger area and population to the southeast of Navan, and very close to Hill of Tara, which is located a mile or two to the east (red arrow).

On this visit, I did a walk around the entire graveyard and noticed a stone belonging to another family which lists another nearby placename: Athboy. See it on the map below? It's on the left side, maybe 10 miles from the red arrow.

This piece of information verifies that immigrants buried in the Irish Settlement graveyard hailed from the same area. Does it mean that the Philpotstown marked by the red arrow is the correct place of origin, because it's closer to Athboy? Maybe.

Or maybe not. The economic crisis affected an entire region, so even though people settled in the same area in New York, it doesn't mean they were next-door neighbors back in Ireland. More research is needed. I hope to visit Ireland some day to do it in person, on the ground, seeing all of these places with my own two eyes.

There was another piece of information on my ancestor's gravestone, at the very bottom, right above the dirt:

"Also, Barnard his son died Feb"

So the son died a few months before the father. It makes you wonder if the two deaths were connected in some way. The stones do not say.

I paid my respects to my 4x Great Grandfather, touched the stones of other ancestors and relatives, and continued on my journey.

Father's Day memories: How farmers made Apple Jack

2022-06-19T06:24:00.003-04:00

Thought I would share this story in honor of Father's Day. Last year, we had an outdoor brunch with my dad, who shared an interesting story about his own father, my grandfather.

My grandfather came of age during Prohibition in farming country in western New York. The people there were not only skilled at procuring alcohol from north of the border in nearby Canada, they were also skilled at making it. Lots of people brewed beer or cider for underground sale or home consumption ... and sometimes made harder stuff, too.

"Apple Jack" was one type of home brew popular among the Irish and Scots immigrants and their descendants living in the area. My grandfather's method, according to my father, involved taking a casket of hard cider, and putting it out in the barn on a really cold night. The water would freeze around the outer edge of the casket, but the liquid in the center - concentrated cider with a much higher alcohol content - could be tapped and extracted. This was how Apple Jack was made in those parts, and in other parts of the northeast during colonial times.

My father also remembered going fishing with his dad in the 1950s, and stopping to buy worms from local apple farmers. It turns out that a certain type of worm used to thrive in the discarded mash from the cider presses. Fish apparently loved them, so farmers would sell them as bait. Part of the ritual when buying worms, my dad recalled, involved the farmer offering some sweet cider to the kids, and a glass of hard cider to the adults, if they were so inclined. On a hot summer's day, that must have been refreshing.

The tradition of home-brewed alcohol still lives on. We used to live next to an Italian immigrant from Naples who brewed his own wine in the cellar and generously shared it with neighbors. It's very interesting to see much younger people who were born in the United States and have no family traditions getting into brewing beer using home kits. Others have gotten into craft beer, or spirits made by local companies, often family-owned companies.

The Pilgrim's struggle with soil

2022-05-11T07:34:00.001-04:00

Earlier this year, I took our son on a scout camping trip in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth was made famous by the Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 to escape religious persecution and create a new life for themselves and their children.

But if you were to visit Plymouth today, you would be surprised about how empty the area is. Driving through Myles Standish State Forest to the campground, we were struck by the wilderness around us. Miles and miles of scrubby forest and sandy soil, with most of the plant life consisting of short pitch pines and bushes, as shown in the picture above.

Indeed, Plymouth and nearby areas of Southeastern Massachusetts must have been a shock to the Pilgrims. Not only were the winters colder and the summers hotter than in England, the soil was terrible for planting. Quoting the Soil Science Society of America blog post titled "What type of farming challenges did the Pilgrims face?":

In the coastal area of Plymouth Colony, soils are shallow, sandy and stony. This contrasts with the farmlands of southern England, with deep, nutrient-rich loamy soil. In addition, the English soils were more fertile and tillable by hand or with draft animals to a depth of perhaps 6-12 inches. Massachusetts coastal soils were not deep, and sit on top of hard bedrock. The Pilgrims did not bring draft animals (horses or oxen) and although the sandy soils could be tilled or cultivated by hand, they were very stony, making this difficult work.

Sandy soils do not hold the nutrients – or water – that plants need for a bountiful harvest. They are more susceptible to drought, because the water filters through faster. The Pilgrims were lucky that the Wampanoag shared more suitable crops with them, such as corn and squash. These crops are able to grow in less ideal conditions. It’s reported that a late-season rain helped boost the harvest as well.

During that brutal first winter of 1620-1621, nearly half of the 102 Mayflower passengers died, and the colony came close to failing, as described in Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War.

The Pilgrims were determined, but it was not enough, especially as members began to die around them and it became clear that raising crops in the New World required a different approach. If you have Pilgrim ancestors, they survived only because the Wampanoag (specifically, the Pokanoket people) showed them how to farm. One of the many gifts the Native Americans gave to the Pilgrims were crops, such as corn, that were better suited to their new farming location, as well as the "Three Sisters" technique for strengthening soil nutrients and avoiding famine, as described in the SSSA blog.

Walking around the desolate Plymouth backcountry, I spotted two other things the Wampanoag introduced to the English settlers: wild turkeys and cranberries! Cranberries are now one of the few crops to truly thrive in southeastern Massachusetts, and you can see the bogs everywhere.

A special request for St. Patrick's Day

2022-03-16T21:53:00.004-04:00

Dingle Peninsula, Ireland. Licensed from Depositphotos

Growing up outside of Boston in the 1970s and 1980s in a (mostly) Irish-American family, St. Patrick's Day was a big deal. As with other North American cities that had large Irish-American populations, people with roots in rural Ireland wanted to celebrate their heritage. St. Patrick's Day was the special day to do it.

The celebrations were well-intentioned, but could also be superficial or even out of control.

We kids would wear green clothing and greet each other with "Erin go Bragh" (Anglicization of the Gaelic Éire go Brách, “Ireland till the end of time”). We would also indulge in junk food with green food coloring, including green cookies, green cake, and the infamous Shamrock Shake.

The adults wore green, too. Some put on T-shirts and plastic hats that said "Kiss me, I'm Irish." There was a huge parade in South Boston, as well as Irish music performances and banquets around town.

That said, the main attraction on March 17 seemed to be the partying on the sidelines of the parade, or heavy drinking in the bars, which could get wild. Very wild.

As Boston's demographics have changed, the parades are smaller and the wearing of green are not as common. But the revelry seems to be just as crazy.

In Ireland itself, St. Patrick's Day was once a subdued religious holiday, commemorating both Saint Patrick's death and the arrival of Christianity. In addition to attending Mass and wearing green, people would have a special meal even though it was Lent. In recent years, though, the celebrations have looked to America for inspiration, and taken on a more lurid, commercial tinge.

Shop window in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day

It's disappointing that a day honoring a saint and intended to recognize one's Irish heritage has become a big excuse to party. It seems hollow.

So, can I make a special request for St. Patrick's Day this year?

Instead of celebrating the superficial aspects of March 17, how about making an effort to recognize Ireland's history, culture, and spiritual life?

If you have Irish roots, take things a step further. Think about your ancestors' journey to a new land and a new life, and record their stories. Dig out those old photos, documents, and genealogy records, and make an effort to preserve them for the next generation.

St. Patrick, I think, would approve.

Pandemic-era Eagle Scout Service Project with the Boston Area Gleaners

2022-01-08T22:00:00.006-05:00

Last summer, my son led his scout troop (Troop 355) to gather hundreds of banana boxes for a local group that fights food insecurity. This was part of an Eagle Scout Service project, which is required of all scouts seeking to attain the rank of Eagle. The following pieces of information are from the project summary he prepared.

The Boston Area Gleaners is truly a fascinating organization that not only provides fresh produce to local food banks, it also targets food waste on local farms by taking excess produce. The humble banana box is an important part of the storage and transportation infrastructure, as this video shows:

According to the Greater Boston Food Bank, the pandemic has caused food insecurity among children to rise 117% in Eastern Massachusetts so that now 1 in 5 children live in a home that is food insecure. In 2020, the Gleaners collected and distributed 8 million lbs of fresh produce to go on tables across New England. To run their operations, the Boston Area Gleaners need lots of banana boxes!

The original goal of the project: obtain 400 empty boxes, and deliver them to the Gleaners by July 31st. This represents capacity for the Gleaners to transport 14,000 pounds of produce, enough fruits and vegetables for nearly 38,000 meals! Most cars can fit between 5 and 15 banana boxes each (bigger cars or trucks could most likely fit between 20-25 boxes).

By the end of July, scouts from Troop 355 as well as parents and siblings gathered 450+ banana boxes, and did so safely, following safe social distancing requirements. Twenty scouts from Newton and Boston took part, with support from scout parents, scoutmasters, and other members of the community.

Managers and staff at Star Market, Shaw's, Stop & Shop, Russo’s, Market Basket, and Whole Foods played a crucial role in setting the boxes aside, which otherwise would have been crushed or used for other purposes.

It really was a great learning and leadership experience, and a great cause. Thank you all for your help!

An education with the KLF Communications

2021-11-13T08:39:00.009-05:00

I wrote this in December 2000, an uncompleted recollection of my internship at London's Lillie Yard Studio in 1991 when I was 21 years old. The studio, which was co-owned by Hans Zimmer (Buggles, Hollywood) had a 24-track analog heart, but was on the cutting edge of the digital revolution with gear to support the nascent digital recording and sampling revolution. It was used by a number of UK indie dance artists, including Nomad and The KLF. I didn't know anything about this industry, but it was an education that I would never forget. I ended up working for the KLF's independent record label, KLF Communications, which in 1992 sold more singles worldwide than any other band.

It was the age of E, a new era in the UK music scene. Ecstasy and boom-boom beats had washed over European youth in the late 80s like a double-edged tidal wave. By 1991, the UK music industry was working flat out to supply the grooves that would keep a generation dancing.

Not that some snotty American indie rocker college fucker like me would know it. But it was happening just the same. And I was about to get a long-term, behind-the-scenes look at how one of the biggest bands of the era operated.

Except The KLF wasn't a band, as I soon discovered. There was no lead singer, guitarist or bassist, like the groups from earlier pop music eras. The KLF was more than that, a sprawling experimental collaborative encompassing music, art, and media.

The organization formed around several business and creative concepts. It had a core of two people, Jimmy Cauty (co-founder of The Orb) and Bill Drummond (Big In Japan, and manager of Echo and the Bunnymen). They were a binary star, surrounded by two or three permanent satellites which fed off the core while simultaneously keeping it alive and healthy. Add to the KLF system another five or six semi-permanent and temporary satellites which would spin away from the core after their assigned mission was complete. Sometimes one of these lesser satellites would swing back into orbit around the core, other times the satellite would spin off into the void, never to return.

These satellites weren't necessarily musicians. In fact, some of the most important people to the KLF collaborative were the permanent and semi-permanent associates who handled business matters. Chief among them was Sallie Fellowes, the manager of The KLF's record label, KLF Communications. Sallie was undoubtedly the Jupiter of the system. Most other orbiting satellites felt her pull if they had any dealings with The KLF.

As for the musical talent that appeared on the albums, only a few were vital to the Cauty/Drummond core. They included Nick Coler, a friendly half-techie/half musical wunderkind who played keys on The White Room and handled some programming duties as well.

Other musicians -- such as the rappers appearing on several White Room tracks, and Tammy Wynette -- were hired guns, bright comets paid to reel off a few verses during a song and maybe even to appear in the video, then being whipped back out into deep space.

I was a very small satellite indeed. In the year or so I orbited the system, I had no real input in anything The KLF or KLF Communications ever did. I wasn't anyone's "mate." I never went down to the pub with anyone in the KLF system for a drink. I never hung out with Bill or Sallie, I never met Scott Piering, Mick Houghton or anyone else in The KLF's publicity machine and I doubt Jimmy ever spoke more than a thousand words to me, or even remembers who I was.

But I did interact quite a bit with Sallie and Bill and some of the KLF music and studio people. And I did observe a lot, starting on on my first day of work at Lillie Yard.

It was a sunny weekday morning, and the door to the studio was ajar. I let myself in and wandered up to the office, which was dominated by a large calendar showing bookings in the coming weeks and months. A thin young blonde woman with black eyebrows was sitting at one of the three desks in the room talking on the phone. She paid me no attention. I didn't see Emma Burnham, the studio manager, so I went out to the living room.

I noticed another room next to the office with different bits of recording gear lying about -- tape consoles, music stands, and some other components I couldn't identify. The techie who had let me in the previous day was standing with his back to me, coiling a cable around his arm.

"Excuse me," I said.

He turned around, and recognized me. This time he grinned. "Oh, you're Ian, aren't you?"

"Yeah. I'm supposed to start work today."

"Yes, Emma told me. I'm Dave. I'm the engineer." Dave put down the coil and reached out to shake my hand. "You're American, aren't you." It wasn't a question, more of a statement.

"Yeah, that's right. I'm from Boston."

"We sometimes get Americans in the studio. Come on, I'll take you downstairs to meet the boys."

"The boys" were Julian Gordon Hastings, the assistant engineer, and Paul Bloom, the "tape op," a sort of apprentice engineer. Both were in the control room, a dim, low-ceilinged, carpeted and soundproofed room absolutely packed with gear. There were computers, reel-to-reel tape recorders, DAT recorders, electronic compressors and gates, and lots of components whose purpose was unknown to me. There was also an absolutely massive mixing desk that seemed to take up half the room, facing a wide-screen video monitor and two expensive-looking speakers.

It looked just like what I thought a professional studio would look like, minus the musicians.

Making music in the early 1990s was a million miles away from making music in the 1950s. Forget anything you think you may know about recording music from watching music videos or Hollywood biopics. No band gathers in a room to lay tracks down live. No singer simultaneously plays guitar while laying down a vocal track. As for dance music, it is not a matter of firing up the drum machine and playing the keys at the right moment over a beat.

Recording pop music in a professional studio in 1991 was a painstaking, layered process. Spontaneity was limited by the highly technical nature of studio recording.

Julian was sitting at the console. He was tall and thin, very short blonde hair, taken to wearing turtlenecks and acting very serious. He had a biting wit that sometimes shone through, often at Paul's expense. Paul, who was coiling cables, was thin, with longish black hair under a baseball cap. He was almost always smiling. He spoke with a local North London accent and was known as "Max" to his friends -- apparently because he had worked at a McDonalds before becoming entering the recording industry.

While Julian and Paul got their paychecks from Lillie Yard, they also received credit on some of the songs and albums they helped record. Julian, for instance, was named several times in the liner notes of The White Room. To Julian and Paul, and I'm sure any other young engineer or tape op, getting a chance to work with The KLF was a great opportunity and a necessary step in building a respectable career in the music industry.

It was in the studio control room that Julian and Paul spent most of their time. They were subordinate to the producers, programmers and others who rented the studio. If someone needed a mike in the sound booth, Paul would set it up. If the producer needed to listen back to the rhythm section or tweak the bass track, Julian would help make the necessary adjustments on the console. If Bill and Jimmy wanted to stay until 3 a.m. getting a inserting a sample into a song, Paul and Julian would be there until 4 a.m. making sure all the gear was shut off, put away and locked up afterwards. Emma would be long gone by that point, of course. Dave, whose main duties were fixing, installing and ordering components, would probably be gone too, unless some major troubleshooting issue arose.

I said earlier that I wasn't anyone's mate in the KLF organization. That's not totally accurate. Nick Coler was always friendly to me and loved to show me things about music - I remember one time expressing surprise at seeing a rhyming dictionary on a bookshelf in Nick's room, which launched him into an enthusiastic discussion about patterns in pop music. Jimmy Cauty's wife and KLF Communications associate, Cressida Bowyer, was very kind and shared stories about the early days of the British punk scene. Other people I worked with at the studio were friendly, including Paul and Julian and Emma and Dave.

I followed Dave back upstairs. Emma had arrived, and seemed happy to see that I had actually shown up and not fled after the previous day's interview.

I am used to rolling my sleeves up right away when works presents itself, and asked her straight away what she wanted me to do.

"Well, I am not sure there is anything to do at the moment. But you should meet Sallie, 'cause you'll be helping her out a lot," Emma said.

Sallie was the thin blonde woman who had been on the phone in the office. On the first few days she was friendly in a tense sort of way, but that wore off as my low position in the Lillie Yard pecking order became clear.

Sallie's personality was the opposite of Emma's. She was as cold as Emma was warm, direct as Emma was tactful, and efficient as Emma was relaxed. She had a brutal intelligence; no business matter was left unfinished, nothing slipped by her unnoticed and there was absolutely no pulling the wool over her eyes. I consider her one of the sharpest people I have ever met.

I found that most of the time Sallie had distracted air about her. This was not surprising considering the large number of business and creative activities The KLF was involved in and the small size of The KLF organization - she was the only full-time person. I seldom saw her take it easy and never saw her waste time. If it were possible to do several things at the same time, she would. During a phone conversation, for instance, she would often be doing something else -- typing, reviewing a contract or making one of those weedy British fags with pouch tobacco and rolling papers.

Sallie tolerated no dissent from lesser bodies in The KLF universe. She kept things close to the vest, too. For instance, telling me not to let Emma in on certain KLF business. Later, when I worked directly for Sallie at KLF Communications HQ in Brixton - a small, one-room office at the Brixton Enterprise Centre - she would sometimes let me in on the the realities of the music industry, including some minor collisions in deep space involving The KLF and associates. But for some of their biggest capers, including the infamous 1992 Brit Awards controversy, I was mostly kept in the dark (the main hint something weird was going down - calling around to local chemists asking if they had a de-coagulant for a large quantity of sheep's blood).

On that first day at Lillie Yard, Sallie was willing to cut me a little slack. But only a little.

"Emma mentioned you haven't heard of The KLF."

"Yeah, I haven't," I admitted.

"That's not odd," Sallie said, turning to Emma. "We haven't signed to anyone in the U.S. yet."

"Really?" said Emma, looking surprised. "You're not released in the States? I thought they'd be massive over there."

"That's the plan, after we decide who to go with." Sallie smiled tightly and took a drag from her cigarette with one hand, and wrapped her other around her stomach, as if she were cold. Later when I saw Sallie give herself this one-armed hug, I knew it meant she was deep in thought about some important KLF business.

Emma asked her if there was any KLF discs lying around for me to listen to at home.

"Hmmm, I think we have some samples somewhere ..." Sallie replied, turning to a shelf by her desk.

"Actually, I don't think that's necessary," I interrupted. "I don't have a CD player at home." I didn't add that I had no interest in dance music, either.

Sallie shrugged. "Well, we have some other things." She reached over and took a thin, oversized paperback with a glossy cover from the top of a stack. It had a white cover, and stamped in an oversized black typeface like some bland government-issue pamphlet was the title: "The Manual." But the small print underneath the title was distinctly un-governmental: "How to have a number one the easy way." By way of explanation was the message "The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu reveal their zenarchistic method in making the unthinkable happen." The authors were The Timelords.

Justified Ancients of Mu Mu? Zenarchistic? The Timelords? This was all way over my head. "Thanks," I finally managed. "It looks, uh ... Who wrote this?"

"Mostly Bill," said Sallie. "They used to be called The Timelords. Ah!" she said, suddenly remembering something. "That's right! You might know them, The Timelords had a song that got a lot of club play in the U.S. about a few years ago. 'Doctorin' the tardis.' "

It sounded familiar, but I wasn't sure. "Hmm, I don't think I know it."

Emma was nodding. "You know, it goes 'Doctor Who, Hey! Doctor Who!' ..."

Something clicked in the back of my memory. "Oh yeah! I know that song." Finally, some common ground.

There wasn't any more chat after that. Sallie was busy, as was Emma. I made some tea for Emma and Sallie showed me how she liked her coffee. I was let go early on the first day, there was little for me to do, and The KLF wouldn't be coming in until later in the afternoon.

Boston University: 1987 vs. 2020

2020-01-03T21:41:00.003-05:00

I've done some volunteer mentoring for my alma matter Boston University at the graduate level, but today I got to see the school through prospective undergraduate eyes after taking my daughter there for an info session. It's interesting to see how much has changed since I attended BU some 30 years ago, even while some things have remained the same.

Being an urban campus spread out along Comm Ave, BU never had a "center" of campus the way many other schools do. That said, when I started my undergraduate degree back in the 1980s the center of gravity was generally the area from Marsh Chapel/Warren Towers/GSU down to Kenmore Square, where the BU Bookstore and Myles Standish Hall were located. Kenmore was a lively and somewhat gritty place, not just because of its proximity to Fenway Park, but also because of the clubs, restaurants, and shops. There was even a movie theater a short walk from Kenmore, the Nickelodeon behind Warren Towers and the College of Communication.

West Campus in the 80s was a distant planet, a mile up Comm Ave from Marsh Chapel. This is where athletes and fine arts students roamed. BU had three large dorms there, as well as SFA and a few real estate holdings like the old brick armory. I only went up there when I was in the BU marching band (BU still had a football team) or when I attended concerts in clubs such as the Paradise or Bunratties.

How things have changed. In 2020, Kenmore is a luxury dead zone. The Rat, Narcissus, Nemos, and the BU Bookstore are all long gone, along with the many small record shops and cheap restaurants that students used to frequent. They've been replaced by high-priced hotel rooms and condos. Just about the only holdouts are the Buckminster and of course Kenmore Station, as well as the dorm and a few brownstones BU bought decades ago.

West Campus is now totally transformed, thanks to a slew of new dorms and facilities including Agganis Arena and a very modern fitness center. The BU Bookstore is there, too (moved up to 990 Comm Ave.) And the cultural attractions including food and activities seem to have multiplied. The Paradise is still there (and better than before with a more concert-friendly layout), but now there are new clubs (Brighton Music Hall) and far more Asian restaurants and small shops down Brighton Ave and up Harvard Ave.

Indeed, the new BU axis seems to have flipped to the west. Students still live in Warren and take classes across the street in the old academic buildings, COM, and the expanded School of Engineering, but they are more likely to be drawn up to West Campus to use FitRec, go to the BU Bookstore, or sample the student haunts in Allston than to go down to Kenmore. Why go to Kenmore when there's nothing to do there?

One of the few buildings that hasn't changed much on the outside is COM, at 640 Comm Ave. The exterior still looks as it did 35 years ago (a squat 50s-era classroom/lab building), although the interior has been refreshed and WBUR is no longer on the third floor (it moved to West Campus, naturally).

BU Academics

The academics at Boston University have evolved and gotten stronger. I have seen some of this through the pages of Bostonia (the alumni magazine), which highlights research and other activities. BU's physical expansion has been going on since the 1980s, thanks to some smart real estate investments in the second half of the 20th century, but a lot of organizational change and a focus on research and academic excellence across the university has taken place under President Robert Brown, who was recruited from MIT 15 years ago.

This excellence is reflected in the many research initiatives as well as scholars and students attracted to the school. According to the handbook I was given today, the middle 50% for SAT scores ranges between 1420 and 1530, and the admit rate is below 20% -- roughly what Harvard College experienced in the 80s. It's pretty clear that BU is now in the upper echelons of second-tier private colleges. In the 80s, BU was considered a good school, but wasn't at that level.

During my student years in the late 80s and early 90s, it was clear that President John Silber sought to raise BU's profile as well, and succeeded in the sense of moving BU from a regional college to an international university. But Silber also held it back. He was a condescending, polarizing figure to students and faculty. Silber delighted in steamrolling campus voices that spoke out or took stances he didn't like, and would go to great lengths to shut them down, such as his move to establish WBUR as an independent entity (as a COM student, I was not able to even intern there). It wasn't until both he and his protege Jon Westling had left that the university could enter a new phase of development, and I think Brown's stewardship has been wonderful.

Brown and his people brought over some concepts from MIT that are a breath of fresh air, including UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program) which matches undergraduates with labs, studies, and other academic research initiatives. I really wish we had something like this when I was there (at the time, serious research was typically the domain of grad students) but I was able to do other activities that matched my academic interests.

It's interesting to me that some of the academic activities I took part in as a student 30 years ago are still around, including the London Internship Program -- a combined internship/study abroad program that literally changed my life (long story for another post). The London campus has also become a bigger part of the undergraduate experience thanks to integration with the College of General Studies -- from what I understand, CGS students starting in the Spring spend their first semester in London with faculty, which seems like a fantastic opportunity for learning and bonding.

Anyway, those are some thoughts I have after visiting BU with my daughter. Are you a current or former BU student? Please feel free to share comments below.

Ardoch, Scotland in 1830: Recreated map and census

2019-11-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

I've posted in the past about Ardoch, the tiny Scottish Highlands hamlet in Glengairn, Aberdeenshire from whence several of my forebears came. Ardoch was abandoned long ago, but those blog posts generated a fair amount of interest from all over the world -- I'm not the only Ardoch descendent looking into his or her genealogy!

One of the emails I received was from Peter Brown, an Australian who descended from one of the other 19th century Ardoch residents, Charles Calder, who ran a shop in the village. Peter noted that in the the mid 1950s a Reverend Mark Dilworth wrote about the famous Father Lachlan McIntosh, who lived in the village and tended to the hundreds of Catholic families residing in Glen Gairn and surrounding valleys north of the River Dee. The report was titled, "Catholic Glengairn in the early nineteenth century."

The Dilworth report included recollections collected by Mgr Meany (a missionary serving the Glen Gairn area) one stormy night (the interviewees may have been stranded in an inn during a storm) from several elderly ladies who had grown up in Ardoch 60 or 70 years before.

I had seen an abridged version of these accounts in Nita Caffrey's extensive 2006 genealogy, and wondered about the rest of the primary source. Peter speculated that it was located in Aberdeen University library, but he also had a PDF of the Ardoch pages, and from it had drawn up a map of the crofts at Ardoch circa 1830.

Peter and I decided to embark on a fun genealogy project: Publishing the 1830 map online (see below) and also building a census of the Ardoch occupants from the late 1700s to the mid 1800s based on data from Dilworth, official censuses, and other documents.

Ardoch was marked on a 1755 British topographical military survey; the arrows below point to "Ardoch" and "Ardoch Pinzey":

In 1785, according to the Dilworth paper, Father McIntosh built a chapel at Ardoch. The shape of the village was roughly like a horseshoe, as this 1868 UK Ordnance Survey map shows:

The earliest recorded inhabitants I could find were a Stuart and Lamont families (doubtful that the latter were related to me) who had infants born in Ardoch 1799 according to Catholic baptismal records. I took recreated census snapshots at 1814 and 1830. The official UK census for Scotland did not start until 1841, which is also included on the spreadsheet and people mapped to specific houses in the village.

First, here is an description of Father McIntosh and the village of Ardoch from Caffrey's 2006 genealogy:

The priest lived in a predominately Catholic hamlet, called Ardoch ( high field). This higher area was known to be of the ‘old faith’. It had about fourteen houses and it was a muddy place (and still is). “The houses were stragglin’ back and ‘fore as if they had fan’an oot o’ the air”, said one resident. There was steep land behind the houses. They had a school there but was “just a reeky hole”. A little burn (creek) came down between the houses and every house had a tiny dam, an outlet spout and a bucket underneath. It was a place for gossip and friendship.

My parents visited the abandoned village in 2015, and took pictures of the grassy ruins.

“It’s a rough landscape with steep slopes and lots of stones and boulders. Few crops are seen except hay and potatoes, and few of the latter. The old tenant farmers were kicked off the land to make way for grouse and deer hunting, or for religious reasons. ... That said, the scenery is majestic and serene. Rugged peaks, burns, falls, deer everywhere and red grouse. The people are friendly and quite jolly, too. Pubs are crowded in town with locals and visitors. Two Highland weddings took place in town yesterday and they were dancing until 1 am next to our hotel.”

The map based on the Dilworth report was rough, but working with Peter and other sources I was able to create a digital version. The map notes a path leading northwest out of Ardoch to Clashinruich, the site of a simple chapel (Latlong coordinates: 57.097421, -3.134536). Citing James Dyas Davidson in this Flickr photo:

[The Clashinruich] chapel was built in 1785 by Father Lachlan McIntosh, a priest who tended the Catholic community in Glen Gairn for sixty four years. He died in 1846, aged ninety three. He was known as the apostle of Glen Gairn. ‘The altar was just a rough table. The roof was open and showed rude beams. Father Mann had the chapel lathed. Some of the folk had kneeling boards, but maist of them prayed kneeling on the clay floor.’ According to Ian Murray’s book, In the Shadow of Lochnagar, the field below the chapel was a burial ground, mainly for children who died in infancy. There is nothing today to indicate that it was a site of such tragedy.

Here is a map of Ardoch in 1830:

As for the Ardoch census, I started working on it in Google Sheets. It's ugly, but helps to track the evolution of the town in the early 1800s.

Peter also proposed tracking residents of Ardoch to their respective countries of emigration, which as far as I know include Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, and possibly Canada. That's a project for another day, but if you have insights to share, please leave them in the comments or contact me.

A look back at the Cold War, 30 years after it ended

2019-05-30T22:13:00.000-04:00

My daughter just interviewed me about growing up during the Cold War for a school project. The way I described it: It was constantly in the background and a source of great concern, kind of like Global Warming is now.

As a young kid in the 70s, awareness of the Cold War was driven by some types of activities, such as drills in our elementary school to file down to the school basement which was supposedly a fallout shelter. I was also aware of news events driven by Cold War conflicts, such as the Boat People crisis, defectors or athletes crossing over or seeking asylum, the 1980 Summer Olympics being cut short, and concern when Brezhnev died or stepped down - would someone even more grim take over the USSR?

As a teen in the 80s, we knew about the risk of a full-on nuclear war breaking out and M.A.D. ("mutually assured destruction" IIRC). And there were the hot wars and conflicts popping up, usually in hot places. Grenada, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Angola ...

We were the good guys and they were the bad guys, as evidenced by our value on freedom and the fact that they kept their people in line with fences, minefields, and cruelty. Hollywood played up this good guy/bad guy thing too, from Rambo to Rocky to Red Dawn. 

But there were some questions in the backs of our young minds when it came to things about the Cold War that didn't quite make sense. Like: the leaders in client states we backed and gave free reign to oppress and kill in the name of "freedom." Were our strongmen morally superior to their strongmen? Were their policies and goals all bad? 

And what about the people who lived under these regimes? The media was good at concentrating our loathing on the evil leaders, military forces, and the extensive police-state apparatus. We didn't know much about the ordinary people, except that some went to great lengths to get out. But most of them didn't. Was it because they were incapable, didn't want to go, or didn't care? 

Sometimes media made us ponder the divide. The ending to the movie "Wargames" was kind of corny, but it made a point. And that Sting lyric: "Do the Russians love their children too?" I had issues with Sting breaking up his fun pop band and turning into a pretentious artiste, but nevertheless that particular line struck a chord, and made me think.

What are your Cold War memories or stories? 

Chinese Summer Camp Review (2018)

2018-11-03T06:54:00.000-04:00

In the summer of 2018, our son returned to National Taiwan Normal University to attend the NTNU Mandarin Training Center summer program for children and teens. We liked the Chinese summer camp in Taiwan experience the first time around when both of our kids attended.

This time, we wanted to help our son's Mandarin improve while having a special cultural experience in Taiwan. This is a review of his 2018 Chinese Summer Camp experience at NTNU. I will also talk a little about other things to do in Taipei and Taiwan while you are on the island, and how we handled living arrangements via AirBnB.

The 2018 Chinese summer camp experience

My son was in the "Little 1" group four years previously; this time he was in the "Big 3" group as his Chinese had improved in the interim, thanks to classes in his American middle school.

One issue I noticed this time is the program has many students can actually speak Mandarin quite well (thanks to exposure at home) but cannot write. As a result, at the "big" levels for older kids, many students are bunched up at the big 2 and big 3 level, but they don't have enough kids to attend the higher level classes (4 and 5). As a result, they encourage kids from the middle levels to attend the higher-level classes.

On the one hand, this really challenges the kids to improve rapidly on their spoken and written Chinese. On the other hand, it may be too much for some. My son was placed in the level 4 class, but it was just too hard -- his written Chinese was better than many, but his spoken Mandarin was not as good and he couldn't understand the level 4 vocabulary. The program is very good about moving kids up or down in the first week, so he dropped down to level 3 which was just right.

My advice to anyone attending the Chinese summer camp program in 2019 or beyond is to really pay attention to what the kids are saying (too easy, too hard) in the first few days. Also ask for feedback from the teachers and assistants. If it doesn't seem like a good fit, let the teachers know in the first week and they can reassign your child.

Not many things changed in terms of the structure or approach to education. Mandarin is spoken almost all of the time at the middle and higher levels. The quality of the instruction was identical, and a very high level. But some of the learning materials did change -- I actually preferred the older Chinese textbooks for the beginner levels as the printing was better quality and they had side-by-side simplified and traditional versions of each lesson. My son was able to learn a lot regardless -- in fact his aunt and uncle were honestly quite impressed at the improvement over one month.

Even better: The 2018 summer experience at NTNU in Taiwan supercharged his Chinese writing and speaking ability for his middle school Chinese class in the Boston area. It made a huge difference. He was average in his 7th grade Chinese class at school before he went to Taiwan, when he came back in the fall for 8th grade he was advanced. He surged ahead and qualified for honors-level Chinese for 9th grade, when he starts high school. I asked him how/why he thinks he was able to do so well in 8th grade Chinese, and his answer was "Chinese summer camp."

Taiwan summer camp: side trips

One other thing about this trip that is worth mentioning: I made a point of doing a lot of extra stuff with him over the four-week period. Almost every night we went somewhere to eat, and two or three nights per week we did special excursions to night markets or other attractions. He was older, and our apartment (an Airbnb about 15 minutes' walk from National Taiwan Normal University) was far more convenient for getting on the MRT subway system and getting to the Taipei Main Train Station. Sometimes we went with relatives, but most of the time we were on our own using public transport or sometimes a rented car. Our 2018 excursions included:

Ximending markets and arcade at night (twice - so much fun for teens)
Shilin night market
CKS Memorial, Taipei
Jilong night market
Tamsui night market
National Palace Museum
L'Amigo Monkeys professional baseball game in Taoyuan (bought tickets at convenience store, took high speed train to and from Taoyuan)
Many restaurants all over Taipei
Three-day excursion to Taroko Gorge, Taitung County (rift valley and coast), and South Cross-Island highway.

For the last side trip, I pulled him out of the summer camp on a Friday (it was field trip that day, not classes) and took a train to Hualian, where I rented a car from Avis and did all of the driving. It was a lot of driving that weekend, but it was utterly spectacular mountain and country scenery and an amazing experience for us both. You can also take tour busses to Taroko directly from Hualian, too. It's amazing and worth a side trip!

There are many more opportunities for trips near Taipei or further afield: Shopping, Taipei 101, fishing in cement pools, travel to the beach, travel to other cities and towns ... there are too many things to list!

During the day while he was in camp, I usually worked at a coworking center in Taipei (I have my own publishing and consulting business) but I also made a point to do a hike in the nearby hills on my own or with friends once per week. How many other chances will I get in my life to do something like this?

A few photos from our summer in Taiwan are below:

Jilong night market

Northern style Chinese restaurant in Taipei

Our Airbnb

Taiwan professional baseball game in Taoyuan

Doing homework on the balcony of our Airbnb

Taroko gorge

Tea harvest, Taidong county

Chinese summer camp homework project

Cliffside temple, Xindian, New Taipei City

Hiking markers near Maokong station, Taipei

Puppet show on the last day of the Chinese summer program

Tang Dynasty sculpture at National Palace Museum

Notes: I was not paid money to write this post, and we don't have any affiliation with NTNU other than sending our kids to camp there in the summer of 2014 and again in 2018. I just wanted to share my experience, after finding it so difficult to locate real reviews about the program!

However, since posting this review, I have added affiliate links for Amazon and Airbnb on this page. I get a small commission or travel credit if you click on them and spend money on those sites. If you don't want to use the links, here are the plain old links: Amazon/Airbnb. I also use advertising on the page, which you can turn off by switching to reader view in Firefox or Safari, or by using an ad blocker.

One week in Taiwan in autumn: Where to go

2018-10-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

A friend who lives in Singapore recently wrote me, asking about places to visit in Taiwan to see fall foliage and good beaches.

The question about foliage was interesting. I lived in Taiwan for 6 years and don't recall autumn scenes, other than some yellowing leaves on a few types of trees in the parks and hillsides near Taipei. Most of the island remains green throughout the winter, at least at the lower altitudes.

I did a little Internet research and found that there are a few places on Taiwan to see autumn foliage. Can it compare with what I'm used to, here in New England? Probably not. But where Taiwan excels in natural scenery is in the mountains, which cover 50% of the island.

Over the summer, I took my son to Taroko Gorge (太魯閣) in eastern Taiwan and the first 25 kilometers of the South Cross Island highway in the southeast, which follows another massive gorge deep into Taiwan's interior. They are quite amazing -- possibly two of the most spectacular roads outside of the Himalayas or southwest China. Here's a brief clip from our drive through Taroko:

Another area which is spectacular and has lots of hiking areas is Alishan National Scenic Area in Chiayi County. I used to like to go up to Hehuanshan (合歡山), too, for hiking and scenery, which includes the "sea of clouds" phenomenon. The advantage of going to these areas in the fall is there are fewer tourists, the air is drier, and there are probably opportunities to see some foliage, especially at the higher altitudes.

As for beaches, unfortunately the once-sleepy beach town of Kenting in the southwest has been totally overrun by commercial development in the past 20 years, including hotels somehow cordoning off sections of the beach for private use, even though it's within the grounds of a national seashore. However, this summer when I drove down to the southeast there were many beaches between the industrial city of Hualian (you can rent a car right outside the train station) and Taitung in the southeast, about a three hour drive along route 11. The ones close to Taitung are rocky, but the small towns and cities on the coast further north from Taitung are sandy and look deserted for the most part ... which is good if you like deserted beaches but not so good in terms of a lack of lodging and infrastructure for tourists (there might be some B&Bs, though).

There are alternatives to beaches which I think would make a fun fall vacation in Taiwan. B&Bs in the countryside around Ilan County are easy to get to from Taipei and are quite striking. I stayed in one about ten years ago right in the middle of the rice fields, and you can do things like rent bikes, go to local town markets, etc. There are also similar B&Bs in the rift valley north of Taitung. The scenery there is really beautiful with many Taiwanese and Aboriginal farming communities and mountains on either side. It's possible to rent bikes and travel these roads and lanes, and I think in the fall it would be really nice as the temps are moderate and the air is dry. Here's a clip of the tea harvest in early August in the rift valley:

Bottom line: If you only have a week in Taiwan in the fall, I would recommend going to Hualien, renting a car, driving to Taroko Gorge where there are some hiking opps of varying difficulty and you can stay in Tianhsiang (or Tianxiang) about 25km up the gorge. After a few days, drive back down the gorge and head south on Route 11 in the direction of Taitung, finding some B&B to stay at near the beach, and exploring around by car or bike. You can also do the return trip to Hualian via the rift valley mentioned earlier. Taroko is one of the natural and man-made wonders of the world -- there's nothing quite like it that I am aware of outside of remote parts of China or India or Nepal, and it's something adventurous travelers should try to see once in their lives.