///unbelievable drive through rural upstate New York between Ithaca and Oneonta. rolled into town around 5pm and headed straight to Hope and Joseph Von Stengel’s place… good buddies of ours from the Moscow days… they were hosting a pre-show potluck and invited us over for some grub and hangtime.

show that night was a benefit for the Oneonta Teen Center and held there as well. what a rad space. decent crowd came out on a rainy and cold Wednesday night. it had been set up by Joe, who has collaborated with us on several occasions now doing projections with his MAshUp, RE-Mix Digital MEdia SHow. the space worked great for the collaboration. the whole show was videoed and we should have footage soon. really really fun working with Joe. check out more of his work and philosophy at culturerecycling.com

Jared Mees & The Grown Children played first. here’s a few photos and a video of “Slabtown (Friday Night)” featuring Joe’s projections… keep in mind that this video is lo-fi off of my digital camera, and not from the video that the venue did… still pretty cool though… note Zissou Cam dancing….

Joe’s always been a wealth of quality conversation… thus we conversed into the wee wee hours… lots of big thinking. psyched we’ve been able to schedule stops in Oneonta on all of our tours out East… this was the first official show though. cool town. look forward to more.

///gilbert

We awoke in one of the dirtiest parking areas we have ever stopped in. It had this beautiful view looking down on a town, and over some hills, but the hill just over the guard rail where the cars park was covered in litter. It was pretty gross, and I think really added to our excitement at leaving the city after a few days there.
We headed north, and a little west to get to Oneonta. Beautiful beautiful drive through barn country.

We visited our friends Joe and Hope here in the fall, and this time we did a little house show at their place. We would at least hang out, see what happened. Hope cooked some amazing vegetarian food, and we set up our gear to do an acoustic show if the mood should strike. Oh and boy did it strike.

After a couple of hours of engaging conversation with Joe, Hope, Barry from the US Postal Service, and some other rogue characters, we fired up the music making juju and played a short acoustic set. Couple of the tunes got captured on video and should be surfacing soon, but in the meantime, here’s a stripped down version of Detamble Wings that we filmed the next morning. Joe – Joseph von Stengel – doctored it into 8 bit to fit the nakedness of the music. Sorta looks like video game versions of ourselves. Check it:

It was nice after the hectic pace of the city to have a bit of a night off in a small town in upstate NY. And with friends and good food. It was pretty much amazing.

reporting for all of us finn rigginses.
lisa

PS little reminder. check out more of Joseph von Stengel’s work at www.culturerecycling.com

We headed into the city and ended up eating Indian food again. At the same place. Cuz we love it. We were getting free internet on the street, so I walked around checking out some cool toy stores and such while Eric tried to keep up with the machine. Steve met us after work, and Marty came and met up with us once again. We had several more friends come down for this, our final NYC show on this tour, which was very exciting.

The Lit Lounge is very cave-like. Dank. Dark. Crooked walls. Little pockets of magic. Basement. It was fantastic. Sounded great too. We did get the chance to see a huge cockroach down there, so the trip felt pretty complete at that point. We played with a solo artist from a band called The Study. He was nice. Helped us carry our gear down the crazy steps into the dungeon. He was good too. We all really enjoyed his set. His name was Eric.

Joseph von Stengel came down from Oneonta, NY with his partner Hope to do projections for our set. Really fun having them there and to have him onboard with the visuals as it seemed to add a lot to the overall ambiance. Was pitch black other than his moving pictures. Joe got some good video footage of a couple of tunes. We hope to share it with y’all at some point.

The show was a lot of fun, and the best crowd yet for a NYC show for us. We did get a few new people who came out, or just happened to be there. A couple of Hasidic Jews seemed to really like it, and they spoke to us briefly after the show. Nice guys. Cool that they dug it. Steve brought a couple of friends out. Cam also had a friend from High School there. It was a fun show, and it was a nice way to end our stay in the city that never sleeps. And as we loaded out, some go-go dancers started doing their thang to help fire up the dance party. It was, uh, pretty epic.

After the show, we decided to hit up a French fry place that Steve had told us about called Pomme Frites. They only serve fries. We tried to go by verbal directions that were a little sketchy, and then decided to look it up on our handy dandy direction giver. We got there just in time to get some amazing Belgian-style fries. They offer at least 28 different dipping sauces. They were super good, a bit extravagant, but mighty mighty tasty.

We drove Marty back to her hotel and got to see Times Square all lit up like Vegas. All the flashing lights made Eric very happy. We then headed on out of the city and used our friendly direction giver to avoid paying any tolls, so the trip out of Manhattan was a little convoluted and windy, but cheap. We slept about 45 minutes outside of the city in a parking area in the hills.

reporting for all of us finn rigginses,
lisa the simps

Note: check out Joseph von Stengel’s work at www.culturerecycling.com

Note: the Ghost Ghost spent two whole nights parked on the street in Brooklyn, we were somewhat surprised and mostly glad that it didn’t leave the city looking like this: