The Tenth Muse

                    Infrared Rose

Way back in ancient times, or what my kids might thing of as ancient times, well, before they were born anyway, I took photographs with infrared film, specifically black and white negative film (although I did shoot some infrared slide film, but this isn't about that). It was a bit of a process because of a couple of things: the film speed was slow, you had to shoot through a filter (dark red is the one I used to use), and once you had focused on your subject or scene you had to compensate for the shift to infrared. Also you had to load and unload your camera in absolute darkness which also could be a pain. The images were different too, in a day and age when many people were (and still are) striving to create the clearest, the sharpest of images possible, infrared introduced the subtle distortion of grain.I could look up all the pertinent data, the exact specifications and numbers and settings and what developers were recommended to process the film (I liked HC110) but it doesn't really matter, it's what you did to take the pictures and to print them, it was all part of the craft of photography.

                                      The Pond Mills Bridge, London, Ontario

But the results were magic.

                                        Creeping Charlie and the Old Clarinet

I always felt that there was a bit of magic to photography, maybe a bit less so in this digital day and age (or just a different sort of magic, the kind that deals with computers and programs that allow you to manipulate images), but magic none the less, and particularly in the case of infrared film and the resulting prints. There is an extra element here because you were, and I mean I was, never a hundred percent sure what the final image was going to come out looking like. Oh you had an idea, that's for sure, but the tenth muse always put in an appearance. The name of that muse is serendipity.

                                            Cloud and Tree, Toronto, Ontario 

I came to love the muse and the things she showed me, particularly when she was in one of her playful moods, when she did something special with the light. Here I've picked just a few examples for you that I hope you'll enjoy.

                                                        Country Cemetery

I still plan to play with infrared photography in this digital age (you can see an example in an earlier posting) but it isn't quite the same and it's taking me longer to come to terms with the muse's requirements. Still, it's part of the journey, isn't it.

Places I remember

Photograph entitled "Winter Beetles" by Colin Campbell


There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain

In My Life - the Beatles

One of the things I like about photography is that it can capture, in an instant, certain elements of a place and time. That's what the medium does. The photographer chooses a position from which to record the scene visually, sets up (or leaves set) the camera's controls, trips the shutter and an image is recorded. Sometimes the setup is a bit more complicated but that's basically it. When the image is converted, either through what these days seems the ancient and almost mystical (alchemical?) chemical processes that produce slides or negatives and prints (which I used to do for fun and profit), or converted into pixels that may be viewed on a monitor or screen, hopefully you take in information and you get some feeling from the image. Of course what is seen is experienced differently by different viewers.

It's interesting for me that sometimes too the image becomes the trigger for the memory of the place. The photograph included here is one of those examples. If I had to hazard a guess I would say that this image was shot something like 30 years ago. The place, the wrecker's yard and the Volkswagon graveyard you see before you, is long gone. The shot was taken just north of Toronto, Ontario, on the outskirts (then) of the city of Barrie. I still think the image holds up well. I can still remember bits and pieces of the day and of the site and thinking about how to try to get the exposure just right. Snow isn't always easy to record.

I always have liked to take photographs that have an element of humour or that are visually striking in some way. I think this is both.

20 Million Things To Do

This is a short essay about music, about some of my preferences, quirks, and thoughts. I hope you like it.

This is a concept that I may have some difficulty explaining but, all the same, I find it to be an interesting aspect of being and of mind and of, well, me self. I'm sure there are others who are similarly inclined.

I often have some sort of song playing in my head (as they say), sometimes way in the background, sometimes more up front. It seems that I've always been accompanied by music, often like a soundtrack to my life.

As for content, the 'now mentally playing' tune can vary quite a bit. It might be the hook from some popular song, or even one of those annoying commercial jingles. Often though it is something dredged up from my personal collection, and also often a benevolent soundtrack, providing counterpoint to what is happening, how I am feeling, or what I am doing. Rarely is it the entire melody. Normally it's comprised of just a fragment of the whole, often playing over and over again in a loop, sometimes to the point of distraction (in the most annoying of cases). Upon occasion I've had to attempt to drown out or white out or pink out a particularly annoying tune by concentrating on some decidedly nasty piece of soundscape ('One Red Nightmare' by King Crimson often has a suitable blanking effect). The source, however, can range from the symphonic (I'm particularly attached to Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Sheherazade' in that realm) to the ridiculous, Yellow Ribbons vie with Kraft Dinners for control of radio station Cloin, the end is listless. I mean the list is endless.

The triggers for what song plays when are interesting too. There are those songs that are artifacts, like an uninvited lingerer or leftover, one of those songs that stays in your head after you've heard it, whether consciously or not. I get a lot of that, from, as an example, the grocery stores and elevators I've been in. I think I'm not as sensitive as I once was to this type of material (because I don't always now remember all the songs that were playing in a store while I was there shopping) but I'm still sensitive there, I get hooked by many tunes that way. And end up having them on an internal play loop until I can dislodge or replace them with something else.

There a word in german, ohrwurm, or literally ear worm, that nicely describes it (those damn Germans have a word for just about everything).

The other type of trigger that I find most often happening is caused not by music itself but by language; an idea, thought, or phrase that somehow has become linked with a particular tune. Some triggers, naturally, are the direct correlations, I'll hear a phrase, a title, or a line from a lyric that immediately cues the mental recording (I heard it through the grapevine might be a good example), others are less forthright. These later ones I'll often do a kind of mental exercise and attempt to trace it back to the original impulse. That can be fun.

And then sometimes too I find that I'm haunted by a particular song. It keeps following me around, often for extended periods of time, days in fact. I had a run with the Rimsky-Korsakov like that, for three days.

Then there are songs that rise from where they've been slumbering in your subconscious.

Like the other day. It was one of those blue funk days (cue a minor flourish of 'Funk 49'), where I knew I should be doing something but couldn't get my feces collectivized enough to do anything constructive, deep in ennui, part of it depression I think. I found myself playing a song in my head, one that I haven't thought of or heard for years and years. The name of this particular song is '20 Million Things To Do'.

This song I had mentally associated with a band that I have liked for many years, the band called Little Feat. I have most of their 'older' albums somewhere in my collection and on my computer. But when I searched for this particular tune it turned out that I didn't have it, which was momentarily confusing for me. With a little bit of research (and wow, isn't the internet handy for that) I found out that that particular song wasn't one recorded by the band. It was actually from the solo album of one of the main members of the band, a fella by the name of Lowell George (guitarist, vocalist, composer) who died not long after the release of the album ' Thank's I'll Eat It Here'.

Back in the olde days, when vinyl was king, I used to own this album as well as a few others (I can still remember needing 12 liquor store cartons for the records when I had to move). After doing this for a number of years and during one particular move I found that I was tired of carting them around. I did a purge, took them right off the tailgate of my brother's pick-up truck that I had borrowed for this particular move, and turned them in to one of those used record and book stores. I used the money I got from the sale to purchase a futon, which I needed. I now miss much of the music I once had. I've reacquired some small part of it, but not all (and I don't think you'd be able to find it all now). That was how I ended up not having the album. At least until recently.

So I sourced it on iTunes and I bought it...


...and then my computer died before I could listen to it. I couldn't listen to the song for another 3 days, until I got my computer back from service. It was really annoying because, by now, it felt like I needed to listen to it to complete myself somehow, like having to play the last note of a song, to complete the musical thought. Shave and a haircut, two...

Sigh...

There are also a few songs that I find I'm very sentimental about. I don't know if you could say that they speak to my soul but they do something. I have found that these are not necessarily the most popular of songs from a particular artist. I have on more than one occasion purchased 'best of' or 'retrospective' albums by artists (in small or in large part looking for these songs) and not found them on the collections, and not be able to find the original, here are two examples:

One of these lost songs was, or rather is, on Leon Russell's 'Carney' album. I did a little research and found out the title of the track, which I hadn't known until now. The track is 'Manhattan Island Serenade'. I don't have the song, iTunes doesn't offer either the album it was taken from or the song itself. There is just something about it that I really like, a wonderfully moody and thoughtful tone, very atmospheric. Part of the lyric of the song is, if I remember, "Sittin' by the highway in a broken van, thinking of you again". Another of these haunting songs was done by Sandy Denny and called, I believe, 'The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood'. I don't have that one either.

Just a note, one of the reasons that I like the band Little Feat so much, besides the musicianship, is that they have a number of tunes that help to define moments, like Trouble, Easy To Slip, and more. I still have times when I need Little Feat accompaniment. It's good to drive with too, often an excuse for exercising vocal chords while barreling down the road.

I have a driving song, I believe the song is called 'Marie', which is an artifact of my father and why it has come to be associated with driving I'll never know. I'll often also have a windshield wiper song, which one dependent on the cycle of the wipers, in beat to the rhythm of the blades as they clean the windows.

So as you can see the music is all around me, even when I'm not actively playing anything.

New Orleans

Jackson Square

I can't say that I'm much of a world traveller. Oh, to be sure, working with Greyhound has certainly kept me on the move, and I've done a few charters that have taken me away from Toronto and it's environs; Montreal, Quebec city, New York and Boston being the main places I've visited on those occasions. I have always been accompanied by a camera but, since I was working my main concern was, naturally, for the bus and for my people (Ah yes, my people. How cool it sounds to have people of one's own.). But what that really means is sometimes I don't have as much time for myself as I might like, time to tool around and take pictures. New York is a prime example. I never had enough time to take advantage of the city, of Manhattan, of the sights. Often I had to stay with the bus when I wasn't shuttling the people from one place to another, but I took pictures when I was able.

I've also visited other places on vacations. I've been to Mexico, this is a number of years ago now, to the Yucatan Peninsula and visited Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza and Uxmal, also to the Grand Canyon and a number of incredibly beautiful sites in that area (I'm big on gorges and canyons don't you know). More recently, and with my friend Sid who lives on the west coast, I've visited Vancouver, British Columbia, toured a number of places there, as well as, on another trip, visiting again Vancouver and then traveling to Victoria BC. On that occasion we took a side trip to Seattle, Washington. Very nice. I might do a little piece on those locations at a later date. I love the west coast, land of mountains and water and beautiful forests. But there is another place I visited with my friend Sid, a special place, and this is New Orleans, Louisiana. I have to say N'Awlinz is one of the special places in the United States, and a place that has it's own distinctly different feel. When we visited the city our accommodations were in the old French Quarter and from there we walked and walked, explored the sights and the sounds as they say, stood on the banks of the Mississippi River and watched the paddle boats sail by, enjoyed the food (like dirty rice and beans with cajun sausage, and po'boy sandwiches. My thanks to Sid for remembering their names), and took a gazillion photographs.

On the road, passing a southern mansion

Now if you want a musical score to accompany this little story then I don't think that you could do much better than listening to Dr John's album 'N'Awlinz, Dis Dat and Dudda', or 'Goin' Back to New Orleans'. I listened to those albums quite a bit during the months preceding the trip. Or you might like to listen to some Allen Toussaint, or any of the other wonderful music and musicians which came from that area. If you're into a little more of a rocky mood you could do a lot worse than to listen to a bit of early Little Feat as well, Sailin' Shoes, or Dixie Chicken (from which the Dixie Chicks derived their name).

For us traveling is a pictorial odyssey. Both of us love the taking of photographs, it's a way that we use to explore our surroundings, and we have similar tastes in what we photograph as well, we are enchanted by many of the same things; the scenery of course, but old buildings and machines, particularly the broken down or broken in variety, the severely aged or decayed ones (dilapidation as I like to call it), and those quirky things which have a certain humour about them, and places of the macabre, graves and stones and quiet. Being from Canada, and from Ontario, the trip really was an eye opener, as travel should be, taking me out of myself. The city and the sites were wondrously foreign. Staying and photographing in the French Quarter was magic. And you could feel the age of the place. And all right, we didn't just photograph, we might even have gotten a bit 'Burboned on Drunk Street', and it was a gas.



It should be said that we ventured away from the city as well. New Orleans was the point of arrival for us as well as the point of departure when we had to head for home. We stayed there a couple of days and then rented a car and headed out into the south, that is north, traveling to places like Vicksburg, Mobile, and getting as far as Tennessee on a special pilgrimage, which I'll explain later. From there we started heading back to where we started from, in a great loop. We travelled back along the gulf coast for a while and saw the incredible amount of damage which Katrina had caused: causeways collapsed, whole strips of buildings just decimated, trees torn up. It was humbling. Me, being the driver, did the driving. Isn't that the typical busman's holiday? And then we returned to New Orleans and rested up before we had to leave. But N'Awlinz, I'll tell you, has a special enchantment. A certain je ne sais quoi, pardon my french.

My home town is Niagara Falls, Ontario. I've always considered it the universal hometown because just about everyone has heard of it. There has always been a carnival side to Niagara Falls, you can see it in the major touristed areas that are located just up the embankment and not far from the Falls and park itself, the major tourist area is called Clifton Hill. I jokingly refer to it as the dark side of Niagara Falls. Well, Bourbon street has that carnival atmosphere but more so. There is the shine of the cheap beads, the iron railings, holiday masks, gaudy colours, music filtering through the air, and just underneath it all the slightly sweet smell of decay.

One of the places that we most wanted to visit in town was St. Louis Cemetery #1, one of the three catholic cemeteries that share that name. It's location borders on the housing project which was built over the site of the old 'Storyville' which was the prostitution district of New Orleans. The place is also in an area of town that it's inadvisable to travel alone in, or at night. While we were there we heard about another shooting taking place in another St. Louis Cemetery, #3 I think it was.



The cemetery itself is a stone city surrounded by high stone walls. I found it a quiet place for contemplation and a magical place for photographing. Many of the pathways are strewn with crushed sea shells that crunch underfoot when you walk between the rows of tombs. There is an amazing variety in the architecture of the structures; it is a place of grand mausoleums and humble rubble topped grave crypts, single graves as well as family crypts, and again some that appear like row housing for the dead, all built above ground because of the height of the water table. And within the cemetery the grave we searched out is the one which belongs to the famous 'Voodoo Queen' Marie Laveau, who is interred in the Glapion family crypt.



It takes a bit of wandering to find. We had no road map of the site so I can't remember whether we just stumbled upon it or whether we asked someone as to it's location, but once you find it it is unmistakable, with offerings placed in front of the entranceway (candles, flowers, cigarettes, alcohol, beads, food) and the XXX markings on the side (which I found out were drawn there by people asking Marie to grant them a wish).



I certainly wouldn't mind going back to New Orleans again. Maybe this time to take a ride on the Natchez, the paddle steamer, and check out more of the surrounding area, maybe this time head into Florida and check out some sites there. No, I wouldn't mind that at all.

Oh, I almost forgot that I was going to tell you about the pilgrimage. Sorry, sometimes the mind wanders. When we were planning this trip Sid and I made a list of things we might like to see in the area and then we tried to fit them into an itinerary, well like Vicksburg Mississippi and the Civil War museum (with the Union gunboat Cairo under it's awning) and a number of others. Just throwing out a possible name and destination I suggested Lynchburg Tennessee. And why? Well, if you can't guess or don't know it happens to be the location of the Jack Daniels distillery. We went, we saw, we bought the mugs, and the whiskey. And, not because I'm mean or anything I'll defer that discussion on that until a later time because that's another story.

Playing through my music.

How to play through.

I've already written somewhere here that I'm listening to my music collection alphabetically. Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately it isn't. Even within the limited context of 'listening', provision has to be made from time to time for life to intervene or intrude on the 'playback' project. The course of play is then changed. How then do you get back to the project you might ask? I know there are people out there who will say 'Just do it!' and that, of course is the right answer, in most circumstances, but I started to think about those rules of play and what they might look like and, playing with the idea, came up with this...

I, Colin Campbell have initiated the project of playing through the entire alphabetical listing of songs that are currently on the hard drive of this computer (which is known as Hex). This has been done just for the heck of it. The order of songs to be played is, therefore, determined by it's place within the alphabetized list of songs that are found in the Music directory of iTunes on said hard drive of the computer and shall be played in that order.

An exception to the rule of play shall be when a specific 'album' or 'playlist' or 'song' has been selected for alternate play according to my whim.

When an alternate album or playlist has finished playing then playback shall default back to the next song in the alphabetized list, unless a further alternate is chosen, at which point the process repeats itself.

However, when compelled to listen to an individual song, as occasionally happens, the next song to be played following the completion of the chosen song shall be the one which directly follows it in the alphabetized list. This play will continue for no more than two (2) further songs when it shall revert to the next unplayed song in the interrupted alphabetic master list.

As in the case of classical music, titles from a same source may happen to appear in the alphabetical listing sequentially (even if not appearing in that listing in 'album' play order). These 'accidentals' or 'sequential titles' may be played through or they may be bypassed. If bypassed, play shall continue from the next alphabetic entry not of the sequence. This bypassing must occur within three songs of the sequence having started. If the sequence is past the third song then the whole of the sequence must be played through. Upon completion playback shall naturally default to the next song occurring in the master list.

Portions of the master list that have been recently played, for whatever reason, either as alternates or accidentals, or as generated by other rules may be skipped. Playback shall then continue from the next available song in the alphabetical listing.

Play may be interrupted at any time to listen to a new acquisition. Upon completion of play and if no other song, portion, or album selection is made, playback will default to the next song in the alphabetized master playlist and continue from there. Notwithstanding, new music comming in may but doesn't have to be played immediately.

Cloin has the right to terminate a song at any point following 7 seconds of play (You try to do it any faster).

He also has the right to change any of the rules that he has written at any time without notice. (It's always nice to provide yourself with a backdoor clause.)

The Graces at the Guild Inn

In a tucked away corner of Toronto, actually Scarborough (near the bluffs), is a garden. Within this garden are stone sculptures and the remains of the frontages of a few of the buildings that used to grace the downtown core. Mainly these frontages were banks, perhaps all of them were, but they all represent things that used to be, buildings that used to stand ornate and proud. They were built, for the most part I would say, at the end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's, decorated with columns and figures and scrollwork, the style of the age, built before glass and steel took over and created the current canyons of downtown. These facades and this sculpture now sit, for the most part, in the garden behind the shell of an old hotel.

The garden now is a popular place for people to stroll. It has also become a popular site for wedding photography (fees paid to the city). You can even exit through a gate at the back of the property and get a look at Lake Ontario from the top of the bluffs, or continue to wander along the paths that follow the top of the cliff.

The hotel itself, the Guild Inn, was built in at least two stages. There was the original and much smaller structure, and I guess that it was pretty swank at one time, with a popular restaurant and lounge located within, and then a hotel of 7 stories was built alongside it. Both sections have long been closed and boarded up, left to the ministrations of the weather and of the seasons. The city, it turns out, owns the property. I don't know any of the details on how that occurred but at some point in time I may feel the urge to do a little research on the site and see what I can dig up. The important thing to remember here though is that the city is not in the hotel business. The site has been fenced off and closed now for years.

The hotel part will soon be torn down. Workers are already preparing the site.

Located at the rear of the hotel and on the back elevated terrace are more slabs and sculpture and figures. These are being carefully removed before the hotel comes down. Cradles and scaffolding and chain hoists are being set in place for the salvage effort. I was told that eventually the pieces will be transferred to other places within the garden area. I hope they take great care in this endeavor because I'm in love with a number of the female figures that have long stood here, whom I have come to term 'the graces'. I call them that because they have inspired me on numerous occasions to come look at them and to photograph them (which I have done fairly extensively, and printed their images as well). There are six of these figures altogether, life sized, in three main groupings, each group having two of the women on a panel. They are basically crests. The actual names on these crests are Industry, Intelligence and Agriculture. I've seen similar crests in other places, often adorning public buildings (and not just limited to this province, Ontario. I've seen similar figures, but not so detailed, in places like Victoria, British Columbia).

To back up the story a little bit I wanted to say that sometimes there are events which occur that just seem meant to be. Everybody has had them. Whether you think of these times as chance or happenstance, they are, to steal the term, 'meaningful coincidences'. They happen, you derive (and I think it has to be special) meaning from the event. I don't think that they are what was originally intended by the word 'synchronistic', but that does give the flavour of what I'm attempting to convey. In this case there was a string of ordinary events that led up to a special payoff.

The first event, outside of the daily routine, was a telephone call from a long time friend, one that I don't see very much anymore. His name is Walter. It was his suggestion to get together and to go out and revisit the place I had taken him to the last time we got together a month or more earlier. Guess where? This time he would bring his camera gear. And he has nice camera gear. Walter is a representative for a major photographic software company who has published books on it's use and gives seminars across Canada, Europe and the United States.

If it weren't for Walter's urge or whatever to call and to go to the Guild site we might never have seen the 'girls' in situ again.

We spent quite a bit of time photographing around the hotel. I was actually kind of surprised that Walter and I didn't get kicked out of there, where the workmen were constructing the scaffolding and doing other getting ready type of work. Sometimes I think it's an advantage being friendly and up front. We strolled in as if we owned the place, I think we even asked the worker we met if it was okay to be there and he said yes. So we set down our camera bags and started photographing.

An additional benefit of all this attention on the figures was that workmen had cleared the vines and weeds that had grown in and around the figures, and although the growth was one of the charms of the setting for me, particularly the vines, it did have it's benefits. This was the first time that I had seen the entire sets of figures without overgrowth. One set was still in shade from a sumac growing close by but you have to take what you can get sometimes.

In another pleasing coincidence we also happened to meet the woman in charge of the salvage project, named Sandra I believe, who works for the City of Toronto. When the initial introductions were being made she asked if we were professional photographers. I said that I was just the talented amateur and Walter was the professional.Walter and her ended up exchanging cards, I exchanged hello's. It was from her that we learned what was happening.

Sandra is the one who told us that the hotel part of the Guild (at least) is being demolished. Even she was not sure of the fate of the original Guild Inn. I hope the ladies, my graces, don't suffer from the experience of being relocated.

Before deciding to head for home Walter and I also walked and photographed the rest of the garden grounds as well. Back in the old days, before digital photographic technology, I used to take photographs using infrared film. I'm just in the process of checking out how to do something similar with my digital camera and used this occasion to try. I took one archway, which I thought might be a good subject, and ran a test. The results that came about were pretty nice. The exposure was something like f56 at 10 seconds.
Nice day all around.

More on me

Although I actually have a degree in photography, in something called instructional media, I am not employed in that field, although I have been in past incarnations, as an optical camera operator, lab technician, product photographer, all that good kind of stuff. And then much of that world went digital and I had to find different work to pay the bills. I went driving. I've been on the go ever since. I've been a taxi driver, transit bus driver, and now a Greyhound coach operator (fancy title, eh?) in Toronto, Ontario for the past five years. (Somebody once told me that Toronto is the fourth busiest terminal for Greyhound in North America. Somebody else once told me that 84% of statistics that are used in conversation are made up on the spot, and believed to be true only about 68% of the time. You can make up your own mind on that. I just know that it can really be busy.)

I still like to take pictures and I still consider myself an amateur, in the original sense of the word, a lover of photography. I've gone digital with the age, kicking and screaming only a little because I've found the new technology keeps me out of the dark. Just now I'm experimenting, as you'll read elsewhere, on infrared photography. Really, this is new stuff to me and I'm quite excited about it. Hopefully I'll have images that I can show you later on. I have two main cameras, one, which travels with me most of the time, is a Canon PowerShot S50. and the other is a Nikon DX80.

On the music side of things, I'm currently playing through all the tunes I have on the computer, playing them alphabetically from the master list, usually while I'm working on things like this, or cooking, or petting the cat, picking my nos... alright a fair bit of time. According to iTunes (I have both an ibook and an iMac, I used to be a Windows guy but I got better) if I were to just let the music play, 'All Day and All of the Night', it would only take me 20.9 days to go through it. I'm sorry, man, I have to at least have time for breaks. It's going to take somewhat longer than that, okay?

So life does interfere a bit with the 'play' project. I've been doing this for a while now, a couple of weeks probably, in fits and starts, and I'm still in the b's. I heard 'Bat Out Of Hell' a little while ago, also 'The Battle of Epping Forest'. Thomas Dolby is currently on. I have a very eclectic mix when listened this way. Hell, I have stuff that I don't even know I have. Some tunes are real surprises. I heard, oh probably an hour ago, a song from The Alligator Records 25th Anniversary Collection by a person named Kenny Neal and the song was 'Bayou Blood'. Very nice (and actually a very nice surprise as well because I happen to have a soft spot in my heart and a great fascination for N'Awlinz. I will even admit to having visited it and getting Bourboned on Drunk Street with my good friend Sid).

I used to be a musician, many years ago. I played the bass guitar in rock bands, I played in show bands. I had, at one time, a black tuxedo jumpsuit and wore ruffled shirts, accented with either the white or the black patent leather boots. Our choreography usually started with left foot on one, and I don't know how many times I played 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon'. On the plus side, the more rocky one, I also played King Crimson, Gentle Giant, and more popular bands like ZZ Top and Supertramp. But that was years ago as I said and I'm afraid much of my playing has gone to rust. I still play on keyboards occasionally and have started fooling around on my fretless Fender Jazz Bass, which I bought originally in 1969, don't ask me why I remember that.

I'm also trying to learn how to write properly and how to tell a story. I'll share some with you within this blog.

I'd also like to give acknowledgment to my friend Sid, the very talented individual who took the photo of me above, and ask you to check out his blog at http://theinfiniterevolution.blogspot.com. He'll put the tea on if you plan to stay a while.

This is actually my second foray into the land of blog. Effort the first was done for my brother and friend Ralph. If you're interested in that you might wish to check out the Campbell Brother's Winery blog at http://campbellbrothers.blogspot.com.

So this is me, get used to it.

In the beginning...

I've been meaning to start working on a personal blog for a while now. This is the initial effort to spike those finicky boundary marker stakes around that claim, to reserve that little bit of cyber space I need. What I'm planning to do is to use this space as a a soapbox, a platform to talk out loud about a number of subjects. There will be running discussions on music (sitting ones too if I want to get into more depth), commentary on culture and the media, and other ideas I've had mulling in wine for a while. You may also see a picture or two, and there will still be enough room, I'm sure, to throw in anything else that might come to mind.

Good deal?

A first thing to cover: Where does this Doctor Underscore Cloin thing come from?

Many years ago, if 30 or so years can be thought of as many, I had (and still have) a good friend by the name of Walter. Now this particular individual has always been a wild and crazy kind of guy in my mind, a good guy mind you, and in many ways a like mind. Walter has, how shall we say, a way with words and it was he who originally called me Doctor Cloin (which is, of course, the honorific of the spelling of my first name 'done sideways' as I like to think of it). He once explained something to the effect that he got the idea because he thought of me as a doctor of philosophy or something.

It was him officer. He was the first guy who called me that.

And, like gum on the sole of a shoe, it stuck.

And for inquiring minds that want to know this kind of thing, the photograph of me was taken by that nice plastic fellow, my bestest friend (and a heck of a good photographer in his own right), Sid Plested.