here is this week's blog post - Bill
Wild Bill Ketelhut provides the "blog" to this anti-blog
He has a radio program on WXOU out of Oakland University
Wild At Heart
Hi everyone!! I’m back in town from my vacation and looking forward to some upcoming shows, but first, let’s talk about my trip. I am from upstate New York in a little town called Spencerport. In a nutshell, the town was founded in 1804 when Daniel Spencer bought a farm about 1½ miles north of Ogden Center. When the Erie Canal opened, the farm was sold to become the first village lots. As a port on the canal, the area was called Spencer's Basin and later changed to Spencerport. That is about it though it has one of the best used bookstores I have ever been to (this is where my addiction to comic books and sci-fi came from). Besides me, other notable people from Spencerport include Alan Zemaitis (Penn St and later Tampa Bay NFL cornerback), MAD magazine writer Andrew Jost, musician John Viavattine, skier AJ Kitt and serial killer Arthur John Shawcross (aka The Genesee River Killer) who is of no relation. That is all there really is to say about my home town which I loved growing up in. I can mention that it is about a 15 minute drive to downtown Rochester and that by living in Pontiac, I am still about a 15 minute drive to a downtown Rochester.
It is always great visiting the parents because 1) I love them, 2) they buy me clothes (I always like shopping with someone who can get me motivated to buy and convince not to buy certain things) and 3) my mom is a great cook. I also like the area because 1) it has 4 really great record stores (my college buddy Rob manages the wonderful Bop Shop and I am starting to play his KISS influenced band “The Veins” on my radio show – Mon & Thurs 8-10AM on http://www.wxou.org/ ), 2) some really great used bookstores and novelty shops and 3) The Rochester Amerks, my favorite hockey team though they were recently bought by Florida and are no longer part of the Buffalo Sabres farm team. I also got to go to one of my parents old dating haunts. It started off as a place for kids of German decent to hang out and you actually had to have a key to get in. Nowadays, it is a sports bar and concert venue and I was lucky enough to catch Nick Lowe in concert who played a wonderful set of old hits including a Rockpile song and a few new cuts off his new album, At My Age. Greg Townsend, lead singer of the Rochester based Hi-Risers, opened the show in spectacular fashion which a bunch of catchy and funny pop tunes.
I also took the opportunity to check out the refurbished George Eastman museum. The house has been there for awhile and for those not familiar, he founded the Eastman Kodak Company (where my dad retired from) and invented roll film, which helped bring photography to the mainstream. He also helped found the Eastman School of Music and establish MIT. The museum has a couple of nice exhibits if you get out that way in the near future. The exhibits include the mixed media work of John Wood, the railroad photography of O Wilson Link and a wonderful collection of historic and unique cameras. Go to www.eastmanhouse.org for more information.
Lastly, we took a nice tour of the fall foliage of the Naples area and picked up some grape pies (a local delicacy which brings people from as far as Buffalo to pick them up) and took in the Balloon Manor (a haunted house which is up this week at Greece Town Mall that is made up entirely by balloons). You can go to www.balloonmanor.com for more information and see some of the neat images. Larry Moss is from the Rochester area and also holds the Guinness World Record for the largest non-round balloon sculpture and the creation of the “Fantastic Flying Octopus” a large balloon sculpture piloted by John Ninomiya.
Getting across the border was a mixed bag this trip. I had half hour delays crossing on the way home at both Windsor and NY, though I crossed in 5 minutes at NY on the way back. I stopped to eat lunch at a park next to the Canada Marine Discovery Centre which I also walked through. This is a nice place for kids where they can pilot a ship near Niagara Falls, learn about conservation and various historical facts about the area. The have a small art gallery, some live fish from the lakes and a few historical artifacts of interest. You can also walk around the dock outside and during good weather, you can tour the warship HMCS Haida, a Canadian destroyer which saw service from 1943-63. After a beautiful day, I ended it up getting stuck at the border for one hour and 45 minutes which made me late for the Mates Of State show at the Magic Stick. It was a good show but I was a little upset at missing the opening band, the Javelins. Oh well, things happen!
This week has a number of good shows. The tail end of the week will have me at the Flobots/Matisyahu @ the Fillmore on the 23rd, David Byrne on the 24th @ Michigan Theatre and Metro Station on the 25th @ Clutch Cargos. After the Byrne show, I would have seen every member of the Talking Heads perform so if they could just bury the hatchet and reunite, I would be very happy.
I am also looking forward to seeing the opera ‘Margaret Garner’ which still has shows on Wed, Fri and Sat. The opera is loosely based on the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner originally premièred on May 7, 2005 in Detroit. Margaret Garner was an enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil War America who was notorious - or celebrated - for killing her own daughter rather than to see the child returned to slavery. Actor Jeff MacMullen, who plays one of the judges, admits the opera takes some liberties on her story, but this makes it even more poignant to today’s audiences. This opera really takes a hard look at what it means to be a slave and the actions of what people would do to free themselves from those bonds. I will be seeing this on Wed and will put a review on www.myspace.com/wildatheart_13 after I see the opera. Her story was also popularized by Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved” (and the following movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover).
For next week, look for info about Avenue Q (coming soon to the Fisher Theatre), the Henry Ford exhibit “Out Of This World” and a theatrical version of “A Nightmare On Elm Street”.
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