Twenty three years ago I started a blog, Art of BG Noise, to showcase the collection of local rock and punk flyers I'd amassed from my involvement in the local Crystal City music scene. That blog folded relatively quickly but I've decided to re-up the old posts, to document the ephemera produced by the small, unheralded, but vibrant community of underground musicians and fellow travelers. Their stories are important. They created the moments in which we once lived.  This was Art of BG Noise's first uploaded flyer, and now this blog's too, a nice hand-drawn invite to see Hezekia Storm (yes, the flyer is misspelled) open for Mindpower--or was it the other way around?--on Saturday  May 23, 1992 at Good Tymes Pub.  Hezekia Storm were a Lima, Ohio metal band (Michelle Lee on vocals and Richard "Storm" Spradlin on guitar). Mindpower was one of the many side projects of Scott Cramer who occupied a unique musical niche in the Crystal City in the late-'80s and earl...

Speaking of love, my dad died two years ago today.  He was 91. Cloth cap dilettante born into corridors of class and circumstance, working life—draftee, decorator, copper , courier—half-disguised secret dream self—poet, memoirist, local historian, cricket lover, hillwalker, herpetologist, hankerer after high, wild places. . . . He'd fallen at home a couple of weeks before but, in the way these things often seem to go, he’d rallied and was doing better. The end, when it came, was quick. He was holding my mother's hand and died on his own bed, in his own house, on his own terms. Change was a horror. “Time is the enemy” he once wrote. “It plucks you back when you would run; it hurries you when you would pause to reflect.” I remember the family joke about Time's great black oxen, their galloping hooves trampling all before them. We laughed then, but we knew all along that those oxen are real. And now he's two years gone.  On my last trip back, in 2019, we talked about Edwar...

Sunspots August, 1988: The intersection of Wooster and Prospect Streets, Crystal City, Ohio. Hot and humid. A lanky white boy in a black leather jacket and Beatle boots is feeling the heat as he walks downtown. He's taking in the sights and the whole crazy adventure of America, a place imagined through the fictions of Jack Kerouac, Jim Rockford, Theo Kojak, wide eyed with possibilities only imagined back there in the narrow grey valleys of Yorkshire. Now here he is in Crystal City, USA, and the sky is wide and bright--there are stop signs!--and despite his studied nonchalance he feels a lot conspicuous, a lot out of place.  He sweats his way across the incandescent intersection in his heavy black jacket and pointy boots. Suddenly there's a forest green 1968 Ford Fairlane, heading South on Prospect, and a ruddy face, topped by a disheveled mop of blond hair, framed in the glassless square of the open car window.  "Are you a drummer?" the face asks.  "No, I'm n...

  "Today , we've got an easter egg hunt for orphans and then visits to the State mental institute - We're kept real busy!  30 hr. drive home - blah!     Love, Jane"

  On Thanksgiving Day last year, I drove the full length of Devil's  Hole Road to see what I could find.  In truth I was looking for the Hole, or at least evidence that some sort of a portal once existed in this part of the otherwise unremarkably flat and vacant landscape. But I couldn't find it. I'm still not fully attuned to the voices of the landscape. Sometimes they whisper in a tongue that's unintelligible. Other times all I hear is the traffic.  What I did find is a place in which all context and interrelationship has been stripped away. Open  fields  flat as the sea , cloudscapes, all motion stilled and far off.   A swamp drained and denatured and that exists largely in name only. A past that's as muted as the colors of a late afternoon in late November. If there are clues about the Hole in this topography, they are gridded to almost nothing. Roads slice straight through bioregions and habitats, cutting through the sinews and tendons of the land...

I drive  northwest from the Crystal City,  out past the pet resort,  on the road General Hull hacked through the swamp to the Maumee Rapids two hundred years ago. Nowadays the road flees arrow straight through dry corn fields, a chalk sky as still as the landscape itself, vanishing to a horizon punctuated by the spidery fingers of cell towers and pylons. Dark copses of trees and blank houses wait for winter.   I am looking for the Devil’s Hole. I’ve heard the name for years and often wondered. What is it? Where is it? Who first called it the Devil’s Hole and why? Is it an actual place or a figment of some unknown author’s imagination, a story written now in the wind and the silences? All I know is that I heard somewhere that the county highway department has stopped worrying about the disappearing road signs—college kids looking for dorm decorations most likely. Best surrender to the invisible.   Other than this, my knowledge is as two-dimensional as the map on ...

  Welcome to Tales From the Crystal City.   It’s a nickname that was bestowed on the town in which I live sometime in the 1880s, not long after the discovery of natural gas reserves led the city fathers to offer it up free to those who wanted to do business here. The place thrived and by the end of the decade, the east side of town was home to several glass companies with names like Canastota, Lythgoe, and (of course) Crystal City [ 1 ].   All too soon, the natural gas ran out, and the Crystal City’s burgeoning glass industry was consigned to a footnote in local history. But the name remains, as a sort of ghostly reminder of a place and time that lives on in the stories that pile up dream deep, sedimented like the wetland mud and glacial clay that lies beneath the parking lot blacktop.   I’ve come to think of the Crystal City as a sort of invisible landscape [2], a spectral twin mapped on top of the present day town, an unseen topography of magic and dread , longing ...