Shandaken satire

By Julia Reischel
9/7/10 - 9:25 am

UPDATED 9:40am: I've been punked. Update below. 

I've been quietly following the satirical stylings of anonymous Shandaken blogger Helena Handbasket (er, that's a pseudonym) for months now. Her blog, All That is Wrong With Shandaken, is a sort of local Onion, with more profanity. (Helena seems to be part of a cohort of disgruntled Shandaken residents who vent their gripes about the town online. Shandaken Truth, a blog penned by someone named Fluffy Ghostbuster, is along the same lines, but angrier and more prone to personal attacks.)

Helena has a way with words, but also tends to have a hard, nasty edge that curdles a lot of her satire. I've been waiting for her to find the right mix of funny to caustic in one of her posts, and was rewarded last week with a Jonathan Swiftian news story about the town's residents all fleeing at once:

Three Thousand Shandakites Suddenly Realize Shandaken A Horrible Place To Live

'We're Getting The Hell Out Of This Sewer,' Entire Populace Reports

SHANDAKEN—At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of the Town of Shandaken decided to evacuate the famed vacation land, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, tree-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.

The trees, it seems, are making people crazy -- as are the lack of cell phone service and of a sewer:

Other incidents that prompted citizens to pick up and leave included the sight of flower barrels on the sidewalk; the realization that being alone among hundreds of anonymous people is actually quite horrifying; the constant bickering over who should pay for the sewer; the plethora of flags on the telephone poles and grave sites; sunburned tubers leaving actual crap in the Esopus; muddy, leaf-filled puddles that have inexplicably not dried in three years ... and all the goddamn trees.

But worry not -- Shandaken has a future:

By Tuesday night, Shandaken was completely abandoned. At press time, however, some six thousand Woodstock residents, tired of their self-centered, laid-back culture and lack of distinct reason, and yearning for a town with no cell service, had already begun repopulating Shandaken.

UPDATED 9:40am: The reason why this particular All That is Wrong With Shandaken post was notably good was because it was plagiarized almost word-for-word from an Onion article about New York City, also published last week. Helena did add a little local flair by substituting local Shandaken regionalisms for some NYC details, but that's her only contribution. So much for a promising local satire scene. 

  Read more

ATP Day 3: This time with more fog

By Barry Thompson
9/6/10 - 11:54 pm

Barry Thompson, a Boston-based music writer, has been filing dispatches from the music festival All Tomorrow's Parties throughout the weekend. Above, the band whose name the New York Times refuses to print plays "Twice Born." (Warning: We printed it, and several other expletives, below. Seeing as we're not the New York Times.)

I probably shouldn’t have likened Liberty to a shantytown a while back -- no Depression-era slums would have a Taco Bell, a Subway, and a Burger King conveniently located on the main drag. Nor would there be a coffee shop called “The Zombean,” which is totally where I would’ve had breakfast yesterday, except that it doesn’t open until noon. Is this not a questionable business practice? Don’t people usually buy lots of coffee in the morning?  Read more

Mohonk gatehouse goes boom

By Lissa Harris
9/6/10 - 3:48 pm

As if we hadn't had enough mysterious propane leaks around here lately: In the wee hours of Saturday, in the middle of a sold-out Labor Day weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, the hotel's gatehouse blew up. It's a miracle nobody was hurt, the Freeman reports:

“Fortunately, no one was injured in the incident,” said Jackie Appeldorn, general manager, on Sunday evening. “The staff has just been great. And, the woman who was on duty last night reported for work today.“

Appeldorn said it’s been determined that a gas leak from a propane tank led to the explosion shortly after midnight on Saturday. “We’re just not sure what ignited it,” she said.

The Poughkeepsie Journal says hiking on the grounds is suspended until sometime in the middle of the week.

And now, for something completely different:  Read more

ATP Day 2: Dance party at 4pm, anyone?

By Barry Thompson
9/5/10 - 10:18 pm

Barry Thompson, a Boston-based music writer, is filing dispatches from the music festival All Tomorrow's Parties throughout the weekend. It's totally not his fault all the bands here have F-bombs in their names. Above, Shellac performing at Kutsher's yesterday.

I need to rethink my strategy, here.

It’s kind of hard to report on how locals deal with all the kooky rock ‘n roller ATP people if I keep leaving my motel at 1 p.m. and vacating Kutsher's at 2 a.m. The people who booked a room at Kutsher's itself could conceivably spend their entire three days here without leaving the premises. The main bit of local color I picked up on Saturday is that Kutsher’s internet capacity can’t handle 200 people all trying to check their Facebooks at once. 

With notable exceptions, Saturday’s acts mostly fell under the modern/experimental umbrella, which is a very wide umbrella, and comes in handy should it ever happen to rain boredom instead of water.  Read more

All Tomorrow's Parties: Day 1

By Barry Thompson
9/4/10 - 10:20 pm

Barry Thompson is a damn flatlander and a music writer from Boston. He shot this video of Iggy and the Stooges performing “Shake Appeal” at Kutsher's yesterday. He'll be filing dispatches from the music festival All Tomorrow's Parties throughout the weekend.

Blame it on my coddled, urbanized realm of experience, but Liberty looks a shantytown. I had a hard time imagining that a few miles away from this anywhere-America setting for a Stephen King novel, Iggy and the Stooges would be performing later in the evening.

Several neighborhood school buses have been enlisted to shuttle the ATP crowd from their hotels to Kutsher's Country Club and back. During my first ride over, the driver was obviously contending with a personal crisis. The fuzz, she told me, had just nabbed her son with a negligible quantity of marijuana. Aside from that ordeal, she’s happy to help ensure the ATP goers’ safety, and described the sudden influx of out-of-town weirdos as a “down to earth” and “respectable“ bunch. Though unfamiliar with any of the bands playing this weekend, she cites Led Zep, the Stones, Hendrix, and Kraftwerk as personal faves. Which is sort of like somebody saying, “My favorite foods are cake, candy, milkshakes, and celery.”

After a gruff but helpful security dude directed me to the press check-in at Kutsher's, Mudhoney blew my face completely off my skull. During the half hour I needed to put my face-meats back in proper order, I settled in to partake of some excellent people-watching. This Catskills country club was crawling with every variety of 20- to 40-something-year-old archetype one could expect to see at a rock concert. It was clear from the crowd that ATP mixes up bands that were trendy 20 years ago with bands that became trendy within the last five.

We're all here for the music, but there's plenty more to do besides watch live bands. Kutsher’s indoor pool and arcade were open for business, and there was also some unsubstantiated talk of “luxury showers” for anyone who didn’t feel like cleaning off at their motels. Delightfully bizarre painted portraits by Tim Biskup and Eric White attracted curiosity from several.

I gave up trying to reassemble my face once I realized that the Stooges were just going to melt it off again anyway. As they plowed through their classic Raw Power and a couple of songs from Fun House, it was pretty remarkable seeing a 157-year-old vampire shadow box, spastically slither, almost knock an amp over, entice a quarter of the room to dance on stage, and bound in and out of the crowd with more uproarious fury than most people half his age could possibly conjure.  Read more

Rock of ages: A (380-million-year-old) tree grows in Gilboa

By Simona David
9/3/10 - 5:27 pm

Kristen Wyckoff, the chair of the Gilboa Museum, stands next to one of Gilboa's prehistoric tree stumps. Photo by Simona David.

In the 1850s, a Gilboa minister named Samuel Lockwood, an amateur naturalist, found a sandstone cast of an ancient tree trunk in the Schoharie Creek. It was the first clue in a mystery that would not be solved for over 150 years.

Over the next century and a half, many more fossil tree stumps were found, dating back to the Devonian period, some 380 million years ago. Gilboa became known to scientists around the world for its “fossil forest.” But what did this prehistoric forest look like? With only the stumps preserved in stone, scientists could only guess.  Read more

Brawl brewing between Greene County and governor

By Julia Reischel
9/3/10 - 10:19 am

Governor David Paterson made good on his promise to appoint a new treasurer in Greene County yesterday, thereby overriding the treasurer that the Greene County legislature picked in July. The Daily Mail reports that both Paterson and county officials are preparing for a fight over whose treasurer gets to stay:

County Attorney Carol Stevens said Thursday that she intends to inform [state officials] Friday morning that the county does not recognize the New York State County Law that gives the Governor the authority to make the appointment trumps the county law that leaves that power to the county.

For his part, Paterson has sent the county a strongly-worded letter about his choice:   Read more

This weekend: Painting dogs, olde-timey fun, wooden bobcats, and local farms

By Julia Reischel
9/2/10 - 2:28 pm

Guess who painted this? Hint: She's not human.

The excrutiatingly fabulous among us already know what they're doing this weekend: they're attending All Tomorrow's Parties, the hipsterrific music festival at Kutsher's in Monticello this weekend. We've sent a correspondent, Barry Thompson, to tell us what happens when the cavalcade of flatlanders invades Sullivan County, so stay tuned for his dispatches.

For the rest of us, there's plenty to do this Labor Day weekend that doesn't involve Iggy Pop:

Tillamook Cheddar Gallery Opening

What's trippier than three dozen indie bands stuffed into a Borscht Belt hotel? Try watching a Jack Russell Terrier paint. Tillamook Cheddar is an 11-year-old dog from Brooklyn (where else?), who vents her artistic impulses on vellum-coated paper. She'll be demonstrating her painting technique live at a Kingston art gallery that is -- oh yes -- showing her work. The scenesters in Monticello won't know what they're missing.

5pm to 8pm Saturday, One Mile Gallery, Kingston, Ulster County.

Turn of the Century Day

1898 was a very good year. It saw the Spanish-American War, the creation of the five boroughs of New York City, the Dreyfus Affair, the annexation of Hawaii, and the invention of the meat-slicer. Bone up -- you'll need to know this kind of thing to pass convincingly as an upstanding citizen in Roxbury this Saturday. (A nicely-fitting corset would help, too.) Olde-timey treats galore are promised, including gigantic lollipops, roving acrobats, snake-oil salesmen, stilt-walkers, and a child's tea party to which teddy bears and dolls are cordially invited.

10am to dusk Saturday, Roxbury, Delaware County.

Catamount People's Museum Opening Celebration

It's unlikely that you've ever been to a museum ensconsed in the heart of a wooden bobcat. The bizarre and altogether intriguing art-project-cum-folklore-project has been rising on Bridge St. in the town of Catskill all summer, and this Saturday it's finally open to the public. 

Noon to 6pm Saturday, 21 West Bridge St., Catskill, Greene County.

Bovina Farm Day

Of course there's a Farm Day. What do you expect from a town named "Bovina?" Hay rides, history lessons, and lots of luscious local produce await you in bucolic Bovina this Sunday, as the town transforms itself into a horn of plenty celebrating Catskills bounty.

10am to 5pm Sunday, Bovina, Delaware County.

There's lots more to do in the Catskills this weekend. For more fun times, check out our calendar.

All Tomorrow's Parties rocks the Catskills this weekend

By Lissa Harris
9/2/10 - 12:26 pm

If you're one of the 2,000-odd partygoers headed for Kutsher's this weekend, we salute you. And if not, you had surely better have a good excuse. Indie music festival All Tomorrow's Parties, now in its third year, will be taking over the Monticello country club tomorrow through Sunday.

For music and pop-culture geeks of a certain persuasion, it's the high point of the year, a Cupid's arrow aimed straight at the heart of a small but ecstatically devoted demographic. And even if you're not, say, an experimental-synth-folk fetishist, we defy you not to enjoy the surreal experience of rubbing elbows with half the bands ever recorded by Steve Albini in the resort that inspired "Dirty Dancing." ATP is to moldering Borscht Belt grandeur as Woodstock is to mud.  Read more

Baby monitor company sued for racketeering

By Julia Reischel
9/2/10 - 11:25 am

Two companies that sell baby monitors are duking it out in court over the kinds of allegations usually associated with mobsters. Bainbridge-based BabySafe USA has been suing Pennsylvania-based Babysense in Chenango County court for months, charging that Babysense stole a shipment of 2,800 baby monitors and sold them off, thereby driving BabySafe out of business.  Read more