Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Karen: Tim: European Man of Mystery

This may sound weird, but for awhile, I really thought Tim was from a foreign country. We met one night on the sidewalk outside of the Reynolds Club. I don’t remember who else was there that night. But I was keenly aware of Tim because it was like the moon decided to take the night off, descend on Chicago, and take on the human form of a U of C student. Only, he didn’t look like a typical U of C student--he was more like what a U of C student fantasizes about looking like: an elf from Lord of the Rings. He was not only very handsome, but he had an ethereal quality to him. His eyes, his smile, his laugh--everything about him was luminous. It felt good to be near him.


That night, in the midst of this daydreamy haze, I somehow got the notion that Tim had an accent. I don’t know if it was his cadence or the words he used or what--but my mind made another irrational leap and I started imagining that he was a European man of mystery. He kind of reminded me of this tall, blonde, impeccable Finnish exchange student I had known in seventh grade. When Tim said he liked Norwegian black metal, it was like an A-ha! moment where the pieces fall into place.


I don’t remember how long I believed in this delusion of mine. Days, possibly a few weeks. I do remember having dinner with him months later and talking about our respective childhoods. When he told me about growing up in Connecticut, I told him about my initial confusion over his origins. He laughed his great Tim laugh and was pretty amused by it all.


While my initial impression was that he was worldly-wise, I gradually got to know that he was in fact down to earth. He was so unabashedly inquisitive about the world around him--we had many conversations about music, friends, art, books, ethics (he loved that “Ethicist“ column in the NY Times). We laughed and had fun. Once, we sneaked him into the Empty Bottle using Sam Leimer’s ID--they so did not resemble each other, but the doorperson paid no mind. Perfect, because where there was music, there was Tim.


I have many good memories of Tim, but one stands out because it shows how thoughtful and kind he was towards me. It was winter and I had come down with the flu. I felt so crummy that I couldn’t even get out of bed. I was pretty useless--who wants to hang out with a sick person? You can’t talk without coughing, can hardly laugh or move because your whole body hurts, and you look your worst. Well, who should come over but Tim. And he was just there, to be close by and hold my hand. And despite the flu and winter and everything that was wrong with anything--despite all that, I felt so happy that day. So when I think of Tim now, I like to remember quiet times like these, where it was just us hanging out and enjoying the moment for what it was.

Pictures from Jenni

Tim:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drawingwithcrayons/sets/72157604136719175/

From the memorial in Chicago:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drawingwithcrayons/sets/72157604132249400/

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Young Tim's Service Work

By Mike McPadden
SUNY Purchase
Class of 1990 (except I failed out in 1988)

When I met Tim Aher in 2004 I was, in fact, not "meeting" him at all. I'd known him – off and on, granted – for the previous 17 years.

In 1987, I was a freshman film student at SUNY Purchase. The transition, for me, from a strictly regimented Jesuit boys academy to wild-and-free art-shool bohemia was no easy thing.

In fact, I could not have been more out of my element.

One issue was that I had never spent so much time around people my own age. And I was learning, the hard way, that they were creeps – and not in a manner I could relate to.

Who I could relate to were preschoolers. I was the oldest of 15 grandchildren, at least half of whom converged upon their grandmother's house for dinner at least once a week.

So when I was attempting to fill a required science credit, I stumbled onto a child psychology course that involved working with children. I took it. It wasn't like the teenage girls were talking to me anyway.

Among the three and four-year-olds I worked with was young Timothy Aher. And I actually did remember him, for years, as a sweet little guy who, on occasion, had to be reminded to keep his hands to himself.

Now lest anyone imagine Tim was a bruiser as a toddler, let me shatter your dreams – his two best friends were a pair of twins named Phillip and Sara. Tim was very taken with Sara's shiny red hair and he liked to sort of "pet" it.

Sara, darling though she was, sometimes needed to not have fingers stroking her head, and she'd let me know. Thus was born the sternest phrase I would ever muster during my tenure at the SUNY Purchase Children's Center: "Hey, Tim, let's use our words! Let's TELL Sara how pretty her hair is!"

Sometimes Tim respected my suggestion, sometimes he just took off to keep company with someone in the classroom less dorky than the guy with fluorescent orange hair and a Monkees t-shirt. And, yes, that would have been absolutely anyone else in the classroom.

But what Tim didn't realize – and that I hadn't realized until having this horrible reason for reflection – is how deeply Tim and his pre-kindergarten classmates had helped me during what would prove to be a very troubled time in my life.

I like to make wisecracks about being a misfit and unhappy in college but my depression was, in fact, deadly serious. My time, then, at the Children's Center provided me with hope, with a purpose, with a connection to the world I'd left behind in Brooklyn, and the suggestion that an even better world might be possible.

Years later – when Tim was an adult friend of my (technically) adult friend Brian Collins – I mentioned attending SUNY Purchase and Tim mentioned the Children's Center. I knew who he was immediately. We joked, from then on, about my bad influence on him. It never occurred to me to thank Tim for the good influence he had been on me.

So I'll do that now.

Tim – thank you. You have held a special place in my memory and my heart for all these years, and I want you to know that you always will.

Chris Sienko: totally shocking, perplexing, and wonderful

I didn't know Tim as well as many of you, but I liked and respected him a great deal. He engaged in every activity with complete dedication and passion. He loved the things he loved - music, art, politics, culture, metal - wholeheartedly. He organized the Festival of Marginalized Subgenres, a precedent-shattering day-long festival, without really any fear or worry about how monumental the task would be - people still speak in awed tones about it to this day. Everything I know about him involves him jumping head-long into the things he loves the most - starting bands, making albums, organizing festivals, studying, engaging in causes near to his heart - without the usual dissipation of enthusiasm that comes to so many others after the first wave of novelty has worn off. He engaged in these pursuits not in a pedantic or militant way, but in the voice of a person perpetually discovering new beauty in the world, each event totally shocking, perplexing, and wonderful. Those are the things I think about…

I was home sick the other day, and was channel surfing in bed, when I came upon this public access show in which this enthusiastic blonde woman was interviewing a member of operating black metal group OPETH, a band that I believe was close to Tim's heart. My first thought was not "I wish Tim was here to see this," but "I can't wait to tell Tim about this." Because we didn't spend a lot of face-to-face time together, I still think of things in terms of having to store up things that happened to tell him about later. I'm still holding out hope that there will be a later.

Jeff Sousa: Words for Tim

For my first year at the University of Chicago, Tim was like family. We lived together on the top floor of Snell, and - together with Jon Cowperthwait - we tended to do everything as a unit. We migrated from dorm room to dorm room, staying up to make sense of the Marx-Engels reader or to brag about O-Week conquests. Consequently, my memories of Tim don't take the form of character-defining moments. I remember him as a fixture. At Woodward or BJ, he was a brother at the table.
That said, there are images and sound bytes of Tim that have stayed with me. Rather than editorialize and try to present a specific view of Tim, I'd like to simply let them stand as fragments of the quirk and undying warmth he has impressed upon us.

Shortly after O-Week, Tim kept talking up the band Tortoise. I was ignorant of them at the time. He bought us tickets to go see their show at the Metro. As soon as we got there we were turned away at the door - the show was twenty-one plus. So, we ended up spending the evening at a neighboring McDonald's, trying to make sense of the Midwestern-ness around us (we are both from New England). Seven years later I finally downloaded Tortoise on iTunes. They're now one of my favorite bands. Every time I listen I'm reminded not just of Tim's sophisticated and precocious musical taste, but also of our "soda" vs. "pop" anthropological bullshit session at McDonald's.

Tim and I had a "dude" heart-to-heart about my situation with a girl who…well…would not put out. Tim was shocked and immediately offered his sympathies, appropriating Plato's concepts of "the forms" and "excellence" to champion pre-marital sex. "We have the equipment. I mean, yeah. Heh. We oughtta use it." After our chat he wandered back into his dorm room and sat down to finish his paper on Plato.

Mostly I remember Tim on Easter morning of our first year. Tim didn't have a tie so I lent him one of mine. I also showed him how to tie it. We primped ourselves in the hallway of the dormitory under the fluorescent light, and then the three of us went to mass - a family.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Jonathan Edward Cowperthwaite: I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants

In his first year at the College, Tim's rock-format radio shows on WHPK were 2–4 a.m. at one point, and 4–6 at another. The best way of making sure he'd be awake for these was just staying up — and keeping me up with him. We were the guys who annoyed everyone else at 3:30 in the morning by talking too loudly at the picnic table outside Hitchcock Hall while he rolled cigarettes.

Over the course of a few months of these late nights, at first Tim would leave a mug in my room, then maybe a sweatshirt and shoes, then all of his books (he was going to be studying in my room anyway…). By the middle of the year he'd effectively moved in. I went out of town one weekend in Winter Quarter and returned to find a note from our resident assistant: she'd used her keys to let Tim into the room because he couldn't function without everything he'd left inside it. He was annoyed and slightly surprised that I'd be so inconsiderate as to lock him out of our room.

I have a vivid memory of a photograph from that spring: it's of Tim wearing just boxer shorts, seated in my armchair, reading a Playboy. I snapped it one afternoon upon returning from class to find him there, in what was a pretty common sight. Tim would rise mid-day, wrap himself in his duvet, lumber across the hall to my room, and set up camp. He was unsheepish about answering my phone and taking messages for me, loaning my books out to others in our hall, and, well, not bothering to get dressed. He'd made himself at home.

I share this not to make fun of Tim — at least not exclusively… — but to try to assign a perspective to my sense of loss upon hearing of his death:

We hadn't stayed in close contact after we left the dorms, although I dutifully attended a few of his shows, and was, as he predicted in that Reader interview with Liz Armstrong, bewildered and displeased when he asked me to participate in a noise-music panel at his Festival of Marginalized Subgenres. We did a pretty terrible job of keeping in touch; I hadn't even seen him in two years.

But my experience of my first year in Chicago is inseparable from my experience of life with Tim.

What I lack in the way of specific stories is offset by an entire year's worth of conversation: what we were reading, what was wrong with the world and the stupid people who ran it, whom we found attractive, how I really thought he needed to put on a pair of pants. I owe him some of my skepticism about economics majors, and a begrudging appreciation for music not found at Barnes & Noble. My GPA benefited more than once from finishing homework I would've ditched for bed except that Tim was sitting on it.

It's humbling to realize that the catalyst for an entire year's worth of experience wasn't events, or things, but a person, whose omnipresence I took for granted at the time but will now sorely miss.

Friday, March 21, 2008

Christopher Matranga on Tim


Presented at Geoff Guy's, March 15


As I am sit here trying to collect my thoughts about
Tim, I find it difficult to compile all my thoughts
into simple words. I first met Tim when I was the
WHPK Rock Format Chief at the University of Chicago.
During my first semester as Format Chief, Tim wanted
to do a radio show that mixed punk, noise, and
traditional country/bluegrass. The show would be
co-hosted by Tim and Forrest Gregg. At the time I
bristled at the idea; what the hell were these kids
thinking? Luckily, Kareem Rabie, the previous Format
Chief, talked me into letting them have a show and
honestly it was probably the freshest programming WHPK
had seen in decades. The fact that Tim and Forrest
were on at 4 am did not seem to matter to them. They
put as much time and effort into their show as if they
were in a prime time spot with hundreds of thousands
of listeners. I never had the heart to tell them that
at 4 am and with only 100 Watts of power the only
listeners were the random kids on campus who were
overly caffeinated. The one thing I remember most
about this time was that whenever I stopped into the
WHPK record library Tim was there, usually wearing a
torn up hoodie, searching the record stacks and
playlists for something new and unusual to listen too.
I think I learned more about music by listening to
the radio of show of these two 18 year old freshmen
than I have in my 34 years of listening to and playing
music.

Tim was notorious for leaving his email account open
on the WHPK office computers. As you might expect,
mischief frequently set in with the office staff and
Tim’s account was the target of numerous, X-rated,
joke emails of questionable comedic content. Despite
having his email account abused about 4 times a week,
Tim never seemed to catch on to the fact that he
should log out after his email sessions. We of course
continued with the pranks. Tim never seemed to mind.
I still crack a smile about once a week thinking about
some crazy email we would send from Tim’s account to
his friends and other WHPK disc jockeys.

Even after I graduated in 2002, I still got occasional
emails from Tim. The last time I ran into him in
Chicago he was working at a law firm downtown and had
just decided he was going to attend law school. He
had a certain glow in his eyes that I had seen in
countless young students while I was working on my
Ph.D. It was a look of enthusiasm and hope; a belief
that he was embarking on something that was his
calling, something that he had to do to be complete.
I remember being thrilled for him, mostly because of
the look in his eyes. I knew he had made the right
decision for himself. With Tim’s intelligence and his
never-ending optimism, I had no real concerns that the
cold legal world would change him. I knew that the
legal profession was gaining something it sorely
needed: a hopeful, optimistic, and positive energy.

I know that we are all hurting from the loss of Tim,
but from my perspective we have gained so much from
him in the short time he was with us. These days I
like to remember all the clowning around we’d do with
Tim at the station, the crazy Rock Format parties at
Geoff Guy’s apartment, using magic markers to draw
mustaches on Tim’s face after he’d fall asleep at
parties, sneaking up the bell tower and ringing the
bells at 3 am, and countless other moments. Tim was a
great kid. I am a better person for having known him.
Christopher Matranga, 1010 Downlook, Pittsburgh, PA
15201, matranga at netl dot doe dot gov

Sunday, March 16, 2008

immured in His limitless ranges

The first half of a poem I discovered from a band Tim was fascinated with, Dead Raven Choir. They set rare and profound poetry to noise so dense it drowned out the words. Said words becoming a secret message you had to hunt down yourself. Here's one I brought back (the rest to come when I finish typing it up...)

from William Everson's A Canticle to the Waterbirds

Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes,
North on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough
Pacific surge;
You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack
written on sandbars there of your presence;
Grebes and pelicans; you comber-picking scoters and you
shorelong gulls;
All you keepers of the coastline north of here to the Mendocino beaches;
All you beyond upon the cliff-face thwarting the surf at Hecate Head;
Hovering the under-surge where the cold Columbia grapples at the bar;
North yet to the Sound, whose islands float like a sown flurry of chips
upon the sea:
Break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted breaks unmade for song,
And say a praise up to the Lord.

And you freshwater egrets east in the flooded marshlands skirting
the sea-level rivers, white one-legged watchers of shallows;
Broad-headed kingfishers minnow-hunting from willow stems on
meandering valley sloughs;
You too, you herons, blue and supple-throated, stately, taking the air
majestical in the sunflooded San Joaquin,
Grading down on your belted wings from the upper lights of sunset,
Mating over the willow clumps or where the flatwater
rice fields shimmer;
You killdeer, high night-criers, far in the moon-suffusion sky;
Bitterns, sand-waders, all shore-walkers, all roost-keepers.,
Populates of the 'dobe cliffs of the Sacramento:
Open your water-dartling beaks,
And make a praise up to the Lord.

For you hold the heart of His mighty fastnesses,
And shape the life of His indeterminate realms.
You are everywhere on the lonesome shores of His wide creation.
You keep seclusion where no man may go, giving Him praise;
Nor may a woman come to lift like your cleaving flight her clear
contralto song
To honor the spindrift gifts of His soft abundance.
You sanctify His hermitage rocks where no holy priest may kneel to
adore, nor holy nun assist;
And where His true communion-keepers are not enabled to enter.

And well may you say His praises, birds, for your ways
Are verved with the secret skills of His inclinations,
And your habits plaited and rare with the subdued elaboration of His
intricate craft;
Your days intent with the direct astuteness needful for His outworking,
And your nights alive with the dense repose of His infinite sleep.
You are His secretive charges and you serve His secretive ends,
In His clouded, mist-conditioned stations, in His murk,
Obscure in your matted nestings, immured in His limitless ranges.
He makes you penetrate through dark interstitial joinings of His
thicketed kingdoms,
And keep your concourse in the deeps of His shadowed world.

Mike O'Flaherty Remembers Four Times

from a conversation with Seth Sanders March 14 2008, presented at the Chicago memorial at Geoff Guy’s

PLAYLIST
My first interaction with Tim was when Seth suggested I try out for a show at WHPK. Somebody asked me to submit a playlist. Tim must have been rock format chief. You know how insecure I can get, worried that all my shit would seem too old or there was some cool thing they would know about that I didn’t know about, just worried about social rejection or whatever. Tim was the one who ended up calling me back, told me they’d definitely give me a show. He was just really friendly, interested in the stuff on my list and eager to talk about music with me. I got a sense of how warm he was but how inquisitive too: he was interested in this guy he’d never met. It was a very vivid first impression.

FAR EAST ATROCITIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
That must have been fall 2002. I must have seen a lot of him because by spring 2003 I felt like I knew him fairly well. We had a couple of conversations where we sat down and talked frankly. Both of us were going through rough periods. He was somebody who I felt struggled with things in a way that was similar to the way I did. I’m really apprehensive about how I present myself to people, but there was an unusual lack of that in my relationship to Tim. You could say he was easygoing but that’s not all--there was a kind of ingenuousness, a kind of spontaneousness, there was nothing put-on about him. That might have been related to his fascination with things that were strange or extreme. I remember talking with him about these National Socialist Black Metal bands, and I think he was just fascinated that people could feel that way about things. There was a certain manner he had, he would talk and there was this slight incredulous laughter at the same time.

I would talk to him about some strange thing I was into, and he wouldn’t make small talk. You could tell he wanted to find out what was behind what you were talking about. I would bring up something like Pol Pot’s activities in Cambodia and he wanted to know why they did it. There was this book called “Annihilation Zones,” a pulp account of mass atrocities in 20th century Asia. And what made this book distinctive was that mixed in with what were at least quasi-legitimate historical accounts, suddenly the author would bring in a completely spurious anecdote that would involve something like forced anal sex that would supposedly completely explain the topic under discussion. So he says that in 1938 Hitler and Stalin met for a final set of negotiations over the future of Europe. And that at some point in the discussion Stalin became enraged, threw Hitler down on the floor and had his way with him. And that was the reason Hitler invaded Russia. And I just remember talking about his with Tim and we were both amused and astounded by it and I think it the joke that we both got was that the atrocity of that period of European history was so hard to explain. These two men, Hitler and Stalin, did things so horrible that put them on a scale that the mind can barely process. So bringing in something that was so invented and so grotesque was this not terribly bright person’s way of dealing with something that was actually beyond explanation or comprehension. Trying to deal with it by invoking such a small-scale violation was really funny--there was something touching and tragic and very human about it.

Tim sometimes had a really hard time accepting the hardness and cruelty of the world, and some of this was his way of struggling, engaging, coming to terms with it. He was so fascinated with extreme things while being a very gentle person himself.

SCREAMERS
When he was living in that crazy apartment with those maniac fraternity guys, I remember that they would have these insane parties where lots of stuff would get broken, and they would storm around yelling at each other and yelling at you, and there was this general vibe of chaos and things coming apart at the hinges. And I remember one of these parties where the cops got called and everybody, like 60 people, ran out the front door. in the space of about 2 minutes. including me. And I remember that even though there were so many people there Tim was really excited to see me and he had some records he wanted me to hear, and we ended up going into his room. It was like a railroad apartment with a really long hallway, the classic hyde park apartment with the bedroom off the long hall, and I just remember we were stitting there in his room, every once in a while there’d be a pause and you’d see some lunatic running down the hallway and then there’d be a crashing sound. We were looking through Tim’s record collection and I remember he ended up putting on the Screamers, which I’d never heard. Listening to music with him was very much about you, he wasn’t trying to impress you, so if there was something you wanted to hear he’d put it on. And we were sitting there listening and watching these maniacs running around. This kind of aggressively fey synth-punk of the Screamers, and the preposterously macho antics of his roommates, met at a certain point of joyfully garish and bold aggression.

I remember thinking how weird it was that we were listening to this really esoteric, really smart band while right outside there were these people who were basically cavemen, smashing shit. But I think the thing was that everywhere he went Tim was at home in the midst of this discordant environment. Tim and his giant crates of weird records just fit in with the whole scene, as bizarre and apocalyptic as it was. And I think Tim was someone who really understood, the side of undergound music that he was really into was that thing of making yourself at home in a chaotic environment where a lot of discordant, seemingly incompatible things were happening at the same time and all sorts of shit was flying off because everything was moving so fast. I just remember how gleefully happy Tim was at the whole thing.

THE NIGHT WAS BRACINGLY ACTIVE

This was a later apartment, I think with Erica and Ashley and Elliott and Ryan and Jenni, and everyone else had gone to sleep. There was the usual turbulent stuff going on in our lives, and I remember it was kind of windy out. Not particularly cold or stormy, an early spring or late fall night. and the sense that the night was bracingly active, there was an alertness about things. There weren’t many clouds but the clouds that were in the sky were moving kind of fast. The kind of night where it would still make sense to be talking at two in the morning and still be wide awake.

So we were just talking about the turbulence, comparing notes about the challenges we were facing. And then the conversation slipped, as it often did with us, to music. The topic was the conversation we had with so many of our friends: that we were looking for something that we hadn’t heard that would push beyond what we’d already heard. It was something he shared with that group but his struggles maybe intensified it. That the history of underground music had become this kind of burden that needed to be shaken off, so that you could have music that would really physically and mentally challenge you and we both batted that one around and talked vaguely about what it was that we wanted, stuff that we’d heard that was pushing that direction versus stuff that was going around in circles and getting way too much credit for it. and somehow we ended up talking about metal and I was talking about how I didn’t really understand metal and was trying to find that thing in the musical extremism of punk that appealed to me, that compressed wall of sound. And he asked me if I’d heard Bathory and I’d never had. And he had the Sign of the Black Mark on vinyl, and he put it on. And I remember that it had the kind of grandeur that I’d always gotten off on in metal without understanding it, but there was also this kind of livid guitar sound, that was buzzing and somehow very dark and very alive. And that was what I’d been angling for in my description.

And he understood music so well, and he understood you so well when you were talking about music, so that when he said something it reflected how he knew exactly what you meant. And the kind of engagement and empathy he had, so that he could really get inside the other person and kind of know what they wanted. And I remember sitting there at the table with that weird night going on and being taken, that it opened up a window into a new kind of feeling, a feeling I’d never quite gotten from music. You could almost see the oars going through the black water while you listened to it. And Tim was watching me listen to it and he saw that I’d gotten out of it what you were supposed to get out of it, and that’s the kind of personal connection you can get from two people that understand music and want to communicate about music to each other. There was a kind of satisfaction both in spreading the word and making the other person happy that I really felt from him in that moment.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Early WHPK Radio show of Tim's

Chris M. found a CD of one of Tim's radio shows, and has uploaded it here:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/2uiq13

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Chicago Memorial for Tim: Saturday, March 15

Memorial for our friend, Tim Aher


When: Saturday, March 15
6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Where: Enemy (Geoff's place)
1550 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 3rd Floor
Chicago, IL 60622

Potluck style, without the social pressure and judgment. Georgi's making chili, Jenni's bringing a massive cheese ball, maybe I'll make up some elkballs. If you feel up for making or bringing something (beer is OK, too), shoot me a quick email.

Also, in lieu of a formally organized set of spoken remembrances, we're hoping to solicit as many people as possible to write a couple
words about Tim which people may read at their leisure. These will then be bound up and sent to his family. So consider yourselves formally solicited. They don't have to be epic or all maudlin and Emily Dickinson - brief stories or memorials are totally fine. But if you're up to longer-form writing, or for multiple stories, that's OK, too. If you could email any of these directly to me, [gaguy at uchicago dot edu] that would be highly appreciated. We'll also plan to have pens and paper available (and maybe even a laptop) in case a bite of elkball calls up a stream of Proustian reveries.

In addition, we'd like to invite people to bring non-literary Tim
artifacts. You want to bring doodles or a Grim Slayer plush doll? Any and all fan art would be great. If you've got any recordings of Tim shredding wild on that headless guitar or of his nickel-loaded coffee can, please bring a CD or cassette. I remember Tim writing some record reviews and show reports – if you can direct us to those, we'd like to collect them as well. Similarly, if you're still hoarding photos, you should post them at
this website.

We're considering this open to the public, so please feel free to pass the information about this around. And, don't feel compelled to come with food, or like a piece of writing is your ticket of admission. But help on either front is definitely requested. Basically, we're hoping to celebrate the life of our friend, and the more people who can help with that - whether with food, writing, or their mere presence - the more successful this will feel.

As a final note, we will also be accepting donations to send to the
Connecticut Legal Aid Fund. Thanks all, and hope to see you soon.

--geoff

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Three Reviews by Tim Aher

From Blastitude magazine in 2002.

Editor Larry Dolman writes, "I think they really demonstrate a lot of the things about Tim's character that the eulogies are referring to - they're very raw and funny, intellectual but informal, sharp and fairly caustic but not so much pissed-off as they are bemused, still full of wonder..."

The first two pair R&B pop diva Ashanti, "the first female performer to simultaneously hold the top two places on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart," with the decidedly more white, low-budget and out-of-control Hair Police:

http://www.blastitude.com/13/pg9.htm

The first question on Tim's mind was what the Italian gangster John Gotti meant to the black hip-hop artists who named themselves after him. Intriguingly, the same question preoccupied that "singular historian and philosopher of American experience" Luc Sante when he wrote about the bandit king that year.

The last review was of a hyped underground show where Tim still found something weird to love:
http://www.blastitude.com/13/pg3.htm

From Roger: Rock and Roll Potatoes

Here's a myspace page that Tim made for the Rock and Roll Potatoes, a short-lived False Sex offshoot. Tim is on backing vocals and distorted fuzz guitar.

http://www.myspace.com/rockandrollpotatoes

If you want to download the song, go here for instructions:
http://myspacemp3.org/

Hymn recordings

Tim, Nick McMaster, Tim Merrill and I all played in a band together. Here are recordings from our studio tracks.

Hymn Recording

I thought some of you folks might like to hear it.

-nk-