Arizona State Fair

JWise Photo of the Day

Caroline Wise at the Arizona Fairgrounds

Caroline worked her butt off to put together this sprang shawl to submit to the Arizona State Fair. Sprang is an ancient form of making cloth that has a natural elasticity. While the cloth can use a loom to help assemble it, the threads are not woven, they are interlinked, interlaced, or intertwined. Sprang appears to have fallen out of use for centuries and for a long time was misidentified as knitting, although it predates knitting. With the shawl washed and blocked (which helps retain its proper form) it was ready to bring to the fairgrounds. Today from 8:00 until 12:00 was the window of opportunity to submit crafty stuff for the Home Arts competitions and so here we are. We celebrated Caroline’s accomplishment with a visit to Old Heidelberg Bakery to pick up a loaf of coarse rye bread, a couple of almond horns, and more than our fair share of Haribo Wine Gums (the tastier English variety!) that NO ONE ever has in America. We usually beg her sister to send them from Germany or drag back a pound when we are over there. In October Caroline will be back during the State Fair as she’ll be in one of the halls demonstrating some fibery craft or other.

Kurchhoff Brothers Motorcycle Act

JWise Moments, Photo of the Day

Rudolph Kurchhoff (left) and Herman Kurchhoff (center), unknown on right in Buffalo, New York circa 1902

Rudolph C. Kurchhoff born in 1884 is on the left and Herman William Kurchhoff born in 1887 is in the center, the person on the right is unknown. Herman is my maternal great grandfather. Best we can figure the boys were photographed here around 1903 in Buffalo, New York. The bikes play a foreshadowing role in their lives because less than half a dozen years later the brothers were starting to earn close to $1000 a week by risking their lives simultaneously riding motorcycles in a steel cage known as the “Globe of Death”.

Kurchhoff Brothers Motorcycle Cage circa 1907 in Buffalo, New York

The cage took two years to engineer, build, and perfect at a cost of $4000.

Herman W Kurchhoff circa 1908 with his Reading Standard Motorcycle in Buffalo, New York

When they started riding in the cage they both rode “Indian Camel Back” motorcycles from what appears to a 1907 model. This photo of my great grandfather Herman is from a later date, as his “Reading Standard” motorcycle is most likely a 1908 model.

Rudolph Kurchhoff circa 1907 and his Indian Camel Back Motorcycle in Buffalo, NY

With a little more than 2 horsepower, the brothers sped around the interior of their cage at the crazy speed of nearly 60 mph.

Flyer about the Kurchhoff Brothers Motorcycle Act in Buffalo, New York circa 1907

Not only were they flying dangerously fast, often touching elbows as they passed each other, but they were also blindfolded!

Kurchhoff Brothers performing their Motorcycle act under the big top in New York circa 1907

Their big break came when they were invited to perform their death-defying feat for the very first time at the Hippodrome in New York City, which at the time was the largest theater in the world. They performed this act a full 10 years before Harry Houdini would take the exact same stage in the Hippodrome to make an elephant disappear.

Following the New York City performances, they went on to perform their act across the region.

Newspaper clip from Illustrated Buffalo Express May 17, 1907 about the Kurchoff Brothers

Only a few fragments of press clippings still exist that tell of their story, but it’s interesting for me to know that about 110 years ago I had family that was daredevils and doing the Evel Knievel thing.

Shari Wise

JWise Moments, Photo of the Day

Shari Wise in West Covina, California about 1977

This is my little sister, Share Wise, at home at 943 W. Herald Street, West Covina, California. I believe I shot this image around 1977 when Shari was in 8th grade. This series is from the negatives that I recently scanned. She has since been married and had at least a couple of other last names, but this is how I knew her back then.

Shari Wise in West Covina, California about 1979

I’ll bet a dollar she remembers who the guy was; I don’t. Sure enough, it took her some time, but she came up with his name, Scott Gilbert.

Shari Wise in West Covina, California about 1979

Shari believes this might be 1978 or 1979 on one of our excursions with high school friends to the beach. Might have even been playing hooky and cutting class.

Shari Wise and Steve Wagoner in West Covina, California about 1980

But I do remember this guy well: Wags. I first met Steve Wagoner at Barro’s Pizza on California Avenue in West Covina in 1980. I’d been working there part-time for a guy by the name of Terry Love, who apparently was fired, to be replaced by Steve. I started with Terry in 1977 and liked him in large part because his weirdo friend Jeff was the first person I’d ever met who had purple hair. Jeff introduced me to punk rock, KROQ, and a record store where I went and bought the Talking Heads: 77 album because upon hearing the song Psycho Killer, I had to have it. By 1980 I took on more hours, and right around then, Shari met Wags.

Shari Wise and Steve Wagoner in West Covina, California about 1980

After a while, my sister got a job with Steve and me, and for a good couple of years, the three of us hung out quite a bit. If I had to guess, I’d say this photo was taken up Highway 39, also known as San Gabriel Canyon Road, where we’d go to walk in the trees and listen to the streams trickling through the mountains back in 1980.

Steve was a surfer, and every chance he could, he’d head to a beach. These two were a large part of my life from 1977 to 1982. I know you might be thinking, “Of course, she was a large part of your life; she’s your sister,” but after 1982, we drifted in different directions, and while we’d get together a few times after Shari’s son Shaun was born, we started a long period of estrangement. Dysfunctional parents can have a large impact even on the relationships of siblings.

Shari Wise in West Covina, California about 1979

Shari informs me that this was 1983 and that she was looking at her newborn son Shaun. Shari and Steve had moved to Arizona for a short while and, upon moving back to California, had a son and took an apartment in Covina, California.

Steve and Shari Wagoner at home in Covina, California

While you can’t see much of Shari and Steve I’m posting this for them to remember their old apartment.

Shari Wagoner, John Wise, and Sally in Glendora, California

Shari’s fat and I’m a dork, while Sally, who was also a dork, looks awfully normal here. I wish I could remember Sally’s last name; I owe her an apology for being stupid and horrible.

Steve and Shari Wagoner at Huntington Beach, California

Going surfing at Huntington Beach.

Steve and Shari Wagoner with John Alexander Wise in Covina, California

This is our paternal grandfather, John Alexander Wise, and it was probably the last time Shari ever saw him. He was a cross of W.C. Fields and John Wayne to me when I was still five years old living in Buffalo, New York, and he’s also the guy who gave me my first camera.

Hippies

JWise Photo of the Day

John Wise and Caroline Engelhardt in San Francisco, California 1991

Just as I jammed through our negatives over the weekend, I’ve started scanning our horde of memorabilia that we’ve been stockpiling in case of a cultural apocalypse. Seeing it’s time to replenish the supplies I’m getting busy tossing the old moldy stuff to make space for new junk.

The guy on the left is John Wise circa January 1992 and the woman is still pretty recognizable except back then she wasn’t a Mrs. Wise yet, she was Caroline Elisabeth Engelhardt. Little did we know back then that not only would this be Caroline’s first trip to America, first time wearing contact lenses so she could look cool in sunglasses like her hippy boyfriend, we would also end up going through a meat grinder of tumultuous relationship ups and downs before kissing to make up at the end of the year with a trip to Paris to visit EuroDisney for Caroline’s 25th birthday. The year 1992 was certainly memorable with my dad having his second heart attack, my paternal grandfather’s passing, my friend Tom McNamara overdosed on heroin and died in a hedge next to a bank drive-thru, I learned a lot about myself, lived in a peculiar situation loaded with deprivations that are better left forgotten, yet still kind of interesting in how weird it all was, and yet we closed out the year in blissful love.

These moments are being cataloged as such: there’s a category of topics on your right and “moments” is one of them. I’ll be posting stuff and backdating it all so it falls sequentially into my blog, such as this and probably something or other about that night Caroline and I filmed Nirvana in Hanau at a club called Kuba in November 1989 along with other choice fragments of our lives together and before we ever met. From time to time I’ll post something here at the front of my blog drawing attention that I’ve completed a year, maybe with a preview of some of the highlights.

This particular photo was obviously shot in San Francisco and was taken by some merchant who printed it and put it in a keepsake GIANT keychain.

Negatives Be Gone

JWise Photo of the Day

Film negatives

Starting Saturday morning I began scanning in photos from hundreds of black & white and color negatives along with a good many slides, some going back more than 40 years (as in the case of Caroline and her sister with their parents when they were just about 4 and 6). From trips with friends in the United States to some of my first photos, I shot in Europe back in the mid-1980s when I first visited Athens, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris, and spent a lot of time in the Frankfurt, Germany area. Scanned in a bunch of images from two different shows by Los Angeles performance artist Johanna Went back in the early ’80s. Caroline and I visited Euro Disney (as it was known back then; it’s now Disneyland Paris) for her 25th birthday in 1992 and we have the photos to prove it. Old embarrassing photos from my time in the military are now in the digital domain as are a few photos from my teen years in L.A during the late 1970s.

I scanned about 1,300 images out of approximately 13,000 images, such is my guess anyway. I’ll have to clean them up a bit and then I’ll get to adding them to my blog where almost no one will ever find them when they are buried behind the roughly 2,000 blog entries that are ahead of them.

We are on a tangent to clear out the crap we’ve been dragging around for years without even ever opening the boxes the stuff is hidden in. Next up I’ll start scanning photos that I didn’t find negatives for after I finish scanning old party flyers, ads in German techno magazines, concert tickets from David Bowie to Einsturzende Neubauten, record and CD covers we made, etc., so all of that bulk can join the trash can with the negatives.

Film Scanner

JWise Photo of the Day

Caroline Wise in the Grand Canyon National Park 1994

We bought a tiny Magnasonic slide and film scanner in order for us to transfer our horde of relatively useless negatives into a digital format so we can scrap the originals and post what we want here on the blog. This could be time-consuming as cleaning up the dirt on the negative, looking at thousands of images on the tiny screen where I scan them, digitally repairing, color correcting the images, and then finally blogging about stuff that there are no dates for, using foggy memories at best. This could take a bit. But at least I now have this image of Caroline on her very first time in the Grand Canyon National Park only 72 hours after she and I were married in Las Vegas back on January 12, 1994.