I’m about ready to dash out the door, pick up Molly from work and grab lunch at Lucy’s with two long-time friends, Tiffany Johnson and Justin Vinje. But I wanted to upload a photo from last night, my second practice with Fargo-based punk band, Les Dirty Frenchmen. Last January-February, two of the Frenchmen, Todd and Troy, collaborated with the Punk Archaeology un-conference at Sidestreet Grille and Pub. A couple months after that, they said their drummer was moving to a non-Fargo location (I think the Twin Cities), and they asked me to consider taking up the drums for LDF. I said sure, I’d be glad to.

I keep fiddling with the panoramic feature on my iPhone 4s, and so here is what it looked like from the drummer’s perspective last night in the LDF top secret practice space. I think we might start working on some new songs, too. One of those is titled, “Budget Fracking,” a kind of absurdist nod to the Bakken of western ND. Long live local punk.

A quick concluding note on the punk archaeology unconference from this weekend at Sidestreet Grille and Pub in downtown Fargo, North Dakota. Since history, archaeology and life require us to put ourselves in the shoes of others, I wondered if it would be interesting for non-drummers to have access to a drummer’s view during a sound check. So here is a still photo of the stage from the vantage of the Audio-Video team from the University of North Dakota.

View of the stage from the Audio-Video sound station.

And here it is from another angle, a drummer’s view of the sound check (this brings up the fact that there are always more than two sides to a story, or history):