On Saturday, December 9th at 8:00pm Jon Fried of The Cucumbers will be performing with friend and poet Michael Ruby as part of the Station Hill Intermedia Lab series in Kingston, NY and the concert will be available by livestream as well. The series combines poetry, live music, and video, and this piece, Repeated Memories, features Michael reading from his book Fleeting Memories, along with additional text written for the show, while Jon offers live accompaniment on banjo, electric bass and electric guitar, along with prerecorded tracks of him playing fleeting and repeating pieces of songs well known and not.
The text is drawn from Michael Ruby’s book Fleeting Memories, first published as an ebook by Ugly Duckling in 2008, and then as part of the trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices by Station Hill in 2012. The memories were written down over a period of seven years during work as a newspaper editor, and then they were temporarily lost as a result of the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Jon Fried parallels these memories with snatches of songs from the 1960s to the 1990s. The immersive video includes the World Trade Center from a Brooklyn window in the 1990s, the novelist H.L. “Doc” Humes in 1982 and much more.
Tickets for the livestream are $5 and available for purchase online.
Michel Ruby is a poet, literary editor and journalist, whose previous hour-long performances at Green Kill for the Station Hill Intermedia Project were “Fragments of the Star-Spangled Banner”, Titles & First Lines” and “Subway Poems”. He is the author of eight poetry books, most recently Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill, 2020) and the forthcoming Close Your Eyes, Visions (Station Hill, 2024) . His trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012), includes ebooks Fleeting Memories (Ugly Duckling, 2008) and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep (Argotist Online, 2011). His other ebooks are Close Your Eyes (Argotist, 2018) and Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018). He co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and Mayer’s and Lewis Warsh’s collaboration Piece of Cake (Station Hill, 2020), and he is co-curator of the Station Hill Intermedia Ptoject. He worked for many years as an editor of U.S. news and political articles at The Wall Street Journal.
Jon Fried is a New Jersey-based musician and writer. He co-founded the indy pop band The Cucumbers with his wife Deena Shoshkes in the early 80s; the band has released seven albums and many singles and videos and remains active, mostly as an acoustic duo. The band’s most recent release, a mini-album called “Old Shoes,” was released in July 2023. Jon plays banjo, bass and guitar in an acoustic band called the Campfire Flies, which released its debut album, “Sparks Like Little Stars,” in 2019.
Jon and Deena were the primary song co-writers for “SingSOS – Songs of the Spectrum,” an album of songs about living with autism. The songs were performed by artists including Jackson Browne, Dar Williams, Marshall Crenshaw, Dan Bern, Ollabelle, Don Dixon, Marti Jones and Mike Viola. A fiction writer and journalist, Jon has written feature stories on New Jersey culture and night life for The New York Times and published short stories in many literary journals.
On Sunday, December 10th, Jon and Deena once again join the annual Hoboken Holiday Banding concert at Willie McBrides, where Hoboken musicians, backed by the fabulous Hoboken All-Stars band, sing holiday classics, including some originals written for the show. Jon and Deena are on early! Willie McBrides is located at 616 Grand Ave. Hoboken. Doors open at 4:30pm. Admission is $10.00. Proceeds support Hoboken Cultural Affairs programming for 2024.
