Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your fucking attic!!! Jack Froese
Jack Froese had been a close friend of Hart’s since their teens. A few months earlier Froese and Hart had been up in Hart’s attic at his home in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Jack had teased him then about how messy it was; now, it seemed, he was doing it again.
Except Jack was dead.
That June, Froese had died suddenly of a heart arrhythmia, at the obscenely young age of 32. Months later, he started emailing people. Those who replied to these emails never got a response, and the messages stopped as abruptly as they began.
PHOTO COURTESY CHOCOLATE CHIN PRODUCTIONS Austin and Brendan Lake in A Pharaoh s Lonely Ego. In the past several years local musician Austin Lake has built a name for himself, with his flashy and genre-bending solo project Aweful Kanawful. Lake is now translating that aesthetic into filmmaking with his quirky and zany feature-length movie, “A Pharaoh’s Lonely Ego,” which will be available to stream for free starting Sunday, Feb. 14. Filled with surreal imagery, cheeky humor, and fantastic original music, this indie flick is a bizarre and paranoid fever dream with absurd one-liners and seemingly irrelevant characters, filler, and subplots that flesh out the chaotic world Lake has created in his music.
Holly Cole S band makes an entrance at Harro East Ballroom during the Rochester International Jazz Festival, pre-pandemic, in 2015. For most of 2020, I’ve been working from a second-floor room at my house in Charlotte. Typing, doing phone interviews, waiting for a neighbor to finish mowing his lawn so I can record something for broadcast. October came and went quietly. For the first time ever, no trick-or-treaters showed up at our door on Halloween. October also marked my first-year anniversary of working full-time at WXXI. And doing the math on my fingers, I see that I have actually spent more days working from this room, rather than at my desk at 280 State St. because of the coronavirus pandemic, of course.