This post is the second in a series on The Cosmic Shed. You can view the first one here: "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."
More photos, and some thoughts from my June 18th visit to The Cosmic Shed...
This easily overlooked vignette near the staircase that leads up to the second story transforms a window into a still life. The note reads: “Time is a gift that everyone shares but most people waste it by trying to hurry and not waste it.”
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During the day, most of the light inside The Shed is sunlight pouring in through bare windows. The first and second floors each have rectangular florescent fixtures hanging from the center ceiling. The only other electric light I recall seeing was the lamp visible in this photo from the first floor. After dark, with these as the only light sources, the interior of The Shed takes on an ethereal glow.
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An angel keeps watch over things on the second floor, from her dimly lit corner perch near the stairs. (You may recognize her as the "misfit angel" from a few posts back.) Or at least, I see an angel. Maybe you see something different?
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Making music is a big part of life here, which is one of the reasons I’ve come to love Texas so much. Here’s the “main stage” for the Cosmic Jam, as seen from the balcony of The Shed. Nothing fancy, just good friends making good music and good memories together.
After dark, a small group gathered inside, upstairs, for a spontaneous jam session.
The fretless stringed instrument in this photo is an oud, a piece of musical antiquity with roots going back 5000 years to Mesopotamia.
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Of course, I had to get a few Hipstamatic shots while I was there.
The instrument in the above photo is a dilruba.
Another photo from a previous post. One of my favorite shots from that night. The drum he's playing is called a dumbek.
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I’ve heard that MTV Cribs visited The Cosmic Shed a few years back, but I’m not sure of the whole story on that one. Still, some fellow named “The Joel” did leave his mark.
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I got to see some old friends that day, and meet a few new ones who’d known Fred. They reminisced, among other things, about how he liked to play ping-pong. Here’s the famous ping-pong table on the second floor, where it still gets a little action from time to time.
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Fred was the proverbial "man ahead of his time," a very smart fellow whose understanding of reality went quite a bit deeper than that of most human beings. Such individuals always seem to inspire fear in the dull minded, and condescension in the jaded skeptic. The Shed has long been the subject of rumors spread by a few ignorant people who thought all manner of sinister stuff was going on out there. To this day, tales persist which have no basis in fact. That sort of thing just goes with the territory.
But Fred left the place in good hands, with wonderful people who get what he was about, who appreciate The Cosmic Shed and what it represents. They keep it alive, and keep it real.
To be continued . . .
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*On an unrelated note: the title of this post is borrowed from Swedish director Roy Andersson’s 2000 surreal masterpiece, Songs from the Second Floor, which Roger Ebert called “a collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy– the apocalypse as a joke on us.” It’s too strange for a lot of people’s tastes (very dark humor, absurdist, Felliniesque), but it’s one of my all-time favorite films-- in case you're curious to know just how weird I really am.
