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The Late, Lamented Flying Saucer

Editor's Note: We received a number of letters-more than we had room to publish-on the subject of an article we ran in our September issue "A Little (Ferocious) Night Music," about a new music venue in Kingston, The Uptown. Mention was made of the previous tenant of The Uptown space, the Flying Saucer Cafe, which was characterized as a "punk venue". This was clearly a limiting description of a multi-faceted venue. Our apologies.

To the Editor:
Since I have moved from the Mid-Hudson Valley to attend school elsewhere, I miss being able to pick up Chronogram (especially the Planet Waves Horoscopes by Eric Francis)-getting things online is not the same. However upon reading Jane Smith's article on "The Uptown, A Gathering Space," I came across this remark: "The last tenant of the space The Uptown now occupies was a punk music venue called The Flying Saucer Cafe, which lasted about as long as the flight of a Frisbee."

Yes, The Flying Saucer Cafe did have punk shows-but it also had events such as Frank Crocitto of Discovery Institute doing a poetry reading with accompanying world music. There was jazz, reggae, African, blues shows and Cape Breton violinist Ashley MacIssac as well. In January of 2001, the Saucer's owners Hilary Manning and Earl Lundy helped me in putting on a benefit dinner for Tibetan herbalist Dr. Lobsang Tenzin-the dinner included Indian food and tribal/ambient/trance music from Joaquim Lartey and Chris Lané (who played for free.)

The Saucer lasted for a year, much longer than your average Frisbee flight. I wish all sides in The Flying Saucer's saga the best in there respective lives and being able to go on. But I hoped Jane Smith would have been a little less dismissive in her labeling of the Flying Saucer Cafe as "a punk music venue."

Troy C. Frantz
via e-mail

To the Editor:
Regarding "A Little (Ferocious) Night Music," a profile of The Uptown by Jane Smith, 9/2/02:

"Something rather extraordinary happened in uptown Kingston" on North Front Street two years ago-live music, poetry, art, and celebration-at the Flying Saucer Cafe.

It shows a meanness of spirit to belittle the Flying Saucer as a "punk venue" in order to praise the current establishment. We don't know if Jane Smith was paraphrasing someone else's opinion or is she herself was indeed present one night when a punk band was playing, but her rubric of choice to typify the Saucer's fare can easily be dismissed by anyone who attended shows by such diverse and multifaceted artists as Spider Barbour, The Princes of Sernedip, Joe Giardullo, Sangeeta Michael Berardi, Harvey Kaiser, the amazing Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIssac, and poets Susan McKechnie, J.J. Blickstein, Richard Rizzi, and Simon Felice. Plus, there was Diana Bryan's Sunday morning art and business lectures, as well as art by some of the area's finest sculptors, painters, and video artists on the walls. And there was also Earl Lundy's beautifully conceived and painstakingly wrought floor, composed of transferred pages from Dada, Surrelist, and Futurist manifestos.

we wish The Uptown well and hope it has the strength and support to continue for a year, which was the "Frisbee flight" of the Flying Saucer. A year of incredibly eclectic events effected on a shoestring budget is not a bad run.

Mikhail Horowitz & Carol Zaloom
Saugerties