I set the camera on the tripod by the nightstand, before falling asleep, so that it would react to movement in the room - and found this image, the only one, blinking in the morning...

Falls Church Film Festival

Follow the jump for the submission details. Looks like films have to be in by the thirteenth of October. Should be a good showcase if the word gets out...

Ruby Doobie and Friends: On the Brink of International Fame

I don't want this to get out of hand, but its going to be difficult. I will try to limit my pet-post content to once a year...

Recent Photographs

Eddie Hazel

Switch-hitting Bonds

I would have been more impressed had he hit 756 from the right side. Honestly, that would have vanquished all of my criticisms of his breaking the record.

Religion

Taken by my good friend Daniel (Karl Heinz) Olson




One of the most intriguing photos I've seen in a while. Alec Soth has advertised the work from Magnum's first ever portfolio review on his website and I have to say that this photo inspires me more than just about anything I saw from the twenty three photographers who's work he posted for review. Its not that their work is bad, quite the contrary, technically the photographs are proper and correct I think, but unfortunately they are also quite banal. I guess its hard to compare one photo like this to a series of other shots that are trying to convey something through their unity as a whole. And so hopefully when he's finished his month-long dumpster dive for textbooks and discussions and textbooks on discussions, etc, he'll have time to put together a series as such. Until then, we'll just have to enjoy his photos one by one.

A viewer's response to the works posted for review:

empty rooms, dilapidated buildings; portraits of stiff people standing staring down the barrel of a large format camera… Alec you’ve inspired a generation of cliques without being one yourself; a successful template that thousands have copied. the best advice for anyone in any field is to be different, to find your own voice. probably means spending less time looking at other peoples photography. less time looking for a subject and more time observing yourself.

...just so very little art hits the spot; my aesthetic conditioning obviously comes into play. i just find particularly with photography, because it is so ubiquitous it has to carry an emotional punch for any semblance of it to remain with you and unfortunately -or fortunately- that that has to even be translated through a computer screen; these are the times we live in. i think why so many of these folios feel flat to me is because I can’t feel the person who made them in the image. a lot of the images feel unemotional. you could go on endlessly about what makes a good image but for me what is paramount it is the love for the mystery of life and not the art. a love for the mystery of life is something that is lived and if you’re lucky the spin off is art.

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

Leonard Cohen

Coy and Vance

I spent the morning and afternoon demolishing the already charred floors of a partially fire-burned house when it occurred to me, rather oddly, amidst the prying apart of wooden planks from roasted black joists, that Coy and Vance Duke most likely were Go-bots.

You're Gonna Miss Me

"The Fascinating Story of Rock ‘n Roll Pioneer Roger Kynard “Roky” Erickson And His Struggles With Drug Addiction and Mental Illness."



The essential Roky Erickson documentary will finally be released on DVD July 10 of this year, a must see for anyone interested in the 13th Floor Elevators, Roky Erickson, or, for that matter, the real origins of psychadelic rock music. I saw this back in 2005 when it was still touring the festival circuit, and I was dissapointed that it wasn't eventually given a wider release, at least in the smaller independent theaters. It is not your conventional rock doc as Roky Erickson is not your conventional rock 'n' roll hero. You're Gonna Miss Me deals as much with Roky's mother, Evelyn, and her weird, manipulative relationship with her son as it does with Roky and the Elevators and his indelible fingerprints on psychadelic music. While this might be dissapointing to those in search of early Elevator's footage, (though there is some of this) the documentary more importantly reveals how key a figure Evelyn was and remains to be in Roky's life, and the implications this relationship has had on his music. Much is explained in this film about Roky's early years: his innability to handle heavy experimentation with psychadelic drugs, the inevitable unravelling of the band, and his mental-shock treatment that changed his life forever; his mother is a dynamic enough character to keep the film interesting througout, her surrealist folk-art creations as unsettlingly metaphoric as they are disturbing to behold. The film is funny at times and sad too and there are scenes where Roky casts his own mental condition into doubt; most importantly, though, it succeeds in revealing who Roky Erickson truly is and from where on this planet he has come.

Revelatory Music Now

The Necks: Mosquito



A newly discovered album that I cannot turn off, Mosquito continues in such a way and for such a timeless duration that it becomes a real musical atmosphere, a sonic backdrop that demands attention unlike any ambient piece I've ever heard, though it is not solely ambient, nor is it jazz; and with moving, fluid changes as subtle as the natural buzzing of insects in a river-like field of saw-grass, it is simply a beautiful, disciplined, genre-flattening piece of music. The review from Forced Exposure:

"Another scorching, hypnotic, ground breaking, concept-expanding release from outstanding Australian trio The Necks. Their last few CDs have caused a huge stir. Hanging Gardens was a shimmering space age journey (fuelled by sparkling high hat patterns and lush piano chords), Aether was a profound meditation (on a chord that just kept on coming), while Drive By was a classic R&B road movie soundtrack. This new double CD re-writes the rules yet again. Mosquito begins with the scrunching sound of a hand drum with hanging rattles being draped over percussion, while a fragmentary high piano melody tinkles in the distance. These two elements persist for the entire hour of the CD, providing a supporting texture for the most gorgeous piano chord sequence you've ever heard, gently coaxed by a ride cymbal. There's a hint of Massive Attack's 'Protection' about these chords, which just repeat in an endless melancholy ecstasy. For Llloyd Swanton Mosquito is 'quite austere, but in a rewarding, refreshing way. I think it's one of the most rigorously minimalist pieces we've ever done.' Austere and rigorous it may be, in terms of its beautifully organised structure and economy of means; but don't be fooled. This record is seriously haunting and sensuous. See Through is another beast entirely. Taking its cue from the ultra minimalist Aether, it counter poses ripe piano chords and splashing cymbals (reminiscent of Alice Coltrane) against long passages of silence. Like Aether the music comes in waves, which suggest a vast scale and an open organic structure. But here the silences demand their own space, and the music operates as part of an environment, into which it constantly retreats and from which it endlessly re-appears."

Summer Films

Two movie releases from two great, albeit starkly different, directors: David Lynch's Inland Empire and Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn.

Rescue Dawn is set to open in select theatres on July 4 and, though the trailer has been cut to appeal to wider audiences, (it is depicted with a bit more hollywood flare, ie. fast action cuts and a dramatic Terminatoresque percussive score, than Herzog is used to presenting), I can only guess that the film will seethe with the director's usual gritty realism and his notorious 'character's-on-the-edge-of-their- own-sanity' style. The movie's is based on the personal account of Herzog's close friend, a P.O.W. in the Vietnam war played by Christian Bale, whose epic struggle is to escape from a remote jungle prison camp in Laos.



Daniel Zalewski wrote an intriguing profile in the April 24th, 2006 issue of The New Yorker that focused on the filming of this movie in particular, and, more generally, Herzog's unique approach to making movies. The article gives a valuable behind-the-scenes look at the director's relationship with his rather disgruntled cast and crew as well as his almost reflexive gambles with the production company. Anyone who has seen Burden of Dreams is aware of the kind of turmoil and desperation upon which Herzog's camera thrives and Zalewski's article brings this depiction further up to date, providing more background concerning Herzog's unique motivations and his sometimes bizarre judgement. I recommend the read for anyone who is a fan of his films.

Inland Empire looks to be vintage Lynch material, but because he is producing the film himself, it has yet to gain much publicity as it continues to tour the globe through various film festivals and screenings. Having thought to have missed one of only two Virginia screenings, I called the North Theatre in Danville where it was supposed to show last week. Call it blind luck or a fortuitous benefaction from the technical struggle of cinema, but only one of the three planned screenings showed due to electrical problems with the circuitry in the film house. So for those in Southwest Virginia who have not yet seen a screening of Inland Empire, the man on the phone at the North Theatre has promised to post the newly revised upcoming show dates for the re-screening of the film on their website. What an event! Without question worth the drive, and how in the world did a small theatre in Danville, Virginia get the film?



Here's the jump to Manohla Dargis' thorough review from The New York Times.

Mississippi John Hurt - Spike Driver Blues

Furry Lewis - When I lay My Burden Down

Descending

Images chosen from the google search
results for the word Descending

Thanks a.s. for the idea, even if it was sarcastic.

Zak Smith on Drugs

So I just snagged this section of a provocative interview with Zac Smith from the ever-giving alec soth blog. The whole interview is here and its well worth the jump. Some of his ideas about drugs and people who use drugs to create art are positively honest and discomforting and optimisticly resounding and hillarious, and no doubt controversial, depending on your own tendencies and directions.
The interview is predominantly concerned with the recent release of Smith'sPictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow his collection of pen and ink illustrations for every page of Thomas Pynchon's famous novel written in 1973, though it strays into further corners of the artist's mind.

Terri Saul: Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the most drug-ridden novels ever written. When considering your illustrations of it, I thought about Glenn Gould, a musician who experimented with both drugs and classical music. Do you ever use drugs while working?

Zak Smith: 1-Drugs are very popular among people who are interested in interesting things but are not themselves very interesting.

2-Drugs make your body do weird things–so they’re interesting if you’re in the performing arts.

3-Drugs make boring things seem interesting, so products created by people while they are on drugs are often really boring.

Glenn Gould is a pretty good example of all three of these propositions–his rendition of Webern’s piano opus–(23 or 28?)–is amazing, but when he sits down and writes his own stuff, he’s terrible and derivative.

What I do–and what most fine artists do–is not a performing art, so drugs just do to you what they do to everyone else: they make you suck and then waste everyone’s time pretending you sucked for some non-drug reason.

I mean, in art school if there was some minimalist who made like a 2 by 4 except it was purposefully off by a quarter-inch and that was their art, you knew that guy was either on speed or a big pothead. When you look at all that crap conceptual art from the sixties and seventies–drugs.

Anyone with half an eyeball knows Victor Moscoso is obviously waaaaaaaay better then Andy Warhol–unless you’re on LSD, in which case they’re both exactly the same–green next to magenta, fuuuuuuck duuuuude. Then you sober up and have to defend how much you liked it and well, Andy’s got some old photo of Jackie O in it so you pretend you like it because it was like socially relevant and shit and Victor Moscocco just has a cool picture of a dinosaur so you just pretend you never saw it.

Big muddy neo-expressionist art that looks exactly like every other big muddy painting anyone accidentally made ever? Cocaine.

The funny part is then the critics have to scramble back to their desks and write 80-page essays about why they think Andy Warhol is good that DON’T just say “Sorry, sorry, I was on drugs.”

Terri Saul: Gravity’s Rainbow is a book–at least in part–about how information can tend toward entropy. What is your view of our current information-saturated culture?

Zak Smith: Ok, here’s a view–in newspapers with huge circulations we got headlines saying the president is a felon who lies about pretty much everything all the time and doesn’t know where Sweden is and most people in his country either don’t vote or decide to re-elect him and I got a myspace page which says “Don’t send blind friend requests, explain who you are first” and I get blind friend requests every day.

Information is only information if people are not total morons–however, people are total morons. Therefore we do not live in an information-saturated culture, we live in a Brad-Pitt-and-whatshername-just-had-a-baby- saturated-culture where smart people who care can find what they need when they have to if they’re lucky and we always have and we always will.

What is a Ghost?

"A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber."

- Coceres from Guillermo Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone

Moving the Coven

Dragon Head

Leonardo da Vinci's Dragon head

3 Women in Japan

Lights of Cleveland

In Uaxctun

Ali and I ate whole cloves of garlic on the earthen floor of our little hut, giant cockroaches crackling above our heads in the dry, straw-thatched ceiling. The garlic was meant to repel the mosquitos' bloodthirsty appetite that had suddenly, with the setting of the sun, become so devastatingly apparent; but it had little success, and we made our way through the dense, humid jungle to an evening meal with our hostess. The crudely screened porch where we sat and ate was not as primitive as the kitchen from where the food emerged, but it was a savory meal of roasted chicken, yellow rice and diced beets, wholesome enough to satisfy our hunger after a long day of bruising busrides and a cumbersome search for lodging, that at one point in time had seemed utterly desperate. Luckily for us, as so often occurs when traveling in foreign places, we were bailed out by a child, a young boy of nine or ten years, who directed us to this woman's empty hut for rent. He was not surprisingly shirtless and without shoes, and his well-worn jeans were so brown with dirt and mud that from a distance he appeared to be naked. His Spanish was blunt, but effective enough to understand and, more importantly, he was able to understand us; pointing to the end of the long stretch of open grass that divided the village in two, it could have served as a runway for small aircraft, and then jabbing his finger left as if to signal that by turning at the end of the tract we would find what we were looking for. Which we did find, a place to eat and rest for the night, upon following his directions. Up to that moment, we had encountered nothing short of oblivion from the locals in the village as they had mostly refused even eye contact with us, much less conversation, and with only one bus arriving and departing daily, we had begun to consider the option of roughing it that night in the jungle on the edge of this apparently inhospitable community.

RED STONE

A poem by Dick Hugo

If underwater and glowing, a red stone
is always good luck. Fish it out, even
if you must wade and wet your good shoes.
It will dry flat red like a new potato.
You should rub it and remember the way
it sparkles underwater, like a red haired woman
curving troutlike through moss.
A red stone will get you through divorce, rage,
sudden attacks of poison and certain diseses
like ringworm or gout. A red stone will not
reverse Alzen-Heimer's disease, or get you past
cancer of the colon. Use it for what it can do.
When it has done its work, return it softly
where you found it, and let your wet feet
sting a moment in the foam's white chill.

-Richard Hugo

Vanity Witch

A rare still from the Small Town Witch video shoot.
The goth queen of underground independent music videos adjusts her makeup between takes.

Jump to the video

Rotten D.J.

So whatever, I didn't find this because I was looking for it, but rather stumbled upon it and pilfered it from another blog - I don't remember whose blog, but I'm sure its in my links. Anyway, its a playlist from John Lydon's dj set when he played on Tommy Vance's Capital Radio show on July 16th, 1977. No punk but for the Pistols, though the multitude of reggae tunes shouldn't surprise:

Tim Buckley - Sweet Surrender
The Creation - Life Is Just Beginning
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel
The Chieftains - Jig A Jig
Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets The Rockers Uptown
Gary Glitter- Doin' Alright With The Boys
Fred Locks - These Walls
Culture - I'm Not Ashamed
Dr Alimantado - Born For A Purpose
Bobby Byrd - Back From The Dead
Neil Young - Revolution Blues
Sex Pistols - Did You No Wrong
Lou Reed - Men Of Good Fortune
Kevin Coyne - Eastbourne Ladies
Peter Hammill - Institute Of Mental Health (Burning)
Peter Hammill - Nobody's Business
Captain Beefheart - The Blimp
Nico - Janitor Of Lunacy
Ken Boothe - Is It Because I'm Black
John Cale - Legs Larry At Television Centre
Third Ear Band - Fleance
Can - Halleluwah
Peter Tosh - Legalise It

Dead Moon, The End (belated post)

If you never got to see them live, you should have; they performed the most soulful and intimate rock show I have ever seen, huddled together inside their nest of candles and amplifiers, their barbed and jagged boogie declerations blasting out over mesmerized devotees and further gutter-strutting their way out into the city streets. Dead Moon was the ragged truth, Dead Moon, too soon laid to rest.

Transfloral View(s)

Regarding Round Objects in the Nethers of Abroad

There are times when, far away from home, all the beans are magic beans, and every single window is an invitation to be born again. These are the moments when traveling costs are as insignificant as brushes and pens are useless, for who can sit still to write amidst such delight? Afternoons spent cascading from well-lit bars into dense Tokyo streets, wine stained chins cutting through the breeze; we found our way into a lush green park where children and their mothers posed for pictures on the path and the birds in the canopy were hysterical and deafening like sirens in the trees. The din from the city grew farther away...

The Marvelous Globe of the Human Eye

"Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye."
- Cynthia Ozick

Goodbye, Andrew Hill

Hank Shteamer eulogizes the late, brilliant Andrew Hill better than I could have done, so here's a jump to his thoughts. Check out his links too, especially the recordings from Mary McPartland's Piano Jazz show; the interview is as effortless as the playing is sublime.

Electric Guitar Experiment

I still listen to Ed with great wonder and awe; this video clarifies everything but explains nothing.

Bert and Ernie Experiment

I used to watch them with great wonder when I was young; this short video clarifies nothing.

Appalachia Crossing

Concerning Travel

"He is, of course, the best of travelers, for he is not put off by the vagaries of trains, inn-keepers, or the elements. And since it is the impact of the place upon him and not himself on the place which concerns him, his expeditions are usually both comfortable and successful."

- Phyllis McGinley

I discovered this quote the day following my last post.

Train to Tokyo Airport

Speeding from vast immesuarble Tokyo
on a train
to the airport
with a feeling like I never was there.

BLUE STONE

a poem by Dick Hugo

A blue stone is only one piece
of a huge blue stone no one can find.
A blue stone is anything but
a blue stone. It is a speck of sky
in your hand or a tiny bit of sea.
Of all stones, it contains
the most magics. It can veer your life
away from poverty to riches. It can grow a tree
exactly where you need shade. Just rub
a blue stone and make a wish. A blue stone
becomes the blue marble shooter
you won all those marble games with.
I always act indifferent
around blue stones, sort of nonchalant
like I feel they're nothing special.
That way they work best for me.
I avoid cold faces and cruel remarks.
When I sail a blue stone downwind into
the long blue day, armies start marching.
When I find the stone, armies stop.
When I sail a blue stone into the wind
that always precedes a rain in Montana
and then find the stone and pick it up
a bird sings blue rain.
Days I can't find a blue stone
no matter where I look, I know they've returned
every one to the big blue stone they came from
somewhere in blue mountains,
a place unmapped and roadless
that can't be seen from the air.

- Richard Hugo

Springtime on the Mall

Springtime is the city's best season. The residents are pleased to come out of their tiresome apartments and to mingle in the museums with visitors from around the globe. The warm air guarantees the many blooming parks to be full with revelers and their dogs, and kites floating high into the clouds until long after the sun goes down. And on this day, we set off to meet a painter we'd not seen in years...

In the Morning

in the morning we had steaming black coffee in tall glasses and watched through the front window of the cafe
the old ladies and their little dogs hustling through the fog