Blog Response 3: Inspiring Photgraphs from the Stacks!

Leibovitz never fails to inspire me.  But something about the compilation I found in the library of her photographs of women was particularly fascinating to me.  It was an interesting study to flip through the pages and see so many different versions of the same breed.  All the women featured were led very different lives.  Yet there was a similarity between all the women--a common thread of self-empowerment and individuality in all of them that I'm sure Leibovitz recognized.  It made me think of my own female heroes and the women that inspire me to be the same.  I smell a new photo project....

Some of my female heroes:

Carole King, singer/songwriter

My Mom, Carol, anesthesiologist

Maya Angelou, writer

Stevie Nicks, musician

Blog Respon 2: Bergamont Station

Ron Jude's "Emmett"

The "past" is like a magical beast. 

At times, it makes me want to cry and a pit overwhelms my stomach, coming on like the weight of a ton of bricks. At other times, I want to grin and smile - I want to scream and howl like a hyena at those visions that flood my head, pouring out from my memories. The "past", yes, I can see it in my minds eye and who I was then, something different, another me in third person, frozen forever in my head. In these versions of wide awake dreams I see my youth and the powerful will to think for myself and I see the magic contained in my innocence and in the absence of everything that I had yet to know. In my youth I could only look ahead but now, here I am and increasingly I see so much that is moving behind. 

Perhaps it is then a ghost of me that I see. There he stands, a partial figure or symbol of something, distant and fading... rapidly moving away. 

Ron Jude's use of color was particularly appealing to me at Bergomot Station.   Jude overlays images to create dream like effects in his photographs.  Jude wished to create a sense of the past in his photographs, mimicking cloudy memories that we recollect throughout our lives--perhaps better than the actual events themselves.  

Assignment 1/18: Eggleston LACMA Exhibit

 

There is something about Eggleston's use of yellows in the LACMA exhibit that was particulary striking to me.  Throughout his photographs, Eggleston makes an effort to make his subject matter brighter than life.  If we were, for example, standing in front of the woman above in the yellow dress, our eyes would auto focus the colors she wears.  His work is both a reality and a fiction in that he presents the grittiness of the American life, while simultaneously manipulating the colors of the scenes to project a glamourous mood. 

I like that the collection at LACMA is called the Democratic Camera.  Eggleston emphasized that no subject was off limits for him.  Everything was equal in his lense. By the photographer allowing himself such freedom, the viewer takes another look at the classic American scenes Eggleston presents.  The vibrancy of his palette suggests beauty in all his subject matter.

 

n.

RHYTHM MAKERS

I've always been in awe of drummers--they're always the first people I'm drawn to on a stage.  Nothing is more primitive and real than a drummer hitting the shit out of drum kit.  And they're always placed in back! Not fair.  There should be a national drummer appreciation holiday.  Who can set this up?

I'm definitely no percussion expert, but these guys never fail to give me chills:

Patrick Hallahan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3LkOenYifU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA7jj1EO_7M&playnext=1&list=PLF83F633B47BBBEBE&index=92

Ginger Baker

http://drummerworld.com/Videos/gingerbakersunshine.html

Chris Tomson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_MhjbpWa8Y

Something would be missing if I didn't mention John Bonham

 At least watch what happens around the 14th minute....

http://drummerworld.com/Videos/johnbonhammobidickrah70.html

more to come....(I mean, maybe)

n.

William Eggleston

Are you experienced?

After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers Mary 

A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind, it cries Mary

The traffic lights they turn up blue tomorrow 
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
'Cause the life that lived is, is dead
And the wind screams Mary

Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
And with his crutch, it's old age, and it's wisdom
It whispers no, this will be the last
And the wind cries Mary

MOJO STONE

 Our latest video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9Mf_IZpWPw

Me and my good, good buddy, David Donaldson, formed a little duet back in the fall of our sophomore year.  We released a sugary e.p. which we stupidly called Mojo Stoned.  

Since then, we've become a full band with the likes of Henry McGill and Neil Wogensen. These boys share a passion for music with me and we fucking love playing together. 

We're coming out with our first official E.P. next spring, produced by our very talented pal, Matt Linesch.  I don't think I've ever been more excited for anything in my whole life. Honestly. These five silly little songs mean so much to us now and we can't wait to show them to everyone and let them become a part of your daily soundtrack.  I hope they will eventually mean as much to you as they do to us.

STAY TUNED!

Nat.

Bill Graham Presents

This must be what they mean when they say eye candy....

Lester Bangs, Bob Dylan's Dalliance with Mafia Chic

I was hanging out at a buddy's house and saw a compilation of Lester Bangs essays laying on the floor, entitled "Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste:  A Lester Bang Reader."  I started to browse through his writings on the Stones and Stevie Nicks and found myself agreeing with everything he was saying.  Stevie Nicks is a total space cadet, but she's honest.  It's Only Rock N' Roll will not endure, but Exile on Main Street will.  The usual stuff I think any lover of rock n' roll would agree with (right?)


This morning I woke up, got a big ass cup of coffee, and vegged out to read Lester's thoughts on Bob Dylan.  I expected only the warmest words because now, with the 60's behind us, Dylan has become a dreamy image for us twenty-first century songwriters (with the exception of his 80's stuff and latest Christmas album....what I would give to have a conversation with him asking what the hell that was about).


 Over the past few years,  I have spent countless hours listening to his albums, picking apart his words, trying to get to the root of who he was and what he was trying to say.  His albums to me are like the Bible to christians.  Even if I don't understand it, I agree with it.  And with most of the songwriters I talk to, they don't really question his early and middle-career stuff either.  They only listen as devout believers, trying to absorb it all like a sponge because they assume it's all the real deal.  That's why I was floored with what Bangs had to say about one of my favorite Dylan albums, Blood on the Tracks:


I discovered that I only really wanted to play this record whenever I had a fight with someone I was falling in love with--we would reach some painful impasse of words or wills, she would go home, and I would sit up all night with my misery and this album, playing it over and over, wallowing in Dylan's wretched reflection of my own confusion: 'Women--who can figger 'em?'  I imagine it was also a big hit with the recently (or soon to be divorced).


At length I concluded that any record whose principal utility lay in such an emotional twilight zone was at worst an instrument of self-abuse, at best innocuous as a crying towel, and certainly was not going to make me a better person or teach me anything about women, myself, or anything else but how painfully confused Bob Dylan seemed to be.  Which was simply not enough.






This is a guy that really looks to music for the answers, who views music as the moral force of society. I'm kinda freaked out now.  Probably mostly freaked out because I agree with him, but I just never thought to think that for myself. I got swept up in the twenty-first century starry-eyed vision of Dylan's earliest albums.  I forgot to question if they were for real or not because I grew up in a musical community that never did that.  


I've never really cared for them before, but it's because of pieces like this one that rock writers are so important.  They keep musicians in check and honest. But they've gotta be good writers, the kind that love music so much because of the goodness it brings to society--not just a swollen sense of self-worth.  No way do I agree with everything I've read of Lester's, but I'm glad he's there to bring up an opposing argument.  It promotes hard work and authenticity.  If we continually praise people that sing a word or two on love lost or love gained, music is gonna plateau and fall to shit.  As a songwriter, that goes for me too! What am I singing about that must be said?    Am I writing and performing to look cute and get attention or because I believe in the underlying message of the songs I sing?  I don't think I've written one song yet that HAD to be written.  Something to shoot for.


I'll disagree with all of this in the morning.


n. 


Here is the entire essay if you want to read it, it starts on page 210:


http://books.google.com/books?id=6DyE-UAdYD0C&pg=PA210&lpg=PA210&dq=%22bob+dylan's+dalliance+with+mafia+chic%22&source=bl&ots=D928Ps0eYt&sig=cKU1zwSDZ84NR9VvP5ADr-aXkq0&hl=en&ei=tS_oTLSMCI2-sQOl2pCxCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22bob%20dylan's%20dalliance%20with%20mafia%20chic%22&f=false