Archive for October, 2014
Covering Up
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Summilux Asph, Leica Monochrom, Times Square on October 15, 2014 by johnbuckley100
Jim Marshall’s “The Haight: Love, Rock, And Revolution”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags " Galaxie 500, "The Haight: Love Rock And Revolution" Joel Selvin, Ethan Russell, Ethan Russell Sam Cutler, Jim Marshall on October 15, 2014 by johnbuckley100A couple of years ago, the estate of the great rock photographer Jim Marshall published The Rolling Stones 1972, which contained some of the most iconic photos taken of the Stones as they finished Exile On Main Street and embarked on what inarguably was their best tour.
Now we have something that is in many ways finer — Marshall’s entire oeuvre, or so it would seem, of images taken between 1965 and 1969 as the San Francisco bands, and the spirit they unleashed, changed the world. The Haight: Love, Rock, And Revolution is the best large book of rock photos and essays since Ethan Russell’s Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont, And The Death of the Sixties. And what is clear is that, in addition to the great stage shots and band portraits of the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead, Marshall was a genuinely gifted street and event photographer, capturing not just how, say, the Trips Festival looked, but how it felt.
Jim Marshall was the only photographer allowed into the Beatles dressing room when they played their final show ever at Candlestick Park in 1966. It is a measure of his sheer force of personality that a guy wearing a corduroy suit and with short hair and horn-rimmed glasses could have insinuated his way into the inner circle of the counterculture leaders and the great bands of the day.
The text written by Joel Selvin contains gem after gem, the details piling up in an authoritative manner. Random sample: here is Selvin on the night in October 1967 when Grace Slick joined the Airplane:
“The first night at Winterland, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band brought onstage a friend from Chicago to jam named Steve Miller, who earned a standing ovation by announcing he was moving to town to form a band.”
Even after leafing through the book for the photos, you go back to the beginning to read every word.
Selvin’s writing, which is more than merely an accompaniment to Marshall’s images, captures the full arc of The Haight, from innocence in an environment where acid was legal, to the curdling of the movement during the Summer of Love, to its collapse amidst speed freaks and tourist busses by the end of 1967. Read this book and then Sam Cutler’s You Can’t Always Get What You Want to see the sorry conclusion at Altamont, in December ’69.
Back to Marshall’s photographs: this visual document of the rise and fall of the Haight is also, of course, an image-drenched trove capturing both the short-lived artists who did not get out of the ’60s alive and those who stood the test of time. Worth it alone for the pictures of Hendrix that Marshall made so famous, it is a glorious compendium.
Temptation
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Noctilux 0.95, Leica M-240 on October 12, 2014 by johnbuckley100
Go on, you know you want to… buy V For Vaselines.
“V For Vaselines” Is All We Really Want To Listen To
Posted in Uncategorized with tags "V For Vaselines", Kurt Cobain, Nirvana, The Mekons, The Vaselines on October 12, 2014 by johnbuckley100There’s a delightful perversity to the story of The Vaselines. The Glaswegian band released their first album, Dum Dum, in 1989 — and promptly broke up. They got one of those career boosts a band can only dream of: Kurt Cobain listed Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee as his favorite songwriters, and proved it on MTV Unplugged in New York, when Nirvana covered “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam,” not to mention a killer version of “Molly’s Lips” on Incesticide. And yet by that time, there was no band to cash in on the plug. The story seemingly ended with one album, two singles, and a famous missed chance.
Not for another 21 years did The Vaselines put out Sex With An X, the follow-up to the lauded Dum Dum, and what a follow-up it was. We were, alas, a little slow on the pick-up and had to list in 2011 as one of our previous-year’s regrets the fact that it hadn’t made the Tulip Frenzy 2010 Top Ten List (c). Since then, Sex With An X has been a regular presence in our earbuds, and we play it anytime we want to have our mood improved by gorgeously melodic and often howlingly funny songs. To say that The Vaselines only delivered on their promise after a generation’s absence just ads to the perversity of their story.
And now comes V For Vaselines, the tightest, likely the most tuneful album of punk rock since Rocket To Russia, an album that if listened to on the Delta Shuttle (true story) provokes such aisle seat joy that cross aisle neighbors stare before you realize you are snapping your fingers and possibly singing along. Eugene and Frances have never sung better, the propulsive drumming is more infectious than Ebola, and the whole album swings. We wake in the middle of the night with “Crazy Lady” being powered through the Marshall amps inside our mind, and when we say that this song — actually, the whole album — reminds us of I (Heart) The Mekons, we of course are offering the highest praise. “Earth Is Speeding” is a reminder of what could have happened if Roxy Music, in 1977, had hopped on the punk rock bandwagon. Lovers once upon a time, adult collaborators these days, Kelly and McKee have literally never sounded better than they do on “Number One Crush,” with its great lyrical premise of tongue-tied love (“Being with you/Kills my IQ).
The mythos of rock’n’roll is that a band puts everything into its first record, and either grows or dies from there. There is no precedent for a one-album wonder coming back from obscurity 21 years after the first record, and then four years later puts out a masterpiece. But that’s what The Vaselines have done, and its not too late for you to come along on a greasy, glorious ride.
Protecting Gotham
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Summilux Asph, Comic Con 2014, Gotham, Leica Monochrom on October 10, 2014 by johnbuckley100
Here’s hoping everyone has a great Comic Con 2014.
The New Centurions
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Summilux Asph, Leica Monochrom, Times Square on October 8, 2014 by johnbuckley100
These guys were performing on an October evening when it still was warm enough to show off the tats.
Lou Reed’s New York Still Exists
Posted in Leica Monochrom, Lou Reed, Times Square with tags 50mm Summilux Asph, Leica Monochrom, Lou Reed, Times Square on October 7, 2014 by johnbuckley100It has been a long time since we’ve gotten to wander through Times Square on a warm autumn evening at 10:30 or so. So much has changed since Giuliani and Bloomberg have rendered the city something closer to Singapore than the dirty town we lived in in the ’70s. The pedestrian mall is filled with cops, and cartoon characters. But even out there on the street, with the Disney characters entertaining the tourists, a slice of the New York we used to live in can still be found. Leica Monochrom, 50mm Summilux Asph.
Richard Hell’s Performances*At Symphony Space
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Richard Hell, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Symphony Space on October 7, 2014 by johnbuckley100Richard writes with the following news, which we are pleased to post:
I hardly ever do broadcast emails, but I’m sending this to a few friends and contacts because I’m not sure the signals would reach you otherwise (being that the official ones originate from the Upper West Side), and I want people to come!
I’m curating and hosting a series of events at Symphony Space for which I’ve dragooned one youngish artist per evening to sit still to be interviewed on stage by me before he or she performs. The interviews will be 25-30 minutes and the performances 45-50 minutes (with the exception of Kelly Reichardt’s 1:40 movie–projected via celluloid, not digitally, incidentally). These will happen in a beautifully equipped venue, seating only 168. There will be bonuses—surprise supplements to the interviews and some ace giveaways. The main thing though is that all these people are interesting and talented and this is a unique chance to see them so intimately exposed…
Please attend and spread the word if you can. Any tweets or other social media announcements of the series will be highly appreciated, and please forward this email to anyone you think might be interested. The most practical single link to let anyone know about is the series list at Symphony Space, where clicking on the individual event listings will take you to ticket-sales pages: http://www.symphonyspace.org/events/series/180/night-out-with-richard-hell
Thank you!
My New Performance Series
Night Out with Richard Hell
in the Thalia Theater at Symphony Space
2537 Broadway, NYC (southwest corner of 95th St. and Broadway)
* NOTE: ORIGINAL HEADLINE REFERRED TO THESE AS SPOKEN WORD PERFORMANCES. SEE COMMENT FOR BETTER DESCRIPTION OF WHAT THESE SHOWS WILL BE LIKE.
This Image Chosen By The Leica Store DC For Their Oscar Barnack Wall
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Botswana, Leica M, Leica Store DC, Stephen Bartels Gallery, Summicron 90mm on October 4, 2014 by johnbuckley100
We were honored by the news that the Leica Store DC chose our image from a recent trip to Botswana for display on their Oskar Barnack Wall during the month of October. Oskar Barnack was the developer of the ur-Leica, which means he was the person who invented 35mm photography. To be associated in any way with his name is an honor, and we appreciate the Leica Store for choosing our image.
For those lucky enough to live in the Nation’s Capital, the Leica Store has, since May of 2012, become a remarkable hub for photography here. Whether or not one shoots Leica, to have a serious photography store host so many events, and to be so welcoming, seven days a week, to street shooters wandering by, is pretty remarkable. We’re fortunate to have them in the community. The camera equipment’s not bad either.
About the image: this was taken on the first night of our trip to the Okavango Delta, at Tubu Tree. Literally an hour after our arrival, we went out in the Land Rover and our guide led us to this. Leica M, 90mm APO-Summicron-Asph. That the moon was rising and framed by tree branches while the leopard stared at us was just the kismet of the cosmos.
This image, and a set of 12 black and white images from the same trip, are for sale at The Stephen Bartels Gallery.
The Best News Of The Week Is That The Black Ryder Have A New Album Coming Out
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Aimee Nash, Scott Van Ryper, the black ryder, The Door Behind The Door, The Morning After Girls on October 4, 2014 by johnbuckley100After something like a four-year wait, we were delighted with the news that a new song by The Black Ryder was posted on Stereogum.
Back in early 2010, Tulip Frenzy brought forth upon this land an early look at The Black Ryder’s debut, Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride, which we’d damn near had to swim to Australia to find. Our motivation for diving in the Pacific, credit card in hand, was simple: Aimee Nash and Scott Van Ryper had been core members of The Morning After Girls, whose early recordings were an almost perfect blend of both the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, and the songs that first were released by what then was known, in e.e. cummings lowercase lettering, as the black ryder, were simply awesome.
There are different ways one can measure a great record, but the two that matter are whether it has the potential to change the world, and whether years later you still play it regularly. Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride might not have changed the world, but from the full spectrum of Tulip Frenzy’s 2010 Top Ten List (c), this album today gets called to earbud duty every bit as much as that year’s winner, Darker My Love’s Alive As You Are. There is the squall of guitars laying a pea-soup shroud of noise fog on Aimee Mann’s ethereal vocals, the drama of the songwriting revealing the hidden truth that these guys likely were what made the early Morning After Girls records so beguiling. This was shoegaze music that got into the bones, that sunk into the marrow, that once in the head could not be eradicated. Because of our regular playing of it, we have become intimately aware of the topography of our desert boots, the fray of our shoelaces. We play it all the time.
So the fact that The Black Ryder will, in early 2015, release The Door Behind The Door is reason for celebration, reason for optimism, the best news on the planet in an otherwise pretty dreary week.
Tulip Frenzy 