All images Leica SL and 75mm Noctilux
D.C.’s High Heel Race has gotten so big, they ask spectators to sign up in advance, so they can estimate a crowd count. Let’s just assume that each year, weather permitting, it’s going to get bigger and bigger.
If you’d like to see monochrome images from years past, you might want to go here. If you want to see how it looked in 2018, see below.
In August, word came that, the night before, Iggy Pop had performed “Grunewald,” the best song of Tess Parks & Anton Newcombe’s “Right On” E.P. This was the ultimate tip of the cap from one old pro to another (slightly younger one.) We’ve been playing “Grunewald” for months, a song that sounds like something The Koolaid Electric Company could riff on the whole night through.
On their eponymous new album, Tess Parks & Anton Newcombe continue their work together three years after releasing I Declare Nothing, one of 2015’s best records. Tess Parks & Anton Newcombe proves that each is the other’s muse. Newcombe has long worked with female vocalists in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, from Miranda Lee Richards to Sarabeth Tucek, and Parks sang on last year’s “Fingertips” single. Recording together, though, seems to encourage Newcombe to dig deep into his bucket of velvet hooks, and the results are seldom less than glorious.
Over the weekend, I put together a playlist comprising the best songs the Brian Jonestown Massacre have released over the past five years, coupled with the best songs Anton’s recorded with Tess on their two albums and E.P. The playlist is three hours long.
Tess Parks has a limited range and a husky voice, but on the evidence of her strong 2013 album Blood Hot she doesn’t actually have to record with Newcombe to find something to say. She’s a fascinating artist in her own right — and he is, this many years in, proving that being creative is the best revenge. Their recorded relationship reminds us of how Dave Roback and Hope Sandoval come together in Mazzy Star. Sandoval may have the more beguiling voice, but Parks and Newcombe together are every bit as magical.
Back in January 2017, when things seemed most bleak — we had no real idea how bad things would yet become — we went to the Women’s March and it was uplifting. To see hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, black and white, thronging the Nation’s Capital to protest against Trump was a remarkable experience, and we pledged then that we’d continue to go to protests and document them. In fact, we created a gallery documenting these protests over on our sister site, TulipFrenzyPhotography.com.
We understand that, going into the final few weeks of the election, it has become a Republican talking point that those who’ve shown up to protest Trump, and most recently, the Kavanaugh SCOTUS nomination, are a “paid mob.” Hmm. Let’s go through some of these demonstrations, via photos of attendees, and see if they look like they needed George Soros to write them a check before they showed up. In the interests of brevity, I’ll show only a few photos per demonstration. And admittedly, because I went to so many, not all of them were uploaded to Word Press, and so I’m left here tapping only into images of only those demonstrations I wrote about on Tulip Frenzy. For photos of the Kavanaugh demonstrations, go see my Instagram: @tulip_frenzy.
These were attendees from the Women’s March. Do they look like a “paid mob” to you?
A week or so later, people began coming out to protest Trump’s evil Muslim Ban. Do these look like paid protesters?
Continued protestors against the Muslim Ban. Paid mob? I don’t think so.
Next came the Tax March.
Then the March for Science. Paid mob? You decide.
The Climate March. These people look like it too money to get them out?
I think this was the March for Truth.
These people, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, came out in protest of Trump’s failure to deal with the devastation in Puerto Rico. Paid mob?
The March for Black Women last fall was inspiring.
And then there was the Anniversary of the Women’s March in January.
We could go on and on. The protests we saw in Washington last week renewed our spirits. Calling any of these American families protesting for our rights “a paid mob” is just more derp and hooey, exactly what we’ve come to expect from our President and his cronies. They’re the real paid mob. Lock’em up.
Tulip Frenzy 