Leica M, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph.
The Wrestler
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm APO-Summicron-ASPH, Leica M on May 13, 2015 by johnbuckley100Crocodiles’ “Boys” Leaves An Impressive Residue On Our Stereo Speakers
Posted in Uncategorized on May 13, 2015 by johnbuckley100The great WABC DJ Dan Ingram once memorably followed up some disco-era hit by saying “that song is so dirty it leaves a stain on your car radio.” On their amazing new album, Boys, Crocodiles rubs at least a bit of salsa mixed with club sweat on our speakers, and we mean that as high praise.
Through their early albums, the easy reference point for describing what Crocodiles sounded like was to cite Psychocandy-era Jesus and Mary Chain. This was a little less true on the wonderful Crimes Of Passion, which took the #5 spot on Tulip Frenzy’s 2013 Top Ten List, and it’s less true here. If you didn’t know better, and you heard “Foolin’ Around” come shimmering across the border radio from Tijuana, you’d be forgiven for immediately thinking it was an outtake from Blur’s The Magic Whip. For if there is a guitar sound that Brandon Welchez and Charles Rowell seem to be grasping for here, it’s Graham Coxon’s. That’s a good place to be. Chunky chords, frayed at the edges, over a rhythm section with so much more soul than is usually produced by SoCal punks, it sounds like it was recruited off a Mexico City dance floor.
We also loved the Haunted Hearts record last year, you know, the duet that Welchez and his bride, Dee Dee of the Dum Dum Girls, put together between their two outfits’ tours. Of all three projects, to these ears, Crocodiles has the longest tail, the sharpest teeth, the greatest menace. On Boys, even as the clock ticks in their belly, Crocodiles seem intent on letting Peter Pan live on in polymorphous, not to mention polyrhythmic, perversity. It makes sense that “Peroxide Hearts” sounds like it came straight off Sally Can’t Dance, because there is something about Crocodiles’ sound that seems as devoid of natural fibers as anything Lou Reed produced in his butchest period. And while there was piano on Crimes of Passion, we don’t ever want to hear these guys strum an acoustic guitar: this is airless, smoky, sinuous music, thrilling in its low-budget reverb. And yeah, especially if you play it over and over as we have, it leaves a stain on your speakers.
For Us, White Fence And Thee Oh Sees Were The Highlights Of Levitation: Austin Psych Fest 2015
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Holy Wave, Levitation, The Austin Psych Fest, the black ryder, Thee Oh Sees, White Fence on May 11, 2015 by johnbuckley100
John Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees
It had rained so much earlier in the week (and earlier in the day) that the organizers of Levitation — this year’s version of the Austin Psych Fest — had to change stage locations. The desire was to have no band float off into the river as the stage they played on was swept away, though that sure would have been cool to witness. But even though they provided a helpful pocket map, with set times on the three stages, the reality of the layout did not conform to what was on the map, and thus we were more than a little disoriented Friday evening. And of course, the quicksand texture of the ever-present mud made getting from one stage to the next an adventure.
Going to an event like Levitation, with headliners including The Jesus and Mary Chain, Tame Impala, Spiritualized, the Flaming Lips, Primal Scream, and the reunion of the 13th Floor Elevators, you have to pick and choose who you really want to see, which is a function both of desire and stamina. For us, the priorities were to see Thee Oh Sees, White Fence, and the Black Ryder — three fave bands from the West Coast who non-NYC East Coasters are deprived of. It really was these bands that we flew to Austin to see, as among the headliners, we’ve seen The Jesus and Mary Chain many times over the years, and Spiritualized on their last tour. Much as we would have loved to have seen Roky Erikson play to a hometown crowd, the 13th Floor Elevators reunion was late Sunday evening, and in order to be at work this morning, banging out this Tulip Frenzy update, we needed to be on a return flight well before he beamed down on stage. So we picked and we chose and the best of what we saw is contained herein.
Holy Wave
We loved Holy Wave, who played early Friday evening on the stage they’d moved up from rivers edge. 2014’s Relax was a garage band highlight, and their evocation of the Velvets meet Spaceman 3 seemed a perfect way to get into the Levitation spirit. On a beautiful evening, with the rain gone but not forgotten, we stood by a suppurating mud hole and saw these Austinites (transplanted from El Paso), ring true to a Texas-state tradition that includes ? and the Mysterians, not to mention the Sir Douglas Quintet. Fun set by a great band whose new work, previewed here, seems both poppier and tighter than what was on Relax. Great things await these guys.
White Fence
Longtime readers will remember that Tim Presley in his many guises — Darker My Love frontman, co-conspirator with Ty Segall, genius leader of White Fence — is accorded worshipful respect at Tulip Frenzy World HQ. White Fence’s Live In San Francisco was on 2013’s Top Ten List, and of course, For The Recently Found Innocent was our Album of the Year last year. So to say we were looking forward to White Fence’s set is an understatement, and we are happy to announce they did not disappoint. No, if anything, they exceeded our sky high expectations.
White Fence
From the opening strains of “Paranoid Bait” to the Ian Rubbish-perfection of the closer “Harness”, the White Fence set was scorching, with the guitars chiming perfectly, the drummer damn near pounding this stage back into the river. If you believe, as we do, that the Holy Troika of Ty Segall, John Dwyer, and Tim Presley have saved rock’n’roll in the same way, beginning in ’76, that punk saved it, then you will understand we are not exaggerating in our verdict that the elusive Presley and his incredible live outfit are the most interesting act in contemporary music. This is not easy music to perform — there’s a Magic Band complexity to the hairpin turns and manic galloping of songs like “Wolf Gets Red Faced” and “Paranoid Bait,” and in context, the motorik “Baxters Corner” was a psychedelic anthem. Presley is emerging as a towering American musical figure of Alex Chilton-esque importance, and the set White Fence played Friday night alone was worth the airfare. It also made us replay in the hours since the 2013 live album, and yeah, it’s on a par with Live At Leeds, it really is. Our fervent prayer is that Presley sustains the focus that brought us that live album and last year’s opus, and does not go back to noodling in his room. If we had our druthers, he would take this band into the studio and lock the door. We’d slide cheeseburgers under the door and eagerly await the output.
Thee Oh Sees
Our second favorite set of the festival was Thee Oh Sees on Saturday night. We fought our way forward through the large crowd of the Reverberation headliners’ stage, and man, were we rewarded. The double-drum set up of the new construct was potent, though it must be said that an aspect of melodic subtlety has been dropped in the transition from the San Francisco to LA lineup of Dwyer’s outfit. On songs like “Web,” which they performed gloriously, it appears that when Mutilator Defeated At Last is released in a few weeks, some of what we loved so much about 2013’s Floating Coffin — the ability to both startle the senses and tickle the frontal lobes, all at the same time — will have given way to brute force thundering punk. But that’s high praise in many a home, not least ours, and we were thrilled by the generous set Dwyer and co. played.
The Black Ryder
So we were a little disappointed by the Spiritualized set Friday evening. But while, as we will explain, it’s not entirely fair to judge The Black Ryder based on their Saturday performance, we think maybe it’s time to offer a heart-to-heart, avuncular download of advice to one of our very favorite bands. The problem of unfairness they faced was that they were squeezed into the smaller stage inside the tent next to where Thee Oh Sees would perform thirty minutes after their set began. It was inevitable that the crowd — us included — would drift away to see the bigger band on the bigger stage.
But the additional problem is that the three songs they began with from 2015’s The Door Behind The Door are all slow, and while beautiful, 20+ minutes of music at that tempo was not what a festival crowd wanted to hear. The moment they began playing music from their earlier masterpiece, 2010’s Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride, things improved, for these are far more uptempo songs. The early segment from the new album happen to be the best things on the disk, and if this is an indication of where The Black Ryder are headed, we get it, we accept it. But we have to say we were a bit disappointed with the set, and yeah, on balance, with the new album, in part because we miss the Bloody Valentines meets Morning After Girls ecstasy of the first one, in part because the new music is a tad precious. Growing pains suffered by a great band, who at Levitation were dealt a cruel hand. Given they were inevitably going to lose a portion of the audience to Thee Oh Sees, we wish they’d paced their first 35 minutes a bit differently. And we look forward to seeing them play a full set, at the pacing they choose, anytime they can return, we hope as headliners, to a longer East Coast tour.
All pictures taken with the Leica C.
Reflections On The D.C. Funk Parade
Posted in Uncategorized with tags D.C. Funk Parade, Leica 35mm Summilux FLE, Leica M-240, Nation's Capital, Washington on May 3, 2015 by johnbuckley100
We couldn’t help thinking, as we got to the corner of 14th and U, that the street fair preceding it and the route to be taken by the D.C. Funk Parade was exactly where, in 1968, the riots that gutted Washington’s interior all began. Even as our nearby neighbor Baltimore was bracing for more disturbances in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder by police, D.C. was fixing to throw a party, a parade. 
14th and U: exactly the street corner where, on the Thursday night in April 1968 when word of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination reached the streets, the Nation’s Capital began to burn, with key commercial corridors — the heart of Black D.C. in particular — not recovering for thirty or more years. 
That the Funk Parade would travel from the Howard Theater at one end of U Street, to the Lincoln Theater at the other end, made sense symbolically. Washington is far from a perfect city. If you created a histogram of its population, you would still see the zone to the left completely black and the zone to the right completely white. But especially along this commercial entertainment zone, so filled with history from the Duke Ellington era to the time that began, for some of us, when the 930 Club moved nearby and rock bands began playing in a neighborhood white kids might previously have feared to tread, D.C. has become a city where whites and blacks mix more freely than most others in the U.S. 
And so the D.C. Funk Parade was preceded by a street fair in the U Street Corridor, as it is called, with every alley booming with music. 
Kids were there with parents, old folks mixed with the young, and for a few hours, the city shined. 
We could not help thinking also about how history was everywhere around us, and the hero of the past might now loom with irony in the present. 
But as the parade time came closer, this was a city ready to get its funk on. 
People were out in their celebration finery. 
And the parade itself — which for some weird reason had been forced to go along a different path last year, until this year a Change.org petition and a new mayor restored it to its rightful route — was finally almost here. 
The streets filled and people took their places, even as clouds gathered behind us. 
Until finally the Funk Parade arrived, and it was a joyous event. 
Everyone clamored to see it. And we were again left reflecting on what a remarkable city our home of more than 30 years really is, its problems notwithstanding. What was destroyed by civil disturbances 47 years ago has in many ways come back, with a changed, multiracial population. The very streets that were destroyed by rioting — 14th Street, the U Street Corridor, 7th Street, the H Street Corridor — being the places that today have been restored as the most vibrant sections of a city that is livelier than ever. It made us hope that nearby Baltimore can have the same rejuvenation, but in much, much less time. 
We know there is much to think of, to reflect on, if the progress that D.C. has made is to continue in the future. All images Leica M (typ-240) and 35mm Summilux.
Haunted
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 35mm Summilux Asph FLE, Ben's Chili Bowl, Bill Cosby, Leica M on May 3, 2015 by johnbuckley100
Dale Yudelman’s Very Serious Humor
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Dale Yudelman, South Africa, Street Photography on April 22, 2015 by johnbuckley100
Dale Yudelman is an award-winning South African photographer who has the instincts of a comic novelist able to tell a serious story while playing to your sense of humor. Like Rian Malan and other artists of his generation, he left South Africa when it was intolerable and returned when the country embarked on its democratic path. Since the mid-1990s, several of his projects have gained an international audience, but it is long past time that he be recognized as one of the foremost street and social documentary photographers on the planet.
The artistic stakes are high in a country with as poignant a history as South Africa, but even when Yudelman is funny — funny like Elliott Erwitt is funny — he never hides behind irony. He’ll show things as they are — see on his website, under the project called “Reality Bytes,” the man who’s crashed his car and been projected through his windshield, though the little girl in the foreground seems more amazed that a photographer is taking a picture than she is at the accident itself.
He’ll show the country as it is:
Even as he also captures his Cape Town environment at its most romantic:
Fortunately for some high school students in Cleveland, he was in the States last autumn teaching photography — a white South African in post-Ferguson America, living in Cleveland when a 12-year old black boy could be shot by police while playing with a toy gun. Welcome to America. He calls the resulting project “Knocking On Cleveland’s Door,” and you should go see it: here.
To our knowledge, there are no books by Yudelman in print in the States. But there should be. The only book of his work that we can find, Life Under Democracy, is selling used on Amazon for $1000. A steep price for an introduction to a photographer’s work. A bargain, though, when you realize he is a contemporary master worthy of joining the canon.
To see more of Dale Yudelman’s work, go here.
Mistah Tulip Frenzy – He Dead
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Noctilux 0.95, Dumbarton Oaks, Leica M, ND filter, The Tulip Frenzy on April 18, 2015 by johnbuckley100Life is filled with choices. Last week, we chose to be at the Tidal Basin on the sunny evening in order to catch the Cherry Blossom Frenzy. Of course, we said, we’d be able to get to see the tulips this weekend in their customary frenzy, like so:
And yet upon arrival at Dumbarton Oaks this afternoon, we found this:
We missed the Tulip Frenzy! In fairness to us, the weather pattern has the flora and fauna confused, and the camellia bush that always blooms by Easter just bloomed. But sadly, this was the best we could find:
Wait, You Think The Tulip Frenzy Is This Weekend…
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 28mm Summicron, Cherry Blossom Time, Leica M, The Tulip Frenzy, Tulip Frenzy on April 17, 2015 by johnbuckley100
Wire, Last Of The Class Of ’77 British Punk Bands, Returns Anew With A Gorgeous Album
Posted in Uncategorized with tags "Pink Flag", Bruce Gilbert, Colin Newman, Wire on April 17, 2015 by johnbuckley100Next year, when Wire celebrates its 40th birthday as a working band, only they and the Fleshtones may be entitled to lay claim to having played CBGB in its prime and still be intact. Yes, guitarist and guiding spirit Bruce Gilbert left in 2003, but the core of Colin Newman, Robert (Gotobed) Grey, and Graham Lewis have just released their 14th album, the eponymous Wire. It should be no surprise to readers of Tulip Frenzy that it is melodically beautiful, occasionally thrilling, and completely worthwhile. We still haven’t listened to the new Calexico, because Wire is the only band we can listen to this week, on our iPad, in the car, at home before the computer.
Forget the Halley’s Comet reunions of the Buzzcocks and Sex Pistols, and even that ephemeral episode where Magazine thrillingly came back from the dead. Of the British bands who set our ears on fire in the late ’70s, it is only Wire that we have been able to rely on, at least since they reformed in the mid-’80s following their having been dropped by EMI upon the release of their third album, and masterpiece, 154. That album was the most fascinating document of a fascinating era: Wire’s three-chord rhumba having given way to gorgeous Eno-inflected experimentation all within the construct of pop songs, on an album that symbolically closed the punk era they’d helped create by being titled with the address of New York’s preeminent disco.
Since Gilbert left in the early Aughts, his replacement, Matthew Simms, plays with, not against the grain, and sure, something is lost in the process, same as the way Pere Ubu was never the same without Tom Herman, the Stones without Mick Taylor. But on three successive albums, particularly 2011’s Red Barked Tree, and 2013’s Change Becomes Us, the band has touched past glories and updated the story. With Wire, the foursome consolidate much of their gains in an upbeat, occasionally beautiful record that is more than a reminder of what has been.
Colin Newman has always been a schizophrenic vocalist as comfortable playing the Cockney punk as the pretty-voiced pop singer. On the new one, it’s really all the latter, a series of songs for adults to listen to on a late-night car ride when they want to stay awake and engaged but not on edge. We might not rave about it the way we did Change Becomes Us, but we welcome it, and Wire, as old friends, here for the long haul.
People Taking Pictures Of Themselves Taking Pictures Of People Taking Pictures
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 28mm Summicron, 50mm APO-Summicron-ASPH, Cherry Blossom Time, Leica M on April 13, 2015 by johnbuckley100
All pictures taken by the Leica M and either the 28mm Summicron or 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph.
Since the advent of the iPhone, the Tidal Basin at Cherry Blossom time has taken on a frenzied atmosphere, as crowds press in to have their pictures taken, by others or themselves.
Even when beauties show up for their portraits, it’s hard to believe their friends can get a clean shot without several smartphones in the foreground.
Oh sure, there are faces that can be isolated from the crowd.
And sometimes it’s fun to see people posing amidst the blossom frenzy.
But the advent of Selfie Sticks is a pretty horrifying development, and if you note, even the toddler seems to be taking a selfie.
And then it seems the only way to stand out and have a memorable image taken is to mug for the camera — your own camera.
But as you can tell, it was a lovely night, and after a long winter and a late bloom, the blossoms this year are truly awesome.
Tulip Frenzy 