It was 91 degrees in D.C. last Sunday. This feels less freakish. Leica M9, Noctilux, 2010.
With The Weather Turning, This Is More Like It
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9, Noctilux 0.95 on October 9, 2013 by johnbuckley100The Pixies Are Playing At Strathmore. Bummer.
Posted in Music with tags The Pixies, The Strathmore on October 9, 2013 by johnbuckley100If our memory is correct, the first time we saw the Pixies, it was 1990 and they played at the old 930 Club in D.C., with their opening act being this pretty good Seattle band called… what was it? Oh, yeah. Nirvana.
(We are sure it was 930, unsure whether Nirvana opened for them or some other band we saw there right about that time. The Fall? Wire?)
The old 930 Club was a great place to see a punk band — dank, intimate, the audience of, oh, 400 wrapped around the smallish stage. The original 930 Club — it moved to its present, ideal location circa 1992 — had a unique odor to it, which lingered in the clothes, such that even in winter, when we would come home from a show, Mrs. Tulip Frenzy usually insisted we leave our clothes on the porch and shower before coming to bed — and still we reeked of that potent cocktail: disinfectant, beer suds, cigarettes. That stench was the smell of… rock’n’roll.
We indulge in this nostalgia because yesterday, the Pixies announced the dates of their North American tour, which sees them playing at Strathmore in Bethesda. If the old 930 Club was a ’76 Alfa with a rusted door and a sputtering engine, sexy but cool, the Strathmore is a Coupe de Ville, a luxury boat you’d be embarrassed to be seen in. It is a luxurious concert hall with ushers even stuffier than the seating. It is, perhaps, the least rock’n’roll building in America, and we say that having never been to Branson, MO, but imagining just how awful it may be, or how bad it would be to see, say, the Clash play Vegas.
Some time ago, the Who played “Tommy” in opera houses, and there was a certain charm to such a mash-up. This ain’t that. This is sad.
And Context
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 35mm Summilux Asph, Leica M9 on October 6, 2013 by johnbuckley100Here’s the scene of that previous posted shot, this time using the Leica M9 on a bright sunny day. Slightly different context, no? Click on pic to see what time it is…
Time Of The Season
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica Monochrom and Noctilux on October 6, 2013 by johnbuckley100It’s October 6th in D.C. and it feels like August 6th. Does Nature know what time it is? Leica Monochrom, 50mm Noctilux.
We Weren’t Prepared For The Genius Of Fuzz, Ty Segall’s “Proto-Metal Side Project”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Black Sabbath, Charles Moothart, Fuzz, Ty Segall on October 6, 2013 by johnbuckley100It tells you a fair amount about our expectations that, even after downloading the eponymous first rec by Fuzz, the metal band in which Ty Segall sings and plays drums, not guitar, it took us a few days to listen to it. We figured that, like the acoustic Sleeper, released in July, this was at best a novelty, and more likely something like Jack White’s Dead Weathers — a slumming throwaway.
Whoo! Were we ever wrong! Fuzz is the best metal album we’ve heard since Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound’s When Sweet Sleep Returned. Forget the references invoking Black Sabbath — and yeah, there’re some tunes (“HazeMaze”) that seem like they’re dream marching in a Seconal torpor through LaBrea sludge — this is an album of fast’n’wild punk metal in which guitarist Charles Moothart plays Hendrix licks while Ty sings with all the gusto previously employed on his contemporary classic solo slabs.
We’ve always thought the weak link in the records Ty records by himself is the drumming — not that it’s weak so much as we can imagine how great it could be if he had Aynsley Dunbar or Bev Bevan or Will Rigby pounding the skins. The drumming here is good enough, which is fine, because the singing, guitar playing, and Roland Cosio’s bass playing is quite literally awesome. This may be the best sounding record Ty Segall has ever played on.
Look, we expected this was going to be something we’d indulge, perfectly willing to grant young Ty a gap-year project, given how hard he’d worked to graduate from whatever was the San Francisco school he’s now left, while we eagerly await the next step in his brilliant education, the locale of which has moved back to SoCal. Wrongo! Fuzz is among the greatest works yet from 2012’s Artist of This Or Any Year. It is so much better than what Ty did last time he recorded with Moothart (The Ty Segall Band’s Slaughterhouse.)
This is Ty at his best, the music thrills, and we are blown away.
Speaking Of Bees Kissing Flowers…
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9, Noctilux 0.95 on October 3, 2013 by johnbuckley100This has always been a favorite image of autumn in D.C. Call it a kiss and run. Leica M9, Noctilux, 2011.
The Time Of Year When Bees Kiss Flowers
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Noctilux 0.95, Leica M on October 3, 2013 by johnbuckley100Leica M, 50mm Noctilux. Yeah, click on image and look close.
If This Is Bowie’s Reading List, Wouldn’t You Love To See Eno’s?
Posted in Music with tags Bowie's List of 100 Favorite Books, David Bowie on October 3, 2013 by johnbuckley100We’re always a little suspicious of people who publish their long list of favorite books, as you know there have to be at least some chosen for effect. But as a compendium of favorites go, this list of 100 books submitted by David Bowie is pretty great.
We wish he had listed Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, instead of Herzog. But he sure picks the right Martin Amis novel when he cites Money.
All of the music histories listed, from Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train to Peter Guralnik’s Sweet Soul Music hit the spot, and there are some truly unexpected gems, like Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, and that late-70s college fave, Julian Jaymes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Okay, it’s undoubtedly great that he has DeLillo’s White Noise, but it would have been so much better if he’d had Great Jones Street, with its evocation of a Dylan-like protagonist with the great rock star name of Bucky Wunderlick whose Basement Tapes analog is sought by one and all while he hides out in Lower Manhattan. Or how about Running Dog, which is a play on a late ’70s Rolling Stone and the quest for a sex tape starring Hitler?
And where are Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason and Dixon?
Oh, that’s right, it’s his list, not mine.
Still, as rock star reading goes, this is all first rate.
And now from Brian Eno’s list…
Showing Stamina
Posted in Uncategorized with tags 50mm Noctilux 0.95, Leica M on October 2, 2013 by johnbuckley100The long summer continues into October, and so do the city’s flowers. Leica M, 50mm Noctilux.
Velvet Underground Continue To Empty The Cupboard
Posted in Music with tags "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", "White Light/White Heat", Velvet Underground on October 2, 2013 by johnbuckley100Woo hoo. Now White Light/White Heat gets the three-CD treatment. We can’t wait to hear the outtakes, but mostly we can’t wait to hear the live album, from 1967, that will see the first light of day.
Since the release last year of the complete The Velvet Underground & Nico offered so much archival goodness, we can only assume what follows: yep, a completists’ dream: a three-disk version of The Velvet Underground, which we’ve already had improved by the alternative vocal tracks in the “Closet Mix” on Peel Slowly And See.
And when we hear the new live album from ’67, bear in mind one of the great moments of kismet and contrast in rock’n’roll history: the cosmic joke that saw both Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that first Velvets album released on the same day. While kids with longish hair everywhere were groking to the sounds of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” somewhere on the Lower East Side Lou Reed was performing “Heroin” for 22 people.
This is going to be good.
Tulip Frenzy 