What “Crossfire Hurricane” Gets So Right About The Stones

Posted in Music with tags , on November 16, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Crossfire Hurricane had its U.S. premiere on HBO last night, and what, you think the folks at Tulip Frenzy were going to miss it?  It had much to offer, and we have the usual complaints.

We loved hearing Brian Jones speaking to the camera.  We can never get enough of the video footage, not to mention Dominique Tarle’s still images, of the band recording Exile On Main Street.  But it was the usual pastiche of footage we’ve seen, edited together kaleidoscopically, from movies such as Charlie Is My Darling, Gimme Shelter, Cocksucker Blues, etc.  And it always makes us mad that, in these sorts of films, we can’t get no satisfaction of seeing any given song played live for more than, say, 30 seconds.

But there was one thing — a big thing — that director Brett Morgan completely got right.  The two-hour movie takes the Stones from 1962-1981 and ends there, recognizing that by then, they no longer had it, and the 31 years of hugely profitable touring since then has largely been a scam, if not an embarrassment. A subtraction from, not an addition to, the greatness of the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world, and our first love.

But the arc of the movie even more profoundly makes the essential point about the Rolling Stones story.  Over 100 minutes, we see the Stones rise from their shadow-Beatlemania phase through their Golden Age — from “Jumping Jack Flash” through the ’73 tour of Australia.  The movie stretches out a little, takes its time, from the period between Brian’s death and the Exile era.  We actually get to see more than 30 seconds of “Midnight Rambler” during the ’72 tour, which Tulip Frenzy has long posited was the apogee of the art form, not just the Stones’ greatest tour but perhaps rock’n’roll’s highest moment.  And then, following those shows and the subsequent  tours of Australia, Hawaii, and Europe, Mick Taylor decided he needed to leave the band, if he were going to survive in the Sandy-like destructive wake of Keith’s heroin addiction.  The movie spends two or three minutes on Mick’s departure.  And while the Stones welcome Ron Wood into the band, the director makes his feelings known — and it is a sentiment we completely agree with — that while we used to love them, it’s all over now.  We see a few minutes of footage from those dire Black and Blue days, and then it’s all over, save for a momentary respite when the Stones, challenged by punk, exerted themselves to produce Some Girls.

The movie effectively ends the moment Ron Wood joined the band.  And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. The day Mick Taylor left, it was over.

The Stones are celebrating their 50th Anniversary as a band.  We celebrate the first 10, maybe 12 years.  And we regret the rest.  Apparently so does Brett Morgan.

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Craig Semetko At The Leica Store During Fotoweek D.C.

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on November 15, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Craig Semetko Photography

Craig Semetko is an American street photographer whose book Unposed, published in 2010, announced a sensibility that was one part oxygenated fresh air, one part laughing gas.  In the best tradition of Elliott Erwitt, who wrote its forward, or even Joel Sternfeld, Semetko is blessed with a great eye, a wonderful sense of humor, and enormous luck.  For only luck can explain how a photographer with his point of view could have found, on a Parisian street, a man walking toward him, as he described it in a wonderful talk at the Leica Store in DC this afternoon, “with what looked like a tampon coming out of his nose.”

As for the great eye, Semetko’s mantra can be remembered as D.I.E., with the first letter standing for design.  Like his hero Cartier-Bresson, Semetko understands that the action that takes place in front of him will rise to the level of art if it is captured inside well-ordered dimensions and lines.  The second letter stands for information — what the image is telling you.  And the third stands for emotion, which often as not in his work, is humor.

It makes sense that humor suffuses so many of his images, because — like another wonderful contemporary Leica photographer, William Palank, who picked up a Leica and embarked, mid-life, on a second career — Semetko came to photography late.  You see, he had established himself as a comic, mostly working corporate events.  His prior career trained him to stand before a crowd and entertain them, as he did today at the Leica Store.  But it gave him something more: an ability to capture visual puns, like his image from Unposed that shows a boy selling balloons as a woman with quite large breasts walks into the frame.

Today Craig showed work from his new project, “E Pluribus Unum, which has sent him on the American road, like a modern Robert Frank, capturing all the grit, glory, and absurdity of America today. Photographically, his new work, mostly in color, shows enormous growth and greater depth than Unposed.  He’s partly exchanged his signature humor for something deeper, and more meaningful.  The project is far from complete, and you can support it, like those of us at Tulip Frenzy have, by going to his Kickstarter page and chipping in.  If you do, consider yourself a patron of the arts, for art it is that Semetko’s serving, even as he makes you laugh.

Final note: The Leica Store is hosting Semetko tonight as part of its support for Fotoweek D.C. Fotoweek D.C. is a Washington institution that stretches over a week each November.  The Leica Store D.C. has, in just a few short months, insinuated itself into the cultural life of D.C. not simply as a purveyor of high-end photography gear, but as a genuine community center for anyone interested in photography.  Today’s talk by Craig Semetko is just one of many such free events they’ve hosted since they opened in May, and we are grateful for it, and for them.

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Opening Image From An Imaginary Horror Film

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on November 13, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Leica Monochrom, 50mm Summilux.

Image

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Long Way From Home

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on November 11, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Georgetown Flea Market, 11/11/12.  Leica Monochrom, 50 Summilux.

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This Way

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on November 10, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Leica Monochrom, 50mm Noctilux

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On The Epic Humanity Of “Vivian Maier: Out Of The Shadows”

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on November 9, 2012 by johnbuckley100

In 2011,when Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published, it confirmed in a single volume that the hype about Maier as one of the 20th Century’s great unheralded photographers was correct.  Her photography, mostly from the streets of Chicago and New York, predominantly from the ’50s and ’60s, spoke for itself, and what it said clearly was that Maier was a master, that she wielded her Rolleiflex with literally the best of them.  But there was an added element to the narrative, the art-martyr fairy tale emanating from her work as a nanny, the subsequent discovery of thousands of her negatives, after the storage company she could no longer pay sold them.  A considerable body of Maier’s work went up for auction shortly before her death following a fall on the ice.  There was an element of the Rodriguez tale here, only unlike him, rather than finding out the (photography) world understood her greatness, Maier died without knowing.  The internet’s posthumous judgment that Maier was an unknown genius had a Van Gogh-like poignancy to it.  And we are all suckers for that story.

Last week, the story was updated when the New York Times Lens blog alerted us to a second volume of Maier’s photography, this one entitled Vivian Maier: Out Of The Shadows.  The new book adds considerable depth to our knowledge of both her photography and her life.  For the book is shaped around the voices of people who knew Maier, who could offer both biography and snapshots, if you will, of what she was like. Even as the photographs capture different dimensions of her work, the narrative filled in blanks.  The new book makes her saga, if anything, sadder, because while it confirms her eccentricity, her difficult personality, and gives greater detail to the circumstances in which she lived, it also makes clear something we had not really understood before: that Maier’s photography wasn’t simply the hobby of a nanny with two days off each week and proximity to the Loop.  Maier was, from an early age, a photographer, first and foremost, whose only means of financial support was to take care of the children of upper middle class families in Chicago’s leafy suburbs.

It’s a big difference.  Maier was an artist, who happened to be a nanny, not a nanny who happened to be an artist.  That she seems never to have tried to get her photography viewed by anyone who could have brought it to the market is heartbreaking.

The photography in this new volume is as engrossing as it was in the first book.  And there are thousands more images we have yet to see.

When Maier first was becoming a sensation, and some critics were cool to her work — or maybe it would be better to say, when some wrote her off as a very gifted amateur about whom too big a fuss was being made — someone wrote — can’t remember who — that it was her bad luck that her work was coming out as a jumble, that we were privy not just to her great pictures but her bad ones too.  Because she wasn’t in a position to curate her own work.  And it was a reminder of the aphorism that the difference between a professional photographer and an amateur is that we don’t get to see the pro’s mediocre shots.  What is clear from the very strong collection of images in Out Of The Shadows is that a strong curatorial approach, in this case by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, renders Maier’s photography all the stronger.  As more work becomes available to us, we suspect that Maier’s place in the same circle as Gary Winogrand and even Bruce Davidson will be assured.

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Republicans Discover They Need More Than Just A Tune Up

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on November 7, 2012 by johnbuckley100

This entire vehicle is no longer roadworthy.  Maintenance can no longer be deferred.  Leica M9, Noctilux.

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Election Shocker: Tulip Frenzy Model Shows Woods Taking Lead Over Ty Segall For “Album Of The Year”

Posted in Music with tags , , , on November 5, 2012 by johnbuckley100

This just in.  The Tulip Frenzy 2012 Album Of The Year Forecasting Model now shows that Woods’ Bend Beyond has taken a very narrow 51-49 lead over Ty Segall’s Twins.  While the Tulip Frenzy model is simply an averaging of the Tulip Frenzy World HQ staff’s voting, which is subject to change depending upon factors such as: how many times each staff member has listened to the album, whether or not they are in a jangle mood or a hard rocking mood, etc., the fact that, this close to the publication of the Tulip Frenzy Top Ten List ™ Woods has taken a lead, is meaningful.

Tulip Frenzy polling director Nick Argentina said, “There still are factors in play.  First, the gender gap.  While many of the women in the office think Ty Segall is far cuter than any member of Woods, they do seem to like those chiming guitars, and Jeremy Earl’s voice is growing on them.  Second, when we put together Segall’s Twins with Ty Segall and White Fence’s Hair, and run them as a ticket, the polling goes completely haywire.”

Clearly, with just a few weeks to go, this race is tight as a tick, it all depends on turnout, and who knows whether the polling is skewed by the whole staff having just seen Woods’ amazing show Friday night at the Red Palace.

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Woods Levitates The Roof Off Of DC’s Red Palace

Posted in Music with tags , , , on November 3, 2012 by johnbuckley100

iPhone 5

That Ghostbusters charge of lightning surrounding the Nation’s Capitol last night had nothing to do with the election four days away; it was Woods, who came to the Red Palace on D.C.’s H Street Corridor and levitated the roof off the building.  Sure, they started with their sunshine jangling and fermented ’60s pop, but by the time they left the wind was howling in a psychedelic squall.  But as usual, we get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s start where you must when writing about Brooklyn’s finest, Jeremy Earl’s voice.  On Woods’ records, even the amazing Bend Beyond, which the entire gang at Tulip Frenzy World HQ went kinda nutso over a few weeks back, you keep waiting for Earl to play it straight, to make the transition Dean Wareham made between Galaxie 500 and Luna, when he dropped the falsetto and began singing in something closer to his own real warble.  But when you see Woods live, you realize that Jeremy Earl’s high-pitched voice is a Robert Plant-like freak of nature, an instrument so pure that were he to begin hog calling in Illinois, the Mighty Mississippi would become a solid porcine wave, as every last critter in Iowa harkened eastward.  Some singers need digital help to reach such pitch perfection, but Early barely needs a microphone to lead his kickass colleagues through their animalistic evocation of Byrds and Crazy Horses.

We were blessed with much, if not all, of Bend Beyond, and yep, it’s true that the title track live is like some exhortation.  The transformation of the band, from beginning to end, through its many linked personalities, was like listening to a playlist that begins with Neil Young’s Harvest and ends with Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.”  Happy we were to stand near the stage as they got to At Echo Lake’s “Blood Dries Darker,” which made us think of Camper Van Beethoven — the only other band we know that can stretch from folk rock to literally playing “Astronomy Domine.”  And from there they went into a song whose name we don’t know, though we will dedicate our life’s remaining days to finding it out, because it stretched for 12, no 15, no 20 minutes of jam-band bliss, until finally things reached such a crescendo that the aforementioned roof did lift off into the night, and the lightning bolts flew, and hovering above all was the answer to the question of whether there is a God, and yes, there is, and He bears a stunning resemblance to Sun Ra in his full glittering robes, his Arkestra surrounding him as squawking angels.  And by that time we were stumbling out into the street, and our grin, the grin on our face, it was wider than the Mississippi.

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It Is Time For This Bloody Election To Be Over

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on November 2, 2012 by johnbuckley100

Should we resist mentioning that, if Romney wins, he will set back the clock to a device such as this? Leica Monochrom, Noctilux, LR4, Silver Efex Pro 2.

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