The Frame

khud:BirdsParisFebruary 20, 2012

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:22:51 -0600

khud:BirdsParisFebruary 20, 2012

(via Photo Booth: Beautiful Tourists : The New Yorker)

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:37:37 -0600

(via Photo Booth: Beautiful Tourists : The New Yorker)

Wouldn’t have expected Franzen to be named as one of four...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:24:00 -0600

Wouldn’t have expected Franzen to be named as one of four major pillars of literary influence, but you can’t argue with such a nice flowchart. Especially when you haven’t read Franzen.

(via Literature Flowchart | HTMLGIANT)

. (by Emmanuel Smague)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:45:36 -0600

. (by Emmanuel Smague)

Vivian Maier (via everyday_i_show: photos by Vivian Maier)

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 22:47:00 -0600

Vivian Maier (via everyday_i_show: photos by Vivian Maier)

(by Cody Cobb)

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:27:00 -0700

(by Cody Cobb)

(via Colorful Berlin Architecture Photographed by Matthias...

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:08:00 -0700

(via Colorful Berlin Architecture Photographed by Matthias Heiderich | Feature Shoot)

(via Fred Herzog – Photographs | LPV Magazine)

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:28:31 -0700

(via Fred Herzog – Photographs | LPV Magazine)

(via MATT STUART | PHOTOGRAPHER | SHOOTS PEOPLE)

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:12:05 -0700

(via MATT STUART | PHOTOGRAPHER | SHOOTS PEOPLE)

Strrrange world through google’s eyes. (via 9-eyes)

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:31:00 -0700

Strrrange world through google’s eyes. (via 9-eyes)

Rachel Wolfe

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 08:25:00 -0700

Rachel Wolfe

(via everyday_i_show: photos by Hengki Koentjoro)

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:47:00 -0700

(via everyday_i_show: photos by Hengki Koentjoro)

(via Salaryman – Morning « Whitezine | Design Graphic &...

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:46:00 -0700

(via Salaryman – Morning « Whitezine | Design Graphic & Photography Inspirations)

featureshoot: Photo by Grant Harder

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:45:45 -0700

featureshoot: Photo by Grant Harder

On Drumming

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:18:00 -0700

Paradiddles

I learned how to play the drums when I was 13 through this book, Realistic Rock Drum Method byCarmine Appice. I didn’t know who he was and I remember wondering why he was wearing eyeliner.

But I’ll be damned if he didn’t know how to write a good instructional drum book.

I also had a drum instructor who taught me first how to play along with “Eye of the Tiger,” and eventually how to play along with none other than Neil Peart, Hallowed be Thy Name, on Rush songs like Red Barracuta and Tom Sawyer. He also introduced me to some other awesome prog rock but I have forgotten all of the names. I think Dream Theater was one of the bands.

He also made me play countless number of rudiments every day. Swiss Army Triplets. Paradiddle after paradiddle.

Drumming Now

I think this guy, Zach Hill (see video below), might be the new generation’s Neil Peart, in the sense that he might inspire a new generation of drummers. In no other sense is he like Neil Peart.

I mean, just look at his blood-covered drum set. While the glorious glow of a polished gong shone down upon Peart as he sat in his drumset fortress, Hill bangs like a homeless man on three meager drums and a cracked and jagged cymbal. I read somewhere his drumset is often covered in blood at the end of the show from hitting his knuckles on things.

Talking Drums

But enough about white people drumming. After all, it is Black History Month. I’ve been reading the excellent The Information by James Gleick and in it he explains the fascinating practice of “talking drums.”

Apparently, Africans used drums to convey information across long distances - faster than any European on horse back. One village would hear and reconvey the message to the next village.

And we’re not talking simple messages like, “Fire.” Here’s one example: “The mats are rolled up, we feel strong, a woman came from the forest, she is in the open village, that is enough for this time.” This was a birth announcement in Bolegne, a village of the Belgian Congo.

Apparently this is how it worked: In other languages, and in African languages, speech-tones factor a great deal in a words meaning. While English uses speech-tones only sparingly - e.g. “You are mad” spoken with rising intonation conveys a question while using a dropping tone conveys a statement - other languages make use of different tones as an important characteristic. The same arrangement of letters can mean wholly different things if spoken in different tones.

So they used drums to match the speech tone of the words. One problem, however, is that more than one word uses the same speech tone. Two high tones followed by a low tone, for example, might mean father, moon, river, and a hundred other words. So the drummer overcame this obstacle by drumming several words for context. For example, rather than simply drumming the word for “moon,” which could also be a hundred other things, the drummer would drum, “the moon, which looks down on us from the sky.”

Finger Jabbing

Now people drum with their fingers. Once, when I was younger, I found myself at a DJ Revolution concert. I thought he was going to do some beat juggling, digging in the crates, and scratching on the 1s and 2s. Turned out he just stood behind a table for his laptops and bobbed his head to a beat while he selected the next song to play. To be fair, he probably had that mp3-via-vinyl set up, but it was still so boring watching a guy basically pick songs off his laptop.

Revolution was extra boring because DJ Mike Realm opened for him and was highly phsyical. He spent his whole time frantically digging through the crates, throwing around records, serving ‘em up and cutting back and forth between breaks. He was sweating in his tailored suit and skinny tie. That’s what I want to see in a DJ - not some dude scrolling through iTunes.

Not all electronic music is made by a guy sitting at a laptop, however. For example, I was amazed to see how AraabMuzik makes beats. The old fashioned way. Well not the old, old fashioned way.

I don’t know if my prog-rock-loving drum instructor would have considered this drumming, but it looks like he knows his paradiddles if you ask me.

(via Raphaël Bourelly: Photographie)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:34:00 -0700

(via Raphaël Bourelly: Photographie)

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:34:00 -0700

(via Raphaël Bourelly: Photographie)

homeofthevain: Martin Parr, Stockholm, Sweden, 1992 (from Bored...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:47:00 -0700

homeofthevain: Martin Parr, Stockholm, Sweden, 1992 (from Bored Couples)

Photo

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:19:14 -0700

Thoughts on Jesus' Son

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 23:58:00 -0700

Read Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son this week, and was - and becoming even more - blown away. The stories are entertaining yet complex. I finished the book last night and today while I was thinking about something totally unrelated, one of the stories hit me viscerally - as if it was the residue from some vivid dream I had had where before your mind even has a chance to fill in the details, you feel the way you did when you first experienced it. Two chilling details remained with me: the slimy miniature bunnies found inside the guts of a roadkilled rabbit in “Emergency,” and the protagonist in “Beverly Home” on the ground peering beneath the Mennonite woman’s window curtain.

In this last story, the junkie protagonist starts out a run-of-the-mill peeping Tom but becomes obsessed with observing a Mennonite woman and her husband - seemingly for non-sexual reasons, although this is sort of an open question. In one of the story’s final scenes, the junkie is laying on the ground outside the woman’s bedroom, desperately trying to see beyond a closed window curtain. At one point the woman yanks open the curtain and is face to face with the junkie - but since it is dark outside and light inside, she doesn’t see beyond her reflection. It struck me that this scene embodied something that happened throughout the book: outsiders looking in - and, rarely, insiders looking out.

Every story involves a junkie of some kind, which might sound depressing, but the tone is entertaining and never taxing. The junkies are respectable for some reason - maybe because of the narration - although they are not control of their lives, they are certainly in control of the narration. Although the average reader of Johnson probably does not have much in common with the kinds of people presented in his stories, their lucid narration bridges the gap. You respect the perspective they have on their own situation.

I thought this was an interesting aspect of the book - the fact that the average reader probably doesn’t have much in common with the types of people in the stories. The last line of the book gets at this - “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a hearbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”

The book presents two spheres of people: the responsible ones and the irresponsible ones. Usually you are asked to look into the world of the junky - who often interacts with the responsible ones. This point makes this tension all the more apparent: often, the junkies hold jobs that intrude on the other sphere in an uncomfortable way. They are in charge of cleaning patients in ER room, or working in old folks homes. They work in jobs you’d expect - and demand - more competent people to be working. Positions of trust - to some extent. One particularly horrifying intrusion is when one junkie, who works in an ER prepping patients, does drugs on the job and yanks a knife out of a patient’s eye without even thinking about it - all while the surgeon doubts his own ability to perform such a difficult removal.

There’s one moment where a group of junkies find themselves interacting with another group of even worse junkies. But usually they’re interacting with normal folk and it can be uncomfortable but mostly it’s easy to sympathize - or at least be entertained - by the narrator junky. In “Beverly Home,” you sympathize - at least to some small degree - because he writes such a caring and enthusiastic newsletter for the community. As noted above, I believe the sympathy you feel relates to their ability to write, to express themselves. The narratives are direct and honest, sometimes visionary but controlled.

Here I am throwing around the word junky. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging everyone so quickly in a book called Jesus’ Son. I really don’t think the book is getting at something so trite (i.e. presenting you with “sinful” characters that evoke sympathy all to show you that even the sinful are worthy of love), but there might be something to that. I’m more interested in the relationship between these two spheres of people. The book asks you, the presumably educated, to examine the lives of the uneducated - to look out beyond your own reflection.