bakery jam

was working yesterday on a story for the local paper, the herald dispatch, about a local open mic event. here’s some snaps from that.

here’s albert perrone playing an original tune!

here he is with douglas eye. together, they are dr. strange and professor love.

john van kirk plays some mean harmonica.

and he sang some pretty sweet covers with art stringer, too.

jamz.

paul brill: breezy review

i wrote it! read it in full over at paste.

… collection of nicely polished, if a little vanilla, pop songs whose stated discomfort with their own sunniness makes Breezy a much more compelling alternative to the rose-colored glasses worldview of Brill’s “laid-back bro” peers such as Jack Johnson and Jason Mraz.

richmond

went to richmond to see cousin greer and her boyfriend, who looks a lot like jesus, if jesus had been white.

we went to the river to explore this old building.

we were joined by a special guest.

greer.

what’s in there?

mystery hole!

lookin’ good.

caught this programmer coming out of the mystery hole. he wouldn’t tell me what he was doing in there. found out later — he was peeing.

investigative journalism?

bruno

been taking a wee break from producing lately, mostly reading, rewatching deadwood, listening to hours of terry gross interviews, listening to music. trying to replenish the creative stockpiles inside. thinking on what photos from the european adventure should be submitted in an application to take part in some gallery show in kentucky. making tentative plans to become a gypsy with a few friends. determined to become an ubermensch. hero-worshipping david chang and pining for the ingredients to make all the dishes in the momofuku cookbook i was gifted this christmas.

chief among the piddling tasks i’ve been occupying my days with is spreading good art around, thinking about why i like it, why i think certain other people will like it. wanted to share this with whoever stumbles upon this blog. a small excerpt from nicole krauss‘ the history of love, a story about a man who hid in the woods from nazis for years to escape the holocaust before coming to america. various factors in his life have led him to feel as though he perhaps might not exist at all. he signs up to model for a figure drawing class because it will afford him the opportunity to be seen. here, krauss writes the scene in which the narrator, leo gurtsky, is reunited with a childhood friend.

Bruno and I were friends when we were boys. When I came to America, I thought he was dead, and then one day I was walking down East Broadway and I heard his voice. I turned around. He was standing in front of the grocer’s asking the price of some fruit. I thought, You’re hearing things, you’re such a dreamer, what is the likelihood — your boyhood friend? I stood frozen on the sidewalk. He’s in the ground, I told myself. It’s fifty years later, here you are in the United States of America, there’s McDonald’s, get a grip. I waited just to make sure. I wouldn’t have recognized his face. But the way he walked was unmistakable — skipping along like a bird. He was about to pass me. I put my arm out and grabbed his sleeve. “Bruno,” I said. He stopped and turned. At first he seemed scared and then confused. “Bruno,” I said. He looked at me; his eyes filled with tears. He touched his hand to my cheek; with the other he held a bag of plums. “Bruno.”

something about that scene has stayed with me for years since i first read the book. the detail about the plums, the mitigation of this man’s profound loneliness. i was in tears, and it was only page six. if you’re looking for reading material in the new year, this is my top recommendation (after everything david foster wallace ever wrote, of course). it only gets lovelier as you read on.

unbest!

my pal and former editor at paste magazine, rachael maddux had a really, really good idea this year to make this website called unbest, where people who think year-end best-of lists are silly can write about music that simply meant something to them over the year. i wrote something, and it went up today. you can read it here.

teddy the tape pile

headed to grayson lakes in kentucky on saturday with my new friend, ian, who teaches painting at marshall university. he also happens to be a fabulous painter himself. he’d accumulated an enormous pile of tape over the last year, so we decided to take it out and make an art project out of it.

we were going to take it swimming, but it was too coooooold.

so instead we found a variety of ways to make it look interesting while staying dry.

oops, it looks like a heart.

a broken heart, because ian threw poor teddy away at the end of the day.

goodbye, majestic tape pile.

ladies of barcelona

inspired by spanish photographer joan colom, i spent a day wandering the city back in september, capturing some of barcelona’s most abundant natural resource: ladies.

ladies.

occupy wall street

here about two weeks ago, i went up to check out what was going on at occupy wall street.

for starters, there were free screen prints.

and just a lot of art being made in general.

everything was pretty impressively organized.

this guy was making some kind of comedy video by pretending to be from fox news.

carl dix was there recruiting people for an anti-stop-and-frisk rally in harlem.

there wasn’t so much a drum circle as a permanent drumming mob.

this area was for worshippers of all religious stripes, mostly populated by guys with feathers in their hair.

this marginal celebrity mark ruffalo was there and very upset about hydraulic fracturing.

in harlem, this lovely lady was reppin’ for the faithful at the stop and frisk rally. “god has everything to do with this!”

cornel west looked like a baller even in the hour leading up to his arrest for civil disobedience.

then a bunch of us (not me, because i was dog-sitting and had to go home to walk the pooch) linked arms in front of the police precinct in harlem for some good old non-violent civil disobedience before being carted away by the po-lice.

not too often you see a smile like this on the face of someone being arrested, huh?

this guy regaled us with a tale of the cops making him open up a sandwich from his pocket to show them there were no drugs inside. not cool.

stop “stop and frisk,” y’all.

of montreal halloween show

well, so i submitted these images to paste a week ago today for their 1000 words blog, and i think a week is a long enough time to wait without hearing word one about the assignment before posting them to my own personal blog, don’t you?

this was probably one of the hardest shoots i have ever done, including 2009′s 12-hour day in the pouring rain at the american le mans series race in atlanta. turns out twenty-year-olds on ecstasy who have no concept of what it means to, you know, try to do work you are proud of — well, so turns out they’re an even bigger obstacle to good shooting than a torrent of water that could compromise the integrity of your whole kit. the 40 watt’s lighting guy wasn’t doing me any favors, either. still, it felt good to scrap it out for a handful of workable images, as opposed to the strolling along and shooting at a leisurely pace i was doing in europe all summer. and of montreal are a bunch of dang showmen, no matter how you feel about their music.

they played hissing fauna, are you the destroyer? from start to finish, meaning i got to hear my favorite song, “cato as a pun.”

they carved all these neato pumpkins for a killer lightshow,

and wore matching skeleton costumes.

my camera did some killer stuff with this guy’s feather costume elements. i think it looks like i photoshopped the hell out of it, but this is how it captured in-camera. cool how the feathers wound up looking almost painted in somehow.

barcelona

been in barcelona nearly a week now. i was supposed to leave on saturday, but i’m sticking around to try to vanquish all the tapas, being kept by two very generous Fellow Americans and wishing october 10 (and my flight home) would never arrive.

saw this lady cleaning windows the other day. she seemed freaked out that i wanted to take her picture.

for reasons i don’t fully understand, i wandered into mass at the cathedral, where there were no pictures allowed. it’s rare to see actual services being held in these big old historic churches, so it was kind of a treat, actually.

but the weird thing is, they make all these jazzy, gold-leafed alcoves full of beautiful statues of saints and then lock them away as if they’d done something wrong.

out in the courtyard, lovely fountains abound.

i feel like this picture pretty much wraps up my impression of spain — technicolor, oddly dressed, ever adorned with playful details.

i mean, just look at the stuff this guy gaudi built. where else in the world can you imagine this kind of art being so celebrated?

a few wrong turns led me far away from the sagrada familia, but with these big towers, it’s never too hard to find.

the place has been under construction since, like, forever (1882). from the official website:

The building is still going on and could be finished some time in the first third of the 21st century.

finished the day with some wine on a boat in the marina.