Here are a few photos from our last Modest Proposal band practice (Neal took the one of me and Danny) We’re in Steve’s basement, he’s got a great setup for recording. Which worked out well since we’re finally capable of playing the songs well enough for recording. David is on his way over from London in a couple weeks, we wanted him to have something to practice to in the meantime.
Our reunion show is a month away now, check out Neal’s latest blog post on WTOP.
Sunday night photos at Marvin this weekend, starting at 8pm! I’ll be showing a slideshow of my Eastern Europe work from the last ten years, running on a 15-minute loop. A print catalog of select images is available online (see sidebar), I’ll have free copies with me for the first twenty people who ask.
I’m happy to have been chosen for Foto8 magazine’s Summer Show, going on now at HOST Gallery in London. From their website:
2009 Foto8 Summer Show, 24 July – 5 September
The Summer Show provides London’s greatest spectacle of photography with over 100 images on display – an inspiring variety of framed and mounted images of all shapes and sizes, installed from floor to ceiling. From landscapes and portraiture to documentary, various genres of photography are represented in the exhibition.
The 2009 Summer Show saw an overwhelming response, with over 2300 images entered from 44 different countries, including Bangladesh, Iran, Mexico, Thailand and Turkey.
I just re-read some of the old posts from my original blog. Now there’s a guy with time and mental energy to think, write, spin little connections in the ether… Meaning there’s a guy without a three-year-old child and a teaching job!
For me, reading some of the lengthier posts now, just a few years later, feels like an old person watching an acrobat in rueful amazement. These days I would probably just post a link and roll over to sleep. I guess having kids will do that to you, but it was a good reminder to try to hold on to those little inspirations and musings. I actually have printed out the old blog for Sofia. Hopefully someday she’ll know her daddy a little better if she ever reads it.
Intriguing video of Sigur Ros playing acoustic and unannounced, during the day, in a little Paris cafe. While I think the camera work is pretty stingy with the environment (what’s the point of these things if you don’t get a better sense of the place??), it’s funny to see the few French patrons on hand sort of oblivious and wrinkling their noses a bit at the whole fuss.
More here.
After the Easter egg hunt, Sofia found some real eggs in the mailbox over at Ed’s place.
So the magician asks everyone in the crowd to choose a three-digit number. I think of 437. He calls on someone else to announce their number, and they say 437. And that wasn’t even the actual trick yet! Real magic in the form of bizarre coincidence…
View from my show at Galeria Zoya, Warsaw, 2008
I close my eyes
Every night
And I dream that I can hold you
They fill us full of lies
Everyone buys
About what it means to be a soldier
I still don’t know how I’m supposed to feel
About all the blood that’s been spilled
Look out on the street
Get me back home
On the day after tomorrow
from Day After Tomorrow, by Tom Waits
Artists have struggled to make meaningful statements about the Iraq War. Certainly compared to the Vietnam era, artists have been surprisingly quiet, even after early problems with speaking out (ask the Dixie Chicks) subsided. Movies about Iraq have pretty much bombed, no pun intended. Tom Waits got it right by stripping things down to a soldier’s poignant and ambivalent letter home. Great song.
I get a nice mention in the second paragraph:
https://www.popville.com/2008/11/obama-victory-celebrations-on-u-street/
14th and U St, Washington DC.
I’m honored to be part of the International Center for Journalists’ silent auction and exhibit called The Power of Elections, showing at the Paley Center for Media in NY from October 1 through November 5. Bidding on the auction prints ends on November 12 at the ICFJ Awards Dinner in Washington.
The bidding page for my Orange Revolution print is here.
Tomorrow is the opening of my East exhibition in Warsaw. In Romania at the moment, flying to Poland later today.
This just in to my archive - a recent series called Portrait of an Artist, about Belarusian artist Zoya Lucevich. Look for the green ‘view slideshow’ button on the right.
I met Zoya and her (then) husband Pete Pavlov in Minsk last fall. They’re among the counterculture royalty there, she as an established artist related to Belarus’ early 20th-century poet, Yanka Kupala. Pete as one of the country’s top rock musicians, as guitarist for NRM and as a solo artist. (There are a couple of photos of Zoya and Pete mixed into my updated Belarus series here.)
A friend and I have a little nonprofit and decided to bring Zoya to the US this past spring (she’s known in Europe but it was her first time here). We found her free studio space courtesy of A. Salon in Takoma Park, where she created an impressive new body of work in about a month. We got her an exhibition at the United Nations and a couple of smaller shows in DC. Art sales from the project will help establish arts programs for young people in Chernobyl-affected areas.
Zoya is a unique soul and an amazing person. Her work and personality reflect both her old-world roots and a playful modernism. I hung out with her in DC and NY and tried to capture a quiet, non-literal sense of her as an artist, and as a person taking in and channelling all kinds of new impressions.
Was just telling a friend the story of my original mom’s-side ancestor, Hugh Fraser. In 1707 Paisley Scotland, at age 7, sent home from school for acting up, sent back to school by his angry mom, kidnapped on the way and shipped off to America as an indentured servant on a tobacco plantation. Ended up marrying the owner’s daughter and running the place.
The Double Life of Radovan.
Yes, that’s me to the right of the center guy raising his arms. August 1983. DC’s early 80s mod-revival scene certainly didn’t rival punk’s scope and depth, but we represented. Too bad the headline (MODS ARE BACK) is cropped out of this scan.
Notice the Risky Business movie review teaser at the top, talk about dating yourself.
What ever happened to guitar solos? Not that I’m really a big rock fan anymore, but strange when you think such a staple of 60s-80s music could basically become passé and disappear.
Listening to the guitar solo in Stairway to Heaven at the moment (Led Zep getting me through a day of organizing my office). I’ve always thought it’s one of the greatest of all time, not because it’s perfect but because it’s got such a raw, yearning humanism to it. Like you’re not even sure Page is going to make it through, but he does. Almost brings a tear to your eye. Even the standard speed-riff flourish at the end is charmingly scrappy and uplifting compared to, say, the effortless acrobatics of Free Bird (if we’re sticking to the period).
Today I was happy to help put a bow on the Chernobyl20 project by handing off a $1000 check to Kathy Ryan of Chernobyl Children’s Project International. C20 - which marked the 20th anniversary of the disaster - had two sides, an exhibition (which I curated) of post-Chernobyl documentary photography and a song donated by Thievery Corporation to raise money for Chernobyl relief work.
Getting together for the check-passing (sorry, no giant check) at Thievery’s DC headquarters were (L-R) C20’s Andre Kravchenko, Eric Hilton of TC, Kathy Ryan, Rob Garza of TC, and me.
1979-1999