eightball photography

inoculated city

2011-10-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

there's a peculiar thing about money - in large quantities it tends to have a life of it's own, even a conscience of it's own. the power of money becomes very difficult to control. man has always been a venal animal.
the growth of populations, the huge cost of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation - all these things, make him more scared and more venal.
the average man is tired and scared, and a tired scared man can't afford ideals. he has to buy food for his family.
in our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. you can't expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to lack of quality. you can't have quality with mass production. you don't want it because it lasts too long. so you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle to produce artificial obscelescence. mass production couldn't sell it's goods next year, unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now.
we have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. but in the loveley kitchen the average person can't produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom, is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the beauty industry. we make the finest packages in the world, the stuff inside is mostly junk.
raymond chandler/the big sleep 1953

three o'clock blues

2011-09-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

some photos from a recent session i did with writer u.v. rayand a video that we collaborated on, earlier in the year...

BIRTH OF THE COOL

2011-09-21T11:41:00.000-07:00

loopzilla

2011-08-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

stuff i've been listening to all summer...

cosmic cars

2011-07-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

finally, after taking a year off to concentrate on playing music, i get round to recording something, instead of just randomly playing the many instruments around the house...
under the eighthwave name i've been using, i jammed this piece of old-school techno, using an alesis drum-machine, my microkorg XL and a roland e16, all played live into the mixer...
more to come - as i feel a collaboration coming-on.
Latest tracks by the_eighthwave

lipstick vogue

2011-06-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

what difference does it make?

rip it up

2011-05-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

so there goes my year out of photography, as i crawl slowly back into it.
just twittered with some nice people, and have arranged a photo-shoot for next weekend... i shouted-out for anyone who wanted a photo-session.
will i pick-up the guitar/keyboards?
yes!
but, i know where my strengths lie, and i have ideas for photographs to work on first.
i think last year, i was getting to hung-up on studio work... i enjoyed the stuff i did, but the whole point of studio work is consistency, which can stifle the creative flow a little.
so, more outdoors stuff this time round.

and learn more, i need a learning curve to work with, so that i'm not just turning out photographs with no progression on my behalf.
thanks of course, to all the people who have kept my photo-mojo going in the interim period.

i did a lot of travelling of course around various places, meant i had to take a camera with me, and finding my trusty olympus sp510 helped... i'd stashed it somewhere safe whilst moving house, and promptly forgot exactly where that was(or that i'd put it in a poly bag on a shelf under my nose...) so once i had that back, i had a camera i could take anywhere!

more to come, then...
suppose i'd better finish that book idea i had then.

night and day

2011-05-23T13:26:00.000-07:00

i was supposed to be taking a break from photography this year, and i have spent time playing guitar and some cool blues piano riffs... but things never go to plan like you'd want them to, i just couldn't keep away from a camera...(edit - and the day after i write this post, i get the news that someone has seen my work in an exhibition, and wants to pay me to go round taking photos!).
so here's some of the best duotone stuff i've done so far this year.
i think i may get back into taking photos again, now that i've gotten absolutely nowhere with making music... i have enjoyed playing and such, but i know where my strengths are, and music is a big, big influence on me, but i'll never be the next brian setzer or joe pass, so why bother?
ans i don't mean that in a negative way, maybe i am the joe pass of photography, and just never realised it?

3 cheers for our side

2011-03-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

the ritas latest podcast: music to dance to

don't let your son grow up to be a cowboy

2011-03-13T07:44:00.000-07:00

gin-soaked

xrDs

2011-02-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

tracks include:
cosmic cube/cosmic cube
frightgod - deadtime
gang of 4 - naturals not in it
7 hurtz - sisters
kano - ikeya seki
der klang - der familie
syntech - soundly computer
icon of coil - NYC boy
comsat angels - independence day
covenant - xrds
chicken lips - he not in
laserdance - fear
the b-52s - give me back my man
pay tv - trendy discotheque
funk d'void - diabla
gary martin - subteranean substances
hipnosis - droid
toktok - jean
klein+mbo - wonderful
wolsheim - kein zuruck
richard bone - joy of radiation
eurythmics - singsing
the slits - difficult fun

Film Noir Photos: Light and Shadow: Celia Johnson

2011-02-16T13:19:00.000-08:00

Film Noir Photos: Light and Shadow: Celia Johnson: "Brief Encounter (1945)"

Radio Radio

2011-02-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

this is Radio Rita - a podcast i produced with Helen and Olivia from The Ritas
songs of misery and woe, in this episode.

A Long Time Ago, In A Galilee Far, Far Away...

2011-02-11T11:36:00.001-08:00

A Long Time Ago, In A Galilee Far, Far Away...
Originally uploaded by Digger Digger Dogstar

dont ask me

2011-01-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

my forthcoming untitled music project/list of influences:
dark heavy beats dub bassline/drums, PiL guitar, kraftwerk ping+ambience, urdu/gypsy/blues scales, electronica: cool ladytron city novotel, the chameleons, bowie LOW and young americans, shreikback funk, Joy Division early New Order, joe meek/john barry, client with some karl bartos influence, sunglasses after dark, kim wilde's kids in america, OMD, Cinematic orchestra dub-bass, electroclash, techno arpeggiator, good vibrations composition, comsat angels, cybotron cityscape - The Clash mix-up, jesus and marychain, 80s technopop heavy rehash, darjeeling/nepalese backbeat, Joe Strummer solo material cultural mash-up, The Jam/sound affects, beach boys, the velvet underground, kraftwerk, cabaret voltaire.
lyrics by alvin toffler and friedrich nietzsche:

How one becomes what one is

Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am. Really, one should know it, for I have not left myself "without testimony." But the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; is it perhaps a mere prejudice that I live? ... Under these circumstances I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom, namely, to say: Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!

the future is unwritten

2011-01-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

some of my favourite images from this year....

santa claus - go straight to the ghetto

2010-12-24T11:54:00.000-08:00

merry christmas and all that, to my gracious readers, who have put up with yet another 12 months of photography and general musings!
we've had one hell of a winter fortnight here...

anyway - have a shakin' holiday!

blue christmas

2010-12-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

we had the obligatory romp in the snow - whilst everyone else was sat in their cars, going backwards down the hill, we had fun throwing ourselves into snowdrifts, or bellowing "IT'S CHRISTMAAAAAAS!" noddy-holderstylee!
nature in the raw, get out and enjoy it people...

kitted myself out for the weather with a red-plaid vintage thermo-king hunters shirt-jacket, grinder biker boots, my adidas ski hat and a speiwak snowboard jacket... i usually only wear these clothes at this time of the year, when the snow kicks in!

We like to be out in nature so much because it has no opinion about us. -Friedrich Nietzsche

Stick Shift

2010-12-12T02:07:00.000-08:00

BIG HARD EXCELLENT FISH - Imperfect List (uncensored original version)

2010-12-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

the big hurt

2010-12-08T13:31:00.000-08:00

a short film about sadness.

rakin' and scrapin'

2010-12-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

as is our nature to do contrary "holidays", we spent a few days in london celebrating H's birthday, in what could be termed as the UK snowpocalypse - the media was full of horror stories about the terrible weather, and such... which we averted, by travelling the day before it kicked-in and leaving the day after it all stopped.
but i digress, wednesday night we hit the city in search of vintage fun+japes!
admittedly this led to spending the next morning recovering in the nearby euston station's branch of ed's diner - a chain of retro 50's diners, serving-up authentic hot food on demand(uk sized portions).

nice people in both venues though - at one point, they were so understaffed due to various unavoidable incidents/bad weather - that they had to shut the restuarant, so both us and two other customers were "locked-in" for breakfast, having the whole place to ourselves... friendly people who work there, which is a big change from usual city venues.

the weather was blisteringly cold though - most shop-owners were just glad to see someone come in, even if they were only browsing, luckily i'd packed my woolrich hunters jacket and plenty of pendletons for the sightseeing walks!

we are of course, avid fans of the poirot - thanks to the complete boxset, and so we visited the house where the tv show is set... although it looks a lot less enclosed on camera, almost like it faces onto a public park, which is in fact a locked private green, in the heart of london.

but no matter, it was a great looking art-deco building, looking very dramatic in the snow, and set back from the main drag in a little square.

being a new-wave music fan(since my sonic coming of age in '79), this rather plain street corner was strangely signifigant to me - not only rossmore road, but lissom grove in one shot!

here's me, giving some clash-style attitude, with the mythical westway behind me.
rock&roll icon time...

we headed off into an area i dubbed hipster hell, due to all the on-street shops selling skinny jeans, and second-hand nike pumps(occasionally coming across gems like the above - a great little shop called dolly diamond).

alfie's antiques was out main destination though - several meandering floors of vintage furniture/items, anything you could want - a pile of 1920's suitcases? a huge 50's light-fitting? tables, chairs, etc...
it's all there, not a lot in clothing, unless you're a collector, but otherwise all the other stuff you don't see in vintage shops(and a hairdressers!)...

we ended-up chatting for a long time, with graham who runs the above stall - manic attic, as he loved to expound on his stock, and swap stories with customers, great guy with knowledge of just about any 50's homeware item.

fortified from the rooftop cafe, and with the blue fluffy poodle radio(no, i'm not kidding), we headed off in search of more japes.

i spotted this interesting jumper on the underground - which i immediately named the bridget jones look, although, farah seem to have issued a zip-up ski-jumper, which we saw around town a lot.

we even had our own nostalgia trip, revisiting the good mixer pub, where we'd both first met-up in fourteen years ago... where we both got carried away with the beers in, missing both our trains, causing an overnight stop-out in london.

we've been through a lot since then, but it still feels like it was yesterday.
the good mixer, has gone back to being a strange mix of aussie barmen and old drinking men, now that the britpoppers who made it famous, have all long gone.

herein is another great london rock landmark now lost forever and proof of the lack of respect that developers have for the cultural heritage of the city.
this is the birthplace of rock&roll in the UK, now a faceless restuarant.
where vince taylor, cliff, the shadows/drifters and every other UK rocker played or hung-out.

i'm not even going to mention the new piccadilly, which will one day be written about in the same hushed tones... too bad they put the rent up so that the owner had to sell-up.
shame on you, whoever you are.

we fitted-in a walk down by the thames, which was of course, tourist free, thanks to the freezing weather... where we stumbled across somerset house - which was showing a dior artwork exhibition, featuring all the classic adverts in their original form:

and, as an extra treat, i also stumbled across an exhibition of kevin cummings joy division photographs.
godlike.

ok, neither of us are particularily chap, i spend most of my time loafing around looking like a truckdriver on a duckhunt, but i also dress madmen style(that's what it's called nowadays!), when the need arises, due to owning several classic suits... that's me + H. heading to the chap ball, wearing a vintage tonic aquascutum raincoat, 50's dark POW suit, and a christy's pork-pie(brogues out of shot).
we've both read the chap, from issue #3 though, and appreciate the humour... indeed i once ran a yahoo group cravateers of the world, which parallelled the world of the chap.
i do believe in being polite though - always let other people go first if appropriate, andi think it's a smart thing to help others out... although i'm too much of a ruffian, to let bad manners go unremarked.
i have a vintage attitude, to go with the haircut(shop owners, restuarantuers... why not play some really obvious nostalgia music, when i'm in your establishment, it's not only fun, but original!), so be warned, i will laugh at you for behaving like a square.

the ball was interesting though - some good acts, and plenty of people watching, which is never tiring(although i didn't regret drinking tonic water, the next morning!).

debates rage now, in regards to the people who turn up to such events, in obvious fancy dress... again, i'm not going to get into the debate(others have said it so much better), but what i wear isn't fancy dressing-up.
imagine, all you hipsters, that stuff you put-on, had a laugh with, that made you feel somehow eclectic.
i feel like that every day, so why don't you try it for real?
anyhoo, we found ourselves outside the venue, at some ungodly hour of the morning, overdressed and in need of a ride home... no taxis were forthcoming - so the fuckitt-notion kicked-in, and we caught a rickshaw home to the hotel!

shindig

2010-11-23T10:40:00.000-08:00

just got back from the rhythm riot!
we had a great time too, met so many good people there, a real sense of community(except for the odd square!), excellent music and style!

thursday night, and i'm packing of course... i never prepare for anything until the last minute(that way you only take the stuff you actually need!), this time i had a major wardrobe malfunction, in that our new built-in wardrobe system decided to infect some vintage jackets with mould(thereby restricting me from taking any woolrich coats!).
not to worry, we are soon on the train to camber sands(on the way i keep seeing the man behind rockaphonic, although you cant really miss a 6-foot bloke with a black quiff!, and ironically we catch a taxi from the station to pontins there AND back with him and his missus!).
friday afternoon is spent walking around the campsite, getting to know where everything is, catching-up with fiona+paul from notorious kitsch we hung around their stall, which was as well as good company, was a good vantage point to watch the people and the bands(plus the fact that we buy a lot of stuff from them, so it was like sitting in our house, with bands and a big crowd!)... but they're both veterans of the rockin' scene and weekenders, so it was great to hear their stories of previous events and chew the fat about music.

of course, we frequented the vintage stalls rather too often, but many good items were bought or perused, and i feel at home thumbing through racks of good vintage anyway(H. bought vintage hats and new knitted jumpers), i found some of my favourite films on dvd too!

so a boozy friday night, being entertained by bluesy, honkin' and stompin' bands.
saturday mornin' comes around too soon, and no one wants to leave the warm bed, to walk around a cold holiday flat(well, these buildings are designed to be lived in during HOT weather!), despite the double-glazing(must have been the gap under the door that H. could stick her hand through!
we dropped-in the surf exhibition, and i regaled anyone who would listen(as in H. again) with my own tales of derring-do on a wooden skateboard, back in the dark days of the 70's, when skateboards were nowhere near as good as they are now!
the evening entertainment kicked-off with carmen ghia & the hotrods, one band we were both anticipating, having seen them play birmingham before - sounding like a ramped-up wanda jackson, one of our favourites of the weekend.
we'd both spruced ourselves up, for a photo session with gordon ayres, the master to be honest. i do a similar style of portrait work, and this man is an influence, so it was fascinating to watch him work(another highlight of the weekend!), and i even got to lug his kit for him on sunday(being a fanboy, for a change!).

sunday morning, like saturday came round too soon, and this time it was even more difficult to get out of bed, thanks to double-duvets and hot-water bottles, but somehow we made it to the car cruise at 2 pm!

some excellent cars on show, enough to make you slightly jealous when you see them all heading off in a cloud of blue smoke(if you forget about the amount of work that goes into running a classic car!).

with the car-cruise over, most people headed off to the beach for a refreshing walk on camber sands(unless you run were running a stall!), where we visited the berlin-esquely named kit kat cafe, which sadly wasn't run by stern east german lesbians in bowler hats, but by two fat blokes with dirty mullets... although they made a cracking cup of tea!

sunday evening was the highlight, too many good acts to mention - including jackie wilson's son bobby brooks hamilton, who sounds/looks/walks just like his dad(uncanny like being in a room with a classic!)...

i also enjoyed nico and his rhythm dudes, but the big surprise of the night was top shelf jazz, whom we'd squeezed into the small queen vic bar to see... a taster for the forthcoming chap event we're going to in the next few weeks.

that's torquil arbuthnot of the chap, brandishing a fine weapon with which he'd dispatched several dinosaurs, who had earlier been running rampage. one of the people we met at various times on the weekender, along with minerva miller, fluer de guerre who's blog i've been reading for a long time, tod who produces vintage scans blog... and tojo's wife a vintage jewellery expert who informed h. she was wearing a £400 vintage brooch(which had fallen off twice on the weekend, and had ridden countless times on the no.11), also good to see dogger+miss blueflame who i'd done a photo session with, in our old house, which ended-up in my rockabilly photo-book.

i was actually quite sad to leave on the monday morning, but it was cool riding the train back to civilisation with rockaphonic people rusty and ali, reminiscing about the 80's and talking about vietnamese tailors!
more photos here!
can i just say - the staff at pontins were great - they made us feel welcome, even when we were being dense, tired tourists who wasted time at the tills!
nice people.
so until the next one, cheers!

the blue boogie

2010-11-01T13:59:00.000-07:00

koka kola

2010-10-30T02:51:00.000-07:00

recently there has been a falling out between nicole katherine designs and pin-up parade.
both sides of the story are represented there, take your pick as to who you believe.
me, of course, i fall on the side of pin-up parade, as helen is of course my partner of 14 years, so i know she's honest, isn't a crook, and wouldn't stoop so low as selling faulty items to her customers.
the upshot of this whole debate has been - lots of free advertising for pin-up parade on behalf of NKD, as the integrity of PP has been highlighted as being somewhat fussy and in favour of the customer.
naturally, after having listened to both sides of the scenario, i got involved, and decided to play devil's advocate with NKD, in an attempt to clarify the situation, and maybe even reach a conclusion that would bring the whole thing to a satisfactory close(ie - both parties are happy).
we had a conversation in public on twitter, (quotes by me in green) which went like this -

#rockabilly = hard-working, honest, union-made quality, no plastic, genuine, & authentic. Not quite the #nicole_katherine_designs definition

NK_Designs @eight8all I'm the crook?! We offered an exchange return following our return policy. Pinup Parade wanted to KEEP the items AND money back!

@NK_Designs the request was misunderstood. No one expected you to refund AND then #pinup_parade sell the faulty items. That would be unfair.

NK_Designs @eight8all Nicole Katherine has the same return policy as other designers our size We offered an exchange and did everything we could

NK_Designs @eight8all And your other half isn't so sweet when she's posting horrendous remarks about MY faith and attacking ME personally over business

@NK_Designs the christian thing to do is: get mad and then forgive.

NK_Designs @eight8all she's lucky I'm professional enough to not show the world what she's emailed and posted about me, I have proof she's a liar!

@NK_Designs please do. Transparency is a good thing. Both parties have said things that could be deemed unpleasant to each other.

@NK_Designs but I know H. has attempted to apologise, and would prefer reconciliation, to internet slanging matches.

@NK_Designs in the UK we have http://www.oft.gov.uk/news-and-updates/press/2004/40-04 which differs from US regulations

NK_Designs @eight8all im aware of these regulations and it says business to business is exempt. My policies are honorable

@NK_Designs my O/H is very sweet, except when she feels disapointed, used and let down by someone whom she thought was a trusted friend.

NK_Designs @eight8all And if she has problems with my policies maybe she should think twice about the other lines she carries. Their's are the same!

@NK_Designs the other companies who supply #pinupparade have been in the past, outstanding in taking back faulty items. No quibble.

@NK_Designs H. trusted you, despite sending her tiki dresses with dodgy zips, & had to be replaced before selling. Trust is very important.

@NK_Designs ...and of course, I am under the impression that there is still £500 worth of stock, still outstanding to be sent to pinupparade

@NK_Designs now would be a good time to explain why it hasn't been sent, would it not?

...and with that question, @NK_Designs protected their tweets. Guilty conscience or twitter glitch?

Faulty goods, breach of trust, slander, items/credit outstanding. Thank you @NK_Designs for proving me right all along. xxx

It would be nice if @NK_Designs WERE to print a slanderous blog about me. But if they threaten me with solicitor I'll cry little emo tears.

Just whatever you do: don't upset my girl.

Yknow if you can't justify your actions to the people you have wronged, then its probly best that you go back to moaning in secret.

If someone throws you the chance to discuss an issue in the open, & you hide from them, that is tantamount to admitting you are wrong.

...and that was that, no more debate.
i know that H. is honest, i've never been in doubt of that, and it would seem that this has been reflected by other people as shop sales have gone through the roof with the boosted internet prescence.
but as i see it, the NKD attitude has been: well, if you don't like our stuff, then that's too bad, we won't deal with you, and you can lump it - they seem to think that because they "followed" american regulations, that's ok, everything is fine.
but y'know, there is such a thing as being human and doing the right thing, too.

hats

2010-10-21T12:06:00.001-07:00

Western Suburbs Rugby League Football Club players leave for New Zealand, 19 September 1934 / Sam Hood
Originally uploaded by State Library of New South Wales collection

frequent mutilation

2010-10-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

an early icon of mine passed away yesterday.
ari up, from the slits, a strong smart woman with a free spirit.
she was like a lot of the people i've known in my life.
the slits were one of the bands who informed my teenage years, hearing them for the first time on the evening radio, going out the very next day and grabbing "cut", a seminal turning point in my life which i still remember to this day.

coming home from a midnight london train journey, to find one of their singles delivered in the mail, and playing it at 6:30 am before going to bed... my parents blissfully asleep upstairs.

dj'ing their music in a darkened indie venue, and hearing the bass shake the floor(so much better than on my old hi-fi at home), and having those cool alternative people come up to me afterwards, wanting to know what the hell this great music was.
"Y3" instructing me in the ways of aural chaos, building home-made drumkits, and banging out tunes on pianos, breaking down the structures of songs into some sort of wild freeform.
"the return of the giant" album - my "kind of blue" moment, dub miles davies with great neville brody artwork - again more influence on me and everything i did after hearing/seeing it.
i got back into the slits after a hiatus of a few years, and found their music was still as essential as it always was.
they were of course connected with the clash, PiL and the banshees.

a few old sessions got re-released, and they were back, as important as ever.

i saw them play a small venue, on their last tour, and got to stand a few feet away from ari up before the gig... she looked at me like a ghost from the past(i was rocking a clash t-shirt that night!).
another memory to stay with me for life.
punky reggae!

east st. louis baby!

2010-10-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

so, i've taken the decision to have a year out from photography.
i will be finishing off the art-deco cinema book that i've been working on, and that is going to look pretty damn good - so a lot of work will go into that.
i'm still accepting commissions/ideas/collaborations, but other than that, no new projects will arise.
this actually stems from my decision about a month ago to take up the piano, after a hiatus of two years.
i'm going to study the playing style of professor longhair, and general blues piano - this will involve me working at home on playing and increasing my abilities, then getting a piano teacher to take me to the next level.
no big deal, i've written/recorded music for years - i just can't do photography and music at the same time, something has to suffer.
i've not fallen out with photography, but i think it will be a good time to leave it for a while.
and damned if i'm not actually playing better than ever before, re-discovering my musical mojo again, as well as learning a whole new style - i've hinting to this on my twitter for awhile now, and it feels good to actually come out and say it.
not that it's earth shattering news, a good but largely ignored photographer (me), who never kisses ass or smoozes with the media-wankers who would further his career as well as their own(i do know some media people, who are very genuine though...), and who doesn't hang out with the gallery crowd.
so no big deal, but to me... i enjoy what i do!
and right now, it's all about taking a musical path right back to the innovators.

walk on guilded splinters

2010-09-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

blues on the downbeat

2010-09-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

another saturday to spend milling around in town, stuff to do and places to visit!
as you can see, style birmingham is in full swing(that's victoria square above), with harvey nicholls doing some sort of event from a metal freight container(painted white of course), errr, that was about it, apart from bumping into lots of grumpy, orange-skinned women carrying paperbags and wearing tiny denim jackets, everywhere we went.
there was a facebook-vintage fair on -

which is of course, more my personal idea of style, so we headed to the custard factory.
first i had a look around the cow vintage shop on digbeth high street(slim pickings there, since the last time, when i filled two big yellow bags with pendleton shirt! and i suspect they've got all the good stuff in the great new flagship store a few doors up from the skin-crawlingly odious urban-outfarters).
i love the cow vintage shop though.
always a pleasure going there.
we got to the custard factory eventually...
i was after a dark blue polka-dot shirt to replace a favourite one i'd had for years, and although i was initially sceptical about finding one, we ventured into the new urban village shop(ironically back in the location it used to be in).
this shop has improved in leaps and bounds, there was a real happy soul vibe about the place, and lots of good clothing and retro items to be had... and i even managed to find the exact shirt i was looking for(a pin-sized polka-dot, as opposed to the larger polka-dot garage-punk repro shirts that they do instore).
mods these days, seem to favour large sideburns and lots of loud patterns, kind-of a mix between early skinhead and later 60's mod... much different from my own cleancut jazz stylings(i wanted to be herbie hancock from the 60's bluenote sessions!).
so i was impressed by these people(who were all very cheerfull too, come to mention it! so another bonus!).
onto the regular fleamarket, and H. bought some 1950's doorhandles and some earrings(whilst i stood around loving the old school reggae someone was playing)... then onto the actual vintage fare - which wasn't as busy as last time, less stalls, but easier to move around... didn't find much to buy though as i was only after a long black raincoat.
the great paradox is that the regular custard factory shops, actually have better stuff than the fair that attracts hundreds of people, but the fair brings the people in, and they will visit the regulars, to swell the tills.

did i mention it was style birmingham today(most of this passed us by, despite H. running a successful clothing retail outlet!), we caught a glimpse of some knob wearing a dead animal on his shoulder.

it would have been tastefull to maybe give it a decent burial, and a nice little headstone, if you ask me.
hardly a fashion-statement, this stuff didn't even look good on the victorians(who's obsession with death is probly the inspiration for wearing old animal pelts).
the vintage community is divided on the opinion regarding old fur(especially obvious old lady tatt like this), some say that the animal was killed many years ago, and that the fur-trade make no money from second-hand stuff, and other people say it is just tasteless, and should be consigned to history where it belongs(safe to say, that back in the day, there wasn't much in the way of humane killing.).

anyhoo... in a bid to escape the melee that is the city on a saturday afternoon, we went to the st martins tearoom for some restfull tea and sandwiches.
actually this proved to be a very good idea, plenty of seats(we commandeered a big sofa and table, unthinkable in the lifestyle cafes, mere yards away!), and had some restorative tea and sandwiches.

after some regular shopping, wondering if we should head home, i read a tweet from catnip about a new cafe that we hadn't heard of called shakes, so we headed off there, before going home!

it was here that some people had convened for ben waddington's invisible architecture tour(i'd contemplated on going to this, but had a back-doctor appointment this morning, which they had conveniently cancelled for me at the last moment!).
but instead i took the opportunity to photograph michael grimes flicking through a copy of heat... ironic, given that he is the most un-heat like person, to be photographed reading said magazine!
onward home then, as i had some piano music to listen to.

i have taken-up playing music again, after a break of a couple of years(spent being busy doing other things, i'm happy to say).
recently i had one of those pivotal moments, watching the martin scorsese blues films, and i thought "i want to get back into this!" whereas before, it was booker t. organ-jazz and herbie hancock all the way... now i'm learning to play blues piano(think pinetop perkins), i have an excellent tutor book, which i am working my way through(in one week, i have learned more than i ever knew, which admittedly was mostly instinctive playing), although knowing my way around the blues scale is helping immensely.
i'm going to work on this book, until i feel happy with mastering the great material in it, then get myself a teacher, once i can break out of my small repetoire of jazz-riffs.
this time, i'm going to concentrate on actually learning songs, whereas before i tended to grab snatches of tunes, and mesh them together(which worked, but meant i never remembered whole songs!).
and by this time next year, i want to be proficient in playing, enough to do a gig... i won't need much, maybe just a drummer and a piano....
but before any music(and writing this), some green+mint tea with home-made cup-cake.

anyway, here's a dude in a good hat playing pinetop's boogie woogie.

one day... right now, i'm working my way through fats domino and mose allison riffs!

the cat

2010-09-21T10:37:00.001-07:00

park lane special

2010-09-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

excellent session recently with olivia - a good friend who is also a photographer + model, so understands why i ask her to stand in strange positions, holding her chin...).
very tamara de lempicka - art deco colouring and film noire lighting, maybe with a little bit of edward hopper drama - and my favourite deco colour scheme of green+black....

and finally, Helen Highwater in a Bridget Bardot pose - again good colours... sometimes the image works in colour, and sometimes the image is better in black+white(as above)... i blame going to see the serge gainsbourg bio film, for inspiring this pose!

Pat Rhoden - Boogie On Reggae Woman

2010-09-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

photo by olivia and some heavy post-processing by me.

music for the last couple

2010-09-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

i don't care how many good tracks are on this compilation.
shit cover.
if you listen quietly between the tracks of solid gold music, that's the sound of a barrel being scraped by the ~~goats~~ who compiled this.

rant over.
the original sleeve that this is based on, is admittedly a copy of a bbc sound-effects album.
but y'know, some things are just too precious to muck around with.
there has been in the past a famous falling out between paulo hewitt and paul weller, maybe this is the cappuccino kid's revenge on his former co-writer and confidante, by co-opting the design for one of the jam's finest albums.
i wish a band would come out with something so polemic these days.
an amalgalm of ray davies, the gang of four, bleak indie music, shelley - all wrapped-up in urban/suburban angst and feedback, rock and roll music never sounded so clean, and for me, pushed all the buttons.

jukeboxes, futurism, dead poets, bugger all on telly, mono record players... it's all there, worrying about the future, worrying about the bomb, that was life back then... it's a wonder we ever made it through the nuclear winter.

i first heard the album, previewed by david jensen, on his evening radio show... and was in the record shop the next morning buying it!
and i once saw the original sound effects album in the virgin megastore in glasgow in 1980, whilst on a shopping trip with my fellow retro-mates: and should have bought it as a precursor to being a collective geek, but relented and spent the money on some independent underground comix.
these days(to coin a joy division song title)i can only compare it to the day i sat on the bus, commuting home, and five different people were listening to the elephant album/the white stripes on headphones(having obviously bought it at lunchtime, and had to wait till the journey home, to hear it!)... throughout the ride i could hear the tracks hissssssing through leaky headphones, just out of synch with each other...
even now, the cover art of sound affects, is still with me, in one form or another... here's a photo i took earlier in the week:

as for the 20 original mod classics: you would be better getting hold of the in crowd boxset, 99 tracks and a great way to spend an afternoon....

inner city blues

2010-09-05T04:02:00.000-07:00

seeing as i started-up a new flickr group handsworth, for my recent photos of the area(and because there wasn't already a flickrgroup for handsworth!), i thought i'd put up this list of some of the other groups for the city(drawn-up by pete ashton, over the last few years), and maintained by tim ellis

Birmingham
Birmingham: It's Not Shit
Birmingham Exposure
Metroblogging Birmingham
Birmingham Post and Mail
Social
Birmingham Flickrmeets
Black Country Flickrmeets
Regional
Bearwood
Bournville
Broad Street
Digbeth
Edgbaston
Erdington
Hall Green
Jewellery Quarter
Kings Heath
Kings Norton
Longbridge
Moseley
Selly Oak
Stirchley and Cotteridge
Sutton Park
Yardley
Interactive
Birmingham Chain Photos
Guess Where Birmingham
Themed
A45 Road Birmingham/Solihull/Coventry
Art Deco West Midands
Aston Villa
Birmingham Bicycles
Birmingham Botanical Gardens
Birmingham Canals
Birmingham Christmas market
Birmingham City FC
Birmingham - Forward (for the city Coat of Arms)
Birmingham Graffiti and Street Art
Birmingham Library The Current Library - in Chamberlain Square
Birmingham Music Live
Birmingham Parkland
Birmingham Street Name Signs
Birmingham Tornado
Birmingham Through the Viewfinder
Boring Brick Buildings In Birmingham
The BT Tower, Birmingham
Concrete Birmingham
The Cube: Birmingham
Favourite Birmingham buildings
Haunted Birmingham
The Library of Birmingham The New Library - in Centenary Square
Lomo Birmingham
Made In Birmingham
Number 50 Bus Route
Public Art in Public Transport
The Pubs of Birmingham
Purple Mermaid (Uni of B'ham Circus Society)
Rockabilly Birmingham
Selfridges Birmingham
Sporting West Midlands
Style Birmingham
Suburban Birmingham
Supersonic Festival
West Midlands Cafe Society
West Midland Hard Core (DIY photography)
West Midland Urban Explorers
The Yellow Wall
Live in the Midlands (Music gigs)
Relevant
Red Brick Buildings (tagged)

as i've said - this list is by pete, who started off the birmingham flickrmeet group, back in may 2005, and you can buy his stuff here.
tim updates it here on a regular basis.

version city

2010-08-30T13:00:00.001-07:00

In January and February 1983, Joe Strummer produced and directed a fifty-minute silent black-and-white film, Hell W10. The film starred Paul and Mick as rival underworld characters in Notting Hill, warring over a consignment of heroin. The scene at the end where they all get shot was filmed on the bit of waste-ground next to Westbourne Park bus garage.
For years, Hell W10 was believed lost. Then in 2002 the film turned up on a London market stall, and the following year it was included as an extra on the Essential Clash DVD.

krupa

2010-08-30T09:27:00.001-07:00

Dirty Bristow Launch
Originally uploaded by Marty & Sas Taylor

the dirty bristow launch party - from saturday night, as attended by myself and H.
a fun evening's entertainment, best described as off-the-wall!
i kept coming across various people i knew or had heard of online...
that's me in the fedora, and H. in the red mac.
a magazine that sells beer.
can't be bad.
the article i illustrated is on architecture, and somehow happened to be written by someone i knew from my art-school days(although i haven't spoken to anyone from then, in many years!).
rather a good publication though, i'm chuffed to have been involved.

jimmy jazz

2010-08-29T11:44:00.000-07:00

yesterday, we came across brynel's hat shop - H. was looking in vain for a decent hat-pin, and we'd spotted what is one of the few real hatshops left in the city-centre(albeit just off the main drag, on fiveways).
yeah, h. got her hat-pin, but what kept us longer was my discovery that they stock bailey's hats... cue me trying on various items... i came away with a bailey fedora:

which i couldn't not wear out that same evening.
made me feel like a bluesman... nice item!
i was impressed enough to tell the owner vivean, at least three times, i was impressed that somewhere in birmingham stocks good hats(me, i've been watching certain old dudes out of the corner of my eye, looking for clues as to where they'd get their immaculate pork-pies and fedoras...).
problem solved... vivean asked me if i was in a band, as most of the men who shop there seem to play in one.
nope, i'm not in a band anymore!

we went back a couple of weeks later - and i bought a black baileys fedora.
i may have to make a return trip here, and get some winter bunnets...

ten long years

2010-08-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

so much for the government's much trumpeted big society, in some places it already exists...
like here in birmingham, where a sikh temple sits on the same junction as a church(incidentally, there is another church to the far left of the photo, out of shot).
this was from the early morning photowalk i took along soho road, in handsworth.

this is from the start of the day, under the flyover.

and finally, at the end of soho road.
i was thinking of robert johnson when i processed this image... i'd just been watching one of the francis ford coppola blues films(warming by the devil's fire), which referenced the event where johnson finds himself at a crossroads and sells his soul to the devil.
those films are damn good btw - i'm working my way through them, some are merely historical, and the better ones tell stories - awesome stuff, just what i needed to watch.

more images to come, as i work on them.

true stories of life

2010-08-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

i used to watch this film about 3 or 4 times a week, back in the 80's... i somehow had it on video, and it was my breakfast viewing of choice, seeing as i was an unemployed musician, which meant of course i didn't have to get up early, or leave the house till after 12 most days.
says a lot about me, that i related to the film of a bunch of outsiders, who establish their own codes of behaviour and morales independently of mainstream society, whom they reject, and who rejected them in turn anyway.
at the time, i didn't pick-up on the fact that roger corman directed it(i'd be eating snap,crackle and pop during the titles anyway), and the name penelope spheeris was yet to be famous.
all the actors, save for jack, were unknown... although i'm sure i'd heard of flea by then(who knows).
as i was living at home, on my own anyway, it did kind of feel a bit like a teenage squat, despite the fact that i was paying rent and was soon to be out of my teens... although i never really embraced the drinking, fucked-up, unhealthy lifestyle of eating junkfood and smoking(until a few years ago, and when i saw what it did to me, i stopped!!!).
this was one of those nascent periods in my life, when i was coming out of being a good kid and having a local regular job, and turning into the rebel with ripped jeans, james dean raincoats and too much hair-gel(country born).
yeah, i got called a psychobilly in the street(i never was, although i had friends who were, and i never attempted to look like one anyway...), and people who didn't know i was a youth-worker, thought it terrible that such a cleancut boy like me, spent all his time hanging out with all the wierdos and druggies in town(my client-base in my job, actually)... although what they didn't know was, that when i wasn't being seen around town with all the local alternative types(actually most of whom, were fairly harmless kids like me.), i was cycling up and down the west coast... usually at night, avoiding the traffic and watching the sun come up somewhere...
haven't watched the film since those far off days, you can only watch something so often, no matter how good it is... until now, when i saw it again(this time on dvd, although a crummy transfer with all the video interference of the original)... and how did it stand-up, after 25 years of life inbetween... these days, i don't think i would have devoted so much time to watching one film - but it does feel quite seminal now, i've seen a lot of films since then, who have borrowed various ideas(possibly the last one being american history X, which in turn also borrowed heavily from the american skin novel by don degrazia, although romper stomper steals a lot of the ideas from suburbia too... and i might even venture the idea for the walk on, in reservoir dogs, looks uncannily like the shot of the punks walking down the street...).
i got into minutemen later on, and the whole DIY ethic they proposed was already in my mind though, thanks to watching suburbia...
most of the intellect comes across now as mere smart-ass humour, but i'm glad i got into that frame of mind, it did me a lot of good in giving me the courage to go out and find myself, instead of accepting my fate in a smalltown existence(which worked fine for a lot of the people i grew up with, but wasn't for me.).
after all, if you don't create your own reality, it creates you - i'm just glad i got to find the space to have the choice.

but, i wish i'd watched loveless over and over, then i would have been cooler.

now that is a motherfucker of a film...

the four horsemen

2010-08-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

read this article

the blogpost above lead me to a curious train of thought, how will rule-abiding jobsworths who work in the licencing and food trades deal with the concept of men wearing proper hats again..?
i mean, if i go into a venue/cafe/bar wearing a new brixton fedora, can they really tell me to take it off, in the same circumstance that would befall someone who wears a baseball cap, or a beanie pulled down low... those hats are cultural signifiers of a negative self-image, whereas i'm sure that wearing a christy's chepstow, would only have people believe i'm O.G.(as in orginal gangster, ho-ho).
but the crux of the matter is, staff might have to discriminate, otherwise, they are making people remove formal clothing... personally i rarely go into a venue that has any sort of dress-code other than the one i subscribe to already, but how should i react to someone in a faux-police jacket, telling me i must remove part of my wardrobe?
having seen this in action, many, many years ago, whilst out with a friend who always wore hats, on one night he chose a woolen pakul hat which you can read about here. and we got as far as the front door of one long since demolished poser pre-club bar(where i first saw men who had shaved arms, purely out of their own vanity...), where he was told to take it off... this of course leads to issues with ethnic identity, this type of hat also symbolises history and place... as opposed to the baseball cap or the beanie, which is a cultural signifier and is sometimes worn to indicate wannabe criminal affiliations, or to hide behind/under.
i'm not down on baseball caps, i own several john deere caps, and they are excellent, i like wearing them, even though stateside people wonder why i'd want to look like a farmer... and i have a levi's beanie and a thick woollen adidas beanie(from the early 90's).
but it looks as if the rules are going to have to change, otherwise venues will have to supply hat-racks again... what's the point of spending time and effort on finding a good hat, only to be told to take it off, by someone who has no hair!
i know that i hunted high and low for decent hat shops, while travelling around... and i did actually find a traditional hat shop in barcelona.
now of course, i've done the research and have my favourites, baileys of hollywood and the new york hat co. being two not already mentioned here.

good article here, on shopping for hats in new york.

guns of brixton

2010-08-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

you can crush us, you can bruise us.
but you'll have to answer to...

don't be cruel

2010-08-18T11:08:00.001-07:00

fine stuff.
thanks elvis.

teddy boy walk

2010-08-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

got some product by these nice people, at the weekend: kings1965 and not just because that's the year i was born either... damn nice smelly stuff, reminds me of the classic scents of men's grooming products, black pepper, sandalwood and citrus, with hints of old leather and tobacco.
i can see they are going for a chap-esque look graphics-wise... although i associate the victoriana cut-and-paste style with IT magazine or bugs and drugs comic(a fore-runner to Viz Comic, and much funnier too!), but all very suggestive of a classic gents barber smell... maybe they will include a bay rum hair tonic(like the one boots do, already?).
oddly boots do a range of old-fashioned mens grooming products(their aftershave is very 1950s), which they have been quietly selling for years, with no fanfare, in barely noticeable bottles, on the lowest shelf, so maybe this new brand is tapping into that, as well as the current vogue for all things chap-esque(me, i've been reading the chap for as long as i can remember: pinup-parade paid upfront for a full page advert a few months back, to help them out when they hit some financial problems!).
with Kings, i'm sensing a king of shaves connection - who are my staple brand of shaving product, since 90's, another excellent range of products, and one of the reasons i haven't had a shaving nick for nearly 15 years(i kid you not!)... for when i'm in the mood for elaborate side-burns and the like.
but great stuff from kings1965... i really can't get enough of it, the aroma is very classic, reminding me of going to the barbers back in the day, when they'd slap all sorts of unctions on you, after a proper haircut, from a man who looked like he'd spent the last 30 years in the army...
but this got me thinking about other brand names i couldn't live without, those tried and tested names, so i drew up a handy list:
Levis
Pendleton
RayBan
Lacoste
Vans
Gordons Gin
Converse
Barracuta
Olympus
Woolrich
Steady Classic
Wrangler
Martini
Christy's
Tanquery
Mcillheny Co Tabasco Sauce
New York Hat Company
Penguin
Piaggio
Baileys of Hollywood
Brixton
Fred Perry
Bush
Redbird
Pluko
Brylcreem
Gillete
Sailor Jerry
Jack Daniels
Schweppes

some brands just inspire confidence, who wouldn't feel better with any of these life-enhancing items in their life.
unless, you'd be happy to settle for less.

the website i'm currently fixating over, the brixton site... now they do great hats(one should be winging it's way to me now, courtesy of their UK dealer... who has a page of brixtons bunnets that brought a tear to my eye...), but the brixton site is so damn good, nice and simple design, lomo low key slightly polaroid-ish or black+white photography of "real" people wearing the items, they even make a keyfob covetable.
the lookbook page is worth the visit alone, for some grimey images of musicians and what appear to be street-people, all sporting product naturally... but right now, i'm on a bare-wooden floor and white walls basic trip, maybe i've just had enough of elaborate modernity... and like the broxton site, i'm listening to the clash and blues and punk a lot these days too.
who wouldn't raise a smile whilst looking at this great page of product.

there is a kick-ass article here, on the clash and their look.
read it damn it.

walkin' to new orleans

2010-08-15T10:21:00.000-07:00

started playing the piano again, after a hiatus of too many years!
i was looking for something musical, and even thought of double-bass(don't rule it out, despite the size and expense!), but have reverted to my main instrument... too many people just play guitar(but i'm a rubbish guitarist), this time, i'm going to even do the doctor john piano book i chickened out of, a few years ago... may even have a crack at walk on gilded splinters...

finally got some of my panoramic images up on the web, after various viruses, and the problems caused therein(thanks for directing me to those sites, yeah great..).

these images are of trevelez, in the alpujarras - the highest village in spain, which felt more like(i imagine)switzerland... everyone else went swimming and stuff, but i took a walk around the village.. and soaked up the atmosphere of a place that has a museum of ham, a house of ham, and lots of ham, everywhere...

probably the first time i'd consciously taken panoramic images, with the intention of stitching them together, and to begin with it took ages to do, but i managed to work out a system...

blogger snips the edges off, so best click on them for full wide-angle goodness...

got some good reading to get stuck into:
a.b. guthrie jr. the big sky, paul auster the new york trilogy and various books i should have read by now(not naming any names!)...

40 cups of coffee

2010-08-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

even though it was a few weeks ago, i'm still working on the spain photos, whilst simultaneously also doing a shoot at an underground bunker in deepest darkest essex... been busy then.

the bunker was a blast(ho-ho)... got there early, signed my photo permits, then proceeded to go through the rwong way, which meant that i was the only one in most of the areas(i may have done this on purpose). ok, so that was a scary thing to do, given that i'm a mile underground, in an enclosed space which is full of atmosphere...
more info on the bunker shoot soon.

i've also been working on images i took in spain, a whole flashcard's worth of shots, on my new pen camera, which proved itself over and over as a great piece of kit(small enough to take anywhere, but also usefull as a full-bodied camera).
yet again, more on this as and when(i am busy resurrecting the podcast medium), but here are a few shots i've been working on...
despite being on holiday, i did manage a fashion shoot, just before mid-day(although i ended-up with minor sunstroke afterwards), in the cactus groves

i went on a walk with the express intention of getting high above the village to shoot some model-village images of the place we were staying...

me, with sunburn, hiding out at the back of the flat, with my camera and wearing a hat i bought from a very good tourist shop(where we also bought an anatomically correct battery operated musical torro!).

this is part of the building where we hung out for a day(and i filmed the swimming pool)

ironically it is called rincon del silencio.
i've also been working on some experimental(for me anyway ) panorama shots of spain - using composite photos and most of my CPU...

been a blast working on images though, i'd spent most of my time before going to spain, in preparation for my time abroad - working-out and getting healthy, so putting out all this stuff is a great release of all the work i've been doing recently.
more work to come, as i've got some i-d card photos to take for work(the irony of that!), and a session walking around handsworth taking photos of landmarks(for an educational project someone else is organising).
this weekend, has been busy image wise, in that i had my eyes tested(and some vintage 50's spectacles will soon be on the way to me), and went out to see the serge gainsbourg biography... which i urge everyone to go and see, great film.
speaking of filums... i found a home for my video collection... it's been gathering dust since we moved house(and didn't replace our broke-ass video machine), you can't put them in the bin, you can't recycle them(and i was unwilling to just bin a collection of good films anyway so FTS), so i advertised on twitter, using #freecycle - and vivaVHS got in touch, and was happy to give them a good home, which brought a warm glow to the weekend for all concerned...

anyhoo... more info soon on all the stuff i'm up to as it happens, going to get the radiation ranch radio show back on it's feet with a few surprises to boot!
meanwhile, i've got camera gear to ready, and a live double album from brian setzer to listen through.

moanin'

2010-07-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

it was a good day to get my goat.
waited in all morning for a courier to deliver a bloody hat i'd bought, only to track it on the courier's website, and find out they had delivered to the wrong house, and had gone back to the depot.
much cursing and such followed, as my saturday mornings are a sacred time of not being at home, and sorting shit out elsewhere.
we vowed that when the company phoneline was back up on monday, all sorts of chaos would be rained down on their tiny little heads...
into town, and we go for lunch in our favourite chinese restuarant.
things are very slow to start though, and a few tables get served ahead of us... i'm already picking my bags up to leave when the waitress comes over(and apologises... although we did ask someone to prompt her).
lunch is served, and we wait for our ice-cream... which isn't forthcoming after 15 minutes... so i dig out my phone, look-up the restuarant's website, and by clicking on the telephone number on the page, my phone automatically dials the manager.

the conversation went something like this:
hello?
yes, hello, i would like our second course please.
sorry?
i would like our second course please, we are waiting for our ice-cream, and it has been too long.
ah...(pause)... which table are you at? (the penny dropped with an audible clang)
we are sitting under the tv with the horse racing on.(this is a quality chinese restuarant, the other tv screen was showing a frank sinatra film, where he played a soldier in korea ISYN)
oh, i see... errrm, thank you.
thank you, goodbye.

there was some commotion and shouting from the back office - followed by pots and pans crashing no doubt around the kitchen area... and our ice arrived in about 30 seconds.
and that is the joy of connectivity... by-passing the front-of-house staff who are in some sort of dissaray for whatever reason, and going straight to the (surprised!) manager, who duly sorted things out.
you just can't get away with being slow any more(certainly not in a service industry), as you can't firewall the customer with waffle nowadays, hey customer is already bypassing you on the phone to your boss, or emailing customer services with a complaint, before you have time to figure out an excuse.
does this mean better service... hard to say - a few weeks ago, i was in a well known supermarket(let's call them sainsburys, just for the sake of arguement), and a shelf-stacker, who looked like the idiot love-child of postman pat and jeremy clarkson, decided it would amuse his idiot friend, if he were to walk past me mumbling some sort of elvis impression.
me, i turned on him, and gave him a flea in his large mis-shapen ear(to which he looked suitably terrified... despite the fact i was at least a foot shorter than him! i must look pretty mean pushing a trolley loaded with aubergines...), but of course, once home, i emailed customer service several times, berating them for employing such an obviously failed medical experiment in their shop.
any brief feeling of embarrassment i may have momentarily experienced, was more than balanced out, by the mayhem that can be unleashed on people whose job it is to apologise for the antics of staff-members who can't talk and fart at the same time.
last year was a good example, in harborne waitrose, when i enquired to the wine-snob who works on the alcohol section: did they have any rum?
he responded that they were having a delivery in the next day... i turned-up the next day, and it was obvious that he was a wined-up merchant.
several emails later, and a telephone call from a concerned PR bod, and i've got a gift voucher winging it's way towards me in the post.
mr. wanky wine-snob though, was nowhere to be seen for a few weeks, and now keeps his head down(and doesn't look quite so cocky these days).

anyway, we got home this afternoon, the company had come back and delivered the package to our good neighbours(who were in this time, and they took the package).

my point - with smartphones connected to the internet, if a staff member pisses you off, take their photo, email it to head office, look up their PR number, call them, email them, ride the information highway all the way to the (river)bank... if service is slow, you can call up the manager from the queue and tell them to get their finger out!
all good stuff, for the individual, but not so for large companies who insist on being connected, and then get hauled up because of it...

in regards to the restuarant incident - talking about what happened with people ITRW, their opinions fall between two schools of thought... people who have worked as waiting staff, were more sympathetic to the plight of the one girl that they had waitressing on a saturday afternoon(which i completely agree with, it was a bad situation), but i countered this with the fact that i wasn't unpleasant, merely wanting to wrong foot the management who were sitting it out in the back room, and after all - i only wanted to finish my meal, which is what most restuarants want you to do anyway.
and of course, most people felt that i had to make some sort of a stand, as a customer... so why not use the technology on hand, to make a statement of sorts, that will be remembered(purely because i acted out-of-the-box of normal experience).
i hope they get it sorted, it's my favourite place to eat in town, and their staff who wait on tables work damn hard...

just for you and i

2010-07-24T01:08:00.000-07:00

cool.
stalkers are basically people who you know nothing of(ever or anymore), but who seem to know a lot about you.
i have several internet stalkers, who get up early to read my blog or look at photos i have done... with the intention of posting snarky little messages, so removed from the reality of the situation, that they were laughable.
i even have a stalker of sorts ITRW... who watches and mimics my habits and such in person, with the intention of somehow winding me up in a psychotic, socio-pathic sort-of way.
it used to annoy me, that someone went to all the trouble of trying to bug me... but then i figured out that in a way, it's a pathetic form of flattery, to go to all the trouble of watching what i do, and formulating a way of copying it.
i was reading louise wener's biog about being a figurehead in the britpop scene... and she talks of seeing a queue of girls all dressed like her, at a sleeper gig.
which initially freaks her out(not surprisingly).
i know how she feels, but honestly, i love the attention, at least i know my critics care enough to salve my ego!
and it's so much more inventive than the japanese spam-bots who try to link my readers to e-commerce websites selling crap baseball caps.
so, please don't go changing...
it's better to be talked about, than not to be talked about at all.

rhapsody in blue

2010-07-18T10:03:00.000-07:00

sneakily i had planned to shoot this in advance - i knew we would be staying briefly in a place with a pool, so plotted what i was going to do...
the music of course is the best thing - charles mingus pithecanthropus erectus(the name given to fossils discovered in 1891 at Trinil - Ngawi Regency on the banks of the Solo River in East Java, Indonesia, one of the first known specimens of Homo erectus.), one great dark jazz joint, that suited the mood of the footage i had.

the thing is you see, i can't swim.
and here i was having to get into a pool for the first time since i was about 11, when i nearly drowned(which puts a dampener on things, swim-wise).
so this slightly spooky film, is about me, sizing-up the pool before going in.
as it was, it went ok - and i wouldn't even come out when it started raining...

paper roses

2010-06-21T11:56:00.000-07:00

yeah i'm angry... you may or may not be familiar with the scheme.
it has become a massive hit, despite being shown late at night on bbc scotland... somehow the stories of the people on it have grabbed the national attention, and the bbc are planning to show it across the whole of this tiny little island we live on(with subtitles of course).
it got as far as two episodes, before being shelved temporarily for legal reasons, but now a local SNP politician has decided to try and ban this documentary for good.

first of all, i don't agree at all with the way the headline in local esteemed newspaper the standard reports this article... it all seems a bit too much like telling anyone who disagrees, that the battle has already been won.
so no points for unbiased reporting there, boys.
but the point of the article is what really got me mad... that SNP politician willie coffey should feel he speaks for most of kilmarnock, when he says that the town is "shocked and saddened" by what goes on in the programme.
i think that a little walk down the reality of living in kilmarnock is possibly in order, to gain some insight into what is really going on behind the headlines.
i grew up in kilmarnock, it's a neglected little town, that used to have industry/factories/commerce/trade/brewery... all of these are gone now.
i moved away to get work elsewhere, and every time i return, it seems a little more soul has left the town.
there is a town centre webcam, literally covered in cobwebs, where you watch nothing happen, except for locals drifting aimlessly around... i should know, i used to wander about dreaming of getting away from the place...
when a small town like this loses it's industrial usefullness, there will be a lot of blue collar workers out of a job, a lot of people who if they had a steady income/routine are quite happy... give them hard work and a regular income, all will be well, it's in the blood, generations of men and women who shouldered the industrial revolution, and carried scotland to the forefront of industry.
you get the picture, it's hard-wired into their dna to be busy and to celebrate.
take away the jobs and any hope of finding work locally, and you will have a lot of frustrated people with time on their hands.
successive councils have pissed away all of the great companies who helped fund those big white mansions on the hills, being fooled into thinking that a quick buck was better than pennies now and then.
ok, so far, so kilmarnock.
there are a few people in kilmarnock, who hold onto the town's wealth, and they couldn't give the slightest fuck about what happens to the people who live on the estates featured in the scheme.
i know, from growing up in the town, that these areas were mostly no-go, they were prowled by hard-bitten old men and snarling unrealistically angry young men with fists always ready.
rough housing, cars falling to ruin in the garden, wild dogs, wild kids... at one point the council tried to plaster over the cracks, taking down all the garden fences and turning swathes of back greens into one vast free-for-all.
i had relatives who lived in altonhill, i got mugged there aged 11, my american cousin got mugged there too, my mate had his chopper knicked, but i also grew up around those streets as i saw another side to life different to my cossetted existence on a shiny new estate...
the last time i visited, whole streets had been flattened(like i'd seen in toxteth), there was an air of desperate fin-de-siecle about the place, as if a bomb had gone off...
these estates are on the edge of town, are just like the one i grew up in, but they are mostly ignored by the councillors as well as the majority of people who live in kilmarnock... it's the familiar postcode apartheid - if you come from there, you are instantly stereotyped and doors close in your face.
i know someone who lives in the area: this has in itself become a "some of my best friends are" cliche... as most of the detractors of the documentary are quick to point out some spurious involvement in onthank, altonhill, knockinlaw.
but my own impression of the place, was that it was always a bit tatty, the local kids weren't too nice to soft little oiks like me, and that there were an awful lot of old people living there.
so there.
but what's bugging the good burgers of kilmarnock is that they are having to face up to something they have been ignoring for decades.

these are sink estates.

the most famous historically being townholm, where no one dared to walk as people would come out their houses if you were spotted strolling through the area, they had horses in the street, the locals would push visitors cars into the river for kicks... i went to school with some of the people from there, who were shunned by mostly everyone(they built the prison near where it used to be).
you can apply all the rhetoric you want to the situation, but this is where the council would dump people in order to forget about them.
and that's just what they have been doing up until now.

i've said from the very start of the scheme, the exposure will be good for the people there... and by that i mean the majority, not just the tv-friendly junkies and alcohol dependant residents.
there's a mindset in kilmarnock that likes to turn it's back on those of a lesser standing, to keep your own house in order, and bollocks to the neighbour who hasn't got the wherewithall to keep nice clean windows and a front door step with a weekly layer of paint on it.
but this documentary will highlight the level to which the deprived areas have been allowed to sink.
it's not damningly indicative of the assumed low morals of the maladjusted or vulnerable people who feature in the programme... it's a mirror being held up to a town that has let this happen in it's own midst.
kilmarnock grandees love to bask in whiskey-tinged past of industrial glories and landed lorded auld money, people with long proud sounding scottish names and immaculate wedding attire, living it up in big sandstone houses, sporrans the size of dinnerplates, throwing buns to the local serfs... but that's all history now.

one story on the scheme that doesn't get talked about so much, is of the family who blighted by ill-health, are campaigning to re-open a local community centre, where presumably(if it was organised) they could have medical advice, a social focal point to meet and put the world to rights(in order to maintain a sense of community), debt-advice, tax advice, local fund raising... all the sort of life-improving things the local council clearly want to put a stop to(i expect the land was quietly being gerrymandered for luxury flats, in the same way that the burns monument was allowed to fall to ruin, and was initially going to be replaced by luxury flats... until the local people stepped in with howls of indignation - that something so important to kilmarnock and the world of literature, was going to become another faceless yuppie development, which would exclude locals).
yes, the programme is poverty porn, just like the output on most satellite channels, showing round the clock images of the social underclass being chased by the police in one location or another.
yes, the people featured in it are entertainment fodder.
yes, there are young people with old heads on their shoulders.
yes, none of the content of the scheme will come as any revelation to the people of kilmarnock.
and yes it says a lot about the cognitive thinking skills of the subjects that none of them were actually paid to appear in something which is on the verge of becoming a national phenomenon... it says a lot for the film-makers who i felt were quite impartial, but obviously schooled in the louis theroux method of distancing themselves from the participants in a semi-ironic manner and it says a lot about the town that is suddenly going to have to deal with a problem that been ongoing for more than half a century.
is life really so grim, or are the needs of the people not being met, in favour of new money being drafted in to take up housing and to put up walls and fences to keep the local people out?
this time the red-faced local councillors have fumed and blustered in their ivory towers like never before.
maybe it's time to embrace the problem, and not ignore it any longer.

addendum
now, to be fair, to willie coffy, i contacted him with this blog, and he graciously agreed to talk to me in person about it, regarding some of the participants who felt they had been duped.
so welcome to the world of documentary filming then, personally - i've never really been a fan of photographers who take images of people in some form of discomfort or distress, for the very reason that i feel it is exploitative... and having had a camera pointed at me(by channel four, no less) in such situations without my permission, i roundly told them to f-off(which they did, as you cannot film someone once they have asked you to stop... sort-of).
and yes, there is a lot of criminal behaviour exhibited in the scheme: that's how some people live, what a surprise, would anyone want to watch a documentary about someone who doesn't live out of the norm... and i don't suppose for a minute that seeing the impoverished lifestyle of a heroin addict is going to appeal to anyone, except maybe someone with an existing self-harm problem.
if anything - watching the scheme is as probably a good a deterrent as it gets!

and of course, some political parties have a shortbreadtin view of scotland, which of course is far removed from the reality of life in a struggling country which is slowing slipping out of the view of the rest of europe, as seen in the scheme.

i'm pro-scotland y'know... love the place, love the people. i was born there, and it's in my blood.

visit the country, it really is a beautifull place.

but it has it's problems, just like everywhere else.

and it's time we all woke up to them, instead of trying to sweep them under an immaculately hoovered tartan carpet, in a council office reception area.

file under "filmed as is".

this programme is kilmarnock's wake-up call.
maybe i feel a touch sensitive, as i only recently found out that someone i used to hang out with and look up to, is now living the life of a heroin addict, just out of town.
what a waste.
and if you want to see the filmic equivalent of what happens when middle-class film-makers approach the residents of a deprived area, then have a look here... and decide if the scheme represents inescapable reality.

search for a new land

2010-06-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

just finished reading the awakener, an autobiography of sorts by helen weaver...
i say of sorts, as it's about her, and some of the important people she knew from the beat generation, and beyond... this includes kerouac, ginsberg et al... basically the only writers to ever matter to me...
i speak from experience, these people inspired me!
great book - filled with insight into how it felt to be in on the birth of the beat generation, from within its inner circle(even though kerouac himself felt he had to be on the fringes of society, in order for him to be able to look in on it).
i know a lot of my outlook is inspired by on the road, i spent a lot of time in my late teens, till mid twenties - travelling on coaches and trains, up and down the country, and beyond - just to explore and to move!

my appreciation of new places, and of familiar grimy cities was always flavoured by the outlook of kerouac's characters and writing.
last year, we were in spain, and came back a day early just to see the on the road scroll, that was doing the rounds.
i even got a wink off carolyn cassady, now a feisty old lady!

i bought helen's book, in shakespeare and co. in paris, near the beat hotel, next to the seine.

like helen, i didn't get on the road, the first time i read it either.
i couldn't get my head round the new style of writing that i was being presented with... it took me a few months of growing up, before i read it again, and the penny dropped, and suddenly i'd found my manifesto for living.
ok, not all of it applied to me, the drugs and debauchery never really reached me somehow, but the urge to break-out from a stifling small town, and put my feet on new soil was crystalised in on the road.

i was looking for something too... and i was even a cross-cultural catholic bhuddist at one point(i hold a lot of bhuddist teachings in high regard, and they do really complement catholicism, if you are open-minded enough to avoid dogmatism...)
helen's biog also mentions lenny bruce, another hero of mine... always interesting to see the man behind the myth.
i've read a lot of kerouac books, and books about kerouac(that gives me an idea for a selection of reviews!) and this is up there with all of them, as a great insight into what really happened, outwith all the hype that surrounded the beat generation, and of course the beat generation writers own accounts, which were given to a lot of mystical hyperbole(and why not, that's what life is all about!).

of course, it is also good to read about real life in those times, which is also important from a historical point.
i'm still quite jealous of people who lived through those times of huge social and political upheaval, nowadays it all seems so much like soup...

the truth is not the secret of the few: lawrence ferlinghetti

anyway, read more!
buy this book.

you wear it well

2010-06-01T10:57:00.000-07:00

not sure what other people think, i've been a rod stewart fan for years... a consequence of growing up on the south west coast of scotland, where at one point in the 70's rod was a rock demi-god(no doubt due to his fondness for all things lion rampant, and football), his feel-good songs even made it onto my guilty pleasures playlist, well into the 90's... much to the amazement of my hipper than thou indie-kid associates at college!
but, as a young kid, seeing rod the mod in the richard barnes book, and my parents having a penchant for his later material, then to discover he worked with julie driscoll (above)in steampacket (who went onto do the trinity of which i was and still am a huge fan!) back in the late 60's was enough to convince just how important an artist he is...

and i was, and still am a fan of the small faces, who were until the late 90's, one of the most under-rated 60's bands ever fact.
so there... i had rod's greatest hits kicking around on cassette(the one with the pink cover...), and i still vividly remember trying to get into the scotch glass album cover at an uncle's house, as a very young music fan(the same album is on the record shelf now), and in the 90's i ended-up re-buying all the small faces material i had originally bought on vinyl in the 70's...
ah, but rod is still a busy man these days, and a mooted re-union with the faces was always on the cards, but never yet happened, so the unthinkable has arisen instead despite the fact that the two founding members of the faces are no longer around(and sorely missed).
the connection with me, despite all the history, well here it is, after a short discussion on that twitter thing with writer neil mcormick on the subject, when he asked for people's thoughts on the idea of the faces reforming with simply red frontman mick hucknall in rod's place, and wrote his own review of the situation.
completely agree with what he says on there in regards to rod stewart and the faces.
do i like mick hucknall?
no, not really.
he ruined the valentine brothers version of money's too tight to mention, which i had back in the 80's.
so it's a bit like cilla getting together with burt bacharach, if you ask me.
and of course, hucknall wasn't personally responsible for his fans in the 80's who were odious to say the least, with their liking for owning boyracer cars, hanging out in wine bars and tucking their loud jumpers into snow-bleached jeans... but now he's going to warble all over some more of my favourite music.

20 flight rock

2010-05-31T03:35:00.000-07:00

on a recent trip to paris, i discovered a lot of great art-deco design:

Gaston Bouzy et Jean Giraud, architectes 9, rue du Petit-Musc - 75004
more images by ian alexander on flickr
and of course, i went to per-la-chaise an amazing place to walk around on a balmy summer's afternoon

johnny, remember me

2010-05-30T00:35:00.000-07:00

busy weekend last week - up at 5:00 on a saturday morning to get some photos for dirty bristow magazine article on city centre art deco buildings!
i've been experimenting with these shots, adding some blurred green in the background, for a duotone effect...

it's always a lot easier to take photos in the very early morning(better light and no one around to ask questions or get in the shot), and luckily for me, the sun hit most of the buildings just at the right angle...
and from the recent trip to north birmingham, with crap light and a great building - two more images from the cinema shoot(when i got there, i went vintage shopping, and returned to the location just as the light went and it started raining):

jump, monk

2010-05-20T12:53:00.000-07:00

brand new cadillac

2010-05-08T23:43:00.001-07:00

plans are afoot for a uk published version of both BIRMINGHAMretro and shakeout vol.1...
this will be printed by my very own publishing company radiation ranch!!!
both books will hopefully contain MORE images and twice as many pages, for less money... and no shipping/waiting from the US!
stay right here, and don't touch that dial...

Stingrays play Ventures

2010-05-07T23:36:00.000-07:00

diamonds

2010-05-06T11:33:00.000-07:00

SHAKEOUT volume 1 by gordon eightball | BOOK INFO

AVAILABLE HERE!

Gene Tierney (courtesy of Vintage Stars)

2010-05-06T11:21:00.001-07:00

Gene Tierney
Originally uploaded by Vintage_Stars (Color Photos Only)

the imperial bedroom

2010-05-04T12:24:00.001-07:00

saturday night, party time

2010-05-01T11:18:00.001-07:00

safe european home

2010-04-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

this is why you should vote conservative.
look at the great art and music that came out under a previous conservative regime.
mass murderer and conman tony bliar shaking hands with serial turncoat noel gallagher, after wiping the blood from his hands - was the nadir of rock and roll, the day the music died(for the underlying toryfest that was britpop, anyway).
we don't need a government that sings our songs, we need a clueless oligarchy, who breath a separate air, and wont steal the oxygen of our dissension.

the last conservative government ushered in social engineering on a grand scale, initiating an exclusion policy, that saw hearts being ripped out the heart of towns and cities, as public spaces were left to rot(whereas now they are franchised), shopping malls moved out to the edge of towns(handily out of reach of those who can't drive), cities became a world of the have and never hads, where the old school closed the doors and put up the barriers to the people who couldn't afford or didn't believe in the myth of a designer lifestyle.
but this in turn, freed up lots of cheap spaces in the inner-cities to arts-projects and alternative vintage shopping malls(i'm thinking of my adventures in liverpool, in the very early 90's here... all those great little enterprises that suddenly appeared in empty warehouses, a stones throw from the crowded shopping malls filled with crap bread and circuses...as opposed the current trend to build inner-city housing that is priced way out of the reach of anyone who isn't an office-serf with no committments except to the boardroom and the upkeep of a soft-top smartcar.
yuppie slums, i call them, corporate ghettos... the walls go up, the electric gates close, and another part of the city falls victim to the cultural apartheid.
they sold-off council housing to the very people who owned the houses, and made them responsible for the enviromental facilities needed for sanitation and rubbish-collecting which in turn, they sold off to the highest bidders.

the conservative government penalised scotland for it's complete lack of tory support by issuing the poll tax a year earlier than england: essentially treating the country like a guinea pig for a tax that didn't work in other countries, and it was initiated in england to the sound of rioting in london.
at that time, i was living half a mile away from the scottish border, on the english side... and it really felt like stepping across a dividing line(thus the tories brought about the end of the union.), when i would go to the scottish side to attend college.
so, in essence they created a "them and us" society where voices could be heard without interference(maybe except for the various comic+book shops raided under the obscene publications act... tits&clits fanzine being a notable example: it was a feminist cookbook comic, but got itself arrested due to the title.).

art needs room to grow on it's own, and not be stifled by the hangers-on.
labour messed around with the arts, essentially funding it into the ground, where the art was considered secondary to the amount of money it would attract, and as a result we now have a counter-culture to the counter culture: where artists and creative types have to wade through the crowds of parasitical non-creative individuals, who attach themselves to artistic projects under the guise of "support for the arts", but are only in it for the money and middle-class cachet of fine art patronisation.
the tories put their old paintings up in rarified galleries, where security watch you like a hawk, in case you do something... middle-class airheads swish around in velvet jackets stroking their chins while looking at images of the good old days of the empire, while they hire young art-students to work in the tearoom, serving sandwiches to old ladies in furcoats.
abstract art that matches the curtains, and scented candles baby!
if you want to support the arts, buy a photograph/cd/painting... don't show up at a studio with a spreadsheet and a calculator.

art has become a strange commodity - where people like to hang stuff up on their walls to admire, but spit on the actual artisans who create the work, for being layabouts...
when i tell people i take photographs, they don't ask me whose work i admire, they ask if i "do weddings", and the eyes glaze over at the thought that i might be cheap to hire... or worse, they state that it's good to have a hobby( a fcuking hobby? you poor deluded cogs in the machinery.).

art itself has become passe, merely following the language of graphitti without the message or meaning... real graffiti sprayed on the walls illicitly by fauvist hoodies in the dark of night, has become more political than a thousand damien hursts sitting in their villas, scouring the internet for the new imagery.
we need a government that doesn't want to understand the counter-culture, that leaves it to it's own devices, we need another punk rock revolution, because we really need to hate the people in charge, which is never going to be easy with nu-labour pretending to be your best mate.
i started my artistic journey, under a tory government who couldn't be arsed with artists, and just left the creative community alone to get on with the job of living on benefits and making great art.

the music was better under a tory government too, we didn't have councils organising "festivals" with lacklustre mainstream acts who fitted the bill, we had music fans putting on gigs in local parks for the people, by the people... you weren't told you couldn't come into your neighbourhood park, unless you had the correct colour of wristband, but you were asked to maybe support the cause.
we had angry musicians with a cause to rail against... the last great political anthems were by the stone roses, a long time ago, but following in the great tradition of protest songs.
i was listening to nina simone today(enough said, it doesn't get any better than that.), but i'm not going to go into a rant against x-factor, that's just light entertainment, we had that in the 70's under the name of seaside special, mike yarwood doing MOR impressions and singing with a bit of chat, des o'connor... which in one way or another, provided the smoke screen for punk to happen.

we need the clash, a new rock&roll riot, a new generation of erstwhile teddy-boys in zootsuits ripping up cinemas that show endless films that have the consistency of mashed-potato... but that'll never happen, when local stages are held to ransom by AOR kids with blonde hair, wearing clean denim jeans and playing expensive guitars... if anything coldplay/snow patrol/james blunt/paulo nuttini and all that mordant sonic dross have probably put more people OFF forming bands, as the music is so execrable it kills off any enthusiasm(and stifles rebellion and expression, don't think for a minute that pop has become nuetered by accident,)
the snake-headed hydra that is lilly allen, the perfect summation of this ideal that music should be secondary to being a showbiz personality and having a lucrative career, where the newspapers write more about the subjects relationships than creative influences... she is now no longer a musical artist, and branching out into fashion or whatever franchise she can whore her ass off to... everyone loves a tourist.

the labour government's initiation of the DEbill is a case in point - placing the blame for a failing creative culture at the feet of the very people who support it(ie: music lovers), as opposed to a government who have overseen the closing of small venues(due to arcane licencing laws), and replacing them with no-music policy theme pubs(disneyland for adults)... without maybe acknowledging the fact that without venues, or financial support - bands can't play or make money: not every band has a record deal, but what's the point in having a record deal, if all the independent record shops have fcuking closed because of high rents anyway!
here's an idea... sponsor bands/artists/musicians/photographers/performers and keep the fcuk out the way... watch a creative community develop.

people don't go to gigs anymore, not when there's computer games culture to contend with and hundreds of satellite channels... the internet could actually provide a mass means to organise/agitate/organise... which is why we have arrived at the zenith of surveillance culture, it's hard to watch over a generation who meet underground... i speak from the experience of being involved in organising a few clubs back in the early 90's, that had a few obvious government sentinels in attendance... despite the fact we were doing nothing more than organising a shabeen.
i have seen however the facebook effect, with a nationally organised vintage fair, that attracted people who queued around the block and into the street, essentially to get into to a fair that was fairly lacklustre(but the possibility was there!).

we need a government that's euro-skeptic... britain needs to keep it's grubby toes out of the fantastic places in europe, trampling over culture with macdo's and tourbuses... i was in barcelona, and someone asked me where the nearest macadee's was... i was aghast that someone could come to such a beautiful city, yet want to sit in a sanitised franchise eating something that tastes like the box it came in, that looks like every other outlet anywhere in the world....
if anything, it should be made easier for europeans to come here though - and to bring with them, fresh ideas and café culture, to over-ride the great brutish pub-lunch of steak+stodge, although i do think europe is better off without the influence of britain(just ask anyone who lives on the costa del sol...).
europe is a beautiful place, i worry that it'll become more like little britain.

but here on this sceptic isle, we need a government of obvious idiots, for something good to flourish basically.

montgomery clift

2010-04-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

remind me never to rely on my mobile's gps again.
today, i headed off into darkest north birmingham(where the posh people live and school themselves).
sutton coldfield, to be precise, where the shanty atmosphere of handsworth, melds into the white-trash aesthetic of erdington, and finally succumbs to the gentrifiied rarity of sutton coldfield itself... they have a wooden floor in the trainstation ferfuxsake!
bit of a useless place though, it has to be said.
no coffee shops, except for a druckers in a shopping mall.
looks nice, but feels like a down-market cheltenham... i'm only there, because i'm trying to find an old cinema, and my electronic map tells me that it's in this area.
no such luck, i find i've overshot the mark by one station, so after a quick recce of sutton coldf... can't bothered typing the rest of the name... i'm back on the train to wylde green.
which is actually quite nice, the people seem to talk to each other, and it feels less like new money than S/C, lots of nicely kept old houses... so i get my gps out again, and it takes me on a pointless walk around in the balmy sunshine, where i encounter lots of old people, trimming hedges, and hanging out doing whatever old people do on their lawns come the nice weather... including watching city-folk up for the day.
eventually, the maps leads me to the destination, and i come across the empire cinema.
do i get shooting, while the light is good, and it isn't raining?
no, i head off to find a coffee-shop, and regroup, finding nothing but a second-hand shop, where i buy a copy of the first madness album on vinyl, which i then have to juggle with camera stuff, and camera bags in the rain... smart move.
more images of this great building to follow.

blame it on the PBR

2010-04-28T10:56:00.001-07:00

feelin right tonight

2010-04-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

digging the crates vol.2
found this excellent piece of southern fried rockabilly today - the cult that is tex rubinowitz... covering bad boy, and his own song feelin' right tonight on the flip-side... which features the classic buddy holly descending guitar riff at one point(from that'll be the day).
tex's version of bad boy, is probably the most laid back version that i've heard so far, and has some killer guitar by billy hancock - check out his amazing quiff on the video below!
i was quite impressed with billy hancock's playing on this single, a real master at work.. definately going to look out some more of his material...

this single was(if memory serves me right), one of tex's only hits, along with hotrod man back in the 70's, on the roots music ripsaw label.

following on from that - i also acquired ray campi and his rockabilly rebels/teenage boogie b/w rockabilly rebel... the a-side being a cover of the teenage boogie track that mark bolan covered limply(and had a massive hit with), being played in it's original rockabilly style as written and played by webb pierce back in '56.
the flipside, rockabilly rebel, not to be confused with the matchbox track of the same name(incidentally both webb pierce and matchbox were trying to cash-in on the rockabilly scene, albeit from different decades, when they wrote and recorded their own track)... this song is more or less a list of musicians, and rocks along quite nicely... again, actually the best of the two tracks.
both records are from 1978.

let me take you to the movies, mag

2010-04-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

odeon cinema, kingstanding view large

long gone daddy

2010-04-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

went record shopping yesterday, and picked-up two class albums from the record-exchange.
the first one is an ace records comp. from about 1987, and one of their regular great albums of original 50's material.

SIDE A
1. Pat Cupp - I Guess It's Meant That Way
2. Glen Glenn - Everybody's Movin'
3. Hal Harris _ I Don't Know When
4. Byron Johnson - True Affection
5. Les Cole & The Echoes - Be Boppin' Daddy
6. Sonny Hall - My Big Fat Baby
7. Joe Jackson - Rock My Warriors Rock
8. Les Cole & the Echoes - Rock Little Baby
9. Don Cole - Snake Eyed Mama
10. Jimmy Stewart & His Nighthawks - Nothin' But a Nuthin'
11. Charlie Feathers - Wild Wild Party
SIDE B
12. Johnny Todd - Pink Cadillac
13. Jimmy & Johnny - I Can't Find the Doorknob
14. Link Davis - Slipping and Sliding
15. Pat Cupp - Long Gone Daddy
16. Sleepy LaBeef - All the Time
17. Glenn Barber - Go Home Letter
18. Mac Curtis, Jim Shell - If I Had Me a Woman
19. Ray Scott - Boppin' Wig Wam Willie
20. Pat Cupp - Do Me No Wrong
21. Hal Harris - Jitterbop Baby
22. Sleepy LaBeef - Little Bit More

twenty great rockabilly hits of the 50's on cascade 1983
more great songs on here(a little bit of doubling up, but i don't mind), this album coming from 1981, on cascade records.
SIDE A
1 Johnny Todd-Pink Cadillac
2 Rock Rodgers-My Baby Left
3 Glen Glenn-Everybody's Movin'
4 Hershel Almond-Let's Get It On
5 Jesse James-Red Hot Rockin' Blues
6 Jimmie Dale-Baby Doll
7 Don Cole-Snake Eyed Mama
8 Chester Mcintyre-I'm Gonna Rock With My Baby Tonight
9 Poorboys-Move, Baby, Move
10 Al Urban-Lookin' For Money
SIDE B
11 Gene Wyatt-Prettiest Girl At The Dance
12 Sleepy La Beef-All The Time
13 Benny Joy-Spin The Bottle
14 Hal Harris-Jitterbop Baby
15 Les Cole-Be Boppin' Daddy
16 Sonny Fisher-Rockin' Daddy
17 George Jones-Rock It
18 Matchbox-Circle Rock
19 Glen Glenn-Blue Jeans
20 Benny Barnes-I Walk The Line

this track appears on both album, and is a killer rockabilly track:

that video features artwork from an earlier ace records compilation rockabilly party, which i also own... and is also a great album, worth digging the crates for.

while we're on the subject, this weekend i read the goon - which is set in the 40's, and owes a lot to film noire, jack kirby, sin city and of course will eisner.
very rockabilly it is too...
so a recommended read.

that would make an excellent avatar/profile picture...

forgive me faron young

2010-04-24T12:17:00.001-07:00

i caught some info on twitter that there was going to be another four:am project this weekend: this one ties in with the birmingham city of culture bid... so i put my name down and went to bed early the night before.
funnily enough, the taxi driver i called at 3:15 am didn't know exactly where we heading, and i'd luckily printed a map... but i don't think he liked the idea of dropping off some surly looking bloke, wearing a bike jacket and black beanie, carrying a maglite - in the middle of a deserted industrial estate.
the place was open - and staff were around to let me in though, so i decamped to a briefing room, where we were given the health+safety talk: don't put your hand into the machinery... sensible advice, there was a lot of old industrial equipment in there, i even recognised a few old printing presses like the ones i used to use.
we were led to the warehouse itself... at four in the morning, pitch dark outside, with strip lights everywhere... it is a fairly awe inspiring sight to walk into.

just the other week, i caught the first episode of warehouse 13, and of course everyone remembers all the stuff about area 51 (especially if you're an x-files fan)(which i am, but i'm not fussed about twin peaks, so i retain some form of dignity in that respect...), so to suddenly walk into this enviroment, full of old artifacts(in the middle of the night) is quite a thrill... i'm not going to mention raiders of the lost ark, though... i forgot to ask if they had it on one of the shelves.

my own personal favourite, amongst all the artifacts, was this art-deco chip-fryer from a fish+chip shop... how many people does this strike a chord with - who remembers standing in line, staring hungrily at one of these green+cream pantheons to carbs and high fat content?

a blue chopper, very rare... i have seen orange(the original harley davidson colour scheme), yellow(with fluorescent logo), silver(a special space version), purple or red(quite common), and my own black chopper(with the holographic logo - a special star wars edition, how geeky is that!)... but a blue one, i have never seen.
i did recognise a lot of stuff from the old science museum(newhall street site), as i used to hang out there a lot back in the mid-90's... it was a great building, and was fascinating to just wander about in.

i have to admit, i did comically emit a quiet, little fuck yeah, when i took this one, on a long exposure.... which got me a strange look off someone(hell, i was enjoying myself!).
at one point, the doors started sliding down, and i hurried back inside, fearfull of being locked-out... and i shot some video(which is to be worked on in time).
a good event though - i enjoyed stretching myself, searching out photographic opportunities, although i did see one image which just blew me away, an image taken inside the animal skeleton... why didn't i think of that!

these meetups are the uber-flickr meet though... you get to wander about in all sorts of places, that you shouldn't be in... i was never going to be any good at urbex, as i'm too aware of trespass laws, having appeared in court over it, many, many years ago, so this is a legal way of getting out and taking shots that are off the beaten track.

thanks to karen strunks again, for organising this... and thanks to darren for the lift home(most appreciated!).
disclaimer: this was of course written on about 3 hours sleep from the night before...

the young idealists

2010-04-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

after a period of inactivity, caused by all that other stuff that must be done outside of staring down a lens, there will be a flurried period of activity, as is my want...
first up i am attending the four am project event, to take some photos of birmingham museum artifacts in the dark... should be interesting.
i had a recent troll attack on a post, from someone professing to know something about photography, so this would be a good opportunity for whoever it was to get out from behind his monitor, and show me how to really take photos, why not pop along?
m'kay?

after recovering from that, i'm off to the seaside for the day sometime next week, to take photographs of a decaying seaside town.
and we've been busy discussing foreign places worth visiting, paris and madrid were mentioned... plus another trip home to scotland for a few days of fresh air and wide open space...
here's an image i captured from the last 4am project i went on(actually it was the first event to be held in birmingham, although i have missed a few since then)

and tonight i've got to finish off an article for dirty bristow, on post-punk and it's antecedents(more news of this when it happens).
tonight of course, i had the pleasure of reading about what a dirty bristow actually is...

why the lloyd cole video... well, i've been on a lloyd cole trip for the last week or so, and he is one of the world's most under-rated songwriters.

jump cat jump

2010-04-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

saturday 18th april, was record store day.
oddly enough, it was also the day i was able to get myself down to a record-shop(one that sells vinyl), to do some much needed trading.
i have this jabula album that i am keen to sell on... it has some very good music on, like acid-jazz/afro-jazz hugh masakela... quite uplifting, but i acquired it in a collection as a job lot, and plan to sell it as it is worth about £80... which is way too much for me to hold onto.
so, off to the local exchange shop, where they were playing some dodgy prog-nonsense, and sticking price tags onto easy listening albums(mostly junk, i know this genre... there is a lot of muzak...)... and as they hadn't heard of it, or could find a good enough reference in their little book of albums, they "had to pass".
no worries, now i just have the added hassle of trying to sell it on e-bay.
but i did have a quick look at the singles rack, and found some gems in there: two singles by the blue cats on charly records - even just seeing the label brought back memories of the late 70's/early 80's when i would have been buying a lot of the re-issued blues records on charly, a norwegian fanclub ep(with a killer version of big green car on it by johnny carroll!), and of course, jungle rock with a french picture sleeve.

to be honest, i miss that feeling of going into a record shop... there was something about it, that is lost nowadays, you got to check-out what other people were buying, and hear tracks you wouldn't normally hear... over the years, the local record shops became a meeting point for all the various cultures in my barren hometown, where we'd see people who drank in different pubs, or hung out with other crowds... plus the thrill of scanning the racks, and finding lost gems(like i did), or even rubbing shoulders with other genres...
this was also the weekend that we had the icelandic ash all over the skies, funnily
enough it was a clear sky today, and everybody pulled out the summer wardrobe, but there was a slight haze in the sky(and the whiff of eggs!) as well as dust all over parked cars...

this didn't stop me from breaking out my dickies workshorts, that i'd been planning to wear all winter, even though i managed to cheekily acquire some second-hand cinch-back 501s on the way home...
last night was good, plotting an overnight trip to a random-ish photo-location, in the next coule of weeks... meanwhile, i still have to PP the art-deco shots i took a fortnight ago(which were put to one side, following more pressing matters!).

home of the blues

2010-04-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

i am rarely stunned by anything on the internet these days, but this site is the exception.

record label design by decade... how much work goes into collating something like this?
i don't know, but i certainly appreciate all the effort!

anyhoo... what a week it's been at eightball-villa...
saturday night found me listening to the straycats whilst riding a late night train home in the dark, there have been hospital dramas, and a much awaited job-interview(yes, i got the job...), i finished-off an article for these nice people(with photography) over the last few days too... sleepless nights and stressfull days.
i wouldn't want it any other way.
there's a planned european trip coming up next month, and a planned off-the-cuff trip for the end of this month... in that i've got an idea, but no location, so i'll just grab a camera and go(deciding on a destination the day before..!).
book #2 is in production, and people are already looking forward to it(i'm looking forward to handing out complimentary copies to some of the people who are actually in it!).
and photo project #3 is in progress...

poptones

2010-04-06T12:51:00.001-07:00

after five, i jive

2010-04-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

here it is, a slight clue to the next book project...
from an idea inspired by a neville brody article, many years ago.

lonesome rhythm blues

2010-04-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

headed out early on bank sunday, to get some street photography in... although i could've done with the sleep!
on the way to my destination(more to come from that session), i thought i'd grab an impromptu shot of a pizza-emporium in the street... more so because the light was pretty good at the time, but the shop itself is fairly striking in that it's an oldschool fast food joint, selling chips and such with some neon and 195o's decor.
there is a good bit of perspective, that i managed to pull from the corner view too...

and this old lad was waiting around at the bus-stop in carrs lane(that's the arse of the bullring just out of shot, round the corner), and again, the light was favourable for some shadow-play, so i grabbed the image before it was lost forever!
more in the next post, as to where i was heading... a less than salubrious suburb, which had a location for the next printed collection(details to come...).

the blue cats

2010-04-05T00:51:00.001-07:00

i don't want to go to chelsea

2010-04-03T02:45:00.000-07:00

had a funny incident the other evening...
a troll, a real live troll turned-up on a webpage, and started giving me some very personal and scathing abuse... in regards to a project i've initiated.
it was of course, very, very funny...
and of course a bit pointless, as you are talking to someone who has had to deal with conflict for most of his life, in one form or another... no tears, it's part of life, part of being an individual in this society that frowns on expression and being who you want to be(if i had a penny for everytime someone has told me that i should/shouldn't be doing something because of whatever reason...).
it took me back to the good old days, when i used to get involved on forums, and such... and i'd get into slanging matches with some deskbound clown from somewhere in the ethernet, who was unaware of the personal viewpoint perspective - the other half of course, used to take all this palaver seriously and would occasionally take these attacks personally: as she was involved in forums for a lot longer than me(who had wised-up to the fact that they were basically a waste of time), i would have to remind her that it was nothing personal!
these comments don't exist in real life.
more than likely it would have been someone having a bad day or life/issues just finding somewhere to vent their frustration.
i know, i went there once: i'd had a bad day in the shit job i used to do(the job was ok, some of the people were ok, but there was a fucktard-hierachy in place, who played games with staff), so i vented spleen on someone who had attacked my other half on a forum.
it all got a bit out of hand, and myself and the other person's bloke made peace, after some visceral phraseology passed by... and of course, when we bumped into each other at an event, it was slightly embarrassing as he turned-out to be a decent lad, and she was a virulent, spitefull midget(woops...).
there is of course godwin's law, which is when an internet arguement plumbs the depths of name-calling to whit insinuating that the other person is being a nazi(despite any hint of politics etc... actually being involved in the arguement, and the claim is out of sync with the actual arguement), funnily enough about a week ago, i had a conversation wondering if there was a similar law for that other gem of the internet "get a life", where the instigator insinuates that the other person spends too much time in front of their pc(athough with the popularity of laptops and free wifi, this is now a redundant criticism, i for one am currently typing this in a coffeehouse!)...
i ran into this particular gem a few years back, when i joined a group of people opposed to having video on flickr, due to the fear that the reader's wives types would swamp the site's bandwidth with badly filmed 90 second videos of their spouses dressed in britney spears schoolgirl outfits(it didn't, and they didn't), but i had a few negative comments, insinuating that i should get away from my pc and go out into the real world(presumably with a video camera)... oddly on flickr this is a bit of a misnomer as by the very nature of the site, you do have to get away from your pc, to take photos(except in the days when the site was suddenly flooded by chairbound geeks from the half-life community, but i digress...).

a lot of the internet vitriol back then, seemed to stem from people living in capital cities, suddenly finding themselves marginalised from underground/alternative circles, as the internet broke down geographical barriers(in my experience), or from older members of alternative culture suddenly finding themselves sidelined and out-of-synch with that culture, following an influx of new faces, that they were previously unaware of, and hadn't absorbed into their imaginary social structure.
the oldschool troll from the other evening, oddly came from the same city as me: i know this, due to having a wonderfull app. on the blogsite called statcounter(which we use for the websites), that among other things(such as telling you how someone arrives at your site, how long they stayed, what they looked at), gives you IP addresses of all the visitors to your site, so it's quite easy to trace their actual address and telephone number(if they use virgin cable and aren't internet savvy enough to use a proxy server - there is no privacy on the interweb, not even your firefox 3.6 or windows xp can hide you, if you decide to troll someone), so i can only assume that it was a local who felt i was stealing their thunder or made them feel inadequate or something: although it is kind-of creepy knowing someone logs onto your blog first thing in the morning and last thing at night...
to be honest, i don't have much time for conflict, "hate destroys the haters" as the rev run would say, and i have little enough time in the day to be getting on with creative work, so it's a bit abstract having to deal with someone under an assumed identity - somehow thinking they can convince me to give up doing something i've been quite happily doing for nearly 30 years!
i did find it all hilarious tho, as i tried to guess who it was and why the attack was instigated... to be honest there are a few blustering over-inflated egos out there, whose paucity i may have punctured with my sarcasm(so i am not entirely blameless)!

the purpose of art is howevever to initiate reaction, and it would seem i did instigate at least some form of response(from what had been 100% positive up until then), and i'm no dupe, in knowing that if i can instill such a negative reaction in one person, then i must have had at least one majorly positive reaction in someone else(anger is an energy, as johnny rotten would have once sang).
blogger of course, allows for such instances of free speech(which i applaud), and they helpfuly include a moderation feature for comments(which i employ - and used a while back, after pointing out in a blog that some local band were in fact a little bit shit... which they were, happily... but to which viewpoint a band-member from said group of wannabes disagreed with).
cool.
and the gang.

mystery train

2010-04-02T00:38:00.000-07:00

BIRMINGHAMRETRO by PHOTOGRAPHY by Gordon Eightball | BOOK INFO

be bop a lula!

2010-04-01T11:47:00.000-07:00

this years model

2010-03-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

at last, after many long hours of tweaking and refining the website is finally up!
soon, the shop will be running, ready to sell prints and books... even pomade for steve hooker...
book number one is out as well, birminghamretro, a best-of from the last few years of wandering the streets, and studio work.

it's a nicely produced book, with quality paper... i've got a first copy of it in my hands now, and i'm pleased with the reproductions.
and of course, not released yet, but any day now... shakeout volume1, with images inspired by or from the rockabilly+classic car scene.

both books, and possibly prints will be available from selected vendors and the website... and direct from here.

old clothes a tortured artist do not make

2010-03-06T10:19:00.000-08:00

this weekend was definately a bit of a vintage event - i spent yesterday (friday) mooching around vintage shops in town, and of course top banana in kingsheath - where i bought myself a classic A2 flight jacket(brown, and without the fur...), and some unbleached linen converse(very vintage looking).

today - was supposed to to be taken up by waiting for boilerrepairman to come round and sort out our heating with a new boiler(etc...), but they reneged at the last minute, so we suddenly had time to spend.
luckily when i was in top banana, i picked-up a flyer for a vintage fair at the custard factory(even though i didn't think i was going), so we went there instead!
as usual it was in the old library, which despite us arriving within five minutes of opening time, was already filling-up.
there was humourously quite a crush going on, in the aisles(i'm a veteran of the rag market and jumble sales though, so i'm used to it... the trick is not to move out of the way all the time when people cough in your ear, otherwise you will get nowhere! remember YOU bought the ticket.), and i wasn't going to be buying the same stuff as the young hipsters anyway(get thee to urban outfitters, dammit!), so there's no need to worry.
i'm kind-of bemused by the way most people there seemed to just throw the different decades together though, into a sort of pre-millenial mish-mash of 80's and 90's symbolism(very odd)... i came of age in the 80's, and i seemed to have spent most of my time+money in a shop called flip! that sold vintage american clothing(no surprise there)in glasgow, i fcuking worshipped that palce, it was my mecca/lourdes/vatican/whatever all rolled into one(or two if you are counting the basement...).
but some of the ironic 80's stuff i see people wearing nowadays, was only, and i repeat ONLY worn by squares who worked in offices, or skinny boys who thought that tom cruise or the karate kid were role models.... and who spent most of their time fruitlessly chasing the girls i'd hung out with... i remember one xmas night, when i spent the whole evening fending off a square girl, who was wearing a pink denim jacket!
at the fair though - not much in the way of men's clothing(this had been mentioned beforehand, and they are trying to resolve this issue), - but a good cake stall, selling cups of tea and coffee.
admittedly it was a fight for somewhere to sit, but cupcakes were consumed and bought again(in a box to take home), as they were very good.

we visited the regular flea market(which was free to get into, and actually spent most of the money there, at one stall which had piles of 50's exotica( i want to go back to that one!)... plus a fruitless search around a snooty mod section(too many plastic zips on the plaidjackets and strangely a LOT of tweed for my liking).
the living embodient of paulweller/stevemarriot gave H. a really dirty look, which amused me no end, as 1. he was wearing a suit like one i used to wear, back in the 90's, 2. we both wrote mod-fanzines that won "fanzine of the month" in record collector(one month after the other), 3. i once had a long conversation with johnny moke about the whole mod thing, which i can never divulge without fear of a lawsuit 4. i still have a vespa(albeit off the road for the time being - i'd rather have a 650 cc motorcycle these days!, 5. i was born in the damn 60's and - an original revival type(although i was more into the blues+soul than anything)... the first person in my hometown to order a copy of the re-issued my generation album... 6. H. herself is mates with an old rocker who knew steve marriot - need i go on?
thanks to my melungeon head shape though, i never really mastered the paulweller/stevemarriott haircut, i always looked like ronnie lane's taller goofy brother... i look much more comfortable with my hair smothered in grease.

this was a good vintage fair though, bereft of attiutde - but i'd actually forgotten the attitude that some traders (not the ones at the vintage fair, i might add, who were all very pleasant) have towards customers(i think it's a collective insanity brought about by hoarding all this crap that they think is going to be their pension), even though in the past i've experienced stallholders being openly rude(which usually involves yelling that you should be looking at their stall/shop in case you dare to walk past without buying one of their mouldy suede overcoats), and in brighton, one disgruntled shopowner even bellowed down the street to the owner of the shop we WERE heading to(i think it was because we had spent time in his shop the day before without buying any of his mouldy suede jackets!) telling him that he had some customers coming who were going to buy his stuff.
muppet.
i even got a few sideways looks for wearing my A2(i guess some people don't care, that i wear this stuff because i like it, not because i think it's trendy), and my new york hat company gatsby style cap, even got a salacious remark from one sniffy fart... (woah, a clothes snob... but that's "me" isn't it?).
on the whole vintage retailers are nice people, who do it because they like old items and like to sell stuff to people who appreciate vintage, they are always interesting to talk with... funnily enough while on a weekend trip to haworth(a small hillside town that is the home of the brontes) we came across quite a few vintage shops, on the cobbled mainstreet, and wasted a few hours in them, when we should have been soaking-up the literary atmosphere.
at the flea market - our faith in humanity was restored by the nice bloke with the 50's exotica(see pictures), so we left the venue... only to be confronted by a queue heading round the block(they have a facebook group of about 2,000 people, i later discovered, which explains the numbers!), and headed home to enjoy our new old stuff, and imbibe cocktails( i made a cool manhattan).

girl on a train

2010-02-25T12:18:00.000-08:00

saint jude pray for us

2010-02-07T09:03:00.001-08:00

animated version of yesterday's photo shoot with olivia, and lots of flowers...

little anthony and the imperials

2010-02-05T12:53:00.001-08:00

the first portrait session of the year, with actress tina barnes. the shots from this session will be up on her website at some point.

pink pegged slacks

2009-12-26T01:49:00.000-08:00

this year in review and some new year resolutions/projects...

getting fit... again, i've let the regime slip over the last couple of months, due to being busy with moving house and photography - so the weights have been gathering dust, but i had a plan to start a new fitness method, and ironically bounder came up with a strange drunken idea which i of course agreed was a great idea(through the medium of twitter), due to being strangely drunk at the time... so now i have something to aim for, with all that running.
i have already scouted out some vintage boxing boots, in anticipation.

musically, this year, i did very little, having taken up photography more than ever.
the results speak for themselves, as i get more positive feedback as a photographer, than i ever have had for my music.
there are still a few projects i have in mind though(i would like to play guitar like brian setzer and learn the harp...), and i know i should listen to rockabilly radio more often, as the music there is inspirational!
two or three hours listening to that station, is time not wasted.
this year - having johnny burnette's complete discography on my mp3 player has been a lifesaver... i wish i'd had it about 30 years ago(when most of it was unavailable of course).
the photography website should be finished over the holiday period, and from there, i will be selling prints and "the book" of my work so far... as well as using the site to get new work, and so on...
i've got a few vague portrait sessions lined-up with some interesting subjects, and of course, ideas will come(usually on the spur of the moment) through time... but nothing concrete is planned(although i am still musing on doing a video for my old musical cohort Laz, for one of his recent tracks...)
transport wise, i need to get the scooter back on the road, i'm looking at a few local scooter garages to just dump the machine into, tell 'em to strip it and repaint the sucker... should cost, but i'll have some wheels again.
maybe a vintage metallic green paintjob, bodywork update, some chroming and whitewall tyres.
more tattoos, and i need to get out more on a social basis(but with all the photography and travelling and moving house - taking-up my money, it's never that easy!).
one thing i need to do, is visit a few more places, like manchester and london... even if it's just to hang around in vintage clothing stalls... i need to talk to other people into that stuff.
2009 - it was a good year though(all over too damn quick), i had a lot of fun, and can't think of any bad times... very creative - possibly one afternoon springs to mind, sitting in a train station with a flashcard full of images, and feeling very content.

2010... it's going to be busy.
looking forward to it.

fishnet stockings

2009-12-12T07:27:00.000-08:00

hopefully one of the last images from the sunday afternoon session at coventry airport, in what seems like a very long time ago...
we were just about to move house, and go abroad for a couple of weeks, i had a month off work... it was all out of the usual routine.
i originally went along to take photos of the great old aircraft, and of course, this nice couple turned-up in their hotrod... leading me to ask politely if they minded me shooting the bejeezus out of it(camera-wise).

all a bit end of one era, start of a new one for me, as things will be moving apace in the next few weeks... the much-planned website will be up and running over the xmas period, as that's a usefull downtime - and will be a good showcase for my work(although i am just a photographer not a psychic or a business-manager, so who knows what the next step will be!), the book should be out and for sale on the website.
i was supposed to be doing a noir portrait session this afternoon, but with people having bad flu viruses and lots of other stuff going on(ok, i needed a haircut!), it's been postponed until the model and my organisation can get together.

the podcast is stalled at the moment, due to the planned studio space and equipment still not up-and-running following the house move(we take our time here...), but it will be a monthly thing once i get it going, so keep 'em peeled.
i'm planning for it to be a mix of rockabilly and obscure 80's stuff.
i want to do a video for my friend's song, which came out in the summer... it got sidetracked by me going away and then having no internet for a month. i'm not going to let a little thing like not having a video-camera stop me from doing that!
...and if you are interested, i'm reading route 19 revisited by marcus gray, a damn fine book about london calling and all that influenced it...
ok - bring on 2010.

of course, the other major news, is that i will not be using this site much longer, owing to it's habit of cropping my photos to suit itself(see images above)...
from this post on, i will be blogging the usual gubbins from here on tumblr.
that site has a much less cluttered aspect to it's layout, and is photography friendly...

sounds from the street

2009-11-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

Sounds from the street, sounds so sweet
What's my name?
It hurts my brain to think
Sounds from the city, sound so pretty
Young bands playing
Young kids digging - And I dig them
The USA's got the sea
Yeah, but the British kid's got the streets I don't mind, the city's
right
Sounds from the street, sounds just fine

so i'm back online(full version) after a hiatus of a few weeks, where i had no connection, or used my blackberry on the go... we spent a few cosy evenings with radio4, and i plotted new creative endeavours to keep me occupied(i'm rhehearsing an idea for a hammond organ party album, of beatles, james bond and tv-themes...).
before i went offline, i did get involved in a bit of a spat with an online forum, which was quite an eye-opener, the story follows thus...

my fault really, i'd never actually read the magazine(who i won't name) before getting involved, i thought it would be a good way to chat with fellow music lovers, and maybe pick up a few tips(damned if i didn't discover some great music though...), but it soon ended-up with me getting into arguements with all these odd, little web-warriors, with no real opinions of their own... knocking down anything i had to say, with one line put-downs, such as "well, i read in a magazine that such-and-such were good, but i disagree... so there."
nice, thanks for the insight.
there were a few people who i enjoyed debating with, but they were sadly out-numbered by the majority who probably had very narrowly defined record-collections, which is too bad(for them, at least).

it all got a bit emotional, which of course is a good thing... who wants to sit and mumble about something that they feel passionate about?
naturally, i got into a routine of slagging off one particular vapid popstar who no one in their right mind would consider worthy of being in a magazine of musical legends... that was the crux of one particular problem though, the writers of the DTP version hailed all the usual old suspects as untouchable and the only modern material they rated was anything vaguely music-biz connected(ie - someone who's people spent a lot of money advertising in the magazine)... and any vaguely unknown bands were "spotty indie herberts", or something similar... also i found myself having to stand-up for loathing loathsome record-company bands... again not naming any names, but dross like coldplay, snowpatrol, radiohead... zzzzzz, sorry, where was i?

just out of curiosity however, i actually made the mistake of buying the current issue, as there was an article on how lilly allen had been hounded on the internet for her views on downloading... and the writer soon got down to the crux of the matter, which was basically criticising bloggers(the old professional writer versus someone who doesn't get paid to do it, and merely has an opinion).
not something i got involved in debating, but i waded in with some excellent quotes here... brilliant stuff really, i enjoyed that feeling of annoying people who thought that they themselves were above criticism.

language is my oxygen.

it was fun for a while, but hanging around with bitter old hippies isn't my thing, and i was just killing time until the inevitable internet shutdown.

read it and weep, i suppose.

tuning up

2009-10-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

here's one i made earlier
got a call last night from alan - he'd noticed the myspace i'd put for him had gone awry... i blame flickr meself... lots of the images i'd linked to were "unavailable".
so i went through the html on the site and re-loaded all the addresses that i'd linked with.
in the interim, i also experimented with an animated gif. about 10 years after everyone else had been using them.
who says i can't embrace technology?
while working on the webpage, it occurred to me that i was also listening to a radio caroline rockabilly show on satellite, and that alan famously performed/recorded image which was used as a radio caroline theme tune for many years(amongst other uses!).

alan of course, played on hundreds of other musical projects, notably being john barry's organist of choice for all his big 60's film themes, as well as releasing plenty of his own material(i have a tidy little stash of his albums...).

the future is unwritten

2009-10-03T11:52:00.001-07:00

granada - spain 2008
Originally uploaded by ☆eightbaII is offline until late october☆

i was watching said film this evening(a biog by julien temple about joe strummer), and as they covered the period where joe goes to granada after breaking up the clash...

we climbed it alright... all the way through the gipsy sector and up the steepest path in the world... it was worth it though ten times over!
on the way back it started raining - so we ducked into a flamenco bar built into the caves and had a nice lunch with free drinks!

they had this very view(including the tree in the background), during a voice-over.
this was a hill above granada in the al baicin, where we climbed up to see some cave houses, and came down the road, only to have it rain, and we ducked into a bar that had been carved out of the rock, for lunch.
yours sincerely - gobsmacked.

international jet set

2009-09-30T01:39:00.000-07:00

The businessmen are having fun are they on a different plane to me
I've lost touch with reality, they all seem so absurd to me
Like well dressed chimpanzees

Spend and spend and spend and spend
Will the muzak never end?

poor buggers... we spent an hour taking the piss out of these people, at the next table, in some generic coffee shop in barcelona's brand new airport wing(no pun intended), all super shiny floors, and over-priced generic coffee shops selling pastries well above the mark.
i was reminded of this following a tweet by that there david quantick about travel-taverns, and my own experience of meeting sales-reps over the years... i've stayed in a few travel-lodges over the years, strange familiar looking places, all brown and orange with oatmeal coloured carpets.
many years ago - i went for a job interview with a courier firm, and i was going to be working with the interviewer, a portly older-looking bloke, who had slept on a cot in his office for three months, trying to catch up on the work... the job was going to be 10 pm till 6 am... and despite them being keen to have me start right away, i got a better daytime offer, thankfully.

back to barcelona though... we'd just escaped the cultural madness that is BCN to find ourselves with an hour to kill in the departure lounge, and of course took to the well worn travel routine of taking the michael out of our fellow journeymen, for shits and giggles.
the businessmen in the photo were tucking germanically into beers and pastries at six in the morning... all dressed up with somewhere to go, still playing their arrogant office politic games with the airport people around them... and were slightly perturbed to find themselves being sniggered at by two tattooed scruff hillbillies(this is not the percieved wisdom of the cultural pecking order - mentally i suppose they were having us demoted to the postroom for six months... although i have worked in a postroom and it's not that bad a place to be...).
i kept having the specials song(see above) go around in my head... it reminded me of not long after i'd first heard the song, and i'd seen some businessmen in a restuarant, all walking timidly in single file, no one daring to take the step of breaking rank.
they did give us a few glances, and once they'd sussed out their powers weren't going to work on us went back to talking about mortgages, and projected business options, or some such guff(do tired businessmen dream of electric sleep?), and even we got bored and amused ourselves by taking photos of the napkin dispencer, as we concluded the character on it looked like a badly dressed transvestite.

autumn is the finest time of all

2009-09-27T03:07:00.000-07:00

i was reminded of this fine tune(whilst browsing a forum i haunt), and it took me back to my 80's days in scotland, when i was living in kilmarnock or aberdeen....
walking around in oversized coats, with those fingerless gloves that fishermen wear, spending a lot of time getting back to nature in various woods, hanging around with new people(the taste of dandelion coffee springs to mind as a signifier of the new era... we were re-inventing our world), there was a feeling that the old world order had changed, and that something new was dawning, although to be honest it did feel more like a nuclear winter than autumn.
i was exploring new places and meeting the sort of people i wanted to hang out with, as opposed to those that fate had thrown my way.

one of those periods in life, when you throw off the shackles of who you used to be at school(or more likely - who you were told you should be), as i was starting to find myself... a scruffy indie-kid with a rockabilly hair-do, listening to winsome indie music, post punk hybrids and the polecats...

it really did feel like one long wintertime, that carried on forever.
bonfires in the woods, walking along deserted beaches, taking shortcuts across industrial wastelands, finding the abandoned cricket pitch in kilmarnock with it's 1940's buildings still intact but unused in decades, parents well out of the scene - as they busied themselves with being old and boring(i was working now, so no longer depended on the past to support me), reading futurist manifestoes, looking at european art and wishing i could be as savvy as modern french illustrators, punks from sink estates tearing it up whilst drunk on cider, rattling old buses with no heating and steamy windows, riding around on my bike in impractical clothing, wondering why all my friends were disapearing one after another into some strange nether world called "beyond the town".
i was a mobile urban dodger(as i-D called us), wearing 50's clothing, raincoats, avoiding anything remotely fusty, listening to new music... working as a graphic designer for the local council, always staying one step ahead of responsibility, always on the lookout for joy.

Days of speed and slow time Mondays -
Pissing down with rain on a boring Wednesday -
Watching the news and not eating your tea -
A freezing cold flat and damp on the walls - that's entertainment!

funny how wearing second hand clothes can seem like the future.

searching for the young soul rebels

2009-09-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

Sir Galahad by Lord Alfred Tennyson

My good blade carves the casques of men,
My tough lance thrusteth sure,
My strength is as the strength of ten,
Because my heart is pure.
The shattering trumpet shrilleth high,
The hard brands shiver on the steel,
The splinter'd spear-shafts crack and fly,
The horse and rider reel:
They reel, they roll in clanging lists,
And when the tide of combat stands,
Perfume and flowers fall in showers,
That lightly rain from ladies' hands.

How sweet are looks that ladies bend
On whom their favours fall !
For them I battle till the end,
To save from shame and thrall:
But all my heart is drawn above,
My knees are bow'd in crypt and shrine:
I never felt the kiss of love,
Nor maiden's hand in mine.
More bounteous aspects on me beam,
Me mightier transports move and thrill;
So keep I fair thro' faith and prayer
A virgin heart in work and will.

When down the stormy crescent goes,
A light before me swims,
Between dark stems the forest glows,
I hear a noise of hymns:
Then by some secret shrine I ride;
I hear a voice but none are there;
The stalls are void, the doors are wide,
The tapers burning fair.
Fair gleams the snowy altar-cloth,
The silver vessels sparkle clean,
The shrill bell rings, the censer swings,
And solemn chaunts resound between.

Sometimes on lonely mountain-meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light !
Three arngels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And star-like mingles with the stars.

When on my goodly charger borne
Thro' dreaming towns I go,
The cock crows ere the Christmas morn,
The streets are dumb with snow.
The tempest crackles on the leads,
And, ringing, springs from brand and mail;
But o'er the dark a glory spreads,
And gilds the driving hail.
I leave the plain, I climb the height;
No branchy thicket shelter yields;
But blessed forms in whistling storms
Fly o'er waste fens and windy fields.

A maiden knight--to me is given
Such hope, I know not fear;
I yearn to breathe the airs of heaven
That often meet me here.
I muse on joy that will not cease,
Pure spaces clothed in living beams,
Pure lilies of eternal peace,
Whose odours haunt my dreams;
And, stricken by an angel's hand,
This mortal armour that I wear,
This weight and size, this heart and eyes,
Are touch'd, are turn'd to finest air.

The clouds are broken in the sky,
And thro' the mountain-walls
A rolling organ-harmony
Swells up, and shakes and falls.
Then move the trees, the copses nod,
Wings flutter, voices hover clear:
'O just and faithful knight of God!
Ride on ! the prize is near.'
So pass I hostel, hall, and grange;
By bridge and ford, by park and pale,
All-arm'd I ride, whate'er betide,
Until I find the holy Grail.

my aim is true

2009-08-31T11:28:00.001-07:00

thinking ahead here(ha! visual pun...)
i bought a hat, a real one.
been after one of these for a while now... keep seeing similar ones around that never quite reach teh target, this will do me just right(with a leather jacket for that cliched joe strummer look i enjoy...), get a hat, get ahead!
but i digress...
house move in motion soon, so i'm using that as a milestone of sorts, to put a few things to bed and strengthen other ideas i have been working on...
i'm plotting a book of photography - some of my best shots in one handy compendium, all sorted out, just have to sit down and work out which images to use, and in which order then send it off to the printer.
i'll be selling it around like a pimp, so keep 'em peeled.
i may invest in a printer to run off individual shots, this should be good as i get to see stuff on walls - there is a digital photography magazine which is campaigning for photographers to get back into printing again(as they say - we put the stuff up on the web, and stick it on cd's but never experience them in a frame... which is exactly what i'm guilty of...).
i plan to visit some dramatic locations next year - if there is time and such this year, i may fit in a weekend to some old seaside towns though...
the music is going to take a back seat to photography, i'm selling off old synths and guitars like nobody's business, although i will continue with the helvatones and record an album of bluesy stuff(working title memphis stew), featuring mainly hammond and bass/drums but precious little of my inept attempts at guitar(which i have been trying to learn all year....).
i will be stepping up the podcasts, with a good mix of rockabilly/blues/post-punk/dub-influenced sounds... this should be at least once or twice a month... i have a lot to say about music and some great material that deserves to be enthused about(i'm in an ian dury mood at the moment).
so the move, is a good point at which to finish/start ideas.
now about that hat...

this year's model

2009-08-31T09:20:00.000-07:00

we are moving house.
i'll be offline at some point possibly for a few weeks, but this explains why i was keen(for once) to spend the afternoon in a housewares emporium(let's call it... ikea, fr'instance...), as well as the reason for a lot of creative downsizing in the last couple of weeks, as i gear up for this momentous up-heaval.
it was disorientating enough that we found ourselves in coventry - which makes you feel like you've wandered onto the set of here we go round the mullberry bush, but to visit this store is like stepping back into the 80's(of course, what would you expect).

i used to pour over a copy of the habitat catalogue that i had back in the early 80's... living in my parent's 70's decor was not good for a young man, i needed something modern to aspire to(even if that modern was tinged with a love of atomic fifties iconography), - all that ordered symmetry and red door handles was like manna from heaven amongst the late 60's furniture and council estate style of my home... habitat was all so thematic, unlike the mish-mash decade-blending(thank you douglas coupland) that my parents unwittingly indulged in - our next door neighbour's house was worse, with their tacky mock-baronial fireplace, replete with brass heraldic shields/swords and abigail's party furniture(the former i got into trouble dueling with and the latter which my mother trashed when she fell over at a party, one evening).
this house also had those staple 70's item: the yellow corner peice sofa, and cylindrical opaque orange standing lamps so beloved of play for today.
but, all that measured order and calmness in the habitat catalogue engaged me(this was when the conran empire was seen as something tastefull, not like today where they sting you £45 for some cardboard boxes with handles on them, etc...), and it was almost warhol-esque, the bright primary colours and stack 'em up, sell 'em off that spoke of happiness and bountiful supply(which was the general idea, to encourage you to buy lots).
admittedly, the only people i knew that owned this stuff were social workers, who wore green cords and had haircuts like mike reid, but we can all dream of our shangri la at least.
this particular shangri la in coventry however, smelled of burnt toast as we entered it's vast front door(on the way there i remarked how the building seemed to be sucking the life out of the nearby area), and the huge elevators were immediately off-putting, like the ones they have in some underground stations, and seemed to have no directions or info about them, it was merely a case of jump onboard.
upon arrival on the sixth floor, we were meeted&greeted by a smiling blonde girl who was handing out oversize shopping sacks(there's that illusion of choice, again), and it was only after i'd walked past, that i noticed she had very, very small arms, totally out-of-context with her body-size.
now this threw both of us out of sync for a bit, so slightly dazed we orienteered our way to the wardrobe section, following the handy map we were given(with it's shortcuts included for brevity)(now is it just me, or does it seem a little bit odd that you should need a map to get around a shop?), and i noticed a few times that there is a direction you have to walk round in... we'd invariably go against the tide, like salmon swimming upstream, only to be met with slightly surprised and almost offended little dry coughs(the english thing that english people do, to express annoyance and indignation)... i also noted the look on (mainly) men's faces, forced to walk round as their other-half's nesting instincts enthused to them about furniture you sit on or sleep on - but the menfolk sported a look that spoke of life slowly draining away from a tortured soul, or of a tired mind that wanted to be down the pub where all his mates were probably.
also interesting was also the amount of tattooes people had - even if they were mainly of the celtic-ibiza beckham-inspired tosh that says nothing about the person other than the fact that they have spent a bit of money on the tatt... designed to look good in the beer-garden in a sleeveless t-shirt... but not something i'd expect to see in this doyen of conformity.
the other half found all the little vignettes quite depressing(the pieces where they would have a whole room laid out like sets in a TV studio), they did have some sort of marie-celeste quality about them... although to me, it just brought back memories of the 80's habitat catalogue(see above), and it was quite easy to lose yourself in them, like wandering in and out of people's homes, through mysterious walls, like a ghost.
cutomers got quite avoricious though, and occasionally they would get a leather-jacket swinging accidentally in their direction if they got too close to where i was standing... there was certainly an air of desperation involved - although i was enjoying it all, finding the atmosphere quite entertaining(i don't think that was the idea though...), a bit like a contemporary museum, or more like stepping back into the 80's...
i found some of the ideas very tastefull, there's definately a 50's aesthetic to a lot of the furniture(despite the industrial 80's wire mesh and big red clocks)... i saw a few chairs that recalled Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen and Harry Bertoia... all very stylish and understated.
my favourite was the round dining tables with the moulded swivel chairs(that ITRW would last about a month), and plenty of low slung, close to the ground lounge furniture that was similarily inspired, although i never made it over to the moulded plastic orange coloured chairs that would have matched our 50's dining table.
we were however, only indulging in speculative consumption(to purchase that stuff from the website), so only bought a 50's inpsired throw for the sofa, but all-in-all not a bad concept for a day out(despite being amused at the caretaker nation aspects of the way people were co-erced into moving around the store).
not exactly relaxing though and the canteen was crap.
like a motorway self-service restaurant.
shame on you.

motorbikin'

2009-08-22T10:26:00.001-07:00

cool old norton bike
Originally uploaded by wordysmith

i want a motorbike for xmas...

radio, radio

2009-08-22T09:03:00.001-07:00

greaser in the studio
Originally uploaded by benjibrum

sleep, who needs it?
when i can be slogging around the house at 5 in the morning because it's really stuffy in the house, aghast that the lagerlesbians next door are still awake, with all their lights blazing..?
or when i can be up and out the house in digbeth for 9 o'clock, to join in the summer xmas fun of the big paws radio show... which i listen to during saturday breakfast-time.
they were having an xmas special, and invited people along for presents and festive food, so who could resist...
that's me on the right of the photo(wearing a newly acquired vintage tootal shirt), wide awake but keeping quiet (and stifling laughter - hence the expression), as i was off mike, and wouldn't be heard anyway(memories of the pirate broadcasting days and my own little station i ran from my house when i was about 13... somewhere there are tapes of me with a high pitched voice, playing sex pistols records in 1978...)
fun to watch the show in person, surrounded by various regular contributors from the show- even if we couldn't hear some of the songs which was a shame as they played a killer graham parker track!
presents were handed out, H. got a set of badges with shakespearian insults on them, i was given a shuttlecock set with tiger faces on the bats, as well as various crackers being pulled - and in return (keeping to a brum theme)we passed on a tiswas best-of video(that i'd found in a vintage shop) to catnip - as tiswas had been recorded on broad street at central television studios(which is now a vacant lot) and a birmingham information film/video to bounder(which i acquired many moons ago... a short documentary inviting middle class people to move to the suburbs of edgbaston whilst sampling the cultural delights of the city... it's a load of snobbytosh basically, where the only working class people you see are waiters and such... plus it's all pre-inner-city-ghetto living which is now the case in the city centre... so the film is out-of-date anyway! but i thought bounder would appreciate as a psychogeographer of the city viewing a snapshot of how some people wanted birmingham to be presented at the time...) - he's blogged it on here

There Is A Better Lifestyle from bounder on Vimeo.

there was an offer of going to the custard factory cafe for more fun after the show, but we went to visit the vintage shop in digbeth, which surprisingly had some good woolrich coats in stock, amongst all the hipster crap that they usually sell, then headed off for some coffee and croisants followed by a visit to cybercandy for american chocolate.
i was after a dressy looking pork pie hat with a stingey brim for a forthcoming thing(to be written about after it happens!), so i dragged our slowly flagging selves down to the birmingham indoor market... but all my regular hat stall had was "mean streets" type leather pork pie hats...
eventually i headed off to top banana for a cool button-down vintage shirt(but not a hat) - where they had some damn nice towncraft shirts, but none in my size, followed by coffee and a chat, to revive myself before heading home tired and sleepy, like eddie cochran did...

today was a good day for spotting people in micheal jackson t-shirts though, the worst of which was the short aggressive woman wearing a black "king of pop" t-shirt, who was offering people to a fight on colmore row(WHO'S BAD!), and the best was seeing a grandad in a red "king of pop" t-shirt, with matching red shorts and sandles in kings heath... whodafunkit!!!

my jelly roll soul

2009-08-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

today was a day for offering me random stuff i didn't ask for for:

our next door neighbours asked if we wanted to rent their superior house off them, as they are moving out.
(we are moving in a couple of weeks to our own place)
i was offered information on religions both western and eastern based, by various pamphleteers.
(i studied theology, get over it)
i was offered flyers for house music clubs.
(i was wearing a 50's jacket and knitted shirt - in fact i even remonstrated these people saying "i'm into rockabilly!!!" and of course i am way too old to go to a club like that... besides the fact that i was heading to a record shop to buy a charles mingus album... blues & roots, should you wonder, although i'm listening to wille dixon as i write this )
i was offered money-off vouchers twice by sad little macDo' people.
(the first time i laughed and asked the person to f-off. the second time i laughed and said "no thanks i only eat healthy food!" - we were on the way to a tofu restuarant)
there were some more forcefull pamphleteers in New street, one of whom attempted to follow me, but as i mumbled a greeting in my basic polish, he quickly thought better of it and fled.
obscurism is usually the best bet.
but the big question of the day is that, with all that the internet provides, is there any need for proffering info like this in the street anymore?
within seconds i can be in touch with anything i wish to know about...
and of course most info proffered in the street is usually from an organisation who enjoy surpressing that facet of freedom of choice.
so ya boo.

Feng Ru Lee

2009-08-08T09:12:00.001-07:00

Feng Ru Lee
Originally uploaded by steve green

A portrait of Feng Ru Lee during her performance as Milee the sheep at the Shift Time Festival

diner au motel

2009-08-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

here's something, i usually trawl the net looking for my photos popping up in unlikely places, and this came up using a photo i'd done of my old mate laz, i actually used a disposable for this and added all the lomo stuff on later, but never mind....
and H's shop got the new edition of a hairstyle book she sells, and i guess they spent a lot of time looking through my modelling sessions, judging by the familiar background technique... it's the sincerest form of flattery, you know...

the streets of your town

2009-08-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

ok, so i signed-up to organise something a few weeks ago.
i'm not naming names, as this could be contentious at some point...
and yesterday i had to send out an email to all the people who had turned-up for the the thing i'd set-up...
now - if you have been on the birmingham page, you will
notice two things...
one is that the "winning photo" appears to have been chosen, and
funnily enough it's one of mine... this is an error, as walk leaders
cannot enter themselves as the winning photo(i will already qualify
for the "prize" so there is no point...). the software to enable
walkleaders wasn't made available on the site until sunday, so i
logged onto the site on sunday to do this and there was a problem with
the website not allowing anyone to upload the winning image as
directed, saying that the MAXIMUM uploads had been used(the answers to
that are buried deep in this thread here),
so after some sifting i found out that i needed to request a password
reset, this was requested and i checked back at 7 am on monday
morning... still no reset - and i assume it was changed/enabled
sometime around 11:00 am... no good for me, as i'm at work then.
i contacted one of the "people" running things and asked for some kind
of leniency here, as the site is running on US time, so is out of
kilter with the UK... but the answer was a negative one.
after i deleted all my images on the site, to allow me to upload the
winning image, one of my deleted images is now pegged as the "winning
image"... this is i assume because it was uploaded early on the day...
it is NOT the winning image however... the one i have chosen is a
superior image by Peter Owen and he will receive the prize.
this is due to a glitch on the site - the organisers were swamped with
contributions and there have been requests for a GMT friendly deadline
or at least one that allows for time differences around the world
should anything go rwong...
great thanks... now it looks like i obliged 30 strangers to turn-up and take photos, and walk around on a saturday afternoon, just so i could "award" myself the winning photo and "win" the prize that i was already going to get for doing the organising.
the reply i got from someone involved was basically - we've been working on this all weekend and if you can't get it sorted yourself, then too bad... but it was a US weekend timescale and after i'd tried a few times to upload the winning image, swore a lot, gone onto the flickr group, worked out there was a glitch on the website, sent off to someone for a password reset, gone to bed, got up for work(v.important that i go to work...)and found it still didn't work, and come back, it was all too late and no chance of a bit of leniency.
grrrr... so here's some jimmy smith!!!

i walk the line

2009-07-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

the first birmingham photowalk was probably a resounding success, then...
i spent saturday morning in a mood of trepidation, sure... nearly 30 people had signed-up but a few had already dropped out, citing other appointments that would drag them away... which in itself is fair enough, as that's what happens.
so i dawdled around in a record shop beforehand(although to be honest, it felt more like a funeral home... neil young has that effect on me, i suppose), before heading up to the arranged meeting point.
what brought me here to begin with... well somewhere, back in the distant past i remember reading about scott kelby's great worldwide photowalk, where photographers all over the world would just get out and walk a pre-arranged route together(like a parallel flickr meet), so i mentioned it on birmingham flickrmeet and someone suggested i set it all up and get it up and running(think globally - act locally).
so weeks later, i've got maps, and contacts and i'm stood around the iron man on new street, waiting for no one to attend or to be arrested for organising an illegal gathering...
thankfully - one by one, people emerge out of the crowd and identify themselves as being here for the walk... it's slightly intimidating to see just HOW MANY have turned-up from quite far away - i can't take any credit for this though, as the walk was seeded through various forums related to digital photography and photoshop(both of which i use all the time, but never go on forums about).
there's some older people with cameras(i talk to one old boy who spoke about shooting photographs in the city back in the 60's... which was very interesting to hear about), as well as a few people who'd brought their sons along to take photos (excellent idea!).

regulars from the flickrmeets arrive to bolster numbers, and i hand out maps, before heading off.

being a flickrmeet veteran i guess just how long it will take us to walk the relatively short distance along colmore row, knowing how distractions will appear(i swear i didn't organise the group on stilts!), then a slight pause at snowhill to take in the new buildings and after a quick regroup at masshouse(where i crack a joke about an approaching policewoman, glancing at us and the skateboarders and not knowing which social menace to arrest first...), it's down bull street(which is very busy) and through a tight little alley into a small urban park that leads onto moor street (i'd arranged this, as a contrast to dale end).
we hung around on moor street, regrouped and cross moor street to catch the interesting building on fazeley street.

i shoot a few frames off, and sneak away to the nearby park/graveyard to catch an image of the bullring, but i notice there are some lushes in the bushes, so i make a hasty exit back onto the route.
park street was a little uninspiring i have to admit, too much traffic and narrow paths to really get anything(although i did get the porno cinema with a billboard advertising a family day out), and then through the underpass onto digbeth...

i shoot a few images of the bullring building (i was only being polite here... i deleted them afterwards...that's for being so precious about your ugly building...), and then a quick stop-off near the markets(where one photographer gets shoo-ed awayby a stall holder), and we congregate by the tiny lifts to ascend to the top floor(some hardy people used the stairs, but i'd done that at the previous flickrmeet, and ended-up ascending 180 steep little bastards!!!).

major revelation once we reach the roof, it's wide open and a relief from the throng down below (possibly my favourite moment!), and people gladly get in loads of images of the 360 degree views that we get...
a couple of bored security guards pass thru but spy the camera gear and leave us alone.
nice way to end the route, and i've got about 4 shots left on my memory card.