I’ve said it here before: Jason Molina is my favourite musician. I’ve said it here before: he was an alcoholic. Jason Molina died last Saturday, 16th March, aged 39. I’m lost for words, not because this is overwhelmingly sad but because it just builds on anger. He was an extraordinary soul and his premature departure was to be expected. In the statement from his label Secretly Canadian one can read “Without him there would be no us — plain and simple” and that’s something I share entirely. Without his music I wouldn’t be the same. That’s not tragic but the memories I would have loose if not for his music are. I’ll have a glass, well a couple. Here’s to Jason Molina:
If in doubt about cinema being as much of an art form as drawing, painting and sculpture are, just watch Bertolucci’s art trilogy “Stealing Beauty”, “Besieged” and “The Dreamers” (1996, 1998 and 2003) and see how harmoniously all art forms join in to become One.
“Craig Bartholomew tracks down Sixto Rodriguez, the second generation Mexican who, with his 70s album Cold Fact, radicalised South African youth. What he found was Gandhi with a guitar.
It’s five o’clock as I wait at Cape Town international airport for a man I think I know well but have never met, one Sixto Rodriguez – mythical guru and serendipitous soothsayer of the 70′s “hey man wow!” generation, and creator of the long-selling cult album, Cold Fact – A man once lost, but now found. Every time an airport announcement is made, fate’s fat fingers play an arpeggio up my spine. The simple problem is that I have no idea what to expect, especially after a death such as his. Never before has one man died so many times in as many ways, and still survived. Not to mention being blind, murdering his wife (at least twice) and all that while performing a host of other heinous crimes – in rumour at least.
What, therefore, would pass through the metal detector at customs? The Bionic man? A walking resurrection? Or simply an impostor? The personal quest that had led to this moment – as I now loiter on the terminal – all began in 1996 when, after browsing through the liner notes of the newly released “Coming from Reality” CD (originally released as After the Fact in 1974), I stumbled across the words which asked if there were “any musicology detectives out there” to find the man, dead or alive. Even though I had already been seduced by the poetry of the man with lines like “It started out with butterflies on a velvet afternoon”, it was the line, “How many times can you wake up in this comic book and still plant flowers?” that made me commit to the search. Without realising it, this line had struck a sympathetic chord with the new, yet-to-be identified, Generation X.
My first stop, naturally, was the record company. Not even they could not tell me the fate of the one artist that had never made it to the deletion bin, even after 26 years of solid sales. (Who cares when you’re coining it?). Next, I climbed into his music and scrounged between the words, searching in vain for even just one single clue, a hint, a mere trace of where the man could be hiding. Many little leads led me nowhere. In “A Most Disgusting Song”, for example, he sang of playing every kind of gig there is to play: From faggot bars to hooker bars, to motorcycle funerals, to opera houses, to concert halls and even halfway houses. He referred to a host of characters almost by name: a girl who has never been chaste; a bearded school boy with wooden eyes; a man who is shorter than himself; and even a teacher who will kiss you in French! But nowhere could I find a direct reference to a town or place that could have blown his cover. Rumour had it that Polygram did not even possess the master tapes to his music, pressing the “Coming From Reality” CD from a good vinyl copy of the album (quite audible, if you listens carefully, is the sheer proof of analogue decay – static, scratches and even a cat’s paw.)
Then, finally after a nine-month long search comprising 72 telephone calls, 45 faxes, and over 140 e-mails, I managed to trace Mike Theodore, the credited arranger of the Cold Fact album. With this breakthrough, it barely took a week before a voice on the other side of the line answered, nonchalantly, “Yes, it is I, Rodriguez, so tell me about yourself?” Then, slowly but surely, the information I had so long sought, started to trickle in. Born in Detroit, this second generation Mexican single-handedly, without even realising it, changed the way South African youth saw things by releasing his album Cold Fact in 1972 (it flopped practically everywhere else). While hippies around the world hummed “ommmm…” in yoga-like poses, the seventies youth of South Africa chose only one mantra to represent their generation, “I wonder, how many times you’ve had sex”. This was not surprising from a country where simply thinking evil thoughts led to swearing which led to smoking which led to drinking which then led to Dagga which led to hard drugs and which finally led to satanism. And before you knew it, you were dead.
Prevalent on the album, was a philosophy that decried the anomalies of social reality, and which the youth bought into whole-heartedly. It was this cynicism – parents called it ‘hate-mail on a record’ (“but don’t bother to buy insurance, because you’ve already died”), or ‘poetry concealed as vinyl’ (“the wind splashed in my face, can smell a trace of thunder”) that actually set the youth free. A simple honesty which became the axiom on which they would base their thinking. A young Mexican who sang unashamedly about drugs and life on the streets (My Estonian Archangel came and got me wasted). Ironically, the man who once sang the words, “the mayor hides the crime rate, the public forgets the vote date”, has actually run for political office on no less than seven occasions, and fathered three daughters and a son (Brian’s note: the son, Aaron, is actually his first wife’s from her second husband).
A 1972 brochure on Detroit referred to the young political candidate ‘revolutionary absurdist, a creative anarchist, and even a leftist guitarist?’ Furthermore, it states that he is legendary at “always brewing or perpetrating something”. Like his Heikki’s Bus Tour no. 2, a guided busload of Inner City wildmen who careened out to the environs to take snapshots of the natives and to communicate. Strange as it may seem, Rodriguez has recorded only 25 songs in his lifetime and had no idea he was even famous here. Finally at quarter past five – with only the mental picture of Rodriguez seated cross-legged in the pearl bubble off Cold Fact – I spot a youthful, well-built man who looks no more than 40. I am at first not sure that this is he but when I see the guitar, I know it is. Suddenly, all the words he ever sung rush before me in cool colour psychedelia. Unreal-surreal! Poetic-myopic! And as my senses rollercoaster-ride in sympathy with the part of my brain that deals with reason, a warm hand shakes mine. “Hi”, he says unassumingly. As we walk off, I realise that this is the most humble artist I have ever met. Gandhi with guitar.
A man who, after all is said and done, would probably prefer to leave the past behind him and someone who, it transpires, has the problem that every time he opens the door to get the milk, fame tries to creep in.”
from the article In search of Rodriguez: from hooker bars to opera houses, published in The Sunday Independant, 8th March 1998
“If one hears this music without any intoxication, or any sort of drugs, one does get the feeling of being intoxicated. That’s the beauty of our music. It builds up to that pitch. We don’t believe in the extra, or the other stimulus taken, and that’s what I’m trying my best to make the young people, without hurting them, of course, to understand.”
Shankar refused the label of anti-drug preacher or social reformer. “I have nothing to say. No, it’s the people’s business if they want to drink, or smoke or take drugs. All I request is that these people just give me a couple of hours of sobriety or sober mind. That’s all I request of them. Whatever they do before or after is not my business.”
“The project first began when I got back into Beijing in October 2007. I was moving back from New York, and I had a friend from college who was out here unexpectedly, working on the soundboard at this music club, D-22.
I made a point of going to the club as soon as I got in. I went up there one night with my camera and I was completely blown away by the music. I saw this band called Joyside, and another band called The Subs. I went up there for 2-3 nights straight, and I was just so impressed. Lots of times when I had seen live music in China, in 2004 and 2005, it was certainly nothing to write home about. But everything had really stepped up.
I approached the club and said I wanted to hang out and take photos. They had this office on the second floor and I decided I was going to go in there and shoot some portraits of this band that needed images for their MySpace page. And that’s when I first took one of the ‘red wall portraits’. That was with a band called Hedgehog. It’s one of the most well known of those pictures now – the girl with the boxing gloves.
It was such a great photo and I imagined at that point that I would start shooting everyone who came through D-22. I’d create this consistent look with the photographs, while also showing that so many different music scenes were moving through this one club, whether it’s rock, or electronic, or punk, or folk, or experimental.
I did that for about two and half years – I still do it now. Shooting hundreds of performers from all over China. The club basically paid for my taxis and gave me free alcohol – and that was it.
(…)
What’s occurring here is a very international collaboration or community of people who are interested in that, and whether it’s artists, curators, or gallery directors – it’s a very eclectic mix to say the least. I feel that the contemporary art scene is much more Chinese, but people are thinking on a global scale now and trying to interact with international artistic communities. And in that sense there’s definitely a bi-lingual nature to it.
The music and the arts scene are what have kept me here. I moved back here in 2007 thinking I might stay a year but there’s been such a creative explosion I can’t leave. You also see a lot of the more experimental musicians, like Yan Jun, run in a lot of the same circles as the contemporary Chinese artists. A lot of their theoretical positions on creativity are very close.”
excerpt of an interview Christen Cornell. continue reading here
Giving into love and sharing my time
Letting someone into my misery
I told it all step by step
How I landed on the island
And how I swam across the sea
And it crosses my mind
That I may wake to a knife in me
No more breath in my hair
Or ladies’ underwear
Tossed up over the alarm clock
Blood dripping from the bed
To a neatly written poem
A heartfelt last line reading
There is no more mystery
It it going to happen my love
It’s all in your head she said
Morning after nightmare
You’re building a wall she said
Higher than the both of us
So try living life
Instead of hiding in the bedroom
Show me a smile
And I’ll promise not to leave you
It happened under a rainy cloud
Passing through the dark south
We went into a big house
And slept in a small bed
I didn’t know you then
As well as you of me
We talked of our sad lives
And we went off separately
I found your overseas souvenirs
Holiday greeting cards
And some long forgotten high school fears
It’s all in my head I said
Banging a piano
I’ve not been so alone I thought
Since kicking in the womb
I drank so much tea
I wrote my letters in kanji
Around the block I walked and walked
Pretending you were with me
Not wanting to die out here
Without you
The hurting never ends
Like birthdays and old friends
We forget what is flesh blood and bone is human
Turning phone lines to airlines
Unwilling to face
The love is found on the inside not the outside
And like a medicine bottle
In the cabinet I’ll keep you
And like a medicine bottle
In my hand I will hold you
And swallow you slowly
As to last me a lifetime
Without holding too tight
I do not want to lose
The thrill that it gives me
To look out from my window
And scowl at the houses
From my world in the bedroom
It’s all in my head she read
In her girlfriend’s self-help book
It’s all his own making
A war with himself
Like two sides of a wall
That separates two countries
He shuts out the world
And wants only to love you
“Simmons, as an artist, doubles down. She captures the fiction/truth dialectic as well as anyone, disarticulating assumptions about the quietly composed and staged images she makes. She’s a Brecht of the photographic endeavor. In her work, Simmons is not so much documenting the performance before the camera, but the performance itself. In one image from the series If We Believe in Theory, Simmons captures a young girl in the woods dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. It’s an example of Simmons using the suggestion of performance to capture the explicit and contradictory nature of individuality. Her subject becomes herself, and also a dismembered characterization of what we’re accustomed to look at. Still, it is not simply Simmons’s understanding of the imagistic theater of photography that is useful, but her way of using form to acknowledge that image is at the center of the creative construction of collective and personal histories. Simmons is a lexicographer who fuses live material and conceptual conceit; she deconstructs and retains a relation to specific times and places. Perhaps paradoxically, she often achieves this through unabashedly excessive detail, like in One Day and Back Then (Standing), where her character stands in a field of sea reeds in blackface, looking out at us, wearing all black (including stiletto boots), ready for a night out on the town.”
excerpt of an article by Adam Pendleton, in Bomb. continue reading here
Klaartje Quirijns’ insightful feature-length profile of Anton Corbijn offers an exploration into the pain of creation while also being a thoughtful examination of one of pop culture’s most iconic photographers and, more recently, film directors.
The taciturn Dutch subject, best known for immortalising artists such as Ian Curtis, Iggy Pop and U2, gives filmmaker Quirijns the opportunity to shine a spotlight on to the darkest corners of his intensely private life.
The narrative alternates between Corbijn’s personal and professional personas, highlighting the perpetual loneliness of man who is adored by many. Corbijn freely discusses his past while retracing the footsteps of his youth. However, family members raise concerns about his present schedule, declaring that he is clearly happiest when at work.
Corbijn notes that both the films he has directed are about isolation and contain protagonists with a lonely soul. Although he has been known to be somewhat reclusive, he doesn’t see too much autobiography in those films. His comments lead Quirijns to adopt a voyeuristic approach to capturing Corbijn’s private life as she explores themes of solitude and seclusion.
However, for all the small revelations, Corbijn is continually in control of each conversation, conducting each discussion like one of his shoots. He exposes little emotion and always keeps Quirijns at a safe distance.
Corbijn is clearly a man deeply immersed in his passions: photography, filmmaking and music. However, behind the focused lens, there is clearly pain and isolation. What could have been a fascinating study of an exceptional and mysterious individual is little more than a static Polaroid with layers still to be fully developed.
One of the reasons for my absence. A journey to watch this project live. It brings together Brazil and Mali, with Arnaldo Antunes, Edgard Scandurra e Toumani Diabaté. Absolutely worth listening and seeing. Songs about struggle, love and how the arts, music in particular, can bring people together…
Bernardo Sassetti is a very gifted pianist and composer, but apart from that he is also very passionate about photography and was currently working on publishing a book. He passed away today, at 41, after falling from a cliff, while photographing. Portugal keeps paving the way for a greek tragedy… His music, his gift
can’t help but wonder: at the same time, I was photographing in another cliff
Now and again I wonder what has happen to Jason Molina, my favourite singer/songwriter, since for the past few years no records have been released. As I was looking for some classic black & white portraits of musicians I came across a statement from Magnolia Electric Co. that reads “Over the last two years Jason has been in and out of rehab” and “is currently working on a farm in West Virginia raising goats and chickens for the next year or so”. The press release also asks for support (monetary and other). Besides the fact that I hope he has the willing to create again, I wonder why there are no photographers out there doing him justice. Given the fact that I can’t do anything about that, I take the opportunity to post a video of one of my favourites “It’s hard to love a man”, from the album “What comes after the blues” and hopefully do some sort of justice by bringing his work to someone new.
