HEAR THIS: ABOUT THE MUSIC

Each Monday, this blog will feature a music “review” from the previous Friday’s concert at Bo Diddley Plaza, plus a series of photographs taken by the writer.

Coming in the next few weeks are articles about Quartermoon, Velveeta Underground, the Duppies, Chuck Levy and Friends, and the Imposters. And that just takes us through August.

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MORNINGBELL BLASTS OFF

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bo diddley community plaza, Free Fridays Gainesville, Morningbell Gainesville

Travis Atria of Morningbell reminds me a bit of Jonathan Richman, the sweet-faced suburban-Boston pop-punk whose oeuvre includes the classic two-chord driving song “Roadrunner” as well as the ditty-like “Abominable Snowman in the Market.”  Richman was always the coolest punk on the block even as he was also the cleanest and most cherubic one; you had the feeling that if Richman hadn’t been a musician he’d have been a celebrated cult poet in a Mr. Rogers cardigan, writing sly couplets that seemed anti-intellectual, childish, and outright silly but which were the echt deal for punk in parvo.

The reason that Travis Atria reminds me of Jonathan Richman is that Atria is on to something in the way Richman was on to something back in the early 1970s, and he’s doing it in the same way Richman did, rocketing lyric onto  vernacular on the way to a new musical planet.  Atria has it in his power to become a cultural avatar the way that Richman (and Lady Gaga) is; it will be interesting to see how and if he straps himself into that particular ship.

I have spent the last year singing the chorus of “Marching Off to War,” Morningbell’s intergalactic guerilla-cry, after seeing the band play last summer.  It was this song that first called Richman to mind (along with other things, like the 1972 Sears catalogue that Atria seems to have mined for his white patent loafers and Richman apparently shopped for his polos).  There were other influences as well; these in turn recalled Richman’s own stealth attacks on a variety of styles.

I am referring to Morningbell’s latest shape-shifting practices, which contain multivalent musical voodoo recently powered by the very muscular drumming of Chris Hillman.  Hillman is the ballast to Atria’s zeppelin falsetto and he has shifted the Morningbell perspective from the dreamy to the visceral.  Morningbell is something to see live; there is nothing like them at least on this regional planet and I am tempted to hand them some sort of imperium and leave it at that.  It’s in the way Travis Atria stands, his arms spread before the musically ravening masses–dark faceless shapes to his white-on-white, spotlit Messiah.  And it’s in the mad-scientist expression of brother Eric Atria as he charms the antennas of his theremin.  Stacie Atria, keyboardist and occasional percussionist, is the band’s firewall, and perhaps in her quiet beauty holder of their secret code.

That code is that Morningbell is like no other.  They are like many things and like nothing at all.  They are a band with greatest authority live, where they become cosmic collaborators in urging you to defy gravity:  If you are standing still and not shooting off into the universe at a Morningbell concert then you are dead and buried face down. 

I doubt anything can capture Morningbell’s live performance, not words, not images, not video.  There are  many modes of identity at play, yet the various influences do not separate but conjoin.  They are pop, psychedelic, punk (with a drummer who clearly could smash his way through heaviest metal), lounge, alternative, unloaders of illusion.  If their latest recorded effort, Sincerely, Severely, chases from influence to influence, the live show brings it all together as a collective.  The band is sweet, satirical (and sometimes sweetly satirical while also being, let’s face it, severe) and are adroit distorters of the theory that singers must always sing tunefully or that they must always attire themselves within the confines of  the present fashion zeitgeist.  Morningbell is kicking the shit out of a number of traditions with their mix of back-combed soul, power-funk, psychedelic pop, art-rock and retrograde punk.  They’re probably too cool for most of us, and I revel in the fact that people might not get them at first reckoning.  I sort of want to keep them here while at the same time believing they would take off on the West Coast starship and only be heard from again on another distant planet, where gravity is nothing and everything exists in an abstract universe, complete with your choice of patent leather footwear.

Morningbell played the concert of the season at Bo Diddley Plaza on Friday night.  There is probably some sort of cosmic penalty for having missed it, but you can listen to whole albums–yes, whole albums–on the Morningbell Web site.

Travis Atria, Chris Hillman on drums

 Travis and Eric Atria

Eric Atria

Stacie Atria

Eric Atria

Chris Hillman

Travis Atria

A WALKING TOUR OF SAVANNAH, PART TWO

On December 21, 1864, the mayor of Savannah surrendered his city to the Union in exchange for a gentleman’s agreement that Savannah’s citizens and their property would be protected from the ravages of war.  Savannah was the terminus for Sherman’s March to the Sea, an ambitious trek that started in Atlanta and scorched the earth southeastwards until it arrived on Savannah’s outskirts.

Maj. Gen. Sherman then presented the city as a Christmas gift to President Lincoln.

Thanks to the promise not to ransack the city, the visitor can travel back in time to the Antebellum era, especially in the city’s gloriously leafy squares, where you will not find a fast-food joint or a Starbucks but you will discover lovingly preserved Antebellum, Federal, English Regency, Italianate, and Gothic- and Greek Revival  structures.

Factors Walk, on the bluffs above the river, was home to the city’s thriving cotton industry.  Here, a honeycomb of steep, ancient stairways and iron walkways lead from the river to the bluff above and from building to building.  This is not a place to walk in anything but sturdy and possibly orthopedic shoes; one misstep and you will be face first on a stone where wagons full of cotton once traveled.   Even in full daylight, Factors Walk has nooks of crepuscular light; parts of it always sit in shadow and you half expect to encounter the ghost of a cotton merchant as you descend a narrow stone staircase to River Street.

This part of Savannah is party central, which makes for a rather unfortunate clash of history and whooping it up.  It’s hard to separate oneself from other people’s parties, something that we experienced when we boarded the river ferry and were quickly surrounded by a drunken celebration and what appeared to be a spontaneous hook-up between a tattooed Southern belle with jet-black dyed hair and a supremely loud mouth and a guy who was either going to get lucky or go deaf, or maybe both.

The historic part of Savannah is compact and is easily walkable, which would be a real treat in any other season than summer.  As it was, we had to take it in small sections.  We started by the river and then worked our way up through the famous squares, stopping to visit a museum, a restaurant, and a bookseller’s.  At Southern Gents, I purchased two fragrances.  One of these, George, is a unisex Oriental cologne named for the store’s mascot, a Yorkie who sleeps in a small bed near the cash register.  George the dog zipped over to sniff at my ankles and then, bored, went back to bed.  George the fragrance got sprayed on my skin.  It’s an Oriental that is more like an eau de toilette than a cologne and although Oriental fragrances can be difficult to wear in the summer, George is light, a ribbon of semisweet mandarin sprinkled with the dry spices of nutmeg and ginger that expands over a vanillic, woodsy-musky base.  It is incredibly sexy stuff that can be worn by a man or a woman or by a man who wants to seduce a woman or by a woman who knows that men like women to smell as if they have been baking cookies naked.

Savannah is a place where Mr. B. and I play the fantasy game, deciding if we’d like a townhouse with walled garden (me) or a riverfront property (Mr. B.).  Since we are generally kept down by a terrible budget, we can play this game without risking an equally terrible argument:  We’ll have both! Certain cities are better than others for playing this game; unfortunately, hometown Gainesville has no such game board.  I, for one, always feel more creative when around tastefully appointed historic residences (nothing gauche, s’il vous plait), while Mr. B. is creative wherever he happens to be.  Mr. B. could write a smashing script in a tent while I bitched about bugs and got nothing done.

It was on this trip that I learned of Savannah’s nickname:  The Hostess City of the South. This was a former branding that is still favored by the city government.  I dislike this nickname intensely and it makes me envision a 1950s housewife with a tray full of chocolate chip cookies and a plaid apron tied with a bow in the back; the name was meant to convey welcome and hospitality.  To me, it represents a Southern female archetype–here’s the feminist in me–whose only permissible and publicly visible talent should be domesticity.  And underneath that apron, she has balls of steel.

Today’s photos were taken around the river, as we huffed and puffed our way through the steam.  Occasionally, a breeze would lift off the river and rustle through the moss-hung trees.  This was nature’s air conditioning and there wasn’t enough of it, causing me to look decidedly un-dainty with a thick coating of sweat covering my face and upper body.  Let me correct that.  This is the South.  What I meant was “ladies’ glow.”

Recommended:  George cologne, $60.00 for 100 ML, from Southern Gents, phone 912-232-9122.

A WALKING TOUR OF SAVANNAH, PART ONE

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GA tourism, George cologne, Midnight in Savannah perfume, Savannah, Southern Gents Antiques Savannah, Walking tour of Savannah

Rick Saffol, one half of the Southern gents who run the Southern Gents antiques store on East Bay Street in Savannah, told me that he always enjoys having visitors from Florida because the Floridians think they have it so much hotter.  Not so, Rick said, and after spending a very steamy weekend traipsing around Savannah I came back to Florida realizing I hadn’t quite made humidity’s true acquaintance.

We arrived in Savannah on Saturday afternoon and immediately set out on a walking tour of River Street, that teeming hybrid of history and tourism.  This was our third trip to Savannah, which allowed us to focus on photography and not on gawking.  Savannah has a large historic district that runs back from the river, encompassing structures used for trade and for residential purposes.  These buildings have in either case been carefully preserved, with unobtrusive updating.

The Port of Savannah is in constant motion with barges and container ships making their way into the city or out to the Atlantic.  You walk by the river on the aptly named River Street, a cobblestoned thoroughfare with as much pedestrian traffic as there is ship traffic in the Savannah River, assuming you date that traffic back to the Civil War. River Street houses tourist-type stores in the lowest levels of historic buildings; they are the usual hat or t-shirt shops and those that sell the South’s most tooth-achingly sweet treat, the praline.  People pop in and out of these shops, entering with cash in hand and leaving with multiple souvenirs.  River Street Sweets is the main attraction, and I had to make two trips in before I found the line short enough to bear.  They hand out praline samples at the door, but the thing to buy here are the glazed pecans.  The nutmeats are shiny and simply whisked through a sugar glaze that allows the nut to retain its natural flavor.  Also available are mounds of thick fudge in a variety of flavors.  I determined that in order to calculate the ensuing increase in bodily circumference, one need only pack individual slabs of fudge inside one’s waistband and then measure.  It works about to about two inches per piece of candy.

We walked the length of River Street and then turned back in the direction we had come.  The humidity wore like a cloak, trapping the air and making it difficult to breathe.  I suggested that we take one of the funky little ferry boats across to the Westin.  The very brief trip across the river would at least provide some momentary relief.  The giant and modern Westin sits directly across from the historic River Street in an almost arrogant counterpose.  It boasts an excellent bar and comfortable outdoor rattan seating where you can enjoy your Patron in relative privacy.  The only gripe I have with the Westin is that they have replaced the lovely terry handtowels in the public restroom with cheap paper towels…in the women’s restroom only.

It was during our respite at the Westin that we learned what a rip-off a dinner cruise is.  The dinner boat plies the river in a deliberate waste of time.  Since the boat cannot travel too far either up or down the river, it inches along so slowly that you wonder if the food is so excellent that the diners do not realize that they have traveled a mile in 90 minutes.  We watched the boat leave the dock when we boarded the ferry.  An hour and a half later, semi-lubricated with our personal drink of choice, we watched it creep upstream, lit up like a spaceship.

The little ferry seemed overloaded when we returned.  The headcount was possibly heavy for such a small vessel, something I immediately remarked upon.  Mr. B. is becoming fatigued with these observations, but I maintain that the last place you want to go down with the ship is with a bunch of drunken and noisy revelers.  The ferry skidded out from the dock, listing a bit to the right, and we were off.

When we arrived back at River Street, the air was as thick as cheese and about as breathable.  We wheezed back down Bay Street as if brachiocephalic and then we melted into the upholstery of my car.  If you can envision the ponderous progress of a tired elephant around the ring of a cheap circus, you will understand how laborious this muggy journey was.  There was nothing for it but to return to our airport hotel and there freeze our asses silly.  Several hours later, my hands and feet numb, I reached for a jacket and crawled under a mound of bedding, mumbling that I really couldn’t handle the South.  This thought lasted only until I met a couple from Virginia, who warned me not to walk near the small pond that separated our hotel from an adjacent golf course.  There’s an alligator in that pond, the female half of this couple said.

Oh, yeah? I said, in Florida-blase fashion.  How big?

The male half of the couple spread his arms.  Giant, he said, gleaming in that way men gleam when they want to terrorize females with bugs, snakes, or rodents.  Really huge!

His wife shuddered.  It was horrible, she added.  Enormous.

The guy had spread his arms three feet apart.

PRESENTING CAITLIN EADIE

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bo diddley community plaza, Caitlin Eadie, Free Fridays Gainesville, Gainesville music

One will be forgiven for worrying that 17-year-old country singer Caitlin Eadie might be “pageanty.”  If you watch American Idol, you’ll be familiar with the term; it is one of Simon Cowell’s favorite dismissals.  If you watch the Miss America competition, you will know all too well the symptoms.

“Pageantry” symptoms include prettiness, a big white smile, a decent singing voice, and the lack of a true connection with the material being performed.  The pageanty singer also is confident and polished (sub-symptoms) and generally has good hair (sub-sub-symptom).

You might think, Hey, wait a minute! What’s wrong with a nice smile and a good singing voice?  Those are assets, not detriments.  As for confidence,  show me anyone who has gotten anywhere without it.

That’s right.  Good hair is also as asset.  But every asset can be cancelled out by a lack of connection to material.  That’s why Caitlin Eadie is not pageanty while still possessing all of the superlatives (she has the best teeth I’ve seen in ages, along with an enviable tangle of long reddish hair). It’s also why Caitlin Eadie–and I am willing to wager on this–will make it to the top of the country charts by the time she’s 25.

Friday night was Caitlin’s third turn at Free Fridays.  The first time she performed, she was booked as an opener for Chris Young, a headliner still coasting on a Nashville Star win two years before.  She was back on her own the next year, where, at age 16, she proved that she could more than hold her own against the concert series’ line-up of much older, more established acts.

Caitlin wound up opening for Chris Young because the Plaza booker found her on YouTube while googling for country singers.  If you ever doubt the power of social media, here is a case study in its influence and reach.  Caitlin was 15 when she was “discovered,” but it turned out she’d been a pro since the age of 10.  She’s still not out of high school, but she has seven years of experience to her credit.

It’s not hard to be charmed by Caitlin.  She bounds over with a big smile and a hug; she remembers the perfume you wore the last time she saw you.  She’s a teenager with the social finesse of someone much older; having known a few difficult and monosyllabic teenage girls I can tell you that Caitlin could walk into a board meeting of a Silicon Valley powerhouse and have them signing over rights to their top secret software technology with very little effort.  That’s the effect she has, this slip of a girl who will head to university in Nashville, where she will no doubt emerge as a country star par excellence.

I’ve gotten this far without talking about Caitlin’s voice, which is big and gutsy and completely capable of handling heartbroken blues and those songs of womanly confidence and attitude that have made people like Patsy Cline a star.  Caitlin isn’t faux-mature, though; she has a decided freshness and young appeal that aren’t in the least at odds with the traditional country domain of womanly triumph over bad men, bad breaks, and bad makeup.  I’m joking about the last one on that list; Caitlin looks like someone you could talk lipstick with with as much ease as you could talk songwriting.

A first CD–Country Girl–reveals that Caitlin co-wrote four of the ten songs on the disc, which was released when she was 15.  That was two years ago, a long span in teen years but the blink of an eye for an adult.  You can hear the adult Caitlin in it; the country sound is already there, formed, even as the singer was a freshman in high school.  What Caitlin sings is bluesy country that doesn’t strain at the boundaries of rock. Country, to my mind, has been diluted recently by the gimmick and by the rock crossover, and it has never been more apparent what a weakening this is to the form until you hear Caitlin’s straightforward take on the traditional stylistics.  This is a strong selling point for the young singer; as the music evolves away from the traditional, it has started to go so far in another direction that a plain take on the standard seems alive and anew, especially when coupled with such a pure country voice.

The only thing holding Caitlin back is the very wise decision to get an education and to not make any big decisions until she’s of an adult enough age to do so.  For the moment, she’s an extremely hard worker who keeps racking up the gigs, opening for big-name acts and playing out with regularity either as a solo, a duo, or with a full band.  She’s won over the notoriously hard to please Gainesville crowd that is used to some superb musicianship.  The Swamp City will get one more summer with Caitlin before she goes off to put her stamp on Nashville–and then we’ll reserve a parking space for her fancy tour bus if she comes back to see us again.

Visit Caitlin at her MySpace, and don’t miss the chance to see her locally while you still can.  Or buy her CD and get into some of the most honest and unassuming country you haven’t heard on the radio.  Yet.

(Also of note: Caitlin’s lead guitarist and second member of her duo act, fellow 17-year-old Joe Brown.  The kid is a dynamo with killer chops; a little seasoning on the touring circuit and we’ll be hearing from him, too.)

Caitlin and Joe Brown.

BOTANICALS, OISEAUX ET LAPIN

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Kanapaha Botanical Gardens

I find nothing quite so humbling as trying to use unfamiliar software.  The only thing that comes close is trying to read Mandarin.  Unlike spoken language, software seems to always suffer design or instructional flaws that make you wonder if anyone thoroughly tested it and kept in mind that the most basic functions are also those that inevitably cause the most trouble.

Of particular irritation is employment software.  I’ve seen my share of these programs and I have yet to see one that lets you explain that you work under a temporary contract for a flat rate.  Employment software makes it appear as if I have held a job for four months only and have worked for minimum wage and as if I have frequently quit my jobs.  For instance, in the past year I have had three such jobs:  I have been the marketing manager and the house manager for the children’s theatre (two months); I have been the production coordinator of the Asian festival (five months); I am presently the photographer for the concert series (five months).  There have also been various other jobs I’ve done, including acting as a casting agent for the theatre and as an executive assistant to Mr. B.

This work is impossible to explain using a software form, so I attach a letter of explanation.  This does little to improve things; I get questions about having held three jobs in one year.  One solution is to make it appear as if the contract lasted for a year, but then I have to explain how it is that I worked–presumably full time–for four cents an hour.

At the moment, I’m wrestling with software that allows you to make a slideshow with music.  This is the most basic type of video and yet I am bouncing off the software’s perimeters, unable to splice sections together and wondering how things got sectioned the way they did in the first place.  I have made, it seems, 58 different videos, each with a single picture in it.  This project reminds me of my first attempts with Photoshop, where I sloppily cut out a picture of my father’s head and placed it on top of the Colossus of Rhodes.  It took me all day to complete and I didn’t receive one word of praise for my efforts.

This latest project was my idea. I’m always trying to learn new skills, not at the expense of others.  That way, I can enjoy no pressure when it takes me two months to learn something that can be accomplished with one click.  From experience, I know the learning process is pretty slow.  I’m best using a tutorial and following someone else’s steps, which, strangely enough, is exactly opposite how I learn dance.

Here, a dance around Kanapaha, oiseaux et lapin the featured players.

BOTANICALS, LES FLEURS

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Kanapaha Botanical Gardens

I am presently at work trying to find food and craft vendors for the Asian Festival, essentially rebuilding last year’s festival from scratch.  We’ve found some wonderful new vendors that I think will help move the festival to a higher level, but I’ve also run into something new and mysterious.  I have now encountered vendors who want you to pay them.

The first I heard of this was when a restaurateur explained that since I’d invited his participation, it must have some monetary value to me.  I should pay him, he said with a straight face.  I thought he was joking, but he was dead serious and I left without his having signed a contract.  Subsequently, I ran into him in the local market and he skittered away like a crab when I mentioned that I’d be paying him another visit in the coming week.  Paying:  Bad choice of verb.

Silly me; I thought this was an anomaly, a cruel joke played upon festival coordinators by that old prankster, the Sovereign of Shit Disturbing, who has just spent his winter vexing coordinators of Renaisssance fairs in the Southeast.  Having gorged himself in good Rabelaisian fashion on gargantuan turkey legs and sweet, sick-making mead, he has reappeared to wreak momentary havoc on innocent little ethnic festivals.

I moved forward undeterred.  I am never deterred by a challenge, and rather than working out some kind of lopsided arrangement with the restaurateur, I did what I always do: I looked for a replacement or at least a solution.  Mr. B. has come up with a solution so startingly good that it solves most of the food-court issues and I am keeping my fingers crossed that we can make it work.  It is still up to me to convince, cajole and otherwise flatter people enough that they want to participate, but at least with the possible solution we would remove the problem spots.

I felt very good about Mr. B’s suggestion, but then I picked up the phone to call an importer of tiki fare whose name I had found in a directory of festival vendors.  This person, named Honda, had advertised himself as the premier importer of tiki kitsch in Florida, if not on the entire mainland.  Tiki is hot and it has been for some time; there is something about a faux-Polynesian aura that gets people very excited and I wanted it for the festival.  My own acquaintance with the allure  of the plastic lei and the Scorpion Bowl dates back to some underage drinking done at suburban Chinese restaurants outside Boston.  I still can taste cheap rum and every single deep-fat-fried item on the pu-pu platter.

Honda, as it turned out, also asked me to pay.  I said, Do you not have an ad in a directory of festival vendors?  Yes, he said, I do, but you need to hire me to appear. 

Why? I asked.  Why would I pay you to sell your merchandise?  I’m offering a platform for you to sell your merchandise and to advertise your business.  At a very reasonable fee, I might add.

Honda wouldn’t hear of such an outmoded arrangment. He wanted a direct flight, a decent hotel room, and a lifetime pass to all Gator home games. 

After this, I made a few more calls before receiving one myself, from a charming vendor who is flying into Gainesville specifically for this event and who marveled at my low fees and my willingness to make his stay as profitable and as enjoyable as possible.  I was happy to go the extra distance for this guy.  You know how it is, unfair as it seems:  For every thirty jerks there is one supremely nice guy.

I hung up the phone with the nice guy and went to swim in the pool, where I was promptly marauded by a vicious knot of pre-teens and five-year-olds who insisted on cannonballing over my head and kicking me when they swam by.  Oh, well, I said to myself, that’s five down and only 25 to go.

Here, the flowers of Kanapaha:

BOTANICALS, A NEW LEAF

I’ve gotten used to (sort of) having Mr. B. throw his hands up in annoyance.  This is a very specific gesture used in two very certain instances.  The first is when he sets off down a wooded path and I do not follow.  In this case, he walks for a quarter of a mile and turns around, only to find out that I am not tiptoeing along behind him, silent as a deer.  The second occurs when I jackrabbit off in some other direction, pulled by something shiny and bright and possibly not good for me, like a poison apple.

The gesture Mr. B. makes is semi-dramatic and involves both hands, which are flung with surprising control to about ribcage height and are then extended in a broad WTF emphasis. For all we know, poor Mr. B. was declaiming to thin air back there in the garden, perhaps giving a speech on spores that affect the common beech tree or the problems inherent in the acting of Othello, while I was off throwing odiferous pellets to bright yellow koi.

The last time Mr. B. had to throw his hands up was at our most recent visit to Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, a place notorious for attracting me away from the business at hand.  If it isn’t the koi, then it’s a bug on a stalk of bamboo or a bee inside the bell of a freesia.  I frequently suggest we go to Kanapaha; it’s a mile from my house and we have a season pass.  There is nothing like sitting inside its midnight green stands of bamboo on a blazingly hot day.

It’s also a great place to practice nature photography and to create hundreds of ruined pictures taken using the wrong ISO setting.  How I wish camera manufacturers would make it possible to view the settings under all lighting conditions! This most recent set of photographs includes a good number of fluorescent pink roses that look like lipstick on a Marseilles whore; these I have thrown out.  I am vexed about one photograph of a bee and flower; the flower is in focus and the bee is not.  I did not use a zoom for this picture and I like to keep my distance from stinging bugs, so I was not completely “in the zone” when I took this one and didn’t realize that my fat striped friend was blurry.  I’d have preferred it the other way around.

The next few days will feature the botanical photographs, all taken with a pocket camera.  It is too hot for me to go anywhere else but green.

PATCHWORK RIDES AGAIN (AND AGAIN!)

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Annie McPherson, bo diddley community plaza, Cathy DeWitt, Jolene Stone Jones, Kathy Rucker, Let's Go Downtown Free Fridays, Patchwork, Tammy Ann Murray

Patchwork was one of the very first bands I saw after moving to Gainesville from California.  They were playing at a gallery opening at The Thomas Center, something to do with the St. John’s River as I recall.  I remember leaving the event thinking that if half of Gainesville music was as good as Patchwork, then I’d hit a musical goldmine.

It turned out that Gainesville was full of the exemplary, no matter the genre.  I’ve spent the last couple of years trying to figure out why this is and I still have no answer;  after all, Gainesville is a small Southern city defined mostly by a football team and it has no nationally famous recording studios or landmark clubs.  Concert tours pass us by and although we have some famous legacy musicians, there is nothing on the map that would explain the phenomenon.

It must be something in the water, or in the air, or in the tradition of regional music.  It’s probably the last; the South in general has spawned any number of well-known bands and musicians whose sound derives from the musical melting pot that simmers south of the Mason Dixon and in particular in and around the Deep South.  This is what I first noticed about Patchwork when I saw them that day in 2008:  They, like many other local bands, draw heavily from regional  roots.  That means bluegrass, folk, R & B, country, what I will inelegantly refer to as swamp music, and, in the case of Patchwork, uptown swing.

The second thing I noticed was some incredible voices that soared and shimmered with gorgeously arranged harmonies.  Jolene Stone Jones’s voice has the clarity and sparkle of a top-grade diamond, while Cathy DeWitt’s sound and phrasing alternate rootsy and sophisticated; listen to her on the Duke Ellington classic “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing”) and you could swear you were in a Hollywood cabaret in the 1930s. Here, Cathy’s all urbane polish, but then you hear her on the celebratory (and self-penned) “My Heart Belongs to Florida” and she’s back to the native sound, with a voice as golden as a Florida summer sunrise.  Janet Rucker sounds like one of those actresses who can really sing (she has, in fact, acted professionally) and who make you wish you were half as well-piped, and Tammy Murray is not just the “Intergalactic Banjo Goddess”  but a person of such astounding talents that you just stare, slack-jawed.  Tammy is an award-winning musician–a virtuouso really–whose abilities make you think that a higher authority must have ensured that Tammy was born with a banjo in her hand.

Rounding out the band is “relative newcomer” Annie McPherson, a smallish woman who plays a big stand-up bass and whose instrument is the anchor of the band’s sound.  She makes that bossy-looking instrument look easy to play, almost as if you could pick it up and play it yourself, which you know is utterly impossible.

You might get the idea that Patchwork comprises superb singers with excellent musical skills (interpretation is also a skill) and this would be as true as statement as you could make.  But what truly sets Patchwork apart is the rapport among its members and a very visceral and infectious joie de vivre and sense of humor.  They’re polished without being slick, which is very hard to pull off without looking contrived.  They are all stars in their own firmament, which is also hard to pull off in a band with so many supremely talented members.

Patchwork calls what it does “Girl Grass,” which just about covers it.  This is a description whose simplicity is mirrored in the simplicity of Patchwork’s music.  It’s my opinion that much of modern music is overwritten and overperformed and otherwise treated about as lightly as a boulder.  Patchwork’s ease and gentle treatments remind me of the work of Christine McVie (Fleetwood Mac), a singer-songwriter who knew how to resist the furbelow and let the music and voice speak for themselves.  The music is personal and the easy rapport between members draws the listener right in.  You feel as if you are in their living room, listening to them tell tales of rivers and streams and wildlife and parks that just happen to be set to music.  Each member is a superlative storyteller and their collective love for the region is very apparent.

It was my pleasure to photograph Patchwork as they played Friday at the Bo Diddley Community Plaza in Gainesville; what follows are a series of pictures I intended as portraits. It’s too easy to just do a group shot and call it a day; most of the time such work tells you nothing.  Before heading to the concert, I decided to try to create close-up portraits of the girls that capture their personalities and spirits.  It was the most analytical work I’d done yet, and I think I succeeded. My other goal was to let you listen to the music through my photography.

You can visit Patchwork at their Web site (where you can also buy a CD and check out their schedule).  The site seems to be down at the time of this writing, but I am hoping it is back up shortly.

Tammy Ann Murray in front of the Plaza sign.

Jolene Stone Jones

Janet Rucker

Annie McPherson

Cathy DeWitt

ST. AUGUSTINE PHOTOSHOPPED

Tags

St. Augustine, Travel

A couple of years ago, I was flipping through a magazine that used its last page as a photography showcase.  I forget the name of the magazine, but I remember the photo; it showed a door in a wall in St. Augustine, about which the photographer wrote that he came across the door by accident and felt that it spoke to him artistically.  The photo was superbly composed and tonally resonant and it was obviously taken by a very talented practitioner.

I came across a similar door–or perhaps it was the door–while walking around St. Augustine on the Fourth of July.  The photo in the magazine reappeared in my imagination; I recall being struck by the photograph and by the walled garden to which it led. I took a series of my own photographs, none of which achieved the desired effect.  My door looks plain and the one in the magazine looked inviting and mysterious, as if contained within it was a secret or a romantic caprice hidden to those who ambled unknowingly by.

The door in the photograph was closed and the door I found was open, which led to the first of the amateur’s mistakes.  I have the door less of a focus than what lay within the garden, and most of my photos were at a tilt.  This problem of plane is a consistent one with me.  If you saw my rejects, you would be convinced that one of my legs is much shorter than the other; either that or I see the world at a slant.  This is probably the most likely explanation, since I square off when taking pictures as if I am shooting a .44.  Shooting pictures is much the same as shooting guns. 

In order to render my photograph remotely purposeful, I resorted to modern technology:  I Photoshopped it.  I am, as usual, trying to learn a software without reading any instructions about it.  This is the same way I assemble particle-board shelving and improvements are made in fits and starts. I went on to Photoshop each photograph in this post, with mixed results.  My biggest issue is that I am not patient and that there is no quality control or sense of caution.  I also color outside the lines.  This tendency is leftover from childhood and I don’t suppose I will ever truly be rid of it, even as I have apparently outgrown a desire to color all faces purple.

Today’s post is a tentative beginning for my new series, “Other People’s Pictures.”  Every now and again, I will post pictures that other people have posed. I take these sneakily and without any sense of composition.  This is because I don’t want to be too obvious about it. The world is that weird now that people taking pictures of other people’s pictures might be cause for alarm.  The results will be nothing short of spectacularly banal.

I have to say that I come from easily frustrated stock and because of this I feel that I have grown by great leaps and bounds.  I seem to have inherited a total lack of interest in things mechanical and a low tolerance for anything mathematical.  I also cannot draw despite the fact that my head is full of politically exciting and subversive cartoons.  I used to restrict myself only to writing; the photography is both departure and distraction from the business of pitching articles that will never get published.

The following photos are a slumgullion of the St. Augustine experience, and I can’t claim to have seen it all.  I have also inherited a tendency to rush in as if storming a fort and then leaving as if someone is firing back.

I’m not so sure this is the door I saw in the magazine.  I seem to recall that the door in the magazine was arched.  In any event, this door led to a courtyard whose steps led up to a small boutique.  Don’t ask me what Photoshop tricks I employed to bring out the details.  It was the product of pure experimentation, not academic knowledge.

I found this tabby wall somewhat away from the main tourist section.  A tabby wall is constructed of oyster shells.  A marker reads:  

“The wall left of this plaque extending 15′ west is the only known example of a colonial tabby wall in St. Augustine. It has been covered to preserve and protect it. The end of the wall was left exposed to show its construction.”

Tabby houses comprised 39% of the structures in the city in 1763 at the end of the first Spanish period. By 1788 only 5% remained.

Tabby, made of whole oyster shells, is the equivalent of modern poured concrete.”

Note the Moorish aesthetic of the Wachovia building, built in 1927-28.

Here comes the tourist trolley! Please shoot me if I ever board one.

I have no idea why I took this picture.  There must have been some reason, but whatever it was is not evident here.

I love photographing the Stars and Stripes, especially with a bit of wind for movement. 

Pet parade.

If you’re going to busk, better have a good place to drop a buck.  A tambourine will no longer cut it.  Only in Florida.  (Aside:  The most memorable busking moment was at Chiswick Park Tube station in London.  The station was built in the early thirties.  I’d gotten off the train to go to a supermarket and when I returned I jumped the turnstile; the station was unattended.  I walked up to the platform and sat on one of the wooden slat benches and nodded off, my bag of Ribena and alco-pops and roast-chicken crisps at my feet.  Some time later, the train arrived and I boarded, to be greeted by a grubby young musician playing “Norwegian Wood” on an acoustic guitar.  This made me want to move to England immediately.  I still do, but I figure I have a lot of Crackerdom still to crack.)

Inside the walled garden. Perfection. Things like this also make me want to move to Savannah.

I firmly believe that environment inspires or inhibits creativity.

The best thing about this garden was that it wasn’t neat.  I also firmly believe in a bit of sloppiness.

I have no luck growing things.  Not even ferns.  I adore gardenias, especially Southern gardenias with their rotted, indolic, and mushroomy smell, but they are as bitchy about the rain as I am about the sun.

I’ve decided to hold off on my newest feature until I gather some more photographs.  Therefore, there will be a delay in posting “Other People’s Pictures.”