Around & About, In & Out of It
Around & About, In & Out of It
More Advertisement for Myself
Keen-eyed readers of the cover above (Scottish Society for the History of Photography’s fall/winter issue, wouah! that’s a mouthful) may see the name Kertész and tease out the connection : notes that appeared here over a year ago blossomed into an essay that appeared there. I’m not sure where the magazine is available outside Scotland (their site is largely pay) but any reader who wants it can write me at jgprop55@protonmail.com for a pdf.
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First draft of another look at French presidential politics, published yesterday, neglected the one truly canine candidate in the field, a politican relatively easy to manage provided you take him out for a walk twice a day and let him bark at strangers. Sound familiar ? Isn’t that what we’re doing with the real ones ? In any case, Justice for Douglas contacted me and the article has been emended.
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Part of my completely unacceptable absence from Riffs (although you all seem to have held up quite well) has been in getting a new music program off the ground on Radio Olympiades here in the City of Light and Wavelengths. Pulsations, cohosted by the man responsible for keeping time in the Goutte D’Or and elsewhere, bassist Tommy Lee MacKenzie, is Jazz with tentacles stretching out to Other Musics along the way. So far we’ve recorded three programs, all with themes (the first, a current playlist of jazz; second, the Women of Jazz, which aired last night at 8pm Europe-time; and third, Pals, a tribute to two players who spent a fair share of time in and out of Paris : Don Cherry and Bobby Few. (A great Terry Riley-Don Cherry duet on program 3 if I say so myself.)
Always great sounds to catch, and easy to find : radioolympiades.fr
with our programs available on their soundcloud hub : https//soundcloud.com/radioolympiades/sets/possession
That’s a laugh, since we started out calling it Pulsations and now it’s somehow Possession. Zombie movie vibe ! The conversation is en français et en anglais, we murder French elegantly, but in any case, le belle langue seems to recover from our onslaught. Possession ! The engineer must be listening to a lot of early Doctor John.
This is real community radio, one guy’s hustle to make a difference in the place where he lives. It still happens, folks.
Olympiades you may know from the recent Audiard film of the same name dedicated to the lives of a clutch of young folks growing up in the maze of most un-Paris-like highrises, with an enormous dalle (flat, wind-swept open space but the word is flexible…) connecting the apartment buildings, with names like Squaw Valley. (Kid you not.) Fascinating place, with a great library named after the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville at the entrance. Just to punish Eric the engineer for screwing up the name (who cares?), here’s a long exposure portrait I took of him in Olympiades in January. He can’t stand it.
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Here’s Etienne Marcel, Paris’ civic patron saint, the man who inspired the lines “I’ll shout and scream and kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants,” who in 1356 led the uprising against the dauphin Charles, one of the earliest checks on royal power. Here he’s giving the hazy early March moon a look over. Took the photo on my way back from the nightly gathering of homeless people, Place Baudoyer, where coffee, tea and a bit of cake are available for those hardy souls. I’ve written about it before but I should write more.
See ya @ !