Category: Art/Photography (Page 3 of 7)

The “Hemphill Girls” of the Mississippi HIll Country

rosaleehillThese ladies, Rosa Lee Hill, Jessie Mae Hemphill, and Ada Mae Anderson, come from a long line of musicians.  They were all taught to play by their father and or grandfather.  When George Mitchell arrived in Mississippi he was introduced to Rosa Lee and her niece, Jessie Mae at Fred McDowell’s house.  He couldn’t believe he was meeting Rosa Lee Hill and asked if he could record her.  She tells him not tonight but then invites him to her house in a few days and maybe then.

Rosa Lee Hill was born in Panola County in 1911 and her father was Sid Hemphill.  Sid was a popular  jessiemaehemphillbrooksmusician in the Senatobia area.  He played every night to make money for his family and taught all of them to play too.  Rosa Lee began playing guitar at age seven and was  playing parties with other family members by the age of ten.  Jessie Mae was Rosa Lee’s sisters child and as soon as she was old enough was taught to play guitar by her grandfather, Sid.  She soon though started to beat the snare drum with some of the Fife and Drum bands that played at the picnics around the area.  Ada Mae Anderson was the daughter of Sid’s brother, George Hemphill,  she played with the Hemphill clan when she was young but also sang in a female gospel band.  Jessie Mae is probably the most well known of the adamaeanderson“Hemphill Girls” having collaborated on many albums and touring Europe and being featured in the documentary Deep Blues.  There is no doubt that the Hemphill Clan was an important and vital part of the history of the MS Hill Country Music history.

 

 

For your listening pleasure…Rosa Lee Hill singing Bullying Well.  This was recorded in Como, MS in 1967.

 

 

Othar Turner

 

otharturnerWhile Othar Turner was born in Rankin County, MS in 1907 he lived the majority of his life in Gravel Springs near to Como and Senatobia.  He grew up going to fife and drum gatherings and by watching other players he soon learned how to build and blow a cane fife of his own.  He often was seen playing drums with Napoleon Strickland’s band and when he was too ill to play Turner started his own band.  Turner upheld the tradition of the fife and drum until his death in 2003.  Sharde Thomas, Othar Turners granddaughter, was 12 years old when he passed away.  She took up the fife blowing in the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps and continues to do so.

This is what Othar Turner says about how he learned to play music…

I started on a tin tub. Beat it with sticks. Take my hand and beat that drum and take me some sticks and went to doing just what the next fellow doing.  Practiced and practiced till I got my right lick.  Not just pecking on the drum, you got to play tunes on the drum.  That’s right. So I learned ’em.  I started playing on the tin tub when I was fifteen years old, and when I started playing the drum, I was seventeen.

And I learnt myself to blow the fice {fife}.

So I got me a cane and got me a nail.  Just plain cane.  Started to boring my holes; I couldn’t make none out of that.  so I went and got me a thick piece of wire and put in the stove to  burn the holes in there.  My mama then come: “Get out of the way, boy! What you doing?” I said, “I”m trying to make me a fice.”  “Oh, you ain’t going make you no fice. You don’t know how to make a fice.”  I said, ” Mama, I’m going make me a fice. I’m going learn how to blow this cane.” I learnt.

Othar Turner’s Rising Star Fife & Drum band (Turner, fife; G.D. Young, bass drum; E.P. Burton, snare; Eddie Ware, snare) playing a picnic at Othar’s farm. Shot by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long in Gravel Springs, Mississippi, August 1978.

Mississippi Fred McDowell

fredmcdowellWhile Fred McDowell was born in Tennessee, he lived most of his life in Como, Mississippi.  He is considered one of the ‘elder statesmen’ of the Hill Country and during the 60’s was the most well known outside of the area.  He began playing guitar at a young age for picnics and house parties and in 1959 Alan Lomax recorded him.  While he did play an electric guitar, McDowell always insisted that “I do not play no rock n’ roll.”  He passed away in 1972 just a few years after meeting George Mitchell.

When George Mitchell decided to make the trip to MS he called some friends for some leads to go about finding these “unknown” blues musicians.  He was given Fred McDowell’s name and told that he lived somewhere around Como.  He and his wife, Cathy, headed south hit I-55 and took Exit 52 and pulled into a Stuckeys to get some gas. George decides to ask the attendant if he knows McDowell and he says yes….

Do you know where I can find him? I ask.

You’re looking at him.

I’m taken aback. The first man we meet in Mississippi is Fred McDowell?! Damn! And he works in a service station?!

Mitchell tells McDowell what they are doing in MS, that they want to interview and record some unkown blues musicians from the area and Fred says that shouldn’t be a problem.  He then invites them to his house where he promises to have some folks for them to meet.  The rest as they say is history.

Mississippi Fred McDowell—Going Down to the River

Spark: How Creativity Works

sparkSpark is a collection of essays about how real life and creativity collide, revealed through many conversations on Studio 360, the fastest growing show in Public Radio International’s history. Artists, filmmakers, architects, sound engineers, writers and musicians share their experiences of creating solutions out of adversity, incorporating family and home life into their work, growing in creative partnerships, and how they get to work, start again and understand when a creative effort is actually finished.

Ulf Andersen Portrait - Richard FordOne of the writers featured in Spark is one with whom Mississippians are familiar: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford. The foundation for Ford’s creativity began in childhood out of adversity. As a child, Ford never dreamed of becoming a novelist; he rarely even read as he struggled with dyslexia. Reading out loud turned out to be faster than reading silently and as a result he became acutely aware of the sounds and rhythms of language as he lingered over sentences and eventually began to write his own stories. When he was writing The Lay of the Land, Ford and his wife, Kristina, took turns reading passages aloud to each other, discussing melody and meaning of the lines. Ford says: “I feel like if I don’t read things aloud, I don’t really fully authorize them. I have to hear everything, hear what every sentence sounds like. I write so somebody will read what I write.”

Spark is a delightful book to pack in your bag as you travel this summer. From Richard Ford to Roseanne Cash to Kevin Bacon to the collaboration of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, Spark illuminates the creative life and inspires. You will also learn the story of how Studio 360 became such a successful show despite some of its key players having no radio experience. I’ll leave you with the wisdom of Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, a great inspiration for Studio 360 host Kurt Anderson: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

Spark: How Creativity Works by Julie Burstein, foreword by Kurt Anderson, $14.99

Maddie’s On All the Things

Well dang! That pretty girl named Maddie is up for preorder over on Amazon 

It’s finally here– a whole book full of pictures of Maddie on Things! For those of you unaware of what this is or how it started, a little history: Theron Humphrey, a photographer on a mission to photograph 365 people in 365 days all across the country needed a travel buddy. Enter Maddie the coon hound, an adopted and adorably passive looking canine with freckles like a baby deer. She’s precious and there is no other word for it. While feeling particularly American on his road trip, he placed Maddie on top of his truck to capture beast and machine at their finest– and she stayed! No leaping, rowdy shenanigans from this speckled girl.

“I was like, okay, what else would she stand on?” Humphrey said, “Will she stand on this trash can? Will she stand on the fire hydrant? It just grew and snowballed from there.” Humphrey has been photographing Maddie for quite some time now and posting the pictures on his website, which I have been ravenously following since I first stumbled across an almost painfully cute picture of a dog wearing a “ghost costume”. This dog has the patience of Job and we have been assured is safe at all times and is given a multitude of treats after every picture.

Halloween costume: option 2

I’m so very very excited that there is now a concrete collection of the best of these pictures that I can grab off of my coffee table whenever I’m feeling blue. And here’s the thing– these pictures aren’t cheesy stock pet photos that you might find on a calendar in a dentist’s office. The subject is smushably cute, yes, but there is a lot of artistry in these pictures. Craft+a coonhound= I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT. I have to stop typing and just show you guys pictures. Probably way too many pictures.

Boise, ID

This happened.

Austin, TX #sxsw

Brooklyn, NY

Taking to higher ground in Pittsburgh, PA

We’re going on tour! We are pumped to meet ya’ll! RSVP over on www.maddieontour.com - We are making over 40 stops all over the ole USA + Canada. The tour kicks off 3/8 in AustinYou can pre-order the book on Amazon: Maddie on Things OR support your local indie bookstore!(do you follow us on Instagram? hear more about this image and our adventure over there: @ThisWildIdea)

Had a blast today KC! Thank you for being a friend

Here’s the man himself with the dog herself

 

 

Seeking the Cure: Get Out of those Downton Abbey Blues (Because Deventon Abbey Rules)

Sometimes the world gets too intense, boring, weird or any other thing the world gets too much of. When these things become readily apparent in our every day lives, we like to take a little vacation, to get away from the intensities of existence, the vicissitudes that are intrinsic to being human.

dThere are three forms of escapism: TV, Literature, and Hard Drugs. Watching the telly gives many a people great satisfaction and it’s the most accessible form of “getting away”. Turn it on and become an automaton. Literature requires much more <work> but induces a far superior stupor than television and generally the escape made is very well received. Hard Drugs produce a complete escape from reality, one is left thoroughly <gone> and without <work>. The draw to this is undeniable, but the plunge back into reality can be quite harsh, leaving the user only wanting more. Burn out is probable, and often it is the TV/Lit user that is left to maintain the physical state of the reality blasted HD user. You will become a wretch most like. Burnout is inevitable and your TV/Lit friends will leave you. So, in summation the best and safest forms of escape are indeed TV and Literature, of which literature is the triumphant winner.

But sometimes, even for us Lit users, the allure of the automaton is just too great, and you sit down, turn on the television, flip around, nothing, open up Netflix, look around, “Oh, here’s this show I’ve been hearing about, Downtown, no, Downton Abbey? Yeah… I wonder what it’s like? Let’s try it.”

So, now you’re trapped! Ensnared! Unwittingly you have watched Downton Abbey, and found it not to be what it claims to be, viz. television. You thought you were going to be watching TV, become an automaton, but what was up with all the emotions you were made to feel? The Anxiety. And what was up with the overwhelming sense of DREAD, is that not what you were trying to escape in the first place? It was, but now by means of trickery you are in a dual reality. You must deal with your life, as before, but now you’ve got to worry about a whole host of rich folks and the scurrying servants that live and snuggle and fight and kiss and plot beneath fthem! But how have they hooked you, it’s just a television show, right? No.

Here I propose that by powers unknown, wizry, voodoo, magic, whatever you want to call it, you have been given, under the guise of <just TV> , Hard Drugs. People, I warned you earlier, burnout is inevitable, your friends will leave you – you will crash and burn. If you continue on this path, you will not live to see another episode of the spectacle that has become yourlife. Oh despair! But, what if I told you there is a way out, and, for you that have been spent and used up by this show (Hard Drugs), there is still hope!

gatesAGENT GATES AND THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF DEVENTON ABBEY (A PARODY) is your antidote! This is a graphic novel that totally erases the long lasting effects of using Downton. It’s a miracle worker! It’s as if you’ve never been touched by Matthew’s back injury (he couldn’t have babies for heaven’s sake!) or Edith’s wedding day abandonment (that jerk!). Whoa! Just talking about those events makes me need to escape them. Good thing I’ve got AGENT GATES AND THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF DEVENTON ABBEY (A PARODY). This graphic novel is so funny! It had me laughing again! I hadn’t laughed since Bates was accused of stealing Richard’s cuff links. I was freed by it, and so can you! Having trouble sleeping after O’Brien killed Cora’s baby (Oh GOD kill that pickle curl headed woman now!)? I’m not, because I have escaped my dual reality with AGENT GATES AND THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF DEVENTON ABBEY (A PARODY).

Come by Lemuria today and get your cure for only 14.99 USD, a  mere pittance for it’s potency!

Not Your Everyday Coffee Table Books

Story Teller by Tim Walker

If you were to judge any book at all by its cover, it should be this one. Story Teller is an amazingly unique photo book that is just as whimsical and eerie as the cover would suggest. Photographer Tim Walker takes fashion and portrait photography to an exciting new place by shooting his subjects (You’ll recognize a few of the subjects- Tilda Swinton and her unforgettably creepy face pops up all over the book) in imaginative and sometimes frightening dream-like sequences that tell an amazing story. I was reminded several times of Lewis Carroll’s imagery while I was flipping through it and got that same prickly feeling as when I read Through the Looking Glass for the first time. A definite must buy for those who aren’t content with your blah-de-blah every day coffee table book.

Murals and Portraits by Richard Avedon

In quintessential Avedon fashion, the brilliant photo collection Murals and Portraits is both shocking while being utterly honest and beautiful at the same time. The photos are grouped into four sections: Avedon’s work with Warhol and the members of the Factory, the series covering Alan Ginsberg and his family, the Chicago Seven war activists, and the photos that were taken during Avedon’s first and only trip to Vietnam in 1971. I find it a little hard to fit a description of this book into just a paragraph because of the range of emotion that fills it’s pages. Jumping from the shocking and strangely effortless pictures taken of Warhol and the members of the factory to the weirdly stand-offish and cold portraits of mangled war victims somehow works, although it feels like it shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the beauty of Richard Avedon’s work though, showing history as it really happened: good and bad, all happening at the same time.

Vivian Maier

If you ever wondered what kind of photos Mary Poppins would have taken, these are it. Especially if she lived in mid-century Manhattan, never made enough money to make rent, and didn’t have a magical umbrella to spirit her away.

A professional care-giver and nanny, Vivian Maier remained an undiscovered street photographer until her death in 2009. It wasn’t until a locker, containing hundreds of thousands of negatives, was auctioned, that her art came to light.

Rolls of undeveloped film.

 

 

 

 

 

Vivian Maier spent most of her life in Chicago and New York. She never studied art, instead she relied on her experience to educate her. We don’t know much about her life, but her photographs, some taken years before Diane Arbus became a household name, are a haunting portrait of post-World War II America.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

by John Maloof, 2011

“Vivian Maier represents an extreme instance of posthumous discovery; of someone who exists entirely in terms of what she saw” –Geoff Dyer

Poetry + Comics = Love

On Sunday, I made an amazing discovery (I’m not sure how I’ve missed it so long)–poetry comics exist.

I know how this sounds–Batman quoting sonnets while fighting evil in Gotham city–but I promise you, the comics of Bianca Stone are deeply moving words and pictures working together. And no super heroes make an appearance. (not yet, anyway)

Bianca Stone’s blog is packed with images in various stages of completeness, including an inside look at the drawings behind Anne Carson and Bianca Stone’s book, Antigonick–a retelling of Sophocles’ Antigone. (Anne Carson translated, Bianca Stone illustrated). Antigonick is beautiful–Bianca’s drawings are printed on semi-transparent paper, bound intermittenly. The verse is arranged like a free-form poem and spreads across the page. The book follows the story of Antigone pretty closely, though it does vere off course every once and awhile (I doubt Kreon discussed Hegel in the original), but the modernization of the text only adds to the depth of the story.

 

In other news:

Today, we got a box. Inside the box are small bound books in all sizes. Each of the small books tells the story of one of the inhabitants in a Chicago townhouse (one book is the story of a bumble-bee who lives in the hive on the building).

 

 

 

 

I had been anxiously awaiting Chris Ware’s new graphic novel, Building Stories, but I had no idea it was going to be like this. This is not the comic book hero graphic novel you bought every week when you were a kid. This the grown-up version. The characters (all women, except for the bee) seem to be trapped mid-existential crisis.

The sheer size of this book/box (it’s about the size of your Monopoly box) is enough to scare even the most adventurous reader, but really, its just a collection of short stories. Plus, its all pictures!

The Principles of Uncertainty

A few weeks ago in Chicago, I saw a wonderful Roy Lichtenstein exhibit at the Art Institute. It was arranged roughly chronologically, each room both a different stage and style in Lichtenstein’s work and a deeper, novel-like exploration of the artist himself. You never know when you’re going to have a unique experience of the art like that when you’re going into a museum or a new exhibit. And I had no idea that I’d have one when a friend scooted this quirky little book across a table towards me.

People just love Maira Kalman’s illustrations. I told Kelly that I was reading this book (it took about a day), and she got so excited to show me Michael Pollan’s book, Food Rules, in which he and Kalman collaborated for an illustrated version of his popular, no-nonsense, list of back-to-basics rules about eating that is a lovely read—or just good for the curb appeal and approachability of the art. Here is Kelly’s November blog post about that book. People have already bought two of them since we put them on display near the front desk about a week ago.

This is a case of an artist who knows her medium so well because she’s put in her ten thousand hours, the requisite amount of time that Malcolm Gladwell famously explores in Outliers. This is also one of those exciting cases in which the artist was born outside of the U.S., and has a hint of that untraceable sensibility that the rest of us can sniff out at page one. It makes for some of my favorite art, visual and of the written type. Kalman’s style is to intertwine hand-painted illustration and an episodic storyline (hand-written signature font) to patiently share her detail-oriented and gracious perspective on all things earthly. The key element here is empathy. It is shameless compassion with which she paints the way people wear hats, the funny piece of paper that she finds on the sidewalk, or a bowl of berries fed to her by an aging friend.

Her illustrations for other books shine with this empathy, but this one stands apart because it is a kind of memoir, with each observation reflecting back on the story of the author herself. It reminds me a little of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in that sense. This is a book in which we are graciously invited to try on Maira Kalman’s eyeballs and see her person, her history, and her suffering. Somehow I found a way to personally connect my own feelings of uncertainty having just graduated from college with hers about life around age 58. And isn’t that sort of exactly what we’re digging for when we pick up any book?
 

Visit Kalman’s New York Times blog for a sampling of her work. It contains a year’s worth of a column she wrote about democracy in America at kalman.blogs.nytimes.com.

The Principles of Uncertainty, Maira Kalman, Penguin Books, $20

by Whitney

 

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