Still Bill meets Salinger

Still Bill Trailer from B-Side Entertainment on Vimeo.

"Not everything is gonna make your socks roll up and down," Bill Withers told me and approximately 50 other people last night at the IFC after a viewing of the documentary about the "Ain't No Sunshine" man, called Still Bill. Most people don't know Bill by name; just by the music he wrote and sang. Probably because not only did he not really dig the spotlight all that much, but he hasn't released anything since 1985. So, as I was taking my first few breaths, Bill's musical career was taken its last.

That's not to say he isn't still producing anything. Bill calls on his "old friend fear" for one of the reasons he hasn't made anything new. And in the aftermath of seeing this documentary, and with JD Salinger's death today, I have to ask...is this what made Salinger hide in Cornish NH this whole time too? Or was it just to create romantic myths to liberal arts English majors everywhere about him and his shot gun and his reclusive rocking chair life?

Regardless, what do you do when you've created a masterpiece? Where do you go from there? After you write Ain't No Sunshine or Catcher in the Rye, and it's received as well as they were, what's the next step? Do you feel pride or just like a big..fat..phony?

All I know is whoever now owns the rights to JD's stuff better be smart about it. You know Hollywood already has 5 sunglassed douchebags pulling up to Cornish. They've been waiting.

Juliet, Naked

High Fidelity is in my top five movies. I think this scene alone made me fall in love and never look back. So when I saw Nick Hornby had a new novel out, I picked it up right away. And...5 months later, I finished it. Half the time I imagined a slightly older and unshaven John Cusack narrating it. Maybe because the main plot revolves around a musician, or maybe because Hornby continueously has that same mocking-bemoaning yourself thing going on in all of his books. Regardless, I enjoyed it, and was kind of disheartened when I looked up some reviews today and saw mostly Spark-note critiques that involved the plot summary and not much more. I was hoping to read more about Hornby, rather than the book I had just finished. He's developed some sort of pattern at this point, and I guess I had assumed the NYTimes had some expert that could tell me more about that. Maybe I just naively expected Hornby to write his own review.

Word Art

I recently stared at a Mel Bochner piece I had never seen before for awhile last week. As much as I gave the Kraus Campo crap when I was at CMU, there is something about an artistic venture that involves words that makes me happy. Maybe it stems with my fascination of quotations. I used to look up quotes to every movie I saw and highlight the best lines of books, type them up and print them out. So, when I see actual made-by-their-hands street art with words, my heart aches. My favorite of all time was in an alley in Pittsburgh that read, "Graffiti is Watching You." I never got a photo of it, after all the times I walked by there. But after a recent trip to NOLA, and finding an especially great quote written on a wall (see photo on left), my dormant passion for this specific graffiti motivated me to go into my photo archives and pull a few others out.

"If you want sympathy, you'll find it between shit n syphillis in the dictionary"

I'm not sure whether it's the harsh quote itself, the fantastical ideas I have about the person who wrote it, the pete sticker or cougar paw, probably there much before, or the great shadow dragging across it; but I love it dearly.




Past CEO's Sleep on Park Benches, Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh, PA



















Love Notes on a Cactus, Agrigento, Sicilia, Italy









Being in love is the most glorious two and a half
days of your life, Strip District, Pittsburgh, PA














La belleza es tu cabez, (the beauty is your head) Roma, Italy

Sixty40

TV1: Beach from sixty40 on Vimeo.

Loving the Sixty40 studio and all they do. Reminds me of when my good friend Rachel used to make her Pepperidge Farm Goldfish duke it out.

Primero

It took some time and coaxing but I am finally attempting the blog. I will try to avoid telling you what I ate for breakfast, and focus more on things that I see and learn that are neat and funky. Maybe I'll share some of my own writing and photography as well. Warning: Some days I am creative and witty; other days I am sordid and sour. Enjoy both!

-E

First suggestion: Check out 'Its Nice That.' Specifically a zine they just published titled "If Drawings were Photographs."