paleo, orphaned

Here is the poster joe and I collaborated on for PALEO's upcoming End-of-the-Song-Diary Show in DC. For the last 351 days Paleo has criss-crossed the country and each day has written and recorded an original song and released it on his website. That's right. By April 15 there will be 365 songs. And they're good. We were very much looking forward to contributing artwork to advertise for the show, but unfortunately due to some miscommunication this poster will not be used. It is an orphan.

memory

BIRMINGHAM 1982
by Maria Taylor
from the album 11:11 on Saddlecreek Records

Dinner call in the late afternoon
The sun step down for the moon
Story books, nightlights
And I still remember songs
Piano sing-alongs
And the colored sounds of spring
Its harmony
Do you still remember?
Fireflies, four-leaf clovers
Fingerpainted skin
Where life was a reaction
And love was just laughing with a friend

Down out in the backyard stream
Make a wish for your dream
Maybe a kiss maybe a ring
And I still remember songs
The banjo sing-alongs
And the crisp sound of fall
I still recall
Do you still remember?

Flashlights under covers
Raindrops on my tongue
When life had no distractions
And love wasn't hurting anyone

Fireflies, four-leaf clovers
Fingerpainted skin
We don't know where we're going
We'll get nowhere if we've forgotten where we've been

gerard lange

When thinking about romance and memory and the landscape, one of the first photographers that comes to mind is Gerard Lange. Not only is Gerard a long time close friend, but he is an incredibly talented photographer with a unique vision - one with an ability to turn the everyday into beauty and the overlooked into the significant with a nuanced sensitivity and distinct style which allows him to illustrate the collective conscious with a delicate touch of light.

Go see his pictures at GERARDLANGE.COM

Here is a picture Gerard made upon a visit to DC last year. Thats me in the middle.

Its in the trees

Last week I attended a screening of a film about Sally Mann and her five part photographic project, "What Remains." The first time I saw "What Remains," a beautiful group of photographs on death and memory and the southern landscape, was at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. The gallery is a little converted cottage on a wooded street nestled in the heart of the city, and despite its busy surroundings it is a silent place where the only sounds are the creaks and pops and scuffing sounds the hardwood floor makes as patrons walk in the small rooms and under the gabled passages of the space. I'd like to paint the memory of this particular visit as one made during a typical southern day - hot, oppressingly humid, quiet, with the sun just in that certain position in the sky where it punches orange and yellow blazing beams through the thick canopy of leaves in the trees. But I can’t really say it was that way. I have no real recollection of the time of the year, only an impression that was made more by place and image than anything else. And that’s the thing about great pictures - they can generate or supplant feeling, replace memories, or act as markers of memories that you might have never remembered in the first place.

So goes Sally Mann's work. It manages to express a sense of loss without explicitly communicating what was lost, and defines a place in a way that a fuzzy memory makes a place you hardly know feel like home. Mann's pictures hold a tangible, yet invisible, weight and sing the sweet romance and melancholy of the southern gothic. She says, "When I am in the pastures making my own images it is the light that leads into suspended time. The photographs created there in that oneiric warp embrace time and memory and become the still point at which they intersect. As always, that stillness brings longing and a dizzying, time-unraveling spiral into the radical light of the American South." During the film, and again following the screening during a Q&A, Mann said, "as a southerner you're given the freedom to be romantic," and I like that. I'm not quite sure who gave her the power to make such a decree, but I really liked hearing a validated, successful artist free up an avenue leading away from all the years of heady art school critiques and cold postmodern criticism and towards something that is so much more natural. Romance is part of this southern boy, just as its part of the southern landscape, and I think its time to make some art that reflects it.

coast to coast

Here, a marvelous collaboration and our first national tour poster:



for more on the band, go THROUGH THE SPARKS

Baker

Today, a transformation was realized. I have become a true Washingtonian.

Whilst riding my bike home from the office with tie still tied, perfect dimple still in place under a perfectly triangled half-windsor knot, i had an exciting celebrity sighting. Somewhere along Pennsylvania Ave, maybe around 12th Street, I saw James A. Baker. He was crossing Penn, alone, and talking on his cell. I craned my neck to look backward as I passed him, slowing my speed to get as long a glimpse as possible, then was forced to swerve to keep from colliding with a parked Chevy. What made seeing Mr. Baker even more exciting is the fact that I had just spent last Saturday night listening to his "10 Maxims for U.S. Foreign Policy" speech as it was broadcast from the Library of Congress on CSPAN radio. That's right friends, this time last year I was bemoaning periwinkle nooses, and now I'm spending my Saturday nights at home alone with CSPAN radio broadcasts of foreign policy addresses. Oh, how life changes.

And Joe, so you know, James A. Baker is a former Secretary of State and was Ronald Reagan's Chief of Staff. Last year he was the co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, and he's got more cool than Chris Cornell.

posta!

apes and apes

all day today there has been debate over which poster design to submit for the upcoming APES show in b'ham. I like both, but thats because I made them. Which do you prefer? In the left corner, Cheeky Chimpanzee in the blue and red trunks, and in the right corner, Gritty Gorilla in the grey trunks with the red trim. Come out swinging!





i need a banana.