John Edwin Mason: Documentary, Motorsports, Photo History

"One Love, Ghoema Beat: Inside the Cape Town Carnival"

I've created a website for my book, One Love, Ghoema Beat:  Inside the Cape Town Carnival.  It's published, in South Africa, by Random House Struik and, elsewhere, by the University of Virginia Press.  An audio/video preview of the book is the star attraction on the site.

Soulful Sunday: Duke Ellington, "Come Sunday," Barbara Bruckmueller Big Band

One of the happiest things that happened to me in 2011 was being introduced to the music of Barbara Bruckmüller.  Barbara is a young Austrian composer, arranger, and conductor who's been leading a big band in Vienna for the last several years.  She's been following two related paths -- reimaging the music of jazz greats and her developing own funkified, rocked-out sounds.  I wish I'd stumbled across her sooner.

This reworking of Duke Ellington's great hymn is terrific.  I love it.  I bet that you will, too.

 

 

Come Sunday:  Written by Duke Ellington / arranged by Barbara Bruckmüller

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 The Barbara Bruckmüller Big Band:

Soloists on "Come Sunday":  Cédric Gschwind, tenor saxophone; Karl Sayer, bass.

Barbara Bruckmüller:  composer, arranger
Andi See, Viola Falb, Cédric Gschwind, Martin Harms, Florian Fennes:  saxophones
Andi Pranzl, Bastian Stein, Simon Plötzeneder:  trumpets
Hermann Ebner, Michael Handler:  French horns
Robert Bachner, Mario Vavti, Martin Grünzweig:  trombones
Hepi Kohlich:  piano
Peter Panayi:  guitar
Karl Sayer:  bass
Wolfgang Kendl:  drums

Recorded at Porgy and Bess, Vienna, Austria, 3 January 2012.

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PS  You can check out more of Barbara's music on her website, here.

Convergences, 5: Weegee the Famous & the Daily News

New Yorkers are talking about murder.  Pictures of murder, that is.  For the last week, there's been a tremendous buzz around the opening of Weegee:  Murder is My Business, an exhibition dedicated to the crime photos of "one of the most relentlessly inventive figures in American photography (to quote New York's International Center for Photography [ICP], which is hosting the show).

There's no doubt that Weegee's gritty crime photos are part of what made him famous in the '30s and '40s.  Oddly enough, however, his best known photograph had nothing to do with crime -- or, at least, nothing directly.  It's "The Critic," a cartoonishly unsubtle commentary on the gulf between rich and poor.

 

Weegee:  The Fashionable People [title first used for "The Critic."]  Life magazine, 6 December 1943.

"The Critic" is classic Weegee.  And, as much as it hurts to admit it, the photo was staged.  Here's how the ICP tells the story:

In a recent interview, Louie Liotta, a photographer who acted as Weegee's assistant, recalled that Weegee had been planning this photograph for a while.  Liotta, at Weegee's request, picked up one of the regular women customers at Sammy's on the Bowery at about 6:30 p.m.  With a sufficient amount of cheap wine for the woman, they proceeded to the opera house.  When they arrived, the limousines owned by the members of high society were just beginning to discharge their passengers.  Weegee asked Liotta to hold the now intoxicated woman near the curb as he stood about twenty feet away from the front doors of the opera house.  With a signal worked out in advance, Weegee gave the sign to Liotta, who released the woman, hoping all the while that she could keep her balance long enough for Weegee to expose several plates.

Well, all the excitement over the exhibition prompted the folks at the New York Daily News to rummage through their photo archive, and what did they find?  "The Critic's" fraternal twin.

 

New York Daily News:  Among those present at the Met's Diamond Jubilee opening were Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh (left) and Lady Decies, both of whom had polished up their diamonds for the occasion. Among those missing was the Queen of American Society, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt....  22 November 1943.

Sure enough, the Daily News sent photographers to cover the Diamond Jubilee, and one of them came back with a picture that's almost a dead ringer for Weegee's -- although, as the Daily New tweeted, "sans hired help."

There's actually nothing surprising about this particular photo convergence.  In spot news coverage, it happens all the time.  Sometimes the resulting photos are eeirily similar.

For instance, take the iconic photo of "Tank Man," the white-shirted protester who confronted a column of tanks in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, in June 1989.  Four photographers made virtually identical pictures -- but only one was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  The New York Times' Lens Blog tells the story behind the photos, here.

The Lens Blog has also reviewed Weegee:  Murder is My Business.  You can read it and see many more of Weegee's photos, here.

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PS  I should add that, at the time Weegee made "The Critic," it was common practice for photojournalists and documentary photographers to stage or "direct" photos.  Most of his contemporaries -- Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, and many others -- did the same thing.  It wasn't considered unethical, as it would be today.

Video Tapes & Photo Icons: Marines in Afghanistan, Marines on Iwo Jima

You've seen it by now, the video showing four United States Marines in Afghanistan pissing on what are purportedly the bodies of dead Taliban fighters.  (If you haven't, you can watch it, here.)  It went viral the instant it appeared, sparking outrage across the world and sending the Obama administration into full damage-control mode.

The anger is understandable.  The desecration of a human corpse is something that strikes virtually all of us as particularly intolerable, at least in the abstract.  It was an ugly act, and it's provoked some bitterly sharp responses.

Historian of photography that I am, I was especially struck by the Steve Bell editorial cartoon that appeared in last Thursday's edition of the British newspaper The Guardian.

 

Copyright Steve Bell, 2012.

It's a diabolically clever cartoon, and it will hit Americans hard.  Many of us won't like it, even if we also feel shame and anger at what the Marines did.  (It's worth mentioning that the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the highest-ranking Marine general in Afghanistan have all condemned the Marines' actions.)  Bell is riffing on Joe Rosenthal's iconic 1945 photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, transforming an image that embodied American heroism and sacrifice into one that shows the nation as whole -- not just four of its Marines -- as shameless and depraved.

 

Joe Rosenthal/Associated Press:  Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.  1945.

Every American knows Rosenthal's photo and has since he or she was a kid.  It hurts to see what Bell has done with it, but it's hard to argue back.  We're feeling vulnerable, right now.  We feel trapped in a seemingly endless and increasingly pointless war, so it's sometimes comforting to look back on World War 2, when line between good guys and bad guys, between justice and oppression, seemed so clear.  Bell's cartoon has tainted a cherished image and the memories and dreams that we associate with it.  It stings, no doubt about it.

The Marines' video tape (and Bell's reminder that much of the world views us with deep skepticism) confronts us with questions that are difficult to sort out.  I certainly don't think that it makes sense to think of America or Americans as shameless and depraved.  But I have to admit that we sometimes act that way, as a nation and as individuals.

The best commentary that I've seen on the incident comes from the writer and filmmaker Sebastian Junger.  He spent a year with a Marine platoon in Afghanistan and, with the late Tim Hetherington, made Restrepo, an award-winning documentary film about the war.  In an Op-Ed piece in Friday's Washington Post, he acknowledges that what the four Marines did was reprehensible.  But more importantly he wants to help those of us who have never been in combat understand how these young men could have committed this unsettling act.  He also wants to remind us -- we Americans -- that ultimately we're all responsible for dehumanizing the enemy.

Here's some of what Junger had to say:

I can't imagine that there was a time in human history when enemy dead were not desecrated. Achilles dragged Hector around the walls of Troy from the back of a chariot because he was so enraged by Hector's killing of his best friend.  Three millennia later, Somali fighters dragged a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu after shooting down a Black Hawk helicopter and killing 17 other Americans.  During the frontier wars in this country, white Americans routinely scalped Indian fighters, and vice versa, well into the 1870s.

The U.S. military should be held to a higher standard, certainly, but it is important to understand the context of the behavior in the video.  Clearly, the impulse to desecrate the enemy comes from a very dark and primal place in the human psyche.  Once in a while, those impulses are going to break through.

There is another context for that behavior, though -- a more contemporary one.  As a society, we may be disgusted by seeing U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters, but we remain oddly unfazed by the fact that, presumably, those same Marines just put .30 caliber rounds through the fighters' chests.  American troops are not blind to this irony.  They are very clear about the fact that society trains them to kill, orders them to kill and then balks at anything that suggests they have dehumanized the enemy they have killed.

But of course they have dehumanized the enemy -- otherwise they would have to face the enormous guilt and anguish of killing other human beings.  Rather than demonstrate a callous disregard for the enemy, this awful incident might reveal something else: a desperate attempt by confused young men to convince themselves that they haven't just committed their first murder, that they have simply shot some coyotes on the back 40.

It doesn't work, of course, but it gets them through the moment; it gets them through the rest of the patrol.

There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty.  A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact that it's okay to waterboard a live Taliban fighter but not okay to urinate on a dead one.

I can't think of anything to add.  But, as always, your comments and conversation are welcome.

Funky Friday: "Tigger's Bounce," Barbara Bruckmueller Big Band

Funky Friday from Vienna, Austria?  You bet.

For the last few years, the young Austrian composer, arranger, and conductor Barbara Bruckmueller and her band have been cooking up a tasty musical gumbo in the wilds of central Europe.  All sorts of good things go into their pot -- ballads, New Orleans styles, odd meters, the Great American Songbook, Brazilian music, funk, rock, punk, and a little chanson.  That list might look like a mish-mash, but, like good Louisiana chefs, Brockmueller and company bring it all together.

The video below is a terrific example.  It's from a gig just a week or so ago at Porgy and Bess, a club in Vienna.  It starts slow, and it ends big.

 

 

 

The Barbara Bruckmueller Big Band:

Andi See, Viola Falb, Cédric Gschiwnd, Martin Harms, Florian Fennes:  saxophones

Andi Pranzl, Bastian Stein, Simon Plötzeneder:  trumpets

Robert Bachner, Mario Vavti, Martin Grünzweig:  trombones

Hermann Ebner, Michael Handler:  French horns

Hepi Kohlich:  piano

Peter Panayi:  guitar

Karl Saye (subbing for Gina Schwarz)r:  bass

Wolfgang Kendl:  drums

Barbara Bruckmüller:  composer, arranger, leader

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Yes, it's Friday the 13th.  If anything's going to bring you luck on this trickster rabbit of a day, it's good music.  Spend the day listening, that's my advice.

Funky Friday: Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace

Aretha's on my mind this morning.  Right now, On Point Radio's Tom Ashbrook is speaking to a variety of guests -- musicians and writers -- about Amazing Grace, the stunning gospel album that she recorded in 1972.  It's radio at its best, and you can listen to the episode, here.

I just learned, among other things, that the director Sidney Pollack filmed the recording sessions, in the hope of making a documentary about them.  The film was never released, but you can see the trailer below.  It starts slowly, but give it time.  It's worth it.

 

 

 

The personnel on the recording included gospel and R&B royalty:  the Reverend James Cleveland, piano, Kenneth Lupper, organ, Cornell Dupree, guitar, Chuck Rainey, bass, Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, drums, Pancho Morales, Latin percussion, and the Southern California Community Choir.