Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

A recent SF Chronicle article highlighting New Orleans paino great James Booker led to my contacting Bill Roberts, who took part in the Maple Leaf Bar’s weekly Sunday afternoon poetry readings along with Everette Maddox. Bill recalled Booker playing there frequently, and related a story.

While waitering at Commander’s Palace Bill worked a party for the upper crust of New Orleans society: bankers, judges, and business owners. They made a special request for James Booker to play at the party, and Bill describes what happened…

The piano keys under the spell of James Booker had unleashed such powerful, raw blues on the psyches of the elite of New Orleans, members of the old line secret Krewes (Rex, Comus and Momus) of Mardi Gras, that it decimated their sense of decorum.

James Booker was oblivious and indifferent to their transformation. He just kept pounding away on the keys, and would not free the ladies and gents from his enchanting grip.

The place went crazy. They were dancing wildly and bumping into each other. They became unravelled, they came apart under the influence of Booker’s playing. A judge was even dancing around in his official robes.

When the party was over I found the judge’s robe on the floor. I didn’t know what to do, so I brought it home, and then brought it back to Commander’s the next time I worked there. They almost fired me over it.

Mayor Landrieu was still in office, the last white Mayor of New Orleans.  Maybe the event portended the seismic shift in political  power in the Big Easy.

If one subscribes to the belief held by the Black Clergy of the Mississippi delta during the 1920’s,30’s and 40’s, that Blues was the Devil’s music; then truly I declare that it was Mephistofiles himself playing that night to Dr. Faust.

Earlier this year I was contacted by Sony BMG Music’s London office in a request to use one my photographs of Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart found on this web site. I was curious about how they were going to use this photo for a CD, since I don’t consider it as one of my best. It was a surprise to see the result (below) when it was recently released. The fisheye lens motif is an echo from the original Safe As Milk album cover.

Captain Beefheart apparently has a faithful following in Great Britain, since this is the third British Beefheart album cover publishing one of my photos. A fourth is due to come out later this Spring.

Part of the fun of this has been getting back in touch with my friends who are in this 1980 photo, Jeff and Mike DeMark. We went to that show toether, and they’ve written their recollections of the Beefheart performance and lounging around with him in the hallway of his hotel after the show when the photo was taken. Click here to begin reading about the strange evolution of this CD cover.

This weekend I am finishing up the last of 200 health-themed biomedical images for a PureStock CD-ROM. All of the illustrations were composed and rendered with Maya 3D software. This project started late in the summer, and is finally arriving at the last few images to complete the collection. Along the way I made use of some cool texture shaders to give the body parts an x-ray look, and cells an “under the microscope look.” If sales go well enough, I’d like to invest in more detailed 3D body models, with more veins, nerves, muscles and tendons. “Igor, come quickly, I’ve got a job for you!”

Came across this inspirational passage by D. H. Lawrence in a recent New Yorker book review:

Dying of tuberculosis in the winter of 1929-30, unable to walk, and rendered sexually impotent by his disease, he wrote these words on the last page of his last book:

“Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. . . . The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.”

He died on March 2, 1930, aged forty-four and weighing all of eighty-five pounds, in Vence, where Frieda, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and some others buried him, Frieda wrote, “very simply, like a bird.”

Let’s dance!

I’ve been out of touch with many of the multi-talented, creative folks I met and worked with on Shrek 2 at PDI/DreamWorks. So, it was with great surprise and delight that I read a front page San Francisco Chronical news story about the friendly, energetic software engineer Reid Gershbein writing and directing an independent film Broken Arrows. The Chronicle knows that eyeballs are attracted to Google, so the headline is more about how the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are involved in funding roughly 50% of the making of Broken Arrows. Turns out Reid knows them and successfully pitched his story.

The Broken Arrows trailer looks very promising and I’ll be looking forward to seeing Reid’s first film when it comes out later in 2006. Maybe I’ll even be fortunate to get a pre-screening…. hello, Reid?