One of the last of the East Tennessee wild asses…

Proof off wild assery:

Oh yeah, Happy 2009 in March… on St. Patrick’s Day.

Damn, turns out they were physic after all. I think it was the shrooms.

Yep. Definitely the shrooms.

Thanks to Brian.

And like I said in my response e-mail, “I’m pretty much the same way after 3 Adderalls and a Dr. Pepper.”

A few months back I get a call from Van Campbell (drummer for the Black Diamond Heavies & Ghostfinger). He was inquiring about possibly using some of my photos as part of the art work for their upcoming album Touch Of Someone Else’s Class. I said “by all means”, got the pics they were interested in ready, and e-mailed over. Then I promptly proceeded to forget all about it.

Flash forward a few months later, the record is released. I popped over to iTunes to have a look-see. The iTunes cover art is of Van’s kit. Cool. Not my pic, but cool. Then I realized that the iTunes version was labeled “CLEAN”. Which led to an immediate response of

“Say Jim, what?”.

There are very few things that I won’t download off the internets, but at the top of that small list is any album labeled “CLEAN VERSION”. I said to myself:

“No big deal. I’ll just grab a copy the next time I am Grimey’s.”

Well being the lazy fuck that I am, I haven’t been to Grimey’s in months. MONTHS! Which led me to promptly proceed to forget all about it.

Flash forward to this past Friday. The Heavies were in town playing a show at Springwater. With the help of US Justin, I attended and took the opportunity to get myself a copy of the record. Only it wasn’t the Van cover it was the John Wesley Meyers cover. I didn’t realize they had dueling covers. But it just so happened that the JWM cover was shot by ME!

It’s a crop from the original:

Which don’t make no never mind to me. I still dig it the most.

Needless to say, I feel a tad bit like Navin Johnson when he first saw his name in the phone book. And I can say “suck it” to Chattanooga State’s art department. I really wasn’t making a bad decision by layin’ out of class because I was high. Now I am a published photographer.

So… yeah. I got that going for me.

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I’m a huge fan of Boogie Nights. The film, the song, the actual act of boogin’ and doing it all night long, but especially the film.

I first read about the movie in Film Threat. Back when it was in print and good. Not the half-assed web site of today. The article wasn’t even an article, it was just a couple of sentences in a festival-round up paragraph. They went something like this:

“Burt Reynolds wows in 2 1/2 hour film about the porn industry in the 70’s…”

Burt Reynolds, 2 1/2 hour film, porn, and the 70’s. That was all I needed to see. I kept my eyes peeled on the movie listings for months. MONTHS! Then one day, there it was. No big ad, just the showtimes buried amongst all the movies of 1997 showing at the Northgate 7. So I went, and went and went.

Now in the years since, I’ve become pretty well versed in all things Paul Thomas Anderson. But the two things that have always eluded me was, Cigarettes & Coffee (the 16mm B&W short that would become Hard Eight or Sydney) and The Dirk Diggler Story.

For those not in the know, The Dirk Diggler Story was a fake Spinal Tap style documentary on the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler. PTA shot & edited (on VHS using two VCRs) it when he was 17. From this and the subsequent research and writing he would do over the next 10 years, TDDS would become Boogie Nights.

TDDS has been floating around for years on E-Bay and various bootleg video distributors. And I have toyed with idea of buying a copy for nearly as long. I could never find the rational for throwing down 30 - 40 bucks on a copy of a copy of a copy of something shot on VHS. There are/were plenty of other things I could spend $40 bucks on.

Well, fast forward to today. I’m sipping my coffee perusing the internet as usual and what do I find?

Lo and behold Google video has The Dirk Diggler Story! For free:

Ha! Bully for me!

PTA has basically disowned this as nothing more than an amateurish work done by a 17 year old trying figure out movie making. For the most part he absolutely right. But, I will say that it is not totally without merit. Bob Ridgley makes a very good if slightly more gay Jack Horner (Ridgley was the Colonel in Boogie Nights). PTA’s use swish panning to give him an in camera transition was nicely done. As were some of the group scenes (already showing that Altman vibe).

The main enjoyment, for me any way, is seeing that the seeds of would become some of Boogie Nights best stuff were already in play in this film. From lines of dialog, to character situations, etc. The twist on Dirk’s and Reed’s relationship is particularly laffo.

Once again, I must paraphrase the late great Anne Ramsey and say:

“Thankyou, Mr. Internets. Thank you.”

James has made it back into the states. Good for him.

The local rag scored an interview and wrote a brief article about the schmeal.

I’ve decided to start using Vimeo for all my video hosting. Better design. Better quality. And it’s in HD. Which is nice. Very very nice. I’ll still use YouTube for the dumb shit, like my Star Wars Bubb Rubb Romeo Rose mash-ups, but that will be about it.

Now please enjoy Bonnaroo 2007 in 3 minutes or less.

Bonnaroo ‘07 - Miss Lolly Pop’s Burlesque Coterie

Fade In: CASA DeLa ADF - Morning

It’s 7am and I’m awakened by the wife who is in a tizzy.

“Hey, guess what?”

“Hmmnmm.”

“You’ll never guess who just got arrested.”

“Who?”

“James…”

“Lipton?”

“No, Powderly.”

“What the fuck did he do?”

“He got arrested in Beijing for doing some kind of Free Tibet art instillation, protest thing.”

“Say what?”

FLASHBACKSTORY - BACK HOME YEARS AGO

James and I have known each other off and on since high school. We went to different schools, but Chattanooga being what it is/was, if you were into music or the arts you’re pretty much an acquaintance of everybody.

CUT TO: 1995 - The Bowels of N. Georgia

My friend Andrew got me on at his job making high-end concrete garden planters (big and small) and ornaments (frogs, rats, knomes, bunnies, etc). This place was staffed completely with band dudes and starving local artists. The owners viewed them selves as artists too and they felt they were doing the community a favor by giving us employment. I.E. - We worked for cheap.

So on my first day, one of the first persons I run into is James. We start bull-shitting and catching up. His area of operation was making the ornaments. A nice well lit area that was relatively clean considering the fact that every one was working with wet concrete. I asked him if I was going to be working with him. He laughed and said

“No, you get to work over in the planter area… With Robin and Tim”

Now Robin and Tim were two of the most wildest of all Ringgold, GA wild asses. Robin looked like a cross between a fat Weird-Al Yankovich and Mike Shank from American Movie. Tim on the other hand was a little more normal looking. A shorter, stockier, version of Peter Scolari with his hair always pulled back in a pony tail. The real catch with Tim was, apparently when he a was kid he managed partially dis-em boweled himself in a bicycle accident (real talk). The ER docs were able to get most of his intestines back in and sew him up. The only problem was, that ever since the accident Tim’s farts and dumps took on a stank of Grade-A Nuclear proportions.

If you could smell-o-vision the feeling you get when you put a 9-volt on your tongue, you still would even come close.

So, not only was his shit stank stanky. It was thick too. A fart would pollute a 30 foot area for a good 10 -15 minutes. His dumps? A 100 foot radius surrounding the john, lasting for at least an hour. And you never… ever… dared to go inside. I am serious. IT WAS THAT BAD.

That winter was particularly cold that one day the pipes froze in the work area, so we had to use the front office restroom. Well, Tim had a particularly greasy meat n’ 3 lunch and he had to go and TCB. He funked the front office up so bad they closed for the remainder of the day to let it air out. When we showed up the next day, there was a Port-A-Shitter sitting outside the loading docks with sign taped to the door. It read:

“FOR TIM”

Needless to say, working in the planter area was stanky dirty hole of a job, that everyone wanted get out of. Everyone that is, except for Robin and Tim.

I could go on and on about those dudes and the company, but those stories are for another day.

Anyway, James and I became pretty good work buds and would goof off talking/making for fun of local bands, music, art etc. A few months later I guess ole’ James had grown tired of busting his hump for $6/hr and decided not to return to the concrete glory hole of North Georgia. We would still occasionally run into each other at shows, but that was our extent of keeping in touch.

CUT TO: 1999 - The Bowels of N. Chattanooga

Once again I was starting a new job. This time it was the lunch shift at a hot new Jewish Deli. Bully for me! And once again I walk in and the first person I run into working behind the counter is James. We laughed and caught up, reliving Tim & Robin stories and what not. Since bailing out of the planter business, James went back to UTC and was in the process of finishing up he BFA in music.

It was during this time that I made my first steps into computing and inter-webbing. It was James who helped sell me on going Mac. He helped walk me through the hills and valleys of OS 8.6 and Photoshop.

When not helping my dumb-ass work the computering machine, James would tell me about his ideas for crazy-ass projects. He was moving away from traditional music and composing (he was a freakishly good guitar player) and was focusing on multi-media-sound-collages, infra-red triggers, robots. All kinds of far out shit. His final project for UTC was an instillation that was comprised of a room filled with speakers, and infra-red triggers. These were all tied into his Mac which was running software that he wrote. So, when you entered the room depending on how you and where you moved, the infra-reds would open a speaker, thus changing the tone of the sound running in the software. It’s really hard to explain and my memory tends get foggy from time to time. But to put it simply it was like you were a human theramin. Pretty far out, but also pretty cool.

He graduated that Spring and then it was off to NYU in the fall. We kept in touch through e-mail for a while, but eventually lost contact.

FLASH FORWARD - THIS MORNING

“Yeah. It was in the New York Times. I sent you a link.”

And off to the internet I went. NYT Article. After reading that I got my Google on to see what the hell he has been doing up there in NYC for the past 8 years. Apparently besides getting his Master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, James discovered his inner activist and decided to combine the two. Among other things…

He co-founded The Graffiti Research Lab. Which is involved in all kinds shit. Too many to get into here, so please hit the link and check them out. The one project that really struck me was their development of L.A.S.E.R. Tagging.

In action:

In action at the M.O.M.A:

G.R.L. @ M.o.M.A. from fi5e on Vimeo.

Time.com interview:

And if that wasn’t enough, he helped engineer The Rock Abrasion Tool for the Mars rover.

THE FUCKING MARS ROVER!

Needless to say my mind has been blown. I always knew James was wicked with the smarts, but I had no idea. Same goes for his activism. From what I remeber we almost never talked politics. And if politics ever came up, James was usually the first one to cut a joke in order to change the subject away from politics.

Now he’s locked up Beijing for 10 days. Hopefully neither he or the Chinese have seen Midnight Express.

Now, if may pull from Stephen Colbert, I give a tip of the hat to my old buddy, for doing his thing above and beyond the call of duty. And a wag for of the finger for making me realize that everything I’ve accomplished in the last eight hasn’t been shit. Actually it has, but in comparison…. Dayuuummm.

Here’s to you James.

Well the internet is all a flutter about ole Quentin Tarantino’s new script for Inglorious Bastards. Or Basterds as he spells it. Ever since the news hit that he had sent the script out I have scouring around the interwebz trying to find it. And now thanks the kind folks at Nightly.net I found some links. Get your download on here (part 1) & here (part 2).

I hope you’re not German.

Merry Christmas in July.