21 posts tagged “memphis”
i am *slammed* in my last two weeks until final book due date. slammed! i'm glad i was ahead most of the process-- because i have SO much more to do. i am in that last sprint of the marathon.
still, got to take a moment to blog about geoff and my amazing trip to memphis last weekend. some friends of ours were playing in a local garage band music fest called gonerfest and we promised if they ever played in my hometown we'd come and help show it off. to boot, geoff's old friends own goner records, the organizers of the fest. goner had sold out of geoff's last memphis zine in little more than 24 hours so he figured he'd try his hand at photographing bands-- something that had always intimidated him-- and see if he couldn't come up with enough good stuff to produce a mini-goner zine.
but in the days leading up to our flight we were wondering why we booked the trip. geoff was slammed at work and i was in the homestretch of the book-- and getting over a nasty cold (that unfortunately took a worse turn for stomach flu on sunday- gross!) still, we sucked it up and went.
as it turned out several bands were from san francisco and bay area kids just flooded the joint taking over much of midtown memphis. and-- my years of preaching how great memphis is and yelling at people when they mistakenly said i was from nashville-- were finally proven true as nearly everyone fell in love with the town. my friend andy had two great lines on the subject. at one point he came inside the club, holding up his cell phone and said, "this is the danger of living in the cell phone age. i just bought a condo across the street and joined the local country club." he later remarked, that real estate agents should set up a table alongside all the bands' merchandise tables asking people if they prefer their property by the acre.
of course in true memphis-style, few people actually LIVING in the city came out. this is what keeps memphis from selling out: it has no idea how great it is. many of the bands participating marveled at how goner had seemingly pulled off the impossible in the fourth year of this festival: keeping the quality top notch, the crowd small, the scene non-commercial.
oh, and geoff's photography was simply amazing. it's fair to say he's conquered his fear. here are some shots on his blog of Jay Reatard, who headlined Thursday night and was discovered by the Goner folks. geoff very impressively elbowed his way to the front of a near-mosh pit to get them. i was sitting on the bar a safe distance away supervising. i'm too old to mosh.
it's odd how much i love karaoke. i can't sing. and i'm usually very shy about that fact. except of course when there's a microphone in front of me. go figure.
apparently this has been a lifelong thing. my mom just sent this photo she just found from my childhood. it's me bowing after singing for the family. apparently i'm using baby powder or something as a microphone.
poor family. (although my mom behind me appears to be enjoying it!)
What's the longest boat ride you've ever been on?
it wasn't a very LONG boat ride in distance. i think we just went around a lake, but it was very long in time and it felt incredibly long. it was a harrowing experience, and i think for some odd reason one of the first times i'd ever been on a boat, even though i must have been about 21ish.
it was on some lake in arkansas where rednecks like to play. i was there with my ex-fiance (then not an ex) and his large, sprawling, male dominated family. he had about 7 uncles on his dad's side, and 21 first cousins, all mostly boys. they'd all been married and divorced and remarried giving way to more kids and confusion. by this time we'd been together three years so i had who was who and the complex tree of who was who's dad mostly figured out.
anyway, we were there for some sort of crazy long weekend. they all brought boats, gear, and cases and cases of budweiser. a couple boats went out on the lake as soon as we got there. most of the girls went out on the "lady jane" the plush, comfy pink and white speedboat. i ended up on my father-in-law-to-be's camo, unpadded duck hunting boat. that wouldn' t have been to bad if a massive storm hadn't hit as soon as we set out. the boat was tossed all over the lake. i was holding onto a rope tied to the side of the boat, my fiance, and a beer screaming for what felt like hours but was probably a good 30 minutes. the waves were throwing the boat in the air and the boat was in turn throwing us up in the air several feet only to slam back down into the rock-hard boat. my beer was half water, but i was still gulping it down, terrified, but also at times laughing at the sheer bizarreness of how things like this always tended to happen around this family.
within an hour i was on land, and bruised most everywhere. and i was drinking another beer. amazingly, i went back out on the boat later that afternoon.
when i married geoff, i knew he was talented. in addition to being an amazing graphic designer, he's a photographer
After years of spending every free moment shooting, he started to get really serious in the last year or so about promotion. He made these amazing press kits he mailed to galleries. no dice. after getting a slew of rejection letters he still didn't want to give up. he thought, what else can i do? he used his graphic design skills to build a photo blog and decided to self-publish a four-color zine. He was partially influenced by the guys who do the photo zine Hamburger Eyes and have parlayed it into very successful art careers. He didn't care if he made money on it, he just wanted to get his work out there. He sold out a run of 75 and was happy.
Then he produced Sadkids #3 (#3 is his second zine. #2 is a very specific idea that he hasn't done yet.) Sadkids #3 went insane. It was written up on influential art web sites and sold in stores in san francisco, portland, la and paris. it sold out two runs of 75 and has still been in demand. Geoff has gotten amazingly personal emails from people all over the world who somehow got their hands on a copy, loved it, and wanted to know when the next one was coming out. It was even in a zine show in Tokyo and got Geoff into more group art shows in one year than he'd had in his art career combined. And the gallery arm of the SF MOMA has asked for four of his pieces.
This brings us to Sadkids #4. It's the culimation of ten years of photographs of Memphis, where Geoff and I met. It was the biggest undertaking yet, in part because there was so much material and because very little of it was digital. And there was the pressure to live up to #3. He has finally finished it, and it's beautiful. But it was hard for both of us to judge it because the images are so familiar and, for me, so personal. this one he used for the invitation was of a sign i saw nearly every week in Memphis as my parents drove me around town doing various things. i love this photo in part because like so much of his work, geoff made me see Memphis differently. but i can hardly look at it with fresh eyes.
His release party is June 7, and so far the buzz is building. It was blogged about by one of his resellers who got his hands on a promo copy. Already stores in Sweden and Paris (random!) are asking if they can sell copies. since it isn't officially out, the only place they are on sale now is at a few stores in Memphis, because i was there for the past week and hand delivered some. That was on Monday afternoon. They've already sold out and want more copies.
i know anyone who knows me has heard all of this (and the other good art news we can't divulge yet because it's not public!). but it still blows me away, because i watched all the years of set backs and am watching all this success just as i'm writing a book about the inherent power in the democratization of the Internet. yes, it is a printed zine, but he used the Internet-- his blogs, other people's blogs, online stores, MySpace-- as his personal marketing and distribution engine. these are literally some of the exact same images he was sending to galleries years before, but until his grassroots campaign they wanted none of it. this year he already has his first solo shows booked.
so, i'm mainly writing this for anyone i don't know who for some odd reason reads my blog. if you are talented, there's no longer an excuse not to make things happen for yourself!
calm down rosie- i'm talking about my trip to memphis! i just got back today. it was fun, but not very relaxing. i actually did a lot of work and saw a lot of people, so it didn't exactly take away my fatigue with endless parties, meetings, dinners etc. and a certain freelance project continues to give me an ulcer. i think i've offended everyone i know by treo-ing throughout dinners. in short, i think silicon valley has finally made me truly insufferable.
still, let's go over my to do list and see how i did. Next to each item i'll say my percentage completion in brackets:
1. cook my mom and sister a late mother's day brunch on sunday [100%. we even had mimosas with heart-shaped ice cubes. ok a few heart shaped ice cubes. i forgot that part of the plan until about 30 minutes before]
2. go to bbq fest and eat until i explode. [60% i did go and i took THREE disposible cameras full of film in about 10 minutes. it was....amazing. more in another post when i have visual aids. but i didn't actually eat that much there nor did i explode.]
3. write 50 pages of my book. ok, 40. [100% I met my 60 page goal for the month a week early!]
4. get some serious pool time in the memphis heat [20%. it wasn't that hot and i only got in a pool for reals once. on other time i dangled my legs because i wanted it to be pool weather so badly, but it just wasn't so i fled to a nearby hot tub, teeth chattering.]
5. eat at Tops at least 100 times. [1% i only ate there once.]
6. drink at alex's [0% the opportunity never presented itself somehow!]
7. see good memphis music at the hi-tone and/or produce bad memphis music at a karaoke bar [100% the latter. oh my. i maintain there were flaws with yosimite sam's sound system because i sounded bad even for me! fun nonetheless though. i "closed out the night" with "bust-a-move" which may become a new sarahoke standard.]
8. spend q.t. with my niece and nephew, parents, sibs and sib-in-law [1,000% highlight being my brother peter and i taking ramie and bob to see shrek 3. we all got green paper shrek ear hats. bob told his mom before we left that he was glad he was seeing it with me because i'd probably buy him popcorn or something. i got us a hot dog, reeces pieces, twizzlers, raisinettes, popcorn and a diet coke. peter tacked on a pretzel. we ate it all, except one twizzler that bob polished off the next day. i'm amazed we weren't all ill.]
9. pimp geoff's new memphis zine around town [100% sold out the issues he sent me with at the first place; geoff has to mail more to the second place this week. "CAN I GET MORE QUICKLY IF I SELL OUT?" one of the shopkeeps asked. they also took some of geoff's rad posters to hang in the stores.]
10. interview some teens about how they use social networks so i can write off the trip as book research. [70% didn't talk to as many as i wanted because it was exam week. but got some good stuff nonetheless.]
long and awesome post on bbq fest to come. please forgive misspellings etc. i am EXHAUSTED...
leaving for memphis in two days! i'm so excited. here's a list of the top ten things i want to do.
1. cook my mom and sister a late mother's day brunch on sunday (menu: planned for weeks)
2. go to bbq fest and eat until i explode.
3. write 50 pages of my book. ok, 40.
4. get some serious pool time in the memphis heat
5. eat at Tops at least 100 times.
6. drink at alex's
7. see good memphis music at the hi-tone and/or produce bad memphis music at a karaoke bar
8. spend q.t. with my niece and nephew, parents, sibs and sib-in-law
9. pimp geoff's new memphis zine around town (SF RELEASE PARTY JUNE 7!)
10. interview some teens about how they use social networks so i can write off the trip as book research
i just got on myspace for like the first time in a year and was delighted to see this as my brother's profile pic:
this is my parents' backyard with our trampoline that brought all the kids to the yard. Peter is busy pretending the peter rabbit blanket my mom made us is a dress while i am flinging around the matching pillow and my favorite thing ever, the sear's pooh bear. i still have that pooh bear!
although my parents might argue with behavior later in life, we were the best kids! we just did stuff like this all the time. good times...
so....like good ex-memphis kids we are spending a friday night watching "hollyhood" the new mtv show about three 6 mafia moving to LA. and O M G. they show them leaving their house in memphis and IT'S LIKE TWO HOUSES DOWN THE BLOCK FROM MY PARENTS HOUSE. yes. the house i grew up in.
the house that the guys were allegedly living in was my brother's bff's house growing up!!! i've been in that house like a million times!!!
Who's going to be in the Final Four?
all i know is it'll be TIGERS TIGERS TIGERS!! i need a new final four shirt...the one from 1985 is getting a bit worn...
one of my friends in memphis is sending me real time text updates from alex's, only my favorite memphis bar. did i mention they have a big screen tv and the best burgers i've ever eaten? there are few moments when i hate being in san francisco. :(
