Ricardo Montalbán is unimpressed with your efforts.
At risk of sounding like a pompous ass, I have style. I believe this because I get a lot of compliments on my choices in dress. Walking down the street I get asked for my advice a lot, or asked where I buy things, and do I always look this way? I’ve been caught on the street a handful of times by Asheville Street Style, interviewed by the Urban News, and regularly advise my friends on what to wear to meet Fortune 500 executives in China or on a first date. Fine, I surrender already — I have style.
And I’m into that, I’m into what is stylish. But — I’m not into fashion. I don’t have a well thumbed copy of the September Vogue on my night stand, and though I subscribe to the Sunday edition of the New York times, I don’t luridly gaze at the latest offerings of the major designers in the Style Magazine. I don’t care what’s in or what’s out, if it’s past Labor Day or if it was recently seen being worn by Lady Gaga at Occupy Wall Street. Those are useless ways to think about what will make you look awesome.
What’s the difference between style and fashion? Style is forever, fashion is for today. Style is accessible for everyone, fashion is passé by the time everyone identifies it. Style belongs to you, fashion belongs to wealthy hairless eccentrics in Milan that feed caviar to tiny inbred dogs.
A few months ago I was playing piano at a house party in West Asheville (the notorious Montana House) with Reese. We were trading places at the piano bench and mixing it up with some four-handed stuff and really just having a blast playing and entertaining the folks that crowded around the swaying, rocking old upright. We beat that piano to a pulp for five hours, and my old friends Mike Belleme and his girlfriend Kristen were there for much of it.
A few weeks later, Mike asked me to be a part of a skate video featuring the skaters of Asheville’s PUSH Skate Shop that he was going to be in. He’d filmed all his parts and there was a rough edit but no music yet. Inspired by the music that he had heard Reese and I play, he asked me to play the soundtrack. So we met over at World Coffee, where they have a beat up old Wurlitzer spinet in the back, RJ Hess (the filmmaker) set up some recording equipment and I improvised some music while I watched the rough cut. I treated it like I was playing to a silent film, trying to accentuate action. After about six takes and some great ideas from Mike, the above is what we got. Damn it was fun. Mike said we made history — he didn’t think any skater had ever had a live piano track before.
In exchange for musicking his video, Mike took some professional head-shots of me. Here they are:
I even got a shout out in the MountainX. Kind of weird seeing my name listed next to the Rolling Stones. I love a good collaboration, and though the output is unique, what made it work was not. Can’t wait til the next project.
There’s a new club opening up in Asheville, the Arcade Asheville, in the location of the old and much mourned Joli Rouge and they are planning to have raging dance parties every Friday night. For a dance party to rage, you need the right DJs and they landed the best in town. By best, I mean with the best taste and widest appeal. They got Marley and my good friend Par. I’ve worked for Par’s former project, Under One Beat Productions, and designed lots of posters and other documents for them. So he called me up and said he found the best image ever to use as the basis for a poster. And he’s right, this photograph is dope. Super dope. It inspired this design.
Been trying to beef up the ol’ portfolio lately, and this was just the sort of project I was looking for.
Speaking of that, you should check out my portfolio.
Sometimes you’re just in the right place at the right time.
I was sitting over at Izzy’s several days ago laptopping away, occasionally taking my pulse to see if I needed further espressos when my old friend Mike McBride of Sonmi Suite walked in. Mike was there meeting a local group of electronic producers, beat makers and DJs that had just collaborated on Asheville Beat Tape, a project he was involved with through Skew Records. There was about 15 of these guys that had gotten together and somehow all made time out of their busy schedules for a photo-op, but there were two problems. 1) No camera. 2) No photographer. “Well, I’ve got my Canon Rebel with me,” says I, “I’ll take the photo, though I’m far from a pro.” Twenty minutes later we’re on the roof of a parking deck shooting photos. The light was poor, so I herded them into a stairwell and got onto the landing above and that’s where the above shot came from.
Photography is a new hobby of mine, but early results are promising. It was really fun to do, and I didn’t mind doing a favor for a friend and helping to make something cool happen for everyone. I’m going to keep it up.
You should listen to the music they made. 100% local and organic. Plus, it’s a free download.
UPDATED: Mountain Xpress, the Asheville Citizen-Times and Ashvegas all covered this as well. I feel special.
As promised, though a couple days late, I’m posting the latest UNC-Asheville Humanities 324 lecture from this week. The topic was The Enlightenment, and you can read the lecture outline [pdf]. Dr. Rizzo was the speaker. We watched some clips of a movie about this guy to the left, Olaudah Equiano.
For the complete podcast series, check this post: http://blog.afletcher.net/2010/01/humanities-324-lecture-podcast/
As promised, the recordings of the the Humanities 324 lecture’s have been podcasted and were just accepted into the iTunes store. Here are all the links.
- Subscribe in RSS reader
- View and stream on the web
- Subscribe in iTunes
- New episodes should post Friday afternoons.
- I’m using an iPod Touch 2nd gen. with headphones and included mic. The recording quality will get better as I experiment with where to sit and where to set the mic (I’m trying to be unobtrusive).
- Also, somebody told me that UNC-A did or perhaps still does offer a podcast of these lectures. I couldn’t find it on their website, can anyone confirm or deny?
I really think that these lectures are valuable and informative and should be available to the public. Many of the top tier colleges like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, et cetera offer podcasts of their classes to the public. After all, schools are in the business of selling degrees, not information. Let’s emancipate the information from the lecture hall. Enjoy!
Well the semester has just started and I’ve been trying to think up new ways to stay engaged and motivated in school, so I’m going to synthesize school with the geeky things that I love to do like blogging. With that in mind, I’m going to (attempt) to record and post every HUM 324 lecture this semester here on. You’ll find them all under this category, and if you want to subscribe in your RSS reader, here’s the feed. And Coming Soon: This will be a podcast, which you will be able to subscribe to in iTunes. The lecture outlines are posted as well.
Oh, and while you’re at it, if you use this, add me on the bookFace.
Yes, I’m bootlegging academia and podcasting it. ZOMG! Technology FTW!
