Justin Timberlake

Hump day is notoriously.....drab. So here's an inspiration video to get you through it. Thanks to those creatives in Stockholm.

Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.  -Jack Kerouac, from the Introduction to The Americans

Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey, 1955
Private collection, San Francisco
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org

I had the privelege this month (on October 9th) to attend a lecture, or more of a round table discussion, with photographer and living legend Robert Frank at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His world-renowned book, The Americans, is widely considered to be the single most important photography book since World War II. Now celebrating its 50-year anniversary (the book was first published in the US in 1959), the Met Museum currently has a full exhibit dedicated to those 83 indellible images and the man who traversed the country to capture them.

From his modest entrance onto the stage, Robert Frank was upbeat, if not a bit off-beat, gracious, and thoroughly enjoyable. Reflecting on his now-legendary (almost hallowed) trek around the dusty corners of the United States, Frank told of the suspicious eyes that looked back at his voyeuristic, mechanical one. Lest we forget, he was going around surreptitiously taking pictures of strangers -- foreign accent and all -- in the midst of a Cold War and the lingering paranoia of McCarthyism. "You were a spy!" he exclaimed when asked why a stealth photographer at the time might be met with such hostility.

Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Trolley—New Orleans, 1955
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.454)
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org

My favorite bits of the lecture were the stories Frank told about the road trip he took to Florida with Jack Kerouac, who wrote the Forward to The Americans. The men behind the two greatest American travelogues in the same car? What kind of adventure did they seek out? High-stake poker games, drag races, fast women...? "He slept most of the time," Frank recalled: a stark reality, no doubt, compared to the glossy, romantic, starry-eyed visions that danced in many a modern beat-poet's head. Frank drove back to New York with Kerouac, Kerouac's mother, and her two cats, he said.

When asked if it was true that he stopped back at the same barber shop that appears in his book, where they offered to buy his car in exchange for two older cars...

"I don't remember that. The stories change over time," Frank replied.

He's a photographer, folks. He tells it like it is.

If you get a chance, be sure to check out the Robert Frank exhibit at the Met Museum, which runs through January 3, 2010. His photos tell a story you won't soon forget.

What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day by some young new writer high by candlelight bending over them describing every gray mysterious detail, the gray film that caught the actual pink juice of human kind. -Jack Kerouac, from The Americans

Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Charleston, South Carolina, 1955
Susan and Peter MacGill
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org

Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Elevator—Miami Beach, 1955
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with funds contributed by Dorothy Norman, 1969
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org

Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
U.S. 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas, 1955
Private collection, courtesy Hamiltons Gallery, London
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans, via metmuseum.org

The band Surfer Blood performing at CMJ

Every year, amongst the 1,300 bands that perform at CMJ Music Marathon, there is one band that is the rugged crown prince of festival. It is the band that performs a dozen shows, breaks a dozen guitar strings, burns a zillion brain cells and packs each room with hipsters, bloggers, and industry elite. As a result, their name proliferates on the blog-world in the prior weeks, and if they play their cards (read: guitars) right, they rise to become commerically viable. (Need we mention MGMT?)

Last year, the buzz band was Passion Pit. This year, it appears to be Surfer Blood, a band from Florida that farcically doesn't surf. Unlike most of the musicheads at CMJ, we hadn't heard of them before the festival - but they were ubiquitous throughout CMJ. Their sound: punchy, Afro-inspired garage rock, with probing cowbells, fuzzy guitar loops, and jumpy percussion via maracas n shake. As though the younger brothers of Vampire Weekend has been locked in a over-heated basement with a bad case of ADD, Friendly Fires' zeal, and a couple old Weezer CDs.

We know what you are thinking: Like most bands this year, Surfer Blood looks a bit too baby-faced and young to be rockers - or the princes as we indicated above. (Evidently, gone are the days of too-good-lookin-for-their-own-good rock hunks like Interpol and The Strokes. Sorry girls.) But noone seems to care. With the industry and marketing budgets diminished, there is less money thrust into image, hair gel and leather jackets, and high-end marketing campaigns. It is all about DIY exposure AND quality of sound. Surfer Blood has both. They played CMJ to the ground. Hell, even music critic Jon Pareles of The NY Times gave them a good paragraph and title picture.

Who knows? If the music gods are watching, you may even hear them on the radio in a year...

Surfer Blood performing at Cake Shop this Saturday for CMJ

Shake it like a polaroid picture

Ray Concepcioñ put together a cool video with footage from Surfer Blood's Pianos show (Thanks Stereogum):

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner: Surfer Blood [ Part 1 of 14] from Ray Concepcioñ on Vimeo.

Photos by Faith-Ann Young

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