2/5 there

I have only a handful of favorite photographers. It is a small and scattered group.

These artists are all intelligent and sincere. The photographs are excogitative and often include pieces of the artist's physical body or traces of its existence in the images. The work is not evidence of life or as a result of living, it is more.
My favorite photographers are perspectivists. Their work illustrates the many ways of seeing 'real' objects and the unlimited truths in our world. A photograph can offer the viewer many ideas or perspectives, but it can never give a definitive truth. Neither the photographer, subject or viewer has knowledge of the noumenon, the thing-in-itself.

My favorite photographers are transcendentalists.

Photography is less art and more science. The medium requires traveling to a destination and studying a particular subject. A talented photographer can study a subject's qualities that are not immediately apparent to the human eye. The best photographs are to be viewed slowly. Repeatedly. The most interesting photographs do not rely on shock or the allure of novelty. These images do not necessarily display a new subject to the viewer, but display the subject in a way that the viewer has rarely, if ever, seen before.

Consequently, this display opens a new realm of possible meanings, interpretations and actions in our world.

Jim Goldberg

We are a very emotional and tight family, 1979 Silver print 35.2 x 27.4 cm.

SAN FRANCISCO — "Manny loves me—but I am too strong to love him." ... "This photo makes me want to cry," 1982.
© Jim Goldberg



Francesca Woodman

Lee Friedlander is close to being a favorite, but he I don't think he is.

a poem

a poem about a person

I like it when my cat watches me have sex
He is usually upstairs sleeping

on my roommate's bed

when I go looking for him
I take him under one arm and bring him into my room
I feed him
He is confused and stares at the bowl before he begins to eat
That’s when I close the door
J is already on my bed, adjusting my ipod. Something 70s and Brazilian starts playing
When I am on top and feeling everything—one hand on J’s shoulder, the other against the wall
I turn my body
My brown eyes meet his
Big and yellow and glowing in the dark

waterloo sunsets

Taken from a mediocre essay written in Spring 09.

------------------------------

Ray Davies, what do you mean to voyeurism and what does voyeurism mean to you?

But I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. -Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks

... after glimpsing a colorful boy running down the streets. The boy was chasing a large red ball that was propelling itself down an alleyway and away from a grubby mob of French-spouting children. The boy was the balloon’s friend, but the other children were jealous and chased the balloon and tried to harm it by throwing stones. Eventually the red balloon meets a crowd of other Technicolor balloons and together they float away in silent concert to the top of the sky.

That was the first time I saw Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon (Le ballon rouge.)

Yet, this is my personal account of a sentimental attachment to a work of art—the love of a spectator. I am a pedestrian, a student, an amateur photographer and an audience member. What is more interesting to analyze is the indissoluble and unexplainable relationship between an artist and their creation. Just as I have found my connection to The Red Balloon to be extraordinarily rare, it is the same for artists.

...It’s the artworks that are never completed to satisfaction, or never seen shown before the death of an artist that have the most significance in one's life.

...Ray Davies songs are short, at around 2:30 and combine definitively '60s British electrified-rock with head-bobbing pop rhythms. His work uses personal narrative to capture the smallest, but most enjoyable moments in of life: the scenes we witness from a window, meeting a mysterious woman, getting over a lover or watching the daily rush hour traffic when you are not a part of it. These songs are in fact stories about the small minutes of happiness, infatuation and nostalgia that make up our lives.

“Waterloo Sunset” is written from the point of view of a man staring out the window onto the Waterloo Bridge connecting the East and West sides of London over the River Thames. Davies sings, but I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. He spies a young couple, Terry and Julie, and everything in the world seems to be at peace as long as they are in love, as they are in that moment.

By the end of the song we do not learn who Terry and Julie are, or if they are even real. It is not necessary to know the identity of the lovers in order to understand the bliss of their meetings. Davies has offered many contradicting identities for Terry and Julie, recorded in interviews and his autobiography. ...But the song is widely thought to be about Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, British film stars that were once a high profile romantic couple—even Christie acknowledges that the song is about her and Stamp. Could be the mystery that preserves this song as a timeless story about finding connection in the London’s swarming metropolis? If so, is Ray Davies doing a service to his work by protecting the subject’s true identities?

The cynic might hear “Waterloo Sunset” as a mundane observation of everyday urban traffic patterns. But the song has been proclaimed “a masterpiece” by The Who’s Pete Townshend and "the most beautiful song in the English language" by music critic Robert Christgau. ...In 1985, Return to Waterloo, a soundtrack to a self-directed and written film of the same name was released by Davies. The title is a direct reference to the 1967 song, but the story takes a more dystopian perspective on London street life, while still playing on public voyeurism, imagination, exploring a relationship to the city of London. Davies’ song "Return to Waterloo" concerns the struggles an aging man’s dreams of a return to the world of his youth. Another 15 years later, in 2000, Davies published Waterloo Sunset Stories, a collection of short stories titled exclusively after Kinks songs. The autobiographical stories revolve around an aged rock musician, Les Mulligan, and a cynical promoter planning his comeback.

...I have experienced unexplainable echoes of art, film, and literature—a result of what I can only assume is a deep personal connection to a work. Such as my love for an old French children’s movie about a boy chasing a balloon, or the songs that stick themselves to the insides of all our heads, or the books we continue to read over and over. Artists have similar relationships to their own work, as there are enduring forces that connect the creator his creation. For some, a particular story is perennially created, expanded, destroyed, and redigested over an entire career. Artists are able to dedicate themselves to a story with many endings, just as Davies is connected to “Waterloo Sunset”. ...

the beginning

I don't think my senior thesis is working out how I want it to. The content and idea won't change, but instead of making large prints and concentrating mostly on the photogaphy I think I will try and bind a book- and not do what I usually do (taking dollar books from the Strand and photo-mounting my own images on the pages) but instead really binding it well and stronger and with more text. Most of my photos from last week are very overexposed. Below are some paragraphs introducing the House of Studies and Einstein. I'll add more later. The photos are of Nygel, a canal and the Six Flags sign outside of Einstein.

I opened my eyes in the dark, a minute before the alarm clock broke the quiet and rolled off my plastic-coated twin mattress pad. The wasps buzzed around the frayed screen of my open second floor window. A leaking sink stuck out of the wall near the foot of my bed, I turned its steel handle and the faucet blasted hard water against my hands. For the past three years, local newspapers had been telling the public to avoid drinking tap water. I raised my palms to my face and let the cold water drip down my face and neck into my t-shirt. The heat outside would dry my clothes within a half an hour. I changed into my uniform and met the other who were waiting outside on the steps, in a loose half-circle. We sat silently before boarding the vans heading to our separate campsites.

+++++++++++

To the farthest east of the city, outside of the St. Bernard Parish, is The Einstein Charter School. On the outside, the building is layered with grey painted rectangles covering graffiti on the blue brick pillars. The lopsided roof is missing shingles and the school seems to have fallen out of the sky and into an overgrown field. The grass behind the main building is pockmarked with Cisco wine bottles, foil hot fry bags, lost socks, deflated basketballs and moldy wet mattresses. Neighborhood kids and teenagers play games on these abandoned mattresses, jumping from one onto the other until they get bored.

The football goal posts stand at a 50-degree angle from the wind force of the storm three years before. Beyond the field is a labyrinth of small, one-story houses, some trailers are still parked in front, and some houses still have the red or orange crosses and numbers spray painted beside the front door.

This elementary and middle school building was home to an AmeriCorps summer camp during the hot vacation months the kids were supposed to have away from classrooms. The program was free for low-income families with the exception of a $15 fee for three Gulfsouth Youth Action Corps t-shirts that the campers would never wear. Inside, the heat of the school rose, and the humid air was thick with smells of mold, urine, warm pencil shavings and sour milk. The fluorescent lights in the wide main hallway were kept off during May, June, July and August to keep the building cooler. It didn’t seem to be working. At each end of the hallway were thick metal doors, wrapped in unlocked chains; the daylight came inside, highlighting the bottom ½ inch where the door did not reach the floor.

Josef Koudelka

Assignment for Adv NF class.

I compiled some Koudelka photographs to go with this essay.

Asleep on a Burlap Sack,

Josef Koudelka

Who took these photographs? And what do they mean? This man has traveled. How old is he? Who are these strange people? Are they his friends? His family maybe?

We come to knowing a man by seeing the places he has been. While we never view his face, we see pieces of his body. An outstretched fist, displaying a wristwatch before an empty street. It is 6:00 PM in Prague, 1968. Flip ahead and it is 10:38, somewhere in Spain, 1976. We see him in a pair of rolled up, loose bluejeans and creased leather shoes, worn from travel. He is resting his legs against the trunk of a young tree. We see the simplicity of his lifestyle in an unfolded newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, used as a plate. He eats a baguette with cheese and an apple sliced horizontally, revealing the centrical star in holding the seeds.

He is a man who lived without a home for over half his life. He is a photographer.

When Josef Koudelka ended a career as an engineer in Bratislava, he let the right side of his brain grow over the left. He began his career in photography taking photographs of Czech absurdist theater performances, including, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. But his real interest was in the Gypsies. He explored what was then the lower part of his country, Slovakia and learned the language, played their music and listened quietly to their stories. He was a gypsy, sleeping on a burlap sack on the floors of acquaintances and waking early to catch the light.
One day, with no warning, Prague was invaded. Josef took over two thousand exposures of crowds, violence, streets, rebellion, machinery, and anger. His photographs were published anonymously and he left his home for a nomadic life to be had elsewhere. He traveled over Europe, and the rest of the world, finding and documenting other exiles. He did not return to Prague for over 30 years.
Photography is unlike other artistic mediums because it is influenced by technology, unlike painting or sculpture which has changed very little in the past hundreds of years. Painters and sculptors use the same instruments and can ignore the digitized world, while photographers cannot. Josef Koudelka remained devoutly loyal to his Leica 25mm for most of his life until 1986, when he traded it for a panoramic camera. I was born in 1987, and for my own unexplainable reasons, I gravitate to his Leica photographs. As a collection, these photographs show the movements of one man tracking the diasporas of Europe, carrying the weight of a German steel devices with precise lenses, and rolls of sensitive film in his backpack.
This technology was the most valuable thing Josef Koudelka ever owned. The most fascinating thing about Koudelka is his ability to move. He never put down roots, he never paid rent, not until a few years ago when he finally purchased an apartment in Paris and one in Prague. He is 70 years old and still taking photographs.
The French journalist Bernard Cuau wrote of his friend, “He is the one who lives in dangerous places and who heads for uncertain destinations. He has been an exile... and as a matter of principal has refused to master any one language fully – which is an easy way of avoiding questions.”
Rather than allow others to ask the questions, it is Josef Koudelka’s photographs that ask the audience questions. Look again at the photographs. Do you see the tortoise in the middle of the dirt road? He is immobile. His body is upside-down. His neck is stretched, looking to the ground, and he is trying to regain support on his feet rather than balancing on the shape of his convex shell. The tortoise’s scaly legs and sharp toenails scrape uselessly into the air. He runs faster than his body allows him on the ground, but he goes nowhere. How did he get in this difficult position? And how will he get out of it? There is a trodden dirt road that disappears over a hill. It isn’t too far. Where does it lead? Where will the tortoise go, once he is back on his feet?

First came Josef’s love of Gypsy music. After college, Josef Koudelka traveled to Italy with a Slavic folk band. He knew how to dance the Klezmer. The nomadic Romani (Gypsy) people are known for wandering across North Africa, the Middle East, but especially in Eastern Europe, working as tradesmen and musicians. Over centuries the Romani have collected musical influences from the distances they have traveled: India, Arabia, Persia, Iberia, Bohemia, and Slovakia. Accordions chase guitars, trumpets parade by the pianos, and brass drums play beside the cimbalom.
Gypsy voices are unusually adenoid and rough with wide ranges and the song's notes rise and fall over the violins squealing glissando. There is a sadness and pride to Romani music that is always present, although the languages and instruments change by region. Some instruments travel from one generation onto the next. Many families play music together, during festivals, weddings, and wakes. Fathers give their sons the violins that their fathers gave unto them.
Second, Josef was attracted to the physicality of the Gypsies.
The hereditary dark skin and pronounced features of the Romani highlight their expressions of exaltation and sadness. Josef Koudelka photographed the small daily joy and heartbreak of these communities. The most beautiful and captivating photographs he took were of tradition and rituals: the dusted wrinkles on old women’s faces at funerals. He captured street concerts in photographs: the crowds gathered to listen and lines of smiling crooked teeth unknown to dentists. Josef was a magician with his camera: he froze juggler’s objects in midair, onlookers stare with eyes forever affixed towards the sky.
Josef Koudelka has never been confused for a fashion photographer like his contemporary Richard Avedon. He never stepped into a studio and only photographed his subjects and landscapes using available light. Yet, he was able to capture the timeless style of Romanian and Slavic gypsies. The men wear patched suits and women wear long homemade dresses and thick knitted sweaters covering their shoulders. There are no athletic logos or tiny alligator insignia decorating the breast pockets of shirts. The people have no need for branding, not even for their cattle, which is cared for communally.
Finally, and most completely, Josef fell in love with the gypsy lifestyle. Free from consumerism, and free to travel and live as they like, Josef adopted this life. He traveled the world taking photographs of Man, Community, Ritual, and Death. He worked for the premier international photojournalism co-op, Magnum Photos. But he took few assignments from Magnum, instead he continued to ramble by his own design. The themes of alienation, despair, and desolation resonate throughout his work, while somehow maintaining a hopefulness and sense of humor.
His scenes lack the usual bookmarks of time- there are no advertisements, no posters in the background, no logos or other recognizable cultural cues. The audience is placed in a moment that could be almost anywhere, anytime. It is this timeless quality that makes Koudelka’s photographs so memorable. Other photographers aim to capture historical moments, celebrities, assassinations, space shuttle launches, or disasters. Josef Koudelka wants to preserve scenes that could happen in any family of Man.
Koudelka formed a strong connection to his subjects. Other photographers encapsulate private moments in photographs can objectify or exploit the subject. An arrest, a funeral, a gunshot, or a kiss. Josef does not steal these moments. He preserves them storing the happy and sad in the same frame. An unobtrusive man, his photographs are like gifts given to family members. But the Gypsies, who rarely use mirrors have even less care for visages of what they looked like in yesterdays.
“Even the Gypsies were sorry for me because they thought I was poorer than them. At night they were in their caravans and I was the guy who was sleeping outside beneath the sky,” he said in an August 2008 interview.
The gypsies are abused by the government and overlooked by the masses for not making substantial economic contributions to society. The photographs of Slovakia taken in 1963 are of these families that Josef found so captivating. These families lived no regard for the popular culture. Josef also chose to live this way, with these same values. He relied on his friends, relationships, hard work, and personal curiosities rather than social norms or material objects and never felt tied down to a particular city or country.

"They can crush the flowers, but they can’t stop the Spring" - Alexander Dubcek August 21, 1968
It is the morning of his return. Josef is back to Prague after six months spent in Romania on an anthropological Gypsy assignment. In the night some 200,000 soldiers and 2,000 tanks drove through the streets of Prague beginning the lasting Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia and violently halting Alexander Dubcek's ‘Prague Spring’ political liberalization reforms. Josef took over 5,000 photographs during the first week of occupation. His negatives were secretly messengered out of Prague by his curator friend, Anna Farova, and passed to the Magnum offices in Paris. The images were published anonymously using the name PP (Prague Photographer.) Josef feared for the lives of his family.
“'For a long time no one here was interested in remembering, but now I think they start to remember again. If this book helps the remembering I am happy. We Czechs are not like you Irish or the Poles. We do not behave bravely many times against the odds, but in this one week, as my book shows, we should be very proud of how we behave.”
After the invasion, Koudelka moved to London. He continued to sleep on the floors and couches of friends. After his three-month visa expired, he chose not to return to the Czech Republic. He became officially “stateless”, like the subject in the majority his photographs. The UK granted him asylum, where he stayed until 1979, continuing to live from a suitcase while he traveled Europe and made photographs. His images of public life are also images of the ver things that tie men together. The still of a suited man in Spain with some kind of rocket is magical. The scene seems strange to the audience. The smoke obscures the face. Why is he dressed so fashionably? Why is he releasing a missile?
In 1984, following the death of his father, Koudelka finally published his name beside his images of the Prague Invasion. He had remained anonymous for 16 years, in fear that the Czechoslovakian government would harm his family. His work began to be appreciated worldwide, including a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery and later the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam.
Three years later he returned to Czechoslovakia after 20 years in exile. He uses his panoramic camera to capture some of the most environmentally devastated natural land in the world, the ‘Black Triangle’, where the Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet. Named accordingly, The Black Triangle is one of Europe's most heavily polluted regions. The air there is thick with lignite, a soft brown coal mined locally, dust created by communist heating plants. Since the end of the Cold War, greater efforts have been made to reverse the area’s air pollution.
Today, Koudelka moves between Paris and Prague. He has two daughters and a young son, each from a different woman and each from a different country: France, England and Italy (in that order.)

The forward to Koudelka’s book Exiles was written by fellow Czech exile, Nobel Prize recipient, Czesław Miłosz. “Now hundreds of thousands, and even millions, migrate, chased from their homes by war, by harsh economic necessities, or political persecution, and an expatriate, for instance a writer, an artist, an intellectual who left his country for his own, so to say, fastidious reasons, motivated as he was not only by fear of starvation or of the police, cannot isolate his fate from the fate of those masses. Their nomadic existence, the slums they often inhabit, the deserts of dirty streets where their children play are, in a way, his own; he feels solidarity with them and he only wonders whether this is not an image, more and more generalized, of the human condition.”
Yes, Josef Koudelka is part of the masses of the global Diaspora. He moves easily, swept along with the global political, social, and economic current. But there is more to these photographs than dirty streets, poverty, and isolation. He finds simple happiness beside suffering. In the photograph of the Slovakian funeral, a large crowd gathers around the body of a woman. A white light saturates the central figure in the photograph. The mourner’s profiles are aglow, but the only faces acknowledging the camera are those of the children. Where there is grief, there is also hope.

references:
Magnum Images. Ritual. London: Andre Deutsch Limited, 1990.
Thames & Hudson, Photofile. Josef Koudelka. London: Thames & Hudson Inc. 2007.
O’Hagan, Sean. “40 years on: the exile comes home to Prague." The Observer. 24 Aug. 2008. 21 Oct 2008 .

adv nf

I took Advanced Non Fictionwith a professor who had terrible reviews on Amazon. When I first looked her up (I look them all up,) her name drew two types of work: 'Creative non fiction' work about Russian ballet, early American cinema and the biography of a woman's life written by her closet. The other was an autobiography written by one of Ted Bundy's ex-girlfriends. You can probably figure out which one she was.


Things I wrote included
an essay about Josef Koudelka
'How to Score an Israeli Soldier' American Girl Taglit Summer
New Orleans travelogue
a short story about forgetting things




some writing exercises are ridiculous. like recreating a moment in three sentences.

I wipe Abita foam from my upper lip. I am sitting on the front steps with Travis and smoking my first cigarette of the Summer. We are discussing the latest fight and lunchtime gossip.

Standing alone if front of a room full of buzzing brown eyeballs. My body begins to itch with anger and skin grows pinker with anger and embarrassment. Finally, as the messiness seems to be under control, a loud voice is thrown from the corner. He asks me where I’m from; he tells me, “What you ah doin, it’s alotta like teachin’.” A man named Mr. Omar.

Flying down a dead road named Freemanville. The air smells like horses and construction. I still get lost on night roads around my parents house.

notes on mason

my brother and i don't get along too well. he dosnt think im too cool and i think the same about him usually. we don't have much in common; none of the same friends, we went to different high schools, have different interests, different tastes in music, and different ideas of fun for the most part. but for a recent assignment i wrote about him and his music. i talked with him about his band and i made a tape recorded the whole thing. it was probably the best conversation we've had for a long time.




Becoming So Clear
My brother and his dreams of getting into heaven

I am at my parent’s house in Atlanta, sitting at my old desk. Mason, passes by the doorway, each time I visit he seems less and less familiar. His arms are bigger, like tree limbs; he lifts weights. What’s up with yer face? I throw across the room. He checks out his reflection and says Dude, fuck pimples! I then ask if he has some time later, to sit down with me so I can tape him talking about his band, he agrees.

Mason, my younger brother, is now 16. A junior at Milton High School, he is more importantly the lead singer and guitarist of Becoming So Clear, a suburban Atlanta alternative/emo trio with a growing teenage fanclub of short skirted girls and parking lot stoners. BSC is not just a hobbyl; they play regular gigs at local bars and house parties, they have over 2,500 plays on Myspace, two Facebook groups in their honor, and a swarm of groupies loyally gathered at the edge of their stage and sending them love notes online. BSC’s current line up is Mason Alexander (16, vocals & guitar), Chris Bullock (16, guitar & keyboard), and Kenny Roberts (16, drums.)

The first question I had to ask was about the name of the band. What do you think of the name, what does it mean?

I think it’s good. It means a lot. I don’t know it’s about trying to figure shit out for yourself. It’s becoming so clear.

I tried again, But what is ‘becoming so clear’?

It is Everything said Mason.

I laughed. My brother’s answer was as empty as the band’s name.

As little kids, my brother and I tried piano lessons. We both quit pretty early on, but it was different a few years later when, at age 10, Mason picked up a guitar. He taught himself the chords and technique, learned new songs and started writing music and lyrics to his own. Mason has been involved with various music projects before, but he has never been as dedicated to one like Becoming So Clear. The band has been practicing, writing, recording, and performing together for about a year now. An archetype of a high school band, the guys face many of the same problems as those that came before them. They sit through long and boring school days and at night they work crappy part-time restaurant jobs, they save their money for recording time at a studio. There is also the usual romantic entanglements, inner-band fighting, and parental expectations to think about. Mason has no intention of heading off to University of Georgia, or any college at all, like the majority of the MHS class of 2009. College is the monster Scylla and whirlpool Charybdis he and his band mates must navigate beyond in their epic musical journey to fame.

To date, BSC has self-released only one single. The song was recorded this past summer, during a 12-hour session at End of Autumn Studios. While bringing their instruments and equipment into the studio, the boys had their first brush with musical royalty. As they were heading inside to lay down their very first track, local Atlanta rapper, Ludacris was exiting the studio after throwing down lyrics to the remix of Gucci Mane’s “Freaky Gurl”.

Becoming So Clear's single, “Alice”, is a simple upbeat pop song, it sounds a little 90's, like the Spin Doctors or Polaris (Nickelodeon’s Adventures of Pete & Pete), and is an allusion to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The song was featured on 99X station’s Sunday School, a radio showcase of local musicians. The chorus urges the listener “Don’t believe what they say, because they just want you to stay. Don’t fall asleep under that tree, just stay right here with me.”

"It’s really just about peer pressure,” says Mason, “… you don’t have to listen to anyone else, and you can do things for yourself. It’s a lot about people trying to get you to do drugs and shit. Everyone thinks Alice in Wonderland is about drugs, but really it’s about some girl’s adventure- and then these druggies are like, ‘the cat is acid, and the white rabbit is cocaine.’ No. It’s some girl who is confused and listening to a bunch of other people tell her what to do."

Listening to my brother talk about this song, I think that he is probably right, many of the people in his audience probably consider it a lyrical wink to high school drug use. But, in defiance of certain stereotypes, all the members of BSC claim that they do not use recreational drugs (note: I unable to find evidence supporting these claims.) When asked to describe the typical audience breakdown at a show, Mason has no problem, “mostly girls and pothead dudes. It’s nowhere in between, it is seriously just those two people. Some guys that drink and smoke weed and girls, all kinds of girls.”

By Milton high school standards, the band is fairly eclectic in their musical tastes and background. This may be part of the appeal to such a wide range of the underclassmen female population. The drummer, Kenny, is tall, blue-eyed and friendly; he listens to what he calls ‘hardcore’ music, like Bless the Fall and Chiodos and favors the double bass pedal. Chris, rhythm guitar and keyboards, is only a sophomore, a year below his band mates, he wears sunglasses indoors, listens to pop/punk, and is classically trained in piano. Mason is tall and lean, he wears tight t-shirts, tight ripped jeans, dark shaggy hair, and a smirk like Keaneau's in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. His favorite musicians are The Kooks, Elliott Smith, Circa Survive, and Jack Johnson. He is a showman: loud and confident on stage. At one point during every show, even those going particularly poorly, he commands the audience to clap their hands and sing along.

Mason worships Anthony Green, the singer/songwriter behind Circa Survive and Saosin. If you could meet Anthony Green and ask him anything, what would it be? I say.

Could I kiss you on the lips? he replies then laughs.

A meeting with Green two years ago at the annual The Warped Tour festival confirmed my brother’s plans to become a professional musician. Mason talked his way back behind the tour buses and smoked what was probably the best cigarette of his life with his songwriting idol. Mason composes the majority of the BSC’s lyrics, and besides Green, he is also inspired by the poetry of Charles Bukowski, Jim Morrison, and Elliott Smith.

What have been the best gig you’ve played so far and what made it better than any other? I ask.

The first time we played the Apache Café. ‘Alice’ had just come out, a bunch of people bought tickets, and there were people at Apache already. Everyone knew all the words, and everyone was singing along to our songs, and it just felt really good. Now we need finish the demo and put out more singles.

The band has not written new material for some time, instead focusing on perfecting their current set list. Occasionally, lyrics are reworked, as was the case after a particularly awkward Christmas card was received by BSC's keyboardist, Chris Bullock.
Our guitarists’ last girlfriend wrote him some hilarious letter, it was for Christmas. It all talks about some stupid shit and then the last two lines are, ‘I would tell you “I love you”, but can’t because I don’t- but maybe some day I will. Merry Christmas, baby’. We went and added those lines to this instrumental song we had.

Other than the heartbreak of high school relationships, other elements of everyday life seem work their way into the boy’s songs. Recently, the band’s former bassist, 17 year-old Kyle Pind, quit. Kyle’s abrupt departure eerily parallels the lyrics to the upcoming single, “Which Road Would You Take”, originally written to address teenage suicide. According to BSC, Kyle did not take his commitment to the band as seriously as his commitment to the Milton High School theater program and his goal of attending the Savannah College of Art and Design in the fall.

Being in a band is definitely our top priority, and it just wasn’t his. We’re not looking to get into state colleges and stuff right now.

The boys are currently looking for a new bassist, but in the mean time they continue making sweet music without Kyle, performing nearly every weekend at local venues and house parties. BSC works with Big Time Entertainment, which while most definitely a scam, it does provide the band with bi-monthly shows at somewhat respectable bars and smaller venues, including the Apache Café and the Red Light. Big Time requires that the band print and sell their own tickets to their performances, and in return the band only receives 30% of the profits from ticket sales. Mason and the guys agree that these venues are not ideal for their fan base; the bar’s regulars tend to be much older, and because the venue serves alcohol, the band can only perform earlier sets.

Next month, BSC has booked their first show at Swayze’s, a venue that attracts an offbeat teenage crowd.

But Swayze’s also gets lots of weirdoes I warned my brother.

Yea, but girls will go. Girls will definitely go. It’s harder to get the Masquerade, especially Heaven.

I once heard that one of the couches in Heaven once got set on fire and fell through Purgatory and down into Hell I say.

Another one of the goals of the band is to play the Masquerade, a decrepit, ramshackle but arguably awesome venue with three separate stages, Heaven (top floor), Purgatory (main floor), and Hell (the basement). Naturally, only the best bands get to play on top in Heaven, where Becoming So Clear intends on going.

*****---------------------------*****

LISTEN TO THE BAND

*****---------------------------*****