The NolaEastman Trailer

http://straight-faced-blues.blogspot.it/2014/05/the-nolaeastman-trailer.html

The NolaEastman Series

http://www.area35artfactory.com/pen/mostre_mostra.php?id=291&l=en

The NolaEastman Series

Almost every year I go to the U.S. & every time I land overseas I have a promise or if you prefer, a debt: I have to spend some time in New Orleans.

There is a word that gives a sense of all that New Orleans is: N.O.L.A.

This abbreviation, which is typical of a certain American practicality, is nothing more than the union of two acronyms: N.O. (New Orleans) & L.A. (Louisiana).

To a stranger these four pointed letters, maybe if he’s just a simple tourist who travels to New Orleans to paint the town red in the most famous Bourbon Street, they don’t mean much, for sure.

In the word N.O.L.A. there are the sense and the spirit of the town, the real town with its citizens who live & stay in the boundary lines of the small & hot-humid city of Louisiana.

In this series there are shots taken a year ago with a Nikon Fe 1978 camera body with a 20 mm fixed lens. The film is the Eastman Double-X 35 mm medium speed, 250 asa.

It differs from traditional films for general applications, such as 400 asa films of other well-known producers, that despite the fact that they have a large reliability but the result remains a substantial uniformity of the subject.

The film in this series, furthermore if used in a mode privileging the timing, provides, both in development phase of the negative & even more in the darkroom & then in the printing process, a significant differentiation of tonality of contrasts. These features are made possible by the fact that the Eastman Double-X has been conceived & used for the the cinema in order to obtain & maintain a wide depth of field, stability of the structural components of the image, making they stand out in the presence of contrasts.

Leaving aside the technical details, this series has been realized to narrate New Orleans: for this purpose, I chose the expressive vehicles of writing & photography.

You can find the life in the streets, in the endless bars in the french quarter & around the french quarter: they are places for meeting, sharing & conversation, where even a stranger can get in touch with the various souls of different communities & become what they define with an American-English term: a “local".

New Orleans is one of those towns, that with its history, its people - its strong influence of European extraction of people from France, Spain, England, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Portugal etc. - with its traditions, its cults, with its ubiquitous overflowing music, with its contrasting colors, with the plagues over the centuries - from the battle of 1862 during the Civil War to the passage of greedy murderous mother known with the name of Katrina - with its story of ups & downs, becomes a place of the mind.

It’s a town of passage and of recovery too, also for people from Europe who want to start a new track or want to embrace the American way of life, bearing in mind that Nola is not any place on the territory of the United States: it’s more an exception, it’s an island that floats, something which stands with its own rules; it’s not comparable to the great metropolises of the East Coast, to those of the Midwest, to those of the West Coast and even less to small rural or industrial towns.

In fact it is a stratified conglomeration of those geographic parts of the United States that I just mentioned in the previous lines & of the migratory waves coming mostly from Europe.

New Orleans, Proud to call it home.

                                                                                              Nick

The NolaEastman Series

http://au.blurb.com/b/5283662-the-nolaeastman-series

The NolaEastman Series

http://straight-faced-blues.blogspot.it/2014/04/the-nolaeastman-series.html

Definition of Rock

Rock, in addition to being a definition of a certain lifestyle, it’s a term with a precise pronunciation : rɒk.

Rock is a heavy load that crosses your room on Saturday Afternoon.

Rock is Lou Reed with yellow hair, black sunglasses, dressed entirely in black, junkie-ways, who sings a song from Berlin in a concert somewhere in Denmark in a 1974 tour .

Rock is Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (California, USA) who starts with: "Hello , I'm Johnny Cash".

Rock is a pretty damnation, a viral unleashing of the senses, do not give in, strong self-destruction, rebellion, abandon, fall ill, protest, dance, walk, jump, standing in the middle of a street and do not know what to do.

Rock is a dense and junkie travel within yourself and then you realize that you are the only person alive on earth at 4:32 in the morning and that the world out is ready for another day of total boredom: better burn out than slowly fade away Neil Young said - keep on rockin’ in the free world .

Rock is to take yourself and go far from home and say hello to Mom & Dad while pushing the car as much as possible on a bumpy road on the other side of the world and stop in a motel in the middle of a foreign country and put a chair and a table behind the door before going to sleep because the murderer of the room next to you is not making you a greeting in the middle of the night .

Rock are the gently deadheads and their beautiful secular religion made ​​of freedom, tolerance, open-mindedness, respect, civility, affection, love and so much.

Rock are the punks, stoned and bones and little flesh, towering on the end of the Seventies.

Rock are the arrows of Grace Slick in her dream-state and glacial vowels while she’s watching Janis Joplin with the three hundredth bottle of Jim Beam.

Rock is Jimi Hendrix who will never meet Miles Davis for a super jam session.

Rock is to take your Les Paul with big old strings and make it play in your acoustic Marshall.

Rock is every single day that you buy a record and when you put it on you're high and you read The Brothers Karamazov in a few hours and you think that it’s stuff nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. Terrible deal, Fedor .

Rock are thousands of black and white photographs made ​​on the road in the most unthinkable moments, not to respect the traffic light, to waste the fuel as quickly as possible, to have a caboose crammed till exhaustion with beers and whiskey crates ready to use.

Rock is ramble on for thousands of clubs to listen to your own blues and stand on the sidewalk outside the door, until they reopen, only for another round, one more round, please.

Rock is Woodstock with the rain and the mud and lot of peace and love, brothers and sisters.

Rock are the Beatles so opposed to the Stones and you know: the ones made ​​the music, the others are the greatest rock band in the world .

Rock are dozens of magazines with glossy covers discussing guitar heroes or of the best hundred albums of all time. Sgt Pepper's always wins (maybe The White Album).

Rock is a beard growing for three months at least and think of Creedence or Canned Heat.

Rock is The Last Waltz to not forget The Band Rock of Ages.

Rock is your stereo on for seven days a week, is an incredible amount of pills, doses, mixed stuff and so on.

Rock is the cover of Horses and a photo of Patti Smith with Robert Mapplethorpe.

Rock is wanting strongly a woman and then have another one in your bed.

Rock is a girl just came of age - or thereabouts, that you would like she visits you in your sacerdotal rooms .

Rock is Duane Allman fishing in singlet, Eric Clapton seated  in front of various bottles or Jimmy Page with dragons on the jacket and the Gibson at Madison Square Garden, 1973, year ab incarnatione domini nostri Jesu Christi.

Rock are The Who with Roger Daltrey throwing the microphone in the air while Pete Townshend rolls right arm on SG - Teenage waste land of rock desert.

Rock are the tattoos of Johnny Winter and his fifty records preciously kept in a quiet place in your home, the cut finger of Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan who sizzles the harmonic in D, the patient voice of Leonard Cohen, the crackling thuds of Tom Waits, the schizoid-hieratic deeds of St. Nick Cave, the dark side of the moon Pink Floyd, Elton John singing Bennie and the Jets, the Doctor John get stuck in a cajun swamp, the intros of the Doors, the riffs of Deep Purple, David Bowie with his rock 'n' roll suicide, the fake darkness of Black Sabbath, whitewashed nostrils of Stevie Nicks, Jeff Beck’s vests, the monstrous roll of John Bonzo Bonham and the dreadful earthquake of Keith Moon, the “give peace a chance” of John Lennon.

Rock is a coherent, weird, overflowing vision that makes you get up in the morning and put on Stevie Ray Vaughn with Texas Flood or a Roy Buchanan’s forgotten album.

Rock is your woman that is gone with another woman and you hope she won’t be back.

Rock are shelves full of records to take and burn as a sacrifice to the mighty god of music.

Rock is the one thing that can change your life, that may be the way of salvation or escape.

Rock is physically a physical state, is human distraction, is violence in its purest form .

Rock is all the rest.

Clifton's

Of course I do not know
if it was the proper summer
or the summer that was coming

but only my father
that was back to write
after months, years

a long period
in which no one
couldn't see him

through those books
he read in the shelter
to which he had set on fire

after the absence from the scenes
what he wanted to tell us
what they wanted to say to him

after my mother
he asked
divorce & food

& decided to never come back
she had left him with a letter
abandoned on the cupboard

the last time I saw them
at a table, together
was at Clifton's.