Five Questions. A Meme. Of sorts.

[rhythmaning]

danieldwilliam posed me six questions  in the five questions meme. Top marks for thinking outside the box! Here we go...

1. What makes good jazz good?
   
   I'm afraid this is the wrong question. Jazz isn't good or bad. Some jazz is very good, some jazz is very bad; of itself, jazz is necessarily neutral. It is a bit like asking "what makes painting good?"
   
   
   Perhaps the answer is the person playing the jazz?
   
   
   If you were trying to ask what is it about jazz that I like, I think it has to be a combination of the rhythms, the instruments - the sound of a big band playing is like no other - and the mixture of familiarity coupled with the excitement of improvisation.
   
   
   Purely or largely improvised music - like Blacktop or the Sons of Kemet make - can be incredibly exciting. But only in a live context - it is not music to sit at home listening to. So the same music could be good AND bad.



2. What is the favourite photograph that you have taken?
   
   
   Almost impossible to answer - there are no definitive, absolute answers. "Favourite" doesn't really work in this context. I have been taking photographs seriously for nearly 38 years: I got my first SLR in the autumn of 1974. For 30 years, when I was shooting film, I would guess I took 50 films a year - that's about 50,000 negatives. Since then I have taken digital photos at perhaps two or three times the rate - let's say another 10,000 images. (I have loaded about 8,000 digital images on flickr, so that is probably a huge underestimate - on the basis of what I have on flickr, and the fact that I only put up a fraction of my images, it might be a fair estimate that I have taken c 40,000 digital images.)
   
   
   Picking one photo from 60,000-odd is pretty impossible. Especially since I also sometimes remember the photos I didn't take.
   
   
   I also sometimes take the same subject many times - over the years, I have returned to various buildings. So it might be possible to say, for example, that the World Financial Center [sic] or the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building are amongst my favourite subjects, because whenever I am in New York I photograph them obsessively. But I could not say which is my favourite image of those buildings.
   
   
   There are two images which stick in my mind which I think I have lost the originals (and any copies), going back over thirty years. The first is a picture of Kaye Webb, the founder of Puffin Books, in a hot air balloon at an exhibition; it was the first photograph of mine that I had published (and wasn't attributed: even then, there was rampant copyright infringement)> Kaye hated the picture. It was a great image.
   
   
   The other was a sunset in Italy. I was stuck on a train outside Rome, destined to miss my connection. The train had broken down or something, and we sat there literally for hours. The sun went down, and the sunset was reflected off the ranks of tracks on their way into Rome. It combined the beauty of the sunset with the repetitiveness of industrial architecture.
   
   
   Since these are lost photos, you'll have to take my word for it.




3. How did you get involved in the Tuttle Club?
   
   
   An easy one. Frankie knew Lloyd, who had told her to come along sometime, and the first time she went, since I was visiting London, she took me along, too. It stuck with me, not so much with her.



4. What advice would you give to your 18 year old self?
   
   
   Give whisky another go. You may like it.



5. What advice would you give Bluebird and the Captain about the 21st Century?
   
   
   Head for the hills. Learn to farm and be self-sufficient. No, REALLY.



6. Why do you generally ignore memes?
   
   
   Usually they involve asinine rules dreamt up by ill-educated teenagers who are bored in the mid-west of the USA. Why "ask me five questions"? Why not six, or four? (So top marks for ignoring the rules.) Generally I don't find reading them very informative or entertaining.
   
   
   And usually they are of course the wrong questions.
   
   They do not really create space for conversation or dialogue.
   
   And I don't feel compelled to share everything with everyone.

Comments

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I very much like the stories of the lost photographs.

On improvisation I see the same thing with improvised theatre. Sometimes the magic is that the thing is taking place out of nothing in front of you as fast as you are experiencing it.


You think the 21st Century is really going to be that bad? Why so?


My follow up to the Tuttle question is what are you getting from it that other experiences don’t offer?

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Here: http://rhythmaning.livejournal.com/348220.html

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

With respect to Tuttle, I don't think it provides anything I couldn't get elsewhere. But that doesn't make it any less valuable.

One of the special things about it, though, is the openness it provides: it is a space to develop ideas outside of formal structure.