Ottofilm
The Fly
I'm not drunk but I get the feeling this will read like I am, you have been warned. 3.03am Thursday 2003-04-24 and "God Part II" just came up on random in my iTunes:
don't believe in rock and roll
can really change the world...
Way way back in '01 I'd written up something of a tour diary for the June Elevation shows, and after the tour ended I had a bit of a wrap-up that I shared. I meant to fill in March, April, October and November and have a complete set, for the four or five of you who were following along at home. March I wrote and posted here a month ago. My intention was to do April as April went along - starting with coming within about twenty seconds of being kicked out of Canada trying to get to the April 9th Calgary show, and ending with April 26th, when I headed home after Anaheim 3. It's a reasonably decent story, with excitement and adventure (not that I thought being detained for hours and getting kicked out of a country was fun at the time) and ticket woes and some stunning shows and all that fun stuff; at the very least I felt I should write about the one show I didn't shoot. Clearly, my writing ambitions didn't show up with me at the keyboard. I was on a roll, darn it - I was 15,000 words into this story and at that point, it shouldn't have been so hard to keep going, right?
Except in the time between my last post and when I should have started the April tour diary posts, the first friend I made in Los Angeles, a dozen years ago, was found dead in her apartment. It was her 37th birthday.
The preliminary report said it was accidental; prescribed dose of antidepressant, proper amount of medication for pneumonia, and a few-too-many-but-not-so-many-to-be-fatal-under-normal-circumstances sleeping pills. She's been sick, she canceled her birthday party, and the combination of drugs put her into a final sleep. Read the warning labels, kids.
But another old friend of mine who was also close to her shared a similar thought to mine: the hell it was accidental. She'd let herself go, putting on 100 pounds in the last year or so. The sleeping pills were a constant, I was told, always in larger than suggested quantities. Depression was beating back the drugs and the fire inside that had taken her from waitressing when I met her to producing two films a decade later had gone out. (A blistering complaint letter CC'ed to the LA Weekly once got her a full page reply with the header "Well, [her name], things are tough all over" ... and the letter had been been about a movie theater chain charging extra for butter. To get a page about that, you need Fire capital F. The theater chain is now in bankruptcy, by the way.) But a doubt crept in: that fire couldn't really be out; smoldering at worst and turned inward at best, because she'd just finished writing a novel and her agents loved it and were sure there would be attention for it. Was she back on the upswing with this attention and it was an accident, or was the book effectively a goodbye note and this had been a long time coming? I'll never know what she was thinking. I'd started to dial her number once that weekend, half remembering it was her birthday right around then, but I hung up before the phone started to ring, my mood poor and with nothing worthwhile to say. I can't remember if it was Friday night, when she was alive, or Saturday, when she she may or not have been, or Sunday, when she wasn't.
I can't bring myself to take her name out of my cell phone. It's alphabetically near the beginning and see it every time I go into the phone book. The duration gets slightly shorter every time, but my eyes still linger on it as I scroll by.
--
I have a daughter due to be born Saturday, my first child. This was not planned and I'm filled with excitement and doubt and new purpose and terror. All my grandparents are gone. My father is gone; my baby will never know him, except for what of him is in me. (The fifth anniversary of his passing was last week, adding to this month's general atmosphere of merriment.) For the first time, and within a month of this huge life change for me, a friend of my own generation (a bit older, but still a Gen-Xer) had died. Someday, it'll be my turn.
--
The photo of mine that is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was taken two years ago today. I can't afford to print all my photos, and so for a couple of years I only saw it as a 452 pixel tall web scan, just like the rest of you. The image hadn't made all that much of an impression on me; I liked it, quite a bit actually (at least compared to the crap I usually think my pictures are), but I was unable to separate it in my mind from the completely miserable time I had surrounding the Anaheim shows. Even without a tour, I have a ... complicated relationship with Southern California, and that week it was just making things worse. I had driven thousands of miles, had that little incident with Canada that still had me rattled, was tired, broke, sunburnt, ticketless (and worse than any other show on the tour except possibly MSG, fixing that in Anaheim was a complete nightmare) and after a jawdropping San Jose 2 I had trouble getting my head into the shows. At one of the three shows I ended up in one part of the building and my camera was in another part; it was the only show I got to I wasn't able to photograph. The experience was mostly process and procedure, and I saw all that in the photo.
The shows felt weird too; one night Bono was clearly really pissed at something or someone that wasn't in the room and he wasn't going to name. You could tell there were too many celebrities in the room. All around: aigh!
But the first photo the Rock Hall asked me for wasn't working out, and time was short for a replacement. I had a really high quality scan of that photo around and since the photo had to be REALLY big, it was nominated as a pinch hitter almost by default. Fortunately the Rock Hall liked it, and back in February in Cleveland I turned a corner in the U2 exhibit and there was the photo, six by twelve feet. FEET.
This wasn't a print I'd made, and this was of a scale I'd never dreamed of before. I was able to go up to the photo and look at it closely. I'd not realized you could see the checkerboards on the heart wristbands. More importantly, I'd not realized that the way Bono's hand was down while he looked skyward, it looks like - and probably is - a sign of a question in his head. A question for the universe, for religion, for the lighting guy, who knows. But finally I saw not the photos I missed, not the hassles of getting into the show, not the sunburn, but simply the moment it is.
--
This is all a rambling mess and I shouldn't write at this hour, in this mental state. I'm at a weird moment where I don't really understand the ways lives come and go and touch each other along the way: the friend who is gone for good; the baby on her way; the friends from the tour who I understand and who understand me but I rarely see because of distance and that pesky Real Life. What stokes the fires of ambition and passion seems to be a control I can't operate; I want to make sure it always burns but I have no idea how it works in the first place. I see how my friends live and now, sometimes, die, and I don't think they know how it works either. I hope my daughter grows up to understand it on her own, because I'm not sure I can teach what I don't understand.
So this is what has to pass for a tour diary chapter this month. I'll write up April for real sometime, but for now, I'm in flux, caught between a recent death and an eminent birth. Music still moves me (in Mysterious Ways?) -- this month, I'm crying at the radio all the freakin' time, even to theoretically light and happy songs -- and I have to take on faith that sometimes I can capture that feeling (not the crying, but a sense of motion and emotion) and share it with others; it seems that one of the photographs I took two years ago today is fairly effective. The hope I can do that again someday keeps me dragging the camera out, keeps me near music. (But is it a pilgrim nearing their nirvana, or a moth nearing their flame?) But today, I can't pretend to understand how or why; I can't try to explain how I got here, or where I'm going. There are ... ahem... no maps for these territories.
Anyone got a map I can borrow?
Explain all these controls
Can't sing but I've got soul
Thanks for your infinite patience,
otto
--
A moment of disgusting sales pitch in the form of a one day offer, that will (of the nine of you that read this far) be ignored by seven and be an irritant to the other two. I'm with the two of you who are irritated, but as the broken record has said before: running a website that still gets as much traffic today as it did during the tour isn't free, and with a baby coming in the next few days, the site has gotta take care of itself. I have no ads, no forced payments, no worthwhile affiliate programs, and no NEA grant. Thus, to keep the site (http://www.U2photos.com) online and free for all, I have to sell the occasional photo print. It's probably worth dropping by even if you're not shopping, just because the gallery has much higher quality scans than the main site. The gallery is at http://www.kitsinger.com and I'd like to point out two sales going on: 1. I basically don't print 8x10's anymore and the few that I have left are on the site, and the photo in question above, the photo in the Rock Hall, is available for today only, the photo's anniversary (4/24/03) for half price: http://www.kitsinger.com/gallery/image/010424r4-18c2.html
I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
don't believe in rock and roll
can really change the world...
Way way back in '01 I'd written up something of a tour diary for the June Elevation shows, and after the tour ended I had a bit of a wrap-up that I shared. I meant to fill in March, April, October and November and have a complete set, for the four or five of you who were following along at home. March I wrote and posted here a month ago. My intention was to do April as April went along - starting with coming within about twenty seconds of being kicked out of Canada trying to get to the April 9th Calgary show, and ending with April 26th, when I headed home after Anaheim 3. It's a reasonably decent story, with excitement and adventure (not that I thought being detained for hours and getting kicked out of a country was fun at the time) and ticket woes and some stunning shows and all that fun stuff; at the very least I felt I should write about the one show I didn't shoot. Clearly, my writing ambitions didn't show up with me at the keyboard. I was on a roll, darn it - I was 15,000 words into this story and at that point, it shouldn't have been so hard to keep going, right?
Except in the time between my last post and when I should have started the April tour diary posts, the first friend I made in Los Angeles, a dozen years ago, was found dead in her apartment. It was her 37th birthday.
The preliminary report said it was accidental; prescribed dose of antidepressant, proper amount of medication for pneumonia, and a few-too-many-but-not-so-many-to-be-fatal-under-normal-circumstances sleeping pills. She's been sick, she canceled her birthday party, and the combination of drugs put her into a final sleep. Read the warning labels, kids.
But another old friend of mine who was also close to her shared a similar thought to mine: the hell it was accidental. She'd let herself go, putting on 100 pounds in the last year or so. The sleeping pills were a constant, I was told, always in larger than suggested quantities. Depression was beating back the drugs and the fire inside that had taken her from waitressing when I met her to producing two films a decade later had gone out. (A blistering complaint letter CC'ed to the LA Weekly once got her a full page reply with the header "Well, [her name], things are tough all over" ... and the letter had been been about a movie theater chain charging extra for butter. To get a page about that, you need Fire capital F. The theater chain is now in bankruptcy, by the way.) But a doubt crept in: that fire couldn't really be out; smoldering at worst and turned inward at best, because she'd just finished writing a novel and her agents loved it and were sure there would be attention for it. Was she back on the upswing with this attention and it was an accident, or was the book effectively a goodbye note and this had been a long time coming? I'll never know what she was thinking. I'd started to dial her number once that weekend, half remembering it was her birthday right around then, but I hung up before the phone started to ring, my mood poor and with nothing worthwhile to say. I can't remember if it was Friday night, when she was alive, or Saturday, when she she may or not have been, or Sunday, when she wasn't.
I can't bring myself to take her name out of my cell phone. It's alphabetically near the beginning and see it every time I go into the phone book. The duration gets slightly shorter every time, but my eyes still linger on it as I scroll by.
--
I have a daughter due to be born Saturday, my first child. This was not planned and I'm filled with excitement and doubt and new purpose and terror. All my grandparents are gone. My father is gone; my baby will never know him, except for what of him is in me. (The fifth anniversary of his passing was last week, adding to this month's general atmosphere of merriment.) For the first time, and within a month of this huge life change for me, a friend of my own generation (a bit older, but still a Gen-Xer) had died. Someday, it'll be my turn.
--
The photo of mine that is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was taken two years ago today. I can't afford to print all my photos, and so for a couple of years I only saw it as a 452 pixel tall web scan, just like the rest of you. The image hadn't made all that much of an impression on me; I liked it, quite a bit actually (at least compared to the crap I usually think my pictures are), but I was unable to separate it in my mind from the completely miserable time I had surrounding the Anaheim shows. Even without a tour, I have a ... complicated relationship with Southern California, and that week it was just making things worse. I had driven thousands of miles, had that little incident with Canada that still had me rattled, was tired, broke, sunburnt, ticketless (and worse than any other show on the tour except possibly MSG, fixing that in Anaheim was a complete nightmare) and after a jawdropping San Jose 2 I had trouble getting my head into the shows. At one of the three shows I ended up in one part of the building and my camera was in another part; it was the only show I got to I wasn't able to photograph. The experience was mostly process and procedure, and I saw all that in the photo.
The shows felt weird too; one night Bono was clearly really pissed at something or someone that wasn't in the room and he wasn't going to name. You could tell there were too many celebrities in the room. All around: aigh!
But the first photo the Rock Hall asked me for wasn't working out, and time was short for a replacement. I had a really high quality scan of that photo around and since the photo had to be REALLY big, it was nominated as a pinch hitter almost by default. Fortunately the Rock Hall liked it, and back in February in Cleveland I turned a corner in the U2 exhibit and there was the photo, six by twelve feet. FEET.
This wasn't a print I'd made, and this was of a scale I'd never dreamed of before. I was able to go up to the photo and look at it closely. I'd not realized you could see the checkerboards on the heart wristbands. More importantly, I'd not realized that the way Bono's hand was down while he looked skyward, it looks like - and probably is - a sign of a question in his head. A question for the universe, for religion, for the lighting guy, who knows. But finally I saw not the photos I missed, not the hassles of getting into the show, not the sunburn, but simply the moment it is.
--
This is all a rambling mess and I shouldn't write at this hour, in this mental state. I'm at a weird moment where I don't really understand the ways lives come and go and touch each other along the way: the friend who is gone for good; the baby on her way; the friends from the tour who I understand and who understand me but I rarely see because of distance and that pesky Real Life. What stokes the fires of ambition and passion seems to be a control I can't operate; I want to make sure it always burns but I have no idea how it works in the first place. I see how my friends live and now, sometimes, die, and I don't think they know how it works either. I hope my daughter grows up to understand it on her own, because I'm not sure I can teach what I don't understand.
So this is what has to pass for a tour diary chapter this month. I'll write up April for real sometime, but for now, I'm in flux, caught between a recent death and an eminent birth. Music still moves me (in Mysterious Ways?) -- this month, I'm crying at the radio all the freakin' time, even to theoretically light and happy songs -- and I have to take on faith that sometimes I can capture that feeling (not the crying, but a sense of motion and emotion) and share it with others; it seems that one of the photographs I took two years ago today is fairly effective. The hope I can do that again someday keeps me dragging the camera out, keeps me near music. (But is it a pilgrim nearing their nirvana, or a moth nearing their flame?) But today, I can't pretend to understand how or why; I can't try to explain how I got here, or where I'm going. There are ... ahem... no maps for these territories.
Anyone got a map I can borrow?
Explain all these controls
Can't sing but I've got soul
Thanks for your infinite patience,
otto
--
A moment of disgusting sales pitch in the form of a one day offer, that will (of the nine of you that read this far) be ignored by seven and be an irritant to the other two. I'm with the two of you who are irritated, but as the broken record has said before: running a website that still gets as much traffic today as it did during the tour isn't free, and with a baby coming in the next few days, the site has gotta take care of itself. I have no ads, no forced payments, no worthwhile affiliate programs, and no NEA grant. Thus, to keep the site (http://www.U2photos.com) online and free for all, I have to sell the occasional photo print. It's probably worth dropping by even if you're not shopping, just because the gallery has much higher quality scans than the main site. The gallery is at http://www.kitsinger.com and I'd like to point out two sales going on: 1. I basically don't print 8x10's anymore and the few that I have left are on the site, and the photo in question above, the photo in the Rock Hall, is available for today only, the photo's anniversary (4/24/03) for half price: http://www.kitsinger.com/gallery/image/010424r4-18c2.html
I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
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