Finally B Hyphen

B Hyphen talks about being a rapper in West Virginia, his first time on stage, and being a part of a hip hop group.

You can download his music at www.bhyphen.com

B Hyphen

Local rapper B Hyphen talks about being a rapper in West Virginia, a state that is not know for its hip-hop community.

You can download Byphen's music at his website.  www.bhyphen.com

People w/o People?

 After humans are gone.  Buildings will stand until they are weathered down and buried.  Buried and found below strata of sedimentary rocks.  The moon will still revolve around the Earth.  The Earth will still revolve around the sun.  Eukaryotes will still inhabit the earth.  

Earth's flying machines will no longer fly.  Clouds will still form, but the carbon dioxide in the air will be significantly less.  No machines will run anymore.  It will take a lot more than another Hindburg disaster to take homo sampiens out of excistence though.

What do you see? I see U92.

You walk out of your house and into your office or class every day.  You see the same walls, floors, ceiling, lights, and windows every day.  The mundanity of life can lead to an overall regression in brain processes.  This is my office.  The desk on the right is mine.  There are CDs everywhere.  I am the music director of the radio station.  I have to listen to tons of CDs every week to update the playlists that U92 has.

 This is the radio station that is in the Mountainlair beside the Gluck Theater.  It's a little hidden away corner that I have spent most of life days at WVU.  Late night shifts, early mornings, long days, all have been here.

 The posters and stickers you see on the walls have been accumlated for almost 30 years.  The radio station started in 1982.  Do you even listen to radio anymore?  I do.  And I'm a voice behind the microphone.  One of many.

 U92 represents an underground part of the radio industry, a dying industry at that.  U92 will play bands that usually wont get airplay on popular corporate stations.  I have an endless amount of people begging me to play their music.  And of course you can't please everybody.

 Unlike most radio stations, we do not ahve a computer sytem yet.  All of our music is either played by CD, Vinyl (yes we have records), or a plug in we have to use our iPods in.

 We have our extremely dusty transmitter emitting a signal to a tower on the hill behind Arnold Hall.  The range for our towers on a good day is about thiry miles outside of the city.

Our DJs are a combination of students and community volunteers.

You can listen to the station live at U92.wvu.edu anywhere in the world thanks to that new thing called the Internet.

NYC

 New York City is bustling with street art.

 A store that sells cupcakes and coffee?

 And only that? 

The cupcake shop

TOBACCO/DREAMEND and LIGHTNING BOLT

Tobacco and Dreamend are both side projects of the Pittsburgh group Black Moth Super Rainbow.  They had a chance to play in Morgantown back in October.

 Tobacco making use of a vocoder attached to a guitar.  Notice the angry Basketball head mask

 Tobacco now with a mask on.  The basketball head was stolen from the band after the show.  Eventually it was returned, but not without some harsh words about Morgantown on the bands Facebook page.











 I didn't get any pictures of the Lightning Bolt performance, but here are some pictures of the setup.

 The band has used this equipment for virtually the past 10 years. 

 Tons of wattage have to go through the amps to give them the power that they need (using only a bass guitarist and a drummer)

 In order to get their distinctly heavy sound the bass guitarist uses an elaborate pedal setup. 

Coming soon...

Pictures from last weekends Tobacco/Dreamend show at 123 Pleasant Street and the upcoming Lightning Bolt show tonight at 123. 

Plaster Casts of Everything

 

All of my posts are related to songs.  This long 30 second exposure reminds of the video for the Liars song "Plaster Casts of Everything."

Remember to drive safe when trying to focus a camera on your dashboard while driving in the rain. 

Laguna Bleach: About a trip

"American Masters" W. Eugene Smith: Photography Made Difficult

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364110/

In class we watched the film mentioned in the title.  The film is a documentary that uses video interviews, slides of Smith's photos, and an actor portraying and narrating Smith's quotes.  Portraying Smith in these sequences is Peter Riegert, who played Donald in National Lampoon's Animal House. 

Photography Made Difficult creates dramatic scenes telling the stories around Smith's pictures.  Some of which would be the brutal pictures of World War II, one picture showing a newborn Japanese baby being help by an American soldier. 


Most of his photos show some sort of outside emotion, even without the context of the situation.  All the movie needed to be was a slide show of all his photos and it would have done its job. 



What Smith did was show what most people didn't want to see.  Disformaties, death, life, and darkness. 



The photos of the Kepone poisoning, to me, had the largest impact.  Smith showed the deformed child being bathed.  Something that no one else would want to see.


If it weren't for Time magazine, people would have not known about a lot of topics he covered.  Thanks to the print medium people were able to see the pictures.  Now, thanks to the Internet, people can see things like almost instantly.

Watching the movie, although rough for a first class was an inspiring way to start the class.