PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Joe McNally knows sugar plums

    Ballerinas are all the rage at the moment. Black Swan, New York Times critic Alastair Maccaulay stating that one dancer, Jenifer Ringer, “eaten one sugar plum too many” for a recent production of the Nutcracker. And now Joe McNally, famed photographer, comes to her defense.

    Joe took portraits of Jenifer with a giant, 40×80 Polaroid camera on his own dime. He knew she possessed the poise and grace to keep her composure for the length of time needed to get a decent shot.

    You also could not focus the camera. You had to focus your subject. Small shuffles back and forth would place them in that tiny zone of critical sharpness. Then they had to hold that position for about 30 seconds while the interior workings of the camera got spooled up, the lights got shut, and the flash fired. Not easy to do. Especially on point.

    But Joe recognizes an artist whose body is their art.

    It’s been equally wonderful to watch from afar as she has fought through personal struggles, dropped out of dance for a while, and then returned to the stage as a principal dancer. She has always talked straight up about the life of a ballerina, and her struggles with her weight. Her talent and candor, I feel, make her a beacon in the dance world, which prefers to keep the pain, the anorexia, the sweat and the tears behind the curtain. Ballerinas look amazing on stage. Offstage, their bodies can be just as beat up as an NFL offensive lineman.

  • True Grit (2010)

    True Grit, as remade by the Coen Brothers, is ok. It’s less hokey than the original with John Wayne, but plods along with a series of events strung together. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn works well as he fully embraces the character, and Hailee Steinfeld plays the spunky Mattie Ross with conviction.

    I think the issue is that the movie is made to be a serious western but the incongruity of a 14 year old girl marching a one-eyed, drunken federal marshal is anything but serious. Further, the snake pit scene still feels tacked on for the sole purpose to completely redeem the Cogburn character.

    The visuals and cinematography are well done and evoke a western feel.

  • My songs of 2010

    Below is the track listing for my 2010 songs. By no means is it exhaustive, but I focused on the songs and albums I listened to. I also left out quite a bit of music I did listen to, notably Arcade Fire, Band of Horses and Sufjan. The ordering is only a track listing and not a ranking. Also, each track is linked to an accompanying video, preferably a live version. Without further ado:

    1. King Charles – The Brightest Lights: This guy hails from England, and phenomenal only begins to describe how cool he is. He performs this live, acapella but repeats the verse, changing certain lines as he goes.
    2. The National – Terrible Love: The National write songs that you may not like on the first listen. They start slow, contain cryptic lyrics and musically, a lot goes on. After the third listen, you’re singing along. Give this song a minute to build, and then wait as it soars.
    3. Broken Social Scene – Meet Me In the Basement: A bouncy, jangly instrumental, perhaps the perfect waltz for an indie rock ice cream man (or woman).
    4. OK Go – This Too Shall Pass: They’ve come far. Far from dancing on treadmills. I’m sure they’re wiser, too. A fun song about letting go–not too many of those.
    5. Doug Burr – I Got This Fever / O Ye Devastator: Doug Burr’s a local guy from Denton. This is a more upbeat track, folky, catchy answering some grand questions.
    6. The Morning Benders – Excuses: It sounds a bit like late-era Beach Boys with the symphonic arrangement, melody swirling and progressing beat.
    7. Beach House – Norway: This song pulses, warming a cold, winter night.
    8. Girl Talk – Triple Double: Sure, that’s some Phoenix you hear at the start, but by the end, listen for Willow Smith. Girl Talk makes songs from other songs for an instant summer party mix.
    9. Sleigh Bells – Rill Rill: Treats (Sleigh Bells’ debut) was my summer album, and in defiant protest to Katy Perry, this was my summer song. The sugary vocals and thumping percussion make for a good drive on a summer night with the windows down.
    10. Yeasayer – I Remember: In love, it’s the beginning and end you remember the most. Vividly.
    11. Vampire Weekend – Horchata: Horchata is made differently, depending on where you are.
    12. The Head and the Heart – Sounds Like Hallelujah: This Pacific Northwest band deserves to be heard with their blend of folk, rock and pop.
    13. Bruno Mars – Count On Me: The Glee kids did this as a sugary confection, but the original keeps the punch.
    14. Mumford & Sons – The Cave: Knowing Mumford & Sons is like knowing a revival, a celebration of the soul with banjos and rockin’ sing alongs. See them live if you can.
    15. Janelle Monáe – Cold War: R&B, jazz and rock get fused together into a space opera.
    16. King Charles – We didn’t start the fire: Sorry for the crappy quality, but it’s the best I could find. Now, imagine if Billy Joel did update his 80s anthem.
    17. The National – Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks: This song, performed unplugged at the Dallas show in October, had a sold out crowd standing, singing and crying.
    18. Titus Andronicus – A More Perfect Union: It begins with a passage from an Abe Lincoln speech and turns into something else entirely. The vocals are raw and defiant, but I think the song’s guitar noodling is epic as it climaxes to a bar room sing along.

  • My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West

    Kanye’s got the beats, the rhymes the ego and the vision to pull off an album like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy full of so many themes. From the self introspection (Monster, Lost in the World), to class (Power, Runaway), to misogyny (So Appalled, Hell of a Life) to politics (Who Will Survive in America).

    Musically, there’s an ebb and flow. Dark Fantasy, led by Nicki Minaj in a British accent, starts the album off gently. Power, throttles forcefully, followed by the spacey All of the Lights. Runaway serves as an epic track, nine minutes long, and Lost in the World combines the indie sensibilities of Bon Iver. Who Will Survive in America closes the album in a scathing indictment of political doubt.

  • Those Were the Days – Dolly Parton

    Those Were the Days by Dolly Parton is a trubute/cover album of Dolly performing other artists’ songs. At 12 tracks, all have countrified, Dolly arrangements that play well with her style toe tapping music. Me and Bobby McGee (with Kris Kristofferson), Crimson and Clover (with Tommy Jones) and Turn, Turn, Turn are stand outs.

  • Don’t Take My Picture – Craig Alesse

    Don’t Take My Picture by Craig Alesse is a good photography 101 for the family shutterbug who likes to take snapshots at all the family events, but get a little better at getting those shots. Topics covered include composition, lighting, group shots and how to put all these tools together to see a good shot. The writing is simple, casual and direct with very little photo jargon. The focus is understanding situations and when to click the shutter button.

  • Emma Donoghue – Room

    Room: A Novel, by Emma Donoghue, tells the story of a boy named Jack, who lived the first five years of his life in an isolated shed. The circumstances for his sheltered life stem from his mother being kidnapped and imprisoned and bearing the kidnapper’s child, Jack. Jack narrates the story in four acts: life in the room, events leading up to the eventual escape, the escape and initial adjustment and life thereafter.

    Life is the common thread throughout the four acts, and Donoghue uses language to capture the perceptive of an isolated five year old’s view of the world. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it stretches. The simple sentence structure and purposefully incorrect verb tense add to Jack’s proper naming of items within his Room–Rug, Bed, Toilet. At times Jack seems too perceptive or the innocent naivete wears thin, however, he remains an endearing character. Surprisingly, Jack describes his mother well, well enough for her character to be fully realized, and adults and infer the things Jack doesn’t know. Ma, as he calls her has done her best to educate Jack as if he received a normal upbringing.

    The first two acts are tense, with the question–how will they escape, while the last two acts tend to float along as Jack and Ma adjust to their new found freedom. Everything is new to Jack–rain, bees, the entire size of the world. Ma struggles to cope with how much she’s missed, and perhaps the weakest moment of the story is her interview with a TV reporter, where the reporter superficially pities her as a poor subject and questions whether Ma made the right choice in keeping Jack. The dialogue is thin to the point of caricature–the media is only there to exploit the hottest story. Other character interactions are shallow as well in the last act, particularly that of her father.

    Ultimately, the story is about Jack and his growth as his world explodes in a short period of time. Throughout, Donoghue keeps a light of hope on as she illuminates some dark corners.

  • A physicist solves the City equation

    Geoffrey West, a physicist, set out to study cities and urban growth and find variables for growth and decline. Consuming massive amounts of data, he discovered cities are governed by Laws, just like physics.

    After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars.

    Cities grow like organisms:

    The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

    Why do people move to cities?

    In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

  • An Intimate Portrait of the Carousel Horse

    An intimate portrait of the carousel horse. Vol. 1 — Southern California is a vintage, specialized photography book from 1982. John R. Cook photographed carousel horses. The copy I looked through contained no forward or afterward to detail what the intimate portraits were attempting to achieve.

    Most of the photos appear to be snapshots and seemingly, there are such subtle differences that the horses are indistinguishable. Perhaps this book could serve as a reference for carousel horses, but these pictures appear about as intimate as the results you’d get from grandma at the family reunion learning how to use her disposable camera.

  • Black Swan

    The ballet Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky serve as both a back drop and an allegory for the film, Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky. Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers is turned against herself in the ultra competitive, cutthroat world of ballet. The supporting cast of Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey and Winona Ryder serve only to add to the psychological transformation Nina undergoes, from innocent, hardworking dancer, to a self destructive presence, intent on seeking the dark, black goal of perfection. Hershey plays the vicarious, over protective mother who pathologically dotes on her daughter who wails during a key scene later in the movie, “What has happened to my sweet Nina?”

    For the acting, Kunis is good as Lily, seducing Nina to embrace her darker side. Cassel manipulates scenes with Machiavellian intent as the dance director Thomas Leroy. The film is emotionally intense, and visually dark and surreal, and at times jarring with outlandish visuals designed to create a nightmarish fever dream for Nina.