Brooklyn Diasporism

Zach Barocas, Diasporist Diarist

Coney Island Photographs

It’s my wife’s birthday this week and per our custom, she expressed a relevant wish to see the sun rise at Coney Island. Past efforts have been thwarted by weather, sickness, indifference, travel, and other interventions, seemingly divine and otherwise, but this year we made it and it was delightful. Not only did it fulfill a birthday wish extending back for a decade or more, but I hadn’t been there since I was a boy.

My father is a NYC native (Kingsbridge, Bronx — like any diligent New Yorker of his generation, he’ll be happy to tell you what made it both a harder and a better place to be from) and we made roughly annual visits to our family here and in New Jersey until I was 18 or so.

The trip to Coney Island was in 1977, maybe, or 1978. My uncle, my father, my brother and I went together to visit the Aquarium. There is a single photo from that trip, of my brother and me on a breaker, smiling from the relative high ground of the rocks. I wore a shirt with a 3 on it, a non-sequitur. That is, the number was not that of a favorite athlete or anything. Just a 3. It became, however, the title of the photograph, which my family refers to as The Three Picture, and in due time a personally-identifying numeral between my wife and me. Over the years she has bought me all manner of printed material featuring single 3s, some of which hang above my desk at this very moment. As it happens, unfortunately, I cannot right now find the photograph of origin. When I do, I’ll post it here. In the meantime, if you have a chance, please wish Kimberley a happy birthday.

Color

This gallery is a sort of companion to the previous one, consisting of color photos from the same recent stretch of activity. There are no particular themes to look for but it might be worth noting that I seem to be more open to abstraction when I’m making photos in color than I am when doing so in black and white.

Black and White

Here’s a gallery of recent black and white photos, some of which have been posted elsewhere but at reduced size. I hope you enjoy them.

Some Recent Photos

In addition to making photos, I’ve resumed some reading about photography, notably Susan Sontag, Hollis Frampton, and Robert Adams, books I originally picked up in the course of my cinema studies. It’s been a pleasure and an education to reacquaint myself with their work. More on this, I assume, in later posts.

In any event, these images appear on Instagram and elsewhere but in the interest of better-sized presentation, I’ve decided to post them here as well. Click the image above to view the gallery. Enjoy.

New Camera

As many of you already know, I recently bought my first real camera: a Fujifilm X-T10 with a Fujinon XF35mmF1.4 R lens. I look forward to checking out other lenses in the future but am quite happy for now just getting a feel for making non-phone photos with a fixed lens. I’m posting many of them on Instagram and also started a flickr page in order to post larger, less-compressed versions of the images. In any case, here’s a handful from my first month with the new set-up. I hope you enjoy them.

Gordon Withers: Cello Sketches for BELLS≥ “North American Spirituals”

The playlist below includes four examples of what BELLS≥ has been doing towards our next album, a collection of music called North American Spirituals. If you saw any of our performances on our tour last August, you heard quartet versions of another two of the pieces (“The First Ray” and “May You Bury Me”), both of which were written thus far with the group’s then-current line-up in mind.

That is, the pieces that will comprise “North American Spirituals” remain in variously-preliminary states, and while Chris Ernst has been working on them in Baltimore and Stephen Shodin and I have taken a swing at them here in New York, Gordon Withers recently performed some of his own ideas at the Galaxy Hut in Arlington, VA.

At the root of Gordon’s cello sketches are drum demos I recorded with J. Robbins at The Magpie Cage back in May. We set up a drum kit and some other drums and percussion and recorded for an hour or so. The next few hours were spent on edits, overdubs, and rough mixes. Chris Ernst was there, too, and by the time we left the studio that evening, we had drum tracks for a handful of pieces ready for distribution to each other and our collaborators. It’s not the way we’ve worked in the past, but we thought we should give it a shot, passing the tracks back and forth until Chris, Stephen, and I sense completion, and in the meantime, with hopes of such an outcome as Gordon has provided here. BELLS≥ has always been a collaborative group with its three core members at the compositional center, and since the beginning, Gordon, like J., has been a key contributor to BELLS≥. To have Gordon playing along with loops of my beats sounds, in the end, as natural as the two of us playing together.

Additionally, I’ve included in this post a Pete Duvall photo of Gordon and me from a few years ago in hopes of providing evidence of our performative unity in this somewhat unusual situation.

Photo by Pete Duvall

All of which is to say, here are four pieces from Gordon’s last show. One of the selections includes some organ from J. and orchestra bells from Chris, both recorded when I cut the drum tracks, and not live with Gordon. Be advised that these are only sketches, improvisations on some rhythmic ideas we have in mind. But we thought you’d enjoy them so here they are.

Inspiration: Frank Lowe

lowe

Sometimes I think it’s a known fact that we are not paid enough money because certain forces know that we’re gonna play this music whether we get money for it or not, you understand? And to some extent, we’re taken complete advantage of, you dig? And to another extent, it’s our gift to the world, so it don’t matter.

— Frank Lowe