Kyle Cassidy's Blog, page 3

LJ Mon Amour

LJ, if you get cut off from us, it's been a great 20 years. You've got a really clunky editor, but you've never been surpassed. Thanks Brad Fitzpatrick, you made a beautiful place where people met and fell in love with the idea of knowing each other.

2021-2011

Every year since 1999 I've been taking a self portrait a midnight. The self portrait lasts two seconds and starts in the last second of one year and ends in the first second of the next, catching a little bit of both. This year, and for the past two years actually, we spent a lot of time in the back yard. It seemed sensible to take our portrait here. Dressed in our best lockdown Zoom uniforms. Avec trillian_stars






Welcome to the new year. You may clickenzee to embiggen.







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Scott Church

Back in Ye Olden Days when I was thinking that I wanted to become a better photographer (I'd wanted to be a photographer since I was very little, but at some point I thought it would be nice to get good at it). At the time I rolled into Philadelphia, Scott Church was the photographer everybody was talking about. He had a book out. Which was pretty amazing to me. It seemed like the pinnacle of success to have a book out of your photos. He also had a posse. A gaggle of people who sort of swarmed around him, and they were always doing things. A lot of people were cos-laying photographers, Scott seemed to be really doing it.

I started going my thing and years later when I finally met Scott Church in the back room at a party in North Jersey I felt like I wasn't completely outclassed and it was nice to have a conversation with him.

A few months ago, out of the blue he emailed me and said he had a new book coming out (I think his count is nine now) and he wanted to send me a copy.

"Make Me Hate Me" is Scott's reaction to COVID-19. In a year when the pandemic just shut a lot of people down, especially creative people Scott had started thinking about what he could do instead of worrying about what he couldn't do.




Scott Church, Make me Hate Me, 2021



Scott invited people to his studio to celebrate and accept the thing they disliked most about themselves -- from scars to fat to their physical selves, Scott made beautiful images, the last one being himself, coming to terms with the body a year and a half of lockdown had left him with.

Throughout it all, Scott and his collaborators have made something beautiful out of a collection of things that are terrible, showing the gestalt of art and the power that we all have when we realize that we're all in this together.

Read more about it here.


"We can be terrible to ourselves sometimes, especially when we have nothing to do." -- Scott Church, introduction to Make Me Hate Me




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See you on the flip side.

2021 marked the first time I'd seen Nicki Jaine again in a long time, maybe ten years? One of the gifts of the pandemic were Zoom hangouts and back yard visits.

I hope that through all of this you've found good things too. This is the most beautiful version of this song it's been my fortune to experience.

May your 2021 be filled with joy.








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Melvin Van Peebles, 89 no more.

trillian_stars said that when I met him, I had to call him Chevalier Van Peebles because he'd been knighted in France. And he was knighted in France. Back when he started trying to make films in America in the 1960's and ran into the problems that a young, black filmmaker inevitably runs into in the U.S. Melvin heard that France paid its artists, as long as they wrote in French. So he packed his bags, moved to France and started making movies in French. And he was successful. And they knighted him.

When he opened the door of his apartment in a ritzy New York neighborhood I said "Hello Chevalier Van Peebles," and he waved me in with a cigar. I was there to photograph a cover for the Philadelphia weekly, written by Michael Gonzalez about how the badass filmmaker was still very badass and had a new band.

We bonded over running, something we'd both started in our 40's, and art, and movies.

I eventually asked where he kept his suit of armor and he showed me his knighthood, he kept it in the closet. Like everybody in New York does.








I took photos, Michael interviewed, the band played. You meet a lot of people as a photographer and most of them you photograph and you leave and later you have the photos. Melvin was one of those rare people who turned into a friend. He loved what he did, and he loved that he was able to use his cache to help other people.

He called a few weeks later and suggested that he and the band should crash at my house while they were in Philly. Which sounded like a tremendous idea. I took Melvin to our local diner where he tried politely, though legitimately, to pick up the 20 year old waitress for the duration of our brunch.







Melvin watched the movie that trillian_stars had just made, A Doll's House drank a couple of bottles of wine with a cat on his lap and told us stories of Hollywood. The one that sticks in my mind is that when he was making Watermelon Man, (his breakthrough 1970 comedy about a racist white guy who wakes up one morning to discover he's Black,) Columbia Pictures wanted him to cast a white actor to play the role in blackface. Melvin said "why should someone be in makeup for 90% of the movie? Why don't I cast a black actor to wear whiteface for 12 minutes of screen time? And the studio executive twisted his face and said "Can a Black actor do that?!" Melvin said (to us) "They always think that the prince can play the pauper but that the pauper can never play the prince."







The film was a success but Melvin had enough of that and set out on his own where he wouldn't have to listen to people like that. He spent the rest of his life in indie cinema and was a huge inspiration to me in college. The thing I learned from him when I was 20 was that it's better to do something not as polished if you don't have to ask people you don't respect for money. It's been a guiding light of nearly ever creative project I've undertaken since then. Melvin found his own money, he found his own cast -- he wrote, he directed, he acted and he was a success. At a time when Hollywood thought that nobody would go to see a movie with a largely Black cast and a Black hero who fights a corrupt police force and wins, Melvin helped break open Hollywood like a teapot.

Another of the things I found remarkable about him was just how kind he was and pleasant to be around.

A few months after the magazine came out, I got a call from editor Stephen Segal saying that we'd been nominated for two Keystone Press awards, one for my cover photo, and one for his layout of the article. (We won both of them. I keep the award on my desk and a giant copy of the photo on the wall in our living room.)







Right at this very moment, there's an unsent letter to him on our mail table that I keep thinking I need to put a stamp on that.

If you have a letter like that on your mail table, send it tomorrow.

Mikel Banks, Jared Nickerson, Bruce Mack, André Lassalle, Chris Eddelton, and especially Paula Henderson, my heart is with you today.

9/11

I almost didnt repost this link to my 9/11 memories. I just feel fatigued. I didn't turn on the radio today or look at the news. But I've been linking to them for two decades now. So.

Hope you're all feeling well.

https://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/336247.html

Trillian Stars has a new movie

trillian_stars used her lockdown to do a couple of things, one of which was to make a movie about novelist Mary Shelley. It's opening on the 30th of August on Shelley's birthday. You can watch it in the comfort of your home, or, if you're in Philly, you might be able to watch it at a special party in our back yard.

Trailer and link to tickets below.



Mary Shelley: Strange Star
You may clickenzee to embiggen


Watch the trailer here:








BUY TICKETS NOW


(Also: Hi everybody!)

Portraits

I've been collecting masks for more than a year now, using them in portraits of doctors and nurses and essential workers. But the masks themselves, because of their disposable nature and incredible variety, have a beauty all of their own like Hilla and Bernd Becher's photographs of water towers. So much the same, and yet so different.

During this pandemic I feel that I can see the angel wings on some people whose feathers are deeds

"When you give someone Narcan, you’re touching them, and in the early days of COVID when I saw someone going out I didn’t think about putting on gloves, my first response was to get to that person and give them Narcan and check on them and then after it was over it would dawn on me, Did I take the necessary precautions? Did I touch my face? Did I sanitize my hands? And in the rush of the moment you don’t think about those things because your priority and your objective is to get to that person and help them. In those instances you’re not thinking about yourself, you’re thinking about that person who’s on the verge of dying.
"My father died from an overdose, by himself, and sat in a room for three days. Alone. I never wanted anyone to experience that, or feel like no one cared if they lived or died. I never wanted anyone who overdosed to be alone, and unfortunately that’s not how these tend to happen. You can give people Narcan in hopes they use it, you can reverse an overdose and tell that person to be careful and inform people if they’er using just to be safe, but many times it doesn’t happen this way. You never know if someone who overdoses will make it. So I wasn’t thinking too much about my safety, I was thinking I have to make sure that this person lives. I have to do everything possible with my being to make sure this person has a fighting chance. COVID and all—this person has to make it."

Jose Caraballo is a Harm Reduction Specialist with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, working with people experiencing homelessness and substance use disorder in the Kensington area of Philadelphia.

April 29, 2021 — 403 days after the stay at home order

Click to enlarge



Leica M10, TTArtisans 21mm f1.5 Sunpak 622 flash. Printed through a discarded surgical mask.

BetweenUsAndCatastrophe.com

thanks

So we made a movie! And it's 90 minutes long and playing during Philadelphia's Theater Week. trillian_stars plays Nora's friend Christine Linde.

Here's the trailer for the thing.