TALES TOLD OUT OF SCHOOL 4.0, extended musical edition with ad hoc lighting tests

Rare 1966 shot of teenaged, school uniform-clad Fastfilm camping it up at as an uber-hippie and scattering flower petals for Gentle Thursday, a made up holiday to celebrate all things Flower Power fabricated by a student body who loved to make up bogus occasions and actually carry them through (see LINK.)

It was a song from this era that influenced my two years in the future nom de plume/guerre when I first was published locally and nationally. The exact track is LINK with its invocation of purple heather. My beleaguered teenaged self really liked the idea of pairing escape and romance (albeit ephemeral-- note he's got contingency lassies lined up) alongside the exotica of a far off land of cool mists instead of heatstroke-inducing L.A.

It wasn't quite so popular a name back in the Pleistocene when I chose it. For that I blame Louise Lasser's monotone intoning, with bonus diphthongs, to her character's daughter, "Heather...He-a-ther..." on the popular Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman faux soap tv show of the late '70s.

Vintage '70s apparel in selfsame '70s Venice home with Lucretia Borzoi and houseguest Francoise. Photo by Olivier Vuille.

More late '70s musical rumination: LINK a rare example of superb arranging in background orchestration of a pop hit. This so serves the great elements already there- sardonic lyrics of denial vs. dreams underneath that radio-friendly melody, crying seagulls lead guitar riffs and that glistening saxophone solo that still gives me chills every time I hear it.* Compare to live version LINK- still atmospheric, but invariably less so. Denial vs. dreams loomed all too large in my late 1970s preoccupations. Frequent nightmares of watching helplessly as canyons burned out of control so mirrored lives close to my own.

Mr. Twister and me emerge from the 1970s, summer 1980, "...when you wake up it's a new morning..."

Cut to another rare snapshot of us together at a photo exhibit opening in the mid-2000s above, since we are far more likely to be photographing one another separately, as with both shots below, taken in our current studio. My picture of Twister in the early 2000s was a Polaroid taken as a test shot to eschew guesswork for Agfa Portrait medium format negative film before it was processed. His of me tried out some of my newer digital upgrades in 2009.

Such portraits are ad hoc light tests or that of new camera/studio equipment, hence our tres casual appearance (and in my case disheveled since I'd been moving lighting and backdrops around on the most sweltering night of that year in preparation for the next day's shoot LINK. The A/C in the studio only hits the portrait subject.) But these days it's far better to be exhausted from working on my own art in real life than to be daydreaming of cool, misty exotic escapes as in my teenaged years...

Photo (C) 2009 Kurt Ingham

*the casual U.S. radio fans were probably unaware of the ironic backstory of the iconic sax part. The 1978 hit earned its writer/performer a comfortable 80,000 pounds per annum for the rest of his life, but its session paid saxophonist Raphael Ravenscroft 80 pounds for his own contribution to that perfect pop moment with a checque that bounced, eventually framed by his solicitor.