My Other Mother

On January 29, 2010 Marian Barnet passed away. When I was 16 years old I met Marian for the first time. She was sitting at her kitchen table reading a book with some sort of whiskey concoction and a More 100 cigarette. I don't ever remember the cigarette being burned down, they always seemed to just burn at the end. Probably because those Mores are like 6 inches long. Marian was always researching recipes, waiting for the New York Times weekend crossword puzzles, and cursing at the family dog Freddy who had a goiter and understood better English than most people. He would lazily sit on his couch and act humiliated. She was always reading something, I would estimate a book a day. She loved to cook, she was obsessed with it. She would make daily trips in her old Volvo to the one and only Trader Joes in the area and put together something for dinner that we often failed to understand. A gazpacho for instance. We'd sit around the Burke Saarinen dining set and talk about the world. This is where she started shaping us.

When I was 18 I thought I was Bob Dylan, I bought a harmonica holder, and started smoking so I could put the grits in the holder beside the harmonica. Upon seeing me in this state, she held her cigarette and drink in one hand and peered over her book telling me in her mostly British accent "HA!, the world already has one Bob Dylan and we certainly do not need another." She was famous for these well intended but hurtful one liners. It may not seem like much, but she was a master of spotting pretense and folly , and flat out calling it what it was. This brutal honesty sent people cowering and lost her many would be friends. Ironically she was the best friend of all, the one that would tell you the truth about yourself. For those of us who would listen, it changed our lives.

Marian had only one son, Alex, and she pretty much adopted myself, and our friend Jules de Balincourt. She always took an interest in us kids and made it her business to push and encourage us in our artistic endeavors. Up to the bitter end, we were finishing our works, and then taking them to her in Mal Pais, Costa Rica where we would sit on her balcony and talk about what we were doing, our ideas, and life in the states. How the Barnets ended up there is an interesting story. She came up with the idea to sell their house in Seal Beach, load everything in a Volkswagon, and drive to Costa Rica where her and Murray would buy land and build a house. Sometime in 1994 they bought beach front property in Mal Pais and Marian designed 2 houses with her son and husband Murray. Alex lived on the beach under a tarp for a year and built the damn things with Murray and some local Ticos. Below they are pictured.





I was broke in the mid 90's, I did freelance photography for a living, and played in a band that got me out on the road for almost a decade. When the Barnets (my adopted family) moved to Costa Rica, we all lost touch for few years. Mal Pais had no telephones and had only recently gotten electricity. 4 or 5 years went by and one day I got a scratchy call from Alex who demanded I come down and visit. I saved up a little money, packed up my surfboard, and went to Costa Rica. Alex made the 6 hour drive from Mal Pais and picked us up in San Jose. It was like seeing a sibling after being apart for a long time. When I finally got to meet up with Marian again, she was so happy. She had developed emphysema at this point, and was marooned in her lovely home, but hell if she didn't still have one of my photographs on her wall, as did Alex at his Mal Pais restaurant. This was the most touching thing I could imagine and even now it brings tears to my eyes, this woman who believed so much in my vision that she would drag my art across all of Central America.

I got to enjoy another 7 years of visiting her in Mal Pais and going on all her scavenger hunts to acquire a David Lynch movie, a Charley Trotter Raw food book, various herbs, dried berrys, cheese, booze and spices etc. I would listen to her stories of working for James Dean, Jane Fonda, meeting Elvis, this woman, stuck in Costa Rica and in her mid 70's, was turning me onto stuff in my own country. I could go on for days with stories about our youth and Marian's interactions with us, and perhaps some day I will. For those of you who did not know her, this brief description will have to suffice, and this article, one of the very few she wrote, will surely confirm that the world rarely has the privilege of hosting such a great woman. She wrote this as a letter to the Los Angeles Times when Alex and I were still in high school. Murray photo copied it and read it at her funeral at the beautiful graveyard in the village of Mal Pais, Costa Rica. Click on it and read it.

Behave Yourself

Hey Diane,
here is a fun little video from the recording sessions of the new Cold War Kids "Behave Yourself" EP which I had the pleasure of engineering, mixing and producing. I did not know this existed and someone called us the other day to say they saw it on Current TV. It's always fun to see my back yard on TV. It's like Jersey Shore or something, except I've got better abs.

Christmas Art Show

Merry Christmas Diane, I am sending you this on Christmas morning because it's the first chance I've had to sit down with a little free time. It's been in insanely productive month. I made a new Mando Diao video for their winter single, "Nothing Without You". This was a break through for me, I've been directing videos for a while now, but this is the first one that I did everything on, shot it, directed, produced, edited. Total pain in the ass. The catch was, they had no time to shoot, so I had to use existing footage from the Documentary Vern and I are making and force it to work. Totally silly request, but have a look at www.vimeo.com/mattwignall and check out that Nothing Without You video. Pretty sweet. I never want to edit again.

Next, I spent a week in Costa Rica relaxing, and preparing a little art for my friends restaurant, www.maryscostarica.com, I also filmed a how to video for my wife's website www.rawjudita.com, on how to make a jungle smoothie. Coconut water, whatever is growing, and a blender. Delicious and healthy. I'll send you that little video soon. It is funny.

After Costa Rica, I dove into 10 days at my studio of working on the Water Wells for Africa winter exhibit. This was to be the best time of my artistic life, working in my new 4th street Long Beach space, making whatever I want. It went great for a few days, then I got food poisoning and my boy Neil Harrison had to put together all my wood hanging mounts while I barfed my brains out. I finished the show just in time, got it hung up, spent 2 days filming a new video for Sherwood which I am directing, and now it's Christmas and no one is calling me any more, and I don't want to see anyone, unless they are bringing me desert. Here are a couple pictures from the show, I am putting a full gallery on my main website. I'm sorry you could not go Diane, maybe next time. Enjoy the pictures though, it sure looked good, I was so happy.

Merry Christmas.

WWFA Photography Exhibit

Hey Diane, sorry to be a flake. Here is the info for the DEC. 20 WWFA exhibit. I could not be more exited about this. I've been working on some interesting printing
techniques and alternative means of presentation, and this exhibit is the one I've wanted to do since I captured these images. I was able to curate this event too, so I of course invited a few of my favorite artists to join me, namely, Matt Maust, Neil Harrison, Vern and Melinda Moen.

The Nyasa Story
Photography Art Exhibit on
The Life and People of Malawi, Africa

Exhibit Opening
December 20, 2009
7pm to 11pm
at James Gray Gallery
Bergamot Station Art Center
2525 Michigan Ave, Building D4
Santa Monica, CA 90404

The Desert

First off, Diane, you were right. I should not get so worked up over parking tickets, and traffic, and high taxes, and building codes, and lazy contemporary strip mall architecture. I say this without a hint of sarcasm because I am sitting at the Lido Palms hotel in Desert Hot Springs, California. I am in the open desert. I feel nothing but open space and peace. Neil Harrison and myself are on our first of several road trips to photograph the American southwest.

As you well know I will be putting out my first coffee table book in the near future on Write Bloody Publishing. This is a huge endeavor mostly because I have a 15 year catalog of photographs to pour through, edit, print, and scan. While that is what it is, the exciting part of all this, is that these road trips will make up the final chapter of my book. My images of America at this time in history, with my photographic vision where it is now. I could not be more excited and more wrapped up in these moments. Exchange the word "Heroin" for "Sweet Ass Photo Road Trips To Document America in 2009" in the song Heroin by Velvet Underground, and you've got how I feel about it.

Really the whole book will be trips spanning 15 years of criss-crossing America and then jaunting down to Costa Rica, Mexico, Eastern Europe and Malawi Africa. It is all filtered through the American southwest though, this is my home and my heart. My Grandfather was a horse man in the Prescott, Arizona area, he was raised on a ranch and broke wild horses. I grew up photographing and surfing in California, but I still feel it in me, these cowboy roots, I come alive in these open spaces, as do my photographs. The first of these trips started last spring with Myself and Amber Tamblyn flying to Nashville to pick up Derrick Brown and bring him back to California. I photographed the shit out of this trip. Next is where I am now, having left the Salton Sea and on my way to Yucca Valley via Desert Hot Springs. A place I spent much time, but now it's only about photographs and breaking my own photographic cliches. There will be no giant fans and no Joshua Trees photographed anytime in my life.

I am equipped with my Mamiya 645 which is my medium format of choice now. I used to always shoot 6x7 but now with the advent of digital, the smaller medium format negative gives me a hint more grain on big enlargements. Some nice grain says something about a man, or a woman (to keep it equal, after all most of my early photographic inspirations were women, Mary Ellen Mark, Margarete Bourke White, and Diane Arbus were my earliest discoveries at my public library.) I have opted to bring no digital cameras, mainly those are used for commercial purposes. I also, of course, have my Lomo, generously granted to me by Jeff from Lomography.com, and my Horizon panoramic which has really been the flavor of the month. With these tools the California deserts have no hope. This country in it's sad economic state will be photographed, and captured, and loved, and processed and turned into the new artistic economy, we shall overcome your parking tickets and your high taxes and your corporate greed, and your governing swine that crawl like flees through your pretty coat. The deserts and the southwest are full of freedom and hope, the hope of people who build giant chickens from steel and plastic and turn trash into sculpture gardens, and have no fascists telling them no. I am the new outlaw with a camera on each hip. Oh how sad and delusional I am. In the old west I'd be in a straight jacket or just shot dead.
And we are off, there are more photographs to take!!!

2 Parking Tickets In One Day

I've always had a problem with getting ticketed for parking in front of your own house, especially when we are already taxed so much. I got 2 parking tickets in one day, and just enclosed this letter
with the payment:

You people are the filth that make America a bad place to live. You are the ones working for the man to rape the American public while they steal our money and buy bigger houses and tax the hell out of us. What do you care, you work for them and you are their lap dogs. The problem is not the politicians, I expect them to try and steal from us, the problem is that you work for them and give them their power. You are the worst kind of filth.

thanks for raping long beach.

Why We Fled: The Story of America (A Rant)

Diane, today I am in Cologne, Germany on the 5th floor of a more than acceptable hotel. I'm listening to Scott Walker sing "Johanna" at this exact moment, it is raining outside, and I am beginning the selection process of footage and stills for a music video I am directing for Mando Diao and their UK single on Island Records called Mean Street. The last video we did, which was for the first single, ended up being a bang up success and they have decided to give me another shake which is nice being that I'm a Yankee and they could be working with any one of 23 other European directors.

I'm here after 5 days in London where I have turned into a nervous wreck by the tranportative state of affairs. As it happens I'm not alone here. All the guys in the band and my assistant Karl are all shell shocked and confused. I'm of course talking about driving on the wrong side of the street which has lead to my friends and I almost being killed several times a day. But it is not only that, the British are kind of surly, they have not become part of the rest of Europe, they are still weighing things in stones which I'm sure dates back to cave man times, people on the street at night are drunk all over and mouthing off at passers by. I expect this from the Scottish, but London? So the cars here, driving on the wrong side of the street, take on their own English personality, they are the moving version of Gordon Ramsy's tongue lashing out at every other nation in the world. Being that I gravitate towards elitism, complaining, and general discomfort, deep within my British DNA I can find resonance with this kind of contrary behaviour, but I am at least a 10 generation American and I now understand something more about my roots. The founding fathers left and did outright every last thing opposite of England. They were contrary to the contrarians and perhaps more stubborn and bitter than them all. They sailed across the sea, built a shack, killed a bear and wore its pelt, and then put cars on the correct side of the road. How do I know we have the correct side of the road? Because I am in Germany right now looking out my 5th story window and everyone is driving the way we do in America. If I was in France this would not mean shit, but here in Germany, where people are rigid, and linear, and logical, and vehicular masterminds, they have chosen the right side, and when it comes to engineering I'm siding with the Germans every time. To England: your stone measurements suck, your tube system is cramped, your food is greasy, you drive on the wrong side, you shut down at 11pm at night, and your taxes and unemployment rates are a joke. That said, Brighton has got to be one of my favorite places in all of Europe. As for London, I should introduce you to New York some time so you can see how its done.

BERLIN, APRIL 09

BIRTH

I like to think my birthday is special. Herein lies my dilemma, I've been called to Berlin by Mando Diao, on the week of my birthday. A week where I would rather do anything other than take an 11 hour plane flight. I hate flying, I hate flying more than Mr.T from the A team. I carry a case full of mostly legal drugs in and around my travel gear at all times, just so I can have back up when facing down an angry and bitter 11 hour flight. But When Mando Diao calls, I, much like Batman when he sees the bat projected into the sky, must take my camera and fly to Europe, birthday be damned. On this particular jaunt, I am going mostly to film for the ongoing docmentary/art film that I am directing along with my co-director and friend, Vern Moen. On this particular trip, I would be on my own. Vern was trapped in reality TV land trying to get the perfect shot of a shirtless fireman, and getting paid well for it I might add, so I packed up my film and moving camera, and my trustworthy assistant Karl Drehsen, and we headed to Deutchland.


Mando Diao playing to a sold out crowd in Cologne Germany in front of my massive photograph of Baltic cranes.


ASSIMILATION

I get sick just about every time I fly more than 6 hours so I generally arrive a day or two before my jobs. My assistant Karl is German, he has not visited the motherland in years so we flew into Frankfurt and took a train to Cologne a day before the band would arrive. The good people of Universal Germany arranged a swanky hotel, and we checked in and began the hunt for food. I love to hunt for food on the internet. I have the hunter gatherer instinct, and locating a good restaurant is what I live for. I decided, after some considerable hunting, on a place called Green Card, the key here is searching words like vibey and arty restaurant. I'm always looking for a place like Moto or Marlo and Sons in Brooklyn, so the place Green Card fit the bill. We arrived after considerable work and damn if the place was not closed. They apparently keep whatever the hell hours they want to keep, and are entirely bohemian. The owner was there and though it was not going to open this night, he chatted us up with perfect english, gave us free glasses of champaigne, and booked us at another restaurant where he explained, if we were willing, the waiter would take us where we needed to go, in culinary terms. We were sad to leave his restaurant as the vibe is spot on, fantastic. The place I wish to be eating my food. The restaurant we hit was great, we ate well and for the life of me I cannot remember its name. We headed back to our hotel, passed out, and promptly woke up at 3 am, took Ambien, and passed out til at least 9am. We put ourselves together, grabbed all my camera gear, and went to the venue to meet Mando Diao.

Greencard

Neue Maastrichter Str. 2
50672 Köln, Germany

0221 5893725‎

THE GRIND



Diane, let me tell you in advance that Cologne and Berlin went without a hitch. We met up with the band and their tour buses at around noon. We said our hello's, and I proceeded to start filming while Karl kept everything in order. The guys were all exhausted after weeks of touring. Bjorn had a cold which I am sure he passed on to me. I was on double duty, photographing and running an HVX digital movie camera. I was still exhausted from the flight, and the jet lag, but I just spent the whole next two days on auto pilot getting it done, shooting at the frantic pace of 12 hours a day. I don't think many people realize how hard bigger bands work. The concert is the least of it, that is what they sign up for. The reality is that before and after each concert there is any number of interviews, photo ops, appearances, meetings, and exhausting impossibilities. Being that I have been commissioned with the task of directing their film, and photographic documentation, I am included in every bit of this chaos, except I have two large cameras hanging from me at all times. Two days of this and my back is destroyed, but auto pilot is a beautiful thing. I have codeine pills from Costa Rica, if the pain gets bad I take them, and I forget, and I shoot. This is the grind, but the manual labor is almost nothing compared to the pressure of making non stop compelling images. My brain works until it too is on auto pilot, and I cannot understand Germans, but I think I like them more than not.


An innovative perch above the back of the stage in Cologne shot by my assistant Karl Drehsen.



Mando Diao dance off.

At night after the shows and interviews, the band has to unwind somewhere. This almost makes no sense to me as my only instinct is to go to sleep, but they need some kind of personal time and this would be it. They drink some beers, and Christian, their road assistant and DJ, spins some tunes. We end up at some really cool places and tonight it was stark and vibey little concrete bar that seems to have been in this dark alley since WWII. Everyone dances, including me, and especially Karl who even stays behind when me and drummer Samuel head back to the bus at 3:30am. They have this crazy Scottish band opening for them and at the bar, where 30 people or so dance and have a great time, he grabs a bottle and attempts to attack someone, presumably because he is drunk and Scottish. He asks if we have his back, indeed we do, to the extent that we grab him and drag him outside. Karl partied until until the bitter end and even watched the Michael Jackson tour video circa 1984 on the bus until 8am. He quicly began riding the line between useful and useless. At the end of the day, I just need someone to carry my gear and check into the hotel so he may as well be my guardian angel to that end.


BERLIN

Berlin is just so Berlin. Do you know what I mean? Karl noted at one point, that as you walk around the massive buildings, and epic streets, you get the feeling that the people who built these things could take over the world. It is stupefying in its grandeur almost like no where else I have been in Europe. I know that Mando Diao feel especially proud to be selling out Columbia hall in this fine city.




Now so many things have happened so quickly, that I will try to recap the best I can.

-We arrived in Berlin after driving all night and half sleeping in the bunks of the bus where as I have already noted, everyone watched Michael Jackson until 8am.

-Next, everyone scatters to find food and personal space, the road crew begins it daily task of unloading cargo trucks full of metal cases containing other cases full of precious audio gear and instruments.

-The band does a dozen interviews and signs everything from a guitar to a boob.

-The back stage begins to fill up with record company types, the drunk Scottish band, caterers and strange stragglers who do not belong there at all but sort of get lost in the fray.

-Mando Diao performs one hell of a concert that I film like a son-of-a-bitch. I am looking for clips, 3 seconds of time to fit in with the narrative, moments that capture the intensity of what they experience from a perspective no one has seen. I am on codeine now and exhausted. I still have jet lag but there is an energy that makes it all fun. No one loves to perform like this band and it is totally evident and I am in my element in as much as there is an element for me outside of a place like Costa Rica.



-After the concert the very supportive people of Universal Germany have arranged these vintage plastic DDR cars to take the band to a club where they will be mostly surprised by a informal and friendly gold record presentation.



-Karl can't get into the gold record ceremony as it is at some swanky pretentious club where they didn't even want to let me in which made for delightful film footage as they tried to put their hand over the camera lens only making my film more exciting. Karl was cool with it though as he had just met his internet girlfriend of 6 months, a Lithuanian girl who was pleasant to be around. She flew out for our two days off. That is another story.



-I am now reeling from 3 days of codeine and Ambien and jet lag. It must be 3am, I stumble back to my bed at my hotel and pass out. I do not leave my bed until 2pm. I do not leave my room until dinner time. I want to go home. I leave for Costa Rica in 4 days. I need to be on auto pilot if I am going to get home ok. I think I have Bjorns cold.

Over and out.

The Wignall Road Journals

Over the last year Wignall and I have talked several times about creating a forum for his photography road journals. The first and only one he ever did, which chronicled photographing and traveling with the artists Mando Diao throughout Sweden, followed by a week in the UK with the Cold War Kids, and lastly, a trip to the bush of Malawi Africa, instantly tripled the amount of hits his website was getting, and gave me the obvious idea of creating a more formal setting for his thoughts and ideas. It is simple, he sends me entries from wherever he is, and I do my best to edit them, and put them on this blog. Wignall is currently in Berlin, Germany, and will be sending in the most recent of these journals with pictures any day.

Diane

New Website

Diane,
I have hunkered down for 2 days and completely over-hauled my website. I am a light to moderate control freak, and as such is the case I have always been reluctant to hand it over to someone else so it has largely looked like crap for most of my life as a photographer. Anyhow, it is up and running, please make note of it. You should be happy to know that I have
finally made it easy for myself to swap out galleries so it does not get so stale.

cheers,
matt

(the website url is www.mattwignall.com)D.