KANSAN.COM / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010 / ENTERTAINMENT /
7C
MUSIC
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
Jack Lawrence, from left, Alison Mosshart, Jack White and Dean Fertita, of The Dead Weather, arrive at the 2009 mtvU Woode Awards at Nov. 18 at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City.
White Stripes singer tours with new project
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
The Dead Weather is the latest freewheeling project for Detroit-bred musician Jack White, who relocated to Nashville in 2006.
White sounds relaxed but energized as the group, which includes band mate Alison Mosshart (the Kills), Jack Lawrence (the Greenhornes, the Raconteurs) and Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age), winds its way across the country on this latest tour supporting its sophomore album, "Sea of Cowards."
Life has been a whirl for White since landing in Nashville. With the White Stripes on and off haius, he's kept his hands in a slew of pots: forming new bands the Racoteurs and Dead Weather, ramping up his Third Man label with a bustling store and studio, living into collaborations with the likes of Loretta Lynn and rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson.
It's the Dead Weather that has kept the bulk of his attention for the past year. Spawned from informal jam sessions at the Third Man complex _ White is the band's drummer _ the group found itself with a set of songs that became the album "Horehound," and hit the road facing a world that wasn't
quite sure what to make of it all.
"We're in a studio and working together, the four of us all writing in the room together _it's the first time I've been in a band that does that _and we sort of have our own little world going on," he says. "And it's strange to walk outside the studio and have to say to each other, 'Oh, that's right, we have to give this away now to everybody, and they have all those preconceptions of who we are, and the other bands we've been in, etc.' So that becomes our challenge to try to overcome that. But it's almost an impossible task. It's not really something that can be achieved, you know. We just have to go out and play. There's not much we can do about all those preconceptions."
The new album has met a more positive reception, bringing cohesion to the lusty, tempestuous rock introduced on the debut album. Recorded in spurs last year, the 11-song effort was issued in May, just 10 months after "Horehound."
That quick turnaround was a product of the band's creative momentum — "the songs just kept coming and coming," says White
— but it also meshes with his ideas about the way music can work in the modern era.
"I have a grand idea in my head
and I don't know if it's true but I have this feeling that the short attention span provoked and encouraged by the Internet will translate itself to music in some way," he says, "and people will produce more, and albums will come out two or three times a year like they used to 30 years ago."
White thinks in broad strokes
like that:
Concepts get chewed on. But when it comes to career planning, he prefers to keep it loose.
Wanda Jackson's record, and then I don't know what. Maybe another White Stripes record within a month. I really just don't know."
But that spontaneity shouldn't be translated as disregard for detail, and that's clear when he reflects on the White Stripes' early years. The duo's cryptic color schemes, mythology and hands-off relationship with the press were all part
"When we started recording the Dead
"I have this feeling that the short attention span provoked and encouraged by the Internet will translate itself to music in some way."
JACK WHITE
Drummer, The Dead Weather
Weather, we had no plans to make an album, no plans to go on tour, no plans to start a new band. Definitely no plans to put out a second album 10 months later," he says. "It's all been off-the-cuff. And I don't know what I'm going to do when I go home after this tour. Those guys are going on to the Kills and Queens of the Stone Age, and I'm going back to finish
of a carefully orchestrated concept — a showbiz sensibility, he says, that "I still have inside me."
"The easy way to rebel early on for us, the White Stripes, was not to give out information
like everybody else was doing, and not give it to them in the way they wanted it," he says. "Rock 'n' roll and punk rock rebelled in 50,000 ways, and what's left? There's not much left. The thing that always bugs me as a person, as a creator of things, is that (music acts) are sort of giving everything away, which seems to be anti-showbiz, in a sense."
PHOTOGRAPHY
Last roll of early color film developed
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — What should a photographer shoot when he's entrusted with the very last roll of Kodachrome?
Steve McCurry took aim at the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Central Terminal and a few human icons, too. Paul Simon, the singer-songwriter synonymous with the fabled film's richly saturated colors, shied away. But Robert De Niro stood in for the world of filmmaking.
Then McCurry headed from his base in New York City to southern Asia, where in 1984 he shot a famous portrait of a green-eyed Afghan refugee girl that made the cover of National Geographic. In India, he snapped a tribe whose nomadic way of life is disappearing — just as Kodachrome is.
The world's first commercially successful color film, extolled since the Great Depression for its sharpness, archival durability and vibrant yet realistic hues, "makes you think," as Simon sings, "all the world's a sunny day."
Kodachrome enjoyed its mass-market heyday in the 1960s and '70s before being eclipsed by video and easy-to-process color negative films, the kind that prints are made from. It garnered its share of spectacular images, none more iconic than Abraham Zapruder's reel of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963.
But Mama Time is taking Kodachrome away, and McCurry feels the tug of nostalgia even as he loads Eastman Kodak Co's last
From that moment on, "there's a certain amount of observation and walking around — exploring, hunting, moving," McCurry said of his craft. "It's not all about taking pictures. It's about appreciating this world we live in for such a brief amount of time.
manufactured roll into his Nikon F6, just as he's done "so many tens of thousands of times."
"I thought, what better way to
kind of honor the memory of the film than to try and photograph iconic places and people? It's in (my) DNA to want to tell stories where the
National Geographic magazine is considering doing a spread on McCurry's trip that would include a handful of images. All the originals are destined for air-conditioned safekeeping at the George Eastman House film and photography museum in Rochester.
year.
McCurry relied on a digital camera to help evaluate composition, perspective and light, but
"I thought, what better way to kind of honor the memory of the film than to try and photograph iconic places and people?"
action is, that shed light on the human condition"
STEVE MCCURRY National Geographic photographer
Betting its future on digital photography, Kodak discontinued the slide and motion-picture film with a production run last August in which a master sheet nearly a mile long was cut up into more than 20,000 rolls.
McCurry requested the final 36-exposure strip. After nine months of planning, he embarked in June on a six-week odyssey. Trailing him was a TV crew from National Geographic Channel, which plans to broadcast a one-hour documentary early next
choosing the moment to press the shutter was pressurepacked. Even seasoned photographers have a hard time knowing
when "you're going to get that one emotional component to the picture," McCurry said.
His nerves were jangled again when he had to run the loaded camera through airport X-ray machines in Italy and Turkey. One security guard joked, "Oh, take a picture,' guard joked, "Oh, was kind of funny because we were trying to make every frame count."
Ribari tribespeople in Rajasthan and Bollywood luminaries in Mumbai.
McCurry returned to old haunts in western India where "color is important culturally", drawing on Kodachrome's magical power to subtly render contrast and color harmony in depictions of
His journey ended in July in small-town Parsons, Kan., the home of Dwayne's Photo, the last photo lab in the world that processes the elaborately crafted color-reversal film. Dwayne's will close that part of its business in December.
"It's not a process like black-and-white that hobbyists could do in their own dark room," coowner Grant Steinle said, warning Kodachrome hoarders "they really need to get out and shoot those pictures" and perhaps shift over to newer lines of slide film like Ektachrome and Fujichrome.
In McCurry's roll, one or two exposures were a little off, but he was pleased with the results. In one self-portrait, he posed next to a Kodak-yellow taxicab bearing the license plate PKR 36 — the code name for Professional Kodachrome film; in another, he's sprawled on a hotel bed at journey's end.
McCurry has a personal archive of 800,000 Kodachrome images he takes good care of. But in late July, he chanced upon a batch of 1969 and 1972 Kodachromes he put in storage in Philadelphia long ago and forgotten about. The discovery got him reminiscing about his days as a hungry photographer hopping from Amsterdam to Africa to Soviet-era Bulgaria.
"Not only was the color really good, but they were actually not bad pictures." McCurry marveled.
CELEBRITIES
Playboy founder keeping busy at 84
MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE
For someone who (many would assume) lies around his mansion in a silk robe a good portion of the day, Hugh Hefner manages to stay pretty relevant.
Let's just take a quick overview of what the 84-year-old has cooking:
a) A new "safe for work" website, TheSmokingJacket.com: Now office drones can scroll on their lunch hour without getting fired. It links to amusing videos, sex trivia as well as PG photos from the 57-year-old mag's archives.
b) A documentary about his life:
"Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel" paints the bon bantv as most people likely never envisioned him: a defender of human rights and his impact on current events in the 1950s, '60s and '70s.
Hmm, who knew? Though we did give him more for advancing the
Hollywood
We're not worried; Hef's shown his staving power.
very good relationship."
Like most of his galpals, Harris has appeared in the original lad's mag. "Crstalis is lovely. We have a
And he
couldn't be
Harris helps keep her guy in the loop: "She just bought me an iPad for my birthday so I'm 'Twittering."
Could be the company he keeps.
sign _twice.
c) An intriguing ad for Stoli vodka in which the power publisher talks to himself in a bar with the help of hightech magic.
Hefner
"Young people keep you young," said Hefner, who is reportedly only dating one woman at the moment, Crystal Harris. "Remaining active pays dividends."
"Young people keep you young.Remaining active pays dividends."
more happy that old chums Kendra Wilkinson and Holly Madison have parlayed their "Girls Next
The slogan: "Would you have a drink with you?" One of him is in his signature pajamas, the alter ego in a stuffy suit and tie.
HUGH HEFNER Playboy founder
Reached at his Beverly Hills mansion, Hefner seemed slightly overwhelmed by all the action. "Goodness gracious, I've literally got five back-to-back interviews on the phone," he said. "Then I have to get ready and do Larry King."
Door" fame into their own reality shows.
"I'm so tickled for them," he gushed. "I knew from the very beginning that Kendra was a special lady. It makes me proud."
If Hefner thinks life is going to slow down soon, he'd be wrong.
Hollywood big-wig producer Brian Grazer is reportedly working on a big-screen version of Hefner's life; Brett Ratner would direct.
"Robert Downey Jr. He was great in 'Iron Man' and 'Chaplin.' He's got something."
And who has the chops to handle the role?
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