Anita O’Day: Jezebel of Jazz or the Greatest White Female Jazz Vocalist Ever?

November 28, 2009

Anita_O'Day_1958_Newport_JazzEncountering Anita O’Day and delving deep in her recordings was, for me, a transformative experience. It was like the first time I heard Patsy Cline. I knew I was in the presence of a great talent. Then I read about her high life and hard times and my respect for her grew. She was the Keith Richards of jazz canaries. Click on image for larger size.

Leaving home at 14, Anita spent her teenage years hustling (and singing a little) in the Depression-era dance marathons captured so magnificently in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The first phase of her career was as a songbird in Gene Krupa‘s big band beginning in 1941.

This association produced her first big hit Let Me Off Uptown. It was a novelty number with spoken dialogue between the young white female singer and jazz trumpet great Roy Eldridge, who happened to be black. “Well, c’mere Roy and get groovy!” she invites him, and introduces his solo by exhorting, “Well, blow Roy, blow!” Racy stuff for the 1940s.  These were the war years and a more permissive stance in entertainment, and music especially, held sway. This jazz duo famously did not get along because Roy always felt Anita was upstaging him by dancing during his solos.

After Gene Krupa’s marijuana bust in 1943 Anita sang with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. When Krupa reformed his band in 1945 Anita reunited with him for almost a year. In 1947 and gain in 1952 it was Anita’s turn to take marijuana possession busts.

In March of 1953 she was arrested for possession of heroin and did six months in jail. She and her long-time drummer John Poole, who introduced her to smack, were ‘hype buddies’ traveling the jazz club circuit across the country in the 50’s and 60’s, working diligently at the craft of jazz and just as diligently to score and maintain their mutual habit.

“We were spending 10 to 12 hours a day looking for it and playing games,” she writes in her autobiography, High Times, Hard Times. Note the long sleeved gloves in this 1963 concert appearance on Japanese TV.

It was during this period that Anita O’Day reinvented herself as a solo female vocalist. She recorded what many consider her best work for the Verve label between 1952 and 1962 and under the influence of heroin. Think Keith Richards during the Exile on Main Street sessions. She was also, at this time, Big in Japan, just like Tom Waits.

Dig the drum-and-vocal-only intro to Sweet Georgie Brown filmed by photographer and documentary filmmaker Bert Stern at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, released as Jazz on Summer’s Day (1960).

If this song doesn’t send you like it does me, brother, I can’t dig ya’ ’cause you must be dead.

After a near fatal OD in 1968 Anita cleaned up — by withdrawing on a Hawaiian beach — and became a fixture on the Jazz Festival circuit. Call this the third great phase of her career as she continued singing and recording into her late 80s. In 2006 she released a new album, Indestructible and finally left all of us cool cats and kittens behind when she died on November 23, 2006 at age 87.


Luna is Thankful for Her Ball — 3D

November 26, 2009

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This anaglyph shows what I believe is Luna at her happiest. Click on image for larger size.

AIEEEE!

November 21, 2009

AIEEE_Worlds_of_Fear— from “The Dead Lover Returns”,  Worlds of Fear, May  1952, Vol. 1 No. 4,  Fawcett Publications
“To turn each cover. . .is to enter CORRIDORS OF HORROR never before conceived in the mind of man.” — house ad

If she loves me, she will ignore my decomposition!

November 21, 2009

Ignore_my_decomposition— from “The Dead Lover Returns”,  Worlds of Fear, May  1952, Vol. 1 No. 4,  Fawcett Publications


Fuji Finepix 3D W1: 3D without Film, Glasses or Photoshop

November 19, 2009

“. . .You take a picture of your neighbor’s dog and within seconds you are viewing that same image in full color 3D  — without glasses — on the back of your camera.”

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Here’s an anaglyph I made from images taken by the new Fuji Finepix 3D W1, the world’s first twin-lens digital 3D camera (with two 10 MP CCD sensors). The subject is a neighbor’s dog, a Golden Retriever puppy named Bailey. Click on image for larger size.

I’ve only had the camera for a few days, so please take these comments as preliminary thoughts.

Objectively, I have to say that if you are a 3D shooter OMG! you’ve-gotta-go-out-and-BUY-THE-FUJI-W1-before-you-finish-reading-this-sentence!!

If you are not among the small percentage of photographers who already shoot 3D with digital twin rigs or film cameras, you’ll probably want to learn a little more.

Here’s their press release on the well-respected Digital Photography Review site.

Here’s a stunningly negative review titled, “Fuji W1 3D Camera. . .The Worst Camera Ever Made” from the  Akihabara Live from Japan news site. Followed by a more temperate review after Akihabara’s staff was contacted by FUJI. TIME magazine weighs in and lists the FUJI W1 as one of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009.

A great source of information from people who have the camera and are exploring its possibilities is the Fuji3D Yahoo Group started by Linda Nygren.

If your interest runs to Stereo Macros, check out this attachment made partly of Erector set parts by Donald E. Simanek, here. Click on image for larger size.

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For Mac OS X users, check out Mike’s Stereoscopic Web Site. In addition to lots of useful information he provides versions of his program, 3D Slide Maker for Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard users. The Snow Leopard version provides support for .MPO files.

The Challenge! REAL 3D and Mac web site by Junji Ikeda offers a program he created called Stereo Splicer that works with Mac OS 10.4 or later to separate out the Left and Right images in an .MPO file and produce anaglyphs, parallel and cross-view pairs.

Another Mac option is the cross-platform Java program Stereomerger by Geir Øyvind Vælidalo.

There are some intriguing two lens options aside from the 3D, but the main selling point of this camera is the 3D. Examples of what FUJI calls Advanced 2D Twin Camera Mode where each lens takes the same picture with different options: color settings, ISO settings, zoom and non-zoom. Interesting, but clearly not why anyone would buy this camera.

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There’s no viewfinder on the W1, like many digital point-and-shoots, so you view your 3D and frame it on the rear screen, 2.25 wide by 1.75 inches high.

This is one of the things that Fuji got right on this 1.0 version. The screen has crisp, clean color and displays the picture you took just a moment ago in color and 3D.

Though to be sure, the screen’s small sweet spot makes it a single user experience.  A shift of say, five degrees in either direction while viewing your pictures and the 3D effect vanishes and your image collapses into ordinary 2D.

Let me repeat, what I think is the major selling point to the general audience, you take a picture of your neighbor’s dog and within seconds you are viewing that same image in full color 3D — without glasses — on the back of your camera.

Given the history of all previous 3D cameras that have required post processing and a degree of skill to get best results, this almost instant 3D color display feels revolutionary, not evolutionary.

Want to know how this display works? See this explanation (with diagrams) on the Dimension Technologies web site.

Size, weight and form factor: The W1 weighs about 11 oz. with battery and SD card inside. It’s 4.9 X 2.7 X 1.0 inches, the case is metal, so think chunkier, heavier iPhone.  The left lens is at the extreme edge of the camera face and this means the W1 must be held by it’s edges. Is there some technical reason that the lenses and the flash couldn’t be centered on the camera’s face?

This can be a major adjustment from handling a traditional single lens camera, but hey, it’s 3D — it’s worth it.  After a while you won’t even think about it.

Lack of internal battery to maintain settings:
a small minus. If the camera’s battery runs out you’ll lose your initial stored settings for language, date and time. My suggestion: buy a second FUJI NP-95 battery for $30 and get this $9 charger from Amazon: Maximal Power FC600 Rapid Travel Charger for Fuji Battery.

41CY5UFEF0L._SS500_Also, the camera fits nicely in the $9.00 Case Logic # TBC303 Black with a zippered storage pocket on the front that neatly holds an additional battery and SD cards.

Image quality: Too soon to tell, if I am honest. I suspect that my Canon twin-rig of two 7 MP SD 1000’s takes better images in a wider range of settings. But I’ve yet to subject that to direct comparison. It may just be that I’m more familiar with how to optimize the Canon settings.

In addition, my twin rig occasionally goes out of sync and must be restarted. That sync issue does not occur with this new Fuji. And the W1 is significantly smaller than my twin-rig and has no sharp edges (unlike my twin rig).

One thing I notice when using the flash — some of my images have been subject to the small, glowing disc shapes that amateur ghost hunters point to in snap shots as mysterious orbs of psychic energy, Ghost Lights. But are, in reality, just the flash inadvertently catching dust motes in the air, and reflecting back the light.

Could the fact that the flash is centered between the two lenses instead of above (or even off-camera) be the reason this happens? I don’t experience this effect with my other digital cameras, shooting in the same environments.

Menus, Settings and Camera Controls: Well executed and similar to the typical digital point-and-shoot camera format.  I’m more familiar with Canon and Nikon interfaces, but this one seems well thought out.  The controls are on both sides of the LCD screen, three buttons a side. These buttons toggle to double the number of features you can access.

The negative review cited above claims, “I struggled for hours to understand how to set the ISO and I had to read the user’s manual (lame).” Surely this is an exaggeration. Hours of struggling? RTFM. To change the ISO you press the F-Mode Menu (lower right hand topggle) and ISO is the first option on a Menu that includes Image Size, Image Quality, White Balance, Exposure Compensation & FinePix Color Settings.

Yes, it is a horrible shortcoming that you might actually have to refer to a single page in the manual that comes with your new camera.

In addition to the functions you’d expect to find on a digital camera — Menu, OK, Trash, Macro, Flash Mode, Video, Display, etc. — there’s a toggle switch to go from 2D to 3D mode and, most striking of all, Parallax Control. This enables you to change the parallax during playback to adjust the stereo window.  However, you have to go through too many hoops and menus to save a copy of your new window adjustment, IMO.

Besides, for viewing your images off the W1, you’ll probably want to make more adjustments with a an image processor like the free Windows program, Stereo Photo Maker or a major image editing monster like Photoshop.

Huxley_back_800pxClick on image for larger size.

Another new digital image file format .MPO It should be made clear that Fuji uses a new .MPO file format to store your stereo image pair. It’s a proposed standard for storing more than one JPEG in a single file. So .MPO is not strictly proprietary, just very, very new.  This combined JPEG format has applications outside of 3D, like bracketing exposures and High Dynamic Range photography.

The MPO file format is limiting.  Currently no major image editor will correctly open an .MPO file into its two component right and left JPEG’s.  What you get when you can open them, is a single JPEG, the image taken by the left lens.

Stereo Photo Maker has recently been updated to open .MPO files.  On the Mac side, there is no comparable software at any price. There are new programs to open .MPO for Mac users coming out, like SplitMPO.  It’s my hope these will increase.  And with all the photographers (and families) that use Macs, why hasn’t a cross-platform or Mac only program as good as SPM been developed?

Maybe the Fuji W1 will inspire some Mac code monkeys to rise to this challenge.

.MPO format only allows JPEGs, so you’ve already lost image information, right?  A RAW option for each right and left image would be a great improvement. But perhaps this would mean little to the average point-and-shoot customer and was never even considered as an option. Even allowing the option to natively save the separate JPEG images would be a step in a more open direction.

FUJI has an interest in driving users of the W1 towards their stereo processing options: lenticular prints and an optional digital picture frame, the FinePix REAL 3D V1 Viewer, that at $500 is nearly as expensive as the camera itself (at $600).

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You really need more than a single stereo pair to make a decent lenticular print so the process seems inherently flawed. I haven’t seen one of these prints but the word coming back from those who have is disappointing. This service is being offered by FUJIFILM’s SeeHere Photo Sharing site and the cost is $6.99 per print (they don’t indicate the size). That price seems like it’s set up to discourage, rather than encourage orders.

The digital picture frame model is surely the better path towards a general, as opposed to specialist market. No need for any ‘work’ by the photographer. Pop your SD card in the FUJI frame and enjoy a slide show in full color 3D with no glasses required! That’s what the Average Snap Shot Taking family, party and vacation photographer wants. Or so Fuji hopes. . .

As with the prints I haven’t seen the FUJI Viewer. Sight unseen, I still think the price point should be lower for this. However, this seems to me like the right track to a broader audience. Digital picture frames are already established in the marketplace.

The move everywhere is away from print to digital, so perhaps FUJI thinks there will be only a small market segment that actually wants physical prints of their 3D images. I think they may be right about this.

Given the resurgence of 3D in the movie marketplace, is it too much to hope for success for this camera? So that there may  be future models with additional small refinements?

FUJI certainly makes the 3D shooting experience open to the great majority of digital camera users; people who would be unlikely to invest the time in processing two film or digital images into 3D, as every other system requires. The owner of the FUJI W1 doesn’t have to post process their pictures at all. It’s done for you by the W1’s software.

3D without glasses, film or Photoshop! I’d call that revolutionary.

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Fireplace anaglyph made with stereo pair taken with FUJI W1’s Slow Synchro Flash Mode setting.  Click on image for larger size.


Tiger Beat magazine — 44 Years of FAB! GEAR! Teeny Bopper Greatness

November 8, 2009

“They’re exciting! Helpful! Daring! Cunning! BUT. . . what is a GROUPIE?”

Founded in September 1965 and continuously published since them, Tiger Beat magazine has been serving the female ‘tween market place and “stoking the the star-making machinery behind the popular song”* prior to the invention of the word ”tween.’

When I first encountered it in the mid-sixties it was comic book-sized with garish color covers with B&W interiors on 68 pages of  pulp paper. Today it is on slick stock, full color with the ever popular pull-out posters suitable for decorating  suburban bedroom walls of adolescents across America. While I sit here and wonder: Are Pretty Boys Out?

There was a dance party TV show host, Lloyd Thaxton who was cover featured for the first 12 issues as Lloyd Thaxton’s Tiger Beat. When Lloyd left his TV show he was dropped.

dyl_tigerbeat_coverNEWOf interest here is the November 1965 issue that has 2 pages and 4 pictures on Bob Dylan; an article by Earl Leaf titled, “Groupies! Who Are They? Where Did They Come From? (6 pages); Beauty Secrets of the Stars with Lesley Gore, Barbara Parkins, Annette Funicello, Mia Farrow, Sandra Dee and Ann-Margaret and a feature called This Popsy Topsy Music World that mashes together Tom Jones, Jackie DeShannon, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Tina Turner with Bobby Sherman singing and Keith Richards backstage.

Even my own question is not too controversial for TB’s hard-hitting journalism. See this cover-featured article: Are Pretty Boys Out? George Chakiris, James Darren, Richard Chamberlain VS. Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr, Sonny Bono and Freddy (of Freddy & the Dreamers) Click on image for larger size.


tigerbeatcoverNEWThe current version is certainly more polished graphically but the content, of course, is pretty much the same. Even the logo has only been changed (improved) slightly. Thought it could be argued that nobody remotely like Keith Richards would be covered today along side the Jonas Brothers, Hillary Duff and Miley Cyrus. It’s the triumph of the Pretty Boys of both sexes.

Sorry, Lilo. You are strictly a feather weight in comparison to The Human RiffClick on image for larger size.

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* Joni Mitchell, “Free Man in Paris”

Below, just because we quoted her above, we present a beautiful version of Ms. Mitchell’s classic “Big Yellow Taxi.”

Watching this is it any wonder that I (along with most white adolescent males) was in love with her and her music in 1970?

And please note: long before Carl Sagan popularized the notion that we are literally “star stuff,” Joni sang that “We are Star Dust, Million year old Carbon. We are Golden, Caught in the Devil’s bargain. . .”

The original Woodstock Festival took place on August 15 through the 18th in 1969. A month before on July 20, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. On September 14, 1969 Joni Mitchell played a gig at Big Sur, California and debuted a song titled “Woodstock.”

Forward into the Past — Time Travel Conundrum SOLVED by Fed Ex!

November 5, 2009

Fed-Ex_to _the_PastPlacing an web order on Monday, November 2, 2009 I learn that for $76.89 I can get a delivery on Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 3:00 pm.

But for a mere $10.78 more, I can get a delivery that’s much, much faster. I can have my package delivered on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 4:30 pm, 5 days before I even ordered it!

Personally, I think Fed Ex is charging too little for this service. Click on image for larger size.

INFOgraphic: What Do Frankenstein, Dracula, Jesus and Zombies Have in Common?

November 1, 2009

Jesus_Frank_Zombies

Sketch3D is Etch-A-Sketch in the Third Dimension

November 1, 2009

3D_Etch_a_Sketch Gizmodo highlights the release of Sketch 3D a system you can use to generate 3D anaglyph line drawings in real time.

Built to resemble the familiar Etch-A-Sketch toy this version has three dials. The first two are the traditional drawing cursors. The third one controls the z-axis. This is the depth axis, extending the user-generated content (wire frame line art) into the third dimension. To see the effect in the screen capture below, you’ll need a pair of red-blue or red-cyan anaglyph glasses.  Click on images for larger size.

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Gizmodo Gallery 2009: Etch-a-Sketch 3D from Core77 on Vimeo.