My favorite music writing of the year: Joe Carducci on SST photographer Naomi Peterson

Thanks a lot for posting.

There's also a nobility in rendering the life of somebody seen as a side player in an important scene. This might be the first such I've read.

"If Santayana is right that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it then I’d gladly erase the tapes, smash the records, burn the photos and forget all about everyone and everything so as to insure meeting them again and doing it all over. It was some serious fun."

both St. Vitus pics are great.

omgwtflol @ steve shelley's pants

carducci ended up turning this into a full book...taking orders now here (it's on the sidebar on the right hand side of the page)...very excited:

http://www.redoubtpress.com/

yeah, me too! thanks for the update, matt

is that essay posted somewhere?

(dead link)

is that essay posted somewhere?

(dead link)

You can still find it (and all the pictures) via archive.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060423172919/http://209.193.84.198/naomi/naomi.html

good review of this:

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid55300.aspx

i fuckin' love carducci so much, i love his writing

"I think of Naomi as a transition figure," he writes. "To an extent all women are transition figures which is why we open doors for them, but the arts they now inhabit in greater numbers are no longer the drop-out wilderness they were when young Naomi pulled that door open for herself. . . . All that waste of money and time in liberal arts programs, film schools, etc. I say dynamite them all, for art's sake. All of this middle class safety, so well-camouflaged by tattoos, piercings, porn vamping, suicide kitsch . . .

Men buzz around as hardly more than hairy boys until the hand of fate squashes them in their tracks like bugs. Women's lives are demarcated by a series of traumatic, usually bloody, rehearsals for death: the death of the little girl at menses, the death of the nymph at the loss of virginity, the death of the single girl at marriage, the death of the bride at the birth of the mother, the death of the mother at menopause. On occasion, under such pressures a girl might easily add some blood-letting of her own."

just got my copy in the mail...the book is looks "self published" but i got it quick in the mail

Yeah, it's self-published, along with the 3rd ed. of 'Rock and the Pop Narcotic'.
Here's another interesting interview.
It seems that the picture that accompanies the article is the only one ever taken of Carducci.

Joe has written two very sharp pieces so far for our (Arthur Magazine's) blog at yahoo music.

here they are

thanks arthur

Joe Carducci - Wyoming Stories: Yeung Girl, The Winter Hand, Homo Vampyrus

Redoubt Press, 2008, 2008. Fine. In publisher's shrink-wrap. pictorial wrappers 23 x 15.5 cm.; glue bound; black-and-white; edition size unknown; unsigned and unnumbered; offset-printed "'Wyoming Stories' is the first volume of screenplays that have collected on Carducci's desk and in his computer over the years while he worked on records, films, buildings The earliest script here, 'The Winter Hand,' was written in 1991 immediately after his first book, 'Rock and the Pop Narcotic,' was published. The most recent, 'Homo Vampyrus,' was finished in 2005." -- from book's end-flap. "Carducci is perhaps best known as the author of two books on music, 'Rock and the Pop Narcotic,' and 'Enter Naomi - SST, L.A. and All That,' but he quit college moved to L.A. in 1976 with the intention of writing screenplays. This he did. However, as post-Star Wars Hollywood was closing its doors to organic storytelling rooted in life on earth, punk had throw music's doors wide open. And so Carducci's music business detour and those books. Film studio's vaults are full of unproduced screenplays by geniuses like Welles, Cassavetes, Dalí They are unpublished as well, adding insult to injury. That these three Wyoming Stories of Carducci's are unproduced may be somewhat less injury, but the insult hereby ends." -- from books' backcover. Introduction by David Lightbourne. 218 pp. Bookseller Inventory # 11200

anybody read this?

This music, rediscovered, will be heard by more people than were there, just as was true of blues, rockabilly, surf, garage, psychedelia, etc. And then the musicians will be seen as they were in those moments through the lens of Naomi’s Nikon, through her American eyes. An appropriate action-epitaph for this music-loving, history-obsessed, death-haunted, boy-crazy, insomniac, workaholic, absurdist, auburn-haired halfie girl – granddaughter of a Buddhist priest – born in Tokyo, raised in Los Angeles... One of us.

Great book, great way into this subject too.