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SquarePants at 5:41am on Feb. 11, 2008
about 1 year ago
Hey, so where did your interest in Japanese music and anime come from?
I visited you link (based on your Japanese trumpet piece). The bear & dinosaur story was hilarious. It reminded me of my older daughter. We had gone on a Hawaii vacation. Her best friend was supposed to come with us but something happened and she couldn't. So my daughter made a little replica of her with a popsicle stick, glued a photo of her friend's face to it, and took it everywhere we went -- taking a picture holding her stick friend at each place "so she could still be with us". Pictures had the same kind of feeling to them... Reply...
Bill Benzon at 5:55am on Feb. 11, 2008
Can't say that I've got any particular interest in Japanese music, but that particular song was recorded by several jazz musicians and I've known it for years and years. I made that particular recording as a tribute to the Big Friendly Jazz Orchestra of Takasago High School, which is a fantastic big band.
As for anime, a friend and colleague got me interested in manga and anime. As you know, it's all over the world now, and growing. Seems to be on the way to becoming a transnational cultural language. Reply...
Queen SpongeHead at 10:29pm on Sep. 20, 2007
over 2 years ago
Uncle Bill!?! Reply...
Bill Benzon at 8:17am on Sep. 21, 2007
Yes, it's me. For my latest adventure in story telling:
http://mlyhlss.blogspot.com/search/label/gojira Reply...
David at 6:33am on Aug. 30, 2007
over 2 years ago
Hello, Bill. Welcome to SpongeFish. I did Google you. That's a pretty amazing career you've had. Can you tell us more about your graffitti work? Sounds interesting, Reply...
Bill Benzon at 7:22am on Aug. 30, 2007
Glad to be here, David. I won't go into any detail on graffs, because I've already got lots of stuff on the web -- 100s of photos, a fistfull of blog posts, and more to come, real soon now. But . . . Last October I was walking the neighborhood – Jersey City, between the Holland Tunnel and the sourthern end of the Jersey Palisades – taking flicks of interesting things, among them, a few tags. I decided they were particularly interesting and that I wanted to track them down.
And then I was walking down Brunswick near the Palisades and looked thru the chainlink fence that “protects" the Conrail right-of-way and the NJ Turnpike land. I looked at the base of the stanchions supporting I78 as it ramped down to feed into the Holland Tunnel and saw markings at their bases, lots of them, and big. Some of those letters must have been six feet high.
So I came back the next day with my little Canon point-and-shoot, crawled through a well-used hole in the fence, and started snapping flicks. The further I got from street-visible land, the more amazing the graffs became. Here I was, walking among three parallel lines of columns, looking at these amazing images at the base of each one. I felt like I'd fallen through the rabbit hole and ended up in a temple complex in a wacked out Egyptian Shangri-La.
So I crossed the tracks, walked up the bank, turned to me left, and there it was, the enormous head of a green triceratops painted on another stanchion. And then I saw the whole thing, 7 and a half feet high, 18 feet wide, green, with orange accents.
I was hooked. Reply...