Accidents Can Happy
how I made “Fellaheen Guernica”, maybe.
The title comes from my first reaction after seeing this blending of performance images of the band called Fellaheen. With the exploding accordion and dive-bombing guitars caught in a swirl of bandstand abstractions, I thought immediately of that famous painting. With apologies to Spain, Pablo and Fellaheen, there is no trivializing of the death and destruction in a small village in northern Spain in 1937. Apologies as well to Elvis Costello, for misremembering the name of the tune that’s sometimes in my head “Accidents Will Happen”. I often misremember or mix up words. Sometimes on purpose, “Happy” is one of them. May spell-check never get too smart.
I like to think that I tricked Photoshop into doing something it’s not supposed to do. It was a montage of a bunch of images. The way they blended wasn’t what I had intended but ran with it. A print was recently accepted at Studio Montclair’s upcoming “Rhythm & Blues” show.
The original photographs were captured during a performance of the band Fellaheen somewhere in New York City, and who knows when.
The members of the band (two not pictured): Bruce Hanson, guitarist-singer/song-writer, a Jersey guy and founding member of his other band Dogpile On The Rabbit; Kalin Nikak, guitarist, Manhattan born and bred; Ben Dumbauld, accordion, Washington Heights, NYC (ex-Pittsburgh); Nick Sullivan, bass, Madrid, España (ex-Park Slope, ex-Wisconsin); Kaveh Haghtalab, drums, Brooklyn (ex-Tehran).
At this writing, the photographs were stacked, auto-blended with no boxes checked. But the do-over is just not the same.
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