Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Haunting beauty
Photographer’s Ozarks images suggest another time in Jasper
These images seem old. Depression-era stuff with forlorn men, cluttered structures and misty landscapes.
Black and white and rural. Earthy and haunted. Lonely picture poems. But they are not old — just timeless. These pictures were made by 35-year-old photographer Matthew Genitempo, and they are elegantly gathered in Jasper, which is a book and also a town in Newton County.
Some were taken there, others were taken in Missouri, Texas and Appalachia. There are thoughtful portraits of people who live alone, who have distanced themselves from society. There are pictures of the land, tangled and wild, sometimes scarred, slashed by a logging road or burned.
Some approach the abstract, with deep areas of imposing darkness. One is of an animal that looks as if it came from a horror film, some Ozark myth/ creature fuzzily captured on film. Others show dwellings, often pieced together from whatever was at hand.
Jasper (96 pages, $85) was published by Twin Palms Publishing of Santa Fe, N.M. It is Genitempo’s first book. Besides a dedication and credits, a poem by Ryan Paradiso is its only text. The photographs, all untitled, are displayed without accompanying description, allowing the viewer to make his own unencumbered interpretation of these haunting images.
There are payoffs to revisiting its pages. Here you see a ragged trailer door with a wooden-handled hatchet used as a jerry-rigged barricade, but do
cunning neighbor Robert Berchtold, who they unwittingly allow to abduct their adolescent daughter … two times. Make that nitwittingly. If you have any bit of a voice, it will be lost in about an hour in after screaming, “Are you CRAZY?!” And “Nooooooo!” And “What were you THINKING?!” “You did WHAT because he was having issues with his wife?!” “Don’t you DARE sign that affidavit!” And then there’s still another hour to go.
Abducted in Plain Sight is just plain baffling.
FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED
Fyre follows the dumpster fire that was the Fyre Festival. (So does Fyre Fraud, a new Hulu documentary on the same subject.)
The event, which was scheduled for the spring of 2017, was supposed to be an exclusive music festival — for pretty, influential party people on a private island in the beautiful Bahamas with luxury accommodations — that was organized by tech tycoon/con Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule. Only it was never organized at all. And then they became all “liar liar, pants on Fyre!”
It’s fascinating to watch the unraveling as Fyre begins as a hot idea and then totally goes up in flames — not literal flames (or else they might have been able to heat up those sad pieces of bread and processed cheese they served in foam containers instead of world class cuisine as promised).
What’s even more fascinating is why no one even blinked at spending thousands of dollars to see has-beens Blink 182 and that people wanted to attend a festival by Ja Rule who hasn’t ruled the charts since about 2001.
Ja Rule actually said recently that he wants to try to organize another Fyre-esque festival.
Here’s hoping he’s just blowing smoke.