Ragged Band · Dispatches from the Creative Life | Dedicated to the journey of young creatives

Matt Wignall

By: Ben Bishop

04·30·2013

“I started a band in high school with a few friends, and we played some backyard keggers, and by that time it was clear I was not suited for any kind of structured job.”

The word jack is evocative of roguish qualities. Three-day stubble and cool competence. JFK, Jack Nicholson, and Jack Daniels. Jack the Ripper. Blackjack. Sgt. Whiskeyjack and Captain Jack Sparrow.

Fitting, then, that Matt Wignall is a true jack-of-all-trades.

As a photographer he’s shot bands including Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, My Brightest Diamond, J. Roddy Walston & The Business and Thrice, and worked on fashion projects for companies like Volcom and NSF.

He has his hand in the world of moving pictures, having filled the roles of cinematographer, director and/or producer on a range of projects, from numerous music videos to commercial pieces with a documentary flair.

He is a producer and audio engineer who has cut records with Delta Spirit, Mando Diao, Cold War Kids, The Fling, and Deep Sea Diver. His analog recording studio, Tackyland, sits in back of his Long Beach home.

He is the former lead singer of Havalina Rail Co., whose music is too rich and varied to even begin to attempt describing here.

He is a graphic designer.

He’s involved in some capacity with these guys.

His wife, Judita Wignall, is a raw and organic foods cookbook author.

When I contacted Matt about an interview, I opened my e-mail with the following three anecdotes:

1 – In the fall of 1999 my insufferable thrash band, 4 Pete’s Sake, opened for Havalina Rail Co. in the fellowship hall of a small church on the west side of Santa Cruz, CA. Seventeen people attended. One was my mom. Midway through our set our bass player fell down and simultaneously unplugged all of our amps. You and Orlando were kind afterwards.

2 – In the spring of 2007 some friends and I were picking up a trailer that our buddies in Cold War Kids had gifted us. It happened to be parked in your driveway. While lifting the trailer to back it onto our truck’s hitch, we inadvertently struck, knocked over, and utterly destroyed a ceramic chiminea that belonged to you and your wife.

3 – Last year while having coffee with a friend who will remain nameless I was told an apocryphal-sounding story involving you, XXXXXX, a Mexican wedding, a speedo and a toothbrush. I’m not sure I believed it.

Take Heart: Thoughts On Writing A Novel

By: Ben Bishop

04·15·2013

Writers

The author, circa 2008, sitting at the table where he wrote much of his first novel.

In 2005, during my senior year of college, I petitioned one of my literature professors to allow me to do an independent study in fiction. Over the course of a semester I wrote a handful of short stories that he would then review. Among these were a science fiction tale about a young girl who effects a dramatic escape from a futuristic brothel by means of an enchanted flying bathtub, and a few other less memorable pieces, several of which were in fact so unmemorable that even I, the author, cannot recall them.

One stuck with me though, wedged like a popcorn kernel in the molars of my subconscious. A couple of years after graduating, cloaked in blissful ignorance, I set about the task of expanding it into a novel. I would spend six years working on the book, eventually completing ten separate drafts. Towards the end of draft nine I began trying to find an agent, embarking on an ignominious journey that the prevailing wisdom indicated would be disheartening at best.

Skateboarder Jamie Thomas

By: Ben Bishop

03·28·2013

Profile, Skateboarding, Sports

I’m grateful for the mistakes I’ve made. There are always mistakes you could live without, where you didn’t learn as much as you got hurt. But that’s life. We’re human, we’re all broken. You’ve got to learn to deal with that reality, to make your peace with it. – Jamie Thomas

The world of skateboarding lends itself to the creation of mythological figures. Despite having been thoroughly infiltrated by corporate interests, skate culture remains grounded in a kind of psychic free zone that not even Nike can fully buy its way into—an astral plane soaked with the dark magic of lawlessness, the jazzy beauty of kinetic free association, and the weird energies of underground culture.

It is a world littered with tall-striding demigods, some of whom you have probably heard of even if you aren’t a skateboarder. But it’s the cult heroes we’re interested in today. Tony Hawk, with his video games, clean-cut image, and technical precision has done much for skateboarding, but he will never hold the same type of appeal that the dark horses do; the Heath Kircharts and Tony Trujillos of the world, rebel punks who come by cover of night to grind their way across flaming gas station pumps or shred abandoned pools while blasting hair metal. Guys like Jamie Thomas.

Brian Phillips of Grantland & The Run Of Play

By: Ben Bishop

02·08·2013

Profile, Sports, Writers

In the naked quest to forage inspiration for myself that my “editorial responsibilities” at Ragged Band generally constitute, I regularly find myself reading, viewing, or otherwise consuming the work of men and women more talented, recognized, or well-compensated than I am and daydreaming about how they got to where they are now. The bright-eyed search for an answer to that question is the guise under which I have secured several of the interviews on this site. “Care to share with other younger aspirants about how they can attempt to follow in your footsteps?”

But in reflecting on that strategy over recent weeks, and on the focus that comes with it, I’ve been reminded of how trying to zero in on how others have done what they’ve done can quickly become an exercise in despair and envy. While I remain confident that the niche aim of this blog, to ferret out information and inspiration about the art of making art, is a worthwhile endeavor, I’ve also been reminded that part of trying to foster endurance and hope while getting sandblasted by the storm-clouds forever hovering above the creative path demands that we not only get down to brass tacks about the practical aspects of how lofty goals get accomplished in the real world (“How do I put myself in the right place at the right time?; …actually get the first draft of my novel out onto the page?; …pursue an internship?; …build my network?; …figure out where to start in making a film?”), but also remember to continually surround ourselves with good work.

You know, garbage in garbage out. You can only read so many blog posts about how to develop your personal network or increase your creative output before starting to wonder how the tines of that fork lying on the counter over there would feel if you jammed them into your eyeball.

Enter Brian Phillips, a staff writer for Grantland operating in his own self-contained nexus zone at the edge of mainstream American sports reporting. Folks, this is the kind of writing that makes me want to keep writing. Phillips combines Grantland’s colloquial style with his own ephemeral touch to create work that is honest without being self-important, and funny without feeling vacuous. The site, a subsidiary of ESPN, offers up long-form reporting and features on pop culture and sports. In addition to an expected focus on the most popular topics in modern American sport—football, basketball, baseball, and the personalities and exploits of the athletes and owners who populate their respective national leagues—the editors make room for a healthy range of fringe coverage. This is the realm Phillips operates in.

His first passion is soccer, which he covers with vigor and pathos for both Grantland and The Run of Play, where he serves as editor. But Phillips is not daunted by the constraints of expertise. He seems up for anything, bringing the same razor wit and eye for humanity to his coverage of the National Rodeo Finals as he does to his take on the current state of world-wide soccer in the wake of Europol’s recent damning report on match-fixing. Two of my favorite pieces he’s written over the last year include his reflections on Felix Baumgartner’s mind-blowing astronaut skydive, and his epic five-part series of dispatches from Wimbledon.

Andy Barron

By: Ben Bishop

02·01·2013

Design, Film, Interviews, Music, Photography

I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Andy Barron. It was a warm evening in late August, 2001, and I was lying in bed. It was my first night away at college. Just as I was about to fall asleep, the door of my dorm room cracked open and someone slunk inside, attempting to be quiet.

I knew that one of my two roommates was named Andy. We’d even spoken briefly on the phone ahead of move-in day. But I had no idea what he looked like. Being the shrewd fellow that I am, I feigned sleep. I figured if I was about to be robbed by a malingering undergraduate taking advantage of unattended belongings during the chaos of move-in week, I would wait until he got closer and then brain him with my alarm clock.

Instead, the shadowy figure clambered up the edge of the bunk bed, shaking it crazily in the process, such that if I had been asleep I would have woken in a panic thinking an earthquake had struck, and proceeded to fling a guitar bearing a Jimmy Eat World sticker onto the mattress along with a backpack and various other sundry items before climbing back down and immediately leaving again. Two days later I found out it was Andy.

The phrase “one thing led to another” seems to have been invented for Andy, who by now has been making his living as a graphic designer, photographer, tour manager, press wrangler and videographer for over a decade. He has toured extensively with Switchfoot and Foster The People, and has taken captivating photographs, perusable on his website, of everyone from The Jonas Brothers to Paper Route.

Of all the artists I’ve had occasion to know, he is one of the least pretentious, least neurotic, and least anxious. He comes across as being singularly unconcerned with whether or not people find him, or what he “is into,” to be sufficiently cool. Which makes him a very easy person to be around in an industry generally rife with insecure men and women desperately trying to manage others’ impressions of them.

We corresponded via email.

On Interviewing & the 20th Anniversary of Mark Helprin’s Glory

By: Ben Bishop

01·21·2013

Interviews, Writers

My draft board, I am told (although it may be myth), had, of all draft boards in the United States, the highest proportion of men killed in Vietnam—where, incidentally, my godfather, the photographer Robert Capa, was the first American to die, though he was a Hungarian and had nothing to do with the Hudson. The area was salted with military institutions—West Point, military academies, veterans’ hospitals—and old soldiers, including even, when I was young, some from the Civil War. The play of the boys was guerilla warfare in the extensive woods. Every stranger was a threat, an enemy. Indeed, there were a lot of bad apples around—escaped convicts from Sing Sing (twice as I remember), standard criminals, gangs in the fifties, child molesters (a beautiful little girl was taken from my third-grade schoolyard and raped and beaten over a period of many hours), and hoboes (not Shakespearian woodwinds) on the rail line that was the geographical locus of my childhood. I ran wild through all this, protected by my paranoia, by my sharply-honed guerilla skills, and by a rather extensive arsenal. Had you turned me upside down and shaken me, the floor would have looked like a military museum after an earthquake.

- Mark Helprin, The Paris Review

^ ^ ^

As an interviewer, the art of asking good questions, drawing out reticent interviewees, and eliciting Thoughtful Thoughts is a source of constant interest for me. I am fascinated by the strategies employed by well-known hosts, journalists, and at-large interviewers as they seek to alternately woo, cajole, flatter, and berate their subjects.

I mean, did you watch Oprah’s Lance Armstrong interview? Did you feel, like me, that she gave him a pass on the option of whether he was going to “talk about other people,” or fail to press him on when, if ever, he was going to offer real, honest-to-God personal apologies to the people whose lives he knowingly and viciously sought to ruin?

Or maybe you’re a Larry King guy, or a Charlie Rose gal. Maybe you listen to a lot of NPR and have become a cataloger of Tom Ashbrook’s (On Point) idiosyncratic tics, or a devotee of Jian Ghomeshi’s (Q) velvet delivery, or a rapt consumer of Terry Gross’s (Frrrrrrrrrrrresh Air) intimate moments with Famous Voices (did you listen to the one where Maurice Sendak wept on air?)

Whether we read The Seattle Times in the morning, watch FOX News each evening, or devour every issue of The New Yorker, we all get much of our information about the larger world through sources that have been interviewed. People ask other people questions, and the answers they elicit inform us about what is happening down the street or across the globe, or at least reveal something of what it means to be inside the interviewee’s head. Interviewing, it turns out, is but a formalized version of that most basic human relational act, the conversation.

Novelist Patrick deWitt Meets Screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis: Or, How To Corner Someone In A Bar

By: Ben Bishop

01·11·2013

Writers

My piece about Patrick deWitt is running in the current issue of Willamette Week. The Sisters Brothers, deWitt’s stark western novel about a pair of fraternal assassins, is very good. But, in the words of Levar Burton, don’t take my word for it. Take the word of D.V. DeVincentis.

While working on the article, I corresponded via email with DeVincentis, one of the writers responsible for adapting Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity for the screen. It was DeVincentis who, following a chance encounter, started a chain of events that eventually connected deWitt to a literary agent.

DV laid out the story of that night, and the subsequent experience of getting deWitt’s manuscript in the mail, in some detail. Editorial constraints prevented me from using all of it in the newspaper, but I immediately knew it was too good to keep to myself. I asked DV if he’d be open to my posting it here, as a bit of bonus material. He said, yes.

We Barbarians

By: Ben Bishop

01·08·2013

Music

If you’ve ever experienced the mixed blessing of attending a show at Chain Reaction, the all-ages rock club located in an Anaheim strip mall that trafficks in horny tween-punks, screamo bills six bands deep, and the drama which this volatile combination predictably ignites, you will resonate with the somewhat incongruous feeling I had on the evening during my senior year of college when I first saw a band called The Colour. Contrary to Chain norms, nobody onstage was screaming, skanking, or Nazi-stomping. Nobody had pink hair, giant tribal plugs in their ears, or a safety pin through their lip. The guitars weren’t even distorted.

Which is not to say that there wasn’t some serious movement taking place up on the boards. The front man, Wyatt Hull, was in fact gyrating quite a bit, but it was a sinuous, hip-swiveling affair, more Elvis Presley than Fat Mike. I remember him looking a lot like Jim Morrison, and engaging in a lot of interpretive tambourine while the rest of the band churned out a sort of Bravery-inflected indie disco.

It was not bad. But it did not, as they say, grab me.

Fountain City: A Meditation on Luck, Talent, Discipline and Failure

By: Ben Bishop

11·29·2012

Profile, Uncategorized, Writers

At Ragged Band, our focus has historically been on emerging or recently established artists. Their struggles, their successes, their specific stories. In speaking with folks who are still early in their careers, we’ve pursued the hope that connecting readers to the reality of what it’s been like for the normal, mortal, flawed men and women we profile and interview to try to make their dreams come true, in hearing what they’ve had to go through and what wisdom, if any, they’ve gained on the journey, there might be encouragement for those still dreaming into the void.

What’s become apparent over the course of many conversations is that there are three realities linking all “successful” artists. Three common threads running through the stories of every writer, painter and photographer who ends up sticking with their craft over the long haul and enjoying some level of success, as defined by compensation and recognition for their work, those threads being luck, talent, and discipline. The novelist Michael Chabon famously stated that out of these three there is only one that an artist has any control over.

Joshua Longbrake – RB 2012 Blog of the Year

By: Ben Bishop

11·21·2012

Photography, Writers

I went to grad school with Joshua Longbrake, but I never got to know him. We said hello in passing a few times, but didn’t ever get around to sitting down to a substantive conversation. Then he moved to Chicago shortly before I left town for Portland. I’ve kept tabs on him through his blog.

And what a blog it is. Quixotic, unapologetic, often poignant, occasionally weird. A runaway winner for the Ragged Band 2012 Blog of the Year Award.

Longbrake is a talented photographer who has made his living taking pictures, but he’s also passionate about writing and speaking. He’s got a particular facility for examining the interplay between art and faith; those gray lines delineating the space between hope and despair, depravity and holiness. Lines that weave like a drunk and at times disappear completely. He’s the kind of dude who loves Tom Waits. In fact, he’s recently given a series of lectures that included one devoted to old Tom.

If you’ve ever had cause to revisit why it is that you make art in the first place, or found yourself grinding and grinding, doing shit work in the hopes it will lead to something bigger and better, all with the dream of someday getting your big break, you need to read his essay on the idea of giving up.

Matt Wignall

Take Heart: Thoughts On Writing A Novel

Skateboarder Jamie Thomas

Brian Phillips of Grantland & The Run Of Play

Andy Barron

On Interviewing & the 20th Anniversary of Mark Helprin’s Glory

Novelist Patrick deWitt Meets Screenwriter D.V. DeVincentis: Or, How To Corner Someone In A Bar

We Barbarians

Fountain City: A Meditation on Luck, Talent, Discipline and Failure

Joshua Longbrake – RB 2012 Blog of the Year

About Ragged Band

Contact Information

Post Categories

Archives