©Albert Waston

Omahyra, New York, 2004

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Albert Watson in his New York City studio reflects on his 40-year career.

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A Life On Film

By Mike Foldes
with photographs by Chuck Haupt

Albert Watson’s iconic photographs have touched  the lives of millions of men and women over the past forty years. With more than 250 Vogue covers, 40 covers for Rolling Stone, movie posters, movie star portraits, and more, it’s unlikely anyone who’s ever browsed a magazine rack in a bookstore, bus station or airport hasn’t at one time or another seen an Albert Watson cover.

The following interview was conducted in mid-July at Watson’s  ground floor loft-office-studio in Tribeca. We’re let into the building lobby by security and met at the studio door by a young lady who disappears into the back room to announce our arrival – and, I gather, to see if we are even expected. We stand at the door for a moment and then move inside to a foyer with a big-as-life photograph of a NASA space suit on the wall.

Albert Watson comes into the room looking as he does in many of his published interviews and photos, dressed in a black shirt buttoned to the neck, black pants, black beret more or less tilted backwards as if the wind were forever blowing in his face, and a pretty cool pair of sneakers.We introduce ourselves to one another, exchange some pleasantries, then face off across a stainless steel table from deep seats on black leather sofas for what is expected to be about a 45-minute Q&A leaving little time for warm-up.

The interview has been arranged by Watson’s son, Aaron, who manages the photographer’s demanding schedule of museum exhibitions, interviews, commissions and gallery shows that have taken him most recently to Scotland (his native land) and Spain. Aaron is a former Associated Press sports editor, and spent many years traveling from one main event to another, including the Athens Olympics, the World Cup in Japan, the British Open, and more. He is not at the studio when we arrive, but comes in later looking very comfortable in jeans and T-Shirt, and carrying a motorcycle helmet.

Photography historian Gail Buckland, who wrote the introduction for UFO, one of Watson’s forthcoming books, was present for the interview.

The following is an edited version of that session.

Chuck Haupt/Ragazine

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Regarding Strip Search:

 AW: The pictures go way back. The Vegas book was shot the year 2000, 2004 about 16 weeks of shooting off and on for two years, a six-month break and then another year. But basically those weeks were dropped in, in like one and two week periods over that period of time. Several things held up the production of that book, just projects I was doing, museum shows, gallery shows I was doing, then it really came down to the wire because we were able with the publisher to really package two books together, UFO and Strip Search. So basically it meant that, basically I sat before a computer for four-and-a-half to six months pulling material for UFO.

The Vegas material was all together because that was one project. But pulling stuff, material for UFO that went back a long period of time, required a massive amount of research. Sometimes we’d be spending four or five days just looking for specific genre, or a specific thing. Basically, from ‘84 … ’83, the archives are very, very, ridiculously well organized… and previous to that, previous to that, things between ‘78 and ’84, things were quite well organized, and before ‘78  things were in boxes. And that’s pretty much how it went…. so it enabled some of the old stuff to come through …

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View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

• STRIP SEARCH:
  Hardcover, two volumes • 14″ x 11″ (portrait)  11″ x 14″  (landscape)
  180 pages each  • 400 images approx.
  Hardcover with rubber silk-screened case.
  Boxed Edition: Two books presented in a clamshell cloth box with foil debossing
  Publication date: Fall 2010
  Introduction an essay by Tom Wolfe
  Published by PQ Blackwell, www.pqblackwell.com

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A project with a plan?

 AW: Vegas was always very specific. And I had done a book on Morocco (Maroc), and I had shot in a classic style, classic photographic style, because of the nature of the country. I mean you can shoot anything. Just because a country has an ancient tradition doesn’t mean you have to shoot it in an ancient way.  You can shoot it in different ways, and like it’s an old country you can shoot it in an old style.  I was comfortable with that and after shooting Morocco I wanted something completely, absolutely different, and I found that in Vegas. I was fairly familiar with Vegas, and therefore it was easy for me to start that project. … I’ve been going to Vegas for years and years. A lot of times, sometimes for photographing people for jobs, for advertising jobs, and I’ve directed quite a lot of TV commercials based out of Vegas. You’d use the desert around Vegas, but Vegas would be the base for shooting.

About the Web, and a video of Henry Rollins shot in the old Folger’s building in New Jersey:

AW: We don’t place any of that stuff. Aaron does things on the website. So he controls the web site. But beyond the website, all the interviews just get posted. Sometimes Rolling Stone will posts things, because they do music videos that get posted.

What about Hat Blocks?

AW: For quite a few years I collected hat blocks. When I say for quite a few years it sounds like I have a lot of hat blocks. I don’t. I maybe have about 24 of them but I collected the 24 of them over a period of about 10 years. So they’re interesting objects and very sculptural. And interestingly enough you can collect them in England, you can collect them in France, Germany and America. Obviously around the turn of the century hats were gigantic business and therefore hat manufacturing was a big thing all over and I just found hat blocks interesting.

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View larger photos from the gallery please enter the FS button.

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What’s left to shoot, and are you casual about finding ‘it’?

AW: I’m never casual. I’m always pretty determined about finding things, you know. Basically I’m always looking for things. Any good photographer should always be looking for something, you know.

If you’re casual you’re not going to be successful in what you find. If anything’s too relaxed and laid back, and so on. I’m not saying casually… If you sit in your library going through 150 photo books, or books on painters, or reading, you’re right, that can be construed as casual, but you’ll be looking for something. For inspiration. Very often it might be that you would find something in a book, you might look at something in a still life that might inspire you to do something in portraiture. You don’t necessarily find a portrait and suddenly say I’m going to go ahead and do a portrait because that inspires me to do a portrait of somebody.  I’m fairly lucky. When you’re passionate about something it’s the passion that’s the driving force to find things. Looking and working. Of course you go to museums and galleries, and New York is fabulous for that.

I think I can go to an entire museum show and not get any inspiration but I can immensely enjoy the show. Other times you go and see something quite casual, an exhibition of furniture which is not related to painting – I mean it’s a three-dimensional object, and for some reason that can be inspiring, and can help you see something.

How quickly up the ladder?

 R: When you first got into taking pictures of personalities in California, how did that evolve so rapidly? Was it the Hitchcock portrait? Or was it a variety of circumstances?

AW: No, I’m not that lucky. You don’t just happen… It’s pretty unusual in the magazine business for somebody who’s producing, say, Harper’s Bazaar magazine, which Hitchcock was for… it’s not so casual that someone says, “My nephew has a camera. Would you like him to photograph Alfred Hitchcock?”

R: From other interviews it sounds like someone gave you a camera one day, and the next day you’re taking pictures of Alfred  Hitchcock.

(Laughter)

AW: Well someone abbreviated things. I was at university for seven years having a visual education pumped into my brain. So it wasn’t seven years of photography, but it was four years of graphic design and three years of film school. During that period of time, of course, I had a camera as a graphic designer, and photography was viewed as a craft subject towards graphic design. So you’re not really a photographer, but you’re using it. If you want to do a poster and you say, “Well, I need a picture of a flower for the poster,”  they would encourage you to take a picture of the flower and then you lay the typography on your own picture.

And that was my first real contact, as it were, with photography. So I had a lot of training. And then when I went to California I began shooting fairly rapidly for, doing cosmetic advertising for Max Factor — and that was kind of fortuitous. But between 1970 and 1973, I really developed a commercial business. I was working as a professional photographer. You know, a very raw one. But I was working and making — not so much raw as when I was doing cosmetics advertising. But somebody in the advertising agency that handles Max Factor says to me, “I loved those pictures you did of that girl in the ocean. Have you ever thought about photographing cars?” And I said “No.”  “Well, would you be interested? I’ve got a car that needs photographing, and we were talking about doing it at the beach, a truck at the beach…”And I did it, and it was very successful, and then I started doing a lot of cars.

But by that time I was more and more becoming aware of light and using studio lighting. I was getting jobs but I was also learning at the same time and I was always doing a lot of testing on my own. So I might have a job on Tuesday and Wednesday, but Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday I wasn’t shooting, so I would always be shooting.

I would invent something, I would call up a modeling agency and say send me over a girl. I’d call up a designer for clothes and say send me over some clothes. Get hair and makeup people to work with, and so on. And bit by bit, in California, we built up a reputation as being a very productive studio. And from that, somebody from New York called, in ’73, and said, “We need a photographer out there to photograph Alfred Hitchcock. Are you available to do that?” You know… and I said “Yes,” and that was the first celebrity I photographed.

CONTINUED: Albert Watson / Part II

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The opening for Albert Watson’s solo show
at the Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
in NYC is scheduled for Oct. 21,
with a book party/signing scheduled for Oct. 23.
(http://www.hastedhuntkraeutler.com)

ALL ALBERT WATSON PHOTOS ARE COPYRIGHT
ALBERT WATSON & USED WITH PERMISSION OF THE PHOTOGRAPHER.

Chuck Haupt Photos © Chuck Haupt & ragazine.cc, 2010

Names Were Changed to Protect…
(or, The Things My Grandfathers Did to Survive)

1. John

They all called him Johnny K, anyway.
All but the many who heard

Kanciewicz

And told him to get out,
Stay out and never come back.

So he cleaved a couple of syllables
For the sake of a job

Any job

Railroad bull or driving a suicide load
Across the mountains to keep himself

And his orphaned brothers and sisters
And later his two daughters and wife

And then me

Alive.

2. Lutz

If he hadn’t been Herr Doktor,
Would he have had the nerve

To insist on a fair exchange
Of a vowel for the umlaut

The Ellis Island clerk
Was going to take anyway

When the alternative was spelled

Dachau?

Inventory

I think Matthew, the tax collector,
was Jesus’ staff statistician.
Why else would he think we’d care that
“the very hairs of our head are all numbered.”

And this makes me think of my pastor, John Fischer,
who sermonizes that I should think this inventory
comforting, but semi-heathen that I am,
find myself saddled
with a high-definition image of God as
an obsessive compulsive savant,
like the guy Dustin Hoffman portrayed in “Rainman.”

And this makes me think of Lenny,
the kid from my neighborhood,
who when we were growing up,
was most politely referred to as “retarded”.

Lenny could rattle off the age
of every person we knew in common.
If this conversation was happening now
he’d tell me, “I 52, you 50, Mike 49, Dennis 50, Stewie 50, Richard 46, etc.”
and seems hardwired to know
exactly when each of our odometers turns over
to another year.
So, although I’ve never shared
a birthday celebration with him,
he will wake up the morning of August 13
and instinctively add another tick mark
to the inventory of my mortality.

And thinking of Lenny makes me think
of what I’ve recently learned
is known as the “euphemism treadmill”,
the evolution… or de-evolution as two of my favorite Georges…
Orwell and Carlin… saw it, of language.
For example, forty years ago Lenny was mentally retarded.
He knew this, seemed accepting of it
and placed himself on the pecking order of others
in his situation.

He’d say, “You know Louis Nelson?
I a retart, but he really a retart.”
Today I’m told that Lenny and Louis are not retarded,
but at last check are referred to as
developmentally challenged… developmentally special… developmentally delayed…
or whatever else they’ve been redubbed since I typed this. 

And thinking of the euphemism treadmill
makes me think of Sherman Alexie,
who, to use the politically correct euphemism,
is a Native American novelist and poet.
I haven’t seen Lenny recently
to ask what he thinks about his change of semantic status,
but as Sherman says, “Indians call each other Indians.
Native American is a guilty white liberal thing.”

And of course, you, dear listener or reader, whichever the case may be,
may be thinking to yourself,
“he should have paid more attention
to hairs number 417, 2,392, 4,798, 303, etc.,
blah, blah, blah,
ha ha ha,
because they seem to have gone missing.”
And I reply yes,
I like to think of them as becoming,
what was referred to when I was in the retail business as shrink;
another euphemism,
this one referring to the stuff that was
stolen, broken or had otherwise disappeared
from the shelves without being paid for.

And this makes me think that I should let you,
dear listener or reader, know that I,
even in polite company,
refer to myself as bald.

And all this makes me think of the poet Bob McKenty,
because on one Saturday afternoon Lenny appeared in my back yard
and after he reliably related the ages of everyone he assumed we both knew,
he too wondered, in his case aloud,
“I 36, you 34, I have hair, why you no have hair?”
After he left I mulled this while stripping a chair
I’d eventually refinish and began
composing a poem,
well, more a rant, called “Bad Hair Day”
which was quickly published by McKenty,
our contemporary Ogden Nash,
who normally publishes nothing
that is not strictly metrical and rhymed,
but found it funny enough to immortalize anyway.

And so, for this poem of sorts,
I think I’d like to thank Lenny and Bob and Matthew and Sherman and George and George and John and Dustin
and most importantly, a perhaps obsessive and savant-like
God.

Amen

The Optometrics of Love

Thank you for being the one
who never looked
through lenses distorted
by the residue
of former boyfriends,
spouses and lovers
and saw
me. 

About the Poet:

Tony Gruenewald is the production manager of Edison Literary Review. His collection, The Secret History of New Jersey, was published by Northwind in 2009. To find out more, visit tonygruenewald.com.

After Messalina

Death, that old whore
who gladly takes on all comers
will happily accommodate you
for the small price of your soul.
She will do you up good,
make sure you have no complaints,
and send you off into the night
completely satisfied.

Though you may be relieved
to be done when finished,
and you may not have wanted to come
in the first place,
since you have no choice
it’s best you take her hand
and follow her up those wornout stairs,
under the pulsing neon sign,
just as a thousand others
have done so tonight.

For she is used to reluctance
in all its forms. You
have nothing she hasn’t seen before
and will not see again.

When you’re spent
and have pulled those soiled bills
from your pocket,
just be sure you’ve paid in full.
To ensure your proper passage
leave every last sou on her bed.
She will appreciate the payment
for a job well done
and will send you
to the place prepared,
as advertised.   

Mrs. Mathers

Mrs. Mathers died last night,
her fragile hold gave way.
I had seen her just last week.
She seemed to be okay,
but who knows at eighty-three?

She was sharp until the end,
her mind steeped in the mysteries she had read.
I saw these books arrive by mail,
they piled up in the lobby.
Some wait for her now.
They will not get her perusal.

Her penetrating eye could see through me,
she was nobody’s fool.
Once in the elevator I asked
what she was reading.
“Chandler,” she replied.
Her answer left no room
for further inquiry,
though the way she looked
at the elevator door told me
she was not intimidated by The Big Sleep,
nor anything else likely to come her way.

I will miss her cold, clear gaze
and the slight tell
that lingered on her face.
She took us all in
as something she’d seen before.
Still, I counted her as a friend.
Her daughters will now likely sell,
and a young couple with a baby
or maybe a corgi
will take her place.
This seems to be the trend.  

Rob Mustard is a former English teacher, and retired professional photographer. His photographs appear in the May-June 2010 issue of ragazine.cc (See Archives). He and his wife Deborah live in El Segundo, California.

Extra ! Extra ! –

The Paperboy Delivers Today’s Grooves

By Jeff Katz

Soul with balls. Eli “Paperboy” Reed brings it with Come and Get It, his first big time release courtesy of Capitol Records. Reed, the most soulful sound ever to come out of a Boston high school band, is part Wilson Pickett part Otis Redding, sometimes a shouter, sometimes a crooner, and that ain’t bad. Not bad at all.

From the joyous opening horn riff of “Young Girl” (no, not the Gary Puckett and The Union Gap “Young Girl”) to the frenzied anarchy of “Explosion,” Eli and his super-tight band, The True Loves, knock out the competition with the most enjoyable album of the year. It’s a retro romp that brings back the sounds that made AM radio of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s a treat. Influences abound, but Eli Reed’s music is fresh and his biography unique.

How many musicians take this route to stardom: start at a New England high school as a lousy tenor saxman, head southwest to a Mississippi Delta blues joint, then follow Louis Armstrong’s journey upriver to a South Side Chicago church to play a little Sunday morning organ. But don’t stop there. Venture back East to Brooklyn hipster clubs and, finally, do a Horace Greely and “Go West Young Man” on a cross country sojourn to Hollywood and the home of The Beatles and The Beach Boys. Only one guy I can think of, and it’s not Rand McNally.

Eli learned a lot down in Clarksdale. Not only did he discover how an 18 year old could make it on his own in the hotbed of the blues, but how to deliver a tune. The Delta Bluesmen never play it coy with their ladies. Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House – they weren’t asking, they were telling. When the “Paperboy” (dubbed so by the veteran players who dug the old timey newsboy hat he sported) sings to the womenfolk, he lays it down for real – he is the man they want, he is the man they need. In “Name Calling,” which sounds like a lost Jackson 5 classic, Reed informs his latest conquest that she went “from name calling to calling my name.” He takes great relish in her comeuppance.

College was no place for the “Paperboy,” and though he gave the University of Chicago a chance, it was in the sounds of the city that he earned his degree, spinning southern soul for his college radio station between bites of greasy fried chicken. (Don’t smudge those LPs). A devotee of performers famous and unknown, Reed tracked down Mitty Collier, a former Chess Records artist who was now preaching the gospel. She brought him in to play and sing at her Sunday service. Finding the Mitty Colliers of the world has been a way of life for Eli. “I’ve definitely made it a point to seek some of these people out who’ve inspired me.” Towering groovemeisters like Mel & Tim (“Backfield in Motion”) and Tyrone Davis (“Turn Back the Hands of Time”) may have been long forgotten by a public that finds Lady Gaga sublime, but they’re never far from the mind of Eli Reed.

A return to Boston jump started his recording career. Sings Walkin’ and Talkin’ and Other Smash Hits! and Roll With You got the boy some notice in the press. Rolling Stone named Reed a “Breaking Artist,” and, in the UK, he was nominated for a 2009 MOJO Award as Breakthrough Artist of the Year. With that the old music industry took note, and, there you have it, a contract with Capitol Records. Now back to Come and Get It, Reed’s most polished effort yet. The additional horns and strings add to the authenticity of his sound.

The title track is the standout, with the greatest harmony heard since The Friends of Distinction (“I Can Dig It, He Can Dig It, She Can Dig It, We Can Dig It…”). “Come and Get It,” the song, was recently BBC Radio 2’s “Record of the Week.” In “Tell Me What I Wanna Hear,” Reed turns the impossible, taking the melody of Ray Stevens’ cornball classic “Everything is Beautiful” and making it swing. His gospel grooming comes through in the thumping hand clapper “You Can Run On.” There’s no praising the good Lord here. The religious grounds: Eli’s irresistibility to the helpless female.

Reed is a big fan of the ultimate musical expression, the 3 minute pop song. “For me,” says Reed, “it’s all about writing pop songs. Soul music was the greatest pop music of the 20th century and its influence is so far-reaching.” Write on, brother.

The penultimate track, “Pick Your Battles,” takes the album down several notches. It’s a breather, folks, for the insane horns of a Medieval celebration run amok. “Explosion” is a fuzzy treat, crazy man, just crazy. Part James Brown, part Eli Reed. Prepare for the countdown. BOOM!

The cover of Come and Get It shows a generic supermarket, its shelves crammed with packages labeled meat sauce, bleach, crackers… You get the idea. Smack in the middle is the always sharp Eli “Paperboy” Reed. His pompadour (absent in off-hours) rises high, his leather suit shines, his black boots gleam. When you visit your local store, pick up a copy of his latest. but don’t head to the “7 items or less” line. All 12 cust on Come and Get It are part of a well-balanced and musically nutritious diet.

http://www.elipaperboyreed.com

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Illustration by Nate Katz

One-Trick Pony Thirty Years Later

By Jeff Katz

Nineteen-eighty was a tough year for ‘60’s rock icons. January found Paul McCartney in a Tokyo jail, forced to sing “Yesterday” repeatedly by fellow inmates after being busted by customs officials for possession of marijuana. In May, Macca released a logic defying embrace of synth-pop on McCartney II, the cover bearing a striking similarity to a mug shot. Bob Dylan was in the middle of his “praised be Jesus” period, releasing one of the worst records in his catalog, Saved. The Rolling Stones were well into self-parody, and Emotional Rescue, their summer release, was a weak collection, the best songs a hollow mimicry of their sound, the worst unlistenable. No one had a worse year than John Lennon, gunned down in December by a lunatic.

The new decade saw a new face on the silver screen – Paul Simon. One-Trick Pony, both the movie and album, were the first missteps of Simon’s remarkably successful career. After a cute cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, and a hilarious donning of a turkey suit on Saturday Night Live, Simon spent three years writing the screenplay and the songs for his first and only starring role as one-hit has-been Jonah Levin (Levin’s “Soft Parachutes” is including in the CD release). Levin is the “there but for the grace of God” version of Simon. Simon in the lead role is difficult to watch, his range lying somewhere between sleepwalker and corpse. A smoldering sex symbol he is not.

The film has many redeeming scenes: Jonah shaving while his little son pretends, a two-man baseball game between father and child in Central Park, and Levin’s band playing a naming game called “Rock and Roll Deaths” in the van between gigs, arguing whether they should separate the plane crash victims from the overdosers. One-Trick Pony is worth tracking down. Not only do you get to see Paul Simon’s miraculously lush head of hair, most recently seen thinning and combed over on 1977’s Greatest Hits, Etc., but you can also marvel at Lou Reed as a scumbag record producer.

Critics hated the movie and audiences stayed away. It was a resounding flop. But, hey, acting was not Paul Simon’s forte, cut him some slack. Music, now that’s where he ruled. After all, there hadn’t been one solo album of Simon’s that wasn’t better, by far, than anything Simon & Garfunkel produced. That the vinyl version of One-Trick Pony was erratic was a shock to the ears when it hit record store racks on September 6, 1980.

Simon the actor showed no spark, no fire, but at least he was consistent. Simon the singer-songwriter was positively schizophrenic. The cuts are of two varieties: Jonah Levin performances and Paul Simon commenting on Jonah Levin. Maybe the Levin songs are Paul’s best bit of acting, because the tunes are flat and false, but, after all, Jonah is a mediocre performer. Could Paul Simon have intended to write half-assed songs for his onscreen doppelganger? Doubtful, though it’s worth considering. “Late in the Evening,” though propelled by a Latin horn section, is an empty experience, and when Jonah/Paul sings, “I went outside to smoke myself a ‘J’,” it is pandering of the highest order. The sly little guitar line by Eric Gale punctuates the quasi-hip reference that is sure to get the obligatory cheer from the crowd. Side 2 begins with a mirror image of the leadoff track. “Ace in the Hole” may be Paul Simon’s worst song, and that includes, “The Dangling Conversation,” which reeked of sophomoric pseudo-intellectualism. The title track lays somewhere in between these two in quality, equally as slick and devoid of real emotion.

The real songs, the songs that speak of relationships, personal angst and wistful nostalgia are top of the line Simon. “That’s Why God Made the Movies,” “Oh, Marion” and “Nobody” (especially “Nobody”) are stellar works of genius. There are more. It’s a difficult album, well worth your time three decades later as the touchstone of an artist in transition.

Even more interesting is what followed. One-Trick Pony was Simon’s first studio album as a solo performer that didn’t crack the Top Ten (though “Late in the Evening” did). It was disappointing news to Warner Brothers, who had signed the hit maker to a three-album deal worth between $10-15 million. For Simon, the one-two combination of movie failure and weak sales propelled him into a place he had resisted: a reunion with Art Garfunkel. Garfunkel’s acting and recording career were in the toilet and, he too, was up for a moneymaking uniting of forces.

The overwhelmingly popular Central Park concert, attended by half a million strong was followed by a national tour.  Paul was put back on his confident feet, so much so that he unilaterally erased Artie’s vocals from the planned-for new Simon & Garfunkel record. Now simply another solo effort, 1983’s Hearts and Bones made One-Trick Pony look like a smash hit. It sputtered out at #35 on the album charts.

It didn’t matter now. Paul had completely freed himself of trying to understand what the movie-going and music-listening audience wanted from him. So, if he wanted to record his lyrics atop the swinging mbaqanga sounds of South African musicians backing him, well, then that’s what he was going to do. Graceland, the product of his newly found liberation would become his biggest success, selling 14,000,000 copies and garnering the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1986. “Graceland” the song would win 1987’s Song of the Year Award.

­One-Trick Pony is the pivot point to the third phase of Paul Simon’s career, when he brought world music to the popular consciousness of American record buyers. For that, it should be remembered, revisited and celebrated on its 30^th anniversary.

Meditations in Metal

Occasionally something catches the eye, whether the barb is uniqueness, simplicity, or a blast of heat that melts into the imagination. Miya Ando’s metal plates exhibit simplicity, but that minimalism is based upon what is seen, not what is hidden within the crafting of the object, or within the viewer, the complex melding of which determines whether and how the object comes to life.  In this case, one opens the mind’s eye to enter a world captured in the metamorphosis from cold hard steel to cold hard steel with a contemplative soul.