Harvey Robinson adjusts
the settings on his JVC GY-HD 110 camera perched on a tripod in the
doorway of the kitchen in his white duplex in the Aycock District of
Greensboro.
Headphones rest on his neck underneath a black
baseball cap as he bustles to shoot a documentary with Ed Cone,
professional journalist and blogger.
Ed steps carefully around
the tight space, dodging the thick, black camera cord that snakes
across the patterned vinyl floor. He crouches to pet the cat who claims
a napping spot beneath the camera.
“Wow, funky variegated
brown and black cat,” he says to the tom who is missing part of an ear.
“That is Baffi Lungi,” Harvey explains, “but his street name is Snags.”
A 1K Soft box light blazes Ed sitting in a straight back wooden
chair in the center of the boxy kitchen contained by counters laden
with spices, coffee mugs, and dishes drying in a dish rack. A
microphone strings around the ceiling fan and a white plastic office
calendar confirms future dates.
“Can you move about six inches
to your right?” Harvey asks, peering through his wide angle lens. Ed
moves, joking, “Is that right? Is that your right or my right?” “Let’s
just play around first,” Harvey suggests, placing his headphones over
his ears. Ed, dressed in khaki shorts and running shoes quips, “Who’s
doing my hair and makeup?” Harvey bows his head and chuckles into his
hand. Leaning against his refrigerator, he motions with his hands as if
pulling at information.
“Can
you tell me a little bit about how you started venturing into the world
of blogoshere?” “Am I looking at you or the camera?” Ed asks. “Just
look at me,” Harvey nods. A white backdrop that folds from ceiling to
floor transforms the ordinary kitchen into a makeshift studio where
dozens of artists and musicians flock to lay stories and music down to
posterity.
Legendary Greensboro musician Bruce Piephoff ignited the explosion of documentaries known as the “Harvey’s Kitchen” series.
“My friends and I began doing spoof documentaries of monkeywhale.com.” Harvey says of the website he and his friend Vijay Java started about a year ago. “I’ve been friends with Bruce
Piephoff for a number of years. He was playing at Center City Park one
day and Bruce said,’Hey Harvey, is that your camera? You should
document me. I’m a legend and I could retire soon,’” Harvey says. “A
couple of weeks later I called him and said,’Hey, why don’t you come by
my kitchen and I’ll ask you some questions. Maybe you can play your
guitar a little bit. “So I started getting phone calls from people
saying, ‘Hey, I want to do that.’ So I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll do it until
people don’t want to do it anymore then I’ll stop.’” Over the last
year, the former dishwasher and Dunkin’ Donuts server, where he worked
“with a number of ladies laid off from Cone Mills,” has filmed over 80
documentaries with cynosures ranging from Greensboro Symphony Conductor
Dimity Sitkovetsky to Tennessee’s Sam Quinn and Japan Ten. A graduate
of Appalachian State University majoring in theater, Harvey worked for
over 15 years as an actor, appearing in movies, plays and commercials.
“I
decided I wanted something more so I applied to the NC School of the
Arts,” Harvey says, “not because I thought I’d get in but I’d kick
myself if I hadn’t tried. I think there were 4,000 applicants that
year. I got in based on my writing. I was pretty amazed I was accepted
but I didn’t have a financial plan so a bunch of my friends got
together and raised money for my tuition for the first semester. Then I
was one of two students to get a full scholarship. I was working full
time at the Flatiron and driving back and forth to Winston-Salem.
During my third year the school had fiscal problems so I couldn’t go
back. “So, I was really depressed for a couple of years working as a
bartender,” he continues.
“One night there was a guy who
looked like Henry Winkler who tried to get in a fight with me because I
wouldn’t serve him another drink because he was a belligerent drunk.
That same night I had to clean vomit off the ceiling of the women’s
bathroom. I decided, you know, there’s got to be more to life. So, I
started focusing on what I could do. I started working with a couple of
other videographers and made some money I invested into my own gear.
During that time I knew I wanted to make films so I taught some of my
friends how to use the equipment so we could compete in the 48 Hour
film festival, a national competition where teams compete with each
other from all over the world.
We’ve been doing it for about three years.” Harvey is co-founder with Vijay Java
of Monkeywhale Productions, not to be confused with the porn site. He is also cinematographer and creative director of monkeywhale.com and monkeywhale.tv.
Today
in Harvey’s kitchen, Harvey is filming his longtime friend and musician
Joshua West. Old friends from the days working at Pappa John’s Pizza,
Harvey and Joshua banter back and forth as Harvey sets up lights and
cameras. Joshua is in the straight-back chair, already sweating as
Harvey uses oven mitts to adjust one of the four standing lights. The
cat’s water bowl is stagnant, his toys abandoned in a corner.
Baffi
Lungi, AKA “Snags,” passed away in Harvey’s arms just days before.
“Alright,” Harvey says holding his arms our by his side. “Don’t move!”
“But it hurts,” Joshua cries in mock pain. “Just kidding,” Harvey
assures.
Harvey decides Joshua should stand instead of sit. He removes the chair.
“Can
you move about six inches to your right?” Harvey asks. “My right or
your right?” inquires Joshua After one take, Harvey takes his camera
“off the sticks.” Sweat glistens on Joshua’s forehead as Harvey
instructs him to turn slightly to the side and hold up his guitar.
Standing
with his legs braced wide, Harvey hoists his camera on his shoulder
like a heavy machine gun. Joshua belts out verses to his song,
“Halleluiah.” As the melody softens, Harvey takes a step back and sways
slightly. Joshua hits his crescendo as Harvey tightens his grip on the
camera inches away from Joshua’s face. “Come on,” Harvey says. “Let’s
go out on the front porch and do your other song.” They clomp down
Harvey’s steep steps accompanied by Carolyn de Berry, Harvey’s
girlfriend and photographer.
Joshua sits on the antique white
metal glider with his guitar. Three sets of wind chimes dangle over a
stuffed black cat with a sombrero on its head standing on the railing
that surrounds the duplex.
Harvey sits with his camera in his
lap peering down into the lens. He changes chairs and aims at Joshua’s
Birkenstocked feet tapping on the green hardwood floor. A blue jay
squawks as a car rides by. “Nice,” Harvey says when the song is
finished. “Next time can you do it better?” he jokes Harvey steps onto
the front yard for the next take. He stands like a stalwart soldier as
an American flag attached to the porch billows around his lens. He
takes his right hand partially off the camera to still the flag. De
Berry unobtrusively walks over to hold the flag while Harvey films.
“Stay
right there,” Harvey instructs Joshua. He turns abruptly and walks over
to the sidewalk to film a young neighbor sitting on the sidewalk
smoking a cigarette.
Harvey
is a master auteur whose visual acuity unwraps layers of artifice like
a mummy’s sheath to bare the fine crinkles around beautiful Martha
Bassett’s eyes or capturing Samantha Crain’s sweet smile that she
offers to another singer who misfires on the chorus, “Oh, oh oh.” He
crams bands into his kitchen like bodies in a Volkswagen but manages to
capture the nooks and crannies of each facial expression and nuance.
Sometimes he encourages bands to ramble around in his yard to sing and
play. Neighbors often gather on their porches to watch the shows.
“Some
part of filming people is systematic,” Harvey says. “There are specific
constructs that you kind of have to work with and I think until you get
those down you can’t really break the rules. I’ve been stretching a
little bit lately where instead of just having a matching shot I’ll
have a shot that’s sort of jolting or I’ll alter it by a few degrees.
If you look at the film I shot on Filthybird, you’ll see a number of
close ups on Renee’s face and then on another take I would have moved
the camera a few degrees.
Then I’ll move it on a beat so it’s
sort of surprising. I sort of went along with the theme of the song. “I
had them in the kitchen about five hours,” he continues, “so I had a
lot of time to think about lighting: what the image meant more than
rather or not it was a pleasing composition. When I went to the School
of the Arts I didn’t go for cinemantography. I got accepted because of
my writing. I did my five-minute pieces the first of the year and one
of my friends said, ‘Your writing is great but you are visually inept.’
So, I got a camera and started shooting and I haven’t stopped since.”
Harvey
stays afloat by working for other filmmakers and videographers doing
commercial work. He says one of his biggest hurdles is finding money to
fund his projects.
“We applied for a grant from the United
Arts Council to get a server so we could host these videos because
right now I’ve got several hundred hours of footage of people, local
musicians and I don’t have enough space to keep them all on hard drive.
We were denied the grant. They said, ‘Part of the Dotmatrix Project,
that’s fantastic. But we’re not part of the Domatrix Project.
The
Dotmatrix Project embeds our videos. We shoot here for monkeywhale so
the assumptions are we are part of Dotmatrix Project but we’re not. “I
think all of those elements; Artbeat, Dotmatrix Project and monkeywhale
are confusing to some people because we are all walking around in
uncharted territory. We are all advocates for the art scene in
Greensboro whether it be music, film or art. We are experimenting in a
medium that people have not found a way to capitalize,” Harvey says.
“There’s a huge underground music scene in Greensboro that’s not on
anyone’s radar. There’s this guy, and he’ll call band managers and say
come to my house. So it’s the perfect stop for them. There’s this whole
scene going on and it’s not on anybody’s radar. It’s kind of upsetting
that there’s so much disconnection between bands. I really wish there
was a medium sized venue in this town that embraced the music scene
that was in someway subsidized by the city. We have a total artistic
community that is totally ignored. I think it’s a huge mistake. I mean, about the bands that ply in this town and the patchy can play, the
Green Bean, the Flatiron and the Blind Tiger. We need a place where
medium-sized acts can come in and at an affordable rate. The potential
is huge. The Flying Anvil opened up and all of the sudden there was
this tremendous surge of excitement in Greensboro. We were, like, ‘Holy
cow we have a medium-sized venue in this town.’ It’s what this town
needs and it needs to be within walking distance to restaurants so you
can have a direct connection between people coming to see the bands and
the restaurants.”
Harvey’s Kitchen, along with Artbeat and the
Dotmatrix Project are linking arms to use online blogs and social
networks to create an artistic fabric in the community that hasn’t
existed before.
“My friend Pete Schroth asked if monkeywhale
could help promote a show with the Holy Ghost Tent Revival and Molly
McGinn. Both acts had played in the kitchen so we said sure and sent
out messages on Facebook and the show was sold out on a Monday night.”
“I’m
enjoying just doing it for now and enjoying the fact that people I had
known who had been in different bands that there was a chance for
someone else to hear that music. It was also an opportunity to hone my
skills and become a better videographer.
One of my goals is to
basically have a venue in Greensboro, that being Harvey’s Kitchen,
where people come in, we record them and it becomes another reason
Greensboro is a scene,” Harvey says. Harvey is motivated by “whatever
the next thing is.” He says, “I try to know what the next thing is
before I finish the one I’m doing.
That’s the biggest lesson I
learned from Woody Allen. I’ve read his biography and watched all his
movies. Just keep an eye on whatever the next thing is.” A monkeywhale
festival is in the works Oct.2-3. Bands who have played in Harvey’s
kitchen have agreed to play to raise money for essentials such as tape
stock and more hard drives. Clips of “Harvey’s Kitchen” will be shown
between each band on Friday and Saturday night. It will be broadcasted
live on the monkeywhale page so people can comment and talk to
musicians between sets. Harvey’s submission to the 48 Hour Film
Festival won Audience Choice Award, Best Editing and Best Acting
awards.
“When I think about where we were a year ago and where
we are now… it’s just overwhelming how much support we have received
from musicians, friends and family,” Harvey says. “Besides, I get a
couple of concerts in my kitchen every week,” he smiles. “ You can’t
beat that.”
Brian O’Sullivan takes a seat in Harvey’s Kitchen. Previous page: Irata goes live.
Harvey
Robinson, far left, has been known to cram whole bands into the tiny
space in his apartment, like this shoot with Lost in the Trees.
‘I
try to know what the next thing is before I finish the one I’m doing.
That’s the biggest lesson I learned from Woody Allen. I’ve read his
biography and watched all his movies. Just keep an eye on whatever the
next thing is.’
Holy Ghost Tent Revival gets things cooking in the kitchen.
