Love your DJ! Save vinyl!

≡ Category: Books, fliks, tunes..., Semi-daily thoughts, Tunes | ≅ Leave a Comment

vinyl
My early crate digging days were spent rotating between Fat Beats on 6th near NYU, Rock and Soul on 7th Ave., Beat Street on the Fulton Mall, Turntable Lab on 7th st and Dance Tracks on 2nd ave. Unlike non-DJ oriented record stores (ahem, AMOEBA), these shops either have ample turntables to listen to records or an in-house DJ you could request samples from. Yes, you could just grab an armful of records and listen to them before you bought them. If they didn’t have an open copy, a regular customer could just open one up and pop it on the decks.

Most shops had sound systems that filled the store with ridiculous bass and you could listen to the big club DJs flip through new releases and white labels. So a little DJ like me could listen to what others were checking out and chat about what was hot and not. I’ve heard a lot of nonsense about DJs being protective about what they buy, hiding labels blah blah, but in my many hours haunting these stores, I never had a snarky musical encounter. When was the last time your trip to Virgin Megastore or amazon.com resulted in a human encounter and musical exchange?

It was a sad sad day when Beat Street, the hip-hop treasure in Brooklyn, closed down. Then Dance Tracks, the lounge-fest Temple of House went under. This NY Times article chronicles the demise of record stores.

If you love music, even if you don’t play or listen to vinyl, for the Love of the DJ–drop by Turntable Lab, Rock and Soul or Fat Beats while they are stil around. They all have CDs–both commercial and indie labels and mixtapes/mixcds.
Turntable Lab has a great staff that knows their equipment and a special online store.
Rock and Soul is one of the few stores with a solid mix of hip-hop, dance and dancehall–at least last I went.
Fat Beats is a mecca of underground hip-hop. It’s a small shop where you’ll find regulars who know their music.

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Annie Liebovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005 at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

≡ Category: Books, fliks, tunes..., Gear and tech, Photography, Pictures, Semi-daily thoughts | ≅ Leave a Comment

Al-b was in the area presenting on the finer points of using DNA analysis to exonerate wrongfully convicted people. Somehow this meant that I got to eat ridiculous amounts of manchego cheese and have my ass kicked at scrabble. On the upside (not that cheese is a bad thing), we took a moment and basked in the beauty of San Francisco.

Even if you don’t like photographs or do, but think Annie Liebovitz is over-rated, the drive up Van Ness, a stop at the GG Bridge and the ride along Highway 1 is worth the trip to the Legion of Honor. It’s been years since I did it and well, as Al-b might say, “it’s so pretty it hurts my eyes.” What she actually said was, “this view is giving New York some serious competition.”

We arrived on a first Tuesday so thought we would see the exhibit for free, but it’s a “special” exhibit so they took our $5 anyway. It was worth it. The Liebovitz exhibit is sunk in the basement underneath the regular showings of Rodin sculptures and grim portraits of crusty white people sitting very still.

The first images in the exhibit are prototypical Liebovitz–the commercial glamour brought to us by GAP, Vanity Fair and American Express. It wasn’t unpleasant and I was comforted by the familiar style. I was mesmerized by the selective diffuse lighting in the Nicole Kidman portrait and spent more time than I wanted pondering the tonal range in the Donald Trump picture. We’re then led to a looping video of the editing process for the book that accompanies this show. We get a glimpse of her kids (Al-b noted that she had her first child at 51 and then twins at three years later. whoa.) Liebovitz insists there aren’t two of her, i.e that her personal photography and commercial work aren’t separate. The poolside family photos and searing and precious images of Susan Sontag’s final years are shown amidst the iconic portraits of Bruce Springstein, Bill Clinton and of course, a ready to burst Demi Moore.

I realize Liebovitz is a controversial photographer. Some say anyone afforded the same corporate production budget would produce similar work. And my photography professor reserved judgment by asking, “well, we’ll see how her style influences artists down the line.” I’m actually not all that interested in ranking Liebovitz in the pantheon of famous photographers. It’s undeniable that her style is immediately recognizable and she’s created iconic images of some of the most high-profile people in our time. Given our celebrity adoration, she’s captured and defined the visual essence of the U.S. at this “cultural” moment. Liebovitz herself resists being labeled a portrait photographer and noted the ability of her actor, performer, politician subjects professional ability to assertively and effectively project their personas.

OK, whatevers, I thoroughly enjoyed gazing at all the pretty people. It was an opportunity to attempt to separate subject from image and wonder how much of the emotional draw of a picture is grounded in my familiarity with the subject. I mean, I don’t actually know Daniel Day Lewis, but his portrait was compelling in a way that I know would be different if he were some Joe I didn’t recognize.

The vivid commercial color photos were contrasted with black and white images of Liebovitz’s family and the chronicle of Susan Sontag’s cancer. The former seemed to be included mostly to make a point that photography was a part of Liebovitz’s personal life too. The latter was a raw documentation of love, companionship and devotion. There are no pictures of Sontag smiling and I wonder what it felt like to take those pictures. Was reaching for the camera a way of removing herself for at least that moment from the immediate ache of watching a loved one die?

Amidst the high gloss and black and white family pics are journalistic works from her time in Kosevo and Rwanda. These images are the most narrative–in particular there’s a particularly stark image of a bicycle and a streak of blood. Powerful, but they seemed out of place. Maybe it’s unfair, but I think it’s the juxtaposition of genocide, Scarlet Johansen and Liebovitz’s mom’s dance moves that don’t make sense.

The exhibit runs through May 25th. Check it out.

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