You and What Army

OVERHEARD: FUZZY CARDIGAN

THE PLACE: A midtown photo studio
THE PLAYERS: a photographer and me, wearing my favorite fuzzy black cardigan.

PHOTOGRAPHER: "You know what I call that kind of sweater? That's a Kurt Cobain sweater!"
ME: "Ha, you're right!"

OVERHEARD: OVERSHARING

The time: 9:20 on a balmy summer evening
The place: The Prospect Park Bandshell
The players: a hefty thirtyish guy and his apparent girlfriend

Hefty guy: I have to make sure Facebook can't access my photos on my phone
Apparent girlfriend: Why?
Hefty guy: Because I don't want my dick-pics to go up there by accident.

THIS IS NOT (JUST) A PHOTOGRAPH: DEERHOOF'S DIY APOTHEOSIS

When things get so big, I don't trust them at all
You want some control — you've got to keep it small
— Peter Gabriel, "DIY" (1978)

    What you see in the photo below left is the camera that took the cover photo (above) of Deerhoof's excellent new album, Breakup Song.  The camera also happens to be Deerhoof singer-bassist Satomi Matsuzaki's cellphone.  She took the picture one night this summer on her street in Greenpoint.  On the face of it, it's kind of not a big deal.  But really, it's a definitive expression of a DIY movement that began with punk rock, and traces back before that by more than a century.
    The whole idea of punk rock wasn't to make snarly, abrasive music.   It was to be able to make music that the mainstream media would never allow.   And to do that, there had to be a lot of stuff besides musicians.   People had to build a parallel music industry: radio, retail, distribution, recording studios, venues, and print media.  Punk was about seizing the means of production.
    "That is so punk rock!"   In the most interesting sense, that doesn't mean someone is wearing a black leather jacket and a mohawk, it means that they've taken matters into their own hands and made a nervy and resourceful end-run around the usual way things are done. The beautiful thing is, anyone can do that, and in just about any field of endeavor.
    In the early days of indie rock, advances in technology were beginning to make possible just such defiant ingenuity: the photocopier became accessible to just about anyone, which wrought an explosion of fanzines.  Quarter-inch eight-track tape machines enabled more economical recording; soon, four-track cassette recorders appeared, letting anyone easily make multi-track recordings and thereby ushering in the lo-fi movement.
    Along with rejecting high-budget production values, indie rock analogously rejected the cult of technique, which enabled and emboldened a whole new type of musician — people who realized they could make soul-changing music even if they didn't have the chops of Emerson, Lake and Palmer or the studio budget of Steely Dan.
    Now, digital technology has advanced DIY exponentially further, to a virtually global reach and a virtually unlimited scale.   Photoshop, Protools, MP3s, blogs, podcasting, etc. have empowered the music underground beyond the wildest dreams of the '80s indie community.  It's now possible to record music, and distribute and promote it around the planet without prohibitively expensive equipment or the meddling of pricey professionals.   Musicians can be more truly independent than ever before.  Now an inspired indie musician can use her cellphone to take the lo-fi but undeniably artful photograph for her band's album cover.  The future is here.

RFK FUNERAL TRAIN

    Has a photo book ever made you weep?  I was poking around the excellent Strand bookstore the other day and came across RFK Funeral Train by Paul Fusco.  I got choked up right there in the store, just flipping through the pages.
    Fusco's photographs, originally taken for Look magazine, document the train trip Robert F. Kennedy's coffin took from New York to Arlington Cemetery on June 8th, 1968, three days after the Senator from New York was cut down by an assassin's bullet.  Virtually none of the photos are of the train, they're of some of the many thousands of people who lined the route and paid their respects as the car rolled slowly past.
    If you weren't alive then, it's almost impossible to describe the despair and grief that gripped our nation.  The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated just a couple of months earlier, and of course the country had only really begun to recover from the assassination of Kennedy's older brother John less than five years before.  American society was being ripped apart by tectonic cultural shifts, not to mention horrific racial strife and bitter sparring over the Vietnam War.  It just seemed like everything was coming apart.
     RFK seemed to represent our last best hope, and his violent death was the very last thing we needed.  It very nearly broke our spirit.  Things would never be the same again, and I think people knew that more than they even realized.  It's right there in these pictures.
    Fusco's photography is beautiful; the expressions on people's faces are heartbreaking.  It's basically the same shot over and over again — people standing in groups large and small, facing the funeral train.  The variations are what get you: how people stand, where they stand, who they stand with.  Some people dress in their best clothes; some are wearing bathing suits.  The faces are solemn, respectful, distraught, confused, stoic.  Click on the photo at right so you can get a nice big version of it.  Note not only the integrated crowd and the apparitional twin nuns in this picture, but the woman in the center, waving goodbye. It's devastating.

    You can see more RFK Funeral Train photos here.