ISSUE O SIX FIVE
(065)
Today we’re starting with a book and today we’re ending with a book. The former is mostly photographs and the latter is mostly sentences.
Make it work!
1/ A Field Measure Survey of American Architecture
(by Jeffrey Ladd, published by Mack Books in late 2021)
Vince Aletti, photography critic for the NYer, wrote of AFMSAA that “some of the photographs look as if they were taken as crime-scene or insurance-claim evidence, and the blunt, just-the-facts approach tends to reduce the camera to a recording device.”
It’s hard to know where to begin my dissent with Aletti’s dismissal!
We’ll start with the fact that “the camera” isn’t “a recording device”. In fact it is the recording device most decisively shaping the modern world. IN FACT it might wholly transcend that category and be just the singular thing most responsible for globalization, the massive term referring to what defines our present reality.
Ok. Now we’re all on the same page about cameras. NOW we can address how the splendor of this book is not at all due to it being the most beautiful photographs you’ve ever seen. No! The thing to marvel at is how Jeffrey Ladd sifted through “more than half a million documents collected since 1933” and narrowed the whole of the Historic American Buildings Survey down to 224 photographs.
To quote Téju Cole, per one of the sacred post-it's above my desk, “Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.”
Ladd has transfigured the government’s documentary survey into an art object--this book. If you don’t see how that’s punk rock...you might be in the wrong place.
2/ Italian Peanuts
(from 1971, there are about 201 on Fanatics Collect under Buy It Now and some under Auction too. Also a bunch on eBay.)
These are some Italian Snoopy baseball cards that I found whilst poking around Fanatics Collect. They’re pretty funny; in this one Lucy is saying “Here—give me your hand, or your paw, or whatever else you call it...” Classic! Below, Snoopy laments the horrors of war (naturally): “I suffer for those poor, lousy wretches who are forced to live in these trenches...” and snaps a pic! See above re: cameras.
3/ Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon
(released by Reprise in April of 1970, YouTube link)
Turns out it’s always been hard to know exactly how to put the magic of JM’s records into words, as seen above in an excerpt from the April 5, 1970 New York Times.
I’ll take this opportunity to remind you to revisit Joni’s Ladies. It remains rich in its worldbuilding, its thematic references, and of course Joni’s standalone, crystalline voice.
Two underrated favorites of mine are “Willy” for lyrics like “He says our love cannot be real / He cannot hear the chapel's pealing silver bells” and “Rainy Night House” for lines such as “I am from the Sunday school/ I sing soprano in the upstairs choir / You are a holy man / On the F.M. radio.”
No catalog like hers!
4/ Night People
(by Mark Ronson, released late last year)
This is heavyweight music producer Mark Ronson’s new memoir about coming up as a DJ. It’s a spellbinding scene report of nineties night life.
The craft-specific paragraphs about unpacking turntables (“Staples flew as I tore through the thick cardboard and protective sheets to reveal two gleaming, silver turntables nestled in Styrofoam thrones. Each was a plinth of steel and silver painted plastic, heavy as a small TV”) are as engaging as the impossible-to-avoid clout dropping (“Though born in the Bronx, she was as downtown as it got: a muse to Robert Mapplethorpe, a best friend to Keith Haring”).