November 10, 2009

Who Shot Rock & Roll

Henry Diltz's 1985 close up shot of a laughing Tina Turner just lights up the Brooklyn Museum's new show Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History 1955 to the Present. Touting this as the first major exhibit on rock & roll "to put photographers in the foreground" the Museum also proclaims that these "images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock fostered since the 1950s." The exhibition runs through January 31st, and there is an excellent companion catalog written by Gail Buckland and published by Knopf that illustrates over 200 photographs from the show.

Best junk ever

So you think we've found some odd items in the Grateful Dead Archive? Well, as marvelous as some of our realia is, we really cannot compete with the posters of Jackie O in the buff found in the archive of Andy Warhol. We were recently reading about what archivists in the Andy Warhol Museum have uncovered: shopping bags stuffed with well... stuff, thirty silver-white wigs, 4,000 audio recordings, and then there are the "Time Capsules" filled with the detritus of Andy's daily events and adventures. To find out more it's really fun to visit: http://www.warhol.org/collections/archives.html

A Kleinrock/ Barlow connection

UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock is known as one of the "fathers" of the Internet. Now his original computer the "Interface Message Processor" along with other artifacts will be part of UCLA's Kleinrock Internet Museum and Reading Room. The museum commemorates the first computer message sent out 40 years ago in October 1969. To mark the event Kleinrock was interviewed by Patt Morrison of the Los Angeles Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-morrison-use24-2009oct24,0,3095224.story
Kleinrock talks about that first message, e-mail, and what the Internet has begotten. As regards privacy concerns in cyberspace, Kleinrock says he is relaxed about it because none is left. He takes the advice of John Perry Barlow ..."the only way to have privacy is to expose it all and then you have nothing to hide."