Polito Vega in 1957, the year he came to New York from Puerto Rico. Photo by Tim Knox/NYTIn the mid-1960s Mr. Vega was one of the first radio personalities to identify and ally himself with the commercial potential of the musical style that came to be known as salsa. From the beginning of his career, he said, he was bothered by the difference between the powerful, driving music he heard in clubs and the tepid recordings that came his way.Though I honestly don't know a ton about Latin music (yet) beyond the various records I've picked up over the years, this was of special interest to me because for the past several months I've been working with Fania Records as creative director of their forthcoming relaunch. There are loads of great (and, I hope, nicely designed) releases on deck, as well as a brand new website. For now, here's the newly re-drawn logo and colors...stay tuned for more info.
“It was two different worlds in those early days,” Mr. Vega explained. “At the dance halls and up in the Catskills you would hear the Tito Puente and Machito orchestras tearing things up, but on the radio the kind of thing you heard was romantic trios, unless you were tuning in to Symphony Sid late at night.”
All that began to change in 1964, when Fania Records, often called the Motown of Latin music, was founded. With Cuba, the traditional center of tropical music, cut off from the rest of the Caribbean, New York began to emerge as the place where Latin musicians could test one another and blend their musical styles, and Mr. Vega was right there to watch and encourage it.
“He was part of the whole salsa movement, one of its pillars, really,” said Mr. Pacheco, a founder of Fania. “As we were building the company, he was there with us. I’d bring him the LPs, he’d listen and say, ‘I like this song, I’m going to push it,’ and he’d play the hell out of it.”
Jasper Johns, Target, 1974This week SAM offers a tour of Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78 with painter, curator and writer Joey Veltkamp. Since 2007, Veltkamp's blog Best Of has been essential reading for the Seattle visual art community. His paintings and drawings have been seen in numerous exhibitions around Seattle. Veltkamp's [new] project [is] transforming a group of beloved cupcake stores into a showcase for emerging and established community-minded artists.The tour is free with museum admission (which is pay-what-you-can), and will meet at the entrance to the exhibition on the Fourth Floor at 6:30. SAM is open until 9 p.m. tonight, and there's lots of other great stuff to see while you're there. More info on Target Practice here (and more on cupcakes and art here).
After an amazing lunch at La Carta De Oaxaca in Ballard yesterday I stumbled belly first into Bop Street Records and found this Spirit record among their dusty stacks of over half a million records. The album is pretty much hippie drivel except for this one song which I heard somewhere while roadtripping in the West. My compliments to the anonymous FM radio DJ who chose to play this instead of another song by The Eagles.
Helmut Newton, Le Smoking, 1975By the early 1970s, fashion photographers were the new visual heroes. Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin were producing powerful and arresting images at French Vogue, each exploring their own highly personal obsessions under the patronage of fashion photography. Newton was transfixed by sex, power, and a subversive tension to his narrative compositions . . . .
Newton's vision of woman coincided almost exactly with that of Yves Saint Laurent. "I like to photograph a certain kind of woman that seems to have a certain availability, a woman that is probably gonna cost a lot of money to have but that makes it even better," said the late Helmut Newton. "Yves made a woman look just like that. A lot of his clothes, le smoking for instance, are exactly the way I wished my ideal woman was dressed. It is the glorification of the sixteenth-arrondissement bourgeoise woman with too much money, too much free time on her hands, and up to all kinds of tricks."
When it's too hot to snug, Jeans sleeps on the table behind the bed and uses the alarm clock as a pillow.
In the immortal words of Petey Pablo: "North Carolina/ throw your hands up/ take your shirt off/ wave it in the air like a helicopter," a refrain often heard when cocktail hour would arrive everyday after coming in from the beach, tennis or golf. Here are some pictures of the fun we had last week in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, located right close to Cape Fear and Wilmington, North Carolina. Wilmington is a town with a lot of history, Southern mansions, film studios and plenty of shrimp and grits. Dawson's Creek was set and filmed there (for all you Dawson's freaks).
View from the condo. 
This is a fancy house. (Click to enjoy the fanciness). 
Professional shrimp preparation. Unprofessional camera focus.
The intercoastal waterway. Hours of entertainment.
A couple hours later. 
Timeshare madness. I appreciate the boldness of the paint choices. 
Red hot sun.
It's supposed to be 87º today in Seattle, but Fall is on the way – and with that in mind we are pleased to pass on a special 20% discount on any one full-priced Filson item when you order from filson.com between now and Monday, August 31, 2009. Enter the code THANKS at checkout.
Crystals in the sewer system under Moscow. The colors remind me of that Sølve Sundsbø bag Emily posted the other day. Click here for more.
From the John F. Kennedy Library, credited to the office of
"I saw where I used to live – I saw burned-out lots. I saw kids in the middle of burned-out lots acting like kids would anywhere else, and I photographed them.... I really didn't photograph a lot of the rubble – I photographed the life that persisted in the middle of all of this."
Photographer David Gonzalez returns to his home, the South Bronx, through photos he took there in 1979. Click here for his audio slideshow, and here to read the full article at The New York Times.
All photography David Gonzalez
An interesting interview with Mr. Jalopy,
for no particular reason other than i like the colors, and boats are always interesting. also, a boat stuck on the shore seems oddly fitting for a tuesday. can't remember the source of the photo.
One of nineteen covers shot by Paul Rowland for a special 96-page Supreme Model Management supplement to V61. Check vmagazine.com for the other covers and a behind-the-scenes video from the shoot, and look for V61 on newsstands September 1st.
Film still of Scarlet Macaw in flight by Sølve Sundsbø.
