Caryn Rose's jukeboxgraduate.com

I traveled to Hartford last weekend to see Patti Smith’s first museum photography exhibit, titled Camera Solo at the Wadsworth Atheneum. It’s a small but dense exhibit, three rooms of photographs and artifacts. It took about an hour and a half to go through everything, which included time to watch a 7-minute 35mm short that was part of the exhibit, and to revisit favorites at the end.

The exhibit is accompanied by an audio tour that you can access from your cellphone, by dialing an 800 number and punching in an exhibit number. Patti herself recorded the narration, which was just fantastic. It definitely added another dimension to my experience of the exhibit, and I appreciated the low-tech but extremely effective method. (You can hear the narration in the museum’s account on Soundcloud!) If you had the narration and the exhibit catalog (which I had received as part of a charity grab bag I purchased during the New Year’s Eve shows, you would be able to experience about 50% of the exhibit.

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Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame Benefit
30 October, 2009
Madison Square Garden
Featuring: Aretha Franklin, Jeff Beck, Metallica, U2

In 30 million years, I honestly never expected it. Everyone was blah blah blah Mick Jagger, blah blah blah Bob Dylan, blah blah blah. We knew how early the Bruce setlist had leaked out the previous day and so stayed far, far away from the internet. Seeing Bruce with U2 was on the bucket list, but we didn’t know how it would ever actually come to pass.

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More later.

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art
17 October 2009

I keep trying to figure out what it means to be American.
When I look at myself I see Abyssinia, nineteenth-Century France, but I can’t recognize what makes me American. I think about Robert Frank’s photographs – broke down jukeboxes in Gallup, New Mexico, swaying hips and spurs, ponytails and syphilitic cowpokes, hash slinges, the glowing black tarp of US 285 and the Hoboken stars and stripes.

Patti wrote the words above in 1971. I thought about those words as I walked through the new Frank exhibit at the Met. I thought about Bruce Springsteen describing Bob Dylan a few weeks ago – “it was the country I recognized” – and how both of those sentiments describe what it was like being in the same room with “the Hoboken stars and stripes”.

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