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Soft and Wet and Slightly Unformed

There’s an ace show of remarkable photos of a pre-fame Prince at the Black and White Gallery in New York, through March 17^th.

Photo: Robert Whitman

Shot in 1978 just before Prince’s music career really began, his look in the photos is Superfly/Beat Street and a little gritty, but those bewitching doe eyes haven’t changed. Prince’s musical hero at the time was Joni Mitchell, and she’s recalled saying she remembers seeing him in the front row, staring at her with his enormous eyes. It’s amazing to look at this young man on the street of Minneapolis and think of how much extraordinary music would come out of him.

 

Palorazzi

Check out the array of new shots on Meerkat’s longtime associate Lorenzo di Flaneur’s flickr page. Lorenzo is the nom de photo of a fellow who’s worked in the indie film scene and camped out at some cool bars and music venues around the world for the last decade plus, leading me to define his job description at one point as “attending every important cocktail party in the world.”  He got friendly with a lot of cool cats along the way and snapped pictures all the time. I’m hereby coining the term ‘Palorazzi’ in reference to Lorenzo, which I define as the taking of photos of celebrated and talented people but  from the perspective of a fellow party-goer than a sweaty shouting man on the other side of the velvet rope. Lest this be confused with something fabricated like the patent unreality of reality TV, homeboy really is pally with a lot of these folks, and as a professional partygoer with an iconic photographer’s eye, you’ll often feel as though you were living his very rock and roll, very glamorous life, too. And he doesn’t discriminate on the basis of fame--to him the go-go boy at Eastern Bloc can be as fascinating as the Oscar nominee (has anyone else noticed the tattoos on Helen Mirren’s hands-very visible as she poses with all the awards she’s picking up lately? Could she get any cooler?). I’m so completely into his vision and am making it a project to promote his work—I’d so much rather see shots of these folk in their natural habitat, drinks in hand, than standing and posing for a bunch of soulless photographers in the employ of Bonnie Fuller. Check out his take on Helen, Parker, Jake, Lina, Madsteez, Antony, JCM, Yoko, and Joe G-L (above).

Guillame Not Included

A Motorola/Burton collaboration, the Audex snowboarding jacket with Bluetooth speakers embedded in the neck of the thing and iPod (which you drop in an inside pocket) controls on a little panel on the arm, is so choice. I’d be sorely tempted to wear it around town, doing a DJ-on-the-go wearable soundsystem thing, bring the world into my soundtrack, let 'em know how I roll. Shot the jacket for the current issue of reFRESH.

"When it's time to PARTY, we will PARTY hard!"

Pretty sweet David LaChapelle photograph of Meerkat's good buddy Raul.

Birthday Party Girl

Lorenzo di Flaneur’s gotta slew of great shots on his Flickr site from his travels high and low in New York City like this one of Parker Posey and Craig Chester at their joint birthday party. And suddenly I'm homesick.

Design Key West

My friend Greg Needham did the design for a series of ads I shot for KeyHole, a great little Key West store that’s no longer in existence. Greg’s got his own blog featuring his design work as well as his cool photography, including a sweet set he shot during an impromptu journey on his motorcycle to Miami to get some breakfast. Greg’s blog here, and a couple more KeyHole ads we did together in the album on the right.