Sometimes Schles is More

 

You might remember a post I put up back in December about photographer Ken Schles’ new book “Night Walk.” Schles has been getting lots of press lately about his striking photography (including a nice piece earlier this week in the always-excellent Dangerous Minds). You need to check it out.

 

In any case, in my post, I raised a typically inane, pedantic grievance with the video trailer for Ken’s new book, wondering aloud why he chose to use a Sonic Youth track from the 90’s to score images of the East Village in the 80’s. Well, Ken wrote in…..

Hey, thanks for the shout out. I'm just seeing/reading this. That's a good question—why didn't I use something more time appropriate for the Night Walk trailer. I thought the same when I was looking around for a song to cut with the images, but I just kept coming back to "100%." I had the same quibble as you. In the end, I couldn't shake the song. "100%" was stuck in my head when I was editing the book. I tried to use some earlier SY and was a huge Konk fan too, but "sonically" "100%" just felt right to me for the trailer. It had the right tone and tempo and length and driving beat. And Lee Ranaldo was really kind to help the process along and get the rest of the band behind it. 

I hope you can give me a break. I thought I more than made up for it using Live Skull's "Bad Hospital" track off an old Tellus tape for my trailer for Invisible City. And when I talked to Mark C about it, he said the timing was perfect because he was soon reissuing their first album Bringing Home The Bait and was including "Bad Hospital" as an extra track, as it had never been officially released before. Because of that he was able to lend me a nice new mix of it.

The books should drop any day now, they got held up somewhere in the distribution chain. I have an exhibition up at Howard Greenberg Gallery now through March 14th and there currently are books there galore. I hope you can check it out. I'd like to know what you think of the whole of it, books, show and all.

 

In answer to Ken’s query, I think his work is absolutely stunning, and the exhibition at the Greenberg Gallery is still up for another few days. Get yourself away from your computer screen and over to 57th Street to check it out. 

 

In any case, I’d like to thank Ken for addressing my laboriously trivial gripe with a thoughtful answer. I also appreciate his championing of the sorely undersung Live Skull, a band I’ve been meaning to devote a post to here for some time.

As a mea culpa, here's the "Invisible City" trailer, complete with the entirely appropriate score by the mighty Live Skull.

As an extra bonus, here's some great vintage footage of a full set by Live Skull at CBGB from back in the halcyon days of 1986, shot by my friend Greg Fasolino. I briefly had the pleasure of working alongside Live Skull guitarist Tom Paine at The New York Review of Records (he penned reviews under the nom-de-plume "J.Bliss"....a pun on his state of employment at the time...geddit?) He was an exceptionally cool gent.