Yo, Jimbo!

DOWNTOWN L.A. NOIR. From a series of photos I shot in downtown Los Angeles Today. 

These Albums All Turn 25 This Year. And this may have been the hardest year ever for me to compile. I could have easily doubled this list, except Tumblr only allows 10 images at a time. I think 1992 was one of the greatest years ever for me in terms of music. My tastes were all over the place, from popular, to obscure, to veteran favorites making some of their greatest albums yet. From January to December, it was an overwhelming cornucopia. And if only I had been into Nick Cave back then, because surely HENRY’S DREAM would have made the list. I cheated and put Cave’s THE BOATMAN’S CALL  on my 1997 list, even though I didn’t listen to it back then. But 1992 was just too packed for me to cheat. Other albums I could have put here: TELEVISION (their self-titled comeback after a 14 year hiatus); APOLLO 18 by They Might Be Giants; SLANTED AND ENCHANTED by Pavement; WISH by The Cure; COPPER BLUE by Sugar; HOMEBREW by Nena Cherry; THE CHRONIC by Dr. Dre; CHECK YOUR HEAD by The Beastie Boys; NONSUCH by XTC; MARCH 16-20 1992 by Uncle Tupelo; 3 YEARS, 5 MONTHS & 2 DAYS IN THE LIFE OF…by Arrested Development. More I am sure I am forgetting. What a year! 

Albums turning 20 this year. Okay, I’m kind of breaking my own guidelines on this. These are usually albums I listened to during that year that meant a lot to me. I admit that I didn’t hear Cave’s THE BOATMAN’S CALLS in full until many years later. But there’s just no way I could leave it off of this list. Also, I notice I was really into a lot of veteran rockers who were into late career surges. The main one, of course, was Bob Dylan, who released his best album in over 20 years and got a grammy for it that year. But the McCartney album may have been my favorite McCartney solo album ever. And Morrison’s THE HEALING GAME may be the best album he released in the 90s. Of course among the younger artists of that time, OK COMPUTER is a certifiable masterpiece and topped several “Best Albums of the 90s” lists. 

These albums all turn 10 years old this year. They all meant a lot to me in 2007. Hard to believe a decade has flown by so fast. Can you believe it’s been 10 years since the last White Stripes album?

On Friday night, I ran into a friend at a local bar who introduced me to a man who had actually met and briefly worked with Leni Riefenstahl. The man was an older gentlemen who worked in the field of film restoration, which is how he ended up crossing paths with the Third Reich’s most famous filmmaker. This blew my mind. For one thing, doesn’t that count as my being three degrees removed from Hitler? For another, I just happen to have always been fascinated by Riefenstahl. In fact, by sheer coincidence, I recently went back to reading her autobiography, which I had put down years ago. I put it down, because while all the information about her early life as a dancer, then an actor, then a filmmaker were all fascinating, her pained, repeated attempts to distance herself from the Nazis and convince everyone that she knew nothing about the Holocaust grew tiresome after a while. She claims to have hated just about everyone who swore allegiance to Hitler, but not Hitler himself, who she always painted as personally charming and someone who continually protected her from the attacks and interference she often faced from Joseph Goebbels. I’m still trying to decide just how deeply loyal she may have been to the Fuhrer and the party, aside from creating the films OLYMPIA (1938) and, more damning, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935), which–though both brilliant in execution– served as pure propaganda for her superiors. I lean towards thinking that, at best, she was purely ambitious and found it more advantageous to ignore the more egregious Nazi offenses in order to be able to do her work. After the war, of course, she spent the rest of her life defending herself and denying being a collaborator or a Nazi tool, right up until her death in 2003 at the age of 101. 
In the early 2000s, I remember hearing an American comedian on some talk show recalling a trip he had made to Germany and how he had met Riefenstahl. (I honestly can’t remember who the comedian was.) He joked about shaking her hand and how he couldn’t help but wonder if he was shaking a hand that had held Hitler’s penis. I tend to believe Riefenstahl when she insists that she and Hitler never had a sexual or romantic relationship. Most people always seem to assume that any close relationship between a man and a woman must inevitably lead to sex, but I don’t. Also, while we tend to think about powerful men always being driven to sexual conquests, I tend to think of Hitler as, if not actually asexual, someone for whom sex was not a priority in his life. In this one case, at least, I’m more inclined to accept Riefenstahl’s own portrayal of the relationship as one of a fatherly benefactor who may may simply have been charmed by this beautiful artist who was willing to create works that he could use to his benefit. 
At any rate, this man I met told me that when he met her, she was already in her 90s and still quiet radiant. Riefenstahl seemed to maintain  a level of health an vitality deep in to old age that might very well lead one to think she had made some sort of pact with the devil, if one believes such things.