I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: GYPTIAN-Tiny Desk Concert #102 (January 2, 2011).

 I had not heard of Gyptian.  He is a Jamaican singer.  His singing style is kind of like rap, but with all of the Jamaican inflections and emphases that make it sound more flowing and smooth.

I enjoyed his sound quite a lot.  It helps that he has an acoustic guitar player (Anthony “Tony Bone” DiFeo) keeping the melody and rhythm.

Evidently his first song “Hold You” was a huge hit, although I didn’t know it.  “Beautiful Lady” has a bit more of a reggae feel, a bit slower with lyrics about, yes a beautiful lady.

The final song, “Nah Let Go” feels like a lullaby with his gentle delivery.  I don’t listen to this style of music very much but when it’s done well, I can totally groove on it.

[READ: January 7, 2015] “Travel Day”

“Travel Day” is a photo essay about airports.  Dyer was assigned to write a short essay for it.  I like Dyer’s work and I found his essay a lot more compelling than the photographs.

Dyer begins by talking about how when he was 8 years old, his family was on vacation in London and took a special trip to Heathrow Airport because, back then, it was a destination.  In the sixties and seventies the glamour of air travel was at its peak.

The earliest airports were designed to look conservative to reassure nervous flyers.  But by the Sixties, airports gleamed with sleek confidence and modernity.  But now airports are just hubs–non places.  The allure of the future that guided the design of airports in the sixties and seventies also makes airports look really dated now.  Especially since the “future” was based on designs from the Sixties anyway.

You can also see it in flight attendants outfits who had sort of futuristic look back in the Sixties (at least what the future was supposed to look like).

He talks about Garry Winorand who took photos of the social landscape in the Sixties and Seventies and has a book devoted to airports.   He says the photos really documented the social life of Americans as much as it did airports.

In addition to the main photos of this essay, there are two small older photos included.  The first is by Sklava Veder and it is a photo of Lieutenant Colonel Robert L Stirm being greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in 1973 after spending five years as a POW in Vietnam.  It’s an amazingly powerful photo.  The other is by Winorand which shows a subtle version of the same image– a fellow with a beaming face holding a sign that says “Welcome to California Jane.”  It’s about a person coming to a new place and Winorand captured the eternal promise of flight and of the American West in a single moment.

These photos in the essay were taken all over the world and do show the human condition.  But it is less glamorous and therefore to my eyes less interesting.

The one interesting idea however, is that people have stopped reaching for their cigarettes when the get off the plane and have started reaching for their phones.

But that doesn’t make for very interesting photography.  And with a few exceptions these photos aren’t that compelling.  Perhaps because airport themselves are no longer compelling places.