Monday, December 24, 2007



Christmas for me, besides representing an umbearably hot midnight Mass in the midst of a Buenos Aires summer, has always been about mechanical toys and things I wanted and mostly never got - no electric train, no motorbike no rifle. Even now, when I am past being excited about a new computer I think of gadgets. I think of gadgets I now don't want or need. This time around I have the ability to grant (when I can afford it) someone else's wish for a gadget or electronic equipment. I have already mentioned here how Rebecca is getting a glow-in-the-dark Sony clock radio/CD player tonight.

I have been thinking of stereo equipment as I was playing records yesterday with a Sony linear tracking turntable. I could never have afforded one when they were in fashion, but a few Christmases past I bought one for only $100 at a Sony Store because it had a cracked cover. I ordered a new cover for next to nothing and I have been happy with my obsolete turntable since.



Christmas 1977 I was working for a gay/bisexual publication Bi-Line and the editor told me to create and shoot an ad for one of their advertisers which was a semi-sleazy sound equipment retailer called Vancouver Sight & Sound that used Shakespeare's (Twelfth Night)quote:

If music be the food of love, play on...

as its main identity. At the time I had been seeing many alternative scene rock bands including one very strange one called E. It featured gary bourgeois (I think he liked his name like that) on keyboards and a beautiful light-as-air but very tall singer who went by the name of Deborah E but we all knew to be Gina Daniels from the local cult TV show , The Gina Show. I suggested that Gina Daniels would make an excellent model.



At the time political correctness had yet to arrive. We photographers shamelessly posed women, with not much on, by cars, floor lamps and anything else anybody would want to buy. Why not stereo equipment?