sarramkrop

I hope it hasn't been posted before. I couldn't find it.

by Pat McGuire, photos: Autumn DeWilde | 04.27.2007




There's a very tall man in sneakers plodding along on the other side of the street. He's carrying a small, weathered backpack over one shoulder, peering out almost myopically through dark-rimmed glasses into the sunny morning, looking for all the world like the physical incarnate of a character from a Salinger story, if he wasn't so impossibly goddamn tall.

He's scanning the front doors of the buildings he saunters casually past, searching for an address. He looks like he may be running late for something, and yet, coolly, amidst the hustling and bustling kinetic energy carrying on below him, that possibility doesn't seem to be affecting him too much. This is the type of man who will get there when he gets there, unless of course he gets there sooner. He stops at a sidewalk kiosk and, plunking down a bill of some unseen denomination, takes a second to select a few T-shirts from the stack, holds them up for approval, stuffs them into the backpack, and shuffles on down to the corner to wait patiently for the light to change.

We pass each other in the center of the street, and for just one second, we're the only people on the asphalt, this very tall man and me, bound together between the fading white lines of the crosswalk, on a day called Wednesday on a street called Broadway in a city called New York. We brush shoulders, and for that one brief instant, the noise from the traffic silences, the clamor from the storefronts stops, the sky turns gold, and I see him clearly, looking much like the photos from 25 years before, his shaggy blonde hair falling in his boyish face, the tips of his beaten sneakers dragging along the road. His cool is effortless, but not in the traditional "check me out, I'm indifferent" kind of way. It's transcendent, it's magnificent, and did I get a little on my jacket as he grazed by? But by the time my brain can form even the single word "Hello," he's gone, and my first words with Thurston Moore will have to wait another half hour, when I'm to be a spectator at the Sonic Youth photo shoot beginning momentarily two blocks down the busy street.

This is a story about Sonic Youth. Who are, in sum, the coolest, most influential, studied, learned, relaxed, hyper, atypical, artistic, revered, confusing, Big Appled, artist name-dropped, poseur name-dropped, model, DIY, networking, critical, punk, rock, experimental, noise, avant, savant, garde, hip, hop, major label, indie label, fuck-a-label, self-produced, [insert name here]-produced, un-produced, beloved, belonged, behemoth, big in Japan, sexy, successful and important bands of our time. Everyone knows this. You know this. Your favorite band knows this. Even your little sister, even your dentist, even your dog knows that Sonic Youth is the very definition of cool.

And the rest is on here:
http://www.filter-mag.com/index.php?id=14369&c=2