30 years of photographing sweltering summer days

In 'Remembrance of Summers Past', Charles H. Traub documents beachgoers around the world from Naples to Rio.

Charles H. Traub is not a beach person: he doesn’t like slugging all the gear, the umbrellas, beach towels and picnics; he thinks the sand gets everywhere. He’s also rather restless and doesn’t enjoy sitting still. The photographer does, however, find beaches fascinating places for the way they attract a diverse cross-section of the population, who gather together in close proximity. Beaches are pretty democratic spaces, he says, where class doesn’t really matter. No one cares who you are, what you do for a living or what your hobbies are: “On the beach, the mask comes off. It is a place where people basically let it all hang out, let their inhibitions go.”

- i-D

 

'Really weird tapes': How these friends turned an SF basement into a VHS museum

On the television screen, a woman named Adriana stands in the middle of a California desert, nothing behind her but sand and shrubs. Wearing a swimsuit and holding an automatic rifle, she aims the weapon at an unseen point in the distance and fires. Another woman appears, introduces herself, and fires a different gun — an Uzi, I think — at nothing in particular. This routine repeats for an hour.

We’re standing in a blacklit basement, watching 1987’s “Rock n’ Roll 3: Sexy Girls, Sexy Guns” on a VHS tape, which Mitsu Okubo has gingerly loaded into California’s hardest-working VCR. 

The tape is surreal, sleazy and completely tasteless. It’s also phenomenally rare. Of the “Rock n’ Roll” titles, “Rock n’ Roll 3” is the only tape that Okubo has been able to track down. The films are so notorious that Quentin Tarantino recreated his own version for the 1997 film “Jackie Brown” (his title: “Chicks Who Love Guns”). 

- SFGATE