Bios.

A Description of Josh Wertheimer by Amy Eastup

Josh is:
quietly friendly
contemplative
pale
up on current events
a night owl
long fingered
the sort of person you might call when you are in trouble
" you are really sad
" you are getting married
" you are low on rent
" you are quitting smoking
" having a baby

because he is able to be totally present

Josh is not:
very loud
a heavy eater
a car driver
judgmental
a swimmer
ever fake happy
a rule follower

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josh wetheimer was born in philadelphia, pa on march 14th, 1970. his mother went into labor in a pizza restaurant on the same block as his childhood home. garlic powder was substituted for baby powder, and ever since, his back kind of smells, but not badly. his father was a lawyer who could not play the house piano at all, his mother an artist who sewed diamonds & jewels on jean jackets perhaps because she was blind and this was actually an attempt at eating breakfast. both his mother and josh wore braces for 2 years during his teens. it was weird. from early adolescence, he developed a keen interest in photography, music, & duct tape. he had a weakness for joe jackson the singer ("stepping out") but we all have our faults. his early photographs show a fascination with the color orange - difficult to represent as he's worked exclusively in black & white. musically he became well-adept at guitar, fretless bass, & shoe horn but his most impressive talent was as a musical engineer, and he could manipulate a four track tape machine to create delicious hoagies sought after by neighborhood street kids. thusly he became popular among a small (but tall) group of rowdy & lustful teenage boys who all had very puffy unruly hair. one of these friends would later grow a beard.

graduating highschool from the private & dubiously-respected solebury school ("world peace class"? gimme a break), in new hope, pa, where he experimented with psilocybin mushrooms (nearly killing a hippy student in an estacic /psychotic state) and studied foreign people during a month abroad in beijing, he then attended hunter college, where he began an intense & confusing study of the hammer, anvil, and stirrup. unsure whether to persue carpentry, manufacturing, or a career in the rodeo, he dropped out, opting for audio engineering school, which, upon graduation, landed him a lengthy music producer gig at green street studios in soho where he recorded david hasselhoff's (german) hit album "Everybody Sunshine ", and ordered in a lot of pizza (lifelong obsession). in 1994, in san francisco, wertheimer witnessed a man in the street suddenly attacked by a knife, unprovoked. the man bled to death in front of him. said josh "i took his photo, not knowing what else to do". he hung the photo on his wall and looked at it a lot. "life is so very precious & so very short", he said, "and so are midgets". he vowed to live in the present moment, and has basically kept that vow, except for a few hours here & there. when green street studio collapsed, folded, or was blown up by terrorists, he was hired by the legendary NYC punk club CBGB where he spent a dozen years. a well-respected & reliable worker in a sea of post-hair bands & pierced nose rings, he mixed classic concerts from patti smith to the swans to tav falco's comeback tour, redesigned the club's sound system, and documented, in snapshots, the club's history as it continually unfolded. his photographs, first exhibited on the walls of CB's Gallery, drew exceptional criticism from important art figures of the city. on the other hand, some people really liked his work.

a natural artist, a spacious soul, a see-er honing in on the various aberrations of the decaying seagull, i mean city, his photos are full of emotion & tell stories, one i remember seemed to go on and on for about half & hour and there was no resolve at the end. but if you allow your eyes to stay on an image for awhile, wertheimer's photographs reward you with the eerie, profound, & unique details which emerge from stark corners of the frame, moments of time in the crusty cruxt of wertheimer's lonely jaunts thru the naked city preserved & reserved for the patient eye. one time i thought i spotted waldo. and the guy really likes birds. pigeons. oh my god, they're everywhere in his photographs, a veritable campaign to reexamine the pigeon's worth. and those motherfuckers look great, they really do. you are also rewarded by buying his books of photographs, as there's a chance to win a marlboro backpack or even a mountain bike. perhaps that offer has expired. they usually end the offer just as you've accumulated the proper amount of points. life sucks. and in this way, wertheimer understands it best, and turns that cynical phrase on its head, his camera lens like life itself, his snapshots sucking you into a world of nagging beauty, causing a near derangement of the senses (which led to me breaking everything in my apartment in a fit of rage), coming from a rare, calm, kind, keen sensibility, perhaps one that has been jockeyed up on too many 18 hour work shifts, too many bar-hopping street-walking endless nights, too many tropicana OJs not from concentrate, a madman who's allowed to see his city as the very asylum from which he chooses not to escape.

when CBGB's folded, he got a job mixing sound for a comedy club, no joke.


writ haphazardly at 3 a.m. in hazard county, 11/10/08
- Norman Z Crunch