Picture of the Day

Jane Austen will be the new face of Britain’s 10 pound note beginning in 2017.

Picture of the Day

People look at cherry blossoms in full bloom in Tokyo on March 24, 2013. Tokyo’s cherry blossom trees were in full bloom on March 22, Japan’s weather agency said, marking the second earliest blossoming in the capital on record.

Photo By TORU YAMANAKA/Getty Images

Picture of the Day

SHANGHAI, China—High-rise flats, 1994.

Picture of the Day

NEW YORK CITY—Miles Davis, center, on the trumpet with Paul Chambers on bass, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and pianist Red Garland, 1958.

Picture of the Day

NEW YORK CITY—East 100th Street, 1966.

Picture of the Day

CABO DE FORMENTOR, Spain—James Baldwin at a writer’s congress, 1962.

Picture of the Day

ALABAMA—Martin Luther King Jr. leads the march from Selma to Montgomery, 1965.

Picture of the Day

MEXICO CITY—Frida Kahlo, 1954.

Picture of the Day

Patti Smith record shopping, making a very good selection that day, in my favorite record store in NYC, Subterranean Records, located on Cornelia street right off of West 4th.

Even though it was a small store it carried lots of great music.

Being a Bob Dylan fan, as the store owner was, I really loved their extensive range of Dylan bootlegs. They always had his NYC shows in stock just days, or perhaps hours, after the concerts ended. The store also had a nice assortment of Dylan magazines. That’s where I always bought ISIS magazine.

Through the years I bought lots of great soul music from the 60’s & 70’s, impossbile to find blues albums, and it is where I first listened to Television’s Marquee Moon. The store made it well known to all customers that Marquee Moon was the greatest album ever made.

I was really crushed when I found out that the store went out of business and closed forever.

In this day and age of ITunes and digital music reigning supreme over the music business, small, independent record stores like Subterranean Records stand tall.

The fantastic music buying experience of such stores, where one can get hard to find albums, all kinds of imports, and discover great music, new and old, for the first time.

Where one can spend hours talking music with the store employees and customers.

Whenever Dylan performed in NYC, it was virtually a ritual to hang out in Subterranean Records to talk about his latest local shows, the playlists and of course, talk about which bootlegs of those shows were worth buying.

When I saw the picture of Patti Smith shopping in Subterranean Records, she was a frequent customer, it brought back so many memories of the times I spent in the store. All the great music I bought and was introduced to. The excitement of talking music with fellow music lovers. All of those things were a joyful, blissful, one of a kind experience.

All I can say is many, many, thanks to Subterranean Records for being the music paradise it was for me and lots of other people.

Picture of the Day

PARIS—South African singer Miriam Makeba, 1969.