Blondie: Autoamerican

IT WAS late in the '30s when New York cemented its claim as America's most energetic and insistent symbol of urban eroticism and urbane careerism. And a photographer of the time, Berenice Abbott, catalogued the city's obsessive replacement of the new with the newer as "a native fantasia emerging from accelerated greed". That phrase could usefully serve as a description of Autoamerican, the personal Manhattan Project of Blondies Chris Stein and Deborah Harry – with associates Nigel Harrison, Clem Burke, James Destri and Frank Infante.