"Throughout most of the ’60s and ’70s, [Brigid Berlin] dragged her Polaroid 360 and a bulky cassette recorder everywhere, though she once said, 'No picture ever mattered, it was the clicking and pulling out that I loved.'"

"Running out of film, she insisted, was worse than running out of speed. Warhol became equally addicted to documentation and, though his pictures became more well known, hers are arguably as revelatory, often the product of double exposures and lighting both flat and vivid, and featuring such friends as Lou Reed, Roy Lichtenstein, Dennis Hopper and Cy Twombly.... Her recordings — there are more than 1,000 hours of tape... — range from the mundane (chatter about her near-constant doctors’ appointments) to the historic (Rauschenberg ranting at the Cedar Tavern). The original cassettes, with Berlin’s typed and handwritten labels affixed to each plastic case, are stored in a black flip-top handled case in her walk-in closet. 'Brigid wanted to melt them down and turn them into a sort of audio John Chamberlain piece.... but I convinced her that was insane.' It was her 1970 recording of the Velvet Underground, scratchy background noises and all, that was remastered into the band’s first live album, 'Live at Max’s Kansas City.'"

From "Brigid Berlin, Andy Warhol’s Most Enduring Friend/Berlin, who died last year, was a great artist in her own right, and her New York apartment, which is being sold, is a window into a bygone era in the city’s history" (NYT). Worth clicking for cool photographs of the idiosyncratic apartment.

Years ago, John Chamberlain was a reference everyone understood. He was a sculptor best known for welding together parts of banged up automobiles. In the 1960s, "modern art" was a hot topic and his name came up a lot. I doubt if younger people know or care about him.

As for "Live at Max’s Kansas City," I've still got my half-century old copy of the thing. How about you? From the 1972 Rolling Stone review: 

This album (in some ways the first authorized bootleg) exists only because scene-chronicler Brigid Polk wanted to make a tape of the band for herself. She took her Sony 124 down to the club a couple of times, and on August 23rd [1970] recorded an hour and a half cassette, which makes up the bulk of the album....

Brigid’s tape was played for lots of friends (she has extensive documentation of almost everything worth knowing about in New York), and eventually Atlantic heard about the tape and called her up....

The album opens with [Lou] Reed inviting the audience to dance, introducing a “tender folk ballad of love between man and subway,” then stomping into “Waiting For The Man.”...

Those were different times.  I'll have double a Pernod.