Archive for the ‘new york in black and white’ tag
Everyone’s gone to the movies…
My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.
Low ceilings, patterned carpet.
These twenty sentence things are not repackaged tweets; rather they are all new original content generated out of a crushing sense of inertia.
I’m a content provider?
The above photo was taken while I waited for people to get out of the way of another photo I wanted to take: a heavily bolted steel pillar in the middle of a Queens train station.
I had noticed the pillar’s knobby texture in contrast to the tiled surface of the passageway behind it and like so many other of my pictures I didn’t want something in it that would distract from showing that contrast.
Thus, I was in the position of wishing that the torrent of other people moving through the hallway on their evening commute would vanish, so that the purity of my aesthetic vision might be transmitted uncompromised.
I suppose I was feeling like Ayn Rand.
The moment of absence didn’t happen, at least not during the ten minutes or so I was waiting and snapping off pictures so as to ward off the notion that I was loitering, so I packed up my camera and moved on to my evening appointment.
In my pictures New York is mostly an unpopulated city.
It’s as if I appreciate their traces more than their presences: better a scrawl on a wall than the person sitting next to me on the subway.
There’s some exception if the person is cute, and my friends and family show up in front of my camera as well.
It’s a bad habit, to be wishing people away.
Pictures and recognition have been much on my mind lately.
Think of the world before 1800, and ask what percentage of the population had ever had a likeness made of their individual physiognomy.
Following on from that, how many ever had the slightest expectation of that happening to them?
And what is those percentages today?
In much of the world, I suspect that it has become hard to make it all the way through your life without having your picture taken, either by family or by someone else.
Is turning the camera away a recognition of the everyone’s compromised privacy?
Tags: daily photo, new york in black and white, photography, twenty sentencesRelated posts
Where to start?
Just had my first look at LJ in about six days. An 8am meeting at work today, so every time I look at the clock I can’t believe that it’s still so early in the afternoon. I bought lunch at 11:30 because I just couldn’t wait. And now I’m jonesing for a nap.
This is due in part to my efforts to finish a piece for an exhibition in in that’s opening tonight: http://www.annakustera.com/ . If you’re in New York City and feel like coming by, I’ll probably be there on the early side. After dropping off my piece last night I took this shot of a truck full of Richard Serra, probably destined for a Gagosian Show up the block.
I also took a trip to the Boston area this past weekend, and got to see some LJ folks there, including badfaggot and quirkstreet. It was a lovely weekend all in all.
Tags: daily photo, friends, making art, new york in black and whiteRelated posts
Trash and Blur…
If you have time and 75.00 this weekend you should come and spend them both at Postcards from the edge VisualAIDS’s annual benefit, that allows you to buy great art inexpensively and support the practices and legacies of HIV+ artists at the same time. I have something in there as well as many more talented people.
I’m also going to have a few pieces up on display around town this month, which should be fun.
I left my David Antin book in the office, so that has meant that in the interim I’m reading other things: I finished The Best Sex Writing 2010 edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. A mixed bag, but generally a good quick read. I can think of any number of people here on LJ whose posts would make excellent, thoughtful contributions. And I’m just starting in on Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. So far I’m unimpressed, but it’s early days yet. At this rate I should have no trouble getting through those 52 books this year.
A few years back, someone asked me about what they perceived as my nostalgia for a lost time in San Francisco and I explained that my real yen was for New York at the time of my teen age years. Yesterday I stumbled across the home site of Allan Tannenbaum and through it an amazing gallery of photographs of New York in the Seventies much of it shot for the late, lamented Soho Weekly News. If you ignore the shockingly bad web design and look under the section called “Mondo Art” – you get a glimpse of the kinds of events and people that I so desperately wanted to be part of growing up. Is it any wonder I take so many black and white pictures?
And here is something else I ran into on-line this morning:
Let’s hope Latawnya learns her lesson!
Tags: a book a week, art world, big link friday, books, daily photo, new york in black and white, night, photography, readingRelated posts
Not with a bang…
Got to work today to be greeted by a cordoned off Times Square, due to a mysterious van that had been parked there for a couple of days. Police were ushering people away, but providing no information. It was only hours later that I found out through CNN what had happened.
I also found out today that one of my favorite artists, David Levine has died. I had a book of his caricatures early on in the seventies, and remember drawing a self portrait in what I thought was his style when I was 14 or so. He wielded a crowquill like nobody else, and was a devoted Brooklynite to the end.
Yesterday also brought two conversations where I was encouraged to think of myself in new ways. In both of them I came up against the idea that no one believes my self-deprecating patter as much as I do.After many years of working on it, I’m still ready to pick out the worst of myself as the only truth. It feels like the pointlessness of this behavior is being pressed on me by circumstances so that I can finally do something to break free of it.
So often work blockages come as a way of avoiding a confrontation with one’s real power. I’m seeing the way that organizations can stay stuck in talking about problems that they have in essence grown past becuase that allows them the comfort of the known. The same is true for me.
Tags: daily photo, death, new york in black and white, self examinationRelated posts
The big E’s inside of you and me…
I know it’s wrong to question good fortune, so I won’t. For some reason Amazon is giving away MP3s of just about all of Mojo Nixon’s music. Yep he could easily be classed an ’80’s one hit wonder, but there’s something great about all of his crackpot bitter rants that make this a very good deal. And he does a mean version of “Just stopped in to see what condition my condition was in” which is the soundtrack to “Gutter Balls”, the Dude’s Busby Berkeley inspired dream sequence in Big Lebowski.
I can see from all the comments it garnered that people are very concerned about fruit and its qualities, as explored in my post yesterday. I’m also shocked to learn that taking Lipitor means that you can’t eat grapefruit. That the same for all citrus?
My mom is strongly hinting that I’m supposed to pick up a new costume for Lehigh, since she will be staying with her for Halloween. And by strongly hinting I mean she sent me an email with a bunch of pictures of dogs in costumes with the question “what is her new outfit going to be?” She has also commanded me to blow up the drawing of of Lehigh I posted a while back , the one where I’m dancing all cute, but the only part of any interest to her is the drawing of the dog, so she can have that on her desktop at home. The priorities are clear.
Tags: daily photo, lehigh, mom, music, new york in black and white, nightRelated posts
My path is fascinating…
Walked yesterday from my house to Soho via The Brooklyn Bridge. Little bit of dinner at the Souen on Prince Street.And then up Sixth to buy mustache wax. Have to say that it wasn’t taxing. If I had fewer things to do around here, I’d try to do something like it daily while the weather is amenable. As it is, walks fill me with ideas, and leave me with a bit less time for acting on them.
Today’s cleaning chore is digging out from my most recent email mess. I find it faintly amusing that I experience a pang when I hear about other people’s Google Wave invites, given that if I was invited, I’d be saddened by my inability to keep up with it, or to respond in a timely manner. Once again: use the tools you have before acquiring new ones.
Is there ever a time where the doing of things doesn’t simply remind me of all the things I’ve left undone?
Plan for next weekend: organize my jpegs into more usable source material folders. If I’m going to try to draw more sorts of things, I’ve got to get more aggressive about my looking. As I’m saying that I thing I might go the route of making up some Lulu pocket books that I could carry around with me to provide some inspiration.
Got in a little street art yesterday as well. I’ve got a new plan for some new pieces that I hope to be sprinkling around.
Here’s a picture of two bridges.
Tags: chores, clutter, daily photo, new york in black and white, walkingRelated posts
Tango Time…
I left before the jump and Big Link Friday….
Jeff offered me a ticket to go and see the new Tosca at the Met. I caught most of the “controversial” moments that led to the opening night crowd booing the director, but was nodding out despite the lovely, stirring singing and so I made my exit at the second intermission. The production? There were definitely weird bits, but it was a pretty run of the mill “updating” in opera sense: sets were pared back and symbolic rather than illusionistic costumes the same, and there seemed to be little faith in a line of the libretto or the presence of a singer being able to tell us about the character or even hold our attention by just, you know, singing. So everyone has to act out their emotions which might be OK if it wasn’t also coupled with a strange directorial idea that people should wander back and forth across the stage at all times. Nobody seemed to have a direct idea of why they were going to a particular spot on stage or why they should stay there once they got there (unless they got killed. Then they stayed put). The parts that freaked out the Met’s audience? A guy embraces a statue of the virgin. The same guy has three chicks at his house and fondles them a bit (not even second base here). Pretty thin broth, if you ask me especially after seeing things like this, but maybe people are hungry for something to angry about.
One other little oddity about the performance: the singer playing (or the player singing?) Scarpia (statue groper), was suffering from a cold. Before the first curtain someone came out from the wings and asked us to indulge the iffy performance he anticipated giving. Then at the second curtain the same guy came out and announced that while the same person would be providing the action of the character, a second singer would be providing the voice. No understudies for the role? It was a system that actually worked fine, with the relief baritone discreetly placed stage right at a music stand. Of course this is what happens with puppet opera, which leads me to think, why not spare opera singers the trouble of having to trundle all over the stage, wrangle horses and jump off of parapets, swim in chilly polluted German Rivers, or descend into hell entirely? They could sit snugly in the pit with the rest of the orchestra, and stunt people could engage in all the arduous action, or have chimps do it. Everyone likes that, except Peta, and I’m pretty sure they already hate opera.
Instead of worrying about fictional villains engaging in mild petting, or elephants having to do eight shows weekly, maybe we should think back to a time when people were worried about Big jerks from outside of our solar system having non-consensual tentacle sex with Gaia. That’s a link to Pappy’s Golden Age Comics Blogzine, one of my other new loves. I’m finding that now that I check in with feedly so much, I’ve got a window onto all of these other amazing caches of drawing and design. I’m going to try to take some time on Fridays to point you towards them.
Like today I stumbled across this:
Which is part of a flickr set of book covers by Romek Marber. A great use of two color printing. I’m easily seduced by this sort of design. Here’s an article on his role in the redesign of Penguin’s line of paperbacks in the early Sixties.
Just typing the word “controversy” above made me unable to proceed further without listening to some early Prince. The world was better when everything was purple.
At some point the Term “Bag Lady” morphed into “Homeless Person” (“Bag Man” never had the same traction as a catchphrase, maybe because of its previous meaning as the guy who carries the loot in a heist. “Squeegee Man”, however, had the same sort of life) but if the term hadn’t fallen out of fashion the bag ladies’ union might have been interested in this invention. Insane unitasker? or ergonomic gift to the disadvantaged?
Speaking of street life: tomorrow is the Vendy Awards out in Flushing, but don’t bother going because they’re sold out. I’ll be interested to see if my current local fave The Biryani Cart can capture their second consecutive win (you can tell their energy is being put into street cooking and not web design).
Maybe you’re feeling angry and anxious and want to put hurt on somebody in general. Don’t do it! Most people don’t deserve a sock on the kisser. Except for the few that do, and I’ve found that looking over those few getting their just desserts is enough to tide me over until I calm down again so you might want to bookmark Hitler getting punched for your bit of vicarious violence.
And that’s enough for now.
Tags: big link friday, comics, daily photo, design, friends, links, music, new york in black and white, new york life, operaRelated posts
Cheap shot Wednesday: When your CEO is a seven-year-old boy…
…you name your data security company Shreddersaurus.
Can you imagine the glee around the B of A offices as they say: The Feds are coming!! Call Shreddersaurus!
I don’t think it makes sense to associate one’s business with the notion of mass extinction events. Why not pick some destructive force that’s still around? My company is going to be called:
In other news, I walked 90 blocks on Sunday, from the Upper West Side down through one of those spurious street fairs in Midtown, where I was unable to escape buying roasted corn, down to the edge of Soho and back up to 14th. It was brought home to me that New York is a place of billions of competing messages.
Tonight will be my last BOD session at TES for at least a year. Last night’s meeting was charged but productive in terms of the conversation.
Tags: daily photo, new york in black and white, snarkRelated posts
Remake and yay for legumes…
At some point today I started to get frantic and crabby. It was nothing but nutritional drop. The solution was lunch at Olive Vine Café. All hail the platter of five cold appetizers, which was so varied and fresh that it utterly restored me. Humble and robust lentils with bulgar, and this spinach dish with chickpeas and well cooked tomatoes. Olive oil, lemon juice, smokey roasted eggplant in the babaganoush – brought to the table with a freshly made whole wheat pita, which I pricked with a fork so that the steam could puff out while it slowly deflated. I demolished everything my waiter brought and left more than happy. There was something lovely about clear flavors well combined.
Here’s the redesigned Court Square Diner, close by our studio building in Long Island City. Tonight we had our reception dinner for the incoming class. The school year is well and truly underway.
Tags: daily photo, food, new york in black and white, school
